The closest I ever come to physically attacking anyone is when they show up unannounced on my doorstep and signal their arrival with multiple, impatient jabs on the doorbell.
Friends don’t do this. Very few people do, thank goodness. I believe it is the exclusive domain of delivery men, refrigerator repairmen, Kassem and my mother-in-law.
Do they think that when I’m home alone I pull a chair up to the inside of the door and wait there in the off chance that the bell will ring? If I don’t whip open the door within two nanoseconds of my mother-in-law’s first ring she’ll want to know if I’ve been sleeping. Honestly, I swear I’ll take maybe five seconds to get to the door and she’ll ask if she’s woken me up. Well, I don’t know about you but if I’ve fallen asleep in the easy chair I can’t even lift my head off my arm and recollect where I am in less than ten minutes. To get to the door and answer it with eyes that are lined up in parallel directions in five seconds would be utterly out of the question.
One day when we lived in Dubai I was upstairs cleaning when I heard the doorbell ring three or four times in quick succession. I looked out of the window and saw the delivery van of a company I’d never heard of. The way our house was structured I couldn’t see the doorstep or the manner of life-form lurking there but I was pretty sure that the driver of the van had made a mistake. We weren’t expecting any deliveries.
Because it was a long haul from the upstairs bedroom to the front door, and because the driver had nettled me with his impatient rapid-fire ringing of the doorbell, and also because I don’t like opening the door to strange men when I am home alone, I decided not to respond. When the man realised no one was going to come to the door he would probably have a second look at the delivery address and see that he’d got the wrong house.
A moment later the doorbell began to ring in a non-stop fusillade. I stood, frozen in disbelief, as the ringing went on and on for half a minute or more. The unseen presence on my front step was having a temper tantrum. My own temper flared and I threw down my rag and thundered down the stairs. No longer caring if it was a serial killer out there I flung open the door – the bell was still being rung – and found an agitated little Indian man with flaming red hair stabbing the doorbell with a stubby finger.
“What is going on? What are you doing?” I said.
The man immediately composed himself. “I have a delivery for you,” he said.
I took the package and looked at the address written on it. “This is for number 7 on street 9. This --" I indicated our house number on the wall "-- is number 9, street 7.”
“Oh?” he said in surprise, peering at the paper. “Yes, it seems you’re quite right. Can you tell me where is street 9?”
“It’s just there,” I said, pointing to a T-junction about thirty metres beyond our property. “Turn right for villa 7.”
“Okay, thank you,” he said pleasantly, as though he hadn’t been acting like a complete lunatic one minute earlier. He went down the steps and got into his tiny van, drove off unhurriedly to the T-junction and turned left.
After that I asked M if he would rig up the doorbell so that it could be inactivated with a switch and he did it, bless him all the way to tranquillity. We didn’t get a lot of wrong-address delivery men but we did get scores of gardeners and maids all seeking work. They averaged about one ring a day and after a year or two the thrill of rushing to the door had palled.
When we lived in Lebanon the previous time Kassem almost caused the rupture of my best forehead vein. He was our driver then, too, and as solidly trustworthy and good-hearted as he is now, but he had the habit of coming up to our apartment numerous times a day with a very silly pretext – usually to ask me if I “wanted anything” -- just so that he could pass a few minutes of his wretchedly boring day. Kassem, you see, is constantly restless and impatient and unable to amuse himself for even the briefest wink of time. Since the role of a driver in Lebanon amounts to ninety-percent waiting around and ten percent driving, I can’t think of a more unsuitable job for him.
In the beginning when he’d ring the bell I tried dropping hints. I would answer the door with a look of exasperation on my face. I would tell I had been busy and that I would call him if I needed anything. Those tactics didn’t even pierce the outer crust of his hide. Things went on and I retreated deeper and deeper into passive-aggressive, non-confrontational behaviour until M blew a fuse one day.
Kassem had exasperated him somehow; the event was quite unrelated to the incessant pestering at my door. In truth, Kassem manages to annoy M almost constantly. He achieves this by ignoring instructions or neglecting some small aspect of his job or making the kind of poor decision which inflicts needless pain and suffering on our vehicle. M tore a strip off the poor, silly fool that day and included in his barrage a request to stop bothering the madam twenty times a day. He was not to come to the door unless asked.
For a couple of weeks after that I was left in serenity but slowly Kassem began finding excuses to pop up. When I saw what was happening I thought I would just have to find a way to get through to him that I don’t like to be disturbed. I decided to play the serious artist hand. “I’m writing a book,” I told him. I wasn’t (unless 5,000 words of a story one has been reworking for ten years counts as writing a book) but I hoped he would think I was some kind of Booker Prize-winning eccentric who needed complete solitude.
That little speech of mine didn’t accomplish a darn thing. I don’t know why I thought it would. Kassem is a man who spends hours every day standing and sitting around doing absolutely nothing, jittery with impatience but never once to be seen with a book in his hand. He is educated. I don’t know how successful he was at school – it’s hard for me even to imagine him in a classroom --or how much learning he has retained but he certainly can read and write (Arabic) as well as anyone. Not everyone likes to read, of course. I know some very intelligent people who don’t enjoy reading and it’s unremarkable that Kassem doesn’t appear to enjoy it. What astounds me is that when there is absolutely nothing else for him to do he isn’t driven to it out of sheer desperation.
The doorbell-ringing/scolding cycle went around two or three times more. I would complain to M over the course of a few weeks, Kassem would eventually do something to tick M off, and when the verbal blows fell M would include in them another request to stop bothering Madam.
I would squirm to hear the grisly details of the scolding. “Oh, I wish it didn’t always come to this,” I’d say. “I wish he’d just do as you ask and not deviate into his careless habits. Was the scratch on the car quite bad? And do you really refer to me as ‘Madam’ when you speak to him?”
“The scratch isn’t bad, it’s the reason it got there that annoys me,” M would say. “And yes, of course I call you ‘Madam’ when I speak about you to him. What did you think I’d call you – the old ball and chain?”
“I don’t know. I hate the sound of ‘madam’. It makes me feel like I should be running a brothel. I wouldn’t mind being called ‘Empress’.”
“Do you know that he refers to me as his master?” M said.
“What?”
“I’m afraid so. The word he uses to address me translates to ‘my master’.”
“I don’t know how you keep a straight face.”
“It’s difficult. Especially since lately he has started carrying my briefcase to the car for me.”
After about a year Kassem finally seemed to get the message and stopped ringing the bell. I got less exercise after that, since the front door was about twenty metres from the den where I sat at my computer and the frequent sprints down the corridor had kept my blood moving, but I was much happier.
I reflected that Kassem never did seem to understand that when I was inside my head I hated to be interrupted. I don’t think he understood that someone could be inside their head.
I’ve met other people like him. Well, not completely like him – two such manifestations of compressed, seething energy on one planet would surely cause a cataclysmic meltdown -- but equally unable to understand that some people can spend a lot of time inside their own heads.
I remember once years ago a friend in Calgary ringing me up and asking me what I was doing. I knew her well enough at that point – I thought – to admit truthfully that I’d been sitting in a chair thinking.
She was flabbergasted. “Thinking? Just sitting in the chair doing nothing but thinking? What were you thinking about?”
“I don’t know. Lots of things,” I said.
“But isn’t it boring just to sit there doing nothing?”
“But I wasn’t doing nothing. I was thinking. It’s not boring at all.”
“And you really weren’t thinking about one specific thing, like a problem?”
“No. I was just thinking about this and that. General wondering, I guess you could say.”
“Oh my god,” she said. “That is so weird.”
I decided not to tell her that part of that wondering had been done aloud.
Back then I had barely heard the terms ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ but I didn’t need to. I understood from experience, like all introverts do, that there are people who get lost in their own thoughts and people who don’t. It wasn’t always as black and white as that but in general there were the two types. And it seemed to me that the external people, if you will, spent approximately zero time contemplating what made the internal people tick, whereas the introverts puzzled endlessly over what went on in extroverts’ heads.
I don’t always want to be alone with my thoughts. I love my friends. At least, I love them when I have them (they’ve been a bit thin on the ground since we came back to Lebanon – I really must check the expiry date on my deodorant) and am truly delighted when one calls me up and wants to come over for a coffee. There’s something about knowing ahead of time that someone is coming to my house that allows me to decompress. Even if I have only five or ten minutes’ notice it’s enough.
My theory, which I will eagerly explain to anyone who is interested (so far only Theo, who knows all about decompression and doesn’t need it explained) is that it’s like a scuba diver coming up to the surface. If he ascends slowly enough, he’s fine. He’ll bob up from the depths feeling perfectly grand. But if something forces his too rapid return to the surface – the sudden recollection that he left his curling iron on, for example--he’ll suffer agonies with the bends.
I realise now that no friend who reads this will ever want to come to my house again. You’ll be afraid that secretly I didn’t want you here at all. I do want you, I promise. I’m just crabby from Lebanon and its incessant, unbearable noise. I can't hear myself think.