The Names

Lindsay Whitman Keller, eating an olive.Voices around us, some vague occasion of the Mainland Bank, a suite at the Hilton. People stood with their hands in the air, eating, drinking, smoking, or they clutched their own elbows or engaged with others in prolonged and significant handshakes."Is this an assigned duty?" I said."Spouses have no rights. Good thing I have my teaching job.”"Good thing David's not a hard-liner.”"This one I had to attend. Something to do with the future of Turkey. Unofficially, of course.”"Has the bank decided to let them live?”"Banks plural.”"Even more ominous.”"What's your excuse?" she said."Hard liquor. I've been working day and night and not minding at all. This worried me.”Two men seemed to be barking at each other but it was only laughter, a story about a plane skidding off a runway in Khartoum. The bank wives stood mainly in groups of three or four in their corporate aura, tolerant, durable, suffused with a light of middling privilege that was almost sensual in its effect, in the way that a woman's arrangements with a man are a worldly thing, bargained over and handled and full of knowingness. The forced suburbia of these women's lives, the clubby limits of the 1950s in some dead American pasturage, here was a dislocation with certain seductive attributes and balances. The duty-free car, the furlough allowance, the housing allowance, the living allowance, the education allowance, the tax equilization, the foreign assignment premium. Often the women stood with a man in attendance, a flawlessly groomed Pakistani or a Lebanese in a well-tailored suit. Bankers from poor countries dressed like military men. They looked alert and precise and slightly in pain and they spoke a brisk and assured English with a blend of shortened forms. JDs were Jordanian dinars, DJs were dinner jackets.David moved across the room in our direction. I asked Lindsay what it was about him that always gave me the impression he was pushing people out of the way. He fed his wife some cheese and took her drink."Always near a woman," he said to me, then turned to Lindsay. "Not to be trusted, these men who talk to women.”"Tried to call you yesterday," I said."I was in Tunis.”"Are they killing Americans?”He wouldn't give the glass back to her."Per capita GNP is the fifth largest in Africa. We love them. We want to throw some money at them.”I gestured around us."Have you decided to let them live? The Turks? Or will you shut them down for ten or twenty years?”"I'll tell you what this is all about. It's about two kinds of discipline, two kinds of fundamentalism. You have Western banks on the one hand trying to demand austerity from a country like Turkey, a country like Zaire. Then you have OPEC at the other end preaching to the West about fuel consumption, our piggish habits, our self-indulgence and waste. The Calvinist banks, the Islamic oil producers. We're talking across each other to the deaf and the blind.”"I didn't know you saw yourself as a righteous force, a righteous presence.”"A voice in the wilderness. Want to fly to Frankfurt and watch the bowl games on TV?”"You're out of your mind.”"We can watch on a monitor at the Armed Forces studios. No problem. The bank will arrange.”"He's serious," Lindsay said."We're all serious," he said. "It's the start of a new decade. We're serious people and we want to do this thing.”"Let's have a quiet New Year's Eve," she said, "in that little French place up the street.”"We'll have a quiet New Year's Eve, then we'll all get on a plane to Frankfurt and watch the bowl games on TV. The Huskers go against Houston. I outright refuse to miss it.”Why was I so happy, standing in that mob of bodies? I would talk to the bank wives. I would talk to Vedat Nesin, one of the many Turks I met that year who had a name with interchangeable syllables. I would talk to a man from the IMF, an Irishman who complained that he kept walking into scenes of destruction and bloodshed that never got reported. In Bahrain he walked into a Shi'ite riot. In Istanbul he fled his hotel in a service elevator during a demonstration that no one knew was coming, that no one understood, that did not appear in local newspapers or anywhere else. It was as though the thing had never happened, as though the corridors hadn't filled with smoke and rampaging men. His fear was going undocumented in city after city. He was disturbed by the prospect that the riot or terrorist act which caused his death would not be covered by the media. The death itself seemed not so much to matter.I embraced the wives and looked into their eyes, studying for signs of restlessness, buried grudges against their husbands' way of life. These are things that lead to afternoons of thoughtful love. I spoke to a Kuwaiti about the grace and form of characters in Arabic, asking him to pronounce for me the letter jim. I told stories, drank bourbon, ate the snacks and tidbits. I listened to the voices."You are lucky," Vedat Nesin said. "You are a target only outside your country. I am a target outside and inside. I am in the government. This makes me a marked man. Armenians outside, Turks inside. I go to Japan next week. This is a relatively safe place for a Turk. Very bad is Paris. Even worse is Beirut. The Secret Army is very active there. Every secret army in the world keeps a post office box in Beirut. I will eat this shrimp in garlic and butter. Later I will eat profiteroles in thick chocolate sauce. After Japan I go to Australia. This is a place that should be safe for a Turk. It is not.”