Tinderbox (23 page)

Embarrassed at not having been a pallbearer, Adam sits alone on a chair in the corner,
nursing a soda. Again, Raquel holds court, her feet again raised on a leather pouf.
He has not seen Rachida since the cemetery.

A slight, thin-faced man approaches him. “I am Hamid. I was Uri’s assistant.” He holds
out his hand. “I worked for your father-in-law for thirteen years. In the mornings,
when he was in the workshop, I tended the customers. I have been looking for your
wife, but I do not see her. Sadly, I must leave. My own wife is expecting our second
child any day now, so I do not want to be away too much longer.”

Adam knows that he should say something, that Caro or his mother would know the right
thing to say, but he cannot think what that something is. Instead, the words
I’ve got to get the fuck out of here
cycle on an endless loop through his mind.

“Rachida had asked Uri to make something for her. He finished it the day before he
died. I was to have mailed it to her for him.” He removes an envelope from his kaftan
pocket and holds it against his chest. “It is a silver hamsa. He looked for an antique
one, but he could not find one that he would be able to engrave, so he made this himself.
Could you kindly give it to your wife? Please tell her I am very sorry I could not
give it to her personally, but I worry too much now about my wife to wait any longer.”

Hamid gives the envelope to Adam. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “It
was the last thing he made.”

Adam nods soberly. “Thank you. I will tell Rachida.”

When Rachida arrives, she is accompanied by a boy carting bags of ice.

“Where were you?” Adam asks. He does not like the sharpness in his voice, but half
an hour has passed since Hamid left, during which he has been unable to quiet the
I’ve got to get the fuck out of here
tape in his mind.

Rachida looks at Adam and then the ice with disgust.

“Your father’s assistant gave me something to give you.” Adam hands Rachida the envelope.
“It’s the hamsa for Eva.”

Rachida opens the envelope. Inside is a silver hand with engraved writing on each
of the five fingers. She turns it over and reads the Hebrew on the back: “I have set
the Lord always before me.”

The new hamsa looks entirely different from the original: shiny and crowded with letters,
the fingers more elongated. Adam wonders if it will only upset Eva.

“He said it was the last piece your father worked on.”

Rachida inhales so sharply Adam feels himself recoil, the way he might with a dog
baring its teeth or, he thinks, seeing Rachida’s face, his wife refusing to weep.

20

The day after the funeral, the weather turns unseasonably warm. Seagulls caw from
the beach across the road. Rachida brings Omar to the hotel so he can swim. Caro rests
on a lounge chair sipping a vile concoction Rachida has given her, a local remedy
for intestinal ailments. Twenty feet away, Rachida dangles her feet in the water,
watching Omar. Adam stretches out on the lounge chair next to Caro.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“This town gives me the creeps. There’s too much light. It’s too—too blue.”

“So…?”

“Go home. You and I leave. Now. Yesterday.”

“I can’t fly now. I barely made it from the room to the pool. Besides, it would cost
an arm and a leg to change our tickets.”

“I’ll pay.”

“Right. And who’ll pay your credit card bill? It’s charming here. You just hate being
away from home. You used to feel the same way when we went on vacation with Dad.”

Adam squeezes his eyes shut. He does look miserable. For that matter, Caro thinks,
so does Rachida.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s being with Rachida’s family. They’re so conniving,
they actually make me appreciate Dad’s bluntness. Esther pulled me aside to check
out if we are going to continue sending her mother money, which I told her was news
to me. That shut her up. And then there’s some issue about the jewelry business. Whether
Uri’s assistant has a right to the store or whether it can be sold.”

“You’ve never spent any time with them. All families are horrid at times like this.”

Omar climbs out of the pool, shivering like a tiny dog. Rachida wraps a towel around
his shoulders and briskly rubs him dry.

Caro scoots over to make room for Omar. He nuzzles against her. Rachida pulls up a
chair.

“Can I play a game on your cell phone?” Omar asks his mother.

Rachida reaches in her bag and hands the phone to Omar. “Ten minutes. That’s it.”

“It works here?” Adam asks.

“We’ve been paying for international service for three years. How do you think Omar
and I call you every night when we’re here?”

Adam angles his face into the weak sun.

“Let me guess. You’re trying to recruit Caro to escort you home early.”

“No comment.”

Caro puts another towel over Omar. He’s too absorbed in the game on his mother’s phone
to pay attention to her jabs at his father.

Rachida sighs. She turns to Caro. “Not that he deserves it, but I do feel bad that
he won’t see anything more of Morocco than Essaouira. It’s like coming to the States
and going only to Cape Cod.”

“He’ll survive. He can watch movies about the rest of the country.”

“Esther’s husband is going this afternoon to Marrakesh for business. I was thinking
maybe we should go with him. I’m so wiped, I can’t even think right now about all
the things I need to do. We could stay tonight and tomorrow night at La Mamounia—Khalid
would give us rooms—and then drive back with Esther’s husband Tuesday morning.”

Rachida bites her lower lip. “My father loved La Mamounia. We went every spring for
a week. Esther and I would order room service breakfast. It would come on a cart with
pink cloth napkins and platters covered with enormous silver domes. We played tennis
on the clay courts. In the evening, my father and Khalid would have chess competitions
in the library bar.”

She pokes Adam’s stomach. “When Roosevelt visited Casablanca during the war, Churchill
insisted he could not leave Morocco without seeing Marrakesh.”

“Wow. That’s the nicest thing you ever said to me. To put me in the same category
as Roosevelt.”

“They had to carry Roosevelt up the tower of the ambassador’s residence.”

Is this it, Caro wonders, the glue between her brother and Rachida? A relentless teasing
that for the first time strikes her as a parroting of the way her father talks to
Adam. “You’d have to carry me. I’m in no condition for a road trip. But go. Rachida’s
right, Adam. You really should see Marrakesh.”

Rachida stands. She claps her hands next to Adam’s ear. “Up. I’ll call Khalid while
you pack.”

Rachida gives Caro a peck on the cheek. “We’ll see you in two days. I’ll leave Esther’s
number for you at the front desk in case you need anything. Come on, Omar. We need
to let Auntie Caro rest.”

21

Still on the lounge chair, Caro sleeps covered with towels—a long deep sleep cut by
a river of dreams: a room she has escaped to from menacing dogs, a rooftop where Yosefa
threatens to jump to the ground.

She wakes to a ringing sound coming from her feet. Inside the balled-up towel at the
bottom of the chaise is the cell phone Omar had been playing with. It is probably
Rachida calling to find her phone. Caro flips it open. Still groggy, she searches
for the talk button, surprised when she hears a voice, the connection automatically
made when she unfolded the top.

“You naughty girl. You made me wait all this time.” It’s a woman’s voice: young, accented,
throaty. “I’m in the closet, the one we go in. I’m so wet, it’s going to drip out
of my panties.”

Caro looks around. The pool is empty. An old man is scooping dead mosquitoes from
the water with a net.

“Talk to me. Now. Talk very, very nasty.”

Caro’s stomach is cramping, her mouth dry. The voice is familiar. She needs a toilet.

“I have my finger on it.” The woman moans. “You cunt. Why aren’t you here to do it
for me?”

Layla. It is Layla. Caro pushes the red
OFF
button. There is a tearing sensation in her bowels. She races upstairs to her room.

22

They are an hour outside of Essaouira before Rachida realizes she doesn’t have her
phone.

She wants to ask Omar if he remembers what he did with it, but he and Adam are both
sleeping. She feels a moment of panic. What if she left the phone at the pool and
Layla calls and Caro picks up?

She borrows her brother-in-law’s cell phone and tries calling her own phone, but no
one answers. She calls the hotel and asks to be connected to Caro’s room, where Caro
is lying on the bed, trying to gather the strength to go back to the pool to retrieve
her things.

“Hey, how are you feeling?”

“About the same.”

“Did you see my cell phone?”

Caro massages her temples. She has a band headache, which she’d once read is a sign
of being dehydrated. With the throbbing, she can’t decide if she should mention Layla’s
call.

Rachida continues, apparently having taken Caro’s silence to be a “no.”

“Shit. I never took it back after Omar was playing that game. It probably got mixed
up inside the towels.”

“Probably.”

23

Arriving at La Mamounia with its palatial Moorish arches and carved columns, the four
doormen dressed like sultan’s guards, Adam thinks first of the
Arabian Nights
and then of the novels of Wharton and James: a young man on the obligatory year of
travel between his college days, in what his crowd referred to simply as New Haven
or Cambridge, and the banking house he would join in New York. The classic tour with
a transatlantic crossing to England, then Paris, Rome, and Nice for the winter with
an apartment overlooking the Promenade des Anglais. A boat to Tangier and a roadster
into Marrakesh. Beautiful but well-worn calfskin luggage, tended to by his manservant
while he took a stroll through the orange-scented gardens.

Omar knows his way through the marble lobby to the billiards room, to the pool, to
the gazebo circled by silvery olive trees. Standing on their balcony, he points out
the Koutoubia Mosque in the distance.

“I want to go to the square,” Omar tells Rachida. “Remember, last time there were
snake charmers and fire-eaters there? And children boxing?”

“Which is dangerous—and debased.”

Rachida looks at her watch. “He wants to go to the Djemaa el-Fna. It’s an enormous
outdoor market with lots of food and handicrafts and street performers. We could go
for an hour and then eat somewhere nearby.”

Adam is reading the history of the hotel he found in the leather folio on the desk
of their room. For nearly two decades, he reads, Winston Churchill, accompanied frequently
by his wife, Clementine, wintered at the hotel, setting up his easel on his balcony
or in the thirty-two acres of flowering gardens. In 1935, Churchill had spent the
Christmas holidays here alone. “My darling Clemmie, my beloved pussy cat,” he wrote,
lavishing her with his verbal portraits of what stretched before him: “a truly remarkable
panorama over the tops of orange trees and olives, and the houses and ramparts of
the native Marrakesh, and like a great wall to the westward the snow clad range of
the Atlas mountains.”

“I’m too tired. Omar, you go with Mommy. I’m going to stay on the balcony and watch
the sun set.”

After Rachida and Omar leave, the sky turns purple, then orange and crimson. Adam
tries imagining himself as Winston Churchill with Clemmie, here on the balcony. Clemmie,
his little kitten. Clemmie, his tiny bird perched in her white dressing gown on the
edge of the bed. But he cannot imagine whispering endearments to a woman, unfastening
a corset, much less donning a top hat, leading a nation, commanding a war.

He tries to imagine himself as Moishe, Moishe of the Amazon. But La Mamounia was not
built until after all the Moishes and Jaimes and Leons left for the jungle.

Inside, he draws the curtains and puts the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door. He rummages in his duffel bag for the notebook he packed at the
bottom with the photograph of the two men folded inside.

What he can imagine is himself as Debbie, lifted high above John Wayne’s head, himself
as the younger, smaller man held aloft by the older, bigger one.

24

Caro wakes in the morning with the sensation of the calm after a storm. Her intestines
are no longer cramping. She does not need to race to the toilet. She wants grapefruit
and toast with jam and butter. Then she hears Layla’s voice in her head.

She buries her face in the pillow, thinking back to the evening when Rachida brought
Layla to her mother’s house. How could she have missed that the two were lovers?

She showers and dresses, her pants loose, very loose, after three days without food.
Downstairs, breakfast is being served on the terrace next to the pool, where, after
debating just leaving Rachida’s phone, she’d taken it to give back to Rachida on her
return.

Planters overflowing with crimson bougainvillea rim the terrace. Small birds fly between
a persimmon tree and a lemon tree. Caro nibbles her toast, sips her tea. The toast
is delicious. She chews slowly, enjoying each bite. After a few mouthfuls of the grapefruit,
she puts down her spoon, her shrunken stomach full.

She will have to tell Rachida about Layla’s call, only not now, days after her father’s
funeral. And won’t Rachida look in her call log and know? And is Layla the first for
Rachida? The first woman? The first infidelity? Strangely, it is easier to imagine
Rachida with Layla than with Adam, though the image has been unwelcomingly assisted
by Layla’s filthy talk.

In the distance, Caro can hear the wind on the beach. On her first visit to Essaouira,
her first meal after she left her room had also been breakfast, also served on the
terrace. Then, too, she’d nibbled at toast and tea. She had heard the wind against
the ramparts, the screeching of gulls as they dove for fish. Not until she returned
to the States, to her dorm at Harvard, where the nausea continued, did she understand
that what she’d suffered in Essaouira had nothing to do with anything she’d eaten.
At the Cambridge Planned Parenthood, she had been mortified to tell the counselor
that she wasn’t a hundred percent sure who the father was. She’d gone alone to what
was called the procedure, lying that someone was coming to escort her home. It was
then that she’d begun to use food as a drug, the up and down of her jaws, the sweet
or sour or salty taste on her tongue, an eraser for her mind.