The Blue Hour (10 page)

“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.

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?”

“But that means losing Maine—and we put down twenty-five hundred dollars for the fourteen days there. Our airplane tickets are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable . . . and, yes, I know I'm sounding like an accountant.”

“You're right to do so, especially given my behavior in that department.”

I reached out and took his hand.

“That's all behind us now,” I said.

“Because you forced me to grow up.”

“It wasn't about you ‘growing up.' It was about just exercising a bit of restraint.”

“I know I have this compulsion to spend,” he said. “And I know that the compulsion is rooted in the fact that I allowed life to turn out in a way I never truly wanted. Until, that is, I met you. You saved me . . . from myself.”

I kissed him lightly on the lips. “Happy to be of service.”

Just beyond us the sun had been rendered fluid, thawed orange coalescing like spilled paint on the surface of the Atlantic. I shut my eyes and felt tears because I sensed a breaking down of a barrier, an honesty and complicity between us that had been overshadowed by manifold demons.

The next morning was pitch-perfect. An aquamarine sky, cloud-free, faultless. We awoke from a late carnal sleep to a knock at the door. Glancing at the bedside clock I noticed it was high noon. Damn, damn, damn. Soraya had asked if she could organize the lesson earlier today (it was a Friday—the Sabbath day in Morocco), and if it could last only one hour. She had a day off teaching and was coming into Essaouira earlier than usual to catch a 4:00 bus to Marrakesh and a weekend with a friend from university.

“I had to have my friend's mother phone my mother and vouch that she would keep an eye on me over the weekend. I am twenty-nine years old and am still having to check in like an adolescent,” she told me in a low, confessional whisper.

I had agreed to that midday Friday lesson. And now it was . . . 12:02. Soraya was always punctual. Damn. Damn. Damn.

As I jumped out of bed and scrambled for some clothes, Paul groaned awake.

“What time is it?” he asked, half asleep. When I told him, he smiled and said, “I'm glad you're succumbing to my bohemian ways.”

Actually it was the first time we'd overslept since arriving here; Paul always wanting to get to the café by eleven to capture the souk at its most manic.

“That's Soraya,” I said. “I'll do the lesson downstairs.”

“No need. Do it in the front room and I'll slip out in around twenty minutes.”

So I quickly dressed and let Soraya in, apologizing for the slight delay. As she set up her books and pens and papers in the small living area, I ran downstairs and asked for coffee and bread and preserves to be brought up. When I returned to the room I could hear the shower going in the adjacent bathroom—and Soraya looking just a little uncomfortable with the notion of a naked man in the immediate proximity.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “I should have suggested we go elsewhere.”

“No problem,” she said, clearly relieved to have me back in the room. “Shall we start?”

We began by discussing the verb
vouloir
—
to want
—and variations of its usage, especially in the conditional,
would like
. The great aspirational hope. As in:
Je voudrais un café . . . voudrais-tu un café aussi?
 . . . il voudrait réussir . . . nous voudrions un enfant . . .