I’m minded to say something to the kid about the historic context of this diver. It’s a lost cause, however, because one doesn’t know what the cause is. Who can really know what actually happened and what one is to make of it all?
We drive back to the office in silence. The good cheer fades. How could it not?
It’s back to business. Alain hits the number puzzles, I hit the stamps and bosses. Very little is said, either in the office or afterward, when I drive the kid home. I make no mention of weighing him. I will have nothing more to do with this boy’s body.
NOTWITHSTANDING THE OCCASIONAL COMMENT posted on Ted Wilson’s Wall, interest in the Ted Wilsons passed quickly enough. Other scandals occupied us. Let’s see: there was the English couple from Emirates Hills, the W——s, whose Sudanese help, hours after she was fired, was found dead on the golf course. There was the saga of the marriage of B. and M. C——, whose union survived revelations of B.’s cross-dressing, M.’s prescription-drug abuse, and certain colorful claims made by their neighbors. And there was that sad story of the Dubai-based American, a gentle soul by all accounts, who bred falcons in Kazakhstan for sale in Saudi Arabia and was fatally stabbed with a screwdriver out there, in the Chu Valley, and presumably died a lonely death. The Wilsons were no longer talked about because they were no longer around. In Dubai, like anywhere else, we focus on our own.
(I don’t want to attempt a taxonomy of expat chatter, but some distinctions should be made. Scandalized gossip is not to be confused with other modes of chitchat or outraged discussion:
• Stories of drunken antics: doing dumb, dangerous things while intoxicated is considered amusing, not scandalous.
• Nobody has much to say about Western tourists getting into official trouble (for making out in public, wearing too-skimpy clothes, being caught at the airport with microscopic traces of drugs on their shoes, etc.). People overseas may be interested; we’re not. The view here is that visitors should respect and inform themselves about Emirati laws and customs. If they don’t, that’s their lookout.
• Although a person’s financial failure/employment termination is always carefully analyzed, very few take talkative pleasure from it. There but for the grace of God goes one.
• Official injustices done to high-net-worth expats are discussed with sobriety. Take the story of Karl V——, who was arrested, imprisoned for a year, then deported—all because of alleged homosexual acts in a parked car. That got the attention even of straight people. Why? Because all of our heads are on one kind of chopping block or another. (This isn’t to diminish the special and inexcusable perils faced by the LGBT community here.)
• Misfortunes or injustices suffered by low-net-worth expats are simultaneously in our field of awareness and not on our conversational radar. (For example, Karl V.’s lover was a workman from India. He wasn’t talked about, even though his unjust punishment was indistinguishable from Karl’s.)
• Tragedies. We remain sensitive to death, serious illness, the suffering of children, etc., within the expat community.
• We don’t talk about injustices done to Emiratis by Emiratis. We don’t care.
• When it comes to the judicial mistreatment of raped women, we are affronted; and our affront has no communal limitation. Take the story of the young Emirati teenager who was abducted from her home and driven out into the desert, where she was raped, beaten, and left for dead. No asterisk of nationality is placed next to our sympathy for her experience or our horror at the fact that, after she somehow made it home, the rapists were exonerated and their victim, on account of her alleged failure to wear sufficiently modest attire in her own garden (into which the two rapists had furtively peeped), was officially blamed and disgraced for her alleged provocation of the rapists. This is no less appalling to us than (for example) the story of the French woman who was raped by three men (Christian foreigners, note well) and was charged with adultery after she reported the facts to the police. (The overseas press picked up both these stories, and there was a furor without borders. International outrage has no effect on our domestic outrage, except maybe to reduce it, because we disidentify with the fingering holier-than-thou crowd who look down their noses on Dubaians of every stripe, always unaware, in their anxiety to piss on us from a great height, that they have forgotten to wipe the shit from their shoes. (That’s not to question anyone’s freedom of speech or opinion. I’m just saying.)))
Nor should it be forgotten that, of the people who might have been interested in the Wilsons’ miseries, at least half left Dubai within a year. Yes—we have had a lot to brood over, starting with the near-bankruptcy of the emirate and the great economic paralysis that befell the land. (This development, so ruinous to so many, prompted a lot of gloating in the foreign media (British, in particular), where opinionators delightedly recognized a case of “hubris,” an intensely annoying word only used, in my opinion, by a nose-in-the-air jerk who is about to stride into a manhole. (These criticizers—who denounce our carbon footprint from their own catastrophically deforested, coal-built countries—not satisfied with characterizing the Emiratis as until-recently-illiterate camel-jockeying upstarts who have finally been taught a good lesson; not content with repeating unverified scare stories (the taps at the Atlantis give forth cockroaches; The Palm is sinking; The World is dissolving); and not sufficiently gratified by their “exposés” of the “dark side” of the “desert playground,” also attacked us, the expats. Apparently we were fleeing the “suddenly bankrupt” “sheikhdom” in “droves” (i.e., mindlessly, like driven cattle) or in “a Gadarene rush” (i.e., like the demoniac pigs who ran into the sea). I don’t let this stuff get to me. I do, however, look forward to the day Dubai has bounced back and the hubris experts, down in their manholes, are begging for a helping hand.))
So I’ve had a lot on my mind; a thousand and one troubles have kept me awake at night; and yet for some reason I have continued to think about the Wilsons.
Initially my thoughts followed Mrs. Ted Wilson; that is, in my mind’s eye I traveled to Chicago and omnisciently followed her into her own home, and into her bedroom, and into the shower, and watched her doing all the things associated with those places. These crimes of fantasy were of course perpetrated in secret, and with impunity. One’s thoughts are not yet searchable, thank God. Let me say, if I’m allowed to, that it’s not as if in these scenarios I was interacting with Mrs. Ted Wilson or doing gross stuff that would be wrong; and it’s interesting that increasingly I have watched her doing everyday, out-in-the-open stuff—shopping, driving around, drinking coffee. I think what I’ve wanted, most of all, is someone nice and safe to hang out with. Evenings in The Situation can get awfully long.
I have not Googled Mrs. Ted Wilson. The Jenn Rule applies.
(The Jenn Rule provides: It is wrong to Google a person who does not want to be Googled by you. As its name implies, the Rule was promulgated by me to me, in response to my incessant Googling of Jenn, an exhausting but irrepressible habit that did nothing to advance my understanding of how she was doing, if that was in fact my purpose. It dawned on me, after about a year of banging my head against a rigid superficies of data, that Jenn would not want me peering into and sniffing around her life; and it followed that I shouldn’t. I would not want her to shadow me online, that’s for sure. Once I had established, or discovered, the Jenn Rule, I saw no valid reason to limit its scope to Jenn. Thus, it applied to Mrs. Wilson because she would likewise not want me to Google her. (Note, however, that the Rule does not apply to cases where A, the searcher, is unknown to B, the searchee, who by definition cannot want to not be Googled by A. (Confession: my observation of the Jenn Rule is not really attributable to any uprightness in my character. I broke the Rule many times. It was only when a “Jennifer Horschel” search consistently yielded only third-party Jennifer Horschels (a few do exist) and it came to me that my Jenn had become unsearchable by me—it was only then that I stopped Googling her and found myself in compliance with th
e Rule. (I was of course terrified by Jenn’s sudden virtual absence, but I calmed down when I saw that nothing online or anywhere else pointed to her death. I could and can only conclude that she broke her own rule against getting married and in the process completely shed her maiden name, for which she also had no great fondness, I suspect, especially after some prick at the office thought it would be smart to dub her J-Ho. Although the tag didn’t stick and Jenn claimed to see a funny side, I have to think her feelings were hurt. (I did briefly re-break the Rule in order to track her down under her new identity, and I found out, by viewing the relevant photographs, that none of the Jennifers still working at my old firm was Jenn. Clearly she had also made a professional move. (I stopped my prying there, which again was hardly laudable. To refrain from making investigative phone calls is not exactly a triumph of abnegation. (Is Jenn a mother now? I hope so. Is she happy? I hope so.))))))
While as it were haunting Mrs. Wilson, I’d “see” her raging and weeping about her ex-husband, and it was this, I suppose, that eventually turned my own thoughts to the disparu. What happened to him? Where is he now? There was and is no information to be had, not even by way of a rumor. Ted Wilson has never been sighted again in Dubai or, as far as I know, anywhere else. Nowadays it’s he, rather than his beautiful first ex-wife, who loiters most often in my thoughts. I locate him fantastically. He is always somewhere in the East. At first I saw him in Bangkok and in Hong Kong, in Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta, and then, as I considered his position more carefully and understood that these places would be too exposed, that he would be able to survive there only by surfacing into identification, I saw him in smaller, still more remote places such as Balikpapan and Makassar and Davao City. I came up with these last-named ports by drifting always eastward on the online atlas, whereupon I’d image-search these specks on the map and understand that they were large, roaring, self-involved cities with refineries and airports and mature economies that likely would not make special deferential provision for the random incoming white man, and I—I mean Ted Wilson, of course—would have to move on still farther, in search of somewhere still smaller and more receptive to a stranger of dislocated competence who must remain incognito and yet keep his head above water. Is such a destiny still possible? It must be; there must be countless Lord Jims out there, bearded beyond recognition, every once in a while glimpsing with horror a face they know. And it may even be possible, I dream out of sympathy with Ted Wilson, that somewhere out there in the isles of the East, in the Sulu Sea or the Banda Sea or the Timor Sea, there is a neglected little port where honorary consuls drink sundowners on verandas, and ceiling fans whir almost in vain, and sinecures are not extinct, and the long call of the orangutan may yet be heard, a green and placid little harbor where an older white man of indefinite occupation may yet, without further inquiry, be received as a gentleman. This is what I imagine, in relation to Ted Wilson.
But here’s the thing: the fate of Mrs. Ted Wilson II went undiscussed. It was beyond our pale. It became known, or said, that she had avoided deportation and continued to work as a singer at the Arabian Courtyard, in Bur Dubai. No more was offered, and I made no inquiries. There wasn’t anything I could single-handedly do about the general neglect of Mrs. Ted Wilson II, if “neglect” is even the right word. Yet I came to be bothered by the disparity in the attention paid to the Wilson wives, not least by me. I felt ashamed—specifically ashamed, that is, which is to say, filled with a shame additional to the general ignominy that is the corollary of insight, i.e., the ignominy of having thus far lived in error, of having failed, until the moment of so-called insight, to understand what could have been understood earlier, an ignominy only deepened by prospective shame, because the moment of insight serves as a reminder that more such moments lie ahead, and that one always goes forward in error.
Some months ago, I was startled by a phone call from the past. Don Sanchez, the vertical athlete, was in town, and staying at the Arabian Courtyard. I had no memory of giving Don my contact details and had no wish to see him again, decent man though he is, and I really, really didn’t want to paint the town red with the guy. It was only because I couldn’t resist the possibility of laying eyes on Mrs. Ted Wilson II that I agreed to meet him at the Arabian Courtyard’s Sherlock Holmes English Pub. Don wanted to meet “somewhere more adventurous,” but I twisted his arm. That wasn’t very nice of me, I know, but those were my terms.
The Sherlock Holmes is like so many of the British-themed pubs that have spread all over the planet, a gloomy, friendly, wood-everywhere bar with dark Victorian-style wallpaper and a scattering of TV monitors showing “live” broadcasts of defunct soccer matches. It’s a fine establishment, in other words. Don and I ate hamburgers and French fries and drank pints of Foster’s. Don explained that this was his “one drinking night”: the inaugural Burj Khalifa tower race, which was the reason he’d flown over, was four days away, and his “hydration schedule” allowed for the consumption of his “four last pre-race units” of alcohol that evening. Don needed no prompting to tell me about the physical preparations he’d made for the race, which he said was the “most severe challenge” he’d ever “accepted.” He told me he had left the Lincoln Tunnel luxury rental (“I felt I’d gone as far as I could with the setup there”) and moved into a fortieth-floor abode on the Upper East Side (“which was lucky timing, because I had no way of knowing that I’d be running the Burj, and frankly the forty-floor track is a superb amenity”). I was hearing all about his nutrition goals and training routine and run plan when the entertainers—two female singers and a male keyboardist—appeared, to the loud clapping of a bunch of Indian dudes who occupied the table next to the little stage.
I was excited myself. While Don shared his recent performance stats and detailed the changes he was making to his stride pattern, I studied the two singers. I’m not an ethnicities expert, but they looked like Filipinas to me—small, brown-skinned, dark-eyed young women with glossy black hair that fell straight to their shoulders. Which one, then, was Mrs. TW2? Reproductive logic suggested that it had to be the older of the two—I assessed her to be in her early thirties—who wore a tight-fitting but entirely respectable very short black dress and high heels, and not the younger one, who looked to be in her early twenties and wore a short, sexy red dress and even higher heels and was the prettier of the two ladies, I guess most people would say, though personally I’m not one to start pitting women against each other in a competition of beauty.
The keyboardist hit the keys, and, before an audience of nine men and a woman, Mrs. TW2 began to sing “Jolene.” What a sweet voice! The nightingale of Dubai! She sang the song exactly and effortlessly in Dolly Parton’s voice, which is saying something, in my opinion. I further tuned out poor old Don, who was so to speak verbally ascending a tower of data of concern only to himself, ordered another drink, and fell into an ecstatic, inebriated appreciation of Mrs. TW2’s artistic abilities. The young singer may have been the object of the Indian dudes’ admiration, but I was rooting for the single mother and maritally wronged lead vocalist, who sang with great spirit at a venue whose league she was way out of. When Don suggested we go elsewhere, I bought him another drink and stayed right where I was. When Mrs. TW2 sang “Islands in the Stream,” my cup overflowed.
Except that I’d developed a dislike of the keyboardist, a—what, fifty-five-year-old?—white guy in a black shirt and a pair of John Lennon shades. His very long gray hair occasionally fell in front of his gaunt face, and as he played, he would pull the hair back into place with a cruel-looking little finger. From time to time, Mrs. TW2 gave him a frightened glance and received in return an indecipherable signal. The more I studied the onstage dynamic, the stronger grew my conviction that this repellent individual was a Svengali under whose invisible rule these two women, Mrs. TW2 especially, found themselves. You could be sure that he controlled the ensemble’s finances and kept for himself the vast bulk of its earnings, a regime he certainly enforced by the malign use of
his physical and/or mental powers. What a douche. I felt like going over there and pushing him off his little stool.
There was a break in the music. The Indians confidently called over the younger singer, and she went to join them as if she knew them well—which may have been the case. Acting under the inspiration of their example, and ignoring another request by Don to “make tracks,” I waved an inviting hand at Mrs. TW2. She beamed at me but didn’t move, ostensibly preferring to drink a glass of Coke with Svengali.
I got to my feet and went to her.
“Hi,” I said to her. “Me and my friend”—I gestured toward Don, who appeared to be taking his own pulse—“we were wondering if we could buy you a drink. You’re a wonderful singer.”
Mrs. TW2 beamed again. “I’m glad you’re enjoying the show.”
I smiled right back, making sure to blank Svengali, who was right there next to her, in order to demonstrate to Mrs. TW2 that he wasn’t all-powerful. Very amiable and harmless, I said, “Where are you from? The Philippines?”
She beamed.
“I’m from the U.S.A.,” I said. I said something about “my buddy over there” being in town for the Burj race. “Is that a Coke?” I said.
Now Svengali leaned over to her, and they exchanged words. “I have to sing now,” Mrs. TW2 said very happily.
“OK, great,” I said, I think. That’s when I gave her my card and said something innocuous, along the lines of “If you ever want to get in touch.”
Svengali spoke up. “My friend,” he said. “This is my wife. Please be respecting.”
That got under my skin—the ironic “my friend.” I was going to say something about it, when the “wife” assertion registered. Mrs. Ted Wilson II was now Mrs. Svengali.
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