Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  “New boss!” says Maribeth, looking peeved. “Who you think, Madame?”

  “Cut me some slack, MB. I can’t remember the horrors of all your friends’ work lives. I have my own, remember?” And Maribeth shoots Angie a look that lands where she knows it will, right in Angie’s uneasy Western sense of justice and entitlement: I have nothing to complain about/I have everything to complain about. Since the global financial downturn, or GFD as Angie calls it (great fucking debacle), Berlitz has cut her teaching load by half. Every month she worries the school will lay her off. She’s not Arab, after all. Firaj, now doing a tour of duty in Islamabad, sends money when he thinks of it.

  “Okay, I know it’s different,” says Angie.

  “You bet,” says Maribeth, taking Angie’s cup and steering her out of the kitchen into the dining room. She puts Angie’s cup on the long, polished table, sits in the adjacent chair.

  The long and the short of it — though none of these sagas are ever short, thinks Angie, trying not to look at her watch — is that Daisy’s difficult Egyptian family has turned into two difficult Egyptian families.

  “Sixteen person,” says Maribeth. “Poor Daisy. She sleep three hour.”

  “But that’s illegal,” says Angie, feeling, in spite of herself, the quick fury these stories still churns up. “Jesus, Maribeth.”

  “I tell her no good people. I tell her back when,” says Maribeth.

  “But now they’ve fired her?”

  “They say,” says Maribeth, shrugging. “But still make her work. Maybe just…” and she struggles with a word.

  “Threaten,” supplies Angie.

  Her mobile is ringing from somewhere in the apartment. Angie feels Maribeth willing her not to answer it. “Sorry, MB,” she says, dashing first into the kitchen, then into the entryway, trying to remember where she dropped her purse. Mathieu has programmed her phone to play an old Donna Summer song, Hot Stuff. It’s cheesy, but she loves it.

  “Mon ange,” he says, when she finally locates the phone on the powder room counter. “Ça va?”

  “Maribeth’s telling me another horror story. Daisy again. What am I supposed to say to her at this point?”

  “Just listen,” says Mathieu. “Be, you know, sympathique, mais pas trop.” Mathieu keeps telling her she is a bit too involved. Boundaries, he says. He barely speaks to his family’s live-in nanny. She’s from Indonesia, a devout Muslim. Contact with a man, any man, makes her feel uncomfortable, he insists. Angie can tell by his breathing that he’s taking a cigarette break. What with the GFD, he’s going into the office even on Friday afternoons. “I must make myself indispensable,” he says. It’s lucky so many French words are the same in English, otherwise Mathieu would be translating all the time and that would get to be a drag for him. “Ennuyant,” a word he says with a sigh when he talks about his old life in a suburb of Lyon or having to explain things ten times to his Emirati boss, or domestic conversations (and sex) with his wife. Angie takes this as a warning.

  The plan has been that he will take her to dinner tonight at the Shangri-La, a hotel out by the Grand Mosque. A canal runs through the grounds, like Venice. But the real selling point is that the hotel is out of the city so they’re not likely to run into any of his co-workers, though Mathieu has told her that some are also seeing des autres. “Maybe it’s an Arab thing,” he says. “One man, several women? Qui sait?”

  He’ll send Kabir around at seven to pick her up. It’s only three now, which leaves time for a quick wrap-up to Maribeth’s story, a nice long nap and a nice long bath. But when Angie goes back to the dining room, Maribeth isn’t there. She’s even forgotten the teacups. Angie reluctantly carries them into the kitchen, surprised not to find Maribeth at the stove starting to make sticky rice or plantains, comfort food from home. Maribeth loves when Angie eats out and she doesn’t have to cook lentils or quinoa or whatever healthy regime Angie’s on that week. “You too thin,” Maribeth says. “Better before.” After Firaj left, Angie lost thirty housewifely pounds and she doesn’t intend to gain an ounce back. Mathieu says she looks like Audrey Tautou, with her bobbed, dark hair and small frame. Gamine, he says, which makes her feel young and cute and not forty-seven. No breakfast, a few bites of chicken at Mathieu’s. She’ll be able to eat well tonight.

  Moving down the cool tiles of the hallway she makes out the sound of Tagalog from Maribeth’s tiny bedroom. She’s on the phone, probably telling the latest Daisy news to a friend, so maybe they can skip the rest of the story for today. Angie unrolls the fabric blind in her own bedroom — too small, she thinks for the thousandth time since moving in last year — and falls onto her bed. After lunch, they’d made love again, this time on one of the daughters’ beds, which seemed to excite Mathieu. Fridays take it out of her.

  Angie wakes to the sound of Maribeth calling through the door. “Madame!” When Maribeth first came to work for them, Angie, fresh from five years with Firaj in Washington, protested over the “Madame.” It was too formal, made her feel matronly. I’m American, you know, she tried to explain to her husband, who’d grown up with servants in Amman. But Maribeth was not to be budged. She was Maribeth — she tolerated MB, Angie’s nickname for her — and Angie was Madame. Those were their names.

  Angie tries to get up. There’d been a tiny glass of Chardonnay at lunch. Maybe Mathieu refilled it. She can’t remember. Maribeth is still calling. She will stand there calling all afternoon if Angie doesn’t get herself to the door.

  Angie begins to say something not gentle, not patient, but Maribeth’s face is streaming with tears. In all their time together, with all the dramas and traumas, all the friends and relations, Angie has never seen a tear on that face. Her heart tips.

  “The children?” she asks, and feels her knees actually knock against each other. She’s never met the children, of course, doesn’t have any special feeling for children in general, but she’s always liked seeing their photos, seeing how they change each year: attitudinal, smart-cookie Alicia, now sixteen; tall, sweet Eduardo Junior. And the baby, Ernesto, eight, who has some sort of problem, but is clearly Maribeth’s favourite. She, Angie, is helping these kids. Yes, Maribeth does her ironing, washes her car, cooks her meals, but some larger good is being done too.

  Maribeth shakes her head.

  “So what is it?” Angie feels relief and a tinge of annoyance. If it’s not about the children, why did Maribeth wake her up? Why is she bothering her with something or someone else? Priorities, she thinks. Not everyone has to matter that much.

  Still, the tears are new, and she takes Maribeth by the arm, brings her into the room, sits her on the bed. “Okay, what’s going on, MB? Is this still about Daisy?”

  In English stretched to its outer limits, Maribeth tells Angie that the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old sons of one of the families have been raping Daisy for months.

  “One hold down, other do. Fat boy,” says Maribeth. “Too strong. Maribeth little skinny. Family…” and she struggles to find that word again…“threaten. Say she whore. Send back in Philippines. Daisy want to jump.”

  Angie tries to remember the apartment. Once, on the way to a party in Dubai, she drove Daisy home, Daisy thanking her over and over, until Angie had asked her to please stop. The apartment was way up. Twelfth floor?

  “She cry, cry,” says Maribeth. “I think do it.”

  “So what did you tell her?” Angie is on her feet, but Maribeth can’t seem to get up; she’s stuck to the bed.

  “MB! What did you tell her?” Angie finds her purse, phone, sandals.

  “I say, ‘God love you. God forgive you.’”

  “God has not one single thing to forgive Daisy for, Maribeth. Of all the misguided… Come on, get your bag.”

  They don’t speak until they got to Jebel Ali, half an hour still from Dubai proper. In the hour of silence, Angie has had time to wonder what she is doing, but more to the point, w
hat she will be able to do.

  She’s wanted to pursue this impulse before, to show up at the door of an offender and demand the immediate release of the underpaid nanny, harassed driver, abused maid.

  Once, in the first year after she and Firaj moved to Abu Dhabi, to a compound in Al Mushrif, she’d heard screams coming from the villa next door, then an hour later an ambulance pulling into the shared drive. They had only a passing acquaintance with the neighbours, a couple from Belgium (a bit stuffy, but pleasant enough) and the two Filipinas who worked for them.

  “I don’t understand,” she’d told Firaj. “What could they possibly need two maids for? They don’t even have kids.” And Firaj had explained that most likely one did the shopping and cooking, the other took care of the house. “Polishing the silver, who knows?” he’d said. “You’ll never get this, will you? When money is no object, people don’t have to do anything they don’t feel inclined to do.” His own mother in a suburb of Amman still employed a live-in maid, though she was a widow with no grandchildren.

  Angie didn’t know the maids’ names, just raised her hand in greeting when she saw them. One had a sweet smile; the other only bobbed her head. The smiley maid seemed to be gone, Angie noticed about a week after the ambulance. She’d been the one who usually went out with the Belgian woman to help with the shopping. Now it was the other one who unloaded the plastic bags from the back of the SUV.

  One afternoon when Angie was leaving to pick up their mail at the post office, she found the maid standing next to her car. “Please,” she said, looking around. “Please.” The woman looked so desperate, Angie coaxed her into the car.

  “I need phone,” said the woman. She wasn’t especially young, Angie saw now. “I am Inez.” The other maid was in the hospital, she said. The man had thrown her against a wall, then knocked her to the kitchen floor when she’d refused to give him a massage. There was blood. The man had finally called an ambulance. But now there were other problems, said Inez. The couple had taken away her mobile phone, afraid she might tell someone what had happened. Madame was yelling all the time and the man was now looking at her. “You know?” She kept turning around to look down the street as she spoke. Madame was due home any minute from a luncheon, she told Angie. “Today I wait for you. You always wave.”

  If the phone got traced back to Angie, she’d have to deal with the couple. There could be legalities, complications. She might get Firaj into trouble. Then she noticed Inez’s hands, chapped, scabbed, scarlet. It hurt to look at them. She opened her purse, rummaged for her phone, handed it over. But the charger. She’d have to run inside for the charger. A bronze Land Rover appeared in the rearview mirror.

  When the Belgian woman climbed down from her SUV a minute later, head bent into her mobile, she waved to Angie, who watched as Inez, standing on the curb as if she’d been waiting all this time for Madame to return, took the Paris Gallery bag she was handed. Inez did not look back, but Angie had seen her slip the phone into her uniform pocket as she sprang from the car.

  For the next few days, Angie called her mobile. No one answered, no one returned the calls. She told Firaj, in minimal detail, what had happened. He wasn’t impressed. “You’ve got to be more discreet. Who knows who these people are connected to? Remember that we are guests in this country. And even though we are the majority and Emiratis amount to…what? barely 15 percent of the population…it’s their party.” Coming here had meant a promotion from vice-consul to consul. “The higher I go, the more scrutiny,” he said.

  At the end of that month, they’d moved into their permanent accommodations, a new villa in Khalidiyah, just a block from the Corniche. It was an elegant duplex, with a winding staircase to the second floor, and a private pool. They hired Maribeth a week after moving in. Firaj stayed a year, before getting posted to Jakarta. By the time Angie was ready to join him six weeks later — she’d stayed behind for the movers — Firaj had fallen in love with an Indonesian woman half her age.

  She wondered sometimes about Inez, if she’d ever been able to use the phone, how long it had stayed charged, if it had been discovered. She wondered what had happened next.

  It’s impossible to get into Dubai any more. The traffic, the pile-ups, the detours around detours, signs pointing nowhere, massive construction sites of half-finished high-rises.

  “MB,” says Angie, turning finally onto the road running along Jumeirah Beach, “you’re going to have to help here.”

  “What you plan, Madame?”

  “MB, you know as much as I do.”

  “Don’t know, Madame.”

  And for the second time this afternoon, Angie wants to shake her. “What’s going on with you? You’re usually so feisty.” Maribeth looks straight ahead. “I don’t know what to say to these people,” says Angie. “They might kick us out. They might call the police.”

  They will, of course, be seriously outnumbered — sixteen put-out Egyptians against one small American woman and one suddenly chastened Filipina. It’s so insane it’s nearly comical, nearly noble.

  Maribeth is murmuring. “What, MB?” Angie asks, and Maribeth lifts her rosary.

  Nothing is looking familiar on this stretch of Jumeirah Beach Road. Maybe she’s turned the wrong way. When they first came to the UAE six years ago, it had been so much easier to navigate this wild-times city. She and Firaj would come up for a weekend of clubs, restaurants, shopping, drinking. Dubai brought a sense of, not home exactly, but short glimpses of the familiar, something you could get your hands on quick. Abu Dhabi was saner, but she hadn’t necessarily wanted saner in those days.

  Angie comes into another snag of late-model cars, most of them honking, and now nothing looks familiar. “Where are we, Maribeth?” asks Angie and her phone rings. She’d hoped to leave Mathieu out of this, at least for now. Perhaps at dinner, overlooking a concrete-lined canal, she will tell him about their mission. He might even be moved.

  “Where are you, chérie? I hear cars. Are you driving? I thought you were going for un petit dodo. You need energy for tonight.”

  She could lie, tell him she’s forgone the nap for a small shopping splurge. A lingerie run to La Senza for an after-dinner treat, like a pair of black lace thongs he can tear off with his teeth. Mathieu likes that sort of thing, likes her little plots as The Mistress. But she needs information or she will waste the afternoon into evening, driving, or trying to drive, through the parking lot that is Jumeirah Beach.

  “Where’s the Dubai Marina?”

  “Quoi?” he asks. And she’s forced to give him the short version of Daisy and the boys.

  “I keep telling you stay out,” Mathieu says. “It is not your affair, comprenez?” And Angie remembers the way he looked at her a few hours ago, as he was tying his robe. “So no dinner,” he says.

  “Of course, dinner. It’s not even four. This won’t take that long. We get Daisy, we’re back in the car.” But the swell of earlier conviction shrinks as she tries to imagine the scene. All those people standing in the foyer of the apartment. Voices rising, Daisy crying. Who does she think she is?

  “Well, don’t get yourself killed or deported,” says Mathieu, and tells her how to reach the cluster of thirty high-rise apartments on the beach.

  “Do you have friends who live there?” Angie asks, grateful as she makes a U-turn. “You seem to know this place like the back of your hand.”

  “You could say that,” says Mathieu, and Angie feels a catch of anxiety as she tucks the phone back in her bag. Not that she can let her mind go anywhere near that right now. There’s something completely pathetic about the girlfriend of a married man suspecting there’s another girlfriend. Almost as pathetic as being the girlfriend. But she can’t think about that either.

  “Okay, MB, I really do need you,” says Angie, and Maribeth sighs and slips her rosary into her purse. Only now does Angie notice what Maribeth is wearing: her tightest jeans an
d the yellow T-shirt she and Firaj brought back from Disneyland Paris. Donald on the front; Mickey on the back. “That’s us, MB,” says Angie, pointing to the shirt and for the first time all day, Maribeth smiles.

  Angie drives slowly between the towers until Maribeth tells her to stop. “There,” she says, leaning forward, pointing up. Angie starts to count the floors, then stops: something else not to contemplate. At least there’s no police, a good sign. There’s also no parking, this being a Friday. What might have been a space right in back is taken up by a Volvo parked diagonally across two spots. She finds a space in front of the next tower, sits for a moment. Maribeth has slipped her rosary out again, the tiny beads clicking.

  “I pray do right,” says Maribeth.

  They ring the doorbell of apartment 1201. They knock. No one comes. Maribeth points to a few pairs of shoes on the shoe rack. “They out,” she pronounces, and begins to pound on the door. Since they’ve gotten out of the car, she’s back to her old self. “Daisy!” she calls into the door. “Daisy!” And then something in Tagalog.

  They hear someone behind the door. Slowly, slowly it opens. And there, standing unsteadily, is a very old man. He’s barefoot, dressed in a long, off-white jelabiya, a crocheted white skull cap on his head. A stricken-looking Daisy stands behind him. Maribeth goes in, stepping around the man, grabs Daisy’s arm, says something sharp to her.

  “She don’t want to leave,” says Maribeth, turning back to Angie, still outside, suddenly uncertain of what to do. She was armed for a throng of hysterical people, not a feeble old man.

  “Daisy, you have to come with us,” says Angie.

  “But the old man. I can’t leave him. I have to stay.” Thank God Daisy’s English is as good as it is. It will make convincing her easier.

  “You have to, Daisy. This is a very bad place for you.”

  “Yes,” says Daisy. She’s not going to argue about that. But she won’t leave the old man by himself. “It’s my job,” she says pleadingly. “Maybe he die and I be responsible.”