"The ruins. I visited the ruins." This was a stab in the dark; for all I knew, the big attraction in Sidon was a Tijuana-style donkey show.

"The ruins!" Mr. Ibrahim yelled. I wasn't sure what this meant until he grinned and held up the tub of pudding. "My sister made you some sweets!" he said. "We can eat it together."

Relieved at being off the hook, I plopped down next to Mr. Ibrahim and started to spoon up the chocolate dessert. After a couple of bites, Mr. Ibrahim tugged the bowl away from me.

"You smell like Al Cole," he said. One couch over, Adbul diplomatically picked up a magazine and pretended to read it.

"Al Cole?"

"Did you drink al-coal tonight?"

It then dawned on me what he meant. "Just a couple of beers," I said.

"In Sidon?" Mr. Ibrahim yelled.

"Um, no," I mumbled. "I had them here in Beirut."

"You didn't call me because ... you ... were ... drinking ... al-coal?" Mr. Ibrahim glowered at me. Obviously, this was a major betrayal in his moral world.

"Like I said, I was going to ..."

"I have been waiting here for two hours!"

"Well you didn't need to come all the way ..."

Mr. Ibrahim shoved the tub of pudding over at me. "You eat this," he said quietly. "I'm not hungry anymore."

"I'm sorry, it's just ..."

"Eat it!"

"Doesn't Abdul want ..."

"Abdul is not hungry either!"

I stared down at the pudding. The plastic tub was so big that I could have used it to smuggle a bowling ball through customs at the airport. There was no way I could have eaten all of it by myself, and I secretly suspected that he'd had his sister prepare it with the sole intention of punishing me for not calling him within the proper time frame.

Gripping my spoon, I made my best effort. As I choked down the chocolate dessert, it occurred to me that my weird friendship with Mr. Ibrahim betrayed my own credulous, middle-class sense of judgment. Had someone as ruthless and narrow as Mr. Ibrahim been a penniless street sweeper with a donkey cart and a chicken instead of a Mercedes and a bodyguard, I doubt I'd have accepted his efforts to help me in the first place -- and I certainly wouldn't have let him know where I was staying. But seeing Lebanon by Mercedes and eating gourmet meals had made me rationalize Mr. Ibrahim's idiosyncrasies. Somehow, I suspect that both his social life and his moral self-concept depended on people like me.

In the end, Mr. Ibrahim didn't force me to eat all of the pudding. After verifying to his satisfaction that I was truly suffering from the effort, he melodramatically forgave me for not calling him, then went home for the night.

If he had any intention of surprising me with a sightseeing trek the next day, I didn't wait around to find out. Immediately after the pudding incident, I wrote Mr. Ibrahim a note. It read: "I'm sorry to have to tell you this way, but I had to go to Syria on short notice. Thank you for your kindness and hospitality. I will remember Lebanon well."

The next morning, I left the note with the manager of my hotel and took the first bus up the coast to Tripoli, a seaport on Lebanon's northwestern coast. For the first hour of the bus ride, I had trouble relaxing; I kept expecting the old lady in the seat next to me to pull off a polyurethane face mask and reveal herself, grinning madly, as Mr. Ibrahim.

As for the note I left with the hotel manager, it wasn't completely dishonest: I will indeed remember Lebanon well. It's just that too much of any good thing has a way of wearing a man down.

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