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He’d turned to her and in his eyes, amused, certain, she saw how things could play out. For a while, anyway.
    â€œI’m listening,” says Angie.
    The guy jets all over, every week somewhere new, says Mathieu. Moscow, Mosul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur. The whole world is his playground. And wherever he flies, his falcon is there in first class with him.
    â€œDrugs? Arms? Mercenary?” she asks, and Mathieu looks at her like she might be on drugs herself.
    â€œWhat do any of these guys do?” he says. “What do any of these guys
have
to do?”
    Angie has just met a lovely Emirati man over lunch at the Noodle House, a chance meeting at one of the restaurant’s long wood tables, where it takes more effort not to speak to the stranger next to you than to ask and answer the usual “where are you from how long have you been here what do you do?” He was twenty-seven, he told her, and must have seen her as an attractive “auntie,” a woman old enough to be safe to chat with. He had just returned from the States where he’d studied naturopathic medicine. “I have been privileged to go abroad and learn,” he said. “We have far to go in the UAE . We do not know yet how to unify all parts of our being, our bodies and souls and minds.” He’d been so earnest, so diffident, this young man with his manicured goatee and perfectly pressed
khandoura
, that she felt inclined to believe him. This was more than the usual my-country-needs-me speech. “I think you mean that,” she said to him. And he’d given her a quizzical, slightly bruised smile.
    â€œGo on,
mon beau
,” she says.
    Wherever the man with the mansion travels each week, he finds a woman and brings her back to Abu Dhabi. “He does whatever he wants with her all weekend and then” — Mathieu shifts her from his chest as he rights himself against the pillow — “on Sunday morning he sends her back to wherever she came from.”
    â€œA playboy,” she says. “ UAE style.”
    â€œBut here’s the UAE twist. The car that takes her back to the airport? The Hummer or limo or whatever it is? The man orders the woman to fill it with money. However much cash she can stuff into that car she takes with her.” Mathieu looks flushed, almost triumphant. “
Incroyable, non
?” he says, and stubs out his smoke.
    She imagines a late-model silver Mercedes, then a black Maserati, which becomes a massive, white Land Rover. A leg, like one belonging to a Vegas showgirl, spike heel dangling from high-arched foot, dangles out the half-open back window. The girl of the week has been toppled backward from the weight of the money, only her perfect nose and perfect mouth visible between layers of 100-dollar bills, bushels of bills that remind Angie of the leaves she and her brother used to rake every fall in Massachusetts. It would be American money, she supposes. As the car drives off, a few loose hundreds fly from the window.
    â€œDoes he see her off?” she asks. And Mathieu looks at her again with something like annoyance, and gets out of bed. “What would that mean?” he asks. “That he cares? Don’t be romantic.”
    â€œIt would show there are manners behind his money.” She hasn’t planned to say this, didn’t know what she would say. But the man, the one who takes lonely walks through his home, would want to be seen as a gentleman by the women. She feels absolutely certain of this.
    â€œBut don’t you find it so Abu Dhabi?” he asks. “Isn’t it outrageous? Why aren’t you reacting?” Mathieu faces her as he pushes his arms into a robe. He’s trimmed down since he started biking again this summer. She likes to think it has something to do with her.
    â€œI thought I
was
reacting,” she says.
    In its fiscal and sexual excess, the story resembles others she’s heard. But this one brings a