Unaccompanied Women Page 16

  Nima decides to alter the mood. She tells us about a gathering of Iranian women, her tea circle, all over fifty. She asked them, “How old were you when you first came to know your body?” Silence. “Don’t you masturbate yourselves?” A woman said, “What is that?” Nima answered, “It is touching yourself, here.” “Oh my god!” a woman exclaimed; another woman grew faint. Nima announced that orgasm is a good thing. Not one of the women was familiar with the term, not in English and certainly not in Farsi.

  We are astounded by her audacity. Zoreh says to me, “Nima is scandal just like you!” We laugh together, and I wonder silently if my own outrageous behavior is the reason for their interest in me.

  Zoreh breaks in, “Yes, I hear some Iranian men say about their wives, ‘She is cold.’ Well, I tell them they have to warm them up!”

  Nima laughs. “Yes, they think one look at them and women go hot.” She goes back to the story of her tea circle. “I told them, you can touch yourself all alone, even when you are driving. Everybody horrified, gasping, everything. I said, You have to be careful, though, SUV does not come along higher than you and look in your window.”

  Oh, my stars! Even I am surprised! Zoreh says to Nima, “You are hot. You like boys.”

  Nima nods. “Old men can’t do much; old men too set in their ways, old men just more of how they were when they were young. I like sweetness in men; old men are sour, young are not.” I wonder if Nima is fantasizing or if, in fact, she has managed to collect a few young men. I suspect the latter, for this is a woman who seems to be at home in her own body.

  “If a man can’t do it,” says Zoreh, and she looks over our heads out to her garden, “if he’s too old or a little bit sick, I don’t mind. It’s not the sex. I just want to rest near him. His arms around me.” She comes back to us: “Just not Persian.”

  The longing in this room is palpable. The yearning for a sweet man, a kind man, fills us and the air around us, and we grow quiet. In their eyes I have found what they want and what, with the possible exception of Nima, they believe they have no possibility of finding. Their world of exile is small yet influenced by the rules under which, as Iranian women, they were born. They are free of the burka and the scarf, free from the fear of imprisonment, but not free of desire. They are women alone with high spirits and great beauty but little hope. I leave our gathering sad and ashamed of my whimpering over Graham. What these women have lost is incalculable. What they have gained remains under cover of clouds.

  Intentionally or not, with Ralph Lauren’s help my new friends have set me against Persian men, although I am sensible enough to know that Persian men are everywhere and are not always Persian. They can be American or English or Japanese or Finnish or Brazilian. What makes them all Persian, at least the way Zoreh describes it, is their supremacy, actual or imagined, their belief that women are to be enjoyed, that as men they make life possible, women make life pleasurable. I grew up with Persian men: my father, my brother, my teachers, my bosses, all of them dead now. I am happy that era is over, and fortunate to have outlasted it. I am confident that obeisance to men is behind me, that now I can look them straight in the eye without blinking or flinching or even flirting. I am grown up and so is America.

  So how in heaven do I end up in Berkeley, California, with a gastroenterologist who is Persian?

  Like all sensible women of seventy-one, I am having a colonoscopy, and Dr. Bahri is going to give it to me. Wait till Zoreh hears about this!

  Dr. Bahri wears gorgeous clothes, probably more expensive than Ralph Lauren’s. I think I am looking at Armani. When he questions me in our pre-procedure interview and I tell him about some discomfort in my nether region, I am immediately suspicious when he looks at me very sympathetically—a ruse, I am certain, intended to befriend me and make his life easier than it would be with a patient genuinely hostile to his invasive plans. Zoreh and Ralph have prepared me well. I go on the offensive: “Do you read Persian poetry?” I ask. If he answers yes, then the seduction will be complete and I will obey his every command. “Not as much as I wish,” he says. “I have a beautiful book of The Rubaiyat in four different languages, which someday I will spend much time with; for now, however, . . .” Okay, he’s got me. I ask him if stress could play a role in my discomfort. “Absolutely,” he says. He looks closely at me and says, “I see much stress in you.” He places his hand on my shoulder: “It is okay to cry, you know.” I do. I feel better. He has cast a spell.

  At the endoscopy center the man who prepares me, who takes my history, who administers the wonderful stuff that will knock me out, I hope, is named Ardalan Parsi. He is Iranian. “Like your doctor,” he says. He sits close to my gurney and asks me about drugs, allergies, familial inheritances. “Do you drink alcohol?” he asks. “Yes,” I answer. “What kind?” “White wine.” His eyes light up. “What kind of white wine?” “Macon Uchizy,” I answer, “from the Loire Valley, and it’s under ten dollars a bottle.” He takes a pad of paper from his shirt pocket. “Tell me again. I am on the lookout always for good wine. Where did you find this?”

  Wait a minute, is this another ruse? I say to him, “You are very good at questioning. I feel so secure I could tell you anything. Even if I were a spy.”

  He puts his hand on my shoulder—I am swaddled in hospital gowns—looks deep into my eyes, and commands, “Tell me everything.”

  “I will tell you everything. Where shall I start?”

  “Start from the beginning.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then”—he shakes his finger at me—”we will send you to that corner over there for a time-out.”

  I like this man. I tell him about my Iranian friend Zoreh, who cautions her daughters and everyone else to stay away from Persian men. Ardalan grows serious and says, “She is probably right. I came to this country when I was fourteen, your Dr. Bahri when he was twelve. If we had stayed in our country, we would have been as your friend says. It is impossible to escape. It is all around you, this all things for the man, women here to serve.” His beard and sideburns are sprinkled with gray. “My friend,” I tell him, “would like a man in her life. Are you married?” He smiles and says, “I am.” Happily? I wonder but don’t ask, because, after all, this is our first meeting. However, the look on his face, the ease with which he touches my shoulder, my foot—covered up—suggests a good marriage, a good profession, a good man.

  In the endoscopy room, just before I slip under the valium, I say to the RN, “Ah, these Persian men, aren’t they handsome?” She answers, “And they are so very nice.” Outside this room I see Ardalan striding down the hall. From the back, his robes flowing, he looks like a sheik in the desert. He turns and gives me a thumbs-up, and I disappear into semiconsciousness. Dr. Bahri is at my side. Here I am in their tent, drugged up, half-clothed, and vulnerable to their every command. Who would have thought a colonoscopy could be so wonderful.

  AND WHAT OF Persian women? I ask them, “Do you think the younger generation of men is an improvement over the men of your generation?” They are thoughtful, then nod in definite agreement. The good things of marriage and husbands have passed them by, they tell me. They believe themselves too old for the good young men of today and too young for the traditions into which they were born. They are so admirable, these women. With courage, intelligence, and determination, in a new world where the rules, if not entirely absent, were close to invisible, where guidance came, if at all, from an uncle, a sister, or a brother, or from each other, they built new lives for themselves and their children. Unaccompanied women now, they—and I—are desirous of the company of men. “I just want to rest near him. His arms around me.”

  Here with a little Bread beneath the Bough

  A flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou

  Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

  O Wilderness were Paradise enow!

  —from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam1

  As for me, I am captured and captivated by both Persian men and
Persian women. Both sexes have a force that is visceral, in the presence of which I feel bound to do their will. Always when I leave these women, I feel guilty, as if I have failed to do what they wished me to do. Zoreh, the most outspoken, tells me outright she would like to find a man; implied is her hope that I might find her one. The other women are silent, but I sense that Zoreh speaks for them, too. I have failed them. However, I am a good listener and I am a writer. And they know it. It is very possible they want me to hear their stories and write them down and send them out to the larger world. I am happy to oblige.

  * * *

  1Translated from the Farsi by Edward Fitzgerald, 1859

  CHAPTER 15

  oh, dear, what can the matter be?

  He promised to buy me a pretty blue ribbon

  To tie up my bonny brown hair.

  —a song

  MY IRANIAN WOMEN friends are lonely for the attentions of men. I’m not doing all that well either. I continue to maintain, during the question-and-answer sessions that accompany my readings and signings, that it is possible to love more than one man at a time, that I do in fact love more than one man, that I would never turn monogamous because I would have to give up too much, like Graham. Nods all around. I don’t go into details, like Graham got married but he loves me anyway, though probably we will never make love again in a bed, only over the telephone. I do admit to my audience that I am having a hell of a time loving more than one man at a time when the men I love live so far away! So well, yes, of course, I am open to meeting someone here, someone within reach of me and me of him, but no matter the letters and phone calls that arrive almost daily from men “only an hour’s drive from you” or “a few blocks away” (scary), I just don’t find anyone interesting enough to change out of my sweatshirt for, except that man at my reading with the great ass who didn’t even get in line, who took one look and took off, oh well. I look with greater and greater interest at the pocket rocket that came in the mail—”to keep you company until we can meet.” It’s hidden in my drawer, for heaven’s sake. On the other hand, it’s not in the wastebasket. A pocket rocket in the hand is worth how many you-know-whats in the bush. However, all is not lost. Just in the nick of time, London calls. I am wanted there to do publicity for the book. Do I think it over? Do I weigh the pros and cons of such a trip? No. I ask one question: Who’s paying? And since it’s my publisher, off I go. Romance and adventure are right around the corner. Because, as it happens, Barrett will be in London at the very same time.

  We have met once—in New York—a natural next step after exchanging many, many letters. His first letter came in answer to my ad in The New York Review. I did not answer it. His next arrived on the heels of Alex Witchel’s article on me in The New York Times. His letter began, “I’m one of those who answered your delicious ad, so I can’t resist asking a most personal question: Why didn’t I make the cut?” The punctuation of that sentence alone—capitals and commas completely correct, assured, comfortable in their places as accompaniments to and clarifiers of thought, never overriding content—blew out my brains and replaced them, once again, with curiosity. And hell, I couldn’t resist him. However, judgment—a small piece—remained intact, and when I wrote him—of course I wrote him—I told him why I had not answered his very first letter. “You were married.” And he wrote back, “I’m not anymore.” And so we began.

  Barrett is, despite his glamorous international life, seriously East Coast. Born and bred in Connecticut, he will make all kinds of slams at the West Coast, particularly at California, which, “while beautiful to look at, soaks up every bit of intellectual energy before extended thought can attach itself to a human person residing out there wherever it is you live.” He writes me this before we have met and is careful to append, “None of this applies to you, my dear, for of course, your wonderful book is a demonstration of a remarkable mind and glorious spirit.” Omigoodness, what a wonderful thing to say!

  It helped, of course, that when he wasn’t in Paris or Rome or Vienna, he lived in New York. Everything about him and his life—he dabbled in finance “subsidized by a fair-sized family trust”—and everything he wrote made him so goddam glamorous. I didn’t have the clothes for that or for him. I didn’t even know where, if I had the money, I would go to buy clothes for having even lunch, let alone dinner! As surely you know, if you are a woman of a certain age, most clothing stores do not offer departments for Women with Breasts or Ladies with Bellies, and the designer Eileen Simpson, bless her heart, can do only so much. It would be best, I decided, if Barrett and I never met. And then he wrote me something about my photograph in The New York Times, the one in which I am wearing that now oft-remarked-upon red jacket. Punctuation as perfect as ever—you could tell he was born with a sense of it—he wrote about the photograph: “The Times has displayed you in a most refreshing manner. Red is your colour.” He spelled “color” the British way! Is that cool? Am I seducible?

  I had never known a rich man, one who was also so finely educated (Harvard and the London School of Economics), so well traveled (see above), and so, apparently, fond of me, at least from a distance. We wrote each other every day—fountain pen and ink on real stationery, his monogrammed for real. I knew because my grandmother had showed me how to tell if the paper was monogrammed or just printed, and this was the former—he had his own plate!

  He started out with flattery: “Your book handles earthquake events in your life with a lovely delicacy and a fine self-deprecating humor.” Wouldn’t you write back?

  His letters went on to discussions of the Greeks: “Creon and our president are one and the same: ‘Antigone did wrong and you’re either with me or against me.’ Dangerous for everyone when the leader thinks thusly.”

  I rarely disagreed with him, except for the fun of disagreeing with him, so I wrote, “Creon is responsible for law and order, for keeping rebellious pieties from infecting his kingdom; how else, then, could he deal with Antigone?”

  And he wrote, “He could have let her be rescued by his son and sent them both to live in the hills with the shepherds. That, as you no doubt know, is another version of the story.”

  No, I didn’t know. But I did now. This man was a treat, just a treat. And so I decided we should meet. I wrote him I was going to New York. I decided to wear my red jacket.

  Why am I doing this? Haven’t I had enough? Am I just so goddam vulnerable to flattery from an articulate man that I will walk, even run, up the garden path? In one of Barrett’s letters, he asks where the men in my California are. “Aren’t they coming out of the woodwork? Surely, your book has been read there by men who want to meet you; yet, from your letters, you seem not to have found companionship.”

  He’s right, I have not found companionship of any sort from any man within driving distance of my cottage. It’s not that I am still stunned by all the life in and around New York, though I suppose I ought to be. On the contrary, I am fully aware of the cost, financial and emotional, of carrying on romances with men three thousand miles away. How long can I sit around and recall Graham’s passion and Sidney’s gentle affection and John’s prowess? Although they are still part of my life, they are so very far away, and despite letters and e-mail and phone calls, I can’t feel them. I am as desirous of touch as when I wrote the infamous ad, and oh lord, I have turned seventy! Cast your eyes around the room, Jane. Empty.

  There is, of course, the possibility that I don’t want a man in the room, or even next door, that I prefer long distance to up close and personal, that I prefer a life uncluttered by a man on my doorstep. Maybe I was just out to prove something, that I could be attractive to men or that I could love ’em and leave ’em or . . . Well, okay, what I hoped for was that I could be like a man or like the men I had read about: people who had sex without consequences, who had no intention of being faithful to one woman, who could have a fine time making love and not worry about it in the morning, who had multiple partners at their beck and call. If that is so, I am working on failur
e: I worry like hell the morning after about did he like me, will he do it again? I attach myself deeply to every man I sleep with. For me there is no such thing as casual sex, though, if you want my honest opinion, I don’t think sex is casual for anyone, though they may wish it to be. I think “casual sex” is a term made up by someone who had bad sex and didn’t want to think about it, who just wanted to dismiss it from memory.

  Casual or not, in my sex life over the past several years—currently suffering an unwelcome hiatus—I came close to becoming this fictive cool dude only in that I had not been faithful to one man. And by god, I had no intention now of becoming so. Actually, come to think of it, to whom would I be faithful? Sidney has become a friend, not a lover, John is searching hard for a woman who lives within driving distance of his cabin, and Graham, my beloved Graham, is about to turn thirty-six in the company of his child-bride, age thirty-three. Let’s face it: My lovers are getting on with their lives, and not one of them has asked me to move to New York, no one has gotten down on bended knee to beg me to share his life, and truth be told, if anyone had asked, even Robert, I would have said no. I did not want to move three thousand miles from my son and his fear of flying and from my newly born granddaughter. Still, I don’t want my adventures to end, not just yet; I don’t want to settle for the friendship of only three intriguing and wonderful men. So, given the apparent absence of such men in the entirety that is California, I think, What the hell, it’s only lunch.

  But it isn’t. It’s lunch all right, but never such a lunch have I had in such a place as Barrett took me. It’s lunch at his club.