Fiction
The Dead Heart
The Big Picture
The Job
The Pursuit of Happiness
A Special Relationship
State of the Union
Temptation
The Woman in the Fifth
Leaving the World
The Moment
Five Days
Non-fiction
Beyond the Pyramids
In God’s Country
Chasing Mammon
FIRST LIGHT. AND I didn’t know where I was any more.
The sky outside: was it a curved rotunda of emerging blue? The world was still blurred at its edges. I tried to piece together my whereabouts, the exact geographic location within which I found myself. A sliver of emerging clarity. Or maybe just a few basic facts.
Such as:
I was on a plane. A plane that had just flown all night across the Atlantic. A plane bound for a corner of North Africa, a country which, when viewed cartographically, looks like a skullcap abreast a continent. According to the Flight Progress Monitor illuminating the back-of-the-seat screen facing me, we were still seventy-three minutes and eight hundred and forty-two kilometres (I was flying into a metric world) from our destination. This journey hadn’t been my idea. Rather I’d allowed myself to be romanced into it by the man whose oversize (as in six-foot-four) frame was scrunched into the tiny seat next to mine. The middle seat in this horror movie of an aircraft. No legroom, no wiggle room, every seat taken, at least six screaming babies, a husband and wife fighting in hissed Arabic, bad ventilation, bad air conditioning, a one-hour wait for the bathroom after the plastic meal they served us, the rising aroma of collective night sweats hanging over this hellhole of a cabin. Thank God I made Paul pack his Zopiclone. Those pills really do induce sleep in even the most impossible conditions. I put aside all my concerns about pharmaceuticals and asked him for one, and it gave me three hours’ respite from this high-altitude sweat-box confinement.
Paul. My husband. It’s a new marriage – just three years old. Truth be told, we love each other. We are passionate about each other. We often tell ourselves that we are beyond fortunate to have found each other. And I do truly believe that. He is the right man for me. Just as, the day before we legalised our relationship and committed to each other for the rest of our lives, I was silently convincing myself that I could change some of Paul’s worrying inclinations; that, in time, things would tick upwards, stabilise. Especially as we are now trying to become parents.
Out of nowhere, Paul suddenly began to mumble something in his sleep, its incoherency growing in volume. When his agitation reached a level that woke our neighbour – an elderly man sleeping in grey-tinted glasses – I touched Paul’s arm, trying to rouse him out of his nightmare. It was several more unnerving moments of shouting before he snapped awake, looking at me as if he had no idea who I was.
‘What . . . where . . . I don’t . . .?’
His wide-eyed bemusement was suddenly replaced by the look of a bewildered little boy.
‘Am I lost?’ he asked.
‘Hardly,’ I said, taking his hand. ‘You just had a bad dream.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Up in the air.’
‘And where are we going?’
‘Casablanca.’
He appeared surprised at this news.
‘And why are we doing that, Robin?’
I kissed him on the lips. And posed the question:
‘Adventure?’
FATE IS BOUND up in the music of chance. A random encounter, a choice impulsively made . . . and fate suddenly has its own interesting momentum.
It was fate that had brought us to Casablanca.
The ‘fasten seat belts’ sign had now been illuminated. All tray tables stored away. All seats upright. The change in cabin pressure was wreaking havoc with the eardrums of all the babies around us. Two of the mothers – their faces veiled – tried to calm their children down without success. One of the babies was staring wide-eyed at the cloaked face in front of him, his anguish growing. Imagine not being able to see your mother’s face in public. She is visible at home, but in the world beyond, all that can be seen is a slitted hint of eyes and lips: to an infant jolted awake by a change in cabin pressure, it would be even more reason to cry.
‘Little charmers,’ Paul whispered, rolling his eyes.
I entwined my hand with his, saying:
‘We’ll be down on the ground in just a few minutes.’
How I so want one of our very own ‘little charmers’ sitting next to us.
Paul suddenly put his arm around me and said:
‘Am I still your love?’
I clutched his hand more tightly, knowing just how much reassurance he craves.
‘Of course you are.’
The moment he walked into my office three years ago I knew it was love. What do the French call it? A coup de foudre. The overwhelming, instantaneous sense that you have met the love of your life; the one person who will change your entire trajectory because you know . . .
What exactly?
Was it really love that made me swoon? I certainly thought so at the time.
Let me restate that. Honestly.
I fell in love with Paul Leuen straight away. As he told me later, much to his surprise he too felt ‘a profound change in my raison d’être’ after walking into my office.
That phrase is so Paul. He loves to ornament his language – something I still find endearing when he doesn’t overplay his hand. It serves as an intriguing counterbalance to the spare, hugely controlled line drawings that once made his name as an artist; a talent which, though he’s recently been thwarted by self-doubt, still remains astonishing to me.
So Paul also fell in love on the spot – with the woman he’d been sent to in order to sort out his messy financial affairs.
That’s right, I’m an accountant. A numbers cruncher. The person you call as a barrier between yourself and our friends at the Internal Revenue Service.
Accountants are usually grouped with dentists as purveyors of a profession that they privately loathe. But I happen to know quite a few other certified public accountants, and most of them – from the grey bookkeepers to the corporate high-flyers – tend to like their work.
I certainly like it – and that’s speaking as someone who came to the numbers-and-tax game in her thirties. No one grows up proclaiming: ‘I want to be an accountant.’ It’s a bit like driving down an open road, then veering down a lane that looks staid and humdrum. But then, much to your surprise, you find it has its own intriguing allure, its own singular sense of human narrative. Money is that fault line along which we pirouette. Show me a person’s numerical sum total and I can develop a portrait of their immense complexities: their dreams and aspirations, their demons and terrors.
‘When you look at my financial records,’ Paul asked me, ‘what do they tell you about me?’
Such directness. A flirtatious directness, even though – when the question was posed – he was still just a prospective client with wildly disorganised books. Paul’s tax problems were considerable, but not insurmountable. His salary at the state university was taxed at source. His problem was that when it came to sales of his artwork, he’d frequently been paid in cash and had never thought about paying tax on it. Though the total was reasonably modest – maybe $15,000 per annum – stretched over a ten-year period that was a not-insignificant sum of taxable income which some sharp-eyed IRS inspector now wanted declared and paid for. Paul was being audited and the little local bookkeeper who’d been handling things for him for the past decade ran scared once the IRS started knocking on the door. He told his client that he needed someone who was skilled at negotiating with the taxman. And he recommended me.
Paul’s financial problems, however, weren’t simply limited to undisclosed income. His spending habits had landed him in severe cash-flow difficulties. Wine and books were his principal vices. There was a part of me that privately admired someone with such an unfazed approach to life that, while being chased by the electricity company for his quarterly bill payment, he thought nothing of spending $185 on a bottle of Pomerol 1989. He would also only choose the finest French-made charcoals and pencil leads for his etchings and these art supplies alone accounted for another $6,000 in annual outlay. When he went to the South of France for a vacation, though he would stay in a friend’s guest cottage outside the medieval village of Eze – which cost him nothing – he would easily rack up another ten grand’s worth of gastronomical indulgences.
As such, the first impression I had of Paul Leuen was of someone who – unlike the rest of us – had somehow managed to avoid all the pitfalls of the workaday, routine life. And I always wanted to fall in love with an artist.
We are often attracted to whatever runs contrary to our nature.
Did I see in Paul – this rail-thin, six-foot-four-inch artist with long grey hair, his black leather jacket and black jeans, his black hoodie, his Converse high-top sneakers – the possibility of change; a way out of the humdrum that so much of my life had become?
During our first professional meeting Paul made a joke about his financial affairs being somewhat akin to a Jackson Pollock painting, and then said that he was the living embodiment of the French word ‘bordélique’. When I looked it up after our meeting I discovered it meant ‘like a brothel’ and ‘all over the place’. Then there was the way he was almost apologetic about his ‘financial absurdities’, and how he needed someone to take him in hand and ‘turn me into a proper functioning grown-up’.
‘The books will tell all,’ I said.
What the books did tell me was that Paul Leuen was accruing serious debt. I was direct with him:
‘You like to show yourself a good time. The fact is, your income from the state university leaves you – after state and federal taxes – with around fifty thousand a year to live on. Your house has been mortgaged twice. You could be facing a tax bill of sixty thousand plus penalties if the IRS has its way. And since you have virtually no savings . . .’
‘So what you’re saying is – I am a disaster area.’
He was all smiles as he said this; a certain bad-boy cheerfulness as he acknowledged his imprudence, his need to mess up. I knew this smile: my father was all charm and wit and an inability to get the bills paid. He was a so-called entrepreneur; a corporate guy who could never hold down a job, who always had a get-rich-quick scheme on the go, who made me and my mother move five times during my adolescence in his search for the next executive position, the next business scheme that was going to finally get us ‘on easy street’ (an expression he used so often). But that reversal of fortune, that manna-from-heaven moment, never materialised. My mother found ongoing work as a geriatric nurse everywhere we went, infirmity and ageing being two of life’s great constants. She kept threatening to leave my father whenever he had another setback, another financial loss that propelled us to yet another city, another rented house, a new school for me, a sense of ongoing uncertainty counterbalanced by the fact that my dad loved me and I just adored him. He was the sort of guy who, when he had money in his pocket, would indulge me and Mom relentlessly. God knows I preferred my father’s absurd sunny outlook on life to my mother’s bleaker perspective, even though I knew that hers had a certain credibility. When my father died of a sudden heart attack the first week I started at the University of Minnesota I was beyond crushed. Phoning me with the news, she masked her distress with steely coolness. Telling me:
‘There was a will. You’ll get his Rolex – the one thing he never hocked, along with his wedding ring. But don’t cry for him. No one – not you, not me – could have saved your father from himself.’
But cry I did, long into that night and many thereafter. After my father’s death, my mother and I began to detach from each other. Though she was the parent who got the bills paid and somehow kept the roof (or series of roofs) over our heads, I never felt much in the way of love from her. I still spent part of most major holidays with her and dutifully called her once a week. I remained the responsible daughter. And embraced, in my own way, her rigorous standards when it came to financial caution and saving for a rainy day. But when, just a few years ago, I got together with Paul – and finally brought him to meet her – my mother afterwards was bluntness itself:
‘So you’re finally marrying your father.’
‘That’s not fair,’ I said, my head reeling from the slap-across-the-face nature of her comment.
‘The truth is never fair. If that makes you think that I am being, as usual, merciless, so be it. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I don’t find Paul charming. He’s charm itself. For a man eighteen years your senior he’s not in bad shape, even if he dresses like Woodstock was last week. Still, he does have a certain charm. And I know how lonely things have been for you since Donald walked out.’
Donald was my first husband – and it was me who ended our three-year marriage, as she well knew.
‘I left Donald,’ I heard myself telling my mother.
‘Because he gave you no choice but to leave him. And it destroyed you. And now you are with a man much older and as irresponsible as your father and—’
‘Paul isn’t as irresponsible as you think.’
‘Time will tell.’
Mom. She died a year ago; a stroke from out of nowhere that killed her at the age of seventy-one.
Turbulence in the cabin. I peered out the window. The plane was trying to break cloud cover, and rocking with its downward shift towards land. The man in the aisle seat shut his eyes tightly as the plane did a dangerous lurch.
‘Do you think the pilot knows what he’s doing?’ Paul whispered to me.
‘I’m sure he has a wife and children he’d like to see.’
‘Or not.’
For the next five minutes the aircraft was like a prize-fighter having a bad night, as it took ongoing body blows from the storm enveloping us. The children’s cries hit new levels of discord. Several of the masked women began to keen. Our neighbour’s eyes remained tightly shut, his lips now moving in what seemed to be silent prayer.
‘Imagine if it was all to end right now,’ Paul said. ‘What would you think?’
‘If you’re dead you’re not thinking.’
‘But say this was the moment before death hit. What would your last thought be?’
‘Is this line of questioning supposed to distract me from the fact that the plane might crash?’ I asked.
Paul laughed; a laugh instantly silenced as the plane seemed to go into momentary free fall. I gripped the armrests so tightly my knuckles felt as though they just might perforate the skin. I kept my eyes slammed shut until, out of nowhere, order and calm descended on the world. We had hit calm air. Moments later, the runway was beneath us.
I opened my eyes. Paul’s fingers remained gripped around the armrests, his face now the colour of chalk. We reached for each other’s hands. Then my husband spoke.
‘I wonder – is this all a mistake?’
THE IMMIGRATION HALL at Casablanca. Controlled chaos. Hundreds of new arrivals being corralled into two different lines: one for non-Moroccans, another for the rest of humanity. Every historical epoch – from the Middle Ages to our current hyper-connected, cyber-world reality – seemed to be represented. There were sharply suited businessmen and women everywhere, at least half of whom, with their Italian tailoring and their black iPhones, were from North Africa. There were backpacker types, all grungy and twenty-something, looking spaced and eyeing the suits with zonked amusement. Just in front of me was a gaunt man in a dusty brown suit, his teeth blackened by cigarettes, holding a travel document from Mauritania in his right hand.
‘What’s the capital of Mauritania?’ I asked Paul.
Without a pause he replied:
‘Nouakchott.’
‘The things you know,’ I said.
‘This line is insane. When I last came thirty-three years ago, there were no computer checks – the world wasn’t as paranoid as it is now.’
‘Zen, zen, zen,’ I said, stroking my husband’s face.
‘This is Casablanca airport, not some fucking Buddhist retreat.’
I laughed. But he stood there, bouncing from foot to foot, an ongoing fugue of impatience and anxiety.
‘Let’s go home,’ he suddenly said.
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘I do.’
Silence. I felt myself tense.
‘How will we go home?’ I asked.
‘Get the next plane.’
‘You’re not serious.’
‘I think I am. This is all wrong.’
‘Because of the long line?’
‘Because my instinct tells me – go home.’
‘Even though it was your “instinct” that told you we had to come here?’
‘So you’re angry at me.’
‘If you want to go home, we’ll go home.’
‘You’d think me a loser if I did that.’
‘I never think you a loser, my love.’
‘But I know I am a liability.’
Liabilities. That was the word which ricocheted around my head when I discovered, several weeks ago, the extent of his debts, despite his having promised me, months earlier, that he would curb his spending habits. There was a knock on our door one Friday evening around six. A man from a collection agency was standing on our front porch, asking to speak with Paul Leuen. I explained that my husband was at the gym. ‘Ah, so you are Mrs Leuen? Then you might be aware of the sixty-four hundred dollars that your husband owes to the Vintners Wine Society.’ I was speechless. When had he bought all that wine, and why hadn’t I seen it anywhere in our house? The collection agent was explaining that the Wine Society had sent close to ten letters demanding ‘a conversation’ about the unpaid sum which had accrued over two years. Now they had run out of patience. If the bill wasn’t settled forthwith, legal action would follow, and could involve a lien on our home.
Instead of going inside and getting my cheque book (as I had done on several previous occasions) I simply said:
‘My husband is at the Gold’s Gym on Manor Street, about five minutes from here by car. Ask for him at the reception desk – they know him. And—’
‘But you could settle this matter straight away.’
‘I could, but I won’t. You need to speak directly with my husband.’
Repeating the address of the gym I excused myself and closed the door. As soon as the collector had driven off I went into our bedroom, packed a small weekend bag, and called my old college roommate, Ruth Richardson, in Brooklyn and asked if I could use her fold-out sofa for a few days. Then leaving Paul a note – The wine debt must be paid off by the time I am back late Tuesday night – I got into my car and drove the seven hours south-east to the city I had always promised myself I would one day call my own. I kept my cellphone off and spent the next four days trying not to bore Ruth with the cocktail of anger, guilt and sadness that was coursing through me. Ruth – a professor of English at Brooklyn College, divorced, no kids, disappointed in love, wickedly funny and hyper-cultural (‘High art is God’s apology for men,’ she’s often noted) – was, as always, a great friend. She steadied my resolve when I suggested that perhaps I should check in on Paul, see how he was bearing up.
‘When he landed himself in debt last time,’ she said, ‘what did you do?’
‘I dug into my retirement fund and found the ten grand to get him out of trouble.’
‘What did he promise you in return?’
‘You know very well. He admitted that he’s got a sad pathological compulsion when it comes to spending, spending, spending . . . and he promised to curtail it.’
‘A compulsion that is eating away at your marriage. It’s all so sad. Especially as I rather like Paul.’
‘And I do love him madly, despite this one very bad habit. He still makes me laugh. He is so bright and engaged and intellectually curious. He still thinks me hot – or, at least, that’s what he says all the time.’
‘Still trying for a child?’
‘Of course.’
When I met Paul three years earlier, I was thirty-seven. Within six months of declaring our love for each other, and talking about the wondrous possibilities of a shared future together, I delicately raised the fact that I did not want to pass through life without becoming a mother; that I was entering the now-or-never phase. I knew that I was bringing a certain degree of ‘beat the clock’ pressure to our relationship, and said I would perfectly understand if Paul felt this was all too much too fast. His response astounded me:
‘When you have met the love of your life, of course you want to have a child with her.’
Yes, Paul was a great romantic. Such a romantic that he proposed marriage shortly thereafter, even though I told him that, having been there once before, I wasn’t pushed about a return visit. But I was so swept up in the wonder of finding love at my age, and with such a talented and original man, and in Buffalo, that I said yes. He did say that though he realised the clock was ticking we needed some time together before becoming parents. I agreed to his request, staying on the pill until last autumn. At which point we seriously began to ‘try’ (what a curious verb) for a baby. We went about the task very robustly – though sex was, from the outset, one of the aspects of our marriage that always worked. It wasn’t as if we were having to motivate ourselves into making love every night of the week.
‘You know, if I don’t get pregnant naturally there are other options,’ I said six months later when nothing had happened.
‘You’ll get pregnant.’
‘You sound very certain about that.’
‘It’s going to happen.’
That conversation took place ten days before the debt collector arrived on our doorstep. As I headed south in my car towards Brooklyn, my cellphone off, my piercing sadness about Paul was underscored by the realisation that he was my last chance at having a baby. And that thought . . .
Ruth splashed a little more wine into my glass and I took a long sip.
‘He’s not your last chance,’ she said.
‘I want a baby with Paul.’
‘That’s a definitive statement.’
Friendship is always a complex equation – especially a friendship where it had been agreed early on that we would never sugar-coat things; that we would speak what we felt to be the truth.
‘I don’t want to be a single mother,’ I said. ‘If I can get him to just accept that he has certain obligations . . .’
‘Paul had problems with money before you. Even though you’ve tried to organise his personal finances, he refuses to play smart. At the age of fifty-eight, he is not going to have some sort of epiphany and transform himself. He is what he is. Which therefore begs the question – can you weather his ongoing recklessness?’
All the way home that question nagged at me. Life, they say, is a great teacher. But only if we are truly willing to shake off our illusions and self-deceptions.
Love, however, always muddies clarity of vision. And a life without love is a bit like the balance sheets I gaze over every working day: far too concrete, too reasoned. My love for Paul was as bound up in his recklessness as in his talent, his intelligence, his ardour for me.
I got home just after six p.m. to the nineteenth-century Gothic place we’d bought together. His car was parked out front. When I entered the house I was startled to find that order had descended upon chaos. In recent weeks Paul had started treating our home as a happy dumping ground. However, in the days I had been out of contact, not only had he divested the house of his mess, but all the windows glistened, all the wood surfaces were free of dust and had been polished. There were fresh flowers in several vases and I could smell something pasta-esque in the oven.
As the door slammed behind me, Paul emerged from the kitchen, looking just a little sheepish. He couldn’t make direct eye contact with me. But when he did once look up in my direction I could see his sadness and fear.
‘Smells good,’ I said.
‘I made it for you, for us.’ Again he avoided my gaze. ‘Welcome home.’
‘Yes, I came back. But—’
He held up his hand.
‘I sold all the wine.’
‘I see.’
‘I found a guy here in town. Big-deal collector. Offered me six thousand dollars for my cellar.’
‘You have a cellar?’
He nodded, looking like a little boy who had just been caught out in a very big lie.
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘You know that shed behind the garage? The one we never use?’
The shed was something akin to a bomb shelter, with two folding steel doors that lay flat to the ground. When we were negotiating to buy the house we naturally had it opened for us, and found a damp semi-lined cave. As the house already had a renovated basement we simply put a lock on the two doors after we bought the place and left it empty.
At least, that’s what I thought.
‘How long have you been building up this wine collection?’ I tried to sound reasonable.
‘A while.’
He came over and took me in his arms.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘I don’t want apologies. I just don’t want another repetition of all this financial mess.’
‘And I don’t want to lose you.’
‘Then don’t. Because I do want you, us.’
To Paul’s credit he became industrious again after the wine incident, spending all free non-teaching hours on a new series of lithographs. It was the first time that he had settled down to serious creative work since our marriage. Though his gallery owner in New York was enthusiastic, the general downturn in the market and Paul’s lack of visibility in recent times meant that the sort of prices he could demand had shrunk decisively. Still, he did manage to find a buyer. Though Paul was disappointed with the negotiated price, part of him was clearly thrilled with the fact that he still ‘had the chops’, as he put it, when it came to his art. After paying off most of his credit-card debts he then took me out to dinner at a most upscale (for Buffalo) French restaurant where he ordered a far too expensive bottle of wine and told me the gallery owner had another client interested in a new series.
‘The buyer is willing to plonk down fifty per cent up front – so that should be another ten grand to me in a couple of weeks. What’s a bottle of Paulliac compared to that?’
I’m not that into wine. Still . . . why not celebrate? Especially as Paul was making good on paying off his debts. When we got home that night, he lit candles in our bedroom, put on a CD of Miles Davis playing ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’, and made love to me with the ferocity and sensuality that only he could.
My first husband, Donald, had always had issues about intimacy. He was a super-bright, endlessly anxious man; an old-school journalistic muckraker on the Buffalo Sun who covered local politics and was widely considered to be one of the great specialists on municipal corruption in the state. Just out of college, having done a stint on a paper in Madison, Wisconsin, after getting my BA from Minnesota, I was delighted to have landed the job on the City Desk of the Sun. Donald was completely committed to Buffalo. I was so smitten by this five-foot-six-inch whirlwind that I too became committed to Buffalo. But the sex – when it happened – was, at best, perfunctory; at worst, it flat-lined.
‘Not good at this, never been good at this,’ he whispered the first night we slept together and he had what could be politely described as ‘performance-related issues’. I reassured him that this happened to all men from time to time, that it was no big deal, that things would come right. The truth is . . . even when he was able to complete the act it was never satisfying. He was endlessly anxious, caught up in his fears about appearing inadequate and inferior, and no amount of reassurance could assuage such ingrained self-doubts. But I chose to overlook the fact that our bed became a sort of cross upon which Donald crucified himself. By the end of our first year of marriage, our lovemaking (if you could call it that) had dwindled to twice a month. I suggested that Donald seek counselling. He agreed and then refused to go. Though he remained brilliantly engaging company, that crucial part of our married life went into permanent decline.
But I continued to reason that, given even more love and support, all those intimacy issues would vanish and our marriage would steady and . . .
It is extraordinary, isn’t it, the way we convince ourselves all will be well in a relationship that we privately know to be doomed.
The end of my marriage to Donald came the evening he showed up late from the newsroom, with eight whiskies too many in him, and informed me:
‘The fact is, even if I did get counselling or go to my doctor and let him prescribe me something, all the little blue pills in the world wouldn’t stop the repulsion I feel every time you come close to me.’
I snapped my eyes shut, trying to tell myself that he had not said what he had just said. But when my eyes opened the look on Donald’s face was a strange little half-smile. The sight of him, quietly enjoying the hurt and confusion now ricocheting within me, led me to the following uncomfortable truth: he said that because he knew, once it was uttered, we would have passed the point of no return.
‘Now you can really hate me,’ he finally whispered.
‘I just pity you, Donald.’
I asked for a meeting with our newspaper’s editor-in-chief the next morning. I told him that, if the paper was still offering the voluntary redundancy packages mentioned some months earlier during a wave of cutbacks, I would be willing to accept one.
Ten days later – with one year’s salary in the bank – I got into my car and drove north to Montreal. I had decided to learn French and live in a city that hovered somewhere between a European and New World sensibility. It was also cheap. I found a small apartment in the decidedly francophone confines of the Plateau, and went to daily French lessons at the Université de Montréal where I worked hard at mastering that challenging and intricate language. My proficiency improved considerably when I started having an affair with a man named Thierry, who ran a used record store on the rue Saint Denis and was intermittently trying to write the great québécois novel. His charms and reasonable sexual confidence – especially after Donald – were subsumed by unapologetic laziness.
After a year I was able to renew my student visa. As my prowess in French grew, I began to hatch plans about perhaps moving to Paris and working out some way of landing a carte de séjour and reinventing myself professionally as . . .
This was the dilemma. What was I going to do next in my life? I set up an appointment at the French consulate in Montreal and found myself facing a very petite fonctionnaire who discouraged me from even thinking about finding work in Paris without a European passport or a French husband. My Canadian student visa allowed me to take on work for the length of my sojourn there at the university. I found a temporary post as an administrative assistant in a firm of bilingual accountants – and started finding myself fascinated by the world of numbers. I knew that, by retraining as a certified public accountant, I was again landing myself in the world of other people’s narratives that I had said I would dodge when I left journalism. Nonetheless, after eighteen months in Quebec, I decided to cross over the American frontier again and enter a CPA course in Buffalo. I knew why I was running back there. Buffalo was safe. It was the only place to date in my life where I had put down roots. No longer being at the newspaper meant that my chances of running into Donald were nominal. I still felt a deep lingering sadness about the end of the marriage, coupled with the thought that I should have been able to change him. Just as my need to do something practical or serious with my life was also a larger reflection of all the residual things I felt about Dad. In Buffalo I had some good friends and many contacts – so there was also the prospect of being able to set up my own small accountancy firm and have enough people to reach out to as potential clients.
Just to prove that I was a responsible young woman I found a job with a local CPA while doing the two-year accountancy course. This allowed me to take what was left from the redundancy money and put down a 50 per cent payment on a nice apartment in an old Victorian-style house (Buffalo is so cheap), and even renovate the kitchen and bathroom while furnishing it with funky second-hand items. When the time came – and I was indeed an officially certified public accountant – I had seven clients who joined me on the day I first opened my office.
Then, two years later, Paul walked in.
‘I wonder – is this all a mistake?’
His words as we landed in Morocco. A journey that was his idea, his surprise which he sprang on me just two weeks after he had cleared a significant portion of his debts and had sworn off compulsive spending. I’d just come home from my bi-weekly yoga class to find Paul at work in the kitchen, the aromatic aromas of North Africa wafting everywhere. Approaching him at the stove I gave him a kiss and said:
‘Let me guess – a tagine?’
‘Your powers of observation are formidable.’
‘Not as formidable as your culinary skills.’
‘Your self-doubt is touching, but not founded in fact.’
As always Paul’s lamb tagine was splendid. He made it with preserved lemons and prunes; a recipe he’d learned during the very formative two years he’d spent in Morocco in his mid-twenties.
That was back in the early 1980s – when, having graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York and having tried to make a go of it as an artist in the then still demi-monde world of Alphabet City in the extreme East Village, he decided that a radical change of scene was required. Through the careers office at Parsons he learned that an art school in Casablanca was looking for an instructor in drawing: $3,000 a year for a two-year contract, plus a little apartment near the school.
‘They told me it was probably the best art school in Morocco – “though that’s not saying much”. Still, it would give me the chance to live somewhere exotic, escape the workaday world, travel, and get a considerable amount of my own work done under that white-hot North African sun.’
So Paul quit his job, took the cramped overnight flight to Casablanca – and hated everything about the place on sight. In no way resembling the fabled, mythic city of the movie, it was sprawling, concrete, ugly. The art school turned out to be second-rate, the staff demoralised, the students largely untalented.
‘I had very few friends at the beginning – outside of a Franco-Moroccan artist named Romain Ben Hassan who was a rather talented abstract expressionist for such a budding alcoholic. But it was Romain who got me a French teacher and forced me to speak with him in the language of everyone around me. And it was Romain who also got me to stop feeling sorry for myself, and let me into his social circle of local and expatriate artists. He also forced me to get on with my own work.’
Paul had found a life for himself. He had a circle of fellow artists – Moroccan and expatriate – with whom he hung out. He had one or two students whom he thought promising. Most of all he worked rigorously on an amazing portfolio of lithographs and line drawings that chronicled his quarter of Casablanca. Though the art school wanted him to stay on he used this portfolio – which he called ‘The White City’ – to get himself a gallery in New York.
While on a three-week break between art school terms he headed south to a walled seaside city called Essaouira: ‘Like going back to the Middle Ages and landing yourself in the ultimate artist’s colony.’ Essaouira was always one of Paul’s conversation pieces. How he found a room in a fantastically cheap and ‘atmospherically seedy’ hotel, with a great balcony from which he could see the sweep of the Atlantic and the medieval walls of this strange, alluring city where ‘Orson Welles shot his film version of Othello’ and ‘Jimi Hendrix smoked far too much dope while chilling out on the Moroccan Atlantic vibe’. Paul spent his weeks there working on a second collection of line drawings – ‘In the Labyrinth’ – depicting the spindly alleyways of Essaouira. His art dealer/gallery owner in Manhattan, Jasper Pirnie, managed to sell thirty of his lithographs.
‘The money I made from the lithographs could have paid for me to stay another two years in Essaouira, it was so cheap back then. But what did I do? The State University of New York in Buffalo had a position open in their Visual Art Department. The fact that I knew the chairman of the department, who actually rated me . . . well, there it was – an assistant professorship with the possibility of tenure in six years if I kept getting my lithographs and drawings exhibited. But even as I packed my bags in Essaouira, after sending a telegram back to the department head that I was accepting the job and telling the Casablanca art school that I wouldn’t be returning to teach there, I knew this was a decision I would come to regret.’
I remember distinctly this was the moment when I covered his hand with my own; the first time either of us had made an intimate gesture towards each other. Strange, isn’t it, how I reached out to comfort this man after he admitted to me that he had fenced himself in. Perhaps because I too felt fenced in, and because he was someone with a creative, bohemian streak who would pull me away from my innate cautiousness, my need to make lists in my sleep and keep the books balanced. He leaned over and kissed me as I covered his hand, then threaded his fingers into mine and said: ‘You are wonderful.’ That was the first night we slept together. After my sad time with Donald, it was both revelatory and heady to be with a man who was so sexually confident, so adept at giving me pleasure.
He made me a lamb tagine the second night we slept together. And he made me a lamb tagine just six weeks ago, to celebrate him paying off his debts. That night he also dropped a little surprise into my life.
‘What would you say to spending a month this summer in Essaouira?’ he asked.
My initial thought was that we’d already put $500 down on a cottage near Popham Beach in Maine. Reading my mind Paul said:
‘We can still do the two weeks in Popham. I’ve booked us to leave Morocco a few days before we’re due in Maine.’
‘You’ve actually bought us two tickets for Morocco?’
‘I wanted to surprise you.’
‘Oh, you certainly did that. But you could have at least asked me if I was free.’
‘If I had asked, you would have found an excuse to say no.’
He was, alas, right about that one.
‘Did you even consider the fact that I have a business, and clients? And how are we going to afford this trip to Morocco?’
‘Jasper sold four more lithographs last week.’
‘You never told me this.’
‘The nature of a surprise is to keep things secret.’
I was already intrigued. Outside of my time in Montreal and a trip once to Vancouver (hardly a real overseas destination), I had no experience of the world beyond American frontiers. Here was my husband offering to whisk me off to North Africa. But my alleged financial caution was, I knew, underscored by fear. The fear of foreignness. Of being dropped into a Muslim country that – for all of Paul’s talk about its modernity – was, according to anything I’d ever read, still locked in the North African past.
‘We can easily live for a month in Essaouira for two thousand dollars,’ he said.
‘It’s too long to take off.’
‘Promise your staff a nice bonus if they hold the fort for six weeks.’
‘And what are my clients going to say about this?’
‘Who consults an accountant between mid-July and Labor Day?’
He did have a point. It was my slowest season. But six weeks away? It seemed like such a huge block of time . . . even though I also knew that, in the great scheme of things, it was nothing, and that, yes, Morton (my bookkeeper) and Kathy (my secretary) could manage to run everything very well without me. One of the hardest lessons for anyone with control-freak tendencies to absorb is that the world actually carries on very well without them.
‘I’m going to have to think this over.’
‘No,’ Paul said, taking my hand. ‘You’re going to say yes now. Because you know this will be an amazing experience which will take you out of your comfort zone and show you a world you’ve only imagined. And it will give me the opportunity to work on a new portfolio which Jasper assured me he can sell for at least fifteen thousand dollars. So there’s a big financial incentive. Most of all, it will be very good for us. We could truly use some time out of here, time to ourselves, and away from all that day-to-day stuff.’
Morocco. My husband was taking us to Morocco. To Essaouira. How could I not overlook my qualms and give in to the idea of a North African idyll in a walled medieval city facing the Atlantic? The stuff of fantasy. And aren’t all fantasies rooted in one great hope: that of landing, even temporarily, in a better place than we find ourselves now?
So I said yes.
The immigration line inched forward, slowly, inexorably. Almost an hour had passed since we’d landed and only now were we at the front. The man from Mauritania was being rigorously questioned by the cop in the booth, the discussion getting heated, voices raised; the policeman picked up his phone to call someone, two other plain-clothes officers (guns bulging under their suit jackets) showed up and led the now angry and frightened man into a side interrogation room. Glancing away from this little drama towards my husband I could see that he was regarding these proceedings with dread.
‘You think they’ll let me in?’ he whispered.
‘Why wouldn’t they?’
‘No reason, no reason.’ But he sounded uneasy. At that precise moment the cop in the booth called us forward, his hand out for our passports and landing cards. As he scanned them and peered at the computer screen I could see Paul working hard at masking his distress. I reached over and took his hand, squeezing it, willing him to calm down.
‘You stay how long?’ the officer asked in choppy, cadenced English.
‘Quatre semaines,’ Paul said.
‘You work here?’
‘No way. We’re on vacation.’
Another glance at the screen. Then a thorough inspection of all the pages of our passports, during which I could feel Paul tense even tighter. Then: stamp, stamp . . . and the cop pushed the passports back to us.
‘Bienvenu,’ he said.
And we stepped forward into Morocco.
‘See, they let you in,’ I said, all smiles. ‘Why so nervous?’
‘Stupidity, stupidity.’
But as we moved towards the baggage carousels I caught him whispering to himself:
‘Idiot.’
JULY IN NORTH Africa. Heat and dust and gasoline fumes enveloping the parched air. That was the first aroma which hit my nostrils as we left the airport terminal: petroleum intermixed with arid, motionless oxygen. Up in the sky the morning sun was at full wattage. It didn’t matter that Casablanca was on the Atlantic coast. The first sensation on leaving the somewhat cooler confines of the arrival hall was: welcome to the blast furnace.
‘We would have to arrive in hell,’ Paul said as we waited at the packed bus stop for the coach into the city centre.
‘Well, you did once live here in July, right?’ I said.
‘It will be cooler in Essaouira.’
‘And we’ll be there in just a few days. No doubt the hotel in Casablanca has air conditioning.’
‘Don’t be so sure of that. This is North Africa. Discomfort at the cheap end of the spectrum is part of the deal.’
‘Then we can find a hotel with AC.’
‘Or we can change our plans now.’
‘What?’
‘Back in a moment.’
With that he disappeared off into the crowd. I wanted to follow him but our four sizeable pieces of luggage were there in front of me. They had clothes for many weeks and all of Paul’s art supplies as well as the collection of twelve books I had envisaged myself reading while facing the waters of the Atlantic. Were I to leave the suitcases and pursue my husband I would be inviting theft and disaster at the start of what was already shaping up to be a rather dubious adventure. So all I could do was shout Paul’s name. My voice was drowned out by everyone crowded around the bus stop: veiled women, men of varied ages in ill-fitting suits, one or two backpackers, two grandfatherly types in long flowing robes, and three very dark-skinned Africans carrying their worldly goods in cheap canvas bags – making me wonder if they were here looking for work and, judging from the bewilderment sketched on their faces, as adrift here as myself.
Buses, most of them ancient, came and went, belching clouds of exhaust as they heaved away towards assorted destinations. I peered into the distance, but could see no sign of my husband. Ten, fifteen minutes passed. God, maybe he really has decided to do an about-face. He’s probably back inside the terminal building, using a credit card to send us home to the States.
But then, amidst the crowded theatre of this street scene, a tall man emerged. Paul. He was walking towards me, accompanied by a diminutive fellow who was half-shaven with a small knitted skullcap on his head, a cigarette clenched between blackened teeth. He carried a battered tin tray on which sat two stubby glasses, while his other hand clutched a pot of tea. The man smiled shyly. Placing the tray on the empty space next to me on the pockmarked bench he raised the teapot a good foot above the glasses and began ceremoniously to pour a green liquid into them. The heady, aromatic properties of the tea were immediately discernible.
‘Thé à la menthe,’ Paul said. ‘Le whisky marocain.’
Mint tea. Moroccan whisky. The man smiled, offering me the tray with the two glasses. I lifted one of them. Paul took his and clinked it against mine.
‘Sorry to have disappeared like that,’ he said.
He leaned forward and placed a kiss on my lips. I accepted it, as I did his hand which he entwined with my free one. Then I took my first sip of le whisky marocain. The mint was palatably strong, but undercut by a certain sugary sweetness. I usually dislike anything overly sweet but this tea worked because of its aromatic strength and its honeyed undercurrent. After that horrendous flight and the wait in the sun, it was balming.
‘You approve?’ Paul asked.
‘I approve.’
‘Our friend here loaned me his cellphone. There’s a change of plan.’
‘What sort of change?’
‘We’re going straight to Essaouira. There’s a bus that leaves here in twenty minutes.’
‘What about Casablanca?’
‘Trust me, you’re not missing much.’
‘It’s still Casablanca, a place you’ve talked endlessly about from the moment we first got together.’
‘It can wait.’
‘But Essaouira is . . . what . . . four, five hours from here?’
‘Something like that, yeah. I checked just now – the Casablanca hotel doesn’t have air con. Nor will they let us check-in until three p.m., which would mean sitting in a café for almost five hours. Why not take that time getting to Essaouira? And the guy who was selling the bus tickets told me the coach we’re taking is air conditioned.’
‘So it’s a fait accompli that we’re going to Essaouira? You decided for us?’
‘He told me the bus was getting full. Please don’t take this badly.’
‘I’m taking nothing badly. I’m just . . .’
I turned away, feeling beyond tired after the sit-up-all-night stint across the Atlantic, the heat and the oppressive, toxic air. A further sip of mint tea did wonders for a throat gone parched again.
‘Fine, fine,’ I said. ‘Essaouira it is.’