Guapa

  “There’s no electricity and no water,” I say.

  Teta sighs and returns to stuffing a zucchini while Doris stands over a frying pan by the stove. I pour myself a glass of water from the water cooler. I can feel Teta’s eyes on my back. When I turn around her gaze returns to the zucchini in her hands. She stuffs the zucchini with a lifetime of experience. First she spoons the rice and meat into the zucchini with a quick jerk of her thumb, and then pushes it deep inside before dropping it back into the plastic bucket. Her long fingernails are crusted with dried meat and sauce.

  There is silence as Doris and I wait to see what direction Teta intends to take, and whether she will mention anything about last night. If she has watched the news today she would know about the arrests, which may provide an entry point to the subject. I consider asking her but decide not to mention it for fear of inviting a discussion. I stand in the kitchen, paralyzed by the fear that anything I may say could tangentially be related to the events of the night before.

  “I don’t understand this girl,” Teta finally says, pointing toward Doris without looking up from her zucchini. “I specifically told her not to clean the floors every day because it’s a waste of water. Now we don’t have water and need to wait until Friday for the delivery. Clean the floor maximum every other day but at least once a week. Tell me, is that difficult to understand?”

  “Teta —” I begin.

  “There’s no need to clean every day. There. Is. No. Need!” Teta throws the zucchini she is stuffing back in the bowl to drive her point home. Doris looks up from the pan for a moment then, shoulders slumped, lowers her head.

  “Ma’alesh, Teta, just let it go.”

  “It’s a waste. I don’t understand why she does it. Why is it so difficult to follow simple instructions?”

  “Teta, if she cleans you say she wastes water. If she doesn’t then you say she is lazy and dirty. Don’t you see that she can never win with you?”

  “Don’t start acting like a human rights lawyer. My God, we sent him to study in America and he comes back and tells us we are slave owners. The real problem is that you spoil her. Look at her, she’s become a daloo’a. You joke and laugh with her and she thinks she doesn’t have to work. Are we paying her to clean the house or to be your friend?”

  I look at Doris. How would Teta react if I told her I was in love with Doris and we wanted to marry? Would she find that preferable to me being with Taymour? On the scale of public humiliations, which would shame her more — that I have fallen in love with a man from one of the best families in the country, or that I have fallen for our maid?

  I need to get out of here.

  “I’m going to meet Maj,” I say.

  “Just Maj?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?” she asks.

  “Guapa.”

  “You’re always at Guapa. Aren’t there better places than Guapa?”

  “I like Guapa,” I say, downing the water and putting the empty glass in the sink.

  “If only you liked your studies as much as you like Guapa. And why are you dressed like that?” she points a zucchini at me. “Are you planning to get married in Guapa as well?”

  “I have a wedding later.”

  “Whose wedding?”

  I hesitate. “A friend from university.”

  “Then why are you going to Guapa?”

  “The wedding is not until later, Teta. I will leave straight from there.”

  “Do whatever you want.” She drops another stuffed zucchini into the bucket.

  “Can I use the car?”

  “I need the car.”

  “What do you need the car for? Are you going somewhere tonight?”

  “No,” she says. “But I don’t like not having a car. I feel like a prisoner. Can’t Maj pick you up?”

  “It’s fine. I’ll just take a taxi.”

  “Don’t get yourself in trouble. There are problems out there. The last thing we need is for you to get caught in them.”

  “I won’t,” I say, grabbing my wallet and keys.

  “It’s a republic of shame we’re living in these days.”

  “Khalas, stop worrying.” I begin to walk out of the kitchen. At the door I pause. If I mention nothing now, will we ever discuss last night? In another family such an incident might have resulted in a good beating, or at least being thrown out with no money and only the clothes on my back. But that won’t happen, because Teta needs me as much as I need her. Perhaps more. And if I’m out of here then she can’t control me anymore. She’ll be on her own. Last night all she could do was wave her arms in the air and scream incomprehensibly. And now? Nothing. Denial. I turn around and look at Teta’s back. She is still stuffing zucchinis, although her shoulders are now drawn in. She knows I’m standing behind her, watching her. If I leave it like this, she will have won. She’ll have had her way, and Taymour will be relegated to the dustbin, just like Mama.

  “Is there nothing you want to say to me?” I ask. Her back stiffens. She drops the zucchini she is stuffing into the bucket. I hear it fall on top of the pile of zucchinis with a wet thud. She turns in her chair to face me. We look at each other, and I can see in her eyes she knows I am challenging her. She licks her lips, like a cat that has just caught a mouse by its tail.

  “When is Maj going to get married?” she asks in a sweet voice. She’s played her card skillfully. When is Maj going to get married. So she has given up hope on me now, is that what she is trying to say? That there’s no use for me anymore, so let her start on the next person in line.

  “So now you’re working on Maj?”

  “He’ll miss the boat soon.”

  “Oh don’t worry about him,” I say. “He has his own mother to do the nagging.”

  “Haram. He’s a wonderful young man. What a shame if he doesn’t start his own family.”

  “What is it with us Arabs?” I snap. “Our only goal and dream in life is to get married?”

  Teta turns back to the zucchinis.

  “Go to Guapa,” she says, victoriously.

  I go to Guapa, drink ice-cold beer that costs twice as much as it does in America, and eat salted watermelon seeds. I sit at the bar and watch the crowd of intellectuals smoke cheap cigarettes and stare into their phones. It is just after seven, and the wedding begins at nine. I don’t want to speak to anyone and I don’t want to go home.

  Guapa is tucked in a quaint alleyway in the old quarter, the roads leading to it are small and narrow, and you often have to drive around the area three or four times before finding a parking space, but it’s worth it. The entrance is concealed by two low-hanging jasmine vines that attract bees in the springtime. These vines emit a wonderful smell and, during nights so muggy that walking into Guapa feels like stepping into an inferno, Maj and I often sit underneath the jasmine, the sweat on our skin glistening under the streetlights. We drink red wine, smoke cigarettes, and talk until the idea of going back home becomes bearable.

  On the inside the bar is dark and grimy and stinks of beer. Posters of Arabic movies from the sixties hang on the walls. A decaying pool table forms the centerpiece of the room and provides a space for people to congregate in order to drink and watch each other. The bar isn’t air-conditioned but there are rickety fans that blow the stale air around in circles. On the margins people stare into the glare of their laptops and smoke. Every night the staff plays the same playlist from the old MacBook perched on the bar. The laptop belongs to Nora, and the playlist is so her: somber, angry, real. I like that.

  Nora specializes in setting up bars for disgruntled people to congregate in. These places are difficult to find. Sometimes when the Mukhabarat are bored, they bring Nora in for questioning. They ask her why her clientele are not happy, and eventually they close the establishment down for a few weeks or months or until they’ve lost interest.

  It is surprising Guapa has lasted this long. When Nora took over the management six years ago she transformed it from an unknown dive into a semi-known
dive. Her army of lesbians, in their uniform of black T-shirts and jeans, always comes with her. They play pool and have long, whispered discussions with their confused girlfriends, who are torn about whether or not to leave this secret life for a husband and status in society.

  Despite the stench of sweat and stale beer, the atmosphere in Guapa is warm. But it is in the basement that the real fun happens, and where Maj really shines. The moment Maj puts his heels on he becomes someone powerful. He stands in the center of the room, his bright red lipstick glinting under the lights, head tilted slightly upward, and he commands your attention without even trying. He is so good at dressing up you’d never know he was a boy. I’d only recognize him by his big brown eyes and that deep crease between his eyebrows. For some reason I was always afraid that if I stayed in Guapa too long, I might be stuck with such a crease. From being forced to think too much, to rebel all the time. I don’t want to be so outside of everything. Even without a crease I am different enough. I can’t do with any more marks of abnormality.

  On a nearby chair someone has left a copy of yesterday’s New York Times. I pick up the paper, and just for something to do with my hands, leaf through the pages. On page three there is an article Laura contributed to, discussing America’s growing concerns with instability in our country. I put the paper back down. I still haven’t heard from Taymour, although I don’t know what I want to hear from him anymore. I stare at my phone. It sits there smugly on the table. It’s no longer my phone but rather Taymour’s, and they are both conspiring against me with their silence.

  When I see you at the wedding will you act like what we had never existed? I text, not expecting a response.

  I’ve grown used to the agonizing wait for Taymour. One evening last year he called to tell me that we would have to be apart for a few weeks. His father had caught him creeping into the house at dawn. I told him to lie, but Taymour could not disobey his father’s wishes. So I waited for two weeks, checking in every day to see if the embargo was over.

  Since then I’ve spent hundreds of hours like this. Wondering if he will reply, or whether he will come by or not. Then, hearing the sound of the phone vibrating seconds before it lets out a ping. That ping will give me a heart attack one of these days. Sometimes it would say On my way, but more often his response would be a simple Can’t tonight. That Can’t tonight, always pinging its way into my phone. Why could he not do tonight, exactly? Did he not have legs that could walk him from his house to my bedroom if he so desired? No, can’t tonight. So casual. As if it was fine whether we saw each other or not. Whatever. Maybe we will both die and never see each other again. It’s okay. No big deal. Can’t tonight.

  I slam my pint down. Beer sloshes on the wooden bar. The spilled beer bubbles and hisses on the table like a giant protest. I watch the bubbles in the foam pop. Each bubble is like an angry, hopeful face in the crowd. I feel in control, like I am a God creating a revolution from the concoction of spilled foam and beer. When the liquid settles, I drag my finger across the middle, splitting the ocean of protesters into separate camps. My finger is a tank, and I destroy one of the protest camps, dragging my finger along the table to create a vast sea of rebellion. I trace battalions on the wood and imagine they are attacking one another. I make another battalion and then split it into two.

  In a corner of the bar a lean man with a mustache tries to catch my eye. Finally I look at him and he smiles, but I quickly look away. I have no desire for sex. My dick has shriveled up ever since I heard Teta outside the bedroom door last night. It’s hidden away in shame, like a dog caught chewing the carpet.

  It was only a matter of time before I would lose Taymour. For a long time I was stuck between wanting him near me and feeling terrified: terrified of losing him, but more terrified that I would not lose him, that we would be stuck in this predicament for the rest of our lives. And how would I explain that to everyone? How would I explain that to Teta? My feelings swung between wanting to kidnap him and lock him up in my room forever, so that he would be mine and mine alone, and wanting to kill him so he would be out of my life. A crime of passion, a crime of honor.

  I had thought that as time passed I would grow more comfortable with my emotions. Instead, as we fell deeper into each other, I found myself locked in a battle with my feelings. What would happen if I let myself fall? Whenever Taymour came too close I pushed him away with a backhanded insult or accusatory text message. The possibility of abandonment colored what we had. The fear of it lingered between us, so that rejection became an ever-present threat. We were in competition, Taymour and I, over who would leave first. The threat of abandonment is worse than to be abandoned, I think. I couldn’t stand the waiting, so I introduced Taymour to Leila.

  Well, not at first. I began by telling her that there was someone she should meet, someone very special. I enjoyed talking about Taymour like this, to sing his praises and say nice things about him. When I introduced them, she smiled at him with a funny look in her eyes. Later that day I asked what she thought of him.

  “Don’t start with me.” She laughed. “I get enough pressure from my mother.” But even as Leila said this, her eyes registered a flicker of curiosity, and the housewives in the camps who had embedded themselves in her mind many years ago were nodding their heads furiously in approval.

  At the time, I told myself that I wanted to see if she loved him for the same reasons I did. It would be nice to hear someone say those reasons out loud, even if it wasn’t me.

  When I told Taymour of my idea, he laughed it off.

  “That’s a ridiculous thought,” he said. “Why would I do that?”

  “It would help us be together. Make people suspect less, no?”

  “Something bad is going to happen tonight,” a woman seated next to me says, snapping me away from the revolution of spilled beer I’ve drawn on the bar.

  She is in her late twenties, with hennaed hair and lips so chapped they look like gravel. She is sitting alone.

  “Every night feels like that in this city,” I reply.

  “Perhaps. I haven’t been here long enough to find out.” She doesn’t look at me, choosing to stare at the pool table instead. Two men are playing pool with cigarettes hanging dangerously from the tip of their lips. There are only a few balls left in the game, and soon it will be over. The green fuzz of the pool table is ash-ridden and stained with dark patches.

  “Where are you from?”

  “The camp.” She takes a swig from the glass of whiskey that hangs loosely from her chewed-up fingertips.

  “What brings you here?”

  She shoots me a look that tells me I have asked the wrong question.

  “What brings me here? What brings you here? Am I not allowed to be here?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” For God’s sake, how does one disappear in this country without killing oneself? I am tired and don’t want to argue, so I turn around and send Taymour another message instead.

  Don’t give up on us. We always said we would find a way …

  I want to fight for us, but I am fighting alone. I am hanging at the end of a broken string, like the cigarettes in the mouths of the pool players or the drink from the angry woman’s fingertips. It’s as if he has resigned himself to our failure. The part of me that is true and authentic, a part deep within my core, is gone. Now everything is reduced to a single impulse. To see Taymour. To kiss him and run away with him, get out of this shithole.

  The woman beside me flicks open a Zippo and a flame shoots up. She brings it close to her face, almost to her curls, and lights a cigarette.

  “I’m here because I was outside when the blockade happened,” she says, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke across the bar. “I couldn’t go back to the camps and my permit expired so I’m stuck.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. I stare at my drink and hope she won’t pursue further conversation.

  “I hate it in this city,” she continues. “Nothing works and no one wants to admit i
t. It’s like walking onto a theater set. I feel like if I turn a book over I may realize it’s only a cardboard box with a title painted on it. Everyone is in denial … keeping up appearances and trying to ignore the fact that everything is falling apart. This entire damn city is schizophrenic.”

  “Life can’t be better in the camp. You’re stuck in there like zoo animals waiting for handouts from the UN.”

  “At least people have souls in the camp. At least people are resisting, they have a purpose.”

  “So do you support the opposition?” I ask.

  She downs the rest of her whiskey and laughs bitterly.

  We sit in silence for a while, smoking cigarettes, surrounded by the shells of watermelon seeds. I turn back to my beer-soaked revolution on the bar, tracing a few refugee camps with my finger.

  Looking across the room that is slowly filling with people, I am all at once overcome with an aching longing to go home. Not to Teta’s house, with its heavy silences and shame, but to another time entirely, when my mother and father were around, when Mama was still painting and I would sit by the door waiting excitedly for her to come home, to the time of onions and Jacuzzis and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Slush Puppies.

  “You’re making a mess,” someone behind me says, and with one sweep of a dirty cloth wipes away the uprising of beer I’ve created on the table. Only a few trickles of liquid remain where an entire revolution once stood. I turn around and find myself face-to-face with Nora.

  “You left early last night,” she says, pulling up a stool next to mine and lighting a cigarette.

  “I was tired.”

  “You see that guy there?” Nora points her cigarette to a young man who is laughing drunkenly with a group of foreigners. “That’s the son of the Canadian ambassador. I let him drink here even though he’s only fourteen. A few months ago I told him that since he comes here almost every night, the least he could do is give me a visa to Canada. It doesn’t even have to be a permanent one, just a visitor visa for a few months, maybe I can find a nice Canadian girl.” Nora smiles and takes a sip of her beer. “ ‘Sure, sure,’ he says. Nothing so far. I’m giving him another week.”