The Blue Hour (9 page)

“Then how on earth did you get so good at my language?”

“I studied it at university. I watched all the American and British films and television shows that I could. I read many novels.”

“What's your favorite American novel?”

“I really liked
The Catcher in the Rye
 . . . not that I completely understood it.”

“What didn't you understand?”

“All the local New York references. I tried looking many of them up. What's that place he goes to see the Christmas show?”

“Radio City Music Hall.”

“The dancers are acting out . . . what do they call the birth of your savior?”

I found myself laughing.

“It's called the Nativity, and the dancers dressed up like people from the Holy Land are called the Rockettes.”

“Is there a French word for ‘Rockettes'?” she asked.

“No, the Rockettes are truly beyond translation.”

I told her about having first learned French in Canada, and how I was here with my artist husband this summer and was very determined to rejuvenate my French in four weeks.

“But you speak it well already,” she said.

“You're being far too kind.”

“I'm being accurate—though a foreign language is one you must continue to work at, otherwise it does fade from memory.”

She asked me how I'd found my way to Essaouira. She was interested to know about Paul's time in Morocco over thirty years ago, and where we lived in the States, and might Buffalo be a place that she would like?

“Buffalo is not what one would call a particularly cosmopolitan or elegant city.”

“But you live there.”

Now it was my turn to blush.

“Where you end up may not be where you wished to live,” I said.

Shutting her eyes for a moment, she bowed her head and nodded agreement.

“So, if I wanted to regain fluency in French in a month, how many hours a week would I need?” I asked.

“That depends on your schedule.”

“I have no schedule here. No obligations, no commitments, no pressing engagements. And you?”

“I teach at what you would call ‘lower school.' Children between the ages of six and nine. But I am free from five o'clock onward every afternoon.”

“If I were to suggest two hours a day . . .”

“Could you afford three hours?” she asked.

“What would you charge per hour?”

Now she turned an even deeper shade of crimson.

“You don't have to be shy about this,” I said. “It's just money—and it's best to get these things settled at the beginning.”

God, how American I sounded. Cards on the table. Name your price and let's talk.

After a moment or two she said, “Would seventy-five dirhams per hour be too much?”

Seventy-five dirhams was around ten dollars. Immediately I said, “I think that's too little.”

“But I don't want to ask for more.”

“But I want to offer more. Would you accept one hundred and twenty-five dirhams per hour?'

She looked shocked. “That's almost two thousand dirhams a week.”

“Trust me, if it was not affordable for me I would tell you.”

“Okay, then.” She looked away but now with a small smile on her face. “Where shall we do the lessons?”

“I have a suite upstairs. I'll have to check with my husband—but I think that should be fine.”

“And if I may ask . . . what do you do professionally?”

“Nothing very interesting,” I said. When I told her about my work as an accountant I could see her maintaining a neutral pose about it. I could also sense that she was wondering if I had children, and where were they right now? Or was this just me projecting my own concerns and insecurities onto this quiet but observant young woman?

“I'm sure your work is very interesting,” she said.

“When it comes to money, you do get to know a great deal about how other people function. Anyway . . . can you start tomorrow?”

“I see no problem with that.”

“Brilliant—and can you get me all the books I'll need?”

I handed her three hundred dirhams, telling her that if they cost more, I'd reimburse her after our first lesson.

“Three hundred dirhams will buy them all,” she said. “I'll bring them tomorrow.”

“Do you want payment every day or once a week?”

Again she looked away.

“Whatever is easier for you. If you pay me on Friday the bank here is open until nine o'clock, so I can deposit most of it then.”

Ah, a saver.

“Payment every Friday it is, then. One last thing—how do you know Monsieur Picard?”

“My mother is a cleaner here.”

I considered my response for a moment before saying, “I'm certain she's very proud of you.”

Soraya averted her gaze as she nodded acknowledgment. I told her how much I looked forward to being her student and that I would see her tomorrow at five o'clock. Then I went upstairs. Paul was still on the rooftop under the umbrella, a good half dozen drawings strewn across the table. His face was swathed with sweat; his shellshocked eyes indicating the onset of heat exhaustion. I grabbed the water bottle that was by the bed and insisted that he drink it. He drained half a liter in moments, staggered inside, and collapsed onto the bed.

“Are you insane, courting disaster like that?” I asked.

“Inspiration trumped perspiration.”

“But you, of all people, know what the sun is like here.”

“Can you rescue the drawings before they get bleached by the light?”

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—”