Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  The others cheered and clinked glasses, but it had escaped nobody’s notice that the atmosphere in the room had changed. With Jomo’s weird ramblings still ringing in their ears, the group’s social energy seemed to have dissipated. Where had it gone? Into the fish tanks? To another close-knit group of college friends at a different table in the restaurant?

  Jomo sat back down despondently and refilled his glass with so much orange wine it almost sloshed over the top. Rowan, unsure what else to say, also took his seat.

  Thankfully, at that point, the dessert arrived. It was a croquembouche, a pyramid of choux pastries held together with caramel sauce, with a candle balanced on top. Mariam led the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ and set about expertly dismantling the tower in order to serve it – no mean feat, for the thing was huge and became more unstable with every pastry ball she excavated from its sides.

  Rowan used his fingers to eat the pastry – it was the only sensible option – and watched as Jules tried to cheer Jomo up, talking to him, touching his shoulder, all the while unaware that she was the immediate cause of his misery. She was wearing a cream dress that looked like it was made of satin or silk, not at all her usual style. For non-work occasions (that is, events where there weren’t other film stars present), she tended to underdress, hiding her light under a bushel.

  The dress looked unfortunately – given Jomo’s state of mind – like a wedding dress. It was in the style of one Mariam had wanted to buy for their own wedding, before her mother talked her out of it for being too similar to the dress the doomed young wife of JFK Jr. had worn only a few years before their plane went down on the way to Martha’s Vineyard. At the time, the dress fiasco had turned into a major conflict between Mariam and her parents. Her father had weighed in too, saying something typically demeaning about the kind of body a woman would need in order to wear it well. Rowan had fiercely supported Mariam in every argument she had with them until, eventually, her defenses worn down, she’d capitulated and bought a different dress.

  A waitress entered the private dining room holding a magnum of champagne. ‘For the table, from a secret wellwisher,’ she said, unwiring and uncorking it with a practiced hand so that only a sigh escaped from the bottle’s tapered mouth, like a genie set free.

  She filled their flutes as they all turned to peer out the room’s entrance, wondering who had sent it. Nobody made eye contact to take credit for the extravagant gift. It was the sort of champagne that was so pricey it was listed at the very back of the wine list; Rowan was sure it cost thousands of dollars.

  Eloise was looking closely at the label. ‘That’s strange. It’s the same kind as the one sent to us on the night I proposed to Binx, at our last reunion.’

  At that point, Binx stood and clinked her fork against her glass. She was wearing the same gray tunic she’d been wearing the night before. Had she not had time to change? From what Rowan had heard while crossing the Yard that day, the fifth-reunion attendees were having a hell of a lot more fun than the rest of them. They’d had vodka on tap while Lady Gaga performed burlesque inside a Spiegeltent. And that was at eleven in the morning.

  ‘Whoever sent it over, it’s good timing, as we have something to announce,’ Binx said, glancing at Eloise, who was sitting very, very still, as if she had been paralyzed and could not even blink.

  Rowan had noticed in the past that Eloise’s face sometimes took on a complicated expression whenever Binx, fired up with her usual zeal, was about to say something in a group: 99 per cent pride and 1 per cent dread.

  ‘Eloise and I have decided to hire a surrogate to have a baby,’ Binx said. As everybody started excitedly congratulating them, she waved them silent. ‘Not due to difficulties getting pregnant ourselves. We don’t believe that just because we can biologically conceive and carry a baby we should be forced to use our bodies for that purpose.’

  Rowan looked across at Jules and Mariam and saw they both had fixed smiles on their faces as they tried to process this information. But something in him snapped. Was Binx implying that he had forced Mariam into carrying their daughters as if she were a helpless captive to her female biology? Or that Mariam hadn’t had a choice in the matter, that she wouldn’t choose to do it all over again?

  ‘I don’t want to speak for Mariam,’ he said. ‘Though I can speak for myself. The experience of supporting her through her pregnancies, and her births, which were the highlights of her life and also of mine . . .’

  Mariam was making signals at him to be quiet.

  Rowan kept going. ‘You make all that sound like it’s indentured labor, Binx. Yet for most people, nothing else they go through will be more meaningful.’

  ‘But all you ever do is complain about parenthood,’ Binx said, in a singsong tone that inflamed Rowan’s indignation further, as if they were having a discussion about whether it was better to burp a baby over your shoulder or your knee, not about whether it was morally okay to outsource pregnancy and birth for no good reason.

  ‘We want to do things differently,’ she continued. ‘And we will begin by exercising our human right to choose how we become parents.’

  Binx did not understand him. She could never understand him, how he felt about Mariam and his children. That parenting for him was hard because he was all-in. There was nothing more he could give of himself, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. She wouldn’t get that because she had never had to think of anybody but herself.

  And she would not get it even if they did have this mail-order baby, Rowan thought, because she wouldn’t let herself be changed by the experience of becoming a parent. She and Eloise were going to arrange everything to suit their own needs, cutting out all of the messy, painful, difficult bits. They’d probably already arranged to buy breast milk for a fortune from a milk collective (or on the black market; who knew what Binx could find on the dark web with her skills). They’d probably already lined up a night nanny to do the night feeds and settling, and a few day nannies to do the parenting in daylight hours. They would have a baby and yet nothing in their lives would really change.

  The audaciousness of Binx and Eloise’s choice helped Rowan see that he believed very much that having a child should change you, and in order for that change to happen, you had to be there. If you were, then the rewards of parenting were so great that they could not ever really be put into words. That was part of the problem, and the reason why Binx had misunderstood his feelings about being a parent – it was impossible for him to find the language to express to anybody the enormity of the love he felt for the girls, the huge, expanding gratitude he felt to be a father, the richness of his hourly, daily, weekly engagement with them. Only Mariam understood.

  Rowan knew that what he was about to say was so repellent that Mariam might never forgive him for it, but he was so angry he said it anyway. ‘You have two good wombs in your marriage,’ he said to Binx and Eloise. ‘It seems selfish not to use at least one of them.’

  That did it: the shitstorm broke for real.

  There was a period of exaggerated female gasping that would have been funny had Mariam’s gasp not been the loudest.

  Binx, for once, seemed to be at a loss for a comeback. She looked surprised, and flushed, as if Rowan had slapped her. He hadn’t been aware it was within his power to hurt Binx’s feelings – she’d always seemed immune to criticism, in that shrug-it-off way of many millennials. Was she even a millennial? Or was Binx herself too old to fit in that category?

  Jomo started saying something about respect for the choices of others, and Rowan turned on his friend. ‘Shut up, Jomo. You’ve got no idea what it means to take responsibility for anybody else.’

  Next, Jules tried to mediate. ‘I appreciate that you both have strong convictions . . .’

  Rowan had forgotten that Jules had once done the narration for a documentary that criticized baby-farming practices in India, where poor women became surrogates for wealthy Europeans. Maybe that was why she was trying to play peacemaker now.
r />   Rowan was on a roll, though. He shook his head vehemently and cut her off.

  ‘All of you – and you in particular, Jules – are totally insulated from the real world by your wealth,’ he said. ‘You think you’re taking the part of the underdog here. But can’t you see who the oppressors are in this situation? It’s Eloise and Binx! They are buying themselves a baby that someone else, someone who needs the money, has to grow! Mariam, I know you agree with me!’ The last bit he said with a rising tone of desperation.

  ‘I don’t agree with a single word you’ve said tonight,’ she said, in a scarily low tone he’d never heard her use before.

  Eloise left the room then, followed by Jules.

  Jomo sank back into his chair, looking wretched.

  Rowan felt naked, all of a sudden: he had revealed to the others this streak of violent contrarianism that he contained, something he’d learned to suppress early on in his marriage. But what was so wrong about disliking groupthink, on the left as much as on the right?

  Rowan’s rage began to fizzle out. Lately he was so fragile. The champagne was going flat in flutes abandoned around the table. What a waste! Things felt as if they were falling apart. Probably the only Yeats poem he had ever read, if he was honest. Turning and turning in the widening gyre . . . the centre cannot hold.

  Mariam was speaking in apologetic tones to Binx, trying to smooth things over.

  His wife was wearing her hair in a loose braid – her go-to solution, he knew, for when the weather was humid and her curls were untamable – and a sleeveless rose-colored dress. As he looked at her, she reached beneath the high neckline of her dress and absentmindedly, as she talked to Binx, drew out her necklace. She was not wearing the asteroid pendant he’d given her that morning for their wedding anniversary. She was wearing the silver cross on a chain.

  When he was having a hard time, he reached for Mariam, but apparently in times of need she now reached for God. He remembered what that felt like from his years as a believer. Eighteen of them, if you could say a newborn believed in anything but the wonderful soft shape of his mother. His mom had taken him to church with her from the first week of his life, had practically walked out of the hospital and into the baptismal chamber. She had only wanted the impossible, what every parent wants: a promise from above that her baby would be kept safe forever.

  He let himself weep, the tears flowing down his cheeks for the second time that day. At the service for deceased classmates that morning – two young souls whose time had been so cruelly foreshortened – he had sat in one of the pews in Memorial Church and, though he had not known either of them well, he’d wept through each slideshow, each piece of favorite music, each tribute from friends and past roommates.

  Just as Jomo had sobbed through the funeral service for Mariam’s father. That had infuriated Mariam, though Rowan hadn’t understood why – it was only natural to grieve for your own losses, real or imagined, at a funeral. Of course he hadn’t been thinking of his two classmates that morning but of all that he had to lose.

  He’d been thinking about the day he and Mariam made their marriage vows to each other in that very same church. Arm in arm with her father, in the demure lace wedding dress that had been her second choice, she had walked down the red carpet laid between the pews, beneath the vaulted snow-white ceiling held up by colonnades. He had stood breathlessly waiting for her to reach him at the front of the church, watching the light pour in sideways from the huge arched windows, illuminating her veil.

  That day, he had still been more his mother’s son than Mariam’s husband – so much so that he’d convinced Mariam to keep his mother happy by getting married in a church. It struck him only now that Mariam too had been, at that point, more her parents’ daughter than his wife. Yet he had believed she belonged only to him.

  In all their subsequent years of married life, there had been only one other time when he’d felt like he did right now – unsure of what Mariam wanted from him, who she needed him to be.

  Ironically, it had been on their honeymoon.

  They’d spent their first year of marriage saving up for the trip to Syria and Jordan, the region of Mariam’s ancestry. Her parents, and his, had tried to talk them out of going, but it had not been unsafe – this was in 2004, long before the current unrest began.

  Years after the fact, they’d joked about how out of character their constant honeymoon bickering had been. They’d written it off as an aberration brought on by the stress of overseas travel in countries where neither of them spoke the language. But had it really only been that?

  When he was back home in Phoenix over the summer between his freshman and sophomore year, pining for Mariam, calling her day and night, his mother had shared a Puerto Rican proverb with him, which was how she usually tried to give him important life advice. It translated as ‘learn to swim but guard your clothing’. What she meant, as far as he could tell, was that he should hold more of himself back from Mariam, that he was making himself too available to her. But that was impossible: he could not draw back from Mariam. He couldn’t pretend to turn down the wattage of his feelings for her.

  And that had worked for him all through college, and in their first year of marriage. But on their honeymoon, something had gone awry.

  The first problem had been that Rowan couldn’t stand not being physically affectionate to her in public – but in Syria and Jordan that was considered a crime. As was wearing shorts, which he also did anyway.

  Mariam, however, had wanted him to respect the cultural rules of the countries in which they were visitors. Irritated at his suggestion that they should sit side by side on the many bus trips they took, she would go to the back of the vehicle and sit beside all the veiled women, leaving him to sit with the men at the front. There he was interrogated as to ‘how to give an American woman oral pleasure’ and asked all sorts of other lewd and invasive questions about his sex life. These men, the ones who could speak a bit of English, could not believe that in America it was not legal to have more than one wife – in Jordan, it was legal to have up to four – and yet it was okay to dance with a woman who was not your wife.

  The strict divisions between the genders in those countries, he’d felt, had made some of the men childish, obsessed with sex like adolescents. He’d felt angry about this a lot of the time while they were over there – he had imagined that there would be more respect for women in those cultures, not less.

  Usually he was the bleeding-heart liberal in their marriage, the one who thought that everything should be forgiven in the name of cultural relativism. In the lead-up to their honeymoon, he had read every book he could find on the history of the region, and had been desperate to make real, warm human connections with the people there, to apologize for all his sins as an American. But once they arrived, all that went out the window. He’d felt defensive and unapologetically proud of being American, and also irrationally protective of Mariam, as if her honor were at stake. Every man there seemed to see her as a slutty Westerner, open to any sort of sexual advance, though she always wore long clothing and covered her hair.

  Mariam had not liked that version of him much. Or at all.

  At almost every guesthouse they’d stayed in as they traveled about Jordan, the man in charge would sit down uninvited to regale them with tales of his sexual conquests of previous female tourists. It drove Rowan crazy that Mariam listened politely to these stories, playing the good, non-judgmental tourist. In response to her passivity, he would get mouthy with the man in question and ask him to stop offending his wife, which had no effect whatsoever so long as Mariam was still smilingly listening.

  One of the worst fights they’d had on that trip was in the Jordanian hill town of Karak, in a guesthouse called Dream. The owner, Seif, a middle-aged man with a black moustache and a big stomach, had served them hibiscus tea when they arrived in the late afternoon, then immediately launched in halting English into a story about how he had almost had sex with a Japanese woman who had sta
yed there the week before, but he had been too big for her. Rowan had let that one slide; it had been a long day of bus travel through the valley of Wadi Mujib, with nothing but goats to break up the monotonous desert scenery.

  But then, thanking Seif for the tea, and preparing to go to their room upstairs, Mariam had touched Seif’s arm, and Seif had said that when a woman touches a man’s arm, it is very hard for the man, for he thinks it means she wants to have sex.

  ‘She is my wife,’ Rowan had said, livid.

  And Mariam, instead of being grateful he was standing up for her, had given him a furious frown, which he knew meant she thought he was being rude and insensitive. Difficult. Contrarian.

  She had still wanted to climb up to the crusader castle at the top of the hill before sunset, so off they’d trudged. All the way up to the entrance gate, they had shouted mean things at each other. He didn’t remember what he’d said to her, but he recalled almost every word she had flung back at him: that he said all the right things back home but, as soon as he was out of his comfort zone, he turned into an unforgiving bigot. That he was fundamentally insecure or else he would know that she did not need him to protect her, that she was just fine, that she was open to every experience this place could throw at her, and he was getting in the way of that. That he was trying to shut her down instead of letting her expand.

  At the entrance to the castle, they’d bribed the elderly attendant into letting them in, since it was technically past closing time. He had good English, and manners, too: sex was not mentioned once. He had offered to be their guide, and it was a relief to have his words cover the hostile silence between him and Mariam.

  The castle, they discovered, was the ultimate in bricolage. Ancient Nabataean statues had been recycled by the Romans, and in turn the crusaders had recycled toppled Roman pillars and used them as foundation stones. Then the Mamluk Sultan Baibars had refortified the castle, which was used, after them, by the Ottomans.