“I didn’t want him to see you handing over the money,” Fouad explained. “I will pay him later. I chose him because, although he doesn’t say much, he’s not the sort who will try to hit you up for money. He knows that he’ll have to answer to me should anything go wrong, or if he tries anything—which he won’t.”
I reached into my pocket and counted out four thousand dirhams. My crazed hope was that, on arrival in Casablanca, I would find Paul at the apartment of his mistress, verify that he was all right, give him the chance to get on that midday flight with me to New York, and, at worst, have the door slammed in my face, ending a marriage that was, in my mind, already finished.
Fouad counted his way through the money. When he was satisfied that he had the complete amount, he called the driver over and spoke to him in a low, firm voice, showing him the address, gesticulating toward me several times, then making a point of writing out a series of numbers on another scrap of paper, tearing it along its perforated edge, and handing it to me.
“If there is any problem, you phone me on this number,” Fouad said. “But there should be no problem whatsoever. Simo . . . he is okay.”
Then he handed me a plastic bag. “Your husband left this behind when he showed up late this afternoon. I’m not saying he wanted you to have it, but I’d rather that you keep it safe for him.”
“You still won’t tell me where your other driver dropped him?”
“I cannot . . . because I gave him my word I would not.”
“Can you at least tell me if I am right to be going to this address?”
Fouad considered his response for a moment, then answered, “Inshallah.”
Allah willing.
Five minutes out of Essaouira I discovered that the reading light in the back of the car was not working. When I asked Simo if there was a problem with the light he just shrugged. I asked if he could pull over and get it fixed—as I was completely in the dark and very much wanted to see what was in the shopping bag that Fouad had given me. I also wanted to use the four or so hours on the road to read through Paul’s journal—though the prospect of delving into the inner sanctum of his mind made me uneasy. Maybe the blown light was a hint that I’d best not pry into his private world. But the very fact that I was in this broken-down car, fleeing our hotel in search of this lost man . . .
“J’ai besoin de lire, monsieur,” I told Simo when he reported that he could do nothing about the busted light. In response, he reached into his pocket and tossed a disposable lighter into the backseat.
“Ce n’est pas suffisant. Vous n’avez pas une lampe-torche?”
He shook his head and accelerated the engine, causing the first of many belches to exude from the exhaust pipe. I sank back into the vinyl seat, aware of springs sticking up through the upholstery. I had to shift around until I could find a spot that didn’t feel like acupuncture. Then I reached into the plastic bag. I felt something close to massive relief when I pulled out one of his large sketchbooks. Flicking on the lighter—its flame meager—I opened its hard black cover and felt myself tearing up when I found page after page of his Essaouira line drawings. Whatever agony or fury or self-destructive rage made him rip up several of his notebooks back in our room, some sliver of self-preservation clearly kicked in, for this book contained his best work by far. Over fifty drawings, so innovative and daring in his use of line, in his mingling of the abstract and the representational, in the heat-and-dust authenticity he brought to the souk, yet all underscored by Paul’s absolute need to draw these market scenes in an original way. At one point I had to shut the album and put down the lighter and sit silently in the dark, absorbing the sense of loss that was careening through me like a fast-acting toxin. I looked out at the scrubby dusty landscape we were traversing, the beclouded sky that blocked all celestial light. The sheer immense stress of the past few hours, the fear and anguish of what I would find in Casablanca . . . all of it suddenly sideswiped me. I found myself overcome by the realization that the entire terrain of my life had changed.
I began to cry. Weeping in the dark of this shabby car, being watched in the rearview mirror by a silent man uncomfortable with this show of emotion. He lit another cigarette. When I stopped crying he reached into a bag on the front seat and handed me several cubes of baklava wrapped in paper.
“My wife . . . she makes these,” he said in basic French. “You eat them.”
“Shokran,” I said.
He nodded acknowledgment. Not another word passed between us until we reached Casablanca several hours later.
I closed my eyes, hoping sleep might overtake me. It didn’t—so I snapped them open again. I reached into my backpack and pulled out Paul’s journal. Holding the lighter so close to its pages I was afraid that a bump might set it all aflame, I began to go through its contents. Most of them were taken up with fast sketches, doodles, visual improvisations on the life he was incessantly observing. Then there were interspersed jottings, musings, confessions—never more than a line or two at most. The flame from the plastic lighter threw strange, spectral shadows as I read page after page of my husband’s frequently epigrammatic confessions. The fact that they were all undated . . . that was so Paul, wasn’t it? Numbers, deadlines . . . he eschewed them all. There was no definitive chronology to this cavalcade of self-doubt and self-reproach and . . .
Robin looked so shocked and disappointed when I told her, on arrival in Casa, that I wanted to run back home. I don’t blame her for being disappointed. She married a man who shouldn’t be married . . . and who knows that his wife is far too good for such a two-faced loser like himself.
Then, a few pages later, a sketch of me nude in our hotel bed.
Amazing sex, as always. My ambivalence to her, to all this, ebbs away when I am deep inside her.
I snapped my eyes shut. This is why you should never read your significant other’s journal.
Robin sometimes looks at me like I am a five-year-old who has just thrown all his toys out of the crib. Which is not far from the truth.
Close the book now.
She overpraised the new drawings today. I felt humbled by her kudos. Why does her reassurance about my alleged talent make me feel so small?
There was another fast-rendered sketch of me, standing on the balcony of our room, staring out into the great distance.
She’ll leave me when she finds out. She’d be an idiot to stay with me. I will mourn her. Then I’ll turn the page. And tell myself it’s better this way. Because I don’t deserve happiness. I can’t even begin to fathom what it would mean to be responsible for a new life.
So he knew that, by having the vasectomy in secret, he’d loaded a gun that was eventually going to go off in his face.
I can’t ever say what I want. No, the real problem is: I can’t say what I don’t want.
Like assuring me he wanted a child when he clearly didn’t want a child.
This place is full of too many shadows for me. And reminders of all that promise squandered. I must get Samira back in my life. Can Romain B.H. aid my cause?
Who is Romain B.H.? I had an answer to that question a few moments later when I came across a page in his book, with the name Romain Ben Hassan scrawled across the bottom of a page, followed by an address. I searched my memory for several key moments, trying to remember where I had heard that name before. Then the penny dropped. Ben Hassan had been his fellow artist friend during Paul’s Casablanca year. French-Moroccan and something of a louche character who kept Paul endlessly amused and frequently drunk. Luck was on my side; there was a phone number below the address. But turning back to Samira’s address I noticed that she lived in the same arrondissement. Was there some sort of connection between them? Didn’t Paul tell me that he had fallen out of contact with Ben Hassan when his name came up a few weeks ago? Another of his lies to commingle with all the other falsehoods he had been feeding me.
One thing still puzzled me. Why did Paul take his last remaining sketchbook when he vanished but not his pa
ssport or any clothes or personal effects whatsoever? The fact that he left without even his all-crucial pencils and charcoals unnerved me. Paul never went anywhere without a notebook and his beloved French pencils—meticulously curated from several key art supply stores in Manhattan. The trauma of all that self-harm . . . perhaps the fact that he was concussed or, at the very least, disorientated after slamming his head against the wall . . . was that the reason he left the hotel, carrying nothing? Or did he already have clothes and toiletries at his girlfriend’s house? But how would he have gotten them there? Unless he gave her a suitcase to bring back to Casablanca when they were having their assignations in Buffalo, and he was just looking for an excuse to stalk out of the marriage, which I certainly gave him today.
Will you listen to yourself, engaging in crazed speculation . . .
But how could he have otherwise gotten involved with this Moroccan woman? In the three years we’d been together he’d never traveled anywhere without me . . . except for three quick two-day trips to New York to see his gallerist. We’d done a few days in Montreal when he was in a group show there at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Beyond that we’d never been outside the country alone or together. So he couldn’t have met his mistress anywhere but Buffalo. Which must mean that he got to know her at the university where he taught. The photograph of her in her journal indicated she was only in her early twenties. Did he get the vasectomy to ensure that she didn’t get pregnant as well?
Stop, stop, stop. This is getting you nowhere.
But the problem with discovering a lie—especially when you cannot yet confront the liar—is that it leads to further hypothetical scenarios.
When I said earlier that Simo didn’t say another word to me all the way to Casablanca, that wasn’t quite true. He actually said one: “Police.”
Up ahead there was a roadblock and two cops standing in the middle of the road, one of them using a powerful flashlight to indicate that we should pull over. Oh God, they’ve found out somehow that I’ve fled the hotel and am on the run. Now I am going to be brought back to Essaouira and be made to face Inspector Moufad, whose suspicions about me have trebled since I disobeyed his order and fled town. Now he’s going to have someone guarding my door until he gets a judge to sign an order allowing him to relieve me of my passport. Now I am definitely going to be his prime suspect. And he will argue in court that only a guilty person would have tried to run.
But another part of me knew that Mira wouldn’t have betrayed me like that. Because by doing so she would simultaneously land herself in immense trouble. And also because she was, I could tell, someone who believed in keeping her word.
Still, here we were, being pulled over by the cops. I could see Simo’s lips tighten. He finished sucking down his cigarette as his back and shoulders noticeably stiffened. The beam from the blinding police flashlight filled the windshield of the car, forcing Simo to slow right down.
He pulled up in front of the parked police vehicle, stubbing out the cigarette in the brimming dashboard ashtray. The window was already rolled down. I could hear the static of a police radio in the near background. I could make out, as the flashlight beamed around the car, two youngish policemen in ill-fitting uniforms; the novelty of the late-night hour in the absolute middle of nowhere was augmented by their immediate curiosity in discovering a woman—correction, a Western woman—in the backseat. There was a lot of fast talk in Arabic. Simo handed over his identity papers and his driver’s license. One of the officers disappeared for what felt like a long time, then returned and talked at length with his colleague. Then this officer turned his attention to me: “Vos papiers, madame.” I already had my passport in my hand and turned it over. Now the two cops spent far too long studying it, going through it page by page. There was so much blank space on those pages, evidence of how little I knew of the world outside my own country. I saw them reach the page on which my Moroccan entry visa had been stamped. They studied this intently. They talked among themselves. Then the more senior of the two officers asked me if I spoke French. I nodded affirmation. He asked, “The driver says you hired him as a taxi to take you to Casablanca. Is this true?”
“Yes, I have paid him to do exactly that.”
“Why are you traveling in the middle of the night?”
I had already reasoned that this was a question they just might pose, and I had an answer already prepared.
“My husband is arriving in Casablanca off an early flight tomorrow—and I am meeting him at the airport.”
They then disappeared with my passport. I watched as they walked over to their vehicle, lighting up cigarettes, passing my travel document back and forth. Meanwhile Simo had fired up another smoke—and I could see that he was sweating out the outcome of their deliberations as much as I was. I knew if one of them reached for a phone—or the handset attached to the crackling police band radio in their car—to verify my identity, I would be screwed. A good five minutes passed. The older of the cops opened the door of their vehicle. Here it comes—the beginning of the end. But then he pulled out a bottle of water. More talk between them. Then the senior officer approached us. He knocked on the back window. I rolled it down.
“Donc, madame . . .” He handed me back my passport. “Bon voyage à Casa.”
With a nod to Simo, he saluted us as we drove off into the night.
Two minutes after we’d passed the police checkpoint Simo let out a pronounced sigh. Even when you’re guilty of nothing, an interaction with the law is always a source of internal agitation. Did Simo sense I was on the run? The stress of those past few minutes hit me sideways. So too the lateness of the hour, the immense strain of the day. Stretching out along the backseat of the car, again manipulating my body in such a way as to avoid the protruding springs, I passed out. Though the lack of suspension in the car, and the roughness of the road, jolted me awake several times, my exhaustion was such that I vanished instantly again into the underworld. Until there was a massive jolt, followed by the loud braying of an animal and the even louder braying of a car horn. We were on a city street, tall apartment blocks defining the horizon, no traffic except a cart with a donkey parked right in front of us. A man in a djellaba was attempting to move the donkey and its attendant cart, but the animal was refusing to budge and was blocking the road. Its driver was using a whip to get it to move, but the beast was obstinate even in the face of pain. Simo—who could not get around the donkey and the cart, given the narrowness of the street—was blasting his horn. Snapped back into consciousness, but still fogged in, I glanced at my watch. It was just a few minutes before six. Light was beginning to claw back the night sky. It took me a moment to work out that, indeed, we were in Casablanca.
“Arrêtez, s’il vous plaît,” I told Simo, indicating that honking the horn was doing no good. Simo’s reply was to point to a building across the street; a semi-crumbling apartment block, art deco in style, with a shop on the ground floor that was already open and seemed to function as an all-purpose neighborhood store. There was a café with a terrace directly across the street. I also took in an optician’s and a boutique displaying white and maroon leather jackets in its window, along with stone-washed jeans and paisley silk shirts. A cavalcade of expensive bad taste, playing visual games with my psyche after a night of brief, fitful sleep in the backseat of a rusted car. The donkey cart driver finally got his beast moving, clearing the road. Simo pulled the car over, pointing again to the building across the way.
“Votre adresse,” he said, motioning for me to leave. I reached into my pocket and dug out a 100-dirham note. When I proffered it to him, he just shrugged and accepted it with a fast nod. As I slid off the backseat, my pants suffering a slight tear from one of the springs, he uttered, “Bonne chance.”
Myself and my backpack having been deposited on the street, the car engine belched one last time in my presence before disappearing into the already congealing traffic. I checked my watch again and wondered if I should go up to Samira’s apartment now, b
ang on the door, confront her, and force my husband to leave her bed and come with me.
All my instincts told me to walk away. Cut my losses. Accept the sad finality of it all. Not try to save him—as much as I still wanted to; as frightened and worried as I was that my husband was heading toward some sort of point of no return.
I knew I was now negotiating with myself, talking myself into some sort of compromised position from which nothing good would arise.
Go to the café. Order a coffee. Ask them to call you a cab. Immediately. Get to the airport. Get on the plane. Hit the portal marked I’m out of here . . . permanently.
Instead I hoisted my backpack and crossed the street to her building. I scanned the list of names accompanying the apartment numbers and buzzers that were banked on a wall to the left of the entranceway. They all listed the tenants by last name, with no Samira or even an S in sight. Damn. Six thirty in the morning. The shop next door was open. I considered going inside and showing the picture of Samira to the man behind the counter to see if he knew her. Then I reasoned that she was probably a regular there. Which probably would mean that if some sleep-starved, stressed-out, middle-aged Anglophone woman held up her snapshot and demanded to know her last name and apartment number, the guy in the shop would undoubtedly give her a ring to warn her. He might also call the cops. Best to be prudent and wait across the street.
What I discovered within surprised me. It was well stocked with upscale prepared foods, largely French in origin. It had a considerable amount of local produce—hummus, tahini, couscous, assorted Moroccan pastries—but it also sold teas from Hédiard in Paris and Nespresso coffee capsules, Belgian chocolate, and Italian extra-virgin olive oil. This was the sort of local deli that would have fit into any cosmopolitan city, and clearly catered to an educated clientele. There was also a rack of foreign newspapers in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian—all that day’s editions. I grabbed a copy of the New York Times International Edition and the Financial Times, paid for them, then crossed back across the street and found a table on the café terrace with a direct view of the apartment building’s entrance. A waiter arrived. I ordered breakfast, realizing that, in addition to dealing with virtually no sleep, I also hadn’t eaten anything except a piece of baklava since breakfast the previous day, fear and stress supplanting hunger. I started to properly take in my surroundings. The buildings here all were largely art deco, with a few new structures dotting what was otherwise a rather intact architectural quarter. There was an interesting-looking bookshop next to one of those places that specializes in exquisitely packaged soaps and bath oils. There were advertisement posters showing young, vibrant professional couples looking dreamily at each other while holding the latest in mobile phones. There was a high-tech electronics store, hawking the latest in laptops and cellular communications. A woman in a tight track suit came jogging by. An impressive number of high-end Audis and Mercedes and Porsches were parked on the road. There was not a niqab in sight. I was in a Morocco divorced from the realm behind the walls in Essaouira; a world familiar, yet utterly foreign.
The Blue Hour Page 13