The Pact We Made. Layla AlAmmar
did. There were at least fifteen minutes of embarrassed laughter as he ran through his ‘There’s my favorite account manager’ and ‘They should put your picture up in reception: boost business!’ routine. He was of my father’s generation; they’d gone through the same bureaucratic training ground before heading off to their careers. Our families had been quite close once upon a time, spending weekends at each other’s beach houses and meeting up on summer trips to London or Paris. His dark eyes were kind, but practically disappeared beneath low lids when he smiled, the crow’s feet extending far and deep. He had a generous mouth and thin black hair that was salted at the temples.
Our ceremony done, he tugged at his pants’ legs and took a seat. Bu Faisal with his three-piece suits, always the same design, whether it was blue or black or gray or brown. He must have had a dozen of them made – all of them expertly stitched in heavy fabrics, twills and sharkskin wools, with Thomas Pink shirts peeking out at the collar and sleeves, and color-coordinated silk pocket squares. Like Yousef, I’d never seen him in a dishdasha.
‘How are you, my dear?’
‘I’m good,’ I replied, settling into my seat across from his at the small meeting table. ‘How was Tokyo?’
‘Oh, you know the Japanese,’ he said with a wave of his hand.
I shrugged and chuckled. ‘I don’t actually.’
‘Everything’s so small there. Makes me feel like a bear blundering through a museum gift shop. I did find this for you though.’ He reached under the table for a black gift bag.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ I said with a small frown. Bu Faisal had a habit, which I could not break, of bringing me little things from his business trips. Chocolates, perfume, scarves and trinkets. I tried to hint that it was inappropriate to accept gifts from clients, but he never got it, or more likely chose to ignore it.
‘It’s nothing at all,’ he said, waving his hands as I peered into the bag. ‘Just a little thing I saw that made me think of the flowers you draw everywhere.’
I pulled out the item nestled among the white and pale pink gift paper. A Japanese folding fan. It was made of light-colored bamboo, overlaid with scallop-edged ivory silk. The design on it looked hand-painted and very old: a winter landscape, all white fields, black trees, gray skies and crystal blue ice. Snowflakes fell from the sky, looking like cherry blossoms coming to earth. There were ladies walking through the scene, ducking beneath parasols, the reds and oranges of their kimonos like red-breasted robins streaking across the snow. The trees were black and bare and laden with powdery white; bent with hunchbacked heights, they made me think of this ukiyo-e art I saw in a book, floating worlds, like Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
I turned it over, gently running my hand over the delicate silk. ‘Is this an antique?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I found it in a shop and thought you’d like it.’
I shook my head, trying to think how much it might have cost him. ‘I can’t accept this.’
He pulled back with a look of mock horror. ‘Don’t be silly! What will I do with it if you don’t take it? Keep it. It’s nothing, I promise you.’ I was of a mind to protest further, but he changed the subject. ‘My accountant still needs to send you some documents, but you should have them within the week. How’s work anyway?’
I shrugged, returning the gift to the bag and laying it on the table. ‘Hamdilla. Work is good.’
‘And our boy, Yousef?’
‘Really good. We can stop by and see him after the meeting if you like.’
‘Yes, yes, after the meeting,’ he repeated with an officious nod and a grin. ‘Let’s talk risk, shall we?’
And we did. We talked risk and premiums and protections. We went through all the accounts, for all the many holdings across all his many businesses, all of them insured by our little firm because our chairman was an old squash buddy of his. I didn’t know exactly how insurance schemes worked, and he had so much money that at times I felt like he must have been insuring himself as well as all our other clients in some roundabout manner. I was not qualified when I took over his accounts a couple of years ago. Bu Faisal and I had run into each other by chance when he came by to say hello to the chairman. After asking how the family was getting on, he’d asked Bu Mohammad if I could handle his accounts. I was given some of his smaller holdings to start with, but he preferred dealing with me rather than Old Haithum, who’d been with the company thirty years and always smelled like cardamom and paprika, so after a while I was given all of his accounts to manage. For the most part, the work took care of itself, and when it didn’t, he usually knew what I needed to do to fix it.
Bu Faisal was married to an old friend of my mother. Despite how close they used to be, I only saw his wife every once in a while, at a wedding or reception of some sort. She looked how most Kuwaiti women of her generation would like to look: hair long and thick, with highlights that looked natural; a face kept young with regular injections of Botox and collagen; a body that didn’t bear witness to the four children she’d had. She would get up and dance with the younger girls at weddings, tying a scarf around her hips when the belly-dancing numbers came on. She wore the outrageous jewels and big-name brands that she told you were from Paris or Milan, even though they all had branches at the local mall.
When I was younger, when our families used to spend time together, Mama would bring up their marriage a lot. ‘Look at how Bu Faisal treats her,’ she would say, pointing at him serving his wife tea, so unlike my father and uncles, who expected their wives to do that sort of thing. Or when his wife would show off a ring or necklace he’d bought her, and Mama would turn to me and my sister and say, ‘That’s the sort of man we want for you,’ as though lavishing someone with gifts made for a perfect marriage. She painted him as the ideal man, and my sister gobbled it up, but I wasn’t so easily convinced. At an early age I’d learned about men and the masks they wore.
Evening fell and with it the temperature. There was a definite chill in the air: on the tip of your nose; in the soles of your feet; across your shoulders. I sat in the garden, giving in to my desire to sketch Ariel from the film I’d seen with Yousef. I was attempting to duplicate those delicate features and lithe form, but my sprite was looking nothing like the actor.
It was something I often did, try and replicate things I’d seen in films or famous paintings in galleries I visited on vacation. Usually I would alter the paintings in some way, twist them into something relevant to my own time and place; I’d add Bedouin tents to a background or turn an English nose into one more reminiscent of a Saluki. Less often an image would come to me, fresh and original, and I would rush to transfer it to a sketchbook, but I was, for the most part, powerless to execute these things my mind conjured. I found more success with paintings and illustrations that were already created. When I was younger, I’d dreamed of going to art school, of becoming an artist, but Baba maintained that art was a hobby and not a career and besides, copying work rather than creating it probably wasn’t what art schools looked for. I’d done business at university because I was ‘meant to’, and I subsequently took a job in the finance industry because I was ‘meant to’. It was expected of me, like it’s expected of most of us.
I abandoned Ariel and started doodling my namesake in a halo around his head, petals curling around his pointy ears. I’d been drawing dahlias since I found out my name was a flower. My father had come back from a business trip once and brought me a coloring book of different flowers. When I’d colored them all, I tried drawing them from scratch. He bought tracing paper and taught me how to secure it with paper clips, then, his hand over mine, he showed me how much pressure to put on the pencil as I followed the lines and curves. Over and over, until I could do it with my eyes closed.
My dahlias were everywhere: on old schoolbooks; on the knees of the faded jeans I ran around in; along the borders of other illustrations I attempted; on steamed-up car windows, notepads at work and paper place mats at restaurants.
Raju, the houseboy, startled me, wheeling out the duwa – the tea