Arriving tomorrow at 7:22 p.m. If you could pick me up and get me home that would be a mitzvah. And if you know the name of a good divorce lawyer . . . But more on all that when we meet.
Three minutes later . . . bing:
I’ll be there and will bring you to E.B. Green’s for a sirloin and several needed martinis. Hang tough.
Not only was Morton a great friend, he was also one of the few Jewish accountants I knew who liked to drink. He always liked taking on the role of older brother to me, yet never played the I-told-you-so card when it came to Paul. I knew from the outset that he didn’t approve of him, once telling me: “As long as you know you’re about to marry Vincent van Gogh, my blessings upon you.” But after this single admonition, he never said another questioning word about my husband again. Morton knew how desperate I was to have a child. And Paul had promised.
I felt myself getting shaky again. Snapping my eyes shut, I willed myself back to the appearance of calm, collected all the documents I had printed, and settled the bill with the pleasantly spacey guy at the reception desk, watching him take in my distraught state.
“Ça va, madame?”
I just shrugged and said, “La vie.”
I checked my watch. Paul would be expecting me at Chez Fouad for lunch. Steering myself away from the alleys that passed through the center of the souk, I took a byway that led to a narrow unpaved thoroughfare and out the main gates. I was bracing myself for the usual vulturelike swoop of the touts who descend on any unsuspecting foreigner (especially a woman alone). But today when one such guy—sweaty, overweight, the usual smarmy ingratiating smile on his face—approached me and said, “A camel ride for the beautiful lady?” I put my hand up like a traffic cop and barked one word: “Imshee.” Get lost. The man looked startled. I felt like an asshole. I raised my sunglasses, showing him my red-from-crying eyes.
“Mes excuses, madame,” he said.
“Je m’excuse aussi,” I said, hurrying off to the bus depot, dodging the women hawking embroidered linen, and the little kids selling strings of cheap candy, and a twelve-year-old on a moped who kept yelling, “Lady, lady . . .” Reaching the bus depot, I stood in line for around twenty minutes, while each person in front of me engaged in an extended conversation with the guy in the ticket window. When I finally got my chance to speak with him, I discovered that there was a bus early the next morning for Casablanca Airport, nonstop, leaving at 6:00 and arriving at 9:45. I bought a one-way ticket for 50 dirhams, and was told by the gentleman that I should be here no later than 5:30 a.m.
“Entendu,” I said. Understood.
Actually, nothing was now understood. I felt myself drifting into panic again. I glanced at my watch. It was now 2:18. Paul might be wondering where I was and might come back to the room looking for me. Or maybe he’d simply decide that I had drifted off somewhere, as I sometimes did. I was hoping that time was on my side. I would get home, pack my bags, leave him the corroborating evidence, a short note, head off for a long walk on the beach. And then . . .
Part of me wanted to simply jump a cab from the hotel to the bus depot, change my ticket, and hop the next coach to Casablanca. But this expedient part of me was being held back by the need to confront Paul with everything, to demand some sort of explanation, to let him see just how decimated I was, feel the consequences of his actions.
But where would that bring us? Me recriminating, screaming. Him playing the little boy and begging me to give him another chance.
Why is it that we always want some sort of payback, reprisal, a long tearful aria of apology, even when we know it won’t change anything? The damage was so comprehensive that there was no way the two of us would ever recover from this. Why even confront him? Just leave.
I got back to the room ten minutes later, handing ten dirhams to an elderly woman out front who wore the full niqab, and had the most haunted pair of eyes beaming out from the narrow black slit.
“Je vous en supplie . . . je vous en supplie,” she hissed. I beg you, I beg you. I thrust the bank note in her hand.
“Bonne chance!” she whispered. And even though she was wishing me luck, she sibilated it so it sounded like a curse.
At the hotel I ran into the cleaning girl in the corridor.
“Tout va bien, madame?” she asked me, eyeing me carefully, fearful that I might explode again.
“Tout va mieux,” I lied. All is better.
“La chambre est prête, madame.”
I went upstairs. I walked into the room. I stared long and hard at the bed in which we had made love every day, always with the hope that . . .
I had been wavering for the past ten minutes about what tack I should take. The sight of the bed made me adopt a different strategy. After packing all my bags I then laid out on top of the bed all the documents I had just printed, beginning with the invoice, continuing with his credit card statement showing the excess amount he paid for the procedure, then his doctor’s mission statement about the non-scalpel deferentectomy. I wanted Paul to understand that he’d been well and truly found out. Leaving him alone with the evidence of his betrayal would sufficiently unnerve him to make him . . .
Make him what? What do you think he’ll do? Fall on his knees and beg forgiveness? Even if that does happen, then what?
Let him cry himself to sleep. Alone. Let him reflect on what life without me will be like.
I reached for a notepad. I scribbled: You have killed everything and I hate you. You don’t deserve to live. Then I scrawled my name and placed it at the end of the documents I had left fanned across the bed. Grabbing my sunhat and my bag, I headed out. I rushed past the reception desk. Ahmed must have sensed my disquiet. “Is there a problem, madame?”
“Ask my husband!” I shouted.
I stormed my way to the beach. Keeping my head down, walking ferociously down to the sand, sidestepping the camel drivers and the elderly men selling roasted corn, remaining on the move until I reached that point when all signs of the external world had disappeared. I sat myself down. I stared out at the ocean over which I would travel the next day, fleeing the worst sort of heartbreak and knowing full well that, even after running back home, the anguish would cling to me like a metastasizing cancer. I could only begin to imagine the emotional blowback ahead. And the realization that I was, for the second time, about to deal with the debris of a collapsed marriage. Only this time the sense of failure and betrayal would be beyond agonizing. Because I had bought into a lie.
I let go, crying wildly for around ten minutes, free from prying eyes, no one around to watch in disconcerted unease. Here my grief was drowned out by oceanic surf. When I subsided I found myself thinking, Now what? I go home. I go back to work. I try to pick up the pieces. I face into the most crippling sort of loneliness. As much as I now hated Paul, another part of me was convulsed at the thought of losing him. How can you feel that way about someone who has so violated your trust? Why was I needy of Paul at the very moment that I wanted to leave him forever? How could I be so torn? Why couldn’t this be straightforward?
Guilt began to force its way into my psyche. I knew I had no cause to feel guilty, that I was the one who had been wronged and sold short. I was the one who now had to grapple with the agony of such an act of intimate treason. And it was I sitting here, alone on a North African beach, wondering if I’d been too extreme in the note I’d scribbled in fury and left for Paul to find.
The problem with ongoing guilt—especially the sort that has been clogging up your psyche since childhood—is that you simply cannot rationalize your way out of its chokehold. You find yourself negotiating with it in the manner that a hostage tries to talk terms with the terrorist holding him in a basement cell. Surely we can be reasonable about this . . . can’t we talk it through? . . . Yes, yes, even though you have me chained to a bed and only allow me out to the bathroom twice a day, I know I am, in part, to blame here.
The light above was beginning to fade. I checked my watch. It was edging toward five i
n the afternoon. Had I been out here that long? Or was one of the reasons that I had stayed so long on the beach the vain hope that Paul—having discovered all the evidence left for him and the packed bag indicating I was leaving him—would have, by this time, rushed off to find me here, knowing that I walked these sands every afternoon.
But I must have hiked more than an hour to reach this empty spot. Maybe he only got back to the hotel from his lunch and working afternoon at Fouad’s just a few minutes ago . . . perhaps he was heading this way?
And there you go again, wanting some sort of Hollywood moment: I have made the mistake of my life! The vasectomy is reversible! I’ve made an appointment with the urologist! I will fly back tomorrow with you and be unfixed by the weekend!
But the beach was empty. Paul usually returned home from Fouad’s by three for a siesta. Not a sign of anyone on the horizon. I was totally alone.
The walk back to the hotel took an inordinately long amount of time. When I reached the front desk Ahmed seemed unnerved by my arrival.
“Is something wrong?” I asked him.
“Le patron, M. Picard . . . he needs to speak to you.”
Not wants to speak with you. Needs to.
“What’s happened? Where’s my husband?”
“You wait here, please.”
Ahmed ducked into the back office. I shut my eyes, wondering, What fresh hell is this?
M. Picard emerged a few moments later, looking as grim-faced and bleak as an oncologist about to articulate bad news.
“We’ve been looking everywhere for you, madame. We were deeply worried.”
“What’s happened? Where’s my husband?”
“Your husband has . . . vanished.”
I blanched, but in a way that perhaps indicated I was not surprised, as Picard said, “You were expecting this?”
“No, not at all.”
“But you left him documents and a note . . .”
“You’ve been in our room?” I shouted, suddenly angry. “Who gave you the right to—”
“What gave me the right was the fact that the cleaners heard your husband screaming in the room. Screams that followed loud thumps.”
Immediately I was dashing up the stairs, Picard calling after me, telling me I shouldn’t go in there, that it was a potential crime scene, and the police were—
But I raced ahead, throwing open the door when I reached it. When I stepped inside what I saw was . . .
Chaos.
It did look like a crime scene—in which robbery and violence played prominent roles. Clothes strewn everywhere. Every drawer pulled out, contents dumped. Two of his sketchbooks torn apart, the ripped, decimated paper littering the room like deranged confetti. And on the stone wall in front of our bed, a cascade of blood in the process of drying.
Next to the documents and the note I left for Paul was a piece of paper. On which was scrawled—in his characteristic cramped calligraphy—five words:
You’re right. I should die.
TEN
“DON’T TOUCH THE documents,” Picard warned me when I reached for Paul’s scrawled note.
“But they belong to me,” I said.
“The police might think otherwise.”
“The police?”
“Your husband was last heard screaming in this room. Then there was silence. Ahmed reported all this to me when I returned to the hotel just ten minutes ago. He said he didn’t want to disturb Monsieur Paul, as there had been no further screaming since his initial outburst. I told him to go upstairs and check on him. What Ahmed discovered was that your husband had vanished, but blood was covering the walls. Of course we called the police, as I was initially concerned that it might be your blood. Until I saw the letter you left him. Where were you when all this was going on?”
“I was out hiking along the beach.”
“I see.”
His tone unsettled me. It sounded studiously neutral—as if he was hinting that he didn’t believe me.
“I was back here briefly around four thirty and then went out for my usual walk.”
“There’s no need to explain this to me. It is the police who will be asking the questions.”
“Questions about what? I should be out looking for my husband.”
“The police should be here shortly. I had them standing by, waiting for your return.”
The cops did arrive two minutes later. A corpulent officer sweating in his blue uniform, and a narrow-shouldered detective in a cheap suit, a white shirt yellowed from overwashing, and a thin paisley tie. He was around forty with a pencil moustache and slicked-back hair. They both saluted me, simultaneously eyeing me with professional interest. Ahmed showed up in the doorway as well. The detective spoke to M. Picard in Arabic. Picard spoke back at an equally high speed. Then the detective questioned Ahmed, who half-gestured toward me several times. Meanwhile the uniformed officer inspected the bed, the documents, and the two scratched notes that we’d left for each other, the disarray of the room, the bloodied stonework. The officer said something to the detective, who came over to inspect the blood, pulling out a small handkerchief to dab at a drop of it, studying it intently. He asked a question of Ahmed, who replied in a torrent of Arabic, again gesturing at me throughout. Then the detective introduced himself to me, in French, as Inspector Moufad.
“When did you last see your husband?” Moufad asked.
“Around twelve fifteen. We’d slept in late. My French teacher, Soraya, woke us up.”
“What’s her full name and address?”
Picard supplied these immediately, which the officer dutifully wrote down. Moufad continued. “So you slept late . . . your teacher arrived . . . and then?”
“I had my lesson. Soraya saw my husband leave our room. He was heading off to have lunch and work at Chez Fouad.”
“Your husband was working at the café?”
“He’s an artist . . . and a professor at a university back in the States. He was working on a series of line drawings about life in the souk.”
“Where are these drawings?”
I pointed to the cascade of torn paper everywhere, tears coming to my eyes as I took in the debris around me. His exquisite, extraordinary drawings. The best work he’d ever done; the new turning point in his creative career. And now . . . shredded beyond redemption.
“Who tore up these drawings?” Moufad asked.
“I presume it was Paul.”
“Do you have your husband’s passport?”
“Of course not.”
“Why do you think he tore up his artwork?”
“You’d have to ask him that.”
“But he’s not here, is he, madame? M. Picard reports that one of his cleaners heard a commotion in the room around four o’clock. M. Ahmed went upstairs to check—but found the room empty, turned upside down, this fresh blood everywhere.”
He brandished his handkerchief with the still-wet sample blotting into its cotton fibers.
“Was someone here with him?” I asked.
“Was that someone you, madame?” Moufad countered.
“I was taking a walk on the beach—as I do almost every afternoon.”
“Did anyone see you take that walk, madame?”
“No, I was on my own, as always.”
“So you weren’t with somebody then?”
“I just told you I was on my own.”
“How do I have proof of that?”
“What you have proof of is an incident in our room when my husband was here and I was out walking the beach. Look at the state of this place! My husband’s been robbed and clearly injured.”
“But where is your husband now if he was so injured?”
“I am desperate to find that out.”
“If it was a robbery, why didn’t they take either of your laptops?” Moufad asked, pointing to the pair side by side on the desk. “And there is that very expensive Canon camera by the bed.”
The uniformed cop now picked up a mug on the desk, looked in
side, and said something to Moufad. He asked him to bring the object over. Once it was handed to him, he pulled out a small wad of dirhams.
“And a thief would have also definitely taken all this cash that you unwisely left out,” Moufad said.
Picard seemed offended by this remark.
“In the twenty-three years I have run Les Trois Chameaux,” he said, “we have never once had a robbery.”
“There’s always a first time,” I said. Picard and Moufad exchanged a fast knowing look with each other.
“Even if your husband had surprised the thieves,” Moufad said, “even if they had slammed his head against the wall, they would have left with the cash and the electronic goods. They would have grabbed what was valuable and in plain sight—as all these items were. So the fact that the computers, the camera, the cash were left behind . . . a little strange for thieves. Then there is the matter of the whereabouts of your husband. Why would thieves smash his head against a wall and then drag him away with them, while leaving all the valuable booty behind? It simply doesn’t make sense.”
“But surely someone saw my husband leave the hotel.”
“One of the young cleaners—Mira—heard the commotion in the room,” Picard said. “She came downstairs to the reception and raised the alarm. Ahmed came racing upstairs, found the room in its current state of disorder, and found me. We searched the hotel. No sign of your husband.”
“Might he have headed out while Ahmed was upstairs?”
“That is a possibility,” Moufad said. “Another possibility is that you and your husband had an altercation.”
“We didn’t have an altercation.”
The Blue Hour Page 9
