The lawyer was bashful. He was nearly twenty-five at the time and had never had a girlfriend. He had been attracted to many of the Arab students while in school, but he never struck up a conversation, making due with heartache and wistful thoughts before bed. The lawyer had no sense of how he looked. No one had ever told him if he looked good or bad and he himself was not a good judge. He always felt that different mirrors, on different days, provided different perspectives. Photographs didn’t help, either. Like the mirrors, they showed something different each time. Sometimes he felt he looked good, but most of the time he was sure he looked bad. He was not too skinny or too fat. He felt his body was average, normal, not muscular — after all he never worked out — but not flabby, either. His height was average and he wished he was a bit taller, and his skin, like everyone in his family, was light, at least for an Arab. He liked being light-skinned but, much like with his height, he wished he was a bit lighter-skinned, and he would have been happy to have blond hair, or at least chestnut-colored.

Either way, he wasn’t very much preoccupied with his looks: the lawyer knew that his profession, and his success in that profession, would determine who he would marry. He did not have much money and he had bought a used Fiat Punto with the little money he did have, but having graduated at the top of his class, from the best law school in the land, his potential earning power was unquestioned.

One week after their chance encounter, the lawyer went back to the Mount Scopus dorms. It was the middle of the afternoon and the lawyer knew that his sister didn’t get out of class until six. He knocked on her door and no one answered. He decided to wait and walked around among the buildings. Within minutes he saw the roommate walking alone from the bus stop to the dorms. She was wearing blue jeans and a white shirt with some kind of flower design on the front. There was a bag slung over her shoulder and it hung down to her knees. Her hair was long and curly and she was small, about five foot four, which was exactly what he liked. In those clothes, as opposed to the semiformal dress, she looked boyish. He saw her go into the building and decided to smoke a cigarette before going up to knock on her door. While smoking, he rehearsed his lines and tried to imagine her responses. They started out as charming and then got increasingly more barbed. He almost called the whole thing off but in the end he ground out the cigarette and bounded up the stairs with his heart racing.

“Who is it?” she asked from the other side of the door. He said his name and identified himself as her roommate’s brother. She opened the door a crack and looked at him.

“She’s not here,” she said. “She doesn’t get back till six today.”

“I know,” the lawyer said, flustered, stripped of all of his rehearsed lines. “Please,” he said, pushing a bar of chocolate through the barely open door. She took the chocolate from his hand and said, “No problem, I’ll give it to her.”

“No,” the lawyer said, shaken by the sound of his own voice. “It’s for you.”

He still recalled the scorn he had seen in her eyes. She stood behind the door, did not invite him in, and said she was not interested in receiving anything from him. “If you want me to give it to your sister, I will, but if you don’t, please take this back and go away. I don’t know you.” She extended the chocolate bar in his direction, but the lawyer just nodded his head and hurried out of the building.

He berated himself all night long. He went back to his rented apartment in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and waited for the call that was sure to come from his sister. He had nothing but contempt for himself. What had he been thinking? That he would offer her chocolate and she would invite him in for coffee and then fall head over heels for his charms? What charm? He was such an idiot. What a miserable decision, one that would make him look ridiculous in front of his little sister. He, the collected, deliberate one, how had he dared do something so dumb? He chain-smoked, tried to distract himself by watching TV, then by reading, then by looking through his casework, but his mind was trained on the sound of the soon-to-ring phone. He envisioned his sister coming home after class, walking into her room, and hearing from her roommate, as she waved the incriminating bar of chocolate in her hand, that her rude nymphomaniac brother had come by unannounced earlier that afternoon. When the call failed to arrive, he figured that either his sister had not yet returned to her room or that her roommate had left before she came back. At close to ten at night he decided he couldn’t wait any longer and called his sister, expecting the worst. But she sounded natural, asked how he was doing, and said nothing about the events of earlier that day.

“Are you alone in the room?” he got up the nerve to ask, trying to verify whether the roommates had seen each other.

“No,” his sister answered, and he could hear the sound of her door opening and he understood that she had walked out so that they could continue the conversation in private. But she said nothing about chocolate or her roommate.

“I’ve been thinking about coming to visit you,” he said, feeling things out.

“Too bad you didn’t,” she said. “Maybe you could come tomorrow. My roommate’s in class till eight. You want to come at six?”

The next day, at seven in the evening, the lawyer showed up at his sister’s place. He was intentionally late, because he never spent more than an hour in his sister’s room and he didn’t want her to know that something was up. They sat on his sister’s bed and talked, and his sister ate the meal he had brought for her. He, unable to eat, pored over the photos hanging above her roommate’s bed. Some of them, he decided, were taken in the courtyard of her family home and the others in the living room. Her parents seemed rather old and she appeared to be their youngest. Judging by the furniture and the state of the house, their financial situation seemed standard small-town Arab. Her mother wore a flower-embroidered head covering, as women her age did. If all of her siblings were in the photos then there were three sisters and two brothers, and a few little ones, perhaps nephews.

The lawyer looked around for the bar of chocolate but did not see it anywhere. Maybe she’d hid it and maybe she’d eaten it. For a moment he grimaced at the thought of her throwing it out.

Just before eight, he parted with his sister and walked toward the gate outside the dorm.

The roommate was coming up the walk. She approached along with another girl and the lawyer feared saying anything to her in front of her friend. He sat stone still on the wooden bench and watched her come toward him. He looked down when he saw that she had noticed him. When he looked back up she was standing above him with her friend by her side. His face flushed a deep red. He had no idea what to expect.

“Are you here to visit your sister?” she asked. The lawyer got to his feet, looked bashfully at her friend, and nodded.

“I’ll be there in a second,” she told her friend, who said good-bye and left.

“What do you want?” she asked him when they were alone. The lawyer managed to draw a deep breath and stay focused. He decided not to get sidetracked this time and to act according to his original plan. Just as he did in court.

“I came to ask what your response would be if I were to tell you that I want to ask your father for your hand,” the lawyer said. He wanted to make clear that he was not looking for a fling. He did not have time to waste and, as always, he had decided it would be best to be straightforward.

“What?” she snapped. “My response would be a resounding no, that’s what my response would be.”

The lawyer let the insult wash over him. He nodded.