Guapa

  “Habibi,” she takes me in her arms, smothers me with kisses. “Don’t cry. Don’t let her make you cry.”

  I burst into exaggerated sobs. My nostrils fill with the smell of her rosewater perfume. I am aware I have finally taken Teta’s side against my mother. But is that such a surprise? There was never any doubt about it. I am Teta’s child. Everything my grandmother tried to teach my mother, I had swallowed up in her stead. It was down to me to ensure we functioned as a proper family, and although I wasn’t sure exactly what a proper family was, I could only take Teta’s word for it. In the hallway my mother bursts into a fresh round of moans as Doris consoles her. The sound makes me cry even harder.

  The next day my mother is gone. If it were not for that, the day would have been like any other, and my memory of it would have faded without a trace. But of course the texture of that day remained as clear as the present. Baba returning from his shift that morning, whispering into the phone for hours, dialing number after number. The gray February sky hung low, threatening rain, until finally, just before I went to bed, the skies opened up and drenched the city with loud, heavy raindrops, and I thought of where my mother might be, whether she was caught under the rain or whether she had made it farther than that, somewhere where the weather might be different.

  That night, as Baba and Teta put me to bed, I asked them where Mama had gone, and if she would come back, and whether we would look for her. In response my father said something that I have been turning around in my mind ever since.

  “Habibi, the one who knows God most is the one who accepts whatever God has given him.”

  “And God gave us your mother,” Teta added.

  My father didn’t say any more, but those words stayed with me for a long time. My father only talked about important things. The unimportant things, the trivial things, the obvious things, had always been left to my mother. With my mother gone there was no one to talk to about all the other things, and I took my father’s response to mean that my mother’s sudden disappearance was an obvious thing that didn’t need to be discussed.

  After that there were no more questions, even if the longing for my mother grew inside of me with each passing year, a longing that broke out of every secret cage I put it in. Teta had taught Baba and me that our privacy was our way to keep the shameful parts of our life from the public eye. For the longest time it had seemed that my mother was determined to consume as much of our private side as possible, to take up as big a portion of our shame, ensure it was spent on her and no one else. Perhaps as a provocation, or else to force our family into a conundrum — to either confront our shame or relegate her to a secret corner of our minds. But shame was stronger, and in her absence there was at least some relief that our shame would remain undisturbed.

  The morning after finding out about Cecile and Sufyan, I woke up with a newfound fury. To hell with America and everyone in it, Sufyan, Cecile, and even my damn mother if she was here. I was finished with assuming the best intentions in those who abandoned me, done trying to assuage my loneliness in barren places. Ultimately, I was filled with rage at myself. I had deluded myself all this time into thinking that there was something there, when in fact I was only chasing my tail and losing myself in the process.

  And life moved on, oblivious to my pain. The depth of my loneliness was beautiful, and years of hiding my inner turmoil came in handy. All throughout the spring Sufyan and Cecile hung out. I tried not to pay attention but they were there, in my classes and in DuPont. I ignored them and hung out with Leila. Because Leila was serious. She was responsible. She was reliable. She would never do what Cecile had done. What America had done. She would never betray me that way.

  “Do you think I’m too Westernized?” I asked Leila as we walked back home from the library.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This guy, Sufyan, says I’m too Westernized.”

  “The American guy? You’re letting an American guy tell you whether you’re Arab enough?”

  “He’s originally Arab —” I began.

  “Oh please. Arab Americans are even worse than white people. They look at you like they know you, as if they have an idea of what you’re like from stereotypes and their parents’ ancient memories. And when you don’t conform to their image it terrifies them, because they wear their Arab culture like window dressing but underneath they are as white as snow.”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “Mouajanat, I call them.”

  “What do pastries have to do with it?”

  “Because they’re obsessed with the stuff,” Leila continued. “I once went to a dinner organized by a group of Arab Americans. They ordered a plate with four mouajanat and divided them among twenty people! They would pick at the mouajanat like pigeons and sit there so satisfied in their perceived authenticity.”

  I bought a black-and-white kaffiyeh and wore it with pride, wrapping it around my neck like a protective shield. I chastised the West for its colonial history. My culture was complex and different. Our inshallahs were not a lack of commitment, they were a recognition that rules and regulations can only get you so far. If I could not live like a human in America, if I was to have this stereotype foisted upon me, why not run with it and use it to my advantage? I walked down the street flaunting my kaffiyeh, daring passersby to antagonize me. Instead they just crossed to the other side of the street and kept on walking.

  Being gay, that wasn’t for me. My homosexuality would leave me alienated wherever I went. In America the gay world touched my life at the margins, through references and images and occasional conversations with men and women who celebrated their homosexuality with pride. As far as I could see there was nothing to be proud about. There was only pain, humiliation, and shame. If I were to join this group, I would have to act proud and hide my feelings of rejection and loneliness. If I were to show these men and women that I was terrified for my future, I would be regarded as misguided or a victim of Islam and Arabness. But if there was one thing I was certain of it was that there was nothing misguided about my feelings, and I did not feel that Islam or my Arabness was to blame. If I were to join this group, I would simply go from the repressiveness of secrecy to the repressiveness of pride. I didn’t despise my shame. I had no reason to do so. My shame illuminated my intense attachment to the world, my desire to be connected with others.

  I took all my rage and channeled it into activism, into human rights and justice and things that were clear and simple. I was passionately angry about the unjust wars, the brutal occupations, the massacred children, and the exploitation of people for profit and the pursuit of new markets. The angrier I became, the less time I had to think of how lonely I really was. I would never have admitted it to myself at the time, but underneath it all I wanted nothing more than to satisfy an inherent feeling of the unfairness of the world in my own life.

  A few months after I had terrorized Cecile in the computer room there was a knock on my door. I opened it and there she was, drenched from the rain and holding a casserole dish, the tinfoil on the top dented and collecting rainwater into a little reservoir. Cecile was crying, her usually vibrant curls plastered against her cheeks as she wiped the tears and rainwater from her face with one hand.

  “I made him a vegan lasagna.” She held up the dripping dish and burst into tears.

  “Come in.” I brought her a blanket and sat across from her at the kitchen table. The casserole dish sat in the buffer zone between us.

  “I’ve never cooked a vegan meal in my life,” she explained in between sobs. “I thought it would be sweet to do that for Sufyan. I put all my energy into it because he hasn’t been well these past few weeks and I wanted to chu-chu-cheer him up.”

  “Go on.” I lit a cigarette and watched her. For the first time she appeared weak. Was she so involved in her own issues she failed to see the world was going to hell around her? But a part of me felt that familiar rush at the mention of Sufyan’s name, even if she still managed to mispronoun
ce it.

  “He wasn’t taking my calls. I hadn’t seen him in almost two weeks. He’s been hanging out with this Muslim Society group on campus that is full of these serious men. He said I would never understand. So when he didn’t answer my call today I just went over to his house. I knocked on the door and he comes out looking like he hasn’t shaved in weeks. He looked at the lasagna and told me not to come around his house anymore and that we were over.”

  “So you came here?”

  “I don’t know what’s got into him.” She blew her nose, leaving in her wake a trail of white tissue carnage.

  I walked over to Cecile and gave her a hug and a puff of my cigarette. She burrowed her face in my shoulder, soaking my kaffiyeh with her imperialist tears. I looked at the cold lasagna, wondering at what point it would be appropriate to ask her if I could have a bite.

  After that we found ourselves picking up where we had left off. Cecile got over the pain of losing Sufyan soon enough, finding new emotional crises to satisfy her.

  As for Sufyan, he quietly withdrew from the activist circles and spent more time in closed rooms with bearded men. His own beard grew out, from a light, carefree stubble to a serious, fuller Ikhwan beard. In the end neither Cecile nor I could keep him. I was filled with sadness that his new beard had covered up the tiny scar under his lip where the piercing once stood. The silver stud was the first thing that had caught my eye, and its disappearance seemed like a confirmation that everything about those times was now hidden under a thick mound of hair.

  After graduation I made a halfhearted attempt to stay in America. But as Leila and I searched for jobs, it dawned on us that without the right contacts, we would never get work. And soon enough the kaffiyeh started popping up everywhere, worn by fashionable hipsters in a variety of colors. What was once feared was now saturated to irrelevance. The kaffiyeh had lost its significance, so I took it off. It was time to go home.

  I did one thing before I left America, and that was to tell Cecile my secret. During my last summer there, I rented a room in her house. We smoked weed in the mornings and cycled through the city’s parks, reading all the beatniks and listening to Bob Marley. It was like the knowledge that I was soon to return home allowed me to relax and let her into my world, and gave me the courage to step into hers.

  The day before my flight home, Cecile and I went to the park, where we spent all day lying on the grass clearing by the crystal blue lake. We had smoked enough weed that we were no longer high but retained a permanent buzz that enveloped us like a blanket. Our skin tingled from the sun as we watched cloud formations and the gentle swaying of the trees above our heads. We watched the sun set on the warm summer evening.

  I was not intending to tell her. Our conversations that day had been lazy and calm. But I knew I had to tell someone before I left America, someone who was far away from home, so that the secret would be out, yet kept at a safe enough distance. And Cecile seemed like the perfect person to tell: She would not hide her emotions from me, or soften her words to spare my feelings. I would get her judgment swiftly and honestly, and if I was to confess this to anyone, I could not stand to question the sincerity of their response.

  There was a lull in the conversation as we watched the sun set, our bare feet caressing the blades of grass, our bikes lying next to us. She seemed unsurprised by my confession and was quiet for a while.

  “Why are you telling me this now?” she finally asked.

  “I don’t know. I suppose I owe myself this. I can’t say I came to America and left without telling anyone about it. I would go back home and regret it too much.”

  “Would they kill you over there?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so.” I paused. “Listen, people don’t just kill each other like you hear on TV.”

  “In any case,” she squeezed my leg, “I’m glad you told me.”

  III. The Wedding

  I don’t realize I have fallen asleep until the door to Teta’s bedroom creaks open. Thrust back into the present, I rub my eyes and look around. I’m in a pitch-black room. I try to get up and slip. I’m in an empty tub, naked. The toilet bowl smells of dead cigarettes. My phone says it’s just after six p.m. I know it is not a good day when I have spent much of it in the bathroom. I lie back down and stare into the darkness. How long have I been here, dreaming of a time that seems so long ago? Why am I so stuck in the past? Because the present has spun out of my control, so my thoughts are often spent in times where I have the power to change things, even if only in my memory.

  I pull myself out of the tub and stand naked in the center of the bathroom. The sound of Teta’s footsteps shuffling across the carpet fill me with an inexplicable sense of disappointment. Disappointment that she has woken up at all, perhaps, as shameful as such a thought is. Ever since returning from America, I have found living with her to be a nightmare. She is a difficult woman, always sitting in her chair, watching the news and my movements, asking a million questions every time I leave the house. When I tried to move out once she accused me of abandoning her. I can’t leave her now, not unless I get married or she dies, and God knows I’m not getting married anytime soon. So I suppose I will have to continue to avoid her, to read in my bedroom or dream in the bathroom.

  I have studied the sound of Teta’s footsteps for so long that I can tell by the number of steps she has taken that she has paused by my room. To listen or snoop, maybe. This old lady and her antique beliefs. Her ideas should have died a long time ago, yet they hang in the air like a fart. It is her and people like her who keep Taymour and me apart. Does this ancient woman not know what love is? Has old age and her stagnant sense of shame dried out her heart? Eib, she would say. Eib. This obsession with what people will say has stripped her of her humanity.

  Her shuffling begins once more and stops just outside the bathroom. I hold my breath. Who knows what she saw last night? Before the screams it had been a night like any other summer night. The slight breeze brought some cool air and the smell of jasmine through the cracks between the shutters. On the bed Taymour and I had been lost in each other. He lay on his back and I fawned over him, stroking his hair and kissing his neck and cheeks. I wasted it. No, not wasted. Ruined. Because all I can think about is how disgusting we must have looked together. All I can picture is Teta watching her grandson, the man of the house, fawning over another man. I’m a pervert, sick and diseased. I’ve strayed down the wrong path, and it’s taken me here, to the point where I seduce men in Teta’s house.

  I rest my head on the cool tiles of the bathroom wall. I wait but I don’t know for what. For her to knock on the door, kick it open, or perhaps scream and bang on it as she did last night. She’ll drag me out of the bathroom by my ear, throw me out of the house, and if I don’t leave, she’ll call the police or the neighbor’s son to remove me. I don’t know. I am not sure of much, except that I am alone, and that it’s unbearably hot.

  Instead she stands there. She is on one side of the door and I am on the other, two heavy souls separated by the flimsiest of wooden doors. I bend down and gently move the underwear hanging on the doorknob. I peer through the keyhole, half expecting to see her brown eye staring back at me. But all I see is her white nightgown and nothing more. Her body shifts and the nightgown rustles in the gentle breeze of the early evening. She lets out a deep sigh and lumbers toward the kitchen.

  “Doris,” she calls out. And then, quieter, but still audible: “How long has he been in there?”

  I don’t hear Doris’s response, but I imagine Teta sitting at the kitchen table while Doris fills her in on my movements. I had noticed Doris look behind me to see who had dropped me off from work earlier today. Perhaps they were in this together, Sherlock Holmes and Watson, out to make sure my movements are not connected in any way to Taymour.

  I move away from the door and flick on the light switch, on and off, on and off. Nothing. Another damn power cut. My hands fumble in the darkness, feeling for the lighter. I find it, flick it, and look in
the mirror. I look like shit. There are heavy bags under my eyes. My hair is disheveled and my skin is gray. There is no escape from here. I’ve wasted my opportunity in America. It’s gone from me now, like Taymour, like Teta.

  I look at my body, like a prison. I live within this prison of contradictions that fight one another like stray cats in my mind. I’m neither here nor there. Not in America and not here. Each forms a part of me, and when they all add up, all that is left is shaath.

  Ana shaath.

  If said in the right way there was a ring to it. Shaath, allowing the breath to ride the aa in the center of the word like a lazy wave. Shaath. It wasn’t perfect but it was something I could work with, if on inflection alone. Shaath: queer, deviant, abject. Is it just my homosexuality that makes me shaath, or something more than that?

  I tear myself from the mirror, light the candle by the bidet, and turn on the shower. No water comes out. I suppose I’ll have to go to this joke of a wedding in my filth. Besides, Taymour has seen me at my worst: naked, hysterical, pleading with Teta to stop screaming. If he still wants to run away with me then a bit of filth certainly won’t put him off. I get dressed and unlock the door.

  The hallway is dark and quiet, but there is movement in the kitchen. I tiptoe to my bedroom and carefully shut the door. The night table is filled with empty coffee cups, their shadows lengthening in the dying sun. I light a candle and place it on the dresser and lie down on my bed.

  This bed, this room, is Taymour. Everything in my life is Taymour. When I returned from America and moved back in with Teta, I installed a lock so she wouldn’t keep barging in all the time. She threw away my clothes, my ironic American T-shirts, and my perfectly ripped jeans (which she said made me look poor), and she took me to a tacky little shop in the old city and deliberately picked out the frumpiest clothes she could find. I reconnected with Maj and Basma, and it felt like old times except we were drowning in that feeling everyone got when they came back but no one dared mention, of having been surgically removed somehow and realizing that the wound had closed up, leaving us outside. And then there was my first Ramadan back, when I spent the entire month locked in the house watching Oprah, smoking cigarettes, and playing countless games of bridge with Teta (honestly, I’ve never met a person who cheats so much in my life). Then after Ramadan the bars opened again and I got so drunk at Guapa I threw up out the window of Maj’s car as we raced through the streets with Radiohead blasting from the speakers. Then I visited the dying museum downtown and wrote a scathing blog post about the government’s lack of care for cultural artifacts. Then I met a man online for the first time and we drove in circles around his house until his parents left and we snuck in and had sex so quickly that in a moment it was over and I walked home in shame. Then another wave of violence brought a mass of refugees flooding into the city. Then Maj drunkenly tried to kiss me one night and the next day played it off as a joke. Then I slept with a man from al-Sharqiyeh who wore skintight jeans and told me he dreamed of going to America and getting a dog, and afterward I felt so guilty about my life and my chances and how I had spent the last four years in America doing what, nothing, that’s what. Then, after calculating that my monthly paycheck would only buy me thirty beers at Guapa, after a thousand miserable taxi driver conversations and a million paranoid Internet chats with strangers (no name, no face pics, masc4masc), after walking by a policeman beating a teenage boy and looking the other way, after friends started to get married and started to ask me when I was going to get married, after Teta started to ask me when I was going to get married, after women started to ask me questions about my last name, my income, and what neighborhood I lived in (and, of course, whether I was married), after I began to date women out of a lack of any other options, after all of this I met Taymour. He became my world.