The Ruins of Us (21 page)

“You’re the one who needs a haircut, Mr. Coleman,” she said.

He turned in the driver’s seat, as if to confirm that she was addressing him.

“You got a pair of scissors?” Dan asked.

She saw him looking at her through the rearview mirror. He was flirting; she could tell by the subtle way he moved his head to one side, as if asking her to take something from him, an invitation for her to touch him. Abdullah was reading something on his BlackBerry. She stared back at Dan, hoping to squash his boldness. She couldn’t deny that something had passed between them, but it was more like commiseration than anything resembling love. She needed him to think rationally. Making the proper arrangements for her flight out would require lucidity.

“Didn’t you cut hair back in Austin?” Dan pressed.

“Nope,” she said. “Must’ve been one of Abdullah’s other girlfriends.”

“Habibti, why do you say that?” Abdullah cut in. “You know you were the only one.” He said it as if his fidelity was a ribbon she could hang on her wall, a memento of a glorious past.

“I’m sure you could do a fair job of it,” Dan said. “You’ve got to be better than the Filipino guy I go to.”

“There is no way in hell that I would allow my wife to touch your head. Who knows what’s growing there?” Abdullah laughed, and Rosalie knew that was the end of it.

At one time his voice and his laugh had been hers, listening to Hank Williams at the Hole in the Wall on the Drag, the vent wafting fry fumes at them; at Zilker Park, under the Christmas tree. “Who’s the infidel now?” she had shouted at him as they spun dizzily beneath the lights. A private world where they made their own noise. But she would not allow herself to be overcome. Out the window, there was one of the Khalifa palaces, a concrete monstrosity of towers and cupolas, soulless as a new shopping mall. They drove around a traffic circle, Dan craning his neck in search of a barbershop. The blues and reds of traffic signs in Arabic and English. Narrow jewelry stores jammed between shoe shops and teahouses. Through her window, Rosalie watched people moving—Indian men in ragged pants, women shuffling on sidewalks, their feet like two flicking tongues beneath their abayas.

“Over there,” Abdullah said. He pointed out a corner barbershop where two men and a yellow cat sat in the shade of the building’s upper stories.

They parked and got out of the car. She noticed that Dan stood a couple inches taller than Abdullah, his broad back stretching the shoulders of his polo shirt. Both men were large, with athletic strides. Abdullah had once been the keeper for an intramural soccer club at UT, his extra inches of height helpful in sending the ball safely up and out of range of the net. She didn’t know Dan’s history—maybe six-man football on the dusty fields of West Texas, or basketball. She imagined him thinner and younger, loping up and down a brightly lit court where the air smelled of concession-stand hot dogs.

They stopped in front of the open door of the barbershop. The men outside had identical faces, wizened and brown as mahogany. They spoke with Egyptian accents. The yellow cat lifted its tiny head, its fat body stretched out behind, a feline odalisque. Dan said a few halting phrases in Arabic and the men smiled in appreciation. Abdullah looked at her, rolled his eyes. He felt that Arabs were too easily impressed by the cultural overtures of Westerners. In spite of her desire to freeze out care, Rosalie could not stop the low-level telepathy that they had developed through thousands of shared days and words exchanged.

They pushed past the waiting-area curtain and into the shop. A radio buzzed in the corner playing a Lebanese pop song, all habibti and everlasting love. The tiles on the floor were chipped and yellowing but clean, and there were two large chairs set before mirrors. Rosalie looked at herself in the one closest to her. With the headscarf pulled tightly under her chin, her face protruded, pushing against the edge of the scarf like a body caught beneath too-tight sheets. She looked squeezed, slightly puffy. In a single motion, she undid the tuck she had created on the side of her head. She pulled off the scarf, her red hair wild with static beneath it. Through the mirror, she saw the barbers staring at her.

“Put it back on,” Abdullah said.

“No. My ears were sweating. Besides, it’s Bahrain. I’m allowed.”

“These men think you’re a whore.” He said it in English.

“That’s their problem, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s my problem.”

He moved to tug the headscarf back into place, but Rosalie dodged to the left. “La. No.” He took her hard by the wrist, so that she could feel the pinch of his fingers, the cool flat of his palm against her skin. For a moment, she thought he would kiss her. How often had he taken her roughly by the waist, the shoulders, the wrists, scaring her with the violence of his desire, while she pressed back against his embrace, a wordless mock struggle. Now he held her at a distance. There would be no gratifying capitulation, as when she would stop her back-tread and move hipbones-first into him, when he would dig at her limbs with his nails, run his fingers through her hair as if he expected to find gold there. Abdullah made a noise in his throat and dropped her arm. His eyes lingered on her face, and she felt awkward beneath his inspecting glance.

“But we’re in Bahrain, Abdi,” she said.

Behind them, Dan’s eyes stared through the muddy mirror. Emptied of his usual jokiness, they were the still blue of twilight. His lips were parted slightly, as if he were on the verge of speaking. Normally, he would have come to her aid, made a joke about Abdullah’s bossiness. Now she saw that he was scared of giving something away.

One of the barbers wiped down the red vinyl of a chair. Abdullah sat down. At its peak, their love had had an edge that depended on the fear she felt whenever she considered a life without him. She was sure he had sensed it. Power is always clear between two entangled people. Still, she’d felt safe within her marriage. Part of her anger at him was for jolting her out of that safety, for making her feel, once again, like she had to fight for a love that was owed her.

With his good hand, Abdullah waved the barber toward him. She thought of her jealousy-limned dreams. The time she dreamed that Abdullah’s courtship of Isra had followed to the word his courtship of her, every “fuck” and “love” exactly positioned so that his love for the second wife perfectly overlaid and eliminated his love for the first. She had gagged in her sleep and awoken choked and panting. It was not the physical connection that she had imagined having with her husband twenty-seven years into their marriage. She thought of the moment on the dune with Dan, the way they had both pawed hungrily at each other. The way he had looked at her with a kind of boyish reverence, the look she’d grown used to from men when she was a student. On that dune, she had remembered what it was like to be adored, and it was a powerful feeling.

“Come on, yallah,” Abdullah said to the barber. “We need to make it to Gold City before they close for prayer.”

“Don’t rush him. You want a clipped artery?”

“Worry more about your own arteries, Coleman.”

“I’m svelte by American standards.”

“King Fahd is svelte by American standards.”

“That man’s lucky he looks so good in a dress.”

She watched the barber move his fingers through Abdullah’s hair, drawing it out more slowly, pausing against his scalp as he surveyed the hair.

“I’m going to give you a shampoo,” he said.

“Ma’alesh.” Abdullah fanned his stump out in dismissal.

The barber guided Abdullah to the sink on the other side of the room. She often forgot that her husband was a cripple, because he carried himself like some ten-armed Hindu god. As soon as the water opened up, she turned to Dan, placed her hand on his knee. Under her palm, she felt his warmth. He looked at her, eyes questioning. She felt the thinnest fracture of desire breaking through her. Could they? Back in the States?
Habibi habibi habibi,
the woman sang on the radio. One of the barbers had fallen asleep, and his teeth caught each exhale, creating a soft whistle. She felt fragile as an egg, as if she could split apart at any moment, her organs exiting rapidly as a slippery yolk. Dan stood and her hand brushed his upper arm.

“Yallah, yallah,” Abdullah said to the man who had tilted him back, plunged his head beneath the spray of water.

Dan spoke to her in a low voice.

“Have you given any more thought to leaving?”

The smell of anise filled the room from the suds of Abdullah’s shampoo.

“Yes, but I’m nervous, Dan. I’ve never been good at lying.”

His eyes were beseeching. He had a shadowy scruff around his jaw. She felt charged by his desire for her.

“I’m on re-pat next month. Going to Corsica. I’m going to hike across the island. Maybe you could find your way there, after you get your visa. We could drink that liquor they make from myrtle and jump off the calanques.”

His voice had a dreamy quality. She liked the fantasy. Maybe she would stop in Corsica on her way back to Houston, relearn what it meant to be adored.

“You’ll have to forge Abdullah’s signature on the permission documents,” she said. “See if the Tunisian can dig up some old forms so you can see what it looks like. Buy the ticket. Yes. I think . . .” She paused. “I think I’m going to leave him.”

At that, Dan placed his hand over hers just as the barber guided Abdullah into a seated position. Abdullah’s eyes lingered on them, a towel draped around his shoulders. She yanked her hand back.

“Almost done?” she called across the room.

Her voice sounded too cheerful. Abdullah stood and walked toward them, drying his ears with the towel at his neck.

“I’ll get the cut some other time. It’s time to leave.”

Abdullah smoothed the towel over his head. It was something he’d done thousands of times in her company. The intimacy of certain movements—those you’ve practiced since birth in the maintenance of your body. It had been one of her favorite things about married life—watching him shave, memorizing how he stood while taking a piss. She had shadowed him for decades, at times feeling as though their spirits crossed bodies in the night—out with a snore, through the nose, the way the Egyptians removed brains. It was incredible to her that another man’s body could present the same promise of earned familiarity. Impossible. Even if she did divorce and remarry, she was certain that she would only be able to see the next man as rehearsing to play the part of Abdullah in the theatrical production of their epic love—trying to get his tics down, never quite uttering his lines with the same gusto. Abdullah balled the towel and tossed it at Dan’s chest.

When Abdullah looked at her, she could see his jaw bulge slightly. He was clenching his teeth, his lips thinned into an ungenerous line.

Abdullah paid for the shampoo and then they were back out in the street.

“Gold City,” he said.

GOLD CITY SAT
in the heart of Manama, and as they made their way down Government Avenue toward the Bab al-Bahrain, the white gate marking the souq’s entrance flashed brightly. The century had been unkind to the surrounding buildings, some of the last standing traditional structures from Manama’s early days of development. The gate had once abutted the sea, and the pearling vessels that supplied the gold souq had moved along the near horizon. But over the years, the government had reclaimed much of the Gulf waters to expand the reach of the island, and the gate was now far from the waterfront. When Rosalie bought antique pearl jewelry, she imagined the sun glancing off the bare chests of the pearl divers as they hauled their treasure up out of the sea and into the souq, the jewelers fitting the still-dripping pearls into gold settings.

Dan parked the car, and as they walked toward the shops, Abdullah took her hand. Dan walked several paces ahead, almost skipping. With a shake, she freed herself from Abdullah’s grip.

“So it’s jewelry before hand-holding, then?” Abdullah said. “You’re a smart woman, zowjti.”

“Hmm,” she said. She wondered if she could be called smart. Since she was twenty, she’d allowed herself to be led by the hand.

In the souq, ropes of yellow gold hung against red velvet, glittering like metallic flames, cold and brilliant. Medallions large as Aztec suns burned behind glass, and necklaces long enough to join the Gulf to the Red Sea folded in on one another to create curtains of twenty-four-karat gold. The shoppers’ abayas whispered along the marble floor and people spoke in low, awed voices, the gold’s glow falling across their worshipful faces.

“Let’s go to the gems,” Abdullah said. “We’ll find my friend Abdul Wahab.” He hurried ahead, gesturing impatiently at them to follow. When they arrived at the shop, Abdullah asked for a loupe, then bent over and inspected a pair of diamond earrings.

“One carat each. Platinum setting. Feel how heavy,” Abdullah said, placing them in her palm.

“They’re beautiful.” The stones would pay for a car when she got back to Houston; she followed the blue flame that she could see moving in their depths.

“Sixteen thousand dollars,” Abdullah said. “For you.”

Dan snorted, and Abdullah turned toward him sharply. His eyes held the appraising look of a man about to make a wager.

“Dan, I think you should buy these for my wife.”

Rosalie gave a nervous laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

“By way of apology.”

“What are you talking about?” Dan asked

“I think you know the answer to that.”

Dan looked at Rosalie with confusion, his face flushed.

“I saw the way you touched her hands in the barber shop.”

“Abdi, be reasonable,” she said.

“Go on. Buy her these earrings. You’re making what, seventy or eighty thousand now, after that last raise?” The gold merchant looked uneasy, glancing frequently toward the earrings that Rosalie still had cupped in her hand.

“What the hell is your problem?” Dan asked

“Keep your hands off my wife.”

“You’re insane,” Rosalie said.

“Are you kidding me?” Dan said.

“Be a gentleman, Dan,” Abdullah said. “At least buy her a present if you’re going to flirt with her like that.” Abdullah smiled a mean grin, then said flatly, “Go on. Buy the earrings.”