Anyhow, Brett was a proud man from Little Rock. If he needed to buy me brunch to look himself in the eye, I wasn’t going to stand in his way, even if the thought of another all-you-can-eat-and-drink Friday afternoon shindig was basically worrying. It didn’t help that the event had as its stated theme “F*** the F****** Financial Crisis.”
The venue for the brunch was the subject of debate between a dozen or so of the brunchers. Some were in favor of the One & Only, others Al Qasr, others the Park Hyatt, others the Fairmont, others The Address (in Downtown Dubai, not The Address Dubai Marina). I would guess that two hundred messages went into circulation. The initial volley straightforwardly considered the hotels’ relative merits (in the matters of value for money, lobsters, cigar availability, ambience, house champagne brands, etc.); but this give-and-take quickly frayed into off-topic threads, the most popular of which, this being Dubai, inevitably concerned the question of service. To be fair, I suppose it’s theoretically possible that the affluent expat population largely consists of people who arrived with bees already in their bonnets about the performance of waiters, lackeys, and help. But most of us here would shamefacedly agree that something about the local gradient eventually means that pretty much everyone who’s white and/or well-to-do slides into bossiness and haughtiness in relation to pretty much everyone who’s not white and not well-to-do. According to some commentators, our domineering cadre is essentially drawn from the same stock of provincial, socially second- or third-tier Europeans who, in the days of empire, populated the lesser despotic positions—policemen, clerks, overseers—and it’s far from surprising, therefore, that members of what was once the taskmaster or slave-driver class should be given to pushing people around and looking down their lower-middle- or middle-middle-class noses at their supposed social and/or racial inferiors. Maybe this holds some truth; there’s no denying I’ve seen repellently de haut en bas behavior here from men and women about whom it might in all neutrality be said that in their own homeland they might not be widely perceived as having the socio-economic status to as it were plausibly claim for themselves a relative superiority. I have to wonder, though, if the negative critique of these individuals is a function of the critics’ care for the well-being of the dominated persons or if it is, rather, self-serving viciousness and snobbery about persons who the critics feel have no entitlement of their own to viciousness and snobbery, a feeling that’s detestable on the intellectual level among others, since, unless I have been thoroughly misinformed, the so-called top or upper or upper-middle societal tiers cannot be said to have brought glory on themselves, whether historically or contemporarily, in the matter of the kindly or just treatment of less powerful others, e.g., serfs, peasants, defenseless foreign populations. It’s ugly, however you look at it. It’s not uplifting or entertaining to read, as I did on the aforementioned thread about the imbecilities of the servant classes,
I got one. Our cleaning lady whose from Indonesia and a very nice young lady, put away some books with the spines facing INSIDE.
Think I can beat that. I was at Starbucks yesterday and the Indian gentleman waiter tried to “tidy away” the newspaper I was reading. He had no idea that the whole point of sitting down was to read the newspaper. He didn’t know what reading a newspaper was!
Try explaining that L socks go with R socks! Never works. They always think L goes with L because it looks the same. Drives me potty.
Normally, I would never think of intervening. On this occasion, I don’t know why, I was prompted to write, it must be said hesitantly,
I think that here in Dubai, there’s a widespread confusion of the notions of service and servility. Restaurant/hotel service focuses on fawning and obsequiousness rather than efficiency. The question is whether this is due to the customer expectations (i.e., we demand servility), or inexperienced management, or both. We know that it cannot only be due to the imported culture of the staff, because Indian waiters who work in New York, London, etc., are highly competent and resourceful. Ditto cabdrivers. Btw, has anyone noticed how disenchanted the taxi drivers here are, compared with those in New York, say? What is our role in this, I wonder.
Nobody responded to my wonderment, either online or at Yalumba, the restaurant at Le Méridien where the brunch was, in due course, held.
I turned up on the late side, at 2:00 p.m. Brett and his two English co-hosts had booked a huge banqueting table for thirty, and surrounding our table were other tables at which other champagne brunches were taking place, and there was a very happy, very loud, restaurant-wide brouhaha to which my table was contributing its fair share of laughing and yelling. A majority of heads wore pointy bright party hats. Not wanting to be a Buzz Killington, I put on a gleaming red fez.
Brett aside, I recognized only a few faces at my table, and only faintly. Brett seemed a little confused, or distracted, when I greeted him, and it took some rearranging of chairs to make room for me. I wandered Yalumba’s famous buffets. They were wasted on me: I don’t see anything great about crab displays or giant vats of macaroni and cheese, etc. Still, when in Dubai; and boiled potatoes, garlic mussels, and a T-bone steak found their way onto my plate. At the table, I accepted red wine, and champagne from a salmanazar of Laurent-Perrier that happy aproned waiters wheeled around on a mobile ice bed, courtesy of someone somewhere in the restaurant. Who was my benefactor? It seemed wrong to accept the drink without some sign of thanks (even though I was entirely satisfied by my red wine and had no selfish wish to drink champagne). In the end, I decided to raise my glass of bubbly to a table of generous-looking French dudes wearing berets, and they raised their glasses back, though it remained unclear if this was to acknowledge my gratitude or simply to return my friendly gesture.
The chief excitement in my section of the table was provided by the presence of a Scotsman named Jimmy. Jimmy was that very rare bird—the new arrival in Dubai. Here was a chink of economic light! Here might be the recovery’s first swallow! Our joy was lessened by his revelation that his was not an open-market hiring but, in point of fact, a U.A.E. government job—a six-month contract to work on supplementary procurement issues connected to the Metro construction. Never mind, he was a fresh face, and he gave older Dubai hands the chance to once more indulge in what may be our most indestructible conversational trope, that is, tutoring the newcomer to the Emirates about the outlandish legal hazards he or she faces in the areas of buying and consuming alcohol, gambling, having sex, driving, drunk driving, using recreational drugs, incurring debt, and so on and so forth, with illustrative cautionary tales whose invariable moral is that, contrary to its accommodating and modern appearance, for the non-national the emirate is a vast booby trap of medieval judicial perils, and Johnny Foreigner must especially take great care when interacting with local citizens (who constitute only 10 percent or so of the population) because de facto there is one law for Abdul Emirati and another for Johnny Foreigner, so that, for example, if Johnny is involved in an automobile collision with Abdul, responsibility for damage caused will in practice not be determined in accordance with familiar qualitative assessments of the acts and omissions of the parties involved but in accordance with considerations of identity, the local concept (supposedly alien to the person accustomed to Romano-Judeo-Christian jurisprudence) being that the applicability of the duty of care (known to some as the neighbor principle) is subject to modification by the nationalitative interrelation of the involved parties. I.e., it’s not what you do, it’s who you are vis-à-vis the person who does unto you or unto whom you do.
Jimmy was asked about his first impressions. “I love the huge posters of the Sheikh you see everywhere,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind getting hold of one. I could make a fortune on eBay.”
A fork was waved in Jimmy’s direction. “That sort of hipster irony doesn’t go down very well here.”
“Yeah,” someone said. Making quotation fingers, this person added, “He’s not ‘The Ruler,’ he’s the fucking Ruler.”
The fork
waver warned Jimmy, “You want to watch it. They don’t have a sense of humor about that sort of thing. Just so you know.”
“They like to be ruled. It settles them down. I’m not against it, to be honest. Not in England, of course, but here.”
“He’s a good bloke, Sheikh Mo. He’s done a lot of good for his people.”
Jimmy: “Is it true he’s got a private jet just for his falcons?”
“Yes. So they say.”
“And he’s got cheetahs, too.”
“No, he doesn’t. That’s total rubbish.”
The cheetah guy threw his party hat at the rubbisher, who in turn threw his napkin at the cheetah guy. There was a brief storm of things being thrown. Bread rolls flew from one end of the table to the other, to shouts of approval.
When things calmed down, somebody said, “They say he’s after getting married again.”
“That’s what I heard, too. Sheikha number four.”
“Could be number five, for all we know.”
Jimmy: “Why’s it so hush-hush?”
Somebody began to air a theory (which I paraphrase and, to be honest, save from disjointedness) to the effect that the Ruler’s overt power depended on an inner zone of secrecy for secrecy’s sake, and this centrum of inexplicability (which deprived outsiders of data relating even to royal matrimonial and domestic arrangements) tacitly communicated the existence of broader political arrangements by which entitlement to significant information was made the subject of concentric separations, with the Ruler at the center and the populace distributed more or less at the perimeter, etc., etc., with the inevitable reference to the Wizard of Oz.
To my left was a kind-looking blonde in her thirties. She must have been as restless as I was, because she said, “Hello, I’m Samantha. What’s your name?” She was drinking a cocktail involving champagne and Rémy Martin. The neighboring table gave a hilarious roar as I answered her, and we both smiled, because it was good to have so many relaxed and happy souls assembled in one room, and at that moment, in fact, the music came on and a kicking conga line instantly formed and people from every corner of Yalumba joined in, laying hands on shoulders and waists and shuffling along singing the olé song and tooting on party blowers. Samantha said, “Come on,” and I added myself to the shambling human concatenation, and I had fun, obviously because I was well on my way to getting loaded. It was a full five minutes before the music stopped and we all returned to our tables in the best of spirits.
Samantha told me she was heading home to England, to get a divorce and “start all over again.”
“That must be very painful,” I said.
She suggested in a sensitive tone of voice that I might have gone through something similar, and I said, “Perhaps I have.”
“Well, either you have or you haven’t,” she said.
I laughed. Samantha seemed to be upset by this, which was the last thing I wanted, because I was really rooting for her, this spirited and good person, and I said, “Sorry. I was just remembering something. My ex objected to me using that word—‘perhaps.’ ”
Samantha said, “What do you mean, she objected?”
“She just didn’t like it. It got on her nerves.”
“I suppose it depends on the context,” Samantha said with great pensiveness.
“Yes,” I agreed.
The Perhapsburg Empire—that used to be my unspoken nickname for the Jenn-me realm.
I said, “And ‘henceforth.’ ‘Henceforth’ really, really irritated her.”
Samantha giggled.
My theory, kept from Samantha, was that Jenn objected to this fancy (in her mind) vocabulary because it was (as she saw it) the tip of an iceberg of European haughtiness. I suspect she equated my Swiss ancestry with being looked down on from an alp. It sounds crazy, but I don’t think she could quite accept, or understand, that an American could through no fault of his own know French (a language spoken by normal people all over the world), and that the whole thing wasn’t just some kind of trick of one-upmanship designed to knock her back down into the Lehigh Valley.
The salmanazar! Three men hoisted the inexhaustible Brobdingnagian bottle and, not without anxiety, filled our glasses. Samantha was looking very appealing now, and I recognized that I was imagining myself alone with her and prospectively knowing the bliss of being with her, and it took a real effort to avail myself of the technique I’ve developed to protect myself and the woman in question at such moments, which is to fastforward through the joyful scenes of carnality and closeness, valid imaginings though these may be, and slowly play in my cerebral cinema the moment when it’s pain-pain and lose-lose-lose-lose and she’s heartbroken and I’m boarding a boat to Tristan da Cunha.
Samantha declared, “Henceforth I’m going to start saying ‘henceforth.’ Perhaps.” She laughed very hard, and her elbow dropped into a jumbo shrimp combo, and several of the jumbo shrimps sprang from the salad onto the table. A cheer went up.
“Bloody elbow,” Samantha said, wiping her arm with the tablecloth. “Story of my life.” She laughed courageously.
I decided to not give voice to my deep, untrustworthy compassion.
Samantha told me that her husband, Gavin, had been unfaithful to her with a twenty-four-year-old he’d met while “seal bashing” at Barasti. “That’s when he took up ‘scuba diving.’ ” It was her turn to make air quotes. “He’d tell me he was ‘scuba diving’ with this friend from work, Ted, and then he’d be gone for the day. Very easy, really.”
Unthinkingly, I said, “Ted? Not Ted Wilson?”
“You know him?” she said.
“Only very slightly,” I said, as if I were under accusation. “He seems to have gone missing.”
“Cherchez la femme,” a bruncher interposed.
“Cherchez la voiture,” another said. “I hear from a little bird that a very naughty little blue Mazda has been seen in some unlikely places.”
“Really? Where?” The topic had everyone’s attention.
Our informant paused deliciously. “Sharjah,” she said.
“Of course.”
“Of course what?”
“It’s the perfect place to keep his floozy. Then the wife comes over from the States, and old Teddy says no thanks and does a runner. I bet you he’s lying doggo there right now. He’ll be back as soon as the missus flies home.”
I said, “That doesn’t make much—”
Samantha said, “I wonder if he was in on it with Gavin.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Scum collects.”
The fork waver pointed at me. “Hold on—weren’t you in that search party?”
Everybody turned to examine me.
I said, “I—yes. I was asked to take part, so I did.”
Samantha said disgustedly, “You’re a scuba diver, too?”
“Not really,” I said. “Not anymore. I mean, I used to dive, sure. Yes. But never with Ted.”
“You must be a bit pissed off, mate, going to all that trouble while our Ted dips his wick in Sharjah.”
“Did he even really go diving? It was probably a cover, wasn’t it?”
“He went diving all right.” There was laughter.
“Sounds to me like he’s a psychopath,” someone said. “I’m not saying he’s going to murder anyone. I’m talking, you know, psychiatrically.”
More ha-ha-ha-ha.
“No, no, think about it,” the psychiatrist said. “The fake diver thing, the shag pad in Sharjah, all the lying and cheating. The whole double-life thing. No conscience. No empathy for anyone else.”
“OK, here we go.” This bruncher was consulting his iPhone. “ ‘Psychopathy Checklist.’ ” When he started to read out the alleged characteristics of psychopaths, I removed my fez and left. I should have gone earlier, as soon as it became clear that the dignity, and in particular the privacy, of the Wilsons was going to be violated. Privacy is in many respects an indistinct ideal, but surely we can agree that there is such a thing as misappropriating another
’s biographical belongings.
I’d texted Ali an hour earlier. The stout fellow was waiting for me in the Méridien lobby. He drove me and the Autobiography home. Then he took a taxi back to his place or wherever it was he wished to go, Friday theoretically being his day of rest and liberty. I gave him taxi money, of course, and slipped him a hundred dirhams for good measure.
Of that group of brunchers, I would guess that less than half are still in Dubai. Evanescent conga!
Brett Hutchinson is one of those who went away, whether by choice or not I can’t say. He has not stayed in touch, even though he still owes me five thousand AED. The day after the Yalumba event, he e-mailed me this:
Hey bud. Great seeing you. I may be wrong, but I think you left without paying? Give me a buzz when you get a minute or just send me a check. Cheers.
PS: Dh 700 a head inc. giant bottle of bubbly!
I LIKE TO THINK I TRY to be curious about others in the way I’d want those same others to be curious about me, namely in a way that is not alienated from the root meaning of curiosity: to care. I try to not be a busybody. I reject the idea that one can enter another life at no cost. I guard against the lowness of the detective. (When I first came out here, I would daily Google Jenn, then my old firm, then me. It was as fruitless as it was compulsive. I was like the dog with the empty bladder that nonetheless goes from tree to tree, stopping at each one to cock his leg in vain. Later, I went through a phase of Googling the Batroses, and, regardless of the search results, the outcome was the same: my degradation: my falling farther down the slope of Parnassus.) On the other hand, a measure of inquisitiveness is sometimes called for. If the petition “Help!” reaches us, obviously we should want to look into it. I’m not arguing that the Wilsons cried out to me. But I did come away from Brett’s brunch with the feeling that Ted Wilson, and Mrs. Ted Wilson by association, had been run over in absentia. I don’t know why such a little thing should have got to me. Every day, the immaterial ear of conscience—surely the organ that must distinguish a human being from the remainder of animals—receives other, louder calls.
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