had been subsumed in the business of the main course. She was ladling up bowls of lamb stew over rice, fatty and spicy and fragrant.
“In America,” Skandar went on, “there are places like Harvard, where I walk in the door and some version of this happens and I think no more about it. Not, here, so much about my social origins; more about my philosophical ideas, my academic affiliations. I’m known, in a certain way. But mostly—” The wry smile again. In my Barolo fog, I registered that it was a sexy smile, confidential somehow. “Mostly, in America, I’m a cipher. If, to a person on the street, I say I’m from Beirut, he might ask me where that is. If I say I have Palestinian relatives and that I was raised a Christian, he may wonder ‘How is this possible?’ And if I explain that I went to university in Paris, he might wonder that I’ve done such an illogical thing. In America, Europe and the Middle East seem very far away indeed. If you’re a Lebanese who comes here for university, to study, then you become immediately American. You’re accepted, which is wonderful, but you’re given an entirely new suit of clothes, a new outline, that has no context, and you must grow to fit it, or fit it to shape you, or whatever. You come with no baggage.”
“Bring me your tired, your hungry … That’s what this country is for.”
“Of course. I’m simply saying that if I’d come to this country at eighteen, instead of going to Paris, my shape, as well as the shape of my life, would be different, in countless ways.”
“But we are who we are,” said Sirena, in a slightly warning tone, the tone of a spouse who has heard it before, or who feels that her husband verges on the garrulous. “And now, being who we are, we must eat. Nora, eat!”
I put a forkful of her extraordinary stew in my mouth, thinking, “This, of everything this evening, is what I ought to remember: the explosion of flavors, pine nuts, lamb, cumin, currants”—but I was only half attending to my food. I was watching Skandar trifle with his portion while he spoke, and watching him speak only to me, as if Sirena were not in the room. Three is a difficult number, I thought again.
“Don’t you think it works both ways, though?” I asked, eventually. “I mean, if I go to live in Europe, or in Beirut, don’t I suddenly appear, um, denuded? Here, I have my context; but there, I’m just an American.”
Skandar’s eyes were, at this, appraising. As if assessing my Americanness as an attribute. “Just an American? Never. A beautiful woman like you, in France, or in Lebanon, would be seen above all as a beautiful woman. Not so, Sirena?”
Sirena gave a weary nod. “I’m going to say good night to Reza. It’s time he put out his light.”
A few moments later, she reappeared and interrupted her husband: “Nora,” she beckoned from the hallway. “Would you come for a moment? Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
Reza sat up in bed and reached out both arms to embrace me—again, I was hugged, as if affection were commonplace. “Good night, Miss E,” he spoke softly in my ear. “You’re the best.” Then he pulled back and bestowed upon me a luminous and loving smile. I know it sounds silly, but as if he were my own son. As if he actually loved me. I bathed in it; but felt angry, too, at all that Sirena had and seemed to take for granted, idling placidly in the doorway with her arms crossed and a dreamy faraway look.
“Bonne nuit, chéri,” she said to him, and something more, in French, as well, as we withdrew, and left him to the darkness and his brilliant spinning jazz musicians dancing across the wall.
Because it wasn’t far—or because … I could imagine reasons that flattered me, and others that had nothing to do with me—Skandar offered to walk me home. It was only about six blocks, across the slope of the most prosperous stretch of Cambridge, past the dark, still gardens with their looming snow-tipped trees, past cavernous houses in which a single upstairs window shone yolkily out, illuminating a small swath of icy lawn; or past others, shrouded entirely by the night, like sleeping ogres. Skandar smoked as we walked, cupping his cigarette inside his hand like a fisherman in a gale. I was made awkward by