Jasmine and Fire

by Salma Abdelnour

  OCTOBER

  On some days, New York feels like another planet in the distant past. Other days it’s as if I just left minutes ago. I’ll be heading to New York for a short visit later this month, but in the meantime I’ve decided to throw a belated Beirut housewarming dinner for myself. I’ve been making some progress in feeling comfortable and settled into my Beirut life, and I want to bring a few people into a room together to eat, drink, and make my life here feel more real, my presence more official somehow, and my apartment a little noisier for a night.

  I decide to invite Curtis and Diana, along with a few cousins and their spouses who teach at the nearby American University of Beirut, figuring surely they’ll all know people in common and might have lots to talk about. It’ll just be a casual evening, a way to bring people into my home—a particularly key gesture in Lebanon and in traditional Arab culture. The Middle East balances its famous penchant for political disaster and war with a somewhat more flattering reputation for hospitality. Ever since most of the region was made up of nomadic tribes living in tents, it’s been considered important to bring in guests, even total strangers, make them feel at home, and ply them with food and coffee, even if you have barely enough to feed your own family.

  For my small gathering, I’m going to make fattoush salad and some meze dishes like baba ghanoush, hummus, and maybe another kind of salad, too, since the summer produce is still abundant in this unseasonably hot October. Usually after the summer heat starts burning off in September, the thermostat inches down to around sixty degrees Fahrenheit by October, heading south another twenty or so degrees in midwinter. But the temperature is still hovering around eighty. I’m hoping to find some fat red summery tomatoes at one of the produce stands along Makdisi Street, near my apartment and named after my mother’s ancestors, the Makdisis, who settled in this part of the city in the early twentieth century and built homes on what were then grassy open fields. I’m also going to pick up some Lebanese-style grilled chicken, called shish taouk, from the butcher shop and restaurant Cheikha, where I’d had an excellent shawarma sandwich with my cousin Soumaya back in August; later I went back alone to try their shish taouk and became an addict. My oven isn’t heating up so well—only the stovetop seems to work, and a small countertop convection oven my parents had bought last year—so I’m not in any position to compete with the neighborhood grilled-chicken specialists, who can do shish taouk better anyway.

  For three days before the dinner, I run around doing party errands: I find some tall-stemmed, Japanese-looking flowers shaped like green balloons and buy two dozen. I pick up extra wineglasses since I notice I have only three uncracked ones, and I make a hip-hop and R&B playlist with lots of Outkast and Curtis Mayfield and Betty Davis, the powerfully soulful former wife of the late Miles Davis, which I have on a CD Richard made for me a while back. I hire an aunt’s housekeeper to clean the apartment the day before the dinner party. I feel like a harried Lebanese version of Mrs. Dalloway, except I’m having only six people over.

  On the day of the dinner, I pick up a tray of shish taouk, smelling lusciously of lemon and garlic, and also some small triangular pies called fatayer, stuffed with spinach and onion and spiced with sumac. I buy the juicy lamb meatballs called kibbeh from a little bakery called La Cigale around the corner from me, where the air always smells of hot butter, and where I used to beg my mom for the chocolate meringue pastries called succès when I was little and the shop had the more alluring name Candy. I make a big bowl of fattoush, mixing chunks of tomato and cucumber with fresh mint, parsley, scallions, and purslane—the slightly peppery herb found all over here—along with small pieces of pita bread that I fry on the stove, and I toss the salad in a dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, and sumac. To make baba ghanoush, I roast eggplants on the stovetop flame, peel off the skins, and mix the pulpy insides with tahini, garlic, and lemon juice, then I make some hummus—extra-lemony, my favorite style—and quickly throw together one of my favorite easy hors d’oeuvres: toothpick-size skewers of red grapes, basil leaves, and chunks of halloum cheese, a riff on a caprese salad. I’ve made this in New York before for friends’ parties, using tiny mozzarella balls instead of halloum, but here all the flavors pop more, thanks to Lebanon’s late-season juice-bomb grapes and the just-salty-enough white halloum cheese.

  I want the dinner party to feel very relaxed, as if I threw it together effortlessly, no big deal, but of course even after spending a couple of days chasing down and preparing the food, wine, glassware, flowers, and music, in the two hours before my guests arrive, I’m still running around like mad. I have barely time to shower and get dressed, and I smash a wineglass or two frantically trying to get everything clean and ready before they all get here.

  In New York, my apartment and kitchen are small and I don’t own a dining table, so I don’t throw full-on dinner parties. But sometimes a few old college friends who love to cook come over, and we all make dinner together in the tight space, or cobble up something like a potluck, since my downtown Manhattan apartment is the easiest one for our far-flung crew to reach and no one minds sitting on floor cushions, bohemian-style. And I have, oddly enough, always been pretty relaxed and Zen when people come over, never really the nervous hostess in the moment—probably because I obsess about the details ahead of time, no matter how small and casual the gathering, and partly because I lubricate myself with a glass of wine before anyone rings the bell. I’m not quite sure how this Beirut housewarming dinner party will go: if my frantic efforts to pull it all together will make it look as easy as instant Jell-O, or if my hi-I’m-new-here awkwardness will flash like a Broadway billboard.

  On the fateful night, two couples coincidentally arrive at my building at the same time, and I open my door to find them standing there, holding flowers and chocolates. My cousin Karim and his wife, Hala, are already chatting with Curtis and Diana, having discovered they have some AUB-affiliated friends in common. We sit around the living room snacking on the fatayer and kibbeh balls and grape-halloumi hors d’oeuvres, and the conversation—about life in Beirut, and the political scene, and what it’s like raising kids here (they all have small children)—flows naturally and cheerfully. The other two guests I’d invited, my cousin Kamal and his wife, Nour, call at the last minute, apologetic; they’re ensnared by their seven-year-old son’s bad earache. With just five of us, it’s still fun though, and we press on.

  “What’s your take on the political situation now?” Curtis asks Karim, a political scientist and Middle East specialist, as he sips an Almaza beer.

  “It’s pretty atrocious. I’m not optimistic at all.”

  I duck into the kitchen to refill the platters of kibbeh and fatayer and hear the two erupt in laughter about something—somehow grim political conversations in Beirut often lead to laughs. Gallows humor; what else can you do?

  Meanwhile Diana, who has been traveling all over Lebanon to shoot documentaries about Palestinian refugees, asks Hala, who works at the university nearby, for emergency child-care advice. The two chat away, comparing notes on their childhoods in England. Hala is half Lebanese and grew up partly in London.

  The white wine I’ve bought tastes too syrupy to me, but I manage to make a spaced-out gaffe and forget to pour any for my cousin after asking him what he’d like to drink. I get distracted by the conversation and notice half an hour later that he’s still drinkless. He’s busy breaking down the chances of Lebanon erupting in war again, and I’m curious to hear his take. When I finally pour him a glass, he takes only a few tiny sips, having immediately noticed, I’m sure, that it’s crap. I offer to switch him to beer instead, and he protests, “No, no, this wine is very good”—hyperopinionated about politics, but ever the polite dinner guest.

  We eventually make our way to the dinner table, and the shish taouk is a hit, extra juicy, robust with the flavors of the fresh lemon juice and garlic marinade. And thankfully my fattoush, hummus, and baba ghanoush seem to go over well, too, everyone helping themselves to
seconds and thirds as we sit around the table, pouring more beer and terrible wine and chatting up a frenzy.

  Dessert is another near-bungle: the ice cream I’ve taken out of the freezer, a pine-nut-studded apricot flavor I love from a tiny old ice cream shop called Hanna Mitri, almost melts into a giant puddle after I leave it out for too long, again distracted by the conversation. But I rescue it just barely in time and scoop it into bowls to pass around the table. As the hours fly by, we eventually make our way back to the living room to nibble on chocolates, drink Arabic coffee, and lounge some more, listening to music and talking.

  Does throwing a dinner party make you a local? Not really—surely it takes more than that—but as of tonight, I do feel more like I live here. Despite my little wine and dessert snafus, the night is a success overall. I’ve pulled off my first dinner invitation. As of tonight, my house is officially warmed. I’ve had people over, and I’ve fed them and stayed up into the wee hours talking and laughing and listening to music with them. Everyone leaves at one thirty, chattering animatedly as I call the elevator and kiss them all goodnight, and collapse into bed.

  A week later Curtis and Diana return the invite and have me over for another dinner party, with a group of expat friends of theirs who are all in Beirut this year working or doing research. A British friend of Diana’s parents named Rosemary, a professor at AUB for the past few decades, is at the dinner party, too. I learn that Rosemary knows some of my relatives and knew my maternal grandmother. I never knew her myself; she’d died when my mother was a teenager. I’m delighted that, of all people to be mentioned at the dinner party, my teta Wadi’a’s name came up. It’s of course not the first time I’ve experienced this tiny-world phenomenon in Beirut, but tonight was an especially unlikely and happy surprise.

  At the dinner, there’s also an American visiting professor named James, who recently finished his Ph.D. in Philadelphia and seems to be eyeing me from the minute he walks in. He comes over to introduce himself and starts off with a typical Beirut question: Where do you live?

  “Nearby,” I answer. “Around the corner and up the block from Bliss Street.”

  “Wow, really?” He does a cartoonish head spin. “I live right near there, too.”

  “Where?”

  “Just up from Hamra Street, in a white concrete seventies building above a toy store.”

  This time I’m the stunned one. My parents and Samir and I lived briefly in that building in the late 1970s while our current apartment was being renovated.

  After we note the incredible coincidence, we segue into a conversation about the foibles of Beirut life. James has muddy water coming out of his taps for the first few minutes every morning, and daily he has to climb over a car that always parks on the sidewalk right in front of his building. I tell him how I have to remember to flip off the air-conditioning when I do laundry in my kitchen, so as not to short out the electricity in the whole apartment. I mention that I vividly remember the concierge’s wife at that building he lives in, a woman named Samira, who sometimes brought us plates of the lentil and rice dish moujaddra and used to always wear a dish towel tucked into her ample waistband.

  “Wait, I think Samira is still there. I’m pretty sure that’s the concierge’s wife’s name. She introduced herself to me the other day.”

  I wonder if Fate is calling down to me: Hello? Date this guy.

  He’s cute, a little too tall for me maybe, but with warm light brown eyes and auburn hair that keeps tumbling into his face.

  “Here, take my cell number,” he says later that night as he’s leaving the party. “Let’s get a drink this week.”

  He doesn’t ask for my number, which I would’ve felt weird giving him since I, ostensibly, have a boyfriend. Or a guy I’m seeing in New York, in any case, even if Richard and I haven’t yet embraced the boyfriend/girlfriend tags. I can’t exactly refuse to take James’s number—and it’s too awkward to blurt out “I have a boyfriend!” just as he’s walking out the door—so I punch the digits into my phone. I’m feeling slightly off kilter, not sure whether I should interpret the weird coincidences in both of our lives as some kind of cosmic sign and call him up some day this week, or just let the whole thing drop, forget I ever met him.

  Meanwhile I turn my attention to the other guests at the party, all of us nursing our after-dinner drinks and enjoying the midnight breeze through the open windows. There’s Paul, an American Ph.D. student living in Beirut with his boyfriend this year and researching gay culture in Lebanon, and Monique, a young Tunisian historian here on a fellowship. They’re talking about good jobs in academia and how hard they’re becoming to find.

  I drift off a little and think about what it’s like to have your job determine your home, or at least where you’re forced to live. Over the years, my friends in academia have gone where the best or only job they could find was, and they’ve either grown to enjoy their new city, or else haven’t liked it but have resigned themselves to living there indefinitely. As for me, even though I’ve loved living in New York, I eventually figured out that a freelance work life—mostly independent of any specific place—is the most ideally suited for me, or maybe a job that would let me work from anywhere anytime, although those still seem all too rare. The idea of relocating for a job to a place you don’t like has always struck me as a major downside of the academic life and of certain other careers, although maybe city surroundings don’t affect everyone as acutely. For me, having to move long-term somewhere that feels wrong would be pretty much a deal breaker.

  It’s tempting to think of our increasingly splintered geographies—work in one city, family in another, friends far-flung all over—as a mutation of our ever more globalized world. But moving around in search of a better life is nothing new, of course. Since the earliest Homo sapiens days, fifty millennia ago and beyond, humans have roamed to look for fertile land and a decent living, or to escape natural disasters or war. I wonder if those early nomads had the time or luxury to ponder the existential “where is home” question while they fled danger and searched for food. I suspect not. But now, with more careers going mobile and families scattered all over the planet, and with more options for where to live, the question seems more real and ubiquitous, even if it seems to nag harder and more urgently at some people than at others. Without an ongoing, reliably thick network of family and friends in the cities where we’re born and raised, and with educational and career opportunities more and more dispersed around the world, and parts of our lives (family, friends, jobs) spread out all over, theoretically any place is a potential home. We can go shopping for cities now, just like we can shop for vegetables or smartphones or love. But is the “where is home” dilemma a modern luxury or a curse?

  I’ve always been hyperaware of my reactions to cities, my visceral sense when I arrive in a new place. Houston felt alien to me at first; ditto the Bay Area when I landed there for college. So did Washington, D.C., when I first went as a summer journalism intern. But New York always felt familiar somehow, even from the very first time I visited, over Christmas with my family in junior high. I always sensed I wanted to come back someday and stay for a while, maybe try to make a life there. Needless to say, New York doesn’t inspire this feeling in everyone. I’ve known lots of people—friends, acquaintances, former co-workers, relatives—who tried living in New York but left after a few months or even weeks, hating and cursing it. My instinct about the city kicked in again right after college when I moved there knowing hardly anyone. I felt a sense of relief, of “at last,” wash over me as soon as I landed at LaGuardia. And that feeling never left, year after year after year, even as part of me always still pined for Beirut.

  Now as the weeks go by, I keep pitting New York and Beirut in my head as potential permanent homes. What do I need to feel to know I’m home? Beirut has almost all the key ingredients of any recognizable definition of home. I have lots of relatives here and warm relationships with most of them. My neighborhood still has many of the same bu
ildings and shops and people as it always did, even though it’s changed too over the years. The noise and crowdedness and chaos of Beirut feel deeply familiar—that’s one of the things I’ve remembered most about it—and that din can be comforting in ways. Maybe those aspects of New York, so reminiscent of Beirut, are what have always drawn me to it.

  But do I need to be surrounded by family or friends to feel at home? In New York, I had to carve out my own social life mostly from scratch at the beginning. The city wasn’t home because I had friends or family there. I sensed it had home potential as soon as I arrived, knowing hardly anyone—and well before a few college friends from California eventually moved there, too. Maybe the city’s elusive mix of the stimulating and the soulful was what resonated with me instantly, long before I’d noticed any echoes with my former hometown.

  I’m missing New York achingly now. But what I’m missing most isn’t just New York as a city. Beirut can still match it in many ways, in its constant energy and mystique and surprise—the bustling city streets, the diverse mix of people, the vigorous nightlife, the dizzying churn of cafés, bars, shops, and restaurants, and all the alluring ingredients and dishes to rediscover and explore. What I’m missing in Beirut is the sense of ownership, that feeling of “this city is mine.” In Beirut I still feel like a visitor much of the time, even as I’m making some progress in building a life. As the weeks go by, I sense that I’m not yet fully a part of this place, or not anymore, although I’m not ready to give up; it’s way too early still. Maybe I’m not hypersocial enough to be comfortable as an adult in Beirut, and so far I’ve barely met any unmarried Lebanese women my age, living alone, too, so I feel like something of an outlier. In New York, none of that seemed to matter. The city is full of unmarried men and women, single by choice or circumstance, and living solo—a perfectly normal, unremarkable scenario in New York, a city that accommodates virtually every lifestyle imaginable. There I felt the city was mine even when I was sitting alone in my apartment night after night in those first weeks and months.