Of Sea and Sand

by Denyse Woods

  Annie had suspected, when she was younger, that it was on account of her partiality toward Gabriel that she believed him to be so much more talented than Max, but this was fact, not affection. Everyone knew it. Gabriel was hugely, instinctively gifted. He never had to work as hard as Max, but because his focus could meander, the gift eventually became limp. Where Max had passion, Gabriel had fun. Where Max was competitive, Gabriel was laissez-faire. If his big brother had outperformed him, if he had achieved greater things, it would have been because Gabriel allowed it. But for all his work, all his hours on the piano stool, Max’s playing had none of the edge of Gabriel’s sharp, intuitive expression. His interpretation, one teacher had said, was close to perfection. And yet, although applause and admiration were heaped upon him, he had had enough by the time he turned sixteen. He wanted a life, he had told his devastated parents, not the career of the concert pianist for which they, and the School of Music, had been grooming him since he was four. And so Max went after the laurels that everyone—teachers, examiners, and relatives—knew were rightfully Gabriel’s. But Gabriel, Annie used to tell her frustrated parents, had another gift—for living and giving, for friendship and humor.

  They valued that not at all. Perhaps they were right.

  Max had only his work, and they all admired him for it. They loved his peculiarities, his stooped frame hanging over the keyboard come what may, and the way he forgot to eat, sometimes even to wash. They loved him for his poor attempts at telling jokes, though he had no timing, except when he played, of course, and even that had been acquired through hard work. Perfection was the only mistress Max had ever sought.

  Recently he had almost, almost, found her.

  “This is my brother, Gabriel.”

  Annie waved in his direction as they stepped into a square hallway, and a tall, dark-haired Frenchwoman reached out. “Gabriel, how lovely,” she said, shaking his hand. She looked like a long black pencil. “I’m Stéphanie. Come and meet the others.”

  In a broad living room, two other couples stood up as they came in. He didn’t take in their names, but tried hard, for Annie, to adopt some kind of great-to-be-here expression. Keen. He had to seem keen, to appear as though he had come of his own volition, but the assembled guests, it turned out, weren’t particularly interested in him. Small talk rushed in behind the introductions. Expat gossip. He sat mute, feeling like a prize idiot. Baksheesh. Ignorant bastard. Books about Oman had been thin on the ground in Cork, but Annie had left a couple behind, which Gabriel had read while waiting to leave, so he knew about the Portuguese, the British, and the battle of Dhofar. He knew to expect desert and mountains and longed to learn something of Bedouin ways. These had been his expectations of Oman—rudimentary, perhaps, but not unreasonable—and yet the first word he had assigned to this culture was “baksheesh,” which came from he knew not what preconceived notion. He still felt the sharp sting of his worldly brother-in-law’s rebuke.

  He turned his attention to the assembled company: Stéphanie’s husband, Mark, was a dapper Englishman, even sporting a silk cravat; Joan, a woman in her forties probably, wore a long skirt and cheesecloth top, and looked as if she had fallen off the hippie wagon, keeping the clothes, but rejecting the lifestyle, to live in air-conditioned comfort in the Gulf. Her husband wore pristine whites and had such highly arched eyebrows that he looked like he was about to take off. Marie, clearly a good friend of Annie, and her husband, Jasper, also English, were warm and engaging.

  It wasn’t until they were seated at the dining-table that they turned their attention to Gabriel, with a rush of questions. How long would he be staying? What did he hope to do during his holiday? How was he finding Muscat? He had little to say on that score—all he had seen of Muscat was a small airport with two huge sabers over the entrance, some gray-gold hills and a short stretch of seafront, where he had walked with Annie in the late afternoon.

  Joan, leaning her forearms on the edge of the table, said, “Annie was telling us that you’re a musician.”

  “A teacher, actually. I teach piano.” They all looked at him, expecting more. “At the School of Music in Cork.”

  “So are you in between terms right now?” Stéphanie asked, perplexed.

  Fair question, since it was mid-March, but how was it, he wondered, that people sniffed out the holes in any story without even knowing there were any to be filled? “No,” he said. “I’ve taken a leave of absence.”

  That silenced them, but a change of topic only made things worse when Joan said, in a pert, determined tone, “Annie, I haven’t seen you since before Christmas! How was your brother’s wedding?”

  “Not this brother, I hope,” Jasper quipped. “Unless you’ve run away from your new wife already?”

  Gabriel smiled.

  Joan persisted: “Did you find something to wear? You were fretting, I seem to remember, about finding something elegant but warm.”

  Annie chewed a mouthful of lamb at length, as if hoping for inspiration, then swallowed, reaching for her glass, and said, “We stopped off in Rome and I got a dress there.”

  That at least was not a lie, Gabriel thought.

  “It must have been a wonderful day,” Joan went on. “I always think winter weddings must be so romantic. Did it snow? Winter Wonderland and all that?”

  Annie turned her glass between her fingers before saying, “Mmm. It was lovely. No snow, but a great day.”

  Gabriel frowned at her. Rolf frowned at him.

  “I don’t think it’s romantic at all,” said Marie. “I’ve never understood why anyone could possibly want to get married in the winter. The bride must have been perishing, poor thing.”

  “Oh, she was,” Annie said, turning her eyes to Gabriel. “Perishing.”

  Pressed for more details, Annie got off to a halting start, but then the words, the fables, began to flow out: she described the wedding, related key moments and amusing anecdotes, and even made Rolf and Gabriel smile indulgently when she looked to them for confirmation that this or that had been the funniest, most touching moment. It was altogether bizarre: a conspiracy of invention.

  The wedding chat exhausted, the guests turned their attention back to Gabriel, pushing forth suggestions of how he should use his time and telling him he must see this and this, and mustn’t miss that.

  Mesmerized, exhausted, he had never worked so hard to be courteous to people who meant nothing to him, but he would have feigned interest in a babbling parrot if it would help him regain his sister’s respect. Looking at her face now was like gazing up from within a deep pit to see her peering over the rim, down at him.

  “Why did you say all that about the wedding?” he asked her from the back of the car after they’d left. “You don’t have to protect me, you know.”

  “I’m not protecting you. I’m protecting myself. Besides, one lie is much the same as the next. I went with the happy lie.”

  “But how can you sustain it? Isn’t Marie a close friend of yours?”

  “Yes, and I’ll tell her . . . in my own time.” After a moment she said, “I mean, they’ll think we’re a very odd family.” Rolf put his hand on her lap. “But we’re not . . . or we weren’t, or at least I didn’t think we were.”

  Gabriel knew better than to speak, since he was the one who had given the family this new perception of itself. He looked out. The night lights of Muscat told him little about the town, but when they continued on foot, after parking the car, the dark, quiet alleys that led to the house spoke louder. This was a secretive place; much was held in behind the thick walls. Probing deeper into the warren of back streets, Muttrah felt like a den. His den. He and his shame could hide out there, he thought, for quite a while, undisturbed.

  When they came into the house Annie went to the kitchen; Rolf followed her, while Gabriel, near-blind with exhaustion, said goodnight and went up the stairs, but stopped when he heard Annie say to Rolf, “I wanted to tell them. I wanted to say, ‘This is why he is here. This is what he has done.�
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  “But you didn’t,” Rolf said, in his most pragmatic tone, “and you mustn’t. He didn’t come here to be judged, and you, my darling, you of all people, must not judge him.”

  “Why not? Why should I not? Everyone else does!”

  Gabriel could not move without revealing that he was still on the stairs.

  “This is how we change,” Annie went on. “I turned my head and he became someone else. Do you think I should try to save what’s left of him? Of my Gabriel?”

  “I think it’s best you let that Gabriel go.”

  “I wish I could. And I wish I could leave. Get away. If I don’t, I’m afraid I might hurl a glass across the room and cut his face. I want to cut his beautiful archangel face!”

  Gabriel went on up. Short of breath, he passed his bedroom and climbed to the top of the house, where a wooden door led onto a small rooftop balcony. He stepped out and stood, fingers in hip pockets. In spite of stars aplenty, galaxies crowding, and a glow coming off the streetlights on the seafront, it was still, somehow, a dark night. Between the stars, the sky was black as oil and deep. Perhaps all Arabian nights were this black.

  He tried to root himself in place, not time, to blot out why he came to be there. It took quite an effort to strip away the circumstances, but a slow intake of warm night air and the sight of a minaret along the bay brought him properly to Oman. He thought about the invaders and the traders sailing into this cozy cove over the centuries. Arriving in their long wake, he felt the history in the soles of his feet and saw it in the towers that overlooked the town from the surrounding hills. The three Muscat forts, Rolf had said, were built in the sixteenth century when the Portuguese, alarmed by the size of Oman’s navy, occupied this coast to protect their route to the Indian Ocean. Now it was one of the busiest waterways in the world, and the lights Gabriel could see on the blinking horizon were oil tankers, no doubt, plying back and forth.

  The dinner party had been the first social event he had attended in months, the first time he had been part of light conversation, had eaten a meal in lively company. It was a relief that nobody had known anything about anything. He had been prepared to face further reprobation, and even though a bunch of strangers could inflict no greater humiliation than he had endured in his own tight neighborhood at home, he was grateful for his sister’s discretion. In Muscat he could breathe, was breathing already, in spite of Annie’s froideur. How deeply aggrieved she must be, he thought, to go to such lengths to disguise the events that had brought him here. She had almost convinced Gabriel that Max’s wedding had been a grand shindig, so much so that, listening to her describe it in fantastical detail, he had vicariously enjoyed what had not happened, and never would.

  “Max, Max, Max,” he said out loud, and the warm Muscat wind curved around him, like a longed-for embrace.

  A shuffle of bare feet in the stairwell made him turn: Annie, coming to join him. Good. Perhaps they could talk here, with only the sky to eavesdrop. But no one emerged. He had heard her, he was sure of it. Stepping toward the door, he put his head inside. No Annie.

  It was Geraldine who kept Annie awake, not Max. Geraldine, the perishing non-bride.

  She had been, in Annie’s view, an entirely predictable event. Ten years earlier, she could have described to a T the woman who would one day drag Max away from his piano for just long enough to get him to the altar. Geraldine had made herself indispensable from the start, as if she had seen too many films in which able, slightly frumpy but frightfully sensible women take on those men who are not quite tuned in to the diurnal workings of a life and manage to make them function by reminding them to eat, show up for appointments, and change out of their pyjamas before leaving the house. Geraldine almost certainly seduced Max first—it would not have occurred to him to do so, and if she did not exactly propose to him, he most likely proposed under nifty direction. Everyone rejoiced: the family now had less cause to worry about Max because, with Geraldine’s help, the world made more sense to him, and he to it.

  She had been endearingly excited about getting married and went for the full hoopla. This otherwise sensible woman in sensible clothes became altogether giddy when talking wedding dresses, bridesmaids, and banquets. Her dull purposefulness was lost in the romanticism of the event, and she even counted the days, she coyly admitted, from ten months out. When Annie had gone home for the summer, to avoid the murderous Omani heat, she shared in Geraldine’s excitement—somebody had to, since her brother frequently forgot that they were getting married at all and seemed bewildered whenever his fiancée mentioned entrées or invitations. So Annie became fellow plotter and even helped Geraldine select her dress. It was at least elegant, which could not be said of any other item of her clothing.

  What of Geraldine now? she wondered, sitting up in her bed.

  She got up, as had become her habit, and went to the kitchen, where she sat, desolate, pretending to wait for the kettle to boil. For all his oddities, Max was never a caricature; he wasn’t a nerd, quite, though his eyes were round and protruding, and his smile vaguely goofy. He was thin and gangly, and always wore drab V-neck sweaters (dirty gray and dull olive), with check shirts, inoffensive corduroys, and heavily rimmed glasses. He enjoyed watching soccer (he supported Liverpool, because his younger brother did), had few friends, and he liked for everything to be nice and for the people around him to be happy, so that he didn’t have to expend energy on their concerns. Most of the time, he simply wanted to think about musical scores.

  He was an unassuming person and Annie liked him, but she loved Gabriel more. She still hoped that nobody would ever find this out. When she was little, having a favorite brother felt like a sin; as an adult, it felt unfair. But Gabriel was so much more accessible than Max and he knew her so well.

  Until recently she had always believed that she knew him too. Now she had learned that there was something in Gabriel that none of them had known or seen, not even himself. She wanted to pretend that it had nothing to do with him, that he too was a victim, an innocent. It didn’t work. What he had done was part of him, was in him. It had come out. He could not disown it any more than Annie could, because there it was—out, for all to see, and horrible. She could not swallow when she thought of it, and often woke at night sweating, waving her hands over her head until Rolf took them and calmed her.

  She felt ashamed: guilty by association. The truth was, she hadn’t wanted to be the one to put Gabriel back on his feet, but there was no one else to do it, and she owed it to their parents. Her job, and Rolf’s, was to gather him in, as only family could, and reconstitute him. Not punish him, but fix him, then put him back into the world with the fervent hope that he would never do anything like it again. The black patch that had shaded all their lives would surely pass over, having dumped its storm upon them.

  But this visit—Gabriel coming for an indeterminate stay—was difficult before he had even arrived. Her anger with him bordered on disgust, tinged with hatred. That was it. That was why it had been so hard to smile when he had come in, looking forlorn, from the airport. She had wanted to shake him, but she had hugged him instead, saying, “How are you?” when she meant, How could you? Oh, she’d already said it, many times, in Ireland. It had become the broken record, an unspoken mantra, a plea. Even when she held him against her, feeling the steady embrace of the brother who had protected her, comforted her, seen her through bullying schoolgirls and broken hearts, all she could hear in her head was, How could you, how could you, how could you?

  In her dreams, she hit Gabriel. In her dreams, night after night, she hit him, over and over, and woke exhausted from all the slapping. It never served to reduce him, or what he had done.

  “We must take you to Nakhal,” Rolf said to Gabriel over breakfast the next morning. “It’s a beautiful spot, with hot springs and a fort. I like to paint there.”

  Whenever he wasn’t ordering spare parts for heavy plant machinery down at the refinery, Rolf was painting. Self-taught, and good, he was
neither immensely successful nor struggling, but he was generally preoccupied with his canvases and colors, and Annie knew how to live with that. She had come well prepared for life with an obsessive.

  “Great, yeah,” said Gabriel. Tone of voice was everything, he was learning. In Cork, he hadn’t spoken much of late. No one had wanted to hear what he had to say, and they had had nothing to say to him, so he had been getting the silent treatment, far and wide. But not this far, he hoped. Here, he would surely find his voice again.

  “So what will you do today?” Rolf asked him.

  “I have to go to the house.” Annie wiped some crumbs off the table and into her palm. “Check on the painters.”

  “I’ll go with you, so,” Gabriel said, looking around the neat front room. “I don’t know how you can leave this place, though.”

  “It’s too small,” said Rolf. “The villa is very nice. You’ll like it.”

  Gabriel didn’t like it. It was in a new suburb made up of low houses with high walls, big gates, and yards too young to have sprouted so much as a weed. The house was spacious, open-plan, and had a huge window overlooking an uncultivated space, the kitchen was wall-to-wall with dapper American units, and the three square bedrooms each had their own bathrooms.