woke alone. He could barely move, such was the depth of the sleep from which he was emerging, as if he was swimming up from the fathoms. He hadn’t slept so well since the last time he’d got drunk.
He had thought she meant to seduce him; instead, she had brought him sleep. Solid, fretless sleep.
In the wake of a dream about home, he had the impression that he had just walked from one room into another—from their family room in Cork to this bare bedroom in Muscat. His mother was right there, beyond his reach yet still close, still loving, as she had been in the dream. Restored by one good night, Gabriel allowed himself to think about his mother. He was able now to look into her face, the face that had turned to him when he had arrived home that morning, disoriented, inebriated, and found her sitting at the table against the wall, one elbow leaning on the patterned plastic tablecloth, her quilted robe buttoned to the neck. Her eyes had been hanging on something he couldn’t see, because he did not yet know. Fearing his father had died, he asked her what was the matter, and she had lifted her eyes and tried, but failed, to say his name.
The family room—with its aging green couch and brown-tiled fireplace, and a large television in the corner with a plant on top, the fronds of which were pushed sideways, like a comb-over, to stop them flowing across the screen—that room had been the hearth of his life. There, on the day of his Confirmation, spruced up in his school uniform, he had retreated to watch television, until his mother had scolded him for not playing with his cousins. There, he had lost his virginity, on the floor between the couch and the fireplace, when his parents were at the pub and his girlfriend’s body was hot along one side where the flames had warmed her skin. There, his home had dissolved forever when he returned hung-over from his pals’ flat and found his mother destroyed. “In God’s name,” she had said, “what have you done?”
Later that day, in the same room, his father had pushed him, shaken him, shouted until Gabriel feared they would both burst into flames.
They had breakfast together, he and the woman. After a walk along the Corniche, he had returned to the house, where she soon joined him as he lay curled on the bench in the front room, sobbing. Limp, he was, with self-pity. His life, wreckage. He missed his work, the pub, his parents, but missing Max was another form of branding. Sometimes he fancied he could smell his own flesh burning. The abyss beneath him—the only thing he could see—was a huge thing, empty and dark. He felt himself floating into it, limbs outstretched; it was the only place for him, this great hole into which his soul tumbled.
And then she was there, holding him back, as if by his shirt-tails.
“Can’t buckle,” he said, sitting up. “Have to get Annie through.”
Recovered, he had made coffee and heated bread, while she sat at the counter feeding him slices of watermelon. Her lack of appetite, in food as in conversation, meant she ate only apples and sipped warm water. Gabriel, for now, appreciated being in a room without words. Most words, when it came to it, were superfluous. All the language that had poured out of Annie had done her no good, but in silence her anger had been truly chilling. This was better—a few chosen, necessary words. And touch. He pushed his companion’s kaftan back over her knees to stroke her thigh. They kissed. His resolve weakened. Let them frame me, he thought. There could be no stopping this when she was creeping inside his clothes, and into his heart.
He told her, afterward, that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld. Then he laughed. “Beheld? What’s with the virginal language? I’m coming on all Catholic again. Behold the Angel of the Lord. Behold the Virgin Mary!” Gabriel chuckled. “Mind you . . .” His lover was hardly virginal, but in some respects she shared characteristics with apparitions of the Virgin, from Lourdes to Fatima: she was an incontrovertible fact to a chosen few, air to others, and deeply controversial.
Light on his feet, he wandered through Muttrah, knowing no malevolent eyes were upon him, no whispers breaking out behind. He went every morning to buy bread and came back to eat in the bare kitchen, listening to the voices in the alley—the woman next door, with her tendency to screech, the boys running along the lane, the bleat of goats. It was cozy. Tight. No prying eyes. No bloody foreigners.
He was, by all accounts, having an affair with a woman no one else could see. A woman who had coasted into his life, into the room in which he stood, and, just like that, had saved him and doomed him all at once. Had he been at home, he would have assumed that he had fallen into a liaison with a high-class call girl, set up as an elaborate joke at his expense or even as some kind of punishment, but who would have any motive to tease or torment him beyond his own shores? Either way, he went with it. It took some time to get used to her selective invisibility, but when he came to grasp her occasional nature, he embraced it. That no one else believed in her became an abstraction, a curiosity, because the woman in question was clearly defined in his eyes, and her flesh was quite, quite solid. To him, she was real to the point of distraction.
Since his lover had no known name, he called her Prudence, after the woman who wouldn’t come out to play. She liked it, especially when he explained he’d taken it from a great song by a great man. “She was a real person, Prudence was,” he said. “Mia Farrow’s sister. Lennon wrote it when they were in India with the Maharishi, because Prudence wouldn’t leave her hut and he was worried about her. Thought she must be depressed because she wouldn’t come outside, so he penned “Dear Prudence.” Brilliant song. Inspired.”
His appreciation of silent companionship had been short-lived. Her reticence, a few days in, was giving him a new respect for conversation, enunciation, and indeed his own voice. He had taken to rambling—the inevitable result of spending time with someone who had little to say—and his capacity for drivel astounded him. He had never realized he knew so much about nothing in particular or that he was quite handy at impersonations. One afternoon when he was telling Prudence about his most peculiar student, he began imitating him—rather accurately, he thought. The humor, however, was lost on her.
He spent most of the week in the house, venturing out only to get food. He even lied to Annie, saying he had a stomach bug and could not go over to see them. “Stay in bed,” she said. “It’ll pass.”
He stayed in bed. They made love, a lot, and Prudence slept a lot, and Gabriel feared leaving the room because sometimes when he did she was no longer there when he came back, and then he would have to kill the shapeless hours until her return. Boredom set in. He had no work, no friends, and the house had been stripped of all but necessary utensils. All books, games, and magazines had moved to the suburbs. Walking was the only thing to do when she was gone, and it used up the energy, the pent-up desire that made him jittery. Sometimes he would dive into the suq to make contact with living, working people, and chat to the shopkeepers in the shaded alleys. They would talk to him in their limited English and taught him to say “Hello, how are you?” in Arabic. Other times he would go farther afield, out of town and into the hills, hiking for hours until, suddenly panicked that he’d been gone too long, he would hurry home, passing shrouded women and floppy-eared goats, arriving back, hot and frazzled, to find that Prudence was there, or not.
One afternoon Annie called over, and sat on the rampart of the roof with him, the sea breeze ruffling her spiky hair.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Still not pregnant. How’s your stomach?”
“Still rumbly.”
“I hope you kept yourself hydrated.”
“I kept myself hydrated.”
Prudence stepped out of the house and moved to another corner of the roof.
Annie did
