Jasmine and Fire (23 page)

As his arrival date inches closer, my anxieties seem more and more trivial compared to what’s going on a few borders away. This is the first time in Beirut that I wish I had a working TV. In my hotel rooms in Egypt, I’d been glued to the set, watching the protesters march through the streets, cheering them on. But the only television I have regular access to here in Beirut is the one at T-Marbouta, the Hamra café where I work on my laptop sometimes, surrounded by a regular crowd of students and activist types. Lately that set has been tuned in all day to Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Egypt riots. I spend a few afternoons in a row at one of the café’s corner tables, and I overhear people near me discussing the situation in Egypt, guessing at when Mubarak will finally step
down. Every once in a while, as the footage shows a particularly egregious episode of police brutality, the buzz in the room grows, as everyone looks up from their laptops or conversations to boo and jeer at the screen. I can’t remember a time in my life when televisions in Beirut were so fixated on minute-by-minute events in a troubled Arab country, and not Lebanon, for a change.

Day by day the tensions in Lebanon keep deflating—not the ones in my head, though. Although I’m less anxious about political unrest here for the immediate term, I’ve still been fretting:
What if Richard hates it in Beirut? What if it’s awkward introducing him to my family and friends here? What if we can’t make it through two straight weeks without driving each other crazy?
We’ve never spent this much time together.

Meanwhile the rest of the Middle East is in turmoil now, too. Populations all over the region have been inspired by Egypt’s uprising and by Tunisia’s, back in December, and are revolting against their repressive regimes: Bahrain, Syria, Jordan, Libya, Yemen. The potential for a major transformation is exhilarating. Nonetheless, the sense of uncertainty and danger, an unstable region teetering on the edge of something still unknown, is seeping in and rattling my dreams.

My own personal upheaval—my move from New York to Beirut—is so preposterously minuscule in importance compared to what’s happening around the Middle East, it’s embarrassing to even mention it in the same sentence, but I’m still feeling the effects of that shake-up. Will Richard’s visit bring more tremors, another earthquake? Will we mesh here in Beirut the way we do on our more familiar turf, in New York, or will everything fall apart and end in a miserable breakup after his visit? Or worse, during?

FEBRUARY

I love
February in Beirut. It’s only a couple of days into the month—Richard arrives this week—and already the deep freeze I associate with February in New York is a distant memory. It’s barely dropped lower than the fifties here so far, and as I watch locals pull their coats tighter and brace against the wind, I’m feeling like the hardy winter warrior; in New York I’m usually the cold-weather wimp. At least the sidewalks here don’t get slippery with snow and ice, and the wind never gets so cold my face hurts.

It’s not just the weather that’s winning me over. Beirut life in general has been feeling easier, more natural with every passing week. Being away from Richard for long stretches of time hasn’t gotten much easier, but
now I’m finding more comfort in the life I’m building here. As I spend more time with childhood friends and cousins—deepening bonds we’d formed as kids—and as I hang out regularly with new friends and enjoy relaxed get-togethers with aunts and uncles, I’m realizing: Beirut is starting to feel more like home. Not just because I’m more used to it now, but because here I feel surrounded, literally on all sides—upstairs, downstairs, east, west—by people I care about and feel at ease with. Also, life in Hamra never gets dull, with all the little streets to explore and the cafés and bars to meet friends in. My old memories of the neighborhood keep mingling with my new discoveries. If I wimp out and leave Beirut now just so I can be near Richard and stop the long-distance angst, I’m probably going to feel a lot like I did when I was nine:
I’m not finished here. I’m being ripped away against my will
.

If Richard and I manage to stay together not just during his visit but as the weeks and months go by, it might not be so crazy to think he’d move here, too. Somehow we’ve been getting closer through our letters (well, electronic letters). We’ve been writing daily, and our e-mails have gotten more detailed, more like conversations, and more lyrical than phone chats. Our notes read like love letters but are also full of the flotsam of our days, the miscellaneous errands, the films and music and adventures and foods we’ve come across and want to experience together sometime, the things that are driving us nuts about certain people, the work annoyances, the social events and goings-on that are keeping us afloat, or glad to be alive, or sad to be apart.

“Dear S., New York was less brutally cold today. I fought the blues, and got out and about a little during my teaching day. I’ve been feeling inspired about my book again, which is good, but it also makes me impatient with work in a way that can get me down
unless I get super-tough nuts. Tonight I watched the Celtics demolish the Cavs, and watched Obama talk to the country. Soon we’ll be strolling on the Corniche together. Meantime I want you to have fun but be sure to be really safe. Not sure what that entails precisely, but if there’s a question of staying out of a certain section of town that has delicious yogurt-drizzled dill cakes but is experiencing riots or something, please skip the dill cakes, OK? Miss you like crazy.”

My recurring angst about his visit aside, I’m counting the days, practically the hours, until he gets here. It’s odd, though, that we picked February for his visit. February is a loaded month. For one thing, there’s Valentine’s Day—admittedly the dumbest holiday ever, but here it also happens to be the anniversary of ex–prime minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination in 2005. This month is also Richard’s birthday, and I hope he’ll be glad he skipped his annual party in New York to celebrate here instead. I so badly want him to feel comfortable in Lebanon. I can’t help wondering if he will, though, and among my other concerns, I hope he won’t feel in any way awkward about being Jewish here.

To my knowledge, there’s no history of anti-Semitism in Lebanon, not the way there is in Europe and certain other parts of the world. In Lebanon, none of the sects, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or you name it, has ever gotten along terribly well for long, but in various periods or places in Lebanese history, they’ve also gotten along beautifully; mistrust and sabotage alternating with friendly alliance among tribes is par for the course here. But Israel’s penchant for invading, wrecking, and occupying this country is hard to overlook, sitting as we are just across Israel’s northern border. And that history of invasions, massacres, and occupations, whatever its causes or attempted justifications, has
bred resentment and suspicion of anyone with sympathies for the government down south.

I’m also worried that many of my relatives—for whom being just, humane, and intellectually honest includes defending the Palestinian narrative against willful erasure, and calling out Israeli land grabs and policies that brutalize Arabs—won’t believe that I can be happy long-term with someone who is not only not Arab (most of my relatives can deal with that) and not Christian (the more liberal relatives I’m closest to won’t care, even if others might) but a Jewish American with certain sympathies for Israel. Richard certainly doesn’t have unconditional sympathy for Israel, far from it. He denounces the ways in which it has cruelly mistreated Palestinians and continues to. But he hasn’t gone out into the streets to march for those causes, like certain of my Jewish friends in the States. I’d feel more comfortable bringing them to a cocktail party where political issues might come up. With Richard, I’m not as sure.

Nonetheless, I can’t imagine basing my friendships and relationships purely on Middle Eastern political logic. Especially when there’s no logic to this never-ending bloody mess, and when Lebanon, too, has a lot to answer for—not just the way it treats Palestinian refugees living here, but also its own history of inter-sectarian bigotry.

Politics aside, I’ve also been wondering if introducing Richard as my boyfriend to some of my old-school relatives will bring on a mortifying interrogation.

So … when are you two getting engaged, hmm?

Or, more terrifyingly:

Oh, you’re visiting from New York! So you two are engaged? How lovely!

A couple of my cousins went through exactly that when they tried in recent years to bring a boyfriend or girlfriend on a trip to Lebanon. When I introduce Richard as “my boyfriend visiting from New York” to some of my more conservative family members, I envision
Annie Hall–
style subtitles running below the conversation:

Hi, meet my boyfriend. We’re not engaged and have no immediate plans to be. But he’s sleeping in my bed with me, in my parents’ apartment, and they’re five thousand miles away. Yes, I am a slut and a lost soul. But thanks for the coffee! We’ll just show ourselves out now
.

This may be the twenty-first century, but if you’re Lebanese, even a cosmopolitan twenty-first-century Lebanese with an equally cosmopolitan twenty-first-century extended family, you’ll know what I mean. This is treacherous territory. A full trifecta: my boyfriend is visiting even though we’re not engaged; he’s staying with me even though my parents aren’t here to chaperone; oh, and also, he’s Jewish (and therefore, in their minds, he’s already taken sides on the Middle East).

Ever since I landed in Beirut last summer, I’ve been trying to figure out how people my age, the single ones, conduct a normal adult life in Lebanon. The tradition of living with your parents until you’re married, even if you’re in your thirties, is still alive and well here. Turns out the coping strategies come in many shapes.

A friend of a friend is a divorced thirty-year-old who is living back at home with her parents now and has a new boyfriend, but she can’t bring him home. Well, for the occasional afternoon coffee with her parents in attendance, yes, but not for things that normal thirty-year-olds might do. Another acquaintance is thirty-eight, unmarried, and not in a hurry to marry, and she has a semiserious boyfriend she brings home and does whatever
she wants with in her room; her parents don’t notice, or pretend not to.

A good friend of one of my cousins is a lesbian in her thirties but has gay male friends she’s close with, who live with their families in villages outside Beirut and who sometimes crash at her place in the city after a night out. Unbeknownst to her, she was being closely watched by her neighbors over the course of a few weeks recently, and when her parents came to visit from the States, a group of neighbors showed up at their door, rang the bell, and said, “Did you know your daughter has men stay overnight?” The parents laughed. They know their daughter is a lesbian. And they are fine with her lifestyle, with her girlfriend, and with letting her old friends crash at the apartment overnight.

So it depends on you and your family and on a whole web of circumstances. But living solo in an apartment, or living with a boyfriend or girlfriend, is still rare in Lebanon—getting less rare, especially in Beirut, but still all too rare.

No doubt about it: this is a deeply perplexed and perplexing place when it comes to sex. It’s not just that Beirut in summer, with all its skimpy fashions both on and off the beach, is like the world’s hottest runway show. Bars and nightclubs and parties are incredibly flirty scenes year-round, with couples often making out openly, even at gay bars, and going home together if there’s no hovering, disapproving relative or neighbor on watch. (If there is, friends often organize group trips to the mountains, to ski in winter, or hit the beaches down south in summer—and for couples to have some private time and space.) But there’s still virtually no sex ed in schools. And the Lebanese on the whole like to pretend, except among close friends and confidantes, that we’re not having premarital sex, especially if we’re women.

My mom’s friend Nadia told me that in the 1970s, when one of her sisters decided to move into her own apartment in Beirut in her thirties without being married, she was doing something unheard of at the time. It was scandalous and led to much whispering and judging among neighbors and family friends, even though her parents approved of her decision. Slowly, very slowly, the idea of young women living alone in Lebanon has come to seem less outrageous, but it’s still unfathomable to many.