CHAPTER THREE

Desire

Let nothing but nothing stop you,” my grandmother said. So many precarious elements to her life: an older woman, divorced and living alone, at a time when that wasn’t much in favor. Sometimes she got unnerved—long-distance phone calls made her fretful about the expense, and she gave up completely on driving cars. Still, there was something unstoppable in her: After retirement, she trekked around the world on her own, took a prop plane to the high end of Alaska; crisscrossed Eastern Europe; sailed the Panama Canal. There was a “dalliance” with a performer on a cruise ship—to her grandchildren’s amazement. They wrote to each other for years afterward, their letters purple with euphemism. In crucial ways, she seemed fearless.

One summer, Gram took me along to Paris, so I could “get culture.” She’d never visited and had decided my indifferent language studies would suffice. Once we arrived, though, the trip turned into an investigation of boulangeries and patisseries. We glanced at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower on our way to bake shops—tiny places with polished stone floors, wooden counters, and indelibly delicious cakes. There were fruit aspics and meringue twirled like whipped hairdos and mousses shaped like birds and starfish and Impressionist paintings in marzipan.

We went to the shops as early as she could roust me out of bed—usually by orange sunrise—and visited two, three, four bakeries in a day. We poked around corners, down alleyways, tottered over cobblestones, up the broad sidewalk of the Champs-Élysées, a guidebook and torn map fluttering in the breeze. Even through the oily city rain, we could smell the shops on approach, each with its particular scent of rising dough, baked fruit, roasting sugars. Gram leaned on the glass cases, looked toward the swinging doors to
the oven, calling for the baker. If one emerged—blinking, uncertain, antisocial—she introduced herself. These men, glowering as if awakened from hibernation, claimed not to speak English. This didn’t deter Grace from talking and talking to them.

Perhaps there was something compelling about my grandmother’s refusal to believe in language barriers, or possibly some charm in her puffed blond hair, purple lipstick, cornflower-blue eyes, her jaunty lavender outfits, her kimono-style pajama suits. Maybe it was the novelty of being invited out front. In any case, eventually the bakers drifted nearer the counter, arms folded over barrel chests, chins tucked, and began to demand particulars.

“You are from where?” One man barked at us over a counter in the Latin Quarter. “Why are you here?”

I struggled to translate. I’d taken French for years but quickly learned I didn’t know anything—the language, as spoken by actual native speakers, dissolved into a murk of vowels and gestures.

“Why are you dressed like that?” he asked my grandmother, gesturing at her head. “If you go uncovered, you’ll get too much of the sun—it’s unhealthy.”

“Tell him,” Gram dictated carefully, “we don’t wear babushkas in America!”

The baker was dressed in an immaculate apron, his white jacket straining at the buttons. A flat-topped toque flopped forward on his brow. He bore a slight resemblance to Bud—many of the French did—round faces, olive skin, sleepy hooded eyes. When I mentioned this to Gram in the Latin Quarter shop, she said, “Please, don’t ruin it.”

“How old are you?” the baker asked Gram. “Where is your husband? How many children do you have?” He had such a frank, evaluative manner it seemed natural that he’d want to know these things—as if he were sizing up Gram like a basket of berries. Gram squinted at rows of apricot tarts nested in doilies as she offered her vital statistics. She used to tell me that priests were the best sorts of men, because they had “no appetites.” Yet in our tour of bakeries, it seemed she was drawn to men who were nothing but appetite. When Parisians bowed before the oven, I felt they were doing something more than merely baking, something important and secret.

The baker went in back and returned with two slim loaves, which he buttered then spread with a jam black with fruit and sugar. On this, he layered a soft cheese and some sort of meat shaved to translucence, then squashed and cut the sandwich on the bias into spearlike slices that he arranged on three plates. He gave us cups of black coffee and, as a child of perhaps nine had materialized to run the store, the three of us moved to a table on the sidewalk.

Our baker was named Marcel and he came from a line of bakers, he said, dating back to Charlemagne. I translated with effort and clumsiness; Grace’s shoulders rose. “Well, my granddaughter here is in high school. She is in honors English,” she shouted, trying to burst through the language barrier.

He stared at me. “English classes? Why? You already speak English.”

My mortification made translating more difficult. I tried to explain that I was studying literature.

“The books of the English?” He looked cut into. For a long moment, he stared off, scratching the underside of his chin. “Quel dommage! The English, they have no feeling for anything. What do you propose to do with yourself? How will you acquit yourself?” I had reached the outer limits of my language abilities as he raised increasingly metaphysical issues. His face darkened; he said things that I grasped at in a literal way. “Do you think life is for the clouds and the air? Life is for the blood! If you want the feeling for life, for the blood of the mind, you should be studying Hugo, Proust, Stendhal, Voltaire, Flaubert!” He turned his lecture from me to Grace. She smiled and lifted an eyebrow at me as if she understood everything and it was all satisfying. Her thoughts were written across her face: You see what can happen when you take a chance? This is what happens!

Eventually, Gram folded her napkin, telling the baker that his sandwich was “interesting”: I translated this as “superbe.” She went back inside and pointed at the glass case: This one with the chocolate shell, that one with the ganache, the baba au rhum, the one over there like a pyramid. Marcel rushed back and forth with a pair of silver tongs. “Oui, Madame; oui, Madame!” He had a wheezy, cigarette-broken laugh. Together they filled two large boxes. Then Gram simply did what she did at every shop: opened her purse full of francs and said, “Honor system.” He removed one shiny, stray dime among the francs and said in English, “A memento, Madame.”

We took our boxes, sagging with chocolate and cream, to a riverbank, spread our new silk scarves on the bright grass, and sat, just the two of us. The moment intertwined with the bolt of French blue sky, the warm summer air, the smell of the Seine. When we bit into them, the pastries were crisp, then bright puffs; they were clouds and bridges and fine art in gold frames and old books in leather bindings and weightless days to come.

Oh yes, I knew—I knew, I knew!— it was foolish to be married that first time round, for ten silly months, to Jeremy—who had lain on the couch in a haze of pot smoke and TV-lit depression and such lethargy that I found it unendurable—ending in hasty divorce, and I was so relieved to be out of it. Still, the idea of marriage—the comfort, the notion of certainty—had returned to enchant me once I started graduate school and took up with someone new, D. There was love, it must have been love—mustn’t it?

Or maybe it was foolish to try to insist on one narrative, one easy way of interpreting such desires. D. stands for Deconstruction—his course of study in graduate school. A field filled with thickets of language. D.’s favorite theorist, Michel Foucault, said, “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” I turned the thought over and over: If you haven’t discovered who you are, can you still refuse it?

I’d walked into the seminar room and D. was long arms and legs, stretched out on a couch in the back. Hair blue-black as crows’ feathers, a marvelous laugh that could get the whole room stirred up—one of the best laughers I’d ever met. D. was slumming it in a writing workshop, hiding out from the courses on postmodernism. He wrote stories about young men tormented by existential problems and by touchy young women. The class—six men, plus me—hailed his work.

One of the students said my writing, on the other hand, was “like an opera singer having a seizure.” The Deconstructionist defended me vigorously, gallantly. He used the word wonderful. A week later, he gave me a lift home. I leaned across the front seat and experimentally nosed his ear. He was safe, both hands glued to the wheel, eyes on the highway.

“I love a man driving,” I’d said.

His profile smiled. “Do that again. With your nose.”

D. came to my parents’ house for dinner. He brought a bottle of araq for my father. Bud served him stuffed squash and cabbage leaves. That was the first visit. After a few more such meals, Bud began his program of systematic, low-grade harassment. As Mom picked up the platters from dinner, my father rolled forward on his elbows and asked him, “So, you have intentions?”

“I’ve got all kinds of intentions,” D. laughed.

“The kind of getting married.”

“Ohhhh . . . that kind.” He sat back, offering a Mona Lisa smile.

Bud’s chin was pulled in, his brows heavy: Dad with his propriety, his air of bruised dignity, indignant at Americans and their jokey ways. An Arab man with three smiling American daughters. D. was nothing if not a charming troublemaker. Bud turned his head to one side and aimed his eyes at me. “What is this? What is going on here?”

My palms felt damp. “What is what?”

“He comes to dinner fifty million times and you’re not getting married?”

“Oh, no, no—I never said that,” D. said smoothly. “Maybe we will get married.”

“When?”

“Well . . .,” D.’s eyes traveled to mine. “Eventually. Someday. Maybe.”

“Someday? Maybe? What does that mean?”

“Dad, we haven’t even discussed it ourselves,” I broke in, enervated by a sense of déjà vu, annoyed with myself for not seeing this coming. I’d invited D. to dinner so casually, trying to prove something to myself—about my family’s new openness and Americanness. I was an idiot. “We don’t know what we want to do yet. If we want to do anything.”

Bud swiveled toward me. “If you don’t know, then maybe this isn’t the right one for you! Maybe not! Did you think of that ever?”

After each dinner, D. and I had our post-Bud fight. We barely pulled out of the driveway and the question would burst from me, “Well, why don’t you want to get married?” On the outside, I looked just as American as anyone, but the Jordanian daughter emerged from within, addled by a thousand years of Bedouin etiquette and advice.

Foucault said, “Where there is power, there is resistance.” D. was not thrilled about the whole marriage proposition. His father had lived in the basement of their house for years, leaving an arctic region between himself and D.’s mother. I could understand his anxiety, completely empathize with it, and his reluctance made it irresistible to me.

“This is what happens when you wish,” she says, pointing to the girl at her feet. “God plays a joke.” Sitt Abdo is my grandmother’s cousin. She has withered cheeks and three furrows like arrows pointing to the center of her chest. The front of her shift slips enough so I can see them, creases deep enough for a baby’s finger. “All my life I wish for a child, I wish for a child. No baby, no baby. Then he plays his joke.” She looks impossibly old to me when I am seven—the same age as her daughter Joumana. It is possible that she is one hundred, though I hear my aunties, later, telling each other that she is sixty-two.

Sitt Abdo, her husband Sayed Abdo, and Joumana live in the most beautiful house with whitewashed walls and rooms rippling with light, just as if someone tossed buckets of water through the air every morning and left behind sheets of brightness. As her mother carries on, Joumana looks at me with round eyes and a droll smile, so I could almost believe she is in on the joke. Her mother sighs and groans and wanders around the house in bare, lovely feet, carrying a bowl of Seville oranges. “He waits!” Sitt Abdo turns to me suddenly, as if I too played some part in the joke. “He waits until it’s too late. When I’m so old I can barely see and my neck looks like a camel’s back,” she says, pointing to her straight spine. “And my husband is himself a three-year-old child,” she throws in irritably. “When I’ve given up and I don’t want it any longer, that’s when God grants the wish.”

Finally, Sitt Abdo lowers herself onto the step out front, muttering variations of the same thing. She puts her head down into her hand as if she’s only now found out she has a seven-year-old. Joumana and I sit with her on the wide step and begin peeling the tiny, tart fruit. In a bid to regain his country, to raise his daughters to be who they were “meant” to be, Bud moved us back to Jordan months ago—a relocation that wouldn’t last a year—and since we arrived, every day something surprising happens. Like this trip to Bethlehem to see Joumana.

“Don’t worry,” Joumana says to me, right in front of her mother. “She loves to yell.”

Without saying a word, using just her fingertips, Sitt Abdo peels the hair-fine membrane from an orange segment, then touches her daughter’s lips and places the fruit in her mouth.

In a few days, we take the wheezing rental car across expanses of sand and road back to Jordan. Aunt Aya greets us as though we’ve escaped from a live volcano. Sitting on an embroidered couch, my auntie asks for an accounting of our visit. When I tell her about Sitt Abdo, she rocks with laughter, eyes sparkling, black wings drawn at each corner. Finally, she wipes her eyes carefully and says, “That woman was born with a mouth full of complaints. Listen, habibti [my darling]. There are two people who can stop you from getting what you want—the person outside of you and the person inside of you. Guess which is more powerful?”

My aunt is full of tricks and puzzles: I get nothing right, but she keeps trying. Tied back with a silk Hermès scarf, her long hair is black and smooth and perfect as glass: I want to touch it, but I’m afraid of my aunt. I sit on my hands, trying to think of a good answer. After a long time, I declare, “The person outside of you!”

My aunt’s lips pucker. I know she’s wondering why she keeps trying. She has at least thirty-four other nieces and nephews. She says, “The one inside, ya Salteeya [thick-headed woman from al-Salt].”

Ohh! I roll my eyes and nod: that was what I’d meant to say! But at seven, all I know is my parents telling me day and night all the things I’m not allowed to do—which is everything. No standing on the table, no experimenting with the perfume, no eating the candy from between the cushions. When I grow up, I want to be a writer, like my Aunt Rachel, and tell stories like everyone in the family, and people will listen like nobody in the family. Also, I want to be constantly on an airplane, because nothing fills the air with more exciting feelings, nothing lights my parents up more than when we’re on a plane pointed either to Jordan or back to the States. When we get to either place, the lovely feelings go away, but in the air, things are very good.

I try to explain this to my aunt: airplanes, silk scarves, black hair, travel, writing, excitation.

“So you want to be rich.” Aya gives me a long, pleased look. “And free.”

“No. Just write and fly.”

She sighs, slinging one leg over the other, and bangs a cigarette out of a pack. “People don’t know what they should want. They think they do, but they don’t.”

“Not even me?”

She smiles so widely I can see the glint of her gold tooth. My aunt gives me so much advice you’d think there was something wrong with me. That I am one big walking problem. But I’m fine! I keep trying to tell her. Even so, she slips the cigarette behind her ear, stretches her arms wide, silk sleeves unfurling like Dracula’s cape, and folds me into a jasmine cloud. She whispers in my ear, “Habibti, especially not you.”

With luck, a writer may have many chances, many fields to play in. You start out with one sort of plan for how this or that story will go; along the way, however, it forks, doubles back. If you’re easy about it, you learn to follow the tales instead of the other way around: Let the work take the lead and find out what sort of writer you are.

Toward the end of my graduate work, I’d run out of funding and was eyeing help-wanted ads for fast-food “associates.” After years of studying literature, I qualified for nothing in the working world. So I dedicated my free time to writing a romance novel.

Every English grad I talked to had heard of someone, somewhere, who’d paid for school by writing romances. Uncle Hal had given me a cache of garage-sale paperbacks: I pulled them out and read one a night, charting the plots and working on my own by day. I thought if I could nail down the formula, it just might sell. After a month and a half, I sent a story about a lovelorn composition instructor who’s tempted by a glowering Dean of Students to a post office box at Harlequin. A week later, a kindly editorial assistant wrote to say my romance novel was too clichéd.

Next, I spotted an ad on the back page of The Village Voice. A “New York–based publisher seeks authors to write books.” Buried deeper in the ad was a note that this was a publisher of “Adult Fiction.” I assumed this was to distinguish their books from the “Young Adult” genre. My friend Liza cleared things up: “Adult means porn.” She pushed her dark hair away from her face. “Dirty stories—the stuff they publish in Penthouse Forum. Not American Modernism.”

“They specialize in pornography?” I propped my elbows back on the library lounge step and contemplated this. We were on a “smoking break,” in which Liza smoked and I ate vending-machine candy. Over the past three years, I’d grown to enjoy inhaling her secondhand smoke, its smell a Pavlovian bell that it was time to eat a Three Musketeers.

“‘Specialize’?” Liza had a real figure and dark Mediterranean-Jewish features that made people think, of the two of us, she was the Arab. “More like—that’s all they do.” She exhaled a stream of smoke. “I doubt, like, they’re publishing epic poetry on the side.”

The raciest thing I’d ever read was snippets of my aunt’s copy of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, which required hanging around in their upstairs bathroom at fourteen, gaping at the sexual coming of age of a young gay man. That afternoon, I steeled myself and called the number in the paper. Talking quickly, I assured the man who answered that I knew adult fiction “inside and out.” The man, who asked me to call him “Big Al,” said if my work proved satisfactory, they’d start me writing in the One-A category, or what they liked to refer to as “Missionary Position.” “It doesn’t pay great,” Big Al added. “I tell my people, think of this as a writing workshop.”

It was June, but the old mountain ridges around Binghamton were still ridged with snow, the air shining cold. Liza and I paced Front Street in front of the adult bookstore, hands deep in pockets, eyes fixed on the ice-gray sidewalk, scaring away customers. I wanted to go home, but Liza was determined. “This is too stupid. I’m going in.” She pushed through the unmarked black door. A few minutes later, she burst out with a brown paper sack like a grocery bag, eyes wide. “I can’t believe I did that.” We scurried up frost-streaked pavement. “Only for you would I do this.” She handed over a stack of paperbacks. “They had a whole wall, and a sign that said ‘Literature.’” She fished a wrinkled cigarette out of her purse, smoothed it between two fingers. “Love to attend a seminar on that literature.”

Big Al had recommended that I “study up” on the genre. I read the books in a few nights: None were longer than 120 pages; the covers were thin, they curled softly—maybe intended for holding in one hand. As with the romance novels, each of these books had essentially the same plot. In this case, a good-looking man—sailor, salesman, garage mechanic—was constantly running into voluptuous goddesses. Within the first two pages, clothing melted away. Nothing to it! Such fluffy, paint-by-numbers stuff, it wasn’t even shocking. There was one bit of stylistic flair: the zesty references to genitalia. I started jotting down words, noting that they generally fell into two categories. In one column, descriptors like hot, meaty, spicy, raging, in the other column, nouns like staff, rod, wand, poker, etc. You could attach any of the words in column A to any of the words in column B and make a porno anagram.

My dissertation was going to be a collection of interlinking short stories modeled after the structure of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! But first came The Adventures of Wee Willie. I worked and ate all meals straight from the fridge, salami, chips, grapes. Liza came over to read my latest pages, marveling, “It seems like you know how to write this.”

One day I got a call from Zora Minske, a graduate student in women’s studies: one of my short stories—a tale about a man who constructs wings out of beer can pull tabs and flies away from his overbearing wife—had been published by MSS, John Gardner’s literary journal, and her reading group, a high-profile cabal on campus, had decided to discuss the story at their next meeting. She hoped I might like to attend. Intimidated, I yelped, “Sure!” That night I laid stock still in bed, filled with fear and regret.

Dominated by a rectangular table, the meeting room overlooked campus and the distant blue ranges. 1986, and the women around the table in their flowing skirts were unshaven, nonwaxed, bra-free, clear of makeup or other oppressions. I was in jeans, T-shirt, and high-top sneakers. Having convinced myself that this event might involve some kind of potluck, I brought a puree of roasted eggplant with garlic and lemon, loaves of pita, and cookies. Bribes.

A few of the women smiled, eyes glittering. Silence settled in the air like smoke. One raised her brows as I uncovered the tubs. “I’m sorry, no. I have allergies.”

Someone dressed in dark purple moved the dishes to a table behind a podium. The handful of women there had started discussing my story before I’d arrived. Zora, the organizer, didn’t acknowledge my entrance but sat with elbows on the table, hands plunged into her hair. She looked bored and irritated, as if she wanted to be there about as much as I did. As I sat, Penny, the purple-clad student, said, “This is a vital narrative of the masculine body. The narrator an embodiment of the male gaze.”

“No, no, no,” Zora countered. “This text subverts the dominant paradigm by deliberately co-opting the plot, making it into a feminine journey.”

Another young woman sat across from Penny, shaking her head so her springy coils of hair trembled. “Yet another good old boy’s study—a guy hero—lousy wife. He’s the one who gets everything—it replays all the old stories.”

“So, unless a story is promoting heroic women it’s not worthwhile?” Zora asked.

Penny considered the question as she strolled to the front of the room, back straight, covered with a sheath of hair, and returns with a plate of eggplant dip, bread, and cookies. “It’s not a level playing field—we can’t afford to have women writers idealizing male protagonists.”

“There are responsibilities. There are social obligations.” The woman with allergies extended one finger, pointing. “She brought food—a display of domestic labor, if you need it spelled out. It’s like a billboard for women’s objectification.”

Most of the meeting went like this. It was too stressful to listen closely. Instead, as they toiled on, I started thinking about the growing stack of The Adventures of Wee Willie manuscript pages on my desk at home, right out in the open. I began to distract myself by wondering what might happen if any of these women should happen to enter my house and pass by my desk.

“Is this—eggplants?” A comp lit student named Paola interrupted, holding up a wedge of pita with a swirl of the dip on it. She took another bite. “I don’t even like eggplants.”

“My point here,” skinny allergy girl said, “is that this piece doesn’t give the slightest thought to the empowerment of women.”

“How is this creamy like this?” Paola asked, wiping her plate with bread.

“Come over any time,” I blurted, hoping we could wrap things up. “I can show you—”

“Can we not talk about food?” Skinny glared around the table.

“A text in which there is a single, unified, male heroic figure, on a quest for gratification, is by its very construction a phallocentric entity,” Penny declared, leaning against the table, exhausted.

Afterward, rising from the table, my legs felt deboned. Zora clapped me on the back. “You survived.” Out of everything said that day, that was the bit that got to me—a fishhook under the skin. Maybe that was her intention. For the next three weeks, I sweated and sighed through three more meetings. Having pureed my story, they moved on to new writers and topics: patriarchal authority, the male gaze, the imprisonment of the eroticized concubine. Each night I went home and wrote more adventures for Wee Willie. I woke sweating from nightmares that I’d handed out pages to the women’s studies group. In my dream I saw the paper in their hands; I tried to snatch it back; I saw women turning, horrified, faces curdled. I rose from the seminar table, stammering: No, not mine, not mine. . . .

The dream was like one long anxiety session about discovery. The meetings were a crucible of sorts. These women were authoritarian, but also serious readers—my first taste of an audience. I wanted their respect yet couldn’t live up to their expectations.

“Maybe you’re having an identity crisis,” Liza said, an arm hooked over the back of her chair at the kitchen table. I was cracking eggs into hot linguine; lately, all I wanted was pad Thai. The recipe arrived in my grandmother’s weekly stream of magazine and newspaper clippings, along with her usual blue ballpoint notations in the margins. “Sounds spicy! Too strange?”

“You’re pretending to be this big feminist,” she drawled. “You really don’t care about any of it.”

“I do so.” I put my hands on my hips. That’s all I could think of to say.

“What’re you going to do when women’s studies finds out about Wee Willie and his adventures?”

“They wouldn’t even blink. They’d think it was a pedagogical device or something ironic or—like, Madonna.” I shrugged one-shouldered, twirled noodles. “And they are never going to find out.”

Liza gave me a dead-eye glance, her irises nearly as dark as her pupils. “You should decide if you want to be a writer or what the hell.”

It occurred to me, with a mild burst of happiness, that I didn’t have to keep going to women’s studies meetings. Instead, I stayed home and put Wee Willie through his paces. A bumbling traveling salesman, shy and retiring, who happens to be ridiculously well endowed, Willie’s true desire is to sell his top-notch, Swiss-made vacuums. The neighborhood ladies are lonely, libidinous souls who prey on Willie. Night after night, I lived on coffee and chocolate chip cookies, hunched before my hulking computer monitor, grinning, scribbling Willie’s story, my thesis sleeping under my desk.

I slid a sheath of pages into an envelope and shipped it out.

Several days later, at home, staring at my unfinished thesis, I heard a knock downstairs. In a scene straight out of my recurring nightmares, my housemate Meryl pounded up the stairs to say that “two scary girls” were there. Zora and Penny from women’s studies.

“You haven’t been at meetings,” Zora said, cranky as ever.

“We wanted to say hi.” Penny smirked. She was the kind of friend, my Uncle Hal would have said, you couldn’t stop hugging for fear they’d strangle you. Certain I had to have been ill to miss a meeting, they had brought a small bag of brown leaves and twigs they’d bought from the Chinese herbalist store downtown. It had a high mushroomy reek, like that of the herbal remedies my aunt smuggled through customs.

“Come in,” I managed. “Wow. My gosh, you guys. How great is this.”

They trooped up the many flights of stairs into our shared dollhouse, complimenting everything. Penny lingered over my pink-shag-rug bedspread and Talking Heads poster; the built-in bookshelves in the hallway; the scorched pots hanging over the stove. I let them peek into our few rooms, then led them out the back door. For a while, we stood on the landing overlooking dripping clotheslines, watching Zora smoke. My guilty old conscience flared—I felt caught—half truant and half escapee. I babbled about how crazy-busy I’d been, supposedly laboring on my thesis.

Gradually, though, I calmed down: It dawned on me they weren’t on some reconnaissance mission, they really just came over—the way people did in graduate school. I pulled myself together and let them back inside. Feeling expansive, I settled them in our two beanbag chairs in the living room. My housemate drifted through, giving everyone a wide berth.

In the kitchen, I rattled around fixing twig tea, looking for healthy things to offer them. Which was when I realized the answering machine had clicked on. The phone ringer in our apartment had been permanently disabled by a downstairs landlord, so the only way we knew someone was calling was when a disembodied voice shouted in the hallway and everyone jumped out of their skin. I hurried into the living room, tea ball in one hand:

“Diana? Big Al. Got your work. It’s quality. We can’t go with the name Wee Willie, though. How about Steve? Also, listen, you got to slow it down—I mean the pace, babe. You’re gonna burn out. He can’t be pumping on every page. Take it down a click. Anyway, I love it. Send me the next story by next Friday and you’ll get a bonus. Over and out.”

I was flash frozen. I couldn’t look at Zora or Penny. Of course this had to happen. I’d smugly decided I was safe. It’s always the thing you think can’t possibly happen. I’d sent Wee Willie out a week ago, filed or scrapped any remaining evidence of writing, hidden the dirty-book “research” in a shoe box under the bed. I thought: This is what happens when you try to keep secrets! Excuses flew through my head. Confess, I thought. Tell them the truth: you needed the money.

Zora made a little breath sound, a half-cough, and said, “Was that a publisher?” Penny’s smirk faded. Here I was, getting calls at home from an important person.

“Oh gosh,” I stammered. “It’s—no. It’s not anything. Just a little—I don’t know. I’m working on something—on the side. It’s not academic, it’s—for fun.” I half-shrugged, squeezed the fingers of one hand in the other. I heard Penny exhale. “Just—wow.”

I saved this message and for months to come I played Big Al back to dinner-party guests. I told them, “Oh, he’s this publisher who can’t get enough of my work.” When I came clean about his specialty, people wanted to hear the message again and again.

Al was right: I couldn’t stand the pressure. I was pleased to collect my check for $900 and tell him that was the end. Writing was hard enough: I had to feel easy about the way I approached it.

I never saw the actual book, The Adventures of Big Steve, which was just as well—I would’ve had to hide it. Despite having been married and divorced, I’d returned to a virginal state as far as my father was concerned. You peel away one code, one restriction, and find another just underneath. Good daughters didn’t get divorced, and underlying this—they didn’t have sex—certainly not without producing babies; they didn’t know about it; they certainly didn’t write books about it. Sex was something for wild American girls.

The end of grad school brought everything into sharp relief: I was offered a teaching position in Lincoln, Nebraska, and then D. was offered a scholarship to spend a semester studying in Paris. When D. received word of his award, he came home waving the letter jubilantly, drunk with excitement, and blurted out, “Let’s get married, too!”

Some native sense in me crept back. He would go read books in Paris and I would go . . . teach freshman composition in Nebraska? But my ancestors’ collective insistence on marriage was always there: it lapped at my dreams, whispered behind my head. I was stubborn and indoctrinated. I threw my arms around his neck.

The second wedding was as low-key as the first was elaborate: no parents allowed—due to lingering grudges nursed by certain parties. We held it in our apartment, performed by a justice plucked from the Yellow Pages. Afterward, a dinner for eighteen friends at the only place with a big enough table to fit our party. There was a chocolate cake some friends had iced with the words: “You should only live long and be happy.” The previous night, three girlfriends had taken me out in a convertible and we’d sung, I only have eyes for you, dear . . . flinging the words into the soft, black air.

Months later, I went off to Paris to visit my new husband in the Algerian–Moroccan neighborhood called the Marais. In a flat as squat and ugly as a cinderblock, D. had one square window that swung open to gray sky and clotheslines. There was a cement shelf outside under the windowpane where he kept bread, cheese, and milk. I ate a few bites, absorbed by how delicious everything was. A croissant and a thin tablet of black chocolate loosened my senses. And yet the man I was visiting looked starved. When I first walked off the plane, I didn’t recognize his face so much as the way he was standing, curving forward as if about to catch something. D. was thin, his skin and teeth pearlescent. When I put my arms around him, I could feel the bones in his back. “Are you—how are you?” I said, aghast.

“I forgot how beautiful you are.” He kissed my head; his favorite spot—he called this a “righteous kiss.”

I kept glancing at him, but it seemed plain that I wasn’t meant to ask about this transformation. There was a new, furtive air about him, as if he were keeping a secret.

The miserable room came with some meals. D. left early in the morning to go to class, but he had conserved half his breakfast for me: a basket with a feathery croissant, a bowl of blackberry preserves, a sweet orange, a square of something halfway between an excellent cheese and butter, a cup of strong black coffee, half a pitcher of yellow cream. I ate slowly. A commotion of doves outside brought me to the window that framed a view of narrow, sooty streets, pitched roofs, clotheslines, pinched and crowded and charming. The light was so crisp and starched the room seemed almost quaint. The coffee was rich: my body awakened with a sip.

Before his departure overseas we’d had a few moony weeks that were actually delightful, our imminent separation making everything lovely and doomed. We’d kissed with a heat I hadn’t felt in the past three years. But after we’d been apart for a few months with little communication, I struggled to remember what D. looked like. In Lincoln, a naturalist in pointed boots and worn jeans started to court me. He didn’t write and he didn’t know anything about critical theory. After weeks of pursuit during which I asserted I was married and the naturalist asserted I wasn’t, we kissed in his double-wide trailer till we were shaking and then laughed at ourselves. Later, we stood outside the trailer in the frigid night, examining constellations, the smear of the Milky Way, the stars so clear they looked close enough to prick a finger.

When I thought about D., I heard his loud laugh, remembered that he loved film and golf and wine and food. My memory had brought up nothing like this monkish, self-mortifying figure. D. seemed transformed by Paris, reading Proust in French, studying the lives of saints, scholars, philosophers, men who evidently believed that illumination came through self-denial, that a mind that eclipses the body burns more brightly. Each morning he beetled off to class and didn’t return until almost bedtime. After a week of this un-reunion, I was thinking about flying home early when I discovered a notebook under the bed. In it, D. described in semi-coded language an ongoing affair with a charming young language professor.

Though I’d already half-guessed it, was already half-involved with someone else myself, I felt clobbered, a frying pan to the gut. Breathless, I kicked the notebook back under the bed, then I kicked the bed too, the iron bedstead smashing my sneaker. Good! As I grabbed my foot, my eyes flooded with angry tears. I bitterly considered the kiss on my head: the only one I’d received since arriving. The righteous kiss was the last Romeo gave to Juliet—his farewell. D. had kissed me this way for ages, which I saw now as years of goodbyes. After I’d sat with these thoughts for a while, I felt a whisper of unsettling emotions. I thought I must be dizzy or in shock. I went outside, crossed the boulevards. The men and women clipping by in dark suits looked like pieces across a chessboard, their faces revealing nothing. It was late fall, days before Thanksgiving in the States. Winter seemed to be arriving in high, invisible clouds, round scrolls releasing the cold. All of this suited my mood—I was glad to feel lonely and misunderstood. The more I thought about it, the more I began to feel certain we’d married for the worst possible reasons—to be secure, to please others—and so there had ensued betrayals and affairs and separations. Now I saw it clearly written out in D.’s tidy block print, the same printing he used in the margins of his books. The internal workings of our relationship, intimate, physical, whatever there was, had started to collapse.

That afternoon, I sat through a mass at a chapel on the Rue X, trying to feel something other than relief. Blame flitted here and there, a sparrow in the rafters. I watched the priest lift the host, vestments rippling down his arms; there was a catch in my chest. I had the sense that, for all my family’s warnings and advice, I wasn’t ready to be in love with anyone. It seemed that all advice could do was separate you from your own voice, the one that tells you to wait for what you want—that someday, not yet, desire will be there, buzzing in the trees, ready for you to look up. I sighed and felt sorry for myself. Also a little hungry. The hymns and stained glass and ceremony were such an astringent kind of loveliness, cold and airy and distant.

It was even colder outside when I left the church; frosted leaves rattled, sweeping the sidewalks. I ducked into another café, shivering so much the waiter brought me a hot cocoa before I ordered. He placed it on the table. “Ici.” I cradled it in both hands, the brew as strong as coffee, so intense it woke me up. I looked at my own dark, liquid dreams. I’d imagined a joyous reunion: a love affair conducted on the city bridges. And when I tried to picture the face of the one I loved, there was nothing. I drank two more cups of that chocolate, watching tourists hustle up the boulevard, their coats belled before them, full of wind.

To fall out of love while continuing to love—just not in that way—is like the reverse of an arranged marriage, in which strangers are able, over time, to fall passionately in love. D. and I reunited after his term in Paris. There was no throwing of dishes, but there was some lively discussion of what it meant to fall in love with other people, how it was, perhaps, not conducive to a marriage—or at least not the sort we might have hoped for. In a few rare, honest moments, I glimpsed the swap that I’d made in my marriages—freedom from my father’s rule in exchange for giving up on desire. Then I assured myself that couldn’t be it—okay, well, the first time, yes—but surely the second was for love. Still, we never again reached for each other; our contact shrank to holding hands. D. and I lived in a sort of cascade of disintegration, neither of us able to look at it directly. We went to films in basement theatres, sprinkled truffle oil on the pasta, talked to each other late into the evenings—as friends, such good, old friends. It seemed at times, in our chaste bed, that friendship was enough to make a marriage. For five years, I missed desire, but not that much. Mostly the idea of it.

We taught, we moved and moved. We talked about houses and babies—as though describing a life built together was the same as having one. Then I applied for my own travel grant.

When we first arrived in Jordan, where I would spend a year writing in the capital city of Amman, D. and I passed our days with friends, driving to ruins and monuments, taking walks that spiraled along the cobbled streets and broken sidewalks, sampling street kabobs and sipping coffee, going drinking and dancing, attending parties in emptied buildings where, at some point, someone would pull out a pistol and shoot at the moon. Occasionally I sat at my desk and stared at the notes for my novel, clutching my hair, not seeing any way out. Then very quickly it was spring break in Jordan, just like in the States, and everyone goes away to somewhere. Istanbul is popular, but my friend Mai proposed a group trip to Cairo. It would be she and Armand and D. and I. We would stay at a large Western-style hotel on Zamalek, the flower-bound island in the center of the city. D. and I had to produce a wedding license—which the hotel takes and stores in a safe—in order to stay in the same room. Mai and Armand each had their own rooms.

At night, I sense footsteps in the hotel corridor past our door, the furtive pressures of embraces and release just beyond the thin wall. They don’t make a sound.

It’s so hot in Cairo that Mai and I dry our hands on our hair in restrooms, the sweat in our clothes dries on our backs. We gaze at the Sphinx and the pyramids through an iridescence of sand; we try to ignore the streams of importuning young Egyptians.

“What time is it, Miss Americans?”

“Hello, hello, how are you? How do you do?”

“You need a guide? I am yours.”

“Idiots. Comedians,” Mai mutters, though more gently than usual. “No wonder they’ll never get anywhere.” Armand makes a diplomatic calming motion, gathering the tips of his fingers, but Mai doesn’t look at him. “Why should I be quiet? They think if you say it in English it doesn’t count.”

At night, the lovely hotel waits and sighs around us. D. sits at the edge of our bed and watches the news in an unfamiliar language. Perversely, I make my lists: Sophie, Iris, Kalani. Because you want the thing you can’t have; you want it the most. I first started making these lists in the fall, around the time we arrived in Jordan. Camille, Daphne, Maya. Girls’ names, since it was all fantasy anyway. My grandmother had passed away three years earlier. I write Grace at the top of each list.

The future is pressing against us. Mai is thirty-two, I’m thirty-three. We don’t speak openly to each other about our dearest hopes. Jordanians, like many non-Americans, have a reserve about their private lives so ingrained it can seem at times like a form of self-preservation. When the Egyptians ask us about who we are and where we come from, Mai responds in a hearty voice, “Ehna Salteeyeen!” We are from Al-Salt! Ancient village of our big, bossy families, a place famous, some say, for stubbornness and for difficult women. It breaks them up, these thin, kohl-eyed people so ready for a laugh. That’s the most we will reveal to the Cairenes. Mai would perhaps be horrified that I am writing these lines about her, this story. I hope for her blessing.

I love Mai most of all for her serrated edge, her impatience, her dignity. She was born this way, with this beautiful, aloof face, her toasted-biscuit color, her eyes like tinted windows. Men are drawn to her, then disconcerted by her manner. We walk through the Khan el-Khalili souq, unanswered wishes weighing us down. I want something permissible yet somehow unattainable, Mai wants something attainable yet not permitted. She is silently in love with Armand. They work together in separate governmental agencies and are fast friends, but there isn’t a whiff of romance about them. Our friend Dobb tells me more: Armand is married, and although he and his wife have been separated for years, they are Italian Catholics and refuse to divorce. Adding to these difficulties, Mai is Muslim and won’t marry outside of her religion. All of the members of this play seem frozen in place, bound by social dictums and family pressures.

“It’s absurd,” I complain to Dobb. “They’re in love—that’s what matters.”

Dobb, a twenty-four-year-old gay Armenian-Christian in Jordan, raises his eyebrows discreetly. “A person can choose to feel however they need to feel.”

“No, you can’t!”

He smirks. “You sound exactly like an American.”

This kind of desire isn’t permitted to a well-brought-up Jordanian girl. The Qur’an says:

Have you seen the one who has chosen his own desire as his lord? God has knowingly caused him to go astray, sealed his ears and heart and veiled his vision. Who besides God can guide him?

The talented Egyptian dancers know how to whirl desire over the expanse of the belly, to swirl it in midair. But the good Jordanian girl must live in the ellipses between ibe (shame) and haram (taboo). The Jordanian girl must move rapidly—from her father’s house to her husband’s, with no funny business in between—if she is ever to move at all. The babies will be the recipients of maternal ardor, the doting gaze a white light upon their limbs. Before marriage, Bud allowed us a little more ambition than that—instead of eros, we might have education or work. We might listen to his recordings of the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum swooning over her unnameable love. We might learn how to twine snake arms overhead, how to lift and drop each hip, to make a belt of coins ring with each kick. There were always the fine distractions of music, or dancing, or visiting, or food; sheets of filo dough, buttered and anointed with syrup, nearly enough to compete with a night in bed.

In a tiny café, I sit beaming below an oil portrait of Naguib Mahfouz: Beside me, Mai doesn’t smile as the waiter snaps our picture.

Both D. and I can see that Mai and Armand are consumed by each other, which might in turn make us a little wistful, feeling the contrast. Only when I see such couples do I feel the edge of what’s missing, the slim blade of the possible and the denied. Though of course none of us express our dangerous thoughts. During the day, they are the very image of opprobrium, scarcely looking in each other’s direction, but they’re sweetened by a residue from the nights. Perhaps Mai and Armand can sense there is something stopped or canceled between me and D., but if so, they don’t let on. Our secrets are shared yet not spoken. I try to remember how or when D. and I stopped touching each other, but there’s no single day, no critical moment to point to. Even when we were young animals, it seems we lived so much in our minds, hearts in cages. There was sex and there was us, a quiet, still zone in between.

On our last day in Cairo, we ask the concierge to take our picture as a group, then we forget the camera on the shuttle bus to the airport. Once at the departure gate, chill descends: Mai arranges that she and I will board in advance of the men. We sit in the eighth row, Armand in the forty-second. We return to lives of friendly distance. I’d hoped that whatever had been set in motion between Mai and Armand in Cairo might come back with them, some embers, crackling at the edges. But fire needs to breathe—they’d made their secret airtight.

That fall, after nine years of marriage, barely a month after D. and I return to the States, unaccountably, I begin giving away clothes. I box my belongings—books, artwork, pots and pans—and offer them to people. I feel compelled to do it: It’s a rush of light and energy, as if I’m increasing freedom with each donation. One morning, I fit my remaining stuff into a few suitcases and some book boxes. It all seems more haphazard than deliberate: I don’t have a plan. I bike around the park blocks near the Portland State campus where I teach, a ruffled, leafy area. An apartment building outfitted with blue awnings catches my eye. The young woman in the front office leads me down the hall, keys jingling, warning, “Now, it’s tiny.” The first thing I see is gray brilliance: The Willamette River shines like nickel through the panes.

Of course, I put off telling them.

Weeks go by, then more weeks. I don’t know how to admit to this much failure and I’m afraid of their reaction. When my parents call, D. is “napping,” or he “just ran out.” Frequently, he’s “in the shower. He says hi.” Suddenly, three months have passed: Every couple of days I drive to our old apartment to check the mail rather than confess to a new address. For a while, I imagine that not telling is actually my way of being boldly independent . . . until all at once it just seems like cowardice. I pick up the phone, try to piece words together. I put the phone down. In desperation, I sit before the computer. I write, “So guys, hey, sorry to do this by email, but I’ve been meaning to tell you a little something. . . .”

Mom writes back, “Yeah, we didn’t think he took that many showers.”

Two minutes after Mom’s response, Bud calls. “You want me I should round up the boys, go pay the kelb a visit?” He’s offering to beat my ex, the dog, no questions asked—but he puts it in an affable, conversational way.

“Bud. It’s fine. Things just—they weren’t right. For a really long time. We just didn’t. . . .”

“What? What didn’t you?”

I fish for the words, searching the air. “It’s hard to really—”

“Did he beat you?” Bud still suspects (incorrectly) that the first kelb beat me.

“Dad,” I sigh. I can’t think of any way to explain this that he could really get his head around. I hardly understand it myself. “No, Dad.”

“Not a little?”

“No.”

“I never trusted him,” he says (a lie). “He didn’t like to sit and talk to me. Not for more than an hour or two.” Here is my father’s best, truest test of character: who is willing to spend days at a time, without cease, talking to him? That is the person who can be trusted.

“No, Bud, you were right.”

“If only you will listen.” Now he sighs.

“If only.”

Three years earlier, my grandmother had spent her final days in a hospital bed. We’d returned to written messages, our old form of communication, since she’d had thyroid surgery, her neck too swollen for speech. These notes between us seemed like quiet last words, though none of us acknowledged this. She bent over a notepad, then showed us her lovely penmanship saying how happy she was that my sisters and I were “settled” and “squared away.” I’m not sure she imagined that any of us difficult, untamable girls actually wanted to be married, but she would have felt sorry about losing D. Over the years, she’d knitted him several immense pullovers that he dutifully sweated into each time we visited her. A few months before anyone knew she was sick, we’d gone to a family dinner. D. sat on her left and treated her to his rolling laugh as she told him scandalous family stories about Aunt Myrtle, Father Liam, and the mystery baby—my cousin Padraic—or the three bachelor uncles who shared a bed but weren’t actually brothers. Listening well was another of his virtues. Afterward, he could recount hair-raising things about my extended family—including the backstory of the cousin who’d claimed to be a prophet and kick-started his own cult—that I’d never heard before.

But I’d imagine Grace would’ve been as philosophical about my second split as she was about the first. Among her many brothers and sisters, she was the only one to spend most of her life single; this, she swore, was the key to happiness. After my first divorce, she’d said, merely, “Well, I’m just glad you got that out of your system.”

Two years after I left Jordan, Mai was diagnosed with a monstrous, nearly unknown form of cancer: It sprang, seemingly, from nowhere, leeching the life force from her blood. She came to the States seeking medical attention. Still exquisite, aloof, and tanned, she looked not at all sick.

I have started seeing someone new: Mai likes him. He slips an arm around my waist and I think I see the wistfulness on her face that I’d felt in Cairo. When it’s time for her to return to Jordan, she clings to my shoulders and whispers in my ear, “I’m so scared.”

That would be the last time I saw Mai. I learned of her death through friends of friends, weeks after the funeral near her parents’ home in Al-Salt.

There is something I think I couldn’t quite get until I was a bit older, which is that there are unique configurations of time and people. They belong to each other for a while, months or years, atoms in a crystal, until eventually, bit by bit, they fall away. That’s the part a younger person doesn’t believe—that it won’t last forever, that this assortment will never come together again.

I see my grandmother in one of her flowing “pajama suits,” seated at the restaurant table, this one oversize and rectangular, leaning into D., squeezing his elbow, the two of them laughing, coconspirators. I see Mai seated at the breakfast table beside me in Cairo, turning on her finger a gold ring, stamped with large Roman numerals, a ring I’d never seen her wear before, one that slipped, just a bit loose, the last time we saw each other.

All things in due time, my grandmother liked to say, as if eventually desires become clear, the dearest wishes rise to the surface, and all best possibilities pass through your net if you just hold it out long enough. But I began to feel that wasn’t quite true, that one must swing, and swing the net high and wide. There is never enough time and the net is too small. After almost thirty-five years of family, roommates, and husbands, the move into the tiny apartment marked the first time in my life I would truly live in my own space. I’d touched the sliding glass door, the pane so thin I could feel the traffic thrum of a distant bridge along the bones in my forearm. The sense of this opening out, threaded with fear, was also sharp and sure, a diamond-hard bolt: the first moment of hearing your own voice. It takes such a long time, I thought, to get to the starting place.