The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen Read Free Book Online Page B

other people to witness it, they could distance themselves from the actual struggle. Rosalie had been a fairly popular performer on campus, with her deep, stripped-down voice that reminded Dan of the great torch singers. On Saturdays, she sang in the dive where she also tended bar, the Lazy Lion. There was a guy on sax and another on piano. It was never a studied pursuit of hers, just something she did for fun. So many people had loved her—the tall, pretty girl with the mass of red hair Even though he was two years in with Carolyn by that point, he had felt a tug toward Rosalie, a little crush he’d never needed to confess because everyone shared the same feelings.
    Rosie’s taste for the dramatic raised her arguments with Abdullah to a form of high art, both of them gesturing wildly. Sometimes, Abdullah would just spank her, in utter seriousness, right in front of everyone, and then they would collapse all over each other with laughter. Dan and Carolyn, and whoever else happened to be around, would applaud the slapstick but roll their eyes about it later when they were alone.
    “So I guess you told her, then,” Dan said, pausing for a reply. When none came: “I thought you were going to wait until Faisal had gone to university.”
    “Yeah, well, an idiot Yemeni jeweler was bragging to her about what good friends we were, what a good customer I was. And he made the mistake of asking Rosalie how she had liked the anniversary present that I bought for her. Only, our anniversary is in May. She’s not stupid.”
    “The man was understandably confused.”
    “The man is a meddlesome Hadrami fool.”
    “Fine, ya Sheikh.”
    “Yallah.”
    ON THE CAUSEWAY, hundreds of cars were backed up, the line reaching almost to the halfway point between the two countries. Suburbans brimming with families and sleek sedans packed with single men were gunning to get to Bahrain to start the weekend in a place where the religious police weren’t going to be looking over their shoulders. There, they could go to the movies or a restaurant where unrelated men and women could sit together, or a one-star hotel where easy virtue was the house specialty. Horns blared loudly and music came in bursts as Dan and Abdullah whizzed past the stalled cars. Using Abdullah’s VIP transit pass, they made it quickly through security. Abdullah looked at Dan.
    “Princeton Club?”
    Dan shrugged, then steered the car down the coastal road to the abandoned Gulf Oil compound, where the dilapidated clubhouse served as an old boys’ club that came alive every weekend, its sliding-glass doors lit from within, casting golden rectangles of light on the sand outside. It had been named by one of the earliest and most notorious of the old boys, Braxton Neel, who decided to honor his alma mater by slapping her name on his little Gulf fraternity. The compound’s current role in the community solely depended on the continued apathy of various governing forces. Dan didn’t ask questions. After spending the better part of twenty years working in Saudi Arabia, minus the years when he’d gone back to the States to watch his marriage fail and his savings evaporate, Dan had learned that the curious and the questioning were the first to be surplused, the last to attend the consular dinners for the petty diplomats and businesspeople. At one point in his life he had taken pride in his contrarian ways, but now, at the age of fifty-two, he was content to be a company man sitting in a company chair, banking his small but untaxed paychecks and dreaming of the cedarwood cabin abutting the Pedernales River that would be his first purchase upon returning stateside. A place where he’d have a fridge just for beer and a cabinet just for whiskey and sturdy bookshelves that he would fill to the top.
    “I don’t know how you do it,” Dan said. He couldn’t not bring it up, although he was sure that Abdullah didn’t want to talk about the fiasco.
    “What?”
    “Two wives. Must be