Unaccompanied Women Read online

  I DID NOT expect a crowd, but there is one. Four couples, Zoreh, and me make ten; that’s a crowd. Here, at last, I will meet Iranian men.

  His is the dominant voice in the gathering. Slim, sleek, and beautifully dressed in Ralph Lauren, salt-and-pepper hair cropped close, pale of cheek, he looks as upscale as any American man of means. His eyes give him away, for they are almond-shaped and large; they are beautiful. He is Iranian. “Do you like our governor Mr. Schwarzenegger?” he asks me, and before I can answer, he says, “I believe he is doing a fine job. I like his budget.”

  Though it is clear that his answer is the one he wants to hear, I say, “We’ll have to wait and see.” I do not want to get into a political discussion with this man in this place. I am a dinner guest and do not want to offend my hostess. Besides, from long experience I can tell an actual exchange of ideas is not something this man is familiar with, particularly if one of the discussants is a woman. Zoreh, who proclaims that as a devout Muslim she can nonetheless enjoy wine, pours another glass for me, then for herself.

  Ralph Lauren persists. “Did you like the previous governor, that fool Davis?”

  “No,” I say, and decide to shut up about the way Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected, the nasty business of ousting a legally elected governor before his term was up, the frightening power of money in the hands of idiots.

  Next to me sits an adorable woman. Her name is Missa. She, too, is Iranian, has been in this country for twenty-two years. She is plump, her skin like satin. Her accent is strong. “I sell real estate,” she tells me. “Zoreh tells me you write book. What did you write about?”

  On the other side of the room the women are quiet, listening to Ralph continue his monologue on politics both here and in the Middle East. He is joined by another man who, with his wife, has come late. So we are twelve. Enough already.

  Missa is here without her husband, who will come later—thirteen! I answer her question. “Sex.” Missa and I are sitting on high chairs, perched on them at the bar that separates the kitchen from the family room. Missa almost topples, catches herself, and, her beautiful eyes large and a-sparkle, says, “Yes? Really?”

  “Yes, really,” I say.

  “I will get that book. Where will I get that book?”

  “Zoreh will tell you,” I say.

  “I will get that book and put it on the table where my husband puts his papers, and he will read it.”

  I advise her to read it first herself.

  “I never read one book,” she tells me, “in my whole life. I am busy with my children, my work. My husband, now our children are gone from home, he never talks to me about that, we never would ever talk about sex. That part of our life is over.”

  The word “sex” has penetrated the room, and Ralph Lauren’s audience becomes mine. Everyone is silent. I whisper to Zoreh, “What have you got me into?”

  Zoreh smiles; she is having fun. I suspect she is breaking some taboo.

  “What is this book?” Ralph wants to know.

  So I tell them. I repeat the ad as I have so many times before, though perhaps in this venue a bit faster. I explain that the book is about what happened after the ad appeared.

  Silence. Rapt silence? Shocked? Angry? It lasts forever. Then Ralph speaks: “After childbearing women lose interest in that sort of thing. Many men, too.”

  And oh, lucky us, he offers the joke about the ninety-five-year-old man who marries the twenty-three-year-old woman, then is warned by his doctor about the dangers of a long honeymoon. The man says, “Well, if she dies, she dies.” Everyone laughs as if to say, How ridiculous, an old man having sex.

  Ralph says, “Sex between old men and old women is . . . degrading. A good thing not much is going around.”

  And I laugh and say, “You are so funny!”

  Everyone, all the women, too, laugh, and Zoreh says, above the laughter, “He is not funny; he is Persian!”

  Indeed he is, but he and his derision go far beyond Persia. Tonight it will include men, and some women, from everywhere in the world. I say, “In my experience there is great interest in sex among men and women long past childbearing. From what I have seen and known, there is much activity.”

  “A search for intimacy perhaps,” says Ralph, “but the rest, the rest is . . .” He can’t find the word. I do it for him. “Disgusting.”

  “Yes, disgusting. Can you tell me that old women can even do it?” Ralph takes another sip of wine. “Can they get wet, aroused, you know, what has to happen?”

  Ralph’s wife sits to my left. She, like the other women here, is impeccably groomed: She wears a dark suit perfectly fitted to her slim body; she has pulled her hair back into a large bun; it has not gone willingly, the waves and crinkles of what must be a wild unruliness when free are visible under the light, along with glints of red. She is silent, stone-faced, and I’m not sure if this is her reaction to her husband’s outrageousness or if in the presence of her husband she is like this all the time.

  I mention something about physiology and testosterone in women, and nobody hears me, nobody is interested any longer in what I have to say, only in what Ralph will tell us next about sex.

  Ralph says, “The only reason for older people to have sex is from deep love of each other, from long lives of loving each other.”

  “That would be nice,” I say.

  Now Ralph gets himself into trouble. He says, “I can understand how someone could do that maybe to get published or in the newspaper—”

  I cut him off. “Are you suggesting I placed an ad in order to write the book?”

  “No, no . . .”

  “I had no intention of writing a book when I began my adventures.” I am surprised at my curtness.

  Ralph is silent. For a while.

  Zoreh has once again made wonderful food: chicken and saffron rice and cheese and prunes, and all the while the wine flows. She has seated me at the head of the table; Ralph has seated himself on my right. The women, all five, sit together on one side of the table; the four men line up on Ralph’s side. Not one of the men will utter a word, leaving me to assume that Ralph speaks for them or that conversation with a woman—me—is, for a man, unseemly. Fine with me; it turns out that Persian women hold my interest. I want them to talk. I ask, “In Iran are there standards of beauty?” Not well asked. “I mean, what determines, in your culture, if a woman is beautiful or not?”

  Zoreh speaks: “It is inner beauty, we are not concerned with outside. In Iran we say, Don’t be proud of your beauty; it can be destroyed in one fever.”

  “But,” I press, “you are all beautiful; you are very pleasing to the eye.” I do not say “and you are very skillfully made up and gorgeously dressed,” though they are. They are also silent. “I read somewhere that Baywatch is a very popular TV program in Iran. Is that true?”

  Ralph is helpful here. He smiles and says, “Yes, it is true.” In a voice of certainty acquired through a lifelong confidence, he continues, “I like my women blond and long-legged.”

  Finally his wife speaks. “It is the eyes.”

  “And the eyebrows,” says another woman.

  I am so stupid. These women have grown up beneath burkas and head scarves. Of course, it would be only the eyes and the eyebrows that were visible. Zoreh, however, is not to be deterred: “We all have same eyes! Black, black, same difference. It is inner beauty that matters.”

  We move away from the table and into the living room, where Zoreh serves a special tea, the elixir of heaven. If I go out and kill infidels, I want my reward to be this tea, forget the virgins. Ralph’s wife, who has apparently determined me to be a source of lascivious information, leans toward me and asks, “Do you think Michael Jackson did what they said?”

  “I think he is a sad young man. He has tried to re-create himself so many times.”

  “Yes, he is trying to escape from being black,” she says. “Do you think he did what they said?”

  “I think he probably did, but I also think
that he doesn’t believe he is guilty.”

  And so the talk turns to television. “I cut off Cinemax,” says Zoreh, “too much women with women. Who wants to see that?” Nods all around.

  “And men with men. That Queer Eye program is disgusting.”

  Ralph says, “Homosexual marriages should be banned, homosexuality should be banned. It is wrong.”

  “Is a fad, don’t you think?” a woman asks of me.

  “No matter,” says Ralph, “should be stopped.”

  “What would you do with homosexuals?” I ask.

  “I would send them away. They can come back when they know proper behavior.”

  Ralph, who has waved away the offer of tea, continues to drink red wine, and, echoing Zoreh’s earlier declaration, announces, for my benefit I suppose, “I am a good Muslim, I pray, and I drink wine, too.” I excuse myself; it is late, my drive is long. Ralph rises from his chair, everybody rises, and I shake hands with everyone, and Ralph claps his arm around my shoulder and walks with me to the front door, giving me a little squeeze before I go.

  I have done a very un-Muslim thing, two very un-Muslim things: I have shaken hands with four men, and I looked them straight in the eye. And they looked back, though only briefly, and returned my handshake, though not at all firmly. The Islamic Republic would not approve of their behavior or of mine. In the Republic, men who are good Muslims keep their hands behind their backs and their eyes averted; they never touch women not their wives or daughters; they never look directly at them. Men who do are frowned upon; some are forced into exile—like Ralph, like the men at this gathering who have remained silent, letting Ralph speak for them. How, I wonder, do they like their exile, self-imposed though it seems to be? I want to ask them, What of your behavior would you need to change in order to go home? What parts of your own true selves would you be willing to hide?

  At the car Zoreh says, “Next time we will have tea with women, only women.”

  “I would like that.”

  “You see what I mean?” she says. “Persian men. Bah.”

  MY OWN EXPERIENCE with Persian men came in the early eighties. It was entirely unhappy. One year, when the term began at the school in Concord, California, where I taught, our student body changed. Into it came boys, clearly foreign, very handsome, their skin like ivory satin, their dark eyes pools of disdain. These newcomers—on the verge of manhood—dripped in gold: gold chains, gold bracelets, gold rings, all that Persia could provide them, and they opened their shirts, rolled up their sleeves, so that we could see that they glittered when they walked. Their English was limited if present at all. For this reason, because my school’s English as a Second Language program did not yet exist, these boys were assigned to my class—to my 1C class, the 1 indicating grade level nine, and the C indicating failure in English up to this time. Until then my students had all been native English speakers who, for one reason or another, had bottomed out of their middle-school English classes, whose test scores urged immediate remediation. Assigned to bring these students up to grade level or as close to it as they were capable of getting, at first I had no idea what to do. But I made stuff up, and in the few years preceding the influx of Iranian immigrants it seemed to me I was learning how to teach. Then came Persia. At least the Persia that fled Iran after the deposing of the shah.

  Their insolence was astounding. By 1981 I had been teaching for almost twenty years. Although I knew that every new year would bring with it problems of discipline—kids who didn’t want to be in school, who hated school, who didn’t know how to go to school—I was unprepared for the Persian boys. As I walked down the aisle of the classroom, their feet would shoot into my path; sometimes I would stumble. Their feet remained, unyielding in their obstinacy, in their insistence on showing me my position as a woman, my unacceptability as their teacher. They slouched in their seats, daring me to “teach” them; they laughed at me openly, not bothering to cover their mouths. Tired of that, from behind their gold-ringed hands and always in Farsi, they “talked behind me,” a phrase I would learn from my Iranian women friends almost twenty-five years later, the phrase that describes the running commentary of ridicule with which they filled the classroom. In my long life I had been disrespected as a teacher, abused as a woman. But this was different: I had never been publicly humiliated, discounted, disappeared, if you will—my unworthiness revealed to the world at large, by boys to whom I was a flea. They were princes, sons of princes, princes who would have assumed their rightful roles had circumstances allowed; they were royalty dumped without ceremony into a corral of the common herd. They were not happy. Neither was I. I hated them, these boys so arrogant, so rude, so comfortable in their superiority. And then suddenly, midyear, they were gone. No one knew where; we knew only that we were happy they were gone. We never saw them again. When we regained our senses, we realized that in those few months of our persecution we never saw a Persian girl. But I had learned how it felt to be one.

  “Persian men, bah!” I get it, Zoreh, I do.

  This time, at morning coffee, we are all women. I look for Ralph Lauren’s wife, but she is absent. The sun is warm and Zoreh is happy to have a reason to bring people together. Once again she says, “Back home we do everything together, even after revolution, not outside but in our houses.”

  By now they have read my book; they are fully aware of my outrageous behavior. They look at me curiously, suspiciously, admiringly, awe mixed with disbelief. I am no longer the mystery guest, and so I allow myself a bit of boldness. “How did you meet your husbands? Did you marry for love?”

  Nima answers, “Before the revolution in ’79, marry for love. After, is common for younger woman marry older man who can give her things, take care of her.” The women laugh and repeat their mothers’ advice: Marry a doctor, an engineer. Hmm, I think, sounds familiar.

  Zoreh, who will perhaps remain angry with Persian men, maybe all men, forever, bursts out with, “We grow up with this cloud of ‘No, no, no.’ We must never enjoy sex, must remain pure, even when right in the act, we must remember husband is first. If we leave, if we divorce, if we do a bad thing or not, men will lie, talk behind us, tell whole neighborhood we are sluts. And we cannot talk anymore to our families because they say we shame them. Even if we not do anything, men can make stories about us. Everybody believe them. Bah!”

  The other women nod. “Is true. But you”—they turn to Nima—“did marry a doctor.” Nima smiles. “At first,” she says, “he didn’t get my eyes,” then explains to me, “He was not handsome enough for me to notice.” She tosses her blond hair over her shoulders. “But then everywhere I went there he was, and finally my friend said to me, ‘He’s interested in you. Talk to him.’” Nima, fair-skinned, strawberry-blond, and buxom, looks very un-Iranian, if one is to judge by the other women present, who are small, dark-eyed, and dark-haired, dressed in well-cut suits in somber colors. Nima wears a beige linen top, sleeveless, over matching pants. The top is V-necked, pointing to cleavage that surely would get her jailed back home. Nima turns to Zoreh, who says, “Even now since I am divorced, the cloud put by my mother remains.”

  Nima nods and says, “That cloud came with me, too. I was the youngest of ten, the youngest girl, and my mother warned me every day, told my brothers to watch me, to keep me on leash, I would disgrace family one day. She would not let me wear a bathing suit, so when I was a teenager, I sew my own suit with my own hands and walk around inside the house in my bathing suit. My mother is horrified. ‘I want to learn to swim,’ I said. ‘Take that off,’ my mother said, ‘no swimming, you are too wild.’ To this day I cannot swim. But my husband, he trust me and love me.”

  “Not like other Persian men,” says Zoreh.

  “I never ask him can I do something. I tell him I wish to go here or there, and whatever I want or need to do is fine with him.” Nima’s voice softens, her eyes grow moist.

  Nima does not wear a ring. Nor do any of the other women. They are all divorced. Sami, before the rev
olution, worked in the American consulate in Tehran. Her husband was a journalist. Came the revolution, he was jailed for six months. When he was released, he was confined to his house. Then Sami lost her job. At home together, unhappy, they began to argue. They divorced. Her husband went to England, where he could write. Sami came here. Her husband remarried; Sami did not.

  Nima’s husband remarried, too; Nima did not. Nima explains: “When king deposed, new religious government kill anyone they like, rich people just because they are rich. We had to leave because all houses we know will be searched, and in our house are some photographs of me and the king and others, and this would be very bad for our friends. So I take papers and go, with my children, who are then two and a half and six months, but without my husband, because under new regime is forbidden for doctors to leave Iran. He says he will get visa and follow us to America. And then six years go by, and he can’t leave unless he has somehow got academic appointment. So I find him one in Los Angeles, and he calls to say he is in Switzerland. ‘Tell the children I am on my way,’ he says. I answer, ‘I will tell the children when you call me from New York.’ Good thing, because my husband, he goes in line at the consulate to get visa, and when is his turn, the window closes, last visa given to old couple who want to visit their children in America. People at consulate say try again. No luck. He returns to Iran, tells me to come home. I say yes, when I get my green card, which is my visa, because without a green card I could go to Iran but I would not be able to get out again. Our children are now six and eight years old, and finally he says we should divorce. And now he is remarried. When my son turned fifteen, I took him for five weeks to Iran. To meet this stranger, his father. Is very sad.”

  “Is very sad,” says Zoreh, and we all nod. I wonder how often Nima has told her story, this one about loving and losing a husband. From the brightness of her eyes, tears unshed, I gather that although she has often explained the reasons for her exile, she has chosen not to include her regrets, her sadness, the enormity of her loss. To do so would threaten the recovery that has been her life for the past twenty years.