Alexandria Duet

By Leslie Armstrong

New York, late winter 1974

Standing between the fridge and the kitchen counter was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. The sight catapulted my heart into my throat. I was unable to speak.

I had just returned home from work in my usual gloomy state. I was in my early thirties, still mourning the end of my first marriage and numb from the irritating tedium of my second, rebound marriage. Husband two, Louie, was a distinguished architectural critic and writer and a close friend whom I should never have wed. But he persisted and I was afraid to go it alone with my young daughter from marriage one. Louie wanted to help me develop my career as an architect, which had been of no interest to husband one. In fact, Louie had become my Pygmalion and I his Galatea, roles of which I soon tired. He wanted to make me into the architect he couldn’t be. It wasn’t working.

“Lale, this is Chirine,” said Louie.

As a surprise, Louie had engaged Chirine to paint several of the walls in the small brownstone that I had renovated before meeting him in various garish colors. Louie believed that architects were afraid of color and should be relieved of their fear. He was right. But the chartreuse on the wall behind me was as jarring and alien to me as the man before me was breathtaking.

Over the next week I learned that Mohammed Ali Chirine El Khadem was a half-Egyptian, half-Norwegian film student at New York University Graduate School of Film and Television. He paid his way by house painting. He had been raised in Alexandria by his Norwegian mother and Egyptian father, who had met and fallen in love at university in Paris. Chirine was tall, thin, and wiry, with fair, freckled skin, dark-brown eyes, wavy, shoulder-length, amber-colored hair, and a camera-ready face. His shirt and jeans fit well enough to show a perfectly proportioned, athletic body. With that kind of beauty, he had to be gay, which was something of a relief.

My business partners, Kirsten and Russell Childs, and I specialized in repurposing old buildings for the performing arts and in sustainable design, but residential work was our bread and butter. I introduced Kirsten to Chirine, and she was equally taken by him but not so smitten as to be speechless. Over the next year or so, we gave him work on our clients’ houses and apartments. Two years later and shortly after the birth of Louie’s and my son, Chirine was painting an elaborate “supergraphic” scheme that I had designed for a client. (“Supergraphic” was a term that Louie had coined.) I had to be on the job frequently to be sure that Chirine got the translation of the design from drawing to wall correctly. We had occasion to go out for lunch, during which I learned that in addition to house painting, Chirine taught fencing to acting students and was the star techie at NYU Film School. He had been educated at the Lycée Français in Alexandria before going to university in Switzerland. He spoke five languages fluently, including his native Arabic. His English was grammatically perfect and his accent soft, seductive, and slightly British. At one of those early lunches, he pierced my bland hazel eyes with his penetrating brown eyes and said:

“When we first met I found you cold and unfeeling, inaccessible. I am glad to find that you are quite the opposite.” I felt my clothes had been stripped from my body and were lying in small piles around my feet.

Chirine was not gay. And I was besotted—not a good thing for the mother of a newborn baby. Chirine also declared that he was a confirmed Marxist. He had no interest in anything having to do with film that was commercial. His mission was to make films guided by the French philosopher Claude Leví-Strauss’s concept of structuralism with a little Michel Foucault thrown in: all emotion can be explained by reason and science. All human conscious experience is patterned.

Over the next weeks Chirine gently pressed his suit. That his love object was a married woman who had just given birth didn’t faze him. Chirine lived in a world far beyond the strictures of bourgeois society and culture. When he suggested we meet at a friend’s apartment early one spring morning to consummate our mutual attraction, most inappropriately and joyfully I succumbed. From the moment I felt his body next to mine, I knew that I could not live without this man by my side and in my bed, whoever he was, and I would have to extricate myself, my five-year-old daughter, Vanessa, and my newborn son from my marriage as soon as I could figure out how without shattering the soul and spirit of my poor husband. Over the next months I took every opportunity after work to visit and make love with Chirine at his seedy tenement apartment in Alphabet City, complete with bathtub in the kitchen, toilet with an overhead tank and pull-chain flush, and rats running through the walls.

* * *

Kirsten, Russell, and I were renovating the historic Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware. We had to be in Wilmington for weekly job meetings. Occasionally I stayed over for further meetings the next day. In early spring I told Louie I’d be staying over but returned instead to 32 Avenue B to spend the night with Chirine—our first whole night together, a glimpse of what we hoped was to come. The phone rang around midnight. It was Kirsten. Louie was looking for me. He had telephoned the friend with whom I generally stayed in Wilmington and learned I wasn’t there, so had called Kirsten, who professed to have no idea of my whereabouts. She then called me at Chirine’s to warn me that Louie had figured out what was going on.

I went home the next evening and confessed. I said it had just been a temporary infatuation and would not occur again. Given the amount of sexual carrying-on that Louie had engaged in and proudly admitted to before we got together, I hoped he would understand. He agreed to try.

I could not keep my part of the bargain.

However elegant, cultivated, and sexy Chirine was, given his Marxist convictions and my marital situation, Chirine was not a man for whom I should bust up the lives of my husband and children, but I was driven. Until I met Chirine I had been dying inside from grief for husband one and from Louie’s micromanagement of me and my career.

After a few months of maintaining the precarious balance of work during the day, love in the afternoon, caring for my kids in the morning and early evening, and drinking to blot out the night with Louie, I snapped. I asked Louie to move back to his old apartment, which he had kept as an office.

However horrific it was for him, he did as I asked. There was no argument about custody. Louie had been an excellent father, and I agreed to do everything I could to give him as full and rewarding a relationship with our son as possible.

* * *

For the first year my new life with Chirine was near perfect. The cloud of grief and depression that hovered over me throughout my relationship with Louie vanished. Chirine’s lovemaking vacuumed the last vestiges of my first husband from my mind and heart. I reveled in his gift for languages, his love of words, his sense of fun, his consummate intellect, and, not least, in his corporal elegance and grace. For all his structuralist blather, he was loving and kind and devoted to my children, especially to my son, whom he loved as his own. That he was a Marxist didn’t matter in a practical sense as we were both broke. He was struggling to pay for his education at NYU, and I was fighting to hang on to my house for the security of my kids. Our routine was much the same as it had been when I was married to Louie, less the clandestine love in the afternoon: work/school for both of us during the day, caring for my kids in the morning and early evening, and still drinking in the evening, not to drown my sorrows but because life was sweet.

Chirine was not a drinker, or at least not as I was. I was born into a family of super-smart, highly functional alcoholics. Drinking to celebrate the end of the day was a rite, a privilege, and a necessity. However beautiful I found Chirine, I was not prepared to give up my deeply entrenched habit of evening drinking for nightly sex. A pathetic decision, in retrospect, but not yet a deal-breaker.

“There are always the mornings,” I offered.

* * *

That December Vanessa, then six, and I headed for Alexandria to spend Christmas with Chirine’s family, about whom I was more than curious. In deference to his Norwegian mother, Nordic Christmas traditions were celebrated in their otherwise Muslim household. Chirine departed ahead of us to bring the family car to meet us at the Cairo airport and drive us back to Alexandria. Vanessa, her stuffed Snoopy, and I landed in Cairo at 2 a.m. on the morning of 23 December. The airport was teeming with people: men in pajamas (a standard Egyptian garb), distraught and shouting in Arabic, women in robes with faces covered, and small children wailing in and around crudely packaged food and personal belongings. Overhead flocks of pigeons swooped in and out of the open side walls, dropping their feces on the unhappy travelers. By some miracle Chirine found us and loaded us into his car for the long drive along the west bank of the Nile to Alexandria. The two-lane road was well paved and empty but for an occasional rattletrap camion overloaded with what seemed to be hemp. In the darkness strange, almost iridescent fluffy snowballs decorated the roadside trees. These were bits of cotton that had flown off the passing trucks.

It was still dark when we arrived at the El Khadems’ large, semi-attached, non-Marxist terrace house in Alexandria. Chirine guided us to our beds and we fell fast asleep.

Toward noon the next day, Vanessa, Snoopy, and I descended a very elegant oval wood staircase and entered a large, formal living room where Chirine’s parents, Mor (Norwegian for mother) and Papa, were playing backgammon. We were introduced and welcomed in heavily accented French. Papa, a slender and fiercely elegant man clad in a dark three-piece suit, rose to greet us. Mor, once a striking blue-eyed blonde and now slightly frumpy with bleached hair and wrinkled skin, embraced us. They ushered us into an equally formal dining room with a sideboard laden with fruit, toasted pita bread, and imported confections, all in elegant silver containers. The houseman, Shahir, showed us to our places at the table and offered us coffee and tea, and hot chocolate for Vanessa. Mor explained, almost apologetically, that Shahir had been with them forever. They could hardly let him go. Of course not.

While taking all this in, I realized that I had failed to bring stocking presents for Vanessa. What to do? There didn’t seem to be any kind of toy or gift shops in Alexandria like those in Europe or the States, except maybe in summer, when all Cairo flocks to Alexandria to beat the summer heat. Chirine suggested we go to the outdoor market to see what we could find. We left Vanessa and her Snoopy with Mor and Papa and set off on foot. It was warm in the winter sun, and I wore a long-sleeved shirtdress that ended a bit above the knees, stockings, and medium heels, as one did in those days. We toured the food stalls, finding nothing suitable, and finally settled on some clay objects, many of which were accessories for smoking hashish, which we hoped might pass as toys. While we were paying, some local youths started harassing Chirine in Arabic, judging by his fair skin that he was a tourist. Chirine turned and lashed back at them in Arabic and they quickly scattered.

“What’d they say, what’d they say?” I asked.

“Can’t you find anything better to fuck than that stick with the skinny legs?” he replied.

* * *

In the afternoon Chirine’s sister, Evine, as homely and plain as he was striking and handsome, arrived from Montreal. There was a big family party in the evening, including Tante Samiha, Papa’s cousin, and her grown niece, Gigi, who was dressed in some sort of riding habit, apparently Gigi’s expression of her non-binary sexual orientation.

A great northern pine tree had been decorated with Christmas ornaments and real candles, and a sumptuous feast was served by Shahir, ending with Cointreau made by Mor herself in the basement earlier in the winter from oranges from the tree in their garden.

* * *

Alexandria in winter was slightly sad and down at heel, as are most resorts off season. There wasn’t as much money around as there had been in the days of King Farouk. Chirine, Vanessa, and I visited various family friends and walked the beach with its rows of shuttered cabanas. We lunched in a fishing village on Aboukir Bay, where Lord Nelson defeated Napoleon in 1798. We ventured into the desert west of Alexandria and walked along the pristine beaches where the desert meets the sea.

On December 30th we returned to Cairo in time to have tea with an aged aunt on Zamalek, a lively upscale residential island in the middle of the Nile. But because Chirine disapproved of any sort of excessive spending, we stayed at a fleabag hotel elsewhere, which was populated only by Egyptians and mostly men. There was dried snot on the sheets, and we had to use a common bathroom. There were real toilets, not just depressions in the floor with two elevated pads for one’s feet. However, our fellow guests, unaccustomed as they were to western toilets, stood on the seat, then pissed into the bowl and missed. I did not take to this experience but Chirine held firm.

We visited the pyramids and got to ride a camel. We paid homage to Nefertiti but missed the Khan Al-Khalili, Cairo’s famous souk. Marxists do not go shopping except for necessities.

* * *

Back in New York Chirine learned that the French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet had returned to NYU to resume his role as a visiting lecturer, a post he held from 1971 to 1995. Chirine prevailed upon me to host a dinner party for Robbe-Grillet and his wife, and to invite anyone I knew who was intellectually inclined and fluent in French. This included, among others, my lawyer mother and good friends Nick and Sandy Wahl. Nick was a professor of political science at NYU, an expert on de Gaulle, and the director of NYU’s Maison Française. Chirine then informed me that M. and Mme. Robbe-Grillet traveled à trois with another woman who would also be coming and whom I assumed was Robbe-Grillet’s mistress. Very French.

M. and Mme. arrived with La Troisième in tow. She was quite attractive in a severe sort of way, short, dark, bobbed hair and bright-red lips, but the dog collar with giant spikes around her neck was disconcerting. She spoke no English and I was too busy preparing dinner and greeting our other guests to converse with her in French. The doorbell rang yet again, and in came Dan Hollis, my close friend from architecture school who had had a psychotic break in our second year and dropped out. Clad in his handsewn, ragged coat of many colors, he had been homeless on the streets of New York for several years, but he knew where I lived and worked. From time to time he would call on me. Although he made next to no sense when he spoke, there was an irresistible sweetness to him. When he came by I never turned him away. But please, Dan, not this evening!

I looked to Chirine to find a way to tell Dan this was not the night for a visit, but Chirine thought Dan’s arrival was just fine. So did Dan. He marched right past me, filthy hair, filthy ripped coat of many colors, rotten teeth and all, and headed straight for La Troisième and her spiked dog collar. He led her to the sofa, and they proceeded to have an animated conversation while my decorous lawyer mother sat opposite, jaw hanging open.

I remember little else of that evening as I was too busy playing host (and drinking). But I was told that Robbe-Grillet had been rude to almost everyone present. Later I looked him up in hopes of learning more about him and the identity of La Troisième. I read that Robbe-Grillet had been and still was a committed sado-masochist, and after meeting his wife, Catherine, in 1951, he introduced her to the pleasures of sado-masochism. Catherine began the practice, as it is called, as his “soumise” (i.e., submissive) and then became, and remains, France’s most famous dominatrix. La Troisième was most likely Catherine’s soumise.

Interesting—I guess.

* * *

After two-plus years of relative domestic happiness, Chirine and I were going nowhere. We were both still broke. He was displeased by my evening drinking, and I wanted to tidy my life up and create some kind of family structure for myself and my two kids. I urged Chirine to take on paying work in film despite his scruples. He refused. I was frustrated and began to wander. I had a fling in conjunction with a performing arts renovation we were doing for Brown University. When Chirine’s NYU Film School classmate Susan Seidelman asked him to shoot her first full-length film, he declined, professing to have no use for her or her work as she came from a moneyed bourgeois background and valued only trite storylines that would succeed commercially. I begged him to reconsider. He did.

One day, on my return from a trip to Brown, Chirine came home from a day of shooting with Susan and announced that he had slept with Susan while I had been away. Although I had no leg to stand on, I was enraged that he would sleep with Susan as he pretended to be repelled by her, and even more furious that he would want to tell me about it. He regarded an occasional night spent elsewhere by either of us to be justified by his structural worldview of things. Emotions were just patterns, after all. Feelings weren’t real or if they were, they were of no importance compared to the structure and patterns that defined our lives.

That was enough. I wanted to find someone who could take me out to dinner to someplace other than a hole in the wall in Alphabet City and pay for it. I asked Chirine to move back to his rathole on Avenue B (much as I had asked Louie to move back to his apartment on Beekman Place). Chirine protested at first but did so. For a while he stalked me, declaring that, in fact, he was a distant cousin of the late King Farouk, as though that would appease my bourgeois yearnings and enhance his pedigree. It did not.

We were done.

* * *

Afterword

Chirine went on to shoot Smithereens for Susan Seidelman but, in general, stuck to his not-for-profit structuralist guns. A few years later he met and, in 1986, married Joanna Peled, a brilliant and beautiful Israeli-American actress and star at Ellen Stewart’s La Mama Theatre in the East Village, who shared his beliefs, with whom he worked and who bore him a son. Chirine and Joanna’s most notable collaboration was a structuralist reading of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from James Joyce’s Ulysses, performed by Joanna in the nude in which certain words, independent of their context, were given unique emphasis and enactment, inviting an altogether new and different experience of this remarkable piece of literature.  

In 2005 Chirine was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He and Joanna moved to Arizona, where free health care was available. Chirine died in 2012 at age seventy-five. Joanna died shortly thereafter of cancer. Their son, Alfi, has disappeared under the radar.

A thought or a photo of Chirine can still send a tremor of longing through my aging limbs.

END

Author Bio: As well as being a writer, Leslie Armstrong is a practicing architect and interior designer. She has published three books: “The Little House, Collier Macmillan” (1979), “Space for Dance: An Architectural Design Guide” (1984), and in 2020, “Girl Intrepid: A New York Story of Privilege and Perseverance,” a memoir. Reviews of “Girl Intrepid” are available on Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.