A moment passes in silence; Silvia doesn’t know what to say.
“Well, that’s that.” Cynthia wakes up from her reverie and goes towards the golden rectangle falling on the path from the open door. “Let’s keep an eye out for Judy then, yes?”
XXXIV
THE FOURTH WEEK passes quickly. Another seven days of straight sun. None of the guests really notice the drought—nobody ever misses rain, at least not at first—but the one thing Ibrahim notes is how difficult it becomes to distinguish days when the weather flattens them out into one hammered stretch of golden sunshine.
Ibrahim wants to ask Silvia if she’ll pose for him again, but he’s nervous that she’ll say no, that it was just the one-time, mead-drenched thing. He’s not used to this feeling of anxiousness—he’s been in three relationships, each lasting less than six months, and he’s always been the one with the power—and he finds it exciting.
He approaches her in the kitchen at breakfast, managing to get to her when nobody else is around. In the past week they’ve had very little contact, both busy and both shy.
“Sure,” she says, filling a glass with raspberries. “I’d love to.” She pops one into her mouth.
SHE COMES into his room after her shower that evening, hair still wet around her face, patches of water blossoming on her clothes in the elevated places: shoulders, breasts, hips. She’s wearing a green T-shirt and jean shorts.
Her face, always fresh, looks pinker, he thinks. Newer.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says.
She unfolds the blanket, shakes it onto the floor, and takes off her clothes slowly, turned away from him. As she unpeels and settles into her spot, he lines up the colours. Peripherally he notices the way the light falls on her body, the colours of the tartan shawl she lies on—for now he has her floating in a grey void, but he might keep it this way, as tartan is just too plaid—the way her hair curls down her neck. The oak-leaf wings are still right, but today they should be more yellow, so he brings out the cadmium and orange and red and gold and blue and green and white, for all these colours make up yellow, and squeezes them onto his palette with the rest.
Then he looks more, until the world becomes as he wants to paint it. Silvia is there, of course, tangible and beautiful, but looking at her he is beginning to see her as flat, colour-blocked, winged—he’s seeing her as his painting already.
He starts with a thin line above her head—he uses the second thinnest paintbrush he has—and his hand follows the brush. The line, a marbled autumnal rose, turns into letters halfway down the canvas, the Arabic letters haa, the deep one, baa, and yaa—together this spells habibi. Surprised, he puts his paintbrush down.
Picking up the thickest brush, he mixes red into the remaining splotch of pink, the colour of her wings. The line he follows starts with her lips and goes down the middle of her throat to her heart, knotting there before continuing to her groin, where it disappears between her cat-curled legs.
Lips, heart, sex.
“You need me to do anything?” Silvia asks after a while, shifting, rubbing the back of her neck.
“Do you need a break?” he asks, not looking at her, focused on his painting. It’s coming together. He’s feeling it.
“I’m fine for a bit longer,” she says, “but I think it’s getting kind of late. I’m a little sleepy.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly eleven.”
“At night?” He looks up. She’s got the blanket tucked over her feet and she’s no longer propped on her arms but lying flat on the floor. The sun has long since left the sky: he can see, even from the low windows, that the stars are already midnight bright. His mouth moves into a crooked smile, jaw jigsawed. “Sorry. We’re done, of course. We’ll finish another time.”
She gets up slowly, pins and needles all the way up her legs so they don’t even feel like her own, and wraps herself in the bathrobe he has left near her. She comes around to look at the painting.
“What’s that?” She points to the red-pink line going through her middle.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“It looks like my esophagus.” She tilts her face sideways to follow it between her painted legs. “I didn’t realise you were an anatomical painter.”
“And those wings, copied perfectly from your anatomical self.” He wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her towards him.
“And that?” She points to the squiggle down the side.
“Arabic.”
“Saying what?”
“It’s . . .” He pauses. “It’s embarrassing.”
“What is it?” She slips out of his arms and faces him, eyes bright.
“I did it without thinking. The brush just went there.”
She waits.
“Habibi, it says.”
“Which means?”
“My beloved.”
XXXV
IBRAHIM FEELS THAT if he jumped, he would fly. The secret inside him—love, if love is a secret—grows and swells, distributes itself throughout his body like blood, all this happiness coming from his heart.
He is on his way to the pay phone to call his dad. Walking down the path, he notices that the grass on the lot is overgrown, parched to straw in places. But from the top of the driveway, on the small rounded mound, he can see the healthy parts, the long green wild stuff, moving in the wind as if by a divine hand. It ripples not all together but as though a giant is walking through, whooshing around. Or, no, it looks like a flock of birds, the way they move in a coordinated cloud across the sky, bending pale and flashing dark.
He is bringing a handful of quarters down to the pay phone because he doesn’t know how much it will be, whether it’s long distance, since he’s still in Ontario.
It’s eleven o’clock in the morning—Abouya should be up by now.
Just before he reaches the pay phone, he sees that new flowers have blossomed along the path. He recognizes the three-pointed white ones that carpet the ground—these are trilliums, the flower of Ontario. He feels proud for knowing this. There are some pretty pink ones too, which he’s never seen before. They’ve got a sort of basin, gobletlike, and three paler petals stemming from this. The goblet is veiny, nearly see-through; looking closely, he thinks it looks a little . . . a little like sexual organs, actually. A ball sac, he’d say, if he were being impolite. Well—part scrotum, part ovaries. He picks one for Silvia, thinking she’ll find it funny too.
He boxes himself into the narrow glass rectangle and feeds the phone a quarter, then dials. It asks for another two. It rings. After two rings, silence.
“Hello?” Ibrahim says.
“Hello?”
“Abouya?”
“Ibrahim?”
“Hello!”
“What are you doing, not calling us for an eternity?” Ibrahim the Elder isn’t shouting; his voice is naturally loud. “God in Moses, Allah in the highest, you know you could have been dead and I could have been dead and your brothers and and sis—”
“Dad, I’m fine, I’m alive, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t call me Dad!”
“Sorry, Abouya.”
“You prolific son, you abandoned us!”
Ibrahim smiles into the phone. Prolific, prodigal. “You know where I am!” Ibrahim knows that things are fine, that he has already been forgiven, and so goes along with this role his father is playing out. “And you told me to come here!”
“And then you wake me up!”
“I woke you up?” His father doesn’t sound very sleepy.
“You said for the spring, Ibrahim, and now it’s summer. I expected you to write or call or send a phone text to your only family,” Ibrahim the Elder cries.
“There’s no reception on the farm,” he says. Then: “And it’s not technically summer—solstice isn’t until next week.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry, Abouya, please forgive me.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I don’t know, Abouya, things are good here. I’m working well.”
He hears his father take a deep breath. “I’m happy for you.”
“How are things with you, with the kids? How are Zizi and Isa—”
“Fine, everyone is fine. I am the only one who misses you.”
“Good,” Ibrahim says.
The men are quiet for a while but it feels nice, not uncomfortable.
“And I’m in love, Abouya.”
“In love? With who?”
“With a girl here.”
“In love, in love. What is her name?”
“Silvia.”
“Is she Jewish?”
“What? No.”
“Good.”
Ibrahim doesn’t bother pursuing this. Knowing his abouya, it will be Anglicans or Jains next week anyway.
“So what’s she like?”
Ibrahim pauses, as if he hasn’t thought of this before.
Then there’s a triple beep on the line and the square blue text scrolls on the screen: “Please Deposit More Money To Continue This Call.”
“Ibrahim? What’s this girl like, what do her parents do?”
“Dad?” Beep. “Abouya?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve run out of quarters, I have to go—”
Beep.
“Already?” He can hear sadness fill his father’s voice and thinks of him lying alone in his plush four-poster bed, the curtains drawn, full cups of cold tea on all the tables.
Beep.
“I’ll call you soon, I promise, send my love—”
And then one long bee-e-e-eep.
Ibrahim walks up the driveway, newly aware of a feeling he has, not quite of loss or longing but of missingness. It’s not a missing-home, missing-a-person feeling. More like—like he missed out on something. Missed the bus, missed his chance.
His father asked what Silvia was like. He thinks about this. What is it that he likes about her? He should know this, have it on hand.
He likes how small and tight her body is, as though everything is there for a reason. The mole on her neck. The way she looks at things and then looks back at him for confirmation, for collaboration, like a child. Her hunger—how she goes after things, even simple things, like a glass of water—but how too she is easily satisfied. The hunger is not misplaced. She never hungers for things she can’t have. He loves the logic of this; he is not like this. The craving for ambiguous things obliterates him.
But she just . . . is.
He thinks of her smile, how easily it comes, how truthful it is. Uncomplicated. And when they—when he, when she—the sound she makes. It’s not ecstatic; she seems very . . . of her body. But he also loves that she’s unknowable, her own whole person who surprises him. There are so many things about her that he doesn’t yet know, won’t ever understand. In a good way.
He gets to his room, and when he sees her reading in a tidy corner of the floor, he does love her. He sees it, he feels it. In saying it to his father, he made it true. In the beginning was the Word.
“Hi,” he says.
She looks up at him. She’s got the tailless cat, Toby, curled up under her arm. The cat is asleep, but as Ibrahim approaches it stirs, stretches. Its mouth opens in a cavernous yawn and then it goes back to sleep. Silvia looks up at him, her face full of that smile. Like a cat, she is unembarrassed by pleasure.
By this time, the strange missing feeling has left him. There is nothing to miss on the honey farm. Everything is there, everything just is.
He gives Silvia the pink flower, deflated from the journey, but doesn’t mention the resemblance to genitals. The likeness has lessened anyway.
“What is this?” she asks.
“A flower. A flower I picked for you.”
“It’s a lady’s slipper,” she says, considering it, before looking up at him. “We have them in Nova Scotia too. I thought they were endangered or something.”
“Endangered?” He groans, rubbing his chin and the three-day beard that’s growing there. At a certain point, nature exasperates him. “It’s just a flower—whatever, it’s just one flower. I’m not going to extinguish the entire species by picking a flower for my—” He abandons that thought. “I just thought it was beautiful,” he says.
“It is beautiful.” Silvia goes out of the room and comes back with a glass of water. She puts the flower, its papery petals as crumpled as yesterday’s newspaper, into the glass. “Or maybe it would be better to press it,” she says, looking at her stack of still unread books. “Anyway,” she adds, leaning over to him, sitting by the window on her mattress, “thank you.” She kisses his eyebrows, each twice the width of one of hers. “Just don’t tell Cynthia. I don’t think she’d approve.”
They look at each other then, unsaid sentences passing between them. That they would keep this to themselves; that Cynthia would not know. At least not for now. Neither of them is certain that she would approve of their relationship, and they’re unwilling to acknowledge their transfer of power in giving her authority to approve—or not—of their private lives.
“Why not?” Ibrahim asks.
“Well, if they are endangered—”
“Fine, fine, take her side.”
Silvia shakes her head but otherwise ignores him. She moves into the V his legs make and leans her back into him. These small gestures of intimacy are coming with the ease of a mother tongue.
“How’s your dad?”
“He’s good. He misses me.” Ibrahim shakes his head. “I miss him.”
Silvia strokes his knees, wrapped around her like arms of a chair.
“I told him about you.”
“You did?” She smiles, and he can hear it in her voice. “What did you say?”
“That you’re nice. That I like you.”
“That’s nice.”
“The phone died pretty quickly—I didn’t have enough quarters. Have you called your parents? Do you miss them?” he asks.
“My parents? No. No, no.”
“Really? Well, I’m sure they miss you.”
“Definitely.” She props herself up off Ibrahim’s legs and turns to face him. “That’s not the question. They definitely miss me, or at least an idea of me. They don’t want me to be here.”
“Then why don’t you—”
“It’s complicated.”
They drop it. They’re still learning about what to push and what to leave.
XXXVI
SILVIA’S TASK THAT DAY is to alphabetize the library with Monique. It’s good work for an idle mind, and though it takes a long time, the time goes quickly. There’s no system, no categories, and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are filled with English and international novels, history books, biographies, classics in French and English and dictionaries between the two languages, old copies of National Geographic, travel guides to countries in Central and South America as well as South Korea and Slovenia, collections of letters, and how-to manuals about gardening, cars, chess, home-brewed beer, and bees.
So many of the books are so, so old. Old in both senses: some physical copies in tatters, but also some of the texts dating back hundreds of years. Did the medieval religious poet who never left the local radius of Ipswich ever think that his writing would make it to a world—the “New World”—that he didn’t even know existed? Distance, time; it boggles her mind.
If she ever wrote something, how long would it last?
While Monique is busy with a stack of mystery paperbacks, humming some pop song from ten years ago, Silvia flips open a leather-bound collection of John Donne poems, fans the gold-trimmed pages, and reads from where her eye falls.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
She thi
nks she likes it, but she isn’t sure. She’s thinking of Ibrahim upstairs, working on the painting of her. Habibi. Beloved. Does that mean that he loves her? If he does, what does that mean? Thinking about this is like wanting more coffee when you’ve already had too much.
Does she have to tell her parents about him? She doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t want to not. She was always taught that omission is the same thing as a lie, and she knows that her parents would disapprove of everything about him. It’s one of the reasons she can’t call them: she knows what she would say, she knows how they would respond, and she knows enough to try to postpone that for as long as possible if she wants to continue to experience this foreign, terrifying, thrilling freedom.
Just as her mind is about to get lost on that train of thought, Hartford comes into the library and sees that though the girls haven’t quite finished, they’re not going to get any more work done at this stage. Silvia is sitting completely still, staring into space with an open book in her lap, and Monique has poured water onto her shirt and is squatting in front of the fan in the corner of the room, hopping around like a frog to follow the blade as it rotates.
“You girls can go,” Hartford says. “The rest can be finished later.”
“Sweet!” Monique stands up and ties the bandanna that has been sticking out of her pocket around her head like a turban. She doesn’t even use a mirror and it looks good. Stylish. “Let’s go,” she says to Silvia giddily, transformed by this sudden liberty.
“Okay.” Silvia puts down the book of poems as Monique grabs her hand and pulls her out the back door to the garden. They find MJ sitting in a deck chair facing the sun, reading.
“Hey,” Silvia says to MJ.
“Salut,” MJ says, lowering her sunglasses. With the sun beaming right on her hair, it glows like a traffic light: stop.
“You have free time too?” Monique asks MJ. “Amazing. What are we gonna do?”
“Why don’t we go down to the lakes?” Silvia suggests.
“What lakes?” Monique asks.
“There are a few lakes down that way.” She points vaguely in their general direction.
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