sad indeed.” He looked wistful, but strangely as though this had nothing to do with him. “So we are always happy for her to be happy.” He looked at his watch. “She’s late. For once I’m on time, and she’s late.”
“She didn’t mention that she’d be coming back.”
“We’re going to a film, just together, and we agreed—” He interrupted himself, made a great mime of slapping his forehead. “But we changed. We changed the plan.” Again, the watch; then guttural rumblings of exasperation. “She will already be at the cinema. Can you tell me the fastest way to Kendall Square?”
I tried to give him the simplest possible directions, but had the impression he wasn’t taking them in. His distress seemed genuine enough; but I didn’t trust, as he hurried off down the corridor, uttering politesses as he went, that he’d make it to the cinema on time, or possibly even at all.
As I put away my things for the evening and washed out the cups, I constructed a story whereby he’d come, on purpose, in the hope of meeting me. Not because he wanted to know me for himself, but because he wanted to see who his wife spent so much time with, to get the measure of me. Maybe—wasn’t it remotely possible?—she spoke of me with the same barely contained excitement, the slight breathlessness, with which I spoke of her.
It’s the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they’re lying to you, but as often because they’re lying to themselves.
Sirena, after all, rarely spoke to me about Skandar. I imagined that because she didn’t speak of him, he didn’t preoccupy her thoughts. I understood him to be a given, possibly even an ambivalent given. She talked so openly about her work, and her anxieties and fantasies about it, and about the malleability of different materials, and about her complicated feelings about video. She worried that the fashion for video was affecting her interest in it, both her attraction and her repulsion, which I understood. She said that it was one of the things she admired about me, that I had no truck with fashion, that I followed my instincts with such calm. I didn’t tell her that I couldn’t do otherwise; but I was thrillingly gratified by her praise.
Or she talked about Reza—she loved to talk about him, his escapades, his funny comments, his malapropisms in English (“Maman, what is a doggy dog world?”), stories of his early childhood. She even talked about her own girlhood, the large family of siblings and her tyrannical mother, deaf in one ear since childhood and correspondingly voluble, as if making up for the sounds that didn’t reach her by putting out a great din into the world; and her father, as soft, as she put it, as a Camembert in summer. She talked about how close she was to her youngest brother—so much like Reza in temperament, she said—and how tempestuous her relations were with her older sister, eighteen months from her in age, who had longed for family but never married, and who doted oppressively on her nephew whenever given the chance. She told stories of her youth, of backpacking through Southeast Asia, and being so stoned in northern Thailand that she spent almost a week in a stupor in a hut in a village near Chiang Mai, with her then-boyfriend forcing her, every so often, to eat or to drink so as to keep body and soul together.
She talked about all these things, but almost never about her husband. What was I supposed to think?
When she spoke of him, it was in connection with Reza, about the three of them doing things together, like speaking English at the supper table or ogling stingrays at the aquarium; or about logistics, at which he was clearly very bad. Skandar showed up two hours late; Skandar forgot altogether; Skandar never paid the bill; Skandar lost the receipts/car keys/telephone number. She had a weariness, half indulgent, half despairing, when she mentioned these foibles, a particular sardonic set to her lovely mouth.
“You must like it, really,” I once said when she explained that the reason no Shahid had attended Back to School Night was that he’d been assigned the job and,