The Ruins of Us (4 page)

“Are you done?” Rosalie interrupted. “Because I really don’t need reminders of how terrific Abdullah is. I was in love with the man. Am in love with the man, for God’s sake.”

“Well, we all were, to a degree. He had us fooled. If the diplomats ever find out, they’ll be snickering behind his back.”

Rosalie shook her head silently in reply and kept her arms moving. They passed a high-end lingerie store, where mannequins wreathed in satin stood on tiptoe and thrust out their breasts. A male salesman was helping a female customer, who was completely veiled; even her hands were gloved as she reached to touch the negligees and corsets. As Rosalie peered into the store to further examine the sight, she collided with a young man who was standing fixed in the middle of the walkway. Recovering from her stumble, Rosalie tried to apologize but he was too busy staring after a group of girls who had just brushed by. The girls glanced back at him but didn’t wave. After all, one must be coy. Anything too audacious and men will turn away, ashamed for you.

Vulgar, she thought. Eminently vulgar and pitiable, these girls and boys. Striving after love that would end in heartache and betrayal. Rosalie felt her mouth tighten into a grimace. She felt sorry for them, these girls who saw their destinies in the eyes of the mall boys who would only repay them in suffering. The anger returned in waves. She could see that Abdullah’s betrayal of her would live inside her for years.

“You can come and sleep in our guest room anytime,” Lamees said. “You just let me know.”

“The kids,” was all Rosalie could manage by way of explanation. She was not the only one affected by Abdullah’s decisions.

Lamees and Khaled were what the Saudis called “liberalayeen.” They had a perfectly modern marriage that Rosalie had never thought to be jealous of until now. They both worked, and despite pressure from their families, decided that they didn’t want children. When they went abroad, Lamees drove everywhere, trying to make up for the time she’d lost in the Kingdom. They jogged together around the perimeter of the State Oil Compound inside the chain-link fence, where a woman could wear whatever she pleased. Staying with them for a few days would be lovely, Rosalie was sure. Though she’d never stayed over, she knew what kind of host Lamees would be. Gracious, generous, and doting—the kind to leave a carefully selected stack of books on the nightstand in the guest room, alongside a cool glass pitcher of water. Khaled and Lamees’s house was not large, but it was filled with luxurious carpets and sophisticated art. An entire wall was covered in gold-and-white damask wallpaper that made Rosalie feel as if she’d entered a ballroom.

They’d nearly completed a full lap and were approaching the gaudy fountain that sprayed three stories into the air as colorful flashing lights formed patterns on the pool tiles below. A few women paused to watch the display, their children peeking from behind their robes and racing between the overlaid benches that ran the length of the fountain. One of the older children chucked a silver coin into the illuminated water before a man in a checkered headdress—a father or an uncle—scolded him.

The light show ended and the families scattered, pushing strollers and guiding the circles of running children slowly down the walkways.

“I thought the hardest part about raising my children was going to be the first years of their lives, protecting their little eggshell heads and feeling like death could swoop in at any moment,” Rosalie said, looking into Lamees’s face. “But now I think the hardest part is that they will always connect me to their father.”

“They are that bridge, regardless of whether or not you want to cross it,” Lamees replied. “But our attachments are not only blood and bone. Your life is entwined with his.” She paused. “It’s not just marriage and children, it’s love. Even if it ends, even if you cannot bring yourself to love him anymore, you won’t be free. The people we’ve loved are always with us.”

“I don’t know if I agree.” Rosalie said. “I never think of my old boyfriends anymore, and I’m pretty sure I loved them.”

Lamees laughed. “ ‘Pretty sure.’ You know how ridiculous that sounds when you put it next to ‘love,’ right?”

“I suppose. I was happy with them, at least.”

“Not the same thing. To me, love is mostly discomfort and melancholy. Realizing you can’t escape it, even if you tried.”

“Hmm.”

Did Abdullah see her as the gatekeeper of his emotions? An intolerable idea for a powerful man, but love does not discriminate. Kings are made into fools who give up their gods, their treasure, their sanity.

Almost overnight, as soon as he took over his father’s company, Abdullah had become something larger than anyone had predicted—a being whose thoughts and deeds meant a great deal to an ever-widening swath of people. During his rise, Rosalie had experienced some unease knowing she was becoming just one of many people to whom he had obligations. She felt his adulation fade as he was forced to devote more and more of himself to the princes in Riyadh and the investors in New York and Dubai. But she never considered that he would start to see marriage as an investment, one that should be diversified for his greatest benefit. For that is how he put it to her:
My dear, we will profit by this. We will have greater happiness. You’ll have more freedom in your own home. I will treat you with even greater tenderness, because I will remember your generosity to me in my old age.
Now he spoke to her with a certain formality that said,
Our relationship is something recognized more by the state than by me.

“You know,” Lamees said, “Khaled and I both considered having affairs. We’d been married for several years and there was huge relief in the consideration of it. We liked these other people—people we worked with—and the questioning made us feel more normal.” She tucked a loose strand of hair back into her casually wrapped headscarf. “The world is filled with cheaters. Even the word ‘affair’ makes it sound glamorous. Lighter than air. But after we thought about it, we knew it wouldn’t be light. It would be heavy, even while it seemingly freed us from the intensity of our bond.”

They had completed a second turn and were rounding back toward the fountain. There, Rosalie recognized the boy from the parking lot. He was typing rapidly on the keypad of his cell phone.

Recently, she had watched the bright moon of Abdullah’s adoration waning, until it seemed to only reflect light from dying planets—a dull secondhand light. For years, they had been a comfort to each other, but somewhere along the way their marriage had grown functional. Now she could only acknowledge that the devotion upon which she had built her world in the farthest province of a desolate land had dissolved under her feet.

She was sweating as they passed the group of boys. Her abaya fell heavily on her shoulders, the silver thread giving it extraordinary weight. Her feet tangled beneath her and she stumbled, catching Lamees by the arm. When the boys turned to look, Rosalie stopped and stared back.

“Marhaba, Auntie,” the boy said. “You see, I was able to find a friend to let me in.”

“Where are your shoes?” she asked.

“What?” He was confused. How quickly he had forgotten his lie to her. She was not in the mood to be lied to, not after being the rube fooled by lies for years.

She reached over and knocked the phone out of his hands. It skidded across the slick tiles at the fountain’s side before slipping beneath the water.

“Hey!” he shouted at her. His friends laughed. One of them bent down to fish the phone out of the fountain. A few people standing around the fountain watched with casual interest.

“Leave it,” she said. “Leave it, or I’ll bring a mutawa over here. You’ll be kicked out so fast your head will spin.”

The friend dropped the dripping phone back into the water, where it fell with a satisfying
floop
. How pathetic they were, these poor boys who thought that love was something transmitted from a phone, or understood over an instant message.

She thought of the affairs they would have outside their loveless marriages, these electronic marriages arranged for themselves in the air-conditioned, sparkling shopping corridors of this mall, this great and groaning monument to human appetites—greed, lust, envy, all available to these boys.

“I think it’s time to go,” Lamees said.

Rosalie took Lamees’s hand and strode toward the exit. Though her body was porridge, her mind was surprisingly clear. It reminded her of the times she had stayed up all night in college. On the walk home from wherever she had been studying, her body would melt with the force of gravity while her mind nimbly skipped over the events of the previous evening, her senses on hyperdrive. Large dew droplets slipping down blades of grass; a sneeze from somewhere on the fourth floor of a dorm; the dawn moving from black to gray to all the fresh colors of the born day. Dawn had a very distinct smell, not unlike the soap smell of just-washed hands. Vastly different from the choking floral perfumes of the Star of Arabia Mall on this, the fourth night of her new life.

IT WAS MORNING.
Rosalie stood on her balcony and surveyed the block. For the fourth night now she had slept alone, while Abdullah vanished to the shadow lands of his second life. She eyed the houses along the Diamond Mile, the strange little country of money peopled with Al Dawoun’s elite. There was the Zeid family palace on the right, with its garage of glass bricks; the Amoudi estate; the Sherif compound roofed in red tile imported from Spain. She’d once gone to a wedding party there and had gotten so lost that she’d walked right into the men’s sitting room. She managed to squeak, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” in her most American Arabic—people tended to forgive social missteps if they knew you were just an American dunce—and steal a look at her bemused husband before backing into the door and then fleeing. She had found her way back to the women following the smell of Chanel perfume and the rustling of elaborate gowns.

Now, looking at the houses, Rosalie had to consider if her co-wife was also a neighbor. Abdullah’s father, Abdul Latif, had founded the Diamond Mile neighborhood, so where else would a Baylani live? Rosalie liked to imagine that her husband was not so foolish, but again, how can one gauge the foolishness of a man who has decided he could manage two wives?

On the other side of the sliding-glass door, Yasmin, the Bangladeshi maid, was making the bed. Rosalie hummed an old Emmylou Harris song, quietly. She couldn’t remember the words but the melody came back to her; something from her gospel days at Sugar Land First Baptist.

“Yasmin?” she called through the cracked door.

“Yes, madam?”

“Come out here for a moment.”

The maid hesitated before stooping to pick up her slippers by the door. She slid the door open, dropped the shoes on the concrete, and stepped into them.

“Yes, madam?” she repeated.

“Tell me. Where does she live? The other madam?”

Yasmin took in a quick breath and put her hand to her ear, a nervous gesture.

“It’s all right,” Rosalie said. “A good maid serves the family, and you’re the best. You were just serving the sheikh, I understand. But now I need you to tell me. Which house is it?”

Yasmin shuffled across the concrete to the pillared ledge of the balcony. She glanced first north, then south along the street, as if to make sure nobody was watching. Then, she lifted her thin arm and pointed south toward the smaller houses clustered at the end of the street.

“The one with the blue tiles?”

“Yes, madam.”

DOWNSTAIRS, ROSALIE BEGAN
washing a bunch of parsley, moving her hands gently so as not to tear the leaves. These were the small tasks she could still manage. Earlier in the day, close to dawn, she’d heard the garage door slam. It was Faisal, gone again before she could talk to him. She wondered where he and Majid went together so often. It seemed that she hadn’t had a proper conversation with her son in months. Now, with the news of Isra, she thought she should sit with him in case he wanted to talk, but she was afraid of what he might say. Since becoming more religious—a shift she hoped was just a phase, the way the popular high school kids in Sugar Land went to sleepaway church camp and loved Jesus because everyone else did—Faisal seemed to glide through the house with an air of haughty superiority about him. He came and went, and when they were in the same room together, she felt the weight of his disdain. She was sure that he’d known about Isra, that it had only fueled his inexplicable but robust contempt for her. Lamees told her it was nothing, just a sixteen-year-old boy setting his boundaries, and Rosalie realized she needed to stop being intimidated by his solemnity. Those contemptuous eyes were half hers, after all. She missed the excitable boy who had lisped out his stories to her, thrilled for the audience generally and glad of her company specifically. Since returning from boarding school, it was as if each word he chose, each step he took, was an audition for the role of
man
. Still, if they had their moment alone, what would she say to him? She had not yet started to weigh her options, and to tell him she would stay and everything would be all right would be an exaggerated smoothing of the waters for his benefit alone.

She glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall by the fridge. It was mid-January, yet she found herself longing for Ramadan, for the pleasures of its deprivation. Its asceticism would match her mood. In addition to not letting food or water pass their lips during the daylight hours of Ramadan, Muslims weren’t supposed to have sex. Rosalie never understood the need for this rule. Sex meant sweat, and the igniting of that terrible existential hunger that lovemaking evoked but could never fully satisfy. No sane person would try to have sex while starved. It just wasn’t practical. Who could enjoy an act that, by its very nature, required the players to give so completely of their bodies? To let someone else steal your dwindling energies, well, that was just inviting disaster. She finished washing the parsley, dried it, and plucked off a leaf to chew. Despite all that had transpired, Rosalie still had a sexual appetite. Abdullah had been absent so much lately, and she was hungering, though she knew from experience that sex was hardly the cure for desire. It could curb it but not fully satisfy it. She felt that was where people got it wrong, seeking communion, completion, with another broken being. The resulting dissatisfaction was why people smoked or fell asleep or got up to see what was in the fridge after sex. After the disappointing absence of transformation, people needed
things
to fill them up. In her early days of sexual activity (for that was the perfect word for it then, “activity,” as it implied the regimented way she approached sex during her early missteps), she’d tried to find fulfillment through any number of these things, sometimes in combination with one another. It wasn’t until her first night with Abdullah that she was able to just lie there afterward. She didn’t go digging in her fridge or slide out onto the fire escape for a Lucky Strike. She had just felt full and happy, putting her hand on his chest and falling asleep. Maybe that was the problem now—that she’d grown too accustomed to getting that feeling of fullness from someone else. Maybe it was time to admit she needed a crutch, a substance, rather than a single person. Didn’t everyone?