Girls of Riyadh (25 page)

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: January 28, 2005

Subject: The Best Closure Ever

To listen to the song, click here

The story has almost reached its end. But my friends are still candles that life sets aflame. They melt down, burned away by love and giving. I took you by the hands, my dear readers, to lead you on a weekly tour of these scented candles, flickering desperately. I wanted you to breathe in their fragrances yourselves. I wanted you to stretch out your hands to catch a few dissolving drops of wax so that you would feel their hot sting. So that you would understand the pain they had been through and the fires that lie behind that sting.

I plant a kiss, now, on every candle that has been lit and melted away but in so doing has lighted a way for others—making for them a path that is a little less dark, contains a few less obstacles and is filled with a little more freedom.

W
hen Michelle woke up after the first night she had spent in Riyadh after more than two years away, she did not know that she had come back to the city at just the right time to witness an important event—a very important event indeed in a life that was already full of changes and quick reverses.

Her day began with a surprise phone call from Lamees. “Go into the bathroom and wash your face with a little cold water,” her friend advised her, so that she could absorb the full impact of what she was about to tell her.

“What’s wrong? Why did you have to wake me up so early?”

“Michelle. Today is Faisal’s wedding.”

Silence from the other end of the line.

“Michelle! Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Are you okay?”

“What Faisal? My Faisal?”

“Yes, girl, Faisal the scumbag, no one else!”

“Did he tell you himself or what?”

“Here’s the next whammy—it turns out Nizar is friends with the bride’s brother.”

“Your husband Nizar? Knows the brother of Faisal’s bride? Why didn’t you tell me the minute you heard about that?”

“Are you crazy, to ask me that? I swear I only found out about this today. I came from Jeddah to Riyadh yesterday to attend the wedding of one of Nizar’s sisters. I was really eager to come so that I could see you on the same trip. Nizar told me about the wedding a week ago, but I just got the invitation card today, and when I opened it, my eyes just about flew out of my head. I read the groom’s name maybe one hundred times to be sure it was really the same Faisal.”

“…When did he get engaged?”

“I swear to God, I have no idea, and unfortunately I can’t ask Nizar to ask his friend about it because they are not really close buddies. They just know each other from work. Looks like they probably had a bunch of extra invitations, so they invited me. I don’t expect Nizar knows anything more than I do.”

“So who is this girl he’s marrying?”

“Her last name rings no bell. Nothing impressive.”

“Lamees…”

“Yes, darling?”

“I want you to fix me up with an invite. I’m coming with you.”

“What?
No, c’mon, you must be kidding. You going to Faisal’s wedding, are you out of your mind? How would you get through it?”

“Don’t worry about me. I can do it.”

“Michelle, honey, I’m scared. What are you thinking? There’s no reason for you to go and make things harder on yourself.”

“I won’t. In fact, I’ll be giving myself the best closure ever.”

Lamees convinced her husband that she had a splitting headache and couldn’t go to the wedding. She told him she would give her invitation to Michelle, who could go in her place.

Michelle turned the invitation card over and over in her hands as the hairdresser worked on her hair:
Announcing the Wedding of our Daughter Shaikhah to our Son Faisal.
So this is what it comes to, Faisal? A girl named Shaikhah? What a silly, very silly name!

She did her own makeup and put on a gorgeous Roberto Cavalli gown. It was slinky enough to show off her body perfectly.

At the entrance to the hall, she contemplated the photos of the bride and groom that formed a dazzling display on a table near the door. She studied his expression, trying to gauge how he felt about the woman standing beside him. She happily noted that Shaikhah was totally not his type! She was of a large build, when what he adored was petite women. Her hair wasn’t black—which he preferred—but dyed a range of tints to the point where it looked like a disco globe reflecting a prism of colors. She had a big nose and a mouth with thin lips. What did they have in common with Michelle’s cute nose and seductive lips?

Michelle paid her respects, in the way one does, to his mother, whom she was able to single out after hearing one of the greeters call her “mother of the groom.” She congratulated Um Faisal on the marriage of her son. Faisal’s scent seemed to waft from this woman who had given him birth.

She found a seat near the entrance where the bridal pair would emerge, at the end of the hall facing the dais. She chose her spot carefully, for this evening she had an important and historic mission to accomplish.

She moved her eyes among his sisters, assigning the names she had heard to them. This one looked the oldest, so it must be Norah. That was definitely Sarah, the loud one. This young-looking one over here was apparently Nujud, the prettiest of the bunch, as he always described her. And there was the mother again.

This time, observing his mother from a distance, Michelle remembered her overbearing power and dictatorial ways and also Faisal’s abjectness before her. Michelle would have expected to feel disgust and hate for this woman, and to wish her the worst that life could give, but in fact she found herself respecting her and feeling scorn for her weak son. She noticed that Um Faisal was examining her from afar and seemed to like what she saw. She imagined this woman considering trying to get her for Faisal’s younger brother who hadn’t gotten married yet, or maybe for one of her nephews! Ah, could fate be that twisted?

Michelle had decided that today she would announce her victory over all men. She would rid herself once and for all of whatever bits of Faisal remained in her heart and soul. She found herself heading for the long corridor of people preparing to dance. This was definitely a first: swirling around the dance floor on the day her true love married someone else.

It wasn’t as difficult as she had imagined. She had the sensation that she had lived these moments before in her mind, time and time again—so that this was merely a déjà vu. She felt relaxed and happy. That night she danced and sang as if she were the only person in that enormous hall. It was her own special celebration—a celebration in her honor—to acknowledge her survival and endurance despite everything. It marked her liberation from the slavery of deep-seated traditions, which had subjugated all the other miserable, pitiful women in the dance hall.

She imagined Faisal in bed that night with his bride, dreaming of reaching out to touch his love Michelle, while Shaikhah crouched on his chest with her large body, her folds of fat keeping him from moving and breathing.

The lights were dimmed in the other parts of the hall, leaving one strong beam spotlighting the entry. The bride crossed it, heading toward the dais, flashing smiles at the invited women, and even at Michelle, who quietly followed her progress from nearby. Michelle was filled with confidence, seeing the bride’s large body stuffed into the wedding gown, which was stretched tightly around her body unappealingly, creating un-sightly folds of skin at her armpits.

When it was announced that the men were about to come in, a truly devilish idea occurred to Michelle and she didn’t waste any time acting on it. She sent a short message from her mobile phone to Faisal’s:
Congratulations, bridegroom! Don’t be shy. Come on in. I am waiting.

After her message, the men’s entrance was delayed by almost an hour. The hall was awash in the whispers and mutterings of the women guests, and the poor bride was in a state of confusion. Should she go out? Or stay where she was and wait for her groom who refused to come in? After what seemed an eternity the groom appeared, surrounded by his father, the bride’s father and her three brothers. He came in so quickly that no one could really see him. From afar Michelle smiled. Her plan had worked.

A few minutes later, as the photographer was taking photos of the bride with her groom and the family on the dais, Michelle rose, heading toward the exit, intending to leave. But she made very sure that Faisal would see her, more glorious than he had ever seen her before. She looked at his beard, which had altered the face she was accustomed to. He turned toward her, with a desperate look in his eyes, as if begging her to go away. She raised one eyebrow in challenge, not caring in the slightest about any of the women who were looking at her, and she went on standing there in front of the entryway, playing with strands of her short hair as if to annoy him with her new haircut before turning her face away in obvious disgust and making her way toward the door.

After getting into her car, behind the Ethiopian driver, she could not keep back her laughter as she imagined how the wedding night would go for Faisal after seeing her there. It would be a “night cursed by sixty curses,” as Lamees would have said. And that was the point.

Upon reaching the house, she realized that this was the first wedding since her separation from Faisal where her eyes had not become blurry with tears seeing the bride happy with her groom on the dais. Michelle knew now that behind their smiles, many of those brides and grooms were concealing their own sad and yearning hearts because they had been kept from choosing their life’s partner. If she had any tears to shed this evening, they should be for that poor bride whom circumstances would unite tonight, and all the rest of her nights, with a man forced to marry her, a man whose heart and mind were with that other woman, the one who had danced with such abandon at his wedding.

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: February 4, 2005

Subject: The “Getting Over Them” Phase

Now, be honest. Haven’t you had enough of me after a year of e-mails? I’ve had enough of myself!

O
ne day Sadeem read a news item on the society page, congratulating Dr. Firas Al-Sharqawi on the occasion of the birth of his first son, Rayyan. It had now been more than fifteen months since she and Firas had parted for the last time. Sadeem tried to think about their relationship, over nearly four years, compared to an engagement, contract-signing, wedding, pregnancy and birth with another woman that had occurred all in a little over a year. It seemed to confirm that Firas was not the extraordinary and discriminating person she had once imagined him to be, but just another ordinary boy, much like Waleed and Faisal and Rashid and countless others. Those claims he used to make about holding his life partner to absolute criteria were nothing more than a ridiculous attempt to flex muscles that were pretty weak in the first place. Or maybe they didn’t even exist at all.

Sadeem was in Riyadh for the celebration of Michelle’s and Lamees’s graduation, and the four girls gathered at Sadeem’s old home. As usual, they launched into their various complaints on the woes of lost love.

“Sadeem!” said Lamees, “how could you have accepted—even run after—a sweetheart who tramples you underfoot? You know what your problem is? Your problem is that when you fall in love, you lose your mind! You allow the one you love to humiliate you and you let him get away with it! No, even worse, you say to him, I like it, baby, give me more! This is the truth, unfortunately, and if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have stayed with Firas all those years when you knew he had no intention of marrying you.”

Everyone was hard on her these days. They were blaming her for getting into a relationship that was bound to fail from the start. At the time none of them predicted that her relationship with Firas would end as it did; they had been as optimistic, basically, as she was. But now, naturally, all of them claimed to have known it all along! She had no recourse but to remain silent. At one point Michelle, who had gone through a similar thing a few years before, shot her a wink. Michelle, of course, had taken a firm and severe decision to walk away from Faisal the moment he revealed his parents’ position on their relationship. And so she had sidestepped the agony and humiliation Sadeem endured up until the bitter end, when her love finally drowned itself in a sea of emotional mendacity.

Sadeem did wish Firas had proven his superiority to the passive Faisal. She had wanted to demonstrate to Michelle that Michelle had made a mistake in letting Faisal go. She wanted to prove that
she,
Sadeem, a believer in the power of love who upheld the principle that she had a right to marry the person she loved, would end up smarter, more successful and happier.

It hadn’t worked out that way. Having refused to sacrifice her love, she had received the stunning blow that her beloved had sacrificed her. And Firas’s deception had run deep: he had hung hope’s sparkling pendant around her lovely neck and taught her to recite love’s anthem of struggle and persistence long after he himself had stopped reciting it.

“The luck you’ve had, Michelle—you don’t have to constantly see a photo or read an article in some newspaper about the guy you were in love with. The worst thing is for a girl to fall in love with someone famous, because no matter how hard she tries to forget him, the whole world keeps reminding her of him! You know what I wish sometimes, Michelle? I wish I could have been the man in this relationship. I wouldn’t have let go of Firas, I swear I wouldn’t have let go.”

“See? So you haven’t lost a
real man,
have you?”

Her friend’s sarcastic comment made Sadeem more disgusted than ever with Firas. Did that selfish man even realize the rough treatment she had received from society, on top of the way he had mistreated her and then had abused her further by walking out?

“Sadeem, I didn’t drop Faisal because I was no longer in love with him, as you imagine. I was crazy about that guy! But everyone here was entirely against him and against me. I have complete confidence in myself, and I know I can face whatever hassles stand in my way, but frankly I don’t have the same confidence in Faisal or in any other guy in our sick society. For our relationship to have succeeded, we would have had to be strong. Both of us. I couldn’t have done it all on my own. And even though Faisal went on pursuing me and every so often I got an e-mail or a text message begging me to come back to him, I knew it was only one side of him—the weak side—talking. I knew he hadn’t come up with a solution to our problem. That’s why I went on refusing him and denying my feelings and not letting myself be sucked into his weakness. One of us had to be the strong one. I decided it was going to be me. You can be sure, Sadeem, that Firas and Faisal—even though there’s a big difference in age–are stamped out of the same mold: passive and weak. They are slaves to reactionary customs and ancient traditions even if their enlightened minds pretend to reject such things! That’s the mold for all men in this society. They’re just pawns their families move around on the chessboard! I could have challenged the whole world if my love had been from somewhere else, not a crooked society that raises children on contradictions and double standards. A society where one guy divorces his wife because she’s not responsive enough in bed to arouse him, while the other divorces his wife because she doesn’t hide from him how much she likes it!”

“Who told you about
that?
Gamrah?” Sadeem asked, aghast.

“Sadeem, you know I’m the last person in the world to even think about gossiping about my friends. Don’t be afraid of me, because I wasn’t raised in this society which doesn’t know how to discuss anything except who said this and who that.”

“If what you’re saying is true, if your refusals only have to do with our young men, then why didn’t you defy everyone and marry Matti or Hamdan?” Sadeem countered.

“Simple. Anyone who has gone through love and knows how far it can go can never ever be satisfied with a love that’s just so-so. Now I can’t settle for less.
I just can’t!
My love for Faisal—that was the love of my life. Look, even though I threw him out of my life, he still stands there inside my mind like a statue that I measure every man up against, and unfortunately, they all come out short. And of course I’m the one who really loses after such comparison.”

“I wanted a number one, Michelle. The way I saw it was, like, I don’t deserve anything less than Firas. But my number one was satisfied to be with someone less than me, and so now I’m forced to be satisfied with something less than him.”

“I don’t agree with you there, Sadeem. For me, my number one is gone, but someone who’s even better will come along! I will never sell myself short and I can never be satisfied with the crumbs.”