Tangerine

by Christine Mangan

  Maude took a small metallic notebook from her handbag, its outside a darkly embossed botanical design, the kind one saw in Victorian wallpaper, and using the gilded pen within, wrote the address on a slip of paper. I took it, my hand trembling as I placed it into my pocket.

  The very next day, I withdrew my rent money from the bank and stood in line at the ticket office for Cunard, booking a passage across the Atlantic.

  WE HAD BEEN WALKING for nearly fifteen minutes. During that time, neither of us had spoken. At first, I thought maybe the temperature was to blame for his silence—for while the sun had set, there was still a powerful heat that seemed to burn against the back of my bare head. I could feel my blouse cling to my body, smell the scent of my own sweat as the material around my armpits dampened. I wondered if he could feel it too—but he always looked so unbothered by the heat, it was impossible to tell. Perhaps it was just an affectation, like most of his life. Or perhaps he was still upset after last night. I wondered if that was the real reason he looked straight ahead, at the road in front of us, at anyone and anything, it seemed, but me.

  Then, at last, he spoke.

  “I know you saw us.” His voice was neither kind nor threatening. The words were spoken without emotion, as if waiting to see how I would react.

  I looked at him. “You and Sabine.”

  I saw the flash of surprise on John’s face. He had not expected me to know her name, and I wondered what he would have said if I had remained quiet, if he would have eventually tried to pass it off as something innocent, a colleague, a wife of a friend—as I suspected he would have that day in the Kasbah.

  “I won’t ask how you figured that out,” he said, that same teasing smile emerging on his face once more, though there was something halfhearted in the gesture, as if he could no long muster up enough energy for such pretense. “I’m surprised, of course, but you seem rather resourceful.” He cleared his throat. “Have you told Alice?”

  I smiled and said instead: “I’m leaving soon, John. And Alice wants to leave with me.”

  I noticed the change in his face, the way his eyebrows dipped—not quite a frown, nothing quite so declarative as disapproval. It was confusion, I decided. Was he really so naive as to think that Alice would not leave him following his indiscretion? We continued walking to our destination, and almost instinctively, I moved away, creating a slight gap between us as we continued. I wondered whether it would be violent, his reaction, or whether he might cry and beg me to change her mind. I couldn’t decide which one displeased me more. We moved slowly, the night setting in fast. Already it was becoming more difficult to see, the lights of the medina far behind us.

  “You’ve told her, then?” he asked, though his voice sounded neither fearful nor worried. Instead it was almost as though he were amused, as if the notion that I had shared the news of his infidelity with Alice was something trivial, something to be cast aside.

  “She didn’t need me to tell her, John.” I paused. “She already knew. She’d figured it out all on her own.”

  He was silent for a moment, and he nodded, as if attempting to let the words settle. “Yes, I sometimes supposed she would. She’s not dim, that one, is she?” he said, with a short, quick laugh that conveyed his uneasiness.

  “No, she’s not.” I swallowed the bitter taste in my mouth. “So what will you do?”

  He looked at me. “About what?”

  “About Alice.” I stopped. “Surely you don’t expect her to stay with you, not after this.”

  He let out another laugh—this one more real, more authentic, I thought. “And why wouldn’t she?” he asked. “All this was her aunt’s idea, you know. Both she and my mother had been quite keen to introduce us. And though I suspect I’m not Aunt Maude’s favorite nephew-in-law, I think faced with the option of having to care for Alice herself or having someone else take care of her, well.”

  I turned to him, my step momentarily faltering.

  He must have sensed my confusion, even in the night, for he continued, “Alice isn’t going anywhere, Lucy. I think you know that. Beyond all the family ties, we’re good for each other. We’re—what do you call it? Symbiotic. Isn’t that one of your fancy terms? We need each other, Alice and I. Haven’t you already figured that out? I need her money—well, maybe not need, perhaps appreciate would be the better word.” He laughed. “And she needs me to keep her out of the loony bin.”

  I stopped. We had arrived. Even in the darkness, I could see him, looking around, trying to familiarize himself with his surroundings. He didn’t recognize the place, which told me that he had never been there before. I was glad. It would make things easier.

  I had decided, sitting at Café Tingis. John was the problem, the patriarchal head that had to be cut off, the dragon that had to be slain in order to rescue the heroine. I could not compete against John, just as I never could with Tom, not really—for the world told me this was not possible. I was their better in every way but one. I only needed to best them in order to make Alice see this as well. That her future lay not with them, but with me. I could feel the insistence in the air—beating, strongly. The days of suppression, of subjugation, were dwindling for the Moroccans, and I thought, in that instance, that I could feel it, the herald sounding for myself, for Alice as well.

  “She will,” I said, my voice flat and even. “She will come with me. She will see that it’s the right decision.”

  “Lucy,” he said, his voice tinged with something like irritation now. I could feel it, his temper, growing, fanned by my insistence, my determination. “Alice doesn’t care about this whole mess with Sabine, not really,” he continued, his words rushed. “If she had, don’t you think she would have said something, done something by now?”

  I struggled to find my voice. “She’s afraid of you.”

  “No, Lucy.” He laughed. “She just knows there isn’t any better option. Not for a woman like her.”

  I felt it then—my breath jagged, sharp, so that it hurt to breathe, so that each and every inhale was labored, painful. “This is my favorite place in all of Tangier,” I said, pushing the feeling aside. “Those are tombs, just below you.” I paused, turning to him, my voice wavering with emotion. “Alice will come with me, John. She already agreed to it, while we were in Chefchaouen. She’s already decided to leave you. You’re just not smart enough to have realized it yet.”

  He lunged then, and surprised, I lost my balance, falling to the hard, dusty ground. “You bitch,” he spat. I pushed backward, working to right myself, to keep away from him so that he would not be able to stand over me, towering. I couldn’t see his face clearly, not in the darkness, but I imagined it was red, swollen with anger. It seemed absurd that he should be so enraged. He had had Alice and he had let her go, traded her for that other woman. I think that was it—the thought of his betrayal—that convinced me, absolutely, that it was the right thing to do.

  The only thing to do, I knew then.

  John had subsumed Alice entirely, rendering it impossible for her to survive autonomously. As long as he existed, she could not. There was only one way to free her, to ensure that she would not always belong to him, to this place. I thought then too of how much John loved Tangier, realizing that he was right. Things were changing, shifting, and Tangier—all of us—would never be the same again. I knew that if he could, he would choose to remain there forever, with her—his Tangier—just as she was in that moment of time.

  Once I realized that, the rest was surprisingly simple.

  III

  Eleven

  Alice

  WHEN I WOKE THAT MORNING, FOR ONE STRANGE, BEAUTIFUL moment I was back in New England. I could feel the frozen blast of the winter months, could smell the cold, clean air, so that I moved to bury myself deeper within my bed, reaching for the familiar comfort of down. But then, that feeling of euphoria shifted, tilted, replaced instead by a growing urgency, a sense that something was wrong, the realization pulling me under, further and further, un
til I could no longer find my way out from under it. My stomach ached, and I kicked and clawed, but it was no use. I was back there again, in Vermont, and it was no longer nostalgic and breathtaking. There was now a darkness, something large and uncontrollable that threatened to hold me within its grasp once more. I saw Tom, then, lying in the snow, the white pristine blanket underneath him bleeding slowly into a deep, startling red. I stepped closer. No, it wasn’t Tom at all, I realized. It was John, still and motionless—dead. And suddenly I knew. I knew that—

  I sat up abruptly.

  Someone was knocking at the door.

  My head still slow with dreams, I turned to John, to see if he had heard the knocking as well. I saw his empty side of the bed and remembered. The other night at the bar—the kif, the drinks, his subsequent disappearance to Fez, which I could not blame him for, the need to escape apparently one of the few things we shared between us. After all, I had run to Chefchaouen while he had waited at home—now, it seemed, I would do the same, waiting until he reemerged on the doorstep from Fez, tired and full of the realization that there was no escape from the life we had created with each other.

  I took a deep breath, willing my heart to slow, willing the sweat on my skin to dry, but the thought of John, pale and silent, remained before my eyes.

  It seemed ages since I had last seen him in front of me.

  I had stayed in bed the morning after our night out, nursing a horrendous hangover, so I wasn’t even entirely certain what time he had arrived home, whether he had passed the night beside me, in our bed, or out on the sofa. I had woken to the sounds of him in the kitchen, making breakfast. A boiled egg and a slice of msemmen, followed by a quick cup of tea. It was always the same. Later, I had heard the phone ring—Charlie, I presumed, remembering what he had mentioned about Fez—and the closing of the front door not long after that.

  I had listened, after, for sounds of Lucy. For any indication that she was packing, leaving—but there had only been silence. A few hours later, tiptoeing past her door—sometime in the late afternoon, judging by the way the light fell against the walls, insistent, as if clinging to life—I chanced a quick look into her room. It was empty. I had exhaled, feeling something like relief as I returned to my own bedroom and crawled back between the sheets, content to let the day slip by from the comfort of my bed, certain that everything was at last working its way back to how it had been before. And there was a comfort in that, in the realization that Lucy was gone and John was off with Charlie—that I was, once again, alone.

  Toward nightfall I had woken and, unable to sleep, passed an hour or two by the window, looking out at Tangier, at the city that had somehow become my home. In the quiet, I allowed myself to wonder whether I could ever love it, wondered whether I could ever really be happy if I was to remain, with John. Our life was already so different from the way I had imagined it, and now that Lucy was gone, now that it was done with at last, I did not know what that would mean, for John and me, whether we would be able to slip back into the normalcy that we had created together—whether that was something that either of us even wanted. I had retired to bed early then, anxious to still the swirling thoughts in my mind, if only for a moment or two longer.

  The knocking grew louder.

  I pulled my dressing gown tighter and hurried down the hallway. “Coming,” I called, my footsteps sounding against the cool tiles. I reached down and touched the brass knob, already convinced I would find John on the other side, back from gallivanting with Charlie, sulking, most likely, having misplaced his keys somewhere during his adventure and ready for a hot bath and a cup of tea. I smiled at the familiarity, eager to dispel the image of the John from my dreams, and opened the door.

  It wasn’t him.

  Instead a man I did not recognize stood before me, a hat clutched between his hands. He was tall, his stature filling the doorway, his body, it seemed, expanding on each inhale. A scar, I noted, cut through his eyebrow, such that a patch was missing, and the smooth sheen of it, stark white against his skin, seemed to be illuminated in the darkness.

  I frowned, peering through the dim light into the corridor, trying to place the man in front of me.

  “Pardon the early hour, Alice,” he began, his accent indicating he was a fellow countryman.

  I started at the sound of my name. “Yes?” I asked, regretting how small, how tentative I knew my voice sounded.

  “I’m looking for your husband. He wasn’t in the office yesterday. Or today, in fact.” He paused, looking over my shoulder, into the flat. “As you can probably imagine, we’re a bit concerned at his absence.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling, as I did, the relief that surged through my body at the realization it was only a concerned colleague from work that stood on my doorstep, not a policeman out of uniform, carrying with him bad news that would transform my morning nightmare into something real. “He isn’t here. In Tangier, I mean. He went with his friend Charlie to Fez,” I said, giving him a tentative smile.

  The man frowned. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “He left yesterday afternoon, after breakfast,” I said, ignoring the tiny pinpricks starting in the tips of my fingers. “Can I ask what this is about?”

  “But you saw him?” he asked, ignoring my question. “Yesterday, I mean, before he left.”

  “No,” I admitted, the word leaving my mouth slowly. “We had a bit of a night out and I’m afraid I slept rather late the next morning, so I didn’t see him off.” It seemed important, somehow, to explain how it was that I could be so unsure of my husband’s movements, to this stranger who stood before me, assessing.

  The man looked behind me again. “But he was here with you, afterward?”

  I frowned. “I was asleep when he arrived home.”

  “Then how do you know he did? Arrive home, I mean?”

  “I heard him,” I said, defensive. But I wondered then what it was that I had in fact heard, whether it had been John after all, making breakfast the previous morning. I felt my stomach contract and worried, for a moment, that I might be ill. “It was him.”

  The man smiled, but there was something about the expression that made my insides clench further still, made me shrink backward, into the apartment. I thought about all of John’s allusions to his cloak-and-dagger work. I had often scoffed at his stories, believing them to be exaggerations built on insecurity and pride, the result of having nothing but his name to cling to, but now I was seized with the thought that there might be some form of truth in them, and I wondered what that might mean about the man in front of me.

  “And did anything out of the ordinary happen?” he asked, not responding to my admission. “That night, I mean?”

  “No, of course not,” I said, taken aback by his question. “Nothing at all.” Then I thought of Lucy, our argument, and my breath caught in my throat. I was certain he had noticed it, by the way his eyes narrowed. Still, after a few moments of silence, when I said nothing further, he nodded, thanked me for my time, and turned, as if intending to leave.

  I began to close the door, anxious now for the man to be gone—but then he paused and turned back, his face pinched in concentration. “Forgive me,” he said, “but what time did you say he left?”

  I crossed my arms tightly across my chest. “Sometime in the afternoon. I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps late morning,” I said, unsure just how long I had actually stayed in bed the day before. It had felt like ages and only seconds, all at once. I shook my head, looking up at the man now staring intently into my face. “I don’t know, I’m afraid.”

  He frowned, as if my uncertainty displeased him. “I see,” he said. “Well. If you hear from him.” He withdrew a card from within his suit pocket. “Please be in touch.”

  I took the proffered card and frowned, thinking again of that morning’s dream. “Is he—has something happened?”

  He fixed me with an odd expression. “Do you think something has happened?”

  “What?” I fel
t my face flush. “No, I only thought, I mean, I thought you were implying—” I stopped, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t. Instead he pointed to the card in my hand and then started to leave once more. “Wait,” I said, my voice trembling. “Should we—I mean, shouldn’t I telephone the police?”

  His brow unfurrowed, the scarred white stretch expanded, and his mouth slipped into a wide grin that made me want to do nothing so much as shut the door between us, firmly, not waiting for his response. “I don’t think there is any reason to do that,” he said, his voice low, placating. “After all, we wouldn’t want to involve the locals in our business, would we?”

  I heard the force, the threat, implicit in his words, despite the odd smile that clung to his lips. He turned, and at the sound of his retreating footsteps, at last I closed the door.

  John wasn’t in Fez, then. Wasn’t with his friend Charlie. Surely the man—I was unsure whether he had given me his name, and looking at his card realized it was nothing but a telephone number—had already spoken with him. I thought about ringing Charlie, just to make sure, before realizing I didn’t actually know how to get in touch with him. I had met Charlie only a handful of times, at one party or another, and in those moments, I had been convinced that he did not have a sense of who I was, not really. He knew that John had married, knew that he was bringing his wife with him to Tangier. But my name, my face—both of these were a mystery to him, and ones I suspected he was not intent on solving.

  I moved to the living room, to the desk that John rarely used, the drawers transformed into a receptacle for papers and pens. Surely John had written down Charlie’s contact information somewhere. I sorted through each, flinging paper to the ground around me, not caring about the mess that I was making, frantic to find something, anything at all, so long as it would help dispel the image of John’s lifeless body from my mind. As long as it would stop it from becoming a reality.

  “What are you looking for?”

  I jumped at the sound of her voice, slipping in the process, my already bruised knees connecting with the hardwood floor. Lucy stood above me, her hair hanging loose around her shoulders, the long strands trailing down her soft white blouse, which seemed to glow in the morning light.