Bing. An email from Morton.
Found it. Attached as a scan. I am here for you. Anything I can do, just ask. Courage . . .
I started crying again, and was then interrupted by a light knocking at the door.
‘Go fuck off,’ I immediately yelled, certain it was Paul. But why would he knock when he had a key? Instantly I was on my feet heading into the other room and opening the main door to the suite. Outside stood the young girl who cleaned our room and did our washing. She looked ashen and cowed.
‘Mes excuses, mes excuses,’ I said, taking her hands. ‘Je suis . . . dévastée.’
I broke away and went inside, attempting to keep down the new sob that was trying to escape from the back of my throat. Don’t break down, don’t break down. The young girl was gone from view, no doubt running down the stairs, unnerved and fearful by the sight of this crazy woman in the throes of a nervous collapse.
Back to the bathroom. More water on my face. My eyes were red. So I returned to my desk, fastened my sunglasses on my nose, grabbed my passport, a pad and paper, the printout of my plane ticket, my wallet and credit cards. I stuffed it all into my shoulder bag and headed out the door. On my way downstairs I dug out a 100-dirham note. The young girl was hovering at the bottom of the stairs, clearly uncertain at my approaching presence, wondering what I might pull next.
‘I am so sorry,’ I said, thrusting the note into her hand. ‘I received some difficult news today. Please forgive me.’
Her eyes went wide when she saw the sum involved – what Soraya told me was two days’ wages – and she whispered:
‘C’est trop . . . Ce n’est pas nécessaire . . .’
‘Si, c’est nécessaire . . . Et merci pour ta gentillesse.’
‘J’espère que tout ira bien, madame.’
‘On verra,’ I said. We’ll see.
And I headed out into the blazing early afternoon.
There was an Internet café two alleyways from the hotel. I walked in and asked the bored-looking guy – mid-twenties, cigarette screwed in one side of his mouth, scatting along to some local pop song – if he had a printer.
The guy pointed to a beat-up machine.
‘Two dirhams per page, ten dirhams for an hour on the computer. You can pay me afterwards.’
The hotel had a printer and computer for guests which I could have used. But I was concerned that, somehow, the documents I’d be printing would be seen or duplicated. I sat down. I went online and printed the medical invoice, the scan of Paul’s credit card statement, and all the details from Dr Boyards’ website about the non-scalpel vasectomy. Then I crossed over to the Royal Air Maroc website. Using my credit card, I booked myself on the 12 noon direct flight tomorrow from Casablanca to New York. It arrived at 2.55 p.m. (with a five-hour time change). I switched over to the Jet Blue website and found a seat from JFK to Buffalo. There was a final email to Morton:
Arriving tomorrow at 9 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 . . . his reply:
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 was getting shaky again. Shutting my eyes I willed myself back to an appearance of normality. Standing up and collecting all the documents I had printed, I settled the bill with the pleasantly spacey guy at the desk, watching him take in my distraught state.
‘Ça va, madame?’ he asked me.
I just shrugged and said:
‘La vie.’
I checked my watch. Paul would have been expecting me at Chez Fouad for lunch. Steering myself away from the alleys that passed through the centre 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 vulture-like 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 simply put up my hand like a traffic cop and barked the one Arabic word: ‘Imshi.’ 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, 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 – everyone seemed to be having an extended conversation with the guy in the ticket window. I finally got my chance to speak with him, and discovered that there was a bus early tomorrow morning for Casablanca airport, non-stop, leaving at 6 a.m., arriving there at 9.45. I bought a one-way ticket for 50 dirhams, and was told that I should be here no later than 5.30 a.m.
‘Entendu,’ I said. Understood.
Actually, nothing was now understood, comprehensible. I felt myself getting shaky again. I glanced at my watch. It was now 2.18 p.m. Paul would 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 elsewhere, as I sometimes did. I was hoping that time was on my side. I would get back, 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, how he had destroyed so much.
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 is so comprehensive that there’s no way the two of you will ever recover from this. Why even confront the guy? Just leave.
I got back to the room ten minutes later, handing 10 dirhams to an elderly woman out front who wore the full burqa, 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 at me. I beg you, I beg you. I thrust the money in her hand.
‘Bonne chance!’ she whispered. And even though she was wishing me luck, the way she sibilated it made it sound 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.
‘Ça va mieux,’ I lied. All is better.
‘La chambre est prête, madame.’ The room is ready.
I went upstairs. I walked into the room and stared long and hard at the bed in which we had made love every day; passionate, deranged love, 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 laid out on the newly made 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 deferent
ectomy. 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 mean for him.
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 the note at the end of the documents I had left fanned across the bed. Grabbing my sun hat and my bag, I headed out. I rushed past the reception desk. Ahmed must have sensed my disquiet, as he said:
‘Is there a problem, madame?’
‘Ask my husband,’ I shouted.
I stormed my way to the beach. Keeping my head down. Walking ferociously down the sand, sidestepping the camel drivers and the elderly men selling roasted corn, keeping on the move until I reached that point where all signs of the external world disappeared. I sat down. I stared out at the ocean over which I would travel tomorrow, fleeing the worst sort of heartbreak and knowing full well that, even after I’d run back home, the anguish would cling to me like a metastasising cancer. I could only begin to imagine the emotional blowback ahead. For the second time, I was about to deal with the debris of a collapsed marriage. Only this time the sense of failure and betrayal would be beyond agonising. Because I had bought into a lie.
I let go, crying wildly for around ten minutes. There was no one around to watch in disconcerted unease; here my grief was drowned out by the surf. When I had subsided I found myself thinking: Now what? I go home. I go back to work. I try to pick up the proverbial 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 violated your trust? Why was I needy of Paul at the very moment that I wanted to leave him for ever? How could I be so torn?
Guilt began to inveigle its way into my psyche, even though I knew I had no cause to feel any; that it was me who had been wronged. It was me who had to grapple with the agony of an act of intimate treason. And it was me who was sitting here, alone on a North African beach, beginning to wonder if I’d been too extreme in the note scribbled in fury.
The problem with ongoing guilt – especially the sort that has been clogging up your psyche since childhood – is that you simply cannot rationalise your way out of its choke-hold.
The light above was beginning to fade. I checked my watch. It was edging toward five p.m. Had I been out here all this time? Was one of the reasons that I had stayed so long on the beach the vain hope that Paul – having discovered my packed bags along with the documentary evidence left for him – would have rushed here to find me, knowing that I walked these sands every afternoon.
But I must have hiked for over an hour to reach this empty spot. Maybe he only got back to the hotel from his lunch and working afternoon at Chez Fouad 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. It was now almost five. Not a sign of anyone on the horizon. I was totally alone. His non-show on the beach was proof – if it was truly needed – that we were kaput.
The walk back to the hotel seemed to take an inordinately long time. When I reached the front desk Ahmed appeared unnerved by my arrival.
‘Is something wrong?’ I asked him.
‘Le patron, Monsieur 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?
Monsieur 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 perhaps in a way that 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 were part of the perpetration. 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 had 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. 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.’
The tone of that last comment unsettled me. It sounded studiously neutral – as if he was hinting that he didn’t believe me.
‘I was back here briefly around two-thirty p.m. and then went out for my usual walk—’
Picard cut me off.
‘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.’
‘They will 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 over-washing, 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 and Monsieur Picard spoke to each other in fast Arabic, then the detective questioned Ahmed who half-gestured towards me several times. Meanwhile the uniformed officer was inspecting the bed, the documents and the two scrawled notes that we had left for each other, the disarray of the room, the bloodied stonework. He said something to the detective who came over to inspect the blood, pulling out a small handkerchief to daub in 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?’ he 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?’ the inspector asked, finding this just a little strange.
‘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? Monsieur Picard reports that one of his cleaners heard a commotion in the room around four p.m. Monsieur 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 fibres.
‘Was someone here with him?’ I asked.
‘Was that someone you, madame?’ Moufad countered.
The Heat of Betrayal Page 9