Essaouira was always one of Paul’s conversation pieces: how he found a room in a fantastically cheap and “atmospherically seedy” hotel. It too had a great balcony off his room, from which he could see the sweep of the Atlantic and the medieval walls of this strange, alluring city where “Orson Welles shot his film version of Othello and Jimi Hendrix smoked far too much dope while chilling out on the Moroccan Atlantic vibe.” Paul spent his weeks there working on a second collection of line drawings—“In the Labyrinth”—depicting the spindly alleyways of Essaouira, and landing him a decent art dealer–gallery owner in Manhattan, Jasper Pirnie. He managed to sell thirty of his lithographs.
“The money I made from the lithographs could have paid for me to stay another two years in Essaouira, it was so cheap back then. But what did I do? The State University of New York in Buffalo had a position open in their Visual Arts Department. The fact that I knew the chairman of the department, who actually rated me . . . well, there it was: an assistant professorship with the possibility of tenure in six years if I kept getting my lithographs and drawings exhibited. But even as I packed my bags in Essaouira, after sending a telegram back to the department head that I was accepting the job, I knew this was a decision I would come to regret.”
I remember distinctly that this was the moment when I covered his hand with my own; the first time either of us had made an intimate gesture toward each other. Strange, isn’t it, how I reached out to comfort this man after he admitted to me that he had fenced himself in? Perhaps because I too felt self-fenced (is there such a word?), and because he was someone with a creative, bohemian streak who would pull me away from my innate cautiousness, my need to make lists in my sleep and keep the books balanced. He leaned over and kissed me as I covered his hand, then threaded his fingers into mine and said, “You are wonderful.” That was the first night we slept together. After all the years with Donald, it was both revelatory and heady to be with a man who was so sexually confident, so adept at giving me pleasure.
He made me a lamb tagine the second night we slept together. And he made me a lamb tagine just six weeks ago, to celebrate his paying off his debts. That night he also dropped a little surprise into my life.
“What would you say to spending a month this summer in Essaouira?” he asked.
My initial thought was that we’d put five hundred dollars down on a cottage near Popham Beach in Maine. Reading my mind, Paul said, “We can still do the two weeks in Popham. I’ve booked us to leave Morocco on August thirteenth, which is a few days before we’re due in Maine.”
“You’ve actually bought us two tickets for Morocco?”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
“Oh, you certainly did that. But you could have at least asked me if I was free.”
“If I had asked, you would have found an excuse to say no.”
He was, alas, right about that.
“Did you even consider the fact that I have a business, and clients? And how are we going to afford this trip to Morocco?”
“Jasper sold four more lithographs last week.”
“You never told me this.”
“The nature of a surprise is to keep things secret.”
I was already intrigued. Except for my time in Montreal and a trip once to Vancouver, I had no experience of the world beyond American frontiers. Here was my husband offering to whisk me off to North Africa. But my alleged financial caution was, I knew, underscored by fear. The fear of foreignness. Of being dropped into a Muslim country that—for all of Paul’s talk about its modernity—was (from everything I had ever read about it) still locked in the North African past.
“We can easily live for a month in Essaouira for two thousand dollars,” he said.
“It’s too long to take off.”
“Promise your staff a nice bonus if they hold the fort for six weeks.”
“And what are my clients going to say about this?”
“Who consults an accountant between mid-July and Labor Day?”
He did have a point. It was my slowest season. But six weeks away? It seemed like such a huge block of time . . . even though I also knew that, in the great scheme of things, it was nothing—and that, yes, Morton (my bookkeeper) and Kathy (my secretary) could manage to run everything very well while I was away. One of the hardest lessons for anyone with control freak tendencies to absorb is that the world actually goes on very well without them.
“I’m going to have to think this over.”
“No,” Paul said, taking my hand. “You’re going to say yes now. Because you know this will be an amazing experience which will take you out of your comfort zone and show you a world you’ve only imagined. And it will give me the opportunity to work on a new portfolio, which Jasper assured me he can sell for at least fifteen thousand dollars. So there’s a big financial incentive. Most of all it will be very good for us. We could truly use some time out of here, time to ourselves, and away from all that day-to-day stuff.”
Morocco. My husband was bringing us to Morocco. To Essaouira. How could I not overlook my qualms and give in to the idea of a North African idyll in a walled medieval city facing the Atlantic? The stuff of fantasy. But aren’t most fantasies all rooted in one great hope: that we will land, even temporarily, in a better place?
So I said yes.
The immigration line inched forward, slowly, inexorably. Almost an hour had passed since we’d landed. Only now were we the next in line to have our passports inspected by the police. In front of us the man from Mauritania was being rigorously questioned by the cop in the booth, the discussion getting heated, voices raised, the policeman picking up the phone to call someone, two other plainclothes officers (guns bulging under their suit jackets) showing up and leading the now angry and frightened man into a side interrogation room. Glancing away from this little drama toward my husband, I could see that he was regarding these proceedings with dread.
“You think they’ll let me in?” he whispered.
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“No reason, no reason,” he said, sounding uneasy. At that precise moment the cop in the booth called us forward, his hand out for our passports and landing cards. As he scanned each of our passports and peered at the computer screen, Paul was working hard at masking his distress. I reached over and took his hand, squeezing it, willing him to calm down.
“You stay how long?” the cop asked in choppy, cadenced English.
“Quatre semaines,” Paul said.
“You work here?” the cop asked.
“No way,” Paul said. “We’re on vacation.”
Another glance at the computer screen. Then a thorough inspection of all the pages of our respective passports, during which I could feel Paul tense even more. Then: stamp, stamp . . . and the cop pushed the passports back to us.
“Bienvenue,” he said.
And we stepped forward into Morocco.
“See, they let you in,” I said, all smiles. “Why so nervous?”
“Stupidity, stupidity,” he said.
But as we moved forward toward the baggage carousels I caught him whispering to himself one word:
“Idiot.”
FOUR
JULY IN NORTH Africa. Heat and dust and gasoline fumes enveloping the parched air. That was the first aroma to hit my nostrils as we left the airport terminal: petroleum intermixed with arid, motionless oxygen. Up in the sky the morning sun was at full wattage. It didn’t matter that Casablanca was on the Atlantic coast. The first sensation on leaving the somewhat cooler confines of the arrivals hall was “welcome to the blast furnace.” The sort of torridity that immediately stung the eyes and parched the mouth.
“We would have to arrive in hell,” Paul said as we waited at the packed bus stop for the coach into the city center.
“Well, you did once live here in July, right?” I said.
“It will be cooler in Essaouira.”
“And we’ll be there in just a few days. No doubt our hotel here in Casablanca h
as air-conditioning.”
“Don’t be so sure of that. This is North Africa. Discomfort at the cheap end of the spectrum is part of the deal.”
“Then we can find a hotel with AC.”
“Or we can change our plans now.”
“What?”
“Back in a moment.”
With that he disappeared off into the crowd. I wanted to follow him. But our suitcases were there in front of me. They were four sizable pieces of luggage, as they had clothes for many weeks and Paul’s art supplies and the collection of twelve books I had envisaged myself reading while facing the waters of the Atlantic. Were I to leave the suitcases and pursue my husband, I would be inviting theft and a proper disaster at the start of what was already shaping up to be a rather dubious adventure. So all I could do was shout Paul’s name several times over. My voice was drowned out by everyone crowded around the bus stop: veiled women, men of varied ages in ill-fitting suits, one or two backpackers, two grandfatherly types in long flowing robes, three very dark-skinned Africans carrying their worldly goods in cheap canvas bags, causing me to wonder if they were guest workers here looking for work and, from the bewilderment sketched on their faces, very much as adrift here as myself.
Buses came and went, most of them elderly, all belching further clouds of exhaust as they heaved away toward assorted destinations. I peered into the distance but could see no sign of my vanished husband. Ten, fifteen minutes passed. God, he really has decided to do a geographic about-face and head for home. He is probably back inside the terminal building, using a credit card to dispatch us back to the States.
But then, amidst the crowded theater of this street scene, a tall man emerged. Paul. Walking toward me, accompanied by a diminutive fellow. He was half shaven, with a small knitted skullcap on his head, a cigarette clenched between blackened teeth. In one hand he carried a battered tin tray on which sat two stubby glasses, while his other hand clutched a pot of tea.
“Laissez-moi vous présenter ma charmante épouse,” Paul told the gentleman as he approached us.
The man smiled shyly. Placing the tray down on the empty space next to me on a pockmarked bench, he then raised the teapot a good foot above the glasses and began to ceremoniously pour a green liquid into the two glasses. I immediately discerned the heady, aromatic properties of the tea.
“Thé à la menthe,” Paul said. “Le whisky marocain.”
Mint tea. Moroccan whisky. The man smiled and offered me the tray with the two glasses. I lifted one of them. Paul took his glass and clinked it against mine.
“Sorry to have disappeared like that,” he said.
He leaned forward and placed a kiss on my lips. I accepted it, as I did his hand, which he entwined with my free one. Then I took my first sip of le whisky marocain. The mint was palatably strong, but undercut by a certain sugary sweetness. I usually dislike anything overly sweet—but this tea worked because of its aromatic strength and its honeyed undercurrent. After that horrendous flight and the wait in the sun, it was balm.
“You approve?” Paul asked.
“I approve.”
“Our friend here loaned me his cell phone. There is a change of plans.”
“What sort of change of plans?”
“We’re going straight to Essaouira. There’s a bus that leaves here in twenty minutes.”
“What about Casablanca?”
“Trust me, you’re not missing much.”
“It’s still Casablanca, a place you’ve talked about endlessly from the moment we first got together.”
“It can wait.”
“But Essaouira is . . . what . . . four, five hours from here?”
“Something like that, yeah. I checked just now—the Casablanca hotel doesn’t have air-conditioning. Nor will they let us check in until three p.m. . . . which would mean sitting in a café for almost five hours. Why not take that time getting to Essaouira? And the guy who was selling the bus tickets told me the coach we’re taking is air-conditioned.”
“So it’s a fait accompli that we’re going to Essaouira? You decided for us?”
“He told me the bus was getting full. Please don’t take this badly—”
“I’m taking nothing badly. I’m just . . .”
I turned away, feeling beyond tired after the sit-up-all-night stint across the Atlantic, the heat and the toxic air even more oppressive, a further sip of mint tea doing wonders for a throat gone parched again.
“Fine, fine,” I said. “Essaouira it is.”
Twenty minutes later we were aboard a bus heading south. It was absolutely packed, but Paul slipped the guy taking tickets a ten-dirham note to find us two seats right at the back of the coach. It was not air-conditioned.
“Ça se déclenchera dès que le bus aura démarré,” said the guy who managed to squeeze us on when Paul asked, in his rather good French, if the stifling heat inside the coach would be alleviated by cooling air. It will come on once the bus starts. But when the coach pulled out, there was no arctic blast from the vents. The bus wasn’t very old, but it wasn’t very new either. And it was crammed with people and their many possessions. Two women in niqabs sat opposite us with a young girl whose hands were elaborately painted with signs and symbols denoting things beyond my knowledge. Nearby was a wire-thin man well into his seventies, his eyes baffled by dark glasses, praying semisilently, rocking back and forth in his cramped seat, so clearly bound up in the intensity of his beseechings to a power higher than this sweatbox of a bus. Next to the praying man was a young guy—sallow, peach-fuzz beard, don’t-mess-with-me eyes—listening to some pop Arab number on an overlarge set of headphones that leaked sound. He sang along with the song’s lyrics, unaware of how loud he was, his off-key drone accompanying us all the way south.
The seats were tightly packed, allowing for little legroom, and so unsuitable for Paul’s six-foot-four-inch frame. But we did have the long-benched backseat—which let him angle himself in such a way as to stretch out. He pushed himself up against the window. I slid in next to him. Putting his arms around me, he said, “So I got it wrong about the AC.”
“We’ll survive,” I said, though after ten minutes on the road my clothes were drenched.
“We always survive,” he said, tightening his arms around me and kissing my head. Nearby the young guy caught a glimpse of this moment of marital affection and rolled his eyes while simultaneously singing that same toneless lyric over and over again. I peered out the window. North African–style urban sprawl. Chipped white apartment blocks. Chipped white stretches of congested houses. Car dealerships. Warehouses. Congealed traffic. Chipped white strip malls. Chipped white villages. And then . . .
Sleep.
Or an approximation thereof.
I passed out.
Then there was a jolt. The bus had hit a pothole or something akin to that. We were in open country, stony, empty, bleak. Low-lying hills on the horizon. The world vanished again, then woke up when . . .
A baby was screaming. The mother—young, in a multicolored head scarf, sitting in front of us, looking sleep deprived and fearful—kept trying to calm the child. He couldn’t have been more than three weeks old. And he was miserable. Understandably so. What little oxygen there was in the bus had been sucked away by the reek of communal sweat and malodorous exhaust fumes, the heat curdled so that it actually felt tactile, weighty and doughy like four-day-old bread.
Shifting around in the space between Paul’s legs where I had parked myself, I could feel his limp penis. I suddenly had a huge stab of desire—not just for the sensation of abandonment making love with my husband, but also with an overwhelming need to have a baby.
There had, of course, been women in Paul’s past. One was a colleague at the university, with whom he’d lived for around two years. He talked little about her, except to say that it didn’t end well. Otherwise he made it known that he didn’t want to talk much about his romantic past. He did tell me one crucial detail: I was the first woman with whom he could ima
gine having a child.
As the bus hit another bump my husband jumped awake, finding my hand on his crotch.
“You trying to tell me something?” he asked.
“Maybe I am,” I said, leaning up to kiss him on the lips.
“Where are we?”
“No idea.”
“How long have we been on the bus?”
“Too long.”
“And the AC?”
“Never showed up. It’s not your fault.”
He reached over and touched my face.
“How did I get so lucky?” he asked.
“We’re both lucky.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Even though I’ve driven you mad sometimes?”
“Paul . . . I love you. I want this marriage to work.”
“If we can get through this fucking bus trip together we can get through anything.”
I laughed—and gave him such a full and deep kiss that, when the bus hit another bump and disengaged me from my husband’s lips, I saw that everyone around us was either embarrassed or disapproving.
“Sorry, sorry,” I whispered to the elderly man sitting just in front of us. He turned away, showing me his back. Paul whispered to me, “They’ll be a little more open in Essaouira, as they’re far more used to hippie-dippie foreigners.”
“We are hardly hippie-dippie.”
“Correction: you are hardly hippie-dippie.”
I found myself laughing again and causing more disapproving glances by kissing my husband once more. A moment like this—when all seemed right between us—was so pleasing, wondrous, reassuring. Paul was right: if we could get through this bus ride we could get through anything.
Around ten minutes after Paul snapped back into consciousness, the bus pulled into a tiny concrete depot off the side of the road. The landscape here was rocky, scrubby, flat, uninspiring.
The Blue Hour Page 3
