by Caitlin Macy
The door opened onto the outside of the building; she had to inch a few steps along an iron railing before entering the bathroom itself. It was a Turkish toilet, of course. While Lydia was doing her best to manage, Will’s voice from the other room, gregarious and self-deprecating, broke through her thoughts. She buttoned up her pants and stood leaning on the railing outside for a couple of minutes, contemplating the thousand-foot drop, listening to him laughing and speaking his bad French; she had an alert yet blank expression on her face, like an expression she might have put on to pretend she didn’t know him. She walked back into the store.
“You’re supposed to use the subjunctive with il faut, don’t you know that?”
Will was laughing in negotiation with a man and a young boy who, having arrived from nowhere, had spread out their things on a rug on the floor. They wanted to sell him a pipe, an ashtray, a knife, the cedar soap, a ceramic pig; rosewood to keep clothes smelling fresh; pierre-ponce to use as pumice stones. The proprietor was looking on, amused now.
Lydia repeated her grammatical correction and said, “Tell them we’re not going to buy anything but gas,” and when Will seemed ready to object, she insisted, “Please just tell them!” False premises were intolerable to her.
“They want to know if we’ll trade—if we have Levis in the car.”
“No!” Lydia’s hand flew to her mouth. “No. Didn’t you bring yours?” but Will was already shaking his head. “Too hot.”
“Oh, Will!” she said reluctantly. “That would have been a good one to tell.”
“Monsieur, monsieur—priez vous—bonnes choses, I tell you, bonnes choses,” the man said.
“But I can’t pay that much,” said Will, his jovial expression indicating he would pay whatever they wanted. “I already told you.”
The man repeated that the things were nice.
“No, you don’t understand. It will look bad in front of my wife.” The proprietor came out from behind the counter as Will, who seemed to have decided that the situation called for primal communication among men, pantomimed chopping off his own balls. As the men and boy took their cue with a big laugh, Lydia wandered to the threshold of the little building and looked out. Across the road the two men had stopped working and were leaning against the rock eating their lunches. After a moment one of them stood and beckoned to her. He, too, had something he wanted to show her—metal trinkets, it looked; ornaments of some kind. Lydia shook her head gently and averted her eyes, being careful to smile so as not to offend.
My wife. It vexed her to think that without Will’s presence to legitimize her, she wouldn’t have stood a chance.
She felt something push against her leg, and the little boy, the peddler’s son, or grandson, slipped by. The man who had beckoned to Lydia waved the child over. Darting reptile like up the rock, the boy conferred briefly with the man then picked up one of the wire boxes and started toward Lydia, summoning her animatedly and pointing. The thought of having to talk to them filled her with exhaustion but she couldn’t very well retreat into the shop now, and having to look at something, she shielded her eyes and squinted to take a polite look at what they were selling. Not metal trinkets, she saw now, but tiny wire cages they were, a dozen of them, stacked one on top of the other. In each was a live lizard.
THEY REACHED THE city in the late afternoon. It was Will who drove along the wide, tree-lined avenue of Gueliz. He turned north, away from the city center until they found themselves on a high-walled road that wound through the golf courses built by the golf-crazy former king. After passing turnoffs for two or three of these, they came around a wooded bend and out into a stretch of flat open space. Directly in front of them a massive gated complex rose up. Not yet! Lydia thought. As Will sped through the gates she convulsively clutched the door handle. “Will—” she began. But she couldn’t think of a thing to say that would legitimately detain them, or keep them in the car for another quarter of an hour. Already he was unbuckling his seat belt, climbing out. She was alone in the car.
“What, drove yourselves?” The concierge had come running out to greet them, a bevy of foolishly grinning baggage handlers in tow. “Mr. Norris! Mrs. Norris!” the man protested. “You ought to have called me. Next time I will arrange a car for you.”
“But we didn’t want a car,” said Lydia, climbing out as well.
At once she was homesick, as the fawning foursome surrounded her, for the desultory service at the Papillon. There would be no use, she saw, for their high school French at the Bridge Continental.
“Or a flight. It’s a very pleasant flight from the south.”
“We didn’t want to fly We wanted to drive ourselves.” But the man didn’t hear her. She had lagged back while he had taken a proprietary hold of Will, leading him through an immense open-air, rose-pink pavilion. Emerging again, they walked along the side of a vast, shallow reservoir, the surrounding pink edifices and their green-tiled roofs reflected with eerie perfection in the pool’s water.
“What hotel did you visit in Taroudant?”
“The Papillon,” Will said, looking around skeptically.
“It is a nice hotel.”
“Yup.”
“Not, however, comparable to the Bridge Continental, of course. Here, you will find all the amenities—”
“We liked the Papillon,” interrupted Lydia, dragging her heels so they would have to wait, and when Will turned, getting irritated, to check on her, she made a face at the man’s back.
In their room the sucking up continued. Except you could not have called their quarters a room. The huge bedroom suite came with its own outdoor real estate—its own wading pool, tanning beds, gazebo. Despite herself she gawked and Will smiled. The concierge thought Will was smiling at the room and said, “Yes, sir, I think you will be very comfortable with us at the Bridge.”
“I ought to be at the price.”
The man laughed uproariously, paused for a stern aside to a hesitating porter, and finished the laugh. “Come, sir”—he took Will unctuously by the upper arm—“let me show you some of the many wonderful features of the suite, including the granite and marble bath.”
This was nothing new: The global service industry was delighted with Will—salespeople, concierges, drivers. He did not disappoint them, the way so many did in this modern world in which overweight American girls with shaved heads traveled by backpack. Will looked the way they wanted an American to look—tall, large, with the long legs and developing paunch of the ex-athlete, the high color suggestive of good living. In his khakis and English shirts you could see him on a golf course or at a football tailgate, though in fact he shunned both—of late using Lydia as an excuse. In the man’s quick, assessing gaze Lydia was reminded for a moment of something her girlfriends had decided among themselves just before the wedding, while the bitch of a hired hairdresser yanked and tamed her curls into a respectable twist. Martine and Jackie weren’t the kind of bridesmaids one was supposed to have. They were the odd friend here, the odd friend there Lydia had been able to hold on to. But cracking open a bottle of champagne and sharing one of Martine’s cigarettes, they’d agreed on something: Will was wasted on her. “She would have been happy with some short, freakish, penniless asshole—”
“She certainly dated a number of short, freakish, penniless—”
Foolishly Lydia took the bait; she tried to say something in her defense—he isn’t wasted on me, he’s not, you have no idea—but the hairdresser swore because she’d moved her head and they laughed and told her to finish her champagne. Then Lydia’s mother came meekly to the door of the hotel room—cowed because the groom was picking up the tab—and said it was time to go, the cars were waiting.
“My God, he loves you. He absolutely loves you.” The concierge had graduated to grand gestures of summoning and dismissing, “disciplining” the obedient porters with theatrical censure.
Will grunted. “He wants his tip.”
“I feel like a third wheel.”
&nb
sp; When he left, though, they felt the man’s absence; that, as well of the motor’s whir and the soothing reel of landscape that had accompanied them all day. Each was aware that it was the time of day when they normally got into a fight and each of them listened, half unconsciously, for the complaint of Lydia’s that would set them off.
After a moment Will began to undress.
Lydia watched him, not saying anything. She picked up a leather volume from the bedside table, the word Amenities embossed in gold script on its cover, and alit on the edge of the ridiculously large, canopied bed. Too late she realized her mistake, for Will sat down beside her and put his arms around her.
“This is a horrible place,” she said. He smelled of the cedar soap, some faint residue of the spices in the food they’d been eating and his own familiar deodorant, masking sweat.
“It sucks.” He spoke into her hair, pushing his nose into it.
Lydia let him remove the book from her hand, unhappily let him kiss her. But when he ran his hand up under her shirt she flinched, pushing it away. “Will—please.” Her tone was indignant, like a parent’s, on discovering a child has broken a rule agreed upon not five minutes earlier.
He released her without a word.
“Where are you going? Will? Please don’t be mad at me. It’s been a long day—and a long drive—”
“It’s our wedding trip.”
“You know how it is for me,” she said, despising the words as she said them but unable to stop—unable even to sit there. She watched him rummage through their bags.
“Where are you going? Are you going outside? Are you going to take a swim?”
“I thought I’d take a shower,” he said coldly. “If that’s all right with you.”
He padded across the stone floor naked but for his striped boxer shorts. Lydia longed to follow him, to lay her cheek against his chest. Instead she listened to the door slide shut, the rush of water. She wandered around, restless. In the basket sitting on the trunk at the foot of the bed there was a bottle of wine; Lydia picked it up and studied it. “Complimentary” it was called—and she wasn’t above taking it as a compliment: It made her feel better about herself.
When the shower stopped she spoke. “What do you want to do about dinner?” She went to the bathroom and peered in.
Will was shaving, a fluffy white towel wrapped around his waist. The lights on either side of the vanity lit up the tanned muscles of his upper arms.
“Oh, I didn’t realize you were shaving.”
He tapped the razor on the edge of the chrome sink, methodically ran the blade under the running tap, and brought it up to his face. She watched him watch himself in the mirror, the razor plowing paths of skin through the foam.
“So … any thoughts?” Her throat was dry and she cleared it. “I’m ravenous.”
“I told the guy we’d eat here tonight.”
“Oh, but—Really? Did you really do that?” She went back into the bedroom and began hurriedly to unpack her clothes, thrusting piles of shirts and fistfuls of underwear into the wardrobe drawers, as if trying to hide some contraband. (The underwear was lacy, ridiculous, bought for the honeymoon, as if she would suddenly emerge the kind of woman who wore it.) “I thought we’d go somewhere local for dinner.”
“Somewhere authentico, eh? Martin mentioned a place,” Will said from the bathroom, after a minute.
“Yes?” She paused in her manic organizing. “But that’s perfect! He’s someone who really knows the country!”
BUT THE RESTAURANT turned out to be closed on Mondays. In the back of the chauffeured car, Lydia stared out the window at reddish walls of the medina. A man driving a donkey cart who had come down out of a side street drew alongside them. The driver was perched gargoylelike on the front of the cart, knees drawn up to his chest. In one hand he held the reins, in the other a thick piece of wood, more log than stick.
“Let’s just get some food,” Will said wearily.
Lydia dug her nails into her arm. Every other beat, keeping time with the donkey’s trot, the driver raised his fist and slammed the wood into the animal’s hindquarters. The thrashing seemed to have no effect, however; the blows did not make the donkey speed up, or even so much as twitch its long ears.
“Oh, don’t say that—can’t you say ‘eat dinner’?” Lydia said viciously. “I hate it when people say ‘get some food.’ It makes me think of animals at a trough.”
“No car,” the driver said, pointing up the way toward his suggestion. Obediently they got out and walked in the direction indicated. Lydia hurried a little, hopeful suddenly that the dung-strewn alleyway meant they were being directed to a find.
“Here it is!” She stopped briefly at a stout wooden door before pushing through it impatiently. They waited without speaking and were led presently down a short flight of stairs and under an arched colonnade into an interior courtyard. It was empty. There must have been twenty tables all elaborately set for dinner, with pleated napkins fanning out from glassware, all of them unoccupied save one, under the logge, where an American group was winding down a blowout dinner of some sort, a belly dancer circulating among waiters dispensing tea. Lydia looked despairingly at Will, but he was remote, beyond caring.
In the center of the room an alabaster fountain rose up. On the slow, inexorable way to their table, Lydia peered hopefully into it; but seeing that it was dry, she looked away, embarrassed for the thing.
They managed to order; their soup was served, their wineglasses filled.
Eventually the soup bowls were removed and replaced with dinner plates. Will ate his couscous hunched over his plate, shoveling a bit. Lydia began to wonder if their not talking had been noticed, by the Americans, perhaps, or by the waiters. She glanced up at the bougainvilleas spilling like paint onto the high, white walls of the courtyard. How easy it would be to mention the flowers, to point them out to Will, whose back was to them. But it was too late for that. The evening was spoiled—the thing had its grip on her; it had plunged her into its underwater orbit.
“If you really don’t like the Bridge, we should move,” Will said, making an effort. “We’ll go to La Mamounia, like everyone does. It’s my fault—I thought it would be fun to see something ridiculously luxe. Treat ourselves, you know?”
Lydia nodded. She couldn’t bear to see him try hard. It was all right for smaller men, but he was too large a man to make an effort. His gears seemed to wind uncomfortably and it struck her with sadness. Her throat ached terribly. I must be coming down with something, she thought.
In the corner, the Americans were toasting “Todd—the birthday boy!”
“I can’t stay here,” Lydia said. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” She threw her napkin down and rose from the table.
Will stood up as well, looking around for a waiter. “I’ll pay the check.”
“I’ll wait outside.”
“Don’t.” He restrained her with a hand, which Lydia shook off angrily.
“It’s not as if there’s any real danger.”
“Sit down for two minutes while I pay the check.”
Ignoring him, Lydia crossed the patio and ducked into the arcade. Will swore and called her name. She ran lightly up the stairs, started first to the right, then, confused, went left, till finally, with a sense of hysteria, she walked back right again and found the door through which they’d come in. She could hear Will apologizing to the maitre d’—requesting the check. She pressed through it, just in time: She fancied she heard his footsteps on the stairs behind her. She found herself in the alleyway and hurried down it, away from the direction they’d come, instinctively drawn to the pulsing heart of the city.
After about ten yards the path stopped short. There, at the edge of the immense, wide-open space teeming with human activity of every kind, Lydia hesitated. The prospect, even, of such vastness, of such essential liveliness seemed to blow her preoccupations sky-high. She laughed aloud, turned around and half cried, “Will? Hurry up, will you?” as if all al
ong she’d been planning to wait for him. But when she heard the muffled footsteps behind her, a contrarian impulse seized her and she plunged into the square alone.
She walked rapidly among the jugglers and craftsmen, the acrobats and musicians, unsmiling, as if she had been to the carnival so many times she had begun to tire of the acts. Fixing her gaze in an annoyed, shortsighted stare, she tried to lose herself in the darkness and the crowds. In front of her, or behind her—she couldn’t tell which, and was troubled by the confusion—she could hear drums pounding relentlessly. After a very few minutes she felt she could not continue the masquerade of knowing where she was going; she simply must stand still for a minute in order to get her bearings—buy something perhaps, something to eat, the grilled meat she could smell, or some herbs, or cosmetics to take home, show to friends, say, “It was absolutely fascinating.”
She stopped short before a snake charmer’s mat. Squatting on the mat, the ghaitah player coaxed a black cobra into striking position.
Just like that, someone asked her if she wanted to buy rugs. “Non, non, non, merci,” she said firmly. But not as brusquely as she might have, for she had been flattered by having been addressed in French.
The snake charmer’s moneyman was demanding a contribution. She shrank back abruptly and moved on, holding her head up and squinting as if she were shortsighted.
“You American,” she heard. She quickened her pace. “What kind of rugs you like?”
The question, though there could not have been a more obvious ploy, stymied her anew. She saw all at once a way to make it up to Will. Not the rugs but something else—something to calm her down, take the edge off. “Forget the wine,” Will had said, dressing for dinner. “Where’s the complimentary hash stash?” And now she had a chance to be clever about it, to come through for him.
“Madame, where you going?” said the voice at her flank. “You lost?”
She took an awkward step and tripped. A pair of arms reached out to steady her. On the point of shrieking, Lydia caught the scream in her throat. Dusted herself off and pretended to laugh. “No, no, I’m fine.”