In the Kingdom of Men

by Kim Barnes

  “You’re wondering the same thing I am,” I said, “about the Bodeens.”

  Mason nodded. “Maybe they just needed a change of scenery,” he said.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it?” I said. “Having servants?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s strange.”

  “I hate that you’ll be so far away.”

  “Not so far.” He pulled me into his lap, and I rested my head on his shoulder, felt him lapsing into thought. “Burt Cane says he’s going to be retiring soon. Hate to see him go. I can tell he’s one of the good ones, open to new ideas.” He stroked my arm. “When I get back, let’s take a little trip. Abdullah says the desert is full of ruins. Maybe we can dig up some old pots or something.”

  “Ruthie’s coming for lunch on Monday,” I said.

  “See?” he said. “You’re already finding stuff to do.” He rocked forward, hefted me into his arms. “Time for our Arabian honeymoon,” he said, and carried me to the bed.

  He made love to me, then, in that slow way he had of letting me know he was sure, our rhythms familiar, not so different from that first night in the back of his sedan when we fit together, he had said, like tongue and groove. He tucked me up against him, the heat between us cooling in the refrigerated air. I clung to him for a long time, as though I felt he might be torn away. I didn’t want him to leave me behind, not the next day, not ever.

  “You are my anchor,” I whispered to him.

  “You float my boat,” he said, and kissed me so deeply I fell out of myself and forgot I had meant to hold on.

  I listened to his breathing even and slow, and then I heard it—the rain hitting the roof. I slipped from bed and walked down the hallway, stepped out the back door of the kitchen. At first, it was like standing downwind of a sprinkler, a mist of warm water, and then it came hard enough to hurt.

  I tucked back under the eave, closed my eyes, breathed in the smell of what had been nothing but now was peat and dung, new grass, the smell of my grandfather’s rifle shot for rabbit, the blood of the rabbit itself. When I opened my eyes, the flare in the distance burned a hole in the night. My gown hung cold and wet at my shoulders, slicked to my legs, but I didn’t want to go in.

  I need to remember this, I thought. By morning, every drop would be gone.

  Chapter Three

  Early that Sunday, the first day of the Muslim workweek, I helped Mason pack his duffel and saw him to the door. I waved to Abdullah, who waited to drive him sixty miles north to the port at Ras Tanura, where he would catch the launch that would ferry him more than one hundred miles to the drilling platform. I had no sense at all of what it might be like to work, eat, and sleep on a mechanical island in the middle of the sea. None of it seemed real as I watched the Land Cruiser disappear down the street, fighting the flutter of panic in my chest. I was too shy to consider calling some of the other wives, joining them for card games that I didn’t know how to play. Yash seemed busy in the kitchen, raising his head only once to smile at me pleasantly, and I turned back to the empty house.

  I rearranged the living room furniture, moved it back again, then spent twenty minutes at the linen closet, refolding the bath towels the way my mother and grandmother had taught me—three times down, three across—and then the sheets, each corner pocketed, creased tight. I moved to the study and surveyed the operating manuals and old atlases that lined the shelves, but not a single novel.

  In the corner sat a small chair and worktable, a large lighted magnifying glass clamped to its edge, and a shallow drawer full of long-handled tweezers, picks, and scalpels as fine as the tools of a dentist. An empty whiskey bottle, mounted on its side, contained the half-finished body of a ship, its masts still tucked, strings leading into the bottle’s mouth as though, at the very moment the sails were to be sprung, the maker had been called away, dropped his instruments, and left the schooner in limbo. Next to the small jars of paint and miniature brushes lay a pipe still redolent of sweet tobacco. I set the stem between my lips, and the bite brought water to my mouth. I picked up the framed photo that anchored the table’s corner: an older couple, lifting glasses of champagne in front of a pretty red speedboat that looked like it was about to be launched, painted along its bow, Arabesque. His hair a wispy ring of silvery gray, hers a short mass of ash blond curls cut tight to her head, both of them smiling—the Bodeens seemed happy enough, leaning into each other. I studied the photo, looking for clues. Maybe one had taken ill, I thought, or maybe there had been a death in the family, or maybe they had simply had enough of the desert. I laid the picture in the drawer with the bits of sailcloth and compact spools of thread, slid it out of sight.

  I sat in Mason’s chair and opened the first of the red leather books, ran my finger along the gold script like I was reading Braille. I wondered what the intricate pattern of dots and swooping dashes had meant to the Bodeens, or maybe the set was nothing more than decor. The lush illustrations indicated an epic tale or maybe ancient history. I put the volume back, then pulled out another, let it fall open. I rubbed the paper between my fingers—like the diaphanous pages of a Bible—then flipped through the illustrations until I came to the end, where I found several pieces of ledger paper glued over the last pages, just like my grandmother had pasted the cutout recipes from ladies’ magazines to the pages of Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette. I read down the columns of penciled numbers, but the equations were as indecipherable to me as the Arabic script, and I placed the book back with its mates.

  I walked a circuit through the bedrooms, then back down the hallway to the living room, where I frumped down on the couch and read through a dated stack of Aramco World magazines, the pages filled with colorful photographs of Arabs and Americans, building, paving, extracting, standing back to admire the progress they had made. Arabs raising radio antennae, Arabs driving drilling rigs, Arabs in the classroom and the laboratory—the harmony and utility perfectly captured, the desert no more impossible than any frontier had ever been, the ingenious Americans and their Saudi allies headed for sure victory over whatever lay between them and the massive fields of oil. “If it’s there, we’ll find it,” one explorationist proclaimed, and who wouldn’t believe him? Spread across the centerfold, a sleek supertanker rested at anchor near Sidon, its streamlined efficiency set against the clear beauty of the sea. A portrait of its smartly uniformed captain, pipe in hand, handsome as a movie star, filled the next page. “A big man,” the caption read, “with broad shoulders, hair the color of brass, a lopsided grin, a lively wit, a taste for strong tobacco and Dutch gin, and a gift for running a taut ship with a minimum of effort.” I was halfway in love with him myself and maybe even more so with the journalist who had dared to embed such titillating details and somehow sneak them by the censors. I read cover to cover, hard and too fast, soaking up every word, forgetting to save some for later. When I looked at the clock, I saw that it wasn’t even noon.

  “Don’t be a slugabed,” I told myself. “Get up and do something.” I pushed from the couch, tied my hair in a ponytail, and went to survey the sparse backyard, wondering what vegetables might root in sand. Okra would love the humidity, potatoes and yams the porous soil. When I saw Faris watching me from the corner of the house, I lifted my hand, but he ducked away.

  As I paced off the plot, I kept my eyes open for anything that might strike, remembering how, in Shawnee, I once had stepped off the porch without looking. The scorpion had hit my bare heel sharp and quick, not much more than a bee sting at first, but by midnight, I was burning with fever, my leg swollen to the knee. My grandfather began to pray and didn’t stop, right there beside me for two days and two nights, until the tremors lessened and I fell into sleep. When I woke, he stood from his hard chair, rested his hand against my cheek, and looked at me with his watery eyes. “What doesn’t kill you makes you strong,” he said, then turned for the door and the chores he had left undone.

  When I went inside and announced to Yash that I would walk to the commissary, he
protested that shopping had always been a part of his job.

  “But I want to plant a garden,” I said, “and I need seeds.”

  “You’ll not find garden supplies at the grocery store,” he said.

  “Not okra?”

  “What is okra?”

  I described the small fibrous pods.

  “Ah,” he said, “bhindi!” His smile dropped to a frown. “You will not find that either.”

  When I insisted, he handed me a basket and the umbrella, its shade little help against the heat that rose from the blacktop, gumming the soles of my shoes. I stopped to peer out over the compound, its low-roofed houses, the young trees piecing the sidewalk into lacy shade, the homely fence, the stacks lifting their incendiary flares against the blazing sun. I checked out the recreation center with its swimming pool, the bowling alley where Bedouin boys set the pins, and the movie theater with its schedule of censored Hollywood films, traveling operas, symphonies, plays, and meetings held each Friday, one for Protestants, another for Catholics, although, in deference to the laws of the land, the word church was never mentioned. The small auditorium seemed the heart of the compound, everything illegal all in one place.

  There was a small library inside the center, but I knew about small libraries—I could exhaust the stacks in no time if I weren’t careful to ration. When I walked into the single room with its few shelves of books, I saw that it wasn’t small but tiny, its volumes dog-eared and stained with coffee. I opened an issue of Good Housekeeping to find the pages limp and scissored, whether by the censors or wives hunting recipes, I wasn’t sure. I sighed and turned to see a young teenage girl watching me, her nose brindled with freckles, hair the color of flax.

  “Hi,” she said, her voice so high she sounded as though she had inhaled helium. “Is the new Seventeen in?”

  I smiled and shrugged. She plopped down cross-legged and groaned at the dated covers. When she turned back to me, I peered at the magazine in my hands.

  “Are you new?” she asked.

  “I’ve only been here a few days,” I said.

  She eyed me wisely. “You must be out of school.”

  “I just moved here with my husband,” I said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “I’m never getting married,” she said. “I’m going to be a stewardess for Pan Am.” She dusted off the seat of her pedal pushers, as though she’d been sitting in dirt, and left me in the library alone.

  I moved outside and walked to the playground, where I watched the younger children tussle. I wondered how my life might be different here if I had a son or a daughter to join the romp and holler of the group, some experience to share with the other young women. I felt in-between, somehow, out of rhythm with the world, and tried to remember whether I had ever known another childless woman, but only the biblical stories of Sarah and Rachel and Rebekah came to me—women who prayed and obeyed and believed until they were old and still their wombs opened and their sons were conceived. Sometimes I wondered why I had opened my own womb so soon, what had possessed me to give myself away. I remembered Mason, all that talk, all that sweetness, and couldn’t help but smile. Even knowing what it had cost me, it was a mistake I might be willing to make again.

  I twirled the umbrella like a parasol and strolled to the compound’s entrance, where I stood at the fence, peering into the distance while Habib peered back. As far as I could see, there was nothing but the golf course, where a Bedouin caddy, thobe fluttering, waited patiently while an American dressed in bermudas teed off. A turnstile at the fence led me to the narrow lane of suqs, the smell a mix of sour lanolin and cinnamon. Spun fleece, daggers, silver bracelets, camel bags, honey, bolts of bright cloth—each small store had its specialty. I chose a handful of thimble-size strawberries, which the Arab clerk weighed on a balance scale and poured into a twisted paper funnel. I ate them as I walked to the commissary, which was little more than a line shack built of cement blocks. Cases of soft drinks stacked one wall. Shelves along the center held canned goods and cleaning supplies. I inspected the long open freezer as the two Arabs manning the checkout watched. One cleared his throat.

  “Australian beef,” he said, his words heavily accented. “It is very good.”

  I nodded and moved to the produce, where I found several bunches of wilted green onions that might yet revive if planted, softening potatoes and yams sprouting eyes that I could quarter and bury, and a miraculous handful of okra pods. A deep freeze held frozen vegetables and fruit, including a battered bag of sliced peaches, good enough for a cobbler. In the back of the building, I saw a doorway leading to a smaller room, where an enormous Nubian man, his head wrapped in a turban, cut pork into chops. He smiled down at me when I requested a pound of bacon and wrapped it carefully in butcher paper as though diapering an infant. On the way back to the checkout, I stopped at the small rack of used books and magazines and picked up a worn copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, censored but unabridged—a week of reading if I took it slow.

  The Arab clerk who tallied and bagged my few groceries fingered the book’s pages, brought it to his face, and sniffed. The novel felt like contraband, enough to convict me, but the man seemed patient, even kind. He bound the book in brown paper, tied it with twine, then pointed me down the street to a small bakery, its interior roaring with the heat of a wood-fired oven, where the baker, gesturing to caution me that it was hot, pulled out a puffed loaf of bread that quickly flattened. It was then that I realized what had struck me as odd: only men worked the shops, sold the groceries, fired the ovens. I stepped back out, the sun like a heat lamp, and retraced my steps home, my stride falling in time to the muezzin’s second call to prayer. The entire outing had taken less than an hour. Already, the day seemed like it had stretched on forever.

  Yash greeted me at the door, fretful as a brood hen. He approved of the bread and bacon, expressed surprise over the okra, and cut his eyes at the heavy paper package that I secreted to my room. I hid the book beneath the head of the bed, snugged against the wall—a childhood habit still familiar—before going back to the kitchen, where I found Yash considering the bag of thawing peaches.

  “I’m going to make a cobbler,” I said. I opened the drawer that held tea towels and found six of them, each embroidered with a day of the week and a little Indian child, buckskin dress or leggings and breechcloth, engaged in the day’s corresponding chore—Monday, Wash Day, Tuesday, Ironing … only Sunday was missing, but since Saturday was Baking Day, I pulled it out, touched the precise, even stitches—the work of a superior seamstress—then raised the towel to my face, breathed in the smell of clean cotton, and tucked it at my waist.

  Yash pursed his lips. “I will make you the perfect crust.”

  We considered each other a moment before he reached for the lard and I made a move for the sugar. We worked tentatively at first, careful not to brush a shoulder, an arm. I mixed the peaches with sugar and a little flour before spreading the fruit in the baking dish, dotting it with butter, lemon juice, and a dash of cinnamon. Yash unrolled the dough from his rolling pin as easily as laying a baby’s blanket. We began at opposite corners, finger-thumb fluting the edges, his calm intent something I felt with the appreciation of a child, hot afternoons, my mother making pies as I napped, my bed an old quilt spread in the coolest corner of the kitchen.

  “Tell me about your family,” I said.

  Yash took a paring knife and slit pretty petals in the crust, added a border of tendrils and vines. “My family is Punjabi with a tradition of military service.” One eyebrow arched up. “We are, after all, a martial race, according to our lords and commanders.”

  “What about a wife?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer but gave a slight nod, then pinched a piece of dough. When he held it out to me, I drew back.

  “That will give me worms,” I said.

  “What?” Yash looked shocked.

  “That’s what my grandmother always told me.”

  He popped the bit into his mouth, looked at
me slyly. “There are no worms in my dough,” he said, “but perhaps the same cannot be said of your peaches.” I caught the hint of a smile.

  Yash was lowering the dish into the oven when the knock came so hard that I jumped, but he seemed hardly to notice. “One moment,” he called, but I beat him to the door and looked down to see a legless Bedouin garbed in pinned-up trousers and a faded tunic, riding atop a little wooden platform with wheels, balancing an enormous basket on his head.

  “Is-salaam ‘alaykum!” he cried.

  Yash appeared behind me, wiping his hands. “No,” he said, and turned to me. “I apologize, memsahib. I have no idea how the beggar found his way past the gate.”

  I gave him a sharp look before addressing the peddler. “And upon you peace,” I said to the man, who smiled broadly, two black teeth stubbing his gums. He presented the basket, fanning the flies, and I saw that it was full of glistening pink shrimp. I knelt and ran my fingers through the briny casings, cupped two hands full, then watched as the man spread a newspaper and cleaned the shrimp on the spot before handing me the tidy package, smiling his painful smile. He looked parched to me, his mouth puckered and dusty.

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked. “Water?”

  Yash left and returned with a few riyals and a glass, which I handed to the peddler. He drank in one long swallow before thanking me repeatedly and rolling his way down the street.

  “The Muslim won’t eat them himself, but he’s happy to sell them to us infidels.” Yash dumped the shrimp into a colander.

  “That water was warm,” I said. I was remembering the two taps in the kitchen—remembering, too, the separate drinking fountains in Shawnee, one for blacks, one for whites.

  “You do not give a Bedouin sweet water to drink. It is a taste he is not used to.” Yash stirred the shrimp with his fingers. “It is the way of every American home.”