The Wet and the Dry (11 page)

On some days we forwent the boats and drove down the coast
road toward Sur. The villages feel abandoned to the rhythms of the sea. Dibab, Fins, Bamah. The beaches at desert’s edge, windswept and austere, paths running between flattened gardens of okra. We lay together in the wilderness, making words out of pebbles on the beach, walking through the dunes. We talked less and less, but this did not matter in the way that it might have mattered a few weeks earlier. I noticed that she was more withdrawn and that she was not unhappy to be withdrawn. But from what was she withdrawn?

The days at the desert sea were crystal clear, in terms of consciousness. It takes several days for all traces of alcohol to leave the bloodstream, and when that happens, the clarification is surprising. You move differently, you think differently; you sense things differently. You intuit your lover differently. There was something nightmarish about it. And at the same time it was a salvation. The eroticism changed shape.

If we had been drinking, we would have made love on the distant beaches, an act that would probably have led to our arrest. Without drink, we were more mindful, more aware of our responsibilities. A different kind of respect for each other emerged. But the trashy, slippery treachery underlying everything became more obvious.

Sometimes the fights were like something decaying in slow motion, a peach in a bowl caught in a weeklong film. They were caused by suspicions and manias that remained quiescent when we were sober but that alcohol brought into consciousness in an unstoppable way. A decay in which one could suddenly see the nasty end of things. I wondered then if I had suggested Oman
simply because I knew it would be dry. Rancorous and violent evenings would be impossible in the Islamic monarchy by the sea, and we would be forced back into the level-headed banality that is sometimes what saves us from other people.

New Year’s, however. That day we drove to the desert town of Nizwa and back. We arrived in Muscat tired and dusty and dressed up for the one night we had decided we would score a serious drink. The receptionists at the Al Midan took a dim view of trying to find a bottle of champagne anywhere outside a Western megahotel. We said we would go and have a look. In all of them it was three hundred dollars a head for New Year’s dinner with a bottle of bad bubbly, usually Mumm, thrown in for the midnight hour. Exorbitant, then, but as eight o’clock approached and the year began to expire, it seemed irrelevant how much we would have to pay to sip the intoxicant. Four hundred, five hundred, we would have paid it. Elena’s face began to harden as the dim possibility of not finding it at all began to occur to her. A determination appeared.

“We’ll find somewhere,” she said as we went out to the car. “A bottle of champagne at midnight is the
one
thing I insist on.”

In Muscat you have to navigate through huge roundabout intersections, along lonely unmarked roads fringed with malls and developments, inside which your destination often lies. To get to Qurm, where the nearest hotels lay scattered along the beach, we had to get onto the Qaboos Freeway and find an exit that would take us to the Hyatt and the Radisson. By the time we got there, we saw below the drive a garden party under way with a crowd of people in paper hats. The New Year’s party.

“No,” Elena said, turning away, “I can’t do it, baby. I can’t sit at one of those tables and pretend I’m enjoying myself.”

“You get a bottle of Mumm’s.”

“It’s not even good champagne.”

Do we care if it’s good?
I thought.
Is that what we are after, quality?

We drove to the Radisson, which sits on top of a hill at the end of Qurm. It was a madhouse. The Persian restaurant had a few places still free, as it was also three hundred dollars a head with the bottle of champagne. The tables were packed with all the infidel refugees fleeing Islam’s alcohol laws for the night. We took one look and wilted. “Come and join us,” the manager kept crying, making sinister gestures at these overloaded tables. “It’s your last chance in Muscat for a midnight drink! Everywhere is now booked, sir.”

It was eleven, and we had one hour to find that elusive bottle, but we were not tempted to lay our quest to rest at the Persian restaurant of the Radisson. We went grimly back to the car. “One hour,” she said. “We have one hour to not be fucked for New Year’s.”

The reportedly hedonistic seafront boulevards of Qurm, a string of cafés and restaurants where Muscat’s beautiful people liked to parade themselves, yielded nothing but fruit juice. “They’re drinking fruit juice on New Year’s,” Elena gasped. “I’m in hell.” We came to a turnoff and took it, blindly hoping it would go back to the freeway. We stopped at one of the hotels and asked if they knew of any restaurants where we could get a drink at this late hour. The staff patiently looked up alternatives.
Yes, they said, there was a Mexican place in the neighborhood of Madinat Qaboos, in a mall. They drew us a map. They looked dubious. Good luck!

It was one of those small, friendly malls the Omanis seem to love, with restaurants and pleasure gardens tucked behind the retail outlets. We parked and walked down a lane into a series of restaurant gardens hung with lanterns where Omani crowds were smoking their
shish
and perhaps looking at their watches as carefully as we were. We hurried. There was a large Omani place called Kharjeen with gardens filled with trees, and behind it the Mexican joint. It had saloon swing doors and piñatas hung in the interior gloom. We went in frantically. It was filled with drunken tourists and expats in Stetsons and Omani guys on the prowl, and we knew at once that we couldn’t do it. We retreated baffled into the alley, and there was a hysterical scene. It was ten to midnight, and we were to celebrate the hour dry. Our resolutions had come to nothing. There was little else to do but sit in the lovely gardens of Kharjeen and order
shuwa
marinated with pepper and turmeric with two tall watermelon juices. The moon rose over the garden, and the affluent Omanis did not look at their watches.

Elena had calmed a little, and when she had accepted the idea that we would not be drinking a bottle of champagne, she felt less hysterical, and we sipped the watermelon juices and waited. A great calm, suddenly. Midnight, and nothing happened. Everyone kept talking, eating, smoking, and no one even looked up. We kissed and wondered if we had miscalculated the time. The orgy of midnight never happened.

We toasted the New Year with fruit juice and then ordered apple
shish
pipes. The mania of the half-hour before midnight was forgotten, and we stayed in the garden for a long time, looking at the moon and smoking and saying very little. It was the first nonalcoholic New Year I had enjoyed since the age of thirteen. Here I was outside with the moon, smoking with the girl I adored, sober, clear, drinking
kharwa
coffee and not talking. The manic dialogues and monologues of alcohol absent. It was not bad. It was even preferable. We drove home very calmly, curiously contented, and amused ourselves half the night in our hotel bed, indifferent to the concept of a new year.

The following morning we got up early, hangover-free, and drove in the hard light to Qantab. The usual suspects were waiting for us, and we had a boat within minutes. The sea was calm and slightly menacing, as if hammerheads were waiting below.

We went to a new beach twenty minutes south. It was a narrow crescent of sand between two stone headlands that pushed out to sea like the prongs of a fork. The boatman left us in shallow water, and we waded ashore. He would be back at the end of the day. We climbed onto the sand, and within a minute we were alone. Behind us was a hillside of dry grasses and rubble, no road in sight. At the distant tops of the rock shelves, birds sat waiting.

We spread the towels and lay there in the gathering heat. I was glad now not to have a hangover. We had become saner as a result. However, looking up from my doze, I saw that Elena’s
eyes were wide awake, and that she was biting her lip nervously. She sat up then and began to look up and down the beach as if she had heard something unusual.

“I heard a bee,” she said.

There are moments in every relationship when something is revealed that has never been seen before. I had never known that she had a fear of bees, or that bees occupied any place in her subconscious. Prolonged sobriety, perhaps, had begun to expose it.

“There’s a bee here,” she said then, getting up and standing there in the sunlight, magnificently Monica Vitti, tanned and blond and windblown, a girl who had been a dancer.

“There can’t be a bee,” I said.

“There’s a bee. I can hear it.” She began to sweat. “It’s looking at me. I can feel it looking at me.”

“I can’t be looking at you.”

“It’s after me. Where is it?”

She began to wring her hands, then to pace back and forth. She began to cry. Then, suddenly she took off down the beach, screaming and waving her arms at an imaginary pursuing bee. She ran all the way down to the end of the little beach and began to dance about, battling phantom beasts. With a cry, she jumped into the water.

“I have cultivated my hysteria,” Baudelaire once wrote, “with pleasure.” I lay there not knowing what to do. I got up. At that moment a bee flew over my head and meandered its way down to the water’s edge, but at the opposite end of the beach. Its indifference to us was obvious. I walked down the beach, wondering
what I should say to comfort her. Now I wished we had a bottle of vodka to share. It would have made everything better. As I came up, she glared at me and demanded to know where the bee was. I lied that there was no bee.

“There’s hammerhead sharks in there,” I said.

She jumped out of the water back onto dry land and stood shivering, wildly looking around for signs of an attacker with little wings. I gave her the towel and told her to swat the air around her to keep the bees at bay. She seized the thing and did just that. We walked back to our place. Elena swatted the air around her, and soon she began to enjoy the swatting in itself. I lay down, and she paced up and down, swatting and then doing a few dance moves. It was a phobic trance.

Soon she was doing a full-blown number, leaping up and down, pirouetting on the sand, the towel flapping around her to keep off the bee. It became a performance, and the deep strangeness of the scene was offset by its sheer prettiness. At that moment an Arab fishing boat came into view slogging its way across the open water. It came halfway across the cove, and then it stopped, as if stupefied by what the crew had seen. A blond girl of obvious loveliness prancing about naked and capable of professional moves and waving a towel in one hand. I could see the hands raised to shade their eyes. Infidels, there was no end to their weirdness.

I thought about this all the way back to Dubai. We never had a drink in Oman, and the whole voyage had been alcohol-free from the first moment to the last. Its atmosphere had been unforgettable. There was something missing, some romantic
plumpness of mind was not there, and we had felt lean and sincere and too exposed. I had felt subtly accountable, like a charlatan who has been forced to take a lie detector test.

Back at the Four Points in Dubai, I went down alone to the bar and ordered my usual vodka tonic. I was relieved to see the eastern European tarts and to see the dartboard on the wall. Elena was asleep upstairs, the incident of apiphobia long forgotten, and I was mentally free to rejoin the great brotherhood of drinkers. I sank the vodka into my throat and sang a silent hallelujah. Vodka: it is like an enema for the soul. The word means “the little water,” and I drank three Bong and tonics one after the other, not thinking, not talking, just concentrating on my reelevation into normalcy. And yet there was a thread of sadness in this return, a nostalgia. That word in Greek simply means “the pain of returning.”

The Little Water

                                  
There used to be a game one
could play in the cornfields of Haywards Heath with the lumbering combine harvesters that toiled there in summer. The drivers were unable to see anything on the ground, which invited a grim game that could be called a variation of African Chicken. We took turns swigging from a bottle of vodka stolen from our parents, drinking shots out of the metal cap. The Smirnoff tasted like fuel, like something scooped out of the bottom of an engine, but its little kick of heat at the end was addictive. We lay in the path of the combine harvesters, hidden in the wheat, then rolled away from the rotating blades at the very last minute. Lying there in the cool of the wheat stalks, totally out of your mind, you could hear the harvester approaching and could judge its distance aurally. Then, making a split-second decision, you rolled away as the blades whirled past.