by Lisa Gornick
Caro stretches out on one of the chaise longues, covered by two of the long pool towels, the weak winter sun warming her face. She wonders if the hotel on the Place Prince Moulay Hassan, where she stayed fifteen years ago, still exists. There was no air-conditioning, no pool, no hotel bar, but with the kind maid who brought her the tea and cactus and bottles of water, it had been a haven. Emerged from her room on the third day, she discovered the rooftop terrace, where breakfast was served on tile tables, the view of the ramparts and the Ile de Mogador below.
Then she was obsessed with the question of her sexual experience, which for so long had been too little, and then in the space of a few months was too much. The pianist’s husband had left her determined to bring her sexual education in hand, to rid herself of the embarrassment of naïveté. Camped out on her friend Anne-Marie’s floor, she had taken her first lover, Francis, whom she’d met in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where she’d been reading on one of the iron chairs adjacent to the basin where children launched model sailboats. He had offered her a cigarette, and when she said, Non, merci, je ne fume pas, he’d shot back, Et pourquoi pas un café?, and when she said, Je n’ai pas soif, he stood up and did a handstand on his short muscular arms, landing so close to the water, the nearby children gasped, thinking he might topple in.
On their first date, Francis, a factory worker during the day and university student at night, had made her laugh with absurdist quotes from Saint-Exupéry while he picked bread crumbs from his closely cropped beard. On their second date, he came to get her in his tiny Renault and took her to his sister’s apartment, where it turned out no one was home. His beard left a prickly rash across her chest. He made an omelet for them while she scrubbed blood from the couch cushion.
Francis was followed by a Romanian music student, Mikel, whom she met through Anne-Marie. Mikel lived with two other Romanian music students, the three of them having devised a schedule so each had the two-room apartment to himself one night a week. Mikel’s night was Thursday. Every Thursday he would meet her at eight and race her back to the fourth-floor apartment, where he behaved like a madman who’d had no food or drink for a week. On Fridays and Saturdays, he would chastely escort her to student recitals at the homes of various friends who would cook pastries stuffed with meat and breads filled with dates and nuts.
In June, she and Anne-Marie bought cheap airline tickets to Crete, where Anne-Marie had a cousin who worked at a bar in Agios Nikolaos. Meeting Caro, Anne-Marie’s cousin smirked. “Andreas, my boss, will give me a raise for inviting you here. He has a thing for American college girls. You are all Marilyn Monroe as far as he is concerned.”
The bar was a beach club during the day, with umbrellas and chairs laid out on the coarse sand and a motorboat that took out water skiers. At night, it was more a nightclub than a bar. Anne-Marie spread her beach towel on the sand. Belly down, she untied the back string of her bikini top. She had long angular shoulder blades, a tiny waist, and a big bottom. Caro read under an umbrella in the only bathing suit she owned, a navy tank she’d worn for her high school swim class, now stretched out and falling off her.
The motorboat sputtered onto the sand. The driver had gray hair pulled back into a ponytail and deeply tanned skin. “You girls want to ski?”
Caro had never been on water skis and was too terrified to try, but Anne-Marie loved anything fast where the wind would blow in her face. Caro sat in the boat with the suntanned man while Anne-Marie skied off the back. When Caro hugged her arms, he gave her his shirt to put over her suit. Wiry gray hair curled on his chest. “You and your friend come to my club tonight,” he instructed. “You will see the real Greek dances.”
At the club, couples danced on the tables and men threw plates against the stone hearth. Caro and Anne-Marie drank the raki that Andreas kept sending to their table. When Caro stumbled outside to be sick, Andreas followed her with a wet dishrag. He led her to the apartment he kept over the club. When she woke at dawn, he was nuzzled against her, kissing the nape of her neck. “I love you with every bone in my body,” he whispered. He guided her hand into his briefs. Afterward, he lay on his back smoking and asked her name.
In Athens, she saved two baggy outfits but threw out the rest and the old tank suit. She bought two batik print skirts, one short, one long, and a striped bikini Anne-Marie picked out for her. In Barcelona, Anne-Marie insisted she have her hair straightened. A man with rubber gloves brushed Caro’s hair so it fell in soft, chemical-scented waves over her shoulders. “And where is my ugly duckling?” Anne-Marie asked.
By the time they reached Casablanca, Anne-Marie had had it with third-class hotels. Using Papa’s Carte Suisse, she took a room for them in a hotel with air-conditioning and a swimming pool. Tired of the beating sun, Caro remained in the room while Anne-Marie went to the pool. When Anne-Marie returned, she announced that they were going to a nightclub with two brothers she had met in the lobby. Very refined men, she declared. Their mother was a third cousin of the king.
The brothers, Abdu and Yosefa, arrived in golf shirts and khaki pants. They had manicured hands, each with a long left pinkie nail. Anne-Marie touched Abdu’s nail. He whispered something in her ear. Her eyes opened wide.
They drove to a club along the corniche where Abdu danced with his hands cupping Anne-Marie’s butt. At the table, Yosefa told Caro his story: that first Abdu, then, two years later, he had been sent to boarding school in Switzerland. Abdu, who loved to ski, had gone to university in Toulouse; Yosefa had attended in Aix. For the sake of propriety, they lived with their parents and would continue to do so until they were married, though they shared an apartment as well for … and here Yosefa left the sentence unfinished.
The next evening, the brothers took Anne-Marie and Caro to a restaurant overlooking the sea. Anne-Marie wore a halter dress that left her back bare. Abdu ordered a sparkling wine that Anne-Marie drank like soda. When Abdu suggested they return to his and Yosefa’s apartment so they could listen to some music, Anne-Marie shimmied her shoulders, her small breasts jiggling beneath the shiny fabric of her dress.
“No. N-O,” Caro whispered in Anne-Marie’s ear. “I am not going.”
“Do as you please. I’m going.” Anne-Marie dug her nails into Caro’s upper arm. “Bitch,” she hissed.
Afraid to leave Anne-Marie alone, still thinking she could convince her to go back to the hotel, Caro followed Anne-Marie to the brothers’ car. Yosefa stared at Caro with a silly grin. In the car, he touched her hair. “You are so beautiful. I am in love with you.”
Caro removed his hand from her straightened hair. “That is impossible. You just met me yesterday.”
“I know my heart. I want to marry you. I want to be with you forever.”
Abdu turned off the corniche road and began driving away from the ocean.
Caro leaned over the front seat. “I’m not feeling well. I want to go back to our hotel.”
“We will give you something to make you feel better,” Abdu said. “A special Moroccan tonic.” Anne-Marie snorted and then hiccuped.
They parked in front of a five-story building and climbed the four flights of stairs to the brothers’ apartment: a large room with a refrigerator and sink in the corner, a table, and a mattress on the floor with a curtain strung in front.
Anne-Marie and Abdu disappeared behind the curtain. Caro sat with Yosefa at the table. He handed her a Coca-Cola in a glass bottle. That was the last thing she remembered.
When she woke, she was naked on the mattress with a blanket that smelled like an old dog over her. There was a red scratch on her abdomen. Yosefa was sleeping next to her, fully dressed.
Her panties were missing. She found the rest of her clothes and her bag. Yosefa stirred as she tiptoed to the door, but he did not waken. Using the sun to direct her westward, she made her way back to the corniche road, where she gave a waiter scrubbing an outdoor table fifteen dirhams to call her a taxi.
Anne-Marie was not in their room. She was not at the pool. At th
e front desk, the clerk said the other young lady had come in earlier, but had left again with a gentleman. He pursed his lips in disapproval.
Caro returned to their room. She lay on the bed staring at the ceiling until the phone rang.
“I must see you,” said Yosefa.
“No.”
“I will come now.”
“I never want to see you again. You took advantage of me.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“I made love to you. It was from my soul, a beautiful thing.”
Caro hung up the phone. Her heart was beating too fast. She felt scared—of Yosefa, who she imagined already in his car, speeding to the hotel, but also of herself, that she’d crossed a line to become someone unrecognizable to herself.
The phone rang again. Hoping it was Anne-Marie, she picked up.
“If I do not see you, my heart will crack into little pieces.”
“If you come here, I will call the police.”
For a moment, she thought she heard Yosefa snicker, but she must have been wrong, because what he said next was more frightening. “I love you. Allah has chosen you to be my bride. We must marry immediately. By the end of the week. I will tell my mother and sisters and they will prepare everything.”
Caro left the phone off the hook. She stuffed her things in her duffel and scribbled a note to Anne-Marie.
The bus terminal was a ten-minute walk away. The next departing bus was for Essaouira. She had heard the name, but wasn’t sure where it was. She boarded the bus.
19
Uri’s casket is in the front of the synagogue, adjacent to the cabinet where the Torah scrolls are stored. Before Adam has a chance to find Rachida and Omar, Esther’s husband is at his elbow, asking if he will be one of the pallbearers.
“My back,” Adam murmurs, ashamed to decline but unable to bring himself to touch the casket.
When Rachida arrives with her mother and Omar, she seems oblivious to Adam’s presence. Not knowing whether he should sit in the front pew with Rachida and Omar, he sits a row back between Uri’s two cousins. The old men hack so loudly, he can barely hear the rabbi, not that he would have understood the Hebrew.
Afterward, they walk to the Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town, a dusty, downtrodden place with headstones decimated by the sun and the wind. Adam holds the arm of the frailer cousin, though whether he is supporting the old man or the old man him, he cannot say. Three horse-drawn carriages, either commissioned for the occasion or perhaps simply queued outside the walls, bring them back to Raquel’s house, where Esther and her maid have prepared a buffet: lamb kebabs, tomato and cucumber salad, merguez, sweetened mint tea, sticky almond pastries. Omar and the other children sit on Raquel’s bed watching reruns of Friends. Like the other boys, Omar is dressed in a blue embroidered tunic with Western pants and sneakers beneath.
Embarrassed at not having been a pallbearer, Adam sits alone on a chair in the corner, nursing a soda. Again, Raquel holds court, her feet again raised on a leather pouf. He has not seen Rachida since the cemetery.
A slight, thin-faced man approaches him. “I am Hamid. I was Uri’s assistant.” He holds out his hand. “I worked for your father-in-law for thirteen years. In the mornings, when he was in the workshop, I tended the customers. I have been looking for your wife, but I do not see her. Sadly, I must leave. My own wife is expecting our second child any day now, so I do not want to be away too much longer.”
Adam knows that he should say something, that Caro or his mother would know the right thing to say, but he cannot think what that something is. Instead, the words I’ve got to get the fuck out of here cycle on an endless loop through his mind.
“Rachida had asked Uri to make something for her. He finished it the day before he died. I was to have mailed it to her for him.” He removes an envelope from his kaftan pocket and holds it against his chest. “It is a silver hamsa. He looked for an antique one, but he could not find one that he would be able to engrave, so he made this himself. Could you kindly give it to your wife? Please tell her I am very sorry I could not give it to her personally, but I worry too much now about my wife to wait any longer.”
Hamid gives the envelope to Adam. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “It was the last thing he made.”
Adam nods soberly. “Thank you. I will tell Rachida.”
When Rachida arrives, she is accompanied by a boy carting bags of ice.
“Where were you?” Adam asks. He does not like the sharpness in his voice, but half an hour has passed since Hamid left, during which he has been unable to quiet the I’ve got to get the fuck out of here tape in his mind.
Rachida looks at Adam and then the ice with disgust.
“Your father’s assistant gave me something to give you.” Adam hands Rachida the envelope. “It’s the hamsa for Eva.”
Rachida opens the envelope. Inside is a silver hand with engraved writing on each of the five fingers. She turns it over and reads the Hebrew on the back: “I have set the Lord always before me.”
The new hamsa looks entirely different from the original: shiny and crowded with letters, the fingers more elongated. Adam wonders if it will only upset Eva.
“He said it was the last piece your father worked on.”
Rachida inhales so sharply Adam feels himself recoil, the way he might with a dog baring its teeth or, he thinks, seeing Rachida’s face, his wife refusing to weep.
20
The day after the funeral, the weather turns unseasonably warm. Seagulls caw from the beach across the road. Rachida brings Omar to the hotel so he can swim. Caro rests on a lounge chair sipping a vile concoction Rachida has given her, a local remedy for intestinal ailments. Twenty feet away, Rachida dangles her feet in the water, watching Omar. Adam stretches out on the lounge chair next to Caro.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“This town gives me the creeps. There’s too much light. It’s too—too blue.”
“So…?”
“Go home. You and I leave. Now. Yesterday.”
“I can’t fly now. I barely made it from the room to the pool. Besides, it would cost an arm and a leg to change our tickets.”
“I’ll pay.”
“Right. And who’ll pay your credit card bill? It’s charming here. You just hate being away from home. You used to feel the same way when we went on vacation with Dad.”
Adam squeezes his eyes shut. He does look miserable. For that matter, Caro thinks, so does Rachida.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s being with Rachida’s family. They’re so conniving, they actually make me appreciate Dad’s bluntness. Esther pulled me aside to check out if we are going to continue sending her mother money, which I told her was news to me. That shut her up. And then there’s some issue about the jewelry business. Whether Uri’s assistant has a right to the store or whether it can be sold.”
“You’ve never spent any time with them. All families are horrid at times like this.”
Omar climbs out of the pool, shivering like a tiny dog. Rachida wraps a towel around his shoulders and briskly rubs him dry.
Caro scoots over to make room for Omar. He nuzzles against her. Rachida pulls up a chair.
“Can I play a game on your cell phone?” Omar asks his mother.
Rachida reaches in her bag and hands the phone to Omar. “Ten minutes. That’s it.”
“It works here?” Adam asks.
“We’ve been paying for international service for three years. How do you think Omar and I call you every night when we’re here?”
Adam angles his face into the weak sun.
“Let me guess. You’re trying to recruit Caro to escort you home early.”
“No comment.”
Caro puts another towel over Omar. He’s too absorbed in the game on his mother’s phone to pay attention to her jabs at his father.
Rachida sighs. She turns to Caro. “Not that he deserves it, but I do feel bad th
at he won’t see anything more of Morocco than Essaouira. It’s like coming to the States and going only to Cape Cod.”
“He’ll survive. He can watch movies about the rest of the country.”
“Esther’s husband is going this afternoon to Marrakesh for business. I was thinking maybe we should go with him. I’m so wiped, I can’t even think right now about all the things I need to do. We could stay tonight and tomorrow night at La Mamounia—Khalid would give us rooms—and then drive back with Esther’s husband Tuesday morning.”
Rachida bites her lower lip. “My father loved La Mamounia. We went every spring for a week. Esther and I would order room service breakfast. It would come on a cart with pink cloth napkins and platters covered with enormous silver domes. We played tennis on the clay courts. In the evening, my father and Khalid would have chess competitions in the library bar.”
She pokes Adam’s stomach. “When Roosevelt visited Casablanca during the war, Churchill insisted he could not leave Morocco without seeing Marrakesh.”
“Wow. That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me. To put me in the same category as Roosevelt.”
“They had to carry Roosevelt up the tower of the ambassador’s residence.”
Is this it, Caro wonders, the glue between her brother and Rachida? A relentless teasing that for the first time strikes her as a parroting of the way her father talks to Adam. “You’d have to carry me. I’m in no condition for a road trip. But go. Rachida’s right, Adam. You really should see Marrakesh.”
Rachida stands. She claps her hands next to Adam’s ear. “Up. I’ll call Khalid while you pack.”
Rachida gives Caro a peck on the cheek. “We’ll see you in two days. I’ll leave Esther’s number for you at the front desk in case you need anything. Come on, Omar. We need to let Auntie Caro rest.”
21
Still on the lounge chair, Caro sleeps covered with towels—a long deep sleep cut by a river of dreams: a room she has escaped to from menacing dogs, a rooftop where Yosefa threatens to jump to the ground.