Too Much Too Soon (27 page)

“She doesn’t want to work.”

“Joss?” he asked, surprised. “A baby?”

“No,” Honora said softly. “Curt . . . well, I don’t really understand, but it came to me that maybe she’s decided she’s too much of a challenge for Malcolm and wants to even things up between them.”

“Turn in her ability on his masculine self-respect?”

“Am I getting a bit far out?”

He halted to pick a pale pink hibiscus. “It makes a kind of crazy sense.”

“I think they’re going through a rough time.”

“She told you?”

“You know Joss better than that. No, it’s just intuition. She’s very intent on Malcolm moving up the ladder.”

“And at the barbecue he seemed very intent on Lalarhein. But, Honora, you take on marital problems there, not lose them. We’ve had
several divorces in the few months since the project started.”

“She asked me, Curt, she
asked
me, and you know that Joss’d go a hundred miles out of her way rather than ask a simple favor. This Lalarhein job for Malcolm means everything to her.”

Curt tucked the hibiscus in his wife’s dark hair. “Okay, Sweet Leilani. I’ll think about it.”

The irritating roar of the overburdened air-conditioning unit did not cover the light tap on the plasterboard door. Joscelyn, who had been dozing off with her head propped against the arm of the couch, jumped, and her stationery pad dropped into the pillows behind her. Castigating herself for sinking into yet another unplanned nap, she swung up to a sitting position. “Oh, it’s you, Yussuf,” she said.

As if it could be anyone else. She was alone in the little house with Yussuf, her Egyptian “boy.” It was against Lalarheini mores for a man, no matter how impoverished, to become a servant, and no woman worked outside her home, so household help—and whores, too—were foreign recruits.

Yussuf bowed his white cap and shuffled a few inches forward on feet thrust sockless into oxfords whose backs were stomped down. Spare
and short as a gnarled vine, his wrinkled, wood-brown face sprouted a messy gray stubble. “What shall I prepare,” he inquired in his soft, heavily accented English, “for the evening meal?”

“I’ll take care of things tonight,” she said.

Today being Thursday, the eve of Islam’s inviolable Friday sabbath, Yussuf would depart and Malcolm would arrive home from the field. Her husband’s welcoming meal was planned around a contraband can of ham that had just arrived in one of Honora’s care packages. Yussuf was very devout, and Joscelyn—fond of her undemanding fellow prisoner in this air-conditioned prefab—did not insult him by requiring that he prepare foods forbidden by the Koran or serve equally prohibited alcohol, as most of the other Ivory housewives insisted their “boys” do.

“There is still time,” he said politely.

“You just run along.”

“One hundred thanks to you, madam.” He bobbed his head yet deeper. “In the ice box are some good fresh carrots, and a date cake.”

Yussuf purchased whatever they required. When Joscelyn had first arrived in Lalarhein, she had looked forward to shopping as the highlight of her day. Arms and legs covered by a long-sleeved blouse and long skirt, she would park in Daralam Square, where for a few coppers a ragged little boy would watch the red Pinto that Ivory had shipped over with the furniture. She would plunge on foot into the labyrinthian, narrow, cloth-covered alleyways
that were crowded with beggars, men in robes, the black ghosts of women. At every step a different alien odor had reached her nostrils. The raucous cries of the hawkers mingled in a wild song. The merchants in their tiny, aromatic shops cheated her outrageously, but she would never have abandoned her exotic jaunts because of that. No, it was the pinching. The surreptitious pinching that other Ivory wives immediately informed her was the fate of all unveiled women. She never saw whose unrelenting, anonymous fingers squeezed her flesh. Her buttocks, her thighs, even her small breasts were marked with purplish bruises when she returned home. Malcolm, who had not hit her since the night of the barbecue and was tender of her body, would run his fingers over the welts, horrified. So now Yussuf looped the big, woven, papyrus market basket over the handlebars of his bike and peddled into town.

“Mr. Peck will enjoy them,” she said, nodding gravely. “Go ahead, Yussuf. We’ll see you on Saturday.”

“If Allah wills it, Saturday,” he repeated, pressing his palms together for a final bow before he left.

Joscelyn heard the back door squeak as he pushed out his prized, ancient English bike. Going to the window, she opened the Venetian blinds to watch the thin old man swerve past a wagon pulled by a camel and donkey on his way to Daralam. The road, or in Joscelyn’s mind, the two-lane, twenty-three-foot-wide wearing surface paved of hot-mix asphaltic
concrete, was the first stretch of the job that had so disastrously separated Curt from Honora in the early months of their marriage.

Here, about three miles from town, an Ivory construction crew had assembled identical prefabs, and they stood like Monopoly houses, ten on either side of the road. Given the heat and the exorbitant price of water, it was hardly surprising that there were no attempts at a garden. The yellow weeds straggling below the clotheslines were the sole vegetation.

On the packed, sandy dirt by the Urquharts’ front door was a jumble of tricycles. Flexible Flyers and junior bikes with training wheels. Double U, as everyone called Ursula Urquhart, had invited her over. They were endless, these child-infested afternoons when the women smoked like chimneys and drank endless glasses of iced coffee sweetened with rum. (Although alcoholic beverages were illegal in Lalarhein, vast quantities were consumed by the Ivory people.) It would please Malcolm if she wended her way across the street to join the kaffeeklatch. He was perpetually riding her to get into the social swing.

The motivating thrust of Malcolm’s life being his search for mass approbation, he ached to have her, his wife, be the popularity kid. Loving him as helplessly as she did, Joscelyn wished she could live up to his expectations. She had, however, never possessed the knack of easy friendship—only at college and then at work did she find a measure of intellectual conviviality. In Lalarhein, trapped five days a
week in the enclave with women and children, she felt herself shoved back into that proud, unhappy loneliness of her school days: she was convinced that the other women, hausfraus to the core, despised her as a stuck-up oddball for being an engineer and were hiding their scornful dislike because she was the Big Boss’s sister-in-law. (There was a measure of truth in Joscelyn’s evaluation but she underestimated the resentment engendered by her sharp, honest tongue.)

From this window she had a view of the camel-colored hills with their scattering of villas built by British officials in the early 1900s when Lalarhein had been a protectorate. Nowadays these houses were owned by the complex family network that was the local royalty. Lacking a hereditary monarchy, the country’s leadership shifted from one branch to the other, and at the moment Fuad’s older brother, Mohammed Abdulrahman, was Prime Minister.

Joscelyn stared rebelliously through the shimmering heat at the Urquharts’ house.
If I go over there I’ll have to park my brains and put on a bogus smirk for the II’s.
Reducing the women to “II,” or Ivory Idiot, relieved a smidge of her sense of rejection.

“Oh, screw it,” she muttered aloud, and went back to the couch to finish her letter to Langley.

*   *   *

Just before dusk, the Ivory cavalcade roared along the road. Outside the Peck’s house halted a large, shuddering truck with an elongated
flatbed that was specifically designed to carry ninety-three-foot lengths of large-diameter pipe from the Gulf over the incredibly hot Q’ram. (On this job alone Curt had a fortune tied up in heavy equipment: besides several dozen of these pipe carriers, at the site were four enormous Allan Parsons heavy-duty ditching machines, twelve Sideboom tractors, backhoes, tow tractors, bulldozers, cleaning and priming machines, coating and wrapping machines, welding machines, compressors to test the lines, welding trucks and so on.)

Malcolm jumped down from the cab. “Thanks for the lift, Jake, old buddy.”

As soon as the front door was closed, he gave Joscelyn an enthusiastic, sweaty hug, and she felt a mindless happiness.
It’s been a good week for him
, she thought, spreading kisses along his jaw. When things went well, no nasty squalls rocked their weekend.

“How’s my wife?”

“Good, fine, wonderful.” And at this moment, in their clinch, her boring, sleep-squandered days did indeed seem tinged by a roseate light.

“Miss me?”

“Mmm,” she said, kissing the flat spot on his nose. “Let me think about it. Want a drink?”

“Later,” he said. “Right now I could kill for a bath.”

He lounged in the rusty water that cost more than gasoline in Lalarhein while Joscelyn perched on the closed toilet seat, watching his
face as he told her about his week’s progress on the pipeline.

Her mind automatically analyzed and sorted the information, but her attention was fixed on him. Lighter-brown patches where the skin had peeled on his wide shoulders were the only flaw in his magnificent bronze tan. By contrast the skin covered by his work shorts seemed marble white. Between his shield-shaped pelvic bones floated his penis in its wreath of dark hair.

He pressed his feet hard on the bottom end of the tub—his feet and ankles, being covered by the desert boots, were also white. “There’s a problem that’s come up,” he said.

She was used to hearing about problems. Laying pipe requires great skill: once large lines are laid and filled with oil it is nearly impossible for them to be lifted or repaired, which was why Curt had sent experienced people to guide the seven hundred local artisans and laborers. Malcolm, the youngest engineer by ten years on the project, agonized over every decision.

“What is it now?” she asked sympathetically.

“The stretch we’re doing, the plans call for burying the pipe. But I’m not sure it should be buried, just not sure at all.” There was a boyish appeal in his tone.

“Have you run into rock?” Excavation in rocky ground cost a fortune.

“No, but some geologist sure as hell goofed. Near the ridge the ground’s very saline.”

“Salt, mmm. Then what choice is there? You can’t bury pipe where it’ll be corroded.”

“But what about Heinrichman?” Heinrichman, in charge of the entire project, thrust out his large belly and questioned every on-site decision made by his engineers in a loud, argumentative voice. “When he finds out he’ll hang me out to dry.”

“Malcolm, all you have to do is explain to him about the aggressive soil. He’ll be grateful.”

“Think so?” Malcolm asked uncertainly.

“I’m positive.” She was standing. “Ready for me to scrub your back?”

“Be my guest.”

She wielded the loofah vigorously to loosen the top layer of skin and engrained sand, then massaged in the soap with her hands, moving slower and more sensually as she worked her way downward to his waist.

“Hey,” he said, looking down. “Look at what you’ve done.”

“Time to adjourn to the bedroom,” she said, holding out her hand to help him from the bath.

He tugged at her hand. She struggled in his hard grasp a few seconds, then acquiesced, laughing as she splashed atop him. He slipped down her Bermudas and underpants, but left on her dripping shirt. When things were good between them he often initiated one of their crazy games or was adventurous about location and position. They made love like playful seals.

*   *   *

They were at the dinette table eating their ham and carrots au gratin when the phone rang. The instrument sat on the window ledge next to Joscelyn and as she reached for it she was
positive she would hear an invitation to one of the liquor-hazed evenings that alternated along the Ivory enclave every weekend. Malcolm shone at these gatherings.

“Is that you, my little turtle dove?” Fuad asked.

She felt warmth surge through her. She had always been crazy about Fuad, and here in Lalarhein she cherished him doubly because he—a Moslem who supposedly saw women as lesser beings—respected her for her engineering expertise while the Ivory men smiled with infuriating tolerance whenever she talked shop. “When did you get home?” she asked. Fuad and his family had been traveling in Europe for much of the time she and Malcolm had been in Lalarhein.

“My little turtle dove, I flew back Monday to be in your arms. Can you and Malcolm come to dinner tomorrow night?”

“It sounds terrific, Fuad, we’d love to.”

*   *   *

Fuad’s substantial house might have been transported by a djinn from England: crimson brick, numerous prim slate peaks, ornamental chimneys, a plethora of heraldic stained-glass windows, architecture that was at insane odds with the landscape.

The Edwardian interior was overwhelmed by Fuad’s collection of Lalarheini carpets, which are widely renowned for the exquisite workmanship of their yellow, rose and indigo floral designs and their graceful arabesques. Every inch of floor was covered, on the walls hung
small, subtly faded rugs, the numbers woven into their right-hand corners attesting to their antiquity; lustrous silk rugs covered the low divans. The effect was one of exuberantly colorful opulence.

Fuad came toward them beaming. Joscelyn always needed a minute or so to convince herself that this was indeed Curt’s overweight, corny jokester of an old college buddy. In Los Angeles it had been impossible to believe that Fuad was a genuine prince, while here in Lalarhein, wearing his black
bisht
banded with gold to indicate his rank, she found it equally impossible to believe that he was anything other than royalty.

His wife kissed each of them on both cheeks, engulfing them in Jolie Madame.

“Bonsoir, mes chers,”
she said, although neither of the Pecks knew French. Princess Lelith, or Lelith as she had requested they call her, spoke no English. She concealed herself beneath a black
abeyya
and
gutwah
whenever she stepped beyond the high mud-brick wall surrounding the property, but in her home she preferred her Parisian wardrobe. The short-waisted, short-skirted red Jacques Fath dress made her look like a chubby little girl with protuberant, warmly affectionate eyes, and to complete the impression she wore a bow-shaped diamond barrette to hold back her hennaed hair.