The Tooth Fairy: Parents, Lovers, and Other Wayward Deities (A Memoir) (10 page)

S
OLDIERS WITH MACHINE
guns surrounded the plane as we filed down the tarmac in the balmy floodlit night.

Vast old terrazzo floor of the terminal; find the line for currency, then visas; guidebook warnings of graft; my fear of error;
the brusque yet unhurried little clerk carefully making tiny marks on his forms, as if Arabic were a dream language; released
at last into the balmy night air again and the new perils of dishonest taxi drivers.

For sometime I had been harboring panicky thoughts about John, such as, “We’ve been together four years and I still don’t
have a key to his apartment!”

As the reader may have noticed, I like to mingle love with panic, self-doubt, and conjecture.

Coming out hadn’t solved everything.

The taxi sped noisily along the elevated highway wedged between plaster orange-lit buildings, and though the road was certainly
no worse than, say, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, it all felt utterly makeshift, about to collapse, yet not collapsing,
maybe suspended mid-collapse, and every window and roof and dark alley appeared in some fundamental way
different
from anything I’d ever seen before, and my capacity for astonishment awakened.

The first time John had ever spoken to me was in astonishment—we were standing next to a small pond in early spring listening
to weird-sounding frogs—“Wow,” he said, and I knew I wanted to know him.

Just as now we exchanged glances again and again in the cab.

Here, the space between sentences might suggest the gap between the part of me that was happy with John and the part of me
that wasn’t.

Gigantic billboards around the traffic circle advertised Egyptian movies with gigantic hand-painted faces of Egyptian movie
stars.

Odor of unregulated car exhaust; frenetic plinking on the taxi radio.

The hotel appeared not to have been renovated since the 1920s and exuded a shabby colonial glamour: intricate wrought-iron
gate; two-tier lobby chandelier, also wrought iron; dusty ornate carpet runner flanked by heavy, carved thrones.

Poker-faced handsome lobby clerk with Coptic cross tattoo on forearm.

I strongly suspected John had slept around in New York while I was away for three weeks earlier that summer, but I had said
nothing.

We had tried couples therapy the previous year, but I never did get that key to his apartment.

I had been with G., my previous boyfriend, just about four years, of which I now saw the final three as wasted time.

John and I smiled at one another as we ascended the creaky steps, and again as we entered our huge dilapidated room with its
tall shutters, worn red velvet drapes, tiled floor, and sagging maroon twin beds with massive dark-wood headboards.

I had decided I wanted to go back to our couples counselor, but I had put off telling John.

I hoped that our vacation in Egypt—far from ordinary distractions—would be a good time to talk about it.

Muffled sounds of motorcycles, horns, footsteps, people shouting.

“I feel strangely at home here,” I said, lying on my back and looking up at the cracked ceiling. “Me too,” John said.

I
NDEED
C
AIRO OFFERED
no ordinary distractions, only extraordinary ones.

We spent most of the next day with Abdul and Ali, a pair of young men who befriended us on the street as we puzzled over a
map. They helped us 1) find the American Express office; 2) make our train reservations to Aswan for later in
the week; 3) get our passport-size photos taken; 4) obtain fake student ID’s so we could save money on the already low entrance
fees to museums and other sights.

John and I were poorer back then, but not that poor. Nor were we students. I was thirty-nine and John was thirty.

I had caught a bad cold in Israel and was still jetlagged, thus I actually believed that these two friendly Egyptians were
art students, that they were brothers, and that their names were indeed Abdul and Ali.

As soon as we accepted their aid, it was as if we entered a tunnel of gradually deepening trust.

Theory: Because my mother felt my father never listened to her, I doubted John could ever listen to me.

My mother’s own disinclination to listen must also be taken into account.

Though John and I flattered ourselves that we were setting out on a fascinating cross-cultural friendship with Abdul and Ali,
we tried numerous times to get rid of them by offering baksheesh, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

Like all good confidence men they kept each of us engaged separately in conversation, so that we never had the opportunity
to compare notes.

John and I did, however, exchange glances at Abdul’s suggestion to go to his uncle’s papyrus-painting shop, since we hoped
this was what the two men had wanted all along, a commission on whatever we bought.

In the dim room we gazed at dozens of colorful images of pharaohs, barges, and various gods inked onto brown crinkly paper
guaranteed to be real papyrus, not banana leaf.

“Did you paint any of them?” I naïvely asked, but Ali said no, they were still learning.

In our foolish parsimony, John and I bought only a single small painting, and thus began our next escapade: I agreed to go
to the duty-free shop to purchase two bottles of liquor for Abdul.

The circuitous journey of that day must have rhymed with my perplexity over John, since that’s the only way I can account
for my continuing fascination with the incident.

Like my mother, I have a special talent for feeling cheated and deceived, whether of goods, services, or affection.

Until then John and I had walked everywhere with Abdul and Ali, but now as we rode in a cab with Abdul around a huge, insanely
busy traffic circle, John glanced at me uneasily, and I realized with a bolt of dread that we had no idea where Abdul had
asked the driver to take us or what might happen when we got there.

It wasn’t a comforting portent that Ali, the gentler of the two, had decided not to join us on this errand.

But soon enough the taxi came to a stop in front of an ordinary-looking building, and Abdul led us upstairs to a store stacked
to the ceiling with boxes; he spoke to one of the men behind the glass counter, and we were ushered into a side room to fill
out the paperwork.

Something about the way the head-scarfed girl looked at me, as she made notations on my passport, caused me to ask just what
I was signing up for.

“Twelve bottles whiskey,” she answered, “twelve bottles vodka, two boombox—”

“No, no, no!” I said, with outsize indignation, and with equal flourish she tore the forms in two before my eyes.

Abdul had remained chatting with the men at the counter, so John and I tore out of there and hopped in a taxi, hoping Abdul
hadn’t seen us.

I knew from the guidebook that foreigners were restricted to four bottles of liquor each, and I could only guess what sort
of fine or duty I’d have to pay at the airport—not to mention the boomboxes; I also knew that such things could be sold for
a huge profit on the black market, and I feared being implicated in the crime.

As it happened, the taxi had to circle back past the duty-free store, where of course Abdul waved us to a halt.

“I come with you,” he said, trying to open the door.

“No!” John shouted.

“
Fuck
you!” he yelled back. “I waste all my time on you.”

Intense shame as John and I drove off—for running away from Abdul; for being fooled by him; for denying him his payoff.

Indeed, from a political standpoint (as well as a literary one), my sympathy tended toward the young unemployed Egyptian
rather than the two Western tourists—or did I identify with Abdul for other reasons?

That day I never had a minute to worry over my feelings toward John.

Back at the hotel we talked about the encounter late into the night, trying to understand (for instance) whether I was signing
up to actually pay for all that merchandise, or merely lending my foreign passport to the transaction; and who would resell
the items, Abdul or one of the guys in the store?

We also wondered how we’d missed various warning signs that, back in New York, would have been perfectly obvious, or what
we could have done differently to avoid the unpleasant scene in the taxi.

Perhaps most puzzling was that Abdul appeared genuinely hurt and betrayed by our getaway.

It occurs to me now that he must have felt humiliated in front of the store clerks.

At last John said, sighing, “He wasn’t going to be happy no matter what we offered him. The whole thing was bound to end in
tears.”

John dislikes unpleasantness nearly as much as I do.

D
USTY CRUMBLING BUILDINGS
in hazy morning light.

Huge wooden trays of fresh tan pita carried on bicycles through the streets.

I drank the fruit juice despite the ice, even though the guidebook had warned us not to; John frowned.

The old telephones in wooden stalls took only older Egyptian coins, difficult to obtain since they were no longer in general
circulation, nor did my phone card work, so we failed at calling Gabby back in Israel.

The magical nature of the place, added to our desire to see it as such.

In the brand-new subway station two heavily veiled women giggled in delight as they stepped onto the escalator—evidently their
first escalator ride—and so John and I also giggled in delight.

Of course we were ignoring political realities such as corruption and headlong urbanization.

I went back to the hotel to rest, but John didn’t want to. I wrote in my journal that I wasn’t feeling “in love” with him.

The hopeless all-or-nothing flavor of my distress at such moments, experienced not only with John but everyone I’ve ever been
with.

My throat was sore and my nose required constant wiping.

Behind the shutters and velvet drapes: bright hazy air, rubble sidewalks, and the blaring call to prayer.

Were John and I bound to end in tears?

To complete my suffering, I inserted Joni Mitchell into my Walkman.

The Egyptian tissues were speckled and slightly scratchy. I briefly slept.

That night, the tower restaurant revolved uneasily on its Soviet-engineered track, creaking and lurching like an old ride
at Coney Island.

“Cairo is to New York as New York is to San Francisco!” I said, referring to degrees of urban chaos.

Turning and turning with impossible smoothness, the dervish lifted his wide, multicolored skirt to form an inverted cone around
his head.

I avoid conflict and see dilemmas everywhere.

Typical complaint of my mother’s: “Dad doesn’t like to do
x
, but I do.”

I wondered if John and I were “just too different,” for instance his rarely needing to go back to the hotel and rest, whereas
I—

And there was the nine-year age gap, which seemed important then, less and less important in the many years since.

In a café or a mausoleum or a mosque, the place pouring into my senses, pouring into John’s senses, pouring into our senses
together.

The lit-up streets full of men, the bright tacky shops brimming
with goods: we went into a toy store and bought an Egyptian version of Clue.

Of the dervishes I wrote, “Ecstasy is an action, not a state of being.”

L
IKE A CARTOON
car the little taxi seemed to suck in its sides for the tightest passages, then bounce back to normal size, as we motored
through Cairo’s slums. The driver slowed for a battered pickup piled ten or twelve feet high with roughly hewn furniture.
It stopped to unload a table, and though the alley had scarcely widened, once again our Fiat squeezed through and we accelerated
into the next crooked channel. The driver achieved all this antic motion through no apparent effort, one palm resting lightly
on the steering wheel, the other resting just as lightly on the gearshift. The trip lasted perhaps fifteen minutes but like
a roller coaster ride seemed to go on and on. Powdery bright sunshine and blue black shade, motorbikes, donkeys, beat-up vans,
men and children and covered-up women in dusty gowns pressing themselves against the flaking windowless walls as we sped by.
We burst into a small ruined square, where suddenly a thriving produce market revealed itself—tomatoes, greens of all kinds,
brown-flecked yellow tamarinds, bananas in various sizes, all laid out on plastic tarps amid the rubble. We rumbled on into
another darkened alley, where a slender woman draped in cloth floated ahead of us, a lettuce the size of a basketball atop
her head. John and I looked at one another in amazement. I comprehended the poverty, but “poverty” hardly described the profusion
of daily life, in all its resourcefulness, flickering past our windshield.

Whether in rebuke or simply as the next twist of the kaleidoscope, the Mosque of Ibn Tulun—our destination—was as stark as
a de Chirico.

Fortress-like walls surrounded a vast courtyard, a stairway circling the small minaret.

Inside, we were greeted by a small boy with eyes as huge as those in a velvet painting, who asked to be our guide by saying,
“Guide?” and pointing to himself.

His tour was as minimal as the building itself. “Carrrving,” he announced, pointing upward to the intricate stone archway
of the colonnade in which we stood. He drew our attention to other features such as “courtyard” and more “carving.”

“View,” he said, unhooking the chain and leading us up the winding staircase.

There was an austere pleasure in learning absolutely nothing about the place beyond what we could see for ourselves. Like
silhouettes in a line drawing, John and I squinted at the courtyard, the walkways above the four colonnades, the domed structure
in the middle, all dusty and sand-colored, as if made of sand.

“Citadel,” the boy said, pointing in that direction over the city. John and I had just come from there, so it was the one
landmark besides the pyramids that we already knew.

Down the winding steps, we each gave the boy twenty pounds for the tour. He looked disappointed, so John also handed him his
Bic lighter.

I frowned, as if John had gone way overboard.

“I wish there was some kind of rule,” I said, getting into another cab. “Tip adults this and children that—so I wouldn’t have
to go around constantly doubting myself.”