by Caitlin Macy
The rooms at the hotel were detached stone bungalows built in two concentric arcs, the inner of which faced, across a vast expanse of manicured yet stubbornly scrubby lawn, the main building of the hotel. It was an old shooting lodge, turned hotel in the seventies by an enterprising Frenchman and his Moroccan wife. Will and Lydia had been given a bungalow on the outer arc of cottages—the less desirable arc, clearly, though no less expensive. Lydia had attributed the assignment to something more than chance—their being Americans, or their relative youth. Will, however, who did not think that way, had told her to relax—“It’s still pretty damn nice!”
Despite the heat, the mornings had a freshness (albeit an artificial one) created by the staff’s caring for the grounds—pruning, weeding, watering—the orange trees and olive trees, the banks of rose bushes. With an impatient look about, Lydia sat down on one of the iron café chairs to wait. “Tout de suite, Madame Norris,” the man in the kitchen said each morning, but the amusement in his voice suggested she would be a fool to believe him. It was as if he were humoring her with the response—with keeping up his part in the masquerade in which she played one “Mrs. Norris” and he the properly obsequious servant.
Her neighbors across the way, a pair of Brits, were already out on their portion of lawn, oiled and baking face-up on their chaises longues. Lydia watched them with suspicion. All they seemed to do was lie in the sun and drink. She could hear them, from ten in the morning onward—“Two shandies, two white wines, two gin and tonics”—whenever she and Will returned from swimming or tennis, from their excursions to the walled town, to the desert beyond. “They might as well have gone to Fort Lauderdale!” she had said indignantly to Will.
“Morocco’s closer.”
“You know what I mean,” she persisted. “They clearly don’t appreciate it here—you know, the way we do.”
Two of the hotel’s groundskeepers skirted the couple’s chairs, dragging a hose and sprinkler, and crossed in front of the Norrises’ terrace. “Bonjour!” They gave a friendly wave to Lydia; did not add “Madame,” as Frenchmen would have.
Lydia stood and waved back, eager to make the connection. “Bonjour! Bonjour!” She was aware of the picture she made, in the hotel robe and flowered mules, but there was nothing remotely prurient about the expression in their eyes.
The glass door slid open behind her. “Bonn jour!”
Will’s accent incensed her and his presence on the terrace—it put an end to her little adventure.
He put his arms around her from behind, his lips to the top of her head. The gardeners turned promptly away, kneeling down to attend to a row of flower beds. How vulgar we are, Lydia thought, yet knew the vulgarity was in her thoughts, not Will’s kiss. It was she who had been vulgar, in transferring her loyalty from her husband to the gardeners, however briefly.
“I ordered breakfast,” she said reluctantly.
“Good.”
“I suppose that’ll be my major achievement of the day.”
Will took a seat on the chair she had been sitting in, pushing it back from the table so he could sit more expansively. “I’m starved.” He was tall—six three in his socks, her new husband. She found the length of his legs erotic and looked away furiously.
AT THE POOL, disagreeable memories of the wedding came back to her. It seemed the party had scarcely started before the manager of the club had tracked Lydia down to tell her, “You’d better cut the cake now. It’s getting late.”
It wasn’t, of course, their club; someone had been so kind as to lend it to them, and though Lydia had strived to gain the upper hand with the man, she had ended up meekly obeying his orders.
“Why didn’t we just go down to City Hall, the two of us?” she said, putting down her magazine. “We’ll never see half those people again … Will? Did I not tell you the way I wanted to be married was just to go down to City Hall, two witnesses? Didn’t I ever say that?”
“Mmm …”
“I mean, since I was a little girl—that was my plan.”
“You said you wanted a church wedding—that’s what you said.” Will turned a page of his mass-market paperback, bought two days ago—another world, another era—in the bookstore at JFK.
“A church wedding?” She took out the sunscreen and rubbed it vigorously onto her face and neck. She was scrupulous about protecting herself from the sun. “Well, even if I did say that, why should you have gone along with it? You’ve never even been baptized.” She picked up her magazine and put it down again. “Do you have sunscreen on, Will?”
“Hnnn …”
“You should be careful, you know. The sun’s a lot stronger here. Will?”
When he still didn’t answer she yanked off her sunglasses and walked alongside the pool until, choosing a place at random, she dived into the water.
She surfaced, half expecting to find herself reprimanded for diving, but the Papillon wasn’t that kind of a hotel. It almost seemed as if the guests ran the place, the service was so understated; the men in their djellabas would appear from time to time, unhurriedly, as if to say it was all no big deal. The pool was empty, and Lydia practiced each of her strokes, not sticking with any of them for long. Will did not put his book down and watch her, as she would have done him. He went on turning pages. When he was finished he would find a new book—a thriller or some tired Grisham; he wasn’t picky—and repeat the process. Gazing at his immobile form from the shallow end of the pool, Lydia shivered. She took a great, loud inhale of breath into her shoulders, as a child might, and dived back underwater.
“HE’S REALLY VERY good, isn’t he?” Lydia said.
They were having cocktails in the main building of the hotel, just outside the dining room, in a long stone-floored outer room that was anchored by a fireplace at one end, a little bar at the other.
A mustachioed man played a singularly wonderful piano bar each night; his name was Kent and he was an attraction of the hotel. His manner was remote, however; to Lydia’s disappointment, he didn’t mingle with the guests.
Will nodded. “I’m sure he’s classically trained.”
“Is he? Can you tell?” It was the kind of thing she liked him to say. “I’ll never be one of the careless rich,” she remarked pleasantly, watering down her Campari. “This will never not be a luxury.” The drinks were served as in a club, the alcohol poured into the glass, the individual bottles of soda or tonic left for the guest to mete out himself.
Will smiled through the bottom of his drink. “We’ll get them at home,” he said, talking with the ice in his mouth. “I like having the little bottles on hand. I hate it when stuff goes flat.”
Beside them a French couple made a graceful move to go in to dinner. The two had sat without speaking, looking out at the room, frank in their boredom. Lydia had seen them in the mornings, playing beautiful, languid tennis. As they rose, she took in the woman’s face, lined and painted; the elaborately structured jacket she wore, the gold amassed on her wrists, neck, and ears, and looked down at her lap, conscious of her wispy dress, the dash of mascara and lipstick that served as her makeup. One day, perhaps, she would learn.
They drank up, noticing themselves among the last in the foyer. “But now I’ll have to leave it.” Lydia held up the miniature bottle of soda and drained it. She couldn’t help herself; just as she knew she would pack up the hotel soaps when they left in the morning, for Marrakech—another unattractive compulsion she no longer tried to break herself of.
Perhaps following her train of thought, Will said, “I used to want to have just enough money so I could order pizza whenever I wanted,” as a waiter appeared, noiseless in his babouches, to show them to their table.
Lydia fumbled with the clasp of her clutch, hiding her face. He had taken her out of herself, in spite of herself; she loved the humble nature of his dream. She had tried—from New York to Newport and back she had tried—but she had proved incapable of dating a man who wasn’t self-made. It was like that with the acting—her l
aughably short career, the one abortive trip to Los Angeles; with other aspects of her life. She was more than ready, she was poised, eager to sell out, but when the opportunities presented themselves she would dash her hopes on her own inflexibly honest core. There was nothing to do about it. It was like observing a character in a movie, wishing he would take the money and run, all the while knowing he will go to his needlessly honorable fate.
THREE NIGHTS’ HABIT dictated that they adjourn to the foyer after dinner and take their coffee there. The windowed room was elevated from the dining room, the pairs of armchairs and card tables arranged with a view to the grand piano just inside. The pianist was playing Gershwin now—“An American in Paris.” Lydia followed Will’s gaze. “Can’t we talk to him tonight, Will? Compliment him or something? It’s our last night—we ought to at least thank him.”
“What do you want to say?” he asked after a minute.
“I don’t know. You talk to him. You say something.” What she wanted was to be taken in where others had been excluded. Will got her that, pretty often.
Her husband rose and went to the bar for a pack of cigarettes. Lydia remained at the little cocktail table, sipping her coffee and brandy and humming along. She was smiling, but at nothing external. Drinking made her nostalgic for the promise of her youth. He might not have been there, and it was as if she was determined to keep it that way—as if Will had joined the list of uncomfortably problematic facts that must not directly enter her conscience. Even at the altar, her mind had been elsewhere.
Will tossed a pack onto the table, reserving two cigarettes, which he stuck in his mouth. He lit them, passed one to Lydia. She took it distractedly. “Oh, God, Reds? I’ll die. So … shall we say something to him now?”
She could tell Will would rather leave it alone—that his code was telling him to leave it alone. “Please, Will? We’ve sat here three nights in a row—we leave tomorrow …”
Kent was closing up the piano, pushing in his chair.
“We’ll thank him—come on.”
But they were too late. The man slipped outside as they rose. They could see him a moment later through the window, smoking, under the moonlight, his profile half turned to them.
Walking back to their bungalow along the winding flagstone path, she said, “It’s not as if he’s a concert pianist—he’s an employee of the hotel. Part of his job description should be to be civil to the guests. He shouldn’t be able to get away with that condescending act—as if he thinks he’s too good for us.” Her voice rose in the night. “Do you know the gardeners were eyeing me this morning—on the terrace? If you hadn’t come out when you did …” When Will didn’t answer, she stopped dead on the path. “It was borderline harrassment, Will.”
“Well, tomorrow we’ll be in suck-up city.” Will was referring to the hotel they had reserved in Marrakech, one of a global chain that stretched sybaritically from Bali to Beaver Creek. “You oughta like that.”
“Don’t talk like that—please!” Lydia began walking again. “I hate it when you talk like that. It’s not really you—it’s not who you are.”
“Twelve hundred bucks a night.”
IN THE MORNING they had their last breakfast on the terrace and called for the porter. In the driveway of the hotel they examined the rental car, a two-door hatchback, procured the day before from an agent in town.
“God, we’d be lucky to make it to Agadir in that thing.” “You’re not serious, are you?” Lydia said anxiously. “It’ll be fine, won’t it?” Will shrugged and tossed her the keys. “You want me to drive?”
He nodded. “I’m beat.”
She pretended to find the request onerous but couldn’t hold the pose. It was a joy to drive, even in the cheap rental; Manhattanites, they did not often get to. She pushed the car on the long flat open stretches and was soon through the foothills and climbing into the High Atlas. At the sign pointing her toward Tizi-N-Test, the mountain pass, she said impulsively, “Let’s have cigarettes—do you want to?” But Will, who was close to sleep, gave an incoherent murmur. She reached across him to the glove box and took out the pack of Marlboros he had bought the night before, slowing to light one.
They didn’t smoke much at home, either, but these trips abroad seemed to call for the creation of certain touchstones. Since they’d met—six months previously, at a party on the Upper East Side where neither of them had known anyone; she was a temp in the office of one of the hosts—they had traveled a lot together. They had eaten many room-service breakfasts. The hotels ran happily together in her mind from Istanbul to Isola di Giglio; they had spent a long weekend in Cape Town, another in Dubai. Only secretly did Lydia take pride in their travels. It was a vanity she ridiculed in other people, after all: management consultants who counted the number of stamps on their passports; whitey’s trips to Africa, his guided scaling of Kilimanjaro, in her mind only a step up from bragging about the expensive restaurants you had eaten at, the stars you had seen dining in your neighborhood—anyone could do it, and she had a fear of finding satisfaction in ordinary achievements. Yet, it must be admitted, it was she who had said months ago, of a proposed honeymoon in the south of France, “I don’t know … I just wish we could do something a little different.” She had been sitting in the window seat of Will’s apartment on Eighty-fifth Street. (A cramped studio apartment: Ten years at the firm and he had never bothered to upgrade, never seeing a reason. Now, he wanted to and Lydia, superstitious, begged him to leave it.) A whine had come into her voice as she said it—that would also have to be admitted, and the “just” of the spoiled wife, ready at her lips even then when, memory would have otherwise assured her, she was still behaving well.
SHE GOT THE cigarette going and raised her head at a flicker of shadow that a split-second’s forewarning deemed out of place. An enormous bus was barreling down on them—it was on top of her. Lydia screamed, and with her left hand wrenched the wheel around, her cigarette hand clutched uselessly to her body. “Oh, my God! Fuck!” A couple of men who were standing in the front of the bus jeered down at her as they passed. The hatchback had screeched to a halt on a narrow ledge of road and—a standard shift—stalled at once. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Oh, my God, we almost died.”
Will opened his eyes briefly, startled from a dream, then resettled his head against the seat belt.
A strange and pleasant thrill went down Lydia’s neck when she realized he was asleep—had stayed asleep; a new idea came into her head. She didn’t look at him. She started the car and pulled carefully back out onto the road. Her heart was beating and the shifting of the gearbox seemed preposterously loud. She rolled up the window and got the air-conditioning going on low. She wanted to drive all the way to Marrakech without his waking up, to pull into the Bridge Continental and say briskly, “Well, here we are. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” He mustn’t wake up. If she made it, absolution would be hers: They would get a clean start.
THE ROAD WOUND up, up, up, until Lydia was switching between the first two gears and not daring to look over the precipice. Unexpectedly, it dipped through a wooded village. Two Berber women, unveiled, were prodding a cow alongside the road. A little farther on, beside a citadel of some sort—the town’s well?—a game of ball was stopped to let her pass. The gaggle of boys split smoothly in half, moving to either side of the road. They watched her, a few littler boys and then a taller, older one, the ringleader, looking more curiously when he saw the driver was a woman. Lydia gave a little wave, bold behind the glass of the moving car, and the boy raised a hand as well, his expression half derision, half some inchoate proposition.
Two more buses passed, both of them going south and nearly crowding her off the road. Emerging from a hairpin turn, she glimpsed another village across the way, the stone houses tiered into the next mountain slope. She pressed the gas pedal harder, as if she could make the car take off into the air and skip the road in between. She pushed the pedal again, annoyed; the car was sluggish. Belatedly she checked the ga
uge—zero. Zero, after less than two hours. The unfairness of it gave her a sick, baleful feeling. She drove around another razor-sharp turn and over a rise—and she saw a gas station. Feeling cantankerous that the problem was so easily solved, Lydia had half decided to press on past it when the car sputtered for real and, with a fearful gasp, she braked at once.
SHE HAD PULLED into a clearing across the street from a pair of pumps and a small, concrete structure, the once-yellow façade now nearly all peeled away. “A mini-mart, of course,” Lydia murmured—as if they were at a rest stop on the Merritt. She looked hastily at Will and got out of the car; she would go to the bathroom, then fill up. As gingerly as she could she shut the door. Still, the noise reverberated and the truculent sickness threatened to overwhelm her. She had to lean against the car to steady herself. On the rocks above her, two men were working with pickaxes and shovels, apparently to widen the road. They seemed to be standing with their heads directly against the sky rather than beneath it. The sky itself was vast—impenetrably blue. To her left, behind the gas station, the mountain fell off, a thousand feet or more. It was absolutely still and silent, except for the sound of the men’s tools chinking and scraping the rock and a hushed din from whatever village lay below them, so extremely muted that it might have been a murmur in the air itself. Lydia gazed pessimistically up the road. The ridge that lay before them gave the impression, like all mountain ridges, of being the last before the summit. Feeling the men’s eyes on her, she hurried across the road trying not to clutch her stomach and went into the store.
“Bonjour, monsieur. Il y a un w.c.?”
The proprietor, skeptical, indicated a door in the corner. Yes— Lydia understood, crossing to it, the universal expression—if you’re whore enough to use it.
