You Exist Too Much

by Zaina Arafat

  “How? You work at a coffee shop!”

  “I don’t know, maybe Lucy did it while I was sleeping.” Our cat. I concentrated on drying off, squeezing my wet hair into the towel as my mother stared at me.

  “You’re weird, you know?” she said. “You scare me.”

  I reached for the hair dryer and turned to her. “Can you wait until I’m done with the bathroom?”

  “I don’t like you living here anymore,” she said. “By the end of the summer I want you out.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her. I pictured myself with the ambassador’s wife, on the Amalfi coast, my stomach surged with excitement. “I’m planning to get out as soon as possible.”

  •

  We found the coat in a boutique near Piazza di Santa Croce. It was white, with fur around the hood that fluttered when she exhaled. And when she wore it she looked regal. I wanted her to have it, to think of me every time she slipped her arms into the sleeves, as if somehow that meant I could keep her. “I love it,” the Sacrifice said, trying it on and looking at herself in the mirror from various angles. “But it’s so expensive.”

  “I’ll buy it for you,” I called out, like a last bid at an auction, surprising even myself. Even living rent-free, I was still spending more than I made at the television station. “As a present.”

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  We rode home together, the Sacrifice on the back of my bike, in her new coat, her arms wrapped around my waist. I could smell her Gucci Rush as the cold air whisked it away. We locked up my bike and went to her bedroom, closed the door, and put on a movie. When she fell asleep I burrowed my nose in her blond hair, closed my eyes, and inhaled deeply.

  I had never been more sure.

  •

  “So why did you marry your husband?” I asked as she lay next to me. It was six in the evening and I’d been there since ten a.m. I had called in sick to the coffee shop so that I could spend a full weekday with her, from start to finish, or at least until her son came home from a day at sports camp. When I arrived she was in the kitchen making toast. She led me upstairs and invited me into the shower. Afterward we had lunch and then sex that I didn’t deserve—I was not attractive enough to be there, and I feared the moment she would realize it. Pink rays started to spill across the bed and I knew that I would have to leave soon.

  “Were you in love?” I asked. She was far better-looking than her husband, she took better care of herself, so I assumed it was because he had status, power, money.

  She pulled back. “Yes,” she said, appearing insulted by the insinuation that she wasn’t. “Very much so. I’m still in love with him.”

  I felt like I’d been pricked with a pin, the air escaping from inside me. “Oh,” I said. I hesitated before deciding to press further. “Sorry, but what are we doing, then?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, as if she hadn’t been there for any of it. The question crushed me in its honesty. Until then, I didn’t know. I thought that the intensity of sex was correlated with love. That passion was specific and that adultery meant something was wrong.

  “I don’t know if you realize this,” I said. I felt my face getting hot. “But you sometimes say ‘I love you.’”

  I’d been clinging to her I-love-yous like a refugee clings to a threatened nationality. They were the homeland that validated my existence.

  She turned away from me. I watched her back muscles strain and flex as she got up and walked to the bathroom. She took her robe off a hook, covering herself before closing the door. I could tell I’d ruined things, I felt rejected, defeated, worthless. I felt myself shattered to pieces. I got up and pulled on my clothes. I knocked lightly on the bathroom door. She said nothing. I considered apologizing, though for what exactly, I wasn’t sure. I was breathing heavily, anger welling up. I wanted to beg her to forget what I’d asked, to just keep going as we’d been. Instead I went downstairs, stopped in the kitchen for my bag, and left.

  The next day I called her cell phone and got her voice mail. I called back, again and again. I left messages until her inbox was full, at which point I called her landline. Ampy told me she was out. “Where? When is she supposed to be back? Will you please tell her to call me? It’s urgent.”

  As she had already made clear by not questioning my presence each night, Ampy was loyal to her boss’s privacy. She didn’t respond.

  The following night, after it was dark, I drove by the house. The lights were on, and I peered into her bedroom window. For a moment, I thought I could see two silhouettes moving behind the curtains. Was her husband home? As I drove closer the guard stepped out of his booth. I rolled down my window. “I’ve been here before,” I said, as if he didn’t know.

  He shook his head. “Sorry. No guests today.”

  I rolled the window back up and drove away, defeated.

  In the morning I called in to work and told my boss I was still sick, that I probably had mono. I lay on my bed with Lucy at the foot of it and stared at the blank white ceiling. Our abrupt ending left me feeling abandoned, and the pain of it was unbearable. I needed an explanation. I needed to know that it wasn’t my fault.

  A few weeks later, my mother received an invitation for a gala benefiting Palestinian youth. Suspecting that the ambassador’s wife would be there, I asked if she would bring me as her plus one, and she agreed. She even let me borrow a dress.

  We arrived early, and from where we were seated I could see the entire room. I watched the main door as people entered, waiting for her to appear. Finally, I saw her. My stomach somersaulted. She wore a long dress decorated with traditional Palestinian embroidery, a black shawl wrapped around her shoulders. I observed her greeting people, tilting her head back mechanically and laughing, the tips of her fingers pressed to her clavicle. Every so often she’d pop over to her own seat and take polite nibbles of whichever course had just been served.

  After dessert, she floated over to our table. She seemed completely at ease, unfazed by my presence. I felt waves of euphoria tinged with fear. Anxiety rising and crashing inside me. She greeted each person individually with two kisses, sometimes a third, never actually touching her lips to their cheeks. She had perfectly crafted fifteen-second conversations with everyone she encountered, effusively complimenting dresses and offering remarks on weight loss, asking about kids and summer travel. As she was making her way around the table, closer to me, a man with a dark ponytail and thick mustache approached her from behind, sneaking up and wrapping his arms around her. She squealed with delight as she turned to see who it was, placing a deliberate hand on his chest and leaning in to hug him. Who was this guy—another lover? I’d never seen him before, not at any of our other events, and I immediately pictured them in bed together. I felt my chest swell, my throat quivering. He placed a hand on the small of her back and led her away to his table, shattering all my hopes for the two of us communicating.

  I tried not to keep watching her but she was constantly present in my peripheral vision. When I noticed her walking toward the bathrooms I stood up, tossed my napkin onto my plate, and followed her. I turned the corner and called out, “What’s going on?”

  She swung around and her hair twirled like a whirling dervish. “Are you crazy?”

  An electric current shot through my stomach. “What?”

  “Honestly, what are you doing, following me?”

  “Why are you acting like you don’t even know me?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she derailed, pushing past me and back out to the party. I stood there, fuming. “You bitch!” I yelled out loud to myself. I was sick of staying quiet, of keeping things secret. I am not an object—I’m not just Laila’s daughter. I exist!

  I went into the bathroom and stared at my reflection, trying to gather strength. I returned to the party but when I walked into the room my eyes blurred with tears. I ran to the coat check, which was empty since it was summer. My mother chased after me. “What’s the matter?” she asked, and I turned
around, collapsing into her. I couldn’t help myself. But it wasn’t safe to tell her what was wrong, and she never insisted on knowing.

  •

  By January I still hadn’t gone anywhere besides Venice. I had made several attempts but each time I disappointed myself in my inability to pull away, even for a weekend. The Sacrifice was leaving soon, to go skiing with her family in Switzerland, then to Rome for the spring. One night I came home tipsy and found her in bed reading. Once I managed to get out of my clothes and into my pajamas, I started jumping on the bed. She laughed. “What are you doing?”

  I kept jumping, spinning around in midair and tapping the ceiling with my palms, until I fell onto her. We lay there staring at each other, giggling and breathing heavily. When the room stopped spinning I looked down at her mouth. I had observed it intently over the past months, watched it suck the tips of cigarettes, lick gelato, sip wine, kiss cheeks, kiss my cheeks. I could feel her staccato heartbeats as I inched closer to her face, her breaths coming at me in short puffs. By now we were both quivering, goose bumps lining the surfaces of our bare arms.

  For a brief moment, the ambassador’s wife flashed through my mind. Within seconds, she was gone.

  I pressed my cheek against the Sacrifice’s. My eyelashes fluttered against her cheekbone. I then reached up and pushed her bangs back with my hand, and kissed her forehead, pressing my mouth against it fully. Finally I pulled back, rolled off her, and faced the wall. I didn’t turn back around until I heard her breathing rhythmic sleep breaths.

  A few days later, I accompanied her to the airport. We barely spoke during the bus ride or at the ticket counter. When it was time to go through security, she fumbled in her backpack and pulled out a neatly folded piece of paper.

  “Bye,” she said, handing it to me. She turned and walked away.

  I waited until I could no longer see her to open up the note. It was just one line. I’m tired of elephant shoe. I love you.

  I stared at it for a while before crumpling it up and putting it in my pocket. On the bus ride home, I sat against the window and watched cars whip by on the autostrada. When I got back I noticed that she’d forgotten to pack her Smurf pillowcase. I lay down and buried my face in it. Hours later I was still lying there when I heard, “Hey! Get up!”

  Agos was standing in the doorway, though I didn’t turn to look at her. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go to Giubbe Rosse.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  She sighed. “You’re pathetic. You know that, right? It’s draining.”

  I nodded, keeping my cheek pressed to the pillow. Agos then lay beside me and tossed an arm across my back. “Completely pathetic, I swear.”

  I left Italy six months earlier than planned, at the end of March. I flew back to D.C., grabbed the rest of my stuff from my mother’s apartment, and immediately moved to New York. I’d found a sublet in East Harlem that I could afford, and a job working as an administrative assistant for a magazine. It wasn’t exactly the role I wanted—I would essentially be a secretary. But still, it was a start.

  •

  I looked past Charlotte as I answered her question. “I suppose it’s usually unattainable women.”

  “Unattainable, how?” she asked.

  “Like they’re straight,” I said. “Or married. Or there’s a professional boundary.” I looked off to the side, away from her. “Or all of the above.” I was certain right then that she knew.

  “Well, I encourage you to look at why this happens, and what’s really going on.”

  She was starting to sound clinical and it made me nervous. “Do you think I’m completely fucked up?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t.” Then she looked me in the eye. From that close I could see more wrinkles, like stars in a rural sky. I could smell her watermelon-flavored chapstick. She raised her shoulders and parted her lips, and said, “I really like you!”

  My insides lit up like E.T. She didn’t intend it the way I wanted her to—at least not yet—but still. It meant something.

  BY MID-JULY OF MY CHILDHOOD SUMMERS IN JORDAN, I was homesick for America. I’d make a list in my journal of the things I missed most about the States: peanut butter, cow’s milk, Nickelodeon, grass, Heather, my next-door neighbor and best friend. From a distance, the U.S. seemed so beautiful, so welcoming, so easy. How could I spend a minute unhappy there? I promised myself that when I returned I would appreciate every little thing.

  This heightened fondness for the States lasted for the duration of the car ride from Dulles Airport to our house. The first night back in my bed always felt strange, like it was someone else’s. By the time school started the next day I was desperately missing Jordan. I’d long for nights on Teta’s veranda, watching her lay out Arabic newspapers and roll grape leaves, the combination of watermelon and halloumi cheese, fried falafel balls poking out of oil-soaked paper bags, roadside fruit tents with peaches spilling off the display and onto the earth, the sound of the three-stringed oud coming from the wedding at the nearby hotel, the sight of the green-lit minarets and the muezzin’s lyric voice calling everyone to prayer. Above all, I longed for the smell of the jasmine flowers that were outside every apartment building, though curiously I hardly noticed them while I was there. It seemed I could only ever smell them from thousands of miles away.

  9

  MIDWAY THROUGH THE TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS, WE WERE A given one free afternoon in “town,” a strip composed of Plato’s Closet, Pizza Hut, and a Christian bookstore. It was one of the perks advertised on the Ledge’s website and that Nancy had touted, along with the “gourmet” food. During our outing, I picked up a few extra T-shirts and a pair of Umbro shorts at Plato’s Closet. I then wandered into the Christian bookstore. “I would encourage you to look at why this happens,” Charlotte had said, “and what’s really going on.” There was no psychology section, just philosophy, and I picked a book by Søren Kierkegaard off the shelf. I hadn’t read him since an undergrad class on religious existentialism, but I recalled that angst was his specialty. I sat on the floor in back of the bookshop and started reading Either/Or. “Desire in our age is simultaneously sinful and boring, because it desires what belongs to the neighbor.”

  I tossed the book aside and took out my notebook. At the top of a blank page I wrote and underlined the word Charlotte. Underneath it, I wrote, First sighting: Yoga class. No conversation. No attraction yet. 2nd sighting: Cafeteria. Skipped mashed potatoes, went straight to salad bar. Eating disorder suspected, later confirmed. Still no attraction. 3rd sighting: Group, Day 6.

  At the start of group each morning we did an emotional check-in. “I’m feeling frustrated,” I’d announced on the first day that Charlotte was working with us, “by how much time we’ve wasted so far. A lot of the things we’ve done so far seem pretty unnecessary.”

  When it was Charlotte’s turn to check in, she’d said she felt the same. “Time is money. It shouldn’t be wasted.” We made eye contact and she smiled, a thick curl falling onto her face. I smiled back.

  Attraction detected.

  In my notebook, I tried to identify that moment for others. “Let’s say I was to write you a love letter,” the nutritionist said to me during group three summers ago, and all the other lollipop heads turned to look at me as if something had actually transpired. “I would need to eat carbs to have the energy for that.”

  In my journal, I marked down, Nutritionist: a hypothetical remark, misinterpreted as suggestive. I had already scheduled a one-on-one session for the following day, and after our first appointment I started seeing her once a week. Before each meeting I would plan what issues I’d present and what references I’d casually toss into our conversation, ones specifically designed to impress her based on information I’d gleaned from her semi-public Myspace page. And it worked: a few weeks later we were deep in all-night online chats. “I would get in so much trouble right now if anyone knew I was doing this,” she confessed, and I smiled at the illicitness of our correspondence.

>   “You’re fun,” the Palestinian social chair of the Arab Student Association wrote to me after an impromptu lunch my second junior year of college, during which we’d traded stories of our verbally abusive foreign mothers. “Luckily their English vocabulary is so limited,” she quipped, “otherwise who knows how much worse it would be.” A few nights later at an ASA barbecue, she asked if she could use my lip balm. I took it out of my pocket and tried to hand it to her. “My fingers are covered in chicken grease,” she said, lifting them limply so I could see. “Can you put it on for me?” She puckered her lips and I traced her mouth with a moistened fingertip. I spent the next few months introducing her to different kinds of alcohol, which she hadn’t been exposed to at her Islamic high school. “You’ve corrupted me,” she said as she swayed through my living room before puking. We once spent a week sharing a single bed in Beirut, where her extended family lived—as ’48ers rather than ’67 Palestinians, their fate was to be exiled to camps in Lebanon rather than live under occupation—and where I had “coincidentally” planned to be that summer. The two of us slept side by side, her dark hair splayed across the pillow, indistinguishable from my own. I only stayed a few days—I’d driven from Jordan, something you could do back then, when Syria was still intact—and tried to keep my flirtations restrained so that her parents wouldn’t suspect my intentions. She responded in kind, matching my restraint while remaining suggestive. During the day we’d wander through town shopping; I’d step into the dressing room with her and her mother as she tried on clothes. I tried to act natural, neither fixating on her body nor looking away entirely so that her mother wouldn’t suspect something was off. At night we’d go to lengthy dinners with her cousins and pass around argileh; I’d watch her take long puffs from the decorated pipe, the water bubbling as she pressed her lips against the plastic mouthpiece. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get her to act on her flirtations. The closest I ever came to kissing her was at a pop-up nightclub in our college town that two Turkish grad students had started, and where I occasionally DJed. “Come get this ice cube from my mouth,” she taunted. I didn’t waste any time, abandoning the booth and capturing her lips with my own, the ice cube spilling onto my tongue. Somehow it was warm. I stepped back reluctantly, and she smiled. “You just kissed me,” she said. “Gross.”