I, The Divine

by Rabih Alameddine

  I discovered the Divine Sarah performed L’Aiglon around 1900 or possibly even earlier, not 1912. The revelation shook me. As I was reading, I began to formulate excuses. My grandfather could have been four. No, no, he had not been born yet. She may have performed the play again in 1912. Just because it was performed twelve years earlier did not mean she could not have done it again. Then I read about the accident and tears ran down my face. In 1905, while performing in Rio de Janeiro, she suffered an injury to her right leg. By 1911, she was unable to walk unsupported, and in 1915, the leg was amputated. The Divine Sarah, my namesake, continued acting. When she could not walk, she used canes or was helped onstage by the other actors. After she was an amputee, she used an artificial leg. By 1912, she could not jump across the stage. She could not have done L’Aiglon.

  I mentioned nothing to my grandfather, ever. He died unaware I knew. To this day, whenever I feel slightly depressed, I dye my hair red.

  The water stands ready. Bath foam, Caswell-Massey Bain Moussant, scent of gardenia. She prepares for the bath with her current book, Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, a bottle of Crystal Geyser, her Sony cordless phone, and a Granny Smith apple—she loves to eat apples in the bath. Beethoven’s string quartet in C sharp minor by the Tokyo String Quartet fills the room, not a great recording, but more than adequate.

  White tiles rise only halfway up the walls of her small bathroom, followed by light blue enamel paint. Half of a wall is covered with postcards of paintings: the Comtesse D’Haussonville by Ingres from the Frick, the great Portrait of Cosimo I de Medici by Pontormo from the Getty Museum, The Order of Release by Millais from the Tate, and her favorite painting of all time, The Toilet of Venus by Velázquez from the National Gallery in London. Her faux marble sink, two faucets, one hot, one cold, like the English sinks. On the shelf below the mirror, Crest toothpaste, an Oral-B toothbrush, Listerine mouthwash, dental floss—have to keep up her almost perfect teeth. Mint soap from S. M. Novella di Firenze. Henna for her hair from Lebanon, two hairbrushes and a hair dryer.

  She steps into the tub. It is smaller than the one in Beirut. Still, she remembers being lost in that tub, totally immersed, she remembers trying to get clean. She scrubbed herself with the loofah, over and over, as if there was some dark stain and she Lady Macbeth. Out, damn spot. She was dirty, all of her. She wanted to rub herself raw, remove any traces of herself. She wanted out of her skin. She wanted to be a different person, a better person, her tears adding salt to the bath. She scrubbed her arms, her legs.

  I had moved to New York with my first husband, Omar, when I was twenty. Two years later, he would take my son and return to Beirut, leaving me completely alone in an unforgiving city, without family or friends. I had no one in America except for my best friend, Dina, who lived in Boston. I visited her often out of loneliness, continuing even after I remarried. Like me, Dina lived apart from her family, but unlike me, she had adjusted better and much more quickly. It seemed she was adopted into a family in Boston the instant she deplaned. By the time she graduated from MIT, she had a coterie of friends so loyal, they functioned unlike any family I had ever seen. Dina is a lesbian.

  Her lesbian family was a hodgepodge of strange characters. I was not sure at first how they could have accepted her so quickly, since her appearance was so different from theirs. Transcending the term lipstick lesbian, she dressed like a cheap whore who just came into a lot of money, whereas all her friends looked like regular dykes. Someone has to come up with a whole new definition for Dina.

  I visited her and her partner, Margot, sometime in 1984. I watched her while she cooked dinner—both she and Margot were the worst cooks I knew—noticing how serene she looked, how content, how peaceful and composed, as if she had not a single sin on her conscience. I was so envious. I interrogated and pestered her endlessly, trying to discover her secret. In some ways, she had had a rougher life, yet she seemed at ease with every aspect of it, professionally, emotionally, and romantically, while I was floundering. We spent hours talking about the differences in our lives, our perspectives. By the time I finished my amateurish sleuthing, I came to the erroneous conclusion that the basis for her happiness was her care and support of those dying of AIDS. She was a volunteer with a number of organizations. I believed I should do the same once I settled down somewhere.

  After my second divorce, I ended up living in San Francisco. I volunteered for an AIDS organization. I chose one that provided emotional or practical support to people with AIDS. Practical support was not an option for me. There was no way I was going to clean somebody’s bathroom, no matter how sick he was. I never cleaned my own house. How could I conceive of cleaning someone else’s? I also absolutely abhorred grocery shopping.

  An emotional support volunteer provided peer counseling, which entailed listening to clients, agreeing with them, having them expound on their feelings, and then validating those same feelings with unconditional positive regard. This is not as easy as it sounds. In any case, in the first couple of years, I could not get any of my clients to express any feelings, let alone my validating them, because they all died on me. That was the thing with AIDS: it killed my clients, rather quickly, I might add. I could not figure out how Dina thought volunteering would help my state of mind. I became an emotional wreck, but all the staff at the organization thought I would be an incredible volunteer if I ever had the chance to work with a client, since I had no problems expressing my feelings.

  My first client was Dominic, a Frenchman living in San Francisco. After my training, a weekend of intensive indoctrination, I was assigned to Dominic because of my fluent French. I was given all his particulars: age, relationships, medical symptoms, emotional symptoms, and so forth. He had been waiting for a volunteer for eight months. Unfortunately, my supervisor told me, he was at San Francisco General recovering from a bout of pneumocystic pneumonia. I began getting ready the instant I hung up the phone. I practiced what I would say to Dominic. I stood in front of the mirror making sure I had on my nonjudgmental face, my trust-me-and-tell-me-how-you-are-feeling face. I took my bulky training manual with me.

  I arrived at the hospital and inquired about Dominic. I talked to his nurse, who told me he was alone in his room, not doing too well. I walked into his room and saw an emaciated person. He had breathing tubes in his nose as well as a couple of IVs in his arm. I was unsure what to do. Should I wake him to ask him how he was feeling? I sat down on the chair facing the bed to sort out my options. Dominic, lying inert on the bed, had a thin mustache and a wan smile on his face. He looked like a man who had experienced deep sorrow, sorrow without redress. His thin, knobby fingers clutched the blanket tightly. Suddenly he opened his eyes, looking slightly bewildered, as if he did not know where he was. That happened to me often, where I would wake up in my room uncertain where I was. He looked at me quizzically.

  “Hello, Dominic,” I said, using the correct pronunciation of his name. “My name is Sarah. I was sent here as your emotional support volunteer.” I wanted to make certain he knew I was not a practical support volunteer.

  He mumbled something. It took my brain a minute to register that the reason it was incomprehensible was because he was speaking French. I understood three languages, but it took me a minute to recognize anything outside the dominant language I was involved with at the time.

  “Salut, Alphonse,” he said.

  Oh, boy, I thought, he had the AIDS craziness. I had not prepared for that. Trust your instincts, the supervisor had told me, so I did. “Pardon, Dominic,” I said gently, “mais je ne suis pas Alphonse. Je m’appelle Sarah.”

  “Au revoir, Alphonse,” he said and died, just like that. It was only the fact that my father was a physician that stopped me from screaming at the top of my lungs right then and there. I ran out of the room looking for a nurse and found one. Dominic was declared dead, and the nurse was nice enough to send me home with a tranquilizer.

  My second client was Steve, with whom at least I was able to speak on th
e phone. He died between the phone call and the first visit to his home. His lover forgot to call and tell me, so I showed up at the scheduled time to meet Steve, who was already toast. Unfortunately, his memorial was that very afternoon; everyone was sympathetic, but it was embarrassing. I was not dressed for a memorial. I knew no one except Steve, and he was in an urn. I had no experience with American funerals or cremations. What could I say? Nice urn, is it Chinese? I had spent the day dreading our encounter, figuring out all different methods of trying to have Steve let out his feelings. Instead, I ended up dressed in a conservative, canary yellow Armani at a memorial.

  To alleviate the stress of being an emotional support volunteer, we had weekly support group meetings where the volunteers shared their intimate moments with the clients.

  “We spent the afternoon talking about his mother . . .”

  “We lay in bed crying all day . . .”

  “He is having so much trouble with his new medication . . .”

  “I told him if you’re ready to go, I’ll support that decision . . .”

  “He died. Just like that. He died right after our first meeting.”

  While the others talked about many different things, all I ever got to talk about was the swift and premature demise of my clients. After Dominic and Steve, I was assigned John A(dams), John B(elcher), Paul, Randy, John C(alipari), Juan, John D(eGroos), and Lance, in that order. Amazingly, the Johns died alphabetically. Ten men, clients, who died when they were assigned to me. Granted, the disease was unforgiving, but the rapid, headlong descent into death caused me endless anguish. All died within at most two weeks of becoming my clients. I moved to New York in the middle of that necrology (John C. and Juan), came back, but the cycle was unbroken. I was devastated. By the time I was assigned Jay, my eleventh client, I was barely sane.

  I was so desperate to have a working relationship with a client, I was terror-stricken the first week, constantly expecting the dreaded phone call. Jay broke the death cycle, for a while at least. In the beginning, I treasured him for that, I loved him. He gave me something to talk about with my support group.

  His name was Jay De Ramon, born and raised in San Francisco, in his forties, Catalan, his parents from Barcelona. He loved flamenco, his parents having been famous dancers. He could play the castanets, his fingers seemed disconnected from their joints. He was a biologist. Before going on disability, he worked for the government testing milk. His passion was his deceased mother, who had left everything to him and nothing to his brother. He was also the homeliest man I had ever seen by a wide margin.

  Cows. Everywhere I looked I saw cows. Paintings of cows, drawings of cows, cow plates, cow vases, cow mugs, cow silverware, cow-patterned upholstery, sunglasses with cows, and even a cow snow globe. When it came to bovine paraphernalia, Jay was a major collector, a dairy-cattle maven. Everything in the apartment was black and white, which were the only colors he wore as well. He regularly joked about wanting to be buried in a cow-patterned coffin. He was easy to Christmas-shop for.

  Our relationship was straightforward. He was lonely and wanted a companion, someone to spend time with. I arrived one day at Heifer House, hearing strident shouts from behind the door as I rang the bell. Jay looked agitated. “Come in,” he said and then in a louder voice, “my brother was just leaving.”

  His brother stormed into the foyer, ignoring me. “This is not the end of it,” he screamed. “Things can’t go on this way.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jay said. “You’ll have the house when I die.”

  “Well, you’re not dying soon enough,” his brother screamed as he slammed the door. The color drained from Joe’s face. He stared blankly at the door. I moved closer, but he regained his fury before I could show my concern.

  “He’s going to be the death of me. Not AIDS. He’s going to kill me. It’s the Catalan blood. Angry and unforgiving.”

  Jay and I disagreed on practically everything when it came to politics. The tension grew between us when he became involved in anti-immigrant policies. This was long before Governor Wilson adopted his anti-Mexican stance to further his career. In his own way, Jay was a visionary. He wrote letters to newspapers that would be used by the proponents of California proposition 187 after he died. He wrote about the illegal immigrant population draining the resources of the state. He was the first to actually use the argument that the increase in population due to illegal immigration was destroying our environment, which was later appropriated by the Sierra Club.

  As time went on, I began to argue vociferously with him. Instead of maintaining a nonjudgmental tone, I became polemical. I pointed out that were it not for immigration, he would not be in this country. Legal immigrants were not the problem, he would say, though he felt legal immigration should be reduced. It was illegal immigrants. It was those damn Mexicans who crossed the border, the parasites who sucked California dry and never bothered to learn the language. He wanted those damn Mexicans, those intruders, those uninvited guests, out.

  He had been vilified all his life, had whined incessantly about being discriminated against. Yet he turned against a group even less fortunate. He was unyielding in his criticisms.

  It was at his funeral that I finally understood. He had been my client for over two years and I thought I knew him. I did not. He lay in his coffin, surrounded by friends, but not family. A priest began to read to the mourners asking them to pray for Jésus’s soul. It confused me at first until I realized he meant we should pray for Jay’s soul. I looked down at the memorial announcement and saw that Jay’s real name was Jésus. I questioned the woman next to me, a coworker from his days at the FDA.

  “Oh yes, he always went by Jay. He didn’t like the ribbing he got when people found out his name was Jésus.”

  “I can understand that,” I said. “In the Middle East, the Arabic name for Jesus is not uncommon either.”

  “Well, with Jay, his father was José, his mother was Maria. So of course, they named the eldest Jésus. A fairly common Mexican name.”

  “But they were Catalan.”

  “By way of Mexico. His mother was born in Mexico City, but her parents had emigrated there from Spain. That’s why she learned flamenco. I believe his father is Sonoran, but I can’t be sure anymore.”

  Sarah wakes up, but does not wish to get out of bed. She turns over on her side, closes her eyes, in hopes of catching a little more sleep. It is too early in the morning. The sun is still not up. It is July 4. Doesn’t the sun come out at some ungodly hour in July? She turns over again, lies on her right side. Where does she put her right arm? Is it too squished? With her left arm, she reaches behind her for her Piggy, her stuffed toy. She hugs it with both arms. Closes her eyes again. She feels herself slipping, the pig pressing against her stomach, her left shoulder attempting to join her right on the mattress. This position hurts her back. She leans over with her left arm again and brings a pillow, places it between her legs. The chiropractor had said a pillow between her legs will prevent her sleeping on her stomach. The pillow feels too sexual. She takes it and puts it behind her. She lifts her head slightly, noting the time on the digital clock. Four twenty-three. Damn. It is much too early. She closes her eyes again. She must sleep, especially today.

  Sarah looks at the clock again. Four forty-one. She must have dozed a bit. Try again. Closes her eyes. She curses. She should have taken Restoril. Too late now. She should have taken melatonin even though it makes her feel bad. Should she take a Xanax? This is not an anxiety attack. It may relax her though. No. She should be able to relax herself. She has survived the Fourth of July before. She goes under the covers, just like she used to do in Beirut when it got too noisy, too violent.

  Sarah turns over once more. She accidentally kicks her cat, Pascal, sleeping at the bottom left corner of the bed. He jumps, lands back on the bed, and then leaps off. She sits up quickly. Sorry, she blurts; Pascal trots away from her down the corridor. She lies back down, her head on the pillow. Closes her eyes again. No us
e.

  Sarah uncovers herself, sits up, dangles her feet off the side of the bed. Should she get up? If she does, it means she is giving up. She lies back down, fetal position, closes her eyes. One sheep, two sheep, three sheep, lamb chops. She’s hungry. Maybe that’s why she’s not sleeping. She pulls the comforter up around her. She realizes she needs new sheets.

  Sarah switches on her bedside lamp. She fluffs three pillows behind her and lies down, rests her head on the headboard. Maybe she can read, but she doesn’t feel like it. She looks at the books stacked on the nightstand. Too many. She picks up the top book, The Age of Innocence, and throws it in the wastebasket. She always hated that book. She feels guilty. Only last week she had wanted to reread it. She leans over and takes it out of the wastebasket, puts it back on top of the stack. No. She is not going to read it next. She puts it in the middle of the stack. The top book is now Bridget Jones’s Diary. Why did she bother picking up that one? She got it for free. She had started it and could not get past page 20. She found Bridget to be stupid, dumbed-down, neurotic, and with an uninteresting career. Worst of all, Bridget is incompetent at being an adult. Every secretary can identify. No wonder the book is a bestseller. She takes it and throws it in the wastebasket. She slides completely under the covers again.

  Sarah pulls the bedclothes down. Is it five yet? Looks at the clock. It’s five past five. Five past eight in Boston. She picks up her phone and dials. A groggy voice answers.

  Are you up? Sarah asks sheepishly.

  I am now, Dina replies.

  How come you’re still sleeping? You’re supposed to be going to work.

  It’s the Fourth of July.

  Oooops.

  You forgot, I’m sure.

  Yes. But that’s why I’m calling. It’s the Fourth of July.

  What are you doing up so early?