The Wet and the Dry Read online

  I never found this cocktail entirely tedious, which is all one can ask of a city these days. Where Brooklyn and Hoxton and the Eleventh Arrondissement seemed afflicted by a dated preciousness, not to mention a growing lack of identity, I found Dubai grimly interesting. Brash, unnerving, and false, but not dull, not starved of identity, as if identity were a nutrient that never failed to deliver.

  The concession to alcohol is the most surprising facet of this minuscule kingdom. It has been made for financial reasons, but it is a concession all the same. The Emirates are religiously conservative. (There’s “identity” for you; it’s just not an identity we like.) The decision of the Maktoubs, the ruling dynasty, to permit alcohol widely throughout their own emirate was a bold one. It made the city more Western, more tolerant, more indistinguishable from occidental cities, as it was intended to do. It was this quality that led to the charge of soullessness and a dearth of identity. The managers of Emaar used to say, more or less, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

  Elena and I went drinking every night. I took her one night to the notorious bar of the York Hotel, a pickup scene, and we drank whisky sours among a crowd of Chinese girls who were more toasted than we were. Indian businessmen swarmed through that small lobby area looking like wide-awake sleepwalkers. Sex and booze are always in each other’s company, handmaidens to each other. The York is a wild bar. We also went to the Lebanese places where you can drink a bottle of Jumblatt’s Kefraya or a Le Brun arak, and you can drink them deep into the night. There was the pleasure of being with this beautiful, headstrong, unfaithful girl and drinking with her inside our emotional cocoon. Elena seemed, in fact, quite anxious about the prospect of not being able to drink in Oman.

  “They can drink in that country, can’t they?” she kept asking. “It’s New Year’s. There’s only one thing I insist on at New Year’s, and that’s a bottle of champagne. Is champagne legal in Oman?”

  “Of course it is. Would I be taking you to a place for New Year’s where champagne was illegal?”

  “I never know with you, bestia. You’re such a lush, you don’t even think about things like that.”

  “I thought about it. Champagne is legal in Oman.”

  In reality, I had no idea if it was or not. I knew nothing about Oman.

  “But The Lonely Planet,” she objected, “says it’s more conservative than Dubai. Much more. What if champagne is illegal?”

  “Then we’ll have a dry New Year’s.”

  “A dry New Year’s? There’s no way I am having a dry New Year’s. What is a dry New Year’s? It’s nothing. New Year’s without champagne is nothing.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  When we drank together, the moods came thicker and faster, and they were different moods. The tensions, normally latent and indistinguishable from inertia, sparkled at the surface and acquired a menacing eloquence.

  “I don’t want an Islamic New Year,” she whispered. “I mean, I respect the culture and everything, but not on New Year’s. And I don’t want any lectures from you about not being local and all that bullshit. I want a bottle of cold champagne.”

  “You will have it, polpetta principessa.”

  The relationship driven, or watered, by drink has its own rules and its own rhythms, even when we are not aware of them. The suppression of alcohol is itself a sexual suppression. Alcohol is the fuel of desire, and to prohibit it is to prohibit the flow of male and female and, if you like, to prohibit the movements of erotic pursuit.

  I used to think with Elena that there were moments that could not have existed without alcohol. Not just the explosive rows and recriminations, the scenes of rage, but the lovemaking, which left bruises and scars (treasured and left as were), and the moments of falling off into a sleep that was deeper. Alcohol shared has a different effect. I wondered, in fact, if our relationship was disintegrating as my parents’ had done, under the influence of a drug, because it cannot be denied that one says very different things when under that influence, just as one fails to not say things. The equilibrium of tact and sensitivity, of careful, ongoing thoughtfulness, breaks down in a storm of unframed emotion. The words slip and keel over, and things of incredible brutality and unnecessary truthfulness are said. And yet I also watched her head on the pillow, angelic and icily blond, the hair disordered, the hands seized up as if in the middle of an incomplete gesture—the sleep of the drinker. But not that of the alcoholic or the abuser of drink. The sleep of the woman in whom the Dionysian thread has not been broken by prohibition and misuse and the misogyny of the Teetotaler God.

  It is easy to leave Dubai by car, and swift. A few miles on the road toward Hatta, and the glitz is left behind. Thorn trees, a gray gritty desert of drinn and wavelike sand, and the wild camels nosing their way along the oueds. Many visitors take to dune-buggying and two-night desert camps, which are invariably luxurious, but few drive into Oman from the Emirates. At the edge of the Al Hajar Mountains, the Omani border post just beyond Hatta in the hills is housed in a vast and palatial building well stocked in images of the country’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos, a man who dethroned his father in 1970 and then survived a violent Marxist rebellion—the Dhofar Rebellion—with the timely aid of the British SAS and the incomparable David Smiley.

  Qaboos has been mildly favorable to the British ever since. Nowhere else in the Middle East, or indeed the world, can you sit at an outdoor café in a city square and watch huge screens relaying the Changing of the Horse Guard—an equestrian spectacle much appreciated by the audience. His country has also become rich through oil, making his quaint monarchy stable in the trickle-down way. Despite unrest during the Arab Revolution, the country’s low unemployment, magnificent infrastructure, and relative absence of ghetto poverty have held it firm for the moment. It has been agitation spilling over from Yemen that has most concerned the elderly, benign Qaboos. Al Qaeda are here on the desert roads.

  It is a country of sea and desert constantly meeting, of small towns and oases, with no large city other than Muscat, which is not a large city. On the radio, the religious sermons begin as soon as you cross the border and descend through iron-dark mountains toward the beach-town lights of Suhar on the Indian Ocean.

  The coast road then plunges south three hundred miles to the capital. A wide, six-lane marvel, fast, with no police. At the edge of the land cling white villages set against an indigo sea. Indian immigrants swarmed the intersections, running across the freeway to get to the lines of neon-lit restaurants on the other side. You catch their laughter in passing. Risk of death for a nice curry. On the landward side stand freshly painted mosques and banks set in landscaped palm gardens, opulent petrol stations where you pay eight dollars to fill the tank. There is no public transport. Everyone has a car because they are so cheap to run. Not a bus in sight, just the speed and lights of oil-funded superhighways. And yet this American template has not produced an American result. Arab pop music on the airwaves, but little of the Western variety. In the villages and even the towns, the quiet domesticity, the closedness of the traditional Islamic settlement, prevails. No crime, no disturbance.

  The old town of Muscat is a mixture of government offices and open-air museum with, at its center, Qaboos’s Ali Baba royal palace. It is lightly guarded, and its windows face directly onto the ocean, onto piles of rocks where the waves crash. Muscat is a city of forts. Every hillside is crowned by walls, towers, and battlements. The hills themselves rise like jagged piles of pig iron, almost black. The sea is everywhere, yet it does not ruffle the miniaturized stolidity of the city.

  One cannot stay there. The hotels for the foreigners, the all-in resorts, are clustered a little farther on around the village of Al Bustan and the remoter fishing village of Qantab, which itself is untouched, or else near the fashionable seaside neighborhood of Qurm on the other side of the city. In these two locales you will find the Intercontinentals and the Shangri-las, the Hyatts and the Radissons, oases of alcohol within a dry nation. They were all booked soli
d for the holidays. Oman is popular among the British middle classes with a taste for buffets and artificial beaches.

  We drove to the Shangri-la near Qantab to inquire about a room. A grandiose setting, among the desert cliffs and coves. But inside, a suffocating scallop of a hotel filled with people who would clearly not set foot outside for a week. Arabia here was present as a motif in the restaurant and lobby decor, the pendant iron lamps and the dining tents set out at night along the man-made beach. There was a bar, and it was stocked, and people were drinking at it, but this would not offset the wider misery of staying here. But they were, in any case, fully booked. We walked around Muscat in the late afternoon, in that landscape of military wariness and embattlement, walls within walls within keeps, and then drove back to the modernized suburb of Al Ghubrah, where we knew of a more commercial hotel called the Al Midan Suites, popular among business travelers. It sat among construction sites and next to a school. There was a Thai restaurant on the ground floor, but because it was next to the school, it was forbidden to sell alcohol. A dry hotel, but they had rooms.

  We unpacked and lay on the bed. The sea could be seen just beyond the parking lots and cranes. A whole day without a drink, and I could already sense the slight anxiety that this had aroused. Elena crawled on top of me and said, “Drink or amore? Which one first?” Amore, then, but soon after the drink. We went down into a cool, breezy night and an empty street. There was nowhere to drink, and Al Ghubrah is a lively neighborhood without tourists. We drove to Qurm, a short voyage along the Qaboos Freeway, and parked by the sea promenade. A path wound along the low cliffs and along a wide beach lit with fires, and around it stood shawarma cafés and fruit juice bars. It was our first evening alone without alcohol, perhaps ever. Walking under stars, along that lonely path, I felt myself sinking slowly back to earth, a feather descending, and I was sure that this was true of us as a couple as well. Nevertheless, we continued to speculate on where we could get a drink. It became a game between us. Where could we get a drink without going into an overbearing hotel?

  Slowly, hour by hour, the crisis of not drinking was developing. The crisis of being alone with each other without mediation, alone without stimulation or distortion or the slight drama of the drink, the sexual release of the drink.

  Alcohol stimulates the receptors for the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine, along with adrenaline and serotonin, is one of the oldest neurotransmitters in the brain and is shared with most mammals and even, it is thought, with fruit flies. It is associated with pleasure, locomotion, and motivation, and it also mediates addiction through its ability to reinforce pleasure.

  This ancient, primitive chemical inside us keeps us alive in a very basic way; the dopamine neurons produced in the substantia nigra part of the brain are to some extent what makes us enjoy being alive. A rare disease called familial Mediterranean fever is said to destroy dopamine receptors in humans and produces a condition known as anhedonia: the inability to feel pleasure. Alcohol is also thought to have an adverse effect upon the neurotransmitter GABA, gamma-aminobutyric acid, which governs inhibition in the mammalian nervous system.

  The purest stimulator of dopamine is cocaine, but alcohol is close behind, though it is in some respects “dirtier,” more complex, and more dangerous because it hits more receptors than just dopamine. Yet because it can flush us with dopamine, it is also life giving, exultant, sense enhancing, and liberating. It wounds slowly as it awakens.

  Perhaps this is why sobriety feels, at first, so solitary. There is no intensification of life, no rush, and inhibition—that is, separation—returns. Alcohol is able to create a feeling of togetherness when it is drunk in company, especially when it is drunk by a man and a woman together. The solitary alcoholic is only one aspect of drinking. There is also the couple bound together, united and freed by it, their bodies flooded with dopamine, their GABA repressed. This creates closeness and giddy ease, a losing of the mind that is not only desirable but necessary.

  This loosening of the chemical structure of the nervous system is important in friendship, too, because it increases spontaneity and frankness, affection, and temporary selflessness. It is like walking away from the GABA-bound self for a while, and it is this that we identify as the conviviality of alcohol. But with the couple, it is even more important. The tensions of lovers are not easy to resolve day by day, night by night, and alcohol is one of the means whereby open moods are induced. Those moods can also create the macabre scenes of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  A relationship between a drinker and a teetotaler is a parlous one. The teetotaler feels misunderstood and is resentful of the drinker’s facile elasticity and tendency to overstate, to forgive and enjoy the passing moment. The drinker resents the teetotaler’s rigidity, primness, and limited ability to let go of her relentless mental clarity. Her clarity—despite its beauties—is irritatingly pedestrian in the end. Each finds the other a bore.

  The drinker knows that life is not mental and not a matter of control and demarcation. The teetotaler, on the other hand, knows full well how even a molecule of alcohol changes body and mind. The Muslim, the Protestant puritan, and the teetotaler are kin; they understand the world in a very similar way, despite all their enormous differences, while the drinkers, too, understand the world in a way that unconsciously unites them. They know that the parameters that contain us are not all human, let alone divine. You could say even that dopamine unites us for a short spell with drunken fruit flies and happy dogs. It takes us out of the boring, two-dimensional misery of the human.

  Since we were now dry, we began to get up early and drive through Muscat to the beach near Qantab, with nothing in mind other than hiring a fishing boat and exploring beaches farther down the coast. It was a landscape of dark ocher stone, headlands carved by wind, the coves behind them sealed off from the interior by desert scrub. Across that volatile sea went the aquamarine boats of the Omani fishermen always looking for a quick deal. At the end of these days, isolated on a cove with no one else, I would feel panic at being so soberly remote.

  On some days we forwent the boats and drove down the coast road toward Sur. The villages feel abandoned to the rhythms of the sea. Dibab, Fins, Bamah. The beaches at desert’s edge, windswept and austere, paths running between flattened gardens of okra. We lay together in the wilderness, making words out of pebbles on the beach, walking through the dunes. We talked less and less, but this did not matter in the way that it might have mattered a few weeks earlier. I noticed that she was more withdrawn and that she was not unhappy to be withdrawn. But from what was she withdrawn?

  The days at the desert sea were crystal clear, in terms of consciousness. It takes several days for all traces of alcohol to leave the bloodstream, and when that happens, the clarification is surprising. You move differently, you think differently; you sense things differently. You intuit your lover differently. There was something nightmarish about it. And at the same time it was a salvation. The eroticism changed shape.

  If we had been drinking, we would have made love on the distant beaches, an act that would probably have led to our arrest. Without drink, we were more mindful, more aware of our responsibilities. A different kind of respect for each other emerged. But the trashy, slippery treachery underlying everything became more obvious.

  Sometimes the fights were like something decaying in slow motion, a peach in a bowl caught in a weeklong film. They were caused by suspicions and manias that remained quiescent when we were sober but that alcohol brought into consciousness in an unstoppable way. A decay in which one could suddenly see the nasty end of things. I wondered then if I had suggested Oman simply because I knew it would be dry. Rancorous and violent evenings would be impossible in the Islamic monarchy by the sea, and we would be forced back into the level-headed banality that is sometimes what saves us from other people.

  New Year’s, however. That day we drove to the desert town of Nizwa and back. We arrived in Muscat tired and dusty and dressed up for the one nig
ht we had decided we would score a serious drink. The receptionists at the Al Midan took a dim view of trying to find a bottle of champagne anywhere outside a Western megahotel. We said we would go and have a look. In all of them it was three hundred dollars a head for New Year’s dinner with a bottle of bad bubbly, usually Mumm, thrown in for the midnight hour. Exorbitant, then, but as eight o’clock approached and the year began to expire, it seemed irrelevant how much we would have to pay to sip the intoxicant. Four hundred, five hundred, we would have paid it. Elena’s face began to harden as the dim possibility of not finding it at all began to occur to her. A determination appeared.

  “We’ll find somewhere,” she said as we went out to the car. “A bottle of champagne at midnight is the one thing I insist on.”

  In Muscat you have to navigate through huge roundabout intersections, along lonely unmarked roads fringed with malls and developments, inside which your destination often lies. To get to Qurm, where the nearest hotels lay scattered along the beach, we had to get onto the Qaboos Freeway and find an exit that would take us to the Hyatt and the Radisson. By the time we got there, we saw below the drive a garden party under way with a crowd of people in paper hats. The New Year’s party.

  “No,” Elena said, turning away, “I can’t do it, baby. I can’t sit at one of those tables and pretend I’m enjoying myself.”

  “You get a bottle of Mumm’s.”

  “It’s not even good champagne.”

  Do we care if it’s good? I thought. Is that what we are after, quality?

  We drove to the Radisson, which sits on top of a hill at the end of Qurm. It was a madhouse. The Persian restaurant had a few places still free, as it was also three hundred dollars a head with the bottle of champagne. The tables were packed with all the infidel refugees fleeing Islam’s alcohol laws for the night. We took one look and wilted. “Come and join us,” the manager kept crying, making sinister gestures at these overloaded tables. “It’s your last chance in Muscat for a midnight drink! Everywhere is now booked, sir.”