The Night Counter (7 page)

“What was that man saying about purchasing a farm in Jordan?” Nadia asked, and looked away from the computer. “Nothing to do with their money except buy, buy, buy.”

“Actually he was complimenting Tayta and Giselle … and you,” Zade said.

She ignored him and looked at the poster. “Nadia, how could you have not known Giselle was so filled with capitalist greed?” she demanded out loud, using the third person as a diplomatic cushion; she’d developed that habit while negotiating with Elias’s kidnappers.

What mother wouldn’t have set them up? Hell, what dating service wouldn’t have? Giselle was the daughter of a fellow professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Chicago. Just like Zade, her mother was Arab American, her father Arab. She was also half Christian, half Muslim. Both had fathers who had sat on panels with great scholars such as Edward Said, Kamal Salibi, and Hanan Ashrawi, and both had fathers who had been hostages in Lebanon. Four years ago, when Zade and Giselle were both twenty-five, their mothers were moderating a panel on “Cross-Cultural and Middle East Education in the U.S. Secondary School Classroom” at an Arab American University Graduates conference.

Zade, Giselle, and their mothers all sat at the same table during the chicken Kiev luncheon. “Zade loves
kusa bi laban
,” Nadia announced to the air. “I wish someone could go with him on the days it’s the special at Mama Aisha’s.”

“I love it, too.” Giselle smiled. “I love it most when I can’t get it. When I’m hanging out in the Middle East, I kind of forget about it and start missing pizza that isn’t an oil spill.”

Zade laughed. “Yeah, but I don’t miss passable Pizza Hut as much as I miss organized waiting lines.”

“Dude, so true. To stop myself from going all Red Brigades at the post office here, I just remind myself that the line is nowhere near as long as the checkpoints over there,” Giselle explained. “Fascist paper tiger regimes.”

And that was it. That was the moment when both Nadia and Zade fell in love with Giselle: Nadia for Giselle’s astute politics, Zade for the way her raspy voice and wild hand gestures made checkpoints—and even post offices—sound steamy. But there are a lot of things people can have in common that can’t make up for all that they don’t share. Zade did not tell his clients this.

Nadia’s love for Giselle ended a few months after the two started dating,
when Zade announced that he and Giselle were coming over for dinner. Nadia made grape leaves, the only Middle Eastern dish she knew how to make, having been as uninterested in learning cooking from Fatima as she had been in learning Arabic from her.

“Your mother said that if she were the kind of wife who told her husband what to wear, she would have told me to wear a tie tonight,” Elias said that evening. “So I did.” That was when Zade knew that his parents were expecting him to reveal that Giselle and he were getting engaged, and so he took her hand. Giselle gave it a squeeze and beamed first at him and then at his parents, eyes shining with the bright future she had planned for them.

“We’re going to open a hookah bar,” Giselle blurted out.

“You’re going to give people lung cancer?” his parents said in unison. “Shame.
Aabe
. Hasn’t Philip Morris done enough to destroy the world?”

“The water pipe uses all-natural tobacco,” Giselle countered.

Nadia and Elias turned away from her. “Zade, what about completing your Fulbright proposal to research the influence of progressive nonsectarian Islamic politics on post–civil war reconstruction in southern Lebanon?” Elias asked.

“We will be promoting the revival of Arab culture,” Zade replied, not mentioning that he hadn’t downloaded the application. “The hookah is a four-hundred-year-old tradition. There are thousands of Arab students in D.C. who miss back home. Commerce isn’t a dirty word. It’s perceiving a need and meeting it.”

His parents’ shoulders slumped. “It’s like you never read Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal,” Nadia said. “My mother has never read anyone’s words, and she wouldn’t open a hookah bar, especially after my sisters used to call her and her friends backward when they used to smoke the
argileh
. That’s the actual real word—you’re not even using proper Arabic.”

“Just like your mother and her friends were then, these students are a new generation of immigrants hungry for a place to come together,” Giselle explained.

“Arabs are always together,” Elias argued. “They don’t know how to
be alone. The point is to bring them together to talk about something more important than their neighbors’ affairs.”

“But we’re catching a trend,” Zade said.

Catching a trend was exactly how Giselle had pitched to it to him the night before, when she had also defined commerce for him. They were walking home from an Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee gala dinner at which both Nadia and Elias were speakers.

On the Key Bridge, Giselle took his hand. “I want to ask you something,” she said. “Something big.”

“Me, too.” Zade smiled. “You first.”

It was a beautiful full-moon night with a perfect view of the Capitol and the Washington Monument. In a setting like that, Zade was sure she was going to suggest that he move in with her, and so he asked a passerby to take their picture for posterity. The picture, it turned out, was poster-quality, and today hung above the Ali Baba Band-Its.

“Would you like to go into business with me?” she asked. “I know a trend we can catch, a need we can meet. If we open at Christmas, we’ll capitalize on all the kids having nowhere to go at break.”

Their relationship by that point was balanced enough that the question had been perfunctory. So while Giselle borrowed money from her brother, who had a booming engineering business in Saudi Arabia, Zade borrowed money from his twin sister’s husband, a wealthy Qatari she had met while working at Al Jazeera TV as a reporter. Nadia and Elias had been so proud of Lamya until her pretty face destined her to doing fluffy celebrity interviews.

And now Zade had disappointed them, but he didn’t want to be without Giselle. Others—say, his parents—hadn’t heard the smart-ass comments she whispered to him during movies through a mouthful of popcorn, hadn’t felt the smallness of her waist when she reached up to kiss him, and couldn’t see that her face was always as luminescent as the moon on its fourteenth day, something his grandfather Ibrahim had murmured about his grandmother at her seventieth birthday party, an event Nadia had insisted
on celebrating when she had taken Zade and his sister to Detroit years ago, with his grandmother protesting the whole time. Zade had heard Ibrahim’s words right after everyone sang “Happy Birthday” He wished other people had been listening because no one, least of all Nadia, believed him when he quoted Ibrahim. It was only when he met Giselle that he knew there were women worthy of such a description. He sprang the moon thing on Giselle the day their business became profitable, and she had gotten uncustomarily flustered, the way he always was in her presence. She was the first person, place, or thing that had ever motivated him to finish something he’d started. His family’s passions had had the opposite effect on him, making him shrink away from accomplishment, as if without their noble goals he couldn’t hold his own, so why even bother? He couldn’t equal Giselle, either, but just the scent of her inspired him to try, at least occasionally.

A week after Zade and Giselle signed the café lease, taking over a doughnut shop that had become passé, the World Trade Center was hit. Zade then assumed that the planet was doomed—and that he and Giselle had a bad idea on their hands. But Giselle hired a security guard, and they opened to a packed house a few months later. Scheherazade’s Diwan Café was the envy of bar owners from Georgetown to Adams Morgan, and it didn’t even serve alcohol.

September 11 had left Zade’s parents decidedly grayer and sadder. Perhaps that was why the success of Scheherazade’s Diwan Café touched them, and for a while, if not for the hookah smoke, they would have been almost proud of how Zade was fostering Arab understanding.

One night, as the crowd began straggling home, Giselle grabbed Zade in a hug and they swayed to the Ali Baba Band-Its’ version of Fairuz’s “
Habetuk bi Seif.
”

“I want people to be as happy as we are,” she whispered.

“Me, too,” Zade said.

“I was thinking about our future,” she hinted.

“So was I,” he said. He already had the ring in his pocket. But before he could get on his knees, she took his hand and looked deep in his eyes.

“I want to ask you something,” she said.

“Me, too.” He smiled. “You first.”

“Let’s let the world see our love.”

“Just what I was thinking.”

“Really?” She blushed. “Oh,
habibi
, I should have known. Your mother told me that your grandmother always brags about your great-great-grandmother’s matchmaking skills. Guess what? I bet with my help, you’ll find out it’s genetic. We’re going to have one hell of a matchmaking service.”

Zade let go of the ring in his pocket. They both borrowed more money from their siblings and started Aladdin and Jasmine, Inc.

“How could you possibly know your clients are going to be a good match if they don’t sit down and hash it out first?” Elias asked.

“Arguing about Middle East politics over dinner without actually listening to each other isn’t love for everyone,” Zade said, summing up the spice in his parents’ marriage.

Within five months, Aladdin and Jasmine, Inc., had over a thousand people signed up. It was a ratio of four males for every female, but it was working. It went national within a year. Elias almost boasted that Zade was the owner when a student in his contemporary Middle Eastern politics seminar said that Arabs’ devotion to their heritage could be manifested in the popularity of Aladdin and Jasmine, Inc. “Love is very important in maintaining a culture,” Elias told his students. “Cultures without love die.”

At the wedding reception for the first couple to meet and marry through Aladdin and Jasmine, Inc., Giselle sniffled and Zade took her hand.

“Look at this beautiful thing we’ve created,” she gushed.

“Sit down, Giselle,” he said. “I want to ask you something.”

She sat down, big eyes aglow with tears. “We’ve had several successful engagements since we opened,” he began.

“Twenty,” she confirmed. “We’re probably doing far better than Match.com and eHarmony, speaking per capita.”

“Yes,” Zade said. “So I was thinking—”

“So was I,” she interjected.

“Okay, me first,” Zade said, drying off his palms on his suit jacket. “What if we took ourselves to the next level.”

He pulled the ring out of his pocket.

“So you want to go global, too?” she said, looking in his eyes and not seeing what was in his hand. “Think of all the Arab immigrants in Brazil, West Africa, and Canada and all the Lebanese, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Moroccan guest workers living in the Persian Gulf, all looking for true love. We can bring that to them, sweetie.”

He put the ring back in his pocket. “Expansion is expensive,” he said. “We don’t even have people on the ground in those places.”

“We can do it,” Giselle countered. “We’ll spend a month in each place. Hire a good part-time person to be in charge, work out the initial marketing. We’ll start in London. Guess what? There’s a restaurant there that makes the best
kusa bi laban
outside of Lebanon.”

“What about here?” he pointed out. “This is where love cashes the checks.”

“You’re right,” she conceded, momentarily as defeated as he was. “No, we have no choice. I’ll be the one that goes. You stay. Your mom would go all loco alone, with your dad away for the next two semesters.”

“And you won’t go loco without me?”

“I’ll be fine,” she answered too quickly. “And so will the business. Your mom can handle that end. She already does, even though she won’t admit it.”

“You know who won’t be fine?” he said. “Remember me?”

“You can live without me for a couple of months.” She grinned. “We’ve got the rest of our lives. And we’ll talk on the phone every day.”

“If you go, Giselle, then we’re over,” Zade decided aloud. He felt the pores on his underarms release significant amounts of sweat, as using ultimatums on her—or anyone—was not something he had ever tried before.

“Why are you talking to me that way?” she said, taking a step back.

“We know from our own website that three in four of our long-distance matches end in failure,” he said, pressing his feet into the ground to help keep his shoulders lifted.

“What if I come back at least once a month?” she offered, but did not step forward.

“Don’t bother,” Zade said with no threat implied this time. He let his gaze leave her moonlike face, focusing on the ground instead. “I don’t want to spend my whole life trying to make you happy by becoming the greatest entrepreneur love has ever known.”

“God, you sound like our parents,” she said.

He had no response to that. Giselle crossed her arms.

“I love you,” she said. “But I don’t want to stand in the way of your happiness. If you want to find someone more socialist, then I won’t deprive you of that. We’ll just stay business partners.”

It was not the answer he was hoping for, but it was the one he should have expected.

“I might become a member of Aladdin and Jasmine, Inc., myself,” he declared.

Giselle teared up but did not protest. She hugged him tight. “Bye, baby,” she whispered, and walked out right past their poster.

It had been four months since they had decided to expand their business and break up. He had not seen her since. Nor had he joined Aladdin and Jasmine, Inc. He hadn’t even filled out the questionnaire. But he had added to it: “Please note that there is a 20% surcharge for clients in Latin America, West Africa, and Canada.”

He looked at the clock. He still talked to Giselle every day, mostly about the sales figures Nadia put together. Today he couldn’t wait to tell her about the Qatari who had just left.

The phone rang, as it did every night at eight-thirty A nine-hour time difference necessitated planned, rather than off-the-cuff, communication. As a result, business was at a peak, and he often wondered what heights their personal relationship would have reached with more scheduled talking.