I, The Divine

by Rabih Alameddine

  The water felt refreshing. I placed my head under the spray, closing my eyes, wishing I could cleanse myself. I wondered why I was not feeling as bad as I should after last night. Maybe the reception was too surreal, maybe I drank enough to subvert any real feeling.

  I opened my eyes to reach for the soap and saw a large spider at the edge of the tub, small body with long, spindly legs. It was struggling hard to get out of the tub, but drops of water were getting in its way. I was sure the steam was not making it feel safe either. I wanted to help it, but did not know how since I was wet. I turned my back to it to block the water and help it climb out. I soaped myself, thinking the spider had to save itself. Usually, I used a tissue to move spiders out of the way. I was fond of them.

  My first boyfriend, Fadi, had to study the Koran like all dutiful Muslim boys. I remember him telling me a story once about one of the adventures of the prophet Muhammad. When the prophet was running away from infidels who were trying to kill him, an angel told him to hide in a cave. Once the prophet went in, a spider built a large web covering the entrance and a dove laid eggs within the web. When the infidels arrived at the cave’s mouth, they decided no one could have entered without disturbing the web and the eggs. The prophet was saved. Ever since I heard that story, I liked spiders.

  The phone rang. I turned the water off and reached for the bathroom phone, hoping to get it before Dina woke up. I said hello and heard its echo from Dina in the bedroom.

  “Oh, good. I got both of you.” My stepmother, Saniya, was on the phone, calling from Beirut. “Tell me everything. How was it?”

  “Disaster,” I moaned on the phone.

  “Wonderful,” Dina said.

  “That’s about what I’d have expected you two to say,” Saniya said. I could hear her chuckle on the phone.

  “Don’t listen to her,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the tub. “It was an unmitigated catastrophe. There was a fistfight, for crying out loud. Guys were punching each other at my opening. How can that be wonderful?”

  “Did you know the men?” Saniya asked.

  “No, she didn’t know them,” Dina added. “They were just guys who walked in off the street. It wasn’t a big deal. The show looked fabulous, Saniya. It was gorgeous. You’d have been proud of her.”

  “What do you mean no big deal? People were slugging each other at the opening. How can that not be a big deal?” I wanted to get out of the bathroom and slug Dina myself.

  “Let’s just say her paintings had an extreme effect on viewers,” Dina added. “The show elicited visceral reactions. Emotions were flying all over the place.” Saniya began giggling at the other end. I was jealous that my stepmother and my best friend got along so well.

  The evening was a disaster. Dina and I left our hotel at five-thirty. We took the subway from Seventy-second Street and got off at Fourteenth to avoid the midtown crush and then frantically searched for a cab to take us down to SoHo. We arrived too early. The reception was from six till eight. One of the gallery assistants was still sweeping the floor.

  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.

  By six o’clock, no one had arrived. The wine, however, was on the table. There were, count them, six jugs of cheap white wine. The only other thing to drink was tap water in pitchers. The gallery had gone all out. The owner must have spent all of twenty dollars.

  By six-fifteen, strange-looking men started arriving. The elevator door would open, and a couple of haggard, wretched-looking men would pour out. They did not look at my paintings, but walked straight to the smaller gallery where the wine was. The other artists from the group show soon followed, every one of them dressed in black, looking pretentious and self-important. They too began to drink. Everybody congregated in the small room, and no one was looking at my paintings. I went to the table to get myself a glass of wine, but almost gagged when I tasted it. It was fructose-laced vinegar. I threw the plastic cup in the wastebasket only to be glared at by two of the men for wasting precious liquid.

  I ran back to Dina and whispered. “They’re winos. These guys are here for the free wine.”

  “Sure looks like it,” she said, amused.

  Thankfully, some friends from my college days in New York arrived. They loved my paintings and we were distracted for a while. The other gallery was full, everybody hanging around the wine table, when a fistfight broke out. One of the winos punched another. The punchee gulped down what was left in his glass and jumped the puncher. They dragged each other around the small gallery, each man using a headlock on the other. One of the artists, a skinny, acne-faced, effeminate young man, jumped up and down, screaming hysterically, “Watch out for my sculpture,” a traffic-department wooden sawhorse covered with sheepskin. He tried to direct the combatants away from his chef d’oeuvre without daring to get within reach of them. The owner of the gallery did not budge from his seat. Finally, a couple of the other winos separated the two. One guy, a South Asian, took the man who lost the fight out of the gallery. For the next hour, until the wine ran out, the South Asian came up to the gallery and left with two glasses of wine every ten minutes.

  None of my friends stayed for more than a couple of minutes. I could not blame them. I wanted to leave my own opening. Two drunks, probably homeless, stood in front of one my paintings. One said to the other in a loud and quivering voice, “These are awesome paintings. They keep moving.” He was barely able to keep himself standing, swaying from side to side.

  “See.” Dina nudged me. “They get it.” She was taking everything a little too lightly.

  “They’re moving because you’re drunk,” the second man said, slurring his words. He could handle his alcohol much better than his friend. “There’s color interplay here, but I don’t think you’re sober enough to see it. These paintings are informed by Mondrian as well as by the hard-edged abstract school that came out of Los Angeles. I think they’d have worked better if they weren’t all so uniform.”

  Dina cracked up. I wanted to kill them. I actually moved in their direction to give them a piece of my mind, but Dina held me back.

  “Only in New York,” she said. “Let it go and enjoy it. This is only the reception. As you can see, no one who loves art will show up tonight.”

  A group of Russians, friends of the conceptual artist from the smallest gallery, went out the fire-exit door carrying their own bottles of vodka, wanting to smoke. Shortly thereafter, they began singing Soviet anthems. We could hear the singing clearly, though muffled, coming from behind the wall. The first drunk looked at his friend. “These paintings are singing now,” he said.

  “That’s really weird,” his friend replied.

  I freaked. I wanted to leave right then. The two walked back to the table and realized the wine was all gone. Within a couple of minutes, the gallery emptied. All that remained were a couple of artists, the gallery owner, and Russian songs. I walked out fuming, went to a bar and got drunk. To add insult to injury, my own mother, my only relative who lived in New York, did not show up at my reception.

  I was telling the whole story to Saniya, with Dina doing color commentary on the other phone, when I felt the Xanax kick in. It was timely: I began to see the ridiculousness of the whole thing.

  “The show will get good reviews,” Dina told Saniya. “The opening won’t influence that.”

  “I’d better hang up,” Saniya said. “I’m sure everyone will want to call and find out what happened.”

  She was right. The instant we hung up the phone, it rang again. It was my sister Amal from Beirut. I let Dina talk to her and tell her the whole story, while I dried my hair. I remembered the spider and checked the tub to see if it was still there. Didn’t see it. I looked around and nothing. I figured it must have died and was swept down the drain. All of a sudden it occurred to me to loo
k at my butt. There the poor spider was, squished, looking like an intriguing tattoo on my ass.

  I came back to the room wearing the hotel’s bathrobe.

  “That looks nice,” Dina said. She sat on the edge of the bed. “We should filch it.”

  I put my hands to my face, screamed a high note, but not too loudly. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” I had to shout that every time I saw her without makeup. It was our ritual.

  “Shut the fuck up.” That too was part of the ritual. She stood up and went into the bathroom.

  The phone rang. It was my half-brother, Ramzi, calling from San Francisco. He wanted to know everything. He was taking care of my cat and plants and told me I owned, without a doubt, the stupidest cat in the world.

  The phone rang again. It was my half-sister Majida from Beirut. I had to tell her the same story. I was feeling fine and I told the whole story as one long joke. I could hear her and her husband laughing across the line.

  By the time my ex-husband Joe called from Dallas, I had the story down. I was laughing hysterically with him on the phone. My ex-husband Omar called from Beirut. Ditto. We laughed so hard, Dina came out of the bathroom and handed me tissues to dry my eyes.

  “Did everybody call?” Dina asked, while getting dressed. “Let’s go out for coffee.”

  “Not everybody,” I said dejected. “Neither Lamia nor David called.”

  “And neither one of those two will. Get dressed.”

  “David might call.”

  She shook her head in exasperation. “You two are breaking up,” she said.

  “Well, my husbands called. Why not him?”

  “Because they are decent human beings and they care about you, which he doesn’t. Get off your ass and get dressed.”

  The phone rang on cue. I reached for it and gave Dina a raspberry. It was Margot, her lover. I could have died. Dina took the phone from me, snapped her fingers for me to get dressed.

  At eleven o’clock we found ourselves walking across Central Park, a habitual walk. When I lived in New York, I had an apartment in the same neighborhood, the Upper West Side, and I used to cross the park once or twice a week to visit my mother, who lived on the East Side. I realized I wanted to confront her. I had not expected her to show up to the reception even though she had promised she would. Nonetheless, I found myself disappointed at her confirming my expectations.

  We entered my mother’s building and Jonathan, the concierge, came running toward us, more like lumbering, since he was corpulent. “Ms. Sarah, I’ve been trying to find you,” he said anxiously. He had a look of concern, which was not uncommon for him since my mother was not an easy tenant. “I didn’t know where you were staying.”

  “My mother does,” I said. “Is there something wrong?”

  He looked unsure about what to do, which disquieted me. His expression went from afraid to nervous to sad to tragic to worried, trying to settle on an emotion. “I have some bad news,” he said. He paused, hesitated. “I don’t know how to say this. I’m so sorry. Your mother is dead.”

  Before I could say anything, I felt Dina hold my hand. I wanted to say something, but my mouth seemed sewed shut. Different feelings welled up within me, yet the predominant one was shock.

  “When? How? What happened?” That was Dina. I squeezed her hand to make sure it was still there.

  “Yesterday. She called down at noon asking for a car in the evening. She wanted to go to Ms. Sarah’s opening. When the car came, she wouldn’t answer her phone. Clark went up to see if she was okay and found her dead in the bathtub. She had killed herself.”

  I began to feel faint.

  “I tried to find you, Ms. Sarah. The police have been here. So has her attorney. She left everything to an artist colony in Maine. I called her brother and he didn’t want anything to do with her. We’re wondering what do with her stuff, Ms. Sarah. I don’t think it’s right that strangers take her personal stuff. We had no one to call, Ms. Sarah. She had no one else.”

  I heard the words he was saying, but did not exactly grasp them. They floated about, revolving around my head, it seemed. I was lost, dizzy.

  “The attorney wishes to speak to you, Ms. Sarah,” he went on. “He says you can take all her personal material, but please don’t take anything expensive because, technically, it all belongs to the colony. They’ll sell everything. But you should go through her possessions.”

  I must have nodded or given him some sign he interpreted as acquiescence because we were walking toward the elevator. I followed, terrified of what I might find upstairs. My mother could not still be up there. I wondered who would have dealt with the corpse. How did she kill herself? So many questions, but being mute, I could ask nothing.

  “We cleaned everything once the police left,” Jonathan said as he let us in the apartment. “After they removed Mrs. Nour el-Din, we had to clean the bathroom.”

  It took a minute to register. He was leaving, closing the door when I heard myself shout, much louder than I should have, “Jonathan!”

  He reentered quickly, frightened.

  “What did you call my mother?” I asked, quieter, but firm.

  He looked confused. “Mrs. Nour el-Din.”

  “She didn’t go by Janet Foster.”

  “No, ma’am. Janet Nour el-Din.”

  I plopped down on the couch. Dina sat next to me. Jonathan let himself out quietly. We sat silently on the couch for over an hour.

  “Why would she keep her name?” I asked. “She hated our family.” I lay back on the sofa, looked up at the ceiling. “Why keep reminding yourself of past pains?”

  “Sometimes you’re so naïve,” Dina replied. I looked at her, eyebrows raised. “She was as much a Nour el-Din as any of you. Just because she was ostracized doesn’t mean she’s not part of the equation. Think about it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  I got up and walked to the desk in her office. I wanted to make sure. I went through her papers. All her bills were for Nour el-Din. I became increasingly frantic as I searched. I wanted to find something, but was not sure what.

  “Help me look for her artwork,” I said excitedly. “I have never seen anything of hers.”

  I opened the closets in the office. There was nothing there. We went to the bedroom. Nothing. I searched the closets and dressers. There was only one room left. I looked in and there was a drafting table. On the table were some brushes and tubes of gouache. I felt my face flush and a feeling of relief overcame me. My mother always talked about being a painter, yet no one had seen a single painting. In the back of my mind, I wondered whether she even owned any paints. I searched the room and found no paintings.

  “Look here,” Dina said, pointing at some papers stacked underneath a heavy book of impressionist paintings. There were only ten of them, all of them seemed abandoned after a couple of strokes. Some were left in mid-stroke. So many false starts. I began to cry.

  Dina pulled out a framed piece. It was a Time magazine cover. Saddam Hussein’s photographically darkened face dominated the cover. My mother had painted little hearts in red gouache all around his face. Some of the hearts had silver arrows running through them. It was signed Janet Nour-el Din in the bottom right-hand corner.

  “What’s this about?” I asked.

  “She had the hots for Saddam?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I know a woman up in Boston, a kindergarten teacher, who thinks Saddam is amazingly sexy.”

  I rummaged through the papers. No more paintings. “We should go. I don’t want anything. I don’t think I can take this much longer.”

  “Are you sure? You might regret it later.”

  I looked around. “I don’t know what to take,” I said.

  “Pictures,” Dina said. “There must be pictures.”

  “Yes.” I ran to the bedroom. I had a feeling they would be next to her bed and I was right. In the drawer of her nightstand. Only four, but they were all of our family. With her in every pict
ure. There was one of my father, in which he looked so joyful, full of life, holding my mother. She looked serene, but he was ecstatic, a man who had conquered the world. I was flabbergasted. In all the years I had known my father, I had never seen him look like that. I put the pictures in my handbag.

  I walked back to the living room. The day before, my mother had sat on the chair in the corner. She had looked radiant, in a long, billowing green dress. Her red hair reflected the sun. She inhaled her cigarette voraciously. “Look at this,” she said to me, handing me an old kaleidoscope. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  I looked though the lens. “It’s just a regular kaleidoscope,” I said.

  “No, it isn’t. I bought it yesterday at an antique store. It’s beautiful. I love how it comes together.”

  I looked again. I didn’t know what antique store she had bought it at, but I had a feeling she must have overpaid. “Yes,” I had said. “It’s lovely.”

  On the table, next to the corner chair, lay the kaleidoscope.

  I took it and left.

  “Here I am, the wretched city, lying in ruins, my citizens dead . . . you who pass me bewail my fate, and shed a tear in honor of Berytus that is no more.”

  —UNKNOWN SIXTH-CENTURY POET

  1.

  The Kent billboard says Evolve in six languages. Hardly recognizable, Beirut has changed much in the last seven months, billboards obscuring brisk construction of high-rises, bright-colored ads exhorting me to listen to avant-garde Lebanese radio stations, to switch cell phone services, to attend the absolute Millennium event. Beirut at the turn of the century. A relic remains, Bruce Willis announcing he is the last man standing, an ad for a film that had played in Beirut at least three years earlier. A short, pockmarked building flickers briefly on my right. A mosque’s crescent moon on a tall steeple glides by.

  We speed along the new highway connecting the airport to the center of town. The trip now takes only ten minutes. My ex-husband sits next to me in the sumptuous backseat of the Mercedes. Black everywhere, his suit, my dress, the car’s leather.