by Mai Al-Nakib
For twenty years he was sexually faithful to Meredith, the first woman he ever slept with. Being faithful wasn’t difficult in his twenties. He loved Mere and wanted to start a family with her. During those early years, his genuine feelings for his wife and his intense longing for kids kept him committed. It was the best he ever was. After learning he was sterile, Charles’s libido froze. He would try to satisfy Mere, but he was clumsy and self-conscious. He wanted neither her nor anyone else. His dead desire kept Charles loyal to his wife through his thirties.
In his forties, he strayed. It was the usual, nothing in the least exceptional. It was the same ugly shape of anyone’s indiscretion. He slept with women much less attractive, much less intelligent, much less generous, much less than Mere. With these women he had the kind of sex he felt he couldn’t with his wife. He would bend their bodies over. He would knead them into a shape, long and sinewy, that could wrap around his anger and strangle it. Until he turned forty he hadn’t fully grasped the vastness of his anger. He had acknowledged his sorrow over the broken lives of his parents, his anguish over his missing children, but he had not recognized his anger. His affairs were packed with it, and it made the sex burn. What he came to realize over the years, as the rage slowly diminished, was that his affairs were as much about fear as they were anger. He fucked women who meant nothing to him because he was afraid of getting older. More precisely, he was afraid of getting older with a woman he loved without fervor, and he was afraid of getting older bereft, as he was, of offspring. He could not tolerate the idea of his mother’s genes coming to an end. He would be explaining to his students about DNA and RNA, about the passing on of genes, dominant or recessive, and he would suddenly feel on the brink of collapse. He would stand quietly in his place, as still as possible, trying to fight the urge to pull his hair out of his head or scrape the skin off his face or puncture the backs of his knees with a sharpened pencil, anything to erase the overwhelming realization that would smack him as if for the first time, though it was the hundredth, the thousandth time. Without children of his own, his mother’s death was irreversible. The only thing that would hold back his imminent collapse in the middle of class, in front of twenty-five thirteen-year-olds, was the thought of pushing whomever she happened to be that year against a wall and filling her with his wretched semen.
Charles made it a point not to sleep with women he worked with, and of the ten, nine were strangers to his wife. He was honest with Mere about his affairs from the start. He hid nothing, though he did not believe this absolved him of anything. In fact, he realized it may have been worse of him to tell her than to hide it from her. Hiding it, at least, showed some respect. He thought of those French or Italian husbands venerating their wives, protecting them from their transgressions. There was no need to bring them into it. It usually passed like indigestion. Why destroy everything in the process? The difference between Charles and those impeccable Casanovas was the children, the spectacular silhouette of a family worth preserving, worth lying for. Confessing to Mere was an act of selfishness. He must have wanted to hurt her, to punish her for something. She would have found out on her own – ten years of infidelity is a long time, with many occasions to discover misdeeds. For her to have found out on her own would have given her power. It might have impelled her to leave him, to look for someone worthy of her. He didn’t want to take that risk, so he told her right from the start. He spared her the specifics, but he told her with whom and generally when. He was a coward.
There was another reason Charles fucked around, apart from sorrow, anger, and fear. He did it for exuberance. Exuberance: energy, excitement, luxuriant growth, even, at its root, fruitfulness. He cheated because, as he was doing it, even as he was thinking about doing it, it made him believe something tremendous might happen. It gave him the sense that there was time for everything, no end in sight. It felt like holding a small hand in his or watching light laddered through blinds. Doing what he knew he shouldn’t be brought him life in a crystal bowl. It had been taken away too early in a scream of late night sirens and a speeding ambulance. He was reclaiming it. All wrong he was going about doing it, but he was trying. There was exposure in those meaningless encounters, a stripping away. It was not about revealing himself to the women, and it was most certainly not about the women revealing anything about themselves to him. He was not in the least interested in that form of exchange. What was revealed to Charles, what was exposed to him every time he slept with a woman not his wife, was another seed of potential. Nothing else generated the same charge of electricity beneath the surface of his skin. Exuberance, the luxurious fruit of possibility. It was his addiction.
Charles never experienced the waves of potential in his teens and twenties that most young people take for granted. There they were, stomping through yellow leaves as crunchy as Cheerios, huddling together in a corner of the library late into the night, experiencing collectively the deviant ecstasy of a snow day, and he felt apart. He could see their lives, endlessly open, precious, but not his own. He existed in a detached bubble, confounded by the simplest choices, making selections as though from miles away, as though for someone else. It wasn’t until his early thirties, with one of his students, that he got a taste of what he had been missing. He is so ashamed to think of it, even now, decades later, when what could any of it possibly matter? It makes him hang his head. If only he could smother the shame and live with that first taste of exuberance. If only he could clear a space, tiny, secret (nobody has to know), inside himself so he could relive it a hundred times, over and over again until he is dead. He seeks that early purity. Back to a time before he knew what it would become, before he knew what the need for it would make him do. He wants again what Mina made him feel for the first time when he was thirty-two.
* * *
Mere helps him up, holds his arm firmly as he walks to the couch. He doesn’t need her help, he hardly sways, but he lets her give it to him. A few months ago he would not have survived without her help. He is stronger now. He can walk into the pharmacy on his own, fix himself a sandwich, wrap the covers around his own shoulders. But Meredith lives – even after every appalling thing he has done – for him. She seems to want to do nothing but administer to his needs. Pills, warmth, nutrition, bathroom. Why? She is healthy, full of energy, still lovely, her gray hair mesmerizing. Why is Mere suspending her own life for his? It is heavy, much too heavy to die carrying.
Charles is dying. He has testicular cancer. They have removed what they can. They claim the odds are in his favor. Charles doesn’t believe them. He knows he is dying. Poetic justice. He is not a brave man. He is not like his mother. He is not like his father. He does not want to die, but neither does he want to fight. It is a conundrum. He wants to live in order to go backwards, to curl back into the spaces of exuberance, to chronicle those moments, each and every one. His present is over and he cares nothing about his future. He wants to live only so he can organize a series of dossiers with colored labels documenting everything. He won’t write down what happened. What happened isn’t what matters. That’s why Charles always told Mere about his affairs. She was routinely kept abreast of what was happening. What truly matters, however, he has never shared. What matters is precisely what he wants to file away.
He kept things in the course of his affairs. He collected oddments and slight objects from his lovers, things they would never miss. Grocery lists, shopping receipts, tickets for various performances, pages from magazines or books they happened to be reading, postcards or junk they may have received in the mail, balled-up tissues, chewed-up straws or toothpicks or pencils, the crust off their toast, colored hair bands and clips, candy wrappers, instructions for their husbands left on fridge doors, tags from their clothes, lint from under their beds, cigarette butts stamped with their lipstick, strands of their hair, feathers or fur from their pets, flowers from their gardens. He wants to arrange these scraps in files. He wants to shape together the impossible logic of his forties, to put toge
ther the dots otherwise scattered every which way. He isn’t looking for sense, nor is he seeking closure. All he wants is a way back to Mina.
He met Mina his second year in Kuwait. She was in his seventh grade science class. She was twelve years old and a stunner. He recognized in a naked instant his admiration was not innocent. This was new. He recoiled automatically, his stomach duly bruised. But something else began to spread open at the same time, something that made him feel stupendous, puffing fast and huge with expectation. He had never had this particular sensation before, this desert of intensity. There was a pointy rebellion inside, and he found it impossible to speak, to welcome that year’s seventh graders to life science, where they were going to learn about the building blocks of life – cells, plants, animals, humans – all rolled up together in the busy reproductive fabric called existence. Something in him was being choked, and he didn’t want the marvel of that asphyxiation to stop because it was unclogging another tributary, one he had no idea ran through him.
Mina’s body was a tendril. Her eyes, dark pools of intelligence, made her look thirty and her voice was surprisingly deep. When she spoke in class, it took every ounce of control to stop himself from touching her face. Ruin was on the horizon, but for the first time in his life, he felt free from the threat of impending catastrophe. The best thing about Mina in the seventh grade was that she had absolutely no sense of her own flawlessness. She carried her immaculate beauty around like something she could afford to lose. It was exactly this Charles found irresistible, what he wanted to possess until the end of the world.
He taught her in the seventh grade. He was nice to her, favored her, though he was always discreet. He left the door of his classroom open during lunch time and announced to his classes that students were free to come in if it was too hot outside. He knew the boys never would – there were marbles, footballs, computer games outside. Most of the girls didn’t either. Mina and two or three of her friends were regulars though. He would pretend to be busy with his preparations for class. He would sit calmly at the front of the room, papers and books spread before him, patiently counting chunks of time – five minutes, ten, fifteen – then, and not every day, he would allow himself a glimpse. He would not move his head at all. He moved only his eyes, up or to the left or right, to Mina. About midway through the year, Mina began to come to him. She told him things, her voice hesitant but conveying a confidence she shouldn’t have had at that age. He let her talk to him about her crushes, about how her legs hurt at night, about the music she liked. She would shove her Walkman at him, laugh at his inept bobbing to an unfamiliar beat. She would come in close as he listened. He would be able to recognize her smell in a dark room, even now. She smelled like snow or the sun in winter or smoke from fire on a freezing night. She smelled like weather he had known as a boy, which confused him. She was a whirlwind of joy with a serene center.
The following year he didn’t teach Mina science, but she still came to visit him during her breaks. At thirteen, she was beginning to understand what her body could do. She flirted with Charles mercilessly, and he played the fool. His obsession with her pushed him to extremes. From extremes of happiness – a roiling delirium that took him into the desert on weekends to stare gratefully at an indigo sky and a galloping moon – to extremes of sorrow – a tormented lament for the lives he would never lead because he had grown up without a mother, because he would never have children of his own. His lows left Meredith bewildered. He was inconsolable. His hollow moans escaped from under the locked bathroom door, but to his wife’s concerned queries he was resistant as tarp.
The year after that, his fourth year in Kuwait, Charles arranged with the school to teach ninth grade biology. He didn’t like teaching high schoolers, especially not high school boys, but he wanted Mina in his classroom one last time. He needed to see her every day. He was ashamed of himself, the things he was thinking about her. There was a steady build up of danger, danger all around. He was jumping into a volcano of folly, there was no stopping him. His dreams were taking over his waking life. She was there every night. When he saw her the next morning, biology class came first, she seemed impossibly familiar. None of it made sense to him. Three years was a long time. He convinced himself it could not be a simple fixation. This was love. She was young, but he imagined waiting for her to get older, waiting for her to graduate from college so that he could marry her. He would have children with her – it wasn’t his fault after all. With her, everything, every possible life, could materialize. He was positive, certain he loved her, would love her always.
When she turned fifteen, in the tenth grade, Mina pulled away from him. In any case, that’s what it felt like to him. He hardly ever saw her. He caught slivers of her – waves, cheery smiles, hellos light as air. She was elsewhere. Her life still unfurling. She was flying high. For Charles, it was ending. Exuberance was collapsing, after only three years. He wanted more.
He saw her one December day sitting silent under a tree. It was rare to see Mina by herself, her still center always attracting others as it did, fine young boys he could never hope to compete with, their own lives expanding as robustly as hers. That early afternoon, though, she was alone under the low branches of a tree. He slid up to her without thinking, so close he could smell her once again, that same snow smell he wanted to scoop up. This was it. He stared into her eyes like he had never done before, inhaled her into his very soul, brought his mouth to her ear – this was going to get him fired, he knew it would, but he was in the midst of folly and there were no brakes underfoot – and whispered, “Stay out of my dreams, kiddo.” He had never and would never again use that word. “Kiddo” should have been reserved for his own kids. “Kiddo” would have pushed him to break the knees of any man saying it to his own daughter. That whispered “kiddo” under the tree was the death of his exuberance. Kiddo, for whom every fuck in his forties had been and for whom now, inexplicably, he wants to put together endless files, a labyrinth of dossiers through which he might trace his way back to what she had made him feel all those years ago, to her smell.
It took Charles four years after the encounter under the tree to put Mina on the back burner and to acknowledge exuberance, his for so short a time, was gone forever. Turning forty helped him rediscover his desire for sex. He slept with Mere, he slept with others, and he found an unconventional balance for about a decade.
* * *
Their last year abroad was in Beirut. They had been there for two years, were crazy about it, and signed a second two-year contract. Charles felt he might be coming out of his haze and, for several months, started nothing new with anyone. Once again, their friends Veronica and Tom had ended up in the same place as them. They had been friends for almost fifteen years. They too were childless. Veronica’s fault. This brought them all closer together since most of their colleagues, if they weren’t too young, had children and always socialized with their children, which neither Charles nor Tom could take. Charles loved Tom, the only man besides his father he loved with an open heart. Tom knew about Charles’s affairs. He was a man without judgment, and he was gentle with his friend. Midway through their third year in Beirut, Charles turned fifty. Tom and Veronica were there for his birthday.
Charles wasn’t just anticipating a midlife crisis, he was staging it himself. They all got very drunk that night. Charles followed Veronica into a room. He held her by the wrists and pushed her against a ready wall. He kissed her and she responded at first. He pushed harder and she started to resist. He could see himself, his bloated stomach and already sagging thighs. It was farcical and he could hear her saying no. He continued anyway and Tom walked through the door. There were tears and screams and rage. There were ugly accusations and a destroyed friendship. He had violated Veronica. There could be no future for him. Mere did not speak to him until the phone call with the news about his father four months later. Mere did not speak to him but, as always, Mere stayed.
It isn’t forgiveness he is after. It isn’
t redemption, either. He has paid his dues, living longer than his mother had, not holding his father in his arms as he lay dying in a lonely bed. He lives in a world where oil could burn hot enough to turn the sky black at noon, the sun a slate circle in the sky. A place where people die by the hundreds in the desert, throats slashed, villages purged. A place where bodies are blown to bits by other bodies blowing up. What could he possibly matter in the middle of all that? Forgiveness? Redemption? His life isn’t history, but it is in ruins. He has fathered no one. There is no going forward. But there is a way back. Onward he will die, backward he will find his way. Through the small things his wife has known about all along (the beads those old men counted, the marbles of his childhood, the mosaics in his head), he hopes to wend his way back.
Meredith holds out her hand to him, and he takes it. He will hold it tight enough to get through. Holding her hand and counting the beads, the marbles, the smallest, unsolicited smiles, the tears in his eyes, he will get through. A passage through the dossiers. For a life of snow. For goodness unfurling, taking him in.
IX
Elsa was a Christian Iraqi. Her parents were firecracker smart. They realized early on that they couldn’t remain in Iraq and that Kuwait, pleasant as it was at the time, wouldn’t last. They left to the US in the early 1970s, stayed for the time required to get a green card, and then returned to Kuwait for another decade to earn enough money to build their dream home in Georgia. I remember Elsa in the third grade, braided hair in hoops around her ears, starched white collar under her sharply ironed navy blue jumper. Elsa spewed a million words a minute, conclusions I always believed, like I would a teacher’s or a mother’s. She was my age, but she felt like my big sister. One year, Elsa told me her aunt was dying of cancer and that she was going to become a doctor when she grew up so she could find a cure. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I had no doubt she would do it. (I wish, Elsa, you had found the cure. You promised, Elsa, and I believed you.)
