Suite Dubai (Arriving) (5 page)

“Everything okay with the laptop? You know how to...to make a document?”
 

“I think so,” she told him.

“If you have any questions, come to me. I am the answer guy around here.” He was leaned back again with his shoe still hidden. “About the computer, the hotel. Anything at all.”

“I can’t think of any right now,” she said. Then she thought of a question, something she’d been wondering since her new boss rushed out the door. “I was wondering, is Samantha always like that?”
 

He laughed. “Sometimes, she’s worse. Why do you think the last IT guy went home after two months?”

She studied his expression, trying to decide if he was telling the truth. “Hamid?”
 

“I can’t speak for him, of course. He’s back in India now, sitting on the floor in some Mumbai slum thanking Allah he doesn’t work here anymore.’
 

She laughed. “I thought you were being serious.”

“I am being serious.”

“Do
you
like it here?”
 

He shrugged. “The money is good and I don’t have much of a social life anyway.”
 

“Me neither, I guess. I don’t know anyone here.”
 

“You know me.” He leaned over and playfully touched her shoulder. “And, you met the owner already?”
 

“Yes, last night. I don’t think he likes me.”
 

“I don’t think he likes anyone,” he said. “He doesn’t like...or dislike. I don’t think he cares.”

She remembered the night before, how he’d looked at her. “He might dislike me.”
 

“I don’t believe it. You?”

“I said something...I asked about his relationship.” Hamid’s smile stretched wide; he seemed to be making fun of her, so she added. “It was a business question. I asked who in his relationship chooses the hotel. It’s so confusing, the culture, I mean.”

“He’s not married,” Hamid said. “He was engaged once. The girl...Nada...she died. From a car accident. That’s what I heard.”

“That’s awful.” She covered her face with her hands.”No wonder.”
 

“Don’t worry about it. How could you know? It wasn’t too much in the newspapers. He probably asked them to keep it out. “You know,” he said, rubbing his thumb and fingers together to indicate money. “I wasn’t here, of course. I came here after. But people talk. Say he wasn’t seeming too sad after it happened. He came to work the next day and had his meetings,” he shrugged again. “Business as usual.”

“Maybe he didn’t love her,” she said.

“Love?” He laughed.
 
“Those guys don’t marry for love. They don’t even know what love is.”

“I doubt that’s true Hamid,” She remembered the sheik whispering to his horse, repeating the word
shuf
. “He might not, but that doesn’t mean they’re all like that. He is arrogant though. This morning, he walked right past me in the lobby and didn’t say a word.”
 

Hamid thought this was hilarious. “What did you expect?” He put his hands together like an excited girl. “Oh, beautiful Rachel, how are you? Let me put this sandal on your foot?” He rolled his eyes.
 

“Slipper,” she said glaring at him. “That, or say hello. What he did was rude. Where I come from...”

“Do you have princes in America? Kings? Rachel, that’s the way they are. Some are much worse. Some--” He shook his head. “They don’t care about anything.” He made his way to the door then. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

When he reached the it he turned to her. “He is the second most eligible bachelor in Dubai.” His smile was back, big as ever.
 

 
“Who’s the first?”
 

 
“Me, of course,” he said before he walked out and closed the door.

***

Samantha arrived to the meeting last.
 

Rachel arrived first, almost ten minutes early. Then Hamid and Kritika came next. Rachel distributed copies of her draft timeline to each of the twelve chairs around the long conference table.
This is a draft timeline
, she planned to say, emphasizing the word “draft.”
 

She’d met Anaton Jensen, a lanky man who stooped through the doorway and continued the posture all the way to his seat. In spite of his height he looked delicate to her, the way his thinning hair still held the channels left by his comb, the way his cheeks flushed even in the cool conference room. “I come from the dark land of Norway and...the dark land of accounting,” he told her. She met Suki, the woman who’d interviewed her over the phone. And William, from the Philippines, who was in charge of “the pool and the grasses and trees.”
 

Samantha burst in like wind and told everyone Judith would be absent. “Something about a leaky loo on the 21st floor. Shall we get going? You’ve all met Rachel Lewis, the long awaited public relations person.”

She gave Rachel a slight smile, the first almost-genuine smile.

“She comes to us from America-r, the city of Atlanta? Atlanta, Georgia, is that right Rachel?”

Rachel told her it was.

“Shall we go around the room then, and tell about out own backgrounds, languages, hobbies, that kind of thing? I’m happy to start.”
 

Samantha said she worked for
Harrods
, in London. She started in the accessories department and worked her way up, all the way up to assistant manager of the whole store. She had a Masters of Business Administration with special emphasis in hotel management so she was happy to finally put that to use. She spoke fluent French which she'd learned while attending a Swiss boarding school. She also knew some Congolese. “Just enough to shop in the market,” she explained. “My father was a diplomat, mostly worked in Africa-r, Somalia, the Congo, that type of thing. Lots of travel.”

Hamid, it turns out, had gone to Caltech and graduated with a Masters in Computer Science. He did a year internship at the United Nations in New York City where he helped modernize an outdated translation system. He spoke Pashtun, Arabic and English. He looked at Rachel, then put his hands in his pockets and sat down.
 

It got worse as they went around the room: Suki rode dressage. William directed a reforestation program in the Philippines. Kritika had worked at an office in British Parliament, spoke three languages, played the cello. In addition to working in Oslo and Shanghai (where he learned some Chinese), Anaton Jensen had gone to the Olympics for speed skating. “I took only the bronze medal,” he said, looking apologetic.

Only a bronze? Rachel stopped listening and started searching her memory for something more significant than a degree in journalism. She’d written a few articles for her school newspaper, about the cafeteria’s switch from plastic to metal silverware. One about the rising squirrel population on campus. When her turn came she hoped for a natural disaster, an earthquake or a tsunami, to preempt her own.
 

 
“Go ahead,” Samantha urged. “Tell us a bit about yourself.”
 

“Yes,” she said. “I--”

“Rachel,” Samantha said. “Please stand up so we can hear you?”

She stood. “I have a degree in journalism. I wrote for the school newspaper.” Hamid looked up at her, trying to encourage her. Samantha nodded, her lips pressed together like she too was anxious about what Rachel would say. “I volunteered for a nonprofit that raises money for kids who need tutoring, medical care. I volunteer for the annual art auction.” Okay, that was better. “We raised 120 thousand dollars this year, 20 thousand more than last year.”
 

“Hmm,” Samantha said. “How many tickets did you sell?”

“Four hundred?”

“Rachel, you wrote on your resume that ticket sales went up almost twenty percent. How did you
 
manage that?”
 

“We-” her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “We built on what we’d done the year before and expanded our mailing list. We, the executive director, did an interview on public radio.” She noticed she was wringing her hands and stopped. “Word of mouth helped too. People really like the art and the collection grows every year. So people come for that.”

“What about hobbies? Languages?”
 

The room was quiet. Out the window she saw a family walk past, a man and woman, two kids, carrying towels and goggles and an inflatable elephant. They were headed to the pool. Unaware that on the other side of the reflective window was a girl with the rapt attention of her new coworkers, unable to name a single thing she’d accomplished in her twenty-three years.
 

“I run, sometimes. For exercise,” she said.
 

When she was thirteen she took first runner up in the Miss Kroeger pageant. Her local grocery store held a spring festival to celebrate twentieth year in her neighborhood. She had gone at the urging of her parents and at their insistence entered the pageant. Her prize was a coupon for a free turkey, her picture in the newspaper, shaking hands with the produce manager, a copy of which still hung at Kroeger, in the hallway near the bathrooms. The girl who beat her sang “God Bless America” a cappella and hit most of the notes. Most. Rachel, watched her realizing she had no talent and decided to do the robot dance to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.”
 

The small crowd that had gathered in the parking lot to watch her, mistook her performance for a comedy routine.
 

“And I played on a soccer team,” she added.
 

“In university?” Samantha asked, perking up.
 

“High school,” Rachel said. She looked around the room again and then, like someone else had taken charge of her mouth, blurted out. “I speak German.”

German? She’d taken two German courses in college and could barely conjugate the verb to be.
 

“Well, that’s very good,” Samantha said. “German, quite a hard language, that. Quite guttural compared to French. Perhaps you could say something in German, just so we can hear it.”

“I mean,” she said, looking at Kritika and Suki. “I can speak
some
German. Very, very basic German.”
 

“Just say something,” Samantha said.
 

Rachel cleared her throat. “Am Morgan” she said. “Gehen wir nach dem Biblioteque.” Yes! That was German! Something about going to the library. It must’ve come from one of those dialogues she’d been forced to memorize. It
does
come back to you.

Samantha looked not pleased, but not disappointed either.
 
“Very good. And what did you just say?”
 

“I said -,” Rachel swallowed. Her throat was tight but she could still breath okay. She looked directly at Samantha now, wanting so badly to keep her non disapproval. “It’s very nice to meet you. I look forward. I look forward to working here. And...that’s it.”

Before Samantha had a chance to ask her anything else, she sat down and looked down at her agenda.
 

***

After the meeting she headed straight for the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. What was wrong with her? German? Her face looked pale; her eyes, red. In another time zone she’d missed her bedtime. German? Where had that come from?

Her phone vibrated. It was another text from Samantha.
Please
come
to
my
office
, it said.
We
have
a
lot
to
discuss
.
 

Oh God, she was going to be fired. She imagined Samantha’s sorry-to-do-this smile, if she had one of those. Rachel straightened her jacket, tucked some escaped tendrils of hair back into her bun and reapplied lipgloss.
 

Samantha’s office was decorated just like hers, with floor to ceiling windows, a sitting area, and a big cherrywood desk. Unlike hers, every surface, from her desk to her sofa and all the floor space near her feet was covered with files and papers. The stacks made a nest around her chair. “Have a seat,” she told Rachel.
 

Rachel relocated the documents on her chair so she could sit.
 

Samantha held up a piece of paper and squinted at it. “I have your timeline here. I’m sorry we didn’t get to it at the meeting.”

“That’s fine, It’s just a--”
 

“Ninety days,” Samantha said looking at her phone. “Ninety days would put the opening in July, right?” She looked up now. “That, Rachel, is the worst time of the year to have an event. It’s bloody hot here. Not even hot but imagine for a moment the desert, which is where we are, during the hottest part of the year, with the humidity cranked up to a hundred percent. It’s almost unbearable, which is why everyone goes on holiday in July. Even the Prince tries to get away for a few weeks. Goes to San Moritz.”
 

Rachel didn’t say anything.
 

“I was thinking,” she continued, looking at what Rachel assumed was the calendar on her phone. “We could do something sooner, rather than wait until it gets cooler. You don’t really need three months to find someone to serve food. There’s a restaurant right downstairs. Even if you fly something in, oysters, or lobsters, that can be arranged in a snap.”