Authors: Mona Simpson
“Heliopolis,” he said. He stopped before one mansion and pointed. “Omar Sharif.”
At the airport, he came inside with me. I studied the English TV screen. There was a flight at eight o’clock tonight. It was only three. He took my hand and I followed him to a phone booth. He was carrying my pack again and it felt easy to let him. It was a regular modern phone booth. He lifted a book, paged through, found a spot and showed me. I remembered from his hand that Arabic scans from right to left.
His hand brailled over the whole page. “Atassi,” he said. “Atassi. Atassi. Atassi.”
I smiled and shook my head. It was too late for that now. I was finished with something. I wanted home. We spent time close in that phone booth, I sat on his lap, we decided with the watch. Back here at six-thirty for customs and security. Now, we’d eat. Eat, we could mime. I didn’t want to close the book over the page of Atassis. He ripped it out, folded the paper up, and put it in my backpack, zipped the zipper. And then he drove me to a low neighborhood of two-story buildings, tenements, with children playing in the bare street. It was a small restaurant, underground, and we sat cross-legged on the floor. The tablecloths looked clean, many times washed. A short-stemmed pink rose leaned in a tin can on our table. Two of the petals, cleft in the center, had fallen to the cloth. The light from back and front of the room came in slanted and he ordered in Arabic and I sat low, against a pillow, and we looked at each other and sometimes smiled, sometimes not, but we stopped trying at all with words. And after time, the food began to come and make our clock. Olives and new cheese, then kibbe, then I think what was my father’s layered pancake with different butter and burnt sugar. It tasted honey and deep caramel and rose water. I handed him a pencil and paper for the name. “Fatir,” he drew and whispered it.
Then we used the guidebook. He pointed to his chest and showed me the word “poor.” I smiled a little, embarrassed for him. He didn’t have to ask me. I’d already decided to give him all the money I had and only save back twenty dollars for the bus into New York. He pointed to himself again, then made wing motions, then said, in an accent I’d never heard say the word “America.” He pointed to
me and I smiled. None of this seemed to matter. I gave him my address, he put it in the little bag he had around his neck where he kept money, clasping it shut again. He took my left hand and banded a cleft rose petal over my third finger. I knew before the book. “Marrying,” he said. I got up to leave. He was so young, I was thinking.
It was still light when we walked outside again. I wanted to buy a souvenir, I didn’t know what. There was still more than an hour. With the guidebook I showed him the word for bazaar and shrugged. We began walking and I followed him and then we were in a district of close streets and corners and brown buildings and smells of burning meat and then we rounded a corner and there was a square filled with market stands and around the sides were the neon-lit fronts of casinos.
He pulled me over to the edge of the square where there was a tiled drinking fountain and a man stood with a camera draped in black cloth and a camel tied to a palm. He seemed to be asking, did I want to have my picture taken with the camel? I thought of my father’s old women and smiled. I wanted nothing like that from this trip.
We walked around the stands of the bazaar and I slowly became interested in things again. I wondered if all religions, all identity with a place or an origin or a culture that began late, began hokey. I wondered if Navaho doctors bought their children little tepees and tomtoms, but I felt a kind patience towards all that now because it was a start, I knew I would come back here again a different way, for longer. From a dusty market table, we picked out an everyday Turkish coffeepot, a little one. I wanted to open the jar of what it was my father had liked. When the woman had given it to me, I thought I’d save it for my father and give it to him as a present the first time I saw him, if I ever found him and we met again. But in this late afternoon light, sweet with dust and honey, I didn’t want to wait. I’d waited and saved enough for him. The lid stuck. I gave it to Ramadan, he held it against his belly, straining, and again I thought, he’s young, and then it was open. It was a rich distilled paste that tasted of almonds and honey. We ate it with our fingers, just walking through the market, past fabric bolts, animals, eating and licking our hands. We finished the whole jar. I turned my back for a moment and he bought me a dress and a small prayer rug. I was staring at a casino called the Las Vegas that had a wooden painted cutout of a bride and groom
propped outside, the heads open circles for you to stand behind and have your picture taken.
BE THE BRIDE
, it said.
In the airport I bought a snowball paperweight with sand instead of snow, a scene with camels and tents in the desert. He paid for this. He’d paid for the coffeepot. He’d paid for dinner. He’d paid for the dress and rug and he’d try to pay for photographs of the two of us I didn’t want. Then it was time to go. We passed a bar called the Ramadan Room, which was playing an orchestrated version of “Home of the Brave.” At the gate where I had to go in and he had to stay, I tried to give him my money. I had two hundred and ten dollars cash, I wanted to give him all of it. He would take none. It got so I pushed the crinkled bills in his pockets. His mouth got hard, his chin made a clean line, he took it all, balled it, jamming it down in my pack. So I was the one after all who was paid.
At the metal bar going into the security gate, we drank a long kiss good-bye. His appellated, articulate hands moved around my face as if fashioning an imaginary veil there.
“Good-bye,” I said. I knew in a way I could never explain but understood absolutely I would never see this soul again.
He said words I didn’t understand but I made out Allah. Everything in his language had to do with God.
11
I
STOOD IN FRONT OF THE MIRROR
, in the middle of the day, and tried on the dress. It was white, a kind of cotton that comes from more than one third-world country and looks like it has already been washed. It fell in vague ruffles at my knees and on my shoulders. I felt foolish. It didn’t look like me in it. My legs seemed wrong, under the dress, like two stiff, thin trees. I picked up my hair, fingered it. Too long. And the ends were split.
I came of age at a time when a dress was an almost quaint thing. I’d spent my childhood in dresses and school uniform jumpers, but then it was jeans every day. I’d never stopped wearing jeans. My grandmother sent me money for a dress every spring I was in college and I spent it, but never on a dress.
It was the middle of the day and I collapsed on the bed. A while
later I pushed myself up with an arm and began to try. There was so much to do. It was hard to know where to start. So I called for a haircut appointment with Shawn, who had always made me look like a busy person you saw walking loosely on the street.
“Just one minute please,” the girl said.
Someone else came on the line. “Shawn Timmelund is dead,” she said.
“He’s dead?”
“He died two weeks ago.” All those cancellations. The time they’d said his elbow hurt. “Would you like an appointment with his assistant, Terry?”
I put down the phone.
A
LL WEEKEND
, I waited for something to happen. I thought I better not call people too much. I felt like having them hear my breath, but then I had nothing to say. I called Stevie and made him ask me questions but it seemed too much work to answer. I just mumbled yeses, mostly nos. I couldn’t tell him much about Egypt. “Now you give up, Mayan,” he said. “You’ve got to.”
I had never quite been like this, how I was now, before. Or maybe I had, sometimes, and forgot because I wanted to. I was in bed. Depressed, round and round like a unthreaded screw in a socket. I couldn’t read. My head hurt and I felt like, let somebody else do it.
And this seemed true. Of me. All the other times, when I’d been high and gay, marauding arm-in-arm with my friends down the streets, now that felt like I’d been trying, pretending. Making myself an imposter.
This seemed a completely flat, unemotional, almost sensible decision. It was too much work to live. I didn’t want to. I have to try so hard, I reasoned, too hard. I was sick of being an overachiever. And my house was a mess full of little scraps of paper. Phone numbers and addresses, lists I couldn’t throw out because I’d drawn on them. I had skyscrapers and swimming pools and fountains. Towers. Since I’d been to Egypt everything I drew had a place for water.
Somebody else would be born. They would have a life like mine, but a little more. One part of them, one shred, would survive less damaged. Preserved. And they could do it. Let them do it. They could build the towers, trace the viruses, find the cure. It didn’t matter who
did it. Only that it be done. It didn’t have to have my name on it. I didn’t even have my real name anyway.
The world could wait for them. It would have to. It was too hard for me. Not that I was doing much good, anyway.
The world couldn’t wait, but it would. The world had been waiting for a long, long time. Those who have to wait have been waiting always, and they will wait some more.
Sometimes I sensed what I could have been otherwise, like a broken horse’s dream of flying. I couldn’t follow that, it was too long a thought. That was why I had always wanted a daughter. I kept feeling I could stand myself if I had a daughter who was better than me. Before, when I’d been dry and the doctors had told me they didn’t know if I would have periods again or not, on the street, in line for movies, everywhere, I looked at girls, not boys, and thought, if I didn’t shrink myself inside she could be my daughter someday and perfect. For what was still in me to have a chance again. It was hard to see what was erect in my spirit be laid down, while other people, heartier, but less of that, survived. And now that I finally could have children, I wouldn’t, I was giving up. I hadn’t eaten anything for almost a week. It seemed too much work to get up and buy food.
When they told me I was out for a year, Timothy said to me then, “You can’t use everybody else’s standards. A year off might be fine. When you look at what you’ve made out of what you’ve come from, you’ve done a lot.” I felt then the way someone must feel when they’re told for the first time, officially, they are retarded and they understand what they’d privately feared always can be seen from the outside.
My father had known me before he left. Perhaps he measured my qualities. Perhaps he stood over my small childhood bed and looked at my face; I was not the beauty he had wished.
But what were the allures—taste? Taste of wine, of the inside of mouths, the tart taste of sores, the feel of money, its usedness, Italian fabrics, reptile skins, leather, the casing feeling of vastly expensive clothes?
The lightness and forgetting of travel.
The thrill of adultery. Of gambling. Of throwing it all away—forever.
Of destroying the weak who know no better than to stare at your portrait like a faraway president and memorize your lost name.
I heard a rush of water from upstairs and thought, oh good, the old man was running a bath. The sound was powerful, voluminous, the force of water pushed through pipes. I liked the idea of the old man stepping into the bath, luxuriating. I could imagine him rubbing his small hands together, taking his little pleasure with a nervous relish.
My apartment seemed better and it was later in the day from the water. Falling Water. Waterfalls. I’d always wanted to go to see the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Pennsylvania and now I had time. Now I had nothing but time.
I dialed Bud Edison’s number. Nobody answered. It was Saturday night.
I remembered Emory telling me, with the bad nickel taste in your mouth, the only thing to do like that is cry and sleep and wait. Tough it out.
I kept ricocheting back and forth between the numbers. 1971 to 1975 I went to high school. He was just in Montana. In 1973 I was fifteen, sitting by the garbage cans in the alley while my mother raged inside. He flew to Cairo. The Cairo Caper.
He was alive. He was not dead. Now I fully believed he existed.
I stayed in bed for two days. I didn’t eat. It got worse. My mother called me and asked about her wedding dress. Was I wearing it? Because if I wasn’t she would really like it back. It was hers after all, she said.
Her wedding dress? I would have loved to have her wedding dress.
“I never had it,” I said.
“Yes you did, I gave it to you in college, I shouldn’t have, I knew I shouldn’t have.”
“I wouldn’t have thrown away your wedding dress!”
“Well yes you might have, it didn’t look like a wedding dress. I had it shortened. I shouldn’t have maybe. But it was like just a cocktail dress. Raw silk. It was two colors. A sort of pale silvery blue and off-whiteish.”
Maybe I had lost it. I unplugged the phone. I didn’t want to hear.
I knew whatever it was it wouldn’t be enough because I wasn’t. I believed the truth: I didn’t have enough good in me. Not enough had been put in. And now, like my mother had said, I would always have to try so hard. Too hard.
I thought of different places I had wanted to see. Falling Water. Racine once more. Glacier National Park. The Grand Canyon. But I
couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t go forward. I couldn’t go back.
I stopped being afraid to die. The world was beautiful, so much I could not go outside. I knew the colors, spring, would hurt my eyes.
I wanted to leave it all be. I felt inside my grandmother’s way finally, the wish to vanish, letting the animals go free.
I didn’t want anyone to notice. On the old couch, I stayed home and pulled the covers up. The coward way. It was raining against the one window. This was glamorous rain. It gave a soft halo to the streetlight. Even only that made me nostalgic. Two kids nudged on the sidewalk below, both wearing black tight clothes and masks and I thought, good for them, let them, they can have it.
I was making lists; I scribbled in pencil on a bill envelope the names of all my friends.