A Marriage in Four Seasons

by Kathryn Abdul-baki

  26

  The sea shimmered like blue topaz—the color of Joy’s eyes— in the afternoon sun. They’d come to the archaeological site of ancient Carthage, and she was standing at one corner of a large square next to a headless marble torso of a youth with coils of hair touching the shoulders. Richard stared at the sensuousness of the Roman statue’s musculature, the tight torso brazenly erotic, the piece in remarkably intact condition except for the missing head and penis.

  They still hadn’t heard from Belinda. To their surprise, a woman did finally contact their room two evenings ago and told Joy, who had answered the phone, that Belinda had been hospitalized. It was for some routine testing, she said, and Belinda would send word within a few days. She wouldn’t give Joy any more information or a telephone number, only insisted that Belinda would soon call them herself.

  Although it was a great relief to receive even this morsel of news, neither he nor Joy had been able to sleep after that. It was all he could do to keep from demanding that the hotel have the call traced, but Joy had convinced him to wait a few more days as the woman had instructed.

  He now followed Joy across some wild grasses through an elaborate ruined archway, an obvious later Roman addition to the earlier and simpler worn-down Phoenician—Punic—Carthaginian structures. He remembered studying about the Punic wars in high school, battles fought between Rome and Carthage, most famous for the campaigns of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who crossed Spain and France, hiking the Alps with his army and elephants to attack Rome.

  “These ruins are from later, from Roman Carthage, which was rebuilt by Julius Caesar in 46 BC,” Joy said, sounding disappointed.

  “Yep. Hannibal’s Carthage was destroyed by Rome in vengeance after his defeat. The Romans killed and scattered the population to make sure they never raised an army again, then sowed the fields with salt to make sure they couldn’t grow food.”

  “Ugh,” she said, with a shudder.

  “Warfare hasn’t changed. Destroy or be destroyed.”

  “Look at—honey, what’s wrong?”

  He realized he must have been grimacing again from the throbbing in his jaw. “Nothing.”

  “You don’t look good at all,” she said.

  “It’s that filling. I’ve got to change dentists.”

  He didn’t want to concern Joy, but he’d had this pain on and off since they got here, especially when he was stressed. But he was sure it was just tension. Maybe he was clenching his jaw in his sleep. At any rate, he didn’t want her to worry.

  She looked at him a minute longer as if straining to see him clearly, then seemingly satisfied by his explanation, returned to her initial focus. “Look at this floor,” she said, pointing to the faded tiles at her feet. “The partridge over here, and that gazelle, and fruit. This might have been a dining room. I can see why these are considered some of the best Roman mosaics in the world.”

  He gazed across the ancient site that was obviously a valued tourist attraction. Great care had been taken in its preservation despite the apparent political upheavals in the rest of the country. They were lucky in that, except for a watchman, they were the only ones here.

  His thoughts drifted back to Manhattan, to the office turbulence, but he roped them back in with the reasoning that someday, none of his work problems would be important. They, too, would pass, like this once-great empire beneath their feet. All that were left of these ancient mercantile honchos of Phoenician Carthage were some commemorative headstones in museums and the urns in the pits down the hill once used to store the ashes of first-born infants sacrificed to the gods in times of national crises.

  He glanced about him at the entire panorama of Phoenician and Roman ruins. There had clearly been more to this once-thriving metropolis than ritual sacrifice and destruction. Successive epochs had spawned brilliant architecture, luxurious leisure facilities, art; but ironically, what lingered to glare back through the centuries was barbaric child sacrifice.

  “Pray you don’t reincarnate as a Punic infant,” he said.

  She shuddered. “How could they kill their own children?” “The gods were pretty demanding in their day,” he said, although this was equally unimaginable to him. Particularly painful because of Stephen. In a way, they’d already had to sacrifice their firstborn.

  Richard stood perfectly still for a moment, as if he were suddenly hollow and could disintegrate without a trace. He was struck again by how time marched on, slipping by out of control, indifferent to the desires, loves, pains, or joys of the living. It wouldn’t be long before he and Joy and their lives would also pass into oblivion like the lives of those who’d built these structures—pass into the indifference and obscurity of history.

  His entire life flashed by him in an orb of incomprehensibility. What would he leave the world to remember him by? So far, a less than gratifying career, a crippled marriage, a child out of wedlock.

  He reached out and took Joy’s hand.

  “Although I don’t like to live in the past, I can’t help wishing I could create my life over again, do it all differently,” he said.

  Joy shrugged. “We all wish for that at some time or other. We just have to accept our choices. We learn as we go along.”

  His mind raced to his daughter. He had to do right by her, make her world matter. He vowed to give her all the love, powers, and skills she’d need to grow into a happy and healthy woman and create the life she wanted. His daughter. It occurred to him now that it was through her that he would continue to live on. She was his one connection to the future, drawing him along into the next generations like a line on a fishing pole.

  How could Belinda have kept this to herself for so long, kept him away from someone who should have been his main focus and source of happiness? He knew she had been protecting them all in a way, and yet she had forced him in the process to give up his only child. In exchange for Joy and his life as he knew it, as he—wanted it. Perhaps Belinda knew him, even then, better than he knew himself.

  At what point, he wondered, as he had so many times since receiving her first letter, had she gotten pregnant? She said she’d been on the pill, and so he wondered what had happened. She’d also once told him she’d had an abortion in college. He assumed she would have had another. If, that is, she had not wanted a child.

  “Richard?”

  Joy’s voice roused him. She was posing behind another headless statue, this one of a woman in a clinging tunic. He was startled for a moment. Her head fit the sculpture’s voluptuously draped body perfectly, and she looked like some specter from another time. He stared at her, trying to smile through his conflicting thoughts.

  “Take a picture!” she urged playfully.

  He raised his camera, focused, and clicked.

  “Please!” The watchman called out, beckoning to them.

  Richard lowered the camera, thinking he might be objecting to Joy resting her head on the statue’s broken neck. When they reached him, however, the watchman sprinkled water from the spout of a watering can onto yet another mosaic floor.

  “Oh,” Joy gasped.

  Moistened by the water droplets, the mosaics began to emerge and sparkle: a dove’s eye turning mauve, a feather glimmering green. Grapes and vines breathed in the wetness. The watchman splattered more droplets and brought to life a banquet of figs, plums, apricots, and olives.

  Joy bent for a closer look at the floor mosaics. “Unbelievable!” she said. “All this beauty—it’s a miracle it survived. These are as good as those at the Bardo.” She chuckled. “I can just see Julia Child, even Martha Stewart, applauding.”

  Richard nodded.

  “Imagine growing up with all this history in your backyard. I like these mosaics a lot better than those burnt children’s coffins.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he agreed.

  At the mention of children again, the earlier question that had been plaguing him for some time returned. Had Belinda planned to get pregnant?

  JOY

&
nbsp; 27

  Joy looked around for a doorbell, but couldn’t find one, or any name posted to indicate the house’s owner. Above the arched doorway, there was only the address, 24 Rue Koubba, which she had been told to give the driver.

  She peered through one of the double wooden doors left ajar. The doors of this white villa were painted a bright yellow rather than the usual turquoise, and they were ornamented with the customary black nails studded in delicate, arabesque patterns. One of the doors had a large, iron-ringed handle.

  She thumped the heavy handle against the door. “Hello?” she called.

  She waited a few moments. When nobody answered, Joy stepped through the open door into a small foyer.

  The white vaulted ceiling curved above a tall rubber tree that arched up against it. On the black-and-white tile floor were two wooden chairs inlaid with luminous mother-of-pearl, like some she had admired in the medina market. Behind them, glass doors opened out to an interior courtyard with red-flowering bushes. There was no indication that the home was occupied by an American expat rather than a local family.

  Joy’s chest caught. Thief! She couldn’t help thinking she was one, standing inside the home of a woman whose child she would soon take.

  She knew it was absurd to think this. The girl was also Richard’s child, but Joy couldn’t help feeling that she was stealing, through another woman’s death, something she’d always wanted for herself.

  She sucked in her breath, wishing things could have been different. Different for her and Richard, different for the woman, different for the child.

  “Come at two,” the voice had said over the phone. Joy knew it to be Belinda’s from its sensual low timbre that had struck her when she’d met the woman several years before, unsuspecting back then. She still couldn’t believe she’d overlooked the possibility at the time that Richard had something going on with the woman, what with the way she was overly friendly with both of them and the slight discomfort Richard had shown in her presence.

  She’d marveled that this same voice could now belong to such a sick woman. “And please,” the voice had continued firmly, “come alone. Just you.”

  “Hello?” Joy called again, now catching a sweet, full-bodied aroma like baking bread coming from farther inside the house. Although she’d clearly been told to come at two o’clock, Joy had the uneasy feeling now that she was intruding on lunch.

  From a side hallway came shuffling footsteps. An elderly woman appeared, wearing a long gray robe and a white scarf loosely draped around her head.

  “Hello,” Joy said, somewhat embarrassed to have let herself in.

  The woman looked surprised to see her as she wiped her hand on a rag and mumbled something. The fair, wrinkled skin of the woman’s chin and forehead was dotted with what appeared to be small blue tattoos.

  “Belinda?” Joy asked. “Is Belinda here?”

  The woman continued to wipe her hand, then turning away slightly, called out shrilly, “Sitty!”

  Joy thought she heard a child’s voice. Her spine stiffened in an involuntary jerk, and she wished she’d disregarded the instructions to come alone. She could have asked that they meet in some public space, in a cafe or at the hotel. She could have at least insisted that Richard accompany her, but she was also relieved that he was not here. As wary as she was, she knew she needed to have this first meeting alone.

  The elderly woman turned back to her and gestured for her to follow.

  Joy walked behind her down a hall past a kitchen, where the homey scent of cooking grew stronger, and then up a narrow staircase. They climbed up two flights to a sunny, flat rooftop with rooms on one side. A warm breeze rifled through Joy’s blouse, drying some of her nervous sweat.

  The elderly woman walked over to the open door of one of the rooms and called in, softly this time, “Sitty?”

  A woman’s voice instantly responded in English, “Come in.” Joy started at the sound of the cadenced voice, knowing that it was addressing her. She slowly walked to the open door and, bracing herself, glanced inside.

  Like the rest of the villa, the walls of the room were stark white, but sheer indigo curtains billowed at the open windows, casting a cool blue pallor over everything. Two white sofas were set across from one another with a scattering of colorful cushions on each. A low coffee table, like a floating island, sat between the sofas. Out a window, a silken streak of aqua sea lit up the horizon.

  On one sofa reclined a striking, youngish woman dressed in a long purple robe, her head wrapped in a vibrant yellow-print scarf tied to one side of her face.

  “Joy,” the woman said cheerfully, lifting her hand as though to wave her in.

  The very air of the room seemed to grow dense, as though taking on a suffocating shape. Joy had expected to find Belinda more gaunt and sickly, but there was an animated glow to her face despite the notable absence of the black hair and eyebrows that had so defined her at their one meeting in New York. Also, she looked plumper than Joy remembered, with a rosy complexion that made her look almost angelic. When she’d met Belinda that previous time, Joy had been acutely aware of her vibrant youth. The same inadvertent feeling of being old by comparison returned to her now.

  She took in the whimsical room and this woman on whom she’d fixated for so long, one moment demonizing her as a Jezebel and the next elevating her to the sacred status of the terminally ill. The woman before her now seemed to be neither. She was simply an attractive woman whose missing eyebrows and drained expression were the only signs of illness.

  “I’m so happy to see you at last,” Belinda said with a smile and in that rich, earthy voice.

  The vivid fantasies again invaded Joy’s head like lightning: this woman and Richard together, their bodies heaving in passion. How dare you! she wanted to scream, but she swallowed her breath and glanced away, out the window to the sunshine and sea.

  “Please, sit down,” Belinda said weakly, gesturing with her outstretched arm.

  Joy hesitated, wondering whether she could endure staying in the same room and retain her composure. She sat on the sofa across from her, the buffer of the table between them.

  “I wanted to call you sooner, but I’ve just returned from the hospital,” Belinda said matter-of-factly. “My stays there are getting routine now. They give me blood, and I bounce back for a week, and then I slide downhill again.”

  Joy continued to fight the urge to get up and run out of there, never to see the woman again or deal with any of this. She resented, more than ever, having to pick up the pieces of Richard’s affair. Then she thought of the little girl about to lose her mother, a child with nobody to replace the only parent she knew. Like a book she felt compelled to finish reading, even when she didn’t enjoy it, Joy knew she would have to plod on with this for all of their sakes.

  Clearing her throat, she forced herself to ask, “How are you feeling?”

  “Not as bad as I must look,” Belinda said with an apologetic chuckle. “I’m thankful I’m still able to dress myself and help care for Karma.” She glanced at her watch. “She’ll be home soon. They let them out at two.”

  A quiver of anxiety ran through Joy at the mention of Richard’s child, the child she couldn’t give him. Would the girl look like him? Would she have the shape of his eyes or mouth? From the one photo he was sent, Joy knew she had her mother’s dark hair and eyes.

  Belinda went on. “It’s a long school day for a little one, but she’s happy there. She fusses when she’s at home, especially now that I’ve lost my energy. I’m not fun to be with anymore.”

  “It must be hard,” Joy said, nodding, an inadvertent rush of sympathy washing through her. A natural compassion for this sick mother was almost as quickly squelched by the overwhelming awareness that she was facing her one-time rival.

  Belinda sighed. “Kids gravitate toward life. It’s their nature. She knows something’s wrong with me, but the pull of the healthy world outside is overwhelming.”

  “I’m sorry.” Althou
gh Joy wanted to offer words of comfort, she also needed to keep this meeting strictly business. They were only in this together for the sake of the child.

  She now sat forward and said, “You asked to see me, but isn’t it Richard you should be talking to?”

  Belinda met her gaze, and Joy, absurdly, suddenly felt like she was “the other woman.” If not for her, this woman and Richard could have been a family with their daughter. If she, Joy, had been the one to get sick rather than Belinda, if she were to die, Richard could simply have brought them both back to New York to live with him. Happily ever after. She wondered how often Belinda must have had these thoughts herself, wishing that Joy were out of the picture. She suspected that Belinda did not want Richard to come along today for fear of betraying the love she still had for him—or that he might reveal his feelings for her.

  “I don’t need to see him,” Belinda said simply.

  Joy was surprised, even annoyed, by this pretense at indifference to Richard. It was she, after all, who had wanted him back in her child’s life. “What if he needs to see you?” she asked, wanting to get it all out in the open.

  Belinda wrinkled her brow. Perhaps she wasn’t expecting Joy to acknowledge that Richard might want to see her. “I only mean that I already know him and know the kind of father he’ll be.” She paused. “But I needed to see the woman who’ll be my child’s mother—”

  “You don’t have much of a choice at this point,” Joy interrupted, anger rising in her at her qualifications as a suitable mother being questioned by someone who was practically forcing her child on her. She curled her fingers into the sofa, and then released her grip, willing herself to simmer down.

  “I know you’ll be kind and loving—”

  “You don’t know that,” Joy said, resentment rearing again at this assumption about her.

  “I think I do know,” Belinda said calmly. “I knew even before I had Karma that you’d be a wonderful mother.”