Rolf and Annie, he increasingly believed, had genuinely not seen Prudence. Before they moved out, she had been quick to pass through a room, usually behind them. She almost always moved behind their backs. Why? Annie appeared to be truly perplexed by his affair, which only perplexed him further, because if she did not know this woman, who the hell did? Who had planted her there, on his life?
Annie was also more unsettled, less in control, than she had been when he had arrived, as if she were seeking the ghost within him for her own reasons.
“You know,” she said one afternoon, when they were taking a walk along the beach west of Muttrah, “they can cure things.”
“Who?” The hot wind was beating through his shirt.
“Jinn.”
A fleshy body lay farther along the shore by the waterline. As the waves came in, it shifted lazily, like someone turning in their sleep. Annie curved away from the shiny gray heap, but Gabriel stopped to look down at the dead dolphin. “So you reckon I should prevail upon the jinn to cure me of my jinniya?”
“I wasn’t thinking about you. I was thinking about me.”
He looked up. “You? How so?”
“There are jinn, Sabah says—special ones for different things, like . . . infertility.”
“But you aren’t infertile!”
“Who says?”
“It’s far too soon to reach that conclusion.”
“I’ve been trying to conceive for over a year.”
“A very tough year.”
“I was thinking,” she said, moving on, her feet in the water, her thoughts farther out, “I could go to one of these ceremonies.”
“Ceremonies?”
“You know, like . . . not quite séances, but you can go to see people who invoke certain jinn who have particular powers. Like when there’s a bad jinni, it’s because somebody has given the evil eye to whoever they’re peeved with, so that the jinn will create problems or illness for them, but then there are good jinn too, who can also intervene through a kind of holy person, or sorcerer.”
“Oh, Annie, don’t buy into all that! Far better you see some specialist in Berne. Don’t mess with that ritualistic stuff. From what I understand, a lot of it comes from Zanzibar and it’s . . .”
“What?”
“A bit too close to black magic for comfort.”
“This, from a man who sees an invisible woman?”
“She is not invisible. She is simply shy, careful about who sees her.”
“Prove it then. Introduce us.”
“But that’s the thing—she won’t meet anyone or go anywhere. It’s not what she wants.”
Annie shook her head. “What a choice—either I believe that you’re going slightly mad or that you’re being visited by jinn. Frankly, the latter option is less scary. I need you sane, Gabriel.”
“I am sane and she is real, Annie.”
“How can you be so sure when I look at the same place as you do and see nothing?”
“Because I’m sleeping with her, that’s how.”
Annie stopped, her arms hanging by her sides, the corpse of the dead dolphin twisting about behind her.
“And now you’re going to call me depraved, I suppose, as well as delusional?”
“Humans can sleep with jinn,” she said. “They even marry them. Every village in the country has that story: the man who married a jinniya.”
“Listen to you. You’re talking about them as if they’re real.”
“Maybe they are. What do we know?”
Gabriel put out his arm. She hesitated, then moved into him and he held her against him. “We’ll laugh about this one day,” he said. “When we’re sitting around with our kids, yours and mine, Prudence’ll tease us about how we thought she was a jinniya.”
“That’s her name? Prudence?”
“That’s what I call her, yeah.”
“From your favorite song.” Annie looked up at him with what might have been a flicker of forgiveness in her eyes.
Prudence asked him, one day, as they lay spent on the bench in the front room, why he was there.
There—where? Muscat? Oman? That particular house? There were so few specifics in her conversation.
Gabriel ran his finger along her breastbone, skiing through the sweat that lingered between her breasts. “I’ve run away,” he said, coasting toward her navel.
A woman, she immediately presumed.
He had yet to speak of it to anyone. There had been deluges of earnest, but rhetorical, questions: “Why would you do something like that?”; “Did you not think?” But he had been given no right of reply, ever, since no one really wanted any answers or excuses. Here was his chance to speak, with this woman, who would not judge him. He could release it into the air, into sound and words, and see where it went.
“I’m running from what the French would call ‘honte,’” he began. “A more haunting word than ‘shame,’ wouldn’t you say? Being ashamed, that’s what a child feels, that’s . . . standing with your feet turned in, your hands behind your back, and your eyelids lowered. But ‘avoir honte’ is something else, something that has to be carried, much heavier than shame. It sounds like an unpleasant disease, doesn’t it? And in most respects, it is.”
She turned her gray eyes on him.
Did she see him at all? Did she see anything?
“Are you a jinniya?” he asked, without expecting her to respond.
Nor did she.
Back in her fresh new house in Muscat, Annie was sitting with Stéphanie outside the French windows, staring across her soulless unplanted yard. Their voices were heavy, the conversation low. Annie was smoking—which was stupid, since she wanted to conceive—but when Stéphanie had expressed concern
