I, The Divine

by Rabih Alameddine

  “You’re right,” I said. “Maybe we should go to the cafeteria.”

  “No. We can talk here. It’s not like she’s listening.”

  I sat down on a chair facing the bed and Amal sat next to me. “Is he married?”

  “Yes, of course.” She raised an eyebrow and smiled with only the left side of her mouth.

  “Is he in love with you? Are you in love with him?”

  “No, no, it’s not like that.”

  “You’re doing it for the sex?” I asked incredulously. After my parents, Amal would be the most difficult to imagine having sex.

  “No. Stop that. It’s not about sex. I wish it was as easy as it is for you.”

  “You are having sex though? I mean you did say you’re having an affair. Usually, that involves more than afternoon coffee.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, slightly irritated. She leaned back in her chair and adjusted her dress. “We are having sex, but that’s not why I’m having an affair. I want to be with someone. I’m lonely, really lonely. Twenty years I’ve been married to that idiot and I began to realize I don’t like him. I know you never liked him, but I thought I did. One day I woke up and realized I don’t like him. He’s not the best kind of man, he’s not the worst kind of man and I didn’t care. After everything he’s done to me, I don’t hate him. I just don’t care. Twenty years of my life spent with someone I don’t like. It’s a terrible blow. I woke up one day and the first man who flirted with me got me. A prize, huh? Are you upset?” She looked away from me, down at her hand as if examining her fingernails.

  “Upset?”

  “Are you upset with me? I thought you’d be the only one who would not be embarrassed by what I’m saying.”

  “Embarrassed? I’m proud of you. If there’s anything that’s upsetting, it’s that you’re still with the asshole. Divorce that son of a bitch and send him to his mama. I told you that a long time ago. Dump his haggard ass. I’m surprised it took you this long.”

  We sat in the dark, no longer looking at each other, but staring at poor cataleptic Lamia. I wished there was something more I could say. Amal suddenly whispered, “Well, if not a divorce, then a frying pan again.” She began giggling uncontrollably. It took me a few seconds to join in, enough time to recover from the shock of her bringing up the frying pan incident at such a stressful time. We giggled like schoolgirls again. “Boing,” she would say and try to keep her laughter low enough not to be heard. “Boing,” I would reply.

  The frying pan incident. Another family scandal. Amal’s husband slapped her once, ten years earlier. She was furious, but had to live with it, or so she thought. She complained to Saniya, who told her she was lucky her husband was a nice man. Amal should look at the marriages around her and consider herself fortunate. My father agreed it was a terrible thing for her husband to do, but he was her husband after all. She called me. I told her if any man ever hit me, I would deck him and damn the consequences. Apparently her husband got upset with her one day a couple of years later while she was cooking. He slapped her. She turned around and banged him over the head with her frying pan (full of butter). His first reaction was, “What did you have to do that for?” Like a little boy. Our father had to stitch his bleeding forehead. Her husband was the butt of jokes for a while, but he never laid a hand on her again. Whenever Amal and I got together, all one of us had to say was, “Boing,” and we would crack up. People were unable to stop talking about the crazy Nour el-Din women for a while.

  Lamia remained unconscious throughout our hysterical giggling. I sat looking at her, wondering what part she played in our family’s problems. A friend once drove me from Brooklyn to John F. Kennedy Airport. Along the way, while stuck in traffic on the expressway, I noticed a black family in a small, brownish, older-model Toyota. Dad driving, Mom in the passenger seat, four kids in the back, the eldest no more than ten, the youngest no less than four, all singing at the top of their lungs, in discordant harmony, with the radio blaring, a song called “I Believe I Can Fly.” As I watched them I was uplifted at first, but a feeling of envy overcame me. Our family never sang, never came together in joy, not as long as Lamia refused participation. If my father wanted to tell a story, she made sure to mention she hated fairy tales. If my mother suggested a game of trumps, Lamia commented on the silliness of card games. We had no family outings. Our family did not believe it could fly.

  I have a great story to tell you. I was there. This is what I saw:

  I saw a principled man regretting his past actions and attempting to correct the course his young life had taken. I saw him cruelly divorce his blameless wife. For a few moments, he had taken a risk, stepping beyond the imaginary circle Lebanese men drew around themselves in colored chalk. He had married nontraditionally, an American woman, for love, the riskiest of all. He divorced for comfort, for tradition, for safety.

  I saw a young woman, still a teenager, marry a man many years her senior, for duty, to fulfill her destiny. I saw a woman who looked at the principled man finding him a worthy husband, a doctor, a provider, a father for her future family. She saw a good name, and an upward move in the community. She saw the pride in her mother’s eyes.

  I saw a debonair city man choose a mountain girl for a wife. I saw him pick an uneducated girl he could train, mold in time, sculpt as his Eliza. I saw a man from a titled family decide on a peasant for a wife, someone who would always look up to him, never challenge him, never threaten. I saw a man choose a girl for a wife.

  I saw a silly young woman, the butt of her in-laws’ cruel jokes. I saw an incompetent homemaker trying hard to learn on the job. I saw a horrendous cook ruin every meal, the aroma of burned food stultifying. I saw a naive girl stand for hours in front of modern appliances unable to figure out how to work them. I saw a crying girl murmuring heart-wrenching apologies for placing an electric kettle on a stovetop burner. I saw an unforgiving family snicker.

  I saw an inexperienced girl look at the man’s daughters and recoil in terror at the prospect of responsibility. I saw her unsure what to do, make many mistakes. I saw a little girl take full advantage of these mistakes.

  And boy, was my father surprised.

  My father divorced my mother in 1962, when I was two. She died in 1995. In all those thirty-three years, he never saw her, wrote, or called her. She no longer existed. I, through no fault of my own, reminded him of her. I was my mother’s daughter.

  As I grow older, I notice how much I look like my mother. The eyes are the same, the hair is almost the same, mine is more brown than red, but I do dye it red every now and then. The nose, the forehead, the same. My sisters take after my father’s side of the family. I inherited the exotic looks.

  When we were children, my father would regale us with stories, some fairy tales, some real stories from his days as a child, and some that were entirely made up. He used to love telling us “Sleeping Beauty.” He would show us each a mirror and in a solemn voice, tell us in English, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” My sister, Amal, would shout, “Sleeping Beauty.” Lamia stayed silent, as if she were being asked a trick question. I would shout, “Me!” My father loved that.

  These days, the rhyme is different. I look at myself in the mirror and can’t help myself. I begin to chant:

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall,

  I am my mother after all.

  And I start crying.

  It isn’t just the looks. I notice how my life ended up and realize I am my mother, even though I hardly knew her

  Had I known the opening of my New York exhibit would turn out to be a complete fiasco, I would have stayed home. My friend Dina and I reached the gallery at ten minutes to six, breathless. The gallery was empty. One of the assistants was still sweeping the concrete floors. The reception was from six till eight.

  I was lucky to have Dina with me. I was a nervous wreck, floating in a rough sea of anxiety. For nineteen years, she had been my anchor. She had taken a week off from her job in Bo
ston to be by my side, flying out to San Francisco to accompany me across a continent to New York.

  “Do you need me there?” she had asked over the phone.

  “No, I’m fine. It’ll be nice to see you in New York, but you don’t have to come here. I think I can manage. Look, it’s no big deal. We just had another fight. That’s all. He didn’t want to come to the opening. He was surprised I asked. That’s all the fight was about. No biggie. It’s not like he usually shows up at any events.”

  “Lovers are supposed to support each other.”

  “Well, maybe he’s not my lover.”

  “I know that, but do you know that? I’ll be there. I’ll fly to San Francisco and we can come to New York together. I’ll feel better that way.”

  And that was that. She arrived in San Francisco to escort me.

  I thought the exhibit looked wonderful. My paintings had never looked better, they had breathing space. Even though my best painting was not hung since UPS had damaged it during shipping, the rest of the work was good enough. I was elated.

  The gallery had three rooms with three different exhibits. Mine was in the main room. In the smaller gallery there was a group exhibit of New York artists, both paintings and sculptures. In the smallest room was a conceptual exhibit by a Russian émigré.

  It was January 19, 1995, and I felt my life might be going somewhere. It did, just not where I expected.

  I had not been painting for a long time, but I had reached a style all my own. Having been influenced by what some people called hard-edged abstraction, from Mondrian to McLaughlin, I began painting symmetrical rectangular bars on a plain colored background. The canvases were always large.

  I drove my black Honda Accord on the freeway for the simple reason that I needed to get out of the house. It was Sunday morning and I wanted time to think. I crossed the bridge, unconcerned where I might end up. In time, I would turn around, returning along the same route, without even thinking about it. I wondered what to do, as the rolling hills of the East Bay flew past me. My ex-lover, David, had not called in over six months, but I still wished fervently he would. I was stuck in a relationship that had been over for years.

  For someone who had believed the main point of life was relationships, I had done a poor job of living. If relationships were the crucible of transformation, I had shattered those fragile containers. I had failed every romantic relationship I had plunged into. The reasons for these failures continued to elude me, but the resulting feelings did not. I sometimes felt like I had been dropped into a sea of overwhelming sadness. I was unsure whether the feelings were the direct result of my incompetence at relationships or the effect of a biochemical imbalance. For sometimes, like this moment, as I drove on the freeway, I cried for no reason.

  The enveloping sadness began in my belly, moved up to my heart, and inundated me. Tears flowed down my cheeks as I drove. I was in the midst of a feeling explosion. I zipped past a highway patrol car on my left. I panicked. The patrol car was behind me, the disco lights went on, and I slowed down. I breathed deeply, slowly, trying to control myself as I parked along the side. I could not let a policeman, a stranger, see me in that state. I tried to stop crying, but was unable to. What the hell, I thought, go for it. I allowed myself to sob and heave loudly. The policeman came to my window, Mars, the god of war, personified, all pomp and circumstance capped off by reflective sunglasses. “Can I have your registration and driver’s license, ma’am?”

  “Yes, of course, officer,” I replied between sobs. I began looking through my purse.

  “Are you all right, ma’am?” he asked, beginning to visibly deflate.

  “Yes, yes, I’ll be okay. I’m just having emotional problems.” It was a miracle I could even be understood. I was practically in hysterics as I handed him my driver’s license. “It’s an old picture. I looked better then.” The last sentence was followed by a loud heave and a renewed bout of crying.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, ma’am?” he muttered, no longer sure of himself. His hand trembled.

  “Yes, I’ll be okay in a few minutes. I’ll just stay here for a bit until this passes.”

  “Where are you going, ma’am?”

  Go for it, I thought to myself. It was Sunday. “To church.”

  “Will you be able to drive?” he asked me, his voice hesitant.

  “Yes, just let me catch my breath. I’ll be able to drive as soon as this passes. It always does.” Another loud sob.

  “Well, ma’am,” he said, giving me back my license without having looked at it, “please take your time before getting back on the highway.”

  “I will, officer,” I said compliantly. “I’ll just wait here for a while.” No ticket, not even a warning, nothing.

  He backed away from me, turned around, and practically ran back to his car. He drove out so fast he almost hit another car as he changed lanes. I sobbed and laughed at the same time. Animus meets Anima and runs away in terror. My life story

  Unlike me, my sister Lamia was not the sort of person who would attract attention, preferring to blend into the background. She was such an anonymous presence in our family we sometimes forgot she was even there. Though she was the sister closest to me in age, we were not close in any other way. She was a reticent child. She spoke so little many assumed she was a deaf-mute or incapable of understanding our language. Adults spoke to her slowly, loudly, as they would to a foreigner, and she rarely replied unless it was absolutely essential. When she did reply it was aggressively, snapping back at whoever had the audacity to engage her. Every now and then, she surprised us by interrupting, using a polemical tone, disagreeing with what was being said. Her utterances were not usually a statement requiring an argument or further elaboration, simply an assertion of her disagreement like, “You’re wrong,” or “That’s absolutely untrue.” She uttered such remarks whenever my grandmother or my father made a disparaging comment about our missing mother.

  My eldest sister, Amal, says Lamia was not always a troubled child. I would not know since she was older than me. I only remember her after her troubles began. Amal remembers her as playful, if not too rowdy, before our parents’ divorce and our father’s remarriage. Our mother’s sudden disappearance was the final in a series of blows that forced her inward. Around herself she wove an impenetrable cocoon from which she never emerged. My father remarried when Lamia was five. By that time, her personality was struck.

  Our mother simply vanished. One day, she was not there. Without any explanation or elaboration. “Your mother went back to America,” our father said. That was all. We were supposed to live with that.

  I always thought that being the youngest, I suffered the most from my parents’ divorce, but I was wrong. By the time Lamia had succeeded in pulling herself out of our world and was institutionalized, I had come to the realization that I knew little if anything about her. Apparently no one else did either.

  Our mother rarely wrote to us. At first we assumed our father had intercepted most of her correspondence. Later on, when I got to know my mother, she explained away her lack of letters as distaste for epistolary communications (her exact words). She did, however, send us cards on our birthdays. Whenever Lamia received hers, she burned the card after reading it. She placed the card in a crystal ashtray, poured rubbing alcohol over it, and lit it with a match, never a lighter. Her eyes bore into the beautiful blue flame. She did not remove her gaze until the flame died out, until the card evaporated.

  I had stupidly assumed Lamia hated our mother and blamed her for leaving without an explanation. Lamia had never attempted to contact her or try to visit as I did. Lamia never mentioned her to either Amal or me. After she was institutionalized, Lamia’s husband asked my sister Amal if she would help pack some of Lamia’s things. While doing so, Amal discovered a well-hidden cache of letters. They were folded sheets of papers, no envelopes, no addresses, undated, frayed, having obviously been read many times. All of them were addressed to our mother. All of them in Eng
lish so our mother would understand them better since her written Arabic was not advanced enough. None of them sent.

  The letters spanned thirty-five years beginning the day our mother disappeared and lasting long past the day our mother committed suicide. The first one, written in crayon on a sheet of paper torn from her school notebook, simply stated in a childish handwriting, “Come back, Mommy.” The last, written with her Dupont fountain pen on light blue stationary, was a six-page letter detailing in jumbled, nonlinear prose all that had transpired since the previous letter, all the pain, all the loneliness, all the insanity. In between those two, there were over four hundred and fifty letters, written about once a month, in which Lamia chronicled her life and feelings in a mundane, running conversation.

  My sister Lamia was a murderess, a serial killer. She hated her job as a nurse. She thought the patients too demanding so she systematically killed those who most annoyed her while under her care. Her methods were not ingenious, mostly overdosing them. By the time the dust settled, it turned out she had killed seven patients and was suspected of one more death, though the authorities could not prove the last. The first time she was asked about the deaths during the investigation, she confessed to everything. The patients irritated her; she killed them. She gave the authorities as many details as she could remember. Luckily there was no trial. She was declared insane and institutionalized to avoid any further scandal. In actuality, she had killed seven patients and failed in killing two more. She stated so in the letters. She had told our mother about each killing, the reasons, the methods, everything.