The Ruins of Us (14 page)

“I’m not talking about school. I’m talking about being with you. Like everything’s OK.”

“Everything will be OK, Mimou, I promise. Let me take you for lunch. Please?” He knew he needed it more than she did, and he felt badly for pressing the issue, but he’d been so excited to see her. He hoped her optimism and energy would spread to him, make him truly believe that everything would be OK. “I won’t tell her if you won’t. It’ll be our secret.”

“But that’s the problem. You keep too many secrets, Baba.”

After a few minutes of silence, Mariam reached over and turned on the radio, flipping channels until she came to some Lebanese pop music. As they drove, she hummed along, folding the edge of her abaya into peaks and then unfolding it again.

When they arrived at the hotel, a valet took the car and drove off. Doormen greeted him by name and smiled at Mariam. She hadn’t rewrapped her scarf, but it was OK. The hotel was lenient about those things, their restaurant popular for its mixed dining room, where men and women sat together freely.

Since it was cool and sunny outside, they chose a table on the promenade. He let Mariam have the chair that looked out toward to sea, which was uncommonly blue that afternoon. She ordered a mango lassi, shrimp cocktail, and a whole grilled branzino stuffed with lemons. She smiled at him after she finished placing her order, as if to let him know that his attempts at diplomacy would cost him. He ordered the fillet with a side of broccoli. Since Isra, he had started to watch his waistline again, picking at his food like a bird. He’d forgotten the energy it took to be in love.

“And how is the internship going? A’m Nabil says good things about your work ethic.”

“He would say good things even if I were lazy. You’re his brother.”

“I don’t think so. You know he has no tolerance for fools and loafers.”

“That’s true. He told me some stories about you from university. The time you two stayed up all night, studying for your rhetoric final—how you kept wanting to take a break and buy a beer, and he got so annoyed that he started a running tab for every time you said the word ‘beer.’ He said you still haven’t paid him the hundred dollars you owe him.”

Abdullah smiled.

“Nabil was the better student, no question. But where did all his studiousness get him? I could buy his whole neighborhood.”

“Baba, don’t be crude. A’ami doesn’t care about money. He’s fighting for bigger things.”

“The luxury of the youngest brother. Not all of us can afford to work on our vanity projects.”

Abdullah could feel his face getting hot. He shouldn’t get angry, especially after he’d dragged her there in the first place, but it was hard. Sometimes, a person could be
too
right. Mariam and Nabil were both that way, and it grated on his nerves.

“I have over four hundred followers of my blog now,” she said, gracefully changing the subject. That was another thing he loved about his daughter—she would drive you to the edge with her questions, but she would never push you over it.

“Really?”

“My blog. You know—
True Confessions of a Saudi Teen
?”

He couldn’t remember anything about it, but he didn’t like the sound of it.

“Don’t worry,” she continued. “It’s totally anonymous. I wouldn’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

He raised an eyebrow at her and made a mental note to read the blog at some point. As a father, he was pretty easygoing, but the name of the blog sounded like a soap opera. He didn’t want to wake up one day as the father of the next big reality television star, or worse, have his daughter made an example of by the government. He knew they’d jailed a blogger a few months back, but the man’s site was political, always digging at the royal family.

“What’s it about, this blog?” he said.

With the help of his prosthetic hand, he popped open a pistachio nut from the small wooden bowl on the table. Whenever he went out, he made sure to wear his prosthesis. His stump was fine for home and family, not for restaurants. He chewed and, while his daughter talked, kept his eyes closed for just a moment. The sound of the waves lapping against the piles that kept the restaurant suspended above the water and the sun on his face made him think, for just a moment, that if he could bring Rosalie here, if they could sit together on the promenade, they both might find their way back to love.

“Fashion. The good abayas I’ve seen lately, the new ones I sew for myself. It’s also about school and my war with Ali. I think my stories are pretty funny, and that’s why people read it. I also talk about things I hear at the
Saudi Times
, about Hisham al-Sabah and the work he does for people put into prison without any reason. Faizah al-Zahrani and I talk a lot. I write about her, too, though I use a code name. It’s Sheytana, since A’ami is always calling her a devil for the trouble her stories cause him.”

He watched his daughter talking. People never said she looked like Rosalie, since their coloring was so different. But he saw it, in her broad mouth and deep-set eyes. Could he have done something to make things different? How could he have even begun to explain to Rosalie that, even though she’d become exactly what his country demanded her to be, it wasn’t what
he
wanted her to become, and now he no longer loved her as he once had? Or maybe it had nothing to do with Saudi Arabia or with the money. Maybe it was just that people changed over time and love vanished without warning, without mercy.

“It sounds great, habibti,” he said.

“You’re barely listening.” She looked at him with exasperation. “What are you thinking about?”

“How you may have gotten my black hair, but everything else belongs to your mother.”

“Really?”

He could see that she was pleased with this assessment. They’d always been close, Rose and Mariam, so close that he’d felt a little jealous; it made him more aware that he lacked that closeness with his son. The food arrived, and Mariam didn’t hesitate to hack off the head of the branzino, stabbing at the white flesh with her fork and making little noises as she ate that showed her happiness. She grinned at him over the table, pulling a fishbone from her mouth and standing to flick it out over the railing and into the sea. “I return you to your brothers!” she said, giggling. Her appetite was also her mother’s.

When she sat down again, her face grew serious.

“I think this is just a phase you’re going through,” she said.

He looked out over the water. An orange buoy bobbed on the surf. He’d heard of dolphins, and even sharks, swarming the shore occasionally, but today the water was quiet. How to explain adult love to a girl, when he himself couldn’t understand its fluctuations?

“Isra isn’t just a novelty,” he said. And then, before he could stop himself: “I’m in love with her.”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“You’re not, though.” Mariam insisted. “You just think you are. You’re in love with Umma. You had me and Faisal with Umma.”

And he was going to have a child with Isra, too. If that was what the world required to make love legitimate, then by God, they were legitimate. He saw, though, that Mariam was on the verge of tears, so he kept that last thought to himself. He had indulged enough already with this lunch. He needed to stop looking for absolution from Farouk, a stranger, and his daughter. Before God, he had done nothing wrong.

“Shall we get dessert?” He said. “Crème brûlée?” He knew how much she liked it.

“Sure,” she said. She didn’t meet his eyes, as if she had betrayed her mother for a custard.

“Happy birthday, my little duck,” he said, patting her knee beneath the table.

BACK AT THE
office, at the day’s end, Abdullah watched from his window as the city of Al Dawoun changed into an alien territory of lights. The white concrete buildings glowed in the blue light, neon flickering on above the stores—al-Shabab Barber Shop; Good Yum Chinese Restaurant; al-Sabah Grocery, where Abdullah bought the sweet-smelling strawberry tobacco for his shisha and the pistachio nuts that he kept in the pockets of his thobe. Running his good hand through his hair, he felt his heart beat slowly in the silence. Everyone had gone home, but Abdullah stayed, dreading a return to the big house. He rubbed his stump as he watched the moon rise, its halfway shape engorged on secondhand light. He had only a few moments to himself before he would have to go to the mosque for the Maghrib prayer, and then to the big house for the night’s dinner. Tonight was the first evening he and Rosalie would host the family since Isra’s existence had been uncovered, and he knew his brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands would scrutinize everything, down to the temperature of the sweet tea, in order to see just how Isra had affected things at the big house. Cold tea or overcooked fish or dry dates spelled disaster, for only a struggling family would overlook the run of its kitchen. He was suddenly glad he had spoken in advance to Yasmin and Anisa about the importance of the meal’s preparations. Of course, there were variables he could not control. Rosalie, for instance.

Abdullah considered his stump an accessory. He polished his interrupted pink wrist with a soft cloth and occasionally used it for cheap parlor tricks. He thought it sad that some limbless people felt inclined to hide their handicap with long shirtsleeves or strategically placed bandages. To make up for the self-consciousness of others, Abdullah was an exhibitionist. He used his stump as a prop to enthrall children at family gatherings, rounding them up and telling stories of the fearsome horseman, Sa’dun, leader of the Bani Khalid, the largest tribe in the Hasa oasis. He spun stories of Sa’dun’s battles against the Ottomans as the warrior tried to protect eastern Arabia and its yellow pearls from Suleiman the Magnificent’s men. Unveiling his stump, claiming that he lost his hand in battle fighting alongside Sa’dun, Abdullah wheezed his thin laugh as the children stared, mouths agape. Never mind that he was neither a member of the Bani Khalid tribe nor several hundred years old. The elimination of mystery and wonder implied by the very uptight, scientific word “proof” was all that Abdullah stood against, for mystery and wonder were the bedrock upon which he’d built his faith in God and the world.

Tilting back in his chair, he ran the old, soft cloth over the rounded flesh of his stump. The blue vein in his wrist pulsed. He closed his eyes and tried to remember life with two hands. Now, where did the dead-ended blood go when the vein tapered out? Abdullah looked down at his stump and thought of the young boy he had been when he’d lost his hand. Funny how the absence of one thing—a hand, or an old love—could lead to the presence of so many memories. Memory was like that, taking advantage of a certain color, a trodden street, a known perfume, the cast of light in morning or evening, to catapult its way back into your head in order to spread its pallet and stay awhile.

He’d been pensive since his lunch with Mariam that afternoon. She reminded him of hard truths—the love that had produced her, for one. Instead of energizing him, their lunch had made him nostalgic, so that all afternoon he’d fiddled unproductively in his office, digging up memories of the early times with Rosalie. The “foreign exchange” party they’d hosted, when she’d forced him to make brisket for fifty of their friends and she, in turn, had to make a similarly outsized kabsa. They’d spread newspapers all over the floor of their tiny place, topping it with bed pillows and couch cushions and whatever else they could find to fashion it into a makeshift majlis. They stole a keg from the Lion—Rose claimed they owed it to her in tips—and Nabil rounded up several shishas from the other Arab students on campus. Miraculously, both meals were succulent and perfect, and everyone stuffed themselves full, then fell asleep in piles around the living room, sauce on their faces, their fists still full of the basmati rice that Rosalie had cooked for days leading up to the party. And there were the Texas football games, when Rosalie would paint orange stripes on his face and they’d go and shout themselves hoarse from the cheap seats at Memorial Stadium. He remembered driving up to Dallas to watch Earl Campbell run like crazy against a mean Oklahoma team. Afterward, Rose had pushed her way to the front of a long line of fans waiting by the team bus. When Campbell finally came out of the locker room, she’d shaken his hand, rattling off his career stats and telling him he was a shoe-in for the Heisman. Campbell just beamed, and when she’d finished, he said he had to get a photo with the girl who knew his stats better than his mother. They’d all three posed together, and then he’d signed their program. Abdullah wasn’t sure where that program had ended up, but the photo was framed and set on the bookshelf of his office at the big house, Rosalie’s red hair in loose Farrah waves, like all the girls wore back then.

In that photo, her smile practically took up her whole face. A shit-eating grin, Dan had called it. That girl, that grinning, bold girl. He closed his eyes and felt his heart beating a little faster, sending warmth through his body. Perhaps he and Rose could get that feeling back and it could be as he’d initially, foolishly, imagined his life with two wives—a different, deep love with each woman. How naïve he had been, how impulsive in marrying Isra. And how cowardly. He saw that now, acknowledged that he had not wanted to deal properly with the distance opening up between him and Rosalie and so had fallen back on the laws of the tribe to avoid it.

Abdullah leaned forward in the chair so his arms hung down between his legs and touched the floor. It was an exercise his doctor had told him to do whenever his back ached. He wished the doctor had told him what to do when his whole body hurt, when his brain cramped up from too many memories. Old man, shaybah, he admonished himself. He sat up and kneaded the fleshy muscles along his spine, recalling one of his father’s sayings:
A sore back means a heavy load is coming.
Abdullah smiled. To Abdul Latif, the idea of a heavy load wasn’t ominous; it merely meant more gold bullion was on the way. The man had never known a day of depression, earning his riches through the force of his optimism, and Abdullah tried hard to emulate him. But in Abdul Latif’s time, things happened backward and upside down. The Americans pulled out the earth’s insides and a Bedu boy walked out of the desert seeking his fortune. Anything was possible.