The Love Season (21 page)

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 café 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 sexual 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 brimming over with all that she’d seen. Fishing 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 space.

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 tassel. “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 glass.”

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 glass-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 Hermés 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 massage?”

“Oui,” Marguerite said. “Avec massage, s’il vous plaît.”

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 glass. 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 unbuttoned 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 breasts 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 breasts. He had pressed against her and moaned. Marguerite laughed. If she had endured the embarrassment 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 ass, flat stomach, and breasts a bit larger than Marguerite would have guessed.

“Nobody 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 bypassed 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 massage; someone was rubbing herself down with what looked like wet cement. Marguerite wondered if they should stop—they had, after all, paid for massages—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.