This time, I drove to the furniture store, where I bought a new mattress, paying the extra fee to have it delivered the same day. Then I stopped by Walmart for new pillows, sheets, and towels. I was in the throes of a manic energy, as though by purging a few artifacts from the cabin, I could disguise the ruins I’d excavated. Yet afterward, when all the remains of his affair had been cleared, I sat alone in the cabin, and I still couldn’t forget what I’d learned about him.
I pulled out my laptop and did something it had never once occurred to me to do: I Googled him. His name appeared in a business listing for the restaurant, dating back to when he bought it. Briefly he was quoted in a Hi-Desert Star article from 2010, after a winter storm had uprooted a palm tree and left debris on the highway near his business. And he had an account with an ancestry website; it seemed he had been researching his family’s history for some time, tracing it from Casablanca to a tribe in the Chaouia. That’s what I’d been doing, too, digging through his past.
But it wasn’t just my father’s life that I was seeing under a new light, it was mine as well. In my first year at Stanford, I’d joined a jazz ensemble that met in the basement of a church half a mile from campus. One day, walking out of rehearsal with the trumpet player, we ran into a friend of his, a tall, lanky junior with brown hair and an easy smile. His name was Beckett Burke. He’d graduated from Harvard-Westlake, regularly spent winter vacation in Switzerland and spring break in Costa Rica, and was planning to work for an organization that offered contraceptive services and infant immunization in Uganda. The mere mention of these countries, which Beckett did offhandedly as he ordered from the à la carte menu of the Peruvian restaurant he led me to on our first date, nearly took my breath away. When, a couple of weeks later, he took me to his apartment and relieved me of my virginity, I did not mind, or yet know I should mind, that the sex was rushed and unenjoyable. I was flattered that he was interested in me and proud to stand beside him at parties, absorbing his effortless cool as if by osmosis. With his hand on my back, he introduced me as “the lovely Nora Guerraoui” and the sound of my name on his lips, even with his exaggeratedly rolled r’s, thrilled me. What did a sophisticated boy like him, a boy who already knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life—aid management in developing countries—ever want with me?
I could not think of a satisfying answer to that question, which was why I started to arrange my life around his. Beckett didn’t like poetry, so I stopped going to the spoken-word performances that had become the highlight of my week and instead followed him to the indie theater where hip new movies played. On Sunday mornings, he liked to drink coffee and read the New York Times, so I bought my own subscription. Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons and after much cajoling, he would agree to go on a hike with me, but it was usually brief because he complained incessantly about the weather; it was always too hot or too cold or too rainy or too buggy. When Beckett started to cancel dates or set them up at the last minute, I blamed his busy schedule. When he forgot to call me, I blamed myself for being dull. Only when I saw him walking down Arboretum Avenue with Margarita Semprevivo, his arm around her tiny waist, did I finally understand that he had moved on to “the lovely Rita.”
Of course, there was nothing unusual about what happened. People break up all the time, for all sorts of reasons. But the cheating had so damaged my ability to trust that it took me fifteen months to start dating again. Sameer Hanim was about as different from Beckett as it was possible to be in a place like Stanford. He had grown up in a small town in Ohio, attended a science magnet school, had perfect SAT scores, but couldn’t tell you what Puligny-Montrachet was or where Eton was located or why sports socks didn’t go with dress shoes. Like me, he had been pressured into his field of study—software engineering, in his case—by a mother whose own ambitions had been deferred and denied. What he really wanted to do was make animation. The sketches that hung in the apartment he shared with two other engineering students would not have been out of place in an art exhibit, or at least it seemed so to my untrained eye. He was a shy, quiet boy who loved spending Saturday afternoons watching old television series or browsing comic-book stores.
And yet when we were out at dinner and a pretty girl walked by, his eyes would always follow after her. What was it about me that failed to hold his attention? The question consumed me and I became obsessed with finding the correct answer. I got a new haircut, bought trendy clothes, spent hours reading Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Jim Starlin so I could keep up with conversations about comics. With each new change, Sameer’s attention would settle for a few days, and then we’d be at a party, and I’d notice him staring at someone else. In the end, he cheated on me, too, with a white girl from his algorithms class. Later, they started a software company together.
Even Max, my current mistake, was the same. The only difference was that instead of cheating on me, he had cheated with me. Either way, I had never been enough. I had always been found wanting. For years, I’d told myself that all this was just bad luck or that I had terrible taste in men. But now I wondered if it was something deeper: my father cheated, and I loved men who cheated.
Maryam
Time passed, yet I still found myself reaching for two glasses when I made mint tea in the morning, or looking for my husband’s socks when I folded the laundry, or wanting him to hand me a fresh towel when I stepped out of the shower. These little moments were painful, they reminded me that I was no longer his wife, that I was his widow now, a state of being I was still trying to accept. But life has to be faced, even when it can’t be accepted, and after I received a second phone call from the restaurant manager, asking me when we planned to reopen, by which he meant something else, of course—he meant that the staff had bills to pay and families to support—I realized I could no longer delay the inevitable. I had to go to work.
At five thirty the next morning, when I pulled into the parking lot of the Pantry, I found the cook already waiting for me, smoking a cigarette by the dumpsters. My husband had warned him not to do that, because Mr. Baker, the owner of the bowling alley next door, often complained about the risk of fire, so I told José to put the cigarette out, and he stubbed it under his shoe and followed me inside, not speaking to me until after the first customers came in. An old man took a seat at the counter, reading his Bible as he waited for coffee; a family of four settled into one of the booths by the window, their children arguing over packs of crayons; and a couple in matching Kings caps huddled in the corner, staring at their phones, but then I looked at the table in the back of the diner, and instead of Driss doing his crosswords or reading the newspaper, there was only an empty chair.
“Coffee, Mrs. Guerraoui?” Marty asked me. Despite what people think, my name isn’t Maryam Guerraoui, it’s Maryam Bouziane, but so many women in this country take on their husbands’ names that I had long ago given up explaining that we were different. Marty was the first employee my husband had hired at the donut shop, a young man barely out of high school back then, and now he had bifocals dangling from a retainer around his neck, yet even he didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t remember, my true name.