The Dog (7 page)

Out of shock at my monstrousness, I’m sure, I decided (in defiance of the house rules) to tip the service personnel. Easier said than done. My unknown cleaner or cleaners rejected the bills I left under my mattress (and placed them, folded, on my bedside table) and she/they ignored an envelope marked “TIP! PLEASE TAKE! THANK YOU!” Evidently I would have to dispense the cash in person. The problem was, I couldn’t make contact with a recipient. My long working hours—this was pre-Ali, when I was trying to single-handedly set up and operate the family office, an experience I never want to revisit—meant that I’d leave my suite too early and return too late to
cross paths with the housekeepers, who moreover were trained to observe an extreme lowness of profile, the better to achieve their labor’s almost magical effect. One Sunday morning, I finally spotted a distant uniformed figure hastening across the corridor. I practically sprinted after her. When I turned the corner, she was nowhere to be seen; yet, from somewhere behind the walls, a kind of poltergeist chatter could be heard. I opened an unmarked door and found myself in a windowless room with a rough concrete floor and a whining service elevator. For some reason I felt a little frightened. I was on the point of turning back when a cart laden with sheets came in. A small lady was attached to it. There was an exclamation, followed by a statement that was linguistically impenetrable but very clear: my presence alarmed and dismayed her. I gave the lady a reassuring smile. “Baksheesh, for you,” I said, and I pulled out a wad of dirhams and made to bestow them on her. She, who appeared to be equally in her thirties and fifties, made a negative hand gesture and, without meeting my eye, drove the cart into the elevator, whereupon she was as it were absorbed still more deeply by the building. I abandoned my quest to privately reward these workers. Apparently that would have been to put them in harm’s way.

To avoid another such fiasco, I keep this place clean myself. It’s no big deal; I like to mop my marble floor, the cleanliness of which I gauge by the blackening of the soles of my bare feet. When Mrs. Ted Wilson came in, everything was spick-and-span.

She dabbed away her tears and her resemblance to poor Lucy Vodden.

She was intent on staying. Short of manhandling her, I saw no way to get her out. I must admit, I was curious about Ted Wilson; and inevitably I was curious about his wife, especially with her being a damsel, and in distress. But curiosity killed the cat. We all know of those gallant volunteers who rush toward
a burning train wreck only to suffer lifelong trauma from the nervous shock caused by the scenes they witness, not to mention the lung disorders contracted from the fumes they inhale or the financial ruin resulting from lawsuits brought against them about what actions they took or failed to take. I resolved to keep as much distance between Mrs. Ted Wilson and myself as was consistent with the basic civility that might reasonably be expected of me, the put-upon stranger.

She got up and wandered to the glass walls, and one might have thought she was going to step right out into the brilliant white tartan of the Marina towers. After a contemplative moment, she gave her attention to the décor: large black leather sofa, two matching leather armchairs, big flat-screen, massive black leather massage chair, mezzanine bedroom, computer desk with computer, framed photograph of Swiss mountains. I’m sure she also took in the air purifier, and the ultrasonic humidifier, and the electronic salt and pepper mills, and the 3-D glasses, and the touchless automatic motion sensor trash can. “This is basically exactly what Ted’s place looks like,” she said. “Do you guys shop together for furniture, too?”

Now she was inspecting my bookcase. She pulled out a volume of
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
and said, “You even have the same books.” She said distractedly, “You know Ted’s a historian, right?”

I said, “A historian?”

Mrs. Ted Wilson took a seat. She related (unprompted) that when her husband initially went to Dubai it had been in order to teach for a year at the American University in Dubai. No one foresaw that he would almost immediately be offered the job with the advertising agency that was (as he saw it) his big chance to “finally break the 70K barrier” and escape the “humiliation” of an intellectual career that had left him teaching a course called “The American Experience” in a place called Knowledge Village. (I pointed out that Knowledge Village
was merely the somewhat naïve-sounding (in English) designation given to Dubai’s academic hub, but Mrs. Ted Wilson didn’t seem to hear me.) The Wilsons had spent most of the previous decade “dragging” their two children (a boy and a girl) from one place to another, and now that both were in high school they agreed it was “out of the question” to “uproot” them again. Mrs. Ted Wilson, meanwhile, had “a project that I wanted to complete.” It was agreed that Ted would take the ad agency job and the family would take things as they came, on the basis that “life has a funny way of working out.” This plan now struck her as humorous, judging from the little noise she made.

By now her misconception about the quality of my association with Ted Wilson was beginning to trouble me. I said to her, “Look, there’s something you should know. I’m afraid I don’t know your husband that well. I’ve just run into him here and there.” I further stated, “I do, or did, scuba dive, but I’ve never dived with Ted.” As I made this disclosure, I was in the kitchen fiddling at opening a wine bottle, my back turned to her. This was my way of giving her space to take in my contradiction of her husband’s story. After a moment, I approached her with a glass of white wine, which by virtue of having opened the wine bottle I was now obligated to offer her, God damn it.

I said, “What was his field? As a historian, I mean.” I placed the wineglass within her reach.

Mrs. Ted Wilson seemed dazed. “German history,” she said.

Interesting. “Which aspect?”

“Which aspect?” She seemed to be having difficulty. “Sorry, you’re asking me which aspect of German history Ted specialized in? You mean what was his dissertation about?”

“Sure, why not,” I said.

“Certain economic features of nineteenth-century Waldeck und Pyrmont.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

I gave her my card. “In case you need to get in touch,” I said. “Thank you,” she said. She wrote her contact details on a piece of paper. “Thanks,” I said, staying on my feet. As far as I was concerned, we were done.

But I’d forgotten about the glass of wine, and now she reached over and took a large mouthful of it and, for the first time, examined me. “So what brought you here?” she asked.

I said, “Oh, the usual.”

“You ran away,” she said. “Everybody out here is on the run. You’re all runners.”

It occurred to me that in all probability she’d had a few drinks earlier in the evening. “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair,” I said.

“Well, am I wrong?”

I said something about a unique professional opportunity.

“Oh, don’t give me that shit.”

I was fully aware that this was a person in extremis. That didn’t mean I had to give up the customary expectation of politeness. I said, “Do you think you know me well enough to say that?”

“I know you well enough,” she said, motioning at my apartment significantly and, I must admit, infuriatingly. “Ted told me about his diving buddy—you’re some kind of New York attorney. And you still haven’t answered my question.”

I understood her mania for enlightenment very well. Her life had become a riddle. I also suspect that she misidentified me as her husband, who was no longer available for questioning. It is fair to say that maybe I took Mrs. Ted Wilson to be none other than Jenn, who was no longer available for answering. For a cracked, treacherous moment, I actually had the notion to tell this woman my story—to have my say at long last.

“I don’t have to answer your questions,” I said—without hostility, to be clear.

There was that laugh again.

“Is something funny?” I said.

“You should see yourself. You’re shaking. What is it? What are you hiding?”

“I’m not hiding anything. I don’t have anything to hide.”

“I think you do,” she said, wagging the index finger of the hand that held the glass containing my wine. “I think you have everything to hide.”

I said, “You wag your finger at me? You come here uninvited, you throw yourself on my hospitality, and you wag your finger at me?”

She jumped up. “How dare you. You pretended to be a friend of Ted. You deceived me. You lied. You lied to get me in here. Shame on you.”

I looked around for something to throw. To repeat, everything was spick-and-span. The only objects to hand were a copy of
Dwell
magazine and a plastic jar of Umbrian lentils. I picked up the jar, turned away from Mrs. Ted Wilson, and hurled it against the wall. There was an unusual brown explosion as the jar burst.

“Get away from me,” she screamed.

“No, you get away from me,” I said. I was panting. I could hardly breathe. “This is my apartment. If I want to throw stuff around in my apartment”—here I picked up the
Dwell
and flung it across the room—“I get to throw stuff, understand? You don’t like it, you’re free to leave.”

She left, as was her right.

I swept up. Even so, for weeks afterward I occasionally sensed a lentil underfoot.

It has to be said, my feet were in magnificent shape.

ALL CREDIT FOR THIS GOES TO
my old scuba buddy from Oz. One day, on the boat ride back to the shore, he, Ollie, said, “You can’t go around like that.” He was referring to my long,
uneven, gray-and-yellow toenails and, especially, to my horribly fissured heels. Ollie said, “I want you to drop by the spa, mate. We’ll take care of you. My treat.”

Although a little jumpy at the prospect, I took Ollie up on his offer. Why not, after all? I wasn’t to know (and would surely have been scared off if I had known) that he would personally handle the job, which is to say, handle me—wash my feet, trim my toenails, clip my cuticles, patiently carve slivers of skin off my heels with what looked like a miniature cheese slicer, rub a pumice stone over the carved heels until they were pink and new-born. (Afterward, his assistant manipulated my insteps and ankles, and, last but far from least, applied lotions to my feet, shins, and calves.) Ollie was not even slightly queasy about any of this, not even about the flakes of dead skin accumulating like muesli on the towel on his lap. He spoke only in order to utter a kind of podiatric poetry about what action he was performing and which part of the foot was the planum, which the tarsus, and which the dorsum, consistently impressing upon me the enormous importance of feet, those great unsung workhorses whose sensitivity and quasi-magical neural properties had been insufficiently examined and remained wrongly undervalued. What can I say? It was my happiest hour in Dubai.

Things have gone amazingly well for Ollie, I am very pleased to say. In a somewhat unreal turn, he has become an important and fashionable pedicurist who flies around the world to meet high-net-worth individuals who want important and fashionable pedicures: to this day he sends me gleeful, can-you-believe-this-shit texts from St. Petersburg and London and New York. There is a downside, of course: Ollie got so busy he was forced to quit diving; and so I quit diving.

(I tried out another buddy but the guy was full of hot air and even underwater would clown around and bug me with pointless OK signs and make me feel unsafe. He boxed me in, somehow, even in the unpartitioned ocean. When Ollie and I dived,
we stayed close; we accepted a severe duty of mutual care; but all the while we enjoyed the feeling of privacy that being underwater offers. This was fundamental to the undertaking, though of course there are those who understand privacy as a business of personal smells and locked bathroom doors.)

Ollie and I still have our jaunts, however. Sometimes, to blow off steam, we will James-Bond-drive, as Ollie terms it, on the Gulf side of the Musandam Peninsula. After we cross the Oman border and hit the new and almost empty highway, we notionally race to Khasab. It is no contest. I’m in my Range Rover Autobiography (2007 model, with a Terrain Response™ system designed for rough ground), and Ollie drives the bright red Porsche Cayenne S that is his idea of a concession to family life. He zooms away almost immediately; from time to time, I catch sight of a pepper on a mountainside. Good luck to him. It is a joy merely to motor on this wonderfully engineered road, which curves between bare brown headlands and a blue bareness of open water, and whose rolled asphalt concrete is a kind of lushness. The road follows a dynamited zone of coastal mountain rock, and yet, as it has struck me again and again, my understanding never profiting from the repetition, this destroyed portion seems hardly different from the rest of the mountain, which itself seems to have been subjected to a vast natural blowing up. It is hard not to feel at one with the car advertisements as your vehicle adheres at speed to the surface of the earth, rushing through and over immense geophysical obstacles, then cresting at the pass, and then twisting down to a fjord so blue it seems technological. Who, a century ago, would even have dreamed of such transportation? We are practically in the realm of the incredible. Ollie sometimes urges me to rent something fast for the day—ideally another Porsche Cayenne S, to make a match of it—but I’ve never done that, chiefly because I don’t want to be in an actual race, which would be frightening and dangerous and reckless. So as not to spoil his fun, I maintain
that my choice of vehicle is strategic. I tell him, Remember the tortoise and the hare.

More usually, Ollie and I meet up when my feet feel dry. When that happens, I drive over to his salon at the Unique Luxury Resort and Hotel on the off chance that he or one of his helpers will be able to fit me in. It would feel wrong to make an appointment.

The morning after the run-in with Mrs. Ted Wilson, my feet felt very dry.

There’s more than one Unique. Ollie is based at the Unique on The Palm, and not the other, older Unique, which is in Jumeira. Driving along The Palm’s main thoroughfare, The Trunk, always makes me think of Ceauşescu’s Bucharest boulevards: visually coercive concrete apartment buildings that speak of broken Hausmannian dreams. A different gloom descends once I have passed through the tunnel and come to the west crescent, at the tip of which, near Logo Island, the Unique is situated. The west crescent consists mainly of the semi-abandoned construction sites of the Kingdom of Sheba and other failed waterside developments. One or two of the resorts give the appearance of functioning, but there is no getting around it: the drive is a downer. I cannot avoid recalling the automatic plenty of childhood, when a pail and a patch of beach sand are enough to summon us into life’s spell.