Jasmine and Fire (14 page)

So far I haven’t heard the “Why aren’t you married yet?” bit since I got here in August—although I’d heard it on past visits to Beirut—and getting a version of it now, twice in a row, catches me off guard. Auntie Nida in particular has always struck me as progressive and independent-minded, far more so than many others of her generation. Maybe I’d forgotten, perhaps willfully, how my ongoing singlehood might puzzle and distress my relatives. Nida then tells us a story about how her aunt Amineh gave up her shot at marriage when, asked to dance on board a ship going to Europe in the 1930s, she’d said to the suitor, “Dance? No thank you. I am a Protestant.”

My mother whispers to me that Nida is full of stories from the old neighborhood in Beirut and is delighted by the company of her nieces and nephews. I make a mental note to stop by her apartment for coffee sometime. There’s a half century between us, but I love
her sparkling eyes, her warmth and wit, and her infectious desire to tell funny stories and be surrounded by family. I want to get to know her better. And I’ll forgive the “damn those men” comment.

It’s not just my parents who are in town from the States this week. Kareem, the thirty-something son of my parents’ friends, is also passing through Beirut. I’ve known him since we were kids although I rarely get a chance to see him these days, and he’s here now visiting from California with his wife, Dionne—a vivacious blonde from Mississippi who I liked from the minute I met her at their wedding reception. They call one night to ask me to join them at a bar called Ferdinand in Hamra with some of their friends. One of Kareem’s former Beirut classmates, Naji, shows up that night, too; he’s a tall, good-looking guy in his early thirties who is in a wheelchair after getting paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident in college. As we all gather around a table ringed with ottoman seats in a corner of the indie-rock-thumping room and order our drinks, the question of what I’m doing in Beirut comes up. Soon we’re all talking about home—where it is, what it is, what we make of it. Everyone here tonight either emigrated with their parents during the civil war or has lived outside Lebanon at some point.

Naji takes a sip of his beer. “Drinking is home, isn’t it?” We all laugh. Naji is a champion athlete in the local version of the Paralympics, and he works in a high-powered job for a local disability nonprofit. He’s not an alcoholic, this guy. But he says what any of my New York friends might have quipped on any of our nights out drinking, catching up, blowing off steam.

Easygoing and likable, Naji wears his disability as lightly and gracefully as I’ve ever seen anyone do it, and he makes it
comfortable to talk about the subject, without awkwardness. I’ve known Naji for only a couple of hours, and I can’t venture to guess what the rest of his life is like. But meeting him is a reminder that accepting circumstances and forging ahead with humor and grace is the way—albeit not the easiest way, and certainly not the only way. If he can rework his reality so he’s living gracefully in a wheelchair, my move to Beirut is nothing in comparison. I decide I’m going to try to face down the emotional, social, and logistical challenges of living here with grace and humor. At least for the next few hours, while I’m remembering my vow.

The truth is, I’ve been madly impatient for my brief break from Beirut to visit New York, and to fall asleep next to Richard, and to have New York back, and my New York life back, even just for a few days. After which I’ll have to leave it all behind and come back to Beirut. And probably ask myself all over again why I’m doing this. I know why, but that doesn’t make it any easier. I’ve only just started picking up momentum here and accepting that Beirut is no longer a city I’m passing through on vacation, with a get-out-of-jail-free pass in my pocket. I don’t want to escape in a hurry this time.

I’m sitting
at the Lufthansa departure gate at the Beirut airport for my three-thirty
A.M.
flight to Frankfurt, then to JFK, and I’m finishing Julia Child’s memoir
My Life in France
. In their long and seemingly very happy life together, Julia and her husband, Paul, jumped around and lived in various cities, houses, and apartments, every time Paul’s diplomatic job forced them to move. They busily tried to make a home wherever they landed. The two of them were like their own mobile home unit; they created a life, and seemed to have a grand old time, in every city, save maybe
the drab-sounding Plittersdorf, Germany—but even there they thrived for a while. If you have a talent for making yourself feel at home no matter where life takes you, is there even a need for another, more permanent kind of “home”?

Last night as I fell asleep, I started wondering if Richard and I, the two of us, could ever be home. I’m excited and anxious about seeing him when I arrive in New York tonight. I just want to soak him in, feel missed. But why haven’t I yet been able to form anything that feels like home with someone else? With guys who’ve hinted at the marriage path, I was always scared I’d feel trapped. With the more elusive ones, I’d let myself entertain the idea silently—the eternal cliché of the hard-to-get—but I’d eventually tire of the lack of intimacy and make a preemptive strike, or they’d pull the plug. In my late thirties, I’m wondering:
Am I now scared of not being trapped enough, of being too free to roam? Or what if I discover that, for me, roaming is home?

The afternoon I arrive in New York, Richard finishes up work early, comes home to find me in his bedroom napping, and wakes me up with a kiss. We snuggle for a long while and keep looking at each other and giggling and kissing. We go grocery shopping, open a bottle of wine, and cook dinner together, talking and laughing nonstop. I’ve been keeping him posted on my Beirut adventures, but we have lots to catch up on, and our conversation as always crackles and goes on for hours on end, and underneath it all, there’s an intense serenity and ease. Not at all like I’ve been away for two months. And surprisingly, not like we’d parted on fairly wobbly terms the last time we saw each other.

While he’s at work the next day, I roam around downtown Brooklyn near his apartment, where I’m staying this week since I’ve given my subletter a one-year lease. I find a café to sit in and
finish up an editing project, and the routine feels natural, as if I’d never left. It also, oddly and unexpectedly, feels like a nearly seamless extension of my life in Beirut. To some extent, I’m doing here just what I do there. And vice versa.

I talk about cities that night with Richard’s roommate, Dan, as we all hang out in the kitchen making pasta. Dan, who has moved around various cities for work in the past few years, tells me he can only feel like a city is home if he decides from the beginning he’s there to stay. That way, he believes, people take you more seriously, invest in you more.

Others have been saying the same thing to me, in Beirut, too: “You have to make a decision where you’re going to live, and commit to it.” Meaning, decide whether the place you’re in is home, and act like it is from the get-go. My childhood friend Rana said this to me over pizza when we met up for lunch in Beirut the day before I left for New York. I hadn’t seen Rana since elementary school, but we’d reconnected a few years ago over e-mail. Since I’d landed in Beirut this summer, Rana and I had talked on the phone a few times, but she’d been busy with her four-year-old and family obligations, so we hadn’t caught up in person until the other day. Seeing her felt strangely normal, as if we’d still been hanging out every day since elementary school, when we used to take ballet classes together and I’d braid her hair, still the same silky-straight auburn strands I loved playing with. She has the same bright smile and easy laugh I remember, and we didn’t need hours and hours of catch-up conversation to get back on track. Once we’d rushed to hug each other as soon as we met up outside the pizza place in Hamra—“You look exactly the same!” “No way. But you do, seriously!”—we were back in business.

After Rana said to me over lunch that it’s better to decide
where home is going to be and stick with it, she paused, then added: Even though Beirut is home for her and her husband, and has been home for most of their lives, now they want to leave for good. A few bouts of street violence in recent years, and the ongoing instability since the war, finally made them decide,
Khalas. That’s it. We need to get out of here if we can figure out how
.

“But isn’t everyone in Beirut always talking about leaving, or at least thinking about it?” I ask her. That’s true of New York, too. As much as die-hard New Yorkers are in love with their city, the cliché about life in New York is that most everyone is always planning to leave. Both cities are exhausting in their way, hence the constant escape fantasies. For those like me who can plausibly transport their career or life elsewhere, Beirut might feel more livable and appealing precisely when it’s a potentially temporary place, not an eternal trap of looming war and chaos and dysfunction. If you’re there for only a little while, in your mind anyway, it’s easier to get through the roughest times.

My New York visit is only a week long, and the time spent catching up with friends, and staying with Richard, turns out to be magical. Somehow after being away and coming back, things feel closer and sweeter and better than ever between us. Mostly we make each other laugh, or we curl up and talk about our worlds—friends and family dramas and work stresses and the news and weird pop culture obsessions—and, an eternal favorite, the Middle East. And even if we argue about the region’s politics, as we have in the past and do a couple of times on my visit, we end up joking or deciding to drop it for now: we don’t have to solve the entire Middle Eastern crisis tonight. I’ve never been able to argue so vigorously with someone, over something personal or political or whatever, then laugh about it minutes later.

I’m headed back to Beirut tonight, flying via the Frankfurt airport. The New York trip went by so fast, and I struggled to fit in plans with my friends, and spend lots of time with Richard, and meet with a few editors, and check in on my subletter, and pack up my winter clothes to bring to Beirut. But despite the whirlwind schedule, the trip was relaxing in its way. I left New York feeling relieved about how no-big-deal it can be at times to adjust and readjust to new and old places, new and old lifestyles, new and old friends.

My parents are still in Beirut when I return and are heading back to Houston in a few days. Their college friends Ziad and Bushra have us over for brunch, and Bushra makes her special tiss’ye, the chickpea, yogurt, and fried-bread dish I love. After we eat, I sit in their garden on the porch swing with Dad and Ziad and watch a video of his and Bushra’s 1970 wedding. Ziad had the family’s old Super-8 films turned into digital videos. Bushra, a brunette beauty with her hair piled high Marie Antoinette—style, and Ziad, a dashing mustachioed twenty-something with dirty blond hair, look vibrantly happy in that video and much the same now. Happiness for them seems to come so naturally: marrying for love, having four dynamic kids, and forty years later here they are, and here we are with them, in their garden drinking mint tea in blue glass tumblers and talking about old times, and the present, and the future. A family trip to Yellowstone next summer, perhaps? All of us reunited after having traveled through America on vacation, Samir and me and all their kids in tow, back when I was seven years old and we still lived in Beirut.

As I’ve struggled over the years about whether I want to get married and have kids eventually, I’ve noticed that most of the married people I know don’t seem happier than most of the singles,
and many seem much unhappier. And I’ve wondered why, in these days when women in many parts of the world can make their own money and the traditional economic arrangement applies less and less, marriage is still considered the conventional path and all other choices are considered deviant. But watching the wedding video at Ziad and Bushra’s makes me think, more than ever before:
This looks pretty good. I get it
.

I wonder,
Could I ever have a life like this with Richard? Could we ever pull it off?

NOVEMBER