June Rain (20 page)

Time flew past Eliyya; quick as an arrow, life was passing him by. The daily chronicles of his life seemed like one long holiday, yet he never found a way to rest. And he wasn’t spared of feelings of boredom and repetitiveness, not just repetition of the details, but of that scenario he kept falling into without meaning to. Something had begun to slowly slip away from his routine, despite his always being prepared and ready to go, rising every morning as if he had vital duties to carry out and which he took on with optimism.

But Eliyya began to chastise himself. A person who lives alone eventually ends up talking to himself. He rebuked himself in the shower or whenever he lay down for a little while after lunch and stared at the ceiling. If he found himself all alone in the elevator, he looked at himself in the mirror, sometimes thrusting his thumb at his image and waving his fist threateningly at himself. He interrogated himself out loud at the diner, Jack’s, where he sometimes went at noon, so that the waitress thought he was trying to capture her attention, forcing him to quickly excuse himself in embarrassment. If he were to write down all the censure he constantly heaped on himself, or if he were able to say it out loud to someone, it would no doubt be harsh. ‘Stop it, Eliyya. Dammit, stop! Don’t you realise you’re overdoing it? Haven’t you gotten tired of feigning desire every time some blonde’s hair unfurls in some place, on some street, some café, some store? One blonde after another . . . the whole country is nothing but blondes, so what’s the point?’

Once, with a woman named Julie, Eliyya became indifferent towards her the moment the dye faded from her hair. Even he couldn’t believe his sudden change in feelings. She cried, demanding an explanation, but he couldn’t explain. The moment he caught a glimpse of a blonde passing by, his antennas went up and he started preparing his lines. He’d start with a pomegranate juice mixed with soda – the deep red colour in the glass made a good opening to intimate chatter that ended the same way every time. To keep up his charade one time in front of a girl, he guzzled down a whole glass of vodka and lemon into the back of his throat, the way he was told Russians do at their boisterous banquets. He nearly choked and his eyes bulged out of his head, so they lifted him up high so he could spit the vodka from his throat and slapped him in the face until he came to.

He laid it all out on the table whenever a girl sat down in front of him: other people’s expressions and proverbs, plus a repertoire of stories he had made up only moments earlier while riding the subway to his date. Stories he drew inspiration for from anything he had read, trying at any cost to create the impression of himself as a genius wandering the sidewalks of New York City, or that the Middle East had spit out into the new world once again because the East could not bear the presence of minorities. He would describe places he never visited in his life with sincere and poetic nostalgia and then get up all of a sudden once he’d made certain from the look in the girl’s eyes that the scheme had worked yet again. He had succeeded in painting a bizarre picture of himself that opened up numerous possibilities to his new friend, things she never expected to come upon in her monotonous life that kept him in an unquenchable state of desire for what he believed women possessed but which he hadn’t yet been fortunate enough to obtain. He would do his dance and then suddenly, like every other time, make up something about having to go home right away and offer the girl a ride home. He would leave, calm and collected, convinced that his phone would ring the next day or the day after that, and the seduction he’d started would reach its conclusion as the activities of daytime made their way onto night’s stage. He was good at the game, too, even though it had started to unravel from overuse. Once he succeeded at a certain restaurant, he regarded it as lucky and returned again and again. He’d take women there one after the other, calling the waiters by their first names, all part and parcel of his seduction toolkit.

He did get caught a few times, however, like the day he went to Calabrese Restaurant and saw the plump redhead he’d met a month earlier and then shunned. When he saw her there having dinner he begged the earth to crack open and swallow him up, because she caught him doing his same act. He read it in her eyes as she watched how he coaxed the new girl he’d just escorted to the same corner of the restaurant he’d sat her down in. She could probably even predict which menu items he was going to suggest to his new little friend. ‘I highly recommend the fillet of sea bass in bitter lemon sauce . . .’

In that way, Eliyya became versed in the art of introductions of all kinds, including the art of persuading young women to come to his apartment, which was also adorned with various allurements, such as paintings, small statues and select furnishings. The stories he told and the details he gave to his ‘prey’ opened the floodgates of her imagination and fed her desire to discover the secret of this slender Easterner . . . The way he postponed going into the bedroom at first had the effect of putting his friend at ease as she attributed his restraint to his refined manners. But this delay tactic of his quickly transformed into the fear that Eliyya was merely delaying a test he would not perform nearly as well on as the preparations for it.

He hadn’t yet reached the age of settling down, but rather continued to eye up university girls a decade or decade and a half younger than him. He wound a rope around himself and never cut the cord, wound it tighter and tighter until he nearly choked, finally forcing him to yank his neck out of the noose he’d made with his own hands and run like the wind. ‘Escaping is two thirds of valour.’ He never knew how to end a conversation. He would excuse himself and make things up and invent all kinds of fibs, because he was incapable of severing any relationship, no matter how short-lived it was. If the other person didn’t bid him goodbye, he was no good at getting out of the mess. The moment he got the feeling one of his conquests wanted to move in with him and cling to his side because this Eastern man with the eloquent tongue had provided her in her time of need with the emotional support she so desperately required, he would run like the devil as if his rear end was on fire. He went as far as moving out of his apartment and moving to another one elsewhere in New York for fear that he would be forced to take in the Filipino girl who was intent on getting to know him fully; he also changed his phone number.

Over time he exhausted all his tricks and started feeling like he wanted to retire, that is until that day at one of his favourite hunting grounds, the department of Middle East Studies and Semitic Languages. He was sweet-talking the department secretary, Miss Davis, when he caught sight of the blonde American girl. There wasn’t anything in her eyes that indicated she was lost in the big city, and that was what attracted him to her. She seemed to be a child of the city. He imagined it: a happy childhood, her parents’ only child, she lived in the city and had sex without giving it much thought. He followed her into the library and managed to sit down beside her. He waited for her to take a peek at the book he was holding,
A Perverse History of the Human Heart
, another item in his toolkit. He waited for her to make a move before turning towards her and saying in one sentence that he thought she might be a student in the Arabic department, but he doubted she would accept his invitation to dinner the following Tuesday, bent as she might be on upholding her reputation as one of those young Baptist women born into a respectable and upright Baltimore family who tried to restrict herself from life’s pleasures. At this point he picked up another book he had in front of him for the girl to see the title,
Dictionary of Small Pleasures
, about going out into nature in the springtime to pick blackberries in season without worrying, just this one time during the year, about clothes getting dirty.

He said it all without taking a breath. Then he followed it with a nervous laugh with which he wanted to suggest that he was only pretending to play the role of the skilled ladies’ man who deployed prefabricated moves on the opposite sex, that in reality he wasn’t like that. His game came at the right time. The blonde was in an easy-going mood and didn’t correct his mistakes but rather responded to him as she was supposed to. ‘A French restaurant would be good. Come pick me up by taxi even if you have a nice car because that doesn’t impress me. You can start waiting for me out front, at 2 Arlington Avenue, as of eight o’clock. It might be a half hour before I come out, which is something I do on purpose to test your patience and desire to see me.’

She, too, capped off what she said with a studied laugh with which she made him realise that she wasn’t actually agreeing to go out with him; she was just pretending to go along with him. The game was exciting for both of them: ten minutes or more of a whispered parody in the silent library, while some of the people reading shot disapproving glances in their direction, until they finally agreed, as is expected when playing with fire, upon an actual date. Once it was concluded, he stood up from his chair in a celebratory manner with no concern for the groans of the other patrons, shook her hand and introduced himself, signalling, perhaps, that it was time to start being serious.

He told her his name was Eliyya, which made her think he was a Jew from some Middle Eastern country. She walked out of the library with him and they passed through the reception area under Miss Davis’s reproachful glare. He didn’t ever tell her he’d gained information about her identity and family background from the department secretary. He already knew her name: Heather Pollock, daughter of the Reverend Henry Pollock, Jr.

He took her to a French restaurant – and what a restaurant it was! ‘
Le Relais d’Arcachon
,’
he said, laughing. ‘French cuisine is one of the keys to seducing American women. Its effect on them is scientifically proven; tests verify it.’ He would run his experiment on her while she was in a state of submission. He didn’t hide his game. He admitted to everything he could be accused of. He would mess up the game and yet continue to play it. He fed her small doses of information about himself while she kept shouting at him, ‘Where are you from, for God’s sake?’

He smiled as if he’d succeeded in getting her right where he wanted. He took a long drink from his glass and a new kind of look came into his eyes – a mixture of pride and longing. He told her a lot of things, among them that the night made him anxious, especially Sunday night. Then he tied his white napkin around his neck, looked at the wine swirling in the glass he held with two fingers, closed his eyes and sniffed the wine as he stirred the glass before tasting it and spouting off expressions that sounded like they came straight out of the dining section of
The New York Times
. He requested that the waiter ask the chef if he still made the duck in orange sauce that he said had become a very popular dish. The kitchen manager came personally to answer his questions. It appeared to have all been set up in advance. He asked him about the prawns and whether they were freshly caught. He and his date argued back and forth. He made her laugh. She let her guard down and surrendered to having a good time. She had only one question left, which she kept repeating like a dumbfounded fool. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’

And he would keep at it, more and more. She’d burst out laughing hysterically, barely able to say, ‘Stop. Stop for God’s sake! Who are you?’

She described him in a letter to her friend as
early forties, slim, eyes sparkling with intelligence. If you saw him on Sunday morning roaming in the streets before he put his contact lenses in, you might think he’s a novelist researching the subject of his next book about street people who depend on welfare and about the broken-hearted poor.

After a little while he surprised her with, ‘I want to visit Lebanon . . .’

Just like that, without any introductions as they walked across one of the city bridges.

‘I want to see the white almond blossoms in early spring . . .’

She smiled and he added, ‘I want to see my mother before she dies.’

He said it without showing much emotion and without a desire to affect her one way or another. He said it like someone saying he had to go to the train station at seven fifteen otherwise he’d miss the morning train to Pittsburgh.

This time around he wasn’t just making up an excuse to escape from his new girlfriend.

Chapter 12

Nishan never could have imagined himself pleading to save his soul and crawling on his knees that way, never could have imagined prostrating himself flat on the floor amidst a crumpled heap of women – nuns and girls from the orphanage – all dressed in black, as he prayed continuously to Saint Vasken inside a church dedicated to one of the Maronite saints. He muttered his cries for help, not knowing what he was saying because the sound of bullets being fired reverberated in his head and he couldn’t hear what was coming out of his own mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut like a child refusing to look when told, and knelt, huddled over himself, propped up by the women’s bodies, protecting himself behind them actually. No, he would not die with his eyes open. The sounds of the bullets clamoured in his head. He felt the shots in every part of his body. The sound of someone screaming, one man’s voice, called out with all his might, without stopping, ‘Hey all of you . . . for the fear of God!’

He couldn’t hear the wailing rising up around him – the moaning of a young woman shot in the shoulder who was bleeding profusely, and a nun struck with a bout of hysteria who was trembling and whose teeth chattered incessantly as she kissed the cross hanging at her neck. The nun’s fright was pushing him to the brink. He listened exclusively to the man’s voice, clinging with all his strength to the loud, angry voice as if it were a lifeline. If the man continued to scream, then Nishan Hovsep Davidian, the twenty-five-year-old photographer, would go on living.