The Nakeds (17 page)

He called this gawking
appreciation,
and he thought he was sly and discreet, which he wasn’t. And he thought it was OK, legal, and playful, since he’d sworn repeatedly to Nina that swinging was something he would not do, could not do, would never
ever
do, without her permission and, more importantly, her participation. He didn’t want to cheat. He wouldn’t be like her first husband and do things behind her back. He knew how much that had hurt her and it wasn’t his intent. He promised. “If, at some point, we both decide to try it out, fine,” he said.

“There’s a revolution going on,” he kept reminding her. “Let’s join in. Why starve?” he’d say.

“Who’s starving? We’re certainly not starving, Azeem.” And she’d think about all the sex they had, how they seemed to have even more of it since his request, which she didn’t understand. She thought she should be physically pulling away from him, but her body disagreed and seemed to insist on holding on. That part of their life together seemed healthier and more exciting than even the active couples she read about in those books he gave her.

She carried
Open Marriage
around in her purse, but hadn’t started reading it. Every time she opened it, she changed her mind and slapped the book shut. Maybe he was right, that she’d surprise herself and agree with the O’Neills. Maybe she
was
afraid. She looked at him now in the car and thought about gluttony, about having too much of anything, a horrible abundance. “I give you enough,” she said.

•  •  •

Nina thought Azeem was wrong when he doubted her open-mindedness. When he first asked her to visit the nudist camp with him, she didn’t hesitate. She wasn’t shy and had no trouble taking off her clothes. That first day, before they left the house, she hummed in the kitchen, packing falafel sandwiches with sprouts and hummus, homemade tabbouleh, and purple grapes. She spent time with the sex scholars who were Azeem’s teachers at the university, and didn’t flinch when one of their more unusual dinner guests showed up wearing a black T-shirt that said
Fuck
in tiny red letters on her chest and
You
on the back. She did have to agree with Hannah the next morning, though, that the T-shirt was off-putting and more than a little bit unfriendly.

She went to see the movie
Deep Throat
with Azeem and had even tried out the technique she’d seen on screen when they got home. She read Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
and loved it. She went with Azeem to seminars on female ejaculation, male impotence, and the phases of sexual response. She learned about the orgasmic phase, the resolution phase. She learned about the sex flush and myotonia, which had to do with muscle contraction. She was particularly fascinated by the carpopedal spasm, the spastic contraction of the hands and feet during orgasm. She’d often wondered about all that clutching. It meant something to her finally when she thought about why she didn’t want to sleep with other men and was her private answer to Azeem’s persistent question. Something about sex and love, she thought, something about marriage, was about clutching itself, it was about the opposite of release. It was about grasping, holding dear. Azeem might be studying the sex act, the mechanics, the way things worked, but it was a pity, a shame, that he didn’t understand the very basic need to hold on.

In addition to Nina opening her marriage, Azeem had been talking about his family back home lately, especially his younger brother, Mustafa, who was sixteen and an epileptic. Azeem thought that if Mustafa came out to Los Angeles for an extended visit, doctors here could cure him. He wanted to send his brother home a new boy, a boy without epilepsy, and so he’d been trying to talk Nina into buying Mustafa a plane ticket. It wasn’t the money, or maybe it was—things were stressful since Azeem had quit his job to study full-time—but it was also the idea of a new person in the house, a stranger, someone who she’d have to put effort into getting to know, and mostly it was the secret she’d have to keep while getting to know him: that Azeem and she were married, and together with Hannah, they were a family. Azeem had said he didn’t want his father and mother to know the truth,
not yet, too soon, they’re not ready
, and when she pushed him, he admitted that they had a girl, a neighbor, just nineteen, all picked out for him. It was bad enough that he intended to stay in the States forever; how could he admit that he wouldn’t accept the bride they offered? He wanted his brother to come visit and he wanted Nina to pay for the plane ticket then pay for the doctors’ visits then pay in a personal way by pretending they were, what, very good
friends
? What would the boy think when they went to sleep in the same bedroom? she’d asked him. And he said he’d deal with it. He said it wouldn’t be hard for him to pretend, it was something he was willing to do for his brother’s health. Didn’t she care about his little brother’s health?

He called Mustafa his
little
brother, but there was nothing little about him. He was obese. When Azeem showed Nina and Hannah pictures of his family, he’d skate right over Mustafa’s image with a huff of shame. Nina would glimpse at a dark-haired boy in a big pair of jeans, but was unable to make out the details because Azeem shuffled along quickly, one picture behind another picture, his tall and pretty sisters behind his smiling parents behind his handsome cousin Ali, on whose head shot he paused, willing Nina or Hannah to comment on the young man’s shiny dark hair, intense black eyes, while poor, fat Mustafa was on the bottom of the pile, the whole attractive family on top of him.

When she asked Azeem about Mustafa’s weight, he made excuses. “It’s the medicine,” he said. “He holds water.”

“Retains
water,” she corrected.

“Holds water makes sense too,” Hannah said, defending him.

That’s a lot of water,
she wanted to say, but didn’t.
That’s a lake or an ocean
, she was thinking, but Nina stayed quiet because that kind of familial shame had a way of shaming everyone who witnessed it.

When Nina was alone in the house, she had searched Azeem’s desk for the blue airmail envelope, thick with photographs, and found it sandwiched between a couple of his textbooks. She was careful not to disturb his mother’s letter when she lifted out the pictures. She knew what the letter was about because Azeem had already told her about the girl he’d never met who was waiting for him to return, the neighbor with very good teeth and straight black hair—a girl named Raina who his whole family was anxious he marry.

“Like
Fiddler on the Roof,
” she had said.

“Like what?”

“Never mind.”

Nina knew that Azeem hadn’t told his mother that he was already married to an older Jewish woman with a teenage daughter, that he was a nudist, that he wanted to open that marriage and invite others in, that he was attracted to almost everyone, and that what he was studying wasn’t just psychology but sexuality, and that he had no intention of ever going home.

“Will you ever tell her about me?” she asked Azeem early on.

“I haven’t told her about
me,
” he’d said.

Mustafa’s photograph was at the bottom of the pile. There he was with his legs like short trees and an enormous belly that spilled over his slacks. There he was between his mother and a washing machine, a clothesline suspended across whatever room they were in, going right over the woman’s head and across the boy’s fat neck. His girth dwarfed everything: little washing machine, little mom, little couch in the corner, tiny lamp, tiny cat, little newspaper or notebook.

Now, Azeem turned in to the parking lot, pulled into a space farther away from the grocery store than was necessary. “It’ll be nice to walk,” he said. He turned off the car and they got out. He put his arm around Nina’s waist and pulled her close. “You smell good,” he said, inhaling her hair, her neck.

In the vegetable aisle he suggested she open her marriage without opening his mouth or moving his lips. They were deciding between white and yellow onions. “It’s good to have variety,” he said, pulling a plastic bag from the roller. He licked his fingers and used them to separate the thin sheets of plastic. He shook the bag out, picked up an onion from each bin. He held them in his palm the way another man might have held a set of pool balls, solids or stripes. “White Bermuda or Vidalia?” he asked her. And then, pointing with his chin at a bin across the aisle, “The red ones are good too.”

“Depends on what we’re making,” she said. “I like the yellow ones for soup.”

“What about for cucumber salad? I was going to make falafel and tahini this week.”

“Hannah’s been complaining about a sore throat. I was going to make chicken soup.”

Azeem looked from one onion to the other, uncertain. He looked at the red ones across the way. “We could get a few of both.”

A young woman came up from behind, her arm reaching between them. “Just real quick,” the woman said. “Can I grab a couple of those?” She smiled at Nina, who backed up and smiled too, giving the woman space.

“Yes, yes, of course,” Nina said.

Azeem looked at the woman.

Nina looked at Azeem looking at the woman.

“My boyfriend loves these,” the woman said. She was chatty and pretty, with big brown eyes and a ponytail of blond hair that bounced behind her. She wore a red T-shirt and denim cutoffs. Her legs were tan and long. “Eats them raw. It’s the strangest thing,” she continued, talking fast, looking only at Nina. “But it’s not that great to kiss him after a couple of raw onions.”

Nina nodded, uncomfortably.

“He acts like they’re apples,” she said, laughing at herself, placing a now full bag of onions into her cart.

Azeem laughed with her, too loudly, with too much enthusiasm, Nina thought, and the woman seemed to agree. She glanced at Azeem for an uncomfortable second before turning back to Nina. “I like him to be happy, so what do I do?”

“You buy them,” Nina said.

“Good for you. Keep him satisfied,” Azeem said, but no one was listening to him.

“That’s right, I buy them.” The woman was talking directly to Nina. “I’m Susan,” she said.

“I’m Nina. She turned to Azeem. “And this is—”

But the woman interrupted her. “I buy a lot of them too. James will sit there watching the football game and eat them, one after the other. ‘Those aren’t apples,’ I tell him. Men—what are you going to do?” She laughed again, and then patted her bag of onions before turning away and steering her cart over to the peppers.

Azeem watched her walk away. He was still holding his own onions in his palm when he turned back to Nina. He seemed shorter to her. Rejected. And worse, the two of them together seemed suddenly mismatched and ridiculous.

“She was a lesbian,” he said, definitively.

“Please,
” Nina said.

“She liked you. Didn’t you see the way she looked at you? Up and down.”

Nina laughed and shook her head.

He took a step back. “Talking about having a boyfriend—that was pretend. How you say,
a front
,” he said.

“I think you just creeped her out,” she said.

“I did not,” he said. “Lesbian.”

“She was creeped out.”

“Lesbian.”

“Creeped out.”

“Maybe she was a creeped-out lesbian,” he said.

Nina looked at the onions and thought that Azeem was selfish, a bad loser, a womanizer disguised as a student of science. She thought that perhaps their eleven-year age difference
was
a big deal and that he was too immature for her. She thought that his hair was thinning on top and the elaborate twirl he’d recently mastered was doing little to keep his secret. She thought the more hair he lost the more serious his need to fuck other women would become. She imagined him completely bald, hopping from one woman to the next, unable to stop himself.

Perhaps she was partly to blame for joining the nudist camp and reading those books. Maybe she was a masquerader, playing a part. Maybe she shouldn’t have agreed to visit that commune up north and maybe sex with others
was
the natural outgrowth of seeing them naked. She thought
of course it would come to this
. She thought he was wrong and she thought he was right. Maybe she
was
an oxymoron, an uptight nudist, an old-fashioned free thinker; perhaps monogamy was ridiculous, or maybe he was. She thought that the onions in his palm looked like a set of mismatched testicles with their skins flaking off.

“I want the yellow ones,” she said firmly, taking the bag from him.

“Why not both? And a couple of the red ones too?” he said.

“I’m the only one working now—we can’t buy all the onions we want to buy. There are things we just can’t have,” she said, sounding like a parent, hating her sharp voice, and feeling like she was about to cry.

“They’re twenty-two cents a pound, Nina. They’re just onions,” he told her.

“No, they’re not,” she said.

He looked at her, confused.

“I like the yellow ones, that’s all.” And then she
was
crying, plucking the onion from his palm, reaching into the bin for a couple more. And he was pulling her close. “It’s OK,” he said. “Whatever is bothering you, we’ll fix it. I promise,” he said.

“When we get home, let’s buy your brother’s plane ticket,” she said.

HE WAS
her sibling—or half sibling. A baby brother. After all this time of being an only child, Hannah knew she should feel excited, but she didn’t. She worried that the baby would be what finally separated her dad fully and completely from his former life. It was hard enough that he lived two cities away, ate bacon in the mornings, and slept with the New Testament on his nightstand, the satin bookmark and red tassels holding his place.

Azeem and her mom were dropping her off at her dad’s new house on the way to the nudist camp. Actually, her dad’s house was in Irvine, south of Belmont Heights, and The Elysium was north, toward Los Angeles. That’s why they got an early start, waking Hannah up at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning.