Tangerine(2)

Morocco. The name conjured up images of a vast, desert nothingness, of a piercing, red sun. The first time I had heard John mention it, I had sputtered and coughed on the drink he had pushed into my hand. We had met at the Ritz in Piccadilly, and only at Aunt Maude’s insistence—which I could feel in those weeks after I returned from Bennington College, pushing, a headache that I could never quite manage to escape. I had been back in England for only a few months, had known John for less than that, but in that moment I was certain I could feel it—his excitement, his energy, filling the space around us, pumping through the warm summer air. Leaning in, eager to grasp it, to hold it, to claim some of it for my own, I had let the idea settle between us. Africa. Morocco. A few weeks earlier I would have balked, perhaps a week later I would only have laughed—but on that particular day, in that particular moment, listening to John’s words, to his promises, his dreams, they had felt all too real, all too attainable. For the first time since Vermont, I found myself wanting—I didn’t know what exactly, and I suspected in that moment that it might not even be the man sitting before me, but wanting something, all the same. I had taken a sip of the cocktail he had ordered for me, the champagne already warm and flat, feeling the acid on my tongue, in my belly. I had reached over, before I could change my mind, clasping his hand between my fingers.

For although John McAllister was certainly not what I had once dreamed of for myself—he was loud and gregarious, brash and oftentimes reckless—I had found myself reveling in the opportunity that he had presented: to forget, to leave the past behind.

To not think each and every second of the day about what had happened in the cold, wintry Green Mountains of Vermont.

OVER A YEAR NOW, and it was still cast in a hazy fog that I could not seem to work my way out of, no matter how long I tripped through the labyrinth. It’s better that way, my aunt had said afterward, when I had told her about the vaporous sheen my memories had taken on, how I could no longer remember the details of that horrible night, of the days that followed. Leave it in the past, she had urged, as if my memories were objects that could be packed away in boxes secure enough to ensure they would never let loose the secrets held within.

And I had in a way, had shut my eyes to the past—had opened them to John, to Tangier, to the blazing sun of Morocco. To the adventure that he had promised—with a proposal and a proper ring, though not an actual ceremony, just a signed slip of paper.

“But we can’t,” I had protested at first. “We hardly know one another.”

“But of course we do,” he had assured me. “Why, your family is practically related to my family. If anything, we know one another too well.” He laughed, flashing me that wicked grin.

There would be no name change—I was adamant on that point. It felt important, somehow, to retain some part of myself, my family, after everything that had happened. And there was something else too, something I had a harder time explaining, even to myself. For although my aunt’s guardianship would technically dissolve upon my marriage, she would still retain control of my financial trust until I turned the age of twenty-one, at which time my parents’ estate would at last be released into my own name. The idea of being doubly covered seemed entirely too daunting, and so, when I reached for my passport, it was still Alice Shipley written there.

And at first I had told myself that Tangier wouldn’t be so terrible. I imagined days spent playing tennis under the hot Moroccan sun, a team of servants to wait on us hand and foot, memberships at the various private clubs throughout the city. There were worse lives to live, I knew. But then, John wanted to experience the real Morocco, the real Tangier. So while his other associates hired cheap Moroccan help and their wives spent days languishing around the pool or planning parties, John eschewed it all. Instead he and his friend Charlie went gallivanting around the city, spending hours at the hammam or the markets, smoking kif in the backs of cafés, always trying to endear themselves to the locals rather than to their fellow coworkers and countrymen. Charlie had been the one to convince John to come to Tangier in the first place, plying his friend with tales of the country: its beauty, its lawlessness, until John was half in love with a place he had never seen. And I had done my best in the beginning, going with him to the flea markets for furniture, to the souks to shop for supper. I had sat in the cafés beside him and sipped café au laits and tried to rewrite my future in the hot and dusty city that he loved at first sight but which continued to elude me.

But then, there had been the incident at the flea market.

Amid a frenzied collision of sellers and stalls, of antiques and junk piled haphazardly, one careless layer after another, I had turned around and John had been gone. While I was standing there, strangers passing me, jostling me from either direction, my palms growing clammy with the familiar beginnings of anxiety, shadows had played at the edges of my vision—those strange wispy apparitions that the doctors had whispered were only manifestations but that to me felt real, visceral, tangible, so that they seemed to grow, until their dark shapes were all that I could see. In that moment I was struck with the notion of how very far away I was from home, from the life that I had once envisioned for myself.

Later, John had laughed, insisting he had only been gone the space of a minute, but the next time he asked me to go out, I shook my head, and the time after that, I found another excuse. Instead, I spent hours—long, lonely tiresome hours—exploring Tangier from the comfort of our apartment. After the first week, I knew how many steps it took to get from one end of it to the other—forty-five, sometimes more, depending on my gait.