I was telling the whole story to Saniya, with Dina doing color commentary on the other phone, when I felt the Xanax kick in. It was timely: I began to see the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
“The show will get good reviews,” Dina told Saniya. “The opening won’t influence that.”
“I’d better hang up,” Saniya said. “I’m sure everyone will want to call and find out what happened.”
She was right. The instant we hung up the phone, it rang again. It was my sister Amal from Beirut. I let Dina talk to her and tell her the whole story, while I dried my hair. I remembered the spider and checked the tub to see if it was still there. Didn’t see it. I looked around and nothing. I figured it must have died and was swept down the drain. All of a sudden it occurred to me to look at my butt. There the poor spider was, squished, looking like an intriguing tattoo on my ass.
I came back to the room wearing the hotel’s bathrobe.
“That looks nice,” Dina said. She sat on the edge of the bed. “We should filch it.”
I put my hands to my face, screamed a high note, but not too loudly. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” I had to shout that every time I saw her without makeup. It was our ritual.
“Shut the fuck up.” That too was part of the ritual. She stood up and went into the bathroom.
The phone rang. It was my half-brother, Ramzi, calling from San Francisco. He wanted to know everything. He was taking care of my cat and plants and told me I owned, without a doubt, the stupidest cat in the world.
The phone rang again. It was my half-sister Majida from Beirut. I had to tell her the same story. I was feeling fine and I told the whole story as one long joke. I could hear her and her husband laughing across the line.
By the time my ex-husband Joe called from Dallas, I had the story down. I was laughing hysterically with him on the phone. My ex-husband Omar called from Beirut. Ditto. We laughed so hard, Dina came out of the bathroom and handed me tissues to dry my eyes.
“Did everybody call?” Dina asked, while getting dressed. “Let’s go out for coffee.”
“Not everybody,” I said dejected. “Neither Lamia nor David called.”
“And neither one of those two will. Get dressed.”
“David might call.”
She shook her head in exasperation. “You two are breaking up,” she said.
“Well, my husbands called. Why not him?”
“Because they are decent human beings and they care about you, which he doesn’t. Get off your ass and get dressed.”
The phone rang on cue. I reached for it and gave Dina a raspberry. It was Margot, her lover. I could have died. Dina took the phone from me, snapped her fingers for me to get dressed.
At eleven o’clock we found ourselves walking across Central Park, a habitual walk. When I lived in New York, I had an apartment in the same neighborhood, the Upper West Side, and I used to cross the park once or twice a week to visit my mother, who lived on the East Side. I realized I wanted to confront her. I had not expected her to show up to the reception even though she had promised she would. Nonetheless, I found myself disappointed at her confirming my expectations.
We entered my mother’s building and Jonathan, the concierge, came running toward us, more like lumbering, since he was corpulent. “Ms. Sarah, I’ve been trying to find you,” he said anxiously. He had a look of concern, which was not uncommon for him since my mother was not an easy tenant. “I didn’t know where you were staying.”
“My mother does,” I said. “Is there something wrong?”
He looked unsure about what to do, which disquieted me. His expression went from afraid to nervous to sad to tragic to worried, trying to settle on an emotion. “I have some bad news,” he said. He paused, hesitated. “I don’t know how to say this. I’m so sorry. Your mother is dead.”
Before I could say anything, I felt Dina hold my hand. I wanted to say something, but my mouth seemed sewed shut. Different feelings welled up within me, yet the predominant one was shock.
“When? How? What happened?” That was Dina. I squeezed her hand to make sure it was still there.
“Yesterday. She called down at noon asking for a car in the evening. She wanted to go to Ms. Sarah’s opening. When the car came, she wouldn’t answer her phone. Clark went up to see if she was okay and found her dead in the bathtub. She had killed herself.”
I began to feel faint.
“I tried to find you, Ms. Sarah. The police have been here. So has her attorney. She left everything to an artist colony in Maine. I called her brother and he didn’t want anything to do with her. We’re wondering what do with her stuff, Ms. Sarah. I don’t think it’s right that strangers take her personal stuff. We had no one to call, Ms. Sarah. She had no one else.”
I heard the words he was saying, but did not exactly grasp them. They floated about, revolving around my head, it seemed. I was lost, dizzy.
“The attorney wishes to speak to you, Ms. Sarah,” he went on. “He says you can take all her personal material, but please don’t take anything expensive because, technically, it all belongs to the colony. They’ll sell everything. But you should go through her possessions.”
I must have nodded or given him some sign he interpreted as acquiescence because we were walking toward the elevator. I followed, terrified of what I might find upstairs. My mother could not still be up there. I wondered who would have dealt with the corpse. How did she kill herself? So many questions, but being mute, I could ask nothing.
“We cleaned everything once the police left,” Jonathan said as he let us in the apartment. “After they removed Mrs. Nour el-Din, we had to clean the bathroom.”
It took a minute to register. He was leaving, closing the door when I heard myself shout, much louder than I should have, “Jonathan!”
He reentered quickly, frightened.
“What did you call my mother?” I asked, quieter, but firm.
He looked confused. “Mrs. Nour el-Din.”
“She didn’t go by Janet Foster.”
“No, ma’am. Janet Nour el-Din.”
I plopped down on the couch. Dina sat next to me. Jonathan let himself out quietly. We sat silently on the couch for over an hour.
“Why would she keep her name?” I asked. “She hated our family.” I lay back on the sofa, looked up at the ceiling. “Why keep reminding yourself of past pains?”
“Sometimes you’re so naïve,” Dina replied. I looked at her, eyebrows raised. “She was as much a Nour el-Din as any of you. Just because she was ostracized doesn’t mean she’s not part of the equation. Think about it.”
“I don’t get it.”
I got up and walked to the desk in her office. I wanted to make sure. I went through her papers. All her bills were for Nour el-Din. I became increasingly frantic as I searched. I wanted to find something, but was not sure what.
“Help me look for her artwork,” I said excitedly. “I have never seen anything of hers.”
I opened the closets in the office. There was nothing there. We went to the bedroom. Nothing. I searched the closets and dressers. There was only one room left. I looked in and there was a drafting table. On the table were some brushes and tubes of gouache. I felt my face flush and a feeling of relief overcame me. My mother always talked about being a painter, yet no one had seen a single painting. In the back of my mind, I wondered whether she even owned any paints. I searched the room and found no paintings.
“Look here,” Dina said, pointing at some papers stacked underneath a heavy book of impressionist paintings. There were only ten of them, all of them seemed abandoned after a couple of strokes. Some were left in mid-stroke. So many false starts. I began to cry.
Dina pulled out a framed piece. It was a Time magazine cover. Saddam Hussein’s photographically darkened face dominated the cover. My mother had painted little hearts in red gouache all around his face. Some of the hearts had silver arrows running through them. It was signed Janet Nour-el Din in the bottom right-hand corner.