He looked at me pointedly. “That girl.”
He was not talking about me, of course. I knew that he had wrongly assumed that it was my husband in the picture—and since I was supposed to be Alice in that moment, I supposed it technically was—and yet, though his words were not aimed at me, I was livid. Angry at him on behalf of Alice, and angry at something else, something I couldn’t quite define.
I grabbed my purse and began to walk away. It was only several minutes later when I realized he had not shouted for me to come back, had not chased after me in order to apologize. No matter. I continued walking, out of Café Hafa, back to the spot above the tombs. If Youssef would not help, I decided that I would find a way on my own. I paused, looking out at the blue merging of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and I wondered if there was a word for it, a name, a title, to indicate this strange layering that seemed to be commonplace in Tangier, where everything was something else first, and nothing was ever entirely one thing. I thought of Alice again. She was something else in Tangier too, something completely different. Hardened, distant, tired. A new Alice had been layered upon an old one, subsuming the original. But I had not given up hope. She was not simply Alice, John’s wife. She had been her own person once, she had existed without him. What I needed to discover was how to get her back, how to move from Tangier to Tingis—and whether such a Herculean feat was even possible.
I HAD BEEN WALKING in the Place de la Kasbah, alongside the fortified walls, stopping every now and then to scribble something in my notebook, trying to shake off my strange conversation with Youssef. I stopped at Bab Bhar, one of the gates that opened and broke up the monotony of the stone, so that there was nothing before me but the sea and the sky. Youssef had told me a story about the place, though I struggled, under the heat of the sun, to recall the exact words. Something about a beautiful female spirit who supposedly haunted the area, tempting men to their fate. I smiled at the idea.
And it was then that I saw him.
I was standing just outside the bab, hidden from his line of vision. At first, I thought he was alone, but then I saw him pull the woman beside him toward the wall—the same woman from the bar, I quickly realized, and my breath caught in my throat.
I noted first the confidence in the way the woman held herself, so unlike Alice: shoulders back, chest out, her body accentuated by the dress she was wearing, despite the loose shape of it. Her hair was piled on top of her head, her arms weighed down with heavy bracelets, both silver and gold, which clinked together as she moved.
I could see, under the light of the day, that she was most precisely as Youssef had described—a little Moroccan, a little French, the combination resulting in something that arrested one’s attention, that seemed to clamor and fight for it, in fact. Her skin was golden, her eyes dark. I thought about John’s love of Tangier and decided it all made sense—that his lust should find itself manifested in this creature, this woman who placed her foreignness on display in a way that was suited, designed, to attract a foreigner’s eye. I pitied the girl—for that was, I could now see as well, all that she was. No more than seventeen years old, I guessed.
Moving closer behind my hiding space, feeling the hot bite of the wall behind me, I watched as John’s fingers—his hands freckled and sun-kissed—splayed themselves across her tiny waist, his desire so evident, so easy. I stood, mesmerized by his hands, by their quick, insistent movements under the hot, unforgiving sun. My face burned, though not from the heat of the day, and ashamed then at the ache I felt watching them together, I moved quickly to turn away.
Later I would wonder at the calmness of my reaction, for I supposed that I should have felt something like outrage, upon seeing John there, his betrayal displayed so brazenly under the hot, brilliant sun of Morocco. He must have reasoned that Alice would never find out, as she rarely left the apartment and knew no one else in the city. He had, it seemed, decided to take full advantage of that fact.
But now, she had me.
It was something that must have occurred to him as well, when he turned and saw me standing there, underneath the arch. His face visibly paled beneath his tan and he started toward me, his arms still wrapped around the woman, entangled, I thought, and not in any way that could be explained away—particularly not if I had witnessed what had come before. I could see him thinking, calculating, wondering how long I had been there and just how much I had seen. At last his hands dropped away and he started toward me.
But I was quicker.
I moved from my perch into the crowd—tourists crowding the bab for a perfect photo, locals trailing behind, trying desperately to unload their jewelry, their hats, whatever piece of merchandise was on sale. It was easy to become lost, to let myself be swept up in the tide. I surrendered to its chaos, to the ebb and flow that grasped me in its clutches and refused to release me. I let it carry me farther and farther away until I felt brave enough to glance over my shoulder. I could barely make out his person. He was simply a small speck of color against a brightly decorated canvas.
My face was flushed from the exertion of my escape, my breath coming in small, sharp gasps. I wondered then whether John would confront me, whether I would return to the flat only to find him waiting, demanding to know what I had seen and whether or not I would tell Alice. A part of me hoped that he would, that his figure would be the one to greet me—I could feel the promise of it rush through me, could feel my fingers begin to tingle, my toes curl in anticipation. Walking back to the apartment—for I could no longer imagine pursuing my earlier wanderings—I noticed that I had managed to drop my notebook somewhere during my escape. And yet the realization seemed dulled somehow—far away and altogether foreign, as if it, what I had been doing earlier, could not possibly belong to the person I was in that moment, a person who burned and raged and did not wish to be silent. I headed for the flat, walking for what seemed like hours, though it could not have been more than a handful of minutes. I watched as the shadows around me began to lengthen, felt the heat of the day begin to dissipate. My heartbeat began to slow, my breath return to normal. By the time I reached the Quartier du Marshan, the emotions that had earlier coursed through me seemed to evaporate, leaking out of my skin, my pores, until there was nothing left but pure and utter exhaustion.
I let out a small sigh and continued inside.
Seven
Alice
IT’S SO HOT.”
Lucy paused at my words, waiting for me to catch my breath as we made our way to Café Hafa. The day was too thick, the sun too hot—but she had been determined, earlier that morning, that I accompany her to the café. I could feel my face, already red and sticky with sweat.
“I can’t believe you’ve never been,” she said, trying, I suspected, to distract me from the heat, though the comment only sat poorly with me.
I could feel my face grow more crimson still, my breathing ragged.
I placed one foot in front of the other, the sun burning the back of my neck, warming the top of my head, so that I looked with envy at the turban that Lucy had wrapped her own hair underneath that morning. She had traded, it seemed, her usual hat—an awful design made of black straw—for a pale wrap she had no doubt found in one of the shops frequented by expats. Earlier I had stared rather hard at the sight of it, just as we were leaving. It’s the fashion now, she had assured me, though I had continued to watch her with unease. It was not the design itself that had stopped me—but rather, the realization of just how well Lucy blended in with the rest of the expatriates that flooded the streets of Tangier. I had been here for months already, while her feet had barely touched soil for a week, and already it looked as though she was the one who lived here, as though I was only the visitor. It was with embarrassment that I had then reached for my own hat—a rather small white pillbox that fit oddly on top my hair.
“It’s supposed to have breathtaking views,” Lucy said.
I peered at her, curious. “How did you hear about it?”
“
Some friends at the bookshop. The Librairie des Colonnes,” she replied.
I nodded, wondering when she had managed to sneak in a visit there as well.
“You sound almost like a local now,” I said, my voice, I knew, tinged with something that made me uneasy.
After that day when she had first told me about Youssef, she had continued to return to the flat late each night, ready to regale me with further tales of her adventures, and I had listened with that same envy, the little knot growing into something large and not so easily managed. Instead I had tried to reshape it, had tried to see Tangier though her eyes, her enthusiasm, similar to John’s, describing a world I could never manage to catch a glimpse of, though all three of us walked upon the same cobblestones. And so when she had demanded, at the end of her first week, that I accompany her, I agreed, anxious to discover what it was that I had been missing, that my eyes refused to see.
“You should come with me next time,” she offered now. “To the bookstore.”
I did not respond.
We walked for a few more minutes in silence until at last we came to stand upon a strange white surface, just a few feet, I could see, from the edge of a cliff. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she ventured, looking over at me. She waited for a reply so that I could feel her, reaching out. It is, of course it is, I wanted to say, but something stopped the words, something stilled me. There were still too many questions and answers obscured by the fog, but which shone, nevertheless, red and bright and warning.
“It’s bluer than anything at home,” I conceded, continuing to stare out at the ocean, working to make my face unreadable.
“These are tombs, just below us,” she continued.
We stood close together, staring at the rectangular formations, at the strange dips and curves and the puddles of water that pocketed the white rock. “Where? Directly below us?”
She nodded. “The tombs are nearly two thousand years old. From when the city was called Tingis.”
“Tingis?” I asked, with a small smile.
“That was the name of the ancient Phoenician city, before Tangier ever existed.” She removed her sunglasses, squinting against the sun. “Tangier has had a lot of different names, apparently. Tingis is only one of them.”
“What were the others?” I asked, feeling my voice become lazy under the heat of the sun.
“There’s Tingis, of course. Tingi, Titgam, Tánger, Tangiers, Tangier—I guess it depends who you ask and how they pronounce it.”
I turned to her. “How do you pronounce it?”
She liked the question, I could see—that it mattered to me what she thought. She seemed to consider for a moment, as if weighing the answer. “I suppose I’ll always say Tangier. But I like the idea of Tingis. Of what it was originally, before it was changed by all the various invaders.”
“There is a sort of romance,” I admitted.
“It’s a country steeped in mythology,” she replied. “Do you know it’s thought that even Ulysses must have passed Tangier during his travels?”
She looked so proud, standing on top of the Phoenician tombs, as if she had made the discovery herself. I tried to picture it—Lucy as some great explorer or conqueror, and I found the idea suited her. Her excitement was so palpable that I could almost feel it, transferring from her body into my own. The heat pulsed around us, the sun pressing down, and yet still, as we moved away from the view, I could sense that we were both reluctant to leave it behind. It was calm here, as if some sort of magic spell divided it from the rest of the city. While down below there was shouting and bartering, the scent of thousands of perspiring bodies pressed up against one another, dirty and unwavering—up here, there was only silence. Only the warm, inviting blue that stretched out and rushed into the currents of the Atlantic, only the smell of the ocean, clean and fresh. I might have imagined it, but I felt as though our feet dragged as we turned away, as we began to close the short distance between us and the café.
WE SAT ON ONE of the lower terraces, under a few scraggly trees. The relief was immediate and I could breathe again. Up until that moment, I had not realized just how warm I had become, standing in the open field before the ocean, without a single tree for protection.
At our entrance, one of the workers ran over, balancing a swinging contraption that allowed him to carry several glasses of tea at once, its metallic coating glinting off the bright sun. Lucy ordered two, and thanked him: Choukran.
I mused briefly over the fact that “thank you” and “no thank you” were so closely related—the difference of a word added to the latter. It was, I realized, the type of inane observation that Lucy would probably enjoy. I closed my eyes and sighed. Wasps swarmed the blossoms on the trees above but for the most part ignored us, even our tall glasses of sugary, hot tea. It should have been peaceful, I should have felt relaxed—but anxiety gnawed at me, refusing to be ignored.
Her arrival had set something in motion. I could feel it already—churning, refusing to remain dormant. And yet, I could feel us both stalled, waiting for that something to happen, as if we had been waiting for it ever since that day she had stepped off the boat. I had the sudden irresistible urge to set it in motion then, to push us, together, over the cliff—to ask her everything that I had been wondering, puzzling over, ever since she had arrived in Tangier, ever since I had first met her at Bennington. All the things that eluded me, slipping through my fingers, the strange wisps of a girl I seemed to have conjured out of my misery but who had never seemed to materialize into something real, something concrete.
I was angry, the heat turning my mood. I could feel it, simmering around me, those things that I did not understand, the places and people that remained a mystery to me, that refused to yield no matter how often I puzzled over them. Tangier and Lucy were the same, I thought. Both unsolvable riddles that refused to leave me in peace. And I had tired of it—of the not knowing, of always feeling as though I were on the outside of things, just on the periphery.
“Are you all right, Alice?” Lucy asked.
“I’m fine,” I replied, though I knew there was an unmistakable edge to my voice as I pushed my sunglasses farther up the bridge of my nose. They had begun to slip from the sweat. I sipped my tea and then thrust it away in frustration. I was silent for a time, and then, only when I was certain that she did not intend to break the silence herself, I began, my eyes squinting in the sun. “I’ll never understand it.”
Lucy turned to me. “What?”
“This.” I indicated the mint tea. “How on earth anyone can drink hot tea in weather like this.”
“You can get used to anything eventually,” she surmised. “It all starts to seem normal after a while.”
“Not to me,” I said, rubbing at my fingertips, angry that I had held on to the glass for a moment too long, so that the hot surface had burned my skin, angrier still that Lucy had not rushed to agree with me, with my inane complaint. “Not this. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to drink this in such hot weather. I don’t think I’ll ever want to drink it in any weather, to be honest.”
She took a sip from her own tall glass. “Don’t you enjoy it?”
I shot her a look then—hysterical, I thought—though I quickly swept it away. “I would quite literally murder someone for a cup of builder’s tea at this point,” I told her.
A few heads turned our way, and I realized that my tone was wavering somewhere between lighthearted and serious, skirting the liminal boundaries between laughing and crying. Lucy extended her hand to me, but I did not take it. “Are you all right?” she asked again.
I considered, tired already of the question—of what I suspected was the truth.
“In New England,” Lucy began, abruptly, “my father had the most ingenious way of keeping us all cool during the heat waves.”
“And what was that?” I asked, the question curt, irritated by this shift, this change in conversation.
But if Lucy noticed, she only carried on, and I wondered t
hen if it was because she could sense my flaring temper that she had introduced the topic—an attempt at distraction. “He used to bring out the garden hose—you have those in England, don’t you?”
I nodded but remained silent.
“Well, he used to take the hose and then walk around the house, watering the bricks.”
I frowned. “The bricks?”
“Yes, the bricks of the house.”
“Why on earth would he do that?” I questioned.
She smiled. “That’s where all the heat is—the bricks trap it all in. So, very carefully, my father would circle the house, spraying the water onto every inch, until the bricks steamed from the combination of hot and cold.” She stopped, and in her silence I imagined it, conjuring up the image of a tiny brick house, a father who cared for his daughter enough that he lingered on the bricks surrounding her bedroom window, making sure they were properly glistening before moving on.
“Did it really help?” I asked, my voice softer than it had been. I looked at Lucy and I wondered what she was thinking—if she was also imagining that small house in the middle of nowhere New England, or if she was thinking of somewhere else altogether.
“It did,” Lucy said, in a tone that I suspected was meant to assure me, to calm me. “I remember lying on my bed, listening to the water as it sprayed against my bedroom wall. And I could feel it. As I lay there, my eyes closed, the curtains drawn to keep out the sun, so the room was entirely lost in darkness, I could feel the moment the water hit, the instant relief it provided. As if someone had turned on a fan and placed it directly in front of me. Sometimes I would get goose bumps, it was so cold.”
I was quiet for a moment, thinking, imagining the cool breeze on my skin. I felt strangely calm, surrounded by the love of a father for his daughter, by the cool draft he had sweated and worked to provide for her. Something tugged at my memory. I remembered that day in Jennings Hall, all those years ago, and turning to Lucy, I lowered my sunglasses and said, “I thought you didn’t remember your father.”
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