Tangerine(12)

Alice blinked, as though startled, as though she hadn’t been listening to our conversation but had let her mind wander, far and away from the room in which the three of us now sat. “Yes,” she said at last, though the word was soft, muted somehow. She stirred a bit, and then her voice came more firmly, more resolute as she said: “Yes, of course.” She turned to me, though her gaze seemed somewhat averted, as if pointed somewhere just above my shoulder. “Lucy, you must stay with us. It would be silly not to.”

“Yes.” John nodded. “After all, the spare room is just going to waste at the moment. It’s become a sort of holding room, for papers from my work and such.” He turned to Alice, who had, I noted, gone a particular shade of red. “Though that wasn’t the original intention.”

I gathered what he meant, of course—and which was, I suspected, the point of him bringing it up at all, for me to understand, for her to be embarrassed—and I found that the thought, the very notion, made my stomach churn in a way that I couldn’t quite describe. I thought perhaps Alice must feel similarly, for it was not embarrassment alone that seemed to color her face, but rather a strange combination of emotions—something that spoke of her inner turmoil in place of the actual words that seemed to fail her.

“That’s very generous of you both,” I replied, my voice louder than I intended, perhaps in an effort to quiet the unease that had settled within the room, creeping and claiming every corner of the space until it seemed that was all there was.

“It’s settled, then,” John said, swirling the ice in his cup. “Say, if you’re really keen on remaining in Tangier, then we’ll go and listen to some jazz. Maybe this weekend. We can stop into Dean’s for a round first.” Alice started to respond, but John quickly silenced her with a shake of his head. “Oh no, my dear. There is absolutely no way we can let your friend visit this city without a trip to Dean’s. It would be sacrilegious, and you know it.”

I tried to conjure up an image of Alice at a jazz club in Tangier, at a bar, even, but failed. She had never been a fan of the raucous, smoky dens that our fellow classmates had gravitated toward, both on campus and off. At the start, I had dragged her to a few, confident I would be able to locate at least one that would suit her, though in the end I had been forced to concede defeat. Instead, we had mixed drinks from the bottles we kept hidden in our closet, listened to records as we danced around our tiny room, using the woven rugs to propel ourselves across the wooden floor, before collapsing into a heap of hysterical laughter. I smiled at the memory. “I’m happy to go if Alice does,” I said, nodding in her direction.

Alice seemed flustered by my words. “I suppose. Like John said, it’s where everyone goes.”

By then, the drink had loosened my tongue. It seemed that Alice still made drinks the way I remembered—with an excessive amount of gin—and I could feel it working, relaxing me, so that the words I would normally keep contained threatened to release themselves. “But what do you want, Alice?” I pressed, refusing to acknowledge the look of discomfort that spread across her face at my question.

“Alice doesn’t like to make decisions,” John interjected. He said it with a smile, but there was something spiteful there, just beneath his words. A tone I hadn’t noticed before, something more than a simple chiding.

I felt that same flutter in my ear from earlier, but I ignored it, shaking my head slightly, as if to dislodge the strange feeling of fullness that had settled there. I wondered briefly whether some sort of desert bug had managed to crawl inside—I had read stories about that, of water having to be poured down one’s ear while others waited with bated breath to see the evidence float upward, emerging from the ear canal and into daylight. I imagined myself in the same prostrate pose, John standing above me, sneering.

Alice, for her part, looked determined to ignore the comment. Already she was up off the sofa, insisting on yet another refill. I obeyed, offering my glass to her as I noted, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything substantial to eat. That strange bread earlier in the day, and the day before that, a handful of crackers prior to the ferry, my stomach too nervous to handle anything else.

“It’s not true,” she said, sitting down beside me once again. Several minutes had elapsed since John’s remark, and I could tell he was confused by her declaration. She pushed against him, sharply, with her shoulder. “It’s not true,” she said again, this time louder. “In fact, let’s go to Dean’s tonight.” Alice smiled, though her voice trembled. “To welcome Lucy properly to Tangier.”

I noted again the strangeness in her sudden cheerfulness—such a change from the stoic calmness she had exhibited earlier that morning. It was almost frantic, as if at any moment it could all go horribly wrong. I wondered then if it would, so close to the edge did Alice seem to be approaching as she smiled, the sound of her laughter empty and hollow as she moved about the room, refilling glasses and hurrying to fill the empty spaces that emerged in our conversation. It was all so different from the girl I had once known. But then, if our senior year at Bennington had taught me nothing else, I knew there was no such thing as an absolute. Everything changes, sooner or later. Time moves along, without constraints—no matter how hard one may attempt to pause, to alter, to rewrite it.