When I first came to Dubai, I stayed for a week at the Westin hotel, which I remember mainly for its tagline — ‘Between Being and Becoming’. From there I moved into a rented suite of rooms near the DIFC, on Sheikh Zayed Road. Beneath my window, six lanes of traffic bowled ceaselessly towards the distant skittles of Sharjah. This was a so-called serviced apartment. ‘Serviced’ meant that I’d come back from the office every evening to find all evidence of my occupation removed, as if I daily perpetrated a crime that daily needed to be covered up. Every one of my few belongings had been put out of sight; everything, down to the chocolate on the pillow, had been restored to the impeccable state in which I’d found the rooms when I first entered them. This was disconcerting, this non-accumulation of evidence of my existence. But what really rattled me was the mysterious population of cleaning personnel. The mystery lay not only in their alternative geography — theirs was a hidden zone of basements, laundry closets, staff elevators, storage areas — but in the more basic matter expressed in Butch Cassidy’s question for the Sundance Kid: Who are those guys? That’s not to say I viewed this tiny, timid population of women in maroon outfits as in some way hunting me down, as Butch and the Kid were, poor guys, all the way to Bolivia; but something wasn’t right. To go back to Carla: I was aware that she originated in Ecuador, lived in Queens with a husband and a young daughter, got paid around seventeen USD per hour: of Carla I felt I could do the rough human math. (Carla, I’m so sorry.) The apartment-servicing crew, though, I couldn’t work out. I couldn’t place those strange brown faces — somewhere in Asia? Oceania? — and I certainly had no data about the bargains that presumably underwrote my room being clean and their hands being dirty. I was confronted with something newly dishonourable about myself: I didn’t want to find out about these people. I did not want to distinguish between one brown face and another. I didn’t want to know whether these persons were Nepalese, Guyanese, Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Kenyans, Malaysians, Filipinas or Pakistanis. What good did it do? How did it help anyone for me to know the difference? For their part, these women seemed not to want to be differentiated or even seen, because they always scurried away those few times our paths crossed. Therefore it was a situation governed by mutual avoidance. As the weeks went by, something appalling began to happen. I began to feel a fearful disgust at these scurriers as they intermittently appeared out of the walls and concealed spaces of the building. The feeling was elusively familiar. One morning, as an accidental encounter again dispersed a group of them into hiding, I recognized that my repugnance for these ladies was the repugnance one feels on coming upon vermin.
Out of shock at my monstrousness, I’m sure, I decided (in defiance of the house rules) to tip the service personnel. Easier said than done. My unknown cleaner or cleaners rejected the bills I left under my mattress (and placed them, folded, on my bedside table) and she/they ignored an envelope marked ‘TIP! PLEASE TAKE! THANK YOU!’ Evidently I would have to dispense the cash in person. The problem was, I couldn’t make contact with a recipient. My long working hours — this was pre-Ali, when I was trying to single-handedly set up and operate the family office, an experience I never want to revisit — meant that I’d leave my suite too early and return too late to cross paths with the housekeepers, who moreover were trained to observe an extreme lowness of profile, the better to achieve their labour’s almost magical effect. One Sunday morning, I finally spotted a distant uniformed figure hastening across the corridor. I practically sprinted after her. When I turned the corner, she was nowhere to be seen; yet, from somewhere behind the walls, a kind of poltergeist could be heard. I opened an unmarked door and found myself in a windowless room with a rough concrete floor and a whining service elevator. For some reason I felt a little frighened. I was on the point of turning back when a cart laden with sheets came in. A small lady was attached to it. There was an exclamation, followed by a statement that was linguistically impenetrable but very clear: my presence alarmed and dismayed her. I gave the lady a reassuring smile. ‘Baksheesh, for you,’ I said, and I pulled out a wad of dirhams and made to bestow them on her. She, who appeared to be equally in her thirties and fifties, made a negative hand gesture and, without meeting my eye, drove the cart into the elevator, whereupon she was as it were absorbed still more deeply by the building. I abandoned my quest to privately reward these workers. Apparently that would have been to put them in harm’s way.
To avoid another such fiasco, I keep this place clean myself. It’s no big deal; I like to mop my marble floor, the cleanliness of which I gauge by the blackening of the soles of my bare feet. When Mrs Ted Wilson came in, everything was spick and span.
She dabbed away her tears and her resemblance to poor Lucy Vodden.
She was intent on staying. Short of manhandling her, I saw no way to get her out. I must admit, I was curious about Ted Wilson; and inevitably I was curious about his wife, especially with her being a damsel, and in distress. But curiosity killed the cat. We all know of those gallant volunteers who rush towards a burning train wreck only to suffer lifelong trauma from the nervous shock caused by the scenes they witness, not to mention the lung disorders contracted from the fumes they inhale or the financial ruin resulting from lawsuits brought against them about what actions they took or failed to take. I resolved to keep as much distance between Mrs Ted Wilson and myself as was consistent with the basic civility that might reasonably be expected of me, the put-upon stranger.
She got up and wandered to the glass walls, and one might have thought she was going to step right out into the brilliant white tartan of the marina towers. After a contemplative moment, she gave her attention to the décor: large black leather sofa, two matching leather armchairs, big flatscreen, massive black leather massage chair, mezzanine bedroom, computer desk with computer, framed photograph of Swiss mountains. I’m sure she also took in the air purifier, and the ultrasonic humidifier, and the electronic salt and pepper mills, and the 3-D glasses, and the touchless automatic motion sensor trash can. ‘This is basically exactly what Ted’s place looks like,’ she said. ‘Do you guys shop together for furniture, too?’
Now she was inspecting my bookcase. She pulled out a volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and said, ‘You even have the same books.’ She said distractedly, ‘You know Ted’s a historian, right?’
I said, ‘A historian?’
Mrs Ted Wilson took a seat. She related (unprompted) that when her husband initially went to Dubai it had been in order to teach for a year at the American University in Dubai. No one foresaw that he would almost immediately be offered the job with the advertising agency that was (as he saw it) his big chance to ‘finally break the 70K barrier’ and escape the ‘humiliation’ of an intellectual career that had left him teaching a course called ‘The American Experience’ in a place called Knowledge Village. (I pointed out that ‘Knowledge Village’ was merely the somewhat naïve-sounding (in English) designation given to Dubai’s academic hub, but Mrs Ted Wilson didn’t seem to hear me.) The Wilsons had spent most of the previous decade ‘dragging’ their two children (a boy and a girl) from one place to another, and now that both were in high school they agreed it was ‘out of the question’ to ‘uproot’ them again. Mrs Ted Wilson, meanwhile, had ‘a project that I wanted to complete’. It was agreed that Ted would take the ad-agency job and the family would take things as they came, on the basis that ‘life has a funny way of working out’. This plan now struck her as humorous, judging from the little noise she made.