Savage Tongues

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  I opened my mouth and let it fill with water. It tasted terrible, so I spat it back out.

  “I need to shave, too,” Ellie called through the door. “And then we can get going.”

  “Okay,” I said, and turned the tap off.

  “Enough cleaning,” she said, opening the door and stepping into the humid air. “This is as good as it’s going to get.”

  I moved the shower curtain aside and looked at her. “Not a hair in sight!” I said.

  She was wearing her reading glasses; the lenses had fogged over. “I can’t see a thing!” She giggled.

  I reached for the towels and wrapped one around my body and another around my head like a turban. I told her that it was likely that, by the time we returned from the beach in the evening, the apartment would have again covered its surfaces with every particle of dust that floated through.

  We both laughed. It sounded terrible to be trapped in a living apartment, a house that had a consciousness of its own—and a dark one at that—but the truth is, we all learn to dislike the company of others when we’ve been left to our own devices for long enough. The apartment’s conduct was heinous, terrifying, brazen, but I knew the source of its pain: it was as empty and dry as an abandoned well. All it had for company were ghosts and it clung to them desperately. It’s hard to restore an abandoned home, to reverse its willful self-destruction, I thought. And I neither cared enough nor was innocent enough to try. After all, what did I owe these walls? Nothing, I thought, and got out of the way so Ellie could shower. The best thing I could do was remain steadfast in my conviction that some piece of who I’d been would be restored to me as a result of having returned to reacquaint myself with who I had been, perhaps even to reclaim some part of that previous version of myself.

  I went into my bedroom and saw the Calzedonia bags I’d abandoned the night before. I emptied the contents onto the bed. I smoothed out the green bikini. I folded the underwear. I went over to my suitcase and pulled out a dress: a simple black linen dress, sleeveless, with a row of delicate pearl-white buttons running right down the middle. I’d gotten it in New York City between book events. I’d seen it on a mannequin in the shop window and had immediately been drawn to its simplicity, its air of effortless elegance. I’d enjoyed going shopping after or before a long reading or a live interview. It reminded me of my body, that I wasn’t just a floating head, a mind charging through life with its sword of reason.

  I put on the green bikini and pulled the dress over it. I regarded myself in the mirror. I pressed my hand against the wrinkles, but there was no getting rid of them. I’d have to get it dry-cleaned. But I liked the way it fell on my body. I admired its straight lines. I thought about how Xavi would encourage me to wear a belt over the dress to accentuate my waist. But he would do it lovingly, tenderly; he was always careful to say that what mattered most was how I felt wearing the dress, that it looked beautiful either way. I missed him intensely for a moment.

  I unwrapped the towel from my hair and used it to soak up the water. I’d cut my hair right up to my shoulders. I liked it that way. It was easy to maintain, easy to style if I ever felt like it.

  I walked around to the window and listened for a moment to the sound of distant traffic, to the children at play in the park up the road, the frenetic chatter coming from the café patios. I heard a clanking in the distance; it sounded like someone pounding metal. Then I heard the engine of a scooter as it labored up the hill, followed by the harsher, sharper sound of a motorcycle being revved to its limit and a propeller plane flying overhead. Up above, I saw a kite floating in the sky. It was shaped like a bird and flapped about uncontrollably. There was a warm wind coming off the ocean. I reached to close the window, and heard Omar’s voice.

  “You should never offer to give a blow job,” he said.

  The air smelled of musk. I was afraid to turn around, afraid he’d walked out of the walls and now was standing behind me, monitoring my every move, asking me to rehearse my words, to use my body in ways that pleased him.

  “I thought I was your whore,” I said.

  “What?” It was Ellie’s voice. She was knocking on my door, ready to go.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  I grabbed the oversize straw purse shaped like a basket that Xavi had bought for me as a reminder to have fun, to take it easy, to enjoy the beach. I put my towel in it and my sunglasses and notebook, strapped my sandals to my feet, and before I knew it, we were reclining on the cushioned beds under the coconut umbrellas, listening to summer hits, sipping our drinks, watching the waves crash onto the shore and retreat.

  9

  THE SUN HOVERED OVER THE COAST. Our waiter, Salim, was a bronzed muscular man in his thirties. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to expose his large biceps, and he had a bandanna wrapped around his head to keep his curls out of his face, which was covered in stubble; it all served to give him an air of cool indifference. He set a chilled bottle of rosé on a small plastic table between our sun beds then swung impatiently away toward a triumvirate of topless women who were lounging in the front row. They’d arrived already drunk and were now chattering away loudly, pinching one another’s nipples.

  Ellie opened one eye and turned to me. “Remember Yaakov?”

  “Yaakov!” I sighed. “Can I please put the tip in? Just the tip!” I said to Ellie jokingly.

  She shook her head and giggled uncomfortably.

  She’d spent an evening with Yaakov in our hut by the Dead Sea. That was years ago, back when we still regularly spoke to Sahar, before she’d disappeared from our lives. Yaakov had fallen for Ellie. The second he’d seen her, he’d pulled me aside and told me that he’d dreamt of her the night before, his princess; he couldn’t believe that she was standing before him in flesh and bone. The fact of having manifested in life the woman who’d appeared to him in his sleep had left him dumbfounded. He spoke like a child relaying to an adult their first experience of an incredible coincidence: open-mouthed, wide-eyed, forgetting to breathe or swallow, picking expectantly at his nails.

  “Please,” he begged me. “Tell her that I am her prince.”

  He must have thought that those words, as charming as they were odd, would somehow be more persuasive if they were delivered by me. What did he expect me to say to her: Princess Ellie, meet your prince, Yaakov? I couldn’t remember how I’d delivered the message, but I could remember Ellie’s face contorting in response, taking on an unsettled expression that revealed her incredulity. She was in her thirties and not once had a man approached her claiming to have dreamt her up the night before. Yaakov’s childlike rhetoric and sweet demeanor had piqued her interest enough for her to concede to a make-out session.

  “He really begged,” Ellie said, winking at the blinding sun. “We were just lying there, making out, and he took his dick out, and whined: ‘Can I put the tip in? Can I put the tip in? Just the tip!’ He wouldn’t stop. It was like his gears had gotten stuck. I thought he’d never say anything else again. Eventually I just got bored and asked him to leave!”

  She hadn’t found Yaakov to be intimidating. There had been no hint of aggression in his voice, only desperation, a child’s begging.

  During our days at the Dead Sea, we’d gone to bed each evening in laughter. We’d spent the days asking each other at every turn if we could dip the tip of this or that into this or that other thing. We were still laughing about it now. We would likely go to our graves laughing about the evening Ellie had spent with Yaakov being harangued about the tip of his penis near the shore of the Dead Sea. Surely, he seemed to suggest, she could kindly step aside while he dipped his penis into her. What did he think? we wondered. That he was merely asking to dunk his croissant into her morning coffee?

  A shift of bodies in the front row brought me back to the present. One of the women, the most petite of the three, stood up and checked herself out in her friend’s tinted lenses. She smoothed her eyebrows and smiled at herself, then brought her hands to her waist a
nd said something inaudible to Salim. It was hard to hear her voice over the breaking waves.

  “What are they doing?” Ellie asked, sitting up and looking straight at Salim, who’d walked over to one of the women. He’d begun to do squats in front of her. He squeezed his biceps and reached down and swiftly lifted her sun bed, tilting her backward.

  “Ready?” he asked, pumping his arms. We realized that he was going to wheel her down to the water but first intended to do a hundred squats with her in tow.

  Her two friends were giggling wildly, and saying, “Oh, Salim, Salim!” It was as if they were having an orgy.

  I poured myself some rosé. “Cheers,” I said, lifting my glass. “To all the truly great men in the world, like Xavi.”

  I lit a cigarette and reclined. In the distance, a flock of birds was gliding down toward the water. I could hear dance music coming from the bars up the coast and, periodically, the sound of a jet ski engine sawing through the water. Nearby, a group of quieter women were getting massaged by two Chinese women in sun hats, striped shirts, and chinos. I wondered who’d established their uniform. Their faces were powder white, ghostly, covered with huge dollops of sunscreen. They were working away at the women’s feet, diligently pressing their thumbs into their toes, oiling their calves. One of the masseuses looked up at me and smiled, aware that I’d been observing them. Her smile, I thought, was gorgeous. She was tall, slender, and her eyes revealed a focused intelligence, a sharp wit.

  “You next?” she asked.

  I nodded yes, and pointed to Ellie to indicate her, too; the woman’s smile broadened.

  Salim was grinning triumphantly as if he were an actor in a well-rehearsed play. He was still doing his squats. The woman in the sun bed was squinting up at him and smiling coquettishly. She was holding her sun hat down with one hand and her breasts were bouncing around. She was having a grand time, they all were, until he lost his footing. Her arm swung overhead as the bed faltered, knocking their wine bottle onto the ground. Several long, tense seconds elapsed. They all stared at one another, then down at the wine, which was spilling out, staining the sand. I looked at the women, their pursed lips and drawn faces, their stony gazes. Salim’s spectacular failure, it seemed, had caused their mood to shift from extreme carelessness to mundane fastidiousness almost immediately. They were distressed over their lost wine, wine they’d paid for, and Salim, aware of their discontent, took care to smile through his embarrassment; he promised them a replacement bottle and left to fetch one before they could make a move to dismiss him.

  He soon returned with a fresh bottle of wine for the women. He neglected us. Instead of asking for our order, he evaded us and ran swiftly back into the kitchen. We wanted a platter of grilled fish. I could already feel the wine going to my head. Ellie, I remembered, had woken up hungry; she’d been saving her appetite for the exquisite seafood I’d promised. We called on Salim several times. At first, we asked gently if he wouldn’t mind coming around to take our order, then we asked again with a hint of irritation that seemed only to exaggerate his apparent distaste for us.

  “In a minute,” he snapped, and he disappeared into the back of the restaurant.

  The beach was momentarily quiet. In that respite, I thought again of Yaakov and the long weekend we’d spent in the dizzying heat of the Dead Sea. Everything about that weekend had been strange, almost surreal. The landscape had seemed warped to me. There was an inconstant quality to the thick desert air, the silky camel-colored sand, the briny dense water of the Dead Sea. It all seemed tenuously attached to the earth, on the cusp of disappearing. I remembered wondering if we would vanish with it, if the landscape would peel away from the ground and lift off into the sky while we bathed in that thick bowl of salty water. I had the distinct sensation of having hallucinated the place myself: the dry white earth, the palm trees that shot out of the roads, the brush and bramble on the gray hills, the Dead Sea’s unmoving surface—no waves, no wind—the blood-blue oily surface of the water, the white ruffle of salt that skirted the sea, that winked and flashed in the harsh rays of the sun. It had appeared almost surreal to me. The landscape was so ancient, so beautiful, so barren. I had often returned to it in my mind just for the pleasure of revisiting the wide stark sky and the flat salty disk of that sea.

  I could still remember Ellie turning to me on the bus on the way there to ask: “Don’t you think it’s strange that we’re traveling to the lowest point on earth just to float?”

  We’d taken the bus from Jerusalem in the high-noon heat. The bus, I remembered, was old; its stench of body odor and cheap cologne made me queasy. The engine choked as the driver settled into second gear; he was trying to hold the bus back as he drove it downhill. It was a dizzying drop, as if the bus were spiraling down to the hollowed center of the world. The sun glowed with a blinding golden light; my vision skipped like a rock across the flat surface of the water.

  “Maybe,” I remembered having said, “it’s about a journey to the interior of one’s self.”

  I turned to look at Ellie, but the sun, which was coming through the window as if with a design to blind and dehydrate, obfuscated her features. I saw her eyes—round and unblinking—and her mouth moving, but the rest of her face had atomized.

  “Arezu,” she said. “Not everything is an allegory.”

  Her face came back into focus. We were almost at Ein Gedi. We just had to go past the checkpoint to reach the first stop.

  “Lots of things feel good,” I said to her in protest. “But to come all the way here to float is a strange obsession. People must experience it on a deeper, more metaphysical level, no? An ancient healing ritual?”

  Maybe, she’d conceded, people have found it difficult to bear their own weight since time immemorial and have come to the Dead Sea to float and lighten their load a bit. She’d laughed freely, animatedly, as we’d been laughing now, reclined on our sun beds, waiting to eat seafood, to get our feet massaged to the sound of the breaking waves.

  Salim finally surfaced. He stood towering over us, sulking. He was in a foul mood. “What do you want?” he asked rudely.

  We put in our order, but before he could turn to leave, I asked him what his name was. I already knew the answer because I’d heard him introduce himself to the women—he was half Egyptian, half Austrian, he’d told them, but like me, he had not seen his father, the Austrian, in more than a decade—but I thought we deserved the same courtesy.

  “Why do you want to know?” he asked, looking over at the women scuffling about, raising their voices as if the beach were theirs alone, caressing their breasts, throwing their heads back, playing with their loosened hair. All of their movements seemed rehearsed. I told him that I’d overheard him offer his name to the others and that it seemed odd that he’d be so wary of introducing himself to us.

  Ellie glanced at me in disbelief then moved her astonished gaze over to him.

  “Salim,” he said bitterly, taking in Ellie’s expectant smile.

  The water level appeared to be rising. We were approaching the afternoon and the light was softening. In the waning heat, the wine we were drinking went down more easily. The three women, I observed, were onto their third or fourth bottle.

  I told Salim to bring another our way, then there was a moment’s pause when we all stared at the women in the front row. Their capacity to draw attention to themselves seemed boundless. They’d flagged down a British man with a potbelly and a white head of hair. They’d dragged their sun beds together and made them into a makeshift bed. He was sitting on the edge, his floral shirt unbuttoned, his belly distended and hanging over his thighs.

  “Clifford,” he said, introducing himself.

  “Oh, Clifford, Clifford!” I joked.

  “No,” Ellie said, drawing out her words for emphasis. “Get it right: his name is Clifforis.”

  I laughed, and Salim joined in despite his mood. He let out a dry giggle, a little puff of air, and his posture relaxed. The sky was taking on a pinkish hue, and
the music we’d heard in the distance grew louder.

  “Do you party much?” Ellie asked Salim, observing that there didn’t seem to be much else to do here but tan, drink, and dance until dawn.

  “Sometimes,” he said. “It depends on how long my shifts are.”

  I took advantage of this moment of earnestness to ask him why we put him in such a dark mood when the other women seemed to do exactly the opposite.

  “I can tell you’re from the Middle East,” he said, turning to glance at his former playmates, who were now busily pawing at Clifford’s hair. Salim laughed sourly. “You see that?” he asked. “He’s going to pay to get them drunk because he thinks at least one of them will go to bed with him, but at the end of the day, he’ll end up at the club alone, sticking euros in a stripper’s underwear. I see this kind of thing all of the time.”

  He seemed blissfully unaware of the fact that a moment earlier he’d been in Clifford’s position, humiliating himself in exchange for whatever might be left over at the end of a long day’s drinking. The women were having fun. That was clear. And there were three of them. They seemed to know their own limits; they were watching out for one another. I never once got the feeling that they were in danger. They were looking for a distraction, for a wild weekend, a fling; and they had every right to. They had every right to drink themselves under the table, every right to go looking for an easy lay without having to worry about who might take advantage of them. If I had a bone to pick, it was with Salim, not because he’d been so easily persuaded by the women or because he’d recognized in them a desire he was more than willing to fulfill even if in doing so he had to act the part of a clown. No, he’d projected waves of animosity at us for precisely the reason that I’d suspected: because we were from the Middle East like he was, and our common codes of behavior required us to be, at least in public, extremely reserved with one another. We—Ellie and I—were required to be chaste, virtuous, to differentiate ourselves from the supposedly licentious vixens of the West even if to their men we were exotic goods, commodities who showed no restraint in bed. This strange paradox demolished us all, dispossessed us of our sexuality, our ability to give and receive pleasure. We were always worried about seeming too free, seeming too invested in ourselves, too unguarded, loose, disposable; to do so would be to invite danger into our lives, a danger the consequences of which we deserved. Any exhibition of sexual pleasure on our part was an opening for men to treat us with disrespect. That’s what Salim had been taught, and that, too, was how Ellie and I had been raised.