Mirage

Soheir Khashoggi

Cover

"Abracadabra! There's a new Scheherazade in town and her name is Soheir Khashoggi. Now that she's woven one tale let's hope she has a thousand more. Mirage is arresting, breathtaking, up to date, sophisticated, erotic, fascinating, heart rending, and suspenseful. This timely saga certainly puts a whole new spin on Sleeping with the Enemy, and lifts the veil of secrecy from Moslem traditions, relationships, and, above all, family ties. Stunning. I couldn't put it down!"

—Judith Gould, author of Sins

"Breathless, larger than life. Khashoggi paints in glamorous and startling colors. Her depiction of the rarefied, claustrophobic lives of many privileged Arab women, as well as of the jet set world of their families, adds depth and sparkle."

—Publishers Weekly

"A bright comet from the East. A commanding novel every woman will want to read and every man should read."

—Cape Coral, Daily Breeze

"A stunning first novel that pushes contemporary buttons while offering the more traditional consolations of exotic settings, glamorous characters, and a fast moving plot. Khashoggi spins an irresistible tale of romance and heart pounding drama in that rarest of fictions. An intelligent page turner."

—Kirkus (starred review)

"A spellbinding story of one woman's struggle to escape the gilded cage of the Middle Eastern aristocracy. I inhaled it!"

—Cindy Adams, syndicated columnist

"A bright comet from the east … A commanding novel every woman will want to read and every man should read."

—Cape Coral Daily Breeze

"The drama and glamour of her story carries the reader along."

—Herald Sunday (New Hampshire)

"Compelling!"

—Connecticut Post

"One of those rare books on Middle Eastern women that is lively, provocative and thought-provoking"

—Jean Sasson, author of Princess

"Mirage is a captivating tale painted with finesse against a glittering international canvas"

—Ronald Kessler, author of Inside the CIA.

"Soheir Khashoggi is a born storyteller! Mirage is rich in emotion and human drama, a story I wish would never end, First-rate entertainment!"

—Lucian Goldberg, bestselling author of Madam Cleo's Girls and People will talk

"Khashoggi, is a natural-born storyteller who quickly engages her reader in a role that is stylish, suspenseful, and entertaining."

—Booklist (starred review)

Title

Dedication

This book is dedicated in memory of my dear brother Adnan, whose love and guidance have helped me become a stronger and better woman. The bond between us will remain forever in my heart. I miss you dearly, my dear brother.

To my darling daughters Samiha, Naela, Farida and Hana. I couldn't have written this book without you. Thank you for being wonderful and loving, and most of all, for waiting so patiently … I would also like to dedicate it to the memories of my mother, Samiha, and my sister, Samira, who inspired me to write about the special bonds that exist between women in other places and other times, and about the kind of love that endures for a lifetime and beyond.

Time's Up

In 1996, “Time Was Up” for me when I wrote my first novel, Mirage, about the survival of a woman and her escape from a male-dominated land.

After this novel, I continued to express my thoughts through the voices of strong female protagonists in my next two novels, Nadia’s Song and Mosaic.

Now, I applaud the women who have come out and let their voices be heard directly, women whose actions courageously represent the #metoo movement. It is this recent chain of events that prompted me to republish my three books—as a reminder that not so very long ago, women like me believed, with reason, that their voices would not be heard. My voice spoke only through my books.

In this new day, it is time for women from all walks of life to stand together, become united, and have a voice.

There is a seductive shimmer on the horizon of life.

Within it lies the promise of love, the joy of fulfillment, and the tranquility of peace. Approach it with great care, for it is as fragile as a mirage.

—Layla K.—

Acknowledgments

I want to express my deepest appreciation to Lillian Africano for her hard work in making this book possible. Her motivation and interest, and especially her knowledge of the Arab world, have added immeasurably to this book. Thank you, Lillian—it was really a pleasure working with you.

I’d also like to thank my wonderful family: Adnan, for being a marvelous big brother, protector, and friend; my brother, Adil, for his support and love; my brother, Essam, for his encouragement and enthusiasm; my brother, Amr, for his research and terrific sense of humor; my sister, Assia, for her loving care. I’m fortunate to have you all.

Thanks to all my friends.

My appreciation to Barry, for his encouragement and friendship.

To my agent, Sterling Lord, who helped make this dream come true, my gratitude. And to my editor, Natalia Aponte, my thanks for her support and guidance.

And, finally, to my dear sister-in-law, Layla Khashoggi, who proofread and wrote a lovely quotation, my love and gratitude.

Prologue

Boston. The Present

The studio in which Barry Manning taped his radio show—a show that Jenna Sorrel disliked on principle but on which she was to be the guest in an hour—was in a renovated warehouse on Commercial Street, overlooking the Boston Harbor. Jenna had not seen this block in years and was amazed at how gentrified it had become. As she got out of the taxi, she was so taken with the proudly refurbished loveliness of the old buildings that she hardly noticed the blue car slowly passing—or the red-haired man in it looking disinterestedly at her, then turning away.

She’d taken three steps up the sidewalk before she realized that she had seen the man before—that morning, near her favorite bookstore on Newbury Street—and that he had given her the same casual, businesslike glance then.

Her first instinct was to run. She turned back to the cab, opened the door, stopped.

“You forget somet’ing, lady?” The cabbie, a young Haitian, looked up from writing in his trip book.

“No. No. I thought I had.” She sounded foolish even to herself. She was foolish, she decided. The blue car moved steadily down the street.

There had been a time when the fear of being followed was as much a part of Jenna’s life as eating or sleeping. But the years had passed and nothing had happened, and now she could not remember the last time she had worried about the man who seemed always to be at the bus stop or the woman who seemed always to be walking her corgi or the car that seemed always to be in the rearview mirror.

Until just now.

She was sure it was the man she had seen near the bookstore. Almost sure. But what if he was? Boston wasn’t such a large place. It was possible for a person to be on Newbury Street in the morning and on Commercial Street in the after- noon. But still …

Far down the street, the blue car turned right and disappeared.

Jenna stood watching for a moment, then took a couple of deep breaths. Forget it, she told herself, it's nothing. Nothing has happened in fifteen years, and nothing is happening now.

She went into the building. A security guard sat at a mahogany desk. For a split second, Jenna thought of asking him to look out for a red-haired man. Forget it. Relax.

She signed the in-out register. “I’m here for the Barry Manning show. Has a Mr. Pierce arrived?”

The guard scanned the page. “Pierce? No. Don’t see him.”

Damn. Jenna had hoped that Brad would be there to help her through her stage fright—the butterflies were already beginning to flutter their cold little wings—but apparently he was still angry. Or perhaps he wanted to remind her what it was like to be alone.

“He’s not gonna be on the show, is he?” the guard asked.

“No. He’s just … a friend. But if he does come, let him know where I am, will you? Wherever that might be?”

“Third floor. Right this way.” The guard escorted her to the elevator and pressed the button.

The offices of the Manning organization were surprisingly small, and the few people all looked to be caught up in crises. Finally, a woman with earphones dangling around her neck like a doctor’s stethoscope noticed Jenna and introduced herself as Courteney Cornmeyer, the show’s producer.

“We’re very happy to have you,” she said sincerely, adding somewhat less convincingly, “I was reading your new book just the other night.”

She propelled Jenna to the station “green room.” “You can do your makeup here,” she said, indicating a mirrored vanity table, “unless you want to change your mind and use Angela. She’s awfully good.”

“No! No, thank you,” Jenna added hastily, realizing how inappropriately vehement she’d sounded. Professional makeup would be nice, but Jenna didn’t want a stranger studying her face, noticing things she’d kept hidden for so many years.

“Suit yourself,” Ms. Cornmeyer said agreeably. “Just make yourself comfort- able, and I’ll be back with Barry in a bit.”

After closing the door behind her, Jenna sank into the upholstered makeup chair took the cosmetic case from her oversized bag, and leaned towards the three-way mirror. First, she brushed her thick chestnut hair.

God, roots already? It seemed that she was having to go to the colorist every other week.

Pretending to be someone else was hard work, she thought for perhaps the thousandth time. A constant effort. The hair, the green contact lenses covering her own brown eyes. And the lies.

As she’d been instructed to do, Jenna laid on the foundation with a heavy hand—the Manning radio show had a studio audience and harsh studio lights. Unconsciously, her fingers traced a delicate scar just above her left brow and another just at the hairline. The surgery to repair her face had been expert, but traces of it lingered, along with the memory of the man who had tried to destroy her beauty—and her life.

When she had given her olive complexion a flawless matte finish, she applied a cinnamon blusher and smudged her eyelids with charcoal shadow.

She finished with black-brown mascara and paprika lipstick.

Jenna was lucky in her looks, she knew, and lucky in the way she had kept them—her next birthday would be her fortieth, but people always assumed that she was in her early thirties. Now, with just a few minutes of deft smoothing and contouring and highlighting, she looked a young thirty. And gorgeous.

She folded her hands, then unfolded them, drumming her fingers against her knees as she waited. Her throat was suddenly dry, her stomach clenched. Was it just stage fright that had her so jangled? The fight with Brad? The strange feeling of being followed?

Jenna got up, smoothed the wrinkles in her cream-colored cashmere suit, and wandered out into the hall. She almost collided with Courteney Cornmeyer, who had in tow a short, round-faced man with orangish skin.

His coloring made Jenna wonder if perhaps he ate too many carrots or used a defective sunlamp.

“Dr. Sorrel, I presume? Barry Manning.” He extended a hand. As he did so, his pale gray eyes flicked over her—an inspection that, from most men, would have been straightforwardly sexual, but from him, seemed more neutral, perhaps simply professional. “What do you think, C.C.? Our distinguished guest is the world’s leading authority on the abuse of women, the evil that lurks in the hearts of men, et cetera, yet here she stands, painted like a scarlet woman.”

It was his voice, Jenna realized, that saved Barry from being a comic figure. With his moon-round face and orange skin, he resembled a jack-o’-lantern. He stood no more than five feet six—an inch or two shorter than she—but his voice was deep, resonant, commanding. At the same time, it was almost a parody of itself. How can you be offended at anything I say, it asked, when I sound so absurdly authoritative?

“Don’t the men on your show wear makeup, Mr. Manning?” she asked conversationally, a mischievous smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

“Sure they do. I do myself. In fact, we’ve never had a man refuse makeup. What was it, C.C., three weeks ago? —we had the president of the Hell’s Angels. No complaint. As often as that crew bathes, he’s probably still wearing the stuff.” “I’ll bet you didn’t suggest to the president of the Hell’s Angels that he looked like a scarlet woman.”

Manning laughed somewhat theatrically. “Touché! We’ve got a live one, C.C.”

“Five minutes to air,” said Courteney. “I’ll be in the booth.”

“So, what happens now?” Jenna asked Manning. The butterflies were now in full flutter. “Is there anything I need to know? I’ve never been on the radio.”

“TV?”

“No.”

“Aha! A virgin. Sorry. Figure of speech. But, seriously, there’s nothing to it. C.C. will give us a countdown, the red light will come on, I’ll introduce you, ask you about your book, you’ll tell me about your book, we’ll take some questions, you’ll answer, I’ll make some comments, and it’ll all be over before you know it. Forty people in the audience. You’ve been at bigger cocktail parties. In fact, that’s the best way to think of it: as if you’re at a party where you meet people, and they ask about what you do. It’s just talk. No need to lecture.”

Jenna breathed deeply. “All right. Let’s go.”

“Whoa! We’ve got four minutes—an eternity in this business, as you’d know if you’d ever had to fill up that much dead air. Let me ask you something. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? I mean, why my show? Why not Donahue or one of those other sensitive types?

Even Larry King?” Manning smiled, no doubt aware of his reputation for skewering guests, especially those he deemed deserving of such treatment.

Yet, for the first time in their conversation, Jenna felt that he was not playing a role, but seriously wanted an answer. “You know the saying ‘preaching to the converted?'” she asked. “Lately, I’ve begun to think that’s what I’ve been doing in my work. I spoke at a symposium at Harvard yesterday—psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric social workers—and every one of them knew what I was going to say and agreed with it in advance, except maybe for a technical objection here or there. But your show, it’s on a hundred stations—”

“A hundred and six and more every day. Move over, Rush Limbaugh.” “—most of them in very conservative markets. Many of your listeners haven’t heard what I have to say, and many of them won’t agree with me when they do hear it. I may or may not convert a single one, but at least I won’t be preaching to the converted to start with. That’s why I accepted the invitation to be on your show—although I admit I debated it for days.”

Manning looked at her with unexpectedly quiet appraisal, but all he said was, “I love your voice. You could go into this business yourself. What’s that little touch of an accent?”

“I was born in Egypt but grew up mostly in France. I married there and was widowed there very young.” All lies but repeated so often they had taken on their own kind of truth. “I came here fifteen years ago.”

Truth.

“One minute to air,” Courteney warned from a wall speaker. Suddenly, Barry Manning was animated again, a boxer answering the bell. “Come on, doc,” he said, grabbing Jenna’s hand and grinning his jack-o’-lantern grin. “Let’s go change the world.”

Barry Manning was right about one thing: It was over almost before Jenna knew it. It reminded her of exams in college: unexpected questions, not enough time to say all she wanted, no chance to examine complexities.

The whole setup was disorienting. She did not know what she had expected— some sort of stage, perhaps—but instead, there was a glass-enclosed booth in which she and Manning sat at a desk with three computer terminals. In a similar enclosure, separated from them only by a glass wall, Courteney and a sound engineer worked with equipment that looked to Jenna as if it belonged on the space shuttle.

The studio audience sat in plain metal folding chairs set in rows at an angle to the broadcast booth. Jenna looked for Brad. He wasn’t there.

Someone clipped a tiny microphone on her lapel. The funky blues instrumental that Barry Manning used as his theme welled up. The audience clapped fiercely as Manning bounced into the booth. After some brief opening remarks, he mentioned that his guest would be “Dr. Jenna Sorrel, the renowned psychologist and best-selling author” and cut to a series of taped commercials.

While they ran, he showed Jenna the computer terminals. Each displayed the name, city, and interest of a call-in questioner already waiting to talk with Barry Manning. “I have the best screener in the business working the phones,” Barry said proudly. “Separates the wheat from the chaff. We tend to use the chaff.”

Jenna, surprised at the note of cynicism, shot him a glance, but the pale eyes showed only concentration. “OK. You ready?” “Yes.”

Courteney cued Barry and, holding up a copy of her latest book, Prisons of the Heart: Women in Denial, he reintroduced her as a best-selling author.

Jenna started to protest that, although her books sold well for scholarly works, they were hardly blockbuster best-sellers, but Manning was already off and running. “So, what is this book about, Dr. Sorrel? The domination of women by men? The abuse of women by men?”

“To some extent—and I certainly have written a number of papers on those subjects. But Prisons of the Heart explores questions I’ve heard so often, questions which seem to blame the victim: ‘Why don’t abused women leave the men who batter them?’ ‘Why don’t they just run away to friends or family—or even to a shelter?’ These are good questions, key questions, but what I’ve tried to show in my book is that there are no easy answers.

What I often hear from battered women is denial. Some cling to that position for years, either out of shame or fear or a combination of reasons. The fear, I might add, is certainly not invalid, not when we consider the violence perpetrated against women who have left their abusers.”

“Hmm. Let me ask you something, doctor. You’re obviously a very attractive woman—you don’t mind my saying that?”

“Not at all.” Some sort of trap being set, she thought.

“—Obviously very attractive, but I notice that there’s no photo of you on your book. In fact, I went to the bookstore and found that none of your books have a photograph of you. Isn’t that unusual for a well-known author?”

“A little unusual, yes.” If she could help it, Jenna never allowed herself to be photographed or videotaped. But even if Barry Manning had somehow learned that, he couldn’t possibly have learned why. Could he?

‘‘Is that a feminist statement? That people shouldn’t care what you look like?” Of course, he didn’t know. He was only trying to make some obscure point. “Actually, I’m one of those people who dislike having their picture taken.

Call it a little phobia. Not exactly something a psychologist wants to admit having, of course.” Jenna smiled as if relieved to confess this minor sin.

Manning laughed. “Psychologist, heal thyself, huh?” “Evidently.” Always deception.

When the call-in and audience questions began, Jenna knew what to expect— she had listened to Manning for a week to prepare herself—but still it all seemed to shoot by so quickly, so superficially, no time to look at deep issues, Barry trying to condense everything to sound bites.

And, of course, no one asked about the actual subject of her book.

Everyone had his or her own agenda: abortion, gays, Madonna, and what the Bible had to say that might pertain to any or all of these. There was even an alarmed query about a girl placekicker on a high-school football team in New Jersey.

From a ruddy, gray-haired man in the audience, dressed as if he had stopped by on his way to the golf course: “I see we have another big brouhaha about so-called sexual harassment in the military, and at the same time, some of these women are protesting about their right to go into combat.

But if they go into combat and get captured, I guarantee you they’re going to be sexually molested. So, aren’t they asking for the same thing they’re complaining about back home?”

Jenna: “I know very little about the military, so I won’t address the issue of women in combat. But let’s look at your logic. All combat troops risk being killed. Does that mean they shouldn’t complain if someone takes a shot at them back at the base, or in their hometown? And if they do object, does that mean they shouldn’t be allowed in combat?”

Barry: “But you must admit that there’s a certain incongruity in some of these feminist demands.”

Jenna: “No, I must not.”

From a disembodied telephone voice with a Southie accent: “My uncle had this girlfriend, they lived together, you know, and she had a life insurance policy on him. And one night, she stabbed him to death while he was asleep. When they arrested her, she said she was a battered woman. She had, like, these little bruises. And she ended up going scot-free. Does that seem right to you?”

Jenna: “I don’t know the facts, so I can hardly second-guess a judge or jury. And while it would be hard for me to justify violence, even as a response to violence, I must point out that, since we’ve ignored the epidemic of abuse against women so long, we may on occasion make mistakes in righting that wrong.”

As the show drew toward an end, Jenna felt as if she had been in battle. It was all rush, back and forth, sound and fury. Yet, oddly, she felt as if she were winning—winning the studio audience, at least.

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