The two students couldn’t read my panic, but Ali Ansari picked up on it. Without breaking a wing, he took off his sign and pulled me up and away. “That’s right. I will take him to do the ablution. But I just remembered, we have a lecture about Plotinus to attend. I totally forgot about that.”
Hatim tried to join us. He was a philosophy major and his thesis sought to reconcile Western reason with Islamic revelation. “Did you know Plato was one of the prophets of Islam?”
“Plotnius, not Plato,” Ali clarified. “This one the Christians already got.”
Leaving Hatim behind, Ali and I rushed out and walked along Broad Street, past the frat houses, toward the movie theater on Cecil B. Moore. There was a pair of skateboarders avoiding the police cruisers whose job it was to keep them off the rails and the steps. A small group of black guys dressed in the finest new athletic gear came our way and headed into the movie theater.
Ali Ansari, it turned out, wasn’t a Temple student. He was actually close to thirty and had graduated a few years earlier. Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to find any serious sort of employment, he also never got around to graduate school. Now he worked in the stacks at the libraries and as a security guard at one of the boutique museums on campus, while making films on the side. He lived in a small place on Diamond Street.
“A delinquent putting his salvation in film,” I said. “But at least you chose a cheaper part of town to live in.”
“It’s not as cheap as it used to be.” He waved his hand toward the intersection.
We purchased rotisserie chickens at the market and sat on a bench across from Assalamalaikum Barbershop, next to the abandoned Kabobeesh. Ali Ansari went up to one of the barbers standing outside and exchanged pleasantries, before coming back to report that Talib was off probation. A pair of black guys came out of a nearby house, in skullcaps, with checkered scarves around their necks, knee-length white shirts over khakis, both with chinstrap Sunni beards. “Cops stopped me the other night,” one of them said. “No probable cause. Punched me in the face.”
I turned my eyes toward the Hillel House. It emanated a soft blue light that seeped into the grass around it. I saw the Star of David and thought of Richard Konigsberg. He and I used to share moments like this.
“Sorry about before,” Ali said after finishing up with his acquaintances. “I should have figured you out earlier.”
I considered this man who hung out at a university; was familiar with the distinction between Plotinus and Plato; and could make jokes about gentrification. He had a name that was similar to mine, and he looked similar to me. This created kinship between us. I got the sense that if I were to tell him about being declared a residual supremacist he would understand me in a way that Marie-Anne and Richard weren’t able to. To them, my being understood as a Muslim was a problem that could be made to go away, either by adapting to it through business, or by going to the courts. But to someone like Ali Ansari, being a Muslim in America was a persistent pain in the heart. The pain of being too visible. The pain of being perceived contrary to how you conceived of yourself in your thoughts.
Ali Ansari saw me staring and narrowed his eyes between bites. “Is this a date?”
“I don’t know what it is yet.”
We starting walking down Cecil B. Moore, past the point where the transgendered prostitutes congregated on 16th Street. I asked Ali if he knew a painting called The Poet. After he was done greeting the prostitutes he told me he did; he had seen it at the art museum a number of times.
We turned down Broad Street toward city hall, which glowed like a revelation in a cave. In hurried and desperate sentences I told Ali a story set in the shade of a Chagall.
Ali’s swearing was a symphony that accompanied my shame.
CHAPTER FOUR
Marie-Anne was the “man” in the relationship and I was the presumptive “woman.” We were aware that this was an atavistic characterization of our dynamic — why should anyone be the “man” or the “woman”?—but understanding ourselves like this made things easier to sort out when big decisions had to be made, or big fights occurred. Both of us were comfortable with our roles.
Troubles arose, however, when we were engaged in a cold war. In these periods, when resentment and moral outrage came easy, our usual clarity collapsed. Marie-Anne turned me back into the stereotypical man and expected me to behave in the chivalric manner of a herald or a knight, appeasing her out of some assured sense of honor, a stoic before her cantankerous digs. I, meanwhile, turned Marie-Anne back into the eternal feminine and expected her to fall at my feet like a geisha, to cease her petulance and be my concubine, telling me that I had been right all along. But since neither of us were trained in holding these perspectives — because she was the one who waltzed through the world with a broadsword and I was the one who navigated society using a perfumed handkerchief — what really ended up happening was more confusion, more disorder, more distance.
This sequestered apartheid was always difficult to negotiate out of, and it was precisely the place we found ourselves in after the Salato fiasco. My ambulatory escapes, along with Marie-Anne’s increasing travel, widened our chasm even further. Perhaps our silence had had rational underpinnings once. But like all rationality stubbornly adhered to, it had turned into dogma, the syllogisms hardening into immutable edicts, our psyches ruled not by term-limited presidents in dirty boots, but by dynastic theocracies with executives in red leather loafers, as the caliphs used to have.
All I could do was look upon Marie-Anne from a distance.
Each act of witness played out like an episode in front of me.
One night she came home crying, went to the bedroom, drew out a copy of her unfinished novel, Gaze of a Cyclops, and with slumped shoulders pounded down a bottle of Two-Buck Chuck and eradicated a pack of cigarettes. Never once did she actually write.
I wanted to reach out and straighten her shoulders and knead the knots that roamed like subterranean monsters beneath her skin. But I just couldn’t do it.
A few nights later she had a verbal altercation with someone at MimirCo. Instead of taking the call in the bedroom she went into the hallway. She didn’t realize I could still hear her. From what I gathered, it seemed that the switch to sales was not going well. Her boss at MimirCo, the former marine named Karsten King, had been upset with her for not closing the deal with the Waziratis during her trip to the Persian Gulf. Her failure with the client prompted them to put a lot of pressure on her. It sounded like they were reconsidering whether she should’ve been elevated from clerk to closer.
Under normal circumstances these sorts of difficulties would arouse my sympathy. Ameliorative action. But not this time. I told myself that Marie-Anne’s crying and hallway conversations were theatrical fictions. I wouldn’t see into her psyche. I would limit her to being a lump of performing flesh.
Marie-Anne wasn’t as stentorian as me about observing silence. This was because she needed me for something — namely, the poems that would get her to the gym. Every few days she would come past me, idle, then linger until I became aware of her, making some comment about how she hadn’t gone to the gym for a while, and if I had something to give her. There was no request in her tone, no supplication. It was all expectation. That made me dig in deeper. By now I had lost all notion of whether I was acting out of principle or stupidity. I only knew that I wouldn’t put pen to paper. The closest I came to conceding was when I dropped an anthology of German romanticism at her feet.