I Can't Think Straight (12 page)

‘What are you doing?’ Leyla asked.

‘Holding your hand.’

‘I see. So we each get five minutes of hand-holding? I get a night in Oxford, he gets a night in London?’

She felt Tala pull back slightly, felt her panic at the harshness, felt her turn a little to where Reema’s voice rose and fell in the room beyond.

‘That’s not fair, Leyla…’ she began.

‘What is fair?’ Leyla demanded in a fierce whisper. ‘That I make love to you and then make conversation with your fiancé?’ She paused, trying to control her voice which had the sound of tears etched into it. ‘How can you bear it, Tala?’

‘We can’t live like this,’ Tala said. ‘Our families would never understand.’

Perhaps that was true, but Leyla realized that she didn’t much care who understood anymore.

Leyla looked down at Tala’s hand, entwined with her own, the fingers grasping hers, communicating a need, a desire. She bent her head and touched her lips to it, gently.

‘Last night wasn’t just an affair. Not for me, anyway,’ Leyla looked up, into the eyes that watched her. ‘Thanks to you, I know what I want. I want to be with someone who, ten years from now, makes my heart jump when I hear her key in the door.’ She hesitated. ‘And that someone is you.’

Tala was right there, then, against her, kissing her, and Leyla closed her eyes, relieved to have made sense of this mess, to have found the simple way through. They loved each other, and that was truly what mattered.

‘Tala! Are you okay?’ Hani’s concerned voice, calling from the dining room was a jolt to Leyla, but it had some other, deeper effect on Tala. Leyla felt the hands drop her own, and leave her standing isolated.

‘I can’t hurt him,’ Tala breathed.

‘Are you in love with him?’ Leyla saw the hesitation, or was it just a pause while she tried a find a way to be kind?

‘There are things I love about him.’

Leyla stared at her. Behind them, the grandfather clock began to chime the hour, a sonorous, desolate noise.

‘Tala. This is wrong. Tell me you can do this.’

Quickly, she moved forward, clasping Tala’s head, kissing her hair, her cheek, but unable to reach the mouth that Tala held away.

Leyla pulled back and watched in silence as Tala turned and walked back down the hall before disappearing into the darkened doorway of the dining room. She stood alone in the hallway, and found herself waiting, waiting for Tala to reappear, to realize that her life – her real life – was out here. But all she heard was the commingling of Tala’s voice with the others in the room beyond, and the voice was faintly embarrassed, doubtless making excuses for her friend’s sudden disappearance. Silently, with a leaden heart, Leyla turned and left the house.

Chapter Nine

Three weeks later

Amman was cold, and it was grey. A brief nostalgia for the humid heat of New York passed over Zina as she closed the window and lay down on the bed, placing a cool hand over her burning forehead. All the travelling back and forth between New York and Amman, first for the engagement party and now for the wedding, hadn’t helped her illness. The various tablets that her mother had been eagerly plying her with over the past two days were evidently not working, despite the fact that Reema stocked more prescription medication in her house than most pharmacies. In the dark recesses of her mind, Zina began to consider the possibility that she did not have flu after all. Perhaps it was something more sinister. Glandular fever, or some form of chronic fatigue. Her new and palpable anxiety about this added to the other knots that gathered like a group of pernicious tentacles in the base of her stomach.

There was a cursory knock on the door before it opened, and Zina found herself scrambling up from the bed. It was her father.

She had forgotten that personal privacy was a non-existent concept in her parents’ house. It apparently never occurred to her mother and father that they might ever walk in on any of their children having sex, or smoking a joint, or doing anything that they should not be privy to.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Come down, we’re having dinner in five minutes.’

‘With who? A hundred of our closest friends?’ Zina muttered. A glimmer of a smile flickered onto Omar’s face.

‘It’s just us tonight. Your mother, me and Tala. Lamia’s at home. She was tired.’

‘I’m sick,’ she managed weakly, but she could not even be sure that he had heard her before the door slammed after him. She listened. His quick steps rang out like wind chimes on the marble floors outside. Reluctantly, Zina rose from the bed and combed her hair. Her feet dragged through the mushy thickness of the white bedroom carpet. She looked down. That carpet was probably not helping her blocked nose and itching throat. Hadn’t her mother ever heard of dust mites? The two inch high shag pile was probably teeming with enough creatures to populate a small country. Zina scratched her arms and tried to relax. It was less than a week until the wedding, and then she could get out of here and back to the wood-covered floors and clean white walls of her New York apart-ment. She climbed back into bed and lay there, her breathing shal-low as she tried not to think about the years’ worth of dust and dead skin cells that were hiding in the sinister cradle of her pillow.

As she had hoped would happen, Lamia found her husband responding with intent interest to the small item of conversation she had quietly introduced as they sat at their own dinner table that evening. He had a tendency to prefer bad news over good, and when it came to talking to him she had learned to sift the events and conversations of her day accordingly. When faced with negative reports, he could indulge his appetite for delicate criticism of the parties involved which was satisfying to him and soothing to her. And in fact, Lamia had begun to require daily this reassuring reminder that she was better off than most others, that people around her were unhappy for reasons that Kareem could so easily and eloquently articulate. Listening to him speak, she felt certain that the taint of such problems could not touch them, and the idea dripped scant, small droplets of warmth into the cold, dark hollow of her chest.

‘Tala told you this herself?’ Kareem looked at his wife, gauging.

She nodded but could not glance up for she was so close to teasing out the last chips of feta cheese from her salad. The cheese was crumbly and creamy, and fragments of it stuck to everything, taint-ing the cucumber and even the lettuce with fatty residues. She felt sickened at the sight of the tiny white curds, bright and taunting against the fresh green of the leaves. Irritated, she pushed her plate away from her.

‘She told you she’s having doubts?’ Kareem persisted. He frowned at his wife’s plate. Once again she had left the mound of salad mostly untouched. He would have to tell the cook to make a smaller one each day.

‘Of course,’ Lamia replied tersely. ‘It wouldn’t be a proper engagement for her without doubts.’

Kareem ignored the sarcasm. He felt a twitch of possibility, an itch in his groin, and he wanted to find out if there was substance to this situation. For Kareem did not care for Tala’s fiancé. He was a loose cannon, a mould breaker, the kind of personality that could deteriorate quickly into an anarchist. And he was helping to run the country!

‘What doubts?’ Kareem asked. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him.’

Except that he’s an anarchist, he thought, and worse, about to become a son-in-law to Omar and Reema. About to step up to the same footing that Kareem had spent the past few years enjoying alone. Kareem had earned a certain trust, a certain familial bond with his parents-in-law that he did not relish sharing with anyone else, especially someone like Hani, who sometimes had trouble understanding the subtle hierarchies of families and communities.

‘I know there’s nothing wrong with him,’ said Lamia. She herself found Hani extremely handsome and very courteous. His manners were underlaid with real consideration; there was the assurance of depth beneath the surface and she found it inexplicably attractive.

‘But she’s not sure she feels passionately about him.’

Kareem snorted. ‘Sometimes I forget she’s older than you,’ he said to Lamia. ‘She’s like a teenager. Passion!’

Lamia touched her forehead. She felt the stirrings of a headache between her eyebrows.

‘It’s not bad to want passion,’ she said, trying to keep the tone of accusation out of her voice, and succeeding only modestly. She felt a pulse of apprehension at his potential response and was already preparing her defence (her head was pounding, she felt ill, she was only talking about Tala…) but luckily, he had not appeared to notice. His gleaming eyes were thinking, focused on his plate as he placed forkful after forkful of fragrant food into his mouth.

Lamia felt dizzy with hunger, but the idea of the slaughtered lamb and cloying rice concoction sliding down into her stomach was too disgusting to contemplate.

Kareem finished his meal and Lamia waited while he reached for a piece of flatbread. She watched, her mouth slightly slack with tiredness, although she could not fathom what she had done all day to create such exhaustion within herself. As usual, he broke off a large piece of bread and then wiped his plate clean. First the right hand side, then the left, with a final sweep down his favourite part, the lamb juices in the middle. With an air of satisfaction he then placed the moistened bread into his mouth and sat back to chew.

He felt tensely invigorated. He looked at his wife.

‘What shall we do tonight?’

She swallowed. Might she ask? She essayed a smile, a quiet smile laden with promise. ‘What about if we just go to bed early?’

It was the response he would have wished for, had he been capable of articulating to himself that he had sexual impulses at all.

His occasional carnal urges inspired within his own mind a curdled mixture of desire and disgust; for at the moment of ultimate sexual release he felt completely lost and uncontrolled. It horrified Kareem that the world might begin to crash down around him and he would be powerless to do anything but make a final, groaning thrust towards the fulfillment of his own, gross animal instincts.

‘You’re going to shower first?’ he said, and she nodded. She had showered but two hours ago, after her session at the gym, but if she was to receive any hope of satisfaction herself, she would need to clean herself again. She stood up from the table, which was already being cleared by their housekeeper and walked into the bathroom to undress.

Much worse for Tala than the daily battles with her mother over clothes, accessories and other wedding-related paraphernalia was the insomnia. Once again, in the weak, early hours of the morning, she awoke, hot and angry, as though snatched from a nightmare, although she could remember no immediate dream. She lay still within the warmed cotton sheets of her bed, keeping her breathing even and calm, trying to reduce herself back to that rare, soothing, restoring level of drowsiness. It was no use. Her mind brushed off the tricks she tried, and she opened her eyes and watched the weak light of dawn cast its slow illumination into her huge bedroom.

The lazy luminosity of the sun on the ancient wall-hangings, on the carved bookshelves, on the softly-veined marble of the fireplace, calmed her. It was in these fragile moments of solitude that she succumbed to thoughts of Leyla. More than anything else, Tala held onto the memory of the night in Oxford, of the gentle fall into slumber when she had felt Leyla’s arms about her. She could still recall the essence of that high emotion, of that exhausted happiness, and the knowledge that such an ecstatic feeling had to be so fleeting brought the sting of tears to her eyes.

At times like this, it was inconceivable to her that she should be even contemplating marriage to Hani. And yet it was inconceivable that she should consider building a life with Leyla, or with any woman. What lay between the two possibilities was a grey swamp in which she had been floating for all of her adult life, into which she had fled after each broken engagement, and from which she felt unaccountably sorry to have been rescued by each new fiancé. She was dimly aware that the events of her everyday life – work, friends, travel, the confidence with which she met the world – successfully covered the unpalatable fact of her inner, emotional flailing.

She turned over and stared at the gold travel clock her parents had given her for her last engagement. It was still only six thirty.

She was sure that her father would be awake, sitting alone in the vast salon downstairs, drinking the thick, brackish coffee he loved, watching the business news on the oversized television, speeding through the newspapers; but she felt unequal to making conversation with him. She wanted to think out this problem further, to test the ground over which she was so reluctant to tread. Her head felt thick with weariness, but she forced herself to consider her situation.

People, girls especially, often went through phases. At her boarding school, several girls in her class (herself included) developed passing crushes on one teacher or another, and one or two of those teachers had even favoured certain girls; a constant frisson, a shivering undertone of desire that made her believe that such excitement must be a natural part of female interaction.

But to be definitely, irretrievably homosexual would be extremely inconvenient. Back at university, in the grasp of that first, heady passion, she had gone as far as to imagine sharing her possible sexuality with her mother and father. In these imaginings, she was never back home in Amman; instead her parents would be visiting her, and at a louche coffee house somewhere near her university campus she would sit with them, relaxed, confident, burning with righteous determination. And she would begin the conversation:

‘Remember you always said you wanted us to be happy?’

And then the dream would pause, for she could not actually recall them having said such a thing. Happiness was a concept that seemed to have passed her parents by. It was certainly not deemed a good enough reason to enter into the important transactions of life – such as work or marriage. She believed differently, or so she liked to think. But if she was not sure she would be happy with Hani, what was she doing marrying him?