Paper Lantern: Love Stories (3 page)

Cole, I said, I
never
used that phrase.

Where do you think I got it? he asked.

Not from me.

Maybe you forgot saying it, he said, maybe you finally forgot who you said it about. Anyway, whoever said it, I’m at a fund-raiser in Ann Arbor, everyone dressed so they can wear running shoes except for a woman I can’t help noticing. You know me, it’s not like I’m looking—just the opposite—there’s always someone on the make if you’re looking. She’s out of
Vogue.
I hate misogynist rap, man, but plead guilty to thinking: rich bitch—which I regret when she comes up with my book and a serious camera that can’t hide something vulnerable about her.
Photojournalist
, her card reads, and could she take one of me signing my book, and I say, sure, if she promises not to steal my soul, and she smiles and asks if she can make a donation to the school, and how could she get involved beyond just giving money, and where’s my next talk, and do I have time for a drink? Two weeks later at a conference in D.C. she’s there with Wizards tickets. And this time I go—we go to the game. In Boston it’s the symphony, in Philly I show her places I lived in college and take her to the Clef, where ’Trane played, and in New York we go to the Met. I’d never been to an opera; we go three nights in a row. Was I happy—happiness isn’t even the question. Remember running a race—thirteen-point-seven-nine seconds you’ve lived for, and when the gun finally fires and you’re running, you disappear—like playing music those few times when you’re more the music than you? She could make that happen again. One night, I’m home working late, Mina’s already asleep, and the phone in my office rings. I’d never given her that unlisted home number. You need to help me, she says, and the line goes dead. Phone rings again. Where are you? I ask. Trapped in a car at the edge, she says. Her calls keep getting dropped, her voice is slurred: Come get me before I’m washed away. I keep asking her, Where are you? Finally she says: Jupiter Beach—I drove to see the hurricane. I say, You’re a thousand miles away. The phone goes dead, rings, and Mina asks, Who keeps calling this time of night? She’s in her nightgown, leaning in the doorway for I don’t know how long. Too long for lies. I answer the phone, but no one’s there.

She have a husband? Mina asks. You got to call him now.

The business card from Ann Arbor has private numbers she listed on the back, one with a Florida area code. A man answers, gives his name. I say, You don’t know me, but I’m calling about an emergency, your wife’s in the storm in a car somewhere on Jupiter Beach.

I know you, he says. I know you only too well. Don’t worry, she doesn’t tell me names, I don’t ask, but I know you.

Mina presses speakerphone.

You teach tango or Mandarin or yoga or murderers to write poetry, film the accounts of torture victims, rescue greyhounds. I know the things you do, the righteous things you say, and I know you couldn’t take your eyes off her the first time you saw her, and how that made you realize you’d been living a life in which you’d learned to look away. And like a miracle she’s looking back, and you wonder what’s the scent of a woman like that, and not long after—everything’s happening so fast—you ask, What do you want? and she says, To leave the world behind together, and you think beauty like hers must come with the magic to allow what you couldn’t ordinarily do, places you couldn’t go, a life you’d dreamed when you were young. But now, just as suddenly, she can destroy you by falling from the ledge she’s calling from, or falling asleep forever in the hotel room where she’s lost count of the pills. She’s talking crazy since she’s stopped taking the meds you never noticed, and when she said she loved you, that was craziness, too—you’re a symptom of her illness. So you called me, not to save her, but yourself, and it’s me who knows where she goes when she gets like this, and I’ll go, as I do every time, to save her, calm and comfort her, bring her home, because I love her, I was born to, I’ll always love her, and you’re only a shadow. I’ve learned to ignore shadows. She made you feel alive; now you’re a ghost. Go. Don’t call again.

I told you on the phone, Cole said, that I was living my life like an opera, but he’s the one who sang the aria.

*   *   *

FIRE!

A borrowed flat above a plumbing store whose back windows look out on a yard of stockpiled toilets filled with unflushed rain. Four a.m., still a little drunk from a wake at an Irish bar, they smell bread baking. Someone’s in the room, she whispers. It’s only the mirror, he tells her. She strips off her slip, tosses it over the shadowy reflection, and then follows the scent to the open front windows. A ghost, she says as if sighing. Below a vaporous streetlamp, in the doorway of a darkened bakery, a baker in white, hair and skin dusted with flour, leans smoking.

FIRE!

A bedroom lit by fireflies, one phosphorescent above the bed, another blinking in the mirror as if captured in a jar. The window open on the scent of rain-bearded lilacs. When the shards of a wind chime suspended in a corner tingle, it means a bat swoops through the dark. Flick on the bed lamp and the bat will vanish.

FIRE! DAMN YOU! FIRE!

Whom to identify with at this moment—who is more real—Caruso, whose unmistakable, ghostly, 78-rpm voice carries over the ramparts where sparrows twitter, or Mario Cavaradossi?

Or perhaps with an extra in the firing squad, who—once Tosca flings herself from the parapet—will be free to march off for a beer at the bar around the corner, and why not, he was only following the orders barked out by the captain of the guard, who was just doing what the director demanded, who was in turn under the command of Giacomo Puccini.

Or with the hooded man, his mind lit by a firefly as he tries to recall a room he once attempted to memorize when it became increasingly clear to him that he would soon be banished.

FIRE! I AM GIVING YOU A DIRECT ORDER.

How heavy their extended rifles have become. The barrels teeter and dip, and seem to be growing like Pinocchio’s nose, although it’s common knowledge that rifles don’t lie. Still, just to hold one steady and true requires all the strength and concentration a man can summon.

Turn on the bed lamp the better to illuminate the target. On some nights the silk shade suggests the color of lilacs and on others of areolas. See, the bat has vanished, which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.

FIRE! OR YOU’LL ALL BE SHOT!

The lamp rests on a nightstand with a single drawer in which she keeps lotions and elixirs and stashes the dreams she records on blue airmail stationery when they wake her in the night—an unbound nocturnal diary. She blushed when she told him the dream in which she made love with the devil. He liked to do what you like to do to me—what
we
like, she said.

In the cracked mirror each member of the squad sees himself aiming at himself. Only a moment has passed since the “Aim” command, but to the members of the squad it seems they’ve stood with finger ready on their triggers, peering down their sights, for so long that they’ve become confused as to who are the originals and who are the reflections. After the ragged discharge, when the smoke has cleared, who will be left standing and who will be shattered into shards?

PLEASE, FIRE!

I can’t wait like this any longer.

Non ho amato mai tanto la vita.

Seiche

… ai-je enfermé sous ma langue un pays,

gardé comme une hostie.

—Nadia Tueni,
Liban: Vingt poèmes pour un amour

A seiche warning was in effect. Both the
Chicago Tribune
and the evening news featured accounts of the killer seiche of June 26, 1954, when a wave ten feet high and twenty-five miles wide rose from a placid Lake Michigan and swept seven fishermen off a breakwater at Montrose Harbor to their deaths. Atmospheric conditions were right for another.

Were the beaches closed? I’m no longer sure. In memory, Lake Shore Drive is empty, barred to traffic, as if awaiting a tsunami. I imagined the seiche like a towering wave from a Hiroshige print, all the more menacing for its froth of moonglow, suspended for a heartbeat before dashing against the night-lit skyline. I didn’t want to miss it.

When I considered a vantage point, what came to mind was a single-story utility shed in the shadow of Madonna della Strada, the Art Deco cathedral on the Lake Shore campus of Loyola University. I’d attended Loyola on a track scholarship. Now I was a caseworker for the Cook County Department of Public Aid. My district was Bronzeville, on the South Side, not far from the barrio where I grew up. I was living on the North Side, in Rogers Park, the neighborhood surrounding the university, and on nights when I couldn’t sleep I had taken to going back to the campus to run as if I were still training for races. Lately, that was most nights. I’d never had insomnia before and wondered if the job was getting to me.

I’d dug out my old track shoes. A potholed, obsolete cinder track circled the soccer field. I set up the hurdles I found toppled together in the nearly obliterated broad jump pit, and ran imaginary heats until my shirt was pasted to my back by sweat and I gasped for breath. Then, to a ticktock of crickets and lawn sprinklers, I jogged from campus along front yards, hurdling hedges and fences along the darkened residential blocks to the deserted beach at the end of Columbia Avenue. I stripped down to my jockstrap, draped my shoes, shorts, and the T-shirt that would later serve as a towel over a crossbar of the lifeguard chair, and waded out. A moonlit sandbar sloped gradually deeper; underfoot, the sand had assumed the undulations of waves. Waist-deep, I slid into the cool night water and swam from the city without looking back until I was out far enough to imagine I had crossed the boundary of a wake left behind long ago by a priest I once watched swim.

*   *   *

At least, people said he was a priest. I watched his implacable crawl during the summer after my senior year—a confused, solitary time. In the space of the few months before graduation, I had become more involved than I’d realized with an exchange student who had returned suddenly to Beirut to attend the funeral of her grandfather. She had been in the States only since the start of the academic year. Her name was Nisa. We’d met during the winter semester in a poetry class. The first assignment was for each student to memorize and recite a favorite poem. “Howl” was too long, so I chose Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At a hundred and thirty-one lines, it took five minutes to declaim. When it was Nisa’s turn, she rose from her seat with her tangle of black hair pouring down her back and in a clear voice recited:

I want to be where

your bare foot walks,

because maybe before you step,

you’ll look at the ground.

I want that blessing.

Then she quickly sat back down. Her recitation had lasted moments. She didn’t say who’d written the poem; no one inquired. I’d never heard a poem like that, a poem direct and sensual, and it occurred to me that perhaps she had written it and was too shy to admit it. I didn’t ask in class for fear of embarrassing her, but I wanted to hear the poem again, to copy it down, and read more like it. After class, I caught up with her and asked who wrote it.

“Rumi,” she said.

“Who?” I asked. Rumi was hardly known in America then, though years later he became a New Age bestseller.

“Jalaluddin Rumi. He wrote in Persian in the thirteenth century. He was a Sufi, an ecstatic.”

“Mind if I walk along with you?” I asked.

“
Let us go then, you and I
,” she said in a portentous voice, mimicking my recital of “Prufrock.”

We walked to the library, where she helped me find an anthology of Persian poetry. Until reading about Sufi mysticism in the introduction, I hadn’t realized that the poem Nisa had recited was a prayer to God, rather than the sensual love poem I’d taken it to be. I decided not to mention my disappointment. Her family was Maronite Christian. Although I had some vague notion that Maronites were connected to the Greek Orthodox Church, I was ignorant as to how they differed from Catholics. I wondered if Nisa’s upbringing had been a strict Christian equivalent to that of Muslim women required to wear burkas. When I asked if she was religious, she told me that she made a distinction between living by religious tenets and living her life in a way that allowed for the spiritual. She believed the sacred was everywhere, hidden only because we are not taught to see. She wanted to know what I believed in. I told her that my current saint, if I had one, was Albert Camus, who wrote, “I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.” She asked if I knew that my name, Jack, meant
God is gracious
. Trying to joke, I asked if her name, Nisa, had anything to do with Phoenicia.

“Actually,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly, as if to the village idiot, “it means
woman
.”

We began meeting at the library after class, discussing poems and novels, and then everything else. By mid-March, on days posing as spring although the tulip trees on campus were still a month from flowering, we’d walk along the lake or wander through neighborhoods, sometimes cutting class. There was a dreamy, timeless ease to those walks, a sense—so brief in a lifetime—when being in college seems like a form of sanctuary. We’d walk for miles and stop along the way at little Mideastern places where the food was cheap, fresh, and fragrant with lemon, parsley, and mint—storefronts I’d have passed by. I’d tease Nisa that her homesickness expressed itself as hunger, and she’d say she wanted me to taste the flavors she grew up with. She could turn the city I was born in into a different city, one that would otherwise have remained invisible.

Her city was in turmoil. We could watch yesterday’s street fighting on the evening news. “No matter the time here, I always feel the exact hour at home, like having a clock inside me, and I’m living here and there in both times at once. It has nothing to do with homesickness,” she told me, trying to explain. “There’s a line in a poem by a Lebanese poet, a woman who actually inscribed a book to my mother. In English, it’s something like,
I have hidden under my tongue a land, I keep there like a host.
”