I’m disappearing to a writer’s conference for ten days. So here, because time is not my friend, is a segment from my book The Lost Girls of Shiraz. A draft, but a taste nonetheless.
He’s so sure of himself, this man beside me. So comfortable in his own skin, so confidant in his opinions, so unapologetic for whom he is. So unlike me.
“Hakim?” I say.
“Mmmm.” He shifts on his back, his eyes closed.
“Do you love me?”
“Of course I do.” An inhale, then an exhale, and Hakim’s asleep.
I wonder if Hakim looked at me, really looked, what he would see.
The elements I’m composed of must be obvious to the naked eye. I would pull the thin blanket over me, hide the evidence for a while, but what’s the use. It’s only a matter of time before he spots the writing on my skin, in day-glo color, that my interest in man as savior started when I was barely fifteen. I’d known then that, if I were ever going to find a Daddy replacement, the one I had being disappointing to say the least, I was going to need someone older, more established than the guys who frittered their days away smoking weed behind the high school art room.
To that end, my first boyfriend, the one I acquired along with my first part-time job at his Oriental art boutique, was a fifty-eight year old veteran of the Chiang Kai-Shek rebellion, who had been happy to adopt me as his lover despite some serious language issues and a thirty-two-year age difference.
Who knows where the relationship could have gone had he not lost the deed to his condo and the business he had spent two decades developing to a serious jai-alai gambling habit?
Laying in this bed, Hakim’s dozing body beside me, the rattle of our neighbor’s key in the hall, just outside our door, as he lets himself in after a night of who knows what, I remember how the single most important thing I got out of my first sexual relationship was the recognition that it drove my father crazy—not because Look Doc Kwan was three years older than him, but because Look Doc Kwan was Asian. “Hey, Suzy Wong,” my father would say over chipped-beef on toast, “Cut the chopstick shit and eat like a human being.”
My father’s bigotry— as evidenced by his generous usage of such euphemisms as Coon, Kike, Dago, and Slant Eye— clicked some primordial switch within me. I made it my personal mission in life, from then on, to date the U.N. just to spite him. I found an Ecuadorian student who, at age 28, still lived in his parents’ unfinished basement, a married Japanese guy who supervised co-op students at the chemical company I worked at for a semester and who moonlit as a minister, and the clinically depressed Vietnamese fellow I have just left. Despite the pleasure I have taken from the bulging veins in my father’s neck, I recognize that none of the men I spent time with were in any position to save me from him.
Now, here is Hakim, one arm draped across his furry chest, appearing to be everything my father is not: stable, confident, sober, and unemotional. Here’s a man who can put an ocean and a continent between my father and me. What I refuse to see, however, is that Hakim promises to be a lot of other things as well.
What I refuse to see is that Hakim doesn’t want to rescue me. Hakim doesn’t even want to know the real me, doesn’t want to hear about my past, sexual or otherwise, doesn’t want to see my photo albums, which I keep under the bed in a cardboard box with my cosmetics, because they may contain pictures of these lovers I’ve never mentioned. Meeting one of them, live and in person, standing, accusingly, in his doorway, was more than enough. And it doesn’t occur to me that someone who’s been raised in a little Middle-Eastern village might not be the best match for me. He’s warned me already about this cultural disparity, not just that those unbidden images of other men touching my body will continually fuck with his head, but that a life of cleaning lentils in some third world country might not leave me feeling like Gloria Steinem.
When Hakim told me, shortly after we started sleeping together, that he wants to finish his Ph.D. and return to Iran to teach chemistry at his alma mater, I couldn’t help laughing. Not at Hakim, per se, or his oil-spewing, sandy little country, but at the full circle my attitude has taken. It wasn’t that long ago, five years to be exact, that I was a junior in high school, passing notes and chewing gum while watching a classroom broadcast about the1979 Hostage crisis raging in Iran. As Ted Koppel narrated, we caught images of the student protests in the streets of Tehran; the flight of the Shah and his nervous-looking family; the arrival of the Ayatollah Khomeini, some grouch with a white beard; the storming and looting of our embassy; and the expulsion of hundreds of American expatriates crying inconsolably at some airport. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would get so worked up about leaving a place like that. What on earth was there to miss? Stacks of tires smoldering in the streets? Ammunition zinging past your head?
Now, however, I’d sell my soul to live in the Islamic Republic of Iran if it means being with Hakim.
Hakim and I have left lots of upturned apple carts in our wake. Hakim split with his girlfriend of seven years, an older American woman named Kathryn who converted to Islam, legally changed her last name to his, and supported him financially the whole time they were a pair. When she downs a bottle of sleeping pills, chases it with a fifth of Jack Daniels, and gets committed to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital for observation, I realize that this won’t be the last we see of her. She won’t be standing on the balcony, waving her white linen kerchief at us, wishing us luck as we ride off together into the proverbial sunset, not after that kind of statement anyway.
Likewise, I have vacated the cramped apartment I share with my only brother, Tim, several pharmacy students, and my husband of two weeks, a Vietnamese fellow who is due to graduate with an engineering degree at the end of the semester. Clearly, I’m at the epicenter of a very messy situation because I’ve just taken a stroll down a church aisle, in front of friends and family, with a man I knew I no longer wanted to be with, with a man that has taken my parents four years of grinding gears to accept.
This man is horrified that I’ve walked out on him because he’s seen no sign of trouble. He’s appalled that I’ve tarnished his clean record by marrying him rather than confessing to him, at the final hour, that I’m in love with my physical chemistry teaching assistant, an Islamic fundamentalist ten years my elder, and don’t wish to proceed as planned. He doesn’t agree that a divorce is less embarrassing than a cancelled wedding. He doesn’t understand my inability to speak honestly or stand up for my own best interest.
Shortly after I leave, he tracks me down at the graduate dorms and knocks on Hakim’s door. He finds us on the floor eating oranges and Pecan Sandies. He looks at me with those wounded, confused eyes and asks me, “Why? What on earth did I ever do to you?”
My parents are convinced that I’ve lost my mind and refuse to deal with me unless I pack my bags and slink back home. “We think we should get you some counseling,” my mother tells me. “We think you may be experiencing a nervous breakdown. Don’t expect us to pay your way through school until you agree to get some help.”
I know it’s my mother who thinks this because I happen to know that my father thinks counselors, like Gary, who we saw for all of three sessions when Daddy got out of rehab, are all a bunch of shysters.
Instead of getting up, pulling on my jeans, and slipping out the door while he sleeps— because, if Hakim wants a virgin, how can I change what’s done? — I decide that I can make him forget. I’ll win him over; prove his reluctance unfounded. I’ll change everything I can about myself— the way I dress, interact with men, and how I think. I’ll toss out my swimsuits and shorts in favor of muumuus; I’ll knock off the flirting and joking and treat men like Ebola carriers; I’ll do some reading on Islam, pick through the volumes on the shelf just above our headboard—the Koran, religious treatisis written by some Ayatollah or another, and a series of rulebooks that dictate the procedure for practically everyting, even washing up after sex.
After awhile, he’ll see how perfect we are for each other. It might even occur to him, given the chance to see what lengths I’ll go to accommodate him, that virginity really isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
