Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “So I won’t go!”

  Melvina put her hand over the top of a glass that Merv was trying to fill. “I’m telling you for your own good. Prevention is the best medicine. You have to go and look the devil in the eye.” Melvina sat back, eyes glittering. Jem felt depressed.

  IT SEEMED TO Jem that virtually from the hour of her mother’s passing, her aunts had converged around her with warnings about men. They told her: stay with your father, he needs you now; ignore boys, they’re stupid and conceited; avoid men, they’re stupid and dangerous; you don’t know what they can do to you, what they want to do. Each summer, visiting Auntie Nabila or Lutfea or Nejla would take Jem’s face between her hands and examine Jem’s lips to see if she’d been kissed. “Not yet,” they’d whisper, crossing themselves. “Alhumd’illah, thanks be to God. She’s a good girl!”

  When Jem turned nineteen, the earth made a quarter turn. The aunts got back on the phone and declared that Jem was ready for the altar. College had been innocent play for a semester or two, they said, but enough was enough, she’d have to shape up now, get serious about marriage and babies while there was time. And her father would have to help out, since the “poor orphan” lacked a mother’s care.

  While no visiting aunts were scheduled that summer, Fatima more than made up for them. “Is your duty, is sacred obligation, to get that baby-girl married,” Aunt Fatima said.

  “Yes, yes, O great big sister,” Matussem said, making a face and avoiding Melvina’s look.

  While Fatima herself was childless, each of her sisters had several sons. “Ripe for pickings,” Fatima said. But not a sister would donate. After all, they pointed out, Jemorah was a wild-American-girl, painted and cunning, not appropriate for any of their sons, not even, Fatima said, poor little one-eyed Nassir. What strange, devil-faced children could come from such a match? A few years later, when several sons immigrated to America to go to school, all they wanted was wild-American-girls, not boring-Arab-cousins. Fatima told Matussem that this was her curse, retribution for her unspecified “sins.” Still, it remained imperative to her that Jemorah marry someone’s son and preserve the family’s name and honor.

  At Jem’s twentieth birthday party, Aunt Fatima and her friends from the Ladies’ Pontifical Committee sat together and sang dirges in Arabic about loneliness and aching hearts. Matussem brought home friends from work, anyone from the head of oncology to the guy who managed the used-car lot down the street. All Arabs, all fifty years old at least, and all looked to Jem to be at death’s door.

  She tolerated these visits for her aunts’ sake, making the men pots of thick Turkish coffee with cardamom seeds and little saccharin pills while Melvina muttered over the dishes about chattel slavery and concubines. All of the prospective suitors seemed to find Jem desirable, tolerable at least; all of them she politely declined; none pressed his suit. After a year or so of this, Matussem had run out of friends and neighbors and told the aunts that Jem had decided to become an old maid and stay with her father.

  Fatima shoved at her Greek Luxury beehive hairdo, snorted, and said, “Yes, we see about that!”

  Jem waited, year after year, but the desire to marry, to love a man passionately—“lassoing hearts together,” her friend Gil Sesame once called it—didn’t come. She was tucked deep into herself, into the life she led with her family. How strange it was—unimaginable, really—to realize that she’d already lived longer than her mother, that in 1968, when her mother was two years younger than Jem was now, she had already married and given birth to two girls.

  Sometimes, though, the thought of having children did come to Jem, like the lambent shadow of a jinni in a bottle. She knew that this idea emerged from another, deeper desire: a dream of rebirth, the longing to move more fully into her own life.

  Seemingly without effort, Melvina had made it to age twenty-two unengaged. Jem believed that Fatima and the other aunties had given up on Melvie around the time she turned twelve and had, briefly, taken to smoking Dutch Master cigars. (Her “rebellious period,” Melvie called it.) With her wide, charcoal eyes and curling lips, she had an almost Aztec beauty. But her expression was so penetrating that Fatima was once moved to say that Melvie had “never looked like a girl.”

  Now Melvie was charged with such responsibility and had seen so much that soon she would become like the other nurses, with a laugh of granite, a chest braced like an iron crossbar. Melvina had been making herself into that woman for as long as Jem could remember. Every morning since Melvie was old enough to dress herself, she had dragged a great weapon of a brush through her curling blue-black hair, forcing the hair down with Vaseline and bobby pins till it shone like lacquer. Her pale olive face was always scrubbed, and her eyes were wet stones.

  THOUGH THE RAIN had died down, there was a faint moaning in the windows; wind came in at the crevices and swirled peanut shells and ashes across the floor.

  “It sounds like Mrs. Niedemeyer is out there,” Jocelyn muttered into her beer. Jocelyn was a big woman who sat with crossed arms, biceps tucked up under her breasts. Her uniform was unzipped in front to reveal monumental cleavage that made Jem think of the parting of the Red Sea. None of them ever bothered to change after work; they stuffed their caps into their pockets, walked straight from bedside to bar, then sailed drunkenly through dinnertime toward nighttime points unknown.

  “Yeah, Nancy ‘Prune-Lips’ Niedemeyer,” Harriet said. “Remember her? Nobody—I don’t care what you say—nobody should live that long. She kept saying I was trying to off her.”

  “She claimed you slipped monkey blood into her IV,” Melvina said quietly, twirling the little parasol from her glass.

  Harriet nodded. “First she used to tell me she wasn’t gonna die. I mean never. Ever. Then when that didn’t look so sure, she told me she was gonna haunt me for all the goddamn rest of my life, walk on my carpet after I shampooed it, turn off my hot-water heater, stuff like that! Christ, eighteen months out of my life, every day having to look at that poison-powder face and stick needles in that dried-out prune rump.”

  Melvina looked at her nails. She didn’t like the nurses to speak disrespectfully of their patients, but she knew it was as much a part of the job as feeding and bathing them. The hospital had made Melvie a team leader after only a year on the job, and head nurse the year after that. Her supervisors told her they’d quickly seen that she was “all nurse.”

  “We found Sadie Bosquick today,” Melvina said abruptly. The women quieted. Jem recognized the name, an older woman Melvie had told her about: postop, disoriented, a heart patient who’d disappeared from her bed the day before, even though until then she’d needed help to move and trailed tubes and IVs like streamers. She had shared a semiprivate room with a patient named Lucy who’d been experimenting with psychoactive drugs just prior to her admission. Lucy said she’d seen Sadie sprout wings and fly out the window, but there was no trace of Sadie on or around the hospital grounds. The admissions folder was blank under next of kin. Sadie had been admitted through emergency and had received immediate bypass surgery. Three days later, she had vanished.

  “Where was she?” Jem finally asked; silence had settled around Melvina, the kind that women working with her dreaded to break.

  Melvie took another sip of her pink lady. “On the commode…”

  The women were looking at her, waiting.

  “Making a bowel movement. Her last act in this life and it was incomplete.”

  “She didn’t like using the bedpan,” Hazel, another of the nurses, murmured. She was almost as young as Melvie. “I guess she wanted her privacy.”

  Jem could tell Melvie was rolling the tip of her tongue around the inside of her cheek, a gesture of extreme irritation. “Of course, we all know she was supposed to have been closely monitored. She was supposed to have been escorted to and assisted in the bathroom,” she said. “She sat dead in that bathroom for six hours, left with her last human function….” Melvie stopped; she looked around the bar, not seeing an
y of the few other drinkers, silent, stirring their cocktails. Then she looked at Jem. “We let her go.”

  Nobody spoke. Jem imagined the corpse, small, white, curled up on the john, the terrible isolation. She turned then and saw something fleeting pale as ghost-skin over Melvie’s features. “Another death,” Melvie said.

  Chapter 3

  MATUSSEM HAD STARTED out that Monday evening before the party, trying to arrange the kind of drum solos an archbishop might like; but he ended up thinking of his wife. He believed that any music was prayer, sending a message out to the sky. Nora was always his audience; she was over there listening. He knew that drumming—its sound and intensity—had the power to penetrate the heavens and earth.

  Coltrane’s music seemed to have been written for her, especially “Naima,” a song so slow and sweetly agonizing that it didn’t sound like there were drums in it at all, but on closer listening they were there, on the edges, moving it along so the song didn’t just stop and close on itself like a wound. You needed drums, Matussem knew, like bodies needed hearts, the muscle to keep things going. He sat under the flashing mirrored ball, drumming, praying, alone in the back of the Key West. He was asking for help with all this “husband business.” His wife had always said that American women didn’t need husbands, even though, at age nineteen, she had married him.

  “My sister Fatima going to put me in the crazy house with her fifty thousand worries about husbands,” he told his friend Larry Fasco earlier that day.

  Hilma Otts was sitting at the opposite end of the bar, drinking a Black Label, still dressed in a down parka and moon boots, even though the spring thaw was well under way. “What? She need a husband?” she asked. “She’s welcome to mine if she can dig up the son a bitch.”

  “No, it not for her. I mean, not officially,” Matussem said. “It for my daughters. Someone show Fatima something says women don’t get husbands after thirty. These country so much the same as Old Country. Only there they says eighteen.”

  “You want, I’ll take that little fireball off your hands,” Larry said, wiping out a glass. “She’s spicier than Chinese food, ha-cha! I do like that.”

  “You mean Melvina?” Matussem looked closely at his friend. Larry was radiant in the bar light, his hand inside the glass looking like a prism of blue veins and translucent skin. The thought of having this man as a part of the family struck Matussem as novel and appealing. He compared their hands on the bar, admiring his earth-dark color next to Larry Fasco’s crystalline skin. Then he said, “My friend, if you caring to tangle, then vaya con dios, but if she ask, I knows nothing!”

  TWENTY YEARS AGO, Matussem had moved to Euclid and memorized its empty landscape, bare trees like pencil scratches and a few halfhearted houses that stood against the sky. There was also one cement building, a windowless cube alone on a dirt-beaten lot, that Matussem glanced at without seeing on his daily commute to work.

  Over the years that big cube had borne the names Joy Unlimited, Bongiorno & Sons, Ellie Mae’s Fish Shack, Kiddie Korner, Dino’s Studio Twelve, the Zal Gaz Club, and Grange #323. For a few years it simply stood empty, a place for the local teens to get high in, sheltered from the elements and truancy officers. The weeds grew twining around it and the snow eroded its layers of paint.

  Then one mid-March, when winter’s steel had melted from the air and the snowdrifts had shrunk to clods of ice and car oil, the weeds around the cube were suddenly cut, and its walls whitewashed. The walls were also stenciled with a male silhouette swinging a decidedly feminine silhouette into the air. Driving by on the way home from work, Matussem felt that he had to go inside.

  Maybe it was the cavorting couples on the outer walls or the rec room paneling and basement smell of the interior. Matussem could never decide what it was about the place that won his heart. Probably it was Larry Fasco, the owner, in a pair of brown double-knit slacks, polyester shirt, and cowboy boots, sitting absolutely alone at the bar of his two-week-old tavern, pouring himself a drink with a shaky hand. When Matussem opened the door, light shot in and struck Larry, turning his face and clothes white and bleaching the color of his eyes.

  “Shut it, will ya?” Larry asked, holding one hand up to shield his eyes. “It’s like a fucking laser beam.”

  Matussem debated if he was meant to shut it while standing inside or out. He let the door close behind him as he stepped in. Once inside, Matussem had been able to see—even by the strings of Christmas lights (until they got the disco wiring worked out)—that Larry Fasco glowed like a painting of a medieval saint. Only his fingernails, eyelids, and the translucent cap of his hair had the slightest tint, and these shone as if heated from within. Larry raised his glass to his visitor, and Matussem watched the tip of Larry’s tongue poke out lizard-quick, lick his white lips, then flick back in.

  “Well, I please to meet you!” Matussem had said, extending his hand. “I am Matussem Ramoud, many year in U.S. of A. You, by Allah, the most interesting person I seen in America.” He had added “in America” at the last minute. Back in the Old Country he’d seen a few doozies.

  “Well, Matussem Ramoud, I sure am glad to meet you. Larry Fasco’s the name, and I may be the most interesting person you’ve met so far, but you’re the third mortal being to set foot in my bar, after me and my ex-wife, the Psychokiller. So step on up and buy us a drink.”

  Without any windows or the sort of customers who came and went at regular intervals—for Larry’s gradually building clientele rested their elbows on the bar all day and all night—time at the Key West stood still. The only evidence of its passing was the accumulation of dust upon the liqueur bottles and of grime under the patrons’ nails. Larry Fasco liked to say of the Key West that it was “The Room of the Absolute Present Tense.” He even considered changing the bar’s name to The Room of the Absolute Present Tense for a while, but he couldn’t fit it all on one wall.

  MELVINA GLOWERED, EYES blackening, waiting in the doorway for her father late Monday evening. “Tell me why,” she said as he entered the house. “Why must you go to that snake pit at all hours of the night? What attracts you?”

  “Snake pit? What snakes? Where? Show to me.”

  Melvie crossed her arms. “You know who I’m talking about—Joe Brummett, Ricky Ellis, Sam Otts; it’s chock-full of shady characters and troublemakers. Don’t play dumb A-rab with me, Mr. Ramoud.”

  “It’s probably a breeding ground for bacteria, too,” Jem said from the living room.

  Melvina waved her hand at this. “Look, Mr. Ramoud,” she went on. “Give me one reason why you must place your body in such close proximity to that Fasco person’s, please?”

  At the time Matussem had no satisfactory answer, but he decided to think about it.

  By the following day, a new marquee had appeared beside the Key West.

  MELVINA AND JEM were driving home from work and the Won Ton à Go-Go on Tuesday and Melvina spotted it immediately. “Oh no. No, no,” she said.

  Then Jem was able to make it out too. It was a new sign that read: The Big Band Sound of Mat Ramoud and the Ramoudettes, Every Wednesday Evening Till the COWS Come Home.

  Melvie didn’t even see the marquee board, only the black letters that seemed to hang suspended in the air by themselves. “No! No! No!” she cried, punching at the car horn. She twisted the steering wheel, driving off the road and up onto the dirt lot of the Key West, missing the marquee by inches. They lurched to a stop and Melvie rested her forehead on the back of her hands. “I cannot go on,” she said.

  Larry Fasco rushed out shouting, wanting to know what the hell they thought they were doing to his lawn.

  Melvie waited, watching him gesticulate through the rolled-up car window. Then she rolled down the window and said, “No, Mr. Fasco-person. I think you have the wrong question! I think the right question, Mr. Fasco-person, is what are you doing to our father in this snake pit of yours?”

  Larry Fasco quieted and studied Melvina for a few moments. Then he said, “Well, my my my m
y my my my! Ain’t she a fierce thing! Ain’t she fierce?” he asked, peering in at Jem. “I love ’em fierce. Always have. I suppose you know I call my ex-wife the Psychokiller. There’s nothing more beautiful, I always say, than a woman who knows how to be really angry.”

  To Jem’s surprise, Melvina had no response. They sat there a moment longer, then Melvie rolled up her window and they drove off without another word.

  Chapter 4

  WEDNESDAY AFTER FATIMA’S summons to the party, Jem picked up the phone in the kitchen.

  “Jem? Is that you? It’s me! The Studs Terkel of algebra.”

  She twisted the phone into the curve of her neck. “I’m sorry?”

  There was a pause, then, “You know, that’s what I always loved about you, Jem. You appreciated my wit. Okay, it’s Gil. Must I give my family name? How many Gils do you know? All right, Gilbert Sesame. You want a photo ID?”

  “Oh no, not really?”

  “And you’re always so glad to hear from me.”

  “Oh, Gil! I don’t believe it!” Jem was flustered, sure he knew she was blushing. “I don’t believe it!”

  “Darlin’, if you don’t hurry up and say something more positive, I’m gonna have to call the next gal on my list.”

  GILBERT SESAME. FIVE foot three to Jem’s five ten. Thirty-four to Jem’s twenty-two—eight years ago when they first met. They were in the same journalism class and took an instant dislike to each other. Jem found him obnoxious and Gil thought she was dreamy. Gil would sit alone in a corner of the classroom, rifling off commentary on the classwork, observations that were usually preceded by “no offense, but….” Such as, “No offense, but I’ve seen cow pies more informative than this article.” The rudeness was exacerbated by a down-home drawl, a weird, undefinable accent. No one knew where he was from, but he wore a wide-brimmed straw hat like a riverboat gambler’s.