The Love Season Part 11

"I feel like I twisted your arm to come here," Candace said. "I feel like you'd rather be at home."

"Home?" Marguerite said. Home on Nantucket, where the beaches were frozen tundra, home where she could wallow in the misery of being disappointed again? "Don't be silly."

The heart of Essaouira lay in the souks, a rabbit warren of streets and alleys and pa.s.sageways within the city's thick, whitewashed walls. Over the course of four days, Candace and Marguerite wandered every which way, getting lost, getting found. Here was the man selling jewelry boxes, lamps, coat racks, coffee tables, and backgammon boards from precious thuya wood, which was native to Essaouira. Here was a shop selling the very same items made from punched tin; here was a place selling Berber carpets, here another place selling carpets. Everyone sold carpets! Marguerite sniffed out the food markets. She discovered a whole square devoted to seafood-squid and sea ba.s.s, shrimp, prawns, rock lobsters, octopus, sea cuc.u.mbers, and a pallet of unidentifiable slugs and snails, creatures with fluorescent fins and prehistoric sh.e.l.ls, things Marguerite was sure Dusty Tyler had never seen in all his life. In Morocco, the women did the shopping, all of them in ivory or black burkhas. Most of them kept their faces covered as well; Candace called these women the "only eyes." They peered at Marguerite (who wore an Hermes scarf over her hair, a gift from one of her customers) and she s.h.i.+vered. Marguerite's favorite place of all was the spice market-dozens of tables covered with pyramids of saffron and turmeric, curry powder and c.u.min, fenugreek, mustard seed, cardamom, paprika, mace, nutmeg.

Who wouldn't open a restaurant if they had access to these spices? Not to mention the olives. And the nuts-the warm, salted almonds sold for twenty-five centimes in a paper cone-and the dates, thirty varieties as chewy and rich as candy.

In the mornings Candace ran, and sometimes she was gone for two hours. The first morning Marguerite grew concerned as she drank six cups of cafe au lait and polished off three croissants and one sticky date bun while reading the guidebook. She found the hotel manager-a short, trim, and immaculately groomed Arab man-and explained to him, in her all-but-useless kitchen French, that her friend, une Americaine blonde, had gone missing. Marguerite worried that Candace had made a wrong turn and gotten lost-that wouldn't be hard to do-or someone had abducted her. She was, obviously, not a Muslim, and unlike Marguerite, she refused to cover her head with anything except for Dan's old Red Sox cap. Someone had stolen her for political reasons or for s.e.xual ones; she was, at that very moment, being forced into a harem.

Just as the hotel manager was beginning to glean Marguerite's meaning, realizing she was talking about Candace, whom he himself had given more than one admiring glance, in Candace came, breathless, sweating, and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with all that she'd seen. Fis.h.i.+ng boats with strings of multicolored flags, the fortress with cannons up on the hill, a little boy with six dragonflies pierced on the end of a spear.

Marguerite got used to Candace's long absences in the mornings. When Candace returned, they ventured out into the medina to look for a restaurant. The restaurant business was alive and well in Essaouira-there were French restaurants, there were Moroccan restaurants, there was tapas and pizza and gelati, and there was a row of open-air stands along the beach selling fish that Marguerite and Candace picked out before it was grilled in front of their eyes.

They meandered and shopped. Marguerite bought an enamel pot for tagine with a conical top and a handcrafted silver platter for fish. Marguerite and Candace always stopped for lunch at one o'clock, gravitating toward the Moroccan places, which were dim, with low ceilings. They sat on the floor on richly colored pillows and, yes, stacks of carpets and ate lamb kefta, couscous, and bisteeya.

After lunch, they returned to their hotel for silver pots of mint tea, which they drank by the small plunge pool in the courtyard. Men in white pajamas brought the tea, then took it away; they brought the day's papers-the Herald Tribune and Le Monde as well as the Moroccan paper, which was written in Arabic-they brought fresh towels, warm and cool. There might have been other guests at the hotel, but Marguerite noticed them only peripherally-a glamorous French couple, a British woman and her grown daughter-it felt like Marguerite and Candace were existing in a world created solely for their benefit. Marguerite discovered she was having fun, all of her senses were engaged, she felt alive. She was glad she was here with Candace instead of in Paris with Porter, and who could have predicted that? Morocco, Marguerite declared, was heaven on earth! She never wanted to leave.

Several times during their week in Morocco, Marguerite revisited the moment when Candace first walked into the kitchen at Les Parapluies on Porter's arm and kissed Marguerite full on the lips. What Porter told me in private is that he thinks you're pure magic. The more time they spent together, alone, in this foreign and exotic country, the more Marguerite began to feel that Candace was pure magic. She was not only beautiful; she emitted beauty. Everywhere they traveled in Morocco, the people they met bowed to Candace as though she were a deity. The baseball hat, which might have been offensive on another American, was adorably subversive on Candace.

"These American women," one of their taxi drivers said. "They like everyone to know they are free."

On the fifth day, they traveled to Marrakech. The hotel in Marrakech was even lusher than their jewel in Essaouira. L'Orangerie, it was called, after the museum in Paris. The architecture was all arches and intricate tile work, open courtyards with sumptuous gardens and fountains, little nooks with flowing curtains and silk divans, bowls of cool water holding floating rose petals. Marguerite and Candace shared a two-bedroom, two-floor suite with an outdoor shower and their own dining table on a roof patio that overlooked Marrakech's famous square, Djemaa el-Fna. Marrakech had a cosmopolitan feel to it, a kinetic energy-this was where everything was happening. The Djemaa el-Fna was mobbed with people every night: jugglers, snake charmers, acrobats, pickpockets, musicians, storytellers, water sellers, street vendors hawking orange juice, dates, olives, almonds-and tourists snapping it all up. The call to prayer from the mighty Koutoubia Mosque came over a loudspeaker every few hours and several times Marguerite felt like dropping to her knees to pray. Marrakech had done it; she was converted. She started making notes for a menu, half-French, half-Moroccan; she wanted to attempt a bisteeya made with prawns, a tagine of ginger chicken with preserved lemon and olives. She looked in every doorway for suitable retail s.p.a.ce.

And yet as Marguerite's enthusiasm flared, Candace's flagged. Her stomach was bothering her; she got quiet at dinner their first night in Marrakech, and the second night she went to bed at eight o'clock, leaving Marguerite to wander the chaos of the souks alone. Marguerite slouched and frowned; shopkeepers didn't give her a second look. Candace missed Dan-Marguerite was sure that was it-she was going to try to call him from the front desk of the hotel. Marguerite was crestfallen. Girl trip, she thought. Best friends and all that. For the first time in years she felt free of the grasp of Porter Harris-and yet that night, without Candace, she ended up buying Porter a carpet. It was a glorious Rabat-style carpet with deep colors and symbols hidden in the weave, but Marguerite was too gloomy to engage the shopkeeper in a haggle, despite the shopkeeper's prodding. "What price you give me? You give me your best price." Marguerite gave a number only fifty dollars less than the shopkeeper's first price, and he was forced to accept. It was unheard of: a transaction for something so valuable over and done with in thirty seconds. The shopkeeper threw in a free fez, a brimless red velvet hat with a ta.s.sel. "You take this, special gift." The hat was too small to fit anyone Marguerite knew; it would fit a baby or a monkey.

The following day, their next-to-last day of the trip, Candace arranged for them to visit a hammam, a traditional bathhouse. She had seemed excited about it when she described it a few days earlier to an ever-skeptical Marguerite. "It's like a spa. An ancient spa." But as they sat at breakfast, Candace picked at her croissant and said she was thinking of canceling.

"I'm just not myself," she said. "I'm sorry. It's something I ate, maybe. Or too much wine every night. Or it's the water."

"Well," said Marguerite. "It's nothing an ancient spa won't be able to cure. Come on. You're the one who wanted authentic experiences. We'll be home in forty-eight hours, and if we miss this, we'll be sorry."

"I thought you said you didn't want to sit in a room with a bunch of naked old women," Candace said. "I thought you said you'd rather eat gla.s.s."

Marguerite tilted her head. "Did I say that?"

The hammam was in the medina. It was a low whitewashed building with a smoking chimney and a gla.s.s-studded dome. A sign on the door said: AUJOURD'HUI-LES FEMMES. Marguerite pulled the door open, with Candace shuffling morosely at her heels. Truth be told, Marguerite was nervous. She wasn't used to working outside her comfort zone. She had no experience with ancient Moroccan women-only communal bathhouses, where, no doubt, there were rituals one was supposed to follow, rules one was supposed to know, gestures to be made. She wished for Porter, who was worldly enough to finesse any situation, or for the old Candace, Candace as she'd been only the day before yesterday-ready to throw herself into any experience headfirst with daring gusto.

There was a desk, ornately carved and inlaid, and a woman behind the desk in an ivory burkha. She was only eyes. Marguerite was wearing the Hermes scarf, Candace the baseball hat.

We don't know what we're doing, Marguerite wanted to say. Please help us. But instead, she just smiled in a way that she hoped conveyed this sentiment.

"Deux?" the woman said.

"Oui," Marguerite said. She reached into her money belt, which was hidden under her blouse, and pulled out a wad of dirham. Candace slumped against the beautiful desk. She was pale, listless, chewing a stick of gum because, along with her other symptoms, she couldn't rid her mouth of a funky, metallic taste. The only-eyes woman plucked three bills from Marguerite's cache, then paused and said.

"Avec ma.s.sage?"

"Oui," Marguerite said. "Avec ma.s.sage, s'il vous plait."

The woman extracted two more bills. Was it costing three dollars, a hundred dollars? Marguerite had no idea. The only-eyes woman slid two plush towels across the desk and pointed down the hall.

The hallway had marble floors, thick stone walls, arched windows with translucent gla.s.s. The windows were on the interior wall, which led Marguerite to believe there was a courtyard. The overall aura of the hallway, however, reminded Marguerite of a convent: It was hushed, forbidding; their footsteps echoed. At the end of the hallway was a set of heavy arched double doors. Marguerite pulled one side open and stepped through, holding the door for Candace. I'm not doing this without you.

They entered a cavernous room with a high, domed ceiling. The floor was composed of tiny pewter-colored tiles; there were platforms at different levels around a turquoise pool. Women lay on mats around the pool in various stages of undress. There were naked teenagers; there were women older and heavier than Marguerite in underpants but no bras. There was one very blond girl who looked Western-she was American, maybe, or Swedish-wearing a bikini. Along the wall were pegs where the women had hung their clothes.

Okay, Marguerite thought, this is it. She looked at Candace, who gave her a wan smile.

"Here we are," Candace said, and in her voice Marguerite was relieved to hear the playful tease of a dare: You go first.

Marguerite stepped out of her shoes. Okay. She peeled off her socks. She stared at the wall as she unb.u.t.toned her blouse. Her initial instinct had been correct. This was not the place for her. She hated the thought of all these women, and especially Candace, seeing her naked. She was too voluptuous, a Rubens, Porter called her, but that was him being kind. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung heavily when she stripped to her bra. She thought of Damian Vix ushering her forward into the dark pantry. He had swept her hair aside so he could kiss her neck; then his hands had gone to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He had pressed against her and moaned. Marguerite laughed. If she had endured the embarra.s.sment of being groped by her attorney in a pantry, she could endure this. She took her bra off next, then her slacks, but left on her underpants.

Candace had stripped completely, and she'd let her hair out of its rubber band. Her body was a museum piece: healthy American woman. Strong legs, small, shapely a.s.s, flat stomach, and b.r.e.a.s.t.s a bit larger than Marguerite would have guessed.

"n.o.body is swimming," Candace said, and she giggled.

"Right," Marguerite said. She was baffled. What was the point of lying around an indoor pool, naked, with other women? How did this make a person feel anything but anxious? She watched the Swedish girl exit through a door marked with an arrow. Marguerite nodded her head. Follow her.

They entered la chambre froide, the cold room, which was an elongated room with three domes in the ceiling. There was a pool in this room also, but the Swede bypa.s.sed it and so did Marguerite and Candace. The room itself was not particularly cold, but it was empty and inhospitable. The next room was noticeably warmer and more ornate-there were carved wooden pillars around the outside of the pool, and niches where women reclined like odalisques. Like Ingres, Marguerite thought. Porter would love this. There were attendants in this room with buckets and scrub brushes, loofahs and combs. Someone was having her hair washed; someone was getting a ma.s.sage; someone was rubbing herself down with what looked like wet cement. Marguerite wondered if they should stop-they had, after all, paid for ma.s.sages-but the Swede kept going and Marguerite decided to follow her.

They ended up in the warmest room of all; LA CHAMBRE CHAUDE, the sign said. The hot room. The room was filled with steam. It was a sauna. Candace breathed the steam in appreciatively and sat down on a tile bench. Marguerite sat next to her. The Swede popped into what looked like a very hot shower. The sound of water was loud and since they were the only three people in the room, Marguerite felt okay to speak.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

Candace gazed at Marguerite and started to cry. Because of the heat and the steam, however, it looked like she was melting.

Marguerite reached out. It might have been awkward, an embrace with both of them naked, but to Marguerite it felt natural, elemental; it felt like they had been friends since the beginning of time, like they were the first two women put on earth. Eve and her best friend. Candace cried with her head resting on Marguerite's shoulder, her hair grazing Marguerite's breast. It was absurdly hot, their bodies were being poached like eggs, and yet Marguerite couldn't bring herself to move. She knew she would never have Candace closer than she was right that second. Marguerite wanted to touch Candace, but she wasn't sure where. The knee? The face? Before she could decide, Candace reached for Marguerite's trembling hand and placed it on her taut, smooth stomach.

"I'm pregnant," she said.

Marguerite prepped the asparagus by chopping off the woody ends and peeling the skins. She drizzled it with olive oil and sprinkled it with fleur de sel and freshly ground pepper. Nearly two decades later and a hemisphere away, it was astounding how well she remembered those minutes in the hammam. Her best friend was pregnant. Marguerite had found she didn't know how to respond. She should have been ecstatic. But she felt offended by the news. Betrayed.

You're pregnant, Marguerite said. Pregnant. I can't believe it.

Candace blotted her eyes with her towel. I thought I was sick.

You're pregnant, Marguerite said.

Pregnant, Candace said with finality.

They returned to the center room. An attendant asked them, Ma.s.sage? In a daze, Marguerite remembered to nod. They were led to mats and instructed to lie down. Marguerite had never been ma.s.saged by anyone other than Porter and she was anxious about a ma.s.sage out in the open, in public, so she closed her eyes. The attendant's hands were both firm and soft; it felt wonderful.

Marguerite let her mind wander. A baby. She should have been relieved. She had thought perhaps Candace was homesick, missing Dan-or sick of Marguerite. But a baby. It was the best news a person had to give. It would be, Marguerite told herself, more of Candace to love.

And yet, as the hour wore on, as Marguerite peeked at Candace-on her stomach with an attendant kneading her shoulders, and later in the pool, her hair caked with greasy clay, her hair rinsed by the same attendant and smoothed with a comb-Marguerite experienced a jealousy that left her breathless. Candace's body would bear a child, and as Marguerite glanced about the room she guessed that most, if not all, of the bodies surrounding hers had borne children. They were, in some unspoken way, more of a woman than Marguerite would ever be. She thought back to her eight/nine/ten-year-old self in leotards and tights in front of the mirror of Madame Verge's studio. The reason she had never graduated to toe shoes, the reason she quit Madame Verge altogether, was that with adolescence came the cruel understanding that she was not pretty, she was not graceful, she would not dance the pas de deux, she would never be someone's star. Promises would go unfulfilled. She would not marry and she would never reproduce. The real shame of her body was that it contained some kind of an end. She would die.

Marguerite decided not to wash her hair-it was far too long and it took hours to dry-though the attendant seemed to enjoy touching it, admiring its length and its thickness. Marguerite waited by the side of the pool, dangling her feet in the water, until Candace was finished, and then they walked, wrapped in their towels, back to the room where they had gotten undressed.

Marguerite made what felt like a Herculean effort to be upbeat. Success? she said.

Success, Candace said. She beamed. I'm so glad we came.

They drank mint tea and ate dainty silver dishes of watermelon sherbet in the courtyard of the hammam. Candace talked, gaily, about names. She liked Natalie and Theodore.

What names do you like? Candace asked.

Inside, Marguerite was dissolving. Candace was married to Dan; she would bear Dan's child. She would form her own family. Marguerite could feel Candace separating herself, breaking away.

Names? Marguerite said. Oh dear, I don't know. Adelaide? Maurice?

Candace hooted. Maurice? she said.

Candace was right across the table, laughing, and yet to Marguerite she had already started to vanish.

They boarded the plane the following evening. While rummaging through her carry-on bag for her book, Marguerite found the notes for her half-French, half-Moroccan menu. She read the pages through, wistfully, then tucked them away. There would be no restaurant in Africa.

4:06 P.M.

Patient's full name.

Renata peeled her sunburned thighs off the vinyl waiting-room chair and eyed Miles. He wasn't doing well. His hands were shaking so badly that Renata had had to drive the Saab to the hospital while he clumsily grappled with the surfboard. (Renata had stopped, for just a second, at the white cross in the road and said a little prayer-for Sallie, for her mother, for herself.) Now she was filling out the admittance form, even though Sallie was already upstairs, hooked up to oxygen and an IV, awaiting someone's decision as to whether or not she should be medevaced to Boston. It was unclear as to whether that decision would be made by the doctors here or by her parents. Renata felt, absurdly, like she knew Sallie's parents: She could picture them standing on a beach in Antigua with a black preacher, Sallie's mother with flowers in her hair, wearing a white flowing sundress to hide her burgeoning belly. Renata could picture this, but she didn't know where the parents lived, and Miles had shrugged when she asked him. They had called Sallie's house, but none of the roommates answered, so they left a message, which felt woefully inadequate.

Patient's full name.

"Sallie," Miles said. "With an i-e. Her last name is Myers. But I don't know how she spells it."

Renata wrote: Sallie Myers.

Address.

Miles exhaled. "She lives on Mary Ann Drive. I don't know which number."

"Do you know anything?" Renata asked impatiently.

"Do you?" he snapped.

Renata wrote:_____Mary Ann Drive, Nantucket.

Phone number. Miles started reciting numbers. Home and cell. He had them memorized.

"You're sure she's not your girlfriend?" Renata said. She meant this to be funny, but Miles didn't crack a smile. He had let Renata wear his s.h.i.+rt into the hospital since she had agreed to take care of all the official stuff like talking to the doctors and filling out the forms, and he, in turn, had plucked a zippered tracksuit jacket out of the abyss of his car's backseat. The jacket was wrinkled and covered with crumbs; it smelled like old beer. He had it zippered all the way up under his chin. His teeth were chattering. The air-conditioning was cranked up. Renata herself was freezing, in no small part because her entire body was red and splotched with sunburn; however, you didn't see her s.h.i.+vering.

Miles didn't answer Renata. His blue eyes were glazed over. Renata gathered this was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. He wasn't used to accidents, to bad luck, to tragedy. He hadn't lived with it, maybe, the way Renata had.

She scanned her eyes down the form. "Age?" she said. "Date of birth?"

"No idea."

When they'd arrived at the hospital, Renata explained to the admitting nurse that they were friends of the young woman who'd had the surfing accident at Madequecham Beach. The nurse slid them the clipboard with the form and Renata had stared at it, wide-eyed, like it was a test she hadn't studied for.

"Just do the best you can," the admitting nurse had said.

"Occupation?" Renata said. "Place of employment?"

"She's a bartender at the Chicken Box," Miles mumbled.

"Really?" Renata said. She had pictured Sallie owning something, a surf shop maybe; she had pictured Sallie as the manager of a hotel or as one of the charming, witty guides on a tour bus. She had envisioned Sallie in a starched white s.h.i.+rt, with pearls replacing her six silver hoops, as the sommelier at a restaurant like 21 Federal.

Renata wrote in: Bartender.

She wrote in: The Chicken Box, wis.h.i.+ng for something that sounded more dignified.

"Phone number of the Chicken Box?"

Miles rattled it off from memory. Renata gave him a look.

"I go there a lot," he said. "That's how I know her."

"Does she have a boss?" Renata said. "Maybe we should call her boss."

"Why?"

"We have to call someone," Renata said. Her voice was so loud that the admitting nurse looked up from her desk. A few chairs down, a woman was breast-feeding a feverish infant. Past the row of chairs was the large automatic sliding door of the emergency room, and on the other side of the door was bright sunlight, fresh air, the real world. It was after four o'clock. Renata felt a strong pull of responsibility to be here, and just as strong a desire to find someone who knew more about Sallie than they did, someone who could take charge, make decisions. But for the time being, Sallie belonged to them. Renata had promised to keep an eye on Sallie in the water and had failed miserably, but Renata was not going to fail now. She was going to handle this. "Listen. We're going to call her boss. Maybe he knows how to reach her parents."

"Maybe," Miles said.

Renata could see Miles was going to be absolutely no help. How had she ever found him attractive enough to sleep with? Only an hour later, it was a mystery. "Do you know the boss's name?"

"Pierre."

"Pierre what?"

"I don't know. People just call him Pierre. That's his name. If you call the Chicken Box, there's only one Pierre."

"Fine," Renata said. She had no money; she was at the mercy of the admitting nurse-who, much to Renata's grateful surprise, offered to dial the number for her.

The phone rang and rang. Finally, someone answered. A man. There was loud rock music in the background.

"h.e.l.lo?" Renata said. "Is this Pierre?"

"What?"

Renata cleared her throat. "Is this Pierre? May I please speak to Pierre?"

"He's not here."

Renata sighed. She had a vision of Sallie upstairs, plugged into ten machines, with only Renata to advocate on her behalf. Renata said, "Is there another way to reach him?"

"His cell phone."