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
