Muneer knew his mother never would have let him go off and write stories while there was so much to do after his father’s death.
“In the future, God willing,” he said, and left it at that.
There were no other young men in the courtyard—it was a bunch of uncles gossiping. Muneer wandered back to the gate and read the paper.
When the door to the villa swung open to reveal Saeedah, bareheaded and smiling, he knew he would have been disappointed if she hadn’t come down. She was framed in the entryway in a calf-length, pleated opal-white dress that was cinched at the waist like an Egyptian film star’s dress. Her face was round as a moon, the kind of face poets loved, well-fed with honey-colored eyes. Her hair was flipped from her shoulders to her ears, teased up in the back. Her lips shone with rouge. Almost as tall as he was, she stared straight into his face.
He pulled the ends of his shimagh under his chin and turned his eyes down. He was being disingenuous, and she knew it. “Go round the back,” she said.
As though she had nothing to fear.
If her father found out, Muneer’s chances of an apprenticeship might evaporate. But he couldn’t say no. He left the gate intending to go home and leave her disappointed. But his feet were connected to his heart more directly than his head, and they did as she said. He leaned against the villa’s back wall and had nearly reached the paper’s back cover when she appeared.
He never learned how she slipped from the villa, around the back of the yard, and out the back gate. But there she was, swooshing her skirts with her hands, seeming pleased that his eyes stayed on her. He folded the paper three times again and tried to stuff it in his pocket, but it was too big, so he tossed it into the street—what other option did he have?—the whole time studying her.
“Anyone famous die today?”
“That’s not why a person reads the paper. It’s not a film magazine.”
She swished the hem of her dress dramatically. “Do you want to kiss me, like in an Egyptian film?”
“Wow,” he said, the American word feeling like carbonation in his mouth. “You’ve never seen an Egyptian film.”
A laugh gurgled in her throat and her fingers fluttered mothlike to his cheek. “Yes, I have. Last summer, in Cairo. And once at the American compound here.”
He shrank from her, eyes on his sandals, blood pumping.
She kissed his cheek, her lips cool despite the heat around them. His torso twisted and his knees buckled. When she moved away, he straightened and touched his cheek despite himself.
She punched his arm, an almost sisterly gesture, as though she were trying to erase what had happened. Or maybe not. Maybe she was underlining the kiss, claiming him a second way.
“Want to go for a ride?” he said. He leaned against the wall to appear steady.
She walked to the car, which he’d parked at the curb, opened the passenger door for herself, and hopped in.
They drove north, sea to the left of them. He leaned on the open window. Between them, the bench seat was as wide as the Red Sea.
“Where shall we go?” he asked.
“Drive.” She unrolled her tinted window.
“Someone might see you.” He motioned as though he were rolling the window back up. “You’re not wearing a scarf.”
“I’m not?” She patted herself on the head. “Oh, I’m not!”
She was funny, but also infuriating. He rotated his hand until she rolled her window up, but not without complaint. “You’re the one who let me into your car.”
He regretted displeasing her, but he wasn’t sure how to reverse things, to please her. He took off his shimagh and handed it to her. “Wear this and roll the window back down if you want.”
She let the cloth fall in her lap. “I love the sea,” she said. “I don’t know if I could live without it.”
“In Ohio, there’s a lake,” he said, immediately wanting to take the words back because they implied he wanted her to go to Ohio with him.
She must have felt a little less annoyed with him, because she opened the window and draped the cloth over her head. She looked like a boy.
“Is Ohio like California?” She wrapped the shimagh across her mouth, like a Bedouin or a bandit. The answer was easily no, but she didn’t give him a chance to respond. “I’d rather go to Cairo,” she said through the cloth.
He lay his arm along the back of the seat, his fingers just shy of her head. Time stretched out like an expanse of shoreline. She reached over and tapped his fingers. He squeezed her fingers and let go.
They parked at a small, empty park near the edge of the sea. She leaned an arm on her open window. The minutes since they left seemed like a beautiful eternity.
“We’d better head back,” Saeedah said. “The wedding.”
He sighed, long and low like the sea. “May you be next,” he said in a falsetto meant to mimic an annoying auntie or uncle.
“Do you want me to marry next?” She pulled the shimagh from her lips, leaned in, and kissed him. He tasted sweetness, like candied almonds. “God forgive you,” she said. Her sly smile a crescent moon.
“God forgive me.”
He steered the car back toward her house. The sea was on her side, and he felt as though the night had wrapped itself around them.
Without thinking, he drove to the front of the house. Guests were arriving in sedan after sedan. The cars dropped off the women, whose sequined hems peeked out from under their black abayahs. The men, in their formal camel’s wool mishlahs with gold borders, parked and headed for the courtyard.
Beside him, she’d hidden below the dashboard, the top of her head close to his thigh.
“What are you doing?” she said. “Drive around the back.”
He licked his upper lip; it tasted like sweat. She widened her eyes: What are you waiting for? He let his hand float to the top of her head, and with one hand on the steering wheel, returned the car to their meeting place. Leaving his shimagh behind on the passenger seat, she got out of the car and stepped up onto the high sidewalk. She looked at him once before slipping through the back gate, and his heart flew out to her.
He saw none of what happened after she left him. But later, when they were married, she told him somehow she had convinced herself she was home free, and as she skipped upstairs, she hummed the sweet chorus of an Abdel Halim song. Already, he can’t remember which one. She opened the door to her parents’ room without knocking. Her aunts had taken the room over for the bridal preparations. Her older sister Randah, the bride, sat on the bed, a floor-length prayer scarf wrapped around her.
“You missed Isha prayer,” Randah had said.
“I prayed alone.”
“Big liar.”
“Bitch.”
“Riham saw you. Getting into a car with a boy,” her sister said. “She told all of us.”
When Saeedah told him what had happened next, he swallowed hard and tried to imagine it: she’d slapped her sister straight across the face. Randah hadn’t fought back because there was their mother, a man’s thick black iqal in her hand like a weapon. Behind her, Muneer’s mother, united with her sister.
“Give her what she wants,” his mother had said. “And she won’t be your problem anymore. She’ll be my son’s problem, God help them.”