The Ruins of Us (6 page)

“Listen, I don’t want to get involved, Rosie,” Dan said.

“My God, this country is infuriating. No one wants to get in-fucking-volved!”

Dan was scared for her now, her body shaking from the force of her anger.

“That’s enough, Rosalie,” Abdullah said. “Go inside.”

“You know what happens when no one gets involved?” she said. “When no one tells the truth? People wind up splattered on the wall, and then all the people who were so busy minding their own goddamn business get to act sorry while cleaning up the mess. I think it’s disgraceful. And Dan, if you knew about this, then by God, you ought to be ashamed. And you,” she pointed at Abdullah. “You’ve been hiding at your other house out of cowardice, too scared to face me.”

Abdullah raised his hand in the air to silence her. He glowered. It was clear that whatever he had permitted by way of verbal abuse from her, whether out of guilt or sympathy, had just become impermissible. “If you ever speak to me like that again, you’ll be on the first plane back to Houston. Do you understand me?”

Rosalie was quiet, but she held his gaze. She had pursed her lips into so thin a line that they almost disappeared from her face. Without them, she looked cruel.

“Now, if you will just calm down and think about this like a rational person, I know that you will see that I’ve done nothing outside of my rights,” Abdullah continued. “When you chose to marry me and move here, you told me that you were ready to accept my culture. You said you loved my culture. Well, this is my culture.”

It was early evening, and the neighborhood was silent save the
ch-ch-ch
of the sprinklers. It seemed Rosalie was barely breathing. Finally, she spoke.

“No one takes a second wife nowadays. Not one of your brothers or friends has taken one. It’s what villagers do!” She paused. “What’s happened to you, Abdullah? What’s happened to my husband? My husband was an honest man. A loving man.” Her voice cracked.

Dan should not have come. It wasn’t his business, this private sadness. It really wasn’t, no matter how many times Rosalie might accuse him of negligence. He knew better than anyone that once a marriage springs a leak, there’s not a soul in the world to put a patch to it except the two people involved.

“Please, Habibti. I am still those things,” Abdullah said. “You must understand, Isra doesn’t change anything between us. I will give to you both equally. You will not want for anything, I swear to you.”

“No. You’re wrong, Abdullah. That’s where you’re wrong. You’re not a cake. You can’t be divided up. Love has to be more whole than that.”

He reached for her hand, but she turned away and walked toward the door.

“It can never be what it was,” she continued. “It won’t ever be that pure again.”

She seemed resigned now, small-shouldered in the shadow of the archway. She turned and went inside, the sound of the lock loud, as if punctuating her statement. Abdullah exhaled. They stood and listened to the sounds of the night: frangipani flowers opening up; sweet beans falling from the branches of carob trees; the chattering of larks, bluethroats, and wheatears. Nature had an infuriating indifference to human entanglements. Sometimes, a blue sky was enough to make Dan smash a glass.

“I need a drink,” Abdullah said. “Let’s try to get to the causeway before the rush.”

“Too late for that. Every sucker in the Eastern Province is heading to happy hour in Bahrain.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll use my pass and take the VIP lane.”

They drove in silence for several minutes. Dan waited for Abdullah to say something about Rosalie, to excuse himself, or her. Back in Texas, they had always fought loudly, as if by making it a show and inviting other people to witness it, they could distance themselves from the actual struggle. Rosalie had been a fairly popular performer on campus, with her deep, stripped-down voice that reminded Dan of the great torch singers. On Saturdays, she sang in the dive where she also tended bar, the Lazy Lion. There was a guy on sax and another on piano. It was never a studied pursuit of hers, just something she did for fun. So many people had loved her—the tall, pretty girl with the mass of red hair Even though he was two years in with Carolyn by that point, he had felt a tug toward Rosalie, a little crush he’d never needed to confess because everyone shared the same feelings.

Rosie’s taste for the dramatic raised her arguments with Abdullah to a form of high art, both of them gesturing wildly. Sometimes, Abdullah would just spank her, in utter seriousness, right in front of everyone, and then they would collapse all over each other with laughter. Dan and Carolyn, and whoever else happened to be around, would applaud the slapstick but roll their eyes about it later when they were alone.

“So I guess you told her, then,” Dan said, pausing for a reply. When none came: “I thought you were going to wait until Faisal had gone to university.”

“Yeah, well, an idiot Yemeni jeweler was bragging to her about what good friends we were, what a good customer I was. And he made the mistake of asking Rosalie how she had liked the anniversary present that I bought for her. Only, our anniversary is in May. She’s not stupid.”

“The man was understandably confused.”

“The man is a meddlesome Hadrami fool.”

“Fine, ya Sheikh.”

“Yallah.”

ON THE CAUSEWAY,
hundreds of cars were backed up, the line reaching almost to the halfway point between the two countries. Suburbans brimming with families and sleek sedans packed with single men were gunning to get to Bahrain to start the weekend in a place where the religious police weren’t going to be looking over their shoulders. There, they could go to the movies or a restaurant where unrelated men and women could sit together, or a one-star hotel where easy virtue was the house specialty. Horns blared loudly and music came in bursts as Dan and Abdullah whizzed past the stalled cars. Using Abdullah’s VIP transit pass, they made it quickly through security. Abdullah looked at Dan.

“Princeton Club?”

Dan shrugged, then steered the car down the coastal road to the abandoned Gulf Oil compound, where the dilapidated clubhouse served as an old boys’ club that came alive every weekend, its sliding-glass doors lit from within, casting golden rectangles of light on the sand outside. It had been named by one of the earliest and most notorious of the old boys, Braxton Neel, who decided to honor his alma mater by slapping her name on his little Gulf fraternity. The compound’s current role in the community solely depended on the continued apathy of various governing forces. Dan didn’t ask questions. After spending the better part of twenty years working in Saudi Arabia, minus the years when he’d gone back to the States to watch his marriage fail and his savings evaporate, Dan had learned that the curious and the questioning were the first to be surplused, the last to attend the consular dinners for the petty diplomats and businesspeople. At one point in his life he had taken pride in his contrarian ways, but now, at the age of fifty-two, he was content to be a company man sitting in a company chair, banking his small but untaxed paychecks and dreaming of the cedarwood cabin abutting the Pedernales River that would be his first purchase upon returning stateside. A place where he’d have a fridge just for beer and a cabinet just for whiskey and sturdy bookshelves that he would fill to the top.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Dan said. He couldn’t
not
bring it up, although he was sure that Abdullah didn’t want to talk about the fiasco.

“What?”

“Two wives. Must be exhausting.”

“I enjoy both of their company. I love them both equally.”

“Abdi.” He paused, glancing at his friend, who looked back, eyebrows raised. “Have you lost your mind?” There. He had finally said what he’d been thinking in the weeks since Abdullah had told him.

“If I wanted angry accusations, I could have stayed at the big house.”

“I mean, what gave you the idea in the first place?” Seeing Rose’s shock and anger had produced a stronger reaction in Dan than when Abdullah had first told him about Isra. Then, it had seemed an abstract thing, like it would somehow come to make sense. But of course it couldn’t. Watching Rose grasp after words, watching her crumple with hurt, Dan saw it for exactly what it was: absurd cruelty, a total fuck-you to rational thought, an act of extreme cowardice.

“I fell in love with Isra. It’s permitted, Dan. In Riyadh . . .”

“Hell with Riyadh. You and I both know the Najd is a different story. Some people are living in the eighth century there.”

“I’m just saying, it’s done, and it’s permitted.” Abdullah was talking toward the glass of the window, avoiding eye contact, his voice tired. “And I didn’t want to say good-bye to her.”

“It’s selfish, you know that?” He paused. They had an easy relationship, lots of jokes and bullshitting and remembering when they’d been young and dumb. He knew he was crossing some kind of line with this talk, but he couldn’t help himself. “I wonder how Rosalie’s going to cope with everything.”

Dan rolled his window down farther. The car suddenly felt too small for the both of them. He rested his left hand on the door so his fingers hung outside the car, a gesture that always made him think of long summers in Texas and the red-striped Chevy truck he drove in high school.

“It’s not as though someone died.”

“Why didn’t you just get a divorce?”

“Divorce is a scourge. It would reflect badly on the family.”

“What does that even mean?” Dan said.

“Look, I still love Rosalie. She’s the mother of my children. But with Rosalie, I always felt like I was lacking some sort of understanding. And after
9
/
11
, I couldn’t even travel to my wife’s country.”

“Don’t go blaming politics for the bust-up of your marriage. That’s straight horseshit and you know it.”

“OK, you want to know the truth, wise guy?” Abdullah stretched his good hand along the car door, strummed his fingers, and stared out the window.

“Yeah. I do.”

Dan had a deep affection for Rosalie. To him, she would always be the redhead with the Chiclet smile serving them Heineken at the Lazy Lion, laughing while Abdullah recited Qabbani with all the melodrama of a lovesick fool:
When I love you, I march against ugliness, against the kings of salt, against the institution of the desert!
The cowboy patrons who were watching the Longhorns on the television had been completely befuddled by the poetry-spouting man in their midst, and rustled their boots nervously against their barstools. Dan had laughed until his eyes watered.

“The truth is, I feel like I hardly know who she is anymore. I hardly recognize her.”

“Maybe if you dug out that old leather jacket she used to wear . . .”

“I’m serious. Don’t turn this into a joke. She’s become”—he paused, then looked at Dan—“a Saudi wife.”

“Wasn’t that the idea, though? That after a while, she’d adapt?”

“If you’re a Saudi man and you marry an American woman, the last thing you want is for her to become a Saudi wife. Otherwise, why would you go through all the trouble with the family?”

Abdullah had defied his entire family, battled them tirelessly for months to gain their approval for his marriage to Rosalie, the Amreekiyah. In May
1978
, the month Abdullah earned his second master’s degree, they got married. He was twenty-eight, she was twenty, just another coed dropping out for love. His family had been furious. They’d had a wife picked out for him for years and only gave their permission for his continued studies in the States because they trusted him to come home and marry their pick immediately. And Abdullah had kept his word, secretly dating Americans, Iranians, even a Spaniard, but never entertaining the idea of marriage. To him, marriage was for Basma or Nura or whoever it was his family had waiting. But then Rosalie had roared into his life with all the subtlety of a Mack truck, and he’d discovered promises were harder to keep when love was part of the picture.

When the two of them arrived in the Kingdom in September of that year, after Abdullah’s student visa officially expired, he had made it his personal mission to force each and every family member, no matter how disapproving, to look him in the eye and say mabrook:
congratulations
.

“It’s just . . .” Dan paused. “You fought so fucking hard for her. You risked everything. Your dad was threatening to leave you out of the business.
The laws of the tribe.
Remember? You fought all that for her.”

“What my family did was all a show. I knew they loved me more than they disliked my choice of wife.”

An insect smashed wetly against the windshield. Dan thumbed the wipers so that blue liquid sprayed up to clean away the guts.

“I don’t know, it seemed pretty real to me. You’re telling me your dad flying all the way to Austin to try and bring you to your senses was just fun and games?”

“The old man had to stand up for propriety. But he knew love when he saw it, and he relented.”

“Exactly. He knew true love when he saw it. You guys were a fucking galaxy back then. It’s why I just don’t understand this.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, habibi. We
were
. Of all people, you should understand. Love changes. It fades. You think I couldn’t have been happy with a woman like Rosalie? Of course I could. But over the years, she became less and less like Rosalie. She threw away that jacket years ago; she has her clothes made in Paris now. She uses the word ‘summer’ as a verb. She started to like the money a little too much.”

“Abdi,
you
like your money. You can’t fault her for wanting to enjoy what’s hers.”

“It’s different. One of the things I loved about her in Texas was that she didn’t give a shit about money. She was just Rosalie and I was just Abdullah. And I’m not divorcing her now, because I still love her, and I have hope that someday we’ll be able to get back to that simple place.”

Dan shook his head. Isra wouldn’t exactly help in that regard, but his friend did seem to be in love. Was this way kinder? Seeking love elsewhere until the first love recovers its sheen?