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“I’M FINALLY GOING TO meet my Egyptian princess!” She was to be my second date and the only reaction I got from Rie was the shaking of her head from side to side and the tightly pursed lips. “What?” I asked.
She looked up from her paperwork. “Where is she going to stay?”
“In a hotel I guess.”
“And how will you see her?”
“I can take time off from work.”
She wrinkled her brow, which made her squint as if she was having difficulty seeing.
“This woman is leaving Egypt to come visit you in Trinidad? That’s a long distance. Clay, she’s in love with you and I don’t think you should be leading her on.”
“She’ll be in the States for a conference, and since she is so close by, she thought that she should just visit. Who knows when next she’ll be on this side of the world?”
Rie continued to shake her head vigorously and I feared I would soon have to pick it up off the floor. I really could not understand Rie’s fear and doubt. What could my Egyptian princess do to me? It was not like I was heading off to Egypt where Muslim law ruled and it was not appropriate for men and women to freely associate as they do in western societies. I was definitely allergic to a public beheading, or to a public anything that involved the chopping off of any of my body parts.
Why would Rie be so presumptuous as to say that my Egyptian princess had to be in love with me to come all this way to meet me? Still, I liked the sound of that. Maybe it was the hand of Providence rewarding me with an exotic beauty for all those years of trying to keep my underwear on, only narrowly managing to do so in some cases. This was the stuff of the fairy tales I had read as a child: a prince turned up to rescue a princess from a dark dream and they lived happily ever after. The roles were reversed now, however.
I remember the day I started chatting with my princess online. It was the same day that one of my well-intentioned friends had sent me, via e-mail, a prayer for single adults. I had prayed it dutifully and had continued to do so for a while. In the prayer I prayed for the woman I was one day going to marry. I prayed that God would protect her and prepare her to be my wife, the kind of wife that I would need: someone to love me, to encourage me to be my best, and who would put up with my weaknesses.
That very night I met Layla online. I was just checking my mail when her message popped up. There was a seven-hour time difference, but she had taken the day off from work and was using one of her rare free moments to do things that she did not normally do. We chatted casually at first and then she asked me what I looked like.
“Tall, dark and handsome,” was my usual answer to any variation of this question.
“Dark as in African?”
That was where I thought she was going to bail on me. “Yes. We are descendants of slaves brought here by Europeans.”
I was not ready for her response. “That’s one thing we have in common,” she said. “We’re both black.”
The conversation continued, delaying my trip to the shower at an hour that was beyond my self-imposed bedtime. I could tell that Layla was unhappy with her life and I tried to encourage her as best as I knew how. Luckily for me I had read many self-improvement books and I could still remember what they said.
Then she asked, “How old are you?”
Okay, this is it, I told myself. Should I lie to try to hold on to this girl with her funny English and creative spelling knowing that I might never meet her in real life, or tell her the truth and let that be the end of the conversation? Certainly no woman my age chatted online. That was something that young people did.
“I’m thirty-eight.”
“Clay,” she wrote. “You are such a wise man. Do you think we can continue to e-mail each other?”
Yes!
Over the next year Layla and I e-mailed each other regularly. I found it easy to share with her all that was going on with me and to answer all the questions she had about my family, my past and my country. From time to time she would send me an electronic card for no reason at all, just to wish me a good day or she might send something poetic or with a hint of romance. I liked that. I liked the fact that someone could think the best of me from my letters alone.
Then she asked for my picture and told me that I should not ask for hers. I respected that and thought that it was some female thing, like never asking a woman her age or her weight. I dutifully sent her my best picture, the one of me pretending to be captain behind the wheel of a boat. She did not comment and I was only a little disappointed.
As our friendship grew, I felt Layla relax. She told me that she was ten years younger than me, that she lived at home with her parents, but that she was not getting on well with her father. She told me that she had two younger sisters who were already married and that she had to work two jobs just so that she could afford some “women things” that I, as a man, would not understand. She had dreams of living in Europe where she could learn to speak English better, and to pursue something else besides her job at a primary school. She wanted to see the world.
When I was down, I was surprised and pleased to see that Layla had written to me before leaving home for work, to give me words that would lift my spirits. She was a gentle soul and though I did not recognize it, someone was playing with my heart strings.
“Clay Powers, I hope you know what you are doing,” Rie said, surrendering.
Of course I did. And I would prove Rie, and all the other doubters, wrong when I brought my Egyptian princess to work with me one day soon.
