After dinner I take them on a stroll through the cobblestoned Achrafieh streets down to the adjacent Gemmayzeh area, lit up as always, its bars buzzing but quieter than in midsummer, and we drink beers at a little dive bar called Godot before I drop them off by taxi at their hotel.
A happy side effect of this night is that I felt like the Beirut expert in the group. (Competition was not stiff, granted.) I’d made the plans and ordered the food and drinks, and after our nightcap I’d sent Alison and Stacy off with advice on where they should stroll and explore the next day, and on where to find original handmade Lebanese textiles and housewares to take home. As we walked to Godot, I also gave them a general overview of Lebanese politics, since they asked about the current situation. I don’t think I would’ve felt this confident showing visitors around just a few short weeks ago. But more and more, I’m realizing now, this city is mine. I live here. More and more I know what to do, where to go—or I know enough for now, anyway. I haven’t yet figured out the home question and likely won’t for a while. But I’m feeling much less like a visitor.
At what point, then, does one definitively cross over from “visitor” to “local”? In my sixth or seventh year in New York, I would jokingly ask my native Manhattanite friends, “Am I a real New Yorker yet?”
The answers would usually range from “Yes, ever since you were born,” to “No, in New York you have to give it another three years at least.”
I’ve been thinking in these past weeks about how we negotiate spaces, how we take foreign environments—cities, neighborhoods, houses—and make them familiar, or how they gradually become familiar over time, whether or not we ultimately fall in love with them. Spaces that seem cold, new, and unfamiliar to our bodies and movements gradually take our shape, and we start to flow through them naturally, unthinkingly. We may feel love for some of those spaces, indifference to others, but still most of the spaces we move through start to mold themselves to our lives, to become easy and practically unconscious.
Maybe the where-is-home question is ultimately chicken and egg, whether it’s about specific spaces or entire cities. Do we move to a city and then it becomes home? Or in these days, when we have more choices of where to live, do we choose to live somewhere long term mainly because it feels like home?
The German twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger was preoccupied with physical spaces and our relationship to them. With apologies to the Heidegger scholars I studied with at Berkeley (and who gave me wondrous A-grades even though I remained mostly in the dark about his major work, Being and Time), this is what I took away, and what I still think about all the time. One of Heidegger’s ideas was the notion of “worlding,” or the way we come into contact with objects and spaces around us, and the way we construct and negotiate our world by unconsciously responding to and interpreting the spaces we move through. I notice how my bedroom here in Beirut felt alien when I first arrived in August, even though it’s the same bedroom I slept in as a child and have stayed in on summer visits over the years. But compared to my New York bedroom, which I’d grown so used to in recent years, this space felt foreign when I walked into it in August, not yet molded to my movements and my life. The bedroom had been an unconscious part of my life before, a very long time ago, but no longer. Now, a couple of months later, I move through it naturally again, unthinkingly.
My living room in Beirut, too: I felt strange and uncomfortable and lonely moving around in it at first, trying to decide which part of the long navy-blue sofa to sit on, whether to put my feet on the thick-legged wooden coffee table, whether the vase-shaped antique table lamp was at the right height. I needed to forge my own pathways through that room, arrange my stacks of books and magazines and papers on the coffee table in a way that felt comforting and accessible to me. Now I move through that room, too, as if I’ve always inhabited this space, not minding or even noticing if the table lamp is too low or the coffee table a little too high to put my feet up on. I’ve gotten in the habit of automatically sitting on the right-hand side of the sofa, nearer the window. It’s as if I’d been living here all along, during those civil war years away when this room, this apartment, became foreign and distant spaces in another world.
But sometimes familiarity with a place doesn’t, despite all efforts, make it home. Once in Vienna I passed in front of the house that the twentieth-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spent years designing only to discover that it was unlivable. When the house was built, with Wittgenstein’s precise specifications about the height of ceilings and the plainness of doors, windows, and other normally ornamental bits, hardly anyone in his family could live in it. It was too austere and too devoid, on principle, of any decorative touches. One of Wittgenstein’s sisters publicly declared the house unlivable, and another lived in it only briefly. It now houses the Bulgarian embassy. On paper the house was a minimalist’s dream. In real life it was chilling, lacking any of the small soothing details that bring comfort or a human touch, at least to those it was built to house.
Whether or not a city, or a house, is ultimately a viable, beloved home must have at least partly to do with how it feels wrapped around you—its spaces, the whole shape and tone of the place, whether it fits snugly or widely, whatever your taste. Or is it ultimately a moot point to wax philosophical about home? Isn’t home just the place where you grew up, or if not that, then the place where you live now, work, have friends or family?
Still, I can’t get around the idea that sometimes “home” doesn’t feel like home—or home doesn’t feel like “home”—and sometimes a place that isn’t “home” feels like home. (Put the quote marks wherever you like.) Maybe home used to be, necessarily, the place where you were born or grew up or where you live and work. But now that “home” can be a choice, at least in theory, just like every other consumer or lifestyle option, I don’t think there’s any going back to a world where Home wasn’t a concept as much up for grabs as Career or Hobby. Now that we can almost easily, in many cultures, switch houses, towns, jobs, spouses, and friends, will more of us do as the most adventurous expats have done for centuries—leave the home of our past, if it doesn’t fit right, and look for our true home?
But for anyone who has the option, I wonder if it would be a net plus to be able to say: “This city where I grew up, or where I’ve moved for work or for a relationship, or where I’m living my adult life at the moment, isn’t the city where I feel most comfortable, happiest, most optimistic. So let me find another one—after all, there are roughly 36,000 other cities in the world to choose from.” Or would that just bring on eternal questioning and longing? Would it be simpler to say This City Here Is Home, thanks to family or work or other necessities, and be done with the whole thing?
On days when the blues creep in, I wish I’d never left all my familiar routines in New York, and my good-enough comfort there, to come back to Beirut. On clearer-headed days, I do know what I’m doing here—seeing whether it still fits, snugly, in the way I want home to fit, but also not too snugly.
My parents fly in from Houston today, and they call tonight, a Sunday in late October, to say they’re en route to Hamra from the airport. The electricity has just gone out in our building, more severely than during the usual partial blackouts. We have a generator, but it’s not kicking in right now for some reason. An electrician is here, on his night off, trying to figure out the problem, so the building concierge, a lanky thirty-year-old named Ali, helps haul my parents’ luggage up four flights of stairs to the apartment.
I open the door to let them in, we hug, and my mother says cheerfully that it’s so refreshing to walk into a lived-in apartment. Normally when they come to Beirut on their visits, the apartment has been empty for long stretches. I haven’t seen Mom and Dad in a few months, since before I left the States, and I’ve missed them. Even though it’s nearly midnight when they get here, just after they finish dropping their bags in the master bedroom, we sit down for a nightcap glass of wine and catch up
a bit. They’re obviously exhausted and ready to crash, but I hear myself dropping the million-dollar question: “Where is home for you guys? Is it still Beirut? Is it Houston?” My mother chuckles, says nothing for a few seconds, then tells me she needs to think about it when she’s more awake. My father answers right away: Houston is more comfortable, he says, because as much as Beirut feels like home and they’re planning to spend more time here now that he’s just retired, the city gets claustrophobic after a while, and he craves the infrastructural comforts (reliable electricity and a building elevator that works, for instance) and more open spaces. But coming to Beirut feels like a battery recharge. Seeing friends and family makes him feel a connection and vitality he doesn’t feel in the same way in Houston. He seems to have figured out what each city means to him, and how it fits into his life now. My mother still doesn’t say anything; she just gazes out the window.
Friends and relatives drop by from morning to night the next day to welcome my parents back. My mom’s cousin Mona, stirring sugar into a cup of Arabic coffee and leaning back in the wooden rocking chair in our living room, glances over and says to my mother, “I wonder if I know any nice men for Salma to meet.” My great-aunt Nida stops by, too, that afternoon and, in between casual chichat with my parents and me, looks over and says to my mom, “Salma is lovely. Yikhreeb zouk al rjal. Damn those men.” Meaning “It’s crazy that a man didn’t nab her”?
So far I haven’t heard the “Why aren’t you married yet?” bit since I got here in August—although I’d heard it on past visits to Beirut—and getting a version of it now, twice in a row, catches me off guard. Auntie Nida in particular has always struck me as progressive and independent-minded, far more so than many others of her generation. Maybe I’d forgotten, perhaps willfully, how my ongoing singlehood might puzzle and distress my relatives. Nida then tells us a story about how her aunt Amineh gave up her shot at marriage when, asked to dance on board a ship going to Europe in the 1930s, she’d said to the suitor, “Dance? No thank you. I am a Protestant.”
My mother whispers to me that Nida is full of stories from the old neighborhood in Beirut and is delighted by the company of her nieces and nephews. I make a mental note to stop by her apartment for coffee sometime. There’s a half century between us, but I love her sparkling eyes, her warmth and wit, and her infectious desire to tell funny stories and be surrounded by family. I want to get to know her better. And I’ll forgive the “damn those men” comment.
It’s not just my parents who are in town from the States this week. Kareem, the thirty-something son of my parents’ friends, is also passing through Beirut. I’ve known him since we were kids although I rarely get a chance to see him these days, and he’s here now visiting from California with his wife, Dionne—a vivacious blonde from Mississippi who I liked from the minute I met her at their wedding reception. They call one night to ask me to join them at a bar called Ferdinand in Hamra with some of their friends. One of Kareem’s former Beirut classmates, Naji, shows up that night, too; he’s a tall, good-looking guy in his early thirties who is in a wheelchair after getting paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident in college. As we all gather around a table ringed with ottoman seats in a corner of the indie-rock-thumping room and order our drinks, the question of what I’m doing in Beirut comes up. Soon we’re all talking about home—where it is, what it is, what we make of it. Everyone here tonight either emigrated with their parents during the civil war or has lived outside Lebanon at some point.
Naji takes a sip of his beer. “Drinking is home, isn’t it?” We all laugh. Naji is a champion athlete in the local version of the Paralympics, and he works in a high-powered job for a local disability nonprofit. He’s not an alcoholic, this guy. But he says what any of my New York friends might have quipped on any of our nights out drinking, catching up, blowing off steam.
Easygoing and likable, Naji wears his disability as lightly and gracefully as I’ve ever seen anyone do it, and he makes it comfortable to talk about the subject, without awkwardness. I’ve known Naji for only a couple of hours, and I can’t venture to guess what the rest of his life is like. But meeting him is a reminder that accepting circumstances and forging ahead with humor and grace is the way—albeit not the easiest way, and certainly not the only way. If he can rework his reality so he’s living gracefully in a wheelchair, my move to Beirut is nothing in comparison. I decide I’m going to try to face down the emotional, social, and logistical challenges of living here with grace and humor. At least for the next few hours, while I’m remembering my vow.
The truth is, I’ve been madly impatient for my brief break from Beirut to visit New York, and to fall asleep next to Richard, and to have New York back, and my New York life back, even just for a few days. After which I’ll have to leave it all behind and come back to Beirut. And probably ask myself all over again why I’m doing this. I know why, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I’ve only just started picking up momentum here and accepting that Beirut is no longer a city I’m passing through on vacation, with a get-out-of-jail-free pass in my pocket. I don’t want to escape in a hurry this time.
I’m sitting at the Lufthansa departure gate at the Beirut airport for my three-thirty A.M. flight to Frankfurt, then to JFK, and I’m finishing Julia Child’s memoir My Life in France. In their long and seemingly very happy life together, Julia and her husband, Paul, jumped around and lived in various cities, houses, and apartments, every time Paul’s diplomatic job forced them to move. They busily tried to make a home wherever they landed. The two of them were like their own mobile home unit; they created a life, and seemed to have a grand old time, in every city, save maybe the drab-sounding Plittersdorf, Germany—but even there they thrived for a while. If you have a talent for making yourself feel at home no matter where life takes you, is there even a need for another, more permanent kind of “home”?
Last night as I fell asleep, I started wondering if Richard and I, the two of us, could ever be home. I’m excited and anxious about seeing him when I arrive in New York tonight. I just want to soak him in, feel missed. But why haven’t I yet been able to form anything that feels like home with someone else? With guys who’ve hinted at the marriage path, I was always scared I’d feel trapped. With the more elusive ones, I’d let myself entertain the idea silently—the eternal cliché of the hard-to-get—but I’d eventually tire of the lack of intimacy and make a preemptive strike, or they’d pull the plug. In my late thirties, I’m wondering: Am I now scared of not being trapped enough, of being too free to roam? Or what if I discover that, for me, roaming is home?
The afternoon I arrive in New York, Richard finishes up work early, comes home to find me in his bedroom napping, and wakes me up with a kiss. We snuggle for a long while and keep looking at each other and giggling and kissing. We go grocery shopping, open a bottle of wine, and cook dinner together, talking and laughing nonstop. I’ve been keeping him posted on my Beirut adventures, but we have lots to catch up on, and our conversation as always crackles and goes on for hours on end, and underneath it all, there’s an intense serenity and ease. Not at all like I’ve been away for two months. And surprisingly, not like we’d parted on fairly wobbly terms the last time we saw each other.
While he’s at work the next day, I roam around downtown Brooklyn near his apartment, where I’m staying this week since I’ve given my subletter a one-year lease. I find a café to sit in and finish up an editing project, and the routine feels natural, as if I’d never left. It also, oddly and unexpectedly, feels like a nearly seamless extension of my life in Beirut. To some extent, I’m doing here just what I do there. And vice versa.
I talk about cities that night with Richard’s roommate, Dan, as we all hang out in the kitchen making pasta. Dan, who has moved around various cities for work in the past few years, tells me he can only feel like a city is home if he decides from the beginning he’s there to stay. That way, he believes, people take you more seriously, invest in you more.
Others have been saying the same thing to me, in Beirut, too: “You have to make a decision where you’re going to live, and commit to it.” Meaning, decide whether the place you’re in is home, and act like it is from the get-go. My childhood friend Rana said this to me over pizza when we met up for lunch in Beirut the day before I left for New York. I hadn’t seen Rana since elementary school, but we’d reconnected a few years ago over e-mail. Since I’d landed in Beirut this summer, Rana and I had talked on the phone a few times, but she’d been busy with her four-year-old and family obligations, so we hadn’t caught up in person until the other day. Seeing her felt strangely normal, as if we’d still been hanging out every day since elementary school, when we used to take ballet classes together and I’d braid her hair, still the same silky-straight auburn strands I loved playing with. She has the same bright smile and easy laugh I remember, and we didn’t need hours and hours of catch-up conversation to get back on track. Once we’d rushed to hug each other as soon as we met up outside the pizza place in Hamra—“You look exactly the same!” “No way. But you do, seriously!”—we were back in business.
After Rana said to me over lunch that it’s better to decide where home is going to be and stick with it, she paused, then added: Even though Beirut is home for her and her husband, and has been home for most of their lives, now they want to leave for good. A few bouts of street violence in recent years, and the ongoing instability since the war, finally made them decide, Khalas. That’s it. We need to get out of here if we can figure out how.
“But isn’t everyone in Beirut always talking about leaving, or at least thinking about it?” I ask her. That’s true of New York, too. As much as die-hard New Yorkers are in love with their city, the cliché about life in New York is that most everyone is always planning to leave. Both cities are exhausting in their way, hence the constant escape fantasies. For those like me who can plausibly transport their career or life elsewhere, Beirut might feel more livable and appealing precisely when it’s a potentially temporary place, not an eternal trap of looming war and chaos and dysfunction. If you’re there for only a little while, in your mind anyway, it’s easier to get through the roughest times.
Jasmine and Fire Page 10