“I’m not going.”

“I knew you’d start on that again. It’s him, the doctor, as I suspected. Maybe you deserve someone like him. An Iranian man who’d order you around, who’d be out every evening with his buddies while he left you at home to keep house for him. It’s slavery for women here, as you well know. They wouldn’t even let you out without a letter of permission from me.” He stood up and began to pace the room. “The least you could do is to be honest with me.”

“Have we ever been honest with each other?”

“I thought so.” His voice was flat. His face seemed drained of emotion. He put the paper in his suitcase. Then he shut the suitcase and picked it up. “I want to go to the airport now. Are you coming or not?”

I shook my head.

“Do you at least understand the insanity of this?” He added more gently, “You’ve been brain-washed somehow. You were ill and people took care of you. It’s natural to get attached to one’s doctor under such circumstances. You must have been very frightened and I wasn’t around to help you.”

“I keep telling you it isn’t the doctor. It has to do with the changes in me. Can’t you understand that?”

“What about me? Where do I figure in all this? Do you realize how selfish you’re being?”

“I’ m sorry.”

“This trip was a mistake for you.”

I did not say anything. I was not being evasive. I really had no answers.

He paused by the doorway. He was furious. “You’ll come back when you realize your mistake.” He turned and left.

I watched him on the street, aching with every inch of distance between us. He walked with the suitcase in one hand and the briefcase under his other arm. His shoulders were hunched, his walk no longer had its usual grace. Hunched, lost in a private pain. I had failed him. We had failed each other.

20

“Aren’t you supposed to go to the airport?” My father looked around for Tony. “What happened to him?”

“He left.”

“Are you staying? I thought you might.” He sounded triumphant rather than surprised. He shouted to Ziba and Darius. “Feri is staying.”

Ziba was in Darius’s room. They came to the doorway, Darius still wearing bandages on his face and arm.

“Are you really staying?” Darius asked.

“Her husband has already left,” my father replied for me.

“Feri, I knew you belonged to us,” Darius said.

In a moment he and Ziba came into my room. We all stood around as if waiting for an important meeting to start.

“He was a cold man,” Darius said.

Ziba bent and touched my nightgown lying on the floor. I had not put things away after I had pulled them out of my suitcase. “Look how pretty American things are,” she said. She got up and added, unexpectedly, “Every day that I wake I say to myself, another long day and I’m still alive to endure it.”