Curled in the Bed of Love (23 page)

“What happened? Did you and your girl have a fight?”

“She's not a girl. We're going to drive up to Tahoe this weekend and go skiing. She's going to teach me.”

“I'll be seeing you in the ortho unit on Monday.”

“Don't be silly. I'm staying on the bunny hill. I'm planning to fall down a lot. It must be very safe to fall down in the snow. She will have to come and help me up every time. She'll fall in love with me a thousand times more.”

A thousand times he'd flirted, a thousand times been taken too seriously, and then he brought these interesting people home to introduce them to me. He didn't bring her home, though he kept talking about her. I made him leave. I didn't want to beg. I still remember the hurt, stunned look on his face when I told him to go.

“It's true that we fight,” Hassan says. “But the fights—they're very good, actually. Big scenes.”

Ever since we lived in Iran, I've been afraid for Hassan, the way you are afraid ever after for a child who's long since recovered from some serious illness. I never want to be as afraid again as I was during those two years. He'd found work right away, consulting with construction crews who were building the roads and bridges and office towers of the Shah's future, and he was popular with the crews. He told jokes; he brought pastries to the site; he had some story about a goat crossing a bridge that was meant to illustrate the principles of weight distribution. He shrugged when bribes had to be paid. And then he was taken in for questioning. He'd told a joke that everyone was telling: the Shah makes a phone
call to hell, and when he asks the operator for the charges, he is told there aren't any, it's a local call. Hassan was picked up by the secret police at a job site, and one of the foremen risked his own neck by sending a worker to the house to tell us.

We were not sure where Hassan had been taken. His oldest brother made a few hopeless phone calls, and then we waited. We sat in the living room on chairs covered with crocheted doilies. Later that afternoon Hassan walked in the door with his jacket over his arm, his shirt soaked through with sweat. He had to work a little this time at being himself. “Nothing to worry about,” he said. He had only been questioned for a few hours; the
SAVAK
men had let him off easy. His mother cried, and he promised her he would be careful; he'd tell a different joke the next time.

I was afraid whenever he left the house after that. I never ran into trouble on the street; I dyed my hair brown and wore a scarf like Hassan's sister, gave shots at the clinic where I'd found useful work, and stopped trying to make conversation with the patients. But Hassan could not choose to be careful. Some urge in him that he couldn't repress would prompt him to make up a story about materials disappearing daily from the job site, or burst out singing some American rock song, or flare up when his instructions for placing rebar hadn't been followed to the letter.

Any of these things could have sealed his fate, and that didn't change when the revolution came, relatively bloodless but not peaceful. Hassan greeted the revolution with anticipation—from such ardor anything might flow. He could no longer find work as an engineer, but he could teach math to high school students. Only he could not help sympathizing with faculty who were denounced by their students. He would not relinquish the necktie he so hated, because someone wished to make him. He would not give up visiting friends in the evening, even though the guards at the checkpoints on the road beat anyone they suspected of drinking. He chewed parsley to disguise the smell of liquor on his breath.

The frenzy would die down soon, Hassan said. Ayatollah Khomeini loved the Sufi poet Rumi, had written poems himself as a younger man. When the
komitehs
began to appear and issue their own laws over their neighborhood fiefdoms, because the revolution had succeeded so far in advance of its ability to govern, Hassan was the one who stood in line to get permission to buy food, fluid at the task of bartering, teasing, and cajoling the armed young men who wanted not bribes but a tithe for the mullahs. He'd joke, to
them,
that the cost of living hadn't changed a bit.

Hassan's sister left the country, smuggling out jewelry as insurance not just for herself but for the rest of the family. His family wanted Hassan to go next. But Persians prefer not to confront one another. They chose intermediaries—an aunt, an uncle—to hint at this. Without result. I felt as if my nerves had been soaked in some flammable solution, priming me forever for dread. I burst into tears one day when Hassan came home from the market on time, as promised. Hassan applied for an exit visa a week later, but he was refused. Finally we left illegally, crossing the border into Turkey on foot, like refugees. From there we returned to America, a place where his impulsiveness would not cost him his life.

Hassan cancels on the next Tuesday but comes the following week. I arrive after he does. I don't want to sit and wait for him. He serves me
dolmeh,
rice flecked with the golden bits of crust and sprinkled with saffron threads, and duck baked with pomegranates and basted with their juice. He has brought a bottle of vodka this time, instead of a bottle of wine, and he fills two tumblers full. If I didn't know better, I'd accuse Hassan of courting me.

“Why are we getting drunk?” I ask.

“You know I like vodka,” he says. “And I have to celebrate. I believe I've been demoted again.”

“Why?”

“They're claiming we've raised enough money to hire someone whose job it is to raise money, so I can concentrate on event planning.
They put it very nicely.” He sighs. “I must have said something to that woman that I can't remember.”

“I had no idea they were so Puritan.”

“It's inevitable,” Hassan says. “It's been coming for a long time.”

“Don't be too unhappy.”

He smiles at me. “They're taking away from me the part of my job that I hate the most. Really, I
should
celebrate. Life is good. We have a plan afoot to hold regional conferences, and this would be a great thing. Give little countries a chance to solve their problems for themselves. Oh! And I didn't break any bones when we went skiing.”

“Why do you have to tempt fate?”

“It was an adventure. And did I tell you I am going to be on the stage? Monica and I are going to be extras in the opera. She gets to sing a few lines. I get to stand at the back and hold a spear.”

He's still slender, and he has the kind of dark, striking looks that come across well on stage. There's a reason so many women have misread his intentions.

“Will you come to see me?” Hassan asks.

“No. I'd like to see you, but I'll pass on seeing her.”

He looks stricken.

“I just don't want to have to set eyes on her and discover she's a luscious young thing. I'd rather think of her as nothing special. Kind of dumpy.”

“Will you feel better if I tell you things are not perfect with us?”

“She's not dumpy, is she?”

“Because she's mad at me. I'm in the doghouse. I banged up the car on the way home from a planning meeting last week. I hit a pole when I was backing out of a parking spot, and that doesn't even really count. But now she's thinking I'm drinking too much, that's the reason. I ask her if she wants to sign on as a consultant to my boss, she throws things. My God, she throws my shoes out the window, so I'll have to go downstairs to get them and she can lock me out. It's terrible.”

“That's why you brought the vodka.”

“If it's good vodka,” he says, “no one can smell it on your breath.”

“Isn't this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? Didn't you tell me she drags a bottle of brandy to bed and wakes you up in the middle of the night?”

“But you see, this is the rub. She threw out the last of her very good brandy. She wants to prove to me that this is important to her. She will do anything for me. She will quit drinking with me.”

“Now
that
I didn't expect,” I say. “I thought she was supposed to be so arty.”

“I know. But no. She is strict. So, all right, I say to myself, this would be a sacrifice. But then I want to know, what could be on the other side of that? What would it be like? Do you think I should quit? Maybe I should try it.”

Hassan pours himself another tumbler of vodka. “So. We toast. Here's to our friends and well-wishers. Here's to my last glass of vodka.”

We clink glasses.

“Also,” he says. “She turns out to be jealous. She wants to know why I have to come and have dinner with you.”

What story of me does he tell her, of all that binds us, without intending this consequence?

“Tell her I'm being a harridan about money,” I say. “That way she won't worry.”

If I didn't see him every week, I wouldn't know if he had dinged a post or found a new crusade at work or fallen asleep at the wheel and awakened just in time.

Our first years back in the U.S., we worried all the time about Hassan's family in Iran. His middle brother got out, but Hassan's mother refused to leave, and so his oldest brother stayed with her. There was the hostage crisis, the gas shortage, the embargo; we had to contrive ways to get money to Hassan's family, all illegal.
Hassan's sister came out to us from New York, where she'd first gone; she'd married and had a little boy and gotten divorced in short order, another worry. Hassan had difficulty finding work as an engineer—we persuaded ourselves it was the recession—and he didn't like the work when he got it. Someone threw a cup of coffee at him one morning when he was in a long line at the gas station. He wouldn't have told me except that he ruined his sport coat trying to wash out the stain himself. “Well,” he said, “he called me a dirty Arab, and I decided it wasn't a good time to inform him that I was Iranian, and Iranians are not Arabs.”

None of this could keep us from being happy. We lived carefully so Hassan could send money home, but we always had enough for little trips. We went away at least once a month, even if it was only to a friend's cabin in Inverness. We enjoyed having our nephew in the house, making forts out of sofa cushions and filling the house with balloons for his birthday, and it was only a favor, not a duty, to give up a concert or a party when his mother needed us to watch him. I never agonized about the value of my work the way Hassan did; I was already doing enough living after hours. We had huge, raucous parties. We invited Hassan's fellow exiles, people he'd met at some futile political committee or on a construction site, a couple of nurses, teachers, his sister's friends from graduate school. If people weren't dancing, they were arguing fiercely, and Hassan would be in the middle of them, usually standing, wavering on his feet. He would tease and cajole and browbeat his friends in his desire for agreement. They must not complain so bitterly about Reagan; his election was necessary to the survival of the left in America, just as the frenzy in Iran was every day making possible the triumph of democracy and reason. I never argued; I plied people with food and drink and smiled a lot. I was a bleached blonde then, with a collection of beaded and silky dresses I wore for these parties, and I enjoyed the dismay and suspicion of some of Hassan's
friends, their assumption that the marriage must be about sex. I wanted them to think that.

Once, for a Fourth of July party, Hassan smuggled in some fireworks from Oregon, and he set them off in the backyard of our rented house, surrounded by an audience, of course. One of the Roman candles misfired and shot into the pine tree that shaded the yard. The tree ignited like a torch, its trunk becoming a slender column of flame. Someone called the fire department; I hid what was left of the fireworks; and Hassan got the hose and doused the fire. We should have been arrested, but Hassan convinced the firefighters that a spark from the barbecue had ignited the tree. Hours later, after everyone had gone home, I was still nervous that a spark might reignite in that dry Monterey pine. So Hassan and I kept vigil in the yard, wrapped in blankets, looking up through the blackened branches at the stars. In his arms, I fell asleep to the sound of the pinecones in the tree snapping and crackling, releasing the residual heat and energy of the fire.

Hassan cancels on me two Tuesdays in a row. When he calls the next Tuesday afternoon, to cancel again, I tell him I don't want to hear another made-up excuse. He doesn't have to torture me; he can just say that he won't be coming anymore.

“No, no, no,” he says, “that's not it.” He is silent for a moment. “I stopped drinking. Pretty much. I am supposed to go to the
AA
meeting on Tuesday night.”

“That's where you've been?”

“No, no. Tonight is the first time. This is a condition—a big condition—she sets for me. I don't know about this. I'm not very good at organized activities.”

“Where is this meeting? I could meet you when it's over, and we could go for pizza.”

“Would you?” he says. “Would you come in with me, just this first time?”

“Isn't that against the rules?”

“If we have to, we will come up with a story for you to confess too.”

I consider staying home alone. I've been trying to break that habit. I've been dating a guy I met at work, a medical-instrument salesman who sat in on surgery to demonstrate a new arthroscope. We've gone out for two Saturdays in a row. We kissed on the second date, a chaste, closed-mouth kiss.

“Give me the address.”

Hassan is waiting for me outside the church social room. When we go inside, the meeting is already underway, so we find seats in the back. People take turns going to the front of the room to announce that they are alcoholics. Some of them describe their most recent temptation, others tell stories of the way that alcohol has rotted their lives. A man does not know how to begin to beg his children for forgiveness. A woman describes how she followed the
AA
formula for resisting temptation: she stopped to register her emotion, unburdened herself of her anger, got a good night's sleep, made sure she ate a hearty breakfast. Hassan whispers in my ear, “She looks like she eats a hearty breakfast.” After a few more minutes, he nudges me again. “Why does everybody discover that they drink for the exact same reasons? Why do you have to go to bed at exactly 10
P.M.
to stay sober?”