You Don’t Know What Love Is.

Samar came last. We’d planned the gathering a week earlier, but she’d been operating in the morning and was tired by afternoon. She told me she needed to go for a run and then get a massage. She was my best friend in high school, and we’d reconnected in Toronto after years of losing touch.

For tonight, I’d invited the three musketeers, my high school friends from Tehran — to meet Guido. When we were lying in bed, I’d shared some of our memories with him. I tried to find photos of our awkward teenage faces with those long mandatory black scarves and the ugly dark-blue school uniform tunics, but couldn’t find any. Since he was eager to see what I looked like, I sketched it for him — the shitty teen Islamic Republic of Iran fashion! We laughed hard.

When I told him that all three now live in Toronto — one even in the same hospital — he was eager to have a social with them. We’d landed on a Friday night, but the day before, Guido came down with a fever. We had to go back to the hospital to check for any complications after his second surgery. He ended up staying overnight for IV antibiotics, and we came home in the morning. I suggested canceling, but he said he needed a distraction, so we kept the plan.

By the time Samar knocks on the door, we’ve already eaten — Yalda and I sitting around the dining table, Guido resting in the bedroom. He’s still not feeling well, and we’ve convinced him to lie down and not push himself to socialize. Samar settles in beside us after taking off her white scarf and chocolate-colored fall jacket, hanging them neatly in the entrance closet. She looks fresh; with light makeup around her hazy green eyes and a touch of pink on her cheeks, she looks pretty — like always.

Originally, we’d planned to have everyone’s families together, but since Yalda’s husband and Samar’s partner weren’t around, we turned it into a girls’ night. Since Guido showed up in my surgery room and stayed with me for recovery, I haven’t really had time with my friends — and none of them have met him. They’ve been pushing me to introduce my ex-lover.

She sits down as I serve her the beet appetizer.
“Where’s our boy?” she asks.
“He had a fever, resting.”
“Did you check him out?” She’s a doctor and knows the risks after surgery.
“Yes, he’s on meds.”

She starts telling us how the massage guy used so much oil that she kept imagining him slipping off her body and falling to the ground. We laugh. She’s always been the light of the party, brightening every room with her humor.

In school, I remember how we locked the door to our building to keep the teachers out of class and organized a speed-walk competition in the second-floor corridor. She and I were the managers. When the teachers finally broke in, we got into trouble and were suspended for a week. We were the two rebels — never with our headscarves properly on, the black cloth hanging loose around our necks like necklaces.

Funny enough, now we’re both doctors in the same hospital — and the only two in our group not settled into family life. Not married, no kids. She’s dating a German civil engineer, and I’m recovering from my divorce — as my friends joke, “in a relationship with my dog, Goebel.”

Yalda is having her dessert as Samar is serving herself the leftover stuffed pepper. I’m sipping my wine and thinking to check in with Guido.

“So?” Samar says as she puts the napkin on her knee. “Feedback please?” She is looking at Yalda.

“Approved instantly.”

Her eyes sparkles, looking back at me. “What was his name again?”

“Guido.”

“Really!? I had an ex with the same name. Super sexy guy.”

Yalda chimes in. “Then, I’ve to say all boys with this name are the same.”

“So, he is hot?”

I’m laughing at how we have grown, no one even talks about what is his job, where he lives, who is the family, we start with bedroom reputation.

“He’s super charming, libido to the roof.”

“Then no interview needed,” she says, taking a bite and chewing with pleasure. “Wow, this is yummy.”
I smile, proud. “He’s a good cook too.”
“So — angels on earth! Where did you say he lives?”
“New York.” She’d lived there for five years after her medical school.

She wipes her lips with a napkin, leaving a light pink trace on it. Then she looks me in the eye suspiciously and asks, “He’s not an architect, is he?”
Surprised, I reply, “Yes, he is.”
Her eyes widen. “Guido Pulla?!”

We stare at each other for a moment, and without needing to ask anything more, we both say at once, “Shit.”

I remember all the stories she’d told me about a man — a married man in New York — whom she’d dated for two years. She’d always said she was so hooked that the night he told her it had to end because his wife was pregnant and he’d decided to stay in the marriage, she walked for hours along the Brooklyn waterfront until she found herself in Brighton Beach at midnight. She never told me his name, his background, or his job — only that she had been madly in love with him. The same as with me, she knew my love of life as I called him, the one who I lost in my twenties and never could compare anyone with him, I never mentioned his name, his background, I never even told her how he looks like.

She covers her face with both hands, trying to hide her emotions, repeating one word over and over.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”

Yalda bursts out laughing, looking between us.
“What a triangle!”

I feel the same confusion I usually have at funerals — I can’t sort my emotions. I want to laugh like Yalda, but the image of Guido and Samar together, as lovers, burns somewhere deep inside me. A pain I can’t properly name.

When Samar finally lowers her hands, I see tears in her eyes, I’m not sure if because of laughing hard or she is actually crying. “Dina… shit. How did that happen?”

This time I laugh, and so does she. Then louder. Yalda joins in, until we’re laughing so hard we don’t hear the sound of crutches in the corridor — Guido walking toward us.

“What’s so funny?” he asks. He hasn’t seen Samar yet — her back is to him. When she turns, he stops. His injured leg swings slightly in front of the other. His salt-and-pepper hair is messy around his ears; it looks like we woke him with our laughter, and he walked straight into the living room without taming those wild waves.

He is stunned, looks at her, looks at me. Then he does what he’s best at — turning awkwardness into humor.
“Oh, bonsoir, madame!”

The rest of the night is a blur of high school memories, laughter, and Guido showing Samar, Sarah’s photos, talking about food and travel as if nothing has happened. We’re ignoring the elephant in the room — the fact that we, two best friends, have both had an emotional and physical relationship with the same man.

He lies in a full leg cast on my light grey sectional in front of both of us — the same way we once lay side by side all day in that small studio in Paris, listening to music, drinking wine, kissing each other’s lips. How were those days for Samar? Where did they make love? How forty-year-old Guido was different from his twenty-something version? I want to know, and I don’t. But one question pushes through, the one I can’t leave unsaid.

We go to bed late. When he lays his head on the pillow, I ask,
“Did you love her?”

He answers with a firm “No,” without thinking. Inside, I feel a flicker of pleasure — one I’m ashamed of. Then he narrows his eyes, watching the shadows of moonlight stretch across the ceiling.

“Exploring new people,” he says slowly, “is different from love.”
“Go on,” I say.
“When you talk about love, it’s not always about excitement, exploration, or adventure.”
“What is it about?”

He presses his lips together, taking his time. I’m cornering him, and we both know it — but I want him to speak. Once in my life, I want the love of my life to tell me what he really thinks about love. I can give him all the time in the universe, but I want the answer.

“…say, I love you, right?” He looks at me with that childish expression I adore. “That’s a feeling that connects with things — like, I truly care about you. But are you an exciting person for me? Not necessarily.”

“Was Samar exciting for you?”
“In that stage of my life, yes. I was bored, and my marriage was a mess. We’d shut down with each other two years after we married. So yes, she was exciting. But did I care about her? …not really.”

“So how do you start caring about someone — truly?”
“Oh, come on… you ask as if you don’t know what love is.”

I pause. I don’t have an answer — or maybe I do. Maybe it’s something I’ve learned only recently, in these last fifty-two days, since Guido’s ski accident. I agree with him that after the excitement fades, something else begins — a quieter kind of longing, a connection that goes beyond adventure or novelty, one that has nothing to do with anything but who you are together.

I say it quietly, mostly to myself. “Time, passion, intimacy.” He’s already closed his eyes. I don’t know how long ago. I kiss his eyelashes gently — the way I’ve done for more than twenty years.