Between Two Kingdoms

Suleika arrives at her furnished apartment in Paris and is struck by the luxury of privacy and a pink clam-shell-shaped bathtub. Suleika takes the métro to work on Monday. Her colleagues smoke and drink espresso at their desks, take her out to lunch for steak and wine, and charge it to the firm. She walks home and imagines the life she will have in Paris: visiting parks, cafes, and outdoor markets. Instead, Suleika lives what the French describe as “métro, boulot, dodo” or subway, work, sleep (13). She works at all hours of the day and is left with little time for exploring. She continues to work at the law firm but concludes that legal work is not the future she wants, finding the legal briefs tedious and the cases benefitting the already rich.

Will and Suleika correspond first through text messages, and then, through letters and emails. Each time they write, they sign off, “no need to write back in equal word count” (14), but their exchanges grow more intimate and frequent over the weeks and months. They share hopes for the future and are both interested in foreign journalism. In the fall, Suleika gathers the courage to email Will and invites him to visit her in Paris. A few hours later, he forwards her his flight information and arrives a few weeks later.

She is nervous on the day he arrives and changes outfits multiple times, causing her to be late to meet him at the airport. She gets winded more easily now and assigns this to being out of shape. Will meets her at the apartment, and she shows him around town. At the end of the day, they sleep together on her loft bed, “a cheap, rickety affair made up of four wooden posts and a flimsy plywood platform” (17). Will returns to New York but with plans to return and move in with her. She writes in her journal: “Joy is a terrifying emotion, don’t trust it” (18).

Chapter 3 begins with Suleika’s relationship history. She hasn’t been single for more than a month or two since 17. She admits being consumed with the idea of being in love, but she always looks for a way out of the relationship. With Will, love is different. She isn’t looking to leave, and she notices that he is present and thoughtful whereas other boyfriends have not been. Will moves into the apartment. On their first night, he snaps a picture of her in front of the window. She realizes how pale and sickly she looks. Jaouad writes, “My eyelids were a robin’s-egg blue, as if all of the veins had floated to the surface” (21). Will replies that they are the “color of pearls” and kisses her (22).

They travel to Amsterdam to celebrate Will’s birthday, but Suleika coughs so deeply and frequently that she can’t do much outside of their run-down hotel. Will and Suleika do what they can to make their trip adventurous. She buys psychedelic mushrooms, but the mushrooms make her feel like she is on fire. She says, “I remember feeling fragile for the first time in my life,” and tells Will, “It’s like I’m made of eggshells” (23). He tries to take her to the hospital, but she refuses to go, insisting she’s tough (23). They return to Paris the next day. The fever and effects of the drugs have worn off, but the sense of her fragility lingers and deepens.

In Paris, Will works as a nanny, and Suleika visits the doctor for birth control. The doctor tells her she is anemic and gives her an iron supplement with her birth control, assuring her that it will give her more energy. The itch isn’t as intense in Paris, and the anemia diagnosis explains the exhaustion. Will and Suleika make plans for the spring: graduate school for Will and a new, more fulfilling job for Suleika.

Over the next few months, she gets her resume ready but is often sick and fatigued. Every time she visits a doctor, she rehashes her symptoms and medical history. Suleika schedules an appointment at the American Hospital of Paris. The morning of the appointment struggles to climb down from her loft bed, gets lost on the métro, and falls from exhaustion. Jaouad writes, “I began to cry again. I couldn’t reach Will, […] and my parents were four thousand miles away. I was space traveling and gaining momentum, spinning farther and farther away from Earth. I had never felt so alone” (29). By evening Suleika arrives at the hospital, and she stays the night. It’s her first night in a hospital since she was born. Suleika stays for a week.

The doctor diagnoses Suleika with burnout syndrome and orders her to take a month’s leave from work. She appreciates the leave yet doubts that what she feels is only burnout from working, drinking, and partying. While on leave, Suleika goes to a job interview for a journalism position to cover the Arab Spring uprising in Tunisia. This is the opportunity that she has hoped for. Her father is Tunisian, and she still has family there.

The interview goes well, but instead of starting a new job, Suleika checks back into the hospital. A nurse tells her that her red blood cell count is dropping and soon it will be too low to travel (33). The nurse says that she should take the next flight home, so Suleika makes plans to return to New York state but buys a return ticket for two weeks later. Will offers to come, but Suleika urges him to stay in Paris to work. The nurse insists that Suleika use a wheelchair at the airport, and Suleika takes painkillers. She is feverish on the plane and feels nauseous. She reprimands herself for drunken nights and drugs of the last few years. She has a fever dream of her five-year college reunion. She is in a wheelchair, and no one recognizes her: “I was all bones in a bag of skin, with only a few long threads of silvery hair hanging from my nearly bald skull” (34). She wakes up when the plane touches down in New York City.