The Hidden Light of Objects (18 page)

Charles coveted every storm the Middle East threw at him.

He also loved the corniches, roads that ran along the shore. There was one in Cairo, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, and in Beirut. He imagined every Arab country had some version of a corniche. To drive down a corniche in the Middle East with the window down, even in the hell of summer, made him feel invincible. It did something to the lining of his heart, softened it, allowing his chest to expand. It felt like the fulfillment of a silent promise. He had no clue why driving down any road would have this kind of effect on him but it did.

Unlike his fellow expats, Charles was endlessly entertained by all the
bukra inshallah
s. The slapdash, give-me-cash mentality did not repulse him. His sensibilities were simply not that delicate, and he was not so deluded as to believe these traits were exclusively Arab. His colleagues were brought to the edge of madness by the disorganization of the bureaucracy and, worse still, by everyone’s shrug-of-the-shoulders attitude. Driver’s licenses, health cards, IDs, visas, telephone lines, everything, but everything, would take months and months to obtain, and if you complained you got a glazed stare and the ever ready
bukra inshallah
, tomorrow God-willing. He watched young teachers cry because they had been promised on somebody’s father’s grave their phone line would be functional the following day. They had been looked in the eye and sworn to that it would work. It never did. Not the following day, not the day after, and not the day after that. Not until some gears were greased would that phone line crackle to life. None of this fazed Charles. It grounded him. It made him feel safe.

*  *  *

Now, at fifty-seven, he is far from grounded. He is unraveling or already unraveled. There are the little details he picks out daily. Those help. He counts them one by one, the way old men at outdoor cafés in Cairo or Beirut worry their beads or the way he used to count his marbles when he was a little boy. Most of the time, though, he feels like he is being lowered into an icy lake. He feels his toes go in, then his ankles and calves up to his knees. He hangs there for a bit, the blood in his feet and lower legs thickening. After about a minute or so, he is lowered again, half his torso in the frozen water, his extremities mercifully numb and brittle. He is plunged in quickly after that, the frigid water closing over his heavy head with a swoosh. He never struggles, his body a bag of stones. He welcomes the pricking fire of the water. None of this means Charles wants to die. He is certain he doesn’t want that yet, not for a while. There are still the details to collect and the layers of memory to archive.

What does one teacher matter? In particular, what is the weight in worth of a childless teacher, a man not always good? Not much, he is beginning to figure. When the young pharmacist with the blue-black hair hands him his orange plastic cylinder of pills, presents them to him with an unsolicited smile, it brings him to tears. It is one of the details he counts. Though her smile to him is probably genuine, what does it disclose about his value to the world? Not a thing.

He has done wrong in his life, and it weighs heavy on him, makes it excruciating to be alone. He is not a bad man. He did not, for instance, practice the inveterate evil of a serial killer. He just isn’t good, not the way Mere is, not the way his father had been. At the time, he hadn’t lost any sleep over it. What had he done? He had slept with a number of women other than his wife. Ten other women. If Mere had left him when he was in his forties, he would have recovered. He would have felt lonely for a while, but he would have still been young enough to believe something else was possible, that a different breed of passion was attainable with a different woman for a different version of a lifetime. He knows now, especially in his state, it is too late. Who would want him, old man before his time? Mere is a saint for staying, for loving him despite his behavior, which she knew all about, which he never (except for that one shameful encounter under a tree he would take with him to his grave) tried to hide from her. What kind of woman would put up with what he had done? Even now he isn’t sure why she is still here, not that he is ungrateful. He is grateful every day, so grateful it makes his heart as limp as his dick.

For twenty years he was sexually faithful to Meredith, the first woman he ever slept with. Being faithful wasn’t difficult in his twenties. He loved Mere and wanted to start a family with her. During those early years, his genuine feelings for his wife and his intense longing for kids kept him committed. It was the best he ever was. After learning he was sterile, Charles’s libido froze. He would try to satisfy Mere, but he was clumsy and self-conscious. He wanted neither her nor anyone else. His dead desire kept Charles loyal to his wife through his thirties.

In his forties, he strayed. It was the usual, nothing in the least exceptional. It was the same ugly shape of anyone’s indiscretion. He slept with women much less attractive, much less intelligent, much less generous, much less than Mere. With these women he had the kind of sex he felt he couldn’t with his wife. He would bend their bodies over. He would knead them into a shape, long and sinewy, that could wrap around his anger and strangle it. Until he turned forty he hadn’t fully grasped the vastness of his anger. He had acknow­ledged his sorrow over the broken lives of his parents, his anguish over his missing children, but he had not recognized his anger. His affairs were packed with it, and it made the sex burn. What he came to realize over the years, as the rage slowly diminished, was that his affairs were as much about fear as they were anger. He fucked women who meant nothing to him because he was afraid of getting older. More precisely, he was afraid of getting older with a woman he loved without fervor, and he was afraid of getting older bereft, as he was, of offspring. He could not tolerate the idea of his mother’s genes coming to an end. He would be explaining to his students about DNA and RNA, about the passing on of genes, dominant or recessive, and he would suddenly feel on the brink of collapse. He would stand quietly in his place, as still as possible, trying to fight the urge to pull his hair out of his head or scrape the skin off his face or puncture the backs of his knees with a sharpened pencil, anything to erase the overwhelming realization that would smack him as if for the first time, though it was the hundredth, the thousandth time. Without children of his own, his mother’s death was irrever­sible. The only thing that would hold back his imminent collapse in the middle of class, in front of twenty-five thirteen-year-olds, was the thought of pushing whomever she happened to be that year against a wall and filling her with his wretched semen.

Charles made it a point not to sleep with women he worked with, and of the ten, nine were strangers to his wife. He was honest with Mere about his affairs from the start. He hid nothing, though he did not believe this absolved him of anything. In fact, he realized it may have been worse of him to tell her than to hide it from her. Hiding it, at least, showed some respect. He thought of those French or Italian husbands venerating their wives, protecting them from their transgressions. There was no need to bring them into it. It usually passed like indigestion. Why destroy everything in the process? The difference between Charles and those impeccable Casanovas was the children, the spectacular silhouette of a family worth preserving, worth lying for. Confessing to Mere was an act of selfishness. He must have wanted to hurt her, to punish her for something. She would have found out on her own – ten years of infidelity is a long time, with many occasions to discover misdeeds. For her to have found out on her own would have given her power. It might have impelled her to leave him, to look for someone worthy of her. He didn’t want to take that risk, so he told her right from the start. He spared her the specifics, but he told her with whom and generally when. He was a coward.

There was another reason Charles fucked around, apart from sorrow, anger, and fear. He did it for exuberance. Exuberance: energy, excitement, luxuriant growth, even, at its root, fruitfulness. He cheated because, as he was doing it, even as he was thinking about doing it, it made him believe something tremendous might happen. It gave him the sense that there was time for everything, no end in sight. It felt like holding a small hand in his or watching light laddered through blinds. Doing what he knew he shouldn’t be brought him life in a crystal bowl. It had been taken away too early in a scream of late night sirens and a speeding ambulance. He was reclaiming it. All wrong he was going about doing it, but he was trying. There was exposure in those meaningless encounters, a stripping away. It was not about revealing himself to the women, and it was most certainly not about the women revealing anything about themselves to him. He was not in the least interested in that form of exchange. What was revealed to Charles, what was exposed to him every time he slept with a woman not his wife, was another seed of potential. Nothing else generated the same charge of electricity beneath the surface of his skin. Exuberance, the luxurious fruit of possibility. It was his addiction.

Charles never experienced the waves of potential in his teens and twenties that most young people take for granted. There they were, stomping through yellow leaves as crunchy as Cheerios, huddling together in a corner of the library late into the night, experiencing collectively the deviant ecstasy of a snow day, and he felt apart. He could see their lives, endlessly open, precious, but not his own. He existed in a detached bubble, confounded by the simplest choices, making selections as though from miles away, as though for someone else. It wasn’t until his early thirties, with one of his students, that he got a taste of what he had been missing. He is so ashamed to think of it, even now, decades later, when what could any of it possibly matter? It makes him hang his head. If only he could smother the shame and live with that first taste of exuberance. If only he could clear a space, tiny, secret (nobody has to know), inside himself so he could relive it a hundred times, over and over again until he is dead. He seeks that early purity. Back to a time before he knew what it would become, before he knew what the need for it would make him do. He wants again what Mina made him feel for the first time when he was thirty-two.

*  *  *

Mere helps him up, holds his arm firmly as he walks to the couch. He doesn’t need her help, he hardly sways, but he lets her give it to him. A few months ago he would not have survived without her help. He is stronger now. He can walk into the pharmacy on his own, fix himself a sandwich, wrap the covers around his own shoulders. But Meredith lives – even after every appalling thing he has done – for him. She seems to want to do nothing but administer to his needs. Pills, warmth, nutrition, bathroom. Why? She is healthy, full of energy, still lovely, her gray hair mesmerizing. Why is Mere suspending her own life for his? It is heavy, much too heavy to die carrying.

Charles is dying. He has testicular cancer. They have removed what they can. They claim the odds are in his favor. Charles doesn’t believe them. He knows he is dying. Poetic justice. He is not a brave man. He is not like his mother. He is not like his father. He does not want to die, but neither does he want to fight. It is a conundrum. He wants to live in order to go backwards, to curl back into the spaces of exuberance, to chronicle those moments, each and every one. His present is over and he cares nothing about his future. He wants to live only so he can organize a series of dossiers with colored labels documenting everything. He won’t write down what happened. What happened isn’t what matters. That’s why Charles always told Mere about his affairs. She was routinely kept abreast of what was happening. What truly matters, however, he has never shared. What matters is precisely what he wants to file away.

He kept things in the course of his affairs. He collected oddments and slight objects from his lovers, things they would never miss. Grocery lists, shopping receipts, tickets for various performances, pages from magazines or books they happened to be reading, postcards or junk they may have received in the mail, balled-up tissues, chewed-up straws or toothpicks or pencils, the crust off their toast, colored hair bands and clips, candy wrappers, instructions for their husbands left on fridge doors, tags from their clothes, lint from under their beds, cigarette butts stamped with their lipstick, strands of their hair, feathers or fur from their pets, flowers from their gardens. He wants to arrange these scraps in files. He wants to shape together the impossible logic of his forties, to put together the dots otherwise scattered every which way. He isn’t looking for sense, nor is he seeking closure. All he wants is a way back to Mina.

He met Mina his second year in Kuwait. She was in his seventh grade science class. She was twelve years old and a stunner. He recognized in a naked instant his admiration was not innocent. This was new. He recoiled automatically, his stomach duly bruised. But something else began to spread open at the same time, something that made him feel stupendous, puffing fast and huge with expectation. He had never had this particular sensation before, this desert of intensity. There was a pointy rebellion inside, and he found it impossible to speak, to welcome that year’s seventh graders to life science, where they were going to learn about the building blocks of life – cells, plants, animals, humans – all rolled up together in the busy reproductive fabric called existence. Something in him was being choked, and he didn’t want the marvel of that asphyxiation to stop because it was unclogging another tributary, one he had no idea ran through him.

Mina’s body was a tendril. Her eyes, dark pools of intelligence, made her look thirty and her voice was surprisingly deep. When she spoke in class, it took every ounce of control to stop himself from touching her face. Ruin was on the horizon, but for the first time in his life, he felt free from the threat of impending catastrophe. The best thing about Mina in the seventh grade was that she had absolutely no sense of her own flawlessness. She carried her immaculate beauty around like something she could afford to lose. It was exactly this Charles found irresistible, what he wanted to possess until the end of the world.