I, the Divine (24 page)

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“In any case, your mother cried during the whole final,” Ramzi said.

“Well, that’s not saying much,” Kamal replied. “She cried in the hardware store on the way over.”

“You did? What about?” Ramzi held her hand.

“Nothing important. Something silly reminded me of David.”

“Oh, come on. Are you still thinking of that jerk?” Ramzi turned away, looked up at the sky.

“You have to tell her,” Peter said, straightening his collar and adjusting his shirt. “It’s better if she knows.”

“Shut up,” Ramzi yelled.

“Tell me what? What should I know?”

“I didn’t want to tell you this, but we met David’s lover.”

“Oh, God. Is she beautiful?”

“
He
. He is beautiful.” He fidgeted, his hands came together, fingers interlocked. A half-smile appeared on his lips.

Sarah laughed. “Get real. We’re talking David here.”

“It’s true, darling,” Peter said. He walked over to her. “David is gay. Or bisexual or whatever they call themselves these days. We met him and his lover of ten years. They’re an openly gay couple. David cheats on him with women. He’s just an asshole.”

“But he was married.” Sarah could not hide the shock.

“Yes. His lover told us the whole story. His wife caught the two together
flagrante delicto
and divorced him. David came out of the closet and moved in with his lover.”

“But he’s supposed to be getting married.”

“He’s a liar, Sarah,” Ramzi said. “He’s lied to you from the start, about everything. You know, in his perverse way, he probably loved you, which is why he hung around for so long. Who knows? But that’s why he didn’t want to go out anywhere with you.”

“Are you sure it was David?”

“Honey, I’m sure. David Troubridge. None other. He recognized us. We were talking to his lover first and all of a sudden David showed up. He could have died right there on the spot. He was stuttering. I wanted to leave that poor bastard alone, but Peter here couldn’t.”

“Oh, you’d have been so proud of me,” Peter told her. “I threw one of your tantrums. Ha! I told his lover, loudly, I might add, I’d never want to be seen with a closet heterosexual. I told him I know we’ve come a long way, but this city was not yet ready for a closet hetero. Then I told his lover we were leaving because his asshole of a boyfriend fucked and then dumped my sister-in-law. You should’ve seen his face. David could have croaked right there, but you could tell his lover had no clue. Well, now he does.”

“You went out with a homosexual for four years, Mom?” Kamal now completed the foursome around the volcano.

She turned around toward the hot tub, pressed the air-jet button, and dunked her whole head in the water. She heard distorted giggling from above. She lifted her head out of the volcano and faced the others.

“Feeling better?” her brother asked.

“I’m awake now, I think,” she said. She flicked her hair, ensuring that everyone got at least a little wet. Her son tried to get out of the way, laughing.

“I wonder if someone can drown in our volcano,” Ramzi said.

“Tell it to me again. You saw David?”

On a rusty swing set in the garden of my father’s ancestral mountain home we sat, my stepmother, Saniya, my sister Amal, and I, between them. The red cushions were tattered, the swing’s canopy chafed thin, no longer an adequate protection against the sun. The metal springs clanked whenever the swing moved, which was not often. It was a lazy afternoon.

“You should get another swing set,” I suggested. “I’m surprised Father has kept this.”

Saniya sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “No one but us uses it. I don’t think your father has been out here in over ten years.” She looked straight ahead, at the runways of Beirut’s airport, apparently thinking of something. “It holds many memories. I don’t want to get rid of it.” She paused, smiled. “We made love on it once.”

Amal laughed. I could not help but smile. “You should have told us before we sat on it,” I joked.

“Janet used to love this swing,” Amal said.

I quickly glanced at Saniya to note her reaction. Nothing. She was still smiling genuinely. After thirty-five years of marriage, she was no longer bothered by the mention of my father’s first wife.

“She’s the one who bought it,” Saniya said. “She chose this bright red color.” She looked at me, smiling wickedly. “It matches the color of your hair.”

“It does not. My hair isn’t that bright.”

“Almost!”

“She used to sit where I’m sitting,” Amal said. “This was her corner. Funny what we remember.”

I did not remember my mother from her days in Lebanon. I was too young when she left. When I moved to New York in 1980, I was able to get to know her, but my Janet was nothing like the Janet the rest of my family knew. My Janet was bitter, a defeated woman.

“Sarah’s right,” Amal said, glancing at a group of sparrows flocking to the giant holm oak on her left. White butterflies hovered ahead of us, some floating, some flitting about nervously. “You should get another swing set or at least reupholster this. The color is all wrong. Nostalgia shouldn’t interfere with taste.”

“I don’t want to get rid of it,” Saniya replied. “It’s a testimonial, a reminder of how things used to be, or how I imagined them to be.”

Amal’s eyebrows were raised, but she did not say anything. It took me a minute to decipher what Saniya said. I could not keep quiet though. “Are you saying you no longer make love?” I asked.

“We haven’t made love for a long time,” she said. “Not since the hysterectomy. It was rare before, but stopped completely after.”

I felt Amal shift next to me. I knew what she was thinking. She and I had had that discussion before, but I was unsure whether she would bring the subject up. Her innate reticence would prevent her from doing so, yet her deep feelings about it made her antsy. She gave me a knowing look, then turned and stared ahead at a tranquil view of Beirut.

“You shouldn’t have let him do a hysterectomy,” she said. Deep feelings won. I smiled to myself, proud of her.

Him
was my father, an ob-gyn.

“It was necessary,” Saniya said. We both waited, thinking she would elaborate.

“I don’t think so,” Amal went on. “Mild spotting is not a good enough reason for a hysterectomy.”

“There was a change in my pap smear.”

“So what?” Amal asked. “Did he try to figure out what was going on? Did he ask for a second opinion. Hell no. Let’s just cut. If it needed to be done, you should have had someone else do it. Dr. Baddour would have been good.”

“Your father is a good doctor.”

“A good doctor does not perform a hysterectomy on his wife.”

“He did one on his mother.”

“I rest my case.”

“You’re putting too much into this,” Saniya said. She took her cup of Turkish coffee from the rusty stand attached to the swing. She sipped slowly. “I’m not sure I would’ve wanted anyone else to do it. He delivered all of you. It’s not a big thing.”

The birds in the tree were getting louder. Amal looked up. “I think this family is one big mess,” she said.

“It’s my family,” Saniya replied.

I woke up with a hangover. Thousands of tiny ants marched in step between my temples, having come through my mouth and dried their feet on my tongue.

I did not recognize where I was. Some hotel room. Why didn’t they put Alka-Seltzer in every room instead of Gideon’s? Dina was sleeping next to me. Slowly, it dawned on me. New York hotel. Friday, January 20. The complete fiasco, otherwise known as the opening reception of my first, and probably last, New York exhibit was last night. I covered my head with a pillow and moaned.

I got out of bed, careful not to wake Dina, who looked peaceful and serene lying on the bed. I would not have survived the night before had she not been with me. She deserved better than my mood today. I tiptoed to the bathroom and closed the door. I looked at myself in the mirror and jumped back. God, I looked awful. I opened my pillbox, took out two Tylenols and one Xanax, popped them in my mouth. I drank a whole glass of water, refilled it and drank again. My mouth was still dry. I turned the hot water on. I desperately needed a shower.

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 look 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.”