Free The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen Page A

against the frame of the company couch, where one of the young women sat and eyed him with a sad but hungry look on her face. Dan knew that she knew she was looking at Abdullah al-Baylani, a billionaire who was not opposed to polygyny. Dan could practically see the dollar signs flashing neon in her head. To be Abdullah’s third wife would be a plum but fraught position. The female community would revile and ostracize her, projecting onto her the fear of their own husbands’ potential polyamorousness. The male community would view her as a sharmoota, a prostitute. They knew that a third wife would probably not be a mother to any new children; she would be a purely sexual vehicle. But there’d still be the mansion and the designer clothing, the first-class flights to Rio and Rome, and the thrill and affirmations that accompany being the youngest wife.
    Dan couldn’t believe he was even thinking the words “third wife” with regard to Abdullah. He never would have guessed his friend would entertain the idea of multiple wives, still couldn’t quite get it situated as fact in his head. Rosalie must wake in the mornings and wonder, What in God’s name is he thinking?
    “Ya Abdullah,” she said, tapping him on the shoulder. He looked up at her, an annoyed expression on his face.
    It was getting late and Dan was tired. He didn’t want to get caught in Bahrain overnight. The thought of his hair commingling with the life forms in the couch cushions made him itch. He caught Abdullah’s eye with a clipped wave, gave him the old saturated eyeball stare that signaled enough , and went into the kitchen to get some water. He took ice from the freezer—it was the one thing that was always in stock at the clubhouse, thanks to a gentleman’s agreement that one should never leave a man without rocks for his whiskey—plopped it into the cloudy water, and sat down on a plastic folding chair to wait for the sheikh to extricate himself from the spider hug of the wannabe third wife.
    From inside the kitchen, he heard Abdullah say “La, la, la.” No, no, no. Alarmed by his friend’s raised voice, Dan peered around the door’s edge. The woman was reaching for Abdullah’s forearm, bumping him as he turned away so his tumbler of whiskey fell to the floor with a clatter.
    “Ana assif,” the woman said, kneeling to pick up the broken glass. She looked up at them, her face a picture of despair.
    “Dan, get in the car,” Abdullah said while trying to shake the whiskey off his thobe. “Let’s go.”
    Fatima was on her cell phone, presumably calling her cousin, who had gone into town for another bottle of brown. Dan mouthed I’m sorry to her before finding the keys to the Range Rover. He climbed into the driver’s seat, the smell of leather comforting, like the tack room of an old barn. At this point in the evening, he was grasping for familiar things. With a short peel of tires, he set them on course back toward Saudi Arabia.
    The wind at the cracked window made distant motorcycle sounds, steady, puttering. Dan loved driving across the causeway and losing sight of land for a little while. In the darkness, he could see the water moving in orange streaks, illuminated by the streetlamps. He loved living in a coastal town. Unexpected moments of beauty always reminded him of the greater world—a dhow whose wooden frame stabbed at the falling sun, or a low dune fully covered in purple flowers. But those moments were fleeting, short lifts of life; he wasn’t really sure how to get back the sustained feelings of buoyancy he had felt when he’d been a family man.
    “Got a little hairy in there for a minute, didn’t it?” he said.
    “I just met that woman tonight and already she was asking me when we would see each other next,” Abdullah said.
    “What did you say?”
    “I said I’m married. But she wouldn’t leave it alone.”
    “Your reputation precedes you,” Dan said.
    “What does that mean?”
    “You’re well known around