Curled in the Bed of Love (22 page)

Lee Ann twists abruptly, pushes into his braced arm, into his chest. She struggles to go back. When he steps forward, she's become a heaviness that he can't wade through, a wall of stone.

Her mouth moves against his skin. “It's crazy.” She pants for breath, as if she's the one who had to keep pushing. “To hope for something as much as you dread it.”

Even her voice sounds unfamiliar to him, tinny, metallic, like the faded recording of his brother's voice trying to speak to him from far away, from forever.

They make slow progress along the crowded sidewalk. Marshall can't remember where he parked his car on these narrow, winding streets. He wants to keep going, leave Lee Ann behind. But he has to go back to her apartment, where he's left his sleeping bag, his shaving kit, his clothes, the tin canister containing his brother. A few ounces of dust, a few pathways between neurons in Marshall's brain that will dwindle with disuse.

Marshall's senses greedily inform him of the warmth of Lee Ann pressed against him, but their brutally imperfect span cannot encompass anything so immaterial as her futile wishes. Oh God, he doesn't want to be trapped here.

Hassan comes to me on Tuesday nights. He is having more difficulty than I am with our separation. I don't know how other people manage to cancel one another out of their lives. I can't. He can't. Hassan can't do anything by half-measures; he won't be reassured that we remain friends unless I see him every week.

He lets himself in—he still has a key—while I am at the gym, and by the time I get home, I can smell lamb in the oven, and the sauce,
khoresht,
bubbling away on the stove, seeping the scent of cinnamon and garlic and stewed cherries. The Persian rice steams over a low flame, a dishcloth laid under the lid of the pot, part of the process of fussing over it that doesn't seem to account for the spectacular results, flaky rice that forms a crunchy golden crust on the bottom.

We kiss. I take off my jacket and go to the sink to wash lettuce for salad. He says I don't have to help, I look tired, but I insist that I'm fine. Hassan watches me anxiously. He expects to read in my body some distressing proof of injury—circles under the eyes, stooped shoulders, the abrupt collapse of muscles that will make me literally an old woman, a thrown-away woman. I'm forty-six,
and I go to the gym five days a week, and I've told him he can forget it, I'm not going to make it that easy for him.

I tell him about the new orthopedic surgeon at the hospital; the guy seems
OK
, only he plays country-and-western music during surgery. Hassan is quick to see this as domineering. Surgeons are as cocky as fighter pilots, but they bear the entire burden of risk; no one has yet sued me for handing a surgeon the wrong piece of gauze. I shrug. “Maybe he just has bad taste in music.”

When we talk about Hassan's job, we're talking about the problems of the entire world. Somehow, with a degree in structural engineering, Hassan ended up working for a nonprofit here in San Francisco that arranges conferences between government officials and scientists and businesspeople from all over the globe. He pursues the world's grievances without any of the pessimism his country's history should have instilled in him. And he happens to be awfully good at parties and getting people interested in one another. He has three hundred names in his E-mail address book. He loves every person on that list, from his colleagues to the security guy in his building to the earnest minor bureaucrats from Uruguay and Indonesia.

Hassan complains to me about his job, which he never used to do. Sometimes I wonder if he means to console me—he may have left me for another, but he is not perfectly happy—but then he'd started complaining before he left.

“Now that we're respectable, everyone becomes cautious,” Hassan says. “I am not supposed to enjoy myself so much at the cocktail parties and banquets. What does this mean? What's too much enjoyment?”

He met this woman when she performed at some benefit. I don't know if he decided to love her in particular or if, out of innocence and boldness, she forced his hand by taking literally his long-standing and general offer to the world.

My husband—my soon to be ex-husband?—is a warm and affectionate
man, a nostalgic creature. When we went back to Iran, we lived under one roof with his entire family. The man badgered his mother to teach him to make all the foods he'd missed when he was at college in the U.S. He and I were happy—very happy—for twenty years. He brought me tulips on every anniversary. I always knew where he had left his reading glasses. He used to save the notes I left under his coffee cup every morning when I left for work, stuff the scraps of paper in the top drawer of his dresser, where they accumulated until he moved out. Hassan is in a predicament, all right.

Hassan turns the rice out of the pot, shapes it into a perfect cone, and makes an impression into which he ladles the lamb and the
khoresht.
We eat by candlelight—something we had forgotten to do anymore when we lived together—and Hassan works steadily at a bottle of red wine.

He slips toward her; he can't help it. He's tired, he says, because she didn't sleep last night. She works late, is used to staying up late. When he first told me about her, so proud to announce she was a singer, I almost burst out laughing. The wife—suited up every day in surgical scrubs, paper cap hiding my frosted hair, plastic booties over my orthopedic shoes, so de-sexed you can tell my gender only by the size of my bones. The lover—a sultry chanteuse.

Hassan tells me he has discovered that Monica is an insomniac. “She stays up, then she feels blue, and then she can't stand it, so she brings a bottle of brandy back to bed and wakes me up to talk.”

It could be too that this is her way of testing him. She must have plenty of younger men available to her. “Maybe she has to find out if you can keep up.”

“Do you know,” Hassan says, “how old and slow she makes me feel? If it's any comfort.”

This is his way of testing me, the limits of my tolerance. “I don't feel that way,” I say. “It's not like that for me at all.”

“I won't talk about her if it bothers you.”

Why does everyone expect me to be bitter? I've been avoiding my girlfriends, who want to take me out on Saturdays, who seem to think it's going to save my life to sit in a bar with them and consider the forms of torture appropriate to husbands who take up with younger women.

“No,” I say. “I'm interested.”

He wonders how she manages for so long on so little sleep. She has to get up and go to work in the mornings too, boring temp jobs to pay the rent, at least until she can earn steady money as a singer, graduate from wedding gigs to a local opera company. Then he tells me what else he's just discovered about her.

“She has some kind of dyslexia when it comes to directions,” he says. “The other night I let her drive home from a party, and I fell asleep in the car. She had to wake me up in order to find the way to her own house. She can't tell left from right. She finds her way by memorizing landmarks, only she has a harder time at night, and if she strays from her route, she has no idea where she is.”

Hassan embroiders the moment until the dyslexia becomes some touching spiritual dislocation, a signifying vulnerability.

He didn't fall asleep. He passed out. I worry about him without me. I never drink as much as he does and can always get him home.

Hassan's stories of his courtship—the trouble he takes to elaborate—remind me of the traditional Persian dances he and his friends used to perform when we were all in college. All of the Persians were studying engineering or computer science or medicine, things that would be useful to the Shah's technological society. They shared apartments, they kissed each other, they cooked together. They paired off to dance to tapes they'd brought with them from Iran. One of them would take the role of the woman and make everyone laugh at the exaggerated sinuousness of his
rolling hips and unfurling arms, his pursed lips. Their tradition codified this lasciviousness, cleared a space for it, a secret out in the open.

Hassan and I went back to Iran in 1977, after we graduated from college. Hassan's mother had been widowed the year before, and he felt a duty to return to his family, to repay his country for his education. We'd just gotten married. There's the story of what happened to us in those years in Iran—Hassan tells it better than I could—and then there are those vivid memories that continue to live in me like sensation, not recollected but reborn whenever they are aroused. I can still return to the garden of his mother's house, an inner courtyard walled in by overgrown pink climbing roses, their branches so thick and luxuriant that anyone who dared their thorns could be hidden entirely beneath their leaves. A path of stones wound through salvia and fanning clusters of white lilies. In a shady corner a flowering vine shaped itself in fluid arabesques in its drive for light. The English word
paradise
comes from the Persian word for an enclosed garden,
pairi-daeza.

On Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram, I watched from the window as men marched past the house, their wailing echoing off the walls of the buildings that faced the narrow street. They lashed themselves with chains and belts, scoring the skin of their bare backs. Some of them flinched when they drew blood; others did not waver in their intoxicated chanting. Their faces were not hungry but hard with satisfaction. Hassan was in such a hurry to explain. These men were commemorating the death of Hossein, their long-ago martyr, and this was their atonement, their allotment of his sacrifice. Hassan shrugged. They had so little else. This was just the sort of thing that the West sensationalized; I mustn't make that mistake. When I
did
see what was before my eyes: how real God is to the poor.

The Shah's regime was already crumbling, with all the randomly intensified dangers of collapse; the mullahs had grown intransigent;
Hassan's sister had taken to wearing a head scarf so she wouldn't be harassed in the street; her brothers debated how this concession might be understood politically; and their mother remembered how the Shah's father had forced women to give up the chador. The world might begin to move at a raging pace, with the moan and roar of those men in the street, and still one lives a slower life in private, stubborn and tentative and intricate in its flourishing. I'd sneak out to that garden to enjoy the relief of being alone, to savor all that I was learning about my husband's family—Hassan and his two brothers, cracking pistachio nuts between their fingers, arguing with the same vivid energy of the boys I'd known in the U.S.; his mother snipping roses and dropping them in a bucket, smiling and nodding to supplement the Farsi words I did not understand.

I cook this time, so it's simple: steak, baked potatoes, peas. I stand all day at work. I sterilize slender implements and lay them out in exacting order on a paper-sheeted tray. In an orthopedic surgical unit, every gesture, like the implements, is scaled to the miniature—the surgeon slices a precisely calibrated seam through tissue, scrapes away at bone in increments that will minimize nerve damage, or studies a video screen that projects images captured by a camera lens so small it can be threaded into the body. I don't want to come home to core or peel or dice or fillet.

Hassan is in trouble from another quarter. He has wooed a little too zealously the representative of a foundation that might fund his organization.

He takes both my hands in his to plead his case. “We went out for drinks. We're relaxing, I think. And the next day she calls my boss and says she's uncomfortable dealing with me. I've sexualized the interaction.”

Another time, his need to befriend a fund-raiser might yield a grant, or he might take a guest from India to a drag show and delight
him instead of shock him. More than once he's gotten conference delegates drunk in order to soften their attitudes toward one another. If it doesn't workout, he is undaunted. He'd roll the dice again if he had to, and let someone else hold his breath. No one wrote to tell him when his mother got sick, for fear he'd rush back to Iran. His brother waited to tell Hassan until it was too late for him to come to the funeral. Maybe it was safe for Hassan to return, maybe he could have visited years ago, and only superstition made us believe that history was written in stone.

Hassan frowns. “I think I touched her elbow. A couple of times.”

And probably he pressed too close, the way he must lean across the table now in order to talk, really talk, to me. Persians routinely invade what an American would consider inviolate personal space. Hassan is so Americanized now, and yet these essential habits persist.

“Would it do any good to call her and apologize?” I say.

“I am forbidden to contact her. Forbidden.”

“Do they understand at work that she just misread you?”

“They say, ‘Don't drink. Don't drink on the job.'”

He did stop drinking for a few months last year, after he learned that his mother had died. He didn't decide to quit; he just lost interest for a while, the way he lost interest in everything else. Maybe they should have written him that his mother was ill. Hassan hadn't seen her for twenty years, not since we left Iran.

Hassan strokes my hands. “With this woman—I thought we were sympathetic, that's all. Remember the good old days, when we were so delighted by the freedom to be sexual? Now we must hide it. We must behave like automatons in our professional lives.”

I smile. “Nobody has any fun anymore.”

“Exactly,” Hassan says. He smiles at me. “Are you? Having any fun?”

“What?”

“Dating someone.”

“Don't feel up to it yet.”

“What about that new doctor? You have such expressive eyes. Why don't you give him a come-hither look the next time you're handing him a scalpel or changing a
CD
for him? What if he wants you already? ‘Nurse, oh nurse, I have an itch. Can you scratch it for me?'”