Three parties, p.13
Three Parties, page 13
“Good!” came a voice from the living room, followed by a loudening mechanical thrum. Jido rolled into the corridor and pointed to the tween, who flinched as though the old man’s finger had poked him right in the chest. “This is the kind of person your mosque should have.”
“What kind is that?” asked Noura, unsure whether she was supposed to feign pride or concern.
“A shit-starter.”
“Fuck yeah!”
“Astaghfirullah!”
“My mosque is about communion, Amo, not divisiveness,” said the sheikh.
“If it were really about communion, you wouldn’t refer to it as ‘my mosque.’ ”
Firas credited the sheikh for retaining his sagacity around the old man. But part of him suspected he was only able to retain it because he wasn’t really listening.
“Have a good night,” Firas’s father said, opening the door and ushering them out before anything more could come out of the old man’s mouth. But before they were out the door, Sheikh Mehdi turned back to Firas.
“Feel free to refer your Arab friends to me. I will mold them just right.”
“Astaghfirullah.” This time, the exclamation came not from Noura but from the old man, who sank into a daze that no one registered but Firas.
“Well, when Firas gets married,” Nasser added, “I hope his marriage will be filled with nothing but joy.”
“Inshallah,” both his parents said, cuing their son with a glance for the refrain.
“Inshallah I’ll have a happy marriage.”
“Inshallah I will get to officiate it!”
“Inshallah,” his parents responded, another glance in Firas’s direction. When the refrain did not come, they leaned forward contentiously. Alas, he was undeterred in his silence.
“Thanks for saying I was badass!” the tween shouted to the old man from the porch.
“That’s not what he called you!” hissed Noura, nudging him forward.
Once the door closed behind them, Firas’s parents went in separate directions, he to the bathroom, she up the stairs.
Firas stared at his grandfather and wanted so much to ask him another series of questions, only this time not with politeness to fill the time, but with meaning to fill an altogether different void. But the old man rolled himself back into the living room to gaze out the windows, their chiffon-white muntins crisscrossing oppressively along the panes. Jido had his own questions to ask, hoping for the answers to sprout from the Dareers’ barren yard.
CHAPTER
NINE
The water was reaching the edge of the tub. He had originally planned for a shower, but the inevitable deconstruction would require more time. Once he ensured the water was at the temperature that always soothed him, he descended into the tub and sighed. He would take a few minutes for himself, he decided. A few minutes to enjoy his amicable divorce from chaos, the self-care that often comforted an entire generation to the chagrin of their overtired parents. The water caressed his skin, moaning to him its wisdom. Life is rest, Firas. All else is madness.
Before he proceeded with the deconstruction, he was forced to wonder how his mother’s indiscretion began. It must have been the heart attack that prompted it. People change after skirting death. Typically they eventually change back, the fear of the other side no match for the comfortable predictability of this one. Numbness was one of Time’s many jagged weapons, wielded methodically against the mind long before its victims even realized they were under attack. But surely a chosen few commit to the change, those whose glimpse of the other side goes far deeper than a flash of images. A correction is made in the lens: a higher f-stop to brighten the corners of the frame, a longer focal length to reduce converging verticals, nary a blur or chromatic aberration. Clarity in its most unadulterated form.
How long had Firas’s mother had this enhanced lens?
Her stay at the hospital nearly three years ago lasted an entire week. Her job at the bank provided her and her family with terrific health coverage, and she enjoyed being waited on and pampered, despite the circumstances. In that one week, the rest of the Dareers visited as often as they could. Firas’s father, every day; Firas, every other day; Suhad and Mazen on the weekend. But upon her return to the house, where she spent most of the ensuing weeks in bed or, coveting a change of scenery, the peach English roll-arm in the living room, few visits were made by any of them. Appearances were made, certainly, regular check-ins about her physical status, reminders of upcoming appointments, deliveries of meals on her glass-rimmed resin tray, which she thought too fancy for everyday use, although her recuperation was not an everyday situation. But no one in the family sat with her as they had in the hospital. Firas’s father was working long hours, Firas and Suhad were buried by their course loads, and Mazen was a helpless child.
Firas proceeded with the deconstruction of his mother’s text, beginning with the last segment: about us. To whom did us refer? As far as Firas had ever known, the word us never emerged from his mother’s mouth but to describe herself and her husband, or herself and her children, or herself and society. There was no us that did not include another Dareer. Yet someone had infiltrated us. Stained the word with strangeness, poisoned it with anonymity. He tried to remember how many months it had been before his mother was back to her normal physical state. It must have been three at most, or she would have surely lost her job. Three months without visitors, aside from the sheikh and a handful of congregators who seldom made an impression on her. He remembered one time hurtling past the living room towards the front door and glimpsing Maysa sitting there with her. He heard no dialogue as he tucked his feet into his shoes, no noise beyond a hoarse Do you need anything? Could it have been then that she’d had the idea to do it? Could Firas really have been one of the seeds to sprout an extramarital affair?
Then the second segment: my husband never found out. The word never implied a long time, and was the main reason Firas suspected the idea came during her recuperation. For the most part, his mother appeared as tired as someone in recovery would. She lay there, waiting for the strength to return and wondering what to do in the meantime. Reading the Sunnah to strengthen her mind, strolling across the bedroom to strengthen her body. But what of her soul? That, too, needed recuperation; that, too, was weakened by the scuff of Death. Maysa was certainly not the answer, which meant someone else needed to be.
Firas thought of his cuckolded father and winced. Less out of pity than out of sheer disgust. The man truly had no clue. Even as his mother kept checking her phone in front of their sheikh(!), his father seemed genuinely bewildered and willing to believe she was merely checking the weather report. Perhaps that obliviousness was the problem. That a man could be so ignorant about his own wife seemed, in a way, an even bigger marital tort than the adultery. It was exemplary of a need some spouses had to see only the best in one another, an expectation that no misdeeds be committed, a right they felt they’d earned simply by saying I do; eventually the complexity of their partner, taken for granted after one too many passionless nights, bubbles to the surface and explodes. This obliviousness reminded Firas of Tyrese. He had never cheated on Tyrese, but it was remarkable how easily he could have. How easily he could have withheld from him, how easily he was already withholding from him. Tyrese never could see through the veil, no matter how thinly Firas wore it. One time after making love in Tyrese’s bed, Firas received a barrage of text messages from Kashif asking him to meet. They hadn’t seen each other since the New Year’s party, every pixel of Firas’s memory still in painfully sharp focus. The texts displayed the spelling and grammatical errors of unsteady fingers, and their content was bold even for Kashif; he was drunk-texting him at three o’clock in the morning—a booty call. When Tyrese, awoken by the repeated dings, asked who was texting, Firas told him it was his mother, whom he’d forgotten to lie to about spending the night at a study partner’s house given that he had a final exam the next morning. When the dings continued, Tyrese asked what his mother wanted now, to which Firas replied she was just wishing him luck on the exam. There were seven dings between the first lie and the second. Firas added that his mother was also texting him a list of things to purchase from the halal butcher shop because they had guests coming over the next night. In a panic, he turned off his phone without texting back. The following morning, Tyrese said that Firas had made him crave halal food all night, then he kissed him and jokingly wished him luck on his “exam.” And that was it. An overbearing mother needing him to purchase halal meat was a believable spin on fourteen successive texts at three o’clock in the morning. No, Firas had never cheated on Tyrese, but this blithe naïveté almost made him want to. In fact, it almost made him hate Tyrese. The way he laughed off his marriage proposal that morning, so sure it was some sort of gag. Firas absolutely despised that laugh. A piercing cachinnation, a mutation of something pure and hearty shamelessly overstaying its welcome each time it made an entrance. Had Tyrese really known him, known him in the way that only love could make one know somebody, he would have recognized the proposal as the rare moment in which the veil was lifted. The even rarer moment that the face behind it was just as it was in childhood: gentle, chaste, eager for whatever came next. Firas was giving himself to another person wholly and bravely. And he was laughed at. No words preceded the laughter, no words followed it. Tyrese simply checked his phone, made his bed, went about his business. The message was clear, the blow cataclysmic. Tyrese rejected not merely Firas’s marriage proposal; he rejected Firas. The real Firas, not whatever he’d been pretending to be all this time. The Firas that nobody had ever been graced with.
Firas had left his apartment without saying anything, the architecture conference badge grasped loosely in his hand. He should have known Tyrese was not the right man for him. The fact that he never even asked if he could come to his birthday party was itself a troubling sign. If he had really loved Firas, he would have wanted to be there to support him, to nurse him back to health, for surely his mind and heart would ail. Tyrese was always sensitive to Firas’s feelings, but without any nerve to help resolve those feelings through actions, what precisely was the point of him? What was the point of their relationship? A star and his spectator, the latter chiming in with critiques about the show but always leaving out the part of how well the role was played. This was not a relationship. This was, Firas now suspected, what his mother and father had.
He moved on to the first segment: I told you. This referenced their past; more specifically, it referenced a past conversation between the familiar half of us and the unfamiliar half of us. The words denoted a hint of frustration—I ALREADY FUCKING TOLD YOU!—for she now had to remind this other half of something she didn’t want to have to keep reminding him of. This other half was a terrible listener, never hearing his mother’s words, her assurances of which, in her fragile physical state, she already had so few left to spare. Or if he was listening, he refused to believe her, insinuating that her assurances were falsehoods, calling her a dirty rotten liar, accusing her of revealing their affair to the one person in the world she promised never to reveal it to. He gaslit her into thinking she really had revealed the affair to her husband, forcing her fragile mind to trace back every single step for the past three years to see if it was true and she simply forgot. Surely this other half knew what she’d done better than she herself had known it, surely he was the more trustworthy of the two, the smart, sensible buck to the feeble, helpless doe. This other half was a gaslighting, misogynistic, sociopathic CREEP!
But it may have been concern. This other half might have been terrified that word had circulated somehow and was now desperate to control the damage. Terrified that his wife would discover his infidelity and desperate to remain good and true in the eyes of his children, who, in the late-night hour at which their mother dragged them into her minivan and towards a distant motel, would cry out weak and weary for their Baba.
Baba.
Firas assumed this other half was Arab. He had no reason to assume he was; he simply had trouble picturing his mother with a man of a different race. Then again, she had no Arab friends, aside from Noura and Nasser. Only Noura, really, for Arab couples of that generation could only ever be friends with the partner of their own gender, mere awkward acquaintances with the other. And Noura wasn’t even a close friend, for they had little in common beyond their regular attendance at the mosque and matching hairstyles—wavy, medium-length, with wispy bangs—which his mother suspected Noura had deliberately copied just to outshine her. He recalled when the Dareers first moved to Dearborn. In their old apartment, they were surrounded by Arabs, Palestinians in particular. All of them flashing warm smiles, extending warm invitations, baking warm knafeh whose tranquilizing smell hovered in the crisp night air of their neighborhood. The sense of community thrived there, each neighbor sharing with one another what they could not share with others: language, mannerisms, tastes, ideals, beliefs, goals, history, identity. Whatever differences existed in the crevices of these similarities were negligible as far as they were all concerned. The Palestinian cause in particular held meaning for everyone, the glue that bound together this elaborate support system. His parents initially accepted all these shared traits. Then they didn’t. Then they moved.
The Dareers didn’t hate that they were Palestinian, nor did they ever hide it. It was simply irrelevant. The equivalent of what color their eyes were or which shoes they wore to the grocery store. When Firas first met Kashif, the latter regularly asked him about his time in Gaza, what it was like living under occupation, what did he do on a day-to-day basis, did he ever feel angry or scared. And Firas disappointed him each time by claiming he didn’t remember much. He did remember certain things, of course—groves whose lemons hung just out of his reach, congested alleyways he used as shortcuts, his family friend’s irrigation tank that doubled as a swimming pool in the summer, the handcrafted ceramic plates in the cragged hands of potters who knew how to haggle, and the swirling rumors of an “Indian pendant state” that eventually fell silent. But none of these memories would have satisfied Kashif, who was looking for something more significant, something along the lines of Firas witnessing his grandmother’s murder at the hands of an Israeli soldier. Something that would further validate his anger and his hunger for righteousness. When he realized that Firas would not be the one to satisfy these needs, he finally stopped asking.
As for the Second Intifada, Kashif figured if Firas could hardly remember the happy or even ordinary moments of his life in Gaza, then he would likely not remember the more traumatic events a child was bound to suppress. Firas did not, however, suppress anything. He remembered the Intifada quite well, at least the part he was there for. But each memory was muddled by the fog of childhood. Friends of his parents showed up at the house, never to be seen again. “They went to Japan to preach the word of Allah,” his father told him with a brave smile. Regular trips to Jerusalem were canceled. “We have already seen it, we must let others have a turn,” his mother explained with frightening zeal. Airplanes no longer shimmered among the stars over their house. “The airport is being renovated,” his father whispered as he wiped the sweat from his brow. The rest was cacophony—wailing car horns, raspy plane engines, thunderous shakes of the ground, the twang of bullets, and squeals cut short before they could echo—all buried beneath the nasheed his parents sang to their children, usually a cappella and sometimes with an oud.
He also remembered much of what preceded the Intifada. The stationing of Israeli soldiers in venerable neighborhoods; Gazans stumbling home under a bleak sky to meet curfew; weddings and funerals interrupted by arrests; bulldozers demolishing homes older than the state that sent them; the Hebrew language stretching its shadow across new settlements; raucous protests he only caught in peeks through his bedroom window; friends who were in school one day and became urban legends the next. But the Dareers endured all this—at least until the day Firas’s Teta was shot. The first Dareer to succumb to Israeli terror since the Nakba; before then, the family had lived under a cloud of dread that was waiting for the right moment to rain its storm onto their lives. They knew they were not lucky or special; they knew that if Fate were singling them out from the brutality of occupation and colonialism, it was for a more severe punishment than any other Gazan in their camp had ever suffered. Firas couldn’t remember any of the details surrounding his Teta’s murder, nor could he remember how exactly his family had managed to flee after the Israel-Gaza barrier was rebuilt with an added buffer zone and new high-tech observation posts. But he could not legitimately claim to be traumatized. All of that was irrelevant to him now, as much so as the nasty English teacher who once called him an imbecile in front of the entire class after Firas noted his teacher’s confusion of its with it’s. Now he didn’t even live near Palestinian-Americans. Like his mother, he had no real Arab friends, besides Kashif, and even that seemed destined to evolve into something more.
He was never quite sure what kept drawing him to Kashif, given how often he unnerved him. Firas would convince himself it was the sex—Kashif was the greatest lover he’d ever had. The fact that he could make Firas feel so good at such a young age foreshadowed a sex life of icons. Kashif would grow up to become everyone’s greatest. His secret was in his utter lack of technique. There were lovers with technique who were good, some who were great, and some who were awful; but those who had no technique at all were almost always the worst. They made such a mess of things: hands that squeezed the chest too tightly, teeth that grazed the shaft too sharply, thrusts that were either felt too hard or not at all, and an assault of pecks forgotten just as quickly as they were delivered. When these lovers bottomed in reverse-cowboy position, Firas had the added responsibility of making sure they didn’t lose their balance and tumble off the bed. At times he was forced to intervene, offer instructions as a teacher to a student he knew would never pass the course. But with Kashif, technique simply would not do. He made love with abandon, the sweat blasting off his hair, cascading down his chest, igniting a bright light directly below it that you soon discovered was your own body, his sweat pooling around your navel and glistening onto his reddened face, accentuating his velvet skin, his head jittering down, down, down until his lips brushed against yours so faintly it tickled. His movements were chaotic; he never thought about what he had to do, relying solely on instinct, an instinct that was never wrong because of how much faith he always put in it. And he was never passive in bed; even when he bottomed in missionary, his hands developed minds of their own and they stroked, pinched, squeezed, rubbed, scratched, gauging the resulting moan or gasp to know just how much further he could push without falling over the edge. Why couldn’t Tyrese make love in that manner? Why didn’t Tyrese ever urge him to come out of the closet? For a long while, Firas thought this a good thing, a relief. But now he saw it as a way of enabling the fundamental lie of his life. Was Tyrese so indifferent as to whether Firas lived a life of honesty? Sometimes it seemed as though he only cared so he could get his roommate Karine to stop lecturing him. He didn’t love Firas. People in love don’t give conference badges as birthday presents. Even though Tyrese had said to him the words, he could no longer believe them. Yet even though Kashif had never said the words, Firas knew the love was there. It was there when he called Firas a pussy. It was there in all the times they fucked in not-so-private places. It was there when he visited the Dareer house to apologize for his vicious letter, for such a reckless act could have only come out of a misguided sense of honor. The fire that burned so hot had by then dwindled, and its ashes bore the bitter taste of regret. All Kashif really needed was someone to tame the fire before it burned anyone else. How perfect he would be with the right partner.
