Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Samira Ahmed

  “You love the Delacroix?” Alexandre asks. “It’s one of my favorites, too.”

  “There’s an art world legend that Dumas—that your grand-père—owned this painting,” I manage, glancing shyly at him.

  Alexandre arches his eyebrows.

  “Well, not this exact one, but one in the Delacroix series that’s in Chicago. At the Art Institute. Where I live. I mean, I live in Chicago. The city. Not the museum. Duh.” I bite my lower lip to stop this embarrassing overflow of spontaneous dork. Proper French-girl flirting involves elegance and restraint. Clearly, I lack both.

  He shrugs. “Delacroix and Dumas were friends. And Delacroix did gift him art . . .” He clears his throat. “You certainly seem to know a lot about my family.”

  When I try to hold his gaze, he turns back to the painting. I clam up. I’m not sure how much more I should confess. If he hadn’t been the one who approached me, I’d seem like some weird stalker-y Alexandre Dumas fangirl. Or worse, a dilettante. Celenia Mondego’s judgment echoes in my mind, and an awkward silence occupies the space between Alexandre and me.

  “So . . .” He scrunches up his forehead, trying gallantly to fill the pause. “You think that my great-grand-père Dumas might have owned one of the Giaours by Delacroix?”

  I shrug and shift my weight from one foot to the other. “Maybe?”

  Alexandre nods. “There are family rumors, at least according to my uncle Gérard who researches that kind of stuff. It’s definitely, um, interesting . . .”

  Oh God. I am a dilettante. A bumbling, ineloquent amateur art-splainer, telling the five (or was it six?)-times-great-grandson of Alexandre Dumas all about his family. Cascading organ failure continuing. What am I on now? Spleen? Bladder? Please don’t let it be bladder.

  Before I can stop myself, I blurt, “Actually I wrote this entire paper on it. For a prize. That I didn’t win. I thought Chicago’s Art Institute Delacroix was the one Dumas owned. I thought I’d made this huge art world discovery about the line of ownership. Turns out I was totally wrong about the provenance.” A nervous giggle slips out. So much for an air of sophistication. “Supposedly Delacroix created at least six in a series based on the same Lord Byron poem, The Giaour. I came here today to take another look at this one in case I missed something, like maybe this was the one Dumas owned, not the one in Chicago. But um, I guess not? I mean, I’m not sure what other clues I was looking for. Probably wishful thinking? I guess if anyone would know if Dumas owned this Delacroix, it would be . . . you. I . . . well . . . anyway . . . Two of those six paintings have been lost—maybe it’s another one?”

  I need to pause for air. I think I’m speaking English, but it’s really a high-speed torrent of nerd. This boy could potentially help me, and I’m over here taking random stabs at history. I cover my face with my palm. Focus, Khayyam.

  Alexandre gently pulls my hand away. “Are you embarrassed? Don’t be. Your paper sounds amazing. No one seems to care about our lost family history anymore, except maybe my uncle. But to me, the past is a mystery waiting to be revealed.”

  I perk up. Maybe this guy speaks nerd, too. And did his hand just linger on mine? “That’s why I’m obsessed with art history!” I practically yell, then quickly lower my voice to a museum-appropriate level. “It discovers life in relics of the past and brings that past forward to the future—it’s like an academic time machine. Those Etruscan vases we walked by? They’re echoes of people who lived over two thousand years ago. We can extrapolate a lot based on a few puzzle pieces. Sometimes it’s a revelation. Though I guess other times, like with my essay . . .” I’m rambling and also too embarrassed to finish the sentence.

  He gazes at me with a warm smile. “Who cares if you didn’t win the prize? Qui ne tente rien n’a rien.”

  “No pain, no gain?” I sigh. “If only I’d gained something more than humiliation.”

  “I thought Americans weren’t defeatist,” he quips.

  “That’s the French part of me speaking,” I deadpan.

  “Well, I think all the parts of you are charmant,” he replies without missing a beat.

  I’m such a pushover for casual French flirting. Wait. Am I enjoying this? I’m enjoying this. I’m supposed to be putting my life back together, but I’m flirting with a cute boy in a museum. Which sounds like the kind of thing Julie would do, not me. But being my usual cautious self hasn’t been working out that great lately, so why not go for it?

  And on cue my stomach twists and turns and knots up with guilt. I stare at Alexandre’s rakish grin, but an image of Zaid’s gorgeous smile pops into my head. I have no reason to feel guilty. Unfortunately, my thoughts and feelings aren’t like a finely crafted Delacroix. They’re messy and abstract—loud, confused streaks and splatters of paint on a canvas.

  “Right,” I mumble. “Of course. Charmant. Because what could be more charming than meeting someone who is scraping crap off their shoe?”

  He grins at me. I smile back. I have to admit, it feels good. Standing here, right now, in front of the Delacroix. Smiling like I belong here. Defiant like: You tried to kill me, but you only deeply wounded me. So there. I think for a moment about what first drew me to this version of the painting in Delacroix’s series, and what led me to its mate in Chicago: There’s something disturbing, almost terrifying about the scene. It’s immediate and entrancing; it pulls you in. Two men on horseback clashing, daggers drawn, tangled ferociously in battle. The Pasha in brooding jewel tones—emerald and garnet—blood dripping from the leg of his white horse. A sharp contrast to the Giaour, the supposed infidel in a vest and simple white robe, the sinewy muscles of his forearms flexed, ready to drive his blade into the Pasha’s chest. The colors are deep and rich and striking. It’s a painting, but when you turn the corner and catch your first glimpse, it’s as if you’ve stumbled onto a real fight. The canvas isn’t even that big; it’s only about two feet wide and two feet tall. But it explodes with movement, as if the scene is about to burst from the frame.

  I clear my throat. “So you said this was one of your favorites, too. Why?”

  “It’s fierce. Alive. So—” He pauses, trying to find the right word.

  “Viscérale?” Visceral. Sometimes the perfect word exists in both my languages.

  “Yes!” His sienna eyes sparkle as he continues. “The brushstrokes are angry. And I know it’s inspired by a Byron poem, but it feels very Dumas to me. Passion. Vengeance. Beauty. Two men fighting over a woman. One loved her, the other killed her.”

  I kind of get what Alexandre is saying. It’s not the first time a man has described Delacroix’s paintings this way, but his words pinch. They’re all wrong. Dismissive. Entitled. “In Byron’s poem, the Giaour and the Pasha both have dialogue, but the woman is silent. I mean, the poem is, like, nine thousand words, and she’s only even mentioned eleven or twelve times.” My voice is flat, betraying my anger. “She’s the whole reason the poem exists, but she never gets a chance to speak. A poet created her. A painter was inspired by her. But they both denied her a voice in her own story. She was erased.”

  Alexandre turns to me, puzzled. It’s clear we’re not flirting anymore. “But she isn’t real. She’s fiction.”

  “So are the Giaour and the Pasha.”

  “We agree, then?”

  I scoff, pointing to the painting’s title, named for fictional men created by real men whose art gets to endure.

  “She had a name, too,” I say. “It was Leila.”

  Leila

  I take care to remove all my jewels, especially the anklets, lest their tinkling wake the entire serai. Tiptoeing barefoot over the stone floors, I slip in and out of the darkness. The full moon could reveal me, but she’s consented to hide her beauty behind passing clouds, offering me safe passage through the latticed corridor. Valide would have me killed if she knew where I was going, but Si’la has assured me that Valide sleeps through the
night—lulled into a slumber by the dream spells of the ruya peri who dwells in the serai. Still, I step lightly through the Courtyard of Eunuchs. If I rouse any of them, my wiles will be useless to dampen their suspicions.

  The Passage of Concubines leads to the Forty Steps . . . down, down, down to the hastanesi reserved only for the women of the serai. With no trace of the moon, I am in utter darkness. But I have passed these stones thousands of times, and my fingers follow the cool walls until they reach a door that is almost forgotten.

  Tonight, it is my portal to a tiny world outside my golden cage.

  I step through the door into the second courtyard. The smallest of the courtyards, it lies abandoned. Even the gardeners have forsaken it in fear of the jinn that lurk in the trees. Though their branches arc and reach to the heavens, heavy with green leaves, the trunks of all the trees here are hollowed, carved out into perfectly smooth caverns. They say the jinn whittled away the trunks to create hiding places. In the center of the courtyard, two trees grafted together over the years stretch to the sky, branches intertwining like lovers’ arms. Their hollows meet to form the heart of the courtyard.

  The night smells of damask roses.

  He is near.

  Khayyam

  On cue, life reminds me once again that magical thinking doesn’t work. Sometimes shit is just shit. Period.

  Stepping in that merde yesterday? It’s not going to bring me “a-penis” after all. Sure, I inexplicably ran into a French guy who may possibly be able to help salvage my academic self-worth. Did I mention that’s he’s hot? Or that he is an actual descendant of Alexandre Dumas? Or that for one fleeting and lovely art-filled afternoon, I was tempted to believe in magic? Fate, even?

  For a few brief hours, the Métro shutdown didn’t seem like such a pain. I spent the dreamy walk home posting scenic Paris shots on Instagram: boats on the Seine, a lone red love lock attached to a bridge, even a Robert Doisneau–style pic of a couple kissing with a black-and-white filter. I’ve been posting almost nonstop since I landed, detailing every step of this trip—except for my chance encounter with the cute Frenchman—hoping to inspire Zaid to appear out of thin air.

  And now he has. With Rekha in his lap.

  I squirm on the sofa, glaring at Rekha’s feed. Even on my phone’s screen she is larger than life: heart-shaped face, golden-brown skin, impossibly long lashes, and eyes that smolder for the lens. A classic Rekha selfie—stunning. Only this time her arm is hooked around Zaid’s neck. It’s classic Zaid, too—mischievous grin, long coffee-brown bangs partially obscuring his beautiful dark eyes that are clearly fixated on her. And he’s wearing his Chicago Brown Line ‘L’ T-shirt.

  I gave him that shirt.

  It was a memento of our first date. We took the Brown Line ‘L’ to the Music Box, where they were screening movies set in Chicago, and saw While You Were Sleeping—a classic, corny holiday rom-com that somehow takes all the clichés of mistaken identity and misunderstandings and makes them charming. Turns out that the Brown Line plays a role in the movie, too. Hours later when we shared our first kiss under the rumble of the Southport stop on that “L,” I almost fooled myself into believing that maybe, just maybe, life did have magic in it.

  For the one-month anniversary of that kiss, I bought Zaid a Brown Line T-shirt. Soon after, he gave me a tee emblazoned with a dorky, desperate While You Were Sleeping quote: i got ice capades. It was so silly and so us, romantic in a completely unromantic way. Unassuming. Comfortable.

  That’s why the gifts were special. Sentimental, even. Until right now.

  Maybe I need to adopt Zaid’s nonchalance and focus on something more rewarding. Say, the French guy who literally almost fell into my lap. It’s infuriating that Zaid was even a stray thought yesterday. That pang of guilt I felt? Tragic. Why does my brain (my heart?) do this to me? The actual facts are right in front of my face, but still, my reason always seems to lose out to my stupid feelings.

  Zaid literally introduced me as a “friend” on prom night to a new neighbor—a gorgeous college sophomore with bright hazel eyes. Half the block was on the sidewalk, an informal party since so many kids on my street were going to prom. The parent paparazzi were out in full force, snapping a million photos—group shots, couples, obligatory family formals, and a bunch of me and Julie and other kids goofing around then pinning boutonnieres on our dates. Zaid had to run back to his car because he forgot my wrist corsage. Of course he did. Julie had had to remind him to get me flowers in the first place. Another obvious sign I chose to ignore. When he finally headed back, he walked over with the new neighbor, so engrossed in conversation with her that he seemed startled when I appeared.

  I want to say it was like the scene in a rom-com when the girl finally realizes that the guy she thought was the one is only just the one before:

  Zaid

  Oh . . . Khayyam! This

  (points to lithe, gorgeous girl)

  is the new neighbor.

  New neighbor

  (waves)

  Hey!

  (Awkward pause, feet shuffling.)

  Zaid

  And this is my . . . friend, Khayyam.

  Khayyam

  (gulps, pulls knife out of heart)

  Is that for me?

  (Points to orchid wrist corsage in

  plastic box.)

  Zaid

  (chuckles nervously)

  Yeah. Yes. Here you go!

  (Hands Khayyam the box.)

  Camera pans from box to Khayyam’s enraged face. She throws the box on the ground and walks away. Zaid calls her name, but she doesn’t turn back, and he falls out of focus. Camera zooms in on Khayyam as she walks off into the sunset, a smile spreading across her face.

  END SCENE.

  But that’s not how it played out.

  I took the box, slipped the corsage over my wrist, and went to prom with Zaid, where we danced and laughed and I pretended I didn’t feel the point of that dagger in my heart. Julie gave him the stink-eye all night long; I’m surprised she didn’t sucker punch him on my behalf.

  In hindsight, it all should’ve been obvious. Zaid and I never had a firm status agreement. We never called ourselves a couple out loud. At least, he didn’t. It always felt like there would be more—there were intimations of things to come, like whispered plans to backpack across Europe while we held hands at the Point or suggestions of me visiting him at college while we snuggled in the hollow of Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy. I wanted to believe it all because we fit perfectly in the chiseled space of that sculpture, arms and legs intertwined. Because when we first kissed under the ‘L’ tracks, it felt like we’d invented the idea of kissing. Because sometimes we’d sit on my back porch doing physics homework and Zaid would ask if I was Bohr’d and then smile at me, and I knew I could listen to his corny dad jokes forever.

  A catastrophic inability to grasp obvious facts. Remember? I was reading between the lines when there was nothing to see but blank space.

  Now Zaid’s off to Reed College in a few weeks, where he’s going to be majoring in environmental studies and smoking pot, and I’m . . . here. Afraid to text him. Scared to admit what Rekha’s Instagram screams at me, that the one person I thought was closer to me than anyone in the world seems to have forgotten I exist.

  To add salt to the wound, Alexandre is apparently ghosting me, too.

  When we exchanged numbers yesterday, he said he wanted to meet up again today. I swear we had a moment. Moments. Sparkly eyed glimpses of what could be. Still, I’m stuck in the moments with Zaid that have been. Maybe it’s my fatal flaw: I’m always in the Past or the Future and never in the Now.

  “That’s three long sighs in a row,” my mom says, peeking around her newspaper from our little balcony, the afternoon light streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  I wasn’t even aware that I’d sighed o
ut loud.

  Mom is staring at me expectantly over her bright red cat-eye reading glasses, her graying brown hair unfurling from her loose bun. When I don’t say anything, she puts down the paper and rises from her seat, stepping through the patio doors into the room. Every August when we’re in Paris—annual time away from her job as Professor of Medieval Islamic Civilizations at the University of Chicago—she reads an actual newspaper. Not a digital edition but real ink and paper. She says human beings are becoming too detached from the simple pleasure of tangible things in our world. It’s why she adores dusty old books. It’s the musk of history that gets her. Smell is linked to memory, she always says, and technology has no smell because it’s never been alive.

  Still, I dunno if I totally buy that, because Rekha and Zaid looked very alive on Instagram. I could almost smell the hormones pulsing off my screen.

  Mom sits beside me on the couch, placing her reading glasses on the coffee table. I know what’s coming next. The concerned mom look: mouth turned down at the corners, eyes focused and worried. I’m blessed with my mother’s dark eyes, the color of brown glass. When I look at her, it’s like a mirror into my slightly wrinklier future. I wonder if she sees me that way, too—as a looking glass to her past, a version of her younger self.

  “It’s nothing, Mom. Waiting for something that’s not going to appear.”

  “That’s rather existential of you.”

  “Well, we are in Paris.”

  My mom grins and pats my hand. “Still haven’t heard from Zaid?”

  Ouch. I feel that question like a static shock to my chest. It’s a simple question without an easy answer. No, he hasn’t texted, but it doesn’t mean he hasn’t sent me a message.