Who is Maud Dixon? Page 13

  The road pulled them upward at a sharp incline, and soon a white house with vivid blue trim—another riad, Florence knew—loomed before them. It was perched, alone, at the top of a steep hill. They drove past a large boulder that had been painted white with VILLA DES GRENADES spelled out in blue.

  “Des Grenades?” Florence had wondered aloud when they’d booked it. “Like hand grenades?”

  “Pomegranates,” Helen had corrected.

  Florence drove through the gate and parked the car in the driveway. She leaned back in her seat. Her entire body was sticky.

  A stout, gray-haired woman in her sixties emerged from the house. She walked down the path toward them with a hitch in her step. Helen and Florence climbed out of the car to greet her.

  The woman stepped forward and shook Florence’s hand. “Bonjour, mesdames, bienvenue,” she said.

  “Do you speak English?” Helen responded.

  “Yes, little,” she said with a shy smile.

  She introduced herself as Amina and explained that she had worked at Villa des Grenades for more than twenty years. She would do all the cooking, shopping, and cleaning. Anything they needed, just ask her. She lived right down the road, she said, gesturing somewhere down the hill. She tried to take their bags, but Florence insisted on carrying them herself.

  Stepping inside the house, Florence felt a wave of panic. The floor was missing large chunks of tile, and mold had found refuge in every corner. Creepers stretched their long tendrils inside the windows, crawling up walls and across ceilings. There were brown stains where the weeds had made gains before being hacked away. They reminded Florence of the sticky wakes left by slugs back home.

  Upstairs, the walls and floors were in similarly bad shape, but at least the sheets looked clean, and the water ran hot and cold. As in the hotel, the second floor was open in the center, dropping down to the sunny courtyard below.

  Behind the house, a large slate-paved terrace stretched back toward a small pool shaded by palm trees whose shaggy trunks of loose, burlap-like bark made it look like they’d been caught in the act of undressing. The pool itself was only three-quarters filled, and a thick layer of green algae filmed the water. Bugs marched fearlessly across the surface. Three mangled lounge chairs were arranged around the edge, trailing broken vinyl straps on the ground below them. Amina pointed to a stack of clean towels folded neatly on a nearby table, which made Helen laugh.

  “I’ll call the rental agency,” Florence said. “Let’s see if there’s anything else available. I promise the photos did not look like this on their website.” Helen had seen the photos too and had okayed Florence’s selection.

  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.”

  Florence didn’t know how to respond.

  “Tell me this—when you were growing up, did you really think the people around you were your equals?”

  Florence shrugged noncommittally.

  “You didn’t, Florence. I know you. You thought you were better than them.” She paused. “And my guess is you were right.”

  “Maybe,” Florence mumbled. She took another sip of her whiskey and turned away to hide her smile.

  “Take my word for it,” Helen went on. “If you spend your life looking for fairness you’ll be disappointed. Fairness doesn’t exist. And if it did, it would be boring. It would leave no room for the unexpected. But if you search for greatness—for beauty, for art, for transcendence—those are where the rewards are. That is what makes life worth living.” Helen set her glass of whiskey down roughly, splashing some on the table. “I’m sure there are people in my past who don’t think it’s fair that my life turned out like it did. And who knows, maybe it isn’t. But I want you to understand this: I wouldn’t change a single thing I’ve done. Not a single thing.”

  Florence loved when Helen spoke to her like this, like a worthy disciple. She was flattered that she’d brought her along on this trip. True, she was just here as her assistant, but there wasn’t actually that much for her to do. Helen was spending a lot of money to have her here to type for an hour a day. It was possible, she thought, that Helen had just wanted her company. That she liked her.

  “Helen,” she said, before she could stop herself. She was feeling reckless.

  Helen was humming and tapping her fingers lightly on the tabletop. She glanced up. “Hm?”

  “How much of it is true?”

  “How much of what?”

  “Mississippi Foxtrot.”

  Helen shook her head. “What does it matter? I’ve never understood people’s obsession with ‘the facts.’”

  “I don’t know.” Florence shrugged. “It won’t change anything, I guess. I just want to know.”

  Helen stared at her for a moment without saying anything. Florence was worried she’d overstepped. Then Helen said, “Oh, fuck it. It’s not like you’re going to tell anyone.”

  “Of course not.”

  Helen looked at her with a brief, amused smile. “Ruby,” she finally said.

  Florence waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.

  “Ruby what? Ruby’s real?”

  Helen nodded slowly. “Ruby is real. Except her name.” She grimaced. “God, I hate the name Ruby. I don’t know what I was thinking. It doesn’t suit her at all.”

  “What’s her real name?”

  Helen smiled in a far-off, dreamy way. “Jenny. She was my best friend.” She paused to light a cigarette. “My father, as you might have gathered from the book, was a worthless bastard and my mother was just, I don’t know, barely there. She was beaten down. She was just waiting to die, I think. Which she did, when I was eight. So it was just Jenny. Me and Jenny.” Helen sighed. “And then she killed that man, and it all ended.” She snapped her fingers. “Our friendship. Childhood. Everything. My whole world ended.”

  “The murder was real?” Florence asked, eyes wide.

  “Well, not all the details. He wasn’t some guy just traveling through town; he had lived there for longer than we had. Then when Jenny turned fifteen, he developed this sick fascination with her. He used to follow her around, ask her on dates, wait outside her house. Finally she’d had enough. She shot him with her daddy’s shotgun.”

  “That’s horrifying.”

  Helen looked up in surprise. “Is it? To tell the truth, I’ve never been horrified. Far from it. I was—what? I was proud. Jealous, too, maybe. She’d gone somewhere no one we knew had ever been before. She told me that after she decided to shoot him but before she actually pulled the trigger, everything was heightened—all her senses, her emotions, everything. She could hear his lungs expanding, she could hear the blood pumping in his veins. And she felt this phenomenal power coursing through her body, like electricity. And I knew nothing about it; I couldn’t relate at all. It was like she had been initiated into a club that wouldn’t have me. I felt like an imposter. I had been pretending at being an adult, being knowing, being cold, being cynical. But she was something else. She was the real thing. And it cowed me. I couldn’t tag along after her anymore. She had gone somewhere I couldn’t. She’d left me behind.”

  Helen patted the table absently for her pack of cigarettes. She took one out and lit it with the stub of the one in her hand. Florence stayed silent, willing her to go on, but she didn’t. She just smoked and stared.

  “What happened to her?”

  “She got twenty-five years.”

  “But in the book—”

  “The novel.”

  “Right, the novel. In the novel, it was you. You made the Maud character the murderer.”

  Helen waved her hand. “Oh, it just makes a better story. Well, maybe it was the jealousy a little bit. I wanted to try and experience a faint shadow of what she had.”

  “So is Jenny still there?”

  “Where?”

  “Prison.”

  Helen’s eyes refocused. Florence had broken the spell. “Yes, of course.”

  Then Helen exhaled loudly and opened her eyes wide. “Well!” she said, effectively ending their conversation. “That went in a direction I wasn’t expecting.” She laughed lightly and placed her hands on her thighs to push herself up to standing. “And now this old sack of bones needs to get to bed. See you in the morning? We’ll go into town, do some exploring.”

  Florence nodded.

  At the door, Helen turned back. “I don’t need to remind you that this stays between us, do I?”

  Florence shook her head.

  “Good girl.” She paused. “I’m glad you came, Florence.”

  Then she disappeared into the dark house without waiting for a response.

  25.

  The tangled vines in the window filtered the early morning light, leaving rippling shadows on the wall beside her. Florence looked at her watch. It was a little after eight. She swung her legs off the bed and planted her feet on the cool terra-cotta floor.

  Downstairs, Amina had laid out breakfast on the terrace. There were fresh brioches in a basket covered with a clean dishtowel. Sweating butter in a ceramic ramekin and three kinds of jam. A bowl of honey so thick that a wooden spoon stood up straight in it. There were dishes of dates, almonds, pomegranate seeds, and slices of navel orange. There were three different pitchers of juice.

  Florence sat down and startled a small, sparrow-like bird pecking at the breadbasket. It fluttered to a nearby chair.

  “Sorry, little guy,” she said, throwing him a bit of brioche. A bird’s feathers weigh more than its skeleton, she remembered from somewhere.

  Helen came down shortly afterward. She paused in the doorway and turned her face up to the sun.

  “God, that feels good,” she said.

  They ate slowly and spoke very little. They were both slightly hungover. After breakfast, Florence checked their email at the laptop in the living room.

  “You have a new message from Greta,” she called out to Helen, who was still on the terrace, smoking a cigarette and staring into the distance.

  “What does it say?” she asked without turning her head.

  “Hope the trip is going well, blah blah blah, and she wants to talk to you about something when you have a sec.”

  “About what?”

  “It doesn’t say. She just says to call her.”

  “Okay.”

  “Should I write back?”

  “Nah. I’ll give her a call in a little bit.”

  Florence logged into her own email. She had just one, from her mother. She scanned it quickly. She caught the word betrayal before closing the window.

  * * *

  They left for town around ten. At the door, Helen once again handed Florence all her belongings.

  “You’r
e bringing your passport?” Florence asked.

  “Life lesson: Always keep your passport on you when you’re abroad. You never know what’s going to happen. Besides, I don’t trust that woman.”

  “Amina?” Florence asked, laughing. “Come on.”

  “Don’t mistake naivete for compassion. Your own I mean. You know nothing about her.”

  Florence rolled her eyes but still trudged back to her room and grabbed her passport.

  Semat proper was a fifteen-minute drive from the villa, in the opposite direction from which they’d come. The town was huddled on a hill above the coast and encircled by ramparts the same color as the sandy beach. The wall helped block the fierce wind that blew in off the water and whipped up frothy waves on its surface. Inside the medina, where there were few cars, a tumble of white buildings were silhouetted against the bright blue sky. It had been founded by Berbers in the first century, and in the ensuing years, it had been occupied in turn by the Romans, the Portuguese, and the French. The guidebooks called it a fishing village, but now its economy depended mainly on tourism, making do with whatever visitors hadn’t been snared by the more popular seaside resorts of Essaouira and Agadir.

  Florence parked near Place Hassan II, close to the heart of Semat, just outside a building with an arched door painted a brilliant blue. In one direction lay the harbor and the beach; in the other, the town. As they stepped out of the car, Florence noticed a grittiness beneath the soles of her shoes. She looked down. It was sand, blown in from the shore.

  She asked if they could stop in the souk; she’d wanted to go shopping since seeing Helen’s hat. Inside the marketplace, which was a fraction of the size of the one in Marrakesh, sunlight flickered through rattan matting strung up overhead to block it. Several tables held tall piles of spices; Florence saw labels for saffron and cumin and harissa. Another held colorful ceramic tagines lined up in neat rows. She wandered over to a man selling tooled leather purses. Behind him, his partner was carving an intricate design into a flap of raw leather with a knife. Florence picked up a small, stiff red bag and opened it.