by Ali Eteraz
For a brief instant, earlier in the decade, there had been a moment when I had been forced to confront the question of Islam. But not for very long. When the towers fell I simply attested to myself that I wasn’t a Muslim—There’s no known god, nor is there an unknown god, and if there must be a god, then all are god—and moved on from any feeling of complicity or guilt or involvement. I decided that I was nothing but a millennial, identified by my income, my profession, my consumption habits, living in this postracial America which through the burning of a Bush had become enlightened enough to follow a man from the Nile despite the fact that his name evoked not one but two of America’s enemies. Then Marie-Anne had gone on to get a job working at a firm whose stated goal it was to keep America safe, and there came to be an additional buffer between me and Islam. As long as I didn’t do anything to willfully attach myself to Muslims, I had figured I would be secure.
Except the security had been illusory. All along there had been a ticking time bomb on my shelf and now it had blown, collapsing the towers of my dreams, leaving me in the soot and ash. Maybe Marie-Anne was right. The best thing to do with a bomb was to pluck out the shrapnel and cry. Maybe explanation and apology was the way to go. Yet, even though I had always listened to her before, and our success was evidence that I should continue to, I couldn’t bring myself to follow this particular command. It seemed like a slap in my dead mother’s face. Given how hard Marie-Anne had taken her own mother’s disowning, it had been shocking that she should ask the same from me. If anything, Marie-Anne should have had more respect for what my mother left behind, because my mother had at least accepted her into the family.
I picked up the Koran and the wooden holder and took it to the antique desk in the bedroom. I opened a drawer and thrust the whole set in there. Then I slammed it closed. Let the tan walnut consume the book into itself, the way ivy enshrouds a house. Let the memories of my mother be swallowed up and digested. Let the stories of the prophets and the Pegasi with human faces and the wars against the polytheists all be hidden. This was the best way of dealing with my troubles.
After all, was I not, as George Gabriel had said, a man inclined toward concealment?
* * *
Philadelphia got coated by a blizzard. The city emerged from the pristine blanket with all the grace of the Minotaur rising from his labyrinth. The scraped snow stank of road salt and of the sewage pipes that had burst in the morning freeze. The plows came in time to get everyone to work, but had knocked over the mailboxes on countless homes, and left snow piled, in some places, thirty feet high. By noon the senior citizens living along Pennsylvania Avenue brought out their Yorkies and terriers and poodles, and the cooped-up dogs defecated everywhere. On the ice rink that had formed, the poop was not easy to pick up. Many of the owners just kicked snow over the shit, leaving a nice surprise for the unaware pedestrians who came later.
The seniors reminded me of Richard, and because I knew that insinuations of aging upset him, I pushed away the blasphemous comparison. I hadn’t seen him since the art museum. One time he had texted just to report that he had spotted the waitress from the museum walking near city hall. I had texted him back saying that he ought to pursue her. He wrote back saying that he had no intention of hounding the sluts anymore because they always seem to outfucks me. He didn’t say it outright, but I knew him well enough to know that his joking, particularly about sex, was a way of opening me up and eventually picking up the conversation about filing a complaint against Plutus.
I didn’t know how to respond. The short of it was that I was incapable of fighting. My coming of age in the eighties and nineties had been a protected one. I had witnessed no great civil rights struggle. The eloquent rabble-rouser of color who I had encountered wasn’t the Pastor from Selma but the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The bespectacled gadfly from Chicago I had grown up with wasn’t Malik El-Shabazz but Steven Q. Urkel. They weren’t the sort of icons that made a man of color become inclined to rise up and resist. Their only concerns were to put on a good show and to be liked, the same qualities that I had cultivated in myself, the same qualities I would have been flouting by turning toward litigation.
But it wasn’t just that. Deep down I also thought that I deserved what had happened. It wasn’t as if the discrimination against me had occurred in a vacuum. Ours was an era that had to grapple with the dream of the nineties coming to a sudden and premature close. The nineties, when the great prejudices of mankind were said to have been overcome; the nineties, when the unfamiliarity between the rest of the world and ourselves was presumably erased through admiration of the things we created; the nineties, when the utopian magnitude of America had been at its apex. It had all gotten lost when New York got neutered. That September destroyed every American in a different way. And that included me. My destruction lay in the fact that when other Americans washed the ash out of their eyes and took a look around, they saw in my swarthy face a reminder of all those golden years eclipsed, the thief who had stolen the key to El Dorado, the brother of the devil whose whispers brought Paradise to an end. It was a testament to my fellow Americans, actually, that calling me a residual supremacist was the worst they had done to me. They could have tarred and feathered me. They could have hung me upside down like a bat in Guantanamo. They could have stripped me of citizenship. It was out of deference to their unexpressed wrath that I didn’t want to be deemed some kind of ingrate. They could have done so much worse.
I didn’t know how to convey all this to Richard Konigsberg, so I simply stopped responding to him. It was not that I didn’t think he would understand. It was that I feared he would tell me to show some courage, to demonstrate some entitlement, to make boisterous demands rooted in moral outrage. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was incapable of these things, that the reason I had made him my mentor hadn’t been so I could learn how to be a force in my own right, but just so that from time to time I could hide behind the shield his ancestors had forged and bequeathed to him.
He was, in essence, not much different than Marie-Anne. A protector. But unlike Marie-Anne, who liked to know that I used her as a sanctuary and quite delighted in the role, Richard would have been greatly displeased by my eagerness to turtle up. He expected more from people. Not only because his ancestors had managed to rise up even against a pharaoh, but because he knew that struggle was how one got ahead. I often told him he would have made a good father. He always said he wouldn’t have. “I’m too ‘My way is the Yahweh’ to be a decent parent.”
* * *
Marie-Anne came back from Virginia, but she and I didn’t talk about the firing. I wasn’t about to make any overtures to George Gabriel and she didn’t confront me about it. Our silence wasn’t so much respect as anxiety. The first fight, the night she had left for MimirCo, had triggered hidden electrons of suspicion, and now they bounced around in oblong orbits within us both, as complex and twisted as the pipelines depicted in Marie-Anne’s giant map in the bedroom entitled, “Cartographic Depiction of Major Pipelines of the World.”
An unemployment check came for a month and stopped. The cutoff was preceded by the arrival of a renewal form. It required documenting the efforts I’d been making to secure a new job. I would then have to take the form to some bureau and stand in line and get approved for the next three months of payment. I decided the whole thing was too tedious, especially since anything I wrote about making an effort would be a lie. I let the form sit on the coffee table. Things spilled on it and made it brown and curl.
Marie-Anne seethed at my dereliction of the chore. She took the form and put it on the fridge. Then it moved to the mirror in the bathroom. Then it got to the TV. When even that failed to inspire me, it ended up on the toilet, hanging in the hole, arms and feet outstretched, taped to the seat. A pen on a string hung off the flush.
“Hostage audience!” I cracked open the door and yelled, and set about filling out the form. Once it was finished, however, there was still the matter of getting out of the
house and going downtown. It took a few more weeks for that to occur. Once Marie-Anne was assured that the money was coming in, she stopped chasing me around.
In this period the image that best defined our intimacy was a scrunched-up face. Ours was becoming a domesticity of the darkest doldrums. Marie-Anne was unwilling to give me the satisfaction of her surrender, while I, not the janissary type, was incapable of infiltrating her defenses. When she came home it was as if she was hanging herself by the collar in the back of a closet while I sat on the sofa like a column of iodine or some other inert gas. She slept there; I slept here. The change occurred without discussion, without remonstration by either party.
Since Marie-Anne kept the door to the bedroom closed, I wasn’t aware of what she did with her libido. Was it finger? Was it machine? Was it nothing? I couldn’t tell. There were times that I wanted to rush into the bedroom, find her sopping wet, and enter her. But this was only a far-fetched fantasy. Not only because I wasn’t capable of such aggression; but because Marie-Anne feared getting pregnant more than death and didn’t want to take any risks associated with intercourse. The last couple of pregnancy scares, her cortisol levels had shot through the roof.
Marie-Anne had not always been afraid of getting pregnant. Babies were how we had bonded. While we had been dating in Atlanta, until we graduated and met her parents, we always played games coming up with the names we would give our children, what they might look like, what their characteristics would be. We would have three. Two boys and a girl. The boys would be musicians. They would form a boy band out of Florida. One of them would then turn out to be gay and go off to Europe. The other, after a bout with alcoholism, would revive his career on Broadway. The girl would be an astrophysicist and marry a Latino musician who reminded her of her brothers. But eventually we had to stop playing these games. The turning point had been the dinner at the steakhouse in Buckhead when I met Dr. Quinn and Mrs. Quinn for the first time. After the initial pleasantries had been offered and the steaks had been consumed and the wineglasses were on their third refill, Marie-Anne had announced that she’d brought us all together to get blessings for our engagement. It hadn’t gone well. While her parents had done their best to feign politeness, the next few months revealed that they didn’t think Marie-Anne and I would make a good pairing. The stated reason hadn’t been, as we’d feared, anything related to race or nationality. Dr. and Mrs. Quinn were elites in the New South. They didn’t subscribe to the old prejudices regarding coloration and ancestry. They had signed numerous petitions trying to take down the Confederate flag at the state capital. They even had a dog named Malcolm. Their objections to me had been far more ephemeral and, in a way, far more personal.
We thought our only daughter would marry a quarterback from Clemson, Mrs. Quinn had put it in an e-mail I wasn’t supposed to read. Even a black construction worker that could handle you like a husband is supposed to. What is this pretty little boy going to do if you fall down the stairs? He’d probably start crying.
Marie-Anne had tried to reason with them, telling them that we didn’t live in the ancient societies where women were shrinking violets and men were their strong-armed defenders. The world belongs equally to women, she had assured. And I know how to make my way in it. The purpose of marriage today is companionship, emotional connection. He understands me in a way no quarterback or construction worker could. We connect in the mind.
Dr. Quinn, who had a political bent and enjoyed talking foreign policy with me, accepted his daughter’s choice. It became a regular thing between us to forward interesting political commentary to each other’s inbox. He had forsaken his ancestral Catholicism and gotten involved with a Unitarian Universalist congregation and was eager to find places in the world where the message of his church might best resonate. He didn’t really ask me for my input so much as he told me what his pastor had decided to do. I always suspected—and he made no effort to conceal—that he was far more dovish around me than he was otherwise. In this mutually indulged deception we formed an odd but comfortable connection.
Marie-Anne’s mother, however, aside from the perfunctory appearance at the wedding, hadn’t changed her mind toward me. Perhaps it was her own scientific background as a geneticist. Perhaps it was a traditionalist aesthetic dissonance about how men and women were supposed to look together. She had become more distant, more intractable. If Marie-Anne ever called her, rather than asking how I was doing, Mrs. Quinn instead tried to talk up some of Marie-Anne’s old boyfriends. She went so far as to make a social media page inviting Marie-Anne to a get-together at their Charleston home where all the other attendees were big and tall twenty-something men from South Carolina and Georgia. For four years Marie-Anne dealt with her mother with patient perseverance. She took me down to Charleston three times a year—Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Easter—hoping that her mother would be won over. Nothing changed.
At last Marie-Anne gave up. She allowed herself to be excommunicated from the religion of family. She told her father that she wouldn’t ever come back to Charleston. And she refused to break when her mother, in the guise of informing her about some tragedy in the extended family, wrote her long self-flagellating missives. It was an act of tremendous strength on Marie-Anne’s part to resist her family for my sake. No one else in this life had ever felt inclined to stand up for me like this.
That was why I couldn’t hate her for bringing pestilence upon us. The pull that our predecessors exerted upon us was a powerful thing. It was a force so strong that the only adequate release we had devised in response was to produce successors. But because of me, Marie-Anne had pincered the relationship with her predecessors into nothingness. Perhaps that was why she no longer wanted to look forward in time.
If things had stayed the way they were, we probably would’ve come around to getting a handle on the mess our family life had become. Maybe I would have been able to convince her that the solution to an imperfect family was not to kill the idea of family but to make another try, to keep pushing the aspiration of a perfect family life into the next generation. Something like that might have gotten us back to the baby talk. But instead the weight gain had struck. Marie-Anne’s body image took a nosedive, and sexing up her mind was the only kind of intimacy she would accept. Bottom line: there was no room for making children when the only communion was verbal and manual.
Mind sex, as we called it, wasn’t all that bad. What we lacked in physical performance we made up in narrative depth. We explored more of our subterranean interests. We were willing to say more deviant things in each other’s ears. There was something of science fiction in our intimacy. Didn’t all the scientists predict that in the future we would cease to have physical sex and be satisfied purely by the direct stimulation of our erogenous neurons using electronic stimulation? Marie-Anne and I decided that, as Sartre and Simone had been pioneers of the contemporary swinging culture, she and I were at the forefront of the kind of sex people would be having thirty years from now. At some point, she said, she would write a book about our experiences. It would be entitled Mindtimacy. Perfect for the virtual age.
Still, there were issues. Chief among the challenges of mind sex was that it was entirely reliant on conversation. When something created a mental barrier between two people it was impossible to appeal to physical connection to overcome that distance. Silence forced us to float away from one another. Each of us in separate quarters. Alone. Dissatisfied. Resentful of the other for withholding orgasms.
That was where we found ourselves now.
* * *
Being banished to the living room meant that I had plenty of time to become familiar with my surroundings. The first thing I did was reorganize the kitchen, reshelving everything from pots to wineglasses. Then I went through the bookshelf and familiarized myself with every book upon it. No more surprises. Next I set my sights on the two drawers underneath the television, which were filled with all sorts of film and music that we hadn’t gotten around to. I took all the mus
ic, burned it onto our hard drives, and discarded the vast quantities of CDs. At last I moved to our film library, most of which was composed of DVDs that Marie-Anne had brought over from her Charleston home, simply sweeping them into a suitcase and dragging it over when her mother told her to clear everything out.
I had never gone through the collection before. I was surprised by it. It contained almost nothing from Hollywood. Many of the films had come down to Marie-Anne from her father. There was a lot of Italian neorealism. There was some early Polanski, including his first work, the taut and tense exploration of infidelity, Knife in the Water. Then I got to the bulk of the films. Almost all of them were French art-house flicks from the fifties to the eighties. With plenty of time to burn, I blew through them. It was an aspect of Western cultural history I hadn’t consumed before. My favorite among these, from a cinematic standpoint, was The Battle of Algiers, about the French occupation of Algeria. Raw and violent. I liked it despite its overtly political flavor.
But it wasn’t the most intriguing film in the collection. That mantle belonged to a mid-seventies film starring Isabelle Adjani. It was called L’Histoire de Adèle H. The container it came in contained a note from Marie-Anne’s father addressed to her mother: This is the actress that Martin Ryerson said you looked like. Take a look. I think the resemblance is uncanny. The note had been written with a ballpoint pen, one that was short on ink so that some of the letters were without color. Marie-Anne had never mentioned her mother resembling any actress, so I figured she was either unaware of the film’s existence or would never bring it up with me. I decided to go ahead and watch it.