“Not too young,” said Alexander.
“How can I go on?” The tears fell from shame and confusion. “Months have passed and they still don’t want my photos. They’re still arguing about the color of the labels. Gordon is still making unilateral decisions. It’s not a cooperative; it’s a one-man band. Maybe if we struggled … maybe.…”
“You have a choice,” he said quietly.
“Choice,” she repeated, surfacing to his voice.
“Choice about whether you want to hear the one-man band or make a harmony or go back to your own work for a while.”
She stared at him, feeling the unshed tears drain down her throat.
“This isn’t the last cooperative,” he said.
She looked closer. Her anxiety abated for the moment. She noticed how weary he looked, run-down. This was her fault. She should have been taking care of Alexander. He lived in the coldest of Highgate flats and never quite learned to make a proper cup of tea.
“I bet you’ve run out of Vitamin C,” she said. “I got a new supply from mother. See, I’ve brought you a bottle. Brother Alexander, methinks you’ve not been taking care of yourself.”
“Do thank your gracious mother. But let’s get back to the problem at hand. You have a choice about the Cooperative. What are you going to do?”
“It’s not as easy as you think. I’ve dragged so many friends into this mess. Joan of Arc, I am, leading the troops—into a brick wall.”
“It’s easier than you think.”
“I even got my dear Alexander involved.”
“That started before you.”
“But I pushed it. I got you to sign their contract.”
“Longman’s won’t do the book,” he said tiredly. “I can’t flog it around at my age. Time has made my choice. Besides the galleys look fine. What have I got to lose?”
Susan wanted to stay in London until Alexander’s book was finished. But the bindery was on strike which meant a six week delay. If she was going to take that magazine assignment in Morocco, she would have to go now.
When she officially quit at the Monday meeting, Rita, Ghilly, Malcolm and Lynda nodded in various degrees of resignation. Wina sighed. “It must have been like this at the Paris Commune.” Gordon was busy scratching her name off the schedule. “OK, OK, it’s your choice.”
After returning from Morocco, Susan secluded herself in the darkroom for days. One afternoon, she emerged to check a reference in the British Museum reading room. As she cycled past Dillon’s Bookshop, she noticed the green Cooperative Press logo. And Alexander’s book.
The cover was silhouetted just as he wanted it. The book looked thicker than she had imagined. It was a tasteful display, with a photograph of Alexander and a short memorium. The entire display window was bordered in black.
Love/Love
Listen, kid. She was just gorgeous. Glamorous. Nineteen thirties chic. A pin-up type. You’ll say I’m just a mortal, sexist man, but honest, she didn’t mind being told she was glamourous, for all her liberated notions. Took care of herself. Had her hair done every week at Yosh. And watched her figure like—as the saying goes—like all the men did. Heh. Heh. Maybe she wore too much mascara, but it really accentuated those ebony eyes. Then there was that red, Jean Harlow mouth—1930s, honest-to-god. Her legs were made for stockings. In the summer they were tan and bare and all the more sexy.
She took care of her looks, all right. And everything else. She wasn’t satisfied with just being a nurse. So she worked her way up to Supervisor. That bored her after six months. At thirty, with a great career ahead, she applied for medical school. She got in, with a scholarship, of course. A very bright girl as well as sexy. Not that you were allowed to dawdle over the latter. Like all good catches, she was hooked four or five years ago. A real super guy. Lots of money. Nice house. I mean they had everything together.
But she got it into her pretty head, about the same time she decided to apply for med school, that she wanted out of the marriage. Not that I was disappointed, personally, to hear about it. But it did seem kind of rash. She had a life that wasn’t all that bad, from the outside.
The whole story is like Richard Corey. Remember the Simon and Garfunkel song? Well, that’s what happened, more or less. First, she changed her mind. Decided she couldn’t bear to leave the lucky bastard. Then one night last week she drove over to the Nimitz and slammed her orange Volvo into a siding at eighty miles an hour. Smashed the whole car. Totaled. And broke every bone in her beautiful bod … well, she did get some pretty severe lacerations on that face. And worst of all, there’s some kind of head damage. Maybe not permanent, but it’ll take her a couple of years to regain control of her memory bank or whatever it’s called. Luckily, she has her husband to take care of her. I don’t get it. She was such a glamourous girl. Bright. Just gorgeous.
VIII
Other Voices
The dark room was stale with the smell of cupboards and drawers unused by one-night tourists. Heavy. Hot. Only a minute ago she had shut out the wind, shut in the flying curtains. Only half a minute ago she had asked Mohammed to leave her. She would be all right alone. Alone. ALONE. She had bolted the door and now she was paying for her pride with a headache. Throbbing like banging. Bang, bang, banging, like someone knocking at the door. She ought to open it. She ought to. What if no one were there? What if, what if, what if this was all a dream. Decisions were endless. Where was the door? How could she open it? The top. Her fingers scratched the top. They were red. Blood red? Not nail polish red. She never wore nail polish. Pagan ritual, Sister Teresa, first grade. Sexist conditioning, Sister Morgan, graduate school. Nail polish was a mistake, like the red dress she wore that late night, lost in Gastown. The bottom of the door was closed too. But she could feel air at the bottom. Perhaps she should just lie there at the door’s edge and breathe deeply. In and out. Ways out. There must be ways out. The same ways as in. Openings. Try the bolt. Try unlocking the bolt. The handle. Turning the handle. Turning.
Turning over in the bed, Susan saw that the watch on the arm that wiped her brow said three o’clock. She moved in and out of the nausea, the delirium. Out long enough to see a moon through the polyester pink and purple flowers. To see Mohammed sitting next to the window, soothing her with his even breathing, his head bent down in sleep like a priest in meditation. Meditating on our sins after the procession. It wasn’t hard to keep up in the procession. Pious pace. Mind on other things. Unquestioned answers. Meditating on the sorrowful mysteries. She was on her third decade and Mohammed was only a boy. The boy’s watch said three o’clock.
Three o’clock. How? It was dark outside. School wasn’t even dismissed yet. Oh, yes, this was the OTHER side of the world. And she was with the African man, no boy. In the dream a few minutes ago, they had gone through the earth. Susan had gone through the dark bowels with a boy. With her little brother. With her divorced husband. She had been walking along, holding hands with her son. She kept getting lost. She kept stopping to ask directions. And the boy began to cry. Because he wanted to be fed. “Can’t cook tonight, dear, I have to work late.” “Hush, child, we’ll get some more formula.” Formula. She had always been bad at formulas. “One divided by two equals one-half.” A divorcee was half a person. “One plus one equals three,” Father had written on the back of her fifty dollar wedding bill. “One from two equals one.” At least her subtraction was always good.
The boy was still asleep. Despite the wheels crocketing along behind the horses hooves three floors below. Despite the shuffling of sneakers in the hotel corridor. “Did you remember the water bottle?” “Shut up. People are trying to sleep in this place, you know.” Despite the aroma of fresh coffee rising from the restaurant downstairs. Despite the sunrise heat pulling through the curtains. It had been crazy, the night, the day. How long had she been asleep? How long had this whole thing been going on? She would pull herself together. She would run it all through her mind, beginning at the beginning of the trip—in Agadir a week a
go.
“Putain!” shouted the two little girls in faded mini dresses. “Whore!” “Hure!” “Putain!” Susan knew she should just laugh at the absurdity of tourist language. Epithets would come easier with Esperanto. But something snapped. She was possessed by the Witch of the West, and she called back, “Pourquoi vous m’appelez comme ça? Pourquoi?” They raced up the stairs of their meringue white apartment building. She watched them running desperately from the madwoman, up to the seventh floor. She turned and walked toward the beach shops. She wasn’t sure whether it was their resilience or her imagination which trailed after her. “Putain!” “Whore!” “Hure!”
Agadir was a mean, ugly city. Shabby mourning to an earthquake she watched on TV when she was nine years old. The late fifties concrete set the city as a cheap, hurried housing project. All the more grungy because it had been done in ridiculous white. At least Americans concealed their squalor in sooty brick shadows.
Garish orange and yellow caftans blew about the breezy doorways of the shops. Orange and red. Red and yellow. Appalling tourist gear.
“Madame, madame, donnez-moi un dirham.”
“Bonjour, madame.”
“Un dirham, madame.”
Susan looked down into the brown eyes of a little boy and saw them looking back at this rich bitch from_____________?
No, that wasn’t part of the game. He didn’t care where she came from. She was an Englishgermanswede. A Westerner who spoke moneylanguage.
“No, No!” she heard herself shouting, one hand gripping a tinselly tourist dress for diplomatic sanctuary. “No, no!” she continued after he had run away. She needed to sit down somewhere and get hold of herself.
“Madame. Madame.”
“No. No.”
“Mais, madame.”
It was a different voice. Older. One of those fucking Arab men.
“No, no!” she shouted. She released the dress and strode off past the gaping shopkeepers.
The voice stayed with her. “Madame.” Persistent.
“Madame.” Unwavering. “Madame.”
Would he really do something in the middle of the city? In the middle of the day? With all these men watching? Why didn’t somebody do something?
“Madame. Madame.”
Probably more chance of getting raped in Berkeley, she had written to her mother, and the white slave trade was a racist myth. Susan neglected to mention that episode in Zanzibar a few years ago. But here in Agadir? It was just built in 1958, for godsake.
“Madame, s’il vous plaît.”
Those were the last words she heard before falling down the steps. Talk about a klutz. It must be her period. She always felt like a giraffe during her period. She tried to summon Susie’s judo lessons.
“Go away,” she turned around with her witchiest expression to find a young man regarding her with amused concern.
“Please let me help you,” he ventured toward her, one hand extended. She noticed he was speaking English and that his other hand held her Michelin Guide.
“You dropped it back in the stall, Miss.”
She said thank you with mixed relief and resentment. Her Michelin Guide was a gift from her mother. If she had to go to such a primitive place, she might as well approach it sensibly.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes, thanks,” she laughed, a sense of humor being the only grace left to her. “I’ll be fine now. Good-bye and thanks again.”
“Perhaps you should rest a minute.”
“No, no. I’m OK, really.” What did he think she was, some kind of old lady? A few minutes ago he was chasing after her nubile body and now he was playing Boy Scout.
“Won’t you please join me for a mint tea? My uncle owns the Quatre Saisons,” he pointed over to a cafe on the Avenue Kennedy, next to her pension.
“Uncle,” sure, she thought. Just like the two kids who wanted to show her around Fez were brothers, until they forgot each other’s name.
“It’s just Moroccan hospitality,” he said. “Nothing else. I don’t want to hassle you.”
It was the “hassle” which touched her. He had studied English for six years at the lycée. He had won a scholarship to the Stanford University. Did she like mint tea? Because Uncle Ahmed also had Nescafé, Twinings, Coke, Fanta Orange.
She laughed easily. The kid was bright and sexy. Shadowy brown eyes, great curly hair and that broad smile. So much for culture and age. Age … what was she thinking about? She was ten years too late. But then again, maybe he had read about Graham Greene’s aunt.
“More tea?”
“No thanks, Mohammed. I’ve got to get back to work, plan my itinerary, and write a letter.”
“I’ll be helping my uncle tomorrow morning,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you here for breakfast? We have the best croissants on the Avenue.”
Grinning, she returned to the Hotel de France. The cool linoleum lobby was bare, except for three wooden chairs, some coverless copies of Time and Woman’s Own, and the arborite table. The manager greeted her with the solicitude that had become obsequious as soon as they had stopped arguing about the twelve dirhams rent. The ubiquitous busboy-cum-taxidriver-cum-guide-of-Agadir also nodded, prepared to bring her anything from a martini to a Mohammed.
God, Mohammed was young. The same age as her little brother. Eighteen at most. This was the sort of movie that happened to middle-aged secretaries from Medicine Hat. She looked in the mottled mirror. The water stains made liverspots on her drawn face. She pulled her long, dark hair back into a rubberband. She could pass for … she could barely pass for twenty-nine which was what she was. That verticle line in her forehead was indelible now. She had started wearing these open-necked shirts because her bone structure was good. Oh, what the hell, Sophia Loren was forty-three and no one complained about her. But then Sophia Loren had Carlo Ponti and two kids. Susan’s feminist guardian angel deserted her at night. Perhaps she should have stayed with Guy. Before the divorce, she had anticipated loneliness—a sort of Joni Mitchell melancholia—not the frantic pillow thrashing that she did, where the bed is too large and cold one minute, too hot and small the next.
A letter to Hilary. She could say anything to Hilary. Hilary had been the only one who agreed with her decision to travel alone.
“Why are the men so obnoxious?” she wrote. “Why can’t I walk down the street without being touched up and talked at? I knew it was going to be a hassle, but this is much worse than Italy or Greece or even Mexico. They’re like flies. I hear myself shouting, “Mouches, mouches.” The worst part is that I find myself wishing I had someone—meaning some man—with me. So the independent lady journalist is chickening out after only seven days.”
“Tangier, quel désastre. I suppose I expected to find Bob Dylan looking for the girl who left him behind. It was more like William Burroughs territory. Putrid pools and smashed bottles on the sidewalks. In a vacant lot across from my pension, kids chucked pieces of the demolished walls at each other. One night I was followed home by a guy with a knife and a lot of cultural pride which was wounded when I wouldn’t buy his dope. Rabat and Casablanca were just as bad—too many tourists, but not enough to keep the mouches off my back. God, I sound like a raving racist.”
A sign of age. Twenty-nine year old fascist. This week Susan had closed up to the people around her. What kind of conversation can you have with a guy who says, “Madame, I show you medina,” or with the trendier adolescent card sharks who hang around the pensions? And the women? She had no communication with the women. It wasn’t just that they didn’t get to go to lycée and therefore didn’t speak a Western language and didn’t have contact with outsiders. It was those damn, impermeable veils behind which they giggled and gossiped and retreated.
She could always write anything to Hilary, anything without being judged. She couldn’t admit the same defeats to Sally. She wrote Isadora Duncan journals to Sally—heady, gay, adventurous. Likewise, she understood that Sally’s installments about the rich cr
ust of Montreal’s soirées anglaises were abridged versions of reality. They sent the letters to reassure each other; they wrote them to reassure themselves. A letter to Hilary, however, was a sort of marathon diary.
“I met a kid this afternoon. God, Mohammed is a kid. Still in lycée. Can I be that desperate, chasing after children? None of the men our age seem to qualify. They’re all too sexist or too juvenile or too boring. Maybe those Y chromosomes really are retarded X’s. Then I look at myself and I’m amazed that I have the nerve to be so choosy. It’s OK now, while I’ve got a few good years left, but what’s going to happen when I’m thirty-five or forty? I know this is terribly unfeminist of me to worry about, but my thighs are spreading; my spontaneity has withered; my feet are getting scaly. If I’m this much of a wreck now, what am I going to be like in six years? So although I don’t want a man, I feel I have to find one while the picking is still moderate. I can’t turn to women as lovers. I’m not saying that you made the wrong choice, but damnit, I want children.”
Susan had had this same debate with Hilary many times in the last year—over coffee in Toronto, on the telephone after Hilary had moved off to live with Anita Evedaughter in Edmonton, and now airmail from Morocco. Susan was bored by her own preoccupation with “relationships.” The word gave her a headache. She turned to her log book. Two more weeks of cultural anthropology. The research had seemed like a good idea last month: a subsidized trip to Morocco, a chance to test her new lenses. But tonight she could find no enthusiasm for the work. She stretched out, trying to fill the big bed. She consoled herself that she could leave Agadir in two days after the museum and a half roll of slides.
“My Uncle Claude owns a hotel in Essaouira. Just the cure you need from the city,” Mohammed said.
She knew something like this would follow the croissants and tea.
Movement Page 10
