Reboot
I FLEW BACK to Cairo the next day wearing a beautiful diamond ring with a platinum band on the fourth finger of my left hand. I had a month to finish up current assignments, people to say goodbye to, and a few days in which to do a handover to my replacement.
Adam Arshad Richardson was a young, darkly handsome journalist in his late twenties. He explained that his mother was Iranian and she had come to the US when the Shah was expelled in 1979. His father was a high school English teacher and had been volunteering to teach English to the newly arrived refugees.
Adam was the youngest of three children, the only son and the only one of his siblings who’d ever been to the Middle East.
He was excited about his new posting, mentioning casually that he’d had a girlfriend back home but had broken it off when he’d been offered the job.
His faintly patronizing comments told me that he thought women weren’t cut out to be foreign correspondents: “too emotional,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to distance yourself from the story, stay professional.”
I had to bite my tongue. It wasn’t that I completely disagreed with his view, but understanding the emotions of the people I interviewed was what made a story relatable to readers back home. I was only five years older than him, but that was five years of experience on the front line.
Even so, he made me feel like a stereotype—the little woman who gave it all up to go home and get married.
When he asked me what I’d been working on, I showed him the stories from Sharm, Amsterdam and Zataari. He was a little more respectful after that.
I gave him my list of contacts too, and at first, there was some tension between him and my fabulous fixer Asim. I suppose it was competition to see who’d be top dog, but after a couple of days they soon saw that working together was going to be mutually beneficial. I had high hopes that they’d figure it out. Asim had been invaluable in smoothing my entry into Egyptian politics: Adam would need him.
Asim took me out for a cup of Koshary tea on my penultimate day. It was prepared the traditional way by steeping black tea in boiled water, letting it to brew for several minutes, then adding cane sugar and fresh mint leaves.
“It has been an honor working with you, Miss Emjay,” he said. “I have told my daughters all about you. I have always believed education is important for girls. It’s not easy for them to see that because female unemployment is so great. We had our first female cabinet minister in 1962, Hekmat Abu Zeid, but I am afraid progression is slowing down, even reversing. We have to keep fighting for our rights. Thank you for being a part of that.”
I was surprised and touched by his words. Asim had always been very reserved with me, very formal. It felt good to know that he’d appreciated my efforts.
For the first time, I saw myself through his eyes: a Westerner, a woman, coming to his country to write about it with no previous knowledge of Egypt. I was proud that I’d been able to exceed his expectations, but I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t seen the assignment through.
I wished him and his family well and, as was the local custom, we exchanged gifts. For Asim, I’d bought a fountain pen with an eagle’s head engraved on the silver nib. For his wife and daughters I played it safe and gave jars of American jelly and several boxes of hard candy. I’d also decided not to worry about the cost and bought five pairs of different Ray Ban sunglasses: Aviators for Asim because they were so macho, and a variety of Wayfarers for his wife and daughters.
As was socially acceptable, Asim’s gift to me was ostensibly from his wife, a gorgeous dark blue leather laptop case from the Egyptian designer brand Wali’s, and a small silver bracelet in the Nubian style.
“Come and see us again, Miss Emjay,” he urged as we said our goodbyes.
I promised to stay in touch which wasn’t the same thing at all because I already knew that it wouldn’t be easy for me to get permission to travel here if I was married to a Marine. There were very strict rules about where you could visit abroad; one of Jack’s friends had been denied permission to travel to Mexico, which astonished me. And I realized with a pang that there would be a lot of places I wouldn’t be able to visit.
I’d already discussed this with my new employers and they’d promised they could work around it, but a sense of panic shot through me—I was giving up an awful lot to be with Jack.
Then I shoved the thought away. He was worth any restrictions his job made on mine.
My last night was spent with Adam, a slightly strained dinner, but the polite thing to do. Not only was he moving into my job, but he’d also taken over the rent of my apartment, so I was staying in a hotel. At least the air conditioning worked.
Gently, I tried to give him some tips, but he seemed more interested in finding out about local nightclubs. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep about it. He’d find his own way—we all did.
And so I said goodbye to Egypt, a beautiful, uncertain country clinging to the north of Africa and a culture that stretched back thousands of years. I wondered when or if I’d ever return.
I arrived back in New York in early January to find it snowbound with worse weather closing in. Sidewalks were slick with ice, the daytime slush refreezing as temperatures plummeted with the sunset to well below freezing, and traffic crawled along slower than a caravan of camels.
Shivering, wearing all the wrong clothes, I lugged my suitcases and bags into the first cab that deigned to stop, returning home to an icy and empty apartment.
The radiators hadn’t been on for months, and a friend who’d been looking after the place and watering my plants had left a message apologizing because she’d promised to turn the heating on, but had gotten stuck at work and didn’t want to risk traveling across town in such bad weather.
The refrigerator was empty, too, and I couldn’t face going out to buy milk, so I drank some aging instant coffee black and munched on a couple of slightly dusty-tasting Pop Tarts that were only a month past their eat-by date.
I pulled a thick quilt over my shoulders and gazed around the apartment, looking at the black and white photographs that I’d taken on assignments; the photograph of my parents, and another of me with my dad; one with Jackson at his mom’s home, sitting on the porch like an old married couple. I remembered that photo because I was trying not to make it obvious to his mom that he had his hand up my skirt at the time. Even now, I could see the mischievous glint in his dark blue eyes.
I was dreading packing up another place, but my home was in San Diego now, with Jack.
Just as I was feeling a little lonely and a lot sorry for myself, shivering in my slowly warming apartment, my cell phone rang and Jack’s photo lit the screen.
“Hey, sugar! Welcome back to the US of A. How are you?”
“Jack! Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice. Yes, I’m okay. Cold, though! There’s a foot of snow on the sidewalks and there’s another storm coming in. It’s going to be a complete whiteout.”
“Sounds bad, and it’s pretty cold here, too. I’ve been shivering through PT in thirty-five degrees. Last time I was here it was eighty-five degrees and the mosquitoes were as big as squirrels.”
He pronounced it ‘skwurls’ and I loved the warmth of his southern accent. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the heat of his large, solid body.
I knew he was in a training class at Camp Lejune in North Carolina. I didn’t know exactly what was involved in this training, although he sounded happy but tired.
“I’ve missed you,” I said honestly.
“I’ve missed you too, sugar. But it won’t be for much longer.”
He was only 500 miles away and I was so tempted to hop on another plane and fly down to Wilmington, but we were working with a deadline of March 13th for our wedding and I had so much to do here.
I wasn’t superstitious about the date in fact I welcomed it. Our love had begun in the most unprepossessing circumstances when I was nearly killed and Jack had saved my life. It seemed symbolic to me—there could be nothing worse, so why worry?
I knew that wasn’t very rational thinking, but love isn’t rational. The ancient Greeks believed that the fickle gods made humans fall in love for their own amusement, enjoying the chaos and disorder that would surely follow. Well, if that was the case, bring it on.
Besides, it would be a small wedding, Jack’s mother the only parent we had between us, and with my friends spread all over the world, I wasn’t expecting many to fly out to San Diego. The thought made me sad: Dad would have been so proud, so happy to walk me down the aisle to marry the man I loved.
I basked in the warmth of Jack’s voice, so much closer now that we were in the same country on the same continent, but still too far away.
I fell asleep on the sofa listening to the rise and fall of his warm words and when I woke up hours later, my phone was stuck to my cheek.