another screed against American women. Did I know the one about the Arab necrophiliac? Yes, I did. He had told me the joke last week. Well, she was the dead woman in his bed. Even his left hand was more sensual. After sex, it was like leaving a motel room: you slammed the door shut, slipped your keys under the doormat, and headed for your car. You didn’t even bother switching the TV off.
Now she was divorcing him.
“At some point,” he went on, “I couldn’t do it with her any longer. I became numb. Like my friend the Algerian, whose ship doesn’t sail, and whose arrows won’t fly—you understand, right?—poor fellow. I didn’t want to ask him for his pills, but a friend told me that peanut butter helped a lot. So I downed so much peanut butter that the color of my skin began to change. But no waking my Monsieur Zeb. I was so worried. Because without him, you know, I am nothing, I have nothing. Because he’s all the gold I carry. But then I met someone else . . . and bam! I’m a Sputnik, a Kalashnikov, a Trans-Siberian locomotive with triple the horsepower of the mounted cavalry at the battle of Friedland, stiffer than oak and harder than marble and bigger than Zeinab’s broomstick.” He laughed. “Still, I do miss her sometimes. She was my wife, you know.”
“Here,” he said, producing a tiny pocket notebook. He removed the rubber band around the notebook and slipped it around his wrist. I had never seen his handwriting before. It was everything he wasn’t: neat, tentative, timid, the product of a frightened child in harsh, French, colonial schools where they taught you self-hatred for being who you were (if you were half French), for not being French (if you were an Arab), and for wishing to be French (if you were never going to be). The handwriting of someone who had never grown up, who’d had calligraphy beaten into him. It surprised me. “Read,” he said.
Dresser.
Turntable.
Television.
Striped ironing board.
A standing lamp to the left.
A night table to the right.
A tiny reading light clasped to the headboard.
She sleeps naked at night.
Cat snuggles on her bed.
The stench from the litter box.
Bathroom door never locks.
Toilet flushes twice.
Impossible to repair. Shower drips too.
I see the Charles. And the Longfellow Bridge.
Sometimes nothing because of the fog.
And I hear nothing. Sometimes an airplane.
No one sleeps in the adjacent room;
It used to be her mother’s once,
She died in her sleep.
They never emptied her closet,
The dresser and the turntable were hers too.
No one plays music in the house.
After all his put-downs and vile words about his current wife, he had written a poem for her in the style of Jacques Prévert. Was he trying to tell me he’d grown fond of her?
“It’s all true,” he finally said, taking back the notebook, slipping the rubber band around it, and putting the notebook back in his vest pocket.
I was tempted to say it felt very true to me as well. “Have you ever shown it to her?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
I must have looked totally baffled.
“I just wrote this because I didn’t want to forget what her apartment looked like.”
Because I didn’t want to forget was the heart and soul of poetry. Had any poet been more candid about his craft?
I was speechless with admiration. This cabdriver was a minimalist poet. He not only trained a pair of fresh yet jaundiced eyes on the world around him, but he saw into the very heart of things simply by describing stray objects. The whole thing capped with the magic of two verses: No one sleeps in the adjacent room paralleled by No one plays music in the house. Leave it to a man born in North Africa to capture the hapless, gritty lives of local Cantabrigians.
“She claims I married her for a green card—”
“Well, did you?” I asked, expecting an outraged, heartwarming denial.
“Of course I did. You don’t think I married her for her good looks.”
“Then why did you write her a poem?”
“What poem?”
“This thing about the dresser, turntable, ironing board.”
His turn to look entirely nonplussed.
“What are you, stupid?” Baffled looks on both our faces. “Poem? Me? My lawyer gave me a list of questions they ask you at Immigration Services. They’re cunning people and they want to make sure you actually live together as husband and wife and that your marriage isn’t just a ploy to get a green card to stay in this country. So they ask