“Not talk.”
His friend nods. Lewis, whom he met for the first time on that long road trip after college, who offered his cheap apartment on Valencia Street, above the communist bookstore, who introduced him to acid and electronic music. Handsome Lewis Delacroix, who seemed so adult, so assured; he was thirty. A generation apart back then; now they are essentially contemporaries. And yet Lewis has always seemed so much steadier; with the same boyfriend for twenty years, he is the very model of love’s success. And glamorous: this trip, for instance, is exactly the kind of luxury that afforded Lewis’s fascinating stories. It is a birthday trip—not for Arthur Less. For some woman named Zohra, who is also turning fifty, and whom Less has never met.
“I’d say let’s get some sleep,” Lewis says as they find a taxi, “but nobody at the hotel is asleep. They’ve been drinking since noon. And who knows what else? I blame Zohra; well, you’ll meet Zohra.”
The actress is the first to go. Perhaps it is the pale Moroccan wine, poured glass after glass at dinner (on the roof of the rented house, the riad, with a view of that upraised pupil’s hand: the minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque); or perhaps the gin and tonics she requests after dinner, when she sheds her clothes (the two riad workers, both named Mustafa, say nothing) and slips into the courtyard pool, where turtles stare at her pale flesh, wishing they were still dinosaurs, the water rippling from her backstroke as the others continue to introduce themselves (Less is in here somewhere, struggling with a wine bottle between his thighs); or perhaps the tequila she discovers later, once the gin runs out, when someone has found a guitar and someone else a shrill local flute and she begins an improvisational dance with a lantern on her head before someone leads her out of the pool; or perhaps the whiskey later passed around; or the hashish; or the cigarettes; or the three loud claps of the riad’s neighbor, a princess: the sign they are up too late for Marrakech—but how will we ever know? All we know is that in the morning, she is unable to get out of bed; naked, she calls for a drink, and when someone brings her water she knocks the glass away and says, “I mean vodka!” and because she is unwilling to move, and because their ride to the Sahara leaves at noon, and because her last two movies were in dubious taste, and because nobody but the birthday girl even knows her, it is in the care of the two Mustafas that they leave her.
“Will she be okay?” Less asks Lewis.
“I’m so surprised she couldn’t hold her liquor,” Lewis says, turning to him with his enormous sunglasses; they make him look like a nocturnal primate. They are seated together in a small bus; a freak heat wave has made the world outside shimmer like a wok. The rest of the passengers lean wearily against the windows. “I thought actors were made from steel.”
“Please to all!” says their guide into his microphone; this is Mohammed, their Moroccan guide, in a red polo shirt and jeans. “Here we pass through the Atlas Mountains. They are, we say, like snake. Tonight we arrive at [name garbled by microphone], where we spend the night. Tomorrow is the valley of palms.”
“I thought tomorrow was the desert,” comes a British accent Less recognizes, from the night before, as that of the technology genius who retired at forty and now runs a nightclub in Shanghai.
“Oh yes, I promise the desert!” Mohammed is short, with long curly hair, probably in his forties. His smile is quick, but his English is slow. “I am sorry for the unpleasant surprise of the heat.”
From the back, a female voice, Korean: the violinist. “Can they turn up the air?”
Some words in Arabic, and the vents begin to blast warm air into the bus. “My friend said it was at top.” Mohammed smiles. “But we now know it was not at top.” The air does nothing to cool them. Beside them, on the road out of Marrakech, are groups of schoolchildren making their way home for lunch; they hold shirts or books over their faces to shield themselves from the merciless sun. Miles of adobe walls and, now and then, the oasis of a coffee shop where men stare at the bus as they pass. Here is a pizza joint. And here an uncompleted gas station: AFRIQUA. Someone has tied a donkey to a telephone pole in the middle of nowhere and left it there. The driver turns on music: the somehow-enchanting drone of Gnawa. Lewis seems to have fallen asleep; in those glasses, Less cannot tell.
Tahiti.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Tahiti,” Freddy told him once, at an afternoon rooftop gathering of his young friends. A few other, older men peppered the crowd, eyeing each other like fellow predators; Less did not know how to signal that in this crowd of gazelles, he was a vegetarian. My last boyfriend, he wanted to tell them, is now in his sixties. Did any of them, like him, prefer middle-aged men? He never found out; they avoided him as if magnetically repulsed. Eventually, at these parties, Freddy would float over with a weary expression, and they would spend the last hours just the two of them, chatting. And this time—perhaps it was the tequila and sunset—Freddy had brought up Tahiti.
“That sounds nice,” Less said. “But to me it seems so resorty. Like you’d never meet the locals. I want to go to India.”
Freddy gave a shrug. “Well, you’d definitely get to meet the locals in India. I hear there’s nothing but locals. But do you remember when we went to Paris? The Musée d’Orsay? Oh right, you were sick. Well. There was a room of carvings by Gauguin. And one said: Be mysterious. And the other one said: Be in love, you will be happy. In French, of course. Those really moved me, more than the paintings. He made the same carving for his house in Tahiti. I know I’m strange. I should want to go because of the beaches. But I want to see his house.”
Less was about to say something—but just then the sun, hidden behind Buena Vista, was glorifying a fog bank, and Freddy went straight to the railing to see it. They never talked about Tahiti again, so Less never gave it another thought. But clearly Freddy did.
Because that is where he must be now. On his honeymoon with Tom.
Be in love, you will be happy.
Tahiti.