"Sameira. Habibi," Marianna calls to me, as I walk up to her front
steps and stand before her. She looks up at me and her face is soft;
it makes me nervous to see her sharp features gone gentle somehow, and
I pull her up into a kiss.
Her room is very small, and sparsely furnished, with a single window,
a narrow futon on a wooden frame, a single dresser and a bookshelf with
several books in Arabic, French, and English. She turns away from me
to change her shirt for the dinner party, and I watch the muscles in
her lean back move as she eases her shirt off over piercings, pulls
the clean one on over her braids. I want to kiss the place where her
body narrows before widening again, but I stay on the bed and turn the
pages of her copy of Stone Butch Blues instead.
She holds my hand while we walk to her cousin's house.
Her cousin greets us at the front door. "I am Fatima."
"Sameira."
She says something to me in Arabic, and Marianna answers her. They
speak back and forth for a moment, and Fatima keeps glancing at me and
frowning. "Come in," she says at last, and turns and leads us inside.
The house is full of many women, and children, and a few quiet men.
There is much lively conversation, shifting between English and Arabic.
I stop trying to understand after awhile, lean back and listen to the
rhythm of the language instead, the rise and fall of women's voices,
and especially of Marianna's voice. She keeps catching my eyes and smiling,
but I am happiest when she forgets that I am watching, caught up in
what she is saying instead, and I get to watch her long expressive face
as she laughs with her friends.
Fatima tells me that I am not eating enough, and I take an olive to
please her, savoring its salt, and then nervously wonder what to do
about the pit.
"So you are one of Marianna's punk rock friends?" she asks me, and
Marianna glances at us sharply.
"Um, not really," I tell her. "Although I did go and see her band.
She has a wonderful voice."
"Yes, she does. But the music she sings is very silly."
"Oh, like what you listen to isn't," Marianna says, smiling at me
across the table. "Don't listen to her Sameira. This woman has a secret
love for Madonna."
Fatima grins back at her. "Madonna can sing! So can you, but all that
you do in that silly band is scream." She shudders extravagantly. "I
went to one show, I had a headache for a week!"
They slip into Arabic again, and I take the opportunity to slip my
olive pit into a napkin and have some baba ghanoosh instead.
After dinner we go outside to have coffee on the back porch, and Marianna
comes to sit by me, gently takes my cup from me when I have finished
with it. "Let me tell your fortune," she says, wrapping long fingers
around the tiny cup, and setting it upside down on the saucer to rid
it of the dregs. "Look. See here, like a mountain? You have a difficult
way ahead of you."
She passes the cup to her cousin, who says something sharp in Arabic
before handing it back. Marianna shakes her head and turns to me again.
"See here? She sees a snake--that means a bad friend. But I don't think
so. And look--" indicating droplets on the inside of the rim. "Good
tears--you will be crying with happiness soon." Her fingers brush mine
when she hands back the cup, and I watch her elegant lips as she smiles.
When we leave she kisses her cousin on both cheeks and says something
to her in Arabic. All that I catch is the word "habibti."
Fatima kisses me on both cheeks, and I thank her very seriously for
dinner.
"Bring her back," she tells Marianna. "We'll teach her some Arabic."
Back at her apartment Marianna sits on the battered living room couch
and I sit on the only chair. "My cousin made it possible for me to move
here. She found me my job, through a friend, and I stayed with her while
I looked for a place that I could afford."
"I don't think that she liked me."
"She will take a little while to get used to you. And she wonders
why you don't speak Arabic, since your father is Arab. Why didn't he
teach you?"
"I'm not sure. I think it was different when he came here--he didn't
want me to speak English with an accent. To go through what he went
through. He wanted me to be American."
"I wish you spoke Arabic. There are things that I cannot say in English."
Her face has gone soft again, and I look down, hoping that I am not
too red, wishing I had something in my hands. "Come into my room," she
says, very low. I look up, and she stands and offers her hand, leads
me to her bed.
I am shy tonight, nervous from the strong coffee but also feeling
very still and slow, and she sits me on her bed while she takes off
the shirt again. I am eye-level with her breasts, but I look up at her
face. She smiles down at me and takes my hand, kisses it softly and
lays it over her breast. I can feel the ring under my fingers. "You
can play with them, but gently," she tells me, and I put my mouth on
one, take the ring between my teeth and very softly tug. When I look
up at her she has closed eyes and caught between her teeth, so I play
for awhile with her metal and her flesh. But when I start to move my
mouth downwards she reaches down and lifts me from her, tilts my chin
up until I meet her eyes. Her pupils are very wide.
"My turn," she tells me, and lowers herself onto me, easing me onto
my back. I tense when she touches my belly, but she puts her mouth on
my throat and I arch towards her when she bites. She keeps me between
pleasure and pain for awhile, my life between her teeth, until it is
too much and I ask her to stop. She rolls off of me and curling herself
around my back.
"Are you tired?"
"Yes," I say, and I am, but I do not think that I will ever sleep
with her body pressed against me and her breath against my neck.
I listen to her heartbeat and her breathing instead, and try to breathe
in time with her, and drift into a sort of daze, and then to sleep.
I wake up very early because she is no longer next to me. She is kneeling
a few feet from the bed, in profile to me. It takes me a moment to realize
that she is praying, and that must be the way to Mecca.
Her face is stern with concentration, and very beautiful. I watch
her long lips form the name of Allah, and then close my eyes. It's too
private--I don't want to spy on her like this. She crawls back under
the covers with me after a few minutes, and I am very quick to fall
asleep again.
When I wake up again, a few hours later, she lets me make love to
her, lets me pin her with my weight and see how wet I can get her. She
is beautiful arching up against my hand--beautiful with her head pushed
back and her neck bared for me--beautiful opening her eyes when I am
not hard enough. "More," she tells me, and I give it to her gladly,
wishing that I had my dick but glad to feel her, to put all my attention
on seeing how wide I can open her, how much of myself I can fit into
her flushed body. I am beginning to wonder about my fist, but she stops
me at four fingers, and I work them into her at the speed she demands
and watch her move. It is when I take one nipple ring between my teeth,
still working her with a hand on her clit and the other inside, and
I tug a little harder than I think is absolutely safe, that she comes.
She sends me off for the first shower, and I stand under very hot
water until it starts to get cold, finish quickly and tell her, guiltily,
"I'm sorry, I used all the hot water."
"Well, you'll have to be punished then," she says, and pulls and pushes
me onto my back. I wrestle with her happily, but tense when she eases
a hand within my jeans. She doesn't try to get inside me, just cups
me through my boxers with one warm firm hand. She smiles at my nervousness,
sweet and cruel. "Don't be afraid," she tells me, "I'm going to take
care of you." And she bends to take my throat again, soft and hard,
until I close my eyes, and say, not knowing what I am asking for, "Please--"
"Turn over," she tells me, voice gone a bit rough, and her hands are
urgent as she helps me onto my stomach, pulls down my boxers. She arranges
myself on me and I feel her weight, and her moisture where she presses
against my lower leg; I brace myself for penetration, but instead she
runs her nails down my back.
I gasp, and she laughs, low in her throat, and kisses the back of
my neck very sweetly. "Not what you expected, hmmm?"
"No."
"Good." She is stroking me now with the palm of her hand, along my
spine, along the curve of my ass. "I wouldn't want to be predictable,"
she says, and slaps me hard.
I jump, surprised, then flush with heat. Turn my head, sideways on
the pillow, and look down the length of my body to see her smiling at
me.
"Do you trust me?"
"Yes."
"Good." She is stroking me again, her strong hands along the curve
of my ass, and then she bends and follows her hand with her light tongue.
Spreads me open, and moves her tongue from the base of my spine, to
my most sensitive flesh.
"Marianna--" my voice is high and frightened, and she lifts her mouth
off me but stays close enough that I can feel her breath. "--Please."
"Sameira, this is what I want. Will you give it to me?" I bury my
face in the pillow and give her a very muffled "yes." She makes me say
it again, clearly, before she lowers her face again, and I clench my
eyes and teeth and endure her touch.
It isn't long, though, before I melt beneath her soft warm tongue.
It's different than anything I've felt before, soothing and arousing
at once, and slowly I come down from the ceiling and into my body, lie
there and let her make me feel what she wants. I am sad when she stops,
relaxed enough not to want to move, and tingly enough to lie drifting
and hope that she'll comeback, but when she rummages in a drawer I figure
that she is getting her clothes on and start to sit up.
"Don't move," she tells me, and then she is touching me again, one
hand firm on my back and the other on my ass. I turn my face and look
at her, and she smiles and works one finger inside me while I gasp.
It isn't quite pain, but overwhelming enough that it almost is; I
have to fight the urge to stop her, concentrate on lying still. It goes
on forever, almost too much, then respite, then more, and I can't help
but move, away from her as she fills me, pushing back against her, following
her when she teases by moving away.
I open my eyes and her face has that stern look again, all of her
attention on me, I shut my eyes and turn my face away, and then it is
too much suddenly and I whisper, "stop." She leaves her fingers inside
me, palm against me, while my breathing calms and my heartbeat slows.
Then she pulls out of me, very slowly, and I pull her down on the bed
and bury my face in the back of her neck. I want to cry, for some reason,
so finally I send her off to the shower. But then I find that I can't,
so I dress quickly and go to the kitchen.
I'm at the stove when she comes in, give her crepes and the strawberries
that she has waiting, and watch her eat while I think about how to explain.
"Do you like Leslie Feinburg's stuff?" I ask, and then have to wait
while she finishes that mouthful.
"I've been reading Stone Butch Blues on my breaks at work. It's wonderful.
I read it a couple of years ago, when it came out, but it's just as
amazing this time, too."
I drink a little water and pick up a paper napkin to fidget with.
"So, yeah. You didn't think she was horrible for taking hormones,
a tool of the patriarchal death culture and all that?"
She laughs, and I curse myself for making a joke of it.
"Sameira, if all the patriarchs were like that, I would have no problem
with the patriarchy."
I smile back at her nervously and look down to find that I've torn
my napkin into little pieces.
She has to work today, so I walk her to the coffee shop and kiss her
goodbye, then take the train for the hour and a half back to Hyde Park.
In the way I think of a million perfect phrases, and wonder if I'll
ever have the courage to use any of them.
Christine is typing something on her word-processor when I walk inside.
"How was your date? Are you in love?"
"Wonderful and horrible. Maybe."
"Ooh, I'm jealous. You'll have to tell me everything--as soon as I
finish this paper."
I wander through the apartment touching things until she banishes
me to the kitchen, says I'm making her nervous. While I'm looking through
the fridge for something to cook the phone rings. It's my mother, wanting
to complain about my brother. I half-listen, saying "oh my," and "how
awful," during the gaps, until she seems to be done.
"Well, he is a teenager," I tell her, and she agrees, starts to make
hanging-up noises.
"Tell Dad I learned a new word in Arabic."
"Oh? "
"Yeah. I think it means beloved. Habibi."
"Oh." Her voice changes. "Have you finally changed your mind about
this lesbian thing?"
"What do you mean?"
"Habibti is what you say to a girl. Habibi is the masculine form."
"Oh."
"Sameira?"
"Listen, I've got to go now. I'll talk to you later, okay?" I hang
up the phone and stand holding it until it starts to beep at me.
I guess that I don't have to come up with the perfect way to explain
it all to her after all.