Tangerine

by Christine Mangan

  Alice flushed. “Oh, leave it, John.”

  “Well, anyway,” John said, his voice light and jovial, though his smile, I noticed, did not quite extend to his eyes. “You’re here now. Perhaps we can find you an interesting suitor in Tangier. Lord knows we’ve got enough of them. Though, of course,” he said, shaking his head, “I’m not sure any of them have that on the mind at the moment. You’ve chosen an interesting time to come to Morocco.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” he asked with a slight smirk, wriggling his eyebrows in what he seemed to intend as comedic effect. “The natives are getting restless, my dear.”

  “Oh, don’t talk about it like that,” Alice said, with a movement of her shoulders, as if she could draw herself further inward, away from the conversation.

  “Like what?” John asked with mock innocence.

  “Like that,” she repeated, casting him a serious glance. “Like it isn’t anything important.”

  He turned to me and gave a short laugh. “Sometimes I think Alice fancies she understands the plight of the locals better than any of us,” he said, with a teasing voice, “even though she rarely leaves the house and never interacts with another person outside of myself.”

  “That isn’t true,” she protested.

  “Not entirely, I suppose,” he conceded. “Still, you’re too sensitive about the whole thing.”

  I noticed the strained look that had settled over Alice’s features. “Restless for what, exactly?” I asked, though I already had a vague idea, based upon the various newspapers that had passed under my eyes over the last fortnight or so.

  “For independence,” John responded, his eyes narrowing as he spoke. “They’re tired of belonging to someone else, and I don’t blame them, not at all. But it means the French are everywhere these days. Protecting their interests up until the very end. Their forces have only grown since the unrest first began, when they ousted Mohammed two years back. Of course, this is Tangier, so it’s all a bit different. Or it’s supposed to be, at any rate. Still, they’re here, if you look closely enough. It almost looks like they are clinging to the hope that somehow things will revert back to their favor, what with their little spies running around everywhere.”

  “Spies?” I asked.

  “Oh, stop it,” Alice said, sipping at her drink. I noticed that her hand shook slightly. “John sometimes likes to pretend he’s in a spy novel, I think. He’s always convinced that someone is watching him, French or otherwise. Pay him absolutely no attention, please. You’re perfectly safe here, Lucy.” She stopped. “Well, as safe as anyone can be in Morocco, I suppose.”

  I had a sudden image of John lurking in unlit passageways, of Alice being watched, stalked, by her own husband, like some sort of damsel in distress, John cast as the villain of the film. I did my best to suppress a shiver.

  “She’s not French, she’ll be fine,” John said, waving his hand dismissively, breaking the spell. “I don’t think she has to worry that any weapons being concealed beneath djellabas are intended for her. Well, not the sort reserved for the French at any rate.”

  I felt myself blush, felt tiny pinpricks of anger, of resentment, hot against my skin.

  “But then, surely it is a sensitive subject?” I pressed, referring to John’s previous slight at Alice. And before I could think better of it, before I could stop myself, I said, “We are talking about the oppressor and the oppressed, aren’t we? What topic could be more sensitive than that?”

  At my words, there was something mean that flashed there, in his sharp little eyes, so that I wondered what it was that he would say in response to my comment. But then it was gone, vanished, before I could fully say whether I had truly seen it to begin with. “Ah,” he said. “I see it now. You’re one of those women.”

  I held my face intentionally still. “Those women?”

  “You know, those women,” he said, taking a loud sip from his drink. “Out of the kitchen, and all that.”

  “John, don’t,” Alice said, looking miserable. Her voice was tight and strained, her face paled a shade or two.

  “Don’t what?” He laughed. “I’m just making an observation, that’s all.”

  “Yes, well,” I said, pausing to take a drink now myself. “I suppose your observation is correct. I am one of those women—out of the kitchen and all that.” I smiled, refusing to cower.

  “Ah,” John cried, giving his leg a quick slap. “You see?” he asked, turning to Alice. “I was right.”

  “Yes,” she responded, not meeting his eye.

  I leaned forward. “So it’s really happening, then?” I asked, anxious to leave the subject behind. “Independence, I mean.”

  John nodded, apparently content, or so it seemed, to move on as well. “Oh, yes. It’s all been agreed already—the whole thing’s been set in motion. The French have already relinquished their hold on Morocco, which means the Spanish aren’t far behind. Tangier will most likely be next. It’s a good thing, as I said before. Independence is always good. But I suspect we’re all running on borrowed time here, as it were. Ticktock.” He took another sip of his drink. “Things will change for those of us who decide to stay behind.”

  I frowned. “How so?”

  He paused, looking at me as though he hadn’t quite understood the question. And then, with another slap on his knee, he exclaimed: “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, taken aback. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  We lapsed into silence then, the three of us staring into our drinks, leaving me to wonder how this could be the man who had stolen Alice’s heart. I thought of the past, of all the plans that we had made, and wondered how it was possible that they had been exchanged for this, for him, though of course I knew it wasn’t as simple as that.

  “So,” John’s voice rang out, startling us all out of our reveries. “Just how long is Lucy here for?”

  “I haven’t quite decided,” I responded.

  He nodded. “But what brings you to Tangier, of all places?”

  “Travel, of course,” Alice answered quickly—too quickly, I couldn’t help but think. “Perhaps you could provide Lucy with some recommendations,” she said to John. She turned and looked at me, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of a tennis match, with that dizzying back-and-forth motion that always made my head ache. “If you wanted to see anything other than Tangier.”

  I nodded but didn’t respond. Instead I found myself preoccupied with the idea that she had mentioned it—the possibility of other cities—only in order to get me out of the apartment, away from herself and John. Though to what end, I was uncertain.

  “I prefer Tangier myself,” John said, though his interest seemed more directed toward the drink in his hand, which had since been refilled, although Alice and I remained on our first. “Most people will say Marrakech is the spot you should go to. Really, though, I don’t like it much myself past three or four nights. And you can’t stand even that, can you?” he asked without turning, though his question was obviously directed to Alice. “Chefchaouen is always worth a few days, and so is Casablanca, I suppose. I know a few who would swear that Fez is the best out of them all. The roadblocks can be a bit tiresome, of course, but once you show your papers, there’s never any trouble,” John continued. He paused, looking at me with a peculiar expression. “Are you really interested in any of this?”

  “Of course,” I responded, though I wasn’t, not really. I had no intention of leaving Tangier anytime soon. My eyes moved between the two of them, the pair of them, and I decided that something was most certainly amiss—I could feel it, for it seemed to fill the very room around us, crackling and sizzling, calling out to be noticed. Watching her from the corner of my eye, I could not help but think how haunted she looked—a strange word, I knew, and yet it was the only one that seemed to apply. She was haunted by the ghost of her former self. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied. “But I think I’ll focus on
Tangier for now.”

  “A wise decision.” He nodded. “And where will you be staying, during your little holiday?”

  I shifted, feeling, in that moment, Alice’s gaze upon me. “I’m not quite sure yet.”

  “Well, then you’ll have to stay with us. We can’t have one of Alice’s friends staying in some suspect riad, not when we have an extra room here.” He gave Alice a slight shove. “Right, darling?”

  Alice blinked, as though startled, as though she hadn’t been listening to our conversation but had let her mind wander, far and away from the room in which the three of us now sat. “Yes,” she said at last, though the word was soft, muted somehow. She stirred a bit, and then her voice came more firmly, more resolute as she said: “Yes, of course.” She turned to me, though her gaze seemed somewhat averted, as if pointed somewhere just above my shoulder. “Lucy, you must stay with us. It would be silly not to.”

  “Yes.” John nodded. “After all, the spare room is just going to waste at the moment. It’s become a sort of holding room, for papers from my work and such.” He turned to Alice, who had, I noted, gone a particular shade of red. “Though that wasn’t the original intention.”

  I gathered what he meant, of course—and which was, I suspected, the point of him bringing it up at all, for me to understand, for her to be embarrassed—and I found that the thought, the very notion, made my stomach churn in a way that I couldn’t quite describe. I thought perhaps Alice must feel similarly, for it was not embarrassment alone that seemed to color her face, but rather a strange combination of emotions—something that spoke of her inner turmoil in place of the actual words that seemed to fail her.

  “That’s very generous of you both,” I replied, my voice louder than I intended, perhaps in an effort to quiet the unease that had settled within the room, creeping and claiming every corner of the space until it seemed that was all there was.

  “It’s settled, then,” John said, swirling the ice in his cup. “Say, if you’re really keen on remaining in Tangier, then we’ll go and listen to some jazz. Maybe this weekend. We can stop into Dean’s for a round first.” Alice started to respond, but John quickly silenced her with a shake of his head. “Oh no, my dear. There is absolutely no way we can let your friend visit this city without a trip to Dean’s. It would be sacrilegious, and you know it.”

  I tried to conjure up an image of Alice at a jazz club in Tangier, at a bar, even, but failed. She had never been a fan of the raucous, smoky dens that our fellow classmates had gravitated toward, both on campus and off. At the start, I had dragged her to a few, confident I would be able to locate at least one that would suit her, though in the end I had been forced to concede defeat. Instead, we had mixed drinks from the bottles we kept hidden in our closet, listened to records as we danced around our tiny room, using the woven rugs to propel ourselves across the wooden floor, before collapsing into a heap of hysterical laughter. I smiled at the memory. “I’m happy to go if Alice does,” I said, nodding in her direction.

  Alice seemed flustered by my words. “I suppose. Like John said, it’s where everyone goes.”

  By then, the drink had loosened my tongue. It seemed that Alice still made drinks the way I remembered—with an excessive amount of gin—and I could feel it working, relaxing me, so that the words I would normally keep contained threatened to release themselves. “But what do you want, Alice?” I pressed, refusing to acknowledge the look of discomfort that spread across her face at my question.

  “Alice doesn’t like to make decisions,” John interjected. He said it with a smile, but there was something spiteful there, just beneath his words. A tone I hadn’t noticed before, something more than a simple chiding.

  I felt that same flutter in my ear from earlier, but I ignored it, shaking my head slightly, as if to dislodge the strange feeling of fullness that had settled there. I wondered briefly whether some sort of desert bug had managed to crawl inside—I had read stories about that, of water having to be poured down one’s ear while others waited with bated breath to see the evidence float upward, emerging from the ear canal and into daylight. I imagined myself in the same prostrate pose, John standing above me, sneering.

  Alice, for her part, looked determined to ignore the comment. Already she was up off the sofa, insisting on yet another refill. I obeyed, offering my glass to her as I noted, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything substantial to eat. That strange bread earlier in the day, and the day before that, a handful of crackers prior to the ferry, my stomach too nervous to handle anything else.

  “It’s not true,” she said, sitting down beside me once again. Several minutes had elapsed since John’s remark, and I could tell he was confused by her declaration. She pushed against him, sharply, with her shoulder. “It’s not true,” she said again, this time louder. “In fact, let’s go to Dean’s tonight.” Alice smiled, though her voice trembled. “To welcome Lucy properly to Tangier.”

  I noted again the strangeness in her sudden cheerfulness—such a change from the stoic calmness she had exhibited earlier that morning. It was almost frantic, as if at any moment it could all go horribly wrong. I wondered then if it would, so close to the edge did Alice seem to be approaching as she smiled, the sound of her laughter empty and hollow as she moved about the room, refilling glasses and hurrying to fill the empty spaces that emerged in our conversation. It was all so different from the girl I had once known. But then, if our senior year at Bennington had taught me nothing else, I knew there was no such thing as an absolute. Everything changes, sooner or later. Time moves along, without constraints—no matter how hard one may attempt to pause, to alter, to rewrite it.

  Quite simply, there is nothing to stop it, nothing at all.

  Three

  Alice

  I HAD BEEN WRONG: ABOUT THE PAST, ABOUT THE CLOSED BOX. Surely.

  As we walked toward the bar—night having fallen fast and quick, so that my eyes searched and sought for safe ground—my heart thumped loudly in my chest, berating me for my hastily spoken declaration. I should not have risen to John’s taunt—for that was what it was, I knew, his words intending to harm, to injure. I should have remained silent, just as I always did. But then he had made that comment about the spare bedroom. About our stalled attempts—which was my decision, my fault. And then, she had been there, staring at me with that same queer, inquisitive gaze she always had, and which was so intimately familiar and yet now somehow so utterly foreign, the year in between the last time we had seen each other and the things that had happened since spanning an ocean between us, so that my breath had caught in my throat.

  Lucy Mason. For a moment, earlier that morning, I hadn’t trusted my own eyes, my own mind, when I first saw her. But it was her, standing on the doorstep of my flat in Tangier, the look on her face closing the distance, dispelling the darkness of that night, the fog threatening to retreat so that I was once again reminded of how entirely I knew her, how entirely familiar she was to me, so that it seemed at times as if we were one and the same person. And yet—and yet, there was always that strange sense of how little I actually knew her when it came down to facts and truths.

  I thought of the few works of Shakespeare I knew and the line that frequently rattled in my brain—what’s past is prologue.

  And there she was: my past, made corporeal, made tangible, or whatever other fancy words I was certain she would use to describe it. Lucy Mason. I had started, grabbing the old housecoat that I had only just shed, my intentions for the day already forgotten, and headed for the door. And as I did so, all I could do was think of that collar from the day before, that stupid, awful little tear and what it seemed to mean, what it seemed to predict. Wasn’t there a smarter word for it? I struggled to recall it then, under the heavy gaze of my former roommate—no, that wasn’t an accurate description—of my once friend, the closest friend that I had ever known before it had all gone wrong.

  We stood together in the front
hall, and I remembered, in the space of our silence, the last words I had spoken to her that night. I had told her . . . no, I had shouted—the first time I could ever remember raising my voice to her—something awful, something wretched, something about wishing she would disappear, wishing I would never see her again. And then I remembered what had happened afterward, what I had thought, what I had said—though not to her, not to Lucy, who had disappeared long before I regained consciousness.

  I felt my cheeks go warm, felt her eyes watching me—certain, in that moment, that she knew precisely what I was thinking about.

  She was different from what I remembered—although at first I was not sure how, my eyes searching her for any clue. Anything that would tell me why she was here, after all that had transpired between us. She was thinner, her features sharper, more defined. She was, I realized, more beautiful than I remembered—but there was still that strange quality, that penetrating gaze that made me blush and look away and that made me love her and hate her all at once.

  I cleared my throat. “Lucy.” Her name escaped me like a declaration, a single word that held so much meaning, and yet nothing at all. I had never, not once in the many moments that had occurred between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the dusty alleyways of Morocco, expected to see her again. Not after what had happened. Not after what I had said and all the questions I still had—about what she had done, about what I had only imagined. My heart began to pound.

  I had stared into her face and wondered—for one mad moment—if, somehow, I had summoned her, if somehow, from across the Atlantic, despite my lingering mistrust, my anger, she had managed to feel my unhappiness, my desperation, and materialized in front of me, a genie I had unwillingly conjured up. I had looked at her, the early morning heat of Tangier beginning to pulse around us—a safety and a danger all at once, just like her. My knight in shining armor, always. I felt the truth of it, heavy against my chest.