Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

For our honeymoon we were supposed to go to Hilton Head. I screwed up the reservations, so we rented a car and drove down to Key West instead. Marie-Anne got food poisoning somewhere near Ocala and we veered off toward Orlando and ended up at Disney World.

The first time we had sex was when we got a little too drunk from the minibar. I was wearing Mickey Mouse ears and Marie-Anne had on a tiara. In the middle of the sex I made the mistake of calling her “my princess,” and she grew angry by that insult and put the tiara on top of my head and pushed me away a little. It wasn’t much of a push, but because it was a gesture of disapproval during an act of intimacy, it made me lose my mind. I accused Marie-Anne of trying to emasculate me and stormed out of the hotel room, going down to the bar to have a drink named after a cartoon dog. A few hours later Marie-Anne came up behind me, hugged me hard, and told me that we needed to go back up and try again. “It’s just nerves,” she had said, and was right. During the act we talked lovingly about making babies in the future, growing old together, other things that virgins said.

The morning of the tenth anniversary, as I sat at the antique desk flipping through my phone, Marie-Anne came up to me dressed in a black shirt and boxers and flicked my ear.

“We forgot each other’s birthdays.”

“I know.”

“But we are old. Birthdays aren’t as important as the date we became responsible for each other.”

“Right.”

“We should go out somewhere.”

“We should.”

Fifteen minutes later we were headed out to Friday-night jazz at the art museum. We sat in the atrium, wineglasses in hand, pressed next to each other. I was dwarfed. It seemed inappropriate to be so close, as if she was forcing herself onto me without having addressed any of our underlying dissonance. The only upside was that the music was continuous and the breaks didn’t give an opportunity to talk.

The artist was from Turkey and played soaring pieces celebrating Atatürk. They had a kind of postimperial grandeur to them. The songs of a state that remained prideful despite losing ownership of the world. It wasn’t music appropriate for America today. We still maintained seven hundred military bases around the globe. We still knew how to take children from other nations and remake them in our image. Our music didn’t need to fill us with pride. Just to have a beat. Pride was something emperors could take for granted.

I wanted to go home before there was more drinking, before inhibitions and resentment dissipated, before I ended up telling bedtime stories; but Marie-Anne was in her ballet flats and eager to stroll downtown. We walked toward the Franklin Institute and headed into Center City, past the Whole Foods, past the adult cinema still clinging to its little slit as skyscrapers and condominiums and culinary schools swallowed it up. It reminded me of the green-domed church on JFK Boulevard, with similar desperation holding on to its location across from the crystalline Comcast Monster.

I went along despite myself.

We continued toward Rittenhouse Square, taking 18th Street. The Friday-night crowd was out. The heat made the women minimalist with clothing. Men stood outside the various bars and restaurants, smoking and staring at the women. Different lines went into the various lounges, the bouncers dour, the doors barred. The longest line belonged to a small restaurant called Byblos. They had a couple of tables out on the pavement where people smoked flavored tobacco from a water pipe and poured mint tea for each other. When the coals on the aluminum foil covering the head died down, a man from inside the restaurant was summoned. With the authority of a Catholic altar-server swinging a thurible, he came brandishing a long-handled coal-scuttle. Using a pair of tongs, he replaced the expired coals with a new batch of ember eyes. The smoke from the nozzle became more bulbous, heavier. The smokers thanked him.

“A hookah,” Marie-Anne cooed. “I had one at the W Hotel in Doha. You up for trying?”

“The coal seems carcinogenic.”

“Seems like everything is.”

Most of the patrons were children of immigrants. They spoke English, but threw in the occasional foreign word. But only nouns; their connection to languages other than English wasn’t complete enough to allow for verbs. Eyes flickered over us. They went from Marie-Anne to me, from her ring finger to mine. The women were far more obvious than the men. I tried to look into Marie-Anne’s eyes to see if she had a comment, if she’d even noticed any of it, but she showed no expression. She was more focused on drawing a waitress over and persuading her to let us go to the front.

My ears burned at her maneuvering. I got the sense that if Marie-Anne and I were successful in jumping ahead, then all the patrons would regard me and think it was only because I was with someone possessing pale skin, someone who they associated with privilege. I cursed Ali Ansari for putting such thoughts in my head, for introducing colors into my once-innocent myopia. I wished I hadn’t met him. This limb — of being identified as a Muslim — that had grown from my back out of nowhere should’ve been amputated at the first sighting; instead I had let it grow muscular and now it had the ability to smack me upside the head.

Marie-Anne was successful and we got seated immediately. As I received the hookah I noticed all the eyes inside Byblos boring into me. Hoping to offset the disquiet, perhaps to extend a sort of middle finger to all the people who were staring, I cupped my face and turned to focus on Marie-Anne.

“Is it just the two of us?”

“It’s our anniversary.”

“Well,” I said, “if it’s just us, I might start thinking about things you don’t like to hear. I might get drunk and bring up the B word.”

“Not this again. Haven’t you noticed that I’ve gotten worse?”

I had noticed. It was the most obvious thing about her. She was in no condition to get pregnant. And that shattered me, because we had almost gotten her to that point, of healthy weight-loss, where it would have been possible to talk conception.

“I blame you for letting yourself slide,” I croaked. It wasn’t something I thought too long about, otherwise it probably wouldn’t have come out; when it came to Marie-Anne I wasn’t capable of premeditated dissent, only periodic prods that were less assertion and more whine.

“You’re blaming me for something I can’t control?”

“You’re lying. There are parts of this you can control. We did control them.”

“But then it fell apart.”

“You let it.”

“I guess you checking out of life had nothing to do with that,” she said. “Besides, even if I was all right, I’m not sure I would have been up for having children.”

“Why not?”

“You won’t get it.”

“Make me understand.”

She pulled on the nozzle of her hookah, exhaled a cloud, and set her eyes on me. The fog contained dissipating roses. “I’m just not sure we would be the best parents to them. Maybe you think you will be good. But I know I won’t. What happens when I fall out of love with them?”

“You can fall out of love?”

“Look at us.”

The coals upon my hookah, once howling in heat, had put on a silver fur and no longer warmed the head. I prodded them with the tongs, trying to undress them, trying to revive them. The ember at the heart was tiny, embryonic, disappearing.

When I glanced back up, Marie-Anne was sliding from the booth, headed out of the bar.

* * *

I stayed put. Byblos on a Saturday night had a kind of intimacy that demanded that you be there with a date. I was not against sitting with Ali Ansari in such a place, but before I tried him I sent a message out to Candace Cooper instead, asking her if she wanted to join me for some genie smoke. She replied after a little while and said she was at a book reading near Rittenhouse and would come on over as soon as she was finished.