The Ruins of Us (5 page)

Overwhelmed, she put her head down on the cool marble countertop, letting her back sway out behind her. She felt a vein in her forehead throb against the pink veins of the marble. Through it, she could feel the slab from which the stone came, and through that, the entire quarry and, even faintly, the pulse of the sea beneath the boat that brought it over from Italy. She felt small, her connectivity tenuous. Resting there, she tried to forestall the building agitation and gather the stillness.

Another beat passed. She took up the vegetable knife that lay by the sink. Then, she strode to the front door. Once past the door, she walked to the end of the driveway, under the magnificent wooden gates that Abdullah had taken from a centuries-old coral house that developers had razed in Jeddah. She took a left at the road, walking briskly, as if she were going to ask for butter or milk. The sharp Bermuda grass along the roadside poked through her sandals. She marched in time with the steady tick of the sprinklers that lined the planting area in the middle of the street. She thought: “
I am doing. I do.
” The movement felt good, the purpose of one foot going in front of the other. She stopped in front of Isra’s house.

Feeling faintly queasy, she pushed the gate open. It groaned on its oversized hinges. She clenched her fist around the vegetable knife, which had grown slick with sweat. She checked the windows, then the garden’s layout. An overgrown fig tree shadowed the driveway, creating darkening, gibbous places into which she could slip unnoticed. She stole through the shadows, until she was at the tree’s base. She stopped for a moment and stood in the tree’s deep shade. Then she plucked a fig from the lowest branch. It was not fig season, so the fruit was withered, folded in on itself. White-knuckled, using the vegetable knife, she cut a large, thin
X
across the fruit’s wrinkled belly. She stuck the knife through it and walked to the front door, where she left the fig on the bamboo welcome mat. She turned and started to jog down the driveway.

Just as she reached the small wooden gate, a voice called out.

“Rosalie? Is that you?”

So she knows my face, Rosalie thought. All this time and she’s known my foolish, ignorant face. Then, remembering advice her father had given her when they were vacationing in Yellowstone—if you don’t move, it can’t see you—she stood still, panic starting its slow climb up from her stomach in all languages. Shit. Khara. Merde.

“Rosalie? Is everything all right? Would you like some of my figs? They’re not in season now, but when they are, they just fall to the ground and rot. I’ve no one to eat them. Abdullah hates . . .” Isra’s voice trailed off, as if she knew she shouldn’t have mentioned his name.

Slowly, Rosalie turned her head, then her shoulders, her hips, her feet, until finally she faced Isra. She called up her best beauty-queen smile.

“Hello!”

“How are you doing?” Isra asked, her head tilted in that warm way that some women had.

The bitch speaks perfect English, she thought. She’d heard from Mariam that Isra was well educated, that she spoke four languages and had been an interpreter for Arafat when she was a student. In another life, Isra would be a woman Rosalie admired. She took a few steps back toward the doorway, wishing she hadn’t left the knife stuck in the fruit, evidence that proved her insanity beyond reasonable doubt.

“Figs. Yes. I—I was just coming to ask you for a bushel or so. I’m making . . . a dessert for tomorrow night. But I forgot they aren’t in season.”

“Oh, it looks as though you’ve forgotten your knife on the doorstep,” Isra said.

She was so polite. So dignified. But she could afford restraint, couldn’t she? Isra had the luxury of even-temperedness for so many reasons: her beauty, her relative youth, the fact that she slept with Abdullah most nights. Rosalie looked at her. That beautiful, calm face, elegant in its lines. The sweep of black hair. Rosalie marched up the slight incline of the driveway until she was a few feet from the woman.

“Now, you listen to me,” she said. “I won’t call you by your name. I didn’t come here for your figs. I came here to let you know how much you are truly despised. I know it may not seem like much. To be hated by a single person. But I want you to know that you have stolen a life.”

She watched Isra’s face change. Yes, there it was: pain. Or, at the very least, discomfort. Rosalie continued.

“How could you do it, knowing about his family?” She gestured violently with her right hand, her voice rising. “You’ll never be anything but a second helping, taken by Abdullah when he got greedy. Remember that. You were chosen by a man having a life crisis.”

A figure appeared in the doorway. She blinked. Her husband.
Their
husband. Wearing a silk robe that she had given him on their twentieth anniversary. The robe, bought for him out of love and anticipation of many mornings together when they would dust sleep from their eyes, don fine robes, and drink strong coffee in the courtyard.

“Rosalie?” he said. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I decided to take some figs from this tree. After all, we don’t have a fig tree, and according to the Koran, you are supposed to provide for all wives equally. So I am just taking my share.”

“In January?”

“Is there a problem with that? Because I’m sure the mutawi’in would be happy to know about such unequal treatment. It wouldn’t be good for your image at all, dear.”

She turned on her heel and went back down the driveway. “I’ll send Yasmin for the figs. Expect her within the hour.”

BACK AT THE
house, Rosalie collected herself before calling for Yasmin.

“Would you please go to the other madam’s house and pick the figs from her tree?” she asked.

“But they aren’t in season . . .” Yasmin hesitated.

“It doesn’t matter. Take whatever you find.”

“Yes, if you say so. Does she . . . ?”

“Yes, she’s expecting you.”

After Yasmin left the room, Rosalie laughed bitterly to herself. Plenty of neighbors screwed around with each other in the States, but there was something infinitely kinder in a culture that recognized such behavior as shameful. Where unfaithful lovers stole back and forth under cover of night, admitting that their behavior caused damages. In the Kingdom, it was legal; her suffering was sanctioned by the government, by the Prophet himself. If she became angry, she would be seen as graceless. If she yielded to sadness, then she would be pathetic. Impossible moments like this made her wonder if, all those years ago, she had sacrificed too much.

Still, she never would have guessed he would go and do a thing like this. Not Abdi, who hated conflict. It was utter madness, and she could only imagine what his sisters and the brothers’ wives were saying about it. No one of his generation in the family had taken a second wife; the family considered itself beyond such things. What could have possibly possessed him?

But of course, she knew. Love. Only love made you into such a fool. And she knew it better than anyone, didn’t she? Before Abdullah, she had been shrewd. Since Abdullah, it had been about feeling, the way of the senses, of instinct. It was a dangerous way, but at its height, it had been glorious. Love had made her let go a little. But she could no longer trust her heart, her body, herself so wholly. Now she had to try to fetter her passions, to reintroduce wariness. To once again lie in a narrow bed, a single body, complete in itself.

Chapter Two

WHEN DAN WAS
buzzed into the driveway in front of Abdullah al-Baylani’s mansion, he looked at Rosalie al-Baylani standing beneath the front archway and hesitated. Perhaps he should turn the car around. He didn’t want to witness this transformation of a living, breathing love into something more spectral. Because that’s what was happening under the archway. He knew it, and the thought saddened him.

When Abdullah called him that afternoon, there had been such desperation in his voice that Dan had gotten into his car and driven the five miles from his apartment at the Prairie Vista compound to Abdullah’s Italianate villa. He’d rarely heard Abdi so worked up, going on about figs and how Rose had just embarrassed herself terribly and he couldn’t stand to be in the same country with her anymore and would Dan please come drive him to Bahrain so he could get soused?

It was after six o’clock on a Thursday evening, which in Al Dawoun, Saudi Arabia, meant the heart of the weekend. Dan did not feel like taking part in Abdullah’s personal fireworks display. Dan would prefer, in fact, to strip down to his undershirt and spend the night eating buttered macaroni drowned in rooster sauce and watching
The Sopranos
on illegal satellite. But he went, impelled partly by their thirty-odd years of friendship and partly by his sympathy for Abdullah’s wife, or rather his
first
wife, Rosalie.

Dan got out of the car and shut the door quietly behind him. He walked up the long driveway toward the house, noticing how the windows had caught fire in the rose-colored light of the waning day. Such an authoritatively grand house spoke fluently on behalf of the family inside, and Dan felt a twinge of jealousy. He felt sure that a family, no matter their trouble, could cast no shadows within such walls. In fact, he might go so far as to argue that it was the exonerating beauty of the estate that was keeping the Baylani family together at the moment, when they seemed so close to breaking open like a geode, exposing all of their jagged edges. As he approached, Dan walked close to the flowerbeds that lined the driveway. Sprinklers ratcheted along their coils, misting the lawn so that it gleamed under the January sun.

Dan felt that it was a shame to disintegrate the peace of such an evening with anger, but he supposed that people did not really choose how and when they got angry. It just happened. In the three years since Carolyn had filed for divorce, it occurred with discomfiting frequency. To escape the disintegration by anger of other beautiful things, and for the paycheck, Dan had moved back to Saudi Arabia. Still, anger and regret had a way of trumping geography to work on a person; some mornings, he felt chewed over, as if rage, like some sort of attack dog, had set on him in the vulnerable moments of sleep so that he awoke already ranting with all the artfulness of the groggily embittered. He would lie in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to the movement of the world outside the condo. In those moments, he felt alone and very far from his children, Eleanor and Joe, so lacking in energy or direction that he even contemplated a passive form of suicide—starvation, sun exposure. He could drive out to Jebel Al Dawoun, lie down at the lip of a cave, and just wait until his heart stopped beating.

As he neared the Baylanis’ front door, Dan could hear the growl of their voices, punctuated by Abdullah’s shushings. The two of them looked small standing in the lee of the enormous arch, where the evening shadows played against their faces and made their teeth glow white. Abdullah was glancing around as if he thought the neighbors might be peering at them over the fifteen-foot walls. If paranoia was the Saudi pastime, then Abdullah was their Roger Maris. But Dan didn’t give him grief for it, because he knew that Abdullah had perfected the game out of necessity. In the Kingdom, reputation was everything, and the country’s rich built empires on it.

Rosalie jabbed her finger repeatedly in the direction of Abdullah’s chest. They were both talking at the same time. Seeing Dan, Abdullah threw up his arms.

“Alhamdulillah. You’re here. Let’s go.”

“Dan Coleman, you go home right now. Don’t take another step this way. Things are fixing to get rough here in a minute.”

Rosalie had slipped into her Texas drawl, an accent that she used like a shield when dealing with bad situations. Tough girl, Panhandle mama, rodeo queen. How could Abdullah have done this to her? This woman who had given up everything—family, religion, homeland—to marry him. Even now, standing on her front step in the unflattering light of the desert sun without a spot of makeup on her forty-seven-year-old face, she was striking. Her strong jaw gave way to a soft mouth whose upper lip peaked in a perfect cupid’s bow. When they’d all hung out in college, he’d often found himself staring at that mouth. It was something a man couldn’t help, noticing the features that made a woman beautiful. Now Rosalie smiled a tight, mocking half-smile. Her hair, dyed red to hide the gray but once naturally the color of molten lava, fell over her shoulders in a tangle. She had on a blue cotton robe cinched tightly at the waist. Dan could tell that she wasn’t wearing a bra by the way her breasts gently sloped downwards, and it brought forth a wanting in him, more for the familiarity of a robed female body than for the breasts themselves. Sometimes the longing was too much. He closed his eyes for a moment and let the feeling pass.

“Dan, stay. We’re going to leave in just a minute. As soon as I can get my wife to calm down.”

“Yes, like you; you’re always so calm, aren’t you?” she said. “So cool and collected, surveying the messes you make. Dan, can you believe it? He doesn’t blink, though he can see what this is doing to me. I had to learn about this mess from a jeweler at the souq.
A jeweler.
All because my husband didn’t have the guts to tell me himself.” She paused, put a hand on her hip. “And what about you, Coleman? How long have you known about this? How long have you been chuckling about what a fool I am?” Anger bloomed a blotched red on her cheeks.

Dan shifted uncomfortably. He felt implicated through his friendship with Abdullah, even though he’d only learned about Isra a few weeks before. Abdullah had kept her in a seaside condominium in Doha for the last couple of years, making monthly trips under the guise of business. He’d been busy all right. It must have been exhausting, maintaining the lie for so long. Last month, around the time he finally told Dan about his double life, he’d moved Isra into a house a block away from this villa because he was tired of traveling back and forth between countries, and he’d been trying to figure out a way to tell Rosalie about her new neighbor. Now it seemed someone had done the dirty work for him.