Love Is an Ex-Country

by Randa Jarrar

  11

  YES, GODDESS

  When my son was about four years old, D was shot several times by a new girlfriend, a woman he’d met in Vegas. D was hospitalized and unable to walk for weeks. His mother called and told me, and I cried; she thought it was because I still loved him. My son was in the tub, in the trailer in Kyle, Texas, and I was watching him play with bubbles. I sat on the lid of the toilet, which, when we first moved in, I was forced to keep shut with several thick books. The previous tenant had found a rattlesnake in it the night she moved out.

  D’s mother listened to me sob about her son while my son bubbled in the bath. I was sobbing because my entire body had flooded with two griefs: one for my son, whom I would have to give the news to if D succumbed to his gunshot wounds, and the other for my old self, who had wished, and hoped, and done so with a feverish desperation, for a moment as liberating, as justice-delivering as this.

  His girlfriend had been signing all the child-support checks that were mailed to a close-by post office box—I didn’t want D to know where I lived. She had called me a few weeks earlier and asked me if D had ever hurt me. I said he had, and she described how he’d smashed her head against a windshield. She said she was in a motel and that she missed her horses. A few days later, she went back home. I hadn’t heard from her since then. It wasn’t difficult for me to imagine what he’d done to push her to protect herself. She was friends with all the police officers in her town. She could have reported him, but instead, she put a few caps in his ass (or, you know, his back) and got away with it.

  Fourteen years later, I found the woman D had dated right after me. She had a child with him, too, and I wanted our children to be in touch. When we talked on the phone, she told me that for years she couldn’t feel safe with a man. Any man. And that the man she married after she got away from D was so safe and kind that she ended up feeling no connection with him. I could relate. My second husband was the same way. I’ve searched for D’s other girlfriend, the one who shot him, all over social media, but I have never found her. In my mind’s eye she is on one of her horses, her pistol smoking.

  •

  I was still in Marfa, where I began taking countless selfies on Pinto Canyon Road, a country highway with almost zero traffic. Against the yellow background, my body stood in relief, a hieroglyph. The vastness of the sky, how the blue body of it snaked all around and above: Westerns began to make sense. The hubris of white men began to make sense. For what was this landscape but a canvas to swing a dick around in?

  •

  I’ve often returned to a favorite memory of my body.

  I was walking down the street in a bathing suit. I was in Egypt, on my way to the beach. I was carrying the chair I would sit on when I finally reached the sand. I was a child, a girl. I was a girl child. No one commented on my body. No one said a thing to me. I was a light-brown noodle with feet and long hair. I was dry; soon, I’d be wet. My damp body would walk back to our apartment, invisible.

  If Ramadan was in the summer, I’d watch a television show about the Prophet Muhammad. In scenes where he was present, his body and likeness were never shown. When he entered a room, a curtain billowed. When he moved something, it rose, unbidden, floating. For a long time, I thought the Prophet Muhammad’s gift was invisibility. Later, religion teachers told me his gift was the word. But words are easy, I remember thinking. The ability to never have your body appear and still be powerful; that’s hard.

  •

  Raahat el-binit, adults would say when a girl was no longer a virgin. “The girl is gone.” The girl has vanished. This means she’s a woman, no longer a girl. Where has the girl gone? Does sex automatically make a girl a woman?

  I met with a young journalist, Y, while I was in Boston for work. We had drinks at a bar full of white men. Y was raised in a conservative Muslim community. When she decided to move out of her parents’ home and to take off the hijab, which she had worn for years, her parents had said, Gone, the girl is gone. Y told me how difficult it was for her to be in a newsroom as a woman of color. How she was having sex with a Jewish guy who doesn’t text her back.

  I told her about my favorite fuckboi, the programmer in the Air Force Reserves. This was before he broke up with me, before the cabin in Washington State, when I still had him. I told her I was fucking him because he loved to kiss me, because he loved my large body. He would cup my right breast in his hand, my breast overflowing out of his palm, and he would remark on how beautiful my breast was. He would say he loved the ridges of my nipples. He would say that the peach color of my nipples was beautiful. He would point out the minuscule, barely visible pores, and talk about how perfectly structured they were: a grid in my skin.

  I would imagine him programming drones, seeing the grids of homes. I would shout at him, later, in the kitchen, about this. He would say he did not program drones, but technical and boring things on airfields and cargo ships to keep people safe. And it has really come to this. There are so few men who enjoy kissing, who are good at it, who will kiss me the whole time we are fucking. Who will make me think, I feel as if I’m in love, but I know I’m not. And what’s the difference? While he was underneath me and I kissed his mouth and rode back and forth, I felt as if I was in love, and that feeling was all that counted.

  My second husband did not want me to be on top. He made sounds, squirming and uncomfortable, when I was on top. He told me a year after we’d gotten together that my body crushed his. His body was smaller than my body. One afternoon, in bed, he nonchalantly told me that I needed to lose a hundred pounds. To shrink myself for him. (Conceivably) to be his equal. I would marry him, cry for years, and leave him, before I realized he did this because he could never make himself big enough—intellectually, financially, sexually—to be my equal.

  My father stopped letting me sit on his lap when I gained weight. He said he would let me sit on his lap if I lost weight. He said he would buy me a house if I lost weight. He said he would give me ten thousand dollars if I lost weight. When I announced to my parents that I was getting married to my second husband, they responded coldly. My father asked me if I wanted to know why. I told him I didn’t. He said, I was hoping you would lose some weight—not much, only a hundred pounds—before you got married.

  •

  During the last few years of my second marriage, we—then-husband and I—had sex once annually. I often felt as if I was begging for sexual attention, because sometimes, I literally was. I’m a fat woman, a size 22, and sometimes, I’d forget, even when strangers complimented me on the street or friends told me I was beautiful, that I was allowed to be a sexual being. Or that other people might be interested in me sexually. When I left my second husband, I began having sex exclusively with younger men.

  M was the second younger man I’d connected with online and had sex with. He was Armenian and had loads of black hair, eyes that almost passed for purple, and a strong, six-foot frame. I was thirty-seven. He was twenty-seven. I fell for him the day we cooked a curry together and ate it on my bedroom floor, naked. He talked to me about his visual art and hugged his knees and said that he deeply wanted to make an expression of himself in his work.

  •

  I spent my late teens dating men in their twenties; my twenties dating men in their thirties; and my thirties married to a man in his forties. Now, I was reversing the trend.

  In 2015, the year before my road trip, I was at a writers’ residency in Marfa. We were not supposed to have visitors, but they gave us a car. I drove the car two and a half hours to the El Paso airport to pick M up four weeks into my residency.

  M often wore the same outfit: jeans, size 13 shoes, and a plaid shirt. He was wearing these coming down the escalator at Arrivals.

  I wore a dress he loved: fitted around the breasts, with a small heart-print over a white background. As I waited for him to get to the ground floor, I could sense a few women staring at me. I could never tell if this was in my imagination, but as a fat woman who enjoys d
ressing up, I sometimes feel judged, especially at airports, where men and women know they can stare with impunity since they’ll never see you again. When M reached the ground floor, we kissed. As we walked toward the exit, I told him that some women had been staring at me. “They probably love your outfit,” he said. “Because I love it. Or maybe they’re jealous of your tits.” The thought of another woman being jealous of my body was alien to me. Why would a slim woman envy me? In a year, I’d know: because I was confident and gorgeous in my rejection of mainstream beauty standards.

  On the drive home, he held my hand, something he’d never done before. We reached a deserted seventy-mile stretch of interstate, and I told him to cover his lower half with the sheet I’d packed. This was something we’d both fantasized about. He wiggled out of his jeans and underwear and covered up under the sheet. I took out a big bottle of lube, our favorite brand, and squeezed half a cup all over his dick. Then, I massaged him for half an hour while I drove.

  M’s penis was perplexingly in a near-constant state of arousal. He orgasmed with difficulty and said he enjoyed that I was not orgasm-centered in my pleasure. He was right. I would get more excited and pleased pleasuring someone for hours than I would having penetrative sex for twenty minutes. I once told a friend what we did, and how much I enjoyed it better than other hookups. “He spends hours touching me,” I’d said.

  She’d responded, “Don’t you get bored?” I often forgot that not everyone enjoyed hours and hours of sex.

  I stroked him in the car until we were five miles away from the Texas border patrol checkpoint. I told him to get dressed again, and he pulled up his jeans and we both laughed uncontrollably. When the border patrol officers asked us if we were both citizens, we said yes, and, as I sped away, M took his pants off again.

  Twenty miles outside of town, I asked him if he wanted to see the Prada installation, a fake storefront that was created by artists Elmgreen & Dragset ten years earlier. He said he did, pulled his pants back on, and we stopped and parked by three other cars. We circled around the installation, a white cube with shoes and bags behind bulletproof glass, both of us discussing how strange and fun it was, and a man in cargo shorts laughed and told us the installation sucked. We kissed at the back of the building and, behind us, the sun was dipping orange and the desert looked aflame. There were hundreds of dead bugs in all the floodlights attached to the building above us.

  In Marfa, M and I stripped off all our clothes and had sex on the couch and on the floor and in the bed. He was the first man in years who’d encouraged me to be on top. He asked me to smother him. He said he loved that all he felt when I was on top were my breasts and my flesh and my cervix. When he said “smother,” I heard mother.

  The West Texas house was warm, and I was worried about falling asleep next to him. We held each other for a few minutes, and then he pulled away, said it was too hot to be so close. I went outside and sat on the porch and worried. How would the next four days go? And would we continue to have fun?

  I often wondered why I’d stayed with my second husband so long, when he showed no attraction toward me, unless he was drunk. It’s painful to admit to myself, but for those years, I didn’t think I was attractive. I knew, objectively, that I had to be, because I often felt good in my skin and wore bright colors and loved my bounce. But, privately, I wondered if I was beautiful in that zoo-attraction way; I felt dehumanized, wondered why a person would choose to be with me when they could be with a woman whose belly didn’t flap over her pubic bone, whose back was flat and smooth. I always thought I could either have a kind partner who wasn’t attracted to me or a booty-call partner who only wanted to have sex with me. I sometimes had dreams where I was thin. I’d look through clothes in thrift stores and wish I could wear them. When I found something there that fit, it was always costume-y, which just reinforced the idea that I was a circus oddity. It makes me feel so raw to admit it, but sometimes, still, I just don’t think I’m loveable or fully human.

  In the middle of the night, that first Texas night, M woke me up to kiss me—long, wet kisses—and suckled on my breasts. He pulled me on top of him, and then we fell asleep again, our arms tangled. In the morning, we had sex again, then made poached eggs—I showed him how. He played video games on his phone while I worked in the house’s office, which faced a row of wooden shutters and a tangled lawn of stipa leaves.

  In the afternoon, we went to look at a rare exhibition of Andy Warhol’s Last Supper paintings, which were floor-to-ceiling large and imposing. M talked about how much he liked the details at the table, certain saints’ faces. We walked around the town hand in hand and took photos of an installation of a car suspended on the nose of its hood.

  Watching M wash his dick, tugging at it with each hand, I was flooded with the feeling I got every time I hooked up with a conventionally handsome man. Why was he with me? And did this mean I was beautiful? I hated asking myself these questions. Of course I was beautiful. The men were usually in poly relationships, or much older, but they were always unavailable. With the unavailable ones, I was able to remind myself that I could not keep them, that I was not beautiful enough to keep anyone. M was my first available Hot Guy. What story would I tell myself about him?

  That night, I took him out to see the Lights, an atmospheric phenomenon on the desert’s horizon, where small orange balls of light bounce and brighten, then fall away. We drove a few miles out of town on a road that led to Mexico, parked in the grass, and stood at a fence and held hands. The stars above us were twinkling, and Venus and Jupiter were orbiting a fraction of a degree from each other. The lights began popping on the horizon, full and then smaller, bouncing left and right. M was afraid of them at first, but I had seen them many times and found them comforting. Eventually, he enjoyed them, too. We stood there for half an hour, kissing and staring at the horizon. That night, we slept in a human pretzel, all our limbs wrapped around the other.

  We drove out to a pool, jumped in the water and swam along its almost two acres, fish nibbling at us from time to time. We had a picnic, made tiny salami sandwiches on crackers. It was like being a tween again, swimming and snacking and being goofy. When we got home, M gave me a medical “exam,” which he’d scheduled with me a couple of days earlier. “You’ve given a lot of the medical doctors at our facility bad reviews on Yelp,” he said, holding an invisible clipboard. “Now, my methods are unorthodox, but they do get results.” I suppressed laughter the entire time he checked my breasts for lumps. When he began using his mouth, I said, feigning shock, “Doctor! Why would you need to use your mouth?” And he said, “The nipple is the lumpiest part of the breast. And the tongue is much more sensitive than hands.” Our role-play was always heavy on the play. That afternoon, M, in his doctor guise, practically made me levitate with pleasure.

  When, on the fifth day, at a bar with a teepee and a school bus and a rickety balcony, M told me I was the best lover he’d ever had, and I told him that he was, too, we wondered if it was the openness each of us had for the other; the fact that I was experienced and he was quick to learn; or, maybe, the fact that this would lead nowhere. That last one was implicit.

  On his last night in Texas, we went out to see the lights again, but the windshield was thick with bugs, and the sky was cloudy. We parked in the grass, but within minutes, our legs were bitten by mosquitoes and fleas. We held hands and searched on the horizon anyway, intent to duplicate our last meeting, but we saw nothing, and insects began buzzing in our faces, which made M slap at his ears. We ran into the car when we’d had enough, and we laughed all the way back down the road, when a jackrabbit darted out in front of our car and I swerved and screamed, and then he screamed, and then we both were screaming and laughing and losing our breath.

  Two weeks later, I would be back home and we would have sex in my bed, but he would leave to go home. He left again. And again. When I confronted him, saying that I thought we’d made a deeper connection in Texas, he responded that he was content the way th
ings were, that he and I were fuck buddies, nothing more. At the end of everything, he was actually an unavailable, attractive twenty-seven-year-old. And I was a beautiful fat woman, making concessions and compromises for a fleeting good time with a handsome man, and a good story. Before he moved out to Seattle for good, M asked me to sit on his lap, and I did, and after asking him three different times if I was hurting him, and after he assured me all three times that I was not, I fully let go, my feet lifting off the carpeted floor, my entire body resting against his.

  •

  A year later, I was back in Texas. Loneliness. Aimlessness. Large-scale land art and installations felt more like military and border parade floats. I left a week earlier than planned and drove northeast. An hour later, I passed a bar called I DON’T CARE BAR & GRILL.

  In Wichita Falls, I met a woman at a Whataburger. She befriended me and we talked about being mothers. She asked me, sheepishly, if she could show me pictures of the son she’d birthed three months earlier, the son who was so premature he died. I could not say no to her; she wanted to unburden her grief for just a few minutes, and I was free to hold it for her. So she pulled up the photo on her phone and slid it to me, and I held the phone and looked at the image, bracing myself for shock. I had never seen a photo of a dead baby outside of war. Her baby was tiny and perfect, and she looked like any new mother in her hospital gown and hair cap. I wished photos like these were more socially acceptable to share, and I told her so. “He was stolen from me,” she told me. “Have you ever felt completely robbed?” I told her I had, and when she asked me of what, I told her it was too complicated to explain.