2 Chapter 2

“Have a good night, then,” I said.

He was still kind of chuckling, kind of looking at me like maybe I was some half-cocked guest who’d tied up the real employees in the back room, when the elevator doors slid closed on him bidding me the same.

* * * *

“It’s not like I wanted to move back home to my parents’, and it’s not like they were dying to have me back. But I needed to get the heck out of Dubai, and my sisters all had blaring neon No Vacancy signs installed in their yards when word got around I was looking for a place to land; it just kind of happened. I’ll get my own place, obviously, but I’m not trying to sign a lease in Oklahoma, I don’t want to be tied to Tulsa if I don’t have to be. But then my cousin Amira bought this hotel, and we’re almost never a hundred percent full, and if I stay over a couple nights a week in an empty room she feels like the place is being looked after. And with five feet of snow on the ground, what am I gonna do, cross-country ski home? Snowmobile, maybe—that sounds kinda fun, huh? But I don’t have one of those.

“So now I’ve been here like a year and a half, when I first told my parents I was thinking a month at the most. But this way practically all my money goes into savings, and when I do split, I’ll be able to get my feet under me. Maybe I’ll go to Minneapolis, you know: ‘make it after all.’ Ha! Talk about needing a snowmobile. Mine are a desert people, maybe more like Vegas…

“I tried Arizona. Phoenix. Went to ASU, but college wasn’t really for me. Not the ‘school’ part, anyway. The party part, I did alright. Talk about an education. I always knew I was gay, since I was a little kid, but I grew up Muslim on the Great Plains; it just never occurred to me it might ever be something I could act on. Not that my family’s even that conservative—my mother covers her hair, but my sisters don’t—but my whole environment, it was just never an option. Honestly, I just figured everybody had these feelings and married women anyway ‘cause those are like the rules or whatever. Some guys are hetero and go nuts for women—I didn’t figure that out until I started having sex. You know, with other dudes, and I was like oh, wow, this is pretty fun, people do this ‘cause they’re into it. So like, college was fun—real fun—but I flunked out by about Halloween. Meh, I figure it’s more college than a lot of people do.

“So I bounced to L.A. With this guy I was ‘with,’ meaning we’d hooked up at like two parties and they kicked him out of my dorm at the same time. But we were more than just roommates, mostly ‘cause all we could afford was this little studio in Hollywood, and so we slept together on this thrift-store futon and tried to force some kind of couple thing to happen, which basically meant adopting a dog that was totally against our lease and ‘breaking up’ when we got kicked out.

“I’d been waiting tables. No place fancy, just this little Mexican dive up the street from our apartment. But now I pretty much had no place to live, Kyle took the dog, and I had this wad of cash—Paris came to me on a total whim, and I was like, Why not? Bought a plane ticket, found this place on a bulletin board at a mosque, right on the river in the 6th in this little old Lebanese lady’s attic, had to walk up like two hundred stairs every time I came and went, in case I wasn’t skinny enough. I don’t speak hardly any French, but I sure speak Arabic, and the lady I lived with, Mme Khoury, she had this nephew, and he had this corner store, and I knew how to sell cigarettes and make change and work for way below minimum wage under the table, and one day I looked at a calendar and I’d been in France for five years. My hair was almost to my hips, I weighed like a hundred and eight pounds, I was smoking three packs of unfiltered Turkish cigarettes a day, and I could say ‘This isn’t a library; buy something or get out!’ in like nine languages. Khalid, my boss, was also pretty much my boyfriend, even though he had a wife and a girlfriend and had two kids with each of them—we’d go on vacations, me and him, sometimes for weeks. Italy, Greece, once to New York. Where he found the time…Then one day my cousin—my cousin who owns this place? Her brother Hassan—he comes through Paris on his way to the Middle East, I meet him at his hotel for dinner. He wants to open Dubai’s first Olive Garden, bought a franchise with some frat brother he went to Rice with, says I should come and help him manage it. What I knew about Dubai would’ve fit in a housefly’s underpants, but Hassan’s talking about you haven’t lived until you’ve flown Business Class on Emirates, and me and Khalid had gotten in this big fight like two nights before, so like three days after pretty much hearing about it for the first time, I’m in Dubai, in this mall the size of Rhode Island, up to my elbows in unlimited salad and breadsticks. They had this local guy, Tarek, running the kitchen, big meathead with this killer smile, and me and him, we worked together like eight days a week, and he loved making me laugh and, well, let’s just say it would have been better for everybody if the cop who found us going at it in Hassan’s SUV in the mall parking lot hadn’t been Tarek’s fiancée’s brother. I was on a flight to Newark within like seven hours. I called my sister in Atlanta, my sister in Houston, my sister in Mexico City, they were all real sorry, but between kids, in-laws, and promises of back-up excuses, they just didn’t have the room. I didn’t know anybody in New York, I’d never really known anybody but Kyle in L.A., and I found a one-way flight to Tulsa—with three stops, mind you—for a hundred and seventy-nine dollars. Which left me with twenty-one bucks in my pocket, which got me to my parents’ house in an airport shuttle, and now I work here, that’s pretty much my story.”

“So what you’re saying is, you’re a fiercely private person who doesn’t share a lot with strangers?” His laugh was good-natured as he scraped the bottom of a little plastic yogurt with his little plastic spoon. I had spent the night at the hotel—not like I had a choice—and laid out breakfast more or less according to policy, even though at the most it would just be the two of us. Like I might pass up a crack at a free waffle? He’d lumbered into the breakfast nook a little before seven, and I’d been trying to make conversation ever since without coming off as desperately flirty. There was something about this guy…

“Meh. None of my secrets are really juicy enough to bother keeping,” I said, shrugging a shoulder. “And it’s not like you’re really saying anything…”

He laughed again. “That’s fair, I guess. Although you’re a tough act to follow in the life-story department.”

“Yeah, not everybody can top, ‘Once I worked at an Olive Garden.’”

“Honestly I’m not sure I can. I grew up in Albuquerque, went to Chicago for college, been there ever since.”

I looked at him. Raised an eyebrow: Go on.