Just as now we exchanged glances again and again in the cab.
Here, the space between sentences might suggest the gap between the part of me that was happy with John and the part of me that wasn’t.
Gigantic billboards around the traffic circle advertised Egyptian movies with gigantic hand-painted faces of Egyptian movie stars.
Odor of unregulated car exhaust; frenetic plinking on the taxi radio.
The hotel appeared not to have been renovated since the 1920s and exuded a shabby colonial glamour: intricate wrought-iron gate; two-tier lobby chandelier, also wrought iron; dusty ornate carpet runner flanked by heavy, carved thrones.
Poker-faced handsome lobby clerk with Coptic cross tattoo on forearm.
I strongly suspected John had slept around in New York while I was away for three weeks earlier that summer, but I had said nothing.
We had tried couples therapy the previous year, but I never did get that key to his apartment.
I had been with G., my previous boyfriend, just about four years, of which I now saw the final three as wasted time.
John and I smiled at one another as we ascended the creaky steps, and again as we entered our huge dilapidated room with its tall shutters, worn red velvet drapes, tiled floor, and sagging maroon twin beds with massive dark-wood headboards.
I had decided I wanted to go back to our couples counselor, but I had put off telling John.
I hoped that our vacation in Egypt—far from ordinary distractions—would be a good time to talk about it.
Muffled sounds of motorcycles, horns, footsteps, people shouting.
“I feel strangely at home here,” I said, lying on my back and looking up at the cracked ceiling. “Me too,” John said.
2
INDEED CAIRO OFFERED no ordinary distractions, only extraordinary ones.
We spent most of the next day with Abdul and Ali, a pair of young men who befriended us on the street as we puzzled over a map. They helped us 1) find the American Express office; 2) make our train reservations to Aswan for later in the week; 3) get our passport-size photos taken; 4) obtain fake student ID’s so we could save money on the already low entrance fees to museums and other sights.
John and I were poorer back then, but not that poor. Nor were we students. I was thirty-nine and John was thirty.
I had caught a bad cold in Israel and was still jetlagged, thus I actually believed that these two friendly Egyptians were art students, that they were brothers, and that their names were indeed Abdul and Ali.
As soon as we accepted their aid, it was as if we entered a tunnel of gradually deepening trust.
Theory: Because my mother felt my father never listened to her, I doubted John could ever listen to me.
My mother’s own disinclination to listen must also be taken into account.
Though John and I flattered ourselves that we were setting out on a fascinating cross-cultural friendship with Abdul and Ali, we tried numerous times to get rid of them by offering baksheesh, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
Like all good confidence men they kept each of us engaged separately in conversation, so that we never had the opportunity to compare notes.
John and I did, however, exchange glances at Abdul’s suggestion to go to his uncle’s papyrus-painting shop, since we hoped this was what the two men had wanted all along, a commission on whatever we bought.
In the dim room we gazed at dozens of colorful images of pharaohs, barges, and various gods inked onto brown crinkly paper guaranteed to be real papyrus, not banana leaf.
“Did you paint any of them?” I naïvely asked, but Ali said no, they were still learning.
In our foolish parsimony, John and I bought only a single small painting, and thus began our next escapade: I agreed to go to the duty-free shop to purchase two bottles of liquor for Abdul.
The circuitous journey of that day must have rhymed with my perplexity over John, since that’s the only way I can account for my continuing fascination with the incident.
Like my mother, I have a special talent for feeling cheated and deceived, whether of goods, services, or affection.
Until then John and I had walked everywhere with Abdul and Ali, but now as we rode in a cab with Abdul around a huge, insanely busy traffic circle, John glanced at me uneasily, and I realized with a bolt of dread that we had no idea where Abdul had asked the driver to take us or what might happen when we got there.
It wasn’t a comforting portent that Ali, the gentler of the two, had decided not to join us on this errand.
But soon enough the taxi came to a stop in front of an ordinary-looking building, and Abdul led us upstairs to a store stacked to the ceiling with boxes; he spoke to one of the men behind the glass counter, and we were ushered into a side room to fill out the paperwork.
Something about the way the head-scarfed girl looked at me, as she made notations on my passport, caused me to ask just what I was signing up for.
“Twelve bottles whiskey,” she answered, “twelve bottles vodka, two boombox—”
“No, no, no!” I said, with outsize indignation, and with equal flourish she tore the forms in two before my eyes.
Abdul had remained chatting with the men at the counter, so John and I tore out of there and hopped in a taxi, hoping Abdul hadn’t seen us.
I knew from the guidebook that foreigners were restricted to four bottles of liquor each, and I could only guess what sort of fine or duty I’d have to pay at the airport—not to mention the boomboxes; I also knew that such things could be sold for a huge profit on the black market, and I feared being implicated in the crime.
As it happened, the taxi had to circle back past the duty-free store, where of course Abdul waved us to a halt.
“I come with you,” he said, trying to open the door.
“No!” John shouted.
“Fuck you!” he yelled back. “I waste all my time on you.”
Intense shame as John and I drove off—for running away from Abdul; for being fooled by him; for denying him his payoff.
Indeed, from a political standpoint (as well as a literary one), my sympathy tended toward the young unemployed Egyptian rather than the two Western tourists—or did I identify with Abdul for other reasons?
That day I never had a minute to worry over my feelings toward John.
Back at the hotel we talked about the encounter late into the night, trying to understand (for instance) whether I was signing up to actually pay for all that merchandise, or merely lending my foreign passport to the transaction; and who would resell the items, Abdul or one of the guys in the store?
We also wondered how we’d missed various warning signs that, back in New York, would have been perfectly obvious, or what we could have done differently to avoid the unpleasant scene in the taxi.
Perhaps most puzzling was that Abdul appeared genuinely hurt and betrayed by our getaway.
It occurs to me now that he must have felt humiliated in front of the store clerks.
At last John said, sighing, “He wasn’t going to be happy no matter what we offered him. The whole thing was bound to end in tears.”
John dislikes unpleasantness nearly as much as I do.
3
DUSTY CRUMBLING BUILDINGS in hazy morning light.
Huge wooden trays of fresh tan pita carried on bicycles through the streets.
I drank the fruit juice despite the ice, even though the guidebook had warned us not to; John frowned.
The old telephones in wooden stalls took only older Egyptian coins, difficult to obtain since they were no longer in general circulation, nor did my phone card work, so we failed at calling Gabby back in Israel.
The magical nature of the place, added to our desire to see it as such.
In the brand-new subway station two heavily veiled women giggled in delight as they stepped onto the escalator—evidently their first escalator ride—and so John and I also giggled in delight.
Of course we were ignoring political realities
such as corruption and headlong urbanization.
I went back to the hotel to rest, but John didn’t want to. I wrote in my journal that I wasn’t feeling “in love” with him.
The hopeless all-or-nothing flavor of my distress at such moments, experienced not only with John but everyone I’ve ever been with.
My throat was sore and my nose required constant wiping.
Behind the shutters and velvet drapes: bright hazy air, rubble sidewalks, and the blaring call to prayer.
Were John and I bound to end in tears?
To complete my suffering, I inserted Joni Mitchell into my Walkman.
The Egyptian tissues were speckled and slightly scratchy. I briefly slept.
That night, the tower restaurant revolved uneasily on its Soviet-engineered track, creaking and lurching like an old ride at Coney Island.
“Cairo is to New York as New York is to San Francisco!” I said, referring to degrees of urban chaos.
Turning and turning with impossible smoothness, the dervish lifted his wide, multicolored skirt to form an inverted cone around his head.
I avoid conflict and see dilemmas everywhere.
Typical complaint of my mother’s: “Dad doesn’t like to do x, but I do.”
I wondered if John and I were “just too different,” for instance his rarely needing to go back to the hotel and rest, whereas I—
And there was the nine-year age gap, which seemed important then, less and less important in the many years since.
In a café or a mausoleum or a mosque, the place pouring into my senses, pouring into John’s senses, pouring into our senses together.
The lit-up streets full of men, the bright tacky shops brimming with goods: we went into a toy store and bought an Egyptian version of Clue.
Of the dervishes I wrote, “Ecstasy is an action, not a state of being.”
4
LIKE A CARTOON car the little taxi seemed to suck in its sides for the tightest passages, then bounce back to normal size, as we motored through Cairo’s slums. The driver slowed for a battered pickup piled ten or twelve feet high with roughly hewn furniture. It stopped to unload a table, and though the alley had scarcely widened, once again our Fiat squeezed through and we accelerated into the next crooked channel. The driver achieved all this antic motion through no apparent effort, one palm resting lightly on the steering wheel, the other resting just as lightly on the gearshift. The trip lasted perhaps fifteen minutes but like a roller coaster ride seemed to go on and on. Powdery bright sunshine and blue black shade, motorbikes, donkeys, beat-up vans, men and children and covered-up women in dusty gowns pressing themselves against the flaking windowless walls as we sped by. We burst into a small ruined square, where suddenly a thriving produce market revealed itself—tomatoes, greens of all kinds, brown-flecked yellow tamarinds, bananas in various sizes, all laid out on plastic tarps amid the rubble. We rumbled on into another darkened alley, where a slender woman draped in cloth floated ahead of us, a lettuce the size of a basketball atop her head. John and I looked at one another in amazement. I comprehended the poverty, but “poverty” hardly described the profusion of daily life, in all its resourcefulness, flickering past our windshield.
Whether in rebuke or simply as the next twist of the kaleidoscope, the Mosque of Ibn Tulun—our destination—was as stark as a de Chirico.
Fortress-like walls surrounded a vast courtyard, a stairway circling the small minaret.
Inside, we were greeted by a small boy with eyes as huge as those in a velvet painting, who asked to be our guide by saying, “Guide?” and pointing to himself.
His tour was as minimal as the building itself. “Carrrving,” he announced, pointing upward to the intricate stone archway of the colonnade in which we stood. He drew our attention to other features such as “courtyard” and more “carving.”
“View,” he said, unhooking the chain and leading us up the winding staircase.
There was an austere pleasure in learning absolutely nothing about the place beyond what we could see for ourselves. Like silhouettes in a line drawing, John and I squinted at the courtyard, the walkways above the four colonnades, the domed structure in the middle, all dusty and sand-colored, as if made of sand.
“Citadel,” the boy said, pointing in that direction over the city. John and I had just come from there, so it was the one landmark besides the pyramids that we already knew.
Down the winding steps, we each gave the boy twenty pounds for the tour. He looked disappointed, so John also handed him his Bic lighter.
I frowned, as if John had gone way overboard.
“I wish there was some kind of rule,” I said, getting into another cab. “Tip adults this and children that—so I wouldn’t have to go around constantly doubting myself.”
5
THAT NIGHT GABBY arrived from Israel, where she was living that year.
In Cairo’s huge labyrinthine marketplace, John went off to explore while Gabby and I sat down in a gaudily tiled tourist café.
There I ordered the meal that would make me sick for the next year and a half.
“I saw your eyes in a portrait in the Coptic museum today,” I said to Gabby. “That’s uncanny,” she replied, “because people keep commenting about my eyes lately!” At that moment everything seemed uncanny to me, probably due to my Egyptian cold medicine, Flu-Calm, which despite its name made my heart race. As did the strong tea I was drinking.
Gabby and I spoke of déjà vu, past lives, destiny … The food arrived. I had ordered Egyptian Pancake with Egyptian Hotdog, which I’d hoped was tourist-speak for a crepe with merguez, but in fact it was a flat doughy thing studded with orange chunks.
Doggedly I ate it.
The analogy might be my doggedly conducting my romantic life as I always had.
Gabby and I realized we had been talking a long time and John hadn’t yet returned. I sipped my tea and began to worry.
Café noise, fluorescent lights, sugary odor of flavored tobacco; outside, the crowded square was strung with bare lightbulbs.
I silently fumed over all the other times John had been late.
But at last he arrived, breathless and exhilarated from having been lost in the innumerable winding passageways of the Khan al-Khalili. He sat down and told us about it. At first he was simply following his wonder, past the dozens of tourist shops full of perfume bottles, silver, or inlaid wood, and on into the real market—piles of baby clothes, towels, surplus plumbing fixtures, tools—until he realized everything was closing and the narrow streets were becoming more and more dark and deserted. He didn’t know the language and didn’t know where he was. Then he felt a hand firmly grasp his arm. He looked to see a teenage boy, who silently led him back through the maze to the brightly lit square. “Do you want to meet my friends?” John asked him, but whether or not the boy understood, he shook his head and disappeared again down the curving alley.
John’s capacity for such adventures was something I’d always loved about him.
6
IN THE MIDDLE of the night I sat in the stained marble hotel bathroom shitting my brains out.
I say brains because I had entered an altered mental as well as physical state, a whirligig of alarm that had begun spewing inside my skull all the recent doubt and confusion over John.
“Are you OK?” he called through the door. “No,” I said.
The sagging mattress no longer seemed charming.
We can assume here a visceral memory of shitting my pants as a kid, whether or not I was aware of it.
Morning tea and toast in the dark-paneled hotel dining room; John said, “From now on you have to be more careful about what you eat.”
My mother’s stories about disagreeing with my father were likely to conclude, “I didn’t say a word.”
Possibly I was ashamed of my inner turmoil, since I mentioned none of it to John.
He and Gabby went to see the Blue Mosque and to find me some Pepto-Bismol.
I shit the tea
and toast away.
I lay in my hammock-like bed staring at the cracked ceiling, muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” at each new twist of my gut.
Wanting the diarrhea to pass was the same as wanting the doubt and confusion to pass.
As my thoughts escalated into a kind of falsetto, I began to debate whether to break up with John right there in Cairo.
Preemptive abandonment.
Yet I was also running away from my own roiling suppositions and imperatives.
It would have been a lot simpler to see a doctor, but in the mental maze I’d entered, a parasite must have seemed the least of my problems.
I wondered if there was such a thing as Egyptian saltine crackers.
I felt no better the next day and desperately tried to decide whether I was too sick to travel to Aswan that night, as John and I had planned. I couldn’t stay in Cairo alone—should I go to back to Israel with Gabby?
Lying there fervently wishing John would proclaim to me, “I’ll come with you to Israel and make sure you get well!”
John said we had already bought our tickets to Aswan and moreover he didn’t know when he would ever get back to Egypt, so he definitely wanted to go to Aswan.
This wasn’t particularly considerate of him, but I’m concerned here with my own actions.
I thought, “My boyfriend is selfish and won’t take care of me!”
It might have been interesting to conduct this conversation out loud, but even on a good day, I couldn’t have conceived of a happy result.
I’ve since learned that John responds well to direct requests, but I had little inkling of this then.
On the other hand I was also sure I would be better soon, as I always had been whenever I had caught a stomach bug up until now.
In the end I agreed to go with John up the Nile, but even at the train station I considered turning back.
I climbed onto the top bunk of our compartment and began to shiver uncontrollably—a fresh symptom.
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