The Forgiven (19 page)

They went through the dining room, where the table was magnificently set for another late-night gastronomic orgy. There was a galleon made of pink sugar in the middle of it.

In the gardens, the disco had been interrupted, and rows of sofas were set up with rugs and furs thrown over them. Water pipes were serviced by the staff, who went from sofa to sofa with tongs grasping tiny morsels of fruit-flavored charcoal.

Hamid led her to a chair where a table had been set up with a pitcher of lemon water, and next to it sat Richard and Dally nestled in each other’s arms. On a sand stage surrounded on all sides by the guests stood the men from Taza in their outlandish costumes, drummers to one side, their tools dripping with gasoline. The noise of the drumming had risen to block out everything else, and the faces around them were already altered by it, shiny, fixed, tuned out from subtler feelings, the eyes concentrated but not able to think, and they gave you only the option of joining in this coordinated mood, not of standing apart from it and watching from a distance. But Richard, sensing that this was not her type of entertainment, shot her a comforting look and Dally held out his hand for her.

“It’s all too awful,” he shouted—a thing that should have been said quietly. She nodded and just sat back, unable to do anything else. She hated this sort of thing, but it couldn’t be avoided now.

The fire-eaters went into their routine. They were stripped to the waist, their chests oiled, and they dipped their inflammable rods in the buckets of petrol and whipped them into the air above their heads, their feet moving in small motions to the pace of the drumming. Cocking back their heads, they held the flaming spears with two hands and brought the fire down toward their mouths, which would miraculously extinguish them. A low gasp went up from the audience, the gasp of unsurprised but chilled children at a fair. She was not interested, but her own revulsion was interesting enough. She felt a momentary blackout shut her down, and she reached out to grip the pitcher of water. A great arc of flame—of fiery saliva—shot across the stage, and the faces went orange for a second and then seemed to disappear.

“
I DON
’
T KNOW WHY IT IS
,”
LORD SWANN WAS SAYING
, “but the
kif
here is stronger than the stuff in Tunisia. Maribel says it makes her hallucinate. Dicky, I think you have a man up in the hills who grows it for you.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

The lord made a swooning expression, and the girls with him, who were a third his age, all giggled and reached for their cigarette lighters.

“See, girls? He’s such a scalliwag. Dicky and I have been playing Ping-Pong for years at the Athenaeum. He scalps me.”

They sat in a ring on the far side of the house, on square tribal cushions, with metal cups of tangerine sorbet and biscotti. The fire-eaters had dispersed to eat with the staff, and the party had become amorphous and loose, which was the way Richard liked it. He kept an eye on its progress, but he rarely intervened directly. He lay back and looked at the intense stars. They seemed to be approaching the earth rather than receding from it. He thought coolly about Jo and her mental state. Was she coping? He couldn’t find her anywhere. And David was driving, driving through the desert, and Richard had lied
to him about everything, but it had been necessary. The fool wouldn’t have gone without a few euphemisms.

“I heard there was an accident last night,” the overbearing Swann cried. “Someone was hurt. Am I off?”

Richard explained.

“Ah,” the lord said, sucking in his
kif
smoke on his back. His Chelsea boots stuck up like little black gravestones. “Mad dog’s an Englishman goes out on a moonlit night.”

“It’s never happened before,” Richard said pointlessly.

His parties were written up on blogs across Europe, in garish magazines, and sometimes in the
New York Times
, and he didn’t want a bad reputation to descend upon them.

“Where’s the dolt?” the lord demanded.

“We sent him into the desert to die.”

A lord’s chuckle. “Good. Quite right.”

“It’s one of those things,” Richard said neutrally, digging into his
sorbet
. “He probably mistook the accelerator for the brake pedal.”

“I had a chauffeur like that once. I had him killed, too.”

A plump, slothful girl in huge tribal earrings turned on her hip and brushed a mound of whitish hair out of her eyes.

“I can see these huge reptiles everywhere,” she purred.

“Maribel, stop smoking at once.”

“
You’re
a huge reptile, Daddy.”

The lord laughed.

“She’s such a prize, this one. She hallucinates every time. Even with rum and Coke.”

“I can see penguins,” Dally said. “They’re marching toward the granaries.”

“Personally,” Richard drawled, “this stuff just makes me unfaithful. I don’t see anything. Perhaps I have a mediocre mind.”

The lord sighed and crossed his gravestones.

“Are you unfaithful, Maribel?”

“Not when there’s so many reptiles around.”

He winked at Richard. “See? What’s the bloody point of bringing them?”

Richard smoked more slowly than the others, with that measured self-restraint that he had learned from his Moroccan lovers. He had fewer than Dally, but he chose men who could teach him things. They had taught him how to sleep properly, how to lie on one’s side, how to eat with one hand, how to be in repose, how to smoke without becoming excited. How to be
slow
.

He didn’t become stoned; he merely allowed himself to slow to the speed of treacle dripping off a spoon. The girls laughed and rolled. The lord lit up with impotent desires that sparkled inside him and went up in smoke. This was how newcomers to the land were. They couldn’t quite adjust. Richard, on the other hand, knew how to smell the wind coming off the valley, how to appreciate the taste of the local lemons. He was rarely excited nowadays, or thrown off balance because this, after all, was the life he wanted, and he consumed it drop by drop, like a liqueur. He frequently felt that he was the only white man of his acquaintance who was able to do this. Even Dally had not mastered it. His busy American nature obstructed the way, clouding his spontaneity with all kinds of wooden preconceptions that made him hesitant and flat. He couldn’t quite get it.

Richard looked over at him now, taking in his full Mick Jaggery lips and his pointed
babouches
dangling on the ends of his long white feet. He was like a mechanical toy dog watching butterflies fly past its nose. “That’s life,” the toy dog would think in perplexity, raising a little metal paw to try and catch it, “but what is it?”

SOME TIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, JO FOUND THE POOL EMPTY
. She was drunk enough to take off her clothes and wander to one of the corner ladders and stand there in the moonlight naked. The moon
danced as a dinner-plate-size counterimage on the water’s surface, not even undulating, intensifying by its presence the depth of the shadows lurking around the pool. She hoped someone was looking. She turned herself this way and that and laughed and let it come on if it wanted. So much the better. The heat had come down. The skies were so clear that the whole hillside was shocked into visibility. Cacti beyond the walls shone like tin; the rock formations offered a thousand ancient details. The air was warm, soothing, still, and the palms murmured as a breeze sifted through them, then stilled themselves in preparation for the next murmur. A martini glass stood on the edge of the pool, an olive still stuck inside it, and sticky forks lay on abandoned china plates set down by the feet of deck chairs, their prongs caked with crumbs of carrot cake and melted icing. Towels lay about in what had once been pools of water. From the ditches on the far side of the wall came the shrill of the frogs the hosts might well have placed there for effect. Who knew what here was artificial and what was indigenous? She lowered herself into the water, which was so warm it was almost distasteful.

The tiles were cornflower blue, with a Roman-style whale depicted on the bottom. When you swam over it, you saw that the whale was entwined with a boy. She glided over this kitsch mosaic scene and flipped onto her back, letting her breasts break water. First the silence of underwater, then the open sounds of the night and the relaxation of the optic nerves. A cicada started up from a hole in the wall and there were echoes coming over the stone slopes. Reverberations of hooves and falling stones, ghosts about, and the party and its hum. She counted her heartbeats for a minute. At the center of the pool, she rotated slowly. A cluster of stars—Aquila?—glowed down on her and she thought of her abandoned work, her books long dead, in the process of being forgotten by the world’s feckless children. Every career has a few moments of visibility followed by a long, painful subsidence into total anonymity. The strange thing was that, on some level, she didn’t mind as much as she had expected to mind. In her writing, she couldn’t think
of anything else to say, and that proved she didn’t need to say anything anymore. It was therefore time to go silent. And in some ways that was a relief. She no longer enjoyed it anyway, and going silent had its own pleasure. If it was a failure, it was a small plop of a stone dropping into the great ocean: a very small sound indeed. Perhaps thousands of years from now, some unhappy child of the future would pick up a copy of
Balthazar’s Nighttime
in a cobwebbed digital library and rescue her from her oblivion. But then again, what a stupid, surreal idea that was. No one would be reading in fifty years’ time, let alone a thousand. Everyone knew that. The children of the future would be empty-headed clowns. No one in the future would need her, any more than anyone in the present did. But not to be needed was as pleasurable as being needed.

Career? That was a strong word. She looked down at her blancmange breasts, quivering under their film of water and to what end? It would be better if someone were observing her right now, not letting them go to waste. But there it was. One ages out of view, in an enforced privacy. Guiltily, she thought about David then, but she couldn’t keep it up. He still hadn’t answered five calls on his cell. Instead her mind drifted back to the party, to the beautiful girls. Was she really less beautiful than they, less unhinged by the present moment?

“I can’t be the librarian every single second,” she thought archly. “Not every single second of every hour.”

She got out of the pool and sat drying next to the martini glass while Dally’s pet doves made their noises in the trees. She began to enjoy her new solitude. At length, she re-dressed and walked back toward the main house. A pinwheel firework turned on one of the lawns that the staff had to water night and day, spluttering with green sparks. She went to one of the open bars and asked for a Cuba libre. The music had started up again and the guests were drifting toward the dining room, where the candelabra had been lit, the dark green candles clustered together in waxy sheaves. It was a very late dinner, but no one seemed to
mind. Boys in pirate dress wandered about asking people if they would like to join the table and ushering them in if they said yes.

It was here she met Day again. He had a head covered with bay leaves and little yellow flowers, and she thought he looked like a Greek celebrant, which was obviously the idea. They smiled and she thought: He’s a little less attractive than the last time.

“You don’t look like a pirate,” she said at once.

“Pirates never do,” he said. “I’m going into dinner as Dionysius. None of these illiterates even knows who I am.”

“I am not an illiterate.”

“Then I have an audience of one. The pirate costume looked bad on me anyway. I looked like Johnny Depp.”

“I would think that’d be better than Dionysius.”

“I look weird in an eye patch. Sort of twitchy.”

She let him charm her.

“You aren’t the god of wine. You’re someone from a toga party.”

“We’re at a toga party, aren’t we?”

They stood by the French windows leading into the dining room, and the creamy light of the dining room fell onto their cheeks. Her hair was still wet and she felt like a child about to go into a cupcake party. Day was wearing a long
djellaba
with elaborate brocade and his face was open wide, very pink, as if the blood inside it were circulating at twice the normal speed. His eyes opened wide as well, with their mineral green quality, and they laughed as loudly as his mouth, just as his mouth laughed as silently as his eyes. A trick of some kind. She wondered how old he was. About the same as David, or a little younger, critically so, even? The difference that five years make in your forties.

“I’m starving,” he said. “After you. I’ve been dancing with some goats. At least I think they were goats. Perhaps they weren’t goats. But I think they had four legs.”

They went into the sweet air of the dining room, where the sugar ship now held a mound of almonds. Richard rose and tapped a wine glass.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I have never seen such a crowd of piratical ruffians. Grab your sabers. Our chef, Monsieur Ben, has created a new pastry stuffed with sardines. It’s sensational. Afterward, you can loot as much as you want. In fact, I encourage you.
Vous êtes ici pour looter
. Just don’t steal my oil paintings. If you please, darlings, not those. Just take a cigar. They’re free.”