An Unnecessary Woman Read Free Page B

wife into our crumbly nest. Having more than one wife wasn’t common in Beirut even then. He’d have been the only one in the neighborhood with two wives, but he could have done it.
    My mother wanted me to be grateful. He may have rejected me as superfluous waste, he may have treated me as merely the dispensable product of his rib, but still I should be appreciative. “He divorced you. You can remarry a gentle widower or maybe a suitor of women more seemly who has been rejected a few times. Consider yourself fortunate.”
    Fortunate? For my mother, being a pathetic suitee was a cut above being a neglected second wife. She couldn’t conceive of a world in which my husband didn’t hold all the cards. In her world, husbands were omnipotent, never impotent. Mine thought of me as the cause of his humiliation and probably continued to blame his other wives. He couldn’t risk having his women talk to one another.
    I would have loved to chat with his second wife, or his third. Did he continue to wear his ridiculously large hat that cruelly emphasized his small head? I could have asked, “In all the years of marriage, did you ever see his penis? Did that shrivelly appendicle ever reach half-mast? When did he surrender? When did he end his fumbling humiliation in the dark? Was it a year, six months, a couple? I hazard it was merely a month. He pursued the charade for seven months with me.”
    In The Science of Right, Kant wrote, “Marriage is the union of two persons of different sexes for the purpose of lifelong mutual possession of each other’s sexual organs.”
    Kant obviously hadn’t met my husband.
    Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family.
    As a young woman, I was so frustrated never to have seen a man naked that I used to wait until my husband snored before lifting the covers, lighting a match within the enveloping womb of the mosquito net, and examining his body under his buttoned cottons. Ah, the disappointment of discovering a worm in place of the monster. Of this I was supposed to be afraid? This, the forge of fertility? Yet I couldn’t rein in my curiosity. Ecce homo. I looked every chance I had, by the light of a match, not a candle, because when quickly extinguished its smoke was not as incriminating. The steady snores, the deep breathing, the lost world of sleep. Never once caught, never discovered.
    Fifteen years ago, at sixty-one, my husband died, a solitary passenger on a public bus, his head leaning at an awkward angle against the murky window. The bus drove two full routes, passengers ascending and alighting, before the driver realized he was keeping company with a lifeless man. Sometimes death arrives quietly.
    Wanting to put him to rest once more, I attended his burial, his final interment. No keening or wailing at his funeral. In the open casket, he lay dead. Someone had combed his hair flat and awkward, as if he’d just taken off his imbecilic hat. Seated all around me, the mourning women could not help but giggle and gossip. He had died with an erection that would not relent, priapism in the final throes, an irony worthy of Svevo.
    In death Eros triumphed, while in life Thanatos had. My husband was a Freudian dyslexic.
    Death is the only vantage point from which a life can be truly measured. From my vantage point, as I watched men I didn’t recognize carry my ex-husband’s coffin away, I measured his life and found it wanting.
    I realize that I haven’t mentioned my husband’s name. It isn’t intentional. It’s just that I can call him my husband and that defines him.
    There are many reasons for not naming a character or someone you’re writing about. You might want to have the book be entirely about the main narrator, or maybe you want the character to remain ephemeral, less fully fleshed.
    I have no such reasons, I’m afraid. He was Sobhi Saleh, a leaden