Feast of Phoniness

#ShortStory

In our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, my husband still fondles my hand and says, "Margaret, do you love me?” His resolute, albeit genuine, question has long ceased to surprise me, and so has my answer to him:

I loved but Nour.

I love you, but I love Nour.

I love you, but...

“I love you.”

Over the years, I have trained myself to embellish the truth. It became a daily routine, much like a facial skin care. I cleanse, I exfoliate, I tone, I moisturize, and I protect. Who among us doesn’t lend the recesses of his soul to brushstrokes? Even Adam, who’s sitting now across from me at this fancy table, all smiles and well-groomed, my husband, who probably knows naught about Nour, at least till now, dyes his words like he dyes his hair, often because he fears he might lose me.

On his deathbed, my father apologized but never cried. He said that people might go to extremes in protecting a truth, treating it as their personal belongings, until the day they utter farewell. Only then do they realize the need to pass it over to the ones who were in oblivion. And perhaps, this is how every human truth has bleached so much in color that people nowadays merely inherit worthlessness. With my husband, I have never exposed the truth; instead, I used him to grow a false life, bleached and dyed and always happening in parallel to another–a life with Nour.

“Margaret,” Adam makes a toast, “to our happy ever after!”

I raise my wine. Our glasses clack. “To our happy every after,” I flush it with a mouthful.

Sometimes, I do feel bad for Adam. I feel so bad and ashamed that I wish he could read my mind to catch me with my forbidden thoughts red-handed and end it right there, expel me for a lifetime from his haven. Other times, his naiveté, or so it seems to me, fuels my disdain, and I simply cease to care. A man who needs reassurance every now and then knows the truth deep inside yet still acts otherwise. He, too, partakes in this feast of phoniness. And so it is only normal we two split the bill evenly.

With a gesture from Adam’s hand, a violinist suddenly barges through the door and stands to my left playing Kodály’s Adagio.

“Margaret,” Adam stands, leaning forward, “shall we have this dance?”

My face nods, my heart cringes.

While all eyes elbow their way toward us, Adam and I dance between the tables, Nour and I run through wheat fields.

I tell myself I cannot lose control over my thoughts right now, I cannot sway amid a crowd makeup-free, so I retract my tongue and speak very little, if not anything at all. I let Adam have his moment, show others how wonderful a speaker, a lover, and a gentleman he is, while I hold the edge of my dress and trespass with Nour into a golden field. This is how I learned to take shelter from a potential moment of mental incontinence. This is how I filter all noise also, so that Nour’s voice would stop dissolving in the distance, in the vastness that’s going on twenty-seven years tonight.

Adam clutches my waist and leans on my lips with a kiss.

Behind his shoulders, Nour stops running and eyes me long enough I shed a tear. Everybody sees me. They see the tear falling behind Adam’s shoulders and down at his heels, and they burst into applause.

Nobody sees through me.

Nour shrugs and leaves; she doesn’t look back. I try to stop her, but Adam’s hands are so firm that my only attempt at escaping ends in vain. I find myself surrendering to Adam’s will. I always do. Yet deep down, I think to myself that Nour will forgive me. Not a day passes that I don’t sin against her willfully. Still, she always finds her way back, lending me a bright smile that speaks forgiveness.

While the violinist reaches the last notes, I notice his Adam’s apple rising and falling with his bow.

Twenty-seven years ago, my dad stood over Nour’s body in our secret wheat field, red-eyed and clutching his shotgun. His Adam’s apple neither rose nor fell as he walked past me, past Nour, past the empty shells at his heels. The next few days, he passed me Adam, unapologetically, perhaps thinking that a kiss from his lips would magically rewire me. And perhaps, he was right.

Tonight, before Adam surrenders to deep sleep, he would still ask, “Margaret, do you love me?” And I would still answer, rising above the darkness, reaching out to Nour’s hand in the wheat field, “I love you.”