Tinderbox

by Lisa Gornick

  She wakes to a ringing sound coming from her feet. Inside the balled-up towel at the bottom of the chaise is the cell phone Omar had been playing with. It is probably Rachida calling to find her phone. Caro flips it open. Still groggy, she searches for the talk button, surprised when she hears a voice, the connection automatically made when she unfolded the top.

  “You naughty girl. You made me wait all this time.” It’s a woman’s voice: young, accented, throaty. “I’m in the closet, the one we go in. I’m so wet, it’s going to drip out of my panties.”

  Caro looks around. The pool is empty. An old man is scooping dead mosquitoes from the water with a net.

  “Talk to me. Now. Talk very, very nasty.”

  Caro’s stomach is cramping, her mouth dry. The voice is familiar. She needs a toilet.

  “I have my finger on it.” The woman moans. “You cunt. Why aren’t you here to do it for me?”

  Layla. It is Layla. Caro pushes the red OFF button. There is a tearing sensation in her bowels. She races upstairs to her room.

  22

  They are an hour outside of Essaouira before Rachida realizes she doesn’t have her phone.

  She wants to ask Omar if he remembers what he did with it, but he and Adam are both sleeping. She feels a moment of panic. What if she left the phone at the pool and Layla calls and Caro picks up?

  She borrows her brother-in-law’s cell phone and tries calling her own phone, but no one answers. She calls the hotel and asks to be connected to Caro’s room, where Caro is lying on the bed, trying to gather the strength to go back to the pool to retrieve her things.

  “Hey, how are you feeling?”

  “About the same.”

  “Did you see my cell phone?”

  Caro massages her temples. She has a band headache, which she’d once read is a sign of being dehydrated. With the throbbing, she can’t decide if she should mention Layla’s call.

  Rachida continues, apparently having taken Caro’s silence to be a “no.”

  “Shit. I never took it back after Omar was playing that game. It probably got mixed up inside the towels.”

  “Probably.”

  23

  Arriving at La Mamounia with its palatial Moorish arches and carved columns, the four doormen dressed like sultan’s guards, Adam thinks first of the Arabian Nights and then of the novels of Wharton and James: a young man on the obligatory year of travel between his college days, in what his crowd referred to simply as New Haven or Cambridge, and the banking house he would join in New York. The classic tour with a transatlantic crossing to England, then Paris, Rome, and Nice for the winter with an apartment overlooking the Promenade des Anglais. A boat to Tangier and a roadster into Marrakesh. Beautiful but well-worn calfskin luggage, tended to by his manservant while he took a stroll through the orange-scented gardens.

  Omar knows his way through the marble lobby to the billiards room, to the pool, to the gazebo circled by silvery olive trees. Standing on their balcony, he points out the Koutoubia Mosque in the distance.

  “I want to go to the square,” Omar tells Rachida. “Remember, last time there were snake charmers and fire-eaters there? And children boxing?”

  “Which is dangerous—and debased.”

  Rachida looks at her watch. “He wants to go to the Djemaa el-Fna. It’s an enormous outdoor market with lots of food and handicrafts and street performers. We could go for an hour and then eat somewhere nearby.”

  Adam is reading the history of the hotel he found in the leather folio on the desk of their room. For nearly two decades, he reads, Winston Churchill, accompanied frequently by his wife, Clementine, wintered at the hotel, setting up his easel on his balcony or in the thirty-two acres of flowering gardens. In 1935, Churchill had spent the Christmas holidays here alone. “My darling Clemmie, my beloved pussy cat,” he wrote, lavishing her with his verbal portraits of what stretched before him: “a truly remarkable panorama over the tops of orange trees and olives, and the houses and ramparts of the native Marrakesh, and like a great wall to the westward the snow clad range of the Atlas mountains.”

  “I’m too tired. Omar, you go with Mommy. I’m going to stay on the balcony and watch the sun set.”

  After Rachida and Omar leave, the sky turns purple, then orange and crimson. Adam tries imagining himself as Winston Churchill with Clemmie, here on the balcony. Clemmie, his little kitten. Clemmie, his tiny bird perched in her white dressing gown on the edge of the bed. But he cannot imagine whispering endearments to a woman, unfastening a corset, much less donning a top hat, leading a nation, commanding a war.

  He tries to imagine himself as Moishe, Moishe of the Amazon. But La Mamounia was not built until after all the Moishes and Jaimes and Leons left for the jungle.

  Inside, he draws the curtains and puts the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. He rummages in his duffel bag for the notebook he packed at the bottom with the photograph of the two men folded inside.

  What he can imagine is himself as Debbie, lifted high above John Wayne’s head, himself as the younger, smaller man held aloft by the older, bigger one.

  24

  Caro wakes in the morning with the sensation of the calm after a storm. Her intestines are no longer cramping. She does not need to race to the toilet. She wants grapefruit and toast with jam and butter. Then she hears Layla’s voice in her head.

  She buries her face in the pillow, thinking back to the evening when Rachida brought Layla to her mother’s house. How could she have missed that the two were lovers?

  She showers and dresses, her pants loose, very loose, after three days without food. Downstairs, breakfast is being served on the terrace next to the pool, where, after debating just leaving Rachida’s phone, she’d taken it to give back to Rachida on her return.

  Planters overflowing with crimson bougainvillea rim the terrace. Small birds fly between a persimmon tree and a lemon tree. Caro nibbles her toast, sips her tea. The toast is delicious. She chews slowly, enjoying each bite. After a few mouthfuls of the grapefruit, she puts down her spoon, her shrunken stomach full.

  She will have to tell Rachida about Layla’s call, only not now, days after her father’s funeral. And won’t Rachida look in her call log and know? And is Layla the first for Rachida? The first woman? The first infidelity? Strangely, it is easier to imagine Rachida with Layla than with Adam, though the image has been unwelcomingly assisted by Layla’s filthy talk.

  In the distance, Caro can hear the wind on the beach. On her first visit to Essaouira, her first meal after she left her room had also been breakfast, also served on the terrace. Then, too, she’d nibbled at toast and tea. She had heard the wind against the ramparts, the screeching of gulls as they dove for fish. Not until she returned to the States, to her dorm at Harvard, where the nausea continued, did she understand that what she’d suffered in Essaouira had nothing to do with anything she’d eaten. At the Cambridge Planned Parenthood, she had been mortified to tell the counselor that she wasn’t a hundred percent sure who the father was. She’d gone alone to what was called the procedure, lying that someone was coming to escort her home. It was then that she’d begun to use food as a drug, the up and down of her jaws, the sweet or sour or salty taste on her tongue, an eraser for her mind.

  By Thanksgiving, she had gained twenty-two pounds, a full suit of armor on her small frame. Her mother blessedly did not comment, but at Christmas, when her father was in New York, he poked her stomach, more hard than affectionately. “Pizza and beer, hey?” By Valentine’s Day, she had settled into a pattern of nighttime binges and daytime starvation, which stopped the scale’s ascent but left her locked in a cycle of disgust.

  For months, there had been letters from Yosefa, forwarded by Anne-Marie, pleading that Caro let him visit. Then, in the spring, Anne-Marie called. Yosefa’s brother Abdu had come to see her in Paris, begging, then threatening her for Caro’s address.

  “Do not give it to him.”

  “He says that Yosefa will not eat, that Yose
fa will kill himself if he cannot see you.”

  “Do you hear me, Anne-Marie? Do not give him my address. If you do, I will move and never speak to you again.”

  Anne-Marie began to cry. Caro could picture her flat stomach, her skinny shoulders, the big buttocks where Abdu had cupped his hands. She wondered if Anne-Marie had let him fuck her again when he’d come to Paris. “Don’t blame me if he jumps out of a window,” Anne-Marie said.

  The letters stopped. In the fall, she marked the anniversary of the abortion with weeks of preliminary dread and not leaving her bed on the day.

  At first, she had thought of her celibacy as expiation. By the time she settled into her job at the school and her apartment on West End Avenue, it was a way of life, a necessity between the nights of gluttony and the mornings with her stomach bloated with congealed greed. In August, it would be fifteen years. Fifteen years with a tire around her middle, like a bumper on a bumper car. Longer than Penelope sat at her loom, weaving by day, unraveling by night. Stalling the suitors.

  She picks up a knife to spread butter on more toast, then puts it down. Enough. She has had enough.

  25

  Christmas Day, Myra wakes with a sense of apprehension, an achy nervousness, a premonition, she worries, of physical ailment or disaster. The present she bought for Eva sits wrapped at the end of the farm table. She eats a bowl of cereal while she thumbs through the holiday’s skeletal newspaper.

  When Eva comes downstairs, Myra points at the wrapped box.

  “For me?”

  “Yes, for you.”

  Eva gingerly touches the wrapping paper. She fingers the ribbon. “I never had anything before that came like this.”

  “You just rip off the paper.”

  Eva tears at the paper carefully, then lifts the box lid. Inside is a yellow ski jacket with a matching black-and-yellow-striped scarf. Eva puts the jacket on over her nightgown and drapes the scarf over her neck. She twirls around. “It fit me perfect. I love it!”

  At noon, Myra leaves for her walk. With the holiday, the day has lost its shape. If Eva were not at the house, she would go back to bed with a cup of tea and a novel. Instead, on her return she decides to play the piano.

  The door to the music room is closed, which is strange, since only Adam ever closes it. She pushes it open. At first, she doesn’t see Eva. Then she sees her kneeling by the closet, the black-and-yellow scarf still wrapped around her neck.

  Eva turns, an odd expression on her face that reminds Myra of Eva’s night terror her second week in the house.

  “You scare me.” She stands, waving the dust cloth in her hand. “The boxes are very dusty.” She picks up the trash basket and leaves the room.

  Myra opens the closet door. Piled inside are Adam’s file boxes. She leans over to read the words written on the lid of the top box: Moishe in the Amazon. She lifts the lid. Inside, there are files, each with a white label bordered in blue.

  She feels tempted to take out one of the files, to read the papers inside. So many of her patients have talked about searching their kids’ pockets and backpacks, reading their journals. With her own children, though, she’s never gone through their things. Nothing she might find, she’s always thought, would justify the damage that snooping would occasion.

  The files are in alphabetical order: Amazon, Boats, Dogs, Herzog, Marrakesh, Rabat, Research Iquitos. Myra closes the lid.

  She plays the Bach Prelude in B-flat Major. She plays the Schubert Impromptu in G-flat Major. She plays three Chopin mazurkas. But still, she cannot rid herself of the thought that Eva was looking at something inside Adam’s file boxes.

  26

  Adam wakes with a start, unable to place where he is, confused as to why his legs are so cramped, what all the noise is around him.

  Caro is shaking his arm. “We’ve landed.” She hands him a bottle of water. There is something different about her, something unfamiliar. When she stands to get their carry-on bags from the overhead luggage rack, he realizes that she has lost weight.

  “What happened to you? You’re thin.”

  “That’s what happens when you can’t eat for three days.”

  In the van back to the city, Omar and Rachida sit in the rear, with Caro and Adam in the middle seat. Adam opens the vent and drinks in the cold air. Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. He twists around so he can see Rachida.

  “Do you want to give Eva the amulet tonight?”

  “Fine.”

  Rachida is staring out the window. Omar has fallen back asleep with his head on her shoulder. Caro has her eyes closed. Difficult as the time away had been, Adam feels a dread of returning descending on him.

  “Did you want to give it to her or do you want me to do it?”

  “It doesn’t matter to me.”

  They drop Caro at her apartment first. When they reach the house on Ninety-fifth Street, his mother comes outside to greet them. She hugs Rachida, then Omar and Adam.

  “Where’s Eva?” Omar asks.

  “She’s out. There’s a lecture at her synagogue.”

  “Daddy brought her something. That hand thing you wear around your neck. Grandpa Uri made it for her.”

  Omar yawns.

  “I made some tortellini and fruit salad,” Myra says. “You can all have a quick bite and then get to sleep.”

  Jet-lagged, Adam wakes at four in the morning. He is alone in the bed. He goes downstairs, where Rachida is already dressed in her hospital scrubs, drinking coffee at the farm table.

  “I’m going in early. Your mom has no patients in the afternoon because it’s New Year’s Eve. She wants to take Omar to Rockefeller Center to see the tree.”

  “What are we going to do for New Year’s?” Seeing Rachida’s strained expression, Adam regrets his question, which he fears Rachida has experienced as a slap in the face of her grief. What, after all, do they ever do on New Year’s Eve?

  “Your mother wants to make a holiday dinner for us and Caro. She bought a leg of lamb. She put Omar’s Hanukkah presents under the Christmas tree.”

  “So what do you think? Should I give the hamsa to Eva today? Or wait for tonight when you are here?”

  Adam can feel Rachida’s annoyance—the effort it takes her not to snap at him to stop asking her the same question over and over.

  “I don’t care.”

  More than anything, Adam wants to put his arms around his wife, to say, Please, for the new year, let’s start fresh, let’s be kind and good to each other, but the gesture feels impossible, his arms inert, his tongue trapped in his mouth.

  27

  After Rachida leaves, Adam takes the newspaper and lies down on the couch. His eyes feel heavy. The paper drops onto his chest.

  When he wakes, Eva is in the kitchen sorting laundry. Adam stretches, then swings his legs to the ground.

  “Hi, Eva,” he calls out.

  Eva doesn’t turn. She bends over to load clothes into the washer. Did she not hear him?

  Adam stands. He’ll shower first and then give Eva the amulet. Under the stream of hot water, he rehearses what he will say.

  When he comes back downstairs, Eva is at the sink, washing the dishes he and Rachida left there last night. Adam holds out the envelope with the amulet inside.

  Eva keeps her gaze on the running water.

  “This is the hamsa Rachida’s father made for you. I know it’s not the same as the original, but he inscribed the same words.”

  Eva turns up the water.

  “We went to Marrakesh. We stayed at La Mamounia. It was Winston Churchill’s favorite place.” He feels ridiculous, this foolish attempt to fill the silence. Why would Eva care about Winston Churchill? Would she even know who he is? “Many of the rubber traders who came to Iquitos were from Marrakesh.”

  Eva leans down to get the cleanser from under the sink. She scours the white porcelain. She scours until the basin is covered in gritty circles.

  Not knowing what else to do, Adam sets the envelope next to the drain boar
d.

  He climbs the stairs to the music room. He unpacks his papers and opens his notebook. The photo of the two men embracing falls onto the desk. He can hear Omar moving around down the hall. He locks the door and pulls the top file box out of the closet. He takes the brown envelope from the folder labeled Research Iquitos.

  His stomach clenches. He has never kept the photos in a particular order, but he has always kept the most important ones, the ones he responds to most strongly, at the back of the envelope. Now the photo of a man licking another man is at the front.

  Adam flips through the photos. Two of them are stuck together.

  His mouth tastes like sawdust. He peels the photos apart, then adds the photograph from the notebook to the envelope. He puts the file box in the closet and goes back downstairs.

  Omar and Eva are sitting with their arms touching at the farm table. They are both eating bowls of cereal and giggling over a copy of Tintin that Omar bought in the Casablanca airport.

  “Look at Snowy,” Omar says. “He’s biting the bad guy on the butt.”

  Adam sits across from Eva. He can see a chain peeking out from the neckline of her sweater, but if there is anything hanging from it, it is hidden beneath her clothes. He hopes she is wearing the amulet Uri made.

  Eva pushes back her chair. She stands and leaves the room.

  28

  Rachida comes home early. Eva is peeling potatoes. “Omar went out with Dr. M.,” Eva tells her.

  “And Adam? Do you know where he is?”

  Eva shrugs her shoulders.

  On the second floor, the door to the music room is closed. In her room, the suitcases are open, still unpacked—as though there was any chance Adam would have unpacked.

  She lies down on the bed and closes her eyes. Layla is angry with her. She claims that Rachida hung up on her and did not return her call.

  “I left ten, twenty messages for you and you cannot be bothered to call me back.”

  “I left my cell phone in Essaouira. I didn’t get it back until we returned from Marrakesh.” They were in the cafeteria, at a table in the center of the room.