Something Like Beautiful (7 page)

I
can still hear my mother's voice admonishing eight-year-old me to slow down, to pay attention. Me, a girl, forever trying to run a circle around the wind. I rushed through school, I rushed through my schoolwork and childhood and childhood's friends, and now at thirty-three, I was rushing through the end of a marriage. It made me wonder, though I will never know, was I born early too, did I rush even then, before I knew word or concept? But whether it was a genetic or learned trait, I knew I wanted to move on, to heal the hurt, build a new life for me, for Nisa.

I'm trying to say I fell in love again, quickly and thoroughly, not long after Rashid and I broke up.

I close my eyes even now and see him, Amir, his walk that made him seem bigger than he was, his brilliant smile, his even more brilliant mind. The first time we met, he said to me, “Forgive me for staring at you. You're just so beautiful.” And it wasn't the words so much as the way he let it go right afterward. He didn't do what most men I've known have done: decide that they like the way you look, that they want a relationship, and that they will pursue it regardless of your feelings. It was
different with this man. I felt then, right there in the beginning, respected. Those words, his words, they made me believe that after a childhood in which so many boundaries had been violated, and after time with a man in prison where the boundaries of our life were violated, finally I was safe. I was safe with this man who early on held my face and said nothing bad would happen to me again, that he would see to it, that he would, “bleed for me,” if need be. How could I not want him? And then one day he said to me, “And you know I love Nisa.”

In the time after the deportation order, Amir and I talked about the future of the world and the future of our world and our hopes mirrored each other's. “Do you want more children,” he asked me once, and I said yes. And he asked me if I would ever consider being a stay-at-home mom and I said yes. And he asked me if I would ever consider moving away from the city and I said yes. And then he said he still wanted to go slowly—before making the full-on commitment—and that surprised me. But I said yes.

In those first months following the end of my marriage, I spent weekends with Nisa and Amir walking across the New York autumn. South Street Seaport, Prospect Park, long drives upstate, we would lose ourselves in the colors that it seemed I was experiencing for the first time in years because for the first time in years, I was experiencing them while holding the hand of a man I loved.

I had never had such a time with Rashid. Never had these simple moments. Not even during my first marriage, really. I'd never had the simple romance of sharing a day, letting the hours fall where they would, answering to no one but ourselves.
And when I had nighttime child care, as I did once a week back then, Amir and I did something else that was brand new to me and sexy. We went to lounges, to clubs together, a couple. We danced fast or slow, but we always connected, legs and arms cobbled together on dark floors. We drank great wines and toasted each other and toasted love. We named the son we imagined we would one day have together, the baby brother Nisa would help guide. We kissed in darkened doorways and then later in the back of taxis because waiting until we were home was too long a wait.

We made love in public places, in bathrooms in fancy restaurants. We talked every day. We made career decisions together—he was a Wall Streeter. We talked about books I would write, screenplays, how he could help with financing. When career challenges presented, we supported each other. And yes, yes I thought about Rashid and what we'd had and what we'd lost, and there were many times when I felt the strangle of guilt. But greater than that discomfort, greater than the pain of the end of a marriage, was the sense that I needed someone who could understand the contours of my life. Amir seemed like that person, the one who understood the contours of my life. And I was certain I understood the contours of his. We even declared as much, our emotions nearly choking another. We said our minds were twin engines. We discussed creating our own human rights organization. We talked about the world as we wanted to see it. “I'm sick of our people suffering,” he said, frustration in his voice when we talked about the Amadou Diallo case that was being played out in the media at the time. “Just so damn sick of it,” he said, even more emotion brimming, and I knew he was
thinking about the boys on the block he came up with, so many of whom were dead, others in prison, others still wandering the neighborhood, shouting to passersby. I think it's likely true that he'd seen more death and destruction before he was ten than I have even now, as of this day—which is saying something given that not long after Nisa was born, in one year alone, fourteen people I knew, many of whom I loved, died. Only one, my aunt Mary, was elderly. But everyone else hovered at just about fifty, except the man who would have been Nisa's godfather, Taheem. He didn't make it to thirty-five.

I knew death and I knew loss and so I knew when someone had the same weight in their heart that I had in mine. He had it. And I wanted to heal it. I wanted to heal it for him and I wanted to heal it for me. We began sharing the details of our lives. He told me of his missing father, the one he looked so much like. I told him of my missing childhood.

I told him about what happened with the molestations and I didn't worry when he didn't seem too turned around by it. I didn't want to compare him to Rashid, who had so much pathos for me, offered so much support. Amir was different and that was okay. It was okay, I told myself this, that he seemed to relegate my past to the past, because, after all, wasn't that where it belonged? Even if his past was right there in the anger that crouched right behind his beautiful brown eyes, that had nothing to do with me. I was moving on. And my job was to help him do the same so we could walk together into a perfect tomorrow.

And you know, it wasn't as though I never noticed the anger that pulsed in him. It was that, first, the anger wasn't all there was to see, and second, I never took that anger as something
that would be directed toward me, his partner. The snide remarks he would make, the mean little jokes he would slip in about everything from the way I talked or laughed to the way I cooked, who takes these things seriously? Who takes them seriously when the whole package includes something you never had before: a lover who was present and daily and who you were politically and emotionally and physically in tune with?

Amir was the first man I ever experienced full-blown, adult romance with. My first marriage was not a romantic affair to be sure, and besides, I was a teenager, literally, when I became engaged, barely a woman, twenty-one, when I married. And of course with Rashid, well, with Rashid there was the prison. But here I was, thirty-three years old with a new baby and, like it or not, a new life. And now I was in places with this pretty man whom I could be with whenever we wanted, whenever
I
wanted. I could make love to him whenever, wherever. So surely I need not focus on a few misplaced and poor jabs. This is what I told myself, what I told friends, one in particular who just kept repeating, “There's just something about him that makes me uncomfortable.” She, like most others, never heard his sarcasm. They would just meet him and feel chilled, tell me he simply seemed “off.”

“He's shy,” I would say, defending my man, “and hard to get to know,” I continued, dismissing her concern, preferring instead the approval of strangers, waiters and others who would meet us in our fancy places and love “a young, beautiful Black couple who was making it happen.” Amir and I were told that, again and again. And in the dark, sexy places, the places blurred by wine and both real and imagined romance, I believed.

I believed it especially as my work as an author and journalist seemed to take its own shape and I continually found myself in elite places, places of celebrity and star shine. Viewed through the lens of my own life, it seemed everything was spiraling up. After the hard mean drop, with my baby on my back, I was headed back up a mountain. But that was the lens that I looked through. For Amir the lens opened onto quite another landscape. His own career was struggling. Much of it wasn't his fault. The nuances of the economy—and he being most junior in the firms he joined—saw him laid off more than once. That was hard. The effort to find other jobs though—that seemed impossible. Months and months went by without work or callbacks. Or money. And I should have realized. As much as women are often defined by others and our own selves by what we look like, men are judged by status and money. But the removal of both is, for many, the removal of their whole humanity. I didn't see things quite that way then. I just wanted, as any woman in love would want, to help. I had connections, knew people who knew people. Reluctantly at first, and then finally, he accepted. He accepted after I convinced him that by helping him I wasn't also challenging his manhood.

“Of course you don't need me to make things right for you,” I argued one afternoon. “But if I can help, why shouldn't I?”

“You act like I can't do this on my own,” he responded, his voice thick with anger.

“That's not true,” I said, in what became a back and forth until at last agreement. We had been dating for under a year. And his reaction was my first glimpse of the full space of the anger that resided in his heart. Because it wasn't only that he ex
pressed resentment at my offer of help. He also took that chance to go on a tangent that would characterize the rest of our relationship. Why were things okay for me but rough for him? Inevitably, unbelievably, in language I could not retain it was so mean, he began to insinuate that I was where I was because I was fucking my way into assignments, because I was a slut.

Worse than the indignity of the name-calling was that it was he, not I, who was not monogamous! He saw that as the whole part of the “not making a commitment” thing, justified by the fact that I'd only recently separated from Rashid. Whatever hearing I gave that the first month or second, as time stacked up and the romance stacked up it seemed less and less a legitimate excuse. But he insisted and I wasn't ready to lose someone again. So yes, he kept sleeping with a bunch of other women all the while calling me a slut.

And I accepted it. I accepted it because I thought if I loved openly and with the whole of my heart I could change him. Our good times were, after all, so very good. It had to work out! When Amir accused me of lying about my commitment to him, instead of walking—or running—away, I just defended myself, did everything to prove it wasn't true. Everything to prove I was a good girl. A girl—not like the baby I once was—a baby worth keeping.

 

I
N THE EARLY SUMMER
of 2001, I was able to maneuver a meeting between Amir and one of the most famous and respected men in finance. It was a coup. In a downtown office, the two men talked for an hour and a half while I wandered in and out
of cheap stores in lower Manhattan, the ones that sell dresses for ten dollars a pop. When finally my cell phone rang and it was Amir saying he was leaving the building and I needed to come back around the corner and meet him, I nearly floated there. An hour and a half? Who has meetings that long? I was certain something would happen and that a new picture-framed life, a life that had been shunted by the prisons, was coming into focus. We glided through the rest of the day, picked up Nisa, went out to dinner, toasted our future, made love through the night, made love the next morning. For much of the rest of the summer, we lived like this: squinting down the road to see where hope was waiting.

If you were to hear him tell it, it was me who screwed it all up that August. Here's what went down: I asked him if he'd ever written a thank-you note to my mentor, the one who'd set up the meeting.

“Why would I do that,” Amir growled, six weeks—perhaps a lifetime—of fury shooting forward at me. “I didn't get a damn job!”

“I know,” I countered, trying to calm him down, “but she couldn't guarantee you a job. She did everything she said she would. She made the calls and set up the meeting. And you got the meeting. The thank-you note is for that.”

“You're such an ass-kisser. No wonder everyone loves you.”

He said this.

And that was it. We were off and fighting. We'd been in his car driving out of the city for the day, a late summer retreat. But before we'd made it out of Brooklyn, he was turning the car around and he was speeding back toward my apartment,
and then I was home, stomping up the stairs and through my front door. For the rest of the afternoon, in between crying jags, I called him, alternately cursing him and then asking, Why would you treat someone who loves you like this? He told me to stop. Said if I didn't, he would make me.

“Make me then, motherfucker,” I said, all Brooklyn-girl defiance in my voice.

And he did. He came over that night. Nisa was asleep. When my doorbell rang and I knew it was Amir, I assumed we would argue but then we would make up. I assumed we would fall into bed together, proclaim our love once more, make it all better. I mean, isn't that how it goes? Isn't that what it is between people who love each other? And wasn't that our pattern? So no, no I didn't think about the names he'd called me for months, for years, accusing me of the very behaviors he was engaging in.

And yes, we'd even had some troubling physical encounters. The worst of them though had confused me about, more than clarified, the rage he held. We would play-fight, wrestle—but the way lovers do—as foreplay. During those “games,” he dragged me down my hallway by my hair—versions of this happened twice, maybe three or four times. Years on, they all become one long nasty incident. But he used to drag me down the hallway and slam my head into the wall and laugh, but I didn't. I said for him to stop. I said he was playing too roughly. It took a long time, after everything was said and done, to see those interactions as something far uglier than playing too roughly. But back then, labeling them as I did, as play, meant I had no reason to tell him to go. No reason to go through yet one more loss. He said he loved my daughter. He said he loved me. And I clung to
that even when my hairstylist or manicurist would stare at the chunks of hair I was suddenly missing, the broken nails, and at least once, scratches down my face. I don't remember anymore how I responded when they looked at me one day and gasped, “What happened?!” I remember only that I said to myself again and again, We were just playing.