Brilliant (8 page)

 

Biking helped. He'd been a serious cyclist when he was younger, biking straight up to McQuaig's Tower, then hitting the thirty-kilometre stretch to Loch Lomond and back four or five times a week. Jobs, marriage, kids had compromised the old discipline. But when Talbot first arrived in Abu Dhabi — Molly and the girls had stayed in Glasgow for nine months while he sorted their new life — he bought a racing bike from someone leaving the company.

“It's keeping me sane,” he told Molly over the phone, not telling her about the traffic, the speeds at which drivers took even alleys, the accidents.

Talbot had met Mathieu and Victor on the Corniche that first summer. Victor was stretching, Mathieu jogging in place, their bikes leaning against the railing. The sheikhs — father and sons — looked out benevolently, proprietarily, across the water from LuLu Island. (The twenty-storey-high portraits still gave him a start sometimes: Who
are
those guys?) Talbot was jogging that morning because he'd discovered a flat on his Italian racer. The job was too big for his repair kit and this being a Friday morning, even the Adnoc station down the street had been closed. He'd taken off at a sprint, no destination in mind.

None of the three could remember later who approached whom, but within a minute the important fact was established: they were expats on bikes. Talbot was the most experienced cyclist, so he'd be their coach. They'd meet Fridays as early as they could haul their asses out of bed and hit the empty streets.

 

When Gomez's furniture and belongings were finally delivered the following week, he wheeled his Japanese racer to Talbot's front door. “A beauty,” Talbot said, feeling sheepish relief that his new friend's bike wasn't one of those stratospheric racers; if anything, it was a notch below his. Since things had gone pear-shaped at work, he'd watched himself channeling more ambition into the morning rides, into the care and keeping of his bike. He was thinking of buying a second one on the next trip home.

“Come out with us Friday,” Talbot said.

Later, he would try to remember the look on Gomez's face: relief, worry, gratitude. “Hey, I'm just an amateur,” said Gomez. “Sunday rider. Well, Friday rider here.”

“We're no Olympians. Just sweaty guys on bikes,” Talbot said.

This wasn't in any way true. Since meeting nearly two years earlier, the three men had each upped their personal best. And best, especially for Victor, meant ever-diminishing times. For a relentlessly relaxed Aussie, he was a demon competitor. Talbot hadn't minded stepping back a bit and letting Victor surge ahead. Mathieu was solid and steady, keeping them anchored and laughing with his filthy French jokes. They'd become fast boys, bad boys, on bikes. Gomez, if he was any good at all, might make a natural fourth.

But Carla wasn't happy about it when the subject came up over drinks by the pool that weekend. “These streets are a bloody nightmare! Every day there's a story in the paper about someone getting mowed down. You're not riding out there.” She was normally so easy, so accommodating.

“We take off early,” Talbot reassured her. “No one's out at that hour.”

“You are,” said Carla, who was balancing Jesse on one leg while trying to drink a beer.

“We're just blokes on bikes,” said Talbot. “Blokes with helmets, I might add.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know what happens when a man mounts a bike,” she said, clearly trying to lighten things up. But she gave Gomez a warning look.

“More later,” said Gomez and everyone dropped the subject.

Molly had said not a word, not unusual for Molly these days, but Talbot realized that she had never objected to his riding here, never voiced concerns over the hell-bent drivers, the fearsome possibilities. She just let him be. He should be grateful for that. He should.

 

Mubarak appeared unannounced at Talbot's office door the next week. There was no time to clear away the muffin and coffee, no time to quickly text the other team members:
guess who's cming 4 brkfst?
Mubarak, tall from this angle, gestured for Talbot to stay seated. “May I?” he asked as Talbot struggled to his feet anyway. He hoped last night's Beaujolais wasn't coming through the perspiration pumping now from pits and forehead.

“Sir?” (Talbot had never known what to call Mubarak, Don and Chuck having conveniently made direct conversation with him unnecessary.) Talbot offered the chair that didn't have anything on it.

“Call me Najib,” Mubarak said, seating himself and turning a beneficent smile on Talbot that only made more heat surge through his trunk.

Sinking back into his desk chair — should he get up and move the pile of papers and sit next to Mubarak, man to man? — Talbot felt his leg begin to jump. Better to stay where he was.

“I'll cut to the chase, as you Americans say,” Mubarak said. “You stay, everybody else goes. You decide when and how to tell them, but by the end of the month I want their exit visas. You…” and Mubarak breathed in and stretched out one sandalled foot — “sissy sandals,” Zoë called the white patent-leather slip-ons worn by local men — “will assume the positions of Don and Chuck. You will be compensated, though of course you won't be making
both
their salaries” — Mubarak chuckled at this — “since the whole point of this exercise, painful for everyone, I assure you, is to cut costs.” He said the last two words as if they might actually cut through something resistant, like metal. “But make no mistake, you will be compensated. After all, you will be doing the job of two. And, I must add, hopefully a better job than those two did.”

They shook hands — “Congratulations! We'll talk after the redundancies are put through,” Mubarak said — and then he was gone, leaving a trail of questions Talbot had been too stunned to even think of. It was one thing to be doing the project managing of Don and Chuck. But what about the work the others were responsible for? What kind of a team would it be now? And better
how
than his predecessors? Don and Chuck were excellent attorneys, consummate professionals. Both legs began to bounce.

 

For a few days Talbot said nothing to anyone — not to Molly, not even to the other team members. Every time he glanced at their strained, expectant faces, he'd resolve to put everyone out of their misery. He couldn't even make eye contact with Bruce, who'd taken to extreme hours, coming in before Talbot and leaving after him, as if this might stave off employment disaster. This couldn't go on indefinitely, or even one day longer, but still Talbot held off.

Gomez was sitting by the pool when he came home Thursday afternoon. It was three days after Mubarak's edict, the beginning of what they called a weekend here and Talbot couldn't take another hour in the fearful quiet that now reigned in Amaal Special Projects. “Migraine,” he'd told Bruce, packing up at four. Gomez kept hours like Talbot's most days — out the door by seven, home at eight or nine, blood-pressure hours. Something about the way Gomez was sitting on the pool chair — he didn't jump up, expression glad and open, his trademark greeting — and the fact he was still wearing his suit trumpeted bad news.

“Gomez?”

Gomez glanced up, smiled, almost, then turned back to face the pool. Some kid had left a Barney blow-up raft out there. It listed slightly in the warm water, very purple.

“They got me first, old man,” he said. “Didn't even unpack all the boxes.”

“What?” Talbot said stupidly.

“She'll leave now. ‘If this job doesn't pan out,' she said, ‘I'm gone.'”

Talbot moved to sit next to him, but Gomez got up. “I'm not good company,” he said and walked to his villa, closing the French doors behind him.

Talbot didn't say anything to Molly that evening — now there were two pieces of information withheld — waiting for her to acknowledge something. She and Carla seemed to be getting closer. Women talked, didn't they? But Molly was her busy, efficient self, focusing all her attention on supper. Alicel, the nanny, was off for her usual day and a half, staying with her sister downtown, so it took longer to get the kids settled. Zoë was grumpy, itchy from a sunburn, and arguing with Molly about what pajamas to wear. Listening to them from downstairs, he hoped it wasn't early-onset hormones. He hoped they weren't spoiling the kids by having a nanny. He hoped Gomez was okay, that Carla would stay, that Bruce wouldn't have a complete breakdown, that he could keep this thing together.

He kept waiting to say something. But with the kids in bed, he and Molly settled into the sectional and the silliness of a
Coronation Street
episode, part of the boxed set his mother had given them the Christmas before. Molly seemed relaxed, almost chatty. She was looking forward, she told him, to coffee with some new Irish friends the next week. “I'm dragging Carla with me. She normally hates these ladies' things, but she needs to start meeting people.” Still, in bed later, she would let him only stroke her breasts while he stroked himself, the diminishing returns of their love life.

 

Talbot was pulling on his biking shorts the next morning when he heard a subdued knocking at the front door. Gomez — bloodshot eyes the only sign of yesterday's crisis — stood on one leg, the other tucked up high behind his buttocks. His racer gleamed behind him on the walkway.

“Let's go,” he said.

It was especially misty that morning, the humidity almost visible as they streamed down Khaleej al Arabi. Talbot was relieved to see that Gomez wasn't half bad, using his long legs to advantage. With a few more weeks, he could almost be at par with Mathieu. When they stopped for a water break, Gomez was nearly purple with exertion, but his eyes were bright. “Hey, man, you're going to best me,” Mathieu said, pouring water over his head. “You're wicked good,” said Victor. This would be good for Gomez, thought Talbot. He'd be able to negotiate another job here, no question. Architects with his credentials were still in demand. Just the week before, Talbot had brokered a contract with an architect-engineer for a five-lane bridge from one of the ruling family's palaces to one of their private islands. They'd laughed over the impossibly complex design — three engineers had already been fired from the project, started five years before. It would be a bridge used by few, perhaps only one, though that one was adamant it be built no matter how many engineers crashed and burned in its execution.

Gomez fell as they made the turn onto 19th. Talbot had meant to warn him about the speed bump, but had forgotten, then remembered, then thought it was too mother hennish to say anything. Of course, Gomez would see it. At least they weren't up to speed at that point, the bump slowing him down, but Gomez hit the pavement hard, careening right, onto his shoulder.

“Fine, fine, I'm fine,” Gomez kept telling them. He'd stood right away to show them how fine he was, but by the way he was holding his right arm, Talbot knew he wasn't. A lone cab, probably coming back from an early airport run, spotted them and took Talbot and Gomez to a clinic back on Khaleej, which then sent them by ambulance to Al Noor Hospital. “Dislocated shoulder. Big deal. It could have been worse,” Gomez kept saying to Carla, who had turned into Molly. Silent.

By the end of the next week, they were gone. “No point in staying,” Gomez told Talbot. “She doesn't want to and it's easier just to pack up at this point.” They were going back to Singapore where they still had friends and work contacts “and a good physio,” Gomez laughed. “See where greed got me?”

 

By the end of the week after that, Talbot's team was gone too. It had been easy, too easy, to hand out the bad news. No one had freaked. “We knew anyway,” said Bruce, who was going back to Aberdeen. He actually looked better than he had in a long while. Every time in those last days when Talbot's BlackBerry would signal an incoming text — Mubarak had taken to texting twenty to thirty times a day: Had he found any Emirati replacements yet? — Bruce would throw Talbot a look of pity.

But Molly's months of silence were over. The day of Gomez's bike accident she talked half the night. The morning Talbot told her what had gone down at work, he'd had to stay home until noon. “You leave for work now, I'll be on a plane tonight,” she said. He was stunned by the magnitude of her misery.

“Are you happy with anything?” he asked at some point. “Does anything about me please you?”

It took too long for her to say: “You're a good father.”

She held him responsible for the accident and for the family's departure. “The one bright spot,” she said tearfully.

“I didn't fire Gomez,” he said. “You can't put that on me.”

In the middle of one of their grievance sessions, the doorbell rang. It was Deborah, their Canadian neighbour. “I know we kept talking about it,” she said to Talbot, who'd been stunned by the sudden sunlight, the rush of heat. There was a world out there. “But we really would like to have you over for dinner. Would Saturday work?”

“Tell her no,” said Molly, when he went back upstairs.

As the next week inched by, her honesty ramped up. “We were thinking of having an affair, you know. We talked about it. I wanted to.”

And when Talbot, too hurt to answer, just looked at her, she repeated: “Gomez. I wanted Gomez.”

Later, when Molly was in the shower, he surprised her, taking her standing up, something he'd never done before. And in that fury, she was almost his.

 

“If I never hear another British accent in my life, it'll be too soon,” Cherry says, and our table ripples with laughter. “I mean it. One more ‘brilliant,' one more ‘forward planning' — like there's any other kind of planning? — one more ‘crikey' and I'll crack. You don't count, Annie March, honestly you don't.”

Annie raises her skinny latte. “I
am
a Brighton girl,” she says cheekily and tugs a white gauze blouse over her massive chest. “Shelf tits,” we called them back home. “And I hate to break it to you, luv, but
crikey
's Aussie lingo.”

“Well, I'm tired of them too,” says Cherry. “We're the only ones who've got the accent right.”

“That is debatable,” says Annie in her plummiest voice. “And don't forget: We arrived on these forsaken shores way before y'all.”

“Twenty years in Pittsburgh,” drawls Dorothy. “Come on, Annie, you're a Yank like the rest of us.” She leans into the table. “Okay, just tell me what we're going to do about those damn Democrats and their stupid health bill.”

“Say, Obama, who's yo' mama?” Cherry wags her head, sounding every bit like Queen Latifa. Everybody laughs again, but no one really wants to talk boring old health care, stalled bills and congressional committees. We've left that long behind. And probably, if we're honest, we were never all
that
interested.

“Marisol got into the gin while we were in Dubai this weekend,” says Dorothy, looking around the table. “Bottle was down an inch.”

“Why don't you just fire her?” says Maureen from the far end, waving to Rosie, our usual waitress. Maureen always arrives late for our coffee mornings. After ten years, the Filipino wait staff at La Brioche makes sure there's a chair for her.

“Hi, Mum,” says Rosie. She always has a big smile for us. We make sure to leave her an extra dirham or two. Spread the wealth, right?

“Really, Dorothy, you've been more than patient,” says Annie.

“Hand Marisol off to another family. Let them deal with her,” says Cherry. “I know, I know. I'm bitch incarnate. But I don't have problems like those. Let them know there are consequences, honey. Like jail.”

But we don't really like talking about jail ever since Ronni's husband, Steve, spent a week in the prison out near Al Ain. Some gossip cuts too close to home. Ronni doesn't come to our little gatherings anymore. Cherry, who lives in the villa next door, says Ronni's family is thinking about going back to New Jersey. “Kind of had it with the
UAE
. Steve's looking into other opportunities,” says Cherry.

Maureen snorts. The rest of us look deep into our lattes.

When we first came to Abu Dhabi — Cherry and Dorothy fourteen years ago, Maureen a year later, Annie and me the next…point being we're long-timers — it was all different. The glory years, Cherry calls them. “We reigned. We rocked. Of course, the Brits were always trying to rock faster and harder.”

Still, there was plenty for all. Plenty of spacious, two-storey apartments facing the Corniche, plenty of parking for the Mercedes and
BMW
s. Nannies weren't so mouthy, just grateful to have a job. You were considered crazy if you paid them more than $200 a month. “You're not running a charity!” we used to tell some noble newcomer who wanted to pay at-home rates. (“The girls don't expect it. Don't go starting a revolution!”) You could drive into Spinney's for frozen pizza and peanut butter or to pick up your dry cleaning, and you didn't drive round and round looking for a parking spot. They didn't have that eye-sore of a recycling bin out back either, the brainchild of some granola-type from Vermont who hadn't considered it would be overflowing with wine bottles come Sunday morning. Weekends we'd golf, brunch at the Sheraton or the Royal Meridien. And not for 300 dirhams per either.
Yallah
, it was great.

Ronni was a newcomer compared to the rest of us. She still had that my-what-an-interesting-place naïveté. She was a soft person, a nice person, the first to offer help. Naturally we talked about her when she wasn't there. Worse, we laughed at her. Did you see that hippie get-up she wore at Brice's birthday party? Did you hear what she said about Sarah Palin? (We agreed: closet Dem.) Did you know they're paying their Filipina 3,000 dirhams a month?

This last we saw as a major infraction. A thousand dollars versus 250? We laughed but we were pissed. Ronni said it was only fair, that Steve made enough money and that Jenny made her life possible. “I have a me again,” she said. With three kids who even she admitted were a handful (Brice, the youngest, had behaviour issues) and a husband who didn't do much around the house, Ronni called Jenny The Gift. The Gift got more days off per week (two) than any of our maids, a higher salary and an excess of verbal appreciation that made Cherry and Maureen shriek. “Stop saying ‘thank you' so much!” Cherry said once after Ronni hosted a coffee morning. “It's her job, for chrissake!” Leave it to Cherry to say what we all thought.

But now it had all changed again. Everything changed: one year radically different than the one before; one month full of people and parties, the next so empty you could see clear to the bottom. One day everything bright and right, the next everything so wrong you could hardly lift your head from the sweaty pillow. Steve got on the bad side of management at the newspaper by trumpeting his journalistic principles. And then there was the incident in the roundabout: “Who would be crazy enough to give anyone the finger here?” he told anyone who'd listen. But no one did and Steve spent that week out in Al Ain and now they were looking to leave.

Steve and I had a thing once. Not a huge thing compared to some of our friends. Maureen had a mini-breakdown when their golf pro went back to his wife in New Zealand and Annie ate her way to a size 16 while her husband went ape shit over his Lebanese secretary a few years back. Yet here we are — calmer, wiser, menopausal — still friends downing lattes every Sunday morning.

Steve and I do talk sometimes, so I knew he and Ronni were thinking of going home. He'd called a few days before from the golf course as I was cruising Al Wahda Mall, no specific purchase in mind.

“You always were a good listener,” he said after we'd chatted a bit. I was standing outside Victoria's Secret. Inside I could see a local woman and two younger women, daughters probably. A trio of
abayas
. The mother held up something lacy and skimpy and the younger girl,
shayla
slipping, doubled over laughing.

Steve told me about Ronni's crying jags, Brice's mood jumps. Everything that wasn't quite right before his incarceration got amped up after, he said. “Hey, what'd you think of Obama's latest caper? Universal health care, what a crock. We're going to end up like Canada. That's one thing I dread about going back. Those guys are in the White House now.”

“But, hey, no more Brits,” I offered.

“Brilliant,” he said and we laughed.

> <

 

The ladies, they go home now, taking needles and puzzles. They try so hard, smile so big. Sometimes I want to say, Relax! We fine.

They come: Sondra and Beth and Ronni — funny name for girl! — every Tuesday in morning time. The embassy give us hot room upstairs from bedrooms and we see ladies turn pink and sweat. Poor them. “How do you stand it?” Ronni ask me today. She tie her hair up in elastic. I hate to say, but she look better with it regular. She has pretty hair, pretty eyes. But mostly her heart.

“Okay, Loissa, what shall we do today?” She always say that, her teeth white shiny. I think she is maybe forty, no grey. Sometime I will ask her. I like her, she like me. I think other girls little jealous, but she is nice to every single Filipina (maybe in the world?) so no one fuss.

She teach me crochet. I already know, but I want Ronni be proud, so I act like I know not even one thing, how hook goes, how you hold little baseball of yarn. “Like this!” she say, and she show and I do. “Quick study!” she say and looks like maybe cry. I joke, I laugh. I tell her, we okay really and we thank you so much. Maybe Ronni already sad and we make her more sadder.

Lunch they go. While crochet, my stomach hurt from empty. Fish and rice, all time fish and rice. We like pork, tofu, plantains, melon, too, but only fish and rice. We have fish sometimes on tip of bad. Smelly. “No money!” Embassy men say and shrug, fat Filipinos with passports. They can come and go, go and come. In shelter we are 300 Filipinas. All run from bad employer. But now no place to run. Now no passport, no visa, no money, no home.

I go back to bed after lunch. Only place that is mine. I be here so long, I graduate to bottom bunk! Honour, says Carmela. But she giggle. Sure, honour live in room with eight bunkbed. New girls sleep on roof on blanket. Head to head, toe to toe. Too many blanket. Too many crying Filipina. Embassy say nothing. Our country need this country. No fuss, just quiet, quiet. Embassy keep us Filipina. We are safe, but we are lost.

I nap, dream of my house. Fish in dream too, pretty funny. No escape the fish! Me and little Manny, and Rodriguez and Mom, everyone at table. I try cook fish, but nothing happen. Big fish, gold colour, but stay raw. Then Rodriguez laugh and laugh and take me into bed and love me like he use to.

“You cry.” Paulina shake me.

“Rodriguez,” I say. Bed on top blocks ceiling, can see nothing.

“Sex good?” say Paulina and laugh big.

I hurt for that man, that boy. And then Carmela come and Emeline and new quiet one, Daisy. They smile and smile and come close so we all under top bed like tent.

“I make coffee,” say Carmela and slap my cheek.

> <

 

Eiman likes the ones with rubies on the heel. They go all the way down, a dozen on each four-inch spike. “I want those,” she says, pointing. I say, no, too much bling, and she gives me her sour Victoria Beckham face. We're not looking at the same magazine. I have
Seventeen
; she has
Vogue
. Because she is five years older, she gets the serious fashion magazine. Now that she's getting married to our cousin, Salman, she is the only female in the household anyone cares about. My nanny listens to her more than me.

“It's going to her head,” I say to Mother. “She's acting like a sheikha.” What I mean is bitch, but Mother won't tolerate that language from us, though she uses the word plenty with the maids.

Mother has come down earlier than usual to the breakfast room. Now that she's decided to get her degree (“Art history, what is art history?” my father said. “Why do you need to know this?”), her hours are more like ours, school hours. Her
abaya
is open over the size zero jeans she bought in London, her hair up in a sequin clip, face already perfectly made up. No one believes she is almost forty.

She claps her hands. “Fatima, why are you standing around looking like an idiot?” Fatima, tiny in her pink headscarf and blue uniform, slippers quickly out of the room. Mother turns back to the table, sizing us up. I slump lower over my magazine. “Sit up straight!” she thumps Eiman on the back.

“Hey!” growls Eiman. “I'm the good daughter, remember? I'm the one you love.” And she gives me a get-even look.

“I love all my children, you know that,” says Mother.

“Even Rashid?” I ask.

“Even Rashid.” She sighs, thinking maybe how our little brother still wets his bed though he is ten, how he's made four nannies quit. She snaps her fingers and Sami, one of the drivers, comes into the breakfast room.

“Madame?” he says.

Mother looks at her watch. “Al Zaabi Bakery at 10:00 a.m. Pick up the
maamoul
. Tell them we pay next week.” She waves him away. “I wish these people spoke better Arabic. You'd think after twenty years, thirty years, they would learn.”

She's been saying this for as long as I can remember, even about Sami, who speaks fine Arabic. And it's only gotten worse, with all of us — me, Eiman, Rashid, Hassan and Sultan — speaking English not just to our nannies, but to each other. “Our language is dying!” Mother likes to say, looking tragic.

But the preservation of Arabic is not at the top of her agenda this morning. Ellen, her professor at the university, is coming over for a tutoring session.

“I didn't know professors made house calls,” says Eiman, flipping through pages of
Vogue
ads. She's preparing her exams for a degree in business at Al Ain University. She can't wait to move out. Of course, marriage will take care of that too.

“Your father talked to the president of the university,” Mother says, picking up a small corner of unbuttered toast and frowning at it.

“So you don't even have to show up for class?” I ask. I've already caused a few disturbances among my friends. “A degree is useless if we don't earn it,” I keep telling them. “For sure it's useless out
there
.” But most of them don't care. They'll get the degree, marry and never, ever work here or out there.

Fatima's back with a pot of coffee, a platter of sliced
halloumi
and cut-up cucumbers and tomatoes.

“Where's the bread?” I ask.

But Mother shoos her off and Fatima goes back to her station near the kitchen door, where she will wait if we need her. Her face is usually a smooth blank, but this morning her eyebrows are tensed, like something hurts.

“You need to eat a lot less bread, Asma. I mean it.” And Mother fixes me with the look that used to intimidate me. I look away, out the window where the gardening staff is trimming a date palm. Our head gardener stands below one of the ladders, waving his arms and shaking his head. Eiman gets up, her magazine sliding to the floor. She doesn't pick it up. “I told Salman I'd call him between classes. You know how he gets if I don't call,” and she rolls her eyes at Mother.