Clio saw Alecko Santos across the room, sitting on a tabouret, his slender legs stretched before him. He was talking to a pretty woman in a pink chiffon sari. Clio wondered if she could sit with them.
“Has he ever told you that delicious story about his dog?” the minister asked Clio. “A sheep dog, I believe.”
“Who?”
“Dirk Bogarde.”
“But I don’t know him.”
“I promise you he is in Switzerland,” the sheika said. “Charming villa. It used to belong to the Begum. The first Begum.” She was beginning to be a little bored with Clio. Clio had not been to Paris and she did not know her old friend.
“It is the most amusing story, really. You should get him to tell it to you. There are missing fingers and lost sheep—marvelous!” the minister said, shuddering in delight.
“Would you like more tea?” Clio asked the sheika. The tea service had been put down on a small lapis lazuli table next to Clio. She lifted the heavy silver pot and a servant wearing a little curved knife at his waist appeared as if by magic, as if she had summoned him. He took the teapot from her with a frown. The sheika pursed her lips and gave a scarcely discernible shake of her head and the genie disappeared as swiftly as he had come.
Clio was very relieved when one of the young princes, a student at Brown, asked her to dance to “My Way.” Clio knew it was just the sort of thing the minister himself might say, but she did think the Gipsy Kings did the best of anyone with a bad song. The prince held her rather close and said that he was eager to take her some afternoon to his brother’s stud farm, but she never heard from him again.
In the late afternoon, Clio would sit alone on the terrace of the Café de Paris, on the second floor, overlooking the
Djemma el Fna, and try for the tenth time to read the chapter “Harems and Ceremonies” in Edith Wharton’s book on Morocco.
There were thousands of people in the square. The bells of the water sellers in their hats jiggling with red pompoms, the fast beat of the drums of the snake charmers, and the raucous cries of the women selling oranges rose to her at the small metal table where she watched and listened. She thought that the harsh, bleating horn of the storytellers might have been the outriders of Idris I summoning the martyrs to paradise.
The sky slowly grew dark around her. Fires were lit in greasy charcoal braziers, and heavy blue smoke, smelling of fat and ash, bloomed haphazardly across the square. She left reluctantly just before nightfall, taking pleasure in each step of what had become her own ceremony—the payment of the small bill; the exchange of farewells with the waiter, once dismissive, now kindly; the melancholy pleas of the boys who waited in the damp tiled stairwell to beg for the Coca-Cola bottles she’d left on the table.
It was during that month in Marrakech that Clio discovered that it was possible for her to be alone. It was a tremendous thing to discover, she knew, after all those years. She had never been on her own before. She realized that she could take care of herself, even in an essentially masculine and unsympathetic culture, and this gave her courage, and happiness.
Although it was extremely hot there at the edge of the desert, Tommy liked to play tennis when he was not needed on the set. He would play with Clio on the red clay court in the hotel garden for an hour or two in the late afternoon when the day had grown a little cooler. It was one of the few times
that they were alone, but play was so strenuous that they did not really have the time or the strength for much talk.
One evening after their game, they walked through the garden to the bar. Clio was out of breath. She wondered what he was thinking about; perhaps the joy of beating her. He did not like to lose, especially to wives. That she played with her old wood racket irritated him. He saw it as part of a general stubbornness in her, an adherence to things that he considered old-fashioned, like wearing white on the court, another of her habits that irked him. Although he behaved as if she were the only person left in the world who played tennis in white clothes, she understood how her habits could be irritating. She had, of course, learned to play with a wood racket, dressed in white, from Emma. Tommy liked to play in his bathing suit to keep up his tan, and although she had never objected to his costume, she had been pleased to find a card in their room requesting that guests dress in white while playing tennis at the hotel.
“I would like to live on my own when we return to Los Angeles,” she said, trying to catch up with him on the narrow path. She could suddenly smell oleander.
“You need to talk to Jerry.” He spoke straight ahead as he walked and Clio had trouble hearing him. “We’ve had this conversation before.”
“Jerry?” she asked loudly. “That therapist who plays pool at the house? The one who wears an ankh?”
“What’s an ankh?”
“It is a kind of torture for me, Tommy! I can’t imagine, I don’t imagine, that you would really mind my not being with you. It is just this idea that you have, that someone put in your head, of how you are supposed to live.” For a moment, for an instant, she asked herself why it should matter so much if he did mind. It seemed very odd, even to her, that she was asking his permission to leave.
“Look, babe,” he said, pausing at the steps to the bar. “I don’t know what the fuck’s the matter with you. Talk to Jerry or to someone else, Mimi or Judy. Jerry’s an imminent psychologist.” He balanced on the balls of his feet and bounced up and down. “What do you want to fuck things up for?”
“I would like to work.”
He laughed. “Work?” He banged his racket on the back of a metal chair, and millions of insects jumped in the beam of the yellow terrace light. “When have you ever worked in your whole life? What would you do? What
do
you do? You write things down and you record things about dead people and you read. Big deal. You want to talk about books? You want to write down Hollywood family trees? That would be real interesting. Extinct birds? Hula dances? Look, you wouldn’t be able to travel with me, like to here, if you had a job. Jobs are for people who need them, babe. I have a real job at six o’clock tomorrow morning and you want to talk about torture.” He shook his head in disgust and walked into the bar. “Howdy, Hussein,” she heard him say to the bartender.
She sat on the steps. There was a light breeze from the mountains, bearing the fragrance of eucalyptus. She shivered as she began to cool beneath her damp shirt. She was always exhausted after playing tennis with him, although she refused to show it. He tired her because he played as if she were another big man out there in a Speedo bathing suit. She was too stubborn to give up, even when she was so exhausted that she could barely return the ball.
She wondered if she could play him for her freedom. She wiped her face with the hem of her white shirt. Not until I’ve had some lessons, she thought.
• • •
Alecko Santos urged her to make the trip, two hours by car, to Essaouira, an old town on the coast. Abdullah was unable to take her, but Tommy’s driver was free. She did not know him very well. He was called Mohammed, although Tommy had shortened his name to Mo. Tommy had told Mo that when the movie was finished he would take him back to Los Angeles as his driver, and Mo had believed him.
It was a fast drive through groves of olive and pine. Mohammed stopped the car so that she could buy a bottle of warm beer at a roadside stand, and she noticed that the leaves of the small trees curled into themselves with the dust and the dryness.
Outside the white walls of Essaouira, a sixteenth-century Portuguese fort rose straight from the sea. Once besieged by Barbary pirates, now besieged by lonely Atlantic gales, the fortress was abandoned. Mohammed had borrowed Tommy’s Walkman and he listened to it in the car, singing loudly to Willie Nelson as Clio walked among the ruined batteries. The cannon bore the arms of Aragon and Castile. Along the esplanade were palms, tattered by the winds, and bleached mimosa.
When Clio came back to the car, she said that she would like to swim, but Mohammed shook his head.
“What do you mean?” she asked, opening the back door of the car. She shook the sand from the cuffs of her trousers.
He shrugged and said, “It’s too rough. I’m in charge, anyway. Mr. Tommy told me to take care of you.”
It was very cold inside the car, the air conditioning too high. She caught his handsome eyes in the rearview mirror as he pulled the Walkman headphone back onto his neck. She was tired from the heat and the journey, and angry that she had been taken in charge.
“Why aren’t you in the movie?” he asked as he drove slowly through the lanes of the town.
“I’m just not,” she said. “Do you mind, Mohammed, making it less cold?” She put on a sweater that she had left in the car.
“It is always cold in the desert at night. Haven’t you heard that?” He leaned forward to turn down the air conditioning. “I will go to school in California,” he said. “To study pharmacy.”
When she did not answer, he said, “I have an uncle in San Jose.”
She nodded, knowing that he was watching her in the mirror.
“I will work for Mr. Tommy and go to school at night. I will work for you, too.” He looked over his shoulder to grin at her. She gazed out the window. She did not wish to encourage him.
Scattered in the fields beyond the town were big rocks, the color of new rust. They looked as if they’d fallen from Mars. Clio leaned out the window to look back at Essaouira. The old city was the color of blood in the light of the falling sun. She wondered whether she would ever return, thinking with melancholy that she would not. Warm air blew into her face. It grew dark in an instant and the fort was suddenly silhouetted behind them, now the color of black grapes. Her mouth and nose were dry with dust and salt. She slowly rolled up the window.
They reached a crossroad and Mohammed stopped the car. Inside one of the small mud houses, a man held a child. It seemed to Clio that the night revealed rather than concealed. A candle had allowed her to see, for a moment, the domestic life of a stranger, and it made her happy again.
He passed back an orange to her and she peeled it and ate it. The smell of it was strong and fresh in the closed car. They rode in silence. Perhaps Mohammed was tired, too. He’d told her that he’d never been to Essaouira.
She felt the car begin to slow. Mohammed stopped at a shuttered tourist stand and lifted himself stiffly from the car. He stood with one leg in the road, and looked up and down, his hands on his head.
“We’re lost?” she asked, leaning over the front seat.
“Not certainly,” he said cheerfully, jumping back into the car. As he moved the car in a tight circle, the steering wheel made a thumping sound.
“I should have been straight at the village,” he said. His eyes found her in the mirror. “
Je suis désolé
. Now we shall be late for the celebration party.”
She had forgotten about the party. Or perhaps not forgotten, as she had picked that very day to make her journey to Essaouira.
There had been a young film student, Rob, assigned to the picture as a favor to his father, the head of the studio. Tommy and Billy Michael had not known what to do with Rob until, on the plane to Marrakech, Billy had said to the boy, “Listen, pal, you’re the only one who can do this, so don’t let us down: you’re going to have to be the mensch who finds the donkey who screws the girl.”
Clio had seen Rob two or three times as he rushed down the narrow dirt alleys of the
souk
. She wondered if she should tell him the truth, that the job of finding the donkey was only a trick to keep him from the set, and she did stop him once, in the lemon market. She had to pull his sleeve to get his attention, so feverishly was he questioning an old woman. “I’m working on it!” he had said quickly. “I’m almost there. Wednesday night,” and he had rushed off, a band of street boys running after him.
And he had done it. It wasn’t a joke, after all. Clio had never really thought that he would be able to arrange such a thing, not because such entertainments were not available, or because she disapproved, but because he did not seem sufficiently competent. The crew was really up
for it, Tommy told her; even if it had started as a joke.
As the car moved swiftly through the dark countryside, she wondered if bestiality had been a favorite entertainment of the Castilian mercenaries who once defended the Portuguese fort. Perhaps the winding streets of Essaouira had echoed with the raucous shouts of lonely soldiers, far from home, as the animals and slave women were brought into the courtyard. She smiled in the dark:
“Je m’amuse.”
“I did not know that we would be returning so late,” she said to Mohammed.
“It is the end of the wonderful movie, the time to say goodbye and thank you to many new and wonderful friends. It is my fault for being lost.”
She hesitated. “I’m not sure that I want to see the entertainment that has been arranged.”
“But I know the man who has made this celebration! He is my mother’s cousin’s husband. He is famous for the fireworks. It will be
un spectacle
! I am sorry to miss it. You are sorry to miss it, I may assure you.” He leaned forward and looked through the windshield as if hoping to see Catherine wheels spinning over the Atlas Mountains.
“I thought there was something else. Not fireworks.” She paused. “A donkey.”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He shrugged and increased their speed, anxious then to get back.
It was midnight before they drove through the arched red-burnt gates of Marrakech. She stepped from the car in front of the hotel. He jumped out and they shook hands and she apologized for causing them to miss the celebration. He, too, apologized and she assured him truthfully that it was not his fault.
She ordered mint tea and asked that it be brought to her in the garden. She did not want to see her husband. Every
night before bed, he sat at the art deco dressing table and read the next day’s lines into the mirror. He asked her to read the part of Nancy Drover, the beautiful Red Cross nurse played by Tracy Bond. He then liked to make love, as he believed that sexual intercourse made him look refreshed for the camera.