An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

  The driver, impressed by having a Lebanese soldier in his car and by his own percolating patriotism, tried to chat up the newcomer, but received little in response. Hannah’s lieutenant was just as shy as she was.

  She blushed, as if she had just dipped into a tub of hot water, her skin turning tingly and red, the color of her hair. She couldn’t help herself. She stared out her window but looked awry through the corner of her eye, trying to examine her possible future husband. She was sure he could hear the clamor of her insatiable heart. She tried to slow her breathing.

  He was ever so quiet.

  They’d been in the car together for only eight minutes when her panic erupted.

  The car slowed for another soldier standing on the curb. She heard herself utter the word no, quite loudly. The service had four passengers already. This soldier would force her lieutenant next to her, into the seat she had paid for. “No,” she said, before the driver could pick up the extra passenger.

  The driver was genuinely polite at first, but sitting behind him, Hannah noticed that his hair wasn’t carefully trimmed at all. A confetti of dandruff and a sprinkling of macassar oil held it together. “That won’t be a problem, madam,” he said, “I’ll return the price of one fare.”

  “No,” she said. “No.” Her voice was louder and shriller than she would have wished. She wanted to insist that she had paid for two, insist once more and again. She wanted to explain that she had no wish to be squeezed next to a man, particularly this most endearing lieutenant, but her heart beat loudly, her lungs shrank like a deflated balloon, and she experienced verbal paralysis. The only word she could say was no.

  “He’s a soldier,” the driver insisted. “We can’t leave him standing on the side of the road. He’s a Lebanese soldier.”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  The passengers in front glared at her with infinite disapproval. Incensed, the driver huffed like a fish out of water, lips pursed, cheeks puffed. “We must honor our soldiers,” he said.

  It was at this point that her knight came to the rescue and picked up her white handkerchief. “He can take another car,” the lieutenant said, “since this one is obviously full.”

  Like most of us on many an occasion, he had vastly overestimated the power of reason. That sentence was the only one the chivalrous lieutenant was allowed to speak. The seething driver—the hottest smoke of Hell leaked out of his ears, the vilest words exploded out of his mouth—kicked both Hannah and the lieutenant out of his car, although he returned her double fare.

  The princess and her knight, slightly shell-shocked, watched as their carriage sped away with the other soldier, leaving them behind in a fog of gray exhaust.

  “I am sorry,” said the lieutenant. “I probably made a minor matter worse.”

  “No,” replied the princess, neither loud nor shrill, thankfully.

  She wished to explain how much she appreciated his standing up for her, how helpless she’d felt before he intervened, how grateful she was, how long she’d waited for a man to come into her life, how happy she could make him and, most important, what a good wife she’d be.

  “We can take another car,” he said.

  It was the use of that pronoun that sealed his fate. I can tell you that from the day she met him until the day he died, Hannah, in her journal entries, used the first person plural about five times as much as the singular.

  Hannah was too overwhelmed to ride in another car. She couldn’t. He asked if she wished to rest before they took another. She shook her head. He asked if she could walk home. That she could do. He walked her home. It was on his way. A Proustian promenade.

  The comfortable autumnal temperatures still prevailed, the air crisp but not dry. A leisurely walk. She carried her handbag, while he carried a gun in his holster and a rifle strapped about his shoulder. She knew he noticed her minor limp with the first step because he slowed down to make her feel more at ease. He was almost as uncomfortable with the spoken word as she was. For the first twenty steps or so, each stuttered, trying to initiate a polite chat, a considerate conversation. Finally, Hannah was able to form a full, coherent, and grammatically correct sentence.

  “Thank you for saving me,” she said.

  He begged her to think nothing of it.

  “I am grateful,” she said.

  “I could do nothing else,” he said, in a voice that cracked at the first syllable. “I was only doing my duty. No honest man could have lived with himself had he allowed that inconsiderate animal to treat a lady as he did.”

  In the journal, she underlined the word lady three times.

  “You are from a good family, the driver isn’t,” he said. “He should know how to behave toward his betters.”

  She underlined the phrase “good family” only once.

  “You bought that seat and he agreed to it,” he said. “Only a scoundrel reneges on his agreements. A man’s word is the only thing that separates him from beasts.” The lovely lieutenant then looked into her eyes and finished the thought with, “I always keep my word.”

  If using the pronoun we had sealed his fate, that last sentence poured hot red wax over it and stamped it with his family insignia.

  He may have been trying to be kind. He may have thought this was what a gentleman did. He may have thought that wearing the uniform, he was duty bound to present the national army in good light. No matter.

  In Hannah’s eyes, the gentleman lieutenant had proposed.

  She wrote it down in her journal.

  Her neighbors saw him accompany her. She walked with head held high, a proud woman, the tip of her nose pointing upward. She was certain everyone could tell that she had transformed into a woman betrothed; she undoubtedly walked like one.

  Her neighbors saw him deliver her to her door, saw him take her hands in parting. They heard her say, “Please extend our invitation to your family for a visit.” They saw Hannah’s brother open the door, an expression of shock painted on his face, saw the men shake hands in greeting as Hannah demurely withdrew into her home. They saw the lieutenant leave the neighborhood, oblivious to the fact that he was being observed and measured.

  Her family was stunned, of course. How unusual a proposal!

  Her mother declaimed that she had never heard of such a thing. One of Hannah’s brothers said that the lieutenant must have been smitten on the spot. Another brother thought God must have intervened and guided the lieutenant’s will. How fortunate, her sister-in-law Maryam exclaimed, how propitious!

  “Why didn’t he come with his family and ask me for your hand,” her father said, “like normal people?”

  “I’m certain he will,” Hannah replied.

  An invitation to lunch was sent by hand to his family.

  An invitation to lunch? I can’t remember ever having any visitors over for lunch, other than my ex-husband and Hannah, neither of whom I’d consider guests, and both have passed away.

  One of the things that concerns me is that I’m turning into the kind of old woman I’ve desperately tried to avoid becoming, the one always directing the conversation back to herself. Hannah’s family invited my ex-husband’s family to lunch. Oh, poor me, I’ve never had people over for lunch. I can’t abide that. Well, I can’t abide it in other people.

  I used to find old people, men and women, terribly narcissistic. All they ever want to do is talk about themselves. But then, what are these pages if not an exercise in narcissism? What are these pages?

  Yet I do talk about other people. I’m a failed narcissist. I haven’t succeeded even though I’ve inherited the best genes. I’m not as good as my mother.

  My mother didn’t wait till she was older to reach her peak. She began circling the top of narcissistic Everest at an early age, and later, after her husband died and her children grew, she floated above the entire Himalayas. The subjects she specialized in, or was willing to engage in, were, in order: herself, her boys, her husband, and the inferiority of everyone else. I exaggerate only sl
ightly.

  As I write this, as the nib of my pen follows its shadow slowly from right to left, my mind floods with memories of the egregious things she’s said. I feel my temperature rise. My cheeks and neck flush, my eyes seem to broil in their sockets, my tongue and palate become dry.

  I feel physically ill. I should eat something this morning, maybe boil another cup of water for tea, but I can’t move. I am listless and weary. I am lassitude. An amorphous anxiety smothers me.

  The pelting rain on the windowpane soothes my wearied memories and me, but barely. My ears are damp from hearing its patter, my mind cools.

  If, as a child, I returned home with some injury, say a bleeding knee from a fall, it was an opportunity for my mother to rattle off all the hurts she’d sustained in her life. How she’d bumped her knee on the coffee table just that morning, how she’d scalded her hand dropping a kettle when she was twelve, how much pain her delicate stomach caused her. Most times, she’d forget to tend to my cut.

  My first period was a chance for her to elaborate on how awful hers were. I had to listen to her describe in detail the exact nature of the queasiness announcing that her period would commence two days hence.

  She prepared me for my wedding night by regaling me with how unprepared she’d been for hers, how horrific it was, how negligent her own mother had been for not telling her anything. She sat me on her bed the night before my wedding while her husband was visiting my in-laws, finalizing contracts. The lights low, the summer heat suffocating, mosquitoes running interference, she explained about babies, then remembered that she’d already done that. She told me she’d experienced pain and lots of it. That was all she could think of to say. “It hurt so much and it went on and on until I was used to it.”

  You know, at least she did tell me. In her own way, she warned me of possibilities and explained the basic mechanics of sex by telling me how terrible her night was. Not that it helped me, of course, since I doubt she knew anything about male impotence. Neither one of us considered the possibility that I’d be a virgin for quite a while longer. She isn’t a good mother, but she’s better than her own.

  While she is a narcissist and difficult to be around, at times I can forgive her. I don’t believe you can reach your eighty-eighth year without being convinced that the world revolves around you.

  At other times, I can’t forgive.

  You may think that the examples above show that my mother was more inconsiderate than nasty. Let me correct you.

  I don’t recall what took Hannah and me over to my mother’s house all those years ago, probably just a visit. My husband hadn’t left me yet, so it must have been in the mid-1950s. My mother, probably half the age I am now, answered the door. As soon as we entered, she led me away by my elbow and whispered in my ear, “Don’t bring her here.”

  I was surprised. I wasn’t yet inured to her admonishments at the time. I couldn’t understand what the problem was.

  “We’re a good family,” she said. “I don’t want people to talk. You can keep company with her if you so wish, but not in my house.”

  I was confounded. “What’s wrong with Hannah?”

  “She has red hair,” my mother said, as if that explained everything, even to someone as dense as I. Noticing that I was still confused, she snapped, “Bright red hair.”

  “Well, yes,” I said, “I can see that.”

  She shook her head in frustration. “Her ancestors slept with Crusaders. Do I have to spell it out? That’s how she has red hair. She has their blood.”

  It took me a few seconds to register this. “Wait,” I said. “Are you blaming her for having red hair?”

  “No, of course not, not me. Her mother also has red hair, though definitely not as bright. I don’t blame her, but other people do. I can’t help what the neighbors think. Personally, I don’t judge. People can sleep with whomever they wish, but they shouldn’t come in contact with my family.”

  What could I say? I was still a teenager.

  I could have told her that her ancestors were raped by Crusaders as well, maybe the black Irish instead of the redheads, and by the English and Welsh Crusaders and the French ones. They were also raped by the Arabs when they conquered us, by the Ottomans, by the Romans, and by the Greeks and Macedonians. Hell, Beirut has survived for thousands and thousands of years by spreading her beautiful legs for every army within smelling distance.

  You really think the whore was from Babylon?

  That Babylonian was an amateur. Beirut, my dear Beirut.

  How do you explain such things to my mother?

  I keep trying to tell myself that she’s an uneducated woman. She believes that if you look up at the stars, warts will sprout on your face. When I was a child, she admonished me whenever I glanced up, just a tap on the back of my head. She was never taught to read or write—I tried to teach her while I was still in school, but as usual, I failed. I can’t keep blaming her. She hasn’t had any opportunities, has had to make do. She’s had a tough life. But I can’t seem to stop criticizing her.

  Whenever I gingerly remove my mother’s noose from around my neck, it is with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.

  I don’t like to complain, truly, I don’t, but I do find that I am doing so often. To age is to whine.

  Should I tell you about my bowel movements?

  I’m joking, I’m joking. However, if you have the misfortune of reading Thomas Mann’s journals, you’ll notice that all he thinks about are his misbehaving bowels, and the perfumed boorish bore was not joking. He wouldn’t have been able to joke if his Nobel Prize depended on it.

  Most of the books published these days consist of a series of whines followed by an epiphany. I call these memoirs and confessional novels happy tragedies. We shall overcome and all that. I find them sentimental and boring. They are the modern version of The Lives of the Saints, with exemplary tales of suffering preceding redemption, only less interesting because we no longer have lecherous Roman centurions lusting after sultry virgin martyrs and smiting their perky, voluptuous, but eternally chaste breasts—less interesting because instead of rising into lush Heaven and His embrace all we get these days is a measly epiphany.

  I feel shortchanged, don’t you?

  Blame Joyce and his Dubliners, which I adore, but do pity Mr. Joyce, because the only thing some writers ever understand from his masterpiece is epiphany, epiphany, and one more blasted epiphany. There should be a new literary resolution: no more epiphanies. Enough. Have pity on readers who reach the end of a real-life conflict in confusion and don’t experience a false sense of temporary enlightenment.

  Dear contemporary writers, you make me feel inadequate because my life isn’t as clear and concise as your stories.

  I should send out letters to writers, writing programs, and publishers. You’re strangling the life out of literature, sentence by well-constructed sentence, book by bland book.

  Wasn’t Herzog, that writer of cantankerous letters, around my age? That’s probably the best Bellow novel. I can’t remember whether Herzog ended with an epiphany, but somehow I doubt it. I must check.

  One day I made a resolution not to complain. As you can see, I failed, but I did make that resolution once. I resolved never to complain again after witnessing a horrific incident years ago.

  It was a day early in the civil war, August 1978. Beirut was racked with convulsions under the double weight of oppressive summer heat and three years of fighting; a bleak city, a wearied city. There had been a lull in the engagements, one of that multitude of brief cease-fires. I was walking home from the bookstore, rushing home in point of fact, toward the safety of my reading room with its brocade-patterned cream wallpaper that was faded in many a spot, my reading room with all the furniture in its appropriate place.

  About fifteen minutes away from my building, I noticed a man on the other side of the street, a sinister-looking old man wearing multiple layers of coats in that groaning heat, obviously not well, probably insane. I remem
ber that the topmost coat was a green loden. His dark eyes seemed to bore right into me across the distance. He leaned against a charred wall, immobile, next to an open doorway—a double door that had been closed every time I’d passed it—and through that doorway was nothing but darkness, an impenetrable darkness, or a darkness not yet penetrated. I realized even then that I was tired and stressed, that I might be daydreaming, hallucinating a scene, but I hastened my steps and refused to look back. The problem, dream or not, and as terrifying as the chimerical darkness seemed, was that I, or at least a part of me, wanted to walk through that doorway.

  I realize now that it must have been a hallucination for it really was too obvious a foreshadowing, a touch of death foretold. Only a few minutes later, several steps on, I saw the corpse.

  A man on the side of the road, thrown there, discarded, probably recently, blocked my path—not just a little in my way, but “thou shalt have to step over me” in my way. There was a smell to him, tart and a tad musky, like that of a carpet left in the attic too long. Underneath dried, flaky clots of blood the color of coffee grounds, his face had a bluish pallor. His head lay at an unnatural angle; his forehead wrinkles gathered around the promenade above his nose. Curly hair, a premature white that seemed almost dyed (no blue tint, no Bel Argent), thin and sparse at the edges, gave his head a spectral effect. I thought he was well and sensibly dressed, in a light-colored summer linen suit and a nice tie, also at a bizarre angle.

  I was calm at first, placid and tranquil, transcendently serene. I considered the Pessoa quote “Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn’t need to take the one and only outfit he’d worn.”

  As bloodied and bruised as his face was, his clothes were spotless and dirt free, as if his murderer was someone of refined taste who dressed him up after killing him, waiting until the blood stopped running. I remember thinking, Yes, it’s quite possible that Ahmad, my Ahmad, would do such a thoughtful thing. It was at that point, I believe, after that notion crossed my mind, that I panicked and ran home as fast as my skinny legs could manage.