Eddie – Disregard my last e-mail, about the shoes.
E – Never mind.
The hard truth of the matter is that I don’t have to ask Eddie to disregard my e-mails. He’s already disregarding them. I have to respect this. You cannot coerce people into having relations they don’t want to have. It’s my job to give up on the idea that I can ask Eddie to take an interest in how I’m doing and what I’m up to.
I’ll catch up with him before long. You cannot keep the world at bay. Exhibit A: Mrs Ted Wilson.
The reason I named her, right from our first encounter, ‘Mrs Ted Wilson’ was not because I find it whimsically gratifying to use a historically oppressive form of address but rather because this designation, while obviously a little old-fashioned, most accurately described the nexus between this person and me: from the outset, I dealt with her as the wife of Ted Wilson. And she set those dealings in motion. That’s right – she came knocking. I answered the door as it were without prejudice (holding it open only by an inch or two, because visitors are always announced by a call from the doorman and it was the first time I’d heard a knocking on this particular door, and it was 9 p.m., and I was in fear, to be honest); and she held herself out as Ted Wilson’s wife and on this basis sought admission to my apartment.
I had never met Mrs Ted Wilson or heard much about her. My information was merely that she’d remained in the United States after her husband had come to Dubai. In the Gulf, this is not an abnormal bargain. And if the arrangement had lasted for an unusually long time (it is not disputed that Wilson came to Dubai in 2004), who was I to question it?
Standing barefoot in my doorway in athletic shorts and T-shirt, I said to Mrs Ted Wilson, ‘Can I help you?’
‘Why – I don’t know,’ she said, looking at me as if I’d said something hurtful. ‘I’d like to talk about Ted.’ She told me she’d arrived in Dubai three days previously and that he’d failed to meet her at the airport and she had since found no sign of him, either at home or at work. ‘He’s just disappeared,’ she said, not hiding her bewilderment.
I said, ‘Yes, that must be worrying.’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I really have no idea where he might be.’
While true, this wasn’t a comprehensive statement. Reports of people going AWOL were not extraordinary in 2009, which of course saw the beginning of the emirate’s sudden depopulation and was the year the famous story went around of hundreds of expensive cars being ditched at the airport by fleeing debtor-foreigners – an understandable phenomenon, this being a legal regime in which financial failure, including the failure to make an automatic payment on a car lease, can amount to an imprisonable crime. (There are still such cars to be seen – brown ghosts, as I think of them, on account of the inch of sand in which they’re uncannily coated. There’s an abandoned Toyota Land Cruiser that’s been sitting right here in Privilege Bay for at least a year.)
Again she looked at me with a pained expression. ‘I thought you were friends. Don’t you go scuba diving with him?’
I didn’t answer, knowing full well that this was ambiguous. How she resolved the ambiguity was a matter for her. I surely wasn’t under a duty to answer her questions or correct any misapprehensions she might have. If Ted Wilson had given his wife to understand that I was his diving partner – a flattering idea, incidentally, my being the buddy of the Man from Atlantis – that was between him and her. I had no wish and no obligation to be dragged into what was, as even a person of modest sensitivity could grasp, a private matter. And exactly what was this caller’s status? She was the acquaintance of an acquaintance, which is to say, a member of a remote and almost unlimited class. It might be said: Wait a minute, she was your compatriot in a foreign land. Or, She was your neighbour. To the compatriotist I say, Give me a break. To the second speaker I say, A neighbour? Really? Number one, the Wilson apartment was two floors above mine; number two, Mrs Ted Wilson’s permanent home was in Chicago, not Dubai; and number three, what’s so special about neighbours? Since when is residential propinquity a basis for making demands? Let me put it this way: can I ring on the doorbells of those who happen to live in The Situation and expect special treatment? Can I burden random door-answerers with responsibility for my well-being?
She began to cry. This unsettled me, even as I was aware that crying is the oldest, most rotten trick in the book and one to which I have been only too vulnerable. But something else was spooking me. That very day, I’d read on my AOL home page of the death of the little girl who had inspired ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. This was news to me – that such an inspirational girl had existed. Her name was Lucy Vodden, née O’Donnell. The obituary reported that back in the Sixties, Julian Lennon, John’s son, made a drawing of his four-year-old classmate and brought it home to show his father and said, Lucy in the sky with diamonds. The cause of her death, at the age of forty-six, was lupus. This made me very angry. John Lennon being dead was bad enough – but Lucy, too? Little Lucy? No! I Googled ‘Lucy Vodden’ and came face-to-face with a very lovely, smiling woman in her forties with blonde shoulder-length hair whom for a moment I fell in love with and whom, only hours later, I briefly confused with another woman in her forties with blonde shoulder-length hair. I am convinced this hallucination played a part in what happened next: I allowed Mrs Ted Wilson to enter my apartment.
She sat in one of my armchairs and accepted a Kleenex. She struck me as a vision. How could she not? It was the first time I’d received a female visitor. That’s right: in the year and a half I’d been there, not even a maid had crossed my threshold.
To be clear, the basis for the exclusion of female domestic help was not sex, and not even my finding it unbearable to have people entering my living quarters in my absence. (In New York, I had no such compunction. Returning home from work on Tuesdays, I looked forward to gleaming wood floors and ironed undershorts and a sparkling countertop, courtesy of Carla the cleaning lady. (What was her surname? Where is she now? How goes it with her no-longer-little daughter?)) The Situation offers its residents a ‘White Glove Domestic Cleansing Service’, but I don’t avail myself of it. Why not? Here’s why not.
When I first came to Dubai, I stayed for a week at the Westin hotel, which I remember mainly for its tagline – ‘Between Being and Becoming’. From there I moved into a rented suite of rooms near the DIFC, on Sheikh Zayed Road. Beneath my window, six lanes of traffic bowled ceaselessly towards the distant skittles of Sharjah. This was a so-called serviced apartment. ‘Serviced’ meant that I’d come back from the office every evening to find all evidence of my occupation removed, as if I daily perpetrated a crime that daily needed to be covered up. Every one of my few belongings had been put out of sight; everything, down to the chocolate on the pillow, had been restored to the impeccable state in which I’d found the rooms when I first entered them. This was disconcerting, this non-accumulation of evidence of my existence. But what really rattled me was the mysterious population of cleaning personnel. The mystery lay not only in their alternative geography – theirs was a hidden zone of basements, laundry closets, staff elevators, storage areas – but in the more basic matter expressed in Butch Cassidy’s question for the Sundance Kid: Who are those guys? That’s not to say I viewed this tiny, timid population of women in maroon outfits as in some way hunting me down, as Butch and the Kid were, poor guys, all the way to Bolivia; but something wasn’t right. To go back to Carla: I was aware that she originated in Ecuador, lived in Queens with a husband and a young daughter, got paid around seventeen USD per hour: of Carla I felt I could do the rough human math. (Carla, I’m so sorry.) The apartment-servicing crew, though, I couldn’t work out. I couldn’t place those strange brown faces – somewhere in Asia? Oceania? – and I certainly had no data about the bargains that presumably underwrote my room being clean and their hands being dirty. I was confronted with something newly dishonourable about myself: I didn’t want to find out about these people. I did not want to
