Then their neighbor, Mrs. Hamidi, mentioned her friend's son. He was a doctor in America, a pathologist with a good-paying nine-to-five job and no on-calls, and he happened to be home right now for a three-week visit. His mother thought it was time he got married. She had been introducing him to various young women even though he said he wasn't interested.
Mrs. Hamidi came to tea, bringing her friend and the friend's son, Kiyan. He was a tall, stooped, serious man in a dark gray business suit, and to Maryam he had seemed quite old, it amused her now to recall. (He'd been all of twenty-eight.) But she liked his face. He had thick eyebrows and a large, imposing nose, and the corners of his mouth gave away his thoughts, mostly turning downward at the older women's insinuations but once or twice twitching upward when Maryam made some caustic response. She could tell that Kiyan's mother found her impertinent, but what did she care? She was planning to marry for love, perhaps when she was thirty.
The women discussed the weather, which was warming up early this year. Maryam's mother announced that her rosebushes had begun to send out green shoots. Everybody's eyes traveled to Maryam and Kiyan, who had been nudged into adjacent chairs at the start of the visit. Maryam jon, her mother said in honeyed tones, wouldn't you like to show Agha Doctor the roses?
Maryam sighed audibly and stood up. Kiyan made a grumbling noise but he stood too.
As in every living room that Maryam had ever seen, the dozens of straight-backed chairs lining the walls framed a giant square of empty space, and she and Kiyan had to cross this space in order to leave. When they reached the center, some demon seized her and she stopped short, turned toward all those staring women, and performed a snatch of the Charleston the part where the hands crisscross saucily over the knees. Not a person moved. Maryam turned and walked on out, followed by Kiyan.
In the courtyard, she gestured toward the scratchy bare shrubs and said, Notice the roses.
The corners of Kiyan's lips were twitching upward again, she saw.
Also the fountain, the jasmine, the full moon, and the nightingale, she said.
There was no moon, of course, and no nightingale either, but she flung one arm toward where they might have been.
Kiyan said, I'm sorry about this.
She turned to look at him more closely.
It wasn't my idea, he said.
He had the faintest difference in his speech. It was not a real accent, and it was certainly not an affectation. (Unlike the speech of her cousin Amin, who had returned from America pretending such an unfamiliarity with Farsi that he had once referred to a rooster as the husband of the hen.) But you could tell that Kiyan was out of practice with his native tongue. This made him seem less authoritative, and younger than she had first thought. She found herself warming to him. She said, It wasn't my idea either.
Somehow I guessed that, he said, and this time the corners of his mouth lifted into a smile.
They sat down on a stone bench and discussed what had happened to the country since he had been away. I hear there have been demonstrations against our mighty Shah of Shahs, he said. My, what bad, rude people, and the two of them dissolved in silent laughter. They exchanged their views about politics, and human rights, and the status of women. On every issue they agreed. They interrupted each other to spill out their tumbles of thoughts. Then after half an hour or so Kiyan cocked his head toward the house, and she followed his eyes and saw three of her aunts clustered at a window. When the aunts realized they had been noticed, they shrank hastily out of sight. Kiyan grinned at Maryam. We've given them quite a thrill, he said.
Maryam said, Poor old things.
Let's go to a movie tomorrow. They'll be in heaven.
She laughed and said, Why not?
They went to a movie the next evening, and to a kebab house the day after that a university holiday and that evening to a party at the home of one of his friends. This happened to be a period when young women had more freedom than at any other time before or after, in spite of Maryam's complaints, and her family thought nothing of letting her go unchaperoned. Besides, it was understood that Kiyan's intentions were honorable. He and Maryam would almost surely be getting married.
But they had no interest in marrying. They agreed that marriage was limiting and confining, a state that people settled for when they wanted to reproduce.
At night she began to feel his presence in her dreams. He never physically appeared, but she caught a whiff of his nutmeg scent; she felt his looming height beside her as she walked; she was conscious of his particular grave, amused regard.
It was unfortunate that by the time they first met, he had already been in the country for five days of the twenty-one planned. The end of his visit drew closer. The women in Maryam's family became more anxious, their questions more pointed. A hopeful-looking uncle or two began popping into view any time Kiyan paid a call.
Maryam pretended not to notice. She acted breezy and unconcerned.
One day after her English class she was descending a long flight of steps with two friends when she caught sight of Kiyan waiting at the bottom. Spring had backed off somewhat, and he wore a casual brown corduroy jacket with the collar turned up. It made him look very American, all at once; very other. He was gazing away from her toward some people boarding a bus. The sight of his strong, pronounced profile sent a knife of longing straight through her.
He turned then and saw her, and he watched without smiling as she approached. When they were face-to-face, he told her, Maybe we should do what they want.
She said, All right.
You would come with me to America?
She said, I would come.
They set off walking together, Maryam hugging her books to her chest and Kiyan keeping his hands deep in his jacket pockets.
As it happened, there was no way she could go with him when he left, a mere four days later. They had a long-distance ceremony that June Kiyan in Baltimore on the phone, Maryam in Tehran in her Western-style floor-length wedding dress with guests from both families surrounding her. The next evening, she left for America. Her mother held a Koran above Maryam's head as Maryam walked out the front door of the family compound, and all the women were crying. You would never guess that they had been praying for this to happen since the day she was arrested.
She had not been one of those Iranians who viewed America as the Promised Land. To her and her university friends, the U. S. was the great disappointer the democracy that had, to their mystification, worked to shore up the monarchy back when the Shah was in trouble. So she set out for her new country half excited and half resistant. (But underneath, shamefully rejoicing that she would never have to attend another political meeting.) The main thing was, she was joining Kiyan. Not even her closest girlfriends knew how Kiyan had grown to fill every inch of her head. When she stepped into the Baltimore airport and saw him waiting, wearing a short-sleeved shirt that showed his unfamiliar, thin arms, she experienced a moment of shock. Could this be the same person she had daydreamed of all these weeks?
She was nineteen years old and had never cooked a meal, or washed a floor, or driven an automobile. But clearly Kiyan took it for granted that she would somehow manage. Either he lacked the most basic sense of empathy or he had a gratifying respect for her capabilities. Sometimes she thought it was the first and sometimes the second, depending on the day. She had good days and she had bad days more of the bad, to begin with. Twice she packed to go home. Once she called him selfish and dumped a whole crock of yogurt onto his dinner plate. Couldn't he see how alone she felt, a mere woman, undefended?
Telephoning overseas was not so common back then, and so she wrote her mother letters. She wrote, I am adjusting very well and I have made several friends and I am feeling very comfortable here; and in time, that became true. She enrolled in driver's ed and earned her license; she took evening courses at Towson State; she gave her first dinner party. It began to dawn on her that Kiyan was not as acclimated to American life as she had once supposed. He dressed more formally than his colleagues, and he didn't always get their jokes, and his knowledge of colloquial English was surprisingly scanty. Instead of disenchanting her, this realization made him seem dearer. At night they slept curled together like two cashews. She loved to press her nose into the thick damp curls of hair on the back of his neck.