‘Let me guess – a tagine?’
‘Your powers of observation are formidable.’
‘Not as formidable as your culinary skills.’
‘Your self-doubt is touching, but not founded in fact.’
As always Paul’s lamb tagine was splendid. He made it with preserved lemons and prunes; a recipe he’d learned during the very formative two years he’d spent in Morocco in his mid-twenties.
That was back in the early 1980s – when, having graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York and having tried to make a go of it as an artist in the then still demi-monde world of Alphabet City in the extreme East Village, he decided that a radical change of scene was required. Through the careers office at Parsons he learned that an art school in Casablanca was looking for an instructor in drawing: $3,000 a year for a two-year contract, plus a little apartment near the school.
‘They told me it was probably the best art school in Morocco – “though that’s not saying much”. Still, it would give me the chance to live somewhere exotic, escape the workaday world, travel, and get a considerable amount of my own work done under that white-hot North African sun.’
So Paul quit his job, took the cramped overnight flight to Casablanca – and hated everything about the place on sight. In no way resembling the fabled, mythic city of the movie, it was sprawling, concrete, ugly. The art school turned out to be second-rate, the staff demoralised, the students largely untalented.
‘I had very few friends at the beginning – outside of a Franco-Moroccan artist named Romain Ben Hassan who was a rather talented abstract expressionist for such a budding alcoholic. But it was Romain who got me a French teacher and forced me to speak with him in the language of everyone around me. And it was Romain who also got me to stop feeling sorry for myself, and let me into his social circle of local and expatriate artists. He also forced me to get on with my own work.’
Paul had found a life for himself. He had a circle of fellow artists – Moroccan and expatriate – with whom he hung out. He had one or two students whom he thought promising. Most of all he worked rigorously on an amazing portfolio of lithographs and line drawings that chronicled his quarter of Casablanca. Though the art school wanted him to stay on he used this portfolio – which he called ‘The White City’ – to get himself a gallery in New York.
While on a three-week break between art school terms he headed south to a walled seaside city called Essaouira: ‘Like going back to the Middle Ages and landing yourself in the ultimate artist’s colony.’ Essaouira was always one of Paul’s conversation pieces. How he found a room in a fantastically cheap and ‘atmospherically seedy’ hotel, with a great balcony from which he could see the sweep of the Atlantic and the medieval walls of this strange, alluring city where ‘Orson Welles shot his film version of Othello’ and ‘Jimi Hendrix smoked far too much dope while chilling out on the Moroccan Atlantic vibe’. Paul spent his weeks there working on a second collection of line drawings – ‘In the Labyrinth’ – depicting the spindly alleyways of Essaouira. His art dealer/gallery owner in Manhattan, Jasper Pirnie, managed to sell thirty of his lithographs.
‘The money I made from the lithographs could have paid for me to stay another two years in Essaouira, it was so cheap back then. But what did I do? The State University of New York in Buffalo had a position open in their Visual Art Department. The fact that I knew the chairman of the department, who actually rated me . . . well, there it was – an assistant professorship with the possibility of tenure in six years if I kept getting my lithographs and drawings exhibited. But even as I packed my bags in Essaouira, after sending a telegram back to the department head that I was accepting the job and telling the Casablanca art school that I wouldn’t be returning to teach there, I knew this was a decision I would come to regret.’
I remember distinctly this was the moment when I covered his hand with my own; the first time either of us had made an intimate gesture towards each other. Strange, isn’t it, how I reached out to comfort this man after he admitted to me that he had fenced himself in. Perhaps because I too felt fenced in, and because he was someone with a creative, bohemian streak who would pull me away from my innate cautiousness, my need to make lists in my sleep and keep the books balanced. He leaned over and kissed me as I covered his hand, then threaded his fingers into mine and said: ‘You are wonderful.’ That was the first night we slept together. After my sad time with Donald, it was both revelatory and heady to be with a man who was so sexually confident, so adept at giving me pleasure.
He made me a lamb tagine the second night we slept together. And he made me a lamb tagine just six weeks ago, to celebrate him paying off his debts. That night he also dropped a little surprise into my life.
‘What would you say to spending a month this summer in Essaouira?’ he asked.
My initial thought was that we’d already put $500 down on a cottage near Popham Beach in Maine. Reading my mind Paul said:
‘We can still do the two weeks in Popham. I’ve booked us to leave Morocco a few days before we’re due in Maine.’
‘You’ve actually bought us two tickets for Morocco?’
‘I wanted to surprise you.’
‘Oh, you certainly did that. But you could have at least asked me if I was free.’
‘If I had asked, you would have found an excuse to say no.’
He was, alas, right about that one.
‘Did you even consider the fact that I have a business, and clients? And how are we going to afford this trip to Morocco?’
‘Jasper sold four more lithographs last week.’
‘You never told me this.’
‘The nature of a surprise is to keep things secret.’
I was already intrigued. Outside of my time in Montreal and a trip once to Vancouver (hardly a real overseas destination), I had no experience of the world beyond American frontiers. Here was my husband offering to whisk me off to North Africa. But my alleged financial caution was, I knew, underscored by fear. The fear of foreignness. Of being dropped into a Muslim country that – for all of Paul’s talk about its modernity – was, according to anything I’d ever read, still locked in the North African past.
‘We can easily live for a month in Essaouira for two thousand dollars,’ he said.
‘It’s too long to take off.’
‘Promise your staff a nice bonus if they hold the fort for six weeks.’
‘And what are my clients going to say about this?’
‘Who consults an accountant between mid-July and Labor Day?’
He did have a point. It was my slowest season. But six weeks away? It seemed like such a huge block of time . . . even though I also knew that, in the great scheme of things, it was nothing, and that, yes, Morton (my bookkeeper) and Kathy (my secretary) could manage to run everything very well without me. One of the hardest lessons for anyone with control-freak tendencies to absorb is that the world actually carries on very well without them.
‘I’m going to have to think this over.’
‘No,’ Paul said, taking my hand. ‘You’re going to say yes now. Because you know this will be an amazing experience which will take you out of your comfort zone and show you a world you’ve only imagined. And it will give me the opportunity to work on a new portfolio which Jasper assured me he can sell for at least fifteen thousand dollars. So there’s a big financial incentive. Most of all, it will be very good for us. We could truly use some time out of here, time to ourselves, and away from all that day-to-day stuff.’
Morocco. My husband was taking us to Morocco. To Essaouira. How could I not overlook my qualms and give in to the idea of a North African idyll in a walled medieval city facing the Atlantic? The stuff of fantasy. And aren’t all fantasies rooted in one great hope: that of landing, even temporarily, in a better place than we find ourselves now?
So I said yes.
The immigration line inched forward, slowly, inexorably. Almost an hour had passed since we’d landed and only now w
ere we at the front. The man from Mauritania was being rigorously questioned by the cop in the booth, the discussion getting heated, voices raised; the policeman picked up his phone to call someone, two other plain-clothes officers (guns bulging under their suit jackets) showed up and led the now angry and frightened man into a side interrogation room. Glancing away from this little drama towards my husband I could see that he was regarding these proceedings with dread.
‘You think they’ll let me in?’ he whispered.
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
‘No reason, no reason.’ But he sounded uneasy. At that precise moment the cop in the booth called us forward, his hand out for our passports and landing cards. As he scanned them and peered at the computer screen I could see Paul working hard at masking his distress. I reached over and took his hand, squeezing it, willing him to calm down.
‘You stay how long?’ the officer asked in choppy, cadenced English.
‘Quatre semaines,’ Paul said.
‘You work here?’
‘No way. We’re on vacation.’
Another glance at the screen. Then a thorough inspection of all the pages of our passports, during which I could feel Paul tense even tighter. Then: stamp, stamp . . . and the cop pushed the passports back to us.
‘Bienvenu,’ he said.
And we stepped forward into Morocco.
‘See, they let you in,’ I said, all smiles. ‘Why so nervous?’
‘Stupidity, stupidity.’
But as we moved towards the baggage carousels I caught him whispering to himself:
‘Idiot.’
Four
JULY IN NORTH Africa. Heat and dust and gasoline fumes enveloping the parched air. That was the first aroma which hit my nostrils as we left the airport terminal: petroleum intermixed with arid, motionless oxygen. Up in the sky the morning sun was at full wattage. It didn’t matter that Casablanca was on the Atlantic coast. The first sensation on leaving the somewhat cooler confines of the arrival hall was: welcome to the blast furnace.
‘We would have to arrive in hell,’ Paul said as we waited at the packed bus stop for the coach into the city centre.
‘Well, you did once live here in July, right?’ I said.
‘It will be cooler in Essaouira.’
‘And we’ll be there in just a few days. No doubt the hotel in Casablanca has air conditioning.’
‘Don’t be so sure of that. This is North Africa. Discomfort at the cheap end of the spectrum is part of the deal.’
‘Then we can find a hotel with AC.’
‘Or we can change our plans now.’
‘What?’
‘Back in a moment.’
With that he disappeared off into the crowd. I wanted to follow him but our four sizeable pieces of luggage were there in front of me. They had clothes for many weeks and all of Paul’s art supplies as well as the collection of twelve books I had envisaged myself reading while facing the waters of the Atlantic. Were I to leave the suitcases and pursue my husband I would be inviting theft and disaster at the start of what was already shaping up to be a rather dubious adventure. So all I could do was shout Paul’s name. My voice was drowned out by everyone crowded around the bus stop: veiled women, men of varied ages in ill-fitting suits, one or two backpackers, two grandfatherly types in long flowing robes, and three very dark-skinned Africans carrying their worldly goods in cheap canvas bags – making me wonder if they were here looking for work and, judging from the bewilderment sketched on their faces, as adrift here as myself.
Buses, most of them ancient, came and went, belching clouds of exhaust as they heaved away towards assorted destinations. I peered into the distance, but could see no sign of my husband. Ten, fifteen minutes passed. God, maybe he really has decided to do an about-face. He’s probably back inside the terminal building, using a credit card to send us home to the States.
But then, amidst the crowded theatre of this street scene, a tall man emerged. Paul. He was walking towards me, accompanied by a diminutive fellow who was half-shaven with a small knitted skullcap on his head, a cigarette clenched between blackened teeth. He carried a battered tin tray on which sat two stubby glasses, while his other hand clutched a pot of tea. The man smiled shyly. Placing the tray on the empty space next to me on the pockmarked bench he raised the teapot a good foot above the glasses and began ceremoniously to pour a green liquid into them. The heady, aromatic properties of the tea were immediately discernible.
‘Thé à la menthe,’ Paul said. ‘Le whisky marocain.’
Mint tea. Moroccan whisky. The man smiled, offering me the tray with the two glasses. I lifted one of them. Paul took his and clinked it against mine.
‘Sorry to have disappeared like that,’ he said.
He leaned forward and placed a kiss on my lips. I accepted it, as I did his hand which he entwined with my free one. Then I took my first sip of le whisky marocain. The mint was palatably strong, but undercut by a certain sugary sweetness. I usually dislike anything overly sweet but this tea worked because of its aromatic strength and its honeyed undercurrent. After that horrendous flight and the wait in the sun, it was balming.
‘You approve?’ Paul asked.
‘I approve.’
‘Our friend here loaned me his cellphone. There’s a change of plan.’
‘What sort of change?’
‘We’re going straight to Essaouira. There’s a bus that leaves here in twenty minutes.’
‘What about Casablanca?’
‘Trust me, you’re not missing much.’
‘It’s still Casablanca, a place you’ve talked endlessly about from the moment we first got together.’
‘It can wait.’
‘But Essaouira is . . . what . . . four, five hours from here?’
‘Something like that, yeah. I checked just now – the Casablanca hotel doesn’t have air con. Nor will they let us check-in until three p.m., which would mean sitting in a café for almost five hours. Why not take that time getting to Essaouira? And the guy who was selling the bus tickets told me the coach we’re taking is air conditioned.’
‘So it’s a fait accompli that we’re going to Essaouira? You decided for us?’
‘He told me the bus was getting full. Please don’t take this badly.’
‘I’m taking nothing badly. I’m just . . .’
I turned away, feeling beyond tired after the sit-up-all-night stint across the Atlantic, the heat and the oppressive, toxic air. A further sip of mint tea did wonders for a throat gone parched again.
‘Fine, fine,’ I said. ‘Essaouira it is.’
Twenty minutes later we were aboard a bus heading south. It was absolutely packed, but Paul slipped the guy taking tickets a 10-dirham note to find us two seats right at the back. It was not air conditioned.
‘Ça se déclenchera une fois que le bus aura démarré,’ said the guy when Paul asked – in his rather good French – if the stifling heat inside would be alleviated by cooling air. It’s going to start after it leaves. But when we pulled out there was no arctic blast from the vents. The bus wasn’t very old, but it wasn’t very new either. And it was crammed with people and goods. Two women in full burqas sat opposite us with a young girl whose hands were elaborately painted with signs and symbols. Nearby was a wire-thin man well into his seventies, his eyes baffled by dark glasses, rocking back and forth in his cramped seat as he prayed semi-silently, clearly bound up in the intensity of his beseeches to a power higher than this sweat-box. Next to him was a young guy – sallow, peach-fuzz beard, don’t-mess-with-me eyes – listening to some pop Arab number on an overlarge set of headphones that leaked sound. He sang along with the lyrics, his loud, off-key drone accompanying us all the way south.
The seats were tightly packed, allowing for little legroom, but we were on the long-benched back seat so Paul could angle himself in such a way as to stretch out. I slid in next to him. He put his arms around me and said:
‘So I got it wrong about the air con.’
‘We’ll survive,’ I said, though after ten minutes on the road my clothes were drenched.
‘We always survive,’ he said, tightening his arms around me and kissing my head. The young guy caught a glimpse of this moment of marital affection and rolled his eyes while simultaneously singing that same toneless lyric over and over again. I peered out the window. North African-style urban sprawl. Chipped white apartment blocks. Chipped white stretches of congested houses. Car dealerships. Warehouses. Congealed traffic. Chipped white strip malls. Chipped white villages. And then . . .
Sleep.
Or an approximation thereof.
I passed out.
Then there was a jolt. The bus must have hit a pothole or something. We were in open country, stony, empty, bleak. Low-lying hills on the horizon. The world vanished again, then woke up when . . .
A baby was screaming. The mother – young, in a multi-coloured headscarf – was sitting in front of us, looking sleep deprived and fearful. She kept trying to calm the child who couldn’t have been more than three weeks old. And he was, with good reason, miserable. What little oxygen there was in the bus had been sucked away by the malodour of communal sweat, the reek of exhaust fumes; the heat so curdled it actually felt tactile, weighty and doughy like four-day-old bread.
Repositioning myself between Paul’s legs I suddenly had a huge stab of desire – not just for the abandonment of lovemaking with my husband, but also an overwhelming need to have a baby. There had, of course, been women in Paul’s past. One was a colleague at the university, with whom he’d lived for around two years. He talked little about her, except to say that it hadn’t ended well. Otherwise he made it known that he didn’t want to talk much about his romantic history. He did tell me one crucial detail: I was the first woman with whom he could imagine having a child.
The Heat of Betrayal Page 3