The Forgiven (25 page)

“There’s a picnic today,” Day went on. “I should—we should—go. There’s a waterfall somewhere.”

“I don’t really feel like a picnic.”

“Sure you do. You can’t mope about worrying about your husband all day. You weren’t moping last night.”

He shot her a mischievous look, and it forced her to do the same.

“I was being a bitch last night. I’m feeling very guilty today.”

“Have some papaya. It’s guilt-free.”

“Waterfall,” she murmured distractedly. “Is that for swimming?”

“I would imagine. The voyeurs among us want to see you in a swimsuit.”

“You’re not very subtle, are you, Mr. Day?”

“I come from a city where subtlety is fined.”

“I can’t fine you. I can just put you down as you deserve.”

She drank some of his strong coffee spiced with cardamom. Day was very neat: his clothes were folded, his books were stacked. She struggled to recall what he did. A financial analyst? She had little idea what financial analysts did, if they did anything. His eyes were gray, though before they had been green. So his eyes changed color.

It was turning out to be a strange weekend. Her calls to David were still going unanswered. Where was he?

“All right,” she said, more alertly. “I’ll come to the waterfall. I can’t really believe there’s a waterfall in a place like this. Are you sure Dally and Richard didn’t create it themselves?”

“I am not sure of anything. Men who can summon papaya and velvet curtains can create anything. Do we care?”

She shook her head.

“Long as it’s cool.”

“Water is water.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s the thing about water.”

He seemed to be holding her in his hand in some way, just holding her and watching her. He was one of those men whose grooming almost puts you off. He stretched out his long legs and stared at her mockingly. Those pajamas—he must have brought them from New York. She wondered if he wore them every night in his sixty-million-dollar bed in SoHo as he tangled with his whorish dolls. She peered through the half-opened door into the room where everything was frighteningly ordered. Curiously, a baseball lay on the floor, as if he had been practicing and had dropped it there. It lay there like a weapon, mute and shining, and when she looked up, the gray eyes suddenly caught her as if she, too, were a ball spinning in midair and she had to be
stopped
. She came, therefore, to a mental standstill. The papaya was deliciously cool on her parched tongue. The trees nearby rustled like paper kites. She wiped her mouth and swigged from the potent coffee. Suddenly there was nothing more to say and the man sitting across from her entered her invisibly, without lifting a finger, with the deftness of a thief who knows his way in the dark, though who knew how.

BY LATE MORNING, DALLY HAD ORGANIZED FOUR JEEPS BY
the front gate, and while he waited for the picnickers, he posed in a
djellaba
for a photographer from the
Times
Style section. “International revelers,” the caption would later read, “are entertained by Mr. Dally Rogers Margolis and his friend Richard Galloway in the remote
ksour
of Azna. Pictured below, Sofia Prinzapolka drinks tea from a sixteenth-century Berber cup while bathing at the Source des Poissons. Guests say it’s the best party east of Marrakech. Hash brownies are served for breakfast with imported bananas. Right, some bemused villagers look on as the annual picnic drives down to the Hadda waterfall.” Dally arched his neck. The girl asked him to stand by the wall and look out at the desert.

“Way cool,” she kept saying.

“I’m used to it,” he said without affectation, simply because it was true.

“Move a little to your right.”

Dally was proud of his picnics. He worked at them and they usually came out right, though he lost sleep over them sometimes. Would strawberries be too predictable if they arrived in the frosted cups with the grape designs, or would they fall flat if they were served with crème fraîche as soon as everyone poured from the cars at the other end? Would the parasols be silly carried by the boys in white gloves? Would dust get into the crème fraîche and the perforated shortbread? No one knew, and Dally didn’t know either. Richard was more concerned with the larger operations and wasn’t much help. But then again, photographers much preferred to snap Dally in a big straw hat sitting on his walls or striking a pose by the waterfalls at the Sunday lunchtime event he had now organized four years in a row. He was more photogenic than Richard, less stern.

The guests began to arrive at the gate in their swimsuits and sun hats and clogs. They looked like a bunch of refugees from a Club Med. Dally yelled at Hamid, whom he spotted at once: “Hamid, get them in the cars smoothly, will you? It’s just awfully hot.”

Richard was there, in his Sunday best. He was so formidably handsome when he dressed up, Dally thought. He was wearing a pair of Loake suede boots in the heat and cuff links. It was that indifference to discomfort that stirred one to admiration.

“Dicky,” he called out. “Have we got enough cars?”

Richard came up with a whiff of Annick Goutal.

“We’re fine, I think. Where is Jo, the Henniger girl?”

“I didn’t see her. Why?”

“Dally, we have to keep her as far away as possible from the snooping scribblers and the photographers. We don’t want her face in any bloody picture. If any of them asks who she is, lie, or say you don’t know. Steer them away from her.”

“I knew that, laddy. I’m not that naive.”

“I know, sweet. But Hamid and the boys are gormless. Make it clear, will you? Keep your eyes peeled during the picnic. I think that girl from the
Times
is sniffing about. Everyone knows about David. They’re gossiping like a bunch of schoolkids.”

“It’s probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to them all year.”

“We don’t want anything exciting to happen to them. We want hush-hush and make them think about something else.”

“Well, the strawberries for one thing. I’ve had them iced. I know it’s weird, but they look like internal organs. Totally freaky. We’ve put them on beds of watercress.”

Richard scanned the mob of faces for Jo. He was determined to ride down to the waterfalls with her.

The staff held a flock of rose-tinted parasols above the heads of the complaining guests, who were coughing in the dry dust of noon. The seating arrangements inside the jeeps were organized, with male-female and same-sex flirtations discreetly accommodated. The ice chests and silver plates and champagne glasses all came in a separate vehicle, tended by a tense and authoritarian Hamid, who always felt that his reputation was on the line when operations of this kind were in full swing. A crate of iced shrimp jostled in the back next to the oblong dishes of frozen strawberries.

“Drive slowly!” he barked at the driver.

Richard finally saw Jo and Day sauntering into the sun’s glare.

“Over here,” he cried, waving a little too determinedly and catching her eye at once, but she seemed suspicious, or so he thought, and he was usually right.

THE CONVOY TURNED OFF DOWN A PRECIPITOUS TRACK
above Tafnet. It was shaded by thin, pale green trees and high walls of sandstone that the local youth had scored with amorous, but discreet,
graffiti. Sitting awkwardly between Richard and Day with the windows rolled down, she felt the humidity of the river flowing in its deep groove and the faintly acid scent of the okra gardens irrigated by its waters. It was a new way of feeling the intimacy that this landscape offered; its close-knit architecture of water and shadow and rock. You felt that it had been created by real needs over considerable time, rather than by a desire to impress or to be grand. She liked the smell of birds that were sheltered by it, and the sudden glitter of a small canal as it swirled around a water wheel. She liked the dewy sweat on the air that smelled of dung. Someone had told her at the party the night before that the Berber names for the months were still a corrupted form of Latin. She didn’t know if it was true, but it was a seductive thought that the world of Apuleius was still alive in an underground way, that the women crouching on their heels in the palm shadows were still partly pagan and that they made her pagan, too.

The road was steep. It passed under ponderous, fractured cliffs, winding past plots of fig trees and then slopes of iron-red dirt dark as fresh liver where tiny black goats stood stock-still with quivering ears. Richard told her all the place-names as they went, because he and Dally walked down here almost every day by themselves with their swimming trunks, reading poetry if the fancy took them.

“Every time we make this walk, I remember why I am not in London. I sing a ballad to Pan, and a few other gods, too.”

“Not Mammon?” Day asked innocently. “He was a god.”

“The Phoenicians didn’t quite make it this far west, Tom. Here we are a pleasure-loving band of complete hypocrites. I am going to look for a house for you.” He turned to Jo with beady eyes. “I’ve de-Americanized one and I’m going to do
him
next.”

“You haven’t de-Americanized anyone.” Day laughed. “Dally?”

“He’s a work in progress.”

They heard the waterfall crashing into its pool, echoing high up into the rocks that formed a small amphitheater around it. A fresh, joyous sound, like that of children playing, and wholly unexpected.
The cars stopped by the edge of the wide pool where the river widened. The waterfall was half in sun, its bottom half dark. The water foamed and rippled away from it.

Hamid organized the setting up of the picnics, the rolling out of carpets, the placing of ice chests and hampers. The party spread out, and a few guests slipped off their outer clothes and plunged into the cooling waters.

Jo sat with Day and kicked off her shoes. She was in a strange mood, not wanting to be there, yet wanting to be there. Looking across the water, she noticed at once that there was a series of interlocking pools reaching back into the edge of the oasis. Day said nothing, sipping a glass of cold Prosecco and warily watching the young girls splashing under the torrent. Something about them irritated him. Their loudness, their weak sense of self. It was only Jo who interested him now. Her deep coldness attracted him because, being the exact opposite in temperament, he could only interpret it as woundedness. Yet he was predatory and she could never be. Personally, he doubted that a womanizer could ever be entirely cold, as portrayed in popular morality. It was the wounded who were cold.
They
were incorrigible.

Day, mildly uneducated, didn’t know what she was talking about half the time—the references she dropped all around her were like heavy stones—but he was skillful enough with people to know how to roll with this small problem. One nodded and said “yeah,” and he didn’t mind. It was a sign of her naïveté, her lack of worldliness.

“Olive?”

She looked disgusted as he thrust one up to her mouth.

“Don’t feed me,” she said.

It was only belatedly that they saw the Moroccan musicians whom Richard had brought down with them, and who now set to playing.

“In the water,” Dally suddenly shouted.

And the small herd stirred obediently, like ruminants motivated by thirst. Two dozen heads dispersed over the pool’s surface, fanning out around the roaring falls, where a stunted rainbow had formed. The
Berbers looked on glassily, on the brink of bemusement. Day took her hand without warning.

“Oh!” she stuttered, and then realized that she was being whisked off into the water.

“You are a great protester,” he muttered.

“It’s going to be really cold, I know it.”

She quailed, then like an elastic band felt the tension inside her reverse and spring forward. She sailed past him into the green water. The shock made her laugh aloud. A few people turned to see who could scream so winningly. Day was delighted. All he had been waiting for was this sign of impulsiveness, since impulsiveness is the womanizer’s best ally.

“But I am not being a womanizer,” he thought then, crossing the thought out in his mind as soon as it occurred.

“It’s like a fjord in Norway,” she gasped.

SEPARATED FROM THE PARTY, THEY FOUND THEMSELVES
climbing into the next pool down, a long oval body of water surrounded by low-hanging shaggy palms, and the unripe green dates were so close to the water that their reflections were stable in the water, across which water boatmen skimmed in quick bursts of energy. She didn’t know why she was going there with this odd man who did not arouse all her sympathy, or why she was so lighthearted about floating on her back and looking up at the clusters of dates. She let herself melt into this clear, devastating water that seeped away from them into irrigation channels, and slowly, mediated by this same water, the idea of sex was developing between them, as it had been for the previous twenty-four hours. The drums and pipes from the neighboring
wadi
made them both giggly and childishly uninhibited. Day went underwater and came up with a dead palm frond to prick her with.

Only a matter of time, she was thinking already. And it was curious how it was always like that: a desire that was inevitable, preordained.
She remembered that feeling from adolescence. It was akin to ball bearings rolling down an incline.

His hand was upon her shoulder and she didn’t make a fuss. His unshaven cheek brushed hers. Men were such opportunists, but if they weren’t scavengers, nothing would happen. The sexual planet would not turn. She certainly gave in.

“I shouldn’t,” she murmured predictably.

He laughed, in the cruelest way, and it was nearly a mistake.

“But obviously you want to,” that laugh implied.

“Maybe,” she wanted to say to him. “But I want to pretend that I don’t want to. Do you understand that?”

They found dry land again. They walked through the dry, bristling palms in the paradoxical humidity. They heard the water wheels and the doves, the voices of women walking through the lines of dates with long sticks. The latter greeted them with cries of
“La bess!”
The decayed fronds underfoot skewered her soles, and she couldn’t pull herself away from the grip of his cold, wet hand. It wasn’t coercion, or even overbearingness. It was just the accurate reading of her own coming-and-going that crushed her a little.