a hundred kilometers over the mountains from Beirut, and he described its enormous scale, the columns reaching to the skies in the middle of an arable plain, and the snowy mountains at the horizon. He described fallen stone blocks taller than any man, scattered like so much gravel around the site, and the beautiful, dwarfing temple of Dionysius, almost intact, with its perfect mosaics and elaborate friezes—the result of hundreds of years of labor by the Romans in the time immediately after Christ. He made you think that Pontius Pilate might have walked there, or certainly his grandson.
He told me about the community of the fishermen of Tyre, who considered themselves the earliest Christians because they’d converted when Christ preached to them, well before he was crucified—so they claimed they were technically Christians before Christ himself was a Christian. He told me about attending the recent wedding of a young Palestinian friend of his at a beach club by the sea south of Beirut, more than four hundred people from all walks of life gathered with the soughing surf behind them, the stars overhead, dancing and singing and drinking orange Fanta (no alcohol at a Muslim wedding—I was shocked by that: four hundred sober people at a feast), while the bride in her resplendent finery arrived at her celebration gliding the length of a giant swimming pool on an inflatable raft draped in white satin, pushed from behind by invisible swimmers, as flaming Catherine wheels illuminated her path on either side and fire-eaters and sword-swallowers performed at the end of the pool in her honor.
“This is typical,” he said. “He’s a writer, my friend, he doesn’t have much money. His bride is a schoolteacher. But if you’re going to celebrate, in Lebanon you must do it properly. So Sirena and I, we came from Paris for the party, we sit at a table and next to us is an old couple from the camps, in traditional dress, and their daughter, very pretty, with sparkles in her hijab.
“We greet each other, but otherwise we don’t speak, and the daughter sits and smokes her nargileh, and the mother sits and chain-smokes Gauloises, filling up her dinner plate with wrinkled white cigarette ends, like grubs, and the father, who has very few teeth, drinks all the bottles of Fanta on the table, sip after sip. They don’t smile, or get up to dance, they eat barely at all. It’s hard to know what they make of it.” He paused. “I’ve been in the camps, I can picture the sort of place they live—fluorescent lightbulbs, flaking paint, mismatched chairs. The glitter in the daughter’s hijab—she will have saved for months to buy that cloth. And the father with no teeth and creases in his skin like canyons, he will have been no older than I am, although I thought of him as a grandfather. And they sit next to us, and there’s the question in my mind, who has had to travel farthest, them or us? In our lives, we span many worlds and many centuries, sometimes without taking a step.”
He said this while we were walking, and I laughed and gestured at the Cambridge streets around us, and replied, “And sometimes you take many steps and stay in just one world.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s possible, too.”
Although that was not my experience of our walks. If, in the studio, I felt free to travel to imaginary lands, and in fact to travel into someone else’s imaginary land—an altogether unforeseen adventure—then as I walked the city streets by night, I was transported out into an actual world, a world of wonders the existence of which caused me to marvel, and to dream. Suddenly, at the age of thirty-seven, I was the opposite of Lucy Jordan: all I could be certain of was that I’d been wrong to be certain of anything. Who could tell me, with any plausibility, that I’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in my hair? I walked to Heliopolis, I idled in Tyre, I fucking built Wonderland! I felt like one of my third graders, like Chastity and Ebullience with their pet chicken, or like José when he made his exploding volcano for the Science Fair. Lili with her hidden world under Esther and Didi’s porch table had nothing on me. Not even Reza, in his little bedroom of dreams, with Zidane kicking the ball on the wall and the jazz musicians parading in the