I was so deeply ashamed of myself. I couldn’t stop thinking that I’d been old enough to know that I was placing myself in danger. That was what I’d wanted. It was what I’d needed. An unconscious impulse to be hurt. The fact that I hadn’t been able to see the full extent of the damage Omar was unleashing in my life didn’t absolve me of responsibility, didn’t erase my desire, nor would I want it to. My desire was real; it was a source of life, of energy that could propel me through my grief. And my right to that desire—pure and straightforward—did not absolve Omar of responsibility or diminish the scale of his assault. Of course, I hadn’t known that the pain would unravel and grow and change with me forever, become a bitter companion for the rest of my life.
Ellie returned and handed me a murky glass of water; there was sediment swirling in the dark green glass. She told me that it was the best she could get, that she had run the water for a few minutes and it still hadn’t turned transparent. I took the glass from her and she disappeared down the hallway.
Ellie was the only person I’d met who was willing to let me consider all of the pieces and parts of that summer. Take Xavi, for example. My willingness to forgive Omar, to look at the issue within its larger social context, terrified him. Each time the subject arose, he turned tense, rigid. His gaze would harden and he’d insist that the only correct emotional response would be to loathe Omar for damaging me beyond repair, not to integrate that damage into who I had become, into how Omar had shaped me. “But he did shape me,” I would insist. “What’s the point in wanting to return to who I was before? What’s the point in wishing I’d never crossed paths with him? I have to live with what is,” I would say to Xavi, “not with what could or should have been.” And he would fall silent, draw me into his embrace, and say, “I know, I know. I just wish I’d been there to protect you.” He would hold me, tenderly stroking my hair and my arms and my back, admitting through the gentleness of his touch that he knew that wanting to shift my narrative to match his emotional response was a transgression he shouldn’t permit himself, not if I’m to rise out of the ashes of my past. And it wasn’t only Xavi. The long line of therapists I’d consulted over the years. My mother. They all wanted me to adhere to the traditional narrative of victimhood. It was only with Ellie that I could acknowledge my yearning for Omar openly without being confronted with a totalizing narrative of the unequal power dynamic that had existed between us.
“Look!” Ellie commanded now, pointing at the floors. She was standing beside me again.
I looked. The white tiles of the floors had turned black. She kneeled down to wipe one with her hand and brought a sooty finger up to my face. I acknowledged that we would have to scrub them. But I wasn’t in the mood to clean. I wasn’t in the mood to instruct anyone, myself included, and least of all Ellie, who can be lazy when it comes to chores, on how to buff the floors until our faces were reflected in the glow of the tiles. I wondered if I’d be able to see the red print of Omar’s fingers on my neck then. I thought, in quiet distress: How am I to know whose face will come forward in those tiles once we polish them? Mine? Omar’s? The person I’d been that summer? I didn’t want to see the decomposed face of my former self, my mouth contorted in a painful grin. And what of the person I would have become had I stayed on, an adult who had misspent her youth being Omar’s lover? I imagined her face, pale and bloodless. I imagined her disintegrating flesh. Her sunken eyes. Her wrinkled forehead. Her anxious, unsettling gaze. I felt repulsed, horrified at the thought of her.
“I’m going to take a shower,” Ellie said. Her voice came at me like a soothing breeze.
“Okay,” I said. Then I warned her that it would likely take some time for the hot water to kick in, that the pipes would likely burp and squeal at first and maybe even spout rust-colored water. “Or worse,” I said, with an irony that failed to land. “Blood.”
“Oh god!” she said, and laughed forcibly from between her teeth. She walked off, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
I moved into the kitchen and leaned against the stove. I felt Omar sliding alongside me, as though he were ready to begin our story again, to lean his elegant brown body against the fridge, to hang his head back, to laugh sardonically, to drink an orange soda, to lick his fine lips tasting of basil and tobacco and honey. I felt unsettled by his presence, and yet I found myself submitting to it as though by habit. His presence, I thought, opening the cabinets and reaching for a glass to drink more water, will be with me until the day I die. I will forever carry with me the stormy timbre of his voice. The smell of his body will forever rise from the very earth on which I tread. I grabbed the glass. It was sticky, thick with grime. It had sat unused for so long that it had turned opaque.
I remembered a conversation that I’d had in therapy, a conversation in which my therapist, whose depth of understanding I usually considered extraordinary, had claimed that, most likely, I’d felt flattered by Omar’s attention, that I’d likely just been charmed by the fact that of all the young girls in the world he’d settled his attentions on me. I’d felt numb in the face of that comment, but right before I shut down, I’d felt an upsurge of doubt, a swell that manifested itself as a tightening in my chest, a constriction of my throat. I remembered feeling as though I were choking on her comment, just as I’d felt a few minutes earlier. Her comment had seemed too simple, too vain, but still likely, still plausible, despite the fact that I had no recollection of ever having felt that way in the least.
What had bothered me about the comment, I considered, returning the dirty glass to the cabinet, thinking that I’d retrieve the one Ellie had already washed, was not so much what the therapist had said but how she’d said it, as if it were a singular truth, a fact that contained revelatory powers. As if her comment alone would forever clarify for me what had happened between Omar and me. I had interpreted her tone—which had been austere, direct, unadorned—to mean that she was offering me the missing link that would allow me to settle, once and for all, the question of what my motivations had been, why I had pursued a relationship with Omar in the first place, a question that plagued me just as much as it plagued me to undermine the desire, pure and healthy, that had catapulted me toward him.
I felt my face prime for tears. I closed the cabinet door and stood there a while with my arm on the handle and my head resting against it. I felt heavy and a little shattered. I looked around. I took in the walls and windows and floors. There were cracks in the kitchen floor tiles and the grout had turned black with dirt. The walls were yellow, the color of abandoned teeth. And I could hardly see through the streaks of grease and the grainy specks of dust that had gotten caught on the window’s surface. It was uncanny, this apartment, this waylaid enclosure. It was at once alive and dead, full of ghosts and yet as empty as a tunnel leading to nowhere at the end of the earth.
This apartment, a vacation home no one in my family frequented—certainly not my father, nor his wife, the main instigator of its purchase. In my mind’s eye, I could see her walking from room to room in her negligee, airing out her limbs in the Mediterranean breeze for two summers, maybe three, before she’d tired of it and directed her attention elsewhere. With hers went my father’s; she pulled the reins of their lives left and right and left again, so they were forever doing circles around themselves, unable to advance. The same way my father had children spread around the world, I thought, as I left the kitchen to search for my cigarettes—children who had internalized his remoteness and who, as adults, consciously or not, considered it our duty to perpetuate the legacy of estrangement that he’d set into motion—he also had apartments gathering dust. He had so many empty homes that he struggled to pay the taxes, was always borrowing against one to pay for another; and yet he refused to liquidate his assets even if it meant living hand to mouth, dying impoverished.
I had never understood my father. He is the most perplexing person I know, and since I am an extension of him, I am equally perplexed by the parts of me that reflect his detachment and lai
ssez-faire attitude, traits that, upon further consideration, were likely the very ones that encouraged me to open myself up to Omar’s secretive, shameful pleasures, to give way to the darkness between us, to applaud and enable his aberrant will.
I found my bag and retrieved my cigarettes. Perhaps, I considered, taking in the hideous walls of the apartment yet again—their crusted seams, their cracks, their sliced and slashed plaster—my father had accumulated children and homes in the hope that each time a new child or apartment came along he would do better; make up for his past errors; keep, once and for all, his feet to the fire. But I did not believe my father capable of change. There had been a time when I had. But I no longer did.
I lit a cigarette and brought it to my lips. The smoke relaxed my throat. I could breathe again. It was a simple gesture, that of lifting a cigarette to my lips, but one that gave me immense pleasure: drawing in the hot smoke, feeling the sting of nicotine against my lungs. Smoking gave me a sense of control over my fate, a destiny that I knew had been shaped in large part by self-contempt. How many times had I lit a cigarette in this apartment? I wondered. Hundreds if not more. And the act, repeated, unchanging, wounding and gratifying at the same time, had the odd effect of reminding me of all of the years that had passed. My hands were rougher now. I had freckles on my skin where there had never been spots before. I was wearing a ring, a simple gold band engraved with Xavi’s name. As I deposited the ash on an old piece of torn glossy paper—a brochure describing the flora and fauna of the region—as I watched the ash tumble onto the brochure, a thin plume of smoke rising from its laminated surface, I felt Omar’s hand sliding off the nape of my neck. For a moment, I breathed easily. I felt that what had passed between us had passed in another lifetime long ago. I resolved to air out the apartment, to open up all of the windows. After that, I thought to myself, I will open the door to my old room. I’ve come here to lay my eyes on whatever monstrosity is there waiting to assault me. It was always like that, my mood: retreating then rising to the occasion.
Ellie stepped out of the shower. Her cheeks were red from the steam. She’d dried herself with a stiff towel she’d found in the bathroom.
“How was it?” I asked.
“Tepid.” She smiled. “But I could feel the hot water coming on at the end.”
I asked her if she would help me draw back the curtains, roll up the shutters, open up all of the windows.
“We need to air this place out,” I said with a forced enthusiasm that betrayed the fact that, deep down, I was feeling restless, unsure, uneasy. I was struggling.
Ellie disappeared into her room to change. I looked down the hall at my bedroom door and felt the sting of fear again. I was gripped by the terror of finding myself—who I had been—still there, sitting on the edge of my old bed, an aged version of me, of who I would have become had I stayed, blue and bloated, her skin hanging off her bones like wet rags. My legs grew weak and wobbly beneath me; I thought they might give out. But I kept on moving.
I opened the window in the living room and the light of the day leaked in. Blond rays pooled at my feet. I wanted to lavish in them, to draw from them my rightful share of life. Ellie reemerged wearing a green cotton dress that came down to her knees. She barely ever wore pants, a habit from having been raised in an Orthodox household. Her hair was wet and it was dripping onto her back and chest, leaving dark marks that spread as she moved around the house taking it in. She’d already digressed from the task at hand. Instead of unlatching the windows, she was going through the closets and cabinets in the bathroom and the corridor with a bemused look on her face, pulling out every object she came across: a large red pair of sunglasses, a cropped yellow top I’d worn almost daily that summer, the two-piece purple Speedo I’d trained in for years. I stood in the living room watching her. She seemed so remote, her figure distant and diminished. A cavernous hole opened in my mind as I stared at that swimsuit, Omar’s voice emerging from inside that drafty cave.
“A fish,” he said. “My little fish.” I had always been a strong swimmer.
“Is this yours?” Ellie asked with a drawn tone that betrayed her dismay, the Speedo hanging from her finger like a wounded piece of meat from a hook.
I didn’t answer at first. Used to my silences, she continued her search. I watched her hand plunge in and out of the corridor as if it were disconnected from her body. Her hand looked so white against the metallic light of that tunnel. I felt the swell building again. I heard the deep echo of a roaring ocean. I was about to be submerged, as though the sea were rising to swallow the apartment, or as though the lakes high up in the mountains where Omar and I had gone swimming were hovering over me, about to tip over and flood me with their warm waters. Who would have known, I thought, that the same skill required to do laps across a pool would serve me in going down on him? I managed to move, to take a step into the feeble light of the corridor and snatch the suit from Ellie’s hand.
“Stop touching everything,” I said angrily.
She backed away from the closet and went into her room and closed the door.
I felt terrible. She’d always been ahead of me in health and healing, in knowing what to do in the face of insurmountable loss. She’d made it her life’s work to study her own grief, to catalogue the invisible pain of others. I could barely deal with my own lot in life. While this asymmetry between us was integral to our friendship, to the care and respect we had for each other, in my weakest moments it also made me feel small, selfish, inadequate, an incomplete citizen of the world. I stood there and lifted the swimsuit to my nose. It smelled like moss and fresh water. It was stiff, the elastic bands rotted, likely because I’d put it away while it was still wet, though I couldn’t remember doing so, couldn’t remember the last time I’d worn it, if it had been on an outing with Omar or if I had, as I tended to do, lain out all day, alone in the scorching sun, occasionally taking a dip into the water, reading Lorca. I remembered reciting lines from The Gypsy Ballads—the wind leaves in the mouth a rare and generous savor. I had sung them quietly to myself. The same savage animal lust I felt for Omar, I also felt, already then, for language.
As I stood there speechless, deferring my apology to Ellie, I felt my hand burning; it cramped up. I felt a scalding, searing pain, an inhibiting pressure, as though my Speedo had acquired a crushing weight in the years since I’d last seen it. I wanted to toss it out the window, burn it in a fire, bury it in mud. It dawned on me again that there were memories from that summer I could not access. I could not plot the sequence of events on a line. The sediment at the base of my mind had solidified, turned to cement, a dead weight I carried around but for which I had no language. I wanted to tell Ellie that she should be careful not to disturb the contents of the apartment, that every object contained information about how I had lived in this space. That I was afraid of losing control, of the chaos I suspected would ensue once I began touching things, moving them around, dislodging them from the past where they were securely moored. It was already happening. As I held that suit, I saw Omar peeling it off my small body at the end of a long day hiking to the high tranquil lakes that lay hidden in the mountains.
I retreated to the living-room window and leaned my head out to take in the fresh air. Below, I saw the vendors preparing to close their shops, retrieving the leeks and oranges and celery that stood in piles on the sidewalk, and thought to myself, Omar knew all of the mountain roads. He knew the mountains like a guerrilla fighter. He lived off those mountains, taking people on excursions, hunting birds and rabbits and wild boars. He knew every rock and tree. I had been so skinny then, so tiny, like that wild boar he’d captured, with her spotted back and coarse hair and blinking eyes, her small raw hooves. I felt an unbearable ache in my heart at the thought of her.
A dog came bounding down the promenade, answering to a whistle that seemed to come from one of the vendors beneath the building. I heard the metal shutters of stores opening and closing. A young woman was making her way up the promena
de, her tanned muscular legs shining in the copper light of the descending sun. I had also been strong then, I considered, wiry, perfectly capable of keeping up despite my incessant smoking habit. I’d swim across the lakes, leaving Omar heaving behind on the rocky shores. I remembered him placing his hand on my hip bones, his gorgeous hands. I remembered him lifting hot sand from the beach and pouring it onto my belly, saying all the while that I needed to eat more. I couldn’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia for him, a feeling that disturbed me greatly because it suggested that I missed him on some deep physiological level I could neither justify nor control. The girl disappeared from view, and for a moment, the promenade lay empty, silent.
The cut-granite stones of the promenade looked dazzling beneath the incandescent sky. I watched three old men come up the road dressed in brown slacks and button-down shirts, wearing espadrilles, leaning into their canes. I pictured my father alone at fourteen, his features swollen as they were preparing to find their final shape, his face red from the cold ocean winds, his small gray eyes raw from the searing salt of the stormy water, the damp air, his back to Great Britain, his neck and shoulders tense from the absence of his own parents, his stomach turning on the high seas. And then I thought of myself at seventeen, alone in this seaside apartment. My father must have thought, What a luxury, what a life this child of mine has.
Ellie reappeared in the corridor. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m sorry, too,” I told her. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have been so abrasive.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” she conceded. “It’s just hard to guess what you’re feeling sometimes.”
Savage Tongues Page 7
