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. 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.
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. 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 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:. I am glad to find that you are quite the opposite. Chirine was not gay. And I was besottedβnot a good thing for the mother of a newborn baby.
