to his newspaper to the clock on the wall.
At twelve thirty several men come out from the inner office. They talk loudly, jabbering away to each other in American. One of them, a big, paunchy man, has a cigar, unlit, in his mouth. He glances at Salim as he comes out. He tells the woman behind the desk to try the juice of a lemon, and zinc, as his sister swears by zinc, and vitamin C. She promises him that she will, and gives him several envelopes. He pockets them and then he, and the other men, go out into the hall. The sound of their laughter disappears down the stairwell.
It is one o’clock. The woman behind the desk opens a drawer and takes out a brown paper bag, from which she removes several sandwiches, an apple, and a Milky Way. She also takes out a small plastic bottle of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“Excuse me,” says Salim, “but can you perhaps call Mister Blanding and tell him that I am still waiting?”
She looks up at him as if surprised to see that he is still there, as if they have not been sitting five feet apart for two and a half hours. “He’s at lunch,” she says. He’d ad dudge.
Salim knows, knows deep down in his gut, that Blanding was the man with the unlit cigar. “When will he be back?”
She shrugs, takes a bite of her sandwich. “He’s busy with appointments for the rest of the day,” she says. He’d biddy wid abboidmeds for the red ob the day.
“Will he see me, then, when he comes back?” asks Salim.
She shrugs, and blows her nose.
Salim is hungry, increasingly so, and frustrated, and powerless.
At three o’clock the woman looks at him and says, “He wode be gubbig bag.”
“Excuse?”
“Bidder Bladdig. He wode be gubbig bag today.”
“Can I make an appointment for tomorrow?”
She wipes her nose. “You hab to teddephode. Appoidbeds odly by teddephode.”
“I see,” says Salim. And then he smiles: a salesman, Fuad had told him many times before he left Muscat, is naked in America without his smile. “Tomorrow I will telephone,” he says. He takes his sample case, and he walks down the many stairs to the street, where the freezing rain is turning to sleet. Salim contemplates the long, cold walk back to the Forty-sixth Street hotel, and the weight of the sample case, then he steps to the edge of the sidewalk and waves at every yellow cab that approaches, whether the light on top is on or off, and every cab drives past him.
One of them accelerates as it passes; a wheel dives into a water-filled pothole, spraying freezing muddy water over Salim’s pants and coat. For a moment, he contemplates throwing himself in front of one of the lumbering cars, and then he realizes that his brother-in-law would be more concerned with the fate of the sample case than that of Salim himself, and that he would bring grief to no one but his beloved sister, Fuad’s wife (for Salim had always been a slight embarrassment to his father and mother, and his romantic encounters had always, of necessity, been both brief and relatively anonymous): also, he doubts that any of the cars is going fast enough actually to end his life.
A battered yellow taxi draws up beside him and, grateful to be able to abandon his train of thought, Salim gets in.
The back seat is patched with gray duct tape; the half-open Plexiglas barrier is covered with notices warning him not to smoke, telling him how much to pay to the various airports. The recorded voice of somebody famous he has never heard of tells him to remember to wear his seatbelt.
“The Paramount Hotel, please,” says Salim.
The cab driver grunts, and pulls away from the curb, into the traffic. He is unshaven, and he wears a thick, dust-colored sweater, and black plastic sunglasses. The weather is gray, and night is falling: Salim wonders if the man has a problem with his eyes. The wipers smear the street scene into grays and smudged lights.
From nowhere, a truck pulls out in front of them, and the cab driver swears in Arabic, by the beard of the Prophet.
Salim stares at the name on the dashboard, but he cannot make it out from here. “How long have you been driving a cab, my friend?” he asks the man, in Arabic.
“Ten years,” says the driver, in the same language. “Where are you from?”
“Muscat,” says Salim. “In Oman.”
“From Oman. I have