Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I saved this message and for months to come I played Big Al back to dinner-party guests. I told them, “Oh, he’s this publisher who can’t get enough of my work.” When I came clean about his specialty, people wanted to hear the message again and again.

  Al was right: I couldn’t stand the pressure. I was pleased to collect my check for $900 and tell him that was the end. Writing was hard enough: I had to feel easy about the way I approached it.

  I never saw the actual book, The Adventures of Big Steve, which was just as well—I would’ve had to hide it. Despite having been married and divorced, I’d returned to a virginal state as far as my father was concerned. You peel away one code, one restriction, and find another just underneath. Good daughters didn’t get divorced, and underlying this—they didn’t have sex—certainly not without producing babies; they didn’t know about it; they certainly didn’t write books about it. Sex was something for wild American girls.

  The end of grad school brought everything into sharp relief: I was offered a teaching position in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then D. was offered a scholarship to spend a semester studying in Paris. When D. received word of his award, he came home waving the letter jubilantly, drunk with excitement, and blurted out, “Let’s get married, too!”

  Some native sense in me crept back. He would go read books in Paris and I would go . . . teach freshman composition in Nebraska? But my ancestors’ collective insistence on marriage was always there: it lapped at my dreams, whispered behind my head. I was stubborn and indoctrinated. I threw my arms around his neck.

  The second wedding was as low-key as the first was elaborate: no parents allowed—due to lingering grudges nursed by certain parties. We held it in our apartment, performed by a justice plucked from the Yellow Pages. Afterward, a dinner for eighteen friends at the only place with a big enough table to fit our party. There was a chocolate cake some friends had iced with the words: “You should only live long and be happy.” The previous night, three girlfriends had taken me out in a convertible and we’d sung, I only have eyes for you, dear . . . flinging the words into the soft, black air.

  Months later, I went off to Paris to visit my new husband in the Algerian–Moroccan neighborhood called the Marais. In a flat as squat and ugly as a cinderblock, D. had one square window that swung open to gray sky and clotheslines. There was a cement shelf outside under the windowpane where he kept bread, cheese, and milk. I ate a few bites, absorbed by how delicious everything was. A croissant and a thin tablet of black chocolate loosened my senses. And yet the man I was visiting looked starved. When I first walked off the plane, I didn’t recognize his face so much as the way he was standing, curving forward as if about to catch something. D. was thin, his skin and teeth pearlescent. When I put my arms around him, I could feel the bones in his back. “Are you—how are you?” I said, aghast.

  “I forgot how beautiful you are.” He kissed my head; his favorite spot—he called this a “righteous kiss.”

  I kept glancing at him, but it seemed plain that I wasn’t meant to ask about this transformation. There was a new, furtive air about him, as if he were keeping a secret.

  The miserable room came with some meals. D. left early in the morning to go to class, but he had conserved half his breakfast for me: a basket with a feathery croissant, a bowl of blackberry preserves, a sweet orange, a square of something halfway between an excellent cheese and butter, a cup of strong black coffee, half a pitcher of yellow cream. I ate slowly. A commotion of doves outside brought me to the window that framed a view of narrow, sooty streets, pitched roofs, clotheslines, pinched and crowded and charming. The light was so crisp and starched the room seemed almost quaint. The coffee was rich: my body awakened with a sip.

  Before his departure overseas we’d had a few moony weeks that were actually delightful, our imminent separation making everything lovely and doomed. We’d kissed with a heat I hadn’t felt in the past three years. But after we’d been apart for a few months with little communication, I struggled to remember what D. looked like. In Lincoln, a naturalist in pointed boots and worn jeans started to court me. He didn’t write and he didn’t know anything about critical theory. After weeks of pursuit during which I asserted I was married and the naturalist asserted I wasn’t, we kissed in his double-wide trailer till we were shaking and then laughed at ourselves. Later, we stood outside the trailer in the frigid night, examining constellations, the smear of the Milky Way, the stars so clear they looked close enough to prick a finger.

  When I thought about D., I heard his loud laugh, remembered that he loved film and golf and wine and food. My memory had brought up nothing like this monkish, self-mortifying figure. D. seemed transformed by Paris, reading Proust in French, studying the lives of saints, scholars, philosophers, men who evidently believed that illumination came through self-denial, that a mind that eclipses the body burns more brightly. Each morning he beetled off to class and didn’t return until almost bedtime. After a week of this un-reunion, I was thinking about flying home early when I discovered a notebook under the bed. In it, D. described in semi-coded language an ongoing affair with a charming young language professor.

  Though I’d already half-guessed it, was already half-involved with someone else myself, I felt clobbered, a frying pan to the gut. Breathless, I kicked the notebook back under the bed, then I kicked the bed too, the iron bedstead smashing my sneaker. Good! As I grabbed my foot, my eyes flooded with angry tears. I bitterly considered the kiss on my head: the only one I’d received since arriving. The righteous kiss was the last Romeo gave to Juliet—his farewell. D. had kissed me this way for ages, which I saw now as years of goodbyes. After I’d sat with these thoughts for a while, I felt a whisper of unsettling emotions. I thought I must be dizzy or in shock. I went outside, crossed the boulevards. The men and women clipping by in dark suits looked like pieces across a chessboard, their faces revealing nothing. It was late fall, days before Thanksgiving in the States. Winter seemed to be arriving in high, invisible clouds, round scrolls releasing the cold. All of this suited my mood—I was glad to feel lonely and misunderstood. The more I thought about it, the more I began to feel certain we’d married for the worst possible reasons—to be secure, to please others—and so there had ensued betrayals and affairs and separations. Now I saw it clearly written out in D.’s tidy block print, the same printing he used in the margins of his books. The internal workings of our relationship, intimate, physical, whatever there was, had started to collapse.

  That afternoon, I sat through a mass at a chapel on the Rue X, trying to feel something other than relief. Blame flitted here and there, a sparrow in the rafters. I watched the priest lift the host, vestments rippling down his arms; there was a catch in my chest. I had the sense that, for all my family’s warnings and advice, I wasn’t ready to be in love with anyone. It seemed that all advice could do was separate you from your own voice, the one that tells you to wait for what you want—that someday, not yet, desire will be there, buzzing in the trees, ready for you to look up. I sighed and felt sorry for myself. Also a little hungry. The hymns and stained glass and ceremony were such an astringent kind of loveliness, cold and airy and distant.

  It was even colder outside when I left the church; frosted leaves rattled, sweeping the sidewalks. I ducked into another café, shivering so much the waiter brought me a hot cocoa before I ordered. He placed it on the table. “Ici.” I cradled it in both hands, the brew as strong as coffee, so intense it woke me up. I looked at my own dark, liquid dreams. I’d imagined a joyous reunion: a love affair conducted on the city bridges. And when I tried to picture the face of the one I loved, there was nothing. I drank two more cups of that chocolate, watching tourists hustle up the boulevard, their coats belled before them, full of wind.

  To fall out of love while continuing to love—just not in that way—is like the reverse of an arranged marriage, in which strangers are able, over time, to fall passionately in love. D. and I reunited after his term in Paris. There was no
throwing of dishes, but there was some lively discussion of what it meant to fall in love with other people, how it was, perhaps, not conducive to a marriage—or at least not the sort we might have hoped for. In a few rare, honest moments, I glimpsed the swap that I’d made in my marriages—freedom from my father’s rule in exchange for giving up on desire. Then I assured myself that couldn’t be it—okay, well, the first time, yes—but surely the second was for love. Still, we never again reached for each other; our contact shrank to holding hands. D. and I lived in a sort of cascade of disintegration, neither of us able to look at it directly. We went to films in basement theatres, sprinkled truffle oil on the pasta, talked to each other late into the evenings—as friends, such good, old friends. It seemed at times, in our chaste bed, that friendship was enough to make a marriage. For five years, I missed desire, but not that much. Mostly the idea of it.

  We taught, we moved and moved. We talked about houses and babies—as though describing a life built together was the same as having one. Then I applied for my own travel grant.

  When we first arrived in Jordan, where I would spend a year writing in the capital city of Amman, D. and I passed our days with friends, driving to ruins and monuments, taking walks that spiraled along the cobbled streets and broken sidewalks, sampling street kabobs and sipping coffee, going drinking and dancing, attending parties in emptied buildings where, at some point, someone would pull out a pistol and shoot at the moon. Occasionally I sat at my desk and stared at the notes for my novel, clutching my hair, not seeing any way out. Then very quickly it was spring break in Jordan, just like in the States, and everyone goes away to somewhere. Istanbul is popular, but my friend Mai proposed a group trip to Cairo. It would be she and Armand and D. and I. We would stay at a large Western-style hotel on Zamalek, the flower-bound island in the center of the city. D. and I had to produce a wedding license—which the hotel takes and stores in a safe—in order to stay in the same room. Mai and Armand each had their own rooms.

  At night, I sense footsteps in the hotel corridor past our door, the furtive pressures of embraces and release just beyond the thin wall. They don’t make a sound.

  It’s so hot in Cairo that Mai and I dry our hands on our hair in restrooms, the sweat in our clothes dries on our backs. We gaze at the Sphinx and the pyramids through an iridescence of sand; we try to ignore the streams of importuning young Egyptians.

  “What time is it, Miss Americans?”

  “Hello, hello, how are you? How do you do?”

  “You need a guide? I am yours.”

  “Idiots. Comedians,” Mai mutters, though more gently than usual. “No wonder they’ll never get anywhere.” Armand makes a diplomatic calming motion, gathering the tips of his fingers, but Mai doesn’t look at him. “Why should I be quiet? They think if you say it in English it doesn’t count.”

  At night, the lovely hotel waits and sighs around us. D. sits at the edge of our bed and watches the news in an unfamiliar language. Perversely, I make my lists: Sophie, Iris, Kalani. Because you want the thing you can’t have; you want it the most. I first started making these lists in the fall, around the time we arrived in Jordan. Camille, Daphne, Maya. Girls’ names, since it was all fantasy anyway. My grandmother had passed away three years earlier. I write Grace at the top of each list.

  The future is pressing against us. Mai is thirty-two, I’m thirty-three. We don’t speak openly to each other about our dearest hopes. Jordanians, like many non-Americans, have a reserve about their private lives so ingrained it can seem at times like a form of self-preservation. When the Egyptians ask us about who we are and where we come from, Mai responds in a hearty voice, “Ehna Salteeyeen!” We are from Al-Salt! Ancient village of our big, bossy families, a place famous, some say, for stubbornness and for difficult women. It breaks them up, these thin, kohl-eyed people so ready for a laugh. That’s the most we will reveal to the Cairenes. Mai would perhaps be horrified that I am writing these lines about her, this story. I hope for her blessing.

  I love Mai most of all for her serrated edge, her impatience, her dignity. She was born this way, with this beautiful, aloof face, her toasted-biscuit color, her eyes like tinted windows. Men are drawn to her, then disconcerted by her manner. We walk through the Khan el-Khalili souq, unanswered wishes weighing us down. I want something permissible yet somehow unattainable, Mai wants something attainable yet not permitted. She is silently in love with Armand. They work together in separate governmental agencies and are fast friends, but there isn’t a whiff of romance about them. Our friend Dobb tells me more: Armand is married, and although he and his wife have been separated for years, they are Italian Catholics and refuse to divorce. Adding to these difficulties, Mai is Muslim and won’t marry outside of her religion. All of the members of this play seem frozen in place, bound by social dictums and family pressures.

  “It’s absurd,” I complain to Dobb. “They’re in love—that’s what matters.”

  Dobb, a twenty-four-year-old gay Armenian-Christian in Jordan, raises his eyebrows discreetly. “A person can choose to feel however they need to feel.”

  “No, you can’t!”

  He smirks. “You sound exactly like an American.”

  This kind of desire isn’t permitted to a well-brought-up Jordanian girl. The Qur’an says:

  Have you seen the one who has chosen his own desire as his lord? God has knowingly caused him to go astray, sealed his ears and heart and veiled his vision. Who besides God can guide him?

  The talented Egyptian dancers know how to whirl desire over the expanse of the belly, to swirl it in midair. But the good Jordanian girl must live in the ellipses between ibe (shame) and haram (taboo). The Jordanian girl must move rapidly—from her father’s house to her husband’s, with no funny business in between—if she is ever to move at all. The babies will be the recipients of maternal ardor, the doting gaze a white light upon their limbs. Before marriage, Bud allowed us a little more ambition than that—instead of eros, we might have education or work. We might listen to his recordings of the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum swooning over her unnameable love. We might learn how to twine snake arms overhead, how to lift and drop each hip, to make a belt of coins ring with each kick. There were always the fine distractions of music, or dancing, or visiting, or food; sheets of filo dough, buttered and anointed with syrup, nearly enough to compete with a night in bed.

  In a tiny café, I sit beaming below an oil portrait of Naguib Mahfouz: Beside me, Mai doesn’t smile as the waiter snaps our picture.

  Both D. and I can see that Mai and Armand are consumed by each other, which might in turn make us a little wistful, feeling the contrast. Only when I see such couples do I feel the edge of what’s missing, the slim blade of the possible and the denied. Though of course none of us express our dangerous thoughts. During the day, they are the very image of opprobrium, scarcely looking in each other’s direction, but they’re sweetened by a residue from the nights. Perhaps Mai and Armand can sense there is something stopped or canceled between me and D., but if so, they don’t let on. Our secrets are shared yet not spoken. I try to remember how or when D. and I stopped touching each other, but there’s no single day, no critical moment to point to. Even when we were young animals, it seems we lived so much in our minds, hearts in cages. There was sex and there was us, a quiet, still zone in between.

  On our last day in Cairo, we ask the concierge to take our picture as a group, then we forget the camera on the shuttle bus to the airport. Once at the departure gate, chill descends: Mai arranges that she and I will board in advance of the men. We sit in the eighth row, Armand in the forty-second. We return to lives of friendly distance. I’d hoped that whatever had been set in motion between Mai and Armand in Cairo might come back with them, some embers, crackling at the edges. But fire needs to breathe—they’d made their secret airtight.

  That fall, after nine years of marriage, barely a month after D. and I return to the States, unaccountably, I begin giving away clothes.
I box my belongings—books, artwork, pots and pans—and offer them to people. I feel compelled to do it: It’s a rush of light and energy, as if I’m increasing freedom with each donation. One morning, I fit my remaining stuff into a few suitcases and some book boxes. It all seems more haphazard than deliberate: I don’t have a plan. I bike around the park blocks near the Portland State campus where I teach, a ruffled, leafy area. An apartment building outfitted with blue awnings catches my eye. The young woman in the front office leads me down the hall, keys jingling, warning, “Now, it’s tiny.” The first thing I see is gray brilliance: The Willamette River shines like nickel through the panes.

  Of course, I put off telling them.

  Weeks go by, then more weeks. I don’t know how to admit to this much failure and I’m afraid of their reaction. When my parents call, D. is “napping,” or he “just ran out.” Frequently, he’s “in the shower. He says hi.” Suddenly, three months have passed: Every couple of days I drive to our old apartment to check the mail rather than confess to a new address. For a while, I imagine that not telling is actually my way of being boldly independent . . . until all at once it just seems like cowardice. I pick up the phone, try to piece words together. I put the phone down. In desperation, I sit before the computer. I write, “So guys, hey, sorry to do this by email, but I’ve been meaning to tell you a little something. . . .”

  Mom writes back, “Yeah, we didn’t think he took that many showers.”

  Two minutes after Mom’s response, Bud calls. “You want me I should round up the boys, go pay the kelb a visit?” He’s offering to beat my ex, the dog, no questions asked—but he puts it in an affable, conversational way.