The Ruins of Us (13 page)

He walked into his office and made sure to close the door with a convincing slam. How could he prepare witty banter about the prince’s family when he was far too preoccupied with thoughts of his own disobedient lot? Why should a man stoop to work a fire that should blaze effortlessly? A woman should love her husband, as long as he provided a suitable life for her and gave her an equal share of his attention. The Koran said,
You may put off any of your wives you please and take to your bed any of them you please.

Of course, Rosalie wasn’t just a woman. She was a hellion, a sylph. In truth, he’d been terrified to tell her about Isra, worried that she would tear out his thinning hair in tufts or suffocate him in his sleep. Even while she’d become more of a Saudi wife than he’d ever thought possible, he knew that her spirit wasn’t dead. The heart wants what it wants, he’d told his brothers, and they had nodded at him and shrugged, but in the back of his mind, he heard Rosalie saying
hogwash
. When it came to women, a yellow stripe of cowardice ran down the backs of the Baylani men. They owned provinces, ran villages, opened their hearts before Almighty God, but they could not bring themselves to be entirely honest with their wives. He knew it was in him, too, and so he’d decided to ride it out and see what happened rather than stick his hand straight into the hive and wait to get stung.

He sat at his desk, swiveling in his high-backed chair until he faced the windows. He wished he were the CEO of some American corporation, so he could keep a bar in the office—a neatly organized cart filled with the clear and amber liquids that helped take the edge off. “To life management,” Dan said whenever they clinked glasses. At that moment, he could use a bottle of at least twenty-year-old scotch.

As he watched the morning unfold outside his window, twirling a pen between his fingers, Abdullah tried to recall any fig-decimating or hair-pulling or other forms of feminine vengeance occurring among his father’s four wives. He couldn’t. But then, he’d rarely seen Abdul Latif’s other wives, and as everyone liked to say, it had been another time. Things had changed; he knew that, but tradition didn’t change overnight. Tradition was the slow accumulation of centuries, and he was his father’s son. His first experience of the world was as a child of Abdul Latif, a man who took wives as easily as he took his ghawa in the morning. It was what some powerful men still did. To hell with everyone and their tsk-tsking, their high-minded visions of modernization.

By the time his father took his second wife, Abdullah had been ten, too old to spend his afternoons in the care of women. While Abdul Latif worked at empire-building, Abdullah went to school, learning how to write neat classical script, perform ablutions, twist ears, and spit with vigor. If there had been trouble among the wives, the ripples had never reached the surface. Abdullah’s mother, Khadija, bore the same slit-mouthed expression until she’d died, when he was seventeen. She’d been his father’s first wife, his only Bedu wife, her body and mind built for hardship, her skin leathered and eyes lightened by the sun, hair a blackish red that seemed to contain all life and death, blood and soot, within its thick waves. The fact of her people’s centuries-long survival in the Rub’ al-Khali meant that she wasn’t a woman to question destiny and she wouldn’t have dared to oppose Abdul Latif’s decisions. But it had been a different era, and having multiple wives was a more accepted way of life. Now the Kingdom was filled with monogamists who said, “Oh, I believe it is every man’s right, by the Koran!” and then, with a false humility that grated on Abdullah: “It is just not for me, alhamdulillah.”

He wished his mother were still alive. She would have loved Rosalie, after the initial shock of it. They were both tough as the desert, survivors. And they both laughed full-force, heads tilted back, teeth showing. Abdullah always enjoyed the way people in restaurants and movie theaters would turn to look at them whenever Rose had laughed that throaty laugh. He tipped back in his chair and surveyed his office. A large mahogany desk custom-made for him by a Dutch carpenter, deep built-in shelves where various plaques and trophies spoke of his years of triumph, two walls of long windows through which he could view the city where he had spent his young adulthood, his middle age, and now, his later years. Yet his well-appointed workspace was nothing in comparison to the homes he’d given his family. He was most proud of Rosalie’s house on the Diamond Mile. It was a family house from the start, and he and Rose had given the children the run of it. The pool was always filled with bright toys, the makeshift soccer pitch in the backyard littered with homemade obstacle courses the kids and their friends would set up and race through, the competitive looks on their faces reminding him that children were not so far removed from the pulls of the adult world. Rosalie was always down on the floor or out in the grass, playing with the kids. They’d never had a nanny, though she’d consented to a housekeeper and a cook. He’d loved that casual, hands-on American way she’d mothered their children. Over the years, though, as her clothing got finer, she preferred to watch from the patio, a tall glass of iced tea in her hand. And maybe that was her right, as a mother—to one day refuse to get down in the dirt with her kids, to feel as if she had done the hard work and could now sit back. Or maybe it was the country changing her, since mothers in her social circle just didn’t behave that way for the most part. But he missed the rambunctiousness, the energy. The years of money and ease had made her more refined and to him, less recognizable. When he had married Rosalie, he knew that the only way for a non-Saudi woman to be fully happy in Saudi Arabia was if she came ready to surrender to the culture and religion. Such was the strength of the country’s orthodoxy; there could be no other way. But he had loved her so desperately that he ignored his misgivings. And at the time, he felt that their passion was enough.

Now her energy was returning, just not in the way he had hoped. When he was being honest with himself, he knew that he hadn’t told her about Isra out of fear. Fear and sadness. In Texas, she’d had a notoriously bad temper—Jalapeño Rose, they called her at the Lion—and certain customers refused to come back to the bar after run-ins with her. Of course, she was usually in the right. Someone had failed to tip, and so she’d publicly shamed him, or some drunk had tried to grab a part of her she was determined to share only with herself or Abdullah.

But he’d also been sad at the predicament he found himself in. He’d fallen in love with Isra. While he hadn’t admitted it to Dan in the car the other night, he agreed with him that a man could really only love one woman at a time. So what did that say about him and Rose? He knew the answer, and it was a punch to the gut.

And now that the truth about his second marriage was out, he could feel Rosalie’s love transmuting into something ugly. He knew she would not cooperate with his efforts to incorporate Isra into the Baylani family, though they
were
all family, especially now that Isra was pregnant, due in early summer. Rosalie, Isra, Mariam, Faisal—all connected through him, bound by blood the moment the baby arrived. He was going to tell Rosalie the other night—babies mitigate anger; he’d seen it himself when Faisal and Mariam had been born, the new softness in his father’s face—but he found he couldn’t get the words out.

Farouk knocked and then opened the door. He set a tea tray down on the small table in front of Abdullah’s desk.

“I thought you might want a tea,” Farouk said. “They say it has soothing qualities.”

The earthy scent of the tea filled Abdullah’s nose.

“See that some gets delivered to everybody else in my family then, will you?” Abdullah shook his head. He watched as Farouk carefully poured the amber liquid into a small, gilded cup.

“Shukran, ya Farouk.”

“Afwan, Sheikh.”

“Farouk?”

“Yes, Sheikh?”

“Pour one for yourself. Sit down for a moment, take a little break.”

Farouk looked confused, probably because Abdullah had never said more than “hello,” “good-bye,” or “thank you” to him in the decade they had both worked at B-Corp. The man poured himself a cup of tea, then perched on the edge of one of the showy leather king chairs that Abdullah had had brought in from Italy.

“Are you a religious man, Farouk?” Abdullah watched him shift uncomfortably in response to the question. “The truth, now. No lying to the boss.” He meant it as a joke, but he saw there could be no joking between the foreign office manager and the CEO.

“Not particularly, sir. My father was a philosophy professor at the University of Tunis.”

Abdullah laughed. “So, you had your own problems growing up, eh? Nihilism? Existentialism? All those isms could drive a man as mad as any suras.”

“True enough, sir.”

“Are you married?”

“No, Sheikh Abdullah.”

“Ever been married?”

“Yes, once.”

“What happened? Did she die?”

“In a way. We divorced after fifteen years of marriage.”

Abdullah tried to appoint his face with the proper expression, but he wasn’t sure what that would be in this case. Sadness? Concern? Anger?

“And why was that, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“She met someone she loved more than me, sir.”

“Hmm. Children?”

“No, sir.”

“Ah, see. There’s where it gets complicated, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose so, sir.”

They each took sips of their tea, the silence stretching out into the next minute, and then the next. Abdullah did not feel comforted by their talk. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to feel, but now it was something akin to annoyance. There should be some sort of training before you got yourself mixed up in such things—marriages and divorces and children and second marriages. He had trained for every other part of his life, football as a youth and then business and economics as an adult. Even driving required training. Yet when you married, what advice did people give? Only congratulations, and what good does that do anyone?

“I’ve taken up too much of your time already, Farouk. Please.” He gestured toward the door. Farouk rose, lifting the tea tray from the table. He had a certain grace about him, and what Abdullah had previously, and a bit resentfully, mistaken for austerity, he could now see was sadness. He had just never taken the time to notice before.

“One final thing,” he called out, just as Farouk was closing the door.

“Yes, sir?”

“Please call Mariam’s school. Tell them she’ll be leaving at lunch. A doctor’s appointment.”

Even though she was a scamp and trickster, or perhaps because of it, Mariam always cheered him up. They would go to lunch at the Gulf Hotel, eat shrimp cocktail on the promenade overlooking the water. After the blow-up at the marketplace, Mariam had canceled her birthday party. She’d not gotten a proper celebration, and he wanted to make it up to her. He knew that she shouldn’t have to suffer as a result of her parents’ problems.

He switched on his computer, counting the beats until the reassuring start-up sounds resonated through the quiet room. Thank God for the office, his cool refuge from the tumult of the big house. He thought of the house he shared with Isra, which was still an oasis. Her newness. Her firmness. Her cute Palestinian way of saying things. He neatened a stack of papers on his desk, pleased with thoughts of her.

AT NOON, ABDULLAH
pulled up outside of the Al-Watan Modern Girls School. He parked at the curb and then rolled down his window to tell the guard his purpose. After a few minutes, Mariam appeared, her eggplant-colored abaya flapping open around her legs, revealing the long woolen skirt beneath. She clutched a stack of books to her chest and moved to open the door, but the security guard lunged at the handle, as if insulted by the idea that she would open her own door. She gave him a withering look.

Once she was inside the car, Abdullah again rolled down the window.

“Tell the man thank you, habibti.”

“Shukran,” she said with a little wave of her hand.

He rolled up the window and turned to look at her.

“I’ve never known you to be impolite, Mimou.”

“Ali and I are fighting an all-out war, Baba, and you just forced me to surrender the day.”

“War? What kind of war could my sweet daughter possibly be fighting?” He said this with a chuckle because everyone in the family knew that Mariam was always stirring things up for some cause she’d adopted.

“He calls Headmistress Shideed when I arrive every morning and reports my ‘inappropriate dress.’ I think my abaya is elegant.”

“Try to be a little understanding, badditi. The man’s old. He’s never seen anything but black abayas. He’s old-guard.”

“Times are changing. Why can’t
he
be understanding? His time is in the past.
We’re
the future, me and the other girls.”

She pulled her scarf off her head and smoothed her hair. He noticed her hands had lost their baby fat, her fingers long and thin, her nails painted bright pink. She was fourteen. Soon, after the baby was born, she would no longer be the youngest in the family. She would be a good sister. She already was.

“You’re right,” he said, pulling the car out into the street. “Patience will only get you so far.” He thought of Rosalie, how she had wanted to change things back in the States—the way women were treated by professors and in bars. When she’d gotten to Saudi, though, she was intent on fitting in, eager to please his family and friends. There was no place for her women’s lib ideas in a country where women couldn’t even drive.

“Where’re we going?” Mariam asked.

“I thought I’d take you for a birthday lunch at the Gulf Hotel. I know how much you like their shrimp cocktail. You can even order a virgin daiquiri.”

When she didn’t respond, he glanced over at her. She was staring out the window, her cheek resting against the car door.

“Love? Doesn’t that sound like fun? Playing hooky with your baba?”

“Not really,” she said. “Umma wouldn’t like it.”

“She won’t mind. She knows you didn’t get your birthday party, and besides, it’s only one afternoon of school . . .”