I, the Divine (5 page)

I also underestimated his sense of property. I belonged to him. I was his wife. Kamal belonged to him. If the man wanted to go back to Beirut, then we were all going. The more I objected, the more adamant he became. I do not think either of us realized the corners we were painting ourselves into. We never raised our voices, but we dug our trenches. War or no war, he was moving back. I was not. Did I want a divorce? It would be for the best. He was taking Kamal back to Lebanon. I could not do anything about it. How was I going to live in New York without any money? I could keep the apartment till I graduated, and I would get fifteen hundred dollars a month for as long as I lived. How could I live without Kamal? I could come see him in Beirut anytime. I was Kamal’s mother. Omar would not stand in the way of my being with his son. That was it. In June, my husband and son left me.

That year, until I graduated, was one of the lowest times in my life. I missed Kamal tremendously. My parents in Lebanon were upset with me when I got married, and were more upset when Omar left me. For them, I was always to blame. The war in Beirut intensified, with the Israeli invasion, the blowing up of the U.S. marines, and the massacres at Sabra and Chatila. I was worried about my family, my son, and everyone. I concentrated on my studies.

I worried about the fact that when I graduated, I would not be able to stay in the United States legally. My student visa, an F1, would expire. I thought I could try getting an American passport since my mother was American.

Luckily for me, another graduate engineering student became infatuated with me. We were going to graduate at the same time, he with a master’s degree and I with a bachelor’s. Joe was the spitting image of Omar, but without the shyness or funny speech patterns. He was from a rich family. This time his parents did not approve of me both because I was not Jewish and because they thought I was after his money. I had practice with minor obstacles by then.

The last time I saw my mother was the day of my first and only New York opening, January 19, 1995. I went to visit her in her Upper East Side apartment. I had been dropping in on her the previous couple of days, trying to talk to her, not about my painting or the impending show and my nervousness about it, but about the problems I was having with David. I thought she would be able to help. All she could talk about were her memoirs. She saw herself as an artist, a painter, although she never really painted, having all the neuroses of an artist, but none of the talent. She had given up painting for the past year to concentrate on writing. “Write, write, write,” she said. “All I do is write. It’s so liberating.” I asked to see, but as usual, nothing was ready to be shown. “I’ve hired a professional editing firm to clean things up before I’m ready to publish,” she told me.

That day she was radiant, wearing a green dress, long, to the ankles. She was in a good mood, almost manic, moving constantly, nervously flipping her red hair back every few seconds. “I’m so excited for you,” she said, “and I’m at a great place in my writing. It’s going well right now, so we have more than one thing to celebrate.” She would not elaborate. “You want to see something funny. I bought this voice recognition thing for my computer a couple of months ago. You speak into it and it types the silliest things. You know how awfully I type. I thought this would help, but it doesn’t work, and I still have to type. Anyway, it’s great fun. Come.”

She led me to her office. The desk was impeccably clean, like the rest of her sparsely furnished apartment. I sat down at the computer and spoke into the attached microphone. “My name is Sarah Nour el-Din and I want to type something.” The sentence appeared on the screen as “A cane barter poor meeting no finance upward to bin.” It was hilarious. I spoke again and again. The words typed on the page had nothing at all to do with what I said. She laughed, called it contemporary poetry. I tried to type something, hit the keys repeatedly, but nothing showed up on the screen. I asked my mother if she knew why her keyboard was not working. She did not. It was obvious to me, a non-computer-geek, that the voice recognition software was interfering with the keyboard. For her to type on her computer, a technician would need to solve the compatibility problem. I did not mention it. We parted, kissing at the door, her hand surprisingly lingering on my face. I knew she would not show up at the reception, but I thought she would come up with some excuse the next day when I called her. I was wrong. That night she cut herself with a razor in the bathtub, not just her wrists, but all over, and bled to death.

It was endless, that afternoon. The ocean was calm, limpid, vast as the sky. But the color was wrong. It was gray, not the blue-green I was looking for. I had moved from New York to San Francisco to see the sun set in water. But it was wrong. The sun disappeared into oblivion at strange angles and with the wrong colors. I drove to the beach that afternoon to think. I sat on the sand, wondering what to do. I felt I needed some drastic changes. Should I move back to Beirut?

I wondered what percentage of the world’s population had never seen the sun set in the Mediterranean. I remembered another afternoon, on a real beach, under a real sun.

We sneaked onto the beach, he and I. We were so young, both fourteen. It was our first summer together.

It was a public beach, not where either one of us would usually hang out. We were sure no one there would recognize us. It was less than half a mile away from the private beach club where our families swam and socialized, yet a world away. The masses on the golden sand were dressed in everything from swimsuits to full dress. The smell of lamb kebabs wafted through the still air.

The sand burned our feet through the sandals. “I know this place,” he told me. He led me running to the waterline, where the sand was wet and cool. We walked hand in hand, the first time in a week. We walked until we reached a small hill jutting into the sea. As we climbed across he said, “In Norway, they have steep hills that fall straight into the sea. The bays these hills create are called fjords.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to, dummy? I know about fjords.”

“We’ll go there someday,” he said, looking ahead, away from me. “I’ve seen pictures. It’s beautiful and very, very romantic. You’ll like it.”

We jumped down on the other side, a secluded area. “Are you sure this will work?” I asked. “Some people might come and if someone walked on the top there, they’d see us. I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

“We’ll hear them coming. Anyway, we’re not doing anything. We’re just kissing.”

We kissed and caressed until we heard people climbing the hill. It was another couple, older. They were shocked to find us there. She smiled. He glowered. They jumped down and sat facing the water with their back toward us. They whispered. They were obviously engaged to be married. Finally, she had the courage to reach over and hold his hand.

I reached over, slipped my hand under Fadi’s swimming trunks and encircled his penis. His face registered shock. “I want to do it,” he said.

“Not till we’re married.”

He kissed me and ejaculated silently.

I grew up infatuated with Sarah Bernhardt, having been named after her by my grandfather. My stepmother considered this obsession, for that is what it was, to be dangerous. She objected to my grandfather filling my head with stories of the great actress, thinking they would lead me astray.

I did not realize when I was younger how much anguish my being a tomboy caused my family. The first day I returned from school wearing makeup—I was fifteen—I was greeted with mouths agape and eyes wide, followed by effusive compliments. I ran into the bathroom and cleaned myself.

My initiation into total femininity was conducted by Dina, my best friend. She took a wardrobe consisting of jeans and sweatshirts and converted it to fashionable dresses and eye-catching skirts. She took a face that had never had a dab of makeup and trained it to accept powdered and creamy intrusions. She took a girl who was notorious for being the best soccer player in school, better than the boys, and turned her into every schoolboy’s fantasy. In my stepmother’s eyes, Dina was a goddess.

Dina’s arrival at school set a new standard of sexual tension among the boys. She was only the second girl in my class. I was one of the first five girls to enroll in the school when it was integrated. That first day, she was fully made up, wore a disturbingly short skirt and an even tighter shirt, which accentuated her cusped breasts. By the first day of school, she had earned a nickname that would stick: Crotale, after the French missiles.

It did not take long for us to become friends. She shattered my misconceptions about her within the first week. I had not known anyone who dressed like her. Because of the way she presented herself, I had mistakenly assumed she was dumb. Her grades displaced mine as the second highest. The highest belonged to my boyfriend at the time, Fadi, but his should not be considered because they were the product of a rare intelligence. I also thought she would be a tramp. She was not, of course, since she did not care for boys at all.

Dina and I grew ever closer. I was transformed, both by her example and by her free-flowing advice. I had always associated concerns about personal appearance with frivolity, and I had no role models to speak of. Who would want to look like Indira Gandhi or Golda Meir? In reality, the only true model of a successful woman was the Divine Sarah. Dina came into my life, intelligent, ambitious, and beautiful in a dress. While she taught me how to apply makeup, we shared our dreams of engineering school, of having our own company, of building a true skyscraper, not that ugly crap the Holiday Inn was forcing on Beirut.

The physical transformation was the easier part. Luckily, I am blessed with a good figure, and my soccer playing proved to be helpful in that department. My stepmother, thrilled by the metamorphosis, showered me with money to go shopping with Dina. The effect on the boys in school, and on Fadi in particular, was thrilling.

Unfortunately for Fadi, my transformation was not only a physical one. With the appearance of Dina, Fadi remained my boyfriend, but he was no longer my best friend. I found it easier to confide in Dina. That was not all, though. Dina and Fadi were opposites in many ways. Fadi was a leftist, a communist really. Dina, on the other hand, was a diehard rightist, a follower of Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy. Fadi was a Sunni Muslim and Dina was Maronite Christian.

Whereas in America most fifteen-year-olds worry about who they are going to take to the prom, in Lebanon we worried about politics. The representatives we elected to our student board were all divided among party lines, right or left. Until Dina showed up, I had voted left. I was not as committed a communist as Fadi, but I had read Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
and believed strongly in the Palestinian struggle against Israel. I marched in demonstrations, attended rallies, and during one demonstration picked up sharp stones for the boys to throw at the police. I must admit that I also derived pleasure from my stepmother’s concern about my communism.

Our world was changing, even though at the time, we had no idea how destructive the change was to be. The civil war was starting, sides were being taken, and debates were heated. I began to wonder why the Palestinian struggle meant fighting the Lebanese. I did not particularly like the Maronites, but at least they were nationals. Dina gave me Ayn Rand’s books and I was transformed into a budding capitalist, the poor be damned. I read
The Virtue of Selfishness.
Fadi did not take that transformation well. We stayed together for a couple of years after that, perhaps because we had nothing better to do and had no idea how to break up, but the relationship was not the same. It is ironic that our relationship lasted for two years, until my resolute Randian stance began to crumble. At seventeen I read Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason,
the book Ayn Rand blamed for the decline of Western civilization, and loved it. I dropped Ayn and Fadi at about the same time.

Dina taught me about myself. The daughter of an analyst, she posited many psychological theories about our lives. She thought my whole tomboy phase mirrored my father’s wish for a boy.

Dina told me that a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt greeted every troubled and neurotic patient who entered Sigmund Freud’s office. A photograph of the Divine Sarah greeted all my neurotic friends as they came up the stairs to my flat in San Francisco as well. I do not know why Freud had her in his office, whether he considered her a symbol of the eternal feminine or of the neurotic woman. If it were Carl Jung’s office, I would suggest the former, but since it was Freud’s, I lean toward the latter.

When my lover, David, saw her picture the first time he arrived at my house, he wondered aloud why I had it. He considered her a wayward slut and a megalomaniac. Having already fallen for him, I forgave his impertinence, giving him credit for being the first heterosexual man I knew, other than my grandfather (whom I had always wondered about in any case), who had even heard of her.

I was unable to find out which picture of Bernhardt Freud had hanging in his office. I had two, a photograph and a poster. The photograph was circa 1880 with Sarah as Dumas’s
La Dame aux Camélias,
the role which made her famous, on a settee, looking despondent, away from the intrusive camera, wearing what appears to be a nightgown and a feather-trimmed
robe de chambre.
The poster was for the 1898 production of
Medea,
with Sarah holding a bloody knife, the supine body of a young boy at her feet.