A Marriage of Inconvenience

How did I get here?

For a memorable decade, I was married or otherwise intimately entangled with an Egyptian deli guy named Khaled. He worked the 7pm to 7am shift at the deli around the corner from where I lived in Manhattan during my senior year of college. He wooed me with piroshkis -- the twentieth century offers no experience closer to being a Byzantine empress than having an entire New York deli at one's behest. "I'll have one of those, and two of those, and a pint of that... How fresh is that tortellini?"

By a conservative estimate, the first six months we were together I put on twenty pounds.

We were married by a Bella Abzug impersonator in a brown caftan named Elvira Burrows ("Ya gotta ring?") in Manhattan City Hall the summer I was twenty-one. It only got sillier from there.

Baa Baa Black Sheep

K: (in a merry warble from the kitchen) Guess what part of lamb I'm cooking tonight!

Now, there's a game of Twenty Questions where no one's coming out a winner...

C: (desultorily leafing through TV Guide article on Barney the Dinosaur in the bedroom) The butt?

K: Nooooo.

C: The head?

K: You're getting warrrrrrrmer!

Every hair on C's body crackles straight upright. Barney's plush purple mug becomes stained with sweat under her clenching fingers.

K: (triumphantly) Lamb tongue!

They meet in the hall. K. impedes C.'s frenzied scurry to her own room.

K: It's very tasty. Want some?

C: You realize we've had sex for the last time now.

K: (Looking back fondly to the spluttering pan) Oh man, did you see how that one jumped? Oh man. What's the matter with you?

C: Lips that touch lamb tongues shall never touch mine.

(A short discussion on the advisability or otherwise of tasting things that can taste back follows. C. retreats back into the bedroom and attempts to call for help. S. is not home. When she emerges, K. is there.)

K: I have some boiled potatoes too. You want some?

C: Were they boiled with... (she cannot quite bring herself to say the words)

K: (Demeanour generally suggestive of furtive hesitation)

C: Answer me as you would answer the Prophet.

K: Well, I can boil some other potatoes for you if you want.

C. makes her escape.

During this break in the dialogue, K. somehow decides that the festivity of the occasion would be enhanced by puckish bleating throughout the apartment. An interval elapses. Then a curly black head noses through the sliding doors into C's room.

K: Baaaaa. Do you need anything?

C: This is hell. This is hell, and I'm damned.

K: Ha ha ha. Baaaa. Are you sure you don't need anything?

C: You're damned too.

Later, K. seems much affected by C.'s powerful oratical portrait of the wretched little creatures condemned to learning sign language. (For those of you playing along at home, a lamb practicing sign language can be easily simulated by making Mr. Spock live-long-and-prosper hands and gesturing vigorously with them.) Unfortunately, affect is one of wild hilarity rather than depressed contrition.

Pole to Fool

K-man unfortunately en evidence during taping of last episode of "Pole to Pole" last night... "What kind of crap you taping now?" It's not crap, it's a travel documentary. "Oh hey, I might want to see that. Where is he? China?" The ice fields of Canton? No, that's Antarctica. He's going from pole to pole. "What pool?"

Unsuccessful and increasingly emotional geography lesson ensues, climaxing with me bellowing "ANTARTICA -- ANTARTICA -- ANTARCTICA" when Khaly begs me to "speak English" one too many times."

What passes for normalcy resumes during commercial break; advertisement utilizing wild horses galloping across plain inspires K-man to burble, "Look at the monkeys!" As I dissolve into helpless, broken laughter, K. ruminates in Joycean splendor, "Beautiful monkeys. All the monkeys, running and running."

Komedy Hour

Khaly was, all unintentionally, a real pisser last night. As he was fiddling around with belts and shoelaces and things preparatory to going out, muttering, "krem, krem, kremmer, krem" after telling me, apropos du rien, that he was "the criminal from the Kremlin," I was reminded irresistibly of [Susan’s] comment about mothers knowing what their own children are saying and couldn't stop laughing. Of course he couldn't rest until he found out why I was rolled up like a hedgehog on the bed in convulsions. My explanation was followed with another stream of gibberish, of which the only clear words were, "I'm going to kick her ass."

The taking of West 24th Street

Found myself watching a bit of "The Taking of Flight 847: The Ule Derickson Story," overwhelmed by the familiarity of it. No, I'm not comparing my marriage to a hijacking by Hezbollah... But they really did get the internal logic (or lack thereof) of Arabic men exactly right in this film. There's this one scene, where the Second Banana Hijacker has developed a crush on Ule, and the Head Banana Hijacker is trying to explain this to her... Lindsay Wagner deserves an Emmy just for her expression as she's listening to the words, "I don't know if he is serious or not, but my friend would like to take you into the back and marry you..." whilst the Second Banana Hijacker is gazing at them with that hopeful dog-at-a-dinnertable look we know and love so well.

"Well... we all have a lot on our minds right now, so why don't we wait until after we've landed in Beirut to discuss this, okay?"

Ants instead of potatoes? Honey, I love you!

...Anyway, as luck would have it, the K-man came home relatively early to provide solace [for a rejected manuscript], in the form of absent-minded but effective massage given during the Monday evening wrestling show on cable. Warbling softly along with the "I'm a Bic Man" commercial ("You say you're a pig man? I know that!") and posing Cheshire-Cat-like conundrums such as "Why do they pay Bobby the Brain Heenan? Can the Macho Man see out of those glasses?", the K-man provided a pylon of stability in this wind-tossed ocean of angst. Final dadaist touch provided at the close of the evening, when I brought him a box of cookies from the kitchen and discovered that ants had got into them first.... "No, no, no, don't throw them away! I'll still eat them." When I remonstrated, the K-man was sanguine:

"I know these ants. They're not killers, they're musicians. I remember their tv show..."

I left him to it.

Madame Muleskinner

The K-man, bless his heart, brought me a present "for the trip [imminent departure for writing workshop in Oregon]." Oh darling, a thigh-length buckskin coat with genuine bathroom fur collar. You shouldn't have. No, really, you shouldn't have.

"For the cold." Well, for mule-packing across the Rockies in February, an invaluable garment. For bombing down I-5 through the Central Valley on Labor Day, perhaps less utilitarian. "Umm, well, it's not quite my style," a polite way to draw attention to the fact that it's Jane Morris who's my sartorial model, not Jeremiah Johnson.

BUST-ed!

We tend to forget that Khaly is actually the alpha male of the El Gendy clan. Consider, for example, the case of poor Cousin Amr, who came to the Big Apple to shovel up some of those gold doubloons lying on the streets of America, about the time that Khaly and I were divorcing.

Cousin Amr did not know that the wind of his misfortune was blowing that day he went to visit Mustapha's pizzeria in Jersey City. Like a lamb before the Assyrian wolf, he gamboled happily in his native fields until the FBI ("or something like that", in Khaly's words) descended to chew the fat about Mustapha's little passport-making hobby.

FBI Or Something Agent: Hey, you. What are you doing here? Where's your green card?

Cousin Amr: Blrdblddsrfgirg?

K-man (as Greek chorus): I think his career here is finished.

Fadeout on Cousin Amr feverishly flicking through the Voice personals as the court date looms ever near. You have to give him credit, he's a plucky little doorknob -- not even being under actual inditement causes him despair.

Cousin Amr: Flrblkgrsdddthpt, man!

K-man (sotto voce): I don't tell him it's hopeless.