Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  FATIMA PRESENTED HER nieces to Tony Il-Kaseem, saying, “What you think? You want marry one? These only second cousins.”

  Melvina groaned and rolled her eyes. “Mistake,” she said.

  Tony ran his hand under his butter-yellow muscle shirt. “Oh, Auntie Fat-eema!” He tossed his head, laughing, and a lock of black hair fell back in ordered strands. “You know I swing whichever way the wind blows, darling. But marriage? I’m not climbing into that closet!” He curled one hand under Jem’s chin and made a kiss-mouth at her. “Gotta go, I’m off to belly dance. Call me, Jemorah—you don’t get out enough, sister.”

  Fatima watched him gyrate his way through the crowds, hands above his head, stirring the air. “All riddles and dancing!” She shook a fist at the ceiling. “By Allah, would you send us a husband!”

  FATIMA’S LAST CONCERTED—and to her mind, most electric—matchmaking attempt of the evening was an old-looking young man named Salaam Alaikum. His face was so thick with sorrow it seemed to hang in the folds of his skin. His eyes appeared to be liquid, about to leak into the seams of his cheeks. His lower lip trembled slightly, and he was so still, propped in the chair Fatima had pushed him into, he seemed to be scarcely breathing.

  “Hello,” he whispered, lifting his hand to Jem without raising his head. Jem took it and felt a brief touch of dampness before he withdrew.

  “A university professor,” Fatima hissed. “Teaching poetry.”

  “Emerson, Thoreau, Gibran, Dickinson, Whitman, my true loves,” he said, scratching his head and producing a little snowfall of dandruff. “‘Press close bare-bosom’d night!’”

  Jem felt a wave of cold wash over her, and she looked up to see a woman dressed and veiled entirely in black who had moved between her and Salaam. There was no hint of her face except for a pair of aviator glasses propped over the veil. “I am the mother,” the woman said in Arabic, then began rummaging through Jem’s hair.

  “Cease and desist this instant!” Melvie said, jumping up and swatting the woman’s hands.

  “I am the mother,” the woman commanded. “I want to look over this daughter-in-law.” She circled around Jem and grabbed her jaw. “Open.”

  Jem jerked back as Melvie grabbed the woman’s wrist. “Unhand her!” Melvie cried.

  “Naughty, naughty girls!” the mother said, while Fatima sighed heavily as if to say, I know, I know. “How can I know my daughter-in-law before I know her teeth? You told me she was a good, obedient girl, sweet as a chicken.”

  “Back off, lady!” Melvie raised a fist. “I’m warning you.”

  “Allah the merciful and munificent! A demon-ifrit.”

  Melvie and the mother began bickering, waving their hands at each other. Jem turned from them to see Salaam staring at her, his eyes wide and pale as ghosts, so steady that Jem felt, for a moment, undressed, and put her hand to her throat.

  “You want to be alone, too, don’t you?” he said. “You’re like me. You want to live the rest of your life blissfully alone.”

  “No,” Jem said, too faintly for the women to hear. “No. I don’t.”

  FATIMA HAD GIVEN up on her groom search for the evening and was now on her fifth sloe-gin fizz. “She did it at least one halfs from spite,” she was saying to her friend Estrelia. “No, I take back, she did it one hundred percents from spite. I’m tell you, she died to make us looking bad.”

  Estrelia, who was five ten and had about seven inches and forty pounds on Fatima, was tipsy. She stared at her smaller friend and wondered if Fatima was going to pass out any time soon. Estrelia had been a flight attendant for thirty-five years and called herself a “vet.” She claimed to have lived through two nose dives and one midair collision, and had navigated countless angry, sweaty travelers, businessmen with martinis, first-class tickets, wives, and roaming fingers. She’d survived boozing it up with stewardesses and pilots in airport lounges, then staggering in a crowd onto the wrong planes. She’d seen the cities of Bangkok, Tai Pei, and Geneva blur together. She could drink till her lips got heavy, her mouth fell slantwise; till she was paging phony names (“Mrs. Hazel Nuts”) on airport intercoms and couldn’t recognize her own voice anymore.

  When she heard her friend Fatima saying her brother’s wife had died to make her look bad, Estrelia knew they’d entered the danger zone. She tried to hush Fatima. The band had been playing for some time and there was a huge crowd up front trying to dance to Matussem’s jazz. The Archbishop and his mother were clapping their hands, absorbed in the entertainment. No one noticed Fatima at the last table, bitterly chewing over the facts of life: ungrateful husbands, unappreciative Ladies’ Pontifical Committees, impossible nieces, and dead, interfering sisters-in-law.

  “C’mon, Fatty,” Estrelia tried to joke, using a name Fatima allowed no one to use. “How do you contract typhus out of spite?”

  Fatima only nodded more vigorously, throwing spray-starched hair around her shoulders. “She doesn’t get the vaccine, these is how! Who get typhus anymore? And die in one night, boom? Nobody but for silly-silly tourists who don’t get their shots and come to Jordan to show so superior they are!” She finished this statement in a scream and several heads turned.

  Melvina jumped up from the next table and Jem rubbed her forehead. “Oh no,” she said.

  “Excuse me, but what were you saying just now?” Melvie asked Fatima, fists on her hips.

  Estrelia tried to wave Melvie away, but the confrontation thrilled Fatima; gin was boiling through her, mingling with a hundred petty grievances and irritations. Zaeed was up on the dance floor with Amy; there was nothing to constrain Fatima; she was free. Soaring on a hot wind of anger, she shouted, “Your mother dies on purpose because she hates Arabs!”

  Melvina slapped her so hard that Fatima spilled out of her chair.

  Later people got the details mixed up. Some said Fatima was threatening to kill Melvie, or herself, or the whole family; others knew it had something to do with mothers; everyone knew Fatima was upset over being left her mother’s ugliest dresses. Some said Fatima slapped first; others, that Melvina pulled a switchblade.

  Jem saw it all, from the slap to the riot that spontaneously combusted around them. Estrelia grabbed Melvie, and suddenly a hundred men were yelling and swinging at each other, launching into a free-for-all. Everyone was shouting in Arabic, shrieking about mothers, Arabs, Americans, and patriotism in general. From what Jem could tell, the men—though all drunk—swiftly factionalized, Saudis with Saudis, Lebanese with Lebanese, and so on. There was civil war at the back of the St. Yusef Syrian Orthodox Church.

  At the front of the church, the party was going strong. The women and children and the men too old or blasé to bother with brawling, as well as a few bewildered American spouses, had crowded forward into the spaces the other men had left behind. The Archbishop appeared to be oblivious to the chaos behind him. Then the custodians had the idea to herd the brawlers, like cowhands herding cattle, back into the big cloakroom behind the dance hall. Jem watched as the still-fighting crowd was custodian-rounded-up through the double doors. She peeked into the cloakroom and saw that the men were now so crammed together they could no longer swing out, but hung on each other’s necks, twisting and pushing like an unruly chorus line. Some of them had already started singing.

  Fatima had swooned in a cloud of gin vapor and was flat on one of the linoleum tables while several women hovered over her. Melvina had disappeared.

  THE DINNER PORTION of the party was over and, as far as Jem was concerned, her sister had issued the final comment on family relations for the day. Matussem and the Ramoudettes were engrossed in their music; Jem’s father had entered a Count Basie trance with occasional riffs from the soundtrack to The Ten Commandments. He hadn’t even seen the fight. But in the moment when the fight passed from the women to the men, Jem saw the pale, eel-skinned Larry Fasco flicking among the brawlers, a fin cutting through the churning water.

  The party itself ended an hour later when one of the Lady Pontif
icals discovered that a huge group of drunken, sweating, singing men was making it difficult to get to her wrap in the cloakroom, and that, furthermore, they were threatening to storm the stage with Arabic drinking songs. The Lady Pontificals called the police, and Jem peeked through the church door just in time to see three police cars, sirens and cherry lights flashing, pull into the parking lot. She stood quickly.

  “Hey Jemmy,” Matussem said when Jem walked over to him. “You’re just in time for help us carry out equipment. I think party’s about winding down.”

  The police, huge in storm-blue uniforms and squared-off shoulders, waded through the little mothers who clucked at their children and scurried out of the auditorium. The officers were holding clubs; the Lady Pontificals had described the fight to them as a full-scale Mid-East uprising, possibly an international incident. By the time the officers reached the cloakroom there was nothing there but settling dust, and Roorhoud, the hunched-over caretaker, restoring coats to hangers.

  “Whad you want?” he said. “Whad? They go boom-boom, boom-boom, big fight, kelbe-dogs, boom-boom, Roorhoud have to fix. Whad bullshit.”

  Jem helped the band pick up cables as the police left, closely followed by an indignant pack of Lady Pontificals. She looked at her father. “Where’s your manager?” she asked. “I thought he was in charge of this stuff.”

  Matussem straightened and turned toward her. His hair oil had broken up and locks fell in spikes across his forehead. He touched a finger to his lips as if imparting a secret. “Who knows?” he said. “Larry Fasco is like moon and tides, he comes, he goes, there no telling. Guy is eighth wonder of the world.”

  JEM HAD A cable slung over each shoulder and a microphone in each hand when Roorhoud ran up to her. “Some guy is call for you, there in office. Maybe one to marry you finally!”

  Jem answered the phone, and Gil Sesame said, “Hey, hey, guess who this is!”

  “Gil Sesame!” she said. “How on earth?”

  “Well darlin’, after I called your house, I tried calling every other Ramoud and Arab-sounding name in the Mona Library’s Syracuse phone book, figuring y’all knew each other. Which turned out to be about right. Also talked to a couple Turks and a Frenchman. They were the ones told me about the party, since most everybody else was already there. Must been one hellfire shindig—whyn’t you invite me?”

  “Well, why would I? Where are you, anyway?”

  “Hell, you’re a regular welcoming committee. Well, gal, remember how I said I was in Salt Lake City? All right, that was just the hind-end of a little white lie. Actually, I’m in a little bitty town just outside of Salt Lake, called Mona. I’ve been unexpectedly detained, but I just received word—in no small part, thanks to you—that I’ll soon be able to hitchhike on out of here, untarred and featherless.”

  Through the door, Jem watched Aunt Fatima sit up and give Roorhoud an appraising look from her table.

  Jem switched the phone from her right to left hand and dried the sweat off on her dress. She hesitated. “Gil, what’s going on? What’s in Mona?”

  “Hell, all kinds of things are here, stuffed owls, a grocery shack, a fishing tackle-religious supply store, just same as in New York. Also, there’s this prison, see, well, more a kind of jail, you know, nothing that imposing, y’understand—”

  “Uh-huh—”

  “Well, y’see it’s like this. Y’all know how I possess this special gift, so’s to speak. You might even say disappearing art form, like Indian pottery—”

  “You mean hustling?”

  “Well sure, yes, to put it baldly, to call an eight ball an eight ball, hustling, yes.”

  Jem glanced back into the party hall. Matussem was draping a khaffiyea around Fergyl’s head, saying, “Better than Peter O’Toole.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “Well, Utahans are a special breed, y’see. Second cousins to Nebraskans, which means they’re the sportin’ kind. Hell, y’all can hardly blame them, spending half their wakin’ hours gettin’ churched up. You have any idea what one of them Mormon services runs to time-wise? Looks like seven, eight hours from where I’m standing. So who’s to blame them if they look to a little relief, is what I’m saying—”

  “Gil, is there something you want to tell me?”

  “Well, that’s what I’m coming to, Miss Jemorah, if y’all’d let me get around to it. Damn it all, you New Yorkers can be the pushiest kind of pushy. See, about a month back I won me a wife—”

  “Upstate New Yorker. What did you say?” Jem switched hands again.

  “Now, girl, listen. This was not my wife. Exactly. More like there’s this feller from somewhere outside of St. Anthony, the wilds, and he wanted to keep playing. I mean he’s the kind so dumb-ass dumb, you can’t help jerking him on the line a little bit longer than is absolutely necessary. And that, Miss Jem, was Gilbert Sesame’s first and only mistake, if indeed mistake it was.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean to say, the guy’s dumb as a stick and just as poor, too, only he wants to keep playing, even after I got him mortgaging his granny’s grave and selling the fillings in his teeth. So he’s bet every last tooth in his head, what’s he possibly got left to give away?”

  “His wife.”

  “Prophetess!”

  “And you let him?”

  “Miss Jem, when a man’s betting, you gotta be accepting. It’s a holy rule, eleventh commandment. You gotta know when ’tis better to receive than to give.”

  “Gil, what happened?”

  “Well, there’s an answer to that question. But to get to it, I’ve got to tell you, for starters, that the Dumb-Ass’s wife was fifteen and five-eighths, though she looks about a full decade above and beyond. And being fifteen and five-eighths would not be such a complete difficulty in some of these parts, only the damn Mormons can be so sticky about insiders, outsiders, and whatnot. Not to mention the gal happened to be the daughter of the owner of the biggest Pinky Binky supermarket this side of the Mississippi—owner being best friends with the district court judge—who’d just as soon his gal stay with the first husband, not that the pa was so all-fired hot on the original article. Fact is, the Dumb-Ass is still serving a sentence. We each got hard time—community service—dishing out mashed food at the Mona Seniors’ Recreation Center. For trading and carousing. Ha! I’d like to see them make that stick. Besides which, I never laid a finger on her. She wouldn’t let me near her. In all actuality, though, I got Mona-style justice—no mashed spuds long as I could give them the name of my far-off sponsor.”

  “Your what?”

  “You, of course, my bride-to-be! The custody is just in theory, of course. No actual doing attached.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Buttercup, it’s called the Law of the West. Mona Ordinance 107: criminals under the age of 60 may be released into the custody of a sponsor if said sponsor resides at a distance of not less than 1,392 miles from downtown Mona, population 27.”

  “Criminals under sixty?”

  “Most of the town is over seventy. I can’t explain the mileage part. Ordinance 108 says no mules in the dry goods store. Makes more sense to me than the sponsor law.”

  “That’s why you started calling me last week!”

  “Now, now, Miss Jem, I know what you’re thinking—” Jem heard a scuffle in the background, the squeak of a palm over the receiver and Gil’s voice, muffled, saying, “All right, already, you’ll get your damn spuds.” He came back. “Pardon the interlude, these senior citizen types are something else. But as I was saying, A, I only have eyes for you, my muse, my guiding light, and B, I’m gonna beat this pathetic rap without a tear or drop of bloodshed. My lawyer, Rex Biggs of Wee, Biggs, and Howe, says to lay low back East awhile—in hiding, so to speak. We’ll sue their shriveled hides for defamation of character and then catch the glory train back out West together. In the meantime, little darlin’, when do we rendezvous?”

  “I don’t know what to say, Gil. It’s all so…
strange.”

  “Yes, indeedy, ma’am. Doesn’t everybody love a surprise? There are so few such pleasures in life. Like your Arab hoedowns—when’s the next one? How many are you hiding from me?”

  Watching Fatima steer Roorhoud in her direction, Jem blurted, “No, none! They’re practically every weekend, but—”

  “Fine, perfect! Bravissimo! Okay, I gotta go now. Till then, arrivederci! Till we meet again in Rome!”

  MELVINA STILL HADN’T come home by the time Jem got into bed that night. Jem fell asleep wondering where she was. Her dreams were jumbled, the color of sloe gin; she saw long hair, trees bending. Somebody was saying, “This is your husband,” behind her sister, who was shaking her head no.

  When she woke the dawn was gin-colored. She went to her window and could faintly see a small figure walking up the Otts’s field toward their house, a black dot in a pool of rose. She pulled on her robe and went outside. The air was pink, and she wasn’t certain of what she saw: it appeared to be Larry Fasco walking through the fields carrying Melvina.

  They were shining like the tall grass. Larry Fasco’s arms, neck, and face made a prism of the sun, a spectrum. He winked in and out of the light; at times Melvie seemed to be floating, her skin wine-dark against the brightness. She was brimming, eyes closed, skin taut as a fruit’s.

  The only sound was Larry’s legs switching through the weeds. He brought Melvie across the street, onto the front lawn, and placed her next to Jem. As soon as she slid from his arms, Melvie returned to herself. She straightened, brushed at her dress, and shook hands with Larry Fasco, saying, “Thank you for a pleasant evening, Mr. Fasco.”

  Larry Fasco didn’t look ready to leave, but Melvie folded her arms.