I didn’t do much those days. Mostly Ali Ansari and I played video games or watched old movies and drank. This led to more conversations about Marty Martel and other related topics. It recalled life in high school. Sometimes we even put on Boyz II Men, or Shai, or Wreckx-N-Effect, and belted out the best songs from the early nineties, which Ali called “a time of peace, a time of free-ish love, a time when America was perfect, a time when the names of guys like Hussein, Khomeini, Gaddafi were associated with a song written by Tupac Shakur instead of guys like you and me.” Tupac’s group was aptly called Outlawz.
We always met at my apartment. Ali wanted to go the Mainline often but I feared running into Farkhunda and vetoed the idea every time. I wasn’t certain if it was my guilt toward Marie-Anne and our vows that prevented me from going back, or because I felt a separate hatred toward myself for having taken advantage of a girl who had been victimized by an overeager prosecutor desperate to make his name in the golden age of the American dragnet. It was my weakness that had made me go off with Farkhunda. The weakness of the need to be superior. I used to get that fix at Plutus, and losing it had made me desperate. Was this need for superiority something that existed in me as a result of my connection to Islam? Or was it something that was part and parcel of my position in America?
I tucked the memory of that morning at the mausoleum into the cloudy folders where I kept inappropriate dreams. The dream where I had been the Minotaur and murdered the Theseus who looked like George Gabriel. The dream where Rasha Florence Quinn was an old witch and I was a young boy and she had promised to turn me into a superhero only to stab me with a sword. The dream where the Koran was my magic flying carpet and I trusted it to carry me over an ocean but it dropped me and let me plunge into the deep.
I also kept Ali Ansari away from Marie-Anne, sending him back to North Philly well before she’d be home for the weekends. For those couple of days I wouldn’t communicate with him, I’d avoid references to him, try not to think about him. I became a man with two lives. One with my actual partner; one with my partner in procrastination.
Their meeting was a prospect I wouldn’t allow. She would question everything from his affiliation with Gay Commie Muzzies, to his obsession with video-game drone warfare, to his simultaneous affection and flagellation of Muslims. But most of all she would question his clothes, his demeanor, his diction. I could envision her calling him a dandy. To flit around, purely as a servant to some aesthetic ideal, was difficult for her to accept, largely because her own creative career had stalled. Maybe because she wasn’t able to be an artist, because she had to do labor like the rest of us, in order to make herself feel superior to artists, she told herself that she was the real humanist, the one truly moral person, whereas a dandy was just a decadent who didn’t care about anything bigger, who had no access to certainty. I had warned Marie-Anne that holding this kind of certitude was dangerous for someone who worked in international surveillance, where declaring someone a suspect, someone worthy of reconnaissance, simply required assertion. Fruitlessly, I had tried to tell her that those who watched others from a distance became inclined to liken themselves to gods, and wrongly concluded that since their vision was limitless so was their judgment.
I didn’t want Marie-Anne to subject my friend to that kind of determination.
* * *
As the summer deepened, Marie-Anne opened toward me. It wasn’t the warmth in the air so much as the imminence of our tenth wedding anniversary.
Our wedding had taken place at Canon Chapel at Emory. The reason I had picked the chapel was because it served as a kind of interreligious and intercultural meeting point for the university, and we hoped that its universalist ambiance would seep into our congregation and keep things civil and polite. We shouldn’t have feared. Our wedding was the model of decorum. Some of the peacefulness was due to the fact that from Marie-Anne’s side only her best friends and her parents came out because her mother had refused to call any of the society from South Carolina. My party was a little larger. But none of the invited, except for my parents, were immigrants. Perhaps ashamed, or perhaps wary of what their immigrant friends might do or say in the presence of South Carolina elites, my father decided that he would only invite his highest business contacts. A few older white couples, a lot of paisley and seersucker. Our wedding, then, had all the tension of a weekend business convention. The congregation gazed upon us as if we were a PowerPoint, or a rather boring panel that had to be endured before we could get to the food. Marie-Anne and I hadn’t cared. We had even liked the formality of the event. It had made our union seem more legitimate. As if by having fun we might have unwittingly said to her mother that this was just a youthful indiscretion. A little stiffness gave a more serious imprimatur to the whole thing.
For our honeymoon we were supposed to go to Hilton Head. I screwed up the reservations, so we rented a car and drove down to Key West instead. Marie-Anne got food poisoning somewhere near Ocala and we veered off toward Orlando and ended up at Disney World.
The first time we had sex was when we got a little too drunk from the minibar. I was wearing Mickey Mouse ears and Marie-Anne had on a tiara. In the middle of the sex I made the mistake of calling her “my princess,” and she grew angry by that insult and put the tiara on top of my head and pushed me away a little. It wasn’t much of a push, but because it was a gesture of disapproval during an act of intimacy, it made me lose my mind. I accused Marie-Anne of trying to emasculate me and stormed out of the hotel room, going down to the bar to have a drink named after a cartoon dog. A few hours later Marie-Anne came up behind me, hugged me hard, and told me that we needed to go back up and try again. “It’s just nerves,” she had said, and was right. During the act we talked lovingly about making babies in the future, growing old together, other things that virgins said.
The morning of the tenth anniversary, as I sat at the antique desk flipping through my phone, Marie-Anne came up to me dressed in a black shirt and boxers and flicked my ear.
“We forgot each other’s birthdays.”
“I know.”
“But we are old. Birthdays aren’t as important as the date we became responsible for each other.”
“Right.”
“We should go out somewhere.”
“We should.”
Fifteen minutes later we were headed out to Friday-night jazz at the art museum. We sat in the atrium, wineglasses in hand, pressed next to each other. I was dwarfed. It seemed inappropriate to be so close, as if she was forcing herself onto me without having addressed any of our underlying dissonance. The only upside was that the music was continuous and the breaks didn’t give an opportunity to talk.
The artist was from Turkey and played soaring pieces celebrating Atatürk. They had a kind of postimperial grandeur to them. The songs of a state that remained prideful despite losing ownership of the world. It wasn’t music appropriate for America today. We still maintained seven hundred military bases around the globe. We still knew how to take children from other nations and remake them in our image. Our music didn’t need to fill us with pride. Just to have a beat. Pride was something emperors could take for granted.
I wanted to go home before there was more drinking, before inhibitions and resentment dissipated, before I ended up telling bedtime stories; but Marie-Anne was in her ballet flats and eager to stroll downtown. We walked toward the Franklin Institute and headed into Center City, past the Whole Foods, past the adult cinema still clinging to its little slit as skyscrapers and condominiums and culinary schools swallowed it up. It reminded me of the green-domed church on JFK Boulevard, with similar desperation holding on to its location across from the crystalline Comcast Monster.