Because he had changed so completely, he was in no danger at work. But she had loyalties she wouldn’t betray, and she knew that, tenure or not, she might not last long, perhaps not even until retirement, although having seen the quiet desperation of professors emeritus she wanted to work until she dropped. How could she communicate the reality of war and its effects – her field was twentieth-century France – without upsetting some Alice-in-Wonderland student who, having experienced nothing and been hypnotized into victimhood, would demand a trigger warning? It was a madhouse, made even more difficult for her in navigating the shoals of what was her second language after French, the third being a childhood Arabic fortified by some later study.
To her astonishment, she was forbidden to describe atrocities against white people or men. At first she thought this was a joke, but it wasn’t, and she quickly came to the realization that such a regime was merely a mechanism to give power to one or another struggling political faction in the highly infected, incestuous bloodstream of the university. She had been protected by her Arabic name. Her father was Algerian, as was her mother, but her mother, blonde and blue-eyed like Amina, was a French colon. What did these idiots, these self-appointed little commissars, who swerved from one angry lunacy to another almost daily, know of the mixture of blood, of race, existence, history, and love?
Despite her many transgressions against orthodoxy, Amina was in a sense paroled because she was an Arab and therefore in their view not white; and because she was a woman, an intellectual, and a foreigner. On the other hand, she was blonde and blue-eyed, magnificently dressed (she bought most of her clothes in Paris when she returned home), and elegant by nature, which screamed elitism and privilege, although she had never been privileged in the accurate or even the common and false understanding of the word. She was not confident that she would be able to work in the American university system much longer, as she was guilty of what had become its gravest sin: she thought and spoke freely.
Things began to clarify much faster than she had expected. In fact, they raced, and the afternoon was not even over.
RIDING INTO THE Arboretum at high speed was rather dangerous, because at lunch she had had too much to drink. Which is to say that she had twenty-five fluid ounces of Japanese beer, almost enough to put her under the table. She never drank, not because she was a Muslim – she hadn’t been devout even as a child in Algeria – but because she didn’t like it and didn’t need it. But after Sayyid had knocked the wind out of her when she came home from class at eleven, and walked out of the house with a German rucksack slung over his shoulder, never to return, she couldn’t stay a minute longer. So she got on her bicycle – she really loved her bicycle – and by accident found herself at a University Avenue Mexican restaurant called “The New Original Celia’s.”
It was a reincarnation, to the letter, of the previous establishment, and like its predecessor highly air-conditioned, welcome that day at noon in Indian Summer. She ordered a ceviche salad and a Kirin Ichiban, thinking that Ichiban meant “little.” It came in a huge glass mug that had been in the freezer probably since 1969, and was so cold that it almost anesthetized her. By the time she left the restaurant her head was spinning in the bright sunshine and, for the first time in her life, at age sixty-one, she was a drunk driver on a bicycle. This was dangerous, exhilarating, and the reason she went so fast and was so relaxed about doing so.
She was sufficiently unused to alcohol that she hoped the delirium would go away after she paid her check and went to brush her teeth – thirty seconds for each quadrant, faithfully as always. Everyone in California had – well, everyone in Palo Alto – glacially white teeth. So did she, although she could not compete with fluoridated youth whose smiles were as blinding as locomotive headlights. But then, locomotive headlights or not, they could not compete with the gentleness, wisdom, and warmth of her inimitable smile, preserved since childhood in all its innocence despite the infusion of a life’s-worth of strength and good graces. As she would note on the bench, the intoxication would take all afternoon to dissipate, it exaggerated her emotions, it filled her with love, longing, and regret, and it sped her decisions and made her recklessly and satisfyingly resolute.
In France, Sayyid had reminded her, men his age had mistresses. “Fuck you, Sayyid. You need another woman when you can’t even give me a child? And fuck them. I don’t care what they do in France. They’re greedy bastards who should be killed, every one of them. If I had someone on the side how would you feel? What if I took up with one of my graduate students, a young man of twenty-four who could father a child? How would you feel?”
“You can’t have a child, Amina,” was the reply.
“Not now, but I could have.”
“I have to go.”
“Yes, Sayyid, you have to go.”
When he actually walked out, not looking back, with a spring in his step, she knew it was really over. It was the lowest point, and she almost fainted. Then came the cycles, which, although she didn’t know it, were part of a spiral that would lead her to a new life. Even while at The New Original Celia’s she fell in love with a man, a handsome, professorial, quiet man who sat at a table by himself reading a medical journal. It was a heady feeling, and dangerous, soon exaggerated by the alcohol. She loved him, and saw him as her salvation. They would marry. He would be perfect. He would be divorced or a widower, and he would have wonderful, beautiful children, to whom she would be a substitute mother, and who would love her as much as she would love them.
But in an instant she understood that she was like a free radical that out of necessity and compulsion would dangerously bond with the first available atom, and she resolved not to, not to hop from one ice floe to another, but soberly – although she was sitting at the counter at The New Original Celia’s, increasingly not sober – to let time pass. Time did pass of course, and all afternoon she stayed on the bench, which was now so firmly her own that if anyone had tried to sit on it, even the Dalai Lama, she would have punched him.
When it began to cool, as it does in the evening all along the Peninsula even in summer, she found herself clearheaded and calm. She would accept her new status, live with her independence while neither glorifying nor regretting it, and, after a decent interval, keep her eyes open in the time she had left, refusing to discount the prospect of love. She had never been indecisive, and although modest she had always been courageous and she had always known her own mind.