by Michael Ryan
“All right. What do you want to know?”
“I shall be succinct. Did you fuck him?”
“Oh, Robert. I swear you men are all alike.”
“We all look the same upside down,” I said.
“That’s women,” Angela said. “Get your misogynist jokes straight.”
“So?” I asked. “Did you fuck him?”
“No.”
“Is that what I want to hear or what you think I want to hear?”
“He’s a devout Muslim, Robert. In Islam, adultery is a capital crime. He would never have sex outside of marriage.”
“Why didn’t you marry him?”
“I didn’t want to marry him. Or anyone. Ever. What would I be, wife number four? Tending the goats while hubby conducts the insurgency?”
“Why not wife number twenty-three? You could have worn Michael Jordan’s jersey. And I bet you can handle a Kalishnikov just fine.”
“Let me tell you something about me. There’s no shoulda coulda in me. It’s a stupid self-destructive habit I decided to break a long time ago. You might consider breaking it yourself.”
“That is not the subject. The subject is the meat pie.”
“All right, I would have fucked him if he would have fucked me. Is that better? Who wouldn’t want to fuck him? Maybe you’d like to fuck him. Let’s get Trymyev and Turkmenbashi and Clinton and everybody else in there too. We could all fuck Jalalzada together. Which is good. Because he’s obviously already fucked. He doesn’t have a chance. So that’s where devotion gets you: dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, after an uncomfortable silence.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I do tell the truth about some things.”
“It would be nice to be able to guess which things.”
“I admire the man. You understand? He is devoted. Do you understand what the word means? It means he is focused and unwavering, or if he does waver or lose focus he never shows it. And he will give his life for what he’s devoted to. It makes him powerful. He’s immune to self-questioning. And he doesn’t have an ounce of bullshit male egoism. Plus he’s courteous and kind and actually respects people. And that’s incredibly sexy.”
“Then why would you want to be with me?” I asked.
“Who said I wanted to be with you?”
“Excuse me. Aren’t we in bed together? Have I been hallucinating?”
“What do you know about Islam?” she asked.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Just tell me. What do you know about Islam?”
“Nothing. What you said in the meeting with Clinton. That’s it. Who gives a rat’s ass about Islam?”
“I do. Or I don’t about Islam, but I do care about devotion. Because I’ve never had it. I would like to give a rat’s ass about something. I think it might make me happy. Or happy enough.”
“Okay,” I said, after a long minute. “I think I get it.”
“Do you? Do you see what people do to each other? I’ve done worse. People don’t mean anything to me. They are all bewildered. It’s all, fuck you and give me your wallet. But that’s not Jalalzada. He’s different.”
“Am I different?”
“You’re innocent. For such a consummate stickman, you’re incredibly naive.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, thus proving her assertion.
“Do you want to know why I lied to get you to go with me? I needed you to go with me. I needed you to be there when I saw Jalalzada. You have no idea what you mean to me. You have no idea how lovely you are. You pay attention. Your heart isn’t even on your sleeve, it’s lit up on your nose. And, as granny says, you have the most beautiful cock in the universe.”
I felt like crying. She saw it immediately.
“Oh, you gorgeous man,” she said and kissed me tenderly on the cheek as if I were a little boy.
Maybe it was the jet lag or sleep deprivation or Turkmenbashi’s meat pie, but the effect of Angela kissing me like this was even stronger than her kissing me deeply, and up came Private Wanky proudly into the picture, as if he wanted to be loved too.
“My God, Robert,” Angela said. “You are astonishing.”
“I can’t help it,” I said.
“I am so glad. Come here to me again.”
And so I did, and we did, praise be to Allah, all the way to Paris.
20.
Anyone who does not want to fall in love with the person sitting next to him should not ride with her through Paris at dawn on a Sunday in late summer. It could have serious consequences. She might actually be a Komodo dragon wearing lipstick, which would require your forever patronizing restaurants that serve live animals, where your beloved may consume four-fifths of her body weight at a single feeding. Not to mention the difficulty of placing the children in a good preschool. Paris is always preposterously Romantic, as everyone knows, but at dawn on a Sunday in late summer it’s even worse. The golden light climbing the enchanting buildings makes them even more enchanting and the city is deserted except for the street sweepers swooshing away joyous Saturday night detritus and the café waiters unstacking café chairs and arranging them around café tables and the quaint boxy lorries of deliverymen idling at the boulangerie: no traffic, no honking, no swearing, no hurrying, and all of it seems to have been created for only the two of you—in this case, Angela and me, riding in the backseat of a Town Car from Le Bourget airport (private jets only) to the Plaza Athénée Hotel (five-star property of the Sultan of Brunei), down the Champs-Élysées, along the river, and through the Eighth Arrondissement to Rue Montaigne.
She even took my hand in hers as we turned onto the Champs-Élysées, which she had never done before, and I did not mention to her that people usually hold hands before they have sex not after nor cite it as further evidence of what Don called Sheed’s reverse dating service: introducing you to the person you’ve already fucked. Angela had certainly been clear that she didn’t have “dates.” I didn’t think she’d enjoy my pointing out that we had consummated our courtship repeatedly before we had a courtship—not because she would mind the reminder of our consummations but because she’d mind the idea that we were now having a courtship. And she was right: we weren’t. I also knew that she didn’t want me to tell her I loved her, nor even mention the L-word, much less a word like “courtship” that could imply our courtship might lead to: (horror of horrors): marriage.
So what were my options? As far as I could see, I had exactly one: chill out. Press mute on Mr. Brain and put a sock in my mouth. Take a close look at the reality here. How bad was it? Better than a red hot poker in a Middle Eastern desert prison. Plus, the hotel and everything we ate (conceived and concocted by celebrity chef Alain Ducasse) was free. That’s right, folks. Free! Compliments of the Sultan of Brunei, for whom Angela had once done “some work.” It must have been “some work” indeed since it entitled her to a lifetime of free stays at any of the Sultan of Brunei’s fifteen ultra-luxury hotels worldwide, including the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was, as she put it when I pressed her, her “home base.” The only question I had when she informed me of all this is the one I did not ask: what in the hell was she doing with me? I should be dumpster diving in Santa Monica not arriving at the Plaza Athénée swarmed by valets, porters, and concierges dressed impeccably in suits I couldn’t afford greeting us with an orchestrated chorus of “Bonne journée, Mademoiselle Chase,” “So good to see you again, Miss Chase,” “Welcome back, Miss Chase,” before the manager himself appeared to kiss her on both cheeks and warmly shake my hand. A bellman loaded Angela’s four big bags on a luggage trolley but tucked my suitcase on wheels under one arm. I hoped my underwear would not burst through the zipper and bite him. He turned a key in the elevator to take us to a “restricted” floor—“to the Eiffel Suite, Miss Chase.”
And that’s where we stayed, without leaving, for the next four days, Sunday at dawn to Wednesday at dusk, fucking and eating, fucking and sleeping, fucking and talking and
laughing: out of touch with this world and all its troubles and cares. Forget the Sufi whirling and the Lakota sweat lodge. For my transcendent state, I’ll take room service and champagne, caviar, silk robes, 2,000-thread-count sheets, and Mademoiselle Angela Chase to make the Kama Sutra look like Plumbing for Dummies.
But all good things must come to an end, right? And great things even sooner. On Wednesday evening Angela decided we needed some fresh air. It was time for a picturesque walk along the Seine to have a drink at Café Les Deux Magots, then dinner at L’Excuse, her favorite bistro from her student days—nothing fancy, no Michelin stars, but real bistro fare, out-of-the-way, small, and quintessentially Parisian.
Should I have been suspicious? Or apprehensive? Well, I was. I didn’t want to leave our cocoon. I wanted to grab a table leg and refuse to let go. A walk along the Seine on a late summer evening: not exactly on Amnesty International’s list of illegal tortures. But too much real world for me. I liked it just fine in “the Eiffel Suite.”
Nonetheless I obeyed my earlier resolutions to mute my brain and mouth. Angela seemed to have excellent reasons for her decisions and an aversion to telling me what her reasons are. Fine, I guess, as long as her decisions kept producing excellent results, by which I meant excellent results for me. My judgment could admittedly be a weeny bit unreliable—why not ride with hers for a while? After all, it had gotten us to Paris together. Anyway, she had obviously been the driver and me the passenger probably since I met her in the bank and certainly since she appeared in my apartment in her hijab.
So I told her that some fresh air sounded great and I couldn’t imagine anything I’d rather do than have a drink at Les Deux Magots and dinner at her favorite bistro from her student days and how bored I was eating Alain Ducasse’s supernal world-famous cuisine and drinking free vintage Cristal. We needed to get out there in the streets of Paris with authentic Parisians and if we didn’t do so right away I’d lose contact with the suffering of real people in real life and my art would become jejune. Jejune jejune jejune. I said it twenty times in a row (an old Woody Allen bit), fast and slow, with varied intonations until Angela said, “Enough. Or I’ll stuff your mouth with one of my body parts.”
I suppose I should have seen that the fates were feeling impish when I pressed the down button and the elevator doors opened and there inside, alone, facing me as if in a mirror, was Prince Abdullah himself. The real one. In thobe and head scarf. With a perfectly centered beard, mustache, and mouche. He thoughtfully pressed the hold button while we stepped on. We rode down with him all the way to the lobby. Angela, fast thinker that she is, did not speak to him in Arabic, which might have made him curious, but muttered some French pleasantry, and he responded in English, being not so slow himself and pegging us immediately as Americans.
“My wives insist on coming to Paris to shop while my sons gamble on the Côte d’Azur,” he said, with mock gravity. “I don’t know which of them spends my money faster.” Angela and I chuckled ruefully, in equally mock commiseration.
And that was the extent of our interaction with Prince Abdullah until the elevator doors opened to six burly bodyguards in the lobby and a dozen more guarding a convoy of armored Range Rovers in the porte cochere. They sped away as Angela and I walked out of the hotel still trying to control ourselves like rowdy middle schoolers in sex education class. When we had achieved a respectable distance from the hotel, down Rue Montaigne, we let out our whoops and exclamations.
It must have been seven or eight P.M.—I didn’t care anymore—and the light was luscious and the river silk, its slow currents rippling its surface in patterns of blue shades. This was a place made for people. The world seemed peaceful and everyone seemed happy. I’m sure they weren’t all happy, but I was. In fact, I had never been happier. It was the high point of my life, no contest.
We walked up a flight of stairs made of medieval cobblestones then a few blocks to Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Café Les Deux Magots famously located on its famous corner. It’s situated like a square at an angle, its entrance through french doors fronted by plate glass with tables both inside and out arranged for maximum people watching, the ghosts of Sartre and Camus, Hemingway and Gide, the surrealists and sym-bolistes all disdaining to act like gawking tourists and established at their usual places inside. So Angela and I sat inside too. We took a crimson-leather banquette in the corner, next to two Japanese girls wearing berets and across from an old man with Einstein hair ferociously reading Le Monde and muttering “Ces idiots!” and “Mon Dieu!” A waiter in a tux and white apron tied around his waist brought our aperitifs: absinthe, into which iced water is poured over a sugar cube. For the surrealists it produced hallucinations. I was hallucinating just fine already. Angela was dressed in a white T-shirt like Jean Seberg in Breathless with a crimson cashmere sweater around her shoulders that brought up the henna highlights of her dark chocolate hair. Her eyes seemed lit from inside, and they were zeroed in on mine as we toasted ourselves.
“Here’s looking at you, kid,” I said.
“You are looking at me,” Angela said. “You’re staring at me. What’s up?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“When you put it like that, I don’t think so.”
“What does Bogart say then? The farewell scene, the plane about to take off and he’s telling her she has to get on it with her noble freedom-fighter husband?”
“ ‘ We’ll always have Paris,’ ” Angela said.
“Right. The toaster oven goes to the pretty lady in the red sweater,” I said.
“Thanks, Robert. I’ll take Big Dick Jokes for fifty.”
“Big Dick Jokes for fifty. My dick is so big . . .”
“There’s still snow on top of it in summer.”
“Another winner!”
“Thanks, Robert. Big Dick Jokes for one hundred.”
“My dick is so big . . .”
“A homeless family lives underneath it.”
“Bingo. My dick . . .”
“Your dick. Absolutely,” she said. “Here’s looking at him.”
“You’re hallucinating,” I said. “Must be the Chinese horny goat weed I’ve been slipping under your toenails while you’re asleep.”
“You are an evil genius,” Angela said.
I stroked my absinthe glass slowly up and down without realizing it. I wanted to tell her Everything I Felt. Was now The Time?
“Don’t do that,” she said, as if she had heard my thought, but referred to my stroking. “We’ll never make it to dinner.”
“Worse things could happen,” I said. “You know, you do pretty good schtick. For a girl.”
“Oh yes. For a girl. I love that. Comedians are the most sexist males in the stratosphere. They make the CIA look like a feminist collective.”
“We all sympathize with the aspirations of your people.”
“You thought I learned to juggle on the high wire in my spare time. I actually did a few open mics in college.”
“Really, where?”
“Comedy Store, Improv, the usual places. After midnight, of course.”
“Funny I didn’t run into you.”
“You had moved on by then.”
“Why did you quit?”
“I was actually doing it because of a guy I had a crush on. I gave it up when he got engaged. Anyway I was taking eighteen credits and working for Folsom and that was enough to do in my spare time.”
“Who was the lucky guy? I probably knew him.”
“Yeah, you probably did,” Angela said. Then she just looked at me and waited with the Folsom Sheed autograph model deadpan expression on her face until the lightbulb went on.
“Oh my God,” I said stupidly.
“Yup,” Angela said. “It was you, my Proud Lion,” she said with her Saudi accent. “You think I fuck every customer who walks into a bank?”
“I can’t believe it. I swear I had never seen you before that. How did you know me? Where had you even seen me?”
“I just can’t believe it,” I repeated.
“Why not? You have a great butt.”
“You couldn’t have been in my discussion section.”
“I wasn’t in your section. And I came to lectures late and left early and sat in the back row. Then I heard about your secret life as a stand-up comic, so I started tracking your gigs and sitting as far back in the dark as I could with my obligatory two watery drinks. In other words, I stalked you. For months. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that midget at the urinal joke. Want to hear it in Arabic?”
“Why didn’t you just hit on me?”
“Send my panties to your table? You men have the subtlety of a bull moose. I took the classic girl route: bump into the guy ‘accidentally.’ But since you were so oblivious, I literally did bump into you once and knocked your drink onto your shirt. ‘Fucking drunk bitch,’ you said. The only words you ever spoke to me. I’ve treasured them ever since.”
“I don’t remember. I must not have seen you.”
“It was just a schoolgirl crush. No big deal. I switched majors from English to politics and threw myself into my so-called internship with Folsom. I held onto this desperate crush on you for only about ten years—until approximately now. In fact, I’m apparently not over it yet.”
“I could have saved myself ten years of Relationship Building and Communication Skills.”
“Timing was bad for me anyway. I was a little shaky my freshman year. Vulnerable, I believe is the word. I couldn’t have handled it if you shot me down. ”
“Your parents had just died,” I said.
“Yeah. They had,” Angela said.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Don’t you think it might have something to do with what you’ve chosen to do for the last ten years? What you’re doing now?”
