The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (40 page)

We all get on famously, spending our free evenings lounging in our
mafraj
, talking over drinks. My friends are more diverse than ever before: Dutch students, German development workers, Ethiopian housecleaners, Kenyan consultants, and Yemeni economists. It occurs to me how insular my world was in the cosmopolitan city of New York. I could not have anticipated, for example, that it would be a Republican oil company executive from Texas, a man named Don, who would become one of my most loyal friends in Yemen.

OF COURSE,
my life is never quite trouble free. Just when my reputation is beginning to recover from my little run-in with customs, it suffers a new insult. One Thursday afternoon, Floor rings. She has the alcohol left over from Kamaran; may she drop it off for the party we are throwing at my house that night? No problem, I say. Swing by the office. There are three bottles of whiskey and two of vodka, which clank suspiciously as I trot from Floor’s jeep back to my desk. I stuff them into my gym bag, which is sitting on a chair by the door, and go back to editing a front-page story.

A few minutes later, I hear a sharp clang, followed by the shattering of glass. My gym bag has thrown itself from its chair, as if offended at being asked to carry the contraband. I look up, horrified to see the spreading pool on my carpet. Immediately, my office smells like an Irish bar at closing time. I panic. I’ve wasted alcohol, in a dry country! I should be taken out back and shot. Worse, my door is open and any minute a reporter is going to walk in and step into a puddle of vodka. Just one bottle has broken, thank god. I vault over my desk and begin to frantically pick up the pieces of glass. I am grateful it wasn’t the whiskey.

I am still on the floor, my knees soaked in booze, when Qasim walks in.

“Dageega!”
(One minute!), I say.
“Law samaht, ureedo dageega.”
(Please, I need one minute.) I wave my hand at him, trying to send him away, but he just walks all the way in and looks over my shoulder at the three bottles of whiskey I have just rescued from certain ruin.

“Oh!” he says.

I curse my ineptitude. Qasim leaves my office, probably to go tell Faris I’m a mad dipsomaniac bent on destroying the remaining morals of my staff. First vibrating artificial men, now this!

I open all my windows and stash the other bottles under my desk, but my office still reeks like a tavern.

Luke strolls in, stares at my carpet, and sniffs the air. “Well,” he says. “There goes the rest of your reputation.”

“Hey,” I say with false cheer. “At least vodka doesn’t stain. My carpet has never been so sterile.”

Our stalwart receptionist, Enass, without saying a word, walks in and hands me a bottle of carpet cleaner.

I have another special delivery that day. Abdurahman, Ali’s dad, calls to say he’s bringing me a bag of organic avocados, which cannot be found in Sana’a. I am so ecstatic I briefly forget the vodka. That evening, in my taxi home, I stroke them, just to feel their firm roundness under my palms. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited to put something in my mouth. Anne and Florens come over to help me mash the avocados into a dip for the party. Which turns out to be a roaring success, in that few people can remember the details of it the next day. I’ve never had such a crowded house. My
mafraj
overflows with people, several of whom I’ve never met. Everyone from Kamaran is there, plus Marvin, Pearl, and Ginny. I wear a short, sleeveless dress and savor the feel of it sliding up my thighs as I raise my arms to dance. It’s springtime, and it feels like it.

After we’ve all been dancing for a while, Marvin requests cowboy music. I put on a country song and he and Pearl actually two-step around the room, knocking over several drinks as they swish around. It feels like a real party. (Yemenis of course have parties too, but they are always sex segregated and usually revolve around
qat
and sugary tea.) The only thing missing tonight, I think, is romance.

IT ISN’T LONG, HOWEVER,
before this last void in my life is delightfully filled by a twenty-six-year-old German water researcher for the Dutch Embassy. Tobias is intelligent and attractive, tall, with oversized feet and hands, like a puppy that hasn’t quite grown into his extremities. His square Germanic face is softened by floppy dark hair, large blue eyes, and an infectious grin. I meet him through Kamaran Island friends, and when he moves into a house nearby he begins inviting me over to parties and
qat
chews. Our mutual attraction is increasingly obvious, but weeks pass before we admit it to each other.

It happens on a weeknight. I’m exhausted from work but when Tobias asks if he may come over, I perk up. It’s the first time we’ve been alone together. We make drinks and curl up in the
mafraj
. After a while, he suggests watching a movie. I put on
Half Nelson
, and we press close together in front of my twelve-inch computer screen. Tobias moves his arm around me and I slide into his embrace. I have no idea how
Half Nelson
ends. I’m not even sure if we turned it off or just left it running as we made love, first in the
mafraj
and again, moments later, in my bed.

He wakes me at dawn. After we say good morning properly, he sneaks home and I get ready for work, feeling more cheerful than I have since I got to this country.

I skip the gym and walk to work. The spring is back in my step, the kind of spring that makes men on the street pay twice as much attention to me as usual. I dare not meet anyone’s eyes, I feel so incandescent with sensuality. When Luke walks into my office, he says, “Okay, what happened to you? Why the Cheshire cat smile?”

I say nothing at all.

TOBIAS SPENDS ALMOST EVERY NIGHT
with me that week, and on Friday, we don’t leave my house. We spend about twenty-one of twenty-four hours naked and entwined, until hunger drives us finally out of bed, and Tobias cooks us pasta, which we wash down with a bottle of wine in my
mafraj
. The
muezzins
keep calling out Friday prayers, the wail of the preachers prompting Tobias to cry out, “You people don’t know what you are missing!” But we are praying, in our own way, to our own decadent gods.

As the sun slides down over the rooftops around us, filling my
mafraj
with gold, Tobias falls asleep in my lap, looking angelic and terribly young. I stroke his hair and run my fingers over the decorative curl in his earlobes, his dark eyelashes, his flushed cheeks, his pale, flat stomach. I like him. The age gap between us and his return to Germany in a few months makes a future unlikely, but for the first time all year, a simple glow of well-being makes worry feel impossible.

I dream that night that I have a good fairy who has been watching out for me. She looks like a middle-aged housewife, plump, with short dark hair, and she seems slightly annoyed.

“Well, it looks like things are now going exceptionally well for you,” she says, a touch resentfully. “So I am going to go find someone else to help, someone with
real
problems.”

THERE ARE PEOPLE
in this world who can go for years without being touched. I am not one of them. I can’t survive more than a month of physical loneliness without wanting to crawl out of my skin. Which means that I’ve been wanting to crawl out of my skin almost since I got to Yemen. I am deeply physically needy, and I refuse to be ashamed of this. So when one of my closest Yemeni friends, a virgin, confesses to me that she also thinks constantly about sex, I try to reassure her that she is not an immoral freak. Don’t you think Allah gave us these desires for a reason? I say. That he gave us these bodies for a reason? This does not shock my Yemeni friend. In fact, she seems quite heartened. “This is true,” she says happily. “Why
would
we be given bodies like this?”

Shaima, on the other hand, simply buries her desires. One night as she drives me home from dinner, we chat about men and relationships.

“I have never kissed a man, Jennifer,” she confesses.

“Never?” Shaima is over thirty years old. I kissed my first boy in fifth grade. No, wait—first grade! I still remember his name. Bobby Woodward. Audacious tyke.

“Never.”

“So how do you …” I want to say, how do you survive never being touched? How can you bear the loneliness? But I swallow the words.

“Jennifer, I just ignore my body,” she says in answer to my unasked question. “I try to forget it is there.”

MY RESEARCH
for our next health page gives me a little more insight into Yemeni sexuality. While searching for interesting new studies, I stumble across a piece in
New Scientist
on how oral sex causes cancer. Apparently anyone who has had five or more partners is about a trillion times more likely to develop throat cancer. While I am spiraling into despair about this, Jabr comes into my office. He is my only reporter not working on something.

“Jabr,” I begin cautiously, “do you think we could get away with a story on oral sex?”

He looks at me blankly. “What is oral sex?” he says. From the awkward way he forms the words, it is clear that he has never heard the phrase.