Nonfiction, Leena Sulahri
I
It's a Wednesday afternoon. I am working from home on my couch. I find myself profoundly, unbelievably sad, with no understanding as to why. I cry a few times out of nowhere. My girlfriend is at work. When she comes home, I tell her that I've been feeling strange. “It's not hormones,” I say. “Maybe I've dislodged something in therapy that I'm not aware of.”
We're headed to Canada for the weekend. My girlfriend has an idealized notion of family that I find unrelatable, and wants to meet mine. I tell her that they're dysfunctional and homophobic and that Pakistanis are very different to Americans; even so, she insists. My sister has a nine-month-old baby who I am making an effort to see when I can, so in spite of my misgivings, we go.
Over the next few days, en route and while there, the spells of sadness continue. They're strange and bodily, and I am very confused. I feel this way but don't know why. It happens frequently enough that I have time to pay close attention to how it feels. It comes in waves, onset not predictable. At one point I'm standing in the mall at the back of a store, and I feel like something has been yanked out of me. Wires being jerked out of a console come to mind, except they yank the face of the console out with them. I feel like I'm leaking into the ether.
By Friday night my girlfriend realized that my relatives are not going to give her the reception or ebullient "family time" I think she envisioned. My sister, homophobic at best, isn't warm. Her husband, whom we are not out to, is standoffish and curt, I suspect uncertain how to interact with the strange white woman in his house. My girlfriend is disappointed. She goes to bed early that night, and I spend time with the baby. When I come to bed, I wake her because I am crying on her stomach. I think she's starting to worry that something is very wrong with me, as am I.
Late the next night, I see I have a voicemail. Someone has made several attempts to call. The message is from Nancy, the younger sister of one of my best friends. My friend Layla is dead, a few days before she would have turned 27.
II
We go for a walk even though it's late and cold. I am aware even as we wander the orange-lit streets of my sister's subdivision of the reels that play in my head, all memories of Layla. It's a strange kind of double-consciousness, like nothing I've ever experienced before, a movie being projected behind everything. The memories go back to when we first met as children when we were six.
In our younger years, she and I would roller-skate together, climb trees together. We had a kind of ritual where we would meet and picnic under a tree, contributing things that we had in our respective houses but were taboo in one another's. She would bring Lion bars and other chocolate. I would boil water in the microwave and then gingerly walk a hot and precariously covered container of cup noodles, which she loved but her parents refused to buy, to our picnic spot.
She moved when I was 11, and I didn't see her again until I ended up in New York City when I was 19. The love of good food- and by then, drink- continued, and there were many evenings when we were young adults in the city that we'd go out for decadent dinners followed by dessert and late-night espresso.
There are other memories. I remembered the penchant for experimentation in clothing and style that started for her in sixth grade. Spending time with her boyfriend just out of college, a skinny Asian goth fellow who had angel wings tattooed the whole way down his back. Being out and drinking together in Pittsburgh, New York, Amsterdam. Flashes and flashes come to me on the walk, through the night, and all the next day.
III
There is going to be a memorial, Nancy tells me, on Monday morning. I book an early return. Nancy says that I am invited since I am the best friend, and so is "the boyfriend."
Strange, I think. I have no idea who the boyfriend could be. Layla had been out, ostensibly as gay, for years. Was this one of her clients? Her subs? In the haze of trying to comprehend the news, I don't think to ask Nancy who she is talking about. Layla had many friends, coworkers, and colleagues, but only the boyfriend and I are invited to the service. I suspect the family doesn't want to meet her community, given what they know about her life.
It dawns on me at some point that I've been in grief for several days now. I don't know what to do with this. Nancy said that Layla had likely died on Wednesday and was found on Friday, and only on Saturday were they able to reach me. I am still getting those awful waves of sadness, only now I am able to put a reason to the feeling. I know why I'm crying.
IV
The last time I saw Layla, we'd met in Union Square about six weeks before she died, just after Thanksgiving, on what must have been an unseasonably warm day since we sat on the wall by the George Washington statue in the park. She talked about how much her relationship with her family had deteriorated. In my memory, the situation was very much sad and hopeless. By now they knew more about her lifestyle, and being conservative Orthodox Christians from the Levant, obviously didn't like it. I realize in hindsight that she'd made veiled intimations that day of what was actually going on for her.
I play our last conversation over and over in my mind on the flight back to New York. I am filled with dread about going to the funeral and seeing her parents. I know these people well, having practically grown up in their house, but haven't seen them in a decade and a half. I picture them asking me how long it has been since we had seen each other. The honest answer is that I saw less of her in that last year, that we'd drifted. My heart aches when I think about it. Would they ask me whether she'd talked about them, and what she'd said? I have no idea what I will tell them.
Layla had done a good job concealing her double life. By her early twenties, she was already highly accomplished, with many of the trappings of adult success. Always precocious, she had begun college in New York at 16, graduating in three years. She had a successful PR job. Post-9/11, during the real estate downturn in NYC, she'd bought an apartment in a doorman building in Midtown East. All this by 24.
The part that Layla didn't initially disclose to her parents, and that they are now aware of, is that she had been moonlighting as a professional dominatrix for years. Not out of necessity, not out of need. My understanding is that she started in college. This was a large cause of the rift between her and her family. I wonder, based on snippets of what she's told me that don't quite add up, how much I don't know.
I soon learn that there's a great deal that I don't know.
V
The summer I turned 19 was a formative one for me. I figured out I was queer, and had my first experience with a woman. I developed my strategy of taking courses in interesting places as a way to travel and get out of Pittsburgh, where I went to college, and avoiding going home to visit family. I had signed up to take a business French course in New York- sensible, given that I was going to be an economics major. But as I was going through the course catalog, another one caught my eye: Sexual Diversity in Society. I took that instead.
The last communication Layla and I had had before that summer was about how excited she was to be going to New York for college. Once I arrived and settled in, I called directory services in the city where her family lived to get their home phone number. A young man answered, who I realized was her baby brother, 9 years her junior, who had been a toddler when I last saw him. We conversed briefly. He gave me her number.
We met in the East Village. She was living in Alphabet City with the skinny fellow with the angel wings. She had just finished college and was working in PR. Her style was exuberantly goth. "Goth goth gotthidy goth goth," she called it, which I thought was hilarious.
She disclosed to me that she was working as a dominatrix in addition to her PR job. I remember my initial reaction was puzzlement. I had only a vague understanding of what S&M was and absorbed the usual, predictable stigma and prejudice. I remember thinking that something must have been psychologically wrong with her, in the same naïve way that people I grew up with wondered whether the same was true for me when I disclosed my queerness. My first question was likely, does that mean you have sex with your clients? (No.) My second, on learning more of what the work entailed, was probably- they pay you for that? (Yes. Quite a lot.)
Layla was full of stories- gleeful ones, off-color ones, strange ones. It became clear to me that she enjoyed the work. Her parents didn't know. She told me a story about how in college she bought an outfit from a store on St. Mark's Place called Religious Sex. She'd put 300 dollars on her parents’ credit card. When they called to ask her about it, she said there must have been a typo on the statement. The store was called Religious Sects, she told them, and she'd spent the money on 50 bibles for distribution to the poor. “They believed you?” I asked. She shrugged.
VI
The service is held on Park Avenue in Brooklyn, in a no-frills funeral parlor with a dropped ceiling. Her parents are there, as are her two brothers and Nancy. I arrive before the boyfriend does. He has mistaken the Park Avenue address for being in Manhattan and is rushing over in a cab.
They have reserved the first portion of time for immediate family only. By the time I get there, they have closed the casket. It is a bit shocking for me to see her father, whom I remember as a serious and unsmiling man growing up, crying. I can feel everyone's heartbreak.
I hesitantly ask the mother when they had last seen her. I expect the answer to be months, maybe years. Her response surprises me. “Three weeks ago,” she says. “She came home for Christmas, and it was a wonderful visit.”
In that moment I decide to keep my mouth shut and my ears open.
When the boyfriend arrives he goes straight to the casket, puts his head on his arms, and sobs. He has a large bouquet with him that he leaves on top. He looks genuinely heartbroken. I feel for him.
I'm also trying to place him. He's tall, skinny, white. I have seen this guy before. His name is Devon. I know him as a friend of hers, and she'd referred to him as a sub, implying– or letting me think– that he was a client. I'd seen them out together once when by chance we'd ended up in the same bar one night. And it had been a while since that happened. Who exactly was he to her?
I do my best to mask my bemusement as Devon speaks to me as if I should know who he is. I listen as each of the family members talk about how magical the visit they'd just had with her over Christmas was.
Something is beginning to dawn on me.
VII
Getting reacquainted with Layla that summer I turned 19, the summer that I was figuring out my own sexuality, the same summer I was learning about sociological and anthropological approaches to sexual diversity, set me on the path that determined my research interests for years to come. Sophomore year, I wrote my history research paper on psychiatric understandings of lesbianism during WWII, the first in what became a long line of history of psychiatry projects. Junior year, I chose S&M subcultures for my anthropology research topic. By then, in no small part because of hearing Layla talk about her work, I'd worked off the stigma I had associated with non-normative sexuality.
My anthropology research seminar professor, however, had not. When I told him that I wanted to do an ethnography of Layla's commercial dungeon, he was deeply distressed and at a loss for what to do. It was discussed at multiple faculty meetings. “Safety is a concern,” he said. “And what if your parents call me?” “Trust me,” I said, “that won't be an issue.” His skittishness made him withhold approval for the project for much of the semester. Eventually I got permission to proceed, with only a few weeks remaining, with conditions. I couldn't physically go to the site. I had to conduct my interviews in writing. My classmates had already gotten a start on their ethnographies, so I agreed and did what I could. The final product wasn't stellar, but it did give me a better understanding of my friend's world. I was particularly proud of the title. I called it The Domme Next Door: Stereotypes and Perspectives from Inside a Subculture.
VIII
Her parents have hired an Orthodox priest to give the service. As he speaks, he consults a piece of paper in his– notebook? Bible? whatever he has in his hands– for her name, which he pronounces… mostly correctly. This must be an awkward part of the job, eulogizing people he doesn’t know.
I think of all the people who are not in attendance, who weren’t invited. The coworkers from her day job, the people she talked about from her work at the dungeon, all of our mutual friends. The parts of her life that didn’t mix, that don’t get to mix now even in death.
The father hands the priest a check afterward, which he folds and places in his book. My mind ticks briefly to the latex nun’s habit Layla told me about wearing one Halloween. Then it goes to the chainmail bikini she made herself, by hand, and wore out under a trench coat a few Halloweens before that. Then I think of all the clergy people she talked about who would come into the dungeon as clients, from across religions, including her least favorite client, a rabbi whose whole kink was talking about kosher food (to these “fallen women,” presumably) in three hour time blocks. “Easy money,” she said, “but horrifically boring.”
I find the priest to be an interesting choice. She would have thought so, too.
IX
Even though New York is a huge city, we knew an improbable number of people in common. My RA for the summer, Lucas, was Layla's RA when she was in college. Two people she worked with at the PR firm were in the same theater company as my high school friend Jessica's boyfriend.
To me, Layla was a childhood friend. Roller skating. Trees, picnics. To them, however, I know she read differently, as someone intimidating, formidable, sexualized. For the ones who knew that she worked at a commercial dungeon, or even the ones who didn't, that was their primary way of understanding her. (To be fair, I'd always been a little intimidated by her too. But that's because I'd always thought she was smarter than me. And she had a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. And she had certain markers of success and stability at 23 that I still struggle with in my 40s.)
Jessica's theater company boyfriend was someone I never warmed up to, in no small part because the first I heard of him was from Layla. Before he and Jessica started dating, he had tried to enlist Layla into talking her into a threesome with him. Layla obviously didn't. But she did call me up to tell me about it. What a sleazebag, I thought. Layla had asked me not to repeat the story to Jessica, so I didn’t. But I did a poor job concealing my dislike for him during the three years that he and my friend were together.
X
She was sick.
She told me that she had thyroid cancer. It's been a long time, and I don't remember the details. Was she managing it with medication?
It was a treatable cancer, I later understood. Her family wanted her to get it operated on, excised. My recollection is that she was worried about the impact of having to take medication for the rest of her life if she did that.
I noticed in her last year that she had lost some of her color, dropped weight, seemed less energetic. We also drifted apart, and I'm not sure why. I found an email I wrote her in September just after I left my job. I told her once I had quit, not when I contemplated leaving. Then I saw her in November. How much had I seen her in the months before that? Not nearly enough.
I wondered later if she got tired of being sick, of feeling bad so much of the time, or if she was afraid of it spreading. She didn't give much away. She made reference to some of the people she was spending time with, including a vague allusion to an anesthesiologist with a drug problem. So many people in that line of work are addicts, she'd said on that day we met in Union Square. A scrap of information, an offhand detail without context, that later bubbled up as possibly very relevant.
She made some changes in her last year. She told me about some of her travels. In the telling of these stories to me, she was alone. Renting a convertible and driving the coast. A beach in California, with a fire that burned long into the night. I later understood that she wasn't alone. She had been with Devon. She had edited out Devon. She didn't tell me about Devon.
Why didn't she tell me about Devon?
XI
Once the service is over, I excuse myself and go outside to smoke a cigarette. Nancy comes with me. She tells me that they got the autopsy results. They'd found opioids in my friend's system.
Pieces are starting to fall into place. Well. Some of them.
I am told that the family is in the process of packing up Layla's possessions from her apartment. I'm a little sad that I'm not asked if there's anything I want to take to remember her by. I don't feel like I can say anything. What will they find, I think, as they go through her wardrobe, her gear. I realize I really don't want to be around for that, because then I can be asked questions. They seem determined to take care of everything as soon as possible, not to linger. I don't blame them.
Devon and I exchange information. Even though I've laid eyes on this person only once before, we're both in deep grief over someone we love, and it seems we only have each other to talk to.
XII
The weeks that follow the service are a haze. This is my first experience with grief as an adult. I envision it as a spiral orbit. First it is tight, immediate. I feel it frequently, many times a day, for weeks. This is my reality now. My mind struggles to adjust. I smoke, which dampens some of what I feel in the moment.
I am working from home these days, which is a relief. My stipend is enough for my modest living expenses. I can be out of it for a little while. Soon the spiral loosens, the orbital period gets longer. I still miss my friend terribly, and I'm perplexed by the things I am learning, mostly things that I didn't know about her life.
At some point I make sense of the pieces that have fallen in front of me. The special, magical Christmas, where all of the animosity was resolved and put aside, three weeks after she'd described the situation with her family to me as quite dire.
She went home to say goodbye.
I cannot know for sure what she was thinking, but this makes the most sense to me. And it is an unbelievably painful realization. I sift and sift and sift through our conversations and interactions in my head. Were there signs? Aside from scraps of story and things that didn't quite add up that were not to do with this, there was nothing to give it away. Still, I think, I failed her as a friend. Why on earth did we see less of each other, and did that have anything to do with it. Could I have done something different?
My heart is broken. I miss her.
XIII
Devon comes up to visit me a few times in Inwood. We go for walks, and I get to know the man that was such a significant figure in her life.
Inwood Hill Park is the one part of Manhattan that isn't built up, gridded, flattened, landscaped, or covered in concrete. It's as close as you can get to seeing what the land looked like before it was transformed into what it is now. I don't make it to the park nearly enough, but it's good to me in the weeks after Layla’s death.
It's late February so the trees are bare. It's quiet. He and I walk the trails, sit on the cold Manhattan schist in the winter sun, and talk.
He tells me stories. I learn that they'd been together for some time. The beach night in California wasn't just a beach night. They'd made a fire and danced together. They'd done a handfasting ritual, committing to one another for a year and a day-- the second time they'd done that.
Eventually I turn to him. “Devon,” I say. “She never told me about you. I mean of course she'd mentioned you, and we met briefly that one time. But these things you're telling me, it's all news.”
I wonder, not aloud, if she didn't want to tell me about being serious about a man after coming out as gay.
It turns out that his picture was incomplete, too. He made passing reference to her childhood, to her having grown up in Cairo. But we grew up in Riyadh, I told him. I don't think they even had family to visit in Egypt. I don't remember them ever going.
It starts to come into focus just how much she kept the people in her life segregated. I never met her PR colleagues, or any of the people she worked with at the dungeon. I hold one truth, one slice of her life. Maybe I was being kept away from the others. I realized that in retrospect, even though I didn't have the whole picture, I always sensed that there was more than what she was telling me, the feeling of a closed door with something behind it.
Devon and I are in touch for a few months, and he writes and occasionally calls, and then later that year he tells me that he's moving away. My sense is that he has taken the first real opportunity he has to get out of the city. I can understand why.
XIV
On that Wednesday when I found myself inexplicably sad, I got a series of strange texts, 5 or 6 in a row, no phone number. They looked like technical glitches. The content was the same in each: a line of equal signs and hearts down the tiny monochrome LCD screen.
In the moment, things like that are mundane. A glitchy text is a glitchy text. But it was a glitchy text that I received the day she died, when, I later conclude even though I don't fully understand, my body knew something that my mind did not.
I decide to take those glitchy texts as her goodbye to me.
Leena Sulahri is a recovering academic with a keen eye for how the mundane, the sublime, and the absurd frequently occur together. She is a Muslim-ish, diasporic South Asian raised in the Khaleej, and very, very gay.
Comments