When I finally get Hina up to the bathroom, I sit her on the floor and I hold her in my arms, the wet of her coat on my bare chest, the smell of rain in her hair. Jenkins is gone now. And what do I tell her? That when the World Trade Center had been bullseye-d by two planes, George W. Bush was in the safest place his handlers could think of taking him: the sky.
•••••
Names have power, so his would be Jenkins. She has told me his name before, which isn't Jenkins, but this is not the point. What I wanted was a snake-skin name. What I wanted was the rumble of a stern warning in a name. Don't Come Here, Watch Your Step, Stop. So, Jenkins. The crooked in the word, the hard-bitten "J" like flashing car sickness, the loose "Ins" dangling off the end, it's bad strength and final weakness, I think it works. Jenkins was perfect for him.
Right now, Jenkins is whispering another racist pirate joke on the other end of the call, which is what I think his humor is supposed to include, because across from my desk is Hani laughing into her hand with her eyes closed, her hijab trembling. I try not to watch. I try not to be there.
Hani talks to Jenkins everywhere on the phone. It's never too late, it's never too busy, it's never too Monday, too rainy, too crowded. "I'd call him during and after a train wreck," she joked once, one hand on her chest as she laughed, the other on my thigh, and I laughed because I felt like she needed me to. This was how happiness worked for her. It had to be part of someone else to be real. And yes, yes, I didn't have to wonder to know she wanted me to be a Jenkins.
A foot kicks me hard under the desk and I look at Hani with anger that alarms me too. It's not about the action. That's not the point.
She covers the phone with her hand, whispers, "Does tonight work for you?"
I look between her and the spreadsheet on my computer, scrawled across with the honesty of numbers. Companies can't lie out of debt.
"I don't know," I say. "I'll have to check my schedule."
She stares at me for a while. She removes her hand from the phone, and, smiling, she speaks into it, "Sure. 7 p.m. right?"
The honesty of numbers.
••••
When Hani first said polyamory wasn't about sex, I never believed her. Anybody could say that in this generation. And hey, no, this was not new age ignorance of "the times" but me keeping me safe from what I think she was benignly trying to say about our "stint": "the sex is nice but I want an upgrade."
The magic of polyamory. Appreciate Hani for easing it in softly. Appreciate her patience. Dropping a comment about Scarlett Johansson believing monogamy is unnatural. Watching House of Cards. She believed in this enough to email me articles, linked me to podcasts. A book, The Ethical Slut, 1997's perspective on safe and respectful non-monogamy and all the har-de-har-har.
"Did you know," she said, lips pink over a mug of cappuccino, "that five out of every hundred people are in non-monogamous relationships?"
"Does that exclude the cheaters?"
She slowly placed the mug down and folded her arms close to her chest. She had chosen a brown Burqa that day. Behind her, the cafe was in the dying stages of four p.m.
"Dean," she said. "This is about fulfilling emotional needs." Her face skewered in that way it did when she was upset and trying to hide it. Eyebrows titled down and eyes wide.
"You know you don't need my permission. This isn't anything serious."
"Let's be on the same page, please."
What I wanted to ask was if it was me, if this was how she tippy toed out the door without hurting anyone's feeling, especially hers. The easy slide from one stint into another stint. Also, forget me, the pursuer, the caretaker.
I didn't ask if this Jenkins business had been going on before me, and the now very prominent Us. I didn't ask if she'd done this before. I didn't ask if her religion, which she had abandoned and rebelled in secret, allowed it. What they won't tell you about polyamory is, experience matters, but your history doesn't. Who you did, where, the occasional why. If you're anything like me, the me who'd called my parents on Christmas to say I think that Hina girl I'd found was the one, if you're anything like that, don't ask.
••••
He didn't know.
Giving a reading demonstration in a classroom to kids at Emma E. Booker Elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush didn't know. When the Chief of Staff for the White House, Andy Card, received news of the two planes that had crashed into the towers, he had to play the words in his mouth, find the tone, read the calm. This was like that time Bush had vomited on the Japanese Prime minister. Andy had been there. Andy had been calm and taken care of it.
He stood in the doorway of the classroom. He waited. Andy understood. He would tell the president, and Bush would not erupt in fear. This was about control. Love, Fear, power—look at them hard enough and you realise they're the same thing.
••••
Every time Hina has to use the conference room for her prayers, every time she pulls her prayer rug from her duffel bag, it's a giant loud gesture, it's everybody's business. She announces it to me but as though this message is being broadcasted to the entire floor. And I play my part. That's what I'm doing now. I listen to her, I smile and say Have Fun. I don't know what else to say to hypocrisy. I don't know how you treat heresy.
And for a moment, as I watch her leave, strut away, I am sane and an adult. Then I look at her desk and I'm tempted to go through her phone which she's left behind.
The half-truth: I've never seen Jenkins before.
The half-truth: I have seen Jenkins before, in a mask, in the dark, in our bedroom, in a threesome.
The first encounter with their kind, the Jenkins, you think it will be a little, I don't know, thrilling. Because this is not you, and part of you can't wait to find what you might be coming out of it. I remember being nervous, but what did that matter? It was the first step. She was in a negligee, I was wearing my sweat suit. It helped to look at it from a learning perspective—"hey, you'll learn something about yourself." But obviously my fear showed, and so she had to go and say it: "You know, research shows that you'll most likely get STIs from a close partner than a casual one, because casual ones practice safer sex."
This is what it's come to. You're the enemy. You and your ideologies.
But it's nice to know that you're slowly fading into irrelevance. Gone the suspense.
Jenkins showed up later that first night. The lights had to be off, his request. Big tall man he was, standing at the front door, and the masculine me felt like marking my territory the way guys do: initiate the handshake. But no, from within his black mask with the punched out hole, he glanced down and just shook his head no.
The whole time I was undressing, it was easy to understand that this wasn't about me. I watched them make out, then their own undressing, then the rushed thuds of rounded bone on dry skin, wet slaps on the landscape of sweaty backs. Me, I'm nudging in. Sneaking a kiss when I can. Groping what I think is what, and occasionally what isn't.
You're the enemy. It's nice to know where you stand.
