“I like it when you talk like that,” I said.
“Come.” She pulled me to the sofa. “Lie down and watch this show and I’ll tell you all the new technology we’re developing.”
She pulled off her skirt so she was only in panties and camouflage socks. Her thighs were like loaves of breads that giants ate. She talked quietly about how some of the new surveillance drones her company was developing were barely as big as a hummingbird. “Drones,” she said in an epiphany, “that’s what we should call them.” I rested my head on her undulating thighs and watched the old men from Harvard and Georgetown talking in front of the American flag. The screen changed and depicted protestors burning that flag. The newscaster played the image in a six-second loop. The repetitiveness of the image caused my eyes to blur. I didn’t want to let myself go to sleep. I wanted to stay up and argue. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I didn’t believe in imposition. I didn’t engage in coercion. I couldn’t bring myself to make a demand. I wanted things, but I was too reticent to fight for them. I gestured toward them from a distance and hoped to get them, and if it all didn’t come to pass, I wouldn’t blame those who denied me. I would blame myself for not having hoped deeply enough. I was a new kind of man. I believed in surrender. I hadn’t come to this conclusion as a result of a personal epiphany. I had come to it because I was cursed with having a Muslim name in America at a time when others with names like mine crashed shadows into America. As a result, I knew I had to do whatever it took to not allow myself to be likened to them, to never appear confrontational. The transformation had been an easy one for me because I had always been a bit of a coward. This was also why I remained so drawn to Marie-Anne. She had intact in her the aggressor, the assertor, the attacker who I sometimes wished I could be, who sometimes I needed to be. It was why I had always kept a flame alight under her power, propped it up, given it oxygen to thrive. I stood to benefit from it. I stood to be protected by it. She was my sword and shield. Behind her I could be naked. Under her I could be safe.
CHAPTER THREE
Spring sprang from snow. The days lengthened. The sky brightened. The trident maples and chokecherries began to display some color and the yellow forsythia, which flowered before showing leaves, started to bloom. The purple beech hedges were somewhere between winter copper and the purple bruise-like color of spring. It wasn’t warm enough to go and sit out in the glades and gazebos along the water, but the rowers were out at Boathouse Row and the rollerbladers and cyclists were doing the six-miler around Fairmount in ever-increasing hordes. And at certain points in the day the art museum looked like it was erupting with golden spears.
Marie-Anne was busy during the spring. She got flown out to Doha—“the forward base of American foreign policy,” as she called it — to make a couple of speeches about unmanned aerial vehicles, to analysts from Brookings Institute and Foreign Policy magazine. Later she visited Abu Dhabi for a defense technology convention. She also helped make a pitch for some drones to buyers from the Wazirate, a small oil-rich kingdom in the Persian Gulf. The trip was a big deal because previously it had been MimirCo’s CEO, Karsten King, who would have gone to make the pitch to the Waziratis.
“Do you want to come along?” Marie-Anne asked before going. “Maybe look for a job in a warmer place?”
“I think I’ll pass,” I said, a little annoyed by her persistence in trying to get me back to work. I also had no intention of becoming an expat.
I was content at home. Marie-Anne’s father called a couple of times, but I didn’t bother answering. It would be impossible to explain the circumstances that had led to my firing. I spent my days playing video games; went down to the Bishop’s Collar to drink and watch basketball; or hung out at the art museum. The brown-skinned punk girl still worked there and she gave me a curious look each time I came.
Marie-Anne texted numerous updates during the trip. Most involved mentions of some guy named Mahmoud. The frequency with which she mentioned him made me curious. Was she attempting to make him seem familiar? What was the reason behind such a move? Was it so that I would not ask any questions about him? Assume him to be a casual part of her professional existence? Despite the anxiety that came with the possibility of marital bonds getting tested, I experienced a brief tremor of excitement. It had been a long time since I’d been aware of any man gazing upon Marie-Anne as a sexual being. The possibility that somewhere out there, in a traditionally masculine industry, in a part of the world still owned solely by men, she might be objectified, pursued, seduced, triggered a possessory desire toward her. It was a validation I had not experienced since the start of her illness. It made me remember how much more I’d valued her when she had been healthy. Not only because of what she meant to me, but what the fear of losing her elicited.
Mahmoud became the first thing I talked about after Marie-Anne landed. We were on the sofa. She spooned me, curling a bit of her hair and dipping it into my ear.
“This Mahmoud seems to have replaced Wu, Sharma, and Jones as the leading singer in the we-love-Marie-Anne chorus. Is there attraction there?”
“Mahmoud knows how to make himself appear attractive.”
“So you like him then,” I said with a twinge of arousal in my foot and heart.
She almost never told me, despite my insistence, the names of her admirers because she believed she ought to determine when and how to spurn them. She certainly never went so far as to use the word attractive in relation to them.
“He is just resourceful. He introduced me to people at think tanks. To experts in surveillance. To journalists who all have great contacts with the military. I even ended up talking to him about your — our — situation. He told me I was wrong to ask you to ditch the Koran.”
“Wait,” I said, the tendril of sexual tension lost. “Let me be clear: I wasn’t upset because you said I should ditch the Koran. I was upset that you wanted me to apologize when I wasn’t the one who did something wrong.”
“Baby,” she said, twisting my wrist, “you don’t have to let me get away on the issue of the Koran. I understand now how insensitive I was. Mahmoud made me see.”
It offended me that my disbelief could be shrugged off because of the simple fact that my name sounded similar to his. It seemed that as long as you had a Muslim name you were presumed to be a believer. Your name was your blood and your blood was your faith.
“Let’s look forward,” I said out of exhaustion.
She clapped my thigh and kissed my cheek. “Yes, let’s discuss how you should become a freelance promoter.”
She made me reach for her purse and then she drew out a box of business cards. During her travels she had given my work a great deal of thought and decided that I didn’t need to join an existing company. I could procure my own clients through initiative and references.
The cards were off-white with pale red trim and a kind of rubbery feel to them. The front had my name and contact information, along with the words: Marketing Consultant. Social-Media Maven. Bon Vivant. She also had the brilliant idea of miniaturizing my college diploma and printing it on the back of the card. “You went to the Harvard of the South,” she explained. “Let’s take advantage of that.”
The cards made me appear like a kind of all-purpose hustler. Such people were pariahs. Low-end peddlers, pushers, pimps. Granted, in a capitalist world everyone was a salesman, but in my heart there was a great difference between being a solitary salesman working out of his house and a specialist with institutional support, someone with hefty patronage behind him. What was next? Was I supposed to put away my dress shoes in favor of sneakers?