He was on his back. She saw half of his sweaty face, one glistening shoulder, and his legs shooting half off the cot. A woman moved on top of him. Her waist was noticeably small, tiny even, but it was her ass that Nina couldn’t stop watching. The ass was enormous, jiggling, quaking, moving, and falling over Azeem’s thighs and covering his middle torso completely.
He looked at Nina with an open mouth, ready to say something. “No, no,” Nina said. “Don’t talk. And don’t stop what you’re doing.” Her voice was steady and calm. “Don’t worry about me,” she told them.
And they didn’t.
They didn’t stop, but continued, and the woman, whose face Nina couldn’t see, held up her finger. “Give me a minute, give me a minute,” she said, breathing hard.
Nina sat on the beanbag chair in the corner, giving the woman a minute and then another minute and then another. She watched the two of them like she was watching a movie. She watched the woman shudder, her toes curl, that myotonic tension, before she stood up and approached them. “Get out of my house,” Nina said calmly.
Azeem was still hard when the woman got off of him.
“This isn’t your house. It’s the Ankh Room. I’m not in your house. This is everyone’s house,” the woman said, standing up.
They faced each other then. Two ridiculously naked women, Nina thought. There were no clothes to hurry on and nothing much to do, so the woman stood there a minute, not sheepish at all, glistening—a perspiratory reaction, Nina thought to herself. And then she said it out loud,
a perspiratory reaction.
Azeem was sitting up on the cot, not talking, staring at them, breathing hard and shaking his head. He ran a hand through what was left of his hair.
“He said you wouldn’t mind,” the woman said, glancing back at Azeem, who only shrugged. Her voice was unemotional, and when she walked away from them, Nina could have sworn that she heard, from those huge ass cheeks, the tiniest fart escape.
• • •
At the car, Nina insisted on driving and told Hannah to sit in the front seat next to her. At first Azeem and Mustafa talked quietly in the backseat, but mile by mile their voices rose and Nina was tempted to turn around and tell them to shut the fuck up. She tried to talk to Hannah about Mica and Mitch, and admired the pretty turquoise choker they’d given her, but it was difficult to act normal and focus.
There’d been an accident, a three-car collision on the 101 freeway, and traffic was bumper-to-bumper, which meant more time in the car with him. Cars skidded to a stop behind them and Nina barely flinched. Mustafa nearly jumped into the front seat when one van came in too close. He screamed like a baby girl and Nina looked in the rearview mirror and rolled her eyes so that Azeem could see. She hated them both. She felt like an idiot. It didn’t matter to Azeem that she hadn’t agreed to an open marriage or not, he’d opened it on his own, he’d opened it with that tiny-waisted woman with the huge farting ass. And who knew how many other women there had been. Maybe he’d fucked a hundred and was walking around with syphilis and gonorrhea and crabs. Maybe he’d given her a venereal disease. Just the thought of it made her want to bathe. She’d take a hot shower when they got home and in the morning she’d call to make an appointment with her gynecologist to check things out.
“Did you know that Mitch is gay?” Hannah said.
“Oh, good for him,” she said.
“Good for him?”
“What did you say, honey?”
“I said Mitch is gay.”
“That’s not nice,” she said.
“I mean, he told me he was gay. He’s not ashamed. It’s who he is.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I like him a lot,” Hannah said.
“That’s great he’s comfortable enough to tell you such a thing. Ten percent of the population has those tendencies, you know.” Nina paused. She looked into the rearview mirror again and caught Azeem’s eye. She shook her head so he could see, then looked at the road again. She couldn’t concentrate. She could hear Azeem talking in the back and she could see Mustafa nodding vigorously.
She thought about pulling over on the freeway and telling them both to get out of the car.
“What’s wrong?” Hannah said.
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Something happened, Mom. What happened?”
Nina ignored Hannah’s question. She felt sick to her stomach. Duped. Used. She imagined he only stayed with her because she supported his hairy ass. “What are you two talking about back there?” she said suddenly.
Azeem leaned forward between the seats. “Calm down, Nina,” he said.
She felt her face heating up and tried hard not to cry.
“My brother is hungry, that’s all,” he said.
“Feed him,” she said.
He laughed nervously.
“Why don’t you fucking feed him, Azeem?”
“Don’t do this, please.”
“Sit back,” she said. “Let me talk to my daughter.”
And then she stared straight ahead and didn’t say a word.
THE NEXT
morning, while Mustafa slept, Hannah’s mom and Azeem sat her down in the kitchen and told her that that they were now platonic, that yes, they were married, but wouldn’t be by the end of the year. They were waiting for Mustafa to go home before they broke up. Her mom had promised to take him to specialists, and
she,
unlike some people, didn’t break her promises. They asked Hannah to please not tell Mustafa. It would only create drama and he wouldn’t understand, they said.
“He doesn’t even know you’re married,” Hannah said.
“That’s true,” Nina said, looking at Azeem. “That you insisted the marriage was a secret should have clued me in. I should have known. What was I thinking?”
“Nina, please,” Azeem said wearily.
“Why would he care that you’re getting divorced?” Hannah pressed.
Nina looked at Azeem then and said, “You see?” She got up from the table and left the kitchen, muttering to herself down the hall.
Azeem didn’t want to break up with her mother, he wanted Hannah to know, but he wanted to sleep with other women. There, he said it. It was nothing to be ashamed of, he believed, and he’d said it out loud, and Hannah was still alive and breathing.
“Isn’t my mom enough for you?” she asked him.
“I only
love
her,” he said.
“So she should be enough,” Hannah said.
“I only love her,” he repeated.
“You want what my dad wanted.” Hannah felt her eyes filling up. She didn’t want to cry but couldn’t help it.
“It’s different,” he said.
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “Why isn’t she enough?” Hannah said, her voice rising.
“You’ll understand later. When you grow up and meet someone and you’re together for years and years. You’ll see,” he said.
But she didn’t think she’d see any such thing. She had kissed Pablo when he asked her to kiss him. She had leaned forward in her chair and moved toward his pink lips. His tongue came at her, a perfect, sweet thing. He had called her the next night and the night after that. He played his harmonica into the phone. He listed the things they’d do together when her cast came off.
I want to ride bikes with you,
he’d said.
I want to dance with you.
“Where will you go?” she asked him now.
“My cousin’s apartment in L.A. Or I’ll rent a place.” He paused. He looked out the window, then back at her. “I want to be there when the cast comes off. I want to see you walk.”
She ignored that comment.
They sat for several minutes without saying anything.
A door slammed.
Another door opened.
Someone was taking a shower. They could hear the water moving through the pipes.
“If you leave her, who will you be to me?” she finally asked him.
“I’ll still be your stepfather,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You won’t be that.”
MARTIN AND
Tony sat in a booth in the far corner and shared a pot of coffee. They ordered cherry pie from a woman Tony recognized from high school. He thought maybe she was the one he felt up in a coat closet at a party in the tenth grade, but it might have been her friend. “I remember sitting on the ground and the coats and jackets hanging in my face, but I don’t remember if it was her or not.” He shook his head. “I was so fucked up, I could have been feeling my mother’s titty,” Tony said, laughing.
Martin laughed too.
The two of them talked and talked.
When the waitress Tony might have felt up was done with her shift, she let them know that another waitress was taking over for her. “Do I know you?” she said to Tony.
“Maybe,” he said. “Did you go to Manhattan Beach High?”
“I’m from Portland,” she said. “But you sure do look familiar.”
“You do too,” he said.
They tipped her before she left and didn’t move from the booth. They asked the new waitress for more coffee and told her that they were almost out of cream.
Martin talked about Las Vegas, about Ilene and Elmer and Marla, about the casinos and how often he won money. He admitted that he drank a lot and smoked a lot and fucked a lot of girls. He told Tony about cooking school and how much he liked preparing food. He liked the smells and spices, working with his hands and making something out of nothing. He said that from now on he wanted to be in the back of the restaurants with the skillets and ovens and people who were creative. He wanted to chop onions and smell garlic frying in the pan. And then he admitted that Marla wasn’t his girlfriend. He hadn’t talked to her in months, he confessed.
Tony said he’d stopped drinking and joined AA. The meetings saved his life, no shit. Sure, the people and their long-winded stories bored the fuck out of him sometimes, but their intentions were good and they needed to vent. We all need to vent, he said. He told Martin that he ran into a fire hydrant one midnight and smashed Martin’s old car and all he remembered was water, all that water shooting into the sky, and that he sat there fucked up in the fucked-up car and decided he’d had enough. The judge decided that Tony had had enough too, and sentenced him to thirty days in jail and six months of community service. He cleaned up hospitals and met patients who’d been hit by drunks or women who’d been beaten up by drunks, or kids who’d been left by drunks, or drunks themselves who were all messed up physically and now trying to sober up.
“You couldn’t walk away from that and be the same man,” Tony said.
They sat for hours.
They ordered another pot of coffee and a second piece of pie each.
Tony said he loved his wife but that she wouldn’t let him touch her. He said she drank wine at night, a glass, two at the most, which didn’t seem to be a problem for her, and that it played with his mind sometimes. He said there were two different Tonys in his head having a conversation at all times: One Tony knew that to take one drink was defeat and the other Tony was always messing with him, saying,
Hey, look at your wife, look how she has a glass of wine and doesn’t need another, look at her control, look at her pretty hand reaching for the wineglass, look at her lipstick on the rim, look at her head thrown back, that neck you used to know, look how relaxed she is after that glass of wine, so content, and look at my kids who won’t go to sleep without a story and a glass of warm milk; even they have something to drink that soothes them.
“I think about the valium I prescribe every fucking day,” Tony said. “The muscle relaxants and painkillers. I think about buying a six-pack and sitting in the car drinking in my driveway until the sun comes up. I think about it, but I don’t do it.”
“Fuck, man, that’s hard,” Martin said.
“We’ve all done things when we were wasted, Marty. Isn’t that right?”
Martin ignored the question. He sipped his coffee and didn’t look at Tony. He looked at the wall above Tony’s head, an autographed picture of some actor or entertainer he didn’t recognize.
Tony scraped his plate with the fork, lifted a bite of pie to his lips, but stopped. He held the fork in the air while he said it. “I know what you did.”
“What?” Martin said.
“I put it all together after you left, man. The car, the way you stopped driving and started taking the bus, the dented fender. The girl the whole neighborhood was talking about.”
Martin put down his coffee cup and exhaled heavily.
“You need to come clean.” Tony ate what was on his fork, staring at Martin. He was chewing his pie, looking right into Martin’s eyes. “You need to come clean, man.”
NINA DIDN’T
forgive Azeem, but she wanted to get through the next month without fighting or incident. Soon Mustafa would return home and Hannah’s cast would come off and she’d insist Azeem pack his bags and move out. It didn’t matter that he swore on his brother’s health that he’d never do it again. It didn’t matter that he tossed the
Open Marriage
book into the trash can and said he was sorry.
Even though she was angry, she kept her promise and went with them to more doctors. They went back to UCLA to see another specialist, one who doubted the first one and claimed that a curative surgery would eventually be available. They’d take out the smallest piece of a person’s brain, a piece you wouldn’t even miss, and the seizures would stop, he said. They took Mustafa to San Francisco for the weekend, up and down the coast, visiting multiple hospitals and various doctors.
The doctor in San Francisco was especially blunt. He’d examined Mustafa and ran his tests and examined the results. They were sitting in his office for the consultation. Mustafa had said he wanted to stand, so Nina and Azeem sat in the two chairs facing the doctor’s desk. There were plaques and diplomas along one wall, and Nina could see that the doctor had graduated from Harvard. On another wall, there were pictures of his smiling family. The doctor was pleasant enough but serious, sitting in a big leather chair. He picked up the plastic brain from his desk and held it in both hands. “The brain is complicated. Epilepsy is complicated,” he said. “It’s not going away anytime soon. I don’t expect a cure in your lifetime,” he said, looking up at Mustafa.
“I expect a cure,” Mustafa said.