“Already?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I got this new job I’m doing. Just popped in here for lunch.”
“Well. ” I lengthened the goodbye. “Your job sounds interesting.”
“I’m with Al Jazeera. I’m a producer. For their video department. AJ+.”
“Very exciting.”
She smiled. “It was good seeing you.”
I opened the door for her and walked her to the sidewalk. We paused, apparently hoping the other would say something, and then backed away from each other. I watched her leave and my eyes expanded to take in the world. The sun was clean and otherwise light, as if dangling on spiderwebs instead of engraved upon the mantle. Planes shot through the cirrus and the clouds curled up and made mustaches.
I came back to Ali Ansari. He gave me an inquisitive smile.
“Just an old friend,” I explained. It was aimed more at myself than at him. “She wasn’t like that,” I waved my hand around my head, “back when I used to know her.”
“I didn’t even ask,” he said. “Just be careful with the converts. They come into Islam and forget to bring their cynicism along. Pretty dangerous, being around adults experiencing innocence.”
Ali paid, refusing to let me even look at the check, and we headed out for a walk. I spied a good number of hundreds in his wallet. Combined with the immaculate clothes he wore — almost all designer by the look of it — I had to wonder how he had so much money. Working in the stacks had never paid well, as far as I could remember.
* * *
We headed down Broad past the Masonic Temple and walked around city hall, cutting through the alleys between Chestnut and Walnut, toward Rittenhouse. A gleam off the skin of William Penn, standing regal atop city hall, blinded me for a moment and I had to take Ali Ansari’s shoulder.
Farther on we passed a stretch of pavement made of diagonally lain brick. Many had been loosened by time and water and now sat on the moist earth with barely concealed enmity, waiting for just the right toe to stub and become an even more dangerous hurdle.
The length of the walk I thought about Candace. The way she had characterized her departure from Plutus made me believe that my firing had played a role in her decision to leave. I guess I wasn’t the only one who had been affected by George Gabriel. I regretted having run out on Candace that day at the art museum. I regretted not using her phone number when things got bad for me. Perhaps we could’ve been there for each other. Instead she had been forced to channel her frustration in another direction, eventuating in her apparent conversion to Islam. Her conversion, if that’s what it was, seemed to say that she had made up her mind in opposition to the Philadelphia of skyscrapers, which was full of people in peacoats and fur-lined hats and stylish gloves. There was in her clothes, as well as in her decision to move into North Philly, the sort of naïveté that the ironic and much younger hipsters in the Northern Liberties area would find kind of sad and desperate, and with a straight face they might even accuse her of being an agent of gentrification. But I was drawn to it. She showed a willingness to challenge convention, to rip out her own upholstery and try a different pattern, a characteristic that had been squeezed out of Marie-Anne and me. Our aim went in the other way. Toward stability. We couldn’t change our designs.
About a block from Rittenhouse Park, near a condominium, a doorman came out from a canopied building with scissors in hand and set to work cutting out the shriveled brown branches from a row of pots containing bright purple flowers. As we stopped to watch we saw two girls come out from an ice-cream shop. Both had waffle cones and licked them simultaneously. One girl licked with the tip of her tongue while the other mashed the scoops against the flat of her tongue.
“Only white girls have the ability to tell you everything about themselves through single acts,” Ali Ansari said. “It’s as if they mastered sexual symbolism before being born. It’s nice but it takes the mystery away.”
“I don’t know about that,” I replied. “Maybe East Coast girls are different than Southern ones.”
“What makes you an expert?”
“I live with one.”
Ali Ansari grasped my shoulder and punched me hard to enough to sting. He took my phone and started interviewing me on video. “Sir, sir. Is it true that you’re with a white girl?”
“Yes.”
“Do you realize, sir,” he said, continuing to film, “that makes you the modern-day Ahab, except you caught the whale?”
“I think Marie-Anne would object to that comparison.”
He kept the camera on me. “How does it feel to be more of a man than us? You make our penises shrivel in homage. You are the godfather. I must pay you protection money.”
“Marrying a white girl didn’t protect me from George Gabriel.”
“Fuck George Gabriel.” I foresaw a rant coming and turned the camera at him. “Sometimes I wish I could kill every George Gabriel I come across,” Ali said. It was too serious for me to laugh. “You know, selective extermination. That kind of thing.” He went on about his preferred ways of killing. Most involved disposing the bodies in a river so they would wash up in some beachside town where other white people could look upon the corpses and experience a warning. Vengeance had to be systematic or else it was pointless.
“Got it out of your system?” I asked.
“Not all of it. The rest will only be washed away in the final bloodbath.”
“Anyway, tell me,” I said and shut off the camera, “is a white girl really such a big deal?”
“It makes you unique,” he said. “The generation of Muslim immigrants that came before us — the first generation — they used to be able to get white girls, easy. Their accents did it, their funny mustaches did it, their patriarchy did it. But for us, the second generation, it doesn’t work like that. We’re associated with terrorism and the bad kind of patriarchy — you know, stoning and stuff — instead of hot patriarchy, like casual spanking. If we go abroad, yeah, maybe we can get a white girl. But here, in America, to get a white girl after this War on Terror is no longer possible. Every now and then, sure, you hear of a brother getting one. But she’s usually one who got manipulated into converting to Islam first and now she’s lonely and afraid because she didn’t realize what a terrible thing it is to be a Muslim today. Those girls don’t count. Sometimes I wonder what is this world in which my nerd father had an easier time nailing white girls than I ever will. The increasing absence of white girls dating and marrying Muslim guys is living evidence of an emerging American apartheid.”
“How did I get one then?”
“She’s probably a PBL.”
“PBL?”
“Pre — bin Laden,” he said. “It’s how we refer to the Golden Age. Back when Americans didn’t have prejudice toward us. A PBL white girl is one who isn’t just white, but is also capable of seeing a Muslim man as an individual, as someone distinct from the collective. Granted, you have to be careful in protecting her from this society that will try to make her change her mind.”
“I wasn’t able to protect Marie-Anne from that society,” I said.
But Ali Ansari wasn’t interested in my lament. “I bet your PBL is real dirty in bed too. Muslim girls don’t know how to be sexy. A girl needs to have some infidel in her to be sexy. Or have been sexually abused in such a way that she becomes a nympho. Of course I don’t advocate abuse. But if an abused girl gets in my bed I am not going to throw her out.”
I raised my eyebrows and said nothing about the hard freeze between Marie-Anne and me.
“So you told me about PBL,” I said. “But are you going to tell me what GCM stands for? Or would you have to kill me?”