Lipstick Jihad (33 page)

“Davar has been extremely close to his mother since he was young,” I offered lamely. “He has lots of female friends.” My answer sounded vague and useless to my own ears. But I didn't know, given the lack of emotional intimacy between us, how to broach such intensely personal matters. In retrospect, I wish I had been less elliptical in warning her about their colliding worlds. I wish I had said, Fatimeh, your conception of a relationship radically differs—in assumptions, substance, and practice—from Davar's. If you judge what exists between you through your attitude, you're going to get disappointed, if not hurt.

I'm certain part of her suspected there was something between Davar and me. In her world, a man and a woman simply did not call each other by nicknames, hang out in each other's houses, go out for dinners and to cafés, unless they were engaged. If they did, their parents would have already met and negotiated their children's potential future. The time alone would simply be a short trial period before marriage, to ensure they did not despise each other.

To disabuse her of this idea, I began complaining about the lack of proper guys in Tehran, making joking laments of my spinsterhood, a refrain in our conversations. Once she realized Davar and I were just friends—that it was possible, indeed natural and common in our milieu, to be platonic in this way—she relaxed. It made her feel less vulnerable to know this was normal, and she sought him out more boldly.

Davar, in his thoughtless but still harmful way, must have mentioned to his new lover that Fatimeh had a crush on him. Though the last person to
pose a threat to their new liaison was Fatimeh, uncertain and awkward in her
chador,
the new lover became defensive. I will never forget the afternoon at Davar's office when we all converged. He and I often met there at the tail end of the workday, to walk to our favorite park to smoke
ghalyoon
. Fatimeh called to say she would also drop by, with some photos as a pretext. The new lover phoned his mobile, as she had begun to regularly, and when she heard we were all there, having tea together, informed him she would be stopping by as well. Probably resentful of having her status confined to his bedroom, she showed up to mark her territory.

Painfully unsubtle, she arrived decked out in a glittery, evening veil, with lots of eye makeup and a cloud of perfume. She promptly took a seat near Davar's desk closest to him and made a point of touching him with a casual but proprietary air. Fatimeh looked on, stunned and quiet. The moment groaned under the strain of its awkwardness. It couldn't have lasted more than fifteen minutes, but our collective self-consciousness seemed to slow time.

Davar blinked at me helplessly. “Well,” I said brightly, rapping my knuckles against his desk, “who's up for
ghalyoon?”

Fatimeh stopped calling Davar, stopped littering his office with little fuzzy ducks and bears. Eventually, she stopped passing by all of our offices, stopped calling with pretexts of photos she wanted to drop off or stories to discuss. She blipped off our screens, and when I asked Davar a few months later if he had heard from her, he told me she had gotten married to “some conservative guy.” But how? I asked. When did she meet him? When did they date? Why had she stopped working? She kept in touch with no one, and we never saw her again.

As an equal-opportunity catastrophe, the revolution had generously confused the sexuality of secular middle- to upper-middle-class Iranian women as well. These girls married for love and professed to oppose the rigid morals propagated by the regime, but found themselves as conflicted as their highly traditional peers in the realm where sexuality, self, and future intersected. Should they try to carve away the influence of tradition and family on their life choices, as Fatimeh was gingerly attempting?
Should they look for relationships with men who thought every part of them, including the unconventional, tentative parts, was fantastic? Could they afford to be honest about their sexuality (like the fact that they had some), or should they be guarded, and play to the still-traditional expectations of Iranian men (who liked the farce of believing they were the first—to make you breathless, to make out, to go to bed).

Relationships that were considered successful, that led to weddings and emigration and babies, so often required a total shrouding of a woman's real life and desires. Everyone knew this, because they had watched girlfriends go through lovers, get bored of not being taken seriously, hit upon a suitable prospect, and fake their pasts and camouflage their needs and tastes in order to get married.

Becoming this mercenary—prepared to meet, marry, and live under pretense of being someone you were not—took a while. It took the failure of the relationships where you tried to be yourself, tried to communicate your expectations and passions (hoping they would be adored and encouraged), and watched it all fall apart.

A young distant relative of mine, Mira, grappled with these considerations at the tender age of twenty-two. We weren't very close, but every couple of months I would drop by for dinner, sometimes staying the night so Mira and I could watch videos and raid her mother's stash of French chocolates. “So what'd we get this week?” I asked her. In Tehran, where Western movies were officially banned, everyone had a
filmi,
a video guy, who schlepped a trunkload of new films around to his clients' homes as a sort of mobile video store.

Mira didn't answer, but she slipped a tape into the VCR, and dimmed the lights. She looked at me with an expectant, abashed smile. I need your help with something, she said, winding her thick, ash-streaked hair into a loose knot. Her skin was like porcelain, and glowed without all the layers of foundation and blush she coated it with during the day. If I had skin like hers, I would wear nothing but lip gloss, ever. But her morning ritual before the mirror took an hour and a half.

When summer rolled around, Iranian girls groomed themselves with a seriousness of purpose I had never before witnessed, even in California, a place dedicated to the worship and pursuit of external beauty. Often, a particular feature was singled out for obsessive attention. Tattooed eyebrows,
collagen-plumped lips. For the daughter of my waxing woman, it was the fingernails. She grew them out an inch long and painted them a different technicolor every single day. Sometimes she affixed nail jems, sometimes alternating colors on the tips, for particular effect. When finished, she would blast Mary J. Blige and “Nastaran,” that year's Persian pop hit, on the stereo in the living room, and dance around alone, waving her hands in the air to the beat, to dry the lacquer. Exhausted, she would splay her fingers for me to inspect that day's creation—the fruits of an hour's labor—which she would wipe off the next day with acetone, priming her canvas anew. I suppose teenagers the world over were preoccupied with beauty—the aesthetics of being not quite a girl, not quite a woman—but in Tehran the attention seemed extreme.

Mira liked to remind me that because of the country's demographics, each year
one million Iranian women were unable to find a husband
. She repeated this figure, or possibly urban legend, with a grave solemnity and tragic expression.

Mira was distressed over my beauty regimen. Since I was neither looking for a husband nor habituated to overcompensating for the veil with too much makeup, I usually went about with what I called a natural look and Mira called self-neglect. Mira's adolescence had corresponded with the years just before the election of Khatami. This had given her a politically weighted relationship to the products of Revlon that continued to this day, when it really wasn't that big a deal anymore.

“You really need to do something with yourself,” she told me with a disapproving glance, as though I had a mustache and I walked about in a mumu. “Men are turned on by makeup.”

Applied properly, she informed me, makeup is meant to mimic how women look when they are aroused—smoldering eyes, flushed cheeks, swollen lips. I was older and supposed to know these things. They were included in the skills of husband acquisition, which also included: knowing how to make a proper béchamel sauce, being coiffed to gleaming perfection at all times, even when stepping outside in the morning for milk, and smiling pleasantly and disguising any hint of a personality.

The objective of this skill-set was to nab an Iranian software designer from Palo Alto who had flown to Tehran for wife shopping. If I had packaged myself properly, maybe he would pick me. Perfect hair! Perfect sauce!
And I would be rescued and taken back to America, to shop at Pottery Barn and get depressed with all the other imported wives (or at least the ones who didn't ask for their divorces on the tarmac).

Deep down, many friends and relatives suspected something was wrong with me. Clearly I had been unable to find either a job or a husband in the West, and that's why I had come to Iran, to toil day and night before a laptop hanging out with clerics. They offered sympathy and helpful advice, like how to pour tea more gracefully and rim my eyes with kohl.

Usually, because she loved me and thought it her duty, Mira was the one giving me lessons, in cosmetics and cuisine, but that night, I was supposed to have the answers, to whatever it was in the VCR.

She hit the play button, and a fuzzy image of two very white, very naked people appeared on the screen. I'm not prudish, but neither have I seen much porn in my life. I
definitely
haven't seen German porn from the seventies, which is what this appeared to be. I rose and shut the door to the kitchen nervously. If someone were to walk in, there was little doubt who would be held responsible for such a session. Certainly not innocent, supposedly virginal Mira.

She expertly fast-forwarded to the next scene. Clearly, this was not her first screening. A towering man, Viking-like, was busily plying his fingers between the parted legs of a frizzy-haired woman.

“Why does he keep doing that?”

I cracked open a pistachio, from the bowl on the table, and studied the shell, encrusted with salt and lemon juice. “He's, uh, pleasuring her.”

“But why there? Like that?”

“That's where her, uh . . . that's a very sensitive spot.” What was it with young Iranians? How could they be so obsessed with sex, yet know so little about it? Or maybe she was being disingenuous, pretending not to know because she was too shy to straight out say she wanted to talk about sex.

I switched off the video and asked for the real story. I refused to believe she didn't know about her own sex organs, though I suppose it was a slim possibility. As it turned out, her boyfriend had given her a “sex kit” to educate herself with, which included the video and a few lewd magazines. Because their sexual encounters were limited, she explained, he didn't want to waste their time in erotic tutorial. Since Mira was a virgin, and I knew they both lived with family, I asked when and where this knowledge was being
put to use. Sometimes we go to the park behind the house at night, or if his parents are out, we'll go to his place, she said. He sounds seedy, I said disapprovingly. I want to please him, she sniffed. Seedy boyfriend preferred the sort of sex that allowed her to remain, technically, a virgin. “Is that a problem?” she asked.

Where to begin? Should I pull up a gynecological site on the Internet, and explain vaginal mechanics? Should I bother asking whether they use condoms, although I was certain they didn't? Do I point out that she is supposed to enjoy sex, too? If Mira started telling her seedy boyfriend what she wanted in bed, he might well consider her loose, acting like a
jendeh,
a whore. Progress in gender relations circa Tehran 2001 meant that men were now willing to marry women who slept with them during the dating phase. But that didn't mean they would marry the ones who had acted like they liked it.

I didn't know what Mira should do. As a starry-eyed romantic, full of passion and dreams of walking into the sunset with her lover, she had to balance her fantasies against her matrimonial prospects. She had to find someone who could accept the many sides of her—the red wine-drinking devotee of flamenco, the bourgeois housewife-to-be with a talent for sauces. On the other hand, as she well knew, Tehran was not exactly littered with suitable guys. Mira had not attended college, had a declining opium addict for a father, and could not afford to let her twenties march by as she worked out what sort of mate would complete her personality and make her an adult and not just a wife.

“Why don't you just go out to dinner more? Are you even friends?”

She rolled her eyes, shooting me one of those exasperated, like, when are you going to get how it is here looks. Curled up in her lilac flannel pajamas, her long lashes sweeping up and down, liberated from all those too-heavy coats of mascara, she looked so innocent.

We sat there silent for a while, occasionally reaching for a square of chocolate. I needed to say something. So I tried to explain that like many men, her boyfriend was intimidated by how much he wanted sex and that it was easier for him to vulgarize intimacy than admit that she (a mere girl/woman) controlled the supply of the most powerful physical experience of his existence. It was kind of an academic point, the stuff you absorb during women's studies classes, and I lost her halfway through.