The Ambassador's Wife (4 page)

“Not even crossing a checkpoint. Tucker says it's perfectly safe. It's near the president's village.”

“Who's with you today?”

“Not sure. Whoever isn't with you, I guess. Mukhtar?”

“Your favorite.”

“Well, he's the only one who ever asks me questions. He takes an interest.”

“Not too much of one, I hope.”

“Finn! You do realize I used to do this every week.
Without
a bodyguard.”

“But that was before you were an ambassador's wife.”

“When I was just an ordinary mortal.”

“A very bewitching ordinary mortal.”

Miranda smiles at her phone. “I'll see you tonight, okay? By the time you get home I'll even have all the pistachios in bowls.”

“That's what the staff are for, sweetheart. Put your feet up.”

By the time she gets downstairs, Gabra and Cressie are outside playing on the front lawn. Dressed in an oversized embroidered Ethiopian shirt (a gift from Gabra) and a floppy flowered sunhat, Cressie is teaching her teddy bear to do high dives from the edge of the dried-up stone fountain at the end of the garden. She is a fortunate child; few other children in this city have lawns—or any outdoor space. Miranda thinks of the children in her old neighborhood, who play their games in the streets, barefoot and unsupervised, dodging cars as they kick small rocks across the cobblestones. When she lived there, they would chase after her as she made her way around the markets, buying tomatoes and tiny greenish raisins, their ranks growing at every intersection.
“Soura, soura!”
they'd cry, making picture-taking motions with their hands. Or
“Qalam, qalam!”
Why these children were permanently fixated on pens was a mystery to her. She understood why they wanted her to take their photographs (and she often obliged). They wanted to see themselves in a way they normally couldn't. Many had never seen a mirror. They would stare in silence at the photo in her camera, wrapping filthy fingers around it to pull it closer. But why the pens? She never saw them using pens, even when she was in their homes.

“Mummy, Mummy!” Seeing her approach, Cressie totters across the lawn, falling on her face every few steps when she catches a foot on the spongy turf. Their grass is inexplicably springy, sinking beneath every footfall, tugging at the heels of shoes. When the embassy staff gathers to play badminton someone always ends up twisting an ankle. Not that that deters anyone. The British must have their bit of lawn, and where else could they find a patch of green? Yonas and Semere spend half their day on the turf, tenderly watering, weeding, and mowing. If Cressie could learn to walk on this, thinks Miranda, she'll be able to walk on anything.

“Hello, my love.” Miranda swings her daughter up into her arms. “Have you had a happy morning?” Cressie is heavy and hot. Miranda presses her close, kissing her chubby cheek until the little girl squirms
to be let down. To Miranda's dismay, she has never been a cuddly child. She tolerates the occasional embrace, but is impatient for it to end so that she can get on with whatever she is doing—collecting flower petals or pretending to make porridge for the bears (even Miranda says porridge now instead of oatmeal, as well as anorak, chuffed, knickers, biscuit, and dual carriageway. Finn's language has been slowly colonizing hers) or sending her small plastic cows on a Tupperware boat down a pot-holder river. She is a perpetually busy child.

Gabra updates her on the minutiae of Cressida's day thus far as they walk toward the house and wander back to the kitchen to see what Teru has left them. Miranda sets Cressie on the floor to open the refrigerator and peers inside. As requested, Teru has made a Thai salad, strips of tofu, carrot, and cucumber in a peanut sauce. Every morning, Miranda picks something out of a cookbook, and every afternoon it appears in the refrigerator. This never ceases to feel miraculous. Gabra has chicken, rice, and Ethiopian injera bread, her favorite. Miranda invites Gabra to join them in the dining room, though she knows it's pointless. Gabra would rather stay with Negasi and Teru in the kitchen.

It was an awkward adjustment, eating separately from the staff. At first Miranda took her meals in the kitchen, wanting to be egalitarian, wanting to be their friend, feeling lonesome in the empty Siberia of their dining room. She didn't know how she was supposed to relate to staff, having never even had a housecleaner. Servants were people she thought of as existing only in fairy tales and Hollywood. But eventually she realized how uncomfortable her overtures made them. The kitchen was their province. They didn't know what to do with her when she was underfoot, interrupting the flow of their work. She was the Madame, and therefore she belonged in the dining room.

Negasi, Teru, and Desta were a seamless team. Whenever Teru had a particularly large dinner to make, Negasi and Desta would be in the kitchen, juicing limes and slicing carrots. Miranda admired their effortless choreography, the way they never discussed who would do what but sensed what was needed. At night when they had large dinners, all three women worked together serving the drinks and food,
not one of them leaving until the kitchen once again looked as though it had never been used.

Now, Miranda has adjusted to her solitary meals. She reads, listens to music, or plays with Cressie. A relatively recent issue of
ARTnews
lies open next to her plate. Miranda hasn't managed much more than a glance at the headlines, though she's had the issue for two months now. Today, Cressie sits in Miranda's lap as she eats, pulling strips of cucumber and tofu off her plate. When she's mopped up the last drops of peanut sauce with a tomato slice, Miranda carries her plate to the kitchen and leaves it in the sink. She hasn't washed a dish in three years.
Don't get used to this
, she reminds herself every morning.
This is not real life
.

U
PSTAIRS SHE WANDERS
through their bedroom—past their canopied, king-sized bed, which Negasi has already made up with clean sheets—to her studio, Cressie in pursuit, babbling a monologue that once again seems focused on her invisible friend Bob. “I'm starting to worry about your relationship with this Bob fellow,” Miranda says absently, as she lifts paintings and sets them down again. Unfinished canvases lean against the sides of a large wooden worktable. So fast and furious have the ideas been coming here that she doesn't have time to finish one painting before the idea for the next one propels her onward. She wants to pin down every single inspiration before it floats away, like a helium balloon. There will be plenty of time to finish them, she trusts, when the visions abate. Still, her New Orleans gallerist is expecting at least a dozen new works for her next show, a mere ten months away. She'll have to finish something. It will be her first opening with Finn by her side—and his first trip to New Orleans. She wants to make it spectacular.

They have less than a year left of Finn's four-year posting, and then they could be anywhere. If he's lucky, if he continues to impress London with his work here, he'll get another ambassadorship. If not, he'll have to spend a few years back in London before applying for new posts. Miranda wonders what this will mean for her. A geographic shift always echoes in her work. It takes time for each new
environment to settle into her bones, dissolve into her plasma, seep out into her brush, saturate her colors. For how long after they leave in June will Mazrooq's inimitable energies pulse through her veins? How long before London's frigid mists cloud her eyes? She pushes the thought away. They have time. Anything could happen.

On her easel rests a painting. A Mazrooqi man kneels in prayer in the stony
diwan
of an Old City home. Dressed in a long, white
thobe
that floats around him like a Halloween ghost costume, he curls forward, his forehead brushing a thick carpet of Mazrooqi design. At first nothing appears unusual about the image, but after a moment, women begin to emerge. For the carpet is crafted from their limbs, from their thighs and elbows and bellies and necks and breasts. Everything in the room—the man, the cushions strewn about the floor, the lamps—rests upon this foundation of women.

Older paintings lean nearby. A well-dressed man in a
thobe
and dark Western suit jacket (the typical Friday outfit of Mazrooqi men) strides down an Old City street clutching the handle of an unusual umbrella. It's fashioned from a naked woman, whose ankles and feet rest in his palm and whose long hair spreads a protective tent over his head. Her face is devoid of expression. On the ground next to the easel rests a painting of a middle-aged man at work, writing at a large, ornate desk. But it is to his chair that the eye is drawn; it is fashioned from the limbs of another nude woman. At ease in the embrace of her arms, he leans his head back against the softness of her breasts, a satisfied smile on his face.
His own private Atlas
, reads the title. In every corner of the room are more of her women, never clothed, always useful. Women serving as sofas, coffee tables, easels, ovens, even churches. Since she and Vícenta first set up house in the Old City, the women haven't stopped coming.

Still, she is frustrated with the literalness of her work, her inability to free herself from narrative. She is not fully the contemporary surrealist she aspires to be; she is too caught up in directing her compositions. She hungers for liberation, to remove the analytical screen between her unconscious and her easel. Someday, she hopes. Someday soon.

In addition to the women are several simple sketches of Tazkia
curled on the end of Miranda's studio sofa in jeans and a T-shirt, her thick black hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. Miranda idly picks up one of these from an armchair by the window. Tazkia is smiling, her mouth slightly open as if she is about to offer the punch line of a joke. It hadn't been easy to get Tazkia to sit still for very long. And impossible to get Tazkia to stop talking. In the end, Miranda had taken a photograph of her and worked from that, though often Tazkia drifted off to sleep while posing, giving Miranda time to work with a live subject. Like centuries of painters before her, Miranda has always preferred to stroke her brush along the lines of a female form. But unlike Rubens and Renoir, Miranda favors the slim-hipped and small-breasted. She would say boyish, if to do so did not imply that a slight form was somehow less female. The male body is capable of arousing her, but she has never found it beautiful.

And then there are the secret paintings, locked away. Their presence in her home makes her uneasy. She will be relieved when they are gone, when they are ashes. It won't be long now.

“Mommy's friend,” says Cressie, pointing to the drawing. “Mommy's friend!”

“That's right, sweetheart. That's Mommy's friend Tazkia.”

“Tazkee, Tazkee!” Cressie knows Tazkia as well as she knows anyone.

Miranda looks at the disordered sprawl of her work, the tangle of feminine arms and legs, and sighs. She comes here every day, even when she doesn't have time to work. It's a way of checking in with herself, with what is central to her. It's the one room in the house the staff is not permitted to enter, barring emergency. In the beginning, Desta had come in every day to try to scrub the desktops and floors, but she had overturned so many palettes and left brushes in such disarray that Miranda had begged her not to clean. She lived in terror of Desta accidentally splashing a cup of turpentine across a canvas. “I'll do it myself,” she'd said. Desta had just looked at her, the dark crease between her eyes deepening. She clearly didn't believe Miranda to be capable of cleaning anything.

Cressie sits on the floor of their bedroom, turning the pages of her books, as Miranda organizes herself for her afternoon hike. Perpetual
motion and painting, the two surest ways to maintain her equilibrium in this surreal world. She stuffs a phone, lip salve, and her camera in her pockets. Would she need money? Probably not. But she folds a thousand dinars (worth about five dollars) and slips it into her pocket just in case. In a small backpack she tucks a bottle of water, a sketchbook, a pencil case, two hard-boiled eggs Finn made for her the night before, and plastic bags of raisins and almonds.

She is meeting the other women at the Al-Bustan café, several blocks away. Miranda is never sure who will turn up on their weekly excursions. People are constantly in and out of the country and busy with work. These women knew her long before she became an ambassador's wife, when she was simply Miranda the painter. In fact, not until she had actually moved into the Residence did she confess to them her relationship with Finn. “I didn't want anything to change,” she'd said to Doortje, the Dutch wife of a Royal Dutch Shell executive.

“But it will,” Doortje had said. “For one, we will be hitting you up for your wine cellar.”

These are not women awed by diplomats; these are women for whom diplomats are an unexceptional part of their daily landscape. These are women who have walked across continents, for decades. Women who have lived in Nigeria, China, Sierra Leone, Malta, Guyana, Laos, and Pitcairn Island. Rangy, athletic women who carry their worlds with them, refashioning their lives every three to five years. Women who gave birth to their first child in Singapore and their second in Krakow. Women who are at ease with strangers and strange landscapes. Women who sleep in the shadow of loneliness and wake looking forward to a simple exchange with a fruit seller. When she is with them, Miranda doesn't feel the need to speak. She is simply happy to be among them, listening to their stories, their different languages weaving together. She picks up strands of Arabic and French, admires the icy inaccessibility of Norwegian and German. Monday—their hiking day—is her favorite day of the week.

She sits on the bed to zip up her backpack and feels a pudgy hand on her knee. Clinging to Miranda for balance, Cressie waves a book with her other hand. It's a raggedy red paperback with folded-down
corners that had been Miranda's when she was young. Her father had sent it over when she told him she was pregnant. Miranda lifts Cressie's small, pudgy body onto the bed, nestles her between her legs, and inhales the dusty jasmine scent of her hair. Gabra often brings her garlands of the flowers, ubiquitous in this city, hanging them around Cressie's neck until she grows restless and tears them off, scattering brown-edged white petals across the marble floors. Miranda opens the book and begins to read. “Corduroy is a bear who once lived in the toy department of a big store. Day after day he waited with all the other animals and dolls for somebody to come along and take him home.”