Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers

The Gingko Trees

The Gingko Trees Amy Motlagh Since I don’t live in Brooklyn anymore, what I know about it these days is mostly secondhand, hearsay reported to me by the New Yorker, or the Times— publications read most enthusiastically by people who used to live in the city but don’t anymore, or who would like to, but never have. The more years pass between me and the last drive I took over the Verrazano Bridge, the more I feel like I never lived there at all. So it follows that I would learn by reading, rather than hearing, that a committee wants the city to remove the gingko trees—all of them. A ban on gingkos. They say that the fruit drops onto the pavement in the fall and bursts, staining the sidewalks and bathing the streets in a peculiar stench of vomit. Well, it is true. Not only that the fruit smells awful, but also that the splatter it makes forms a kind of jelly patina on the sidewalk that’s easy to slip on, especially when it rains. But I always felt that these things were simply part of autumn in the city, part of the city’s way of being itself: achingly beautiful, but emitting a stench that made you hold your breath as you walked through it. I had never seen gingkos before I moved to New York, and I came to love them slowly, and maybe only fully, once I saw them in the fall. That fall they were the most brilliant I had ever seen. The bright, liquid yellow their leaves turned in October was the exact shade of the paint I saw men brushing onto the rim of the subway platform as I watched an implausible number of G trains go by, and waited for the F to carry me back to Manhattan. The gingko leaf is unmistakable: more like an ideal of a leaf than one actually grown on a tree. The apartment we found on Bond Street the April before was perfect like that: something produced through the machinations of our imaginations rather than something born out of reality. 321 It was a one-bedroom “plus” on the top floor of an old refurbished rowhouse . The “plus” was a small den off the bedroom where I thought I could write: I would finish my thesis, and maybe start a novel; or I would work in earnest on publishing the small manuscript of poems I had written a few years ago. Did it matter? There were hammered-tin ceilings with an egg-and-cup design in the living and bedrooms, and an enormous—if oddly shaped—pinktiled bathroom, and best of all, it was priced just below the high end of our budget. The couple that owned it lived on the ground floor, and they were just a little older than us, already married and prone to bicker. We liked them—we wanted to own an old brownstone, too, and be married and successful and happy. But in the end it was none of these things that decided it. As we walked away from the building toward your parents’ house in Park Slope, we saw them: small diaphanous bags squirting improbably through the murky waters of the Gowanus Canal. Jellyfish! That did it. We called the couple the same day to say we wanted the place; we were afraid it might already be gone, though things had proceeded so improbably, so magically, until this point, that somehow we knew it was ours. Later that fall we heard there was even a beaver living in the canal now: it was that clean! Everything in Brooklyn was improving. We would improve, too. Your parents would finally accept me, and then everything would be easier. I saw it all as though it were the final montage in a movie’s happy ending: we would walk together to the jewelry store on Carroll Street and buy a ring; I would finally finish my PhD; you would pass the bar and become a successful lawyer. They were modest ambitions, but to us they seemed fabulous, fantastic. We had been arguing for so long about our families, a ceremony, a place to have a wedding, that resolving these issues seemed like it would take nothing less than a miracle. We moved in that June, and I went away for the summer, just after you nailed the mezuzah to the lintel. You studied feverishly for that strange exam, the...