Who is Maud Dixon?(41)

But Helen just said, “It’s fine. It’s absolutely fine.”

*



Helen wanted to get some writing done that afternoon, so they settled in the large, bright living room on the ground floor, which had doors leading both to the terrace out back and to the tiled courtyard in the center of the house. Helen wrote in quick, frantic bursts, the pen careening wildly across the paper and occasionally digging a divot in the page.

Florence watched from the couch across the room. She, too, had a notebook on her lap and a pen in her hand, but she had not written anything.

One sentence, she told herself. Just write one sentence.

She wrote: I am.

The second shortest sentence in the English language.

I am…what? I am what?

She put the cap back on the pen. She looked again at Helen, her brow furrowed in concentration.

Florence slapped the notebook on the table in front of her, eliciting an annoyed glance from Helen, then stood up and moved outside to the terrace. She lay down on one of the lounge chairs and closed her eyes. It was nearly 7 p.m., but the air was still warm. She listened to the rustling palm leaves and chattering birds.

She felt betrayed. She’d given up her mother, hadn’t she? Why was she still unable to write? Where was the great torrent she’d been promised? Or was that only Helen’s reward?

The shrillness of the bird calls started to annoy her. She went back inside and checked Helen’s email on the laptop, which she’d set up at a carved wooden desk in a corner of the living room.

There were a few emails from Lauren, Greta’s assistant, but nothing pressing. And one personal message in the Helen Wilcox account.

“You have an email from Sylvie Daloud,” she said.

Helen looked up and blinked a few times. “Sorry, what? I was miles away.”

“You have an email from Sylvie Daloud. She says she’s getting her Met subscription for the upcoming season and wants to know if you’re interested in coordinating your dates for some of the performances.”

Helen set her notepad and pen on the table next to her. “Okay, I’ll write back later.”

Florence nodded and shut the laptop. “Helen, I know this is a stupid question…but how do you know what to write about?”

Helen frowned. “How do I know what to write about? I think that’s getting it backward. When I wrote Mississippi Foxtrot, it wasn’t like I decided to become a writer and then sought out a plot. I had a story that I needed to tell, so I wrote it down.”

“Oh,” Florence said, deflated, though she wasn’t entirely sure what Helen meant: she’d had a story in mind, or one that had actually happened? Well, Florence didn’t have either, so what did it matter. “What about now?” she added. “Is it the same process with your second book?”

“Well, no. Not exactly.”

She paused for so long that Florence thought the conversation was over. Then Helen said, “Sometimes you have to make your own story.”

“What do you mean?”

“All stories have to have some basis in reality, otherwise it won’t feel authentic. But of course reality is malleable.”

“Is it?”

“How could you even ask that? Of course it is. You make your own decisions. You act. This”—she gestured around her—“travel, is a way of changing your reality.”

“I guess so,” Florence said. She supposed she had altered her reality. She wouldn’t be in Morocco with Helen if she hadn’t sent those photos to Simon. Was that a story? Maybe her journey from Florida to New York to Morocco was enough of a plot. What did she know about wives who ate their husbands? She knew her own life. Maybe it was finally becoming interesting enough to write about.

*



Amina served them dinner on the back terrace among the rustling palms. They’d bought a bottle of whiskey at the duty-free shop in Lisbon, and they each poured a large glass.

Amina brought out plate after plate of food—harira soup with chickpeas and lentils, spiced puréed pumpkin, mashed eggplant, a dish of oily olives, flat sesame bread that reminded Florence of the bottom of an English muffin, and finally, a steaming lamb tagine with prunes. They kept their napkins tucked under their plates as they ate, so that the wind wouldn’t snatch them away. The moon was a bright, crisp crescent in the sky.

“God, wasn’t El Badi beautiful?” Helen asked, pouring them each more whiskey.

“I’m not sure I would call it beautiful. It was in ruins.”

“But you can imagine what it must have looked like in all its glory. The scale of it; the sheer folly of it. Three hundred and sixty rooms. Marble from Italy. Gold from Sudan. What an undertaking. It certainly makes a persuasive case against democracy.”

“How so?”

“Well, it obviously could never have been built under a democracy. Same as the pyramids of Egypt or Versailles. But aren’t we happy to have them? Aren’t we happy to know what feats of beauty men are capable of when they act without limitations? I suppose democracy is fair”—Helen put the word in air quotes—“but why is fairness always the goal? What about greatness? Sometimes you can’t have both.”

“I don’t know. Isn’t there something to be said for equality?”

“There’s something to be said for everything, Florence. But when everyone is equal, everyone is interchangeable. It’s a flattening out.”