The Ruins of Us (19 page)

“Why don’t you divorce him?”

“You know as well as I do how that would go,” she said. “He’d keep Mariam and Faisal, I’d see them maybe once a year. You know, even if Abdullah suddenly died, custody of the children would go to a male custodian before me?”

“Yeah, well. This ain’t Sugar Land, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

“You know the State Department posts a warning nowadays?
Read Before Marrying a Saudi.
Guess they got tired of all the pissed off ex-wives trying to get custody and blaming the U.S. government for not doing more. But I came here with both eyes open. I grew up here; I knew what it was like. But I wanted my home back. I wanted it back so badly. And of course, I loved him. You know how he is. He put a hand on my shoulder and looked at me with that quizzical expression. He just said, ‘What are you doing here, my destiny? I wasn’t expecting to run into you in a bar.’ And then the Qabbani. Remember? And that was it.”

“Yeah, but is this it for Mariam? For Faisal?”

“They’ve lived here all their lives. They’re Saudi. I couldn’t take away their home. Mariam wants to stay and change things. And Faisal . . . I have no idea about Faisal. Not a clue. He’d rather die than tell his mom anything. He was never a talker, but I used to be able to ask him questions about his life and get an answer. Now he just stares at me like I’ve violated some code by speaking to him. But Joe must be the same way. It’s got to be the age.”

“I don’t know about Joe,” Dan said, looking down at his hands. “That’s the worst part of divorce. You lose the everyday experiences that tell you what your children are like, what kind of people they’re becoming.”

“You didn’t have to move half a world away.”

“Huh. You never were stupid, Rose. No one ever accused you of that.” He paused. “You’re right. After she kicked me out, I couldn’t cope with seeing the kids just on weekends. And I was flat broke. When Abdullah offered me this job, I fled.”

The wind shifted direction, bringing with it the shushing of the waves below.

“I can’t just get a condo in Sugar Land,” she said. “Not after this. I bet I couldn’t even get a job as a secretary. I haven’t worked an honest hour in more than twenty-five years.” She laid back, her hair blending in with the sand. Her face looked bare, exposed, as she stared straight up into the netting of stars. “I’m trying to figure out if I can get by without him.”

That was the worst part of it, thought Dan. Six months after the divorce, when he was sulking in the duplex and keeping up his angry silence, Carolyn had written him a note asking if he would ever speak to her again, and how can two people go from meaning everything to each other to meaning nothing? He’d crumpled the note and kept his silence until the anger almost burned him alive. But six months later, he’d gone looking for relief, for her. He’d driven to the old house, barged through the front door, found her in the kitchen and tried to kiss the life out of her. She’d kissed back—that kiss must have lasted five minutes—but then pushed him away and started crying. He said, Let’s forget about all this crap and try again; and she’d said, I can’t, I can’t, so he’d driven away, his whole body on fire. He didn’t know how people managed to get divorced twice, three times, even four. How did they not die from the sheer pain of it? Humans were not built to bear it; we are cruel in heartbreak. Better to cling with a slippery grip than to wreck yourself so thoroughly in the letting-go. Because when love ends, when you let go, you always lose a part of yourself that you can never reclaim, that the other person keeps, greedily, the toll for their love, the tax.

“Stay with him, Rosalie. It’s not worth it.”

“I’d only stay if we were in love. Any kind of love. And I’m just not sure that’s the case anymore.”

Far below them at the foot of the dune, the water moved endlessly against the shore.

“I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you here,” Dan said.

For a minute, she didn’t say anything. Then she answered, “It’s not the place, if I’m being honest. It would be too easy to blame the place. It’s just that . . . I was so young when we got married. You have an idea of love as being this all-powerful force that will just sweep you along. But it’s not that way at all. It’s
hard
. And it changes shape without you even noticing.”

Dan lay back and felt the sand rise to meet the base of his spine. He closed his eyes, counted his breaths. He turned his head to look at her, only to find her already staring at him.

“You’re beautiful,” he blurted. He looked away, embarrassed. He sounded like a teenager. As he pulled in a long draft of air, at first he felt only her hair as it fell on his face, then her lips against his, and finally the weight of her body as she sank on top of him. He did not push her away. In fact, he pressed his face into hers. Her skin was white with moonlight. His head grew hot, a pressure he hadn’t felt in so long. But there was something else, too—a pang he hadn’t felt in the few cold kisses with the French flight attendant last summer.

Staring down at him, she said, “You’re the first man, besides Abdullah and my father, that I’ve been alone with in years.”

He knew that he should stop her, that she wasn’t thinking clearly. What if someone saw them up there? There’d be hell to pay. And she was sick with grief and the kind of hurt that makes people do mad things. He didn’t want to poach from her broken heart. There was danger in it for her, for both of them. He pushed at her feebly, but she was so close. He didn’t subscribe to the Saudi theory that men and women couldn’t be alone together without screwing, but he did think that danger was imminent once someone of your preferred sex had climbed on top of you. When she had touched him moments before, he had wanted to give in to his animal instincts, but he knew that in doing so he would somehow fail her.

“We’re proving them right, you know,” he said. “That we can’t be alone together.”

She sat up and he watched the dark grooves of her nostrils expand as she breathed heavily. “I’m disintegrating in that house.”

She lay back down in the sand next to him, but far enough away so that they were no longer touching. He turned on his side, put his face near her neck, where her hair met the base of her skull. That old familiar smell, oil from skin and hair mixing with fragrant shampoo. Breathing her in, he wanted more. He was afraid he wouldn’t get enough; that he would never get enough. He felt nauseous with the wanting. He felt the roughness of the sand that clung to her wet skin. Suddenly she was crying, long sobs like the lowing of an animal. Dan moved away from her, watched her as she turned on her belly and rested her face on her folded arms. Even the air and the sea and the moon could not give her what she needed, so Dan kept quiet. After several minutes, she grew calmer, her breath coming in uneven hiccups. At last, she turned to face him.

“Let’s not, Dan. I don’t want to destroy what little I have left.”

“I understand,” he said, though really, he felt surprisingly angry. Abdullah had already wrecked things, and when Rosalie had kissed him, Dan had felt a stirring in his heart like hope, like he was no longer alone.

“I have to be able to look my children in the face, you know? They’re confused enough about what’s going on between Abdi and me.”

“Sure,” he said, but he felt like someone had kicked him in the gut.

They went down to the water to wash the sand off their legs, her ankles bare and white beneath her djellaba, her collarbone like a shell’s edge. While she cleaned herself, her face turned out toward the sea, Dan pulled out his cell phone and snapped a picture, quietly. Something was happening, a change, and he wanted to preserve the moment. Up close, the water glowed with millions of phosphorescent particles. He could see the fat white bodies of jellyfishes moving like orbs.

They might have been walking on the moon, so strange was the tableau. Stunned by their restraint, they moved slowly, like walkers in a garden. She smoothed her hair.

“You’re so good, Rosalie,” he said. “You’re a good wife.”

“But the crime is in the loving, Dan. Not the physical acts. Now he says he loves both of us. Love, and her name uttered right after it. There’s the crime. And I don’t give a good goddamn what the Koran says. If you’re a human being, you know you can’t love two people, not wholly, not at the same time.”

At the parking lot, she picked up her abaya and slid into her sandals while he shook the sand out of his hair. He watched as she draped the niqab over her face. Now he was involved. In-fucking-volved, as Rosalie would say.

“DON’T PULL INTO
the driveway,” she said. “Just leave me right here.”

The house was dark. It wasn’t late, but dinner was over and the cars that had been parked along the street were gone. She took a piece of paper from her purse and jotted something on it.

“I’m going to call you soon, but here’s my cell number, just in case.”

“Doesn’t Abdullah get the bill?”

“Yes, but not until next month. Who knows where I’ll be then. I’ve got to do some serious thinking, Dan. I’m going to need your help. I’m not going to divorce him, not yet anyway. But I want to get out of here for a little while. Get my head on straight.”

“OK. I’ll do whatever I can. I’m here for you, remember that.”

“I’m glad someone is,” she said. “I’ll call you soon.” She got out of the car and headed toward the house.

Without waiting to see her through the gates, Dan drove off. He didn’t want to risk being seen by one of the neighbors, or the kids. They hadn’t done anything too terrible, but by Saudi law they were criminals. The warmth of Rosalie’s body was gone. He wondered how Abdullah could only want that body every other night, that perfect body of nerves and muscle and that heart that loved him. As he drove toward his condo, the night’s events replayed through his mind. Part of him, the schoolboy part, felt a rush of pride. Rosie March had kissed him. She had wanted him.

The dust storm had left small drifts of sand along the perimeter road that led to Prairie Vista. The moon had risen to its highest point, far away in its cold silvering light. In Boston, it was Sunday afternoon. Ellie and Patrick would marry in the summer. They would live together and never be alone. At night, they would hold each other, feel the other person twitch in sleep. Ellie would sleep knowing for certain she would not be like her parents. In the beginning, you are always so sure. Though he was not a praying man, Dan said a prayer for his only daughter: that she would be right in her gamble—steadfast and loved, always.

Chapter Six

AT NIGHT, YOU
can be brave with resolutions. In the dark, emboldened by the late hour, you build cities of hope, elaborate grids for the restless mind. But mornings, you wake without a map, trying to reimagine the cityscape with the same audacity as the night before. When Rosalie went to bed, she felt certain she would leave the country. But the moment she awoke and turned over, felt the cool of the sheets, the roughness of the raw silk pillows that she left piled on Abdullah’s side of the bed, her certainty faltered, wavering just enough for her to notice it, like a heart palpitation. She felt heavy in the bed and imagined the planes leaving Al Dawoun without her, bright, metallic spots in the sky, and she, the little girl standing and waving, her hopes slender as a crane’s legs. She used to have nightmares about being forced from her home, ripped from Abdullah’s side and ushered into the wilderness. Now for the first time, the prospect of remaining had become terrifying.

Rosalie did not know exactly when she’d fallen in love with Saudi Arabia, but now she found herself searching for the definitive moment. How? She asked herself. How did I come to be back here, in this land so unlike the place of my childhood memories?

That love, that mysterious child-love for a left-behind place, that’s larger than time spent there or the remembrance of distant, long-ago faces. It is not innate; it didn’t solidify during her birth in her parents’ temporary home on Dalia Street on the State Oil compound, for that had been marked by struggle—her mother passed down an explicit version of events that left harsh words echoing in Rosalie’s head. Nor did it happen during the afternoons spent feeding mongooses to the alligator that Jimmy Ruweedle kept in a pit in his backyard, although that did inspire the first thought that perhaps she was not living a normal childhood. And Rosalie knew that it didn’t happen at the compound pool, where she and the other company brats dove for halala coins in the deep end, feeling their ears pop and their eyes rage with chlorine as they searched for the glint of silver against the tiles. No, those moments, even taken together, were not love. They were simply memories that she had of an irregular childhood. Love is built of more peculiar stuff, she had learned, and so Rosalie searched her memories for those moments in which she might have constructed her obsession with Arabia—a land that did not want her, that perhaps did not want anybody.

One day erected itself in memory. The day of the birth. Not her own, but a stillborn child of the desert who nearly took his mother with him. The desert was like that. The dead, not satisfied in death, often tried to take the living, too.

The day of the birth was an especially hot one. Kids were warned off the pools: The sun would melt them as they walked from the lounger to the water, fry their little feet like sliced ham in a skillet. Well, what am I going to do with you all day if you can’t go to the pool? Maxine March said to her daughter. Maxine was chewing her green weed again, khat, which always made her restless in the long Arabian afternoons—afternoons that went on and on like seasons. On afternoons like these, while Wayne worked the Tapline, Rosalie often overheard Maxine talking to a shadow as if it were her father or some other man her mama was angry with. Pacing the small temporary house from front to back, Maxine had whole conversations with the sun’s smudge on the living room wall.

Rani, the houseboy who brought the khat up from Yemen on the first of every month, was ironing clothes in the corner of the Marches’ house. The house was propped up on cinder blocks like all the other hastily erected expat homes on Dalia Street, and when the windstorms came, Maxine prayed for deliverance. Lord, don’t sweep us into the Gulf. Lord, we’re sinners but we deserve better than the bottom of some heathen sea.