The Ruins of Us (17 page)

Ahead about a hundred yards, he saw a checkpoint, the makeshift wooden booths looking rickety in the winds off the jebel. He slowed his car and got his iqama out of the glove compartment. “Keep your work papers with you at all times or you can be arrested,” Abdullah had warned him when he’d returned to the Kingdom two years earlier. Since
9
/
11
, the Western expatriate community had diminished rapidly, and Dan felt his foreignness every time he went out of the apartment.

Like many Americans, Dan remembered where he had been on the morning of September
11
. But what had etched that day in memory was his marriage coming apart, the grotesqueness of two people falling out of love. How could he be expected to give a damn about some extremists’ large and abstract hatred for him when he had Carolyn’s to contend with? The night before the towers fell Carolyn had kicked him out of the house. He hadn’t known where to go, so he fell asleep in his car, which he’d parked in the ditch under the oak in front of their house. When Carolyn went to get the paper the next morning, she’d found him red-eyed, slumped over the steering wheel. She rapped firmly on the window. “Something terrible has happened,” she said. Yeah, no shit, he thought.

“Terrorists. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi.” He had been furious with her, thought she was trying to change the subject, to ignore the fact of his broken heart on her doorstep. He might have raised his voice a little, might have called her an empty-hearted shrew. He might have been loud enough to rouse the blue heron that slept in the trees near the creek behind their house. He watched as it rose above the aspens, so slow and elegant. Then he had stormed the house looking for his electric razor and she’d called the cops. “You were always so goddamn self-centered, Dan. They’re saying ten thousand dead and you’re screaming about your razor.” With that phone call to the police, it was no longer “you and I.” They’d had to bring in third parties. The lawyers. The cops. The kids. But despite the inevitable violence of such triangulations, Dan still wished for Carolyn something fierce: on stars, on wishbones, on birthdays, before sleep, in prayerful whispers.

Carolyn. She was so much like her moniker, a bit haughty, sometimes Germanically cold—the kind of woman brought up to appreciate sealskin cloaks and marble, who knew that satin was for beguilement and tulle for surrender. She had once told him those sartorial truths while he waited for her to finish trying on cocktail dresses at Neiman’s. She’d whispered, as if giving away some precious secret kept by the glass-boned dowagers of Pacific Heights, among whom she’d been raised—women who’d managed to dye their pioneer’s blood as blue as the bay they looked out at from their French windows. At that very moment, Dan should have realized that he was in up to his neck, that whatever beatnik salary he could cobble together during the nomad’s life he’d planned for himself would never be enough for such a woman. But she possessed a face that belonged in a blueberry patch or at the edge of a lake about to swan dive, and that freckled warmth hoodwinked him into believing that Carolyn was just a simple girl looking for a way to forget about finery, to taste the salt from the neck of a florist’s son. Perhaps he’d doomed them both at that very moment of willful blindness.

There were two lines of vehicles at the checkpoint, cars on the left and a mile-long line of trucks with bald tires and tattered mud flaps on the right. The dust in the air was so thick he could barely see two cars in front of him. A thin layer of sand had settled on his dashboard. He wondered what the police would do if one of the men on the watch list rolled up. How did you distinguish the terrorists from all of the good and faithful Saudis when they all wore the same white thobes, the same checkered ghutras, read the same Koran, went to the same mosque as you or your cousins? Hell, maybe they
were
your cousins. As he approached the guard booth, he started to roll down his window, but the two fidgety young men perched atop the truck waved him through, barely glancing his way. One of them had his hand on the automatic weapon mounted on the truck’s top. Dan raised his hand quickly, a shukran and masalama. Reflexively, the kid jerked the gun around to face him.

“Shway shway,” Dan said, putting his hand down slowly. Hold it. Hang on. Slow down.

The guard shot him a contemptuous look. They were jumpier than normal. Perhaps they were after a particularly big fish, a fugitive Crazy Sheikh, as Abdullah called the firebrands. Abdullah always laughed a bit too hard when he dismissed the radical element in Saudi culture. “Look around—these are boom times. Why do you Americans always have to focus on the negative? You have Timothy McVeigh, we’ve got the Crazy Sheikh.”

Dan let the wind blow his hair off of his forehead for a few seconds as he drove away from the checkpoint. Nothing like a gun in the face first thing in the morning to get the blood going. Dust rimmed his nose, stung his eyes. He liked to let the dry air suck the life out of his skin. Sometimes, he went to the beach, put on a face mask and goggles, and stood in the middle of the shama’al. The stinging felt good. It made him feel as if he was exercising his right to pain. The highway dipped beneath power lines that stretched to the horizon like some futuristic arbor.

He thought about last night’s feast at the Baylani home, one of the hundreds he’d enjoyed in their living room, with its stained-glass ceiling tessellating natural light and the twenty-seven chandeliers transmuting electricity into crystal starbursts. When Faisal had stood up before the meal to say his piece, Dan had been far from offended. In fact, he had welcomed the discord. In Faisal’s rebelliousness, Dan witnessed the teenage moods he’d missed experiencing from his own son.

They’d served the main course at ten o’clock and people had talked late into the night, forgetting Faisal’s untraditional blessing. Dan ate sweet-fleshed whitefish and delicate egg-stuffed pastries, bell peppers bursting with spiced ground beef, and teardrop almond cookies. When he went to wash his hands at the sink next to the kitchen bathroom, he had crossed paths with Rosalie. She was dressed in a sky-blue djellaba, her slim figure lost in its clean lines. It was the Saudi housewife version of the muumuu, used to hide bloat and paunch, neither of which Rosalie had to worry about. He knew she woke to do yoga in the courtyard every morning. Abdullah prayed beside her at dawn as she did her asanas, though probably not anymore. Those tender acts of habit were surely destroyed now.

“Delicious dinner,” he said.

“Ahlan wa sahlan, ya Dan.”

“Your son was very entertaining tonight.”

“Oh, no. Whatever he did, please forgive him. He’s young.”

“He tried to convert me,” he said. “I wish I felt that strongly about something.”

“Misdirected passion can be dangerous.”

“Yes, but to feel passion at all. Must be easier to get out of bed in the morning.”

Dan thought about the look on Faisal’s face when he had stopped by Prairie Vista the other evening, his green eyes alight, giving him a look of ardor. When Faisal had issued his warning, Dan hadn’t been afraid. It was just Abdullah’s boy, Zool, who’d graduated early and was probably bored out of his mind. What teenager wasn’t eager for rebellion? At least Faisal hadn’t taken up drag racing like the kids in Jeddah, where the bored teenagers got themselves arrested or killed every other weekend. Faisal looked more like the type given over to romantic abandon. Dan had been overseas for most of Joe’s high school years. Had there been moments of fervor, the kind only teenagers are brave enough to show, to allow into their pink, unmarked hearts? He would have to remember to ask Carolyn.

He turned back to Rosalie. “I feel like I just receive information now.”

“Welcome to middle age.”

“Yes, but Abdullah . . .” He stopped himself, glancing at Rosalie to see if she grasped his implication.

“Abdullah is never satisfied. I pity him.” She paused. “I’d better get back to the other room. If I’m gone for too long, they start gossiping.”

“About you? Still?”

“Some things never change. And they have been eager to see how I’m doing since the news.”

“And?”

“I’ve been better.”

“Rosie,” he said, then hesitated. What he was about to say was definitely a breach of loyalty, but he didn’t care. Abdullah was a fool who took love for granted. “I’ve been through it. Just know that I’m here for you.”

He looked hard at her, trying to read her face. She was still so damned beautiful. Carolyn, who was not exactly homely, had always been jealous of Rosalie’s perfect, wide features.

She took his hand in both of hers, squeezed hard, then turned and left the room, her perfume lingering. A shiver passed through him. It struck him suddenly that he wanted to know Rosalie’s thoughts. It had been so long since he had conversed, really
talked
, with a woman. On his yearly vacations to Europe or America, he struck up conversations with bartenders or waitresses, trying for those little sympathies that only women can give.

He’d spent so long with his family as his four walls and a roof that when it all burned to the ground, he was left exposed. In the settlement, Carolyn took almost everything, and he hadn’t wanted any of what she didn’t take—objects that had filled the houses they’d shared for nearly three decades. With each item he left behind, he felt his heart fired and cooled, annealed by each rejection of the symbols of the life they had made together. He hadn’t planned for the memories to dislodge from the material things and follow him into his empty condominium on a desolate stretch of desert on the outskirts of Al Dawoun.

Now, on the drive to the North Compound, Dan found his thoughts returning to Rosalie. They’d been good pals in Texas, but in the Kingdom, their lives had been lived separately. Guiltily, he found that he was glad to have a comrade in heartbreak, especially a woman. He had been starved for company, but the guys never actually wanted to talk about anything. Rosie was perfect: tough but compassionate. She knew Carolyn and he knew Abdullah. They would be each other’s confessor.

He made up his mind—he had to get in touch with her. Nobody could treat Rosie March the way Abdullah was treating her. But he didn’t have her cell phone number or e-mail address. Abdullah was a true Saudi and believed that any male-female contact was inherently sexual. To ask for Rosalie’s cell phone number was equivalent to saying “I want to sleep with your wife.” If Dan had a message to pass along to her, he had to call Abdullah, like a grown-up game of telephone. Tradition always trumped efficiency. A craving rose up strong from his belly. If only Rosalie would just take his hand again. Touch was so important. It took so little to pacify the body, to meet its needs.

Out of nowhere, the low-lying compound appeared, tan trailers against the khaki-colored sand. The desert always dispatched distance extremely. Either it took light-years to reach some prayed-for, quavering marker on the horizon, or a destination stunned the traveler with its immediacy. Nothing was to scale. It was a rabbit-hole world in which size and proximity meant little. The LEGO-sized buildings mushroomed to full size in half a minute. Dan flexed and pointed his feet to get the blood flowing again. It was midweek and the compound had a hivelike energy. Come the weekend, the workers would recharge by watching bootleg
DVDS
of Bollywood films whose extravagance lent the dingy camp some razzle-dazzle for a few hours. As the Bangladeshi and Indian and Sri Lankan men watched the films, thoughts of distant wives and lovers thickened the air as the desert’s yellow light poured in through the windows. The compound residents didn’t have alcohol to bring the out-of-reach back to them, but they did have the movies. Dan felt kinship with the men, marooned together as they were.

He opened the door to the front office, and before he could set foot inside, Yaser descended on him.

“You’re late. Two messages for you. Abdullah and Eleanor. Who’s Eleanor? Are you keeping some piece of ass out in Bahrain? Because if you are, then I guess I’m going to have to stop feeling sorry for you.”

“For chrissakes, Yaser. Eleanor is my daughter. Ellie. You really don’t listen to anything I say, do you?”

“I try to avoid it.”

“Fuck you.”

“You’re not my type.”

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

“Dan?”

“What?”

“You look like hell.”

“Thanks.”

“Dan?”

“What?”

“I changed my mind. You’re definitely not getting laid. You look like hell.”

“Jesus H. Murphy. Can’t a man just come to work?”

The way Yaser mouthed off, it was hard for Dan to remember that he had grown up in the Hijaz and not on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. When he’d asked Yaser where he’d learned his accent, his slang, since he had never studied in the States, he’d replied, “American television. Movies.” Dan was sure that the Ulema loved the idea that the enormous Saudi youth population was learning verb conjugations from Johnny Depp.

He sat down in his tiny office. Sand pinged the plastic windowpane. Same old bullshit. Always the same old bullshit conversations. He felt so alone. He thought of all the boring things that husbands and wives absorbed from each other. Large things. Silly things. Desperate things. The dialogue of love was nonlinear and utterly unimportant to the greater world, but the intimacy created was vital to a person’s survival.

It was still too early to call the States, so he dialed Abdullah first. He picked up on the second ring, his voice tinny.

“Salaam, ya Dan. Guess where I am?”

“Hopefully somewhere with a wider cocktail selection than the North Compound.”

“Dubai. Poolside.”

“Puta madre. What’s the occasion?”

“After last night, I needed to be reminded why I married Isra. She’s helping me remember. She’s really good at jogging the memory. We’re only gone for two nights. But I need you to do me a favor.”

“Shoot.”

“I didn’t tell Rosalie, and she’s expecting me at the house tonight. A small dinner with the family.”

“So call her and tell her you won’t be making it,” Dan said. He didn’t like where the conversation was headed.