Two more men with donkey carts came trudging down the road. One of the animals stopped to pee and simultaneously splashed the fender of a Mercedes SUV. Its owner—a portly business type in a black suit, white shirt, smoking a cigarette, a cell phone in each hand—arose from his café table and came waddling over, shouting reproaches and abuse. The donkey driver tried to ameliorate the situation by rubbing the wet fender with a corner of his djellaba. This infuriated its owner even more. My orange juice and croissants arrived just as a policeman showed up on the scene, telling the businessman to calm down and also instructing the driver to stop rubbing more donkey urine into the Mercedes’s paintwork.
I bit into my croissant, relieved to be eating something. I stared down at the international New York Times, thinking that during our weeks in Essaouira never once did I think about buying a newspaper. Now I was learning about a Wall Street downturn, and another wave of bombings in Beirut, and the death of a onetime dictator in the Caucasus, and . . .
The yelling across the street rose in volume. The businessman was now so frustrated with the donkey driver’s mild-mannered reaction to the bestial baptism of his car that he actually pushed him, causing the policeman to restrain him. Then, in a moment beyond stupid, the businessman shoved the cop so hard that he tumbled into the street. Regaining his balance, the officer dodged an oncoming car. It braked wildly, front-ending the Mercedes.
Chaos ensued, as the businessman became nearly deranged, yanking open the door of the car that had just flattened the front of his own, clawing at the driver.
I was grateful to the donkey for having peed on the businessman’s German fender. Because it made me look directly across the street at a crucial moment—just when the door to the apartment building opened and a young woman with long, richly curled black hair walked out. She was exceptionally tall—over six feet, long-legged, absurdly thin, dressed in tight blue jeans, chic sandals, a loose white linen shirt. I had Paul’s notebook out on the table. I pulled out the photo of Samira. It must have been taken a few years ago, as the woman before me was more mature, but still unbearably beautiful. I threw some money down on the table and raced over. She was standing not far away from the scuffle still in progress—the businessman now being handcuffed—watching the drama unfold. I approached her.
“Are you Samira?” I asked.
She seemed thrown by the question, but still asked me in flawless English, “Who wants to know?”
“Paul’s wife.”
Her face tightened.
“I have nothing to say to you.”
She turned and started walking off. I followed her, shouting, “Please, I need to know—”
“Did you just hear what I said to you?”
She kept walking, with me alongside her.
“Is he here, with you?” I asked.
“I am not talking to you.”
“You have to talk to me.”
As I said this I made the mistake of touching her on her arm. She shrugged me off, hissing, “You put a hand on me again . . .”
She stalked off. But I kept pace with her.
“You know where he is,” I said.
“No idea. Now leave me.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Now she stopped and turned on me.
“Lie? Lie? You dare—”
“Tell me where he is.”
“Let him tell you that.”
“So he’s upstairs? In your place?”
“I wouldn’t let him through the front door.”
“So he came here?”
“I am getting into my car now.”
“You have to help me,” I pleaded.
“No I don’t.”
She reached into her bag, pulled out a set of keys, and clicked open the door to a small Citroën parked on the street. As she went to open the driver’s door I blocked her path.
“I know who you are. I know that you’re involved with him. And if you want him, that’s actually fine by me. But I just need to know—”
I was all but yelling. But her voice rose louder than mine.
“Involved with him? I want him? Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I doubt that,” she said, suddenly very cold and quiet. “Because if you did know, you wouldn’t dare make accusations like that at me.”
“Who are you then?” I demanded.
She met my gaze with a look of ferocious contempt.
“I’m his daughter.”
THIRTEEN
I STOOD ON the curb for a long time after she drove off. I was stunned by the revelation just rendered, stopped dead in my tracks. When I glanced up I caught a final glimpse of her face, staring back at me with hardened contempt. Yet her eyes also radiated the saddest sort of despair.
Then she accelerated and the car shot off down the street.
I remained motionless for several moments, not knowing what to do next. Eventually I retreated back to the café. The waiter was keeping an eye on my table, my newspapers, my croissants, my jus d’orange. As I approached he handed me the 100-dirham note I had thrown on the table before I got up to pursue Samira.
“You left all this behind, madame.”
“I had to speak to someone.”
A small nod of acknowledgment from the waiter. Had he watched that scene unfold? Had he put two and two together and reasoned it was a wife confronting the woman she thought was her husband’s mistress? If only he knew the truth. If only I knew the truth.
I sat back down at my table. I shut my eyes, exhausted and confused and flattened by a disclosure that I simply never saw coming.
He has a child. He has a child who is at least thirty years old. Maybe older. He has a daughter. A beautiful daughter. Evidently conceived with a Moroccan woman. Judging by her age, the point of conception was all those decades ago—and the photo Paul kept of her in his notebook must have been ten years old. A secret he kept from me always. A secret that made his other great deceit—promising me a child and then having a vasectomy—even more heartbreaking.
“Would you like your coffee now, madame?”
I indicated that would be fine. Hunger forced me to eat the croissants, drink the very good orange juice. I tried reading one of the newspapers. The words swam in front of me. I pushed the newspaper away. In front of me the businessman was now being forcibly pushed into the back of a police car, struggling against the cuffs that were restraining his hands behind his back. Now he was going to be arrested for assaulting a police officer and would have to spend serious money on a lawyer. We really are the architects of our own miseries, aren’t we?
I checked my watch. Six forty-three. My flight was in just under five hours. I drank my coffee. Having been turned away by his daughter, seeking refuge in the city he once called home, Paul would surely turn to friends. Or to one specific friend. Someone whose name he dropped in both conversation and in the pages of his notebook. Opening Paul’s journal I found the entry I was looking for. The entry where he wrote about wanting to reestablish contact with Samira.
Can Romain B.H. aid my cause?
Romain Ben Hassan. Whose address was written just below.
I called the waiter over. I showed him the scrawled address and asked where it might be.
“Two streets from here,” he said, then insisted on drawing me a map on the back of a bar coaster, explaining that I could make it to his front door in around five minutes.
A manic plan began to form in my head. I would leave here in fifteen minutes and walk over to Ben Hassan’s place—where, no doubt, my husband was sleeping off the events of last night, which must have involved some sort of confrontation with his daughter. Knowing Paul, the last thing he would have done is try to find a hotel and recuperate alone. Which is why I was pretty sure that he had taken refuge at his friend’s apartment. The idea of now crossing the Atlantic, uncertain of his whereabouts or his injuries, would be a refutation of all the responsible rules I lived by. If he was at Ben Hassan’s, I could, at lea
st, verify that he was in one physical piece (whatever his mental state), and have a face-to-face with him. Then hit the street. Jump a cab to the airport. And fly out of all this sadness.
The coffee arrived. I drank it quickly, the caffeine a fast antidote to my fatigue. I ordered a second and threw it back. I settled the bill, counted out my remaining dirhams, and asked the waiter how much a taxi would cost from here to the airport.
“You will need to negotiate, but don’t pay more than two hundred dirhams. Make sure you agree on the price before he starts driving.”
I thanked him for his kindness and his advice, as well as his impromptu map, which I now used to guide me to 3450 rue Tahia. Though I was too preoccupied to take in much of my immediate surroundings, I did note that this quartier—which the waiter told me was known as Gaulthier, after the French architect who designed the layout and many of the 1920s apartment buildings in the area—still evoked the Jazz Era, albeit in a slightly crumbling way.
3450 rue Tahia was a building that looked as if it had seen happier days. Chipped masonry. A broken sequence of pavements in front of its main entrance. A huge water stain above its front doorway. Electrical wires dangling down from a broken entrance light. I scanned the list of names by the front door, spied Ben Hassan, R., 3ème étage, gauche. I knew that by ringing his bell, I would be alerting him and Paul of my arrival. To hell with the fact that it was now 7:12 a.m. I had to see my husband. So I loitered in the lobby until a woman around fifty—dressed in a black business suit and big Chanel sunglasses—came out the door. She looked at me askance when I walked in past her, holding the door for her as she exited. I was about to invent some excuse—“I forgot the door code”—but thought better of it and simply headed to the staircase, probably once grand and marbled, now showing signs of the same water damage that marked the ceiling, with wood banisters that bent when I grabbed hold of them.
The spiral staircase tilted upward at a dangerous angle, and—as I noticed when I reached the first and second landings—the space between an apartment doorway and the deteriorating banister was minimal. A misstep or two and over you could go. The lack of sleep, the pressing sense of anxiety, the thought What am I doing here? and the sheer dizzy incline all conspired to make me hug the wall on the way up, terrified of losing my balance and encountering what would certainly be a horrifying plunge.
I reached the fourth floor. I turned left. The door in front of me was painted an insane shade of purple, its outer frame glossed black. The choice of color immediately threw me. Too hallucinatory, too out there. I rang the bell. No answer. I waited thirty seconds. I rang it again. No answer. I checked my watch. Almost 7:30. Everybody inside—my husband included—must be asleep.
I leaned on the bell, holding it down for a good thirty seconds. Eventually the door cracked open. I was facing a very short man in his early thirties, a bald head, immaculate skin. He looked like he’d just gotten out of bed. He stared out at me with tired, leery eyes.
“I need to speak with Monsieur Ben Hassan,” I said in French.
“He’s sleeping,” the man said in a voice that defined tonelessness.
“It’s urgent.”
“Come back later.”
He started to close the door, but I inched my foot into its path.
“I can’t come back later. I must see him now.”
“Not now.”
He tried to close the door, but my foot stopped him.
“You see him some other time,” he said.
“No, I am seeing Monsieur Ben Hassan now.”
I barked that last word. I could see the man’s eyes grow wide. I grabbed the knob and pushed my left knee up against the door just as he tried to force it closed.
“You go away,” he now hissed.
“I am Monsieur Paul’s wife. I know he’s inside. I have to talk to him.”
Shoving against his shoves, I began to shout: “Paul? Paul? You have to see me—”
Suddenly the door swung open and I found myself face-to-face with a man who must have weighed at least three hundred pounds. He was in his early sixties, with thin hair that he brushed across his bowling ball of a head. His face was corpulent and treble-chinned. His eyes—vampiric blue—hinted that my entreaties had just roused him into consciousness. But it was his girth that threw me. Encased in a sweaty white caftan, he had the appearance of a monumental block of Camembert cheese that had been left out in the sun and was now oozing. He studied me through squinting, tired eyes.
“Your husband is not here.”
I was thrown by this comment.
“You know who I am.”
A shrug. “Of course I know who you are, Robin. I am Ben Hassan. And, alas, your husband is gone.”
“Gone where?”
As I said this I felt my equilibrium giving way. I leaned against the wall for support. Putting my right hand over my face I wondered if I was about to pass out. I heard Monsieur Ben Hassan say something to his friend in Arabic. That’s when he put his hand on my arm. I flinched, pulling away.
“Omar simply wants to help you inside—before you faint.”
Wooziness was overtaking me.
“He’s gone where?” I asked.
Ben Hassan looked directly at me. And said, “He’s gone to see his wife.”
Now I was in free fall.
“His wife?” I heard myself saying. “I’m his wife.”
That’s when I felt myself pitch forward. Omar caught me. I remember mumbling something about needing to sit down. What happened next? I remember little, except being led into a large room that appeared to also be painted purple and furnished with a surfeit of heavily embroidered velvet cushions. I was led to what seemed to be a mattress on the floor covered by some sort of velvet blanket. Words were being spoken to me in French. They wafted over me, sounding as garbled as my brain. I kept telling myself, Get up, you have a plane to catch. Just as that declaration, He’s gone to see his wife, kept ricocheting around my head. Surely I didn’t hear that correctly.
And then, having been settled by Omar on the mattress, I promptly blacked out.
When I woke again I was in a world of shadows. It took a moment or two to work out where I was and then another nanosecond for me to descend into panic as I glanced at my watch and saw that it was 4:12. I jolted upright. After four in the afternoon. I had been asleep for hours. I had missed my flight.
I was in a large living room with dark purple walls. Floorboards painted black gloss. Heavy red velvet drapes. Red velvet cushions. The red sheet covering the mattress on which I’d crashed for the last . . . had I been asleep almost nine hours? Strange bad abstract art on the walls, depicting boxes within boxes, or gyrating circles that seemed to spin inward and had been painted in bloodied tones against a black background.
I had an urgent need to pee. I also had a terrifying thought: Where was my backpack, within which was my laptop, the printout of my airplane ticket, my wallet with all my credit cards, and, most crucially, my passport? I was on my feet, scrambling around the room in search of it. When there was no sign of it in this velvet whorehouse of a room, I started shouting, “Monsieur, monsieur, monsieur,” and ran down a corridor, throwing open doors. The first one led into a room, bare except for several wooden folding tables, on which were several piles of passports in a variety of official colors, a photocopier, assorted embossing stamps, and a machine that, on closer inspection, seemed to provide a plastic covering for documents.
What the hell was this all about?
I charged down the hall, entering a kitchen that had several days of dirty dishes and brimming ashtrays scattered everywhere, not to mention a stench that I associated with rotting vegetables. I kept shouting, “Monsieur!” Again no answer. Another charge down the long corridor. Another door thrown open. Only this time I found myself staring in at a huge carved bed, on which Omar and Monsieur Ben Hassan were sleeping naked. They were on separate corners of the expansive mattress, Omar looking so diminutive and compact compared to the fles
hy enormity of Ben Hassan. As soon as I threw open the door, Omar snapped awake. Seeing me he scrambled for a sheet to cover himself, then started hissing at me in Arabic. At which point Ben Hassan opened his eyes slowly, took me in, then said, “You interrupted our siesta.”
“I can’t find my backpack.”
“And you immediately thought that the dirty Moroccans had stolen it.”
“You let me sleep through my flight. Where have you put my bag?”
“In the closet by the front door. You will find that nothing has been touched. If you need the bathroom, it’s the door next to the closet. There is a shower there as well. Fresh towels have been laid out for you. Please excuse the state of the kitchen. We have been working flat out on a project for several days, and housekeeping, alas, has taken a backseat. But we’ll eat out tonight.”
“I need to get going.”
The Blue Hour Page 14
