Even though I have Andrew and Joy, it’s not the same as talking to my sister. I miss her and I miss our long, detailed conversations, the things I share only with her. I have so much to tell her, everything that’s happened and all my thoughts, but I can’t say anything. Once, when I accidentally drop a ‘we’, she stops me and asks, ‘Who were you there with?’ She sighs and I can tell she’s making a face. ‘Come on, Liati! Of all the hot guys in New York, do you have to pin yourself to this one?’
So I don’t tell her how we enjoy making each other laugh. I don’t tell her that I spend all day gathering up stories to share with him in the evening, so I can hear him laugh, so I can laugh again with him. I don’t tell her about the moments when I can feel that he understands me, that he can make his way in and out of my mind’s twists and turns, that I can look at his wise eyes and see the wheels of his mind spinning in perfect synchrony with my thoughts. The ease, the satisfaction, the comfort that fills me in those moments. The curiosity and the delight of pondering things together. In those moments when we talk and talk and talk, I feel that if I had been a sort of enigma to myself, a difficult riddle to solve, he has come along to know me and to answer all my questions.
And I don’t tell anyone how fast he gets turned on, catching fire like a field of thistles, eager and yearning all the time, lusting after me. And about how our nights are like an apple that grows new flesh even as we bite into it. About our blissful delight, at once selfish and giving, starving and feeding and starving again. How when we lie under the blanket, embracing each other, cupped like two yolks in one egg, smug and satiated, enmeshed, limbs entwined like a pair of octopi, how sometimes in those moments I feel that I am almost becoming him, so close to him and infused with him that I can practically feel what it is to be him.
And how sometimes, privately, I daydream. I secretly imagine that in the end I stay here with him. That I don’t have the willpower to leave and we stay together and live in a suburb far away from everyone, in a middle-class house with a red roof and a chimney and a fenced garden, or in a college town where no one knows us, with a big car in the driveway, with two kids, a girl and a boy, living out our American lives just like on TV.
chapter 16
In January, after the holidays, I go back to my texts and dictionaries, to the diligent quiet of the library halls. In Brooklyn, Hilmi resumes his work at full steam. He devotes most of his time to the dreaming boy. Thirty-four finished drawings hang over his bed and on the walls, ready for their colours. He needs to finish six remaining sketches for the project, and he intermittently works on a separate series of oil paintings on large canvases and wooden boards: desolate urban landscapes, New York as a ghost town of bridges and abandoned towers, glistening lakes and oily rivers with incongruent objects floating in the water – combs and backpacks, kettles and old shoes, drifting along in the shadowy current.
The new year looks promising for him, with good news early on. In November and December, six of his works are displayed in the lobby of the ‘Center for Arab Culture’ in Queens – elementary portraits of the dreaming boy in pencil and acrylic, as part of a group show by artists from Gulf states and the Middle East. Then he learns that four of the pieces were sold for $1700 to a small gallery on the outskirts of Soho that specializes in young international artists.
Mr Aggio, an Italian in his sixties with bronzed skin and silver hair, is the gallery owner. He arrives at Hilmi’s studio wearing a silk cravat, signet rings and a Louis Vuitton bag over his shoulder. He introduces us to Beatrice, a dark brown pinscher with a grey moustache whose head peeks out of the bag. After a quick spin around the studio, Beatrice hops onto the couch with a refined, bored look and curls up in my lap. She takes a few pieces of biscuit from my hand, and we both watch Mr Aggio’s expressions as he walks around inspecting Hilmi’s new works and his sketchpad. When Hilmi takes Mr Aggio into the bedroom and explains his plans and the scope of his budding creation, Beatrice pricks up her ears upon hearing her master’s exclamations and enthusiastic claps. At the end of the visit, Mr Aggio commissions a series of six more portraits. He reaches into his bag and hands Hilmi $1200 in cash as an advance.
‘In cash!’ Hilmi jumps and skips over from the door, dancing around, cheering and whooping, waving the fan of green bills like a feather crest on his head: ‘In cash, in cash, in cash!’
After four years of barely squeezing by in New York, living hand to mouth, waiting tables and washing store windows, moving furniture and handing out ad sheets, he gives up even the safety net of teaching Arabic. He notifies the private language school in Manhattan, which had sent him Andrew and all the other students over the past year, that he’s taking a break from teaching. At the end of the month he does not need to call the landlady, his absentee roommate Jenny’s mother, to beg for a grace period on the rent. And one evening, when we walk past a big electronics store on 42nd Street, he succumbs to temptation and walks in to look at the state-of-the-art DVD camcorders gleaming on glass shelves in the window. He spends $450 on a new Sony model and mails it to Ramallah for his younger brother Marwan, who has recently finished studying film in Tunis.
Hilmi works constantly now, drawing day and night. He abandons everything else and dedicates himself to finishing the project. Winter takes over the city with a vengeance, and Hilmi holes up in Brooklyn, the tip of his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he focuses intently on drawing, erasing and redrawing. Hailstorms rage, the wind wails, snow piles up on the rooftops and windowsills. Inside the studio, flooded by visions of colours and lines and shapes, Hilmi works feverishly, labouring with a hurried, urgent, restless passion.
He makes do with four or five hours of sleep a night. He wakes when the alarm clock rings at seven or eight, showers, grabs something to eat with his coffee, and after the first cigarette, his curls tied back in a bun and held down with a girl’s hairband, he starts work. By noon he’s covered with grey splotches – his fingers are grey, his entire face is grey, his forehead, neck, forearms. Not infrequently he falls asleep in the middle of the day, sprawled on the couch with a pencil stub behind his ear. He keeps up this routine even when I spend the weekend, even if we go out in the evening and get home late. He smokes a lot and drinks a lot of coffee. During the week he eats cold pastrami in pitta bread or boxed mac ’n’ cheese. When I open the fridge, I find Coke bottles and greasy takeout containers from the Chinese restaurant.
I hug him one night, feeling his ribcage, and point out that he’s lost weight. I run my finger over his sharp cheekbones and the dark circles under his eyes, and warn him in between kisses that his teeth will go black from all the cigarettes and coffee and Coke. But he says it’s nonsense. He hugs me close and claims he’s as healthy as a horse: the hard work makes him more alert and lucid than ever.
‘This is the year I’ve been waiting for, Bazi,’ he whispers, ‘it’s my golden time.’ He repeats the phrase, awestruck, kissing my shoulder again and again: ‘It’s my golden time.’ He gazes at the ceiling and tells me that he is almost scared by all the good luck, the love and the inspiration that have suddenly befallen him. He’s afraid it’s a gesture lavished upon him capriciously by fate, a generous allocation of kindness that might end just as abruptly at any moment.
We meet twice a week on weekdays and spend every weekend together. I feel him slip out of bed and hear water running in the shower, the hum of the kettle. I hear the pencil sharpener scraping and the rustle of his pencils as I doze. Sometimes, on my way to the bathroom in the morning, I find him hunched over his sketchpad, surrounded by empty coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays, and when I wake up again a few hours later he’s still in the same position, pencil in hand, looking up at me with burning, bloodshot eyes.
The dreaming boy project, sixteen months in, has now become his whole world: it is where he exists alongside his regular life. By the end of January there is not a single bare spot on the bedroom walls. The forty hanging drawings, finished down to the last detail, are the
last thing he sees before he falls asleep and the first, amazing sight he beholds when he opens his eyes. One evening in early February he begins the colouring stage, which will last five months. As soon as he picks up the paintbrushes and oil paints and starts to bring the pale grey pencil lines to life with a spectrum of greens, purples and bright reds, the room seems to ignite.
These are the days when all sorts of unusual incidents start to accumulate. Strange coincidences out of nowhere. A woman turns to Hilmi on the subway one day with tears in her eyes and exclaims that his sweater, a blue-grey ribbed-knit pullover that he bought at a second-hand shop two years ago, is one she knitted herself and donated to charity after her husband died. One afternoon there’s a knock at the door and Hilmi finds an elderly woman in a wheelchair and a young man who explains his ailing grandmother’s final wish: she would like to come inside and see the apartment she grew up in. The phone rings and a series of excited callers report that they’ve seen Hilmi’s son wandering around Washington Heights, sleeping in Central Park, or boarding a bus on Amsterdam Avenue. Finally the missing boy’s father calls to apologize: he’d printed up posters with the wrong phone number.
In a different time, such things would be quickly forgotten. But now they take on a bothersome significance for Hilmi, leaving behind a tense, fragile echo, as though he had experienced these things in a different life. And there are dreams – a huge abundance of dreams. ‘I had maybe a hundred dreams last night,’ he keeps telling me on the phone, ‘maybe a thousand.’
There is also a flood of memories from his childhood in Hebron. Corners of the house, the dovecote on the rooftop, his father’s grocery store, the smell that lingered there, the shadows. The sights resurface in his dreams and on the canvases, full of life. He draws the stone houses and alleys and backyards with their laundry lines. He draws the arabesque pattern on the floor tiles, the children’s room covered with mattresses, the high ceiling, the shadow of the minarets from Ibrahimi Mosque through the window, towering over the rooftops at sundown.
And then, one night, he dreams that his father is standing on their rooftop in the wind, smoking contemplatively. It is not the elderly, ailing father Hilmi said goodbye to seven years ago when he went to Baghdad – his sixty-nine-year-old father, whose heart gave in a few months later. Not the blurry figure engraved in Hilmi’s memory from the last family photograph, a copy of which was buried in a drawer somewhere in the apartment. He draws a portrait of his father as he looked twenty years ago, when Hilmi was seven. That’s how he had appeared to him in his dream. He captures the impressive steadfast gaze and the chiselled wrinkles of his forehead, the greying stubble and the folds in his strong, sunburned neck. He weeps while he draws him, as he wept last night during the dream, when his father appeared before his eyes so vividly.
There is a prophetic sense of sorts that stays with him constantly. A discomforting, involuntary feeling, as though all he has to do is ponder something absentmindedly for that thing to somehow come true. He worries that he is clairvoyant, that he can see the future or even unwittingly determine it. There is genuine dread in his eyes when he tells me, ‘It’s like reality is imitating my imagination.’
But when I ask for an example, he refuses. He’s afraid that speaking might set things in motion and make them happen. I try again, but he gets evasive.
‘Forget it,’ he says with a furrowed brow, and keeps flicking his lighter on. ‘I have to stop thinking about it.’
‘You’re worrying me, you silly,’ I explain when he accuses me of sounding like his mother. On the phone I can hear his lighter tapping, and the drag of smoke. I ask what exactly he’s had to eat all day. Recognizing the type of drag and the raspy voice, the stifled inhalation, I comment that he’s smoking way too much weed. I worry about him being distracted and chronically late. The umbrella he left on the train again; $180 that disappeared from his pocket; the bout of confusion and anxiety when we go clothes shopping and he realizes, in the middle of a huge shoe shop, surrounded by bags, that his backpack with the sketchpad is gone. The way he darts around the store, pale-faced, breathlessly running up and down the escalators with his eyes wide. And finally collapses in a changing room, clutching the backpack to his chest and shuddering tearfully into a glass of water a sales lady brings him.
It worries me that he cries so frequently. And when he laughs, I worry about the cough that shoots out of his throat and makes his laughter raspy. I worry about the thunder of harsh, damp sobs he chokes down. One night, washing the dishes, he drops a glass and a thick shard pierces his left thumb through the clouds of foam like a penknife, cutting a deep horseshoe in his flesh that fills the sink with blood. Another time he goes out and leaves a pot of soup boiling on the stove, which sets off the smoke detector. When he gets home in the evening the neighbours and the superintendent crowd around him angrily. The apartment reeks of smoke and the blackened, charred pot is still on the stove.
I find it worrying, and also annoying. The cloud of cigarette smoke that constantly hangs in the air. The little snakes of ash and traces of dust everywhere, oil paint spots and pencil sharpenings, erasings. The mouse that’s been scurrying around for months, appearing and disappearing in the bathroom, crossing the hallway in the dark. The glue traps lurking in every corner with dried-out bits of salami and cheese, clumped with dust and hair. It annoys me that he doesn’t care about the draughts that come in because the kitchen window is stuck, or the flickering fluorescent bulb that needs to be changed. It annoys me that he doesn’t mind washing the dishes with shampoo when the washing-up liquid runs out. It annoys me that he doesn’t fold his laundry when he gets back from the laundromat, just shoves it in the closet, still warm from the dryer. Landslides of clothes spill out of the shelves, and there’s a slight hint of mildew on his shirts and pants. It annoys me that he’s always late, always turning up breathless, full of apologies and excuses. I wait for him once for two hours on West 17th Street while he waits on East 17th. It annoys me that he takes his sketchbook everywhere and keeps drawing when we’re on the train or waiting for our food in a restaurant. At the movies he falls asleep on my shoulder ten minutes after the film starts. We spend an afternoon with Andrew and his little girl Josie, and Hilmi’s head is somewhere else. Jody, Julie, Joey – he can’t remember her name. It worries and annoys me that he apologizes and avoids my kisses and caresses, says he’s not in the mood, he’d rather keep working, he just needs to finish up something.
I cling to the minor details of life, to the everyday rhythm, and I am forgiving. I casually explain to him and to myself that it’s the passion of creativity, the intoxicating power of art, that is gripping him. That is the source of all his emotional intensity and gushing divinations, his wild mood swings, the signs and omens that assail him from all around, the tears.
‘Balance,’ I recite, ‘all you need is balance. Get your life back in balance. Balance things out.’
I latch on to the simple, worldly things, promising it’ll happen if he makes sure to get more sleep and eat regular meals, if he doesn’t spend days on end without any human contact, if he gets some fresh air once in a while, sees more friends, comes to yoga with me.
Perhaps I adopt this practical, maternal voice because I don’t know how to deal with such feverish, panicked emotions, and I don’t want to deal with his vulnerability. Perhaps it’s true that I’ve become irritable, that the minute he starts talking I lose my patience, and that his fragility turns me off, and that is why I have become so efficient and purposeful. That is why the second I arrive, carrying groceries and flowers, even though we haven’t seen each other for five days, I set about frying hamburgers and changing his sheets. That is why today on the phone, when he asked me to come over because he needed me, he didn’t mean sex: he meant that he needed me to listen to him, to talk to him.
‘I’ll say it again. What’s happening to you now is natural and understandable. This feeling you have of being all-powerful is obviously having an effect. It’s not that
I don’t believe you. But the fact is that these imaginings, your subconscious, they’re at their height now— No, no, you listen to me. All these visions, the signs, the strange dreams – are you listening? It’s just your imagination working overtime— Of course it’s connected. And if you think about all that shit you’re smoking, it totally makes sense. It isn’t really surprising that reality, even when you’re awake, looks a bit dreamlike to you— I know, yes. Very frightening. Because if you have the power to make this beauty come true, then maybe the fears, all these wild fantasies you’re having, maybe they can also come true. But look, Hilmik, life goes on. Everything’s OK. Look at me, honey. Nothing bad is happening, right?’
He nods, clearly not reassured.
‘And besides, I promise you it’ll pass. You’ll see, after you finish the collection, everything will pass. I’m telling you, honestly. You really don’t have anything to worry about.’
But at night, when I get into bed and curl up next to him in the dark, I am the one who cries. When I walk back from the bathroom half asleep, past the pictures leaning against the wall in the hallway, past the portrait of his father, who looks back at me full of life before I turn off the light, a thought breaks through from my dreamy fog: that is what Hilmi will look like when he’s old. And it is my tears, then, that wet his sleeping face, the face I kiss in the dark, with the wrinkles and old age it will one day reveal. I kiss that worn, furrowed face, I cry and I kiss Hilmi at fifty, at sixty, the elderly man he will be as the years go by, the mature respectability his body will assume, the flesh that may thicken, the whitening tufts on his withered chest, the age spots and the glasses, and after them the wife – his wife, who appears in my imagination, thin and tall, still beautiful, like one of those Egyptian actresses from the Friday afternoon movies on TV when we were kids. I close my eyes and imagine them in their backyard in the golden sunlight, Hilmi on a chair and she standing next to him. I picture the distant look she gives me, blinded by the light, and their children, the life he will live long after I’m gone, years after we forget about each other and the affair we had one winter in New York is only a distant memory.
All the Rivers Page 9