My hero from the front desk served me mint tea, deftly entering the room and placing it on the balcony table without managing to wake up Paul. He was still collapsed flat out in the bed, oblivious to all that had just transpired. Sitting there, looking out at constellations diminishing with the emerging dawn, I came to the conclusion that, though deeply creepy and offensive, there was no serious sexual threat behind this encounter. But there was, without question, some sort of recklessness on my part that had sent me out into the shadows. And I wouldn’t forgive myself for such impetuousness until I understood what had pulled me toward trouble.
“Well, hello there.”
Paul was standing in the doorway of the balcony, dressed in the white djellaba that the night man had brought up along with the mint tea.
“You really slept,” I said.
“And you?”
“Twelve hours versus your fourteen.”
“Fourteen hours?”
“You needed it.”
“So did you. And I see that I have no clothes.”
“They’re being washed as we speak. That djellaba suits you.”
“The French have a word for an aging hippie still dressing as if he’s just walked off an ashram: a baba-cool. Even during my year here I never wore a djellaba.”
“But it now suits your ‘aging hippie’ look.”
He leaned down and kissed me on the lips.
“I walked into that, didn’t I?” he said.
“Indeed you did.”
Now it was my turn to lean over and kiss my husband.
“Tea?”
“Please.”
I poured out two glasses of the mint tea. We clinked them.
“À nous,” he said.
“To us.”
He threaded his hand in mine. We both stared up at the emerging daylight.
“Do you know what this time of day is called?”
“You mean, besides ‘dawn’?”
“Yes, besides ‘dawn’ or ‘the break of day.’ ”
“The last one’s poetic.”
“So is ‘the blue hour.’ ”
I let that phrase resonate for a moment or so. Then I tried it out myself.
“The blue hour.”
“It’s rather lovely, isn’t it?”
“Indeed. Neither darkness nor light.”
“The hour at daybreak or dusk when nothing is as it seems; when we are caught between the perceived and the imagined.”
“Clarity and blur?”
“The pellucid and the obscure? Simplicity masking enigma?”
“Nice image,” I said.
He leaned over and kissed me. “J’ai envie de toi.”
And I so wanted him. Especially right now. After all that restorative sleep. After that business in the alley. With the blue hour enveloping us.
He lifted me right out of my chair, his hands under my T-shirt. I pulled him toward me, feeling his hardness against me. Then he was steering us to the bed. And some time later, every neutron in my body was electrified as I bit into his shoulder and I came and came again and again. And then he let out a cry and shot into me.
We lay there, arms around each other, bewildered and, yes, happy.
“Our adventure begins now,” I said.
“In the blue hour.”
But, in the world beyond our bedroom window, emerging sunlight had already eradicated the dawn.
“The blue hour has passed,” I said.
“Until sunset this evening.”
“The beginning of a day is always more mysterious than the onset of night.”
“Because you don’t know what lies ahead?”
“At sunset you are more than halfway through the day’s narrative,” I said. “At dawn you have no idea what will transpire.”
“Which is perhaps why the blue is always bluer at dawn. And why a sunset is always more wistful. The entry into night, the sense of another day of life spinning toward its end.”
Paul leaned over and kissed me on the lips.
“As the Irish would say, ‘There’s a pair of us in it.’ ”
“How do you know that expression?”
“An Irish friend told it to me.”
“What Irish friend?”
“Someone long ago.”
“A woman?”
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?”
“Okay, since you asked, her name was Siobhan Parsons. She was a professor of art at University College Dublin and not a bad painter. At the SUNY Buffalo for a year. Unmarried. As mad as a lamp, to use another of her favorite expressions. It lasted between us maybe three months. It was all around twelve years ago, when neither you nor I was aware of each other’s existence.”
Paul kept so much about his life before me in a room marked off-limits. And there was a part of me that was jealous about his past. Jealous of the women who had known him intimately before me. No man had ever pleasured me the way he had, so I didn’t like to think there were others who’d felt what I’d felt when he was inside me. Yet thinking all this here, now, I couldn’t help but feel ridiculous. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. As stupid as wandering off down that murky alleyway.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Don’t be sorry. Just try to be happy.”
“I am happy.”
“That’s good to hear,” he said, kissing me.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“Famished.”
“Me too.”
“There’s no way I’m going downstairs dressed like this.”
“But the outside world beckons. And do you really think anyone will care that you’ve gone native?”
“I’ll care.”
“I won’t,” I said. “And that must count for something.”
“It does—but I am still waiting for my clothes.”
“Isn’t there a movie where someone says, ‘Come with me to the Casbah’?”
“Charles Boyer to Hedy Lamarr in Algiers.”
“So come with me to the Casbah.”
“They don’t call it the Casbah here. They call it the souk.”
“What’s the difference between a casbah and a souk?”
“Mystery,” he said.
SEVEN
A PITILESS SUN overhead. The sky cloudless, a hard cobalt blue. But down here, in Essaouira, everyone except us seemed to be oblivious to the punishing heat. A heat so intense that the unpaved ground beneath our feet felt nearly molten.
The souk at midday. A backstreet labyrinth of stalls and shops and hidden alleyways containing more back streets, more spindly precincts where every sort of merchant was plying his trade. The sense of human density was extraordinary. So too was the prismatic concentration of color. The piles of auburn, maroon, crimson, scarlet, chestnut, sorrel, even chartreuse spices along an entire alleyway, displayed side by side, fashioned into almost minaret-style anthills; the contrasting aquamarine, ultramarine, turquoise, and lapis lazuli in the intricately designed tiles on display by a vendor who had created a mosaic on the ground, which the passing crowd seemed to effortlessly dodge; the searing reds of the butcher meats on display, hanging limbs and fatty flanks, dripping blood, around which flies congregated in mercenary clusters.
The burned-yellow, sea-green, ocher, jet-white, electric-pink, salmon-pink bales of fabrics. The stalls selling intricately patterned leather goods in every shade of brown, tan, khaki. Then there was the melding of aromas, some enticing, some extreme. Fetid sewage interplaying with the redolence of the spice market; the pungent tang of the salted sea overhanging the flower stalls; the brewing mint tea at every curbside stand we passed.
Add to this the souk’s crazed acoustics. Loudspeakers blaring French and Moroccan pop music. Hawkers shouting everywhere. Merchants beckoning us forward, blurting out, “Venez, venez!” At least two competing muezzins—the men who cried Koranic prayers in distended voices—intoning high-noon prayers from a pair of strategically located minarets. The lawn-mower chop of motorbikes and scooter
s, their drivers beeping manically as they negotiated the dirt-surfaced potholed terrain, dodging stands piled high with van Gogh–ish oranges and mangoes, and vegetable stalls where the tomatoes were primary in their redness. And here was a man trying to reach for my hand and pull me over to a corner of the souk where soaps in many hues—ivory, copper, scorched cream, ebony—formed a geometric sculpture several feet high.
Even with the Atlantic nearby the air was still so parched, so arid, that after twenty minutes of exploring the souk’s early byways, my loose-fitting T-shirt and linen pants were sodden. So too were the T-shirt and shorts that Paul had pulled on when our laundry was delivered to our room just after eleven (he held firm to the “no djellaba outside” rule). By that time we’d had a large breakfast on our terrace. Then we set up his outdoor studio—Paul getting me to help him move the desk from the outer room to a corner of the balcony where it was shaded by an overhanging roof, but where he had a direct view of the Essaouira rooftops. He excused himself for a moment, returning ten minutes later with a brightly striped parasol he said he’d bought at a local shop. Positioning its plastic stand to ensure that his desk was fully shielded, he began to ready himself for work. A sketch pad was opened. Eight pencils were laid out with great formality on the varnished wood surface of the desk. Pulling his khaki safari hat on, he sat down, peered out at the rooftops in the immediate distance, and then began his intricate architectural rendering. I stood inside, watching him for a good ten minutes, marveling at the precision and intensity of his vision, the amazing sense of line that he maintained, the way he seemed oblivious to everything but the work at hand, the ferocious discipline that rose up within him as he drew. All I could feel was a strange rush of love for this very talented, off-kilter man.
Then I set up my own little workspace: my laptop, a very nice Moleskine journal I bought before my departure, and an old Sheaffer fountain pen that had belonged to my dad. It was red, with the sort of chrome appointments that recalled the fins on a vintage Chevy. Dad always kept it filled with red ink. His choice of color was a source of dry amusement to my mother. “Your whole damn life is about the accumulation of red ink,” she told him on more than one occasion. But Dad once explained to me the reason he loved that color was the richness of its imprint: “It really does look like you’ve been writing in blood.”
But before I was able to make my first crimson entry in my notebook, the phone by the bed jumped into life. I answered it to hear the guy at the front desk telling me, “Your French professor is downstairs.”
M. Picard clearly worked fast, as I’d only asked him to find me a teacher the previous afternoon.
Before going downstairs to meet him or her, Paul told me, “Whoever is going to be giving you the lessons will need the work. Don’t agree to more than one hundred dirhams an hour.”
“But that’s only fifteen dollars.”
“It’s great money here, trust me.”
When I entered the lobby, I saw a demure young woman waiting by the reception desk. Though wearing a hijab—a head scarf that allows the face to be shown—she was nonetheless dressed in blue jeans and a floral blouse that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1960s commune. A touch of retro-hippie chic. You could tell immediately that this was a young woman who was very much caught between disparate worlds.
When she accepted my outstretched hand, the softness of her grip and the dampness of her palm hinted that she was anxious about this meeting. I tried to put her at her ease, motioning to two dusty armchairs in a corner of the lobby where we could talk undisturbed and asking the man behind the desk to bring us two mint teas.
She was intensely shy and seemed keen to please. Her name was Soraya. A Berber from the extreme south of the country, deep within the Sahara, Soraya was just twenty-nine and a teacher at a local school. Through gentle probing I discovered that she’d studied at the university in Marrakesh and had even done a year in France. When she couldn’t get her visa extended she had to return home. Languages were her passion. In addition to her native Arabic and French she had mastered English and was working on Spanish now.
“But the Moroccan passport makes it difficult to actually live or work anywhere else.”
“So you’ve never lived in England or the States?” I said, completely amazed by her English.
“That’s my dream—to find my way to New York or London,” she said with a shy smile. “But with the exception of France, I’ve never been out of Morocco.”
“Then how on earth did you get so good at my language?”
“I studied it at university. I watched all the American and British films and television shows that I could. I read many novels.”
“What’s your favorite American novel?”
“I really liked The Catcher in the Rye . . . not that I completely understood it.”
“What didn’t you understand?”
“All the local New York references. I tried looking many of them up. What’s that place he goes to see the Christmas show?”
“Radio City Music Hall.”
“The dancers are acting out . . . what do they call the birth of your savior?”
I found myself laughing.
“It’s called the Nativity, and the dancers dressed up like people from the Holy Land are called the Rockettes.”
“Is there a French word for ‘Rockettes’?” she asked.
“No, the Rockettes are truly beyond translation.”
I told her about having first learned French in Canada, and how I was here with my artist husband this summer and was very determined to rejuvenate my French in four weeks.
“But you speak it well already,” she said.
“You’re being far too kind.”
“I’m being accurate—though a foreign language is one you must continue to work at, otherwise it does fade from memory.”
She asked me how I’d found my way to Essaouira. She was interested to know about Paul’s time in Morocco over thirty years ago, and where we lived in the States, and might Buffalo be a place that she would like?
“Buffalo is not what one would call a particularly cosmopolitan or elegant city.”
“But you live there.”
Now it was my turn to blush.
“Where you end up may not be where you wished to live,” I said.
Shutting her eyes for a moment, she bowed her head and nodded agreement.
“So, if I wanted to regain fluency in French in a month, how many hours a week would I need?” I asked.
“That depends on your schedule.”
“I have no schedule here. No obligations, no commitments, no pressing engagements. And you?”
“I teach at what you would call ‘lower school.’ Children between the ages of six and nine. But I am free from five o’clock onward every afternoon.”
“If I were to suggest two hours a day . . .”
“Could you afford three hours?” she asked.
“What would you charge per hour?”
Now she turned an even deeper shade of crimson.
“You don’t have to be shy about this,” I said. “It’s just money—and it’s best to get these things settled at the beginning.”
God, how American I sounded. Cards on the table. Name your price and let’s talk.
After a moment or two she said, “Would seventy-five dirhams per hour be too much?”
Seventy-five dirhams was around ten dollars. Immediately I said, “I think that’s too little.”
“But I don’t want to ask for more.”
“But I want to offer more. Would you accept one hundred and twenty-five dirhams per hour?’
She looked shocked. “That’s almost two thousand dirhams a week.”
“Trust me, if it was not affordable for me I would tell you.”
“Okay, then.” She looked away but now with a small smile on her face. “Where shall we do the lessons?”
“I have a suite upstairs. I’ll have to check with my husband—but I think that should be fi
ne.”
“And if I may ask . . . what do you do professionally?”
“Nothing very interesting,” I said. When I told her about my work as an accountant I could see her maintaining a neutral pose about it. I could also sense that she was wondering if I had children, and where were they right now? Or was this just me projecting my own concerns and insecurities onto this quiet but observant young woman?
“I’m sure your work is very interesting,” she said.
“When it comes to money, you do get to know a great deal about how other people function. Anyway . . . can you start tomorrow?”
“I see no problem with that.”
“Brilliant—and can you get me all the books I’ll need?”
I handed her three hundred dirhams, telling her that if they cost more, I’d reimburse her after our first lesson.
“Three hundred dirhams will buy them all,” she said. “I’ll bring them tomorrow.”
“Do you want payment every day or once a week?”
Again she looked away.
“Whatever is easier for you. If you pay me on Friday the bank here is open until nine o’clock, so I can deposit most of it then.”
Ah, a saver.
“Payment every Friday it is, then. One last thing—how do you know Monsieur Picard?”
“My mother is a cleaner here.”
I considered my response for a moment before saying, “I’m certain she’s very proud of you.”
Soraya averted her gaze as she nodded acknowledgment. I told her how much I looked forward to being her student and that I would see her tomorrow at five o’clock. Then I went upstairs. Paul was still on the rooftop under the umbrella, a good half dozen drawings strewn across the table. His face was swathed with sweat; his shellshocked eyes indicating the onset of heat exhaustion. I grabbed the water bottle that was by the bed and insisted that he drink it. He drained half a liter in moments, staggered inside, and collapsed onto the bed.
“Are you insane, courting disaster like that?” I asked.
“Inspiration trumped perspiration.”
“But you, of all people, know what the sun is like here.”
“Can you rescue the drawings before they get bleached by the light?”
The Blue Hour Page 6
