I, the Divine (20 page)

For the second time that day, she feels the stab in her stomach. A piercing pang followed by a dull twinge for a couple of minutes. Her doctor says this is normal. She feels as though she is being eaten alive from the inside, something is slowly devouring her. A vampire sucks her soul. She must not allow herself to think these thoughts. The bats must be fought back, turned back to the dank caves from which they come. She feels the baby is changing her, transmuting her, into something she no longer recognizes. The real her is being slowly consumed, ingested, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. It starts in her belly and emanates outward, spiraling insidiously, overpowering her mind, vanquishing all her defenses. She must stop thinking these thoughts. This is her baby and she loves it.

It’s a boy. And she loves him.

He walks along Broadway, from One Hundred and Sixteenth to Eighty-third, thirty-three city blocks, every day. Thirty-three blocks of complete anonymity. The passing crowd is always the same, always different. In all the times he has walked, he has never encountered anyone he knows. He would recognize everyone if he took a walk in Beirut. You felt human in Beirut.

The sultry voice of Umm Kalthoum wafts seductively out of a cassette player perched atop a hotdog cart. A twinge of bittersweet nostalgia. The Egyptian hotdog vendor stands next to his cart, customerless, lonely.

Omar arrives at the intersection of Eighty-sixth and Broadway. He stops to light a cigarette, takes the right-hand mitten off and places it in his coat pocket. The red Don’t Walk signal is lit. He notices no car coming. He steps off the curb. His left foot alights on a metal grate. It takes less than a microsecond for his foot to slip from under him. His right foot follows suit, imitating the left in flight. His arms flail helplessly. The cigarette falls from his lips onto his chest in midair. His right hand instinctively reaches out to break his fall, reaches the grate an instant before the heavy thud of his butt, followed by his right elbow. The pain is instantaneous. His right hand is chafed, his left elbow is bruised, and the small bone at the bottom of his spine hurts. He attempts to pull himself up quickly, wobbles unsteadily.

“Are you all right?” asks a black man in a business suit, half of a couple.

“I’m fine,” Omar snaps.

He almost slips again standing up. A group of teenagers, a couple of Puerto Ricans and an Indian, snicker from across the street.

“It’s the ice,” the black woman, the other half of the couple, says. “It’s slippery.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” he growls back. He walks away.

The cigarette has burned a tiny black hole in his coat. His hand is not bleeding. He feels he is about to start crying. Fear. He is terrified. Not a normal kind of fear, primal, nothing he has ever felt before. He feels goose bumps all over his skin. His testicles ache. There is a metallic taste in his tongue. His breath comes fast, shallow. Dark spots appear before his eyes circling clockwise. He stops for a second to regain his breath. His mittened hand instinctively reaches out to the building on his left. He needs to steady himself. He wants to be home. He resumes walking, this time at a brisker pace. This must be primordial, cellular. He is unable to control the feeling. His bones ache. He wishes to wail. He wants to be in his own bed, his mother taking care of him, making him hot tea with a little bit of cognac. His head pounds.

Omar walks through the door, sees her sitting on the couch. His wife. He smiles at her, a forced smile. She worries. She can’t discern his expression. She thinks he is either about to cry or crack a one-liner. She tries to stand up, but he comes over and kisses her. He begins unwrapping himself.

“You burned a hole in your coat,” she says, not an expression of concern, but a conversation starter.

“I know. I dropped a cigarette.”

“They don’t warn you about the sartorial dangers of smoking.”

He hangs his coat on the coathook, takes off one sweater, the scarf, the hat, gradually regains his natural form. He takes off his boots. He comes over and lies on the couch, his head on her lap, his legs draped over the armrest. She strokes his hair gently.

“Did you lose a mitten?” she asks.

“
Mitten
?” She had used the English word. “What is mitten?”

“It means a glove without fingers.”

“I know what it means. I know exactly what it means. Why do they use a different word? Why did you use it?”

“Because a mitten is different from a glove and you lost a mitten. That’s why.”

“Couldn’t you have used the Lebanese word? I mean when did
we
start differentiating between a mitten and a glove.”

“It’s just more precise.”

“Precise. Yes.”

He stares at the ceiling as she continues to stroke his hair.

Régine and Fatima giggled, huddling together on the couch, arms entwined. Janet stood in front of a floor-length mirror dubious of the reflection. She liked the kohl. Not the rest, though. The braided hair made her look prepubescent. The gold chain with dangling trinkets around her forehead, the yellow eye shadow and the blood-red lipstick had the opposite effect, made her look adult, in her thirties. The dichotomy was disconcerting. She did not look Lebanese, yet was no longer American. She knew no Lebanese woman who dressed like that. She stared at the girl in the mirror. She appeared so exotic, straight out of a Sinbad Hollywood movie. Yes. Sin and bad. That was the girl in the mirror. She shuddered. She thought she was losing her footing again, though her feet had not budged. She quickly grabbed the mirror to steady herself. She looked like something out of
A Thousand and One Nights
. She was Shahrazad, a drunk Shahrazad, spinning tales.

“Do you like it?” Régine asked her Galatea.

“It’s strange,” Janet responded, which induced another bout of tittering from her friends. “I look so different.”

Fatima fixed herself another drink. Her parents were in the mountains for the weekend so she had no worries. She placed a single ice cube in the miniature glass, poured the glass jar of
arak
until the glass was half full. The clear liquid whitened as it hit the cube, turning milky when she topped the glass with water.

“To your health,” she said to no one in particular as she lifted the glass in the air, then gulped down the whole drink.

“You didn’t make me one,” Régine pouted.

“Sorry. I’ll do it. Do you want another, Janet?”

Janet was entranced. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Janet heard, “I am,” coming from behind her, but was unsure whether it was Régine or Fatima. She begged to differ. There was no doubt Janet was the most beautiful of the three. How many times had she seen her face in the mirror? She knew every minute detail of it. Yet what stared back at her was a face she did not recognize. She raised the corners of her mouth for a smile, attempting to recapture some glimmer of familiarity. The face staring back at her became more distorted. She shivered perceptibly.

“You don’t like it?” Régine asked, supine on the couch. Fatima was making more drinks. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“I don’t know. I wanted to look Lebanese so that I don’t look so different from everybody.”

Why was she here if not to feel different from the way she did back there? She wanted to experience the world. She wanted to change how the world saw her. Then why was she so terrified of the transformation she saw? She stared at the reflection. She must force herself to like this amalgam of East and West, to embrace it. The reflection might not be the new her, but she should accept any discernible change, no matter how incongruous it appeared. Any change was good change.

“Pour me a drink, Fatima,” she said.

“You’re so remarkable,” Fatima said. “I can’t believe you like
arak.
I bet you no other American would drink this.”

“I want to celebrate the new me.”

Janet kept looking at the mirror. She saw looking back at her a middle-aged woman, sad, lonely, desperate. She saw someone bitter. The woman in the mirror shook her head and told her, “Don’t.” The phrase repeated in her head over and over, a ringing. She was terrified. She covered her ears with her hands, felt faint.

On the corner of Bliss and Abdel-Nour streets, Janet waited for Régine and Fatima, looking in a store’s picture window. Nothing interesting so she regarded her insubstantial reflection. She looked good. Janet had an abundance of bright red hair and was well aware of it. She took out a cigarette as a group of young university men walked by.

“Hi, Janet,” one of the boys said.

She glanced up at him, unsure whether she knew him. She smiled anyway. “Hi there.” The young man puffed up, obviously proud he knew her. One of the boys hesitated, wondering whether they were going to slow down and talk to her. The group kept moving. She lit her cigarette. Looking back, the young man said, “I’ll see you in class tomorrow.” Ah, he was in her math class. Could not remember his name, though. She heard them talking.
Those eyes
were the only thing she understood. She grinned. She should learn more Arabic. One of the boys punched her classmate on the shoulder and they disappeared around a corner.

Her eyes kept reverting back to a sprig of grass between the sidewalk slabs. It looked out of place. She wanted to pick it since she felt some strange affinity to it. Just as she was about to bend down, she heard Régine calling.

As usual Régine showed up first. Fatima was habitually late. Régine was dressed to the nines,
en tailleur Chanel
as the Lebanese would say, which surprised Janet. She assumed Régine wanted to look older to impress the woman. Maybe Régine was not as confident as she appeared.

“Are you ready?” Régine asked, stepping partly toward Janet. She searched through her handbag, stood feet slightly apart, her weight unbalanced.

“Yes, sure. Are you?”

“Yes, of course. Done this lots of times.” She lit a Marlboro, her hands trembling slightly, exhaled loudly.

“I don’t believe in the stuff anyway.”

“You’ll see. She’s good.”

When the dark-red Rambler stopped in front of the girls, Régine quickly threw the cigarette on the ground and stamped it out. Fatima got out of her father’s car. Régine had to stoop, look through the car’s passenger window, to greet Fatima’s father.

The girls waited until the car turned the corner before all three of them opened their purses and took out cigarettes. Régine flagged a taxi. When Janet looked down, she noticed the sprig of grass had been sheared by Régine’s high-heel.

The fortune-teller’s house was in Zi’a’ el-Blatt, a neighborhood Janet had never been to. Like other houses on the street, it was old, Lebanese old. Régine knocked on the oversized door and the girls waited. And waited. Janet noticed the ubiquitous turquoise hand, palm outward, dangling from a chain at the top of the door. After a while a woman opened the door.

“We’re looking for Sitt Noha,” Régine said.

“Well, you found her. Come on in, girls.” Her manner was not cheerful, nor crude, neither welcoming nor antagonistic. However, Janet knew Régine and Fatima would already feel slighted. The fortune-teller had not shown enough respect.

Sitt Noha led them through the foyer into the main room of the house. Janet had yet to see a house like this. Her friends all had modern apartments, whereas this house showed nothing belonging to the twentieth century. The floors were all smoothed stones with intricately painted Islamic designs. A huge Persian carpet dominated the room. Other carpets were hung on the walls. The seats were contiguous cushions on low benches against the walls, circling the entire room. Sitt Noha picked up a plate of food from the top of a low hexagonal brass table and took it into the kitchen. She was obviously in the middle of having lunch. “You girls make yourselves at home,” she said as she left the room.

Janet was enthralled by the room. This was the exotic Middle East she had come for. The gilded mirror on the wall, the antique chandelier, the oil lamps that were obviously functional rather than decorative, the finely detailed backgammon board, open, on one of the cushions—apparently a game had been interrupted.

“I can’t believe she was having lunch in the living room,” Régine said, “and she knew we were coming.” She sat rigid, starched, back straight. She pouted, looking more about to cry than angry.

Janet stared at a turquoise rosary on the seat next to her. It was not made for human hands, the beads much too big, for a giant’s hands. The ashtrays on the table in front of her were silver, shaped in the form of pineapples. Why pineapples? She found that amusing. She sat cross-legged on the cushion. She lit a cigarette.

“And my mother likes her,” Fatima said. “I wonder if my mother comes here or asks her to come to our house. I can’t see my mom here.”

Janet hoped after she had been in Lebanon a while, she would be able to understand the conventions better. Sitt Noha was from a lower class than the girls so she should have shown more respect. On the other hand, she was much older so she did not have to. They were her clients, about to pay, so she should have. It was so confusing. How Régine and Fatima figured out what was appropriate was beyond her. At least she had begun to know intuitively when they felt slighted.

She stared out one of the Turkish windows across the room, into the garden, dominated by a black oak and an orange tree, side by side.

“And she’s so fat,” Régine said.

Although Sitt Noha was overweight, Janet did not think she was that fat. Sitt Noha probably weighed less than Régine’s mother. What Régine was actually commenting on was Sitt Noha’s apparent lack of concern with her weight, her lack of any attempt to cover it up.

Sitt Noha walked back into the room, had changed from her housedress into another, dark purple with gold stitching. Janet had to grin. She was sure Régine and Fatima would scorn the new housedress and mock it, but Janet thought it was charming. The housedress made Sitt Noha look like a giant decorated aubergine.

Sitt Noha had a toothpick in her mouth. Tomato paste stained the corners of her lips. She moved a low ottoman right in front of the girls and sat down, knees apart, her hands between them, packing up loose folds of the housedress.

She yelled, at the top of her lungs, “Where is the coffee, Asma?” The girls jumped, startled.

“What can I do for you, my daughters?” she asked in Arabic. All Janet understood was
my daughters
.

“We’re here for fortune-telling,” Régine said. “Like I said on the phone, our friend here is all the way from America. She doesn’t speak Arabic very well.” Neither did Régine, who was having substantial problems constructing a complete Arabic sentence. Having grown up in a French-speaking household, she, like many Lebanese, had trouble with her mother tongue. “But I can translate for her.”

“And you two don’t want me to tell you anything? You’re not looking for husbands?” Sitt Noha pulled her disheveled hair back, forming a loose ponytail with a rubber band.

“We want to, but we’re here for the American.” Janet was not following the conversation well, but she did notice Régine and Fatima move slightly forward.

“We want everything,” Fatima said. “We can pay.”

“Can you actually tell what our husbands will look like?” Régine asked, breathing noisily, her eyes sparkling.

“When you called,” Sitt Noha said, “I thought you were the foreigner.”

“No,” Régine said. “I’m Lebanese, from Beirut. She’s the American.”

“You said your name was Régime. What kind of name is that?” Janet understood the French word for
diet
and tried hard to stifle her laugh.

“It’s Régine, with an
n
,” Régine replied, moving back into the cushions. She fidgeted with her handbag.

“Why would your mother call you that? Did she know you were going to grow up fat? She must be a fortune-teller too.”

“No, no. It’s Régine, not Régime. It means queen.”