Guapa

by Saleem Haddad

  I had been casually seeing a girl. She was a close friend of his, but I did not know it then. She was the last one, I decided at the time. We had been on a few dates and were approaching that point where there would be no turning back. We would either be together or not. I had stalled for too long, so that what was left was a husk of what could have been marriage, kids, Teta’s approval, all those things.

  We were in Guapa, bored, our courtship hanging between us like a sick dog that needed to be put down. I asked her if she wanted to go to the cinema and she said, “I don’t know” and sighed. We were all bored then, before the protests. Deflated and resigned to the fact that we would remain like this forever. We sat in Guapa watching the mood darken. I had drunk enough beer to maintain a conversation but not to feign interest in one, and I worked to sustain this level, a faint buzz that kept me mellow. There we all were, the entire country and me in that never-ending prerevolutionary resignation, like sexually frustrated adolescents who have had their POLSKASAT disconnected. And then Taymour arrived.

  He was wearing gym shorts, a baseball cap, and a University of Virginia T-shirt. He shook my hand firmly and sat at our table. I was taken by his legs. They were muscled and hairy. He caught me looking at them and I quickly looked away. He looked fresh and sweaty and I could tell from the way his eyes scanned the room that he saw the world the same way I did. I realized then why everything in my life had happened, because it was all leading me to that moment. I saw Taymour and felt that it was true what they say about fate, that in the infinite possibilities we had found each other against so many odds.

  After he ordered a beer I asked him what he did. He said he was a doctor.

  “Don’t just tell him that,” the girl urged. “Tell him what you really like doing.”

  Taymour said he played music, piano, violin, guitar, and that he sang as well.

  “A musical doctor,” I said, and he smiled. I felt so proud of myself for making him smile, because he smiled in a way that showed he didn’t give out smiles for cheap.

  I didn’t learn much about him until later that night. In Guapa he was so quiet. He nodded at the appropriate points in the conversation and coughed when our cigarette smoke blew in his face. But even then I could tell he was from a good family and had been groomed to behave in a manner deemed acceptable by society. At the time, I had thought to myself that if he were a woman I would have taken him home immediately and paraded him in front of Teta. She would have been thrilled for me to have found a girl like that.

  That night I was so happy I drank and drank to delay our separation. By the time we were ready to leave I was ensnared in a blissful drunkenness. Taymour offered to drive us both home, and after dropping the girl off he turned to me and asked if she was my girlfriend. It was so cute, him asking me this, trying to be casual and yet I could sniff out the curiosity underneath the question.

  “I suppose so, yes,” I replied.

  “And yet you’re in the car with me?”

  I asked if he had a girlfriend and he chuckled. We were silent after that. But within that silence a more serious conversation was brewing. Until then, we couldn’t afford to resort to small talk. We relaxed into the stillness and then he began to hum, and then quietly sing, his voice soft and nostalgic.

  When we arrived at my house I invited him in. He accepted. We were both unsure but we were following each other, leading each other into this secret world. He stood beside me politely as I unlocked the front door. In my bedroom I grabbed the bottle of whiskey I keep hidden under my bed, a bottle Teta knows about but acts ignorant of, as if to allow me that one vice. I turned off the lights, lit a few candles, poured us each a glass of whiskey, and turned the radio on, softly, so as to not wake up Doris or Teta. Taymour asked if I lived with my parents and I told him the truth, immediately, which I never do. About my mother and my father. I hid nothing. We were looking into each other’s eyes and to lie would be to blink and ruin what we were creating. On the radio Oum Kalthoum’s voice floated through the room.

  Oh my heart, don’t ask me where the love has gone …

  Taymour picked up the book sitting on my bedside table. Seasons of Migration to the North, he read the title out loud, put the book to his nose and flipped through the pages, breathing in the book’s musty scent. I wanted to be the words in the book, to have him breathe me into his body. He turned to me and, tracing his fingers along the book’s cover, asked, “Do you feel like you don’t belong here?”

  “I don’t feel I belong anywhere.”

  Taymour looked down and smiled. “I almost didn’t come back after university. The thought of coming back, and having to fit into society’s mold, it was too much.”

  “Even if people like us never fit in?”

  He shrugged. “At least we know the game here. We know how society works. We can play by the rules, one foot in and one foot out. It’s the only way to be, because if you get sucked too deeply into society you get stuck in the throes of something that simply doesn’t exist. But if you’re too far away then you are lost.”

  “My father once said that the most important affiliation for the Arab is his family and community.”

  “I agree with your dad,” Taymour said. “If you don’t have society, what else is left?”

  We chatted for a long time that night, stifling yawns and chasing away moments of silence, fearing they would lead us toward an ending where we would have to part. We were creating a new world, our own society, in my room. We were populating this world with our unfiltered thoughts and fears. It was all our doing, we knew we had to make sure everything we put into our world was authentic and real, and it felt so good, to finally live and speak from the heart.

  The muezzin started his call to prayer, which brought us back to the outside world, gently, like a bridge between our world and theirs. Taymour said he had to go home, but it was in the “had to” that I felt I could hold on.

  “The bed is big enough for two,” I said, as casual as I could, fielding off the implications that buzzed around us like mosquitoes waiting to strike. He appeared to consider this for a moment and then nodded. I gave him a T-shirt, some clean shorts. I looked away as he changed, but not before catching a glimpse of his strong chest, peppered with brown hair. I took off my jeans and T-shirt, blew out the candles, and climbed into bed. We lay side by side, staring at the dark ceiling. Suddenly his phone rang. It was his mother. He answered and spoke to her in a hushed tone. I turned on the light and fiddled with my own phone. He listened patiently as she spoke, a seriousness returned to his features, and for a moment I assumed a terrible accident had occurred. When he got off the phone he looked disappointed. I asked if everything was okay.

  “Everything is fine. I just … I have to go home. She sounds worried.” He let out a long sigh and lay back down on the bed, the phone resting on his stomach. I did not say anything until the light of his mobile screen went out and we were once again shrouded in darkness.

  I lay beside him and turned to face him. “Tell me about your family.”

  And he did. He told me about his mother, his father, the maid. How they all live together. On the surface everything appears as it should. His parents attend social gatherings, smiling and holding hands. But when they return home his mother goes upstairs to her bedroom, while his father goes into his bedroom. He told me how his mother discovered his father having an affair with the maid. How she ordered an extra floor be built on the roof of their villa. How she moved there once it was built, and every night the maid creeps into his father’s bedroom. And how not a soul knows, not his uncles or aunts, his cousins or his grandparents. And it’s him, only him, whom his mother has, and she is terrified of losing him.

  “It makes me so angry, to be part of this secret. How a series of incidents has forced me into a situation where nothing makes sense and yet everything appears as it should.”

  Oh how right he was. It was as if he were foretelling our own story, although at the time neither of us could have predi
cted everything that was to happen. And then he looked at me and said, “I didn’t realize how lost I had been until I saw you tonight. Did you feel the same? That we had been lost for years and had only just found each other again?”

  He put his hand on my hip as we lay in the dark. His hand was like an intruder from a parallel universe. I studied the expression on his face as his hand began to move in soft circles on my lower back. I could feel his warm breath on my hand as I reached out and touched his cheek, running my fingers along the contours of his cheekbones and jaw. I was leaving my fingerprints on him, so that if we were to be found there would be no escaping the evidence. I was terrified of what this meant but I also knew that he was right: We had been lost for so many years but now we had found each other, two souls suffering the same pain. I could feel his body trembling. It was as if he had expended all his courage to get himself to this stage, in bed with me, his hand on my back, that he had nothing left to give.

  “It’s okay,” I whispered.

  And then we descended on each other. We ripped off our clothes and masks and delusions until there was nothing left, just the two of us, raw, skin on skin. We were completely bare and utterly whole. Two abandoned souls, we wrapped our arms around each other, tried to become one again. We felt unbreakable. Afterward we lay for a while, maybe fifteen minutes, and then he turned to me with a mischievous look in his eyes. He pulled me toward him, harder now, and this time we were rougher, wrestling and pushing against each other, as if through violence we might drown out the shame we felt. We came one more time and lay side by side, panting and sweating, for a few minutes more.

  The sun was rising when he left. I unlocked the front door and he touched my hand. His face looked so serious. I gave him a quick, hungry kiss, relishing the softness of his lips for one last time that night. Watching him walk to his car, I felt light as air, as if the weight that had been bearing down on me for years was gone, and I was now like everyone else.

  When I returned to the bedroom I noticed his red boxer shorts on the floor by my bed. Had he forgotten them, or did he leave them there for me? I looked for my own underwear but could not find it. Surely he must have noticed, as he pulled on his gym shorts, that he was wearing not his underwear but mine. Maybe it was a message, a promise that he would be back. I put his underwear on, felt my dick touch the soft cotton where his dick had rested only a few hours ago. We were one now.

  But then the sunlight crept through the shutters and I began to worry. The birds were singing and at any moment Doris would leave her bedroom and prepare the house for breakfast. Then Teta would wake up and barge into my room. Yalla ya, Rasa, yalla, habibi. I felt the danger palpably, intimately. I cleaned up, hiding the glasses of whiskey under the bed. As the sunlight crept in through the windows, the shame inside of me began to awaken.

  By breakfast I was longing for him again. I sat across from Teta as she complained. I couldn’t even tell what was annoying her this time, I just nodded along and picked at the halloumi and radishes Doris had placed on the table. I wasn’t concerned with anything that day. I had everything I could ever want. I realized I could be happy without changing myself in the process, and Taymour had shown me how. Was this what all the couples at the weddings I’ve attended feel?

  That damn wedding tonight. I would much prefer to spend the rest of the evening here in my underwear, smoking cigarettes and dreaming I was somewhere else, some other time when there was hope. But if I miss the wedding I would be inviting too many questions.

  I open the closet and pull out my suit. I have only ever owned two suits. The first one Baba bought for me many years ago. I needed something to wear for his burial, and he had the foresight to buy one for me. He didn’t tell me what the suit was intended for, but one of the first things he did after he found out about his illness was to take me to a tailor downtown. We parked the car and walked into a quiet shop in the attic of an old building. As the tailor — an elderly man with a salt-and-pepper mustache — silently measured the length of my waist and inseam, I was dimly aware that my father’s eyes were red and moist. Looking back now, I’m not sure whether there actually were tears in his eyes or if I had added them in later in my memory of that moment. Maybe I wanted to solidify the atmosphere that surrounded us at the time, the grief and sadness for all that we were to lose, manifesting those feelings into solid, round teardrops in my father’s eyes.

  That day my father picked out a classic black suit. I wanted a gray one but there was no arguing with Baba. He also picked out a tie that was dark, almost black, except under the sun the color turned a deep blue. When we got back home he knotted the tie for me and said, in a very serious tone, “Don’t undo the tie. You won’t be able to knot it again.”

  I only wore that suit once, on the day of his burial. After that it hung on a metal hanger in the corner of my closet, the blue-black tie hanging over it, the knot still in place. When I returned from university after my first year the suit was missing.

  “Where did it go?” I asked Doris as I rummaged through the shirts and trousers that hung in my closet.

  “Teta throw,” Doris said.

  I ran to the living room and asked Teta what she did with the suit.

  “That tiny thing? I threw it out, it was too small.”

  “What do you mean you threw it out?” I bellowed. I had never raised my voice at Teta before. But the thought of losing the suit and that tie, which had remained firmly knotted and carried Baba’s touch and breath within its knot, was too much to bear.

  “What are you yelling about?” Teta snapped.

  “Baba bought that for me,” I said.

  “He bought it for you to wear at his funeral. For God’s sake why would you want to keep that? If you loved your father so much, why not hang on to happier memories?”

  “I don’t want to pick and choose memories,” I said. “We’re worse than the government with the way we rewrite history. I am sick of hanging photos of him smiling when I know he’s rotting in the ground somewhere.”

  She slapped me, almost impulsively. When she withdrew her hand, her palm was red. She held on to her wrist, as if using one hand to stop the other one from taking another strike.

  “Shame on you,” Teta said. “Shame, shame on you.”

  I bought another suit, years later, when I had come back from the States and my friends started to drop like flies into the cesspool of marriage.

  I put this suit on now, and stick the photograph of Ahmed’s son — my letter to Taymour — in the shirt pocket. Looking at myself in the mirror, there is nothing special about this suit. There was no tailor, no measurements or anything like that. I simply picked a suit hanging from a rack alongside hundreds of identical suits. I only wear it to weddings, which makes the suit even more distasteful to me. Weddings are perhaps the most cynical of events, so reliant on how much money you earn, what family you come from. Weddings are the most unjust of exchanges dressed up in the language of beauty and love. Each wedding adds a stain of hatred to this suit. It’s summer now, wedding season, and tonight’s wedding, of all weddings, is the pinnacle of this façade. Given the amount of bullshit tonight’s wedding will smear on the cheap fabric, I will probably have to throw this suit away tomorrow morning.

  Dressed for the wedding, I step out of my bedroom and walk toward the kitchen. My heartbeat quickens and I resist the urge to run back inside. They can hear my footsteps now. There is no turning back. I stamp down the hall to make sure they hear me coming, to make sure I won’t chicken out at the last minute and lock myself in my bedroom for the rest of my life. I arrive at the kitchen door. Doris and Teta turn to look at me, their faces partially hidden in the dark blue shadows of dusk. The flame from a single candle flickers in a corner by the oven.

  “You’re awake,” Teta says. She is sitting at the kitchen table in front of a saucepan of carved zucchinis and a neon green plastic bucket of stuffed ones. An unpeeled onion sits in the middle of the table. A warning that things might get ugly. She
looks at me. I feel naked under her gaze, as naked as I was when she peered through the keyhole last night. She sits there looking at me, surrounded by the zucchinis, the neon green bucket, that damn onion. I want to snatch the onion away and demand that she just cry without it. But in fact she’s doing us both a favor, isn’t she?