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Philippines. Privately, Angie thinks he’s a wimp, a mooch and possibly an alcoholic. When Maribeth goes home every July for two weeks, Eduardo seems to resent the time she spends with their three children. “Sex, all time sex,” Maribeth once confessed, shrugging.
    â€œNew boss!” says Maribeth, looking peeved. “Who you think, Madame?”
    â€œCut me some slack, MB . I can’t remember the horrors of all your friends’ work lives. I have my own, remember?” And Maribeth shoots Angie a look that lands where she knows it will, right in Angie’s uneasy Western sense of justice and entitlement: I have nothing to complain about/I have everything to complain about. Since the global financial downturn, or GFD as Angie calls it (great fucking debacle), Berlitz has cut her teaching load by half. Every month she worries the school will lay her off. She’s not Arab, after all. Firaj, now doing a tour of duty in Islamabad, sends money when he thinks of it.
    â€œOkay, I know it’s different,” says Angie.
    â€œYou bet,” says Maribeth, taking Angie’s cup and steering her out of the kitchen into the dining room. She puts Angie’s cup on the long, polished table, sits in the adjacent chair.
    The long and the short of it — though none of these sagas are ever short, thinks Angie, trying not to look at her watch — is that Daisy’s difficult Egyptian family has turned into two difficult Egyptian families.
    â€œSixteen person,” says Maribeth. “Poor Daisy. She sleep three hour.”
    â€œBut that’s illegal,” says Angie, feeling, in spite of herself, the quick fury these stories still churns up. “Jesus, Maribeth.”
    â€œI tell her no good people. I tell her back when,” says Maribeth.
    â€œBut now they’ve fired her?”
    â€œThey say,” says Maribeth, shrugging. “But still make her work. Maybe just…” and she struggles with a word.
    â€œThreaten,” supplies Angie.
    Her mobile is ringing from somewhere in the apartment. Angie feels Maribeth willing her not to answer it. “Sorry, MB ,” she says, dashing first into the kitchen, then into the entryway, trying to remember where she dropped her purse. Mathieu has programmed her phone to play an old Donna Summer song,
Hot Stuff
. It’s cheesy, but she loves it.
    â€œ
Mon ange
,” he says, when she finally locates the phone on the powder room counter. “
Ça va
?”
    â€œMaribeth’s telling me another horror story. Daisy again. What am I supposed to say to her at this point?”
    â€œJust listen,” says Mathieu. “Be, you know,
sympathique
,
mais pas trop
.” Mathieu keeps telling her she is a bit too involved. Boundaries, he says. He barely speaks to his family’s live-in nanny. She’s from Indonesia, a devout Muslim. Contact with a man, any man, makes her feel uncomfortable, he insists. Angie can tell by his breathing that he’s taking a cigarette break. What with the GFD , he’s going into the office even on Friday afternoons. “I must make myself
indispensable
,” he says. It’s lucky so many French words are the same in English, otherwise Mathieu would be translating all the time and that would get to be a drag for him. “
Ennuyant
,” a word he says with a sigh when he talks about his old life in a suburb of Lyon or having to explain things ten times to his Emirati boss, or domestic conversations (and sex) with his wife. Angie takes this as a warning.
    The plan has been that he will take her to dinner tonight at the Shangri-La, a hotel out by the Grand Mosque. A canal runs through the grounds, like Venice. But the real selling point is that the hotel is out of the city so they’re not likely to run into any of his co-workers, though Mathieu has told her that some are also seeing
des autres
. “Maybe it’s an Arab thing,” he says. “One