I went along despite myself.
We continued toward Rittenhouse Square, taking 18th Street. The Friday-night crowd was out. The heat made the women minimalist with clothing. Men stood outside the various bars and restaurants, smoking and staring at the women. Different lines went into the various lounges, the bouncers dour, the doors barred. The longest line belonged to a small restaurant called Byblos. They had a couple of tables out on the pavement where people smoked flavored tobacco from a water pipe and poured mint tea for each other. When the coals on the aluminum foil covering the head died down, a man from inside the restaurant was summoned. With the authority of a Catholic altar-server swinging a thurible, he came brandishing a long-handled coal-scuttle. Using a pair of tongs, he replaced the expired coals with a new batch of ember eyes. The smoke from the nozzle became more bulbous, heavier. The smokers thanked him.
“A hookah,” Marie-Anne cooed. “I had one at the W Hotel in Doha. You up for trying?”
“The coal seems carcinogenic.”
“Seems like everything is.”
Most of the patrons were children of immigrants. They spoke English, but threw in the occasional foreign word. But only nouns; their connection to languages other than English wasn’t complete enough to allow for verbs. Eyes flickered over us. They went from Marie-Anne to me, from her ring finger to mine. The women were far more obvious than the men. I tried to look into Marie-Anne’s eyes to see if she had a comment, if she’d even noticed any of it, but she showed no expression. She was more focused on drawing a waitress over and persuading her to let us go to the front.
My ears burned at her maneuvering. I got the sense that if Marie-Anne and I were successful in jumping ahead, then all the patrons would regard me and think it was only because I was with someone possessing pale skin, someone who they associated with privilege. I cursed Ali Ansari for putting such thoughts in my head, for introducing colors into my once-innocent myopia. I wished I hadn’t met him. This limb — of being identified as a Muslim — that had grown from my back out of nowhere should’ve been amputated at the first sighting; instead I had let it grow muscular and now it had the ability to smack me upside the head.
Marie-Anne was successful and we got seated immediately. As I received the hookah I noticed all the eyes inside Byblos boring into me. Hoping to offset the disquiet, perhaps to extend a sort of middle finger to all the people who were staring, I cupped my face and turned to focus on Marie-Anne.
“Is it just the two of us?”
“It’s our anniversary.”
“Well,” I said, “if it’s just us, I might start thinking about things you don’t like to hear. I might get drunk and bring up the B word.”
“Not this again. Haven’t you noticed that I’ve gotten worse?”
I had noticed. It was the most obvious thing about her. She was in no condition to get pregnant. And that shattered me, because we had almost gotten her to that point, of healthy weight-loss, where it would have been possible to talk conception.
“I blame you for letting yourself slide,” I croaked. It wasn’t something I thought too long about, otherwise it probably wouldn’t have come out; when it came to Marie-Anne I wasn’t capable of premeditated dissent, only periodic prods that were less assertion and more whine.
“You’re blaming me for something I can’t control?”
“You’re lying. There are parts of this you can control. We did control them.”
“But then it fell apart.”
“You let it.”
“I guess you checking out of life had nothing to do with that,” she said. “Besides, even if I was all right, I’m not sure I would have been up for having children.”
“Why not?”
“You won’t get it.”
“Make me understand.”
She pulled on the nozzle of her hookah, exhaled a cloud, and set her eyes on me. The fog contained dissipating roses. “I’m just not sure we would be the best parents to them. Maybe you think you will be good. But I know I won’t. What happens when I fall out of love with them?”
“You can fall out of love?”
“Look at us.”
The coals upon my hookah, once howling in heat, had put on a silver fur and no longer warmed the head. I prodded them with the tongs, trying to undress them, trying to revive them. The ember at the heart was tiny, embryonic, disappearing.
When I glanced back up, Marie-Anne was sliding from the booth, headed out of the bar.
* * *
I stayed put. Byblos on a Saturday night had a kind of intimacy that demanded that you be there with a date. I was not against sitting with Ali Ansari in such a place, but before I tried him I sent a message out to Candace Cooper instead, asking her if she wanted to join me for some genie smoke. She replied after a little while and said she was at a book reading near Rittenhouse and would come on over as soon as she was finished.
I busied myself with the music videos and talking to the waitress about the hookah. A song by Myriam Fares played on the screen. In the video the curly haired singer played a dancer, a ballerina. She was in Paris, chased by a taller version of me, even though I had never chased a girl like that.
“That’s hard core,” Candace said when she arrived. “Smoking by yourself.”
She wore a volumized white scarf and a white dress shirt tucked into a polka-dot chiffon maxi skirt.
I pulled some smoke and blew it at her. It spread over her like a cream.
I helped her sit and ordered wine and hookah for her. She vetoed the wine saying she didn’t drink alcohol any longer. I tried to downplay the faux pas by giving her a little lecture about the hookah based on what little I had learned from the waitress; but Candace put up her hand and said she knew all about it. She’d smoked it in Dubai and Turkey and even frequented a Palestinian hookah bar in her neighborhood in North Philly.
“I like your look,” I blurted out. “I loved it at the deli too.”
She smiled and lowered her eyes. “You always made fun of my clothes.”
“I’m not doing it now.”
We sat together and Candace blew O’s which I both popped and wore on my fingers like rings. She gave me a rundown on Arabic pop music. How Lebanon produced the starlets, Egypt the musicians, and a recording company in Saudi Arabia launched the indecency upon the world. The videos that were released during Ramadan were particularly licentious. As evidence she showed me videos of Elissar and Nicole Saba. Squinting into her phone required sitting together, our legs touching lightly. Candace said she had started taking belly-dancing classes.
“I had always wanted to do it,” she said. “But until I converted I felt it would be stealing someone else’s culture.”
Her comment gave me the opening I needed and I prodded her about how she had taken to Islam. She went on to detail her own coming of age in the suburbs of Atlanta and DC. Her parents, both half-black, were part of the new black elite who turned their backs on her when she decided that she didn’t have a similar love for “black tribalism” that they did. It started when she refused to go to Spellman in Atlanta and opted for a public university. It worsened when she told her father that she imputed no inherent superiority to a black man. Race, she said, was an oppression created by those who profited from making divisions in the world. To agree to belong to a race meant affirming that basic oppression. She couldn’t do it. She needed to belong to something built around inclusiveness, something that erased the differences between people. The natural thing to do would have been to turn to the Christian God, who welcomed all to His flock. But the problem was that she couldn’t erase all of her blackness, and Christianity belonged to the white man. She turned, therefore, to the God of the nonwhites — Allah. Choosing a universalist deity based on somewhat racial reasons was not completely consistent with her initial rejection of the very idea of race, but it was better than living an entirely racial life of the sort her parents led.