I awoke early during those days, drenched in sweat, unable to keep sleeping in the heat. After sitting idly in the tub for a while, I slowly made my way to my computer to check my e-mail and track the sales of Loose Lips on Amazon. On the tenth day of the heat wave, seventy-eight messages were waiting for me. Of these, seventy-six were concerned with my mortgage rate, the health and velocity of my spermatozoa, and the estate of the late Dr. Jumil Abacha, director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. One was from Jimmy: I still had his coat; it was in my storage room, and would I please leave it outside my door for him to pick up? The message upset me, first because it was there at all; second because it was not the apology I had yet to receive for his role in nearly crippling me; and third because it was preposterous: Why did he need his coat, of all things, right now, in the middle of the worst heat wave in European history?
I was struggling to reclaim my equipoise when I opened the next message. It was from an address I didn’t recognize.
From: [email protected]
Date: August 15, 2003 07:40 AM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: (No subject)
Dear Claire Berlinski,
Please allow me to assure you that I am writing to you with the greatest of respect. I encountered the first, and, alas, the only chapter of your novel on the Internet. I live in Isfahan, and Isfahan, as perhaps you do not know, is in the ancient seat and sword of the Persian empire.
But Amazon does not allow itself the luxury of delivering books to my country. Is it possible to order a copy directly from the publisher, and if this is so would you have the kindness to tell me as to how? There is something in what you have written that intrigues me.
With all my very grateful sincerity,
Arsalan
How nice, I thought. I sent him a copy of the whole manuscript as a PDF file, with my compliments. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how, exactly, this person had found my book on Amazon, or what he had been looking for when he found it. A fan is a fan.
• • •
Through the Internet, I kept in touch not only with my oldest friends but with quite a few people I had never met. I considered Samantha Allen one of my closest friends, even though I had never once seen her or spoken to her. My agent—who was also her agent—had the year before suggested she introduce herself to me.
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 04:22 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Please read, this is not spam!
Dear Claire,
Rita Steinberg suggested I get in touch with you since I’ll be in Paris next week and you and I are both writing books about people with secret lives. (Except my book isn’t fiction.) Would you like to get together for a drink while I’m there?
Best,
Samantha Allen
From: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 06:27 PM
To: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Subject: Re: Please read, this is not spam!
Samantha,
I’d be happy to. What kind of book are you writing?
Claire
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 06:43 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Please read, this is not spam!
It’s the gender equivalent of Black Like Me.
From: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 06:50 PM
To: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please read, this is not spam!
It’s what?
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 07:01 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Please read, this is not spam!
Attach: Sam.jpg (36.5 KB) Samantha.jpg (41.5 KB)
I’m disguising myself as a man for a year and hanging out with men. Then I’m going to write a book about it.
Below her message was a photograph of a tall, handsome woman in a skirt and heels; she had broad shoulders, intelligent eyes, and a strong, jutting nose. Below that was a photograph of some nebbish in chinos and a button-down men’s shirt, wearing a baseball cap and glasses. He had a distinct five-o’clock shadow—and precisely the same nose as the woman above him.
From: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 07:22 PM
To: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Please read, this is not spam!
Holy shit, that’s amazing! How do you get the stubble?
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 07:28 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Please read, this is not spam!
It’s from my head; I put it on with spirit gum. It takes forever. Good, isn’t it?
From: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 07:32 PM
To: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Please read, this is not spam!
It’s really good. I wouldn’t have known at all. But isn’t your voice a giveaway?
From: Samantha Allen [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2002 07:50 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Please read, this is not spam!
No, it’s naturally really deep, that’s the beauty of it. I got the idea for the book the five billionth time some receptionist asked if I’d mind holding, Sir. Must ask before I get too attached, though: You wouldn’t happen to be of the Sapphic persuasion, would you?
She didn’t seem to hold it against me that I wasn’t. Several days later, however, she wrote to tell me that she was canceling her trip; she had decided to go to Antigua, instead. Nonetheless, we kept in touch. Our friendship was confined to lighthearted exchanges about the books we were writing until, late one night, I had received a message from her asking, “Isn’t it four in the morning over there? What are you doing awake?” For some reason I had told her the truth: I was miserable. I couldn’t sleep. Jimmy and I were still dating then, and he had disappeared several days before. When, at last, I had gone to his apartment and let myself in with my key, I had found him sprawled on his fold-out sofa, snoring and impervious, surrounded by empty wine bottles. “Your kind of love,” he’d said to me after I shook him awake, “doesn’t nurture. It destroys.”
Samantha proved a patient interlocutor. Never before had I encountered someone with first-hand insight into male behavior and an eagerness to discuss my relationships at great length. I didn’t feel that our relationship lacked anything because we had never met. In fact, in some ways I enjoyed my epistolary friendships more than ordinary ones; they seemed to me to function more smoothly. An e-mail relationship is, after all, undemanding. When you want it to go away, you just shut down your computer: Three clicks of the mouse and voilà—it’s gone.
• • •
On the twelfth day of the canicule, I was reading a message from Samantha when I received another message from Iran.
From: [email protected]
Date: August 17, 2003 04:22 PM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected] Subject: Re: Re: (No subject)
Dear Claire Berlinski,
I am touched by your generous nature and I shall greatly enjoy your gift. I send my very sincere regards and kindest wishes.
Yours respectfully,
Arsalan
Out of curiosity, I clicked on the hyperlink embedded in the words below his name. It took me to a page of photographs without a single word of English, only row upon row of incomprehensible, curvaceous Persian script. The photographs were the kind you find on someone’s personal web page: this is my n
eighborhood, this is my family. One showed the exterior of a small mosque, speckled with a glittering cream-and-peach mosaic. Perhaps it served as a bathhouse, because towels hung to dry at the entrance. An elderly man with a hawkish nose and graying stubble on his cheeks stood beside the billowing towels in the intense light, balanced on a cane, staring past the camera but not smiling, an inscrutable expression on his face. His face was traversed by deep lines, and his cheeks draped inward. I wondered if he was the man who had written to me.
I scrolled down the page, studying the snapshots of a lazy Middle Eastern city: straw-roofed shops, a child riding his bicycle along an alley shaded with plane trees, a street vendor selling pomegranates from crates. Bright sunlight splashed over the plastered mud walls and the old Persian roofs, creating a spectrum of beautiful colors. The scenes in the photos would have been timeless had it not been for the television antennas on the roofs and the surprisingly artistic graffiti spray-painted on the walls.
One photograph showed a group of women of various ages, all in black chadors, picnicking by a still, turquoise pool. They were smiling. They looked as if they were enjoying themselves. Were those my correspondent’s relatives? His mother and sisters? If so, how had a family like that produced an enthusiast of American spy novels? The face of a girl of about sixteen stood out; she was the only one looking directly at the camera. She was not particularly pretty, but her eyes were clever and amused, as if she and the photographer were sharing a sly joke. Could Arsalan be a woman’s name? Was she the one who had written to me? I entered the name Arsalan in Google. There were thousands of them, and it was definitely a man’s name. It meant “the Lion.”
Two larger photographs at the bottom of the page were extraordinarily clear and detailed, as if they had been taken with a much better camera. One showed the interior of a room framed by a large, wide-open window overlooking a skyline of turquoise minarets. Thin muslin curtains billowed in from the window, through which poured an intense, almost white light, illuminating every detail of the shimmering carpet below. The carpet was intricately woven with ivory palmettes, crimson rosettes, and floral shapes in shades of dusky rose and alabaster. Creeping vines and arabesque tendrils framed the centerpiece—a golden bird with wild plumage and flashing ruby eyes.
The other photograph showed the same room from a different angle. A bowl of crystallized sugar filled with pomegranates sat atop a low rosewood coffee table. Beside the bowl stood a tea set and a tarnished copper samovar. Strewn haphazardly around the table were half a dozen luxuriant silken cushions, and on the plumpest cushion lay a small gray cat, sprawled on its back, batting at a mote of dust caught in the sunbeam.
The air in my own apartment was absolutely still.
• • •
My relationship with my friend Imran was outstanding now that we communicated almost exclusively by e-mail. We had met years ago when we were both graduate students; he was now a clinical psychotherapist with a busy practice in London. We had seen each other in person only rarely since we graduated; Imran led an extremely scheduled life. There was no “I’ll meet you outside the museum and we’ll see how we feel” with Imran; it had to be “My 11:30 patient leaves at 12:20, and it will take me four minutes to get there, or six if I take the stairs, which I’m committed to doing these days. I have the tennis court booked for 2:15, so we can spend fifteen, no more than twenty minutes on the Braque exhibit, and the rest of the hour with the Giacometti mobiles—not the sculptures, though; I’ve already seen those twice. Lunch at the sushi place on the northwest side of the gallery would work for me. I have four phone calls booked between my 9:30 and my 10:30, and I shave between 11:20 and my 11:30, so you’ll need to make the reservations. Tell them we’ll take the table at the window, because the music isn’t as loud there—not one of the ones by the counter.” Imran had an immense gift of insight into the behavior of others, which of course made him both an interesting interlocutor and tremendously good at his job, but about the prominent role of timekeeping in his life he was, if not precisely blind, then not unusually perceptive.
The canicule had entered its thirteenth day, and, stuck in my studio, I found myself checking my e-mail repeatedly, then returning to the photographs of what I had decided must be [email protected]’s apartment. It looked peaceful and pleasantly breezy. I had been roused early by the heat and was looking at the photographs again, in fact, when I received an e-mail from Imran. (These arrived at precisely 6:45 in the morning, except on Sundays, when they arrived at 9:15.)
From: Imran Begum [email protected]
Date: August 18, 2003 06:45 AM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Booked!
Dear Old Friend,
I have signed up for speed dating! Once per week I shall present myself at an upmarket venue in Mayfair, where over the course of an hour I shall go on twenty dates of three minutes each.
How perfect for him, I thought.
. . . in other news, I’ve been experimenting with prefacing my remarks to patients with the phrase, “It is entirely possible that I am mistaken . . .” This preamble seems to disarm the rebel in those patients who are rebellious, which is about 40% of my usual caseload. Something to do with me questioning my own phallus so they don’t have to. I need to look more carefully at who the problem parent was in the patients for whom this seems to be a pivotal issue in the transference.
I’m delighted to say that I’ve reduced hours worked, income (and tax bill) bang on schedule, 20% down, 30% better life!
Anyway, must run; 25 minutes remaining.
Much love,
Immie
After replying I found myself at loose ends. I felt guilty that I wasn’t working, but it was already so hot in my apartment that there was no hope of being visited with concentration or industry. I returned yet again to Persia and contemplated the photographs in the middle of the screen. They had been taken at a bazaar, where light fell in patterned shafts from the skylights onto the ornate arcades. Under loose awnings, samovar-makers and tradesmen sold housewares and artwork; a coppersmith hammered a cauldron held by a young man with bare, muscular arms. I wondered who they were—acquaintances of the photographer, relatives, just people on the street? Light shone upon the old Persian scales outside a general store, its copper color contrasting with the huge ripe melons on display. An old man—the shopkeeper? The man who had written to me? Or maybe his father?—sat in the shadow next to the Persian clothing and bolts of Persian fabric, the awning above him anchored to an ice-cream stand. I imagined that the shade from the tree beside him, a mulberry tree perhaps, must provide a cool respite from the blistering sunshine, pouring from turquoise skies over the ancient mud walls.
And that was that; there was no more to see. Over the past few days I had spent hours looking at those photographs. Impulsively, I went back to the first e-mail Arsalan had sent me, and hit Reply.
“Who are you?” I wrote.
• • •
The heat wave was baking all of northern Europe, and it was having an unsettling effect on Imran, in London. He wrote anxious messages to me all through the week.
From: Imran Begum [email protected]
Date: August 19, 2003 06:45 AM
To: Claire Berlinski [email protected]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Booked!
Old Dear Friend,
I’m 39 and 7.12 today. My mind makes me sad about this. Something to do with still being single and not yet having found a woman, age 33–37, to marry within 10–12 months. (Children 6–8 months after that.)
But as I may have told you, I designed two pairs of shoes to celebrate my birthday! Both will be made to the shape of my feet. The first pair will arrive this week, a heavy walking brogue in grained cordovan, an American wingtip style. I hope you see them one day!
One of my birthday resolutions is to give up talking about money and expensive purchases. I find it alienates me from people with less material ease. Or rather, t
hey alienate themselves. So. No more talk of weekly averages, workshop revenue, or the latest Triangle Magellan concerto amplifier and bass driver (equipped with a perforated shield fitted over the motor’s cylinder head in order to provide thermal dissipation!). Suffice it to say that I’m enjoying my burgeoning jazz collection more than ever and that treble definition and bass clarity are adequate!
Lion Eyes Page 2