The Lovebird (6 page)

4
GAZELLE
(Gazella gazella)

I THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT SIMON’S STATEMENT
that marriage was like Chinese water torture. He had repeated it several times since the first. Of course, he was so characteristically bone dry when he said it that I could hardly tell if he was serious. The very ridiculousness of the idea of Chinese water torture, a made-up kind of torture said to induce insanity but not really used by anybody, led me to think that maybe he was kidding. (But it was always so hard to tell with Simon. Even when he looked straight into my face and shared the tenderest of sentiments—“When I watched you push your bicycle across that crowded campus quad, I saw beauty all around you”—his eyes had a dark, gemlike impenetrability. While I could see all the things I loved about him in their facets, I could not so easily see his feelings in them.) Still, it stung me a little to have something about which I’d dreamed for so long—union with another human being—spoken of in such a cavalier way. How could the snuggly, side-by-side peace and matching heartbeats of the lovebirds in Azar’s be akin to the annoyance of having drops of water drizzled on your forehead, against your will, one at a time, forever? I remembered the one and only time Dad had spoken to me at length about his
marriage to Rasha. Had there been anything torturous about their time together? It was only their being apart, I had always assumed, that tortured Dad.

ONE SMOGGY SUMMER DAY WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN
, I wandered barefoot through our house, steeped in the torpor that occasionally overtakes teenagers, the feeling that something is about to happen but it is impossible to articulate just what—the feeling of waiting for life to begin.

Through the open windows I heard the distant buzz of sprinklers, and the closer one of flies, hot and iridescent and hungry. Dad was enclosed in his den, Doral dangling, long fingers wound around his glass of Maker’s Mark with a splash of water. Predictably, I padded into the master bedroom to embark on my ritualistic hunt for relics, which is what I always ended up doing on such slow-motion afternoons.

I didn’t hunt for the type of relics the nuns had always told us about in CCD, not the old alabaster bones of martyrs, or a russet lock of Mary Magdalene’s hair, or a strap from Saint Francis of Assisi’s sandal, or a stolen fiber from the Shroud of Turin. And I didn’t hunt for almost-relics, like the one I had tucked in my top dresser drawer, a single rose petal glued to a paper card printed with the words “This petal touched to a relic of the Little Flower, Saint Thérèse,” with which I had been presented after my first communion. I hunted for Rasha relics.

I turned into the master bathroom and pulled out a shoebox stashed under the sink. It was full of her old beauty supplies. There were several lipsticks. Their waxy surfaces, I had noted during countless previous inspections, were still lined with the prints of her lips. Had she bought them on impulse, I wondered, during a typical toilet-paper-and-toothpaste run to the drugstore? Had she tossed them boldly into her basket in hopes that maybe
Champagne Charm or Frosted Fuchsia would supply a spark that may have been missing from what would ultimately be her short sojourn in the suburbs? Had she tried them on alone behind the locked door of the pink-tiled bathroom she shared with Dad, taking slow, private breaths as she judged the effects of their poisonous pigments on her eyes, skin, mood? And had she filled the wastebasket with tissue after tissue streaked with smears of dissatisfaction? Or had she liked the mouth that shone back at her from the mirror? I pulled the cap off one, Peach Fizz, and twisted it so that the shiny stick emerged from its cartridge like a beacon. I waited a few moments, then twisted it back down and replaced the cap. I had often thought about trying on one of the lipsticks, but didn’t want to erase the marks left by her lips with my own.

In addition to the lipsticks, there was a pair of stray hot rollers on which approximately six Beirut-brown strands had snagged and stayed. There were tiny glass bottles of mysterious oils, their Arabic labels faded and frayed at the corners, a three-pack of velvety pink powder puffs with one puff missing, and a sterling silver compact engraved with the words
SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY LIKE THE NIGHT
. There was a half-used container of Pond’s cold cream that, when opened, revealed the impressions of two fingertips, an unopened box of Pears soap featuring a Gibson girl’s old-fashioned face, and an emery board with the ground keratin of Rasha’s nails still embedded between its minuscule grains. There were a few bobby pins strewn on the bottom of the box. Because they carried no traces of her, I had no rules against using them. I inserted them into my hair to fashion a temporary updo.

Thus adorned, I sat on the closed toilet seat and waited for a feeling of nearness, of completion, to visit me. The only feeling I had was one of limitless longing. It hung over me stubbornly, like the stifling summer air. I took the pins out and let my hair fall onto my sticky neck.

Then I moved back into the master bedroom and opened the drawer of the nightstand on the side of the bed where Dad never slept. I pulled out a picture postcard. The photo had been taken from the sky and featured a cluster of white buildings beside a turquoise sea. “Beirut City” was printed on the image in a decidedly dated font (the letters appeared to have been dashed on with a thick paintbrush in early-eighties-style haste). The message side of the postcard was blank. Instead of putting the postcard back, I slid the drawer shut and carried it away.

Later, Dad saw me using “Beirut City” as a bookmark. He walked down the stairs while I walked up, my eyes flitting over the contents of an opened hardback:
Celluloid Sirens: Great Beauties of the Silver Screen
.

“Where’d you get that?” he asked with a startled expression. He slowly pulled a smoke from between his lips.

“The library.”

“No,
that
.”

“Oh. The nightstand by your bed.”

Dad wasn’t bothered by my snooping or my snatching. He only leaned on the stair railing, stared down at the first-floor foyer where several of our shoes lay scattered, and said, “She sometimes missed Lebanon, I think.”

This fascinated me. I almost could not believe that the woman in the photo albums who belonged so entirely to Dad, who gave her dimpled cheeks to the eye of his camera for immortalization, who still lived in half of his divided face (which half I couldn’t be sure), whose hair still clung to curlers beneath the bathroom sink, had ever belonged to another place, and longed for it. “How old was she when she came here?” I asked.

“Oh, twenty-four. Almost twenty-five.”

Had she bought the white dress with the buffalo-shaped belt buckle when she arrived? Was the buffalo the most American thing she could find, a symbol of her new home? Dad was still,
but I sensed the possibility for conversation. He kept his Doral out of his mouth, suspended. And he had never, never told me enough about Rasha. I hurried out another question. “Why did she come?”

Like most immigrants, Dad said, she had hoped to find better opportunities. “She’d studied the art of perfumery back home in Beirut. She’d been apprenticed to a master there, an old man who made scents the ancient way, using only natural materials. Your mother was ambitious, and an artist. She always told me, ‘A good perfume is an invisible kind of beauty.’ ” Dad smiled. “When the old perfumer died, your mother made the move to America. She had a cousin here. She brought her kit with her—a beat-up black suitcase filled with a hundred tiny bottles of attars and absolutes.”

I imagined Rasha’s kit, countless corked vials filled with extracts of every plant, bloom, bark, resin, and root in existence. Maybe she had sniffed and caught the essence of everything the earth had ever grown and could combine those spoils in infinite ways to create entirely new types of loveliness. Then I pictured her landing at John Wayne Airport, black suitcase in hand. “How did you meet her?”

She was working, Dad explained, at her cousin’s dry-cleaning business in Anaheim. Dad stubbed his cigarette out on the oak stair railing, leaving a sooty black burn. He did this without realizing. “The day before I was supposed to show my first house, I went to that dry cleaners to drop off a suit. I rang a bell. Your mother came out of a great, crowded collection of clothes on mechanical racks—coats, skirts, blouses and sweaters, all this fabric, silk, corduroy, linen, velvet. And still, she was the softest thing in the whole place. So pretty. Have I ever told you what her name means?”

I nodded, and a gazelle ran from one end of my mind to another. Dad went on. “I don’t know what I said when I handed
her my suit, but she laughed. She had tiny sparkles of sweat on her forehead. She was a so golden. She had the sun in her—there were yellow flecks of it in her brown eyes.”

Dad’s facility with fanciful descriptions had served him well at Sunshine Realty, where he could make even the homeliest of hovels sound like a heartwarming hideaway. I wondered if he had first developed this talent while searching for ways to describe the comeliness of Rasha, if he had lain awake nights, lovestruck, composing secret songs about the girl at the dry cleaners. “She was wearing all white that first day I saw her,” he continued, “and every time I came in, which was often. Everything I had in my closet, even blue jeans, went in and out of that place three times before I finally asked her to have dinner with me.

“On our date, she wore a white dress with a brass buffalo belt. She said it was hot in the dry cleaners and wearing all white made her feel cooler. She said most of the buildings by the sea where she came from were white, but from what she could see the buildings around here were painted all kinds of colors. She said it was a bit quixotic, but I knew she meant chaotic.

“After dinner, we took a walk around this neighborhood”—he extended an arm down toward our front door, on the other side of which sprawled the orderly rows of houses, the lawns (all of them but ours) fertilized to near-fluorescence—“the Tierra de Flores tract, brand new then, where I was selling my first properties. She wanted to see where I worked. We strolled through the half-built houses. They were like skeletons. Some had birds nesting in their beams. Our footsteps echoed on the fresh cement foundations. She took off her shoes and showed me how she danced.”

She was living with her cousin who ran the dry cleaners, Dad said, and sleeping on a couch—though she didn’t sleep much. “She told me she sat at the kitchen table every night experimenting with perfume formulas—or recipes, as she called them. She
worked from the time the nightly fireworks show at Disneyland began—she watched it religiously through the kitchen window—until the early morning hours, just before that first slice of light sneaks into the sky. And when she fell asleep she always dreamed of where she wanted to live, in an apartment by the sea, with a white cat for company. ‘There is a Ferris wheel at Newport Beach,’ she told me. So she was saving up for her own place there, and was going to open a little perfumery.

“But one night she told me she loved my eyes.” At this recollection, Dad looked right into
my
eyes, something he did so rarely it made me shy. “She said, ‘I would love to have a child with you because he would have your eyes, with that green color, and the way the lids swoop down over them’—and she touched my eyelids, Margie!” Dad’s cheeks flushed and his voice shook. “This woman who knew the names of all flowers, who could tell whether wine tasted of strawberries or soil, this woman who danced in her bare feet, she had told me about her child with my eyes.”

“Then what happened?” I prompted gently. I couldn’t help myself. I was greedy for more images of her, pictures with more dimension than the album-bound snapshots. I already knew how the story of our family ended. It was the story of how our family began that I wanted to possess.

“She was my bride,” Dad said. “We were joined forever. Her cousin ordered us a fancy wedding cake and closed the dry cleaners for an hour to come over to City Hall and be our witness.

“I had been promised a great deal on a house here. We chose the lot we wanted. It had that big old magnolia on it.” Dad nodded toward the front yard where our tree stood, the only one of its kind in the neighborhood. It was our home’s sweet-smelling sentinel, a favorite perching place of birds, and with the passing years its beauty had increased in tandem with our house’s growing decrepitude. “The builders were planning to rip it out, but
Rasha asked them to leave it. So instead of the sea, she got magnolias. But,” Dad said with a faint frown forming between his eyes, “I thought she was happy.

“We didn’t have any furniture at first, until my grandmother died and we inherited everything she’d had, including that painting of an Indian maiden in a canoe—it had hung in her bedroom for sixty years. The first thing Rasha did with the painting was smell it. She pressed her nose right up to it and guessed instantly the perfume that Grandmother Fiona, whom she had never met, had always worn. ‘Mitsouko,’ she said.

“She worked on her perfume recipes every night at the kitchen table. She finished her favorite one just before you were born, Margie.” Dad closed his eyes. “Those were good months. We felt like two kids who had the run of a big castle. We always
chased
each other up these stairs.”