This is fact
Behind the Veil
By Oliver S. Wharton
I came home from work the other night and, stepping into the third floor hallway, came face-to-face with my neighbor’s wife wearing, what seemed in that moment, like nothing. They are a Muslim family, and she is always wrapped in a chador and long sleeves. But there she stood, in their doorway, in nothing but a T-shirt and jeans. The legs were rolled into a cuff above slender ankles and her hair fell over her right shoulder from a loose bun. Her hair was long too, longer than I think I’d have imagined if I’d ever imagined her without her chador. But I have never imagined her in any way other that what I’ve seen. She lives with her husband and two small children in the corner apartment two doors over from us, and in the nine years that we’ve lived in this building, I have never seen her uncovered.
I paused, I’m sure, for it seems like we found each other’s eyes and stared for a long awkward minute. It was probably no more than a second or two but we made eye contact before I looked away, instinctively feeling that I’d seen something secret, seen something I wasn’t allowed. She froze inside the apartment, clearly not expecting to be seen on a quick trip to the trash room, and she smiled at me. The smile disconcerted me more than her presence. It felt both like a gesture of neighborly kindness and a confession. Well, you caught me. This is what I look like. I hurried into my apartment, though, embarrassed and confused. She waited until I passed to come out into the hallway and take the bag into the trash room.
They’re friendly people, this family, always smiling and saying hello when I pass them in the building. But we’re not friends. I don’t know their names. I don’t know what they do. I pass them at different times, rarely together, and when I see the wife, she always has the children with her, a little boy and an infant She and I exchange brief smiles and muted greetings, sharing, I think, a mutual understanding that her outer covering is a sign meant mostly for me, another man. Her garments instruct me to be courteous but curt, to smile and be on my way. I have thought, from her face alone, that she is an attractive woman. To acknowledge that, though, feels like a violation, like I shouldn’t have an opinion about her appearance. And, for the most part, I don’t. She’s to be regarded as that which cannot stir thoughts of nudity and beauty and attraction and curiosity. She seems attractive, but that’s a fleeting impression based on those early morning greetings with downcast eyes and smiles full of misplaced sympathy.
I know. I shouldn’t feel as though I’m doing something especially nice for her by saying hello. It implies that she’s trapped against her will beneath that cotton barrier. I don’t know that. I don’t know anything about her. And I’m approaching my understanding of her from a particularly Western love of beauty and female form and sex and craving and from a culture with an increasing tolerance of nudity and pornography. I like women. It’s how I’m made. And this isn’t some simplistic and dismissive horn-dog reduction of women to sexual objects. I can respect a woman, treat her with decency, and still find her arrestingly beautiful and sexy. I’m sure my wife would vouch for how well I juggle her presence in my life as a friend, collaborator, confidant, and lover.
We are a species of visual clues, of forward facing eyes and upright posture, of needing to see above and beyond the grasses to know if the lion or the rival clan is lurking. And while we still need to be alert to the larger dangers and clues that surround us, most of us use our inherited visual acuity—and I’m talking Darwinian inheritance here—to read smaller and subtler signs up close. Take my inability to hide my anger, for instance. I’ve learned over the years that when I’m angry I send very clear silent facial clues despite my best efforts not to. People who anger me or encounter me when I’m angry see the signals that I’m not even aware I’m transmitting. I have no idea what my face is doing when I’m angry. (I can never remember to get to a mirror when I’m planning someone’s downfall.) Take also the panoply of gestures and looks that, in context, signal either a fight or a fuck. All of this is to say that I’ve always found the religious urge to cover and hide to be a strange refutation of the need to see each other. Really see each other.
Maybe that’s exactly the problem. Maybe we just can’t bear the raw power of seeing each other, especially women. I’m thinking now of Cyndi Lauper’s great lyric about the fear of women’s beauty: Some boys take a beautiful girl/And hide her away from the rest of the world. It’s because they’re scared. It’s because a beautiful woman has the ability to control us, to lure us with sex appeal, and that can be terrifying. It denies you power over your own desires. It implies that you can be controlled and manipulated and made to feel and behave in ways not necessarily of your choosing. And an attractive woman lures your opponent just as much as she lures you. So you dominate her. You take control of her and set the rules on how and when and in what way she is allowed to express her sexuality, if at all. Sometimes it’s just to have children.
It’s a real shame, too. Sure, I can be frightened by female sexuality. But I know that resides within me, that the fear of being manipulated is a creation of my mind. I also love getting lost in my wife’s seductions. I love losing control and being drawn, like a muted beast, into the bedroom. Take control. I don’t care. I cannot both stifle and love you.
Sometimes I hear the Muslim family fighting, just as I’m sure they hear us fighting. I don’t know now what I expected, what I assumed life was like inside a Muslim home. I think, frankly, I assumed it was unexciting, a mundane navigation of marriage with just enough arousal to bear children. But she looked like a regular woman, a regular wife, a mother who might put the children to bed and then entice her husband to make love. Maybe not. But now I think that if their home life is vastly different from ours, it may have more to do with their personalities than with their religion. Until I saw her their religion defined them. It was who they were. They are suddenly no longer the Muslim couple in the corner apartment. They are Muslim. They pronounce that every time she leaves the apartment. But they are something else now. They are a man and woman who see each other just as my wife and I see each other. And still they are not that either. I see my wife in her jeans and her T-shirts, in her underwear and her slouchy around-the-house hoodies. I see her, really see her. My neighbor sees his wife (did I really think she was covered at all times, at home and away?). Surely he finds her attractive, too, for she is. But he sees something also that he (and she) wants to keep from the world. I understand that even less now that I’ve seen her. Really seen her.
Copyright © 2011, Oliver S. Wharton
