“So you want to hear about that old boys’ club, do you?” says the woman on the bench.
This morning I had still been in bed when a woman named Jules Dubois called me, told me that Mark Kovaks had cashed in a favor on my behalf, and if I wanted to talk to her about what it was like in Lebanon some thirty years ago, I’d better not waste any time getting to Forest Park. Which is where she spends her midmornings. I thought she chose the location because it’s a place where little old ladies can take their daily constitutional and watch over the kickball field, but Jules Dubois is a little old lady who has something different in mind when it comes to her constitution.
We’re on a bench and she’s rolling a joint with meticulous precision. She lights it, lingers over a long pull, and offers it to me. I take a small puff and hand it back to her. I’m not above peer pressure when my defenses are down.
“I have cancer,” she says. She watches me as I close my eyes briefly against the instant high. “When was the last time you smoked a joint?”
“Maybe twenty years.” I think. The pistons aren’t all firing this morning, even without the weed factored in. I’ve spent another night at a cheap hotel in downtown Detroit—a different one this time. I slept for more than eight hours, too, but it’s hard to feel rested when you’re on the run.
“It’s good, isn’t it? Get sick and they give you a prescription. I’ve got it in the tits.”
“Excuse me?”
“The cancer,” she says, as though I’m slow. “It’s in my tits. Man, I thought I was so lucky with these things.” She adjusts her bra, heaving it up by the straps. “You shoulda seen me in my heyday. Small everywhere but the chest. It was like I won the genetic lottery. Now look at me. It’s the opposite.”
“You look fine to me,” I say, determined not to give her what she wants, which is for me to look at her breasts and offer up an opinion for the sole purpose of her knocking it down. Living with Seb these last months has been an exercise in sidestepping these kinds of subjects with the terminally ill. Their bodies have changed with the illness, noticeably so. They know it, but they want their body image reaffirmed. Problem is, they can’t accept this kind of affirmation. They know it’s a lie. And it makes them angry, bitter, or worse. Sad.
“It’s because I’m wearing a prosthetic. Ever seen one?” With her free hand she plucks at the opening of her flowered blouse. Over the blouse and a pair of dark sweatpants, she wears a long pink trench coat. She reminds me of the man on the waterfront, except he was more coordinated. Jules Dubois looks like she threw on whatever happened to be on her floor before coming to meet me. This is probably why I liked her immediately. She seems like my kind of woman.
“Nah, I’m good. Thanks.”
“Just as well,” she says, sighing heavily, before going back to her spliff. “You should really look into getting a prescription. This stuff does wonders. I waited until I had cancer before I partook, but you don’t have to.”
She offers me the joint again, but I shake my head. The first toke was enough for me to question my reasons for being here, suffer the longing to be with Whisper since I’m enjoying the outdoors, and consider the purpose of my existence in general. I’m not sure I can handle what a second will bring. “I live in Vancouver. You can get a prescription off the streets there.” You can walk into any cannabis clinic, fill out some paperwork saying you get panic attacks, and boom: access to reasonably priced marijuana and its various derivative products. I know this because Seb had one for his condition and I often went with him for his refills.
“Lucky you. So what do you want to know? As I said on the phone, I might not have much time left. Got rid of the tits, but not the cancer. Ain’t that something. It’s metastasized—what a word. Metastasis. You heard the phrase ‘spread like cancer’? Well, what happens when it’s your cancer that’s spreading? You lose more than your tits.”
I’m once again under that microscopic stare as she waits for me to explain myself.
“When you were in Beirut, did you know an American photographer named Ryan Russo?”
Her response is almost instantaneous. Whatever is happening to her body, and even on what I personally know to be some very potent bud, her mind is razor-sharp. “Never heard of him. When was he there?”
“Seventies. He was there to work on a book, but he might have been a freelancer also.”
She shakes her head. “I was there as an AP correspondent in eighty-two, right before the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, the Palestinian camps. Most awful thing I ever saw, those bodies on the streets. Right now we’ve got a global refugee crisis happening with Syria, Jordan, Somalia. I’ve visited a lot of camps in my time, but walking through Shatila after all those people were butchered . . .” She shrugs. “Probably the worst day of my life.”
Dubois takes another long pull of her joint and stares through a couple walking their massive pit bull. They give her the stink eye as they pass but she is beyond their censure.
I’ve been told that some things actually do improve with age, and one of them is the ability to communicate to people that you give no fucks without fear of reprisal. Dubois has embraced this fully as she extends her middle finger to the couple.
When they’re out of earshot, she turns back to me. “First of all, let me tell you I left Beirut more confused than I’d been before I got there. I was asked to write a tell-all book about my experience after the hostage crisis became a hot thing in the eighties, but the truth is that I left because I could no longer write dispassionately about human suffering. To continue to live in Beirut I would have had to do like the Lebanese and keep adapting. Play psychological games with myself so that all of the death and destruction didn’t really matter. Keep moving forward and never look back, or even look around too much. I’m not ashamed to say I didn’t want to do it any longer. Maybe your Ryan Russo couldn’t either, because I was there for two years living in West Beirut where all the foreign correspondents lived and I’ve never heard of him. And I would have, if he was anybody. We all hung out at the Commodore Hotel. Heard of it?”
I shake my head, which sends it spinning.
“No? It was a very famous watering hole for journalists and spies. Some decent businesspeople, too, though I can’t imagine how they stayed among all the ruckus in Beirut.”
“Spies?” Something about what Kovaks said back at the bar hits me. Some people were obsessed with conspiracy theories, but this is the second time it’s crossed my mind in relation to Beirut.
She looks at me sideways and stubs out her joint. “It was the Cold War. Besides that, there was a civil war and the Syrian invasion. Also the Israeli invasion. There was so much intrigue that people blamed every little thing on some plot or the other. That’s the story of Beirut. There were plots and counterplots everywhere. In every group of people, there were a hundred different stories used to describe the same event. It was madness. It was the national pastime.”
“Right.” This had seemed to be relevant to Kovaks, too, but Dania Nasri never bothered to talk espionage. Maybe she no longer indulged in the national pastime. Clearly, though, it had made an impression on Dubois.
“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help, but I wish you luck with your search.” She smiles over at me and communicates silently that I’m the one expected to get up and leave. I do, glad that she didn’t give me the look that she’d given the couple with the pit bull.
It should be no surprise to me that she’s talking intrigue and espionage. I come from people who attract secrets. The silky wings of a moth ensnaring them, holding them, daring them closer to the light. That part of me comes from a place like that . . . well, it explains a lot.