She could hear the sound of water splashing on her husband’s body in the bathroom. She pictured his naked body moving around as he shaved and picked out his clothes. He sang in his room. He sang with the pure delight of a man in love. She waited till she heard the front door shut behind him before coming out from her room to take a warm bath. She breathed a sigh of relief. She decided that she wouldn’t even bother to tell him that she was leaving on a trip and maybe never coming back, and that she didn’t love him any more – that his presence in this world wounded her. She wished that she could force him to take off his clothes – the clothes that smelled of another woman – before he came into her house. Sometimes she sniffed them all over for that smell. But she didn’t care in the end; she just wanted to know the truth, to convince herself that she had plumbed his depths. She knew where he hid his letters and when he came in his dreams as she lay sleeping next to him. She was quite familiar with the sticky, foul-smelling stains on his underwear and she understood why he was always leaving them around for her to find. She knew why he always kept his cell phone close to him, in his pocket or under his pillow at night. On that day he had left it on the edge of the dresser. She turned the sleeping phone over in her hands as she waited for the tub to fill with water. She stood there for a long time, lost in thought, then decided to turn it on and read the messages. She still experienced a feeling of utter panic at moments like these. The clean, warm water caressed her body. The phone beckoned. She knew that the PIN code was made up of the letters of her name. After a few tries she got the right combination and scrolled through to the inbox with its long list of messages. She already knew what she would find there: promised kisses, obscene whispers, and postponed meetings. She drowned the phone in the bathwater to erase its memory once and for all.
Charlie pats her shoulder and smiles sympathetically, then he gives her a quick kiss on the cheek and runs up the stairs to his apartment.
*
The women taking classes with Hend at the dance studio dress in long, flowery skirts like the ones Zahrit al-Ula wore in the movies. They clutch scented handkerchiefs and wear high-heeled shoes. Each woman seems to turn in circles around her own failures. The music is always sad, and the lyrics are about weeping women and the men who abandoned them. The sticky, sweaty palms of her dance partners leave her cold and unmoved. At the end of the lesson everybody turns their backs on everybody else and walks off in different directions. Charlie stays behind with her only because they live in the same building and he feels obliged to walk her home. As they walk next to each other, he tells her that he started dancing after his first divorce because he wanted to learn how to gauge the proper distance between a man and a woman; to learn the exact point of balance between desire and retreat, intimacy and habit. Hend nods her head. She had never danced with a man before. When Charlie danced he seemed much younger than he really was, and as he talks she can hardly believe that he is the same man who drags his bike along angrily every morning, cursing the building and its tenants. He explains the history of the dance to her. He tells her that it began with the first wail unleashed by the prisoners in the slave ships, then its rhythms were picked up by the Spaniards who crossed the seas. It was the same lecture he gave all his students. She realises nonetheless that he is deliberately trying to be charming as she walks by his side demurely. When he puts his arm around her, her unexpectedly firm reply surprises her. ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but please don’t do that.’ Does he understand? Does he put her rejection of him down to some kind of radical cultural difference? She leaves a wider space between them after that as they walk: that hypothetical distance that he is always talking about in class, a distance that begs for uncomplicated sympathy.
Charlie tells her that the tango is a dance of longing. She likes this way of putting it. ‘Why do you love me?’ she had once asked her first love long ago (a question that women often ask to gauge the measure of their uniqueness in their lover’s eyes). ‘Do you know that Fairuz song?’ he replied, ‘“I’m Yearning for Someone Whose Face I’ve Never Seen”?’ That was all he said. He left her to translate and she came to the conclusion that, as far as he was concerned, their relationship was nothing but the whisper of an obscure longing, like the longing of Charlie’s Spaniards. Back then his words had wounded her deeply, but she later realised that this vague, objectless longing was also part of the way of the world. The other women in the dance studio are living examples of this dictum. They have crossed over gently into their thirties. Little wrinkles have begun to sprout at the edges of their faces. She can see them sitting, like her, at windows overlooking some avenue or other, calmly watching life pass by and aching to become a part of it. The tango was a kind of therapy that helped them understand the basic rules of love and life, rules whose time was slowly expiring: distance, attraction, and balance.
The dance resembles the game of love. The world retreats as the partner moves in, then rushes forward again as he turns his back and moves away with choreographed steps. The act of coming together and moving apart precisely and deliberately creates an exact distance between solitary bodies that is the notional space of union. The man approaches this space cautiously. He gently reaches out and takes the woman’s hand in his with confidence and desire. ‘Relax in his embrace. Let him lead you. Let him decide when to pull you close and push you away in a single, graceful movement.’ The tango, Charlie says, is the philosophy of shared space. She discovers that most of the other students, both men and women, have been recently divorced; the question of distance perplexes them too.
The second time that she and Charlie walk home together she feels the need to talk and talk. She feels that she has gotten to know him better, that his face has grown familiar to her. It no longer reminds her of a frog’s face. Now he looks more like a greyhound, with slender, well-proportioned limbs made for running races, or a fantastic creature in an animated film. He reminds her of herself, too, because he is alone and wretched just like her, crushed by the noise of a building in which other people made love as he lay alone in bed at night, listening. He holds out a glass of white wine to her and they sit down on the bench outside the Coco Bar. It is hot. His forehead is wet with perspiration and she can feel it staining the underarms of her blouse. She tells him that she is a Cancer. ‘Do you know that Cancer is notoriously bad at finding its balance?’ She tells him that Cancers are like the Blind Bear, falling in love for no reason. Cancers also like to close their eyes and run after their one true love. As a child she had been really good at playing hide-and-seek, running, running away, then finding herself standing all alone, hiding in the shade of a wall. No one ever noticed that she was gone and the game always ended with or without her. It pained her. It still pains her. She tells him how she has always wanted to write, but that her memory is no longer as good as it used to be, and that she has begun to forget everything. He drinks more wine in the hope that it will help him understand what this woman who lives under his bed is saying to him. He wipes away the sweat from his forehead more than once. The smells of alcohol and perspiration drift out of his open mouth and he starts to pant for breath like an amateur horseman. She begins telling him enthusiastically about her other childhood games, for example, her very favourite game: Open This Door for Me.
She stands in the exact centre of a circle made by the children, defenceless and exposed. The children clasp hands and tug at each other with interlaced fingers. The circle contracts and expands in surging waves. In the middle stands the victim. She is the victim, both pathetic and belligerent. She declares war on the joined arms that surround her. In an attempt to break the siege she dashes forward like a sacrificial offering that has torn loose from its tether. Her blood boils and her face grows red, she is like a bull driven to frenzy by the hand of the matador. ‘Open this door for me!’ The sing-song reply follows: ‘The ox has given birth!’ The frenzied beast fears that they’ll steal her calf away, so better not open the door and let her escape. The arms, joined in a s
piralling circle, draw closer and closer around her body. When they grew a little older the words of the chorus changed to ‘Open your eyes, flower; close your eyes, flower.’ She turns and turns like a bee dropping into the stamen of a flower. She searches for a way out of the circle that represents the delicate petals of a flower devouring its victim. The girls abandon her one by one.
Charlie has grown tired of listening to her. His face has assumed a bored, knowing expression. ‘I understand completely. I understand how you feel,’ he says to stem the flow of pointless memories. Charlie doesn’t realise that loneliness is to blame; a desperate need to connect to just about anybody, even to a person with the face of a frog and a body that gives off the odours of sweat and lust and expediency.
As he climbs the narrow stairway he grabs her hand and starts to pull her up behind him to the room that lies right above her son’s head; her son who is probably poring over his map of Africa at that very moment. Charlie’s eyes are bloodshot from fatigue and from listening to her endless stories. He pops open a bottle of beer and lights a cigarette, then he pounces on her, his hands creeping over the bare skin exposed by her low-cut dress. She tells him simply that she can’t sleep with him because she doesn’t love him. She says it as succinctly as possible: ‘I don’t love you.’ She shivers as she says it, like a blood-red sea-crab just emerged from the water. He tries to convince her of the truth that love and hate mean nothing in the dance, as in life, and that all she has to do is relax the muscles of her mind and give her body a chance to express itself, but Hend is unconvinced. The fragile spell cast by the wine and the circle of dancers has been broken and Charlie is once again a clay frog of a man she doesn’t love. She knows that he wants her to be like that other woman, the one who left her daughter at Hend’s apartment out of the blue one day. She dodges his stifling arms and runs away. She hears him slam the door behind her and mutter expressively: ‘Big fat ass.’ Exhausted, she cries alone in her room.
At the next dance class she worries more about her big fat ass than her dance steps and she makes even more stupid mistakes, turning round and round in halting circles, desperately trying to imitate the other women. He takes her hand doggedly, as though he were training an obstinate mule: ‘One, foot forward, two, together, three, backward . . .’ She concentrates on her high-heeled shoes and moves her feet carefully but she still can’t get it right. ‘Don’t look at your feet,’ he yells at her. ‘Here,’ he points to his eyes, ‘look here.’ She knows what men are like when they get tired of a woman. They get just the way Charlie did when he put his hand around her waist impatiently and twirled her in a lumbering, clumsy circle. Suddenly he stands perfectly still and says in front of everyone, ‘I’m not going to eat you. No one in this world intends to eat you, I can promise you that. This is just a dance, my dear.’ She pulls away from him and stands alone, staring at her crooked feet in the mirror. But he isn’t finished. ‘My dear, you have to leave your inhibitions at the door and give your body a chance to express itself.’ He says this in the calm and professional tone of a dance instructor, but her face turns red with mortification and her heart begins to thump in her chest. He spends the rest of the lesson focusing on the other middle-aged women as they move about nimbly. Hend decides that dancing is not for her. Neither is love, for that matter, or anything that she had ever set her heart on. After class, she watches him cross the street, jump onto his bike and disappear down Seventh Avenue. She walks back alone through the dark streets that lead to her house.
From then on they carefully avoid each other. Her friend Fatima, who had also taken a few classes at his studio, has started to pay him visits at home. Hend hears the sound of her perfectly formed rear end going up and down the stairs. She never stops to knock at Hend’s door and say hello or tell her what she is doing up there. Only the scent of Hend’s clove tea floats up to them in the evening, while the smell of his cigarettes and the rustle of their whispers float down through the window that exposes her little home to the world’s indifferent gaze.
7
Atlantic Avenue
The first thing that Americans do when they wake up in the morning is hurry off to Dunkin’ Donuts. The Dunkin’ Donuts at the corner of Atlantic and Fourth Avenues is a pale salmon colour. The oldest community of Arab-American immigrants lives in the neighbourhood. Next door to the Dunkin’ Donuts stands a mosque frequented by African-American Muslims, then there’s the Yemeni restaurant called Sabaa, and a number of shops that sell miswak toothpicks and musk oil and Qurans and prayer rugs. There’s also a home for the elderly nearby, as well as a homeless shelter, a spa, and a welfare office on Fulton Street where the poor go for food stamps and unemployment benefits. Female workers – especially immigrants – are in high demand because their wages are generally lower, and because employers imagine that women of colour are better at communicating with customers who look like them, customers who can understand their heavy accents and argue comfortably about pennies counted out with vigilance.
She leaves him sleeping deeply. She resents the thought of him waking up in an empty apartment, getting dressed by himself, struggling over his shoelaces. She won’t know for sure whether he’s wrapped his scarf tight around his neck against the biting cold or whether he’ll be safe crossing the street alone and walking to school with no one to watch over him. She panics whenever she sees a poster of a missing child. A sharp needle of grief pricks her heart because she knows he has to grow up and become a man without any help from her. She’s afraid for him. She gazes at his round, healthy cheeks and wide black eyes and the broad smile that he bestows upon friends and strangers alike. She is constantly warning him about passers-by and neighbours and strangers and schoolmates older than him, about teachers and classrooms and the school bathrooms and football tackles. She has tried to explain to him that he is a little man already, that he must never let any other man touch him, whether in affection or anger, but she cannot be sure that he has understood her. ‘Fine,’ he would reply impatiently, and again, in English: ‘Fine.’
But that hasn’t eased her fear. She is afraid when she hurries down the street in the dark just before dawn and hops onto an empty bus, and she is afraid when she walks alone from the bus stop to the Dunkin’ Donuts in front of which knots of people huddle in the early hours of the morning, trying to force their eyes open with a cup of hot black coffee. She changes her clothes quickly in front of Fatima (who doesn’t resemble her in the least). Fatima is much younger than her, a dark-skinned Somali girl in her late twenties, tall and slender. Her body is flawless, not an ounce of flab, no traces of childbirth or abuse, and her kinky African hair is cut close to her head like a beautiful boy’s. Fatima is the cashier. She is the exact type of woman that the customers like. She colours her hair white blonde, which creates a sharp contrast with her small, childish features and shining black skin, and gives her face a kind of electric sensuality. Fatima was born to be a leading lady. She stands behind the counter and moves her nimble fingers between the bills and the Styrofoam cups of coffee with a sweet, tranquil smile hovering on her lips. ‘Would you like anything else? Do you want it black or with cream and sugar? Skim milk or whole?’ Then she would wish you a nice day – sometimes a beautiful day – but sometimes she just smiles that quizzical, tender smile that makes the customer feel like an old and cherished friend. They come back again and again on cold, rainy winter mornings because they are addicted to the radiance of her face. Hend’s role unfolds, as usual, behind the scenes. She wipes away the coffee stains and arranges the doughnuts in neat rows and mops the floor quite gracefully – but no one ever notices, of course. She is constantly on the move between toilets and tables, sometimes distracted and absent-minded, other times frowning and pensive.
She spends the whole morning mopping the dirty salmon floor. She stoops slightly as she moves from one table to another. Her rump sticks out, round and strapping, the posterior of a Middle Eastern woman who spends all her time sitting in the same place. Some of the women w
atch it approvingly as she vigorously attacks the dirty tables. The men are usually drawn to Fatima, no matter what she’s doing: frowning, daydreaming, baring her small white teeth in a grin that sets off her full lips. In the morning the workers come, followed by the students. When it starts to rain, the homeless people drift in from all over and greet each other as though they’d made appointments to meet in that very place. They scrupulously count out the round coins in their dirty pockets and then they stand in a long line to order coffee. All day they drag their carts piled high with bric-a-brac: old clothes and shoes, discarded bits of odds and ends, food and drink and blankets. Their shoes are caked in the mud of the surrounding streets and the air fresheners inside aren’t enough to dissipate the powerful odour that comes off their skin in waves. They look at her shyly as though asking permission to sit down in peace for a while until the rain stops, and they sit there in proud silence as they tuck their ragged clothes out of sight under their coats. She passes between them to wipe down the tables. They hide inside the close warmth of the place. Dunkin’ Donuts is a twenty-four-hour refuge for them, as it is for foreigners with big dreams that are always just out of reach.
She presses her nose against the window glass and watches the snow cover the streets. She starts thinking about him again. Why does God create mothers? Is he running through the playground now? Will he fall and break something on the slippery ground? Will the other kids make fun of his accent? Has he found someone to talk to, or is he still standing alone with his back to the wall like the other immigrant kids? Has he understood that sticking out your middle finger at someone is an obscene gesture, and that it’s meant as a grave insult? Do the other kids give him the finger to test his cultural competence?
Brooklyn Heights Page 9