The Opposite of Chance: A Novel

The Opposite of Chance

A Novel

Margaret Hermes

For Ann Grace Hermes

Take Me to the War

1.

Betsy was not a complete idiot, though, once again, she felt like one. She had been grateful to the travel agent for securing a cheap fare from Montreal to Paris but now, waiting at Mirabel airport for her first transatlantic flight, each time she heard French spoken she thought reflexively that everyone around her was more cultured, except perhaps the young boy sandwiched between his parents who was energetically excavating his nose.

She had grown up in Milwaukee, gone to college in Milwaukee, married in Milwaukee, embarked on graduate school in Milwaukee. She had taken French classes in which she did reasonably well when tested on grammar or vocabulary, but in which her tongue—or arguably the vocal folds of her larynx?—led her to fail dismally in articulation, and therefore in confidence, hence fatally in conversation. Like choking on your own tongue, her sister Gina, who had an obedient larynx, had supplied sympathetically.

She had chosen to pursue a graduate degree in anthropology in part because anthropologists seemed predestined to travel and in part because the study of kinship ties in tribal societies promised to be sparklingly devoid of the unbridled opportunities the Romance languages afforded to garble nasal vowels and the gargled R.

Not only was she unable to pronounce French, she couldn’t hear the language. She had never overheard French outside a classroom in all her years in Milwaukee. German, ja. Polish, tak. Italian, si. Even Serbian, da. But never French, jamais. Her ear could not distinguish between war, guerre, and the train station, gare. The sounds were interchangeable when they were not indecipherable. This would be borne out for her explicitly some days later when she requested a taxi driver to take her to the train station and he replied that there was no war in France, she had missed it by four decades, précisément, by thirty-five years and three months. He would illustrate with hands grasping an invisible Thompson M1928 and saying, Ak-ak-ak, repeatedly, in the universal language of guns.

There were no open seats at her designated gate. That must mean the plane was oversold. She pictured herself discovering another passenger snug and smug in her assigned seat, his boarding pass identical to her own. Prior possession would be enough to ensure that he would go to Europe in her place. She wondered if she would ever get off the ground.

Betsy settled herself at the empty, opposing gate. She looked across the wide aisle nervously, speculating on the odds that her flight would be canceled or her backpack stolen. Her eyes dropped as a man in a rumpled suit approached. From a distance, he looked like a house detective in an old movie. She feared he was coming to chastise her, tell her she should not be seated there, but he walked past her to the large expanse of windows. He rustled through a creased duty-free bag and his dog-eared piece of carry-on luggage in their quiet corner. She watched through half-lidded eyes as he set a compass on the floor. He removed a folded, patterned orange and brown shawl from his carry-on, spread it on the floor, and knelt, his back to her, letting his shoes fall away from the heels of his feet. She noticed that the counters of his shoes folded inward, completely flat, allowing him to compromise with his faith, shoes half off, fitted only on his forefeet.

When he bent his forehead to the shawl she saw that his hair was dyed and the roots matched the gray in his mustache. Why would he dye his hair? This was the kind of question she believed she would be able to answer at the end of her travels.

The area around them started to fill: some families, several women with head scarves, one head wrapped in an improbable Burberry signature beige with red and black plaid. She wondered if she had chosen a gate set aside for Muslims. She had never seen any Muslims before, at least none she was aware of. She wondered if attending Catholic schools from kindergarten through grad school had isolated her more than the typical Milwaukeean, but then she thought, no, if anything, that marked her as a typical Milwaukeean.

The man sat back on his heels and refolded the shawl and retrieved his compass and tucked both into the shopping bag. When he turned away from the window, she was startled by how sensationally, almost aggressively, handsome he was, how refined his features. He looked like a movie star down on his luck, the suit in need of pressing, the hair dyed for his last role. Or a movie star playing someone down on his luck. The warm brown of his skin appeared no deeper than a perfect Hollywood tan.

Was there such a thing as a Muslim movie star? Wouldn’t being a film idol be forbidden? Wasn’t it akin to encouraging the worship of icons?

Whatever his career, she was certain of one thing: he was unmarried. A wife would not let him out into the world looking so at odds with himself. Betsy had spent the preceding decade—all of the 1970s—in the role of wife and so she knew.

Betsy and Greg had married while still in college. It had been like playing house. She pretended that she knew how to cook and mend. He pretended that reading the newspaper completely absorbed his attention, his purpose.

Before long, she was turning out tasty meals on a minuscule budget and turning remnants into curtains and floor cushions, and Greg had found other things to occupy his wandering attention.

They celebrated coupledom. Their friends, even the determinedly, dedicatedly single ones, liked to while away the hours in their much cozier flat with its brick-and-board bookcase and orange-crate end tables and couch of cinderblocks topped by a sheet of plywood and littered with pillows. They all entertained each other, occasionally vaulting into the world outside from this central location. Ruth and Paul were their tennis partners and were ushers alongside them one night of each production at the Milwaukee Rep so they could see theater for free. Caroline and Leo scrounged bikes at yard sales and the four made forays on county roads. Every week Alan and Marilyn and Jan came faithfully to watch Saturday Night Live on Betsy and Greg’s flickering screen. There was a constant parade of companions in and out of their apartment, most of whom seemed to aspire to be just like them someday.

Nine and a half years would expire before she tumbled into the real world: a disproportionate number (disproportionate given that nearly half were male) of the fellow undergrads, later anthropology and philosophy grad students, still later Greg’s colleagues in the philosophy department, who joined them at their table had been auditioning for the part of Greg’s lover. So many of those young women who sipped his Almaden and swallowed her home-baked Swedish rye while circled round an enormous cable spool of rough wood rescued from a construction site proved to be ripe for an extramarital adventure. And continued to sup with them at the thrift store replacement with peeling painted legs but a top scoured down to bare oak. And stayed on at the formal mahogany—bestowed upon her by her warmhearted, white-haired neighbor on Kilbourn who had taught Betsy to crochet before being scuttled off to a nursing home—after making the transition to just friends.

She had been stunned to learn that her dinner parties consisted so lopsidedly of Greg’s former/current/prospective bed partners. These were her friends. In some cases, so were their husbands or boyfriends. If they were not her friends, then who were? And who was she exactly? And what was she to them?

She saw what she was to him. A comfort. A convenience. A wife.

Betsy had learned the excruciating subtext of her marriage from biking buddy Leo whose sweetheart Caroline had enjoyed not one but two separate affairs with Greg. During the last, Leo came to the realization that he was no longer content to be on standby. More than that, he decided he had always been more drawn to steadfast Betsy than to flighty Caroline. His mission was to convince Betsy that she ought to feel the same, so he was obliged to expose Greg’s past/present/probable future.

At first, Betsy didn’t believe Leo. Oh, she believed that Leo had become awkwardly, desperately infatuated with her. She came to think he would do or say any outrageous thing in his campaign to secure her affections. She tolerated—and admitted to herself that she was flattered by—his persistence. It seemed like an eternity since anyone had paid her that kind of attention. She and Greg were long settled into their husband-and-wife roles, so she let Leo wax on about her glossy hair, her liquid eyes, her milky skin, but she drew the line at his talking about Greg.

She remained full of faith in her husband, who could not manage to be faithful for a week at a time, until the afternoon Leo engineered a restaurant lunch with their mutual friend Ruth. Leo alluded to Ruth’s relationship with Greg, and Ruth took issue with his verb tense. Oh, stop it, Leo. Greg and I haven’t slept together in at least four years.

Betsy actually fell off her chair. Later, she wondered if one or the other of her two close friends had pulled the chair out from under her literally as well as figuratively.

Ruth had been distressed by Betsy’s tumble, by her spiraling down. Oh, God, she said, her face as white as the restaurant’s bleached table linen, I always thought you knew. I thought it didn’t matter to you. You seemed to genuinely like Caroline and Jan and the others. And me. I thought you were cool with it. Like Paul was. We all thought you knew. Ruth didn’t mean to be cruel. There was no mistaking it: she was genuinely stricken, the more so because she could witness the immediate effect the words the others and we all had just had upon her friend.

It’s the ‘70s, Ruth said, as though the decade just ending explained or excused everything. Everybody’s doing it.

Not everybody, Leo said, laying his broad hand over Betsy’s delicate one that was gripping and bunching the tablecloth.

Was everybody lying about it, too? Betsy asked. Or was everybody just lying to me? She reimagined her dinner parties as complex conclaves of intrigue and lust. She wondered if it was lust or boredom that propelled Greg. She remembered that when she had expressed disapproval of their friends and acquaintances who hopped from one bed to another, Greg would cluck his tongue in accord. She had said that it wasn’t so much that their promiscuity meant they were immoral as that they were unmoored. Greg had agreed, declaring himself lucky to have fastened onto her as his anchorage. Right here, she told herself, sitting in this restaurant, hunched over a plate of shrimp Newburg gone cold, everything changes.

At first Greg resisted the divorce. But then he came to understand Betsy was done with housekeeping.

Betsy moved out of their flat and into the house of her sister and her sister’s husband and their twin boys. Gina and Matt lived in the suburb of Waukesha, where residents had safely eluded the 1970s. They managed to bypass the lanky era of bell-bottoms and long, straight hair and march directly into the puffy decade of shoulder pads and big hair.

Betsy shed her old life and her old friends. She didn’t take anything with her except some of her clothes and all of her books and half of their record albums. She didn’t even take the beloved mahogany table. Especially not that.

She had been struggling with her dissertation. Now she decided she didn’t want to pursue a doctorate in anthropology after all. She didn’t want to resume any part of the life she had shared with Greg or cross paths with any of the people she used to know. Half of them were women and she would be wondering darkly about all of those. She told her sister that she wouldn’t have made a very good anthropologist anyway. Clearly, the study of mating habits was beyond her.

As though she had always had a backup plan, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, emerging two years later with a Master’s of Library Science. Tired of going to school—she been doing that for twenty-seven of her thirty-two years—she opted to take the proficiency exam rather than undertake a master’s thesis.

She wondered if she had elected an emphasis in children’s and young adult literature because or in spite of her inability to conceive. Her periods had never been regular. Gina, whose bad cramps arrived every twenty-eight days, a finely timed affliction, always told her sister she envied her—Betsy could go months without even spotting. At her weakest moment, Betsy asked herself if Greg had sought fulfillment elsewhere because she couldn’t bear him children. Perhaps his straying was a form of loyalty, his way of not abandoning her and her barren womb. Perhaps he had been accommodating his disappointment and sparing them both the constant, nagging sorrow of it. When she voiced this to her sister, Gina found a therapist who disabused Betsy of that notion. Worth her weight in gold, frankincense, or myrrh, Gina patted herself on the back.

Betsy clutched the fake leather arms of her seat as she saw the sign behind the desk at her designated gate change first in French then in English. Her flight would be delayed for two hours. Two additional hours of speculating on the pitfalls awaiting her if she ever actually boarded and if her seat turned out to be unoccupied.

Betsy followed the unsettlingly handsome middle-aged Muslim with her eyes as he walked away from the gate. Then she followed him with her feet.

He made his way to the food court on their concourse and stood, weary, bags suspended from both arms, like a dusty traveler from the past. She thought of caravans and the Silk Road. After three full minutes of indecision, he stepped up to one of the counters. Betsy got into line at a kiosk that sold coffee and croissants. She wondered if Muslims were permitted to drink coffee or if they were forbidden not just alcohol but all stimulants as well. Or was she confusing them with Mormons? Could either of their tribes enjoy a Coke? When she turned around with her paper cup of steaming café au lait, her Muslim was nowhere to be seen.

The extent of her disappointment surprised her, especially since she had no intention of trying to make contact. She had wanted just to observe him, in part for something to fill the time and in part because looking at him was its own reward. She found an empty seat at one of the scattered tables and stared despondently into the oily swirl of coffee and milk.

Pardon me. May I join you?

She looked up to find him—him!—standing awkwardly, his bags hanging by their straps from his forearms, his hands balancing a tray. She nodded dumbly and he set the tray down very slowly, so that the bags would not swing forward and jostle the soup and—aha!—the coffee on his tray, and then he sat opposite her. She was pleasantly conscious of heads turning in their direction.

In my country, he explained, meals are taken in common. A solitary meal is—he extended his hands, palms up, as if holding the concept out between them—indigestible. He shrugged.

Where is your country? she managed, despite his eyes, which were an unexpected green. She couldn’t believe that she was sitting across from him, talking to him. Rather, she couldn’t believe he had chosen her.

Oh, he blinked, his long lashes brushing his cheeks, my country would be Canada now. But I was speaking of Lebanon.

You’re Lebanese. She wanted to keep him talking. She found his accent—which she could only describe as French—improved her outlook, even her posture.

I am afraid there is no such identity.

She looked her puzzlement back at him.

There are Phalangists and Palestinians and Kurds and Armenians in the country of my birth. There are Muslims and Jews and a dozen different flavors of Christians. There are the various Syrian forces—Saheka, Yarmouk, As Sai’qa. If we are not talking about political factions or religious faiths or the sects within them, then we are talking about partisans fighting in the name of their town. We are Zghortiotes or Tripolitans, but we are not Lebanese. And every group has their own fighting force. That is civil war in Lebanon.

I’m sorry, she said, feeling that she was getting tutored in both politics and perspective and extending her regrets for her deficits in both. Her own worries were trifling, his profound.

He smiled at her, and for a moment, she stopped breathing. He was more beautiful than Robert Redford or Richard Chamberlain. Yes, but that was apples to oranges. He was more beautiful than Warren Beatty or Sean Connery. Still not right. Omar Sharif. He was more beautiful than any of them and their more handsome brothers.

I’m exposing my ignorance, she said when she resumed breathing, but I’m really confused by your war. It’s called a civil war, but on the news it sounds more like a war between Lebanon and Syria. And I know there’s been bombing by Israel. But I’m not sure who their target is.

It is confusing even for those fighting in it. According to the president of Syria, Lebanon itself does not exist. Or should not. He has said that Lebanon and Syria are one country and one people. He thinks they should have one government.

His.

Already you understand more than most.

They talked for another hour, Betsy asking him about the city of Beirut, where he had been raised, and he reciprocated by questioning her about growing up in Milwaukee. He told her that she would have found much of the Beirut of his childhood indistinguishable from Europe. The architecture, the automobiles. Even the clothing. Except for what men wore on their heads. In the 1930s a man living in the city might wear a fedora or straw boater with his suit and tie or he might wear a tarboosh or a turban.

Betsy described running in the streets of the North Side of Milwaukee with her playmates in the 1950s behind trucks that sprayed entire neighborhoods with DDT. An enormous traveling cloud of thick white mist. My sister and I used to run with our arms outstretched, as if we were trying to embrace it. The thrill was that you couldn’t see. You were in the cloud and you were running blindly to stay inside it. We were more than blind, we were oblivious to any danger. And so, I guess, were our parents. I am amazed at all the things parents didn’t worry about back then.

He told her that his parents were accomplished worriers and that they had successfully passed this skill on down to their son. It was my mother’s worry that finally got me to leave our country, taking the family with me, of course.

When did you leave?

Three years ago. In ’78. Not as soon as my mother would have liked. But I am being unfair. Not as soon as I should have. Everything that wasn’t being destroyed by the war was being transformed by it, including my job.

At last she could ask, And what was that? She had developed a practice since her divorce of assessing male character traits and manners: Like Greg and Not like Greg. She was certain (though she recognized she had a poor track record in judging such matters) that the man sitting opposite her was not a womanizer. At any rate, he wasn’t womanizing her. Which made her all the more curious about the dyed hair. She felt his profession