We pull up across the street from Fort Batros. A high white wall surrounds the property’s several acres. Behind the wall one can see a sizable cluster of palm trees and, aloft amid the palms, a gaping three-meter satellite dish that would interest me very much if I were a pterodactyl looking for a nest.
“OK, see you tomorrow,” I say. In accordance with protocol, he doesn’t move until two security guards have hastened over from the guardhouse and opened the passenger door. They escort him to the enormous metal double gates and lead him through the doorway that’s built into one of the gates. One of the guards indicates with a wave that the kid is safely home. I don’t doubt it. Fort Batros has a round-the-clock security presence and alarms and floodlights and various other defensive measures in part attributable, as I understand it, to the requirements of the kidnapping insurer. I have never been inside the property, which is managed by an Italian gentleman hired away from the Four Seasons Hotel Milano, but I have gone online and aerially surveyed it. In addition to the family villa, the grounds contain a tennis court and two swimming pools and outhouses and cabins: the expectable inferno.
THIS ISN’T TO SAY THAT high walls and swimming pools and luxury cabanas are intrinsically bad; and I absolutely don’t have anything against the ideal of the family home. As a matter of fact, sometimes I long for the experience of being made welcome by a family in its domain. I’m no Norman Rockwell, but I do believe in the existence of families that are not units of suffering and power. My own nuclear family was not one of these success stories, sadly for all concerned, and I’m forced to conclude that neither was the group comprising Jenn and me and, spectrally, our not-to-be child; but one can hardly fall from these particular disappointments into a general theoretical gloom about familial love or the special domestic comfort that a successful household can offer a visitor. The specialness, here, does not consist in giving a guy/girl the best chair and pouring him a glass of wine and lending him a sympathetic ear and generally bending toward her, indispensable though these things are; it consists, fundamentally, in exercising for the guest’s benefit the power of shelter and exoneration that is the prerogative of the family in its residence, which constitutes (the family home, that is) a private enclave within larger, all-too-hostile dominions. At home—chez soi—one is a potentate; one may grant an outsider relief from the outside; and this must be what I yearn for.
It’s possible that this old question—of the stranger and his reception—detains me because it detained none other than Ted Wilson. This was made apparent by his short advertising film for the Dubai Tourist Board, the award-winning Hospitality of the Desert. In the film, which I Googled without difficulty, a man in tattered Middle Eastern robes walks alone in the desert. It’s a timeless scene, shot in black and white. He is in difficulty, this wanderer. The sun is in that mood we recognize as “pitiless,” and the sand formations have the undulating immenseness we associate with the phrase “sea of sand.” The wanderer covers his face with his scarf and trudges on, up a dune. There is a second man in the desert: an unambiguous Arab in blazing white. He sees someone approaching. The Arab carefully watches this figure: there is something menacing about the slowly advancing silhouette. With a concise gesture, the Arab issues a wordless command to his servants, who have materialized along with goats and camels and a modest encampment of tents. Cut to a tent’s shade: the sheikh—for that is who/what the Arab is—proffers the traveler a cup of water and, on a silver dish, dates and white cheese. That is the drama: the humility of the aristocratic host before the vagrant: the reversal of station. In a burst of color and pop music, everything skips to present-day Dubai, where a family of ecstatic Western tourists checks into a hotel with the help of an Emirati guide/friend/host; whereupon we see the foreigners enjoying a series of stock touristic pleasures, the scenes punctuated by close-ups of the sagacious black-bearded face of the Emirati host/helper. Next, the tourists are waving goodbye to the Emirati at the airport; and then we’re back in the timeless desert, where the traveler, in fresh clothes, heads out into the desert on a horse supplied to him. The sheikh wears a wise smile. The legend appears:
WELCOME TO DUBAI
I’m no expert, but I detect a difference between this ad and the others. I’m thinking of the little films brought to us by the “Reaffirm Your Uniqueness” and “The Prestige of Excellence” and “Dubai: The Exception” campaigns. These obviously laughable and tawdry productions push without irony the idea that Dubai is where an elite of beautiful cosmopolitan tastemakers convenes in order to lead lives of extraordinary luxe and cachet and to buy and use and disport themselves in and with famous handbags, clothes, bathroom fittings, etc. We see men tossing car keys to smiling parking valets, and women emerging long-leggedly from sports cars, and childless couples in their late thirties getting together to drink champagne on yachts. The cheesier, the better, I say. There is a transparency of falsity in this absurd idea of a good-looking socio-economic Weltklasse that almost confers a kind of blamelessness on the falsifiers, whose misrepresentations are (no offense) not far removed from those offered by very young children caught red-handed, and may be regarded, even enjoyed, as good old-fashioned hogwash. Wilson’s effort, by comparison, was sly. I’m not one to pick on a man or knock down the efforts of someone who’s just doing his/her job, and in any case whatever I might think about any of this is subject to the universal rule that dooms to futility a private effort of vigilance and so won’t make a difference to anything. Still, I’ll allow myself a small say. “Hospitality of the Desert” proposed to do battle with the (of course calamitous and disgusting) prejudices directed against Arab/Muslim peoples (the terrorist-towelhead travesty) by offering an alternative mischaracterization, namely the whole wisdom of the desert–slash–ancient custodian of hospitality–slash-ethics thing. The latter is hardly on the same scale of wrongdoing as the cartoons it opposes, but it trawls the same swamp of plausibility; it calls forth fresh species of toads and snakes and slime. There is no high ground here, admittedly. There never is. Maybe the best that can be done, in terms of not making a bad situation worse, is to stick with the vivid fantasia of opulence, or, even better, to go back to the straightforward before-and-after photographic montage that was once very popular here but now seems to be falling out of fashion, i.e., the juxtaposition of a “before” photograph of the acreage of sand that Dubai until very recently was, and an “after” photograph of the extraordinary city we now see. This captures something honorable and true, if you ask me.
No one will ask me, I can safely say; the question is deeply moot. So, too, is the more personal question of my own reception by others, since it hasn’t happened since I got here. That’s right—for reasons that have, I hope, more to do with local custom than with what I’m (perceived to be) like, I have barely crossed the threshold of a private residence in Dubai. I haven’t even been to Ollie’s house, in Arabian Ranches. For that matter I have only once met Ollie’s (English) wife, Lynn, and that was the time I ran into the whole family in Dubai Mall. The term “family” in this instance includes the live-in Filipina nanny (Winda? Wanda? Wilda?), who, on the occasion I’m thinking of, took complete care of the little boy, Charlie, so that Ollie and Lynn were at liberty to stroll around in a carefree manner and permit themselves a measure of public parental insouciance that would be unavailable to them back home in Australia/England or, if available, would not be totally free of stigma, there being in those places people who frown on the conspicuous assignment to an employee of responsibilities deemed to be proper to a mother and/or father, and there being for the time being in those countries a degree of social uneasiness about noticeable master-servant relations. Here in Dubai, there’s nothing particularly unseemly or unusual about one’s children and one’s child-minders trailing behind one at the mall, especially since Emirati women amble at some distance behind their menfolk, often with the little ones. Nor is it suspect or de mauvais goût to have a residential domestic workforce: on the contrary, integral to the app
eal of the expat experience is that the labor of mopping and dusting and washing and cooking that typically forms part of the in patria experience may, ex patria, be transferred at a low cost to others—the so-called help. What about their experience—the labor transferees? This question, inherently valid, arises especially in the minds of the self-appointed inspectorate located overseas and to our northwest, where news agencies periodically run stories of women who have escaped from domestic service as if from slavery and reportedly are found desperately wandering the malls of Dubai without a penny to, I was going to say, their names, except that these escapees evidently are usually deprived by their employers of their passports and suffer from an official namelessness, not to mention denationalization. I completely accept the factual soundness of these stories. The imbalance of power that inevitably characterizes the employment by the relatively rich of persons radically relocated from poor parts of the world must perforce give rise to cases of mistreatment of the powerless. However, no consideration of this problem would be satisfactory without the paying of some attention to the trope by which it is publicized, namely the trope of the scandal. I am not such a theology ignoramus as to be unaware of the time-honored sense of this word: a stumbling block on the true path of religious virtue or, in a different context, Christian faith. This is hardly applicable to the present case: the mistreatment of help in Dubai is hardly a shocking reverse in the sacred project of human goodness to which the scandalized bystander is committed. I say this not out of cynicism but out of a recognition that real-life scandalization is a delight, conferring as it does a wonderfully unpaid-for feeling of righteousness. So let’s get it straight: most of the tut-tutting we hear is the sound of nothing other than opportunistic moral hedonism. And let’s acknowledge that it would be wrongheaded to disregard the fact that a large number of low-net-worth workers in Dubai enjoy relatively satisfactory outcomes, the pertinent point of comparison being the outcomes they would have enjoyed but for their employment in Dubai. Ollie and Lynn retain an Ethiopian live-in housemaid whom I’ve never met or seen but who is most unlikely, knowing her employers as I do, to be a detainee. I think it may fairly be assumed that she’s better off cleaning the nice house of nice people in Arabian Ranches than doing whatever she’d be doing in Addis Ababa, fine city though it may be.
Anyhow, we all walked over to Morelli’s Gelato for ice cream. Lynn Christakos is very pretty, in the sporty, clean-cut way of a star golfer’s girlfriend, and I found her good-natured and reasonable. She and I were in line at the counter, chatting away, when into the salon there stormed, I say without exaggeration, a group of black-robed and black-gloved and black-masked women. They came like a black wave through the tables, and for a second I thought they were coming to get me. I jumped to one side to let them pass. After they’d bought ice creams and surged away (having skipped the queue, pursuant to the relevant unwritten local rule), I said to Lynn, “Jesus, they gave me a fright.”
Lynn laughed. “They’re only mums,” she said. “Just imagine them with no clothes on.”
I forced out a culpable little laugh. More than once I’ve had pipedreams involving women precisely like these women (i.e., dressed in attire designed as a powerful antidote to nudity but counterproductively causing in me precisely the effect of mentally undressing them), and I had the crazy thought that Lynn had X-ray powers that had opened a window onto my revolting inner life. “Yeah, good idea, I might try that,” I said. Mildly risqué banter is not what I’m best at, which is a handicap in Dubai, where the nudge and the wink are vital social tools. According to Ollie, Lynn loves it here. In common with many expat mothers, however, she runs away from the summer heat and humidity and goes with the little boy (and, on a tourist visa, the Filipina nanny) to her parents’ house in Lancashire, England, for a couple of months of rain. In her absence, Ollie gets bored. This is when he becomes a prankster.
There was the famous time when, under the impression that I was getting what Ollie had termed “a really cutting-edge preventive ungual treatment,” I unwittingly allowed one of Ollie’s technicians to paint my toenails pink. When the lady technician removed the cucumber slices from my eyes and showed me her handiwork, I let out a shout of dismay that I immediately regretted because it seemed to upset the technician, who clearly was not in on the joke and plainly was worried that she’d done something wrong and was in big trouble. Ollie, of course, was laughing his head off.
This isn’t my favorite side of him. Our friendship was made underwater, where the scope for dicking around is zero. Quite frankly, I don’t share his taste for mischief and high jinks. One story he told about a night out in Moscow still haunts me. Evidently, Ollie emerged alone from a nightclub in the early hours. (What he was doing in a Moscow nightclub isn’t for me to understand or misunderstand.) There was fresh snow on the streets, and the snow in combination with the hour’s lateness and darkness had produced a vacant and hushed and newly ominous city—a city somehow connected to one’s childhood, if I may gloss the story. Ollie phoned for his car. He was waiting on the sidewalk when along came a horse, pale and jingling and clouded; and in the saddle was a beautiful young woman wearing a fur coat and a fur Cossack’s hat. As Ollie stood there, of course bewitched, a zooming BMW Z4 came down the street and, at a short distance beyond the horse, braked hard. The driver rolled down his window and leaned out to take a look at the horsewoman of mystery. As she drew level with the BMW, this man reached out of the car window and fired a pistol into the air. The horse skidded sideways, regained its balance, and bolted. The gunman sprang laughing out of the car, gun in hand. He hooted and slapped his thigh and jumped up and down as he watched the runaway going away with the woman hanging on for her life. Somehow she was not unseated; but the man slipped on ice and violently toppled backward into the snow like a clown overthrown by a banana peel. This caused him to accidentally shoot. It didn’t put an end to his joy. Laughing more loudly than ever, he kicked his legs in the air and helplessly rolled and rolled in the snow.
Let’s acknowledge right away that Ollie played no part in what happened. He was an onlooker. What bothers me is that he didn’t tell his story as if he’d found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is what I take to be the standard reaction of the eyewitness to a dangerous crime. To hear it from Ollie, he’d lucked into an amazing show. I accept that almost every element of the incident—Moscow, a make-believe night, a horse, gunfire, the randomness at the heart of everything—places what he saw beyond the frontier of the normal and invites a corresponding displacement of sensitivities. But it’s not obligatory to accept the invitation. I am the last person to propose an answer to the problem of determining what portion of the world may be treated as a pure amusement and what portion may not; I just know that I see nothing funny about a woman fighting for her life. And who can say if she succeeded? How do we know a car didn’t run her down? Isn’t it in any case certain that she was in terror? And even if one were to learn that she made it home safely and now viewed the episode as the most fun she ever had, Ollie’s story still cannot be removed from the complication of schadenfreude.
Oh, lighten up, for fuck’s sake, says a voice in my ear.
Fair enough. It’s very possible I’m being oversensitive—that I’m like those thin-skinned smoke detectors that screech at the presence of the slightest cooking fume and, if life is to go on, must be shut down.
When our homes were warm even when air-conditioned and Lynn and son and nanny in due course migrated north, Ollie dragged me out for a drink at Buddha-Bar. It’s in the Grosvenor House hotel, five minutes by taxi from The Situation, and so difficult for me to duck out of going to. The only time I’d been there, three sharp-looking anglophone businessmen, intently discussing what I took to be an important commercial opportunity, occupied the neighboring table. When I eavesdropped, I learned that they were in a conversation about world travel in which they authoritatively misinformed one another about Minorca and Majorca. In this sense, I found Buddha-Bar
unchanged. There was a supercar (a Lamborghini Gallardo) stationed at the hotel entrance; there was a velvet rope, to my mind an archaism of late-twentieth-century New York and its dream of VIPs and in-crowds; there was a pointlessly hushed ambience; and, scattered in the calculated gloom, there was a clientele of very made-up and dressed-up older British tourists who looked as if they actually believed that they’d passed a test of selectness and, when I entered, stared intently at me as if I might turn out to be Hulk Hogan or Henry Kissinger.
And there was Ollie, signaling to me from a shadowy booth. A blond woman was with him, and I realized right away that he’d sprung another one of his little surprises—a blind date. When I drew closer, I saw that my date wasn’t as blind as I’d thought, indeed wasn’t my date. She was Mrs. Ted Wilson.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS inexplicably preceded, in my mind, by what happened one evening years ago, in Union Square, New York, when Jenn and I were walking home from the movies. We became separated in the crowd. I stopped on the busy sidewalk and turned with an extended left hand and said, I’m over here, darling, and reached for her. Instead of Jenn I found myself eye to eye with a beautiful dark-haired woman in her early thirties, herself holding the hand of a man not at all amused by the accidental offer to his girlfriend of another man’s hand. The couple moved on; Jenn, I’m assuming, took my hand for a little while. Whatever the exact nature of our physical contact, I walked next to her in surreptitious anguish, because in that instant of misidentification a fantasy of distressing power and implication had been released—in which the dark-haired beauty drops the hand of her boyfriend and takes my hand with a smile, and together we stroll into a Union Square filled, as always on summer evenings, with young romancing couples, and we walk on through a steaming urban night, laughing and talking as everything and everyone converts into lights and vapor; and we, my dark-haired woman friend and I, jump into an old but reliable jalopy and drive out across George Washington Bridge, and drive and drive into the green deep of the continent, an adventure of gas station snacks and motel sex and maxed-out credit cards, driving onward through forests and farmland until, on a remote highway that pursues a twisting river—in Montana, maybe, or Durango, or Manitoba—a small, solid town catches us, and we stop there, and we take refreshments in a friendly little coffee shop, and we spontaneously begin our lives again for good there, among good neighbors. We befriend the lonely, pretty doctor and the gentle judge. We hold small, rewarding jobs, and we make two clever girls who hopscotch in the springtime. I have always wanted daughters. A chronicle of my awareness of my unhappiness would start with this banal, upsetting daydream, which, as I say, serves as a prologue to that moment in Buddha-Bar, when it was too late to make a run for it and there was nothing to be done except to stand there and wait for the unfortunate Mrs. Ted Wilson to be, entirely reasonably, not nice to me.
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