The Ambassador's Wife (22 page)

Tucker texted her almost simultaneously, asking her to let him know if she had any plans to leave the Residence. Miranda thought it would appear insensitive to go to the gym when so many were mourning. But she didn't have any other way to cope with terrible news; exercise was her drug, her therapist, her most reliable friend. Besides, whom would it help for her to spend the morning pacing around the house? Idleness made everything feel worse. Twenty minutes into her run on the treadmill, the head of an American oil company called her cell phone to ask if Finn had any information about the attacks. He hadn't been able to reach the US ambassador and was concerned for his staff. Miranda called Finn with the message. As soon as she had hung up, an American friend called to say that immigration wasn't letting her leave the country, and did she have any idea why? A few friends from the Old City also called her to find out what she knew. Which was pretty much nothing. Finn wouldn't tell her anything until he got home. Finally she dove into the pool just to get away from her phone.

After her swim, clean, dry, and with nothing else to do, Miranda went back to work on her cards. Many of them were made from postcards or photos in travel magazines of places she and Finn had gone together. There were postcards of the Bosporus in Istanbul, the skating rink at Somerset House in London, the Sofitel Hotel in southern Mazrooq, and paintings they both loved, such as
Farewell
, Remedios Varo's painting of two lovers disappearing down diverging corridors, just their retreating backs visible to the observer. Stealthily, their lengthening shadows have stretched back, their lips moving together for one last phantom kiss. There were photos of more mundane pleasures,
such as Christmas pudding and Hendrick's gin. And there were cards made from
New Yorker
cartoons and from Miranda's own artwork. On the back of each she wrote something she loved about Finn. “You read plays out loud with me in bed”; “You keep your mother's recipes”; “You can tell me you love me in seven languages”; “You make lethal gin and tonics”; “You have never uttered an unkind word about Vícenta (or, for that matter, any of my legions of past lovers)”; “It doesn't scare you when I say things like ‘my legions of past lovers' ”; “You help me with my Arabic homework”; “You made me an art studio even before I moved in”; “The way you say ‘articulated lorry' ”; “You think my Mazrooqi women are brilliant”; “You let me cry on you and don't get all freaked out about it”; and “You sing along with eighties pop songs.”

After she sealed each envelope, Miranda wrote a number (in Arabic) on the front of it. She didn't think Finn would feel like celebrating his birthday on such a grim day. But she wasn't exactly throwing a drunken party and tossing confetti out of the windows with whoops of joy. She simply wanted to make her love visual, tangible, to turn it into a gift. This could not be wrong, no matter what the state of the world outside. Having thus reassured herself, she gathered up her envelopes and headed downstairs. She taped the first card to the front door, the second and third to his office door and wall, and the rest throughout the house, from the front hall to the tiny
diwan
perched on the top of their home. Recently renovated, it had never been used.

The household staff watched her curiously as she fixed cards to the wall in the kitchen. When Miranda explained what she was doing, Teru ran back to the laundry room, returning with a box of Lindt truffles. “The ambassador, he likes chocolate, no?” And she took the roll of tape from Miranda and attached a truffle to each card in the kitchen.

With Desta's help, Miranda then set up the roof
diwan
for dinner, with a tablecloth, paper Winnie-the-Pooh birthday napkins (the only celebratory napkins to be found in the stores), plates, wineglasses, candles, and enormous bunches of flowers that her driver had picked up that morning. She had wanted to choose the flowers herself, but Tucker refused to let her leave the grounds.

In the bedroom, Miranda peeled back the comforter and laid a towel over the sheets. Candles and massage oil stood at attention on her bedside table. In their private kitchen she sliced cucumbers and limes, lined up the bottles of Hendrick's gin and tonic water, and chilled a bottle of champagne. She found an ice bucket, filled it, and stuck it in the freezer. Thus she was able to keep danger and grief dancing on the periphery of her consciousness. The succession of small tasks occupied her until Finn arrived home, at the miraculously early hour of 6:30. For a moment—and only a moment—she considered waiting upstairs while he followed the trail of cards. But she couldn't keep her feet from the steps. After all, he had thirty cards to read before he even got to the bedroom; it could take a while. He was just setting his briefcase down in his study, the first card open in his right hand, when she came in. “Thank you, sweetheart,” he said, hugging her. “Beautiful card.”

“Rough day at the office.”

“Not as rough a day as the American ambassador had.”

“Did you talk to the Americans? How is the staff?”

“I've done everything I can do for the moment. The Americans are as you would expect them to be. I promise I'll tell you everything as soon as we sit down.”

“Okay, but did you read the instructions? There are a few more cards…if you don't mind? Are you up to it?”

Finn looked again at the card, which contained a clue leading him to the next one. “It's a little bit of a relief to be told what to do for a change,” he said, walking back out into the hallway.

Miranda followed him as he discovered each card, peeled it from the wall, and read it slowly. He stopped after each one to take her in his arms or to kiss her, so they progressed slowly. After the fifteenth card, when Miranda edged him forward again, he said, “Oh, there are
more
?”

“Well, sweetheart, how old are you?”

When he looked at her with brimming eyes, she knew her efforts had not been wasted.

On the wall next to the kitchen table was a crossword puzzle, which they religiously completed together on weekend mornings. A
postcard of Kati Horna's 1937 photograph from the Spanish Civil War
Woman from Madrid in a Refugee Centre in Velet Rubio
, of a stout woman breast-feeding a child standing and gazing into the distance, both fear and determination etched in her eyes, hung in the hall between kitchen and laundry room. On the staircase they followed a series of Meret Oppenheim shoe photographs: elegant, ivory high-heeled shoes trussed up like a roast turkey (Miranda's idea of a joke; she still loathed heels although Tazkia's lessons had made her slightly less likely to shatter an ankle). Near the top was Jim Warren's surreal
Sexual Explosion
, its ecstasy-shattered woman flinging her head back in erotic surrender.

In the bedroom, he followed the instructions on the violet, heart-shaped Post-it notes stuck to their headboard, which read, “Remove clothing” and “Rest here.”

“Drink?”

“A gin and tonic would be wonderful,” he answered predictably, struggling to balance on one foot while removing a black sock. “Hendrick's?”

“Would I ever use another gin?”

“Forgive me.”

“Oh, wait! I forgot the Finn's Birthday Music!” Miranda ran to the iPod, and the initial notes of the Magnetic Fields' “It's Only Time” drifted into the room as she mixed their drinks. “Why would I stop loving you a hundred years from now? / It's only time….”

The ice crackled in the gin as she set the glasses down on the nightstand and shrugged her sundress to the floor. Naked, they sat on the towel together.

“So tell me,” she said.

Reaching for her hand, he described the morning's horror and its aftermath. “There are too many days like this,” he said. “Too many.”

Tomorrow morning he would hold a staff meeting to discuss increased security at his own embassy. “And I hate to say it, sweetheart, but we'll have to discuss the possibility of sending spouses and partners home.”

“Home?” Miranda echoed. She no longer had any home other than this, other than Finn.

“I'll do everything I can to keep you here. But not at the expense of your safety, or the safety of others at the embassy.”

“I'm not going,” Miranda said, gently tipping Finn over onto his back and straddling his hips. “You can't get rid of me so easily.” And slowly, her eyes pinning him to the sheets, she bent her mouth to his.

A
FTERWARD, THEY LAY
silently, listening to Wilco's “Reservations.” “I was supposed to give you a massage first,” she finally said.

“It's not too late.”

She smiled. “Where shall I start?”

“Here,” he said. “And here.”

W
HEN
F
INN
'
S BODY
had gone limp underneath her prodding fingers, Miranda slid down beside him.

“I'm so glad it wasn't you,” she whispered. He rolled onto his side and pulled her toward him.

“I wish it wasn't anyone.”

T
O THEIR GREAT
relief, Miranda (and every other spouse) was allowed to stay. But after that day she began to imagine things. When she stripped off her gym shorts in the bathroom and climbed into the shower, she had a sudden vision of the men who attacked the US embassy. They were dead, missing arms and legs and heads and viscera, but still pondering their fate. No virgins had welcomed them to the afterlife. No god had commended them for slaughtering innocent people. No reward awaited them except for the slowly dawning realization that they had been had. “Why don't they come back from the dead and
tell
people?” She said this aloud, turning on the tap and letting the water run through her hair. By the time she was pulling on socks and shoes, she was rigid with fury that these ghosts had failed to appear.

The anger came out in strange bursts now, when she was not
expecting it. The day after the attacks she was absorbed in a painting when the next-door mosque began its midday wail. “How
dare
you?” her reptilian brain cried out, before she had time to moderate her response. “How dare you pretend to be holy when you
massacre
people?” It was not a just anger. It was clumsy and blunt. She was not angry at Islam itself, but angry about the way Muslims were too often manipulated. The threatening missives that regularly arrived on the desks of Finn and other Western ambassadors always began with praise for Allah, and just after that, praise for those who had murdered in His Name. When she read a copy of one of these threats late one sleepless night, her heart staggered with rage. These never-ending crimes committed in the name of God, of religion. Wouldn't a just god want nothing more than peace?

One crisp autumn evening, as she and Finn (and the team) walked the three blocks to the home of his deputy, Leslie, where they were hosting an
iftar
to break the Ramadan fast with local staff, she found that even the ordinary details of their life had begun to take on an ominous cast: the absence of cars in front of the Iranian embassy, a white van turning down a side street, a sudden violent gesture made by a black-robed woman sitting on the sidewalk. There was menace everywhere, even in the purple flowers swaying in the evening breeze, thick enough to hide a body. If I saw someone about to take a shot at Finn, she thought, if I saw him raise his gun, which way would I move? The scene unfolded in her head. She saw herself lunging for Finn, wrapping herself around him like armor. Finn had an entire embassy depending on him. He was the most thoroughly decent person she had ever known. He needed to be alive. It took less than a second for all of this to run through her mind, less than the time it took her sandaled foot to take the next step. And with the
next
step came fresh hypothetical horrors.

These were the things she fantasized about now. When she was waiting for Finn to come home from work, it was hard to believe that he still existed. That
they
existed, that she hadn't dreamed their entire life together. “He wears striped shirts,” she would remind herself. “He comes back to bed every morning smelling of lemon shaving
cream. He has the funny, slump-shouldered walk of a tall person. The first thing he will do when he comes home is ask me if I want a cup of tea.”

At home without him, she watched for signs. A garbage truck went by one mid-October morning, stopping near their door. She watched from their bedroom window, pulling aside the curtains that their security manager insisted they keep shut. A man with longish, curly hair stood on top of the refuse in the back, catching plastic bags of garbage. If it was garbage. There was no way to know what was really in that mound. Why couldn't it be explosives? She wondered if the guards had searched it, or if they had decided they would rather not explore trash. The curly-haired man hauled up a bag from in front of their gate. She could not see who handed it to him, whether it was one of their guards or someone else. He tore it open, let the garbage tumble on top of the heap, and bent to retrieve something. As he stood, polishing an empty wine bottle with his sleeve, staring at the label, Miranda's stomach clenched in fear. We're doomed, she thought. He knows we were drinking during Ramadan.

The anger erupted even in her Arabic class, with her sweet, gentle teacher, Mahmoud. She arrived one morning sweating under a long-sleeved black blouse, long skirt, and
hijab
, her Mazrooq drag.
“Antee mareedha?”
one of the teachers asked when she walked in, pulling off the scarf.

“No.” She hadn't thought she looked that bad. She rethought her decision to forgo lipstick.

“Ta'bana?”
She was neither sick nor tired but finally admitted to the latter, so he had an explanation for her apparently unhealthful appearance. She couldn't very well say, “No, I'm enraged and terrified and
nothing helps
.”