One day, he arrived at our house for lunch. As a gift, he brought a bottle of blended scotch whisky in a yellow box sporting pictures of affluent, well-dressed men. “This whisky is called House of Lords,” he announced. “It’s specifically made for English royalty and nobles. A member of the British Parliament who happens to be the queen’s best friend presented it to me on my last trip to London.” This was the only time anyone unraveled his lie publicly. Uncle Jihad drove to Spinneys, the supermarket, while lunch was being served, and returned within half an hour with another yellow box of the cheap brand. He placed it on the table and announced that the queen herself had given it to him, but on one condition. “The queen told me, in her perfect British accent, of course, that she loved me and considered me worthy of such a perfect bottle of whisky, but that this magnificent brew should be served only to the best of men, to the greatest of friends.” And he poured a glass for Captain Jamil.
It was the captain’s young wife, though, who ensured that the couple received an invitation to every event. She was a bon vivant, and bright, if not too cultured or sophisticated; an uneducated Sunni from Tripoli who realized that she had to rely on her piercing wit and charm to overcome being married to a parody and get ahead in life. And did she ever get ahead. At every gathering, men roamed her summers like fireflies. She amused them, teased and cajoled them. Told the best dirty jokes and the funniest bawdy tales. She was the only woman who could turn our neighborhood militiaman, Elie, into an ogling, trembling teenage boy who desperately tried to cover his excitement every time she walked by. She and Uncle Jihad formed a mutual-admiration society. They would sit in the corner and make fun of everybody else. He once asked her why she married her husband when she could have done so much better. She replied that she’d been young. Captain Jamil had appeared at her doorstep in his sports car. She was blinded by the pilot’s uniform. He spoke to her of flying, what it felt like to be up in the air, the freedom, the glory, the escape from the mundane. She dreamed of magic carpets.
One day, Uncle Akram made the mistake of hinting to my father and Uncle Jihad that he had slept with Nisrine. At an evening gathering on our balcony, as Nisrine delicately puffed her hookah, my father said to her, “Nisrine, my dear, Akram is telling quite a few people that he has bedded you.” She cracked up and crackled, smoke sprouting from her mouth like the sudden eruption of a mountain hot spring. I could see the unadulterated glee in Uncle Jihad’s brown eyes. “Hey, Akram,” she shouted across the balcony. “Come over here and entertain me for a minute.” He hurried over like a child called by his favorite teacher to the blackboard. “Tell me, dear,” she cooed. “I hear you have a wonderful story, and I love stories.” She smiled, batted her eyelashes a few times, and took a long drag from the hookah. She blew the smoke seductively into his eager face. “I hear that you fucked me, and I want to know whether I was good.”
I poured myself a glass of fresh grapefruit juice as my father read the morning paper. Melanie was already dressed in a light-green summer suit. She was standing by the tall windows. “Looks like it’s letting up,” she said. “Might turn out to be a nice day. We can probably walk.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Shopping,” my father said. “I should get your mother something.”
My father went to his room to get dressed, and I sat down and phoned my mother. I had forgotten to call when I first arrived, as I had promised. She wanted to talk. “I miss you already.” I grunted acknowledgment. “Will you make sure to take care of yourself?” I looked around the room. “You will call me once a week?” I watched Melanie light a filtered Kool cigarette and drink her coffee. I used the word “mama” to make sure she knew who I was talking to. Melanie turned around in her chair, crossed her legs. “I don’t care how old you are, you’ll always be my baby.” A lipstick stain appeared on the filter. Melanie used her forefinger to flick the ash dramatically. “I don’t know what I’ll do without you here.” Smoke curled out of her mouth. The lipstick was pink this morning. “You’re your mother’s only son.”
When I hung up, Melanie smiled at me tentatively. “Aren’t you a little young to be going to college?”
“I’m terribly smart.”
“I can see that.” Her laugh included an unattractive snort.
My father wanted to take our rented Cadillac to Rodeo Drive. Uncle Jihad wanted to walk, since it was only across the street from the hotel. The doorman suggested we take the hotel’s car, which dropped us off at Giorgio’s, two blocks away. The four of us must have appeared quite a tableau to passersby, a hodgepodge family of sorts.
The salesman zeroed in on my father, ignoring the rest of us. It must have been the Brioni suit. My father explained what he wanted. The salesman, an attractive young man, looked normal below the belt, but his torso leaned back at an almost unnatural angle, his left arm draped across it, and his right hand seemed to tweak an imaginary string of pearls. All of a sudden, both forefingers pointed at my father. “I have something that may be just perfect,” he said, and scampered across the floor, disappearing from sight. He returned with bundles of cloth in delectable colors, reds, variegated greens, yellows from lemon to ocher. He put them on the counter and spread one out. “Cashmere shawls,” he said. “No woman can resist.” His hand smoothed the fabric in a wide arc. “You just have to pick the color.”
“What do you think?” my father asked. I wasn’t sure which of us he was asking, Melanie or me.
I stepped forward, touching the fabric in the same wide arc. “This is beautiful.”
“I think so, too,” Melanie said.
My father went through the pile, picked a deep-sienna shawl. “You think your mom will like this?” I nodded. He handed the shawl to the salesman. My father kept looking, picked up a blue-green shawl, and held it next to Melanie’s eyes. “And this one, too,” he told the salesman. Melanie blushed.
“I want you to know something,” my father said in Arabic. “She’s not a prostitute.”
I stammered something unintelligible. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m not paying her.” He was staring at a far corner of the store.
“Okay.” I stared at the other corner.
“She wants to be a singer. I can’t tell if she’s any good. I don’t understand this music. She sings a lot, so listen and tell me.”
It began to rain softly. Uncle Jihad carried a bottle of cologne and whistled a Lebanese tune. He picked up a loud yellow scarf, flicked one end over his left shoulder, examining the effect in a full-length mirror. Melanie looked at a dress on a hanger, fingered the material. “Why don’t you try it on?” my father suggested.
“He is loved,” I said above the dins of the room.
My sister had taken Nisrine to the visitors’ room. Fatima had returned and claimed my sister’s seat. The diminishing red numbers of the dialysis machine entranced her, as they did me. Twenty-two minutes, thirteen seconds. Salwa held my father’s hand.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“It’s so obvious Nisrine loves him,” I replied. “You can’t fake that reaction. It broke my heart watching her.”
“Yes,” she said. “They were lovers once.”
“No,” I blurted. “No. It only seemed that way because they both loved to flirt.” My niece just looked at me, her eyebrows forming the top halves of question marks. “How would you know anyway?” I said. “You weren’t even born.” My voice faltered. “It can’t be. He flirted with her in front of my mother. He wouldn’t have done that if it were for real. They were friends.”
Fatima raised her arms in despair and sighed.
Salwa looked at me with my mother’s eyes, brown and wide. In a steady voice, she said, “She was one of his many mistresses.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked, my voice much weaker than hers. “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but all you’re going by is what Lina tells you.”
“He paid for her eldest son’s schooling. You know that.”
“Of course,” I replied. “They were friends of the family.”
“Stop, Osama,” Fatima ordered, loud enough to shock the technician awake. “Take our word for it. If you want me to list all his mistresses, I will. Maybe it’s time you talked to your sister and compared notes.”
Lina filled her lungs with smoke on the balcony. I studied the straight lines of building rooftops. “How could you not know they had an affair?” Lina asked. We both looked out at the calm Mediterranean, which could be seen through a large gap between two buildings.
“God, Osama. You know he slept with other women. You couldn’t have been that blind. Why do you think she finally left him?”
“Please. I’m not stupid. He didn’t hide his womanizing from me. He was proud of it. I just didn’t think he’d do it with Nisrine. I don’t know why. Not her.”
She leaned forward on the railing and took another drag. “Why not her?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I huffed. “Maybe because she was a friend of the family. Maybe because my mother knew her. Maybe because we all knew her. I don’t know.”
She reached out and pulled me to her. I took the cigarette from her hand and noisily smoked half of it. “Bad form,” she said.
“Yes, that’s it,” I snapped. “It’s fucking bad form. That’s what it is.”
I felt her shake before I heard her laugh, a staccato outburst. It took a few seconds for me to join in. I tapped the cigarette ash too hard, and the glowing cinder dropped toward the street below. “I can’t fucking believe it,” I said.
“Fuck yes.”
“But you’re wrong. She didn’t just leave him because of his philandering. You know that. It wasn’t just the women.” I gripped the balcony’s rail, took a loud breath. “He had this way of looking at women he was flirting with, an expressive quality—humorous, even. It was as if his eyes asked them to confide in him, to tell him their stories.”
“His eyes never invited me to share with him,” she said.
“Me, neither.”
We sat at the burnt-orange dinette set, my father, Melanie, and I, waiting for Uncle Jihad to finish his shower. My sister had called and teased me as usual. She said my mother missed me so much she went out and bought a pot of hydrangea, and now no one could tell I was gone. My father smoked, read the paper, and drank his coffee. He made a gurgling sound with each sip. “We have to ask about residence,” he said. “Where will you stay?”
“Don’t know. Maybe the dorms.” I looked around the suite. “Maybe I’ll stay here. This is grand enough for me.”
“It’s nothing compared with the suite in Las Vegas. We had a swimming pool in the room.”
“It’s true,” said Melanie.
“In a hotel room? Why? Did you swim in it?”
“No,” my father replied. “Why should I swim in a pool?”
“I don’t know. You have a pool in your room, you should swim in it.”
“That’s silly.” He crushed the cigarette in the ashtray and picked up the paper.
“Oh, Dad, you just have no imagination.”
Melanie had to stop herself from laughing.
My father folded his paper. “Why don’t you two go out dancing tomorrow night? You two should go to a dance club and have fun. What’s the name of the place you told us about?”
“My Place,” Melanie said. “It’s the in club.”
“You want us to go dancing?” I asked, to make sure I’d understood correctly.
“Yes. Go out and have fun. I don’t want to go to a dance club. My ears won’t be able to handle it. You two kids like music. Go out and have fun.”
Uncle Jihad came down whistling a polka, his feet keeping time on the stairs. He hesitated for a moment, appearing concerned, and his face blanched. He seemed to lose his breath, but it was only a brief interruption of the polka, a musical hiccup. He descended the stairs happily. My father stood up. “Let’s go,” he said. “We don’t want to be late to the interview.”
In the waiting room, my cousin Hafez leaned over and whispered into my ear, “I must see him. I must.” His moist eyes pleaded, regarded me with such ardor, as if I were a saint and my blessing was what he lived for. Or was it my father’s?
“I’ll ask Lina.”
“Please, don’t. You know she wouldn’t let me.” His hand fell on my knee, like my father’s used to whenever he wanted me to pay attention. “I’m asking you.”
It was as if I were seeing him for the first time. Hello, I’m your cousin Hafez. We grew up together and spent hours and days and weeks and months and years in each other’s company, but you have no clue who I am. Let me introduce myself. I was supposed to be your twin, but …
Hafez hesitated slightly at the door before entering the room with me. My sister smiled at him. I cocked my head toward the balcony, and Lina understood. She gestured a need for a cigarette and stood up. She slid the balcony’s door silently and glided out.
Hafez and I were a study in contrasts, I in Nikes, jeans, and a UCLA sweatshirt, and he in suit and tie and Italian moccasins. My disheveled hair was badly in need of a trim, and his was gelled and styled. He looked more like my father in his prime than I ever did. He was a family man with three teenage children, and I was nothing more than an unkempt teenager, even though only six weeks separated us. He was always more our family than I was.
He stood at the foot of the bed, what had been my space in the room. He looked as if he was about to cry but still wasn’t used to the idea. He stared at my father as if he wanted to tell him something, or wanted my father to make things right. “I guess his heart is tired,” he whispered. He inhaled deeply. He was standing as close as possible without our touching. “I hadn’t expected him to fall before my mother. She has been all right this week, with all the family here for Eid al-Adha, but she’ll begin to get worse when Mona returns to Dubai and Munir to Kuwait. They—” He stopped. His face flushed, and he shut his eyes. The only reason his brother and sister hadn’t flown back to their homes in the Gulf was that they would have to return to Lebanon for my father’s funeral.
The UCLA campus was as big as a whole city. School hadn’t started yet, but the campus was busy nonetheless. My father gave Melanie a couple of hundred dollars to shop at the student store. The engineering department was an entire building. The size of the dean of engineering was proportional. He was six feet six and round, with a ruffle of double chins draped over his starched white collar. He introduced himself as “Dean Johnson, but call me Fred.”
“I understand you’re quite the intelligent young man,” the dean said. He seemed jovial and pleasant, a nice person, with a cheerful, impish expression on his fleshy face.
“I test well.” I had the right instincts for multiple-choice questions.
“Have you taken the SATs yet?” He leaned back in his chair.
“Yes, I have. Everything is in the folder.”
He reached for the folder and perused the papers. “You scored sixteen hundred?” he asked—rhetorically, I presumed.
“We had to have him take the GCE with the British Council,” my father said. “We weren’t sure there would be any baccalaureates this year, because of the war.”
“This is very impressive,” Fred said, shaking his head. “I wish you had come to me a little earlier. Admissions have been closed for a while.” He kept looking at all my scores. “Are you considering any other university?” he asked, not removing his eyes from my papers. “Wait. Don’t answer that. Let me make a phone call.” He stood up and left his office.
Neither my father nor Uncle Jihad nor I spoke a single word while the dean was out, as if any syllable would bring down a jinni’s curse upon the proceedings. But then Uncle Jihad stood up, went over to my father, and bent his head. I heard the sound of my father’s lips meeting Uncle Jihad’s head. A good-luck kiss.
The dean re-entered the office, obviously excited. He leaned on his desk in front of me. “I may have been able to do something, but I have to ask you s
ome questions. Are you sure UCLA is the right school for you? Have you thought about what we have to offer?”
“Yes. I like the school. I like Los Angeles.”
“And there’s a war back in your country, right?”
“Yes,” I replied, unsure where that was going.
“And UCLA is your only chance right now for an uninterrupted education, right? UCLA will provide you a peaceful setting where you can pursue a degree and continue your record of academic excellence. Isn’t that so?” I nodded. “Good. Then that’s settled.” He laughed heartily. “Here’s what I need you to do, young man. I’d like you to fill out an application for admission to the university. It has to be done right away, so I can take it to the admissions office before they close. That also includes an essay. Do you think you can do that now?” I nodded once more. “Good. Josephine outside will put you in an empty office, and you can get to work. I’ll talk to your father here about logistics.”
“Can I also take music classes?” I asked. I heard my father sigh.
The dean looked at me quizzically. “It’s not the norm for engineering students to take music classes.”
“Shouldn’t it be?” I asked. “In the Middle Ages, the music and mathematics departments were one and the same. You couldn’t study one without the other. They’re complements, really. It stayed that way until the last century. The separation of music from mathematics is recent.”
“You don’t need to study music,” my father said sternly. “You’ve already studied enough music. We won’t discuss this anymore.”
“Filling out the application may take some time,” the dean told my father. “You can wait, or I can send him to the hotel by taxi, whichever is more convenient.”
“Are you sure you can get him in?” my father asked.
“No, I’m not sure. The dean of admissions is willing to look at his records. That’s a very good sign. I’ll find out soon. In any case, here’s the application.” He handed me some forms. “Just take it outside to Josephine, and she’ll find you a quiet place to fill it out.”
The Hakawati Page 33
