“But you’ll fix this, right?”
It was a statement more than a question. I didn’t need to tell Anna what she already knew—that she had boxed me into an extremely unpleasant position.
“Yes, I’m taking care of it. Thanks so much for stepping in,” Anna said cheerily.
My attempts to rationalize the situation did not make me fine with it, but once the standoff had ended and the air had cleared, I convinced myself that it would all be okay. The managers had said that the hold on my account would only be temporary, and Anna would settle the final bill upon checkout. I was glad to be departing before her.
But a short while later, while Anna was getting dressed, the taller manager returned to the living room just as I was leaving to meet Jesse. He was the same man who had taken my credit card, so I assumed he was there to return it. It was either a clipboard or a tray that he passed me—I can’t recall—but it held a slip of paper that looked like a receipt, which he asked me to sign. My stomach dropped. The slip of paper displayed a block of numbers—date, time, some unintelligible coding—and farther down, in a slightly larger font, “30000.00 MAD.”
I froze. Receipts came after charges, not before them, I thought. What was this?
“I thought my card wasn’t going to be charged,” I said.
He pointed to a word on the ticket printed in all uppercase letters: “PREAUTORISATION.” It was French, a language I had studied, but in this context the word’s meaning eluded me.
“Your signature for the block,” the man said.
God, I wish I had said no, had walked away, had flat-out refused.
It was over in a heartbeat. It wasn’t even my full name that I scribbled: if you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was signed “Rah.” That was enough.
* * *
It was past our scheduled departure time for Villa Oasis, but Anna had only just begun to get ready. I left her in the riad and walked toward the hotel’s main building along the wide central allée that cut through La Mamounia’s sprawling gardens. My head was spinning. Had Jesse ordered my coffee? I glanced at my phone for his reply.
His first message said: I’ll ask.
His second: Why don’t you ask [the butler]?
I let out a sigh. I’m not in the villa, I replied. Don’t worry.
On my way to meet him, I decided to stop by the front desk to tell the concierge that we were running late. But then, considering how hesitant the staff had been to send a car for Kacy, I began to wonder whether the outing had been scheduled at all.
The concierge listened to my question, shifting his weight forward to the balls of his feet and back again to his heels. Then he nodded and picked up the telephone. After a brief call, he turned to me and said, “Your car will be here shortly.”
As the restaurant’s name suggested, Le Pavillon de la Piscine (“The Pool Pavilion”) was adjacent to the hotel’s lake-size swimming pool. Le Pavillon featured a lavish buffet breakfast with a bounty of fresh fruit, yogurts, and pastries, in addition to meats, cheeses, and eggs cooked to order. The dining tables were outside, which is where I found Jesse.
We sat shaded from the harsh sun by a white umbrella. I was preoccupied with an internal call-and-response: a dull aching in my stomach that yanked downward in tugs, which my chest would answer with flutters of vague warning. I buried my apprehension beneath a willfully cheery exterior.
Anna appeared just as my coffee was cool enough to sip, floating across the tile patio to join us. She was wearing one of my dresses. It was the short, cotton, white one with blue stripes that I had recently purchased at a sample sale and hadn’t yet worn. The tag was still attached when I last saw it hanging on my side of the closet. Anna hadn’t bothered to ask if she could borrow it.
I felt a jolt of anger. If my sister had done something like that when we were kids, it would have provoked a temper tantrum. But I was an adult now, I reminded myself, and Anna wasn’t my sister. It was only a dress. Besides, just one more day and I’d be gone.
“That suits you,” I conceded, worrying about whether her frame would permanently alter its shape.
Anna smiled and struck a cutesy pose. “Yes, I thought it would look good in pictures,” she explained.
* * *
After a morning fraught with tension, I was relieved to be leaving the hotel for our excursion to the Yves Saint Laurent villa. It would be good to get out. We’d spent most of the week lounging around the resort, and it felt silly to have come all the way to Morocco to spend so much and see so little.
We set off with our driver and arrived at the Jardin Majorelle entrance fifteen minutes later. Our guide, a handsome man with gray hair, emerged to greet us. He wore thick-rimmed glasses and a denim shirt. His round belly rested atop a camel-toned belt and green khakis. We followed him through the garden’s entrance, past the tourists, and over to a discreet second gateway, where a dusty path lined with tall palm trees and hardy flowers led to the private grounds of Villa Oasis.
The gardens around us were filled with citrus plants and whimsical cacti, wild shapes from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. The walls of the villa itself were peach-hued with turquoise and ultramarine accents, nestled behind spiky green foliage. We paused regularly along the way to take photographs.
Anna always made sure she featured in the pictures. She knew how to pose. Unlike her, I was camera-shy and self-conscious. There’s a rare photo of us together that was taken in front of a fountain, an eight-point star made of multicolored tiles, centered in front of the villa’s main entrance. Anna has her legs artfully crossed in a way that emphasizes her femininity. She has one hand on her hip, which flatters her figure. Large sunglasses shield her face, except for a composed, thin smile. In contrast, I am tucked a tad behind her, facing the camera straight on in my loose-fitting dress, cheeks round and eyes squinting as I grin widely in the bright sun.
Before we entered, our guide announced that filming and photography were forbidden inside the villa. This was disappointing news, especially to Jesse. Anna didn’t appear particularly upset, even though she had said she wanted to use the trip to Morocco as an opportunity to make a film, partially to justify its large expense. In New York, she had been working on the Anna Delvey Foundation, a visual-arts center she was developing that would house gallery space, restaurants, members-only lounges, and more. She was considering making a documentary about its creation, and she wanted to see what it felt like to have someone around with a camera. It seemed to me that Anna cared more about the idea of having Jesse there than she did about what he shot—his presence was more about the feeling it gave her: of being interesting enough to film. By coming to Morocco, he’d agreed to do a job, and he took it seriously. He maintained that for the film to work, it would need to be more than just a montage of Anna gallivanting around La Mamounia. Trying his best to capture an adequate variety of footage, he decided to record audio of our conversations during the Villa Oasis tour, given the photography ban. His handheld microphone was on as we entered through the patterned cedar front doors.
The contrast between the bright exterior and the dimly lit entrance hall was staggering. A feast of texture and color surrounded us, the most intricate ornamentation I’d ever seen: mosaic tile-work, hand-carved plaster, elaborate paintings. We paused for a moment to let our eyes adjust before circling the space as one would in a museum, each moving at our own pace and direction under our guide’s watchful eye. I was struck by the entrance hall’s vastness, its high ceiling and marble floor, which, in combination with a tile fountain in the room’s center, made it feel more like a place of worship than a home.
The other rooms were cozier, smaller but still grand, with textured handwoven fabrics on overstuffed pillows, inviting furniture, and plenty of nooks. There wasn’t a single object that appeared to have come from a store, at least none that I had ever been to. It all looked handcrafted, hand-painted, and handpicked. The place and its contents were clearly the result of loving attention over the course
of many years.
I was overcome with reverence for the mystery and splendor of the villa, but something about Anna’s presence made me suppress the impulse to lean into my interest too profoundly. Letting her see that I cared too much about anything made me feel vulnerable. I moved through the villa taking notes with my eyes, as though I was scouting a location that I might come back to later in life, someday when I could appreciate it properly, on my own time and with different company.
We took photographs on the roof terrace and patios, wherever we were permitted, as we made our way through the tour. We finished in a sunny blue drawing room, taking a moment to admire a square table with a chessboard set into its center. Anna was especially interested in chess. She once told me that her younger brother played at a competitive level, in tournaments and such. Talk of her brother seemed to reveal a soft spot in Anna, an access point to something warmer, more human, a familial affection to which I could relate. As a result, anytime I was with her and saw anything relating to chess, I went out of my way to point it out. She seemed as taken with the game as her brother must have been.
After our tour, the four of us sat on low stools around an etched silver table in the property’s outdoor pavilion. We drank glasses of fresh orange juice and ate crescent-shaped cookies called kaab el ghazal, or “gazelle horns,” from a scallop-edged blue dish.
Then we followed our guide toward the exit, back out through the doorway into the public gardens. He led us down a path and around the side of a bright-blue building, the Berber Museum, a place we hadn’t seen. Wooden shutters with metal rivets framed the front door of the museum’s bookshop, pale against the vibrant cobalt of the building’s exterior. The guide led us inside, to the shop’s cash register, and came to a stop. Was this the end of the tour? An exit-through-the-gift-shop farewell?
“How would you like to take care of the donation?” he asked.
We turned to Anna. “Oh, I thought the hotel took care of that,” she replied. “I’d understood it could be billed through our reservation at Mamounia.”
But it was clear that payment was required there, in person, at the bookshop. Anna and Jesse turned to me, which caused the tour guide and the cashier, a trim man in a dark uniform, to follow suit. My face warmed. I unzipped my leather pouch and riffled through receipts looking for my credit card. It wasn’t there. I felt a surge of panic as I flipped through again. The manager had returned it to me when I signed the preauthorization slip, right? I frantically thought through my steps. Did I drop it in the riad? Leave it on the concierge counter? Did I carry it with me to breakfast and accidentally leave it there?
Flicking through the pouch’s contents a third time, I was forced to accept that I definitely did not have my credit card—only my debit card, which was tucked away carefully next to my passport. I felt stuck. I handed it to the cashier with a heavy heart, knowing that my account, which contained only $410.03, would go into overdraft.
The cashier attempted to run my card once, twice, again, and again—but the transaction was repeatedly denied. Since I hadn’t used my debit card in Morocco, nor informed my bank that I would be traveling there, the irregular charges had been declined.
None of us had a way to pay. I was mortified. What now?
The guide insisted we return to our hotel to collect a card for payment. To ensure that we didn’t just disappear, he would accompany us.
Over the year or so I’d known Anna, I had noticed how determined she was to be taken seriously. Following the guide away from the cash register, I felt a shift as we transitioned from guests to potential criminals, and suddenly I understood how it hurt to have your validity questioned. I felt misunderstood, as if we’d finished dinner in a restaurant and forgotten our wallets (an honest mistake), and the staff didn’t believe that we had intended to pay.
We filed out from the garden’s main entrance to the street, where our driver sat waiting in the van. The four of us climbed into the back seat. The guide was quiet and increasingly withdrawn. During our tour, I had learned that he was actually the director of the Jardin Majorelle Foundation and had been a lifelong friend of Bergé and Saint Laurent’s. His incongruous presence in the crowded back seat of our vehicle, bouncing along the road to our hotel, felt humiliating and wrong. I apologized repeatedly for taking up his time. Certainly he was busy with more important matters than ours, especially since the foundation was working on the Musée Yves Saint Laurent, which was set to open later that year.
Our van pulled into the drive nearest our villa, at the side of La Mamounia’s walled grounds. My friends stayed in the vehicle while I sprang out and set off at a jog. In the moment, faced with problem after problem, my growing anger and frustration toward Anna was overshadowed by my frenzied struggle to keep our ship afloat. I was simply too busy plugging holes to waste time being angry about why they kept appearing.
Our butler, Adid, spotted me coming and opened the front doors. I searched our villa: my credit card was nowhere to be found. I looked again and again in the living room, on my bedside table and the desk, scanning the floors in case I had dropped it. Could I have put it in my suitcase? I opened the compartment where I had hidden other cards for safekeeping. Nothing. In desperation, I grabbed my American Express corporate card, the one given to me by Condé Nast (Vanity Fair’s parent company) for work expenses, slipped it into my travel pouch, and ran back down the soft gravel path to the hotel’s main building. My heart was racing and the air-conditioned lobby felt cool against my skin.
I signaled to a manager behind the front desk.
“Do you still have my credit card?”
He answered with a slow nod. He did! It was there. I felt a pang of relief and thought of everyone waiting in the van. “I need it back,” I choked.
But to my dismay, he refused. The billing for our accommodations was unresolved, he told me. My card was being held hostage because Anna was responsible for payment, which hadn’t yet materialized.
I pleaded, explaining that I needed the card to pay the gardens, that it was our only functioning method of payment, and that the man from the foundation was there with us in the car. My desperate words fell on apathetic ears.
Thinking fast, I unzipped my travel pouch and removed the corporate American Express card.
“Here,” I said placatingly. “Give back my personal card and you can hold this while I’m gone.”
He reached for the corporate card, but before he took it, I said firmly, “You may physically hold it; you may not charge it.” He nodded.
“Where is Miss Delvey?” he asked.
“She’s waiting in the van.”
“We need to speak with her.”
His tone was chilling. I knew the situation was getting serious. I walked fast across the grounds back toward the driveway.
I passed Jesse on my way. He looked peevish. “I’ll be in the villa,” he said. “This is ridiculous.”
Anna and the guide were still in the van. Its rear sliding door was open.
“Anna, they’re asking for you at the front desk,” I said.
Her audible scoff made me feel like the tired mom of a petulant teenager. Without further discussion, she climbed out of the van and walked away, leaving me alone with the director.
It wasn’t like in some places, where they can take down a card’s details or use a device to scan a credit card remotely. We had to return to the bookshop. Sitting on bench seats in the rear of the van, the director and I awkwardly faced each other on the journey back to the Jardin Majorelle. I tried to make conversation but could tell he wasn’t interested.
“I’m so sorry again about taking up your time like this,” I said. In the silence that followed, I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye.
* * *
Once at the cash register, the director stood beside me as a shop employee ran my Amex card.
It was declined.
He tried again.
It was declined.
I had nothing else. The
employee behind the counter tried dialing the number on the back of the card. The call did not go through. Were they going to let me leave? Could we pay them later?
With the wave of a hand, I was ushered from the register, led by the shop employee and director away from the beauty of the bookshop, with its carved wooden shelves and vaulted tile ceiling, a space where nothing bad could happen. They took me into a narrow back corridor, filled with banal office supplies and a low counter that ran along one side.
I stood alone between the two men. My hands became sweaty and started to shake. I struggled to maintain my composure.
“How do you propose we resolve the situation?” one asked.
I stared at the wall in front of me. It was covered with instructional papers and employee announcements, rules and diagrams written in French. The visual details are blurry but I remember thinking how far away my normal life seemed. I was on the edge of nowhere.
“I need to make an international phone call,” I said.
The shop employee picked up the receiver on a landline phone and again tried the number on the back of my American Express card. When it didn’t work, he turned to me and said that the number was wrong. I asked to try for myself and after several attempts—experimenting with the country code—I heard a clicking sound, then a tone, and at last a singsong robot voice: “American Express. Please tell me in a few words how I can help—”
“Representative,” I interrupted. The robot went on. “Representative,” I cut in again. I repeated the word until I reached a human. His voice was deep and Southern. He sounded like home.
With the men standing on either side of me, I explained the situation, doing my best to stay calm while also conveying my distress. Why had the card not worked? He told me that “Responsible Lending” had flagged my account for irregular spending activity when La Mamounia put through a charge for $30,865.79.
My vital organs shut down, caught fire, and floated to the top of my chest.
My Friend Anna Page 2
