“And what business is that of yours?” I asked.
The sharpness of my tone startled him.
“I meant no offense,” he said.
“Yes you did.”
The upstairs corridors were narrow, but reasonably well painted, with ceramic blue tiles surrounding the door frames. We reached a corridor and walked up a set of stairs barely wide enough to accommodate a modest-size person.
“Splendid isolation,” Picard said as we reached a wooden door carved with lattices. He opened it.
“Après vous, madame.”
I walked inside. Picard turned on a light on a side table. At first I thought: Oh, God, this is small. We were in a narrow sitting area with carved wooden tables, a sofa in heavy red brocade, and a small armchair. The entire room couldn’t have been more than around ten square feet. Tiny slits of light from the blue wooden shutters caught the dust in the air. Sensing my disappointment, Picard said, “It gets better.”
Opening a connecting door, we were now in a high-vaulted room augmented by wooden beams. The centerpiece was a king-size bed with huge round cushions propping up the carved wood headboard, upholstered in faded red velvet. Everything here was heavy dark wood and maroonish: the bedspread, the large desk with a matching carved chair, the large chest of drawers, the sultan-throne armchair with a matching footrest. Stone walls. The bathroom was acceptable and clean, with a shower stall enhanced by an intricate painted design. I turned on the knobs and discovered there was reasonable water pressure. When I returned to the bedroom area I was taken aback. Picard had opened all the shutters, allowing light to flood in everywhere. This darkened enclave was suddenly awash with crystalline sun. I followed Picard’s request to follow him onto the balcony, out into a day that was still white-hot, incandescent.
The balcony itself wasn’t substantial. Perhaps ten feet long by three feet wide. But its prospect was ravishing. Turn right and you peered directly over the walled fortress that was Essaouira. The absolute wild originality of the place—its medieval bunkers, its spindly alleys, its visual and human density—was laid out in front of me with a near-cartographic clarity.
Then, when you turned left, the entire spread of the Atlantic enveloped the eye.
Is there anything more balming than the sight of water? Especially this body of water, linking us to home?
There were two folded deck chairs on the balcony and a small table. I quickly envisaged Paul here, his sketchbooks and pencils and charcoals spread out in front of him, engaged with the sky, the sea, the jagged rooftops, the strange scenic concoction laid out directly beneath us. I would be in the next chair, hunched over a French grammar book, fresh from a language lesson I’d had that morning, working my way through the subjunctive case.
“Not bad, is it?” Picard said, his voice more diplomatic since I’d snapped at him a few minutes earlier.
“It will do.”
I stepped back inside. Never negotiate a price when facing a peerless view. Picard joined me.
“I saw the email that my husband received from you,” I said.
“He never received anything directly from me.”
“From your reservations person, then.”
“Madame, we have no record—”
“But I saw it. I know that you agreed to a price of three hundred and fifty dirhams for a room with a balcony and a sea view.”
“It was not this suite. And as this suite is the only room we have left . . .”
“Be smart here.”
“You think I am stupid?” he asked, the tone shifting back into superciliousness.
“I’m beginning to think that I should send an email to the person running my accounting firm back in the States and get her to find the email and send it over here. Then I can find the local tourism authority and report you for price gouging.”
“Now I must ask you to leave.”
“A pity. Not a bad room—and you could have had us here for a month. But your call, sir.”
With that I turned and headed for the door. Halfway out he said:
“I can accept six hundred per day.”
Without turning back to look at him I said, “Four hundred.”
“Five-fifty.”
“Five hundred—breakfast and laundry included.”
“You expect us to wash your clothes every day?”
“Twice a week. We have little in the way of clothes.”
Silence. His thumb was rubbing up against his forefinger, a surefire sign of anxiety.
“And you will be here for the entire month?” he asked.
“I can show you our return tickets.”
“For this price I will need payment in full in advance.”
Now it was my turn to feel as if the tables had turned a bit. But looking around the suite, the hard radiant blue of that North African sky clarifying everything, I decided that a decision was in order. Throw in breakfast and laundry and the savings of two hundred dirhams per night, and I had just saved us well over a thousand dollars. I also sensed that Picard would be relatively civilized from this moment on. So I reached into my bag and pulled out a credit card and said, “All right, sir. You have a deal.”
A small tight pursing of his lips.
“Très bien, madame.”
“By the way, you wouldn’t know somebody who might want to give me a daily French lesson? I’ve decided I’d like to improve my fluency in your language.”
“I’m certain I can find somebody.”
We went downstairs. I found Paul, sitting at a corner table, drinking a mint tea.
“Can you please have our bags sent upstairs?” I asked Picard.
“Très bien, madame.”
He signaled the front desk man to bring up our luggage.
Paul was now on his feet, incredulous.
“Don’t tell me we’re staying,” he said.
“Come see the suite.”
Then I turned back and headed upstairs. After a moment Paul was right behind me. We reached the next floor, then walked down the narrow corridor and up the final set of tiny stairs. When we reached the suite I walked straight through the two rooms and out onto the balcony. Standing outside, the sun full frontal on my face, the blue contours of the rooftops mirroring the bleached azure of the sky, the choppy waters of the Atlantic luminous with reflected light, I wanted to marvel at this exceptional vista. Marvel that I was here on the eastern lip of North Africa, high above a medieval enclave, about to spend a full month immersed in such an alien but strangely compelling corner of this planet. What a privilege to escape the humdrum and be here. I owed all this to the man in the other room, a man with whom I so wanted things to go right.
I felt Paul’s hands on my shoulders. “This view is wondrous,” he whispered.
“And the suite?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“So you’re staying?”
He spun me around and kissed me deeply. Feeling his body so close to mine, his hands sliding up my T-shirt and caressing my back, his penis thickening against my thigh, I had a strong charge of desire, of wanting to obliterate the fatigue, the anger, the doubt, through the wonder of losing myself in him.
So I pulled him closer. And reached down and felt him grow even harder as my hand covered his crotch. Looking briefly over his shoulder to ensure that the door was closed and our bags now in the room, I walked him backward to the bed. The two of us fell on top of it. And then we were pulling off each other’s clothes. I was already wet, so in need and want of him. I immediately pulled him inside me. And threw my legs around him to take him even deeper. The desire, the hunger, was immediate, all-encompassing. I came twice within moments. That only seemed to embolden Paul even more, his thrusts deeper, slower, bringing me again to the edge of a certain crazed abyss, over which I tumbled again, every nerve ending beyond electrified, every endorphin amok. I could feel, as always, the slow, relentless buildup within Paul of his own release—and how he held back, like the extraordinary lover that he was, the mom
ent of climax for so long, wanting us to remain fused, deranged, manic for each other. When the buildup became unbearable, and his moans grew louder, I could feel his loins tensing wildly and his penis within me becoming even more rigid, more penetrating. Suddenly he burst forth, letting out a cry amidst subsequent shudders, and I whispered, “Love of my life, love of my life,” feeling that to be the truth right now. And hoping against hope that, this time, a baby would come of it all.
As Paul fell off me, I glanced at the watch on my wrist. Almost four in the afternoon. After over thirty hours of travel—and all the inherent tension accompanying that long, difficult journey—a siesta was desperately needed. So I reached down and pulled the white sheet over us; the ceiling fan was circling overhead at a speed reasonable enough to generate a bit of chilled air against the heat. Putting my arms around my already passed-out husband, I shut my eyes.
Then it was pitch dark. Drifting back into consciousness, I had absolutely no idea where I was for several strange moments, the clip-clip rotor movement of the ceiling fan overhead intermingling with a voice of incantation discerned from a loudspeaker. I opened my eyes, noticing the windows still open, no curtains pulled against the stars shining with astonishing clarity in the night sky. And then that voice started again—a loudspeaker crackle, then “Allahhhhhhhhhhhhh,” the last syllable held as a long intoned note, wafting through the darkness. Reality began to reassemble itself. Morocco. Essaouira. The hotel. The suite where we would be spending the next month. My husband, now curled up in a corner of the bed, still closed down and unconscious. And me holding up the dial of my watch close to my face and discovering from the glowing hour and minute hands that it was three forty-three. But if we had started our siesta around four . . .
Could we have been asleep for almost twelve hours? I sat up and squinted again at my watch. I had an urgent need to pee. I got to my feet, my balance just a little askew after such deep sleep. The fan overhead kept up its percussive rattle as my bare feet touched the cool stone of the floor. The middle of the Moroccan night was temperate; an antidote to the immense heat through which we had traveled yesterday. I reached the bathroom, taking in the fact that it was decorated in blue tile; an ultramarine that called to mind the sky above, the Essaouira rooftops below. Like everything else about the suite, the bathroom was clean. The floor was also an intriguing ceramic of blue and white. Monsieur Picard may have been an oily customer, but there was something raffishly stylish about his hotel.
I was feeling very awake. Twelve hours of sleep does that. Having last washed almost two days ago in Buffalo, I was also rank. I dug out my toiletries and made a beeline for the shower. There was proper hot water. It remained hot throughout the twenty minutes I stayed under its spray. When I got out, wrapping my hair in a towel and using the other spare towel around my body, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and shuddered. Not because I looked wretched and aged and beaten up by life. All that sleep had actually restored some vitality to eyes previously adorned with dark rings. But, no doubt about it, what the mirror told me that morning was that I too was up against the inevitable forward momentum of time.
When grappling with uncertainties, there is only one solution: organize. I opened my bag and got dressed: loose linen pants, a blue linen shirt. Then I opened the wardrobe and spent the next fifteen minutes hanging up and arranging all my clothes, before turning to Paul’s bag. I hesitated for a moment, but also knew how grateful he was whenever I took charge of the domestic details of our lives. So I unzipped his bag and found chaos. Shirts, underwear, jeans, socks, pairs of shorts, all in an unwashed, beyond-disordered state. Dumping them into the room’s wicker laundry basket, I put on a pair of sandals, then, hoisting the basket, let myself out and down the two flights of darkened stairs to the reception desk. A different man was asleep behind the counter: rail-thin, brown teeth, dressed in a djellaba, middle-aged, a lit cigarette still fuming away between two fingers, his mouth open wide. I put the wicker basket down beside him and reached for a notepad and pen on the reception counter to leave him a note, asking him to get our clothes washed. But suddenly he mumbled something in his sleep, then snapped awake, squinting at me.
“Sorry, sorry,” I whispered. Then, pointing to the basket, I said, “Linge.”
The man’s watery eyes began to snap into focus. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now four twenty-eight.
“Maintenant?” he asked. “On est au beau milieu de la nuit.”
Before I could tell him the laundry could wait until later, he disappeared off through a back doorway, returning a few minutes later with a shy young girl—I guessed she was around sixteen—in a simple gingham dress, her hair covered by a head scarf. She looked half awake.
“There was no need to get her now,” I told the man.
He just shrugged, then turned to the young girl and pointed to the wicker basket and spoke in rapid-fire Arabic. She answered back, her voice hesitant, demure. The man asked me, “Laver et repasser?”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “And I need them this morning.”
More Arabic to the little girl. She gave a shy, quiet answer. The man turned to me and said, “You will have to wait for the sun to dry your clothes.”
“I can’t argue with that,” I said, smiling at the young girl. She smiled back.
“Shokran,” I said, Arabic for thank you and just one of a small handful of words I knew in that language.
“Af wan,” she replied. You’re welcome.
And she disappeared with the laundry basket.
“I have one last favor to ask,” I told the man. “Since all my husband’s clothes are being washed, do you have a robe or something he could wear?”
“Une djellaba pour votre mari?”
“Oui, oui.”
“Attendez là,” he said, and disappeared through the door behind him.
At that precise moment, the voice began to incant again over the loudspeaker. Allahhhhhh. The ah was held so long and in such a haunting, mellifluous way that I felt compelled to step outside and see if I could discern from where it was coming.
Leaving the blue carved archway of the hotel I discovered we were in a back alley, unpaved, narrow enough for one vehicle but little else. The amplified voice started chanting again. I moved away from the doorway. Just ten or so paces away from the hotel and I was enshrouded in darkness: hostile doorways, shuttered shops, tiny alleys filtering off this constricted street. I knew I shouldn’t be here. It was like falling into a blackened maze. But the voice kept beckoning me forward, inviting me deeper into the shadows, making me fearless.
Then I saw the cat. Hanging off a wall directly in front of me, as if he had been glued onto its crumbling stone surface. So emaciated, so grubby, so spooked. Had something terrifying thrown her against that wall? She was now clinging to it, paralyzed perpendicularly. Catching sight of her threw me. The impossibility of her position was so unnerving that I felt as if an ice-cold hand had been placed on one of my bare shoulders.
Then an ice-cold hand was placed on one of my shoulders.
I found myself surrounded by three men. They had come out of nowhere. A guy in his fifties with a grizzled half-shaven face, three teeth, wild eyes. A plump kid—he couldn’t have been more than eighteen—wearing a T-shirt that failed to cover his hairy stomach, his face oleaginous, his eyes darting up and down my body, a goofy smile on his lips. The hand belonged to a hunched young man, sallow-skinned, his countenance glassy, disturbed. The touch of his fingers made me jump. I shrugged him off, spun around, saw him gazing at me with loonlike eyes, the plump kid then whispering, “Bonjour, madame,” the grizzled old guy puffing on a stub of a cigarette, a half-smile on his face. Immediately the hand reattached itself to my shoulder. Immediately I shrugged it off.
“Leave me alone,” I hissed.
“No problem, no problem,” the plump kid said, his face even more greasy as he came right up to me. “We’re friends.”
I tried to move forward, but the hunched guy had hi
s bony fingers around my arm. Not in a restraining way. More as if he just wanted to touch me. My mind was racing. I figured the plump kid would make a grab for me, though at the moment he was simply hovering behind me, laughing a low laugh. And the old guy, though now in close, was just watching, clearly enjoying my fear.
“We like you,” the plump kid said with another unnerving laugh. The hunched guy’s hand was tightening around my right forearm. I took a deep steadying breath. I quickly sized up that I was close enough to catch him squarely, cripplingly, in the groin. I began to count to myself: one, two . . .
Then all hell broke loose. A man came running toward us, a stick in his hand, shouting one word over and over again:
“Imshee, imshee, imshee!”
It was the night man from the hotel, now brandishing the cane over his head, ready to lash out. All three men scattered down dark alleyways, leaving me there, alone, frozen to the spot, terrified.
As soon as he reached me, the night man took me by the arm the way a father would reach for a child who had gotten herself into deep trouble, pulling me along the narrow alley and out of danger.
When we reached the hotel, he all but pushed me inside. He had to sit down for a moment and compose himself. I too slumped in a chair, shocked, and feeling beyond stupid.
The night man reached for his cigarettes, his hands shaking as he lit one. After taking a steadying drag, he spoke two words: “Jamais plus.”
Never again.
SIX
JAMAIS PLUS. JAMAIS plus. Jamais plus.
I sat on the balcony of our room, watching light break through the night sky, still reeling from that incident in the alleyway.
Jamais plus. Jamais plus. Jamais plus.
But my “never again” exhortations had less to do with the behavior of those men and were focused more on my arrogance and inanity. What was I thinking? Why did I even dream of following the loudspeaker voice out into the shadows? The accountant in me was trying to separate the menace and dread of the scene from the hard cold facts of what I’d walked into. Would they have actually attacked me, tried to rape me? Or was I just an object of curiosity for them?
The Blue Hour Page 5
