I went outside to gather up the six drawings exposed to the sun and brought them inside. As I shuffled through them one by one, I felt myself sucking in my breath, floored by what I saw. They were a half dozen variations on the same theme: the rooftops in the immediate vicinity of our balcony. What made these depictions so remarkable was the way that, in each drawing, Paul had reimagined the minarets and water towers and crumbling roofs and dangling laundry and satellite dishes that defined the Essaouira skyline. I glanced up at one point and stared out at the actual panorama on which Paul had based this sequence of work. Then I returned to his highly detailed drawings, marveling not just at their sheer refined technique, but also at the way these six scenes reminded me that there is no such thing as a correct vision of the state of things; that the act of looking is utterly subjective; that none of us ever sees the same objects, the same landscape. And when it comes to a vision of life . . . everything is, by its very nature, an interpretation.
“These are . . . extraordinary,” I told him.
“Now it’s you who’s suffering sunstroke. They are a couple of sketches I knocked off in a few hours.”
“Didn’t Mozart often write a piano sonata in a morning?”
“He was Mozart.”
“You are incredibly gifted.”
“I wish I could share your fulsome opinion of me.”
“I wish that too. But in my humble opinion I think that these mark an entirely new direction for you.”
“You’re biased.”
“Take the compliment. They’re brilliant.”
But Paul just turned away, unable to accept such praise. I quickly changed the subject.
“I start French lessons tomorrow,” I said, then told him all about Soraya.
“How much is she charging per hour?” he asked.
“She asked for seventy-five, I’m paying her one-twenty.”
“You’re a soft touch.”
“Only when it’s the right thing to do.”
“Even seventy-five dirhams an hour is a huge amount of money for her already.”
“And not that much money for me. So what’s the big deal?”
“None whatsoever. Your generosity is admirable.”
“So too is your concern about our finances.”
“Do I hear a tone?” he asked.
“Can we drop this?”
“Of course we can,” he said, getting up and heading into the bathroom. A moment or so later I heard the shower being turned on. When he came out ten minutes later, a towel wrapped around his midsection, he said, “I really wish we could get beyond these exchanges.”
“So do I.”
“Let’s try to steer clear of all stupidity.”
“It gets corrosive, doesn’t it?” I said. “Kindness is the better option.”
He considered this for a moment.
“That just might be a solution.”
He came over and put his arms around me.
“A fresh start, okay?”
“Fine by me.” I kissed him lightly on the lips, simultaneously wondering if I would be replaying this dialogue a day or two from now. Maybe I simply needed to accept that this was how our marriage operated; that this was our weather system as a couple, and one in which the moments of inclemency were supplanted by periods of genuine tranquility and, indeed, amazing love. The word adventure came to mind yet again.
The next day, during my first lesson with Soraya, I asked her whether adventure had multiple meanings in French. She blushed slightly, noting:
“Yes, ‘une aventure’ is the word. But also it’s a very French expression for a love affair. Par exemple, ‘J’ai eu une aventure avec Jacques . . . seulement une aventure, rien de bien sérieux.’”
She didn’t need to translate. Une aventure was just that: a fling that wasn’t love. When I asked about the semantic difference between adventure and love, Soraya said, “In French if someone says—as they often do—C’est l’amour, it indicates its profound seriousness, for the moment, anyway. When I lived in Lyon I had several French friends who always seemed to be exclaiming the fact that they had fallen in love after seeing a man for two or three weeks. Then when it ended a few months later the next fellow they got involved with . . . oh, c’est l’amour, after the fourth night. The way I heard it used so frequently made me think that to exclaim ‘I’m in love’ is to express immediate emotions that haven’t been allowed to deepen. It’s also to admit: I am in love with the idea of being in love.”
“And in Morocco?”
Now her shoulders tightened. “We need to return to other things,” she said, tapping the textbooks. I didn’t protest, because I realized that I had mistakenly traversed an invisible boundary, one that Soraya was going to maintain.
So back we went to the pluperfect subjunctive.
We sat together on the sofa in the small living area of the suite, the French books she’d brought along spread out across the little coffee table. Paul was at work on the balcony, shaded by the big umbrella and his wide-brimmed hat, the sun still at high wattage at five thirty in the afternoon. He had come out to say hello when Soraya earlier knocked on the door of our suite. I could see that she was taking in his lankiness, his long gray hair, the age difference between us. Just as she was also impressed by his French and by the drawings that I had now placed around the room.
“Your husband did all these?” Soraya asked.
“You approve?”
“They’re superb. And they so capture Essaouira.”
“Or at least the rooftops of Essaouira.”
“Will he start doing street scenes as well?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“Imagine being married to such a talented man. Your children . . . ?”
“We have none.”
Now Soraya looked as if she wished the floor could open and swallow her whole. I quickly added, “None yet.”
Her relief was immense.
“I’m so, so sorry,” she said. “I should never have pried like that.”
“That was hardly prying.”
“But it was an inappropriate question. Even though I well know that, in the West, having children is not obligatory for married couples.”
“That’s true. My first husband didn’t want children.”
Soraya seemed thrown by my directness.
“Is that the reason you left him?”
“One of the many reasons.”
“I see . . .”
“But Paul definitely wants children.”
Soraya seemed to approve of this.
“He’s had none before now?” she asked, but then added, “If that isn’t another totally inappropriate question on my part.”
“Not inappropriate at all,” I said.
“In Morocco, marriage is so much about having children,” she said.
“Is that how you see it?”
She considered this for a moment. “How I ‘see it’ and how things are . . . those are two very different things entirely.”
Over the first ten days of my lessons with Soraya the non-French-grammar conversations were an intriguing game of verbal Ping-Pong, in which her innate caution and cultural reticence were frequently undercut by her immense curiosity not just about my life but about the way a woman like me functions in modern America. A fast sense of trust developed between us, though it was not until the second week of our lessons that some of the more private aspects of her life began to be revealed. I sensed very quickly on that her time in France had completely altered her way of thinking, and that her return to Morocco was a reluctant one.
“So when you went to university you actually lived on the campus itself?” she asked in wonder when I started telling her about leaving home for the University of Minnesota.
“Isn’t that the usual way in France or here?” I asked.
“In Morocco, if you go to another city for university, it is arranged that you will live with family there.”
“And when you were in Lyon?”
Her lips tightened.
“The only reason I was allowed to go to Lyon was because my paternal uncle Mustapha was there. He and his wife have lived there for thirty years. He has a rather successful taxicab business and she is a teacher in a lycée—so they are both, on a certain level, quite assimilated. Except when it comes to their responsibilities as guardians of their niece from Essaouira. The entire year was a power struggle. Especially when they discovered I was not wearing the hijab when I went off to class, and was even using a friend’s place to change my clothes. When it came to staying out late, which I started to do when Fabien came into my life—”
“Who’s Fabien?” I asked. But at that very moment Paul came in off the balcony, en route to the bathroom. The subject was abruptly dropped.
Later that night, in a little backstreet restaurant that had quickly become a favorite, I told Paul how Soraya had mentioned the name of a Frenchman whom I sensed she was involved with during her year in Lyon.
“That’s what most educated Moroccan women dream of,” he said. “Meeting a Westerner who can get them out of here.”
“So speaks the voice of experience.”
“Was I indicating that I had any experience of that whatsoever?”
“Surely there must have been a Moroccan woman or two in your life back then.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you are a most attractive man now, which means you must have been even more so in your twenties. And you were probably hanging out with fellow artists, the Casablanca bohemian circle, right? Wasn’t there some gorgeous abstract painter who—”
“What’s the point of this?”
“The point is that I want you right now.”
An hour later, back in bed in our hotel room, his body entwined with mine, the two of us sharing the most extraordinary metronomic symmetry, him whispering to me just how much he loved me, promising wondrous times ahead, free of the shadowy recesses of the past, what else could I do but also proclaim my love for him; as actual and veracious a love as I had ever known.
Afterward, lying next to each other, our arms interlocked, keeping us close, I said, “Maybe we did it this time.”
Because it was right in the middle of my cycle. And because, tonight, our normal level of passion hit an even more dizzying summit.
Paul kissed me lightly on the lips.
“I’m sure it happened this time. We’re blessed, after all.”
Outside the muezzin sang praises to his Almighty. Allah akhbar! Allah akhbar!
To which I could only think:
Your timing, sir, is impeccable.
EIGHT
THE NEXT TWO weeks were supremely happy ones. Happiness has always struck me as a fleeting event—a moment here or there when all the dreck of life washes away for a few precious hours. You’re free of all the fears and neuroses that seem to act as a subtext to everything you are trying to do and accomplish in life. The problem when you are a couple is that you are also in thrall to your partner’s fears and neuroses. So if there is a period when you are both outside the reach of all the emotional baggage you each cart around with you . . . well, that is one of those rare, sublime junctures when you can truly think: we are blessed.
Those fourteen days in Essaouira were magic. Paul got into a serious, high-end creative groove when it came to his work, spending close to six hours a day on his line drawings, moving from the panoramic eyrie that was our balcony to a café table right in the heart of the souk. There he became something of a local celebrity. Its manager—a young guy in his midtwenties named Fouad—saw the work that Paul was producing and made it his business to keep him free of unnecessary distractions, especially from hawkers and tourist touts. Fouad was a shrewd, cool customer. His “patron” was his father, who owned the café but spent much of the time in Marrakesh—where, as his son once intimated to Paul, he had a mistress. Fouad had studied in France—at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Marseille. He’d fallen in love with a fellow painter there from Toulon. She wasn’t a Muslim. And Fouad’s father—though willing to pay for his son’s three-year adventure on the other side of the Mediterranean—pressed the paternal guilt button and insisted, at the end of his course, that he drop all hopes of a life of art and love with the Frenchwoman. He had to return home to Morocco and learn the family business.
So now Fouad managed this café and a small hotel in the souk for his largely absent father. He was most welcoming to Paul when he discovered that he was not just an artist but an exceptional one at that. The café was located right at a corner of the medina, where spice and fruit merchants plied their trade next to butchers with animal carcasses bleaching in the midday sun. It gave Paul a ringside seat on all the manic, chromatic action—which he captured in edgy black pencil and charcoal on off-white cardstock. Fouad—clearly in need of an older brother (especially one who was a fellow artist)—insisted on setting up Paul at a shaded corner table, which became his office, and on keeping him supplied with mint tea throughout the hours he worked there. He also provided us both with a daily lunch. He refused to take any payment for it, which is when my husband began to pay with a daily original postcard. Paul told me that he was borrowing a trick from Picasso—who paid for his hotel and bar bills in the French seaside town Collioure by leaving a sketch with the patron every few days . . . in the process making him the possessor of a very lucrative art collection.
“I doubt Fouad will eventually be able to retire to the Côte d’Azur on the proceeds of my scribbles,” Paul noted after lunch one afternoon when we had retreated back to the hotel to make love and nap.
“Don’t underestimate your market value,” I said. “This new sequence of drawings you’re doing is such a breakthrough.”
I was making progress myself. My classes with Soraya were always rigorous. Most of the mornings I would spend hunched over my textbooks, forcing myself to learn ten new verbs and twenty new words per day. I also read local newspapers in French and bought a small radio so I could hear RFI—France’s version of the BBC World Service.
“You really are committed,” Soraya said when, around ten days into our lessons, I surprised her by asking all sorts of questions about langage soutenu—the most elevated and formal version of French.
“Bravo for your diligence,” she told me. “To be able to speak un français soutenu is the key to so much. If you can master it, the French will be most impressed.”
“If I ever get to France.”
Soraya looked at me quizzically. “Why do you think you’ll never get to France?”
“I’ve never traveled much before.”
“But you’re traveling now.”
“It depends on certain things happening in my life.”
“Of course it does.”
“Still,” I said, “children are portable . . . les enfants sont portables.”
“You used the word portable incorrectly here. Un portable is a cell phone or a laptop computer. The verb to use here is transporter. So try rephrasing it.”
I was obsessed about getting my French back in working order. I needed the sense of accomplishment; of using the time here in a positive, beneficial way. Watching Paul so focused and involved in his work made me push myself even harder to immerse myself in the language.
Meanwhile, Essaouira became a home for us. I figured out, by and large, the maze-like geography of the old city and was able to find my way unencumbered through the souk. I also learned how to deflect attention from the occasional tout or young tough guy playing macho. But though I began to feel as if I had a true handle on Essaouira’s exuberantly twisted realities, the city after dark was a place I never ventured alone. This precaution did not dim my appreciation of the place. Or the fact that, as I discovered, its residents were supremely welcoming and pleased to see that we had decided to spend time among them.
I became a beach walker, setting off most afternoons after our siesta along the endless strip of sand that fronted the Atlantic.
Once past the bathers, there would be the women in hijabs lifting up their djellabas to wade in the water. Nearby the camel guides were offering a half hour on top of one of their haunted beasts for a negotiable fee. Another mile farther south, all traces of habitation fell away. I was alone. The beach stretched into geographic infinity, the Atlantic mirroring the declining summer sun, its horizon boundless. How I always wanted to live on a strip of beach, with hardly a hint of the twenty-first century in sight, walking it daily, reveling in the way that the metronomic pounding of the surf always seemed to smooth out, for a time, all the stress and doubt and anxiety that we haul around with us. We’re a bit like Bedouins when it comes to the trappings of our lives. No matter where we roam, or how far we venture away from our place of birth, we still haul with us so much of the past.
On an empty beach—especially this empty beach—you could almost convince yourself that it might just be possible to detach yourself from your history and all its weight.
Given what a productive place Paul found himself in right now—and how free of shadows he also seemed to be—when I got back from my daily two-hour beach hikes, he’d greet me with a smile and a kiss and the suggestion that we watch the sunset from the rooftop of a very elegant hotel situated just inside the city walls. It was called L’Heure Bleue (of all things); very much an old-style travelers’ hotel of the 1920s, redone in subdued, chic, five-star style. Totally out of our league, budget-wise, but un kir at the open-air bar on its roof didn’t break the bank. And it did provide the most ravishing panorama of the red globular sun slowly liquidizing into a tranquil ocean.
“Interesting, isn’t it, how the Atlantic is so becalmed here,” Paul noted one evening as we sipped our kirs and sat in awe of the wide-screen sunset.
“Especially when compared to Maine.”
“We’ll be there in a couple of weeks.”
“I know,” I said.
“You sound less than enthusiastic about that prospect.”
“You know how much I love Maine. It’s just . . . well, it’s home, right?”
“My thoughts entirely. So why don’t we stay here for another two weeks?”
The Blue Hour Page 7