Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Ali Ansari saw me staring and narrowed his eyes between bites. “Is this a date?”

“I don’t know what it is yet.”

We starting walking down Cecil B. Moore, past the point where the transgendered prostitutes congregated on 16th Street. I asked Ali if he knew a painting called The Poet . After he was done greeting the prostitutes he told me he did; he had seen it at the art museum a number of times.

We turned down Broad Street toward city hall, which glowed like a revelation in a cave. In hurried and desperate sentences I told Ali a story set in the shade of a Chagall.

Ali’s swearing was a symphony that accompanied my shame.

Marie-Anne was the “man” in the relationship and I was the presumptive “woman.” We were aware that this was an atavistic characterization of our dynamic — why should anyone be the “man” or the “woman”?—but understanding ourselves like this made things easier to sort out when big decisions had to be made, or big fights occurred. Both of us were comfortable with our roles.

Troubles arose, however, when we were engaged in a cold war. In these periods, when resentment and moral outrage came easy, our usual clarity collapsed. Marie-Anne turned me back into the stereotypical man and expected me to behave in the chivalric manner of a herald or a knight, appeasing her out of some assured sense of honor, a stoic before her cantankerous digs. I, meanwhile, turned Marie-Anne back into the eternal feminine and expected her to fall at my feet like a geisha, to cease her petulance and be my concubine, telling me that I had been right all along. But since neither of us were trained in holding these perspectives — because she was the one who waltzed through the world with a broadsword and I was the one who navigated society using a perfumed handkerchief — what really ended up happening was more confusion, more disorder, more distance.

This sequestered apartheid was always difficult to negotiate out of, and it was precisely the place we found ourselves in after the Salato fiasco. My ambulatory escapes, along with Marie-Anne’s increasing travel, widened our chasm even further. Perhaps our silence had had rational underpinnings once. But like all rationality stubbornly adhered to, it had turned into dogma, the syllogisms hardening into immutable edicts, our psyches ruled not by term-limited presidents in dirty boots, but by dynastic theocracies with executives in red leather loafers, as the caliphs used to have.

All I could do was look upon Marie-Anne from a distance.

Each act of witness played out like an episode in front of me.

One night she came home crying, went to the bedroom, drew out a copy of her unfinished novel, Gaze of a Cyclops , and with slumped shoulders pounded down a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck and eradicated a pack of cigarettes. Never once did she actually write.

I wanted to reach out and straighten her shoulders and knead the knots that roamed like subterranean monsters beneath her skin. But I just couldn’t do it.

A few nights later she had a verbal altercation with someone at MimirCo. Instead of taking the call in the bedroom she went into the hallway. She didn’t realize I could still hear her. From what I gathered, it seemed that the switch to sales was not going well. Her boss at MimirCo, the former marine named Karsten King, had been upset with her for not closing the deal with the Waziratis during her trip to the Persian Gulf. Her failure with the client prompted them to put a lot of pressure on her. It sounded like they were reconsidering whether she should’ve been elevated from clerk to closer.

Under normal circumstances these sorts of difficulties would arouse my sympathy. Ameliorative action. But not this time. I told myself that Marie-Anne’s crying and hallway conversations were theatrical fictions. I wouldn’t see into her psyche. I would limit her to being a lump of performing flesh.

Marie-Anne wasn’t as stentorian as me about observing silence. This was because she needed me for something — namely, the poems that would get her to the gym. Every few days she would come past me, idle, then linger until I became aware of her, making some comment about how she hadn’t gone to the gym for a while, and if I had something to give her. There was no request in her tone, no supplication. It was all expectation. That made me dig in deeper. By now I had lost all notion of whether I was acting out of principle or stupidity. I only knew that I wouldn’t put pen to paper. The closest I came to conceding was when I dropped an anthology of German romanticism at her feet.

My refusal to compose came to be considered the trumpet of war. There was immediate escalation. Marie-Anne harmed me the best way she knew how: she hurt herself. She refused to go to the gym, refused to do her breathing exercises, refused to write down the daily list of things she was grateful for, and ate foods high in carbohydrates and sugar. In the bathroom she didn’t let herself break out into song. She never stomped her feet and moved her hips to music as the doctor had suggested. She didn’t call her friends or even go out shopping. It was all aimed at heightening her cortisol.

She ballooned, again. The expansion started on the face, as it did always, and the cheekbones were submerged. Within a week her shoulders widened, her hips and thighs thickened, and there was a dour pudginess to her. In two weeks she went from brick to sponge. In the third week her hair started thinning, she developed acne on her face, a rash on her inner arm, and lesion-like bruises on her body. I glimpsed them in the bathroom mirror before she had a chance to close the door.

In the first few weeks of her vengeance she was reluctant to give up the years of progress, so she had, at least, eaten home-cooked meals. But by week four she ordered out every time. Greasy fries, greasier chicken fingers. All the salads and gluten-free things in the cupboards expired and grew stale and got thrown out. The only healthy thing she did was eat the vitamins from the unmarked bottle.

She had been good for so long. And now, while rendering me responsible, she had thrown it all away. She was taking us back to where we had been three years earlier. Except this time we didn’t have any of the warmth, any of the trust, any of the fidelity that had allowed us to struggle together. This time she wanted my love turned into pity, and from pity an obedience to emanate. She wanted my obligation, not my ardor.

One evening during the fifth week she tore into her closet with scissors in hand, and disemboweled and exenterated all of her new clothes, the ones that didn’t fit anymore because she had put on twenty pounds. She cried loud and wheezing, and sitting with my back against the wall in the hallway, hearing the slashing and the tearing, I cried too. Those weren’t just clothes she was slaughtering. They were poems, they were the beauty of her recovering body, they were the memories of our united resistance against the insensitive and cruel imbalance inside her genes. Once, we had been good enough to bond and beat back millions of years of mitochondrial mutations. Now we weren’t even good enough to talk.

One of these days she or I would pack our bags and go. It seemed as inevitable as the tyranny of cortisol.

* * *

My mother had been a subtle woman, indirect, of few words. Much of this had to do with her aborted career as a journalist in the Old World. Once idealistic and activist, she had been silenced by some landed interests — something involving a picture of a rape room — and from that day onward had taken to speaking in a roundabout way, fearful of persecution, cautious to a fault. Much like the Pilgrims of yester-centuries, she brought her circumspect inclination with her to America and carried it into the relationship with my father and then to communication with me. “Look, there is a grocery cart in the middle of the parking lot. I wonder if it’ll hit a car.” That was how Mother taught me morality. No pointing to codes or tablets or commandments. Just a roundabout way. I understood why she had tucked the Koran into a corner of the house. Rather than having a conversation with me, it was better for her if I just had that conversation with myself.