by Kate Wisel
The guy has a point. The Amstels are set down on crisp napkins. Selim takes a sip and his silver watch flashes.
“I speak Lebanese,” I say, feeling clueless. “I can write in Arabic, too.”
“Let me tell you something,” Selim interrupts, holding his bright palms out, the only place on his skin free of hair. “My last secretary didn’t know the fax machine from my asshole.” Jesus. He sips. “If you learn quick, we can work together. I’ve heard nice things about you.”
I bring the newly critical Amstel to my lips and take a thirsty gulp.
“You will research the economy in Beirut, keep up to date on information coming from Lebanon. You manage my contacts and talk to people who have difficulties obtaining visas, passports, and so on. We work with different resources in Boston. Now, let me ask you, what do you think will be your most important job?”
“The research?” I say, impressed by my ability to retain information.
Selim laughs deeply. “You’re hilarious,” he says. “When pretty girls are hilarious, it’s a winning combination.”
“What’s the most important job?” I ask.
“You’re available to me at all times. When I call, you answer. If you’re in the shower, you call me right back.”
He slugs the rest of his beer. “And you’ll learn to make me a good tea. Okay, get up.”
That night on our sunken couch, I bite my nails as Serena files hers thoughtfully, then holds the file up by her delicate cheekbones.
“You drank beers at breakfast?” she says.
“That’s not even the weird part,” I say. “He watched me make him tea, just to test my instincts or some shit.”
“Is it a Lebanese thing? You know, treating women like maids.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Did you know my dad wanted a boy, and when I came out, he wouldn’t hold me?”
My phone rings and I seal myself in the kitchen to pace.
“Nice job answering,” Selim says. “We’re doing good so far.”
Forty-five minutes of lecture (next week he’ll test my Arabic, I’ll organize the computer system that tracks his schedule by the minute, he’ll teach me the intricacies of consular notification so that when I meet with citizens I will be able to explain the process).
Serena peeks her head in. Pizza, she mouths.
I shake my head, send her the worried-eye lock we give when we’re in trouble.
By the second week of working for Selim, I’ve learned how to beat traffic by not joining it. I’m switching lanes down Storrow and catching some long Bostonian honks and a couple middle fingers that I have no trouble mirroring.
“How is it?” Rima says over speakerphone.
“I’m late,” I say as I cut through back roads towards Newbury.
“Well, don’t be,” Rima says.
“Rima,” I say. “How do you know Selim anyway?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she says as I cheat a stop sign, inciting the zoop of a cop car. The officer, fingers hooked in his Santa-like belt, approaches my window, then bends down as I crack it.
“Any idea how fast you were going?” he says disaffectedly.
“Just write the ticket,” I say, nodding towards his pen.
Selim slams the phone down as soon as I shuffle in. He’s moved my desk directly in front of his and he’s got his hands on his hips. No bueno.
“Why are you late?” he says.
“I was driving down Newbury Street. I was, like, almost here. . . .”
“Okay, forget it. Just sit down,” he says.
I sit at the desk. There’s a notepad in front of me. Selim walks over and presses his fingertips into the stained wood.
“I need you to jot out some things,” he says, “for the meetings we have before noon.”
Here is why I can’t eat the other half of the pizza Serena orders at night with extra-extra ranch and a sickly-looking sliver of cheesecake. I said I could write in Arabic. Didn’t say I could write well.
Selim points to the pad. “Write: Oath, any form of an attestation by which a person signifies that he or she is bound in conscience to perform an act faithfully or truthfully.”
I pick up the pen and make, of all things, a star.
“So, write this in English?” I ask. I am certain I will wind up crying in front of Selim, but now cannot be the moment, so I concentrate on the star.
Selim adjusts his tie. “What do you think?” he says. “What do you honestly think, Raffa?”
“I’m guessing . . . Arabic?” I say.
“You guess Arabic,” he says. He begins to clap. His final clap sounds like he’s dropped a Bible and I flinch. He presses his fingers into his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you can’t write in Arabic.”
“It’s been a while. I need a little bit of practice? I don’t know certain words.”
“So, do you always lie like this? Are you always full of disrespect?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I say, then think of a summer in Chekka at my aunt’s house. Dirt roads and concrete houses, the Mediterranean Sea the color of spat mouthwash. Fruit the way it should be, strawberries the size of grapes and tomatoes sweet as cherries. My aunt sacrificed a goat on Sundays. It hung as the dark blood pooled in the divots of the hot grass, swaying with its arms tied as the carcass gleamed a fatty white. She’d eat the cooked meat under the tented table as I snuck off. The night breeze sent me up to the roof, where the scoop of the broken pool sank like a skating rink. I’d lie by the drain and call Benny on my aunt’s flip phone, halfway around the world. He’d tell me that he loved me more than anything as the phone broke up his words.
I didn’t hear about the phone calls until the month after I came home, when Rima called her sister, who instructed her to put me on the line. I sat on the stoop, listening to her broken English for over an hour, my cheeks still hot from the raw Chekka sun.
“You have such disrespect. Where is your heart? Did you lose it? Tell your mother, how does it feel to pay all this money long distance?” she said before she hung up.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Selim says. “Stay here while I have my meetings. Call my wife, tell her I will be staying very late tonight. Meanwhile, you’re studying.”
He goes behind his desk, rummaging through drawers till he finds what he’s looking for. He slaps a yellowed English-to-Arabic dictionary on my desk, thicker than the textbook at the driving course. He writes down his wife’s number, then stalks out with his jacket trailing over his shoulder.
On the other side of Selim’s desk is a black-and-white photo of her, Selim’s wife. Another relative-looking woman with dark untamed hair and eyes a thousand secrets deep. She holds a baby girl, her eyes tightly shut against her shoulder. I hold the photo in my hands while the phone rings. I explain to her who I am.
“Raffa,” she says, “don’t work too hard for Selim. He can be a little much, but he means good.”
A month into the job and I’ve made a habit of calling Rima every day before and after work. It is the most we’ve talked maybe ever. One day she doesn’t answer, the next day, and the next. On the fourth day, after I leave the office weary from staying late, pretending to accomplish the impossible, she picks up.
“Come home,” she says, and tells me she’s making lentil soup.
“You’re skinny,” she says at the front door, tugging at my blouse.
“Where have you been?” I say. “I’ve called you ten times.”
She smiles like a scarf thief. “I went to Lebanon,” she says, her face hidden above a pot of bubbling lentils.
“Are you kidding?” I say.
“Why do you ask me that, are you kidding? I met a man. We talk on the internet. We like each other. I go to see him.”
“Rima,” I say, “since when do you date?”
“Think about this. I meet him at the airport,” she says. She sets a steaming bowl down in front of me. I push it away.
“Are you starving?” she says.
“I hav
e nerves,” I say.
“Why?” Rima says.
“Just finish the story,” I say. There is no way to explain how working for Selim makes me feel like there is a finger jabbing impatiently at my chest as if it is a button on a stuck elevator.
“I meet him at the airport. Raffa, he stinks! I’m telling you.” She takes over the room with her hands and bats away his breath as if it still lingers in her face.
“Stinks! I fly fourteen hours and he can’t fix his hygiene? That’s it. I’m on the next flight home.” She grips her hands on the side of the table.
“You’re out of your mind,” I say.
“I’m crazy, but you have nerves because you’re thirty, you have no husband, no babies, and you’re too skinny now.”
“You’re rounding up,” I say. “And I don’t want another husband.”
“Why are you always so stupid?” she says, smacking my wrist. She picks up a handful of cashews, then throws them into her mouth and starts cackling. I look at her sideways and take a deep breath. She’s got a point.
Selim feels at the height of his powers when he is ordering at restaurants. A month and a half as his assistant and we’ve had lunch at every place on Newbury Street. Selim has religious tendencies when it comes to lunch. I make the reservation regardless of how busy the place gets. We leave the office at half past noon and I walk a step behind Selim on the sidewalk in total silence. Selim motions to my chair, pulls it out with curious politeness, tells me to sit, and then proceeds to spend the entirety of the hour asking me questions that make the hair on my arms prick as we sip on two Amstels each.
“Selim,” I say, “they’re not criminals or animals or anything like that. They’re refugees. They have nowhere to go.”
“I didn’t say they were, Raffa,” Selim says, opening his palms. “What I call them is intruders. Potential terrorists. Worse than animals. Push them to the border, get them out of Lebanon.”
“You have no soul, Selim.”
“What do you know about having a soul? I have pride in my country. You don’t care about where you come from. Your mother helps you with a job and you don’t even appreciate it. Lebanon is still home, you know.”
“What do you know about my mom?”
“If you care to know, we went to school together in Beirut.” He looks at me with that persistent stare. “But you don’t.” He shrugs bitterly.
“She doesn’t tell me anything,” I say.
“A box for this,” Selim says to a passing waiter, pointing to my untouched sandwich. “What are you trying to be, a model?”
You gain weight, you lose. I’m down ten pounds, or whatever number it is that has my office pants in need of a belt.
The next Monday, I sit at my desk without Selim telling me to be seated. He walks in front of the desk and starts laughing like a maniac, clutching his stomach and stamping his foot as if putting out a fire.
When he gets ahold of himself, he asks, “What did you do to your hair?”
“I dyed it,” I say. Serena did. We were distracting ourselves in the aisles at CVS and came across a hair swab that Serena tugged from the rack, then held up to my roots.
“You look like an idiot,” Selim says. “Like someone poured a bucket of bleach over your head.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s essentially what happened.”
If it wasn’t for Rima and my trips to Chekka, I’d think Selim was insulting me, but I’m cursed with the knowledge that Selim is only pointing out the truth. I’m reminded of a conversation I had last week in Rima’s kitchen.
“Oh, Americans think the truth is evil. ‘Oh my god,’ they say. ‘That hurts my feelings. Oh my god!’”
“Rima, that’s why I never had my friends over. You told them they wore too much makeup. Or that they had boyfriends because they had low self-esteem.”
“They do!”
Another curse that comes from working for Selim is that my writing has improved. I’m able to write in Arabic more fluently. Short sentences, even if I sound like an eight-year-old. It has me daydreaming sometimes when Selim is sitting behind me typing, and I’m jotting things down from the dictionary, things so basic and rhetorical but translate awkwardly. Call me. Go away. Answer me. Come back.
Something goes down midweek. I misread a fax from an important client, and for the rest of the week, Selim’s cranky with me.
“Answer the fucking phone!” he says after a single ring.
I get up and walk out of his office as the ringing proceeds, swinging open the door past Lara’s desk, who looks up at me as she sets down a jelly doughnut. She follows me to the bathroom, and when we’re safe inside, she hugs me, her breasts a soft pillow.
“All men are like this,” she says, looking at me fiercely. “They’re manyaks.”
I know what it means because it’s Rima’s favorite word, too. I don’t know whether to be relieved or not, because I don’t actually believe Lara. Not all men are dicks. I wish it were that simple.
The rest of the morning I avoid Selim. I’m sick of his phone calls at night, literally, Serena feeding me Pedialyte from a spoon. When she holds up a Dorito and crunches, I can feel Selim’s voice on my back. How I jump when he slaps a stack of papers onto my desk from over my shoulder.
Quarter past noon hits and I’m back to typing and Selim is on a long-distance call with a diplomat. I quietly gather my coat from the rack and break past security into the April beat of a busy morning. I stop into CVS to ponder a mascara, hyperaware of how ordinary I feel. I want to collect the feeling in a bottle just so I can spray some on later. Serena meets me at Panera and we wait in line for ten minutes, kids with juice-stained upper lips a few feet below us hanging onto the firm hands of their mothers. We sit by the window with our trays. I bite into a turkey club, bacon and everything.
“So good,” I say.
“Yes,” Serena says. “Eat mine, too.”
“I can’t do this job anymore,” I say.
“No shit,” Serena says. “You need more Pedialyte than a day care.”
Serena knows something about quitting. She quit her teaching job and then her babysitting job, and now her job is keeping me fed. A man slides into the booth next to me. Selim. Serena sips her Pepsi with a stunned look. He reaches out over the table to shake her hand and holds it about ten seconds too long. Goddamn dramatic.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Selim,” he says solemnly. “Raffa’s boss. I’m sure you know me.”
Serena stays silent, keeping her eyes focused on me with the worried-eye lock. I turn to Selim.
“What are you doing?” I say in a low voice.
“That’s my question for you,” he says.
“You followed me,” I say, the lunchtime chatter swarming through my head.
“You ran off,” Selim says. “I’m in charge of you. Don’t think you can just run away and I won’t find you.”
I shift the tray and smile nervously. “I’m not a child,” I say. “Okay?”
“Just remember what I said. You can’t just get lost. I’ll come find you. Anyways, nice to meet you, Raffa’s friend.”
Marathon Monday sets Storrow into a frenzy of arrowed neon signs and police officers on steroids barricading the roads. I’m going eighty in a forty-five on the detour and thinking of how my fear of Selim is turning into my fear of a new job, of starting over again. Rima calls and I pick up.
“Why are you working today?” she says.
“Good question,” I say.
Newbury Street is blocked completely, the marathon finish line tented in the distance. I park by the Common and walk the ghostly backstreets, the office like the bank on a Sunday, the security guy forgetting to check me out, then nodding at me sleepily. Lara at her desk painting her nails a murderous red.
“What do you need done today?” I sigh, ignoring the ritual pouring of Selim’s steaming morning tea.
“The question is what do I not need done,” Selim says without looking up. “You should know by now where to
start.”
By eleven we hear the sounds of a crowd gathering below the window, cheering and whistling lifting louder like a rising fog around the office. A sudden applause roars through the windows.
“I think a Nigerian just won,” Selim says from behind me, and I roll my eyes freely.
“Well, we can’t leave for lunch,” I say, savoring the oversight.
By the afternoon, there’s little to do and we’re starving. I’m full of outright contempt, like a grounded girl. Nobody is working today. Selim is just keeping me here because he can. He yawns and I want to reach behind and backhand him. And then the noise, a sound like the street cracking apart, three times over. I turn back. Selim has his hand on his hip by the window. Another crack and Selim’s arms cover his head. The window blows apart. The glass a blur of thrown-up light as it screams past Selim, who is running towards me.
Selim, who wraps his arms around my shoulders and tackles me to the ground, and then we crawl out the door to hide under Lara’s desk, where I look up to her crying, the phone coiled on the floor. Beside it, laying on its side, is one of the metal horses from the edge of Selim’s desk. We wait for who knows how long. The sound of sirens cuts like lasers through the office. Selim keeps his hand on my shoulder as I rock myself back and forth. Noises from the street sound as unpredictably as a jazz record. Selim swipes blood from his forehead, which looks like a can of paint with the drips dried down the side. He keeps his palm on my shoulder protectively, even though the office is still now. Lara picks up the receiver. Her daughter tells her that we should evacuate.
“I’m leaving,” I tell Selim. “We can’t stay under this desk.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” he says. “It’s not safe. We have to stay here.”
Selim’s breath is milky from tea he made himself and his eyes are intent under the dimness of the desk. I am literally on my hands and knees when I say it: “I quit.”
“Don’t follow me,” I say. “Don’t!”
I duck up from under the desk, pulling down my skirt as I wobble away. Selim shadows me down the empty hall. I take off my heels and start to jog till we get to the abandoned security desk, the marble cold on my feet.
“Selim, I don’t work for you anymore.” I back up towards the door, my heels held tentatively in my fists.
