A Good Evening in Beirut

Well, all right, here’s something pro-Lebanese:

Having grown up in Canada, surrounded by decent and fine Canadian boys, I chose a Lebanese guy to be my husband. It was certainly not a case of there being no Canadian fellows good enough — it was simply that M was the guy for me.

Twenty years ago when I first clapped eyes on his comely form it didn’t take me long to realize he was the finest person I’d ever met. You may say that it wasn’t because he was Lebanese that I fell in love with him and that would be partly true, but only partly.   M’s Lebanese-ness is an integral part of who he is — a huge, essential part of who he is. He wouldn’t be M without it. 

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary.  Naturally I forgot about it.  I always forget.  M used to, too, so neither of us had to feel bad, but lately and inexplicably he has been getting rather good at remembering.  Either he has programmed all our special days into his phone or his memory is actually improving at the same rate mine is deteriorating. 

He had made dinner reservations at an undisclosed location and told me I was to take a nap in the afternoon so that I wouldn’t be “all tired and grumpy” by nine o’clock. Oh, romantic talk.

Ten minutes before we needed to leave the house I was still trying to book a plane ticket online for my mom.  I had entered all the contact details, credit card information, head circumference and toilet paper preference when, on the final page, it said my session had timed out. 

I could easily have scrapped the whole thing and done it the next day but instead I feverishly filled in all the fields again and booked the ticket, possibly in the name of a Mrs. Bill Frying Pan travelling to Victoria Falls in Africa rather than Victoria, BC, but anyway, Mom will let me know how it all turns out.

In the space of about two minutes I stuffed myself into some clothes, applied lipstick well over the lines, and told M I was ready to go.  We descended the seven floors in our bumpy, rickety, gold-painted elevator while I fanned myself and tried to cool down.

“Why’d I wear a jacket?” I gasped. “It’s too warm for a jacket.”

“Take it off,” said M.

“Can’t,” I said. “The top underneath is indecently tight.  I can only wear it under a jacket.”

The elevator jolted to a halt on the ground floor and we stepped out into a warm and sultry evening.  A heavy sky hovered.

We drove into the neighbourhood of Ashrafieh — tiny streets with a lot of the traditional architecture — and pulled up outside an old villa which had been converted into a restaurant.  There are a lot of these in Ashrifiyeh and they are all without exception wonderful.  Beirut has so many great restaurants that you couldn’t eat your way through them in a year (though it’d be awfully fun to try).  The quality of the venues and food amazes me.  When we are in Calgary and go out to eat it’s usually Earl’s or Montana’s or something like that.  Those places serve good food, don’t get me wrong, but no one would wear sweatpants to a place in Ashrafieh. 

The restaurant was called Stove, which struck me as an endearingly homespun name for such a stylish place.  We were seated, as per M’s request, in the garden.  Orange trees grew, soft lights glowed, laughter floated out from the kitchen.  

M  expressed admiration for my new trousers.  Or maybe just the fact that I’d got new trousers. I told him that speaking of trousers, something funny had happened earlier in the day. His mom had come to tell me that she’d found a pair of jeans that would be perfect for me in a shop up the street. She wanted to buy them for me and suggested we go that very minute to do so. Or if I was too busy she’d go by herself and get them for me. She was excited, almost aggressive, in her bid to convince me. It was completely bizarre.   Why on earth was she so intent on buying me a pair of jeans? But when I demurred she changed tack and her motives were revealed. The jeans she wanted to get me were tight-fitting; none of my present pairs are.  There were fake diamonds on the pockets, too. I told her, wearily, that she must know by now that I don’t wear tight jeans, especially ones with fake diamonds on the pockets, and that no good could come of trying to encase my thighs in stretchy material.  But she was more than ready for my protests and rallied energetically.  You live in Lebanon now, she said: dress like a Lebanese woman.  Fix yourself up.  You can wear your baggy pants in Canada but here in Lebanon you have to be a little sexy. Your husband is out-dressing you by a long shot and that could be problematic.

M laughed when I got to that bit about him dressing better than me.  He had been studying the menu and I now picked up mine to do the same.  It was all in French but I was used to that.  I could manage okay, and M helped me out, but there must have been something strained in my demeanour because without our asking the waiter came by with a menu written in English.

Now see, along with everything else about me, my taste in food hasn’t adapted to the swish and well-heeled Beirut life.  I like pasta, and stir-fries, club sandwiches and curly fries.  When I see frogs legs on a menu I have to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out, “Oh, man, that is so gross!”  My red-neck qualities must be reined in at times and fancy restaurants are one of them.

I hadn’t planned on ever eating scallops again after looking them up on Wikipedia last year to find out, precisely, what manner of sea creature they were. I don’t know what I had expected, to be honest.  I guess I had hoped to learn that scallops are a kind of living potato, with no discernable body parts. But it was not to be. There was a vivid photo of a scallop and in a line on its upper edge glittered dozens of tiny, malevolent eyes and below them, a mouthful of hairy cilia. I took one long, shivering look and said to myself, alrighty then, no more scallops for me.

But there wasn’t much on the Stove menu that appealed to me.  It was real French cuisine, probably about as fine a menu as you could lay your hands on, but the red-neck in me squirmed and whimpered at the list of pond-dwelling creatures. There were steaks -- certainly the safest bet -- but I wasn’t up to eating a big chunk of red meat at ten o’clock at night. I thought a seafood sampler sounded good until the waiter said everything in it was raw.  I kept combing over and over the menu till M asked if I was having trouble finding something I liked.  I didn’t want to tell him that I was.  It was such a beautiful restaurant and I was sure the food was fabulous.  It was my problem that I had low-class taste and I wasn’t going to let it taint our evening.

The words ‘truffle sauce’ beside the scallop dish kept catching my eye.  Oh, how I love truffles.  I guess that shows hope for me, eh? Well, you would think.  Anyway, the minutes were ticking by and I could find nothing else I fancied so I ordered the scallops.

They were magnificent.  I mean, you have to get over the texture, that’s for sure, and avoid any thoughts of rows of eyes, but I did and the taste was superb.

It had begun to rain, very softly, and M pulled his chair in closer to mine to get farther under the cotton umbrella.

The waiter, smiling good-naturedly as he offered to help M with his chair, said, “Hayk cosy akhtar.”

He was saying that it was more cosy this way, having our chairs pulled up close together, but it was the use of the English word ‘cosy’ in the otherwise Arabic sentence that was so cute.

That happens constantly in Beirut, and I suppose in much of the world (though not, it may be noted, in Alberta).  People slip in words from another language into their otherwise native-tongued remark.  Here it is English and French words, so much so that you may not know a word of Arabic but pick up a general sense of the conversation happening in front of you by the islands of recognized sounds.  It’s a slippery slope, though, and you have to resist the urge to connect the isolated English words into anything but the most likely and mundane thread.  Take it from me, I’ve made the mistake about a thousand times.  It doesn’t happen as much anymore, since I’ve picked up more Arabic, but I recall listening to M and his friends talking and, from a few English words that jumped out at me, getting the most ridiculous ideas.  “What, your brother has been jailed for stealing clothes pegs? Queen Elizabeth choked on a Brussel sprout but was saved by a passing long-handled mop?” 

We had a selection of fruity sorbets for dessert: coconut, mango, raspberry. 

Stepping out into the tiny, cobbled street afterward M handed the valet his ticket.

“This has been a swell evening,” I said.  “I’d like to write about it in my blog.  You know, to show that I’m not anti-Lebanese.”

“Good idea.  You should.”

“Except that it won’t be funny,” I said.  “There’s still time, of course.  A naked man could suddenly streak through the street and then I could write about that.”

No naked man appeared.  Our car pulled up in front of us, the valet having merely gone twenty feet to the other side of the street to fetch it from the parking lot there.

“Did you see where he had parked the car?"  I said as we got in. "It was across the street. What the heck did we need valet parking for?”  

“Because this is Lebanon,” M said, and grinned.