Tangerine

My head still slow with dreams, I turned to John, to see if he had heard the knocking as well. I saw his empty side of the bed and remembered. The other night at the bar—the kif, the drinks, his subsequent disappearance to Fez, which I could not blame him for, the need to escape apparently one of the few things we shared between us. After all, I had run to Chefchaouen while he had waited at home—now, it seemed, I would do the same, waiting until he reemerged on the doorstep from Fez, tired and full of the realization that there was no escape from the life we had created with each other.

I took a deep breath, willing my heart to slow, willing the sweat on my skin to dry, but the thought of John, pale and silent, remained before my eyes.

It seemed ages since I had last seen him in front of me.

I had stayed in bed the morning after our night out, nursing a horrendous hangover, so I wasn’t even entirely certain what time he had arrived home, whether he had passed the night beside me, in our bed, or out on the sofa. I had woken to the sounds of him in the kitchen, making breakfast. A boiled egg and a slice of msemmen, followed by a quick cup of tea. It was always the same. Later, I had heard the phone ring—Charlie, I presumed, remembering what he had mentioned about Fez—and the closing of the front door not long after that.

I had listened, after, for sounds of Lucy. For any indication that she was packing, leaving—but there had only been silence. A few hours later, tiptoeing past her door—sometime in the late afternoon, judging by the way the light fell against the walls, insistent, as if clinging to life—I chanced a quick look into her room. It was empty. I had exhaled, feeling something like relief as I returned to my own bedroom and crawled back between the sheets, content to let the day slip by from the comfort of my bed, certain that everything was at last working its way back to how it had been before. And there was a comfort in that, in the realization that Lucy was gone and John was off with Charlie—that I was, once again, alone.

Toward nightfall I had woken and, unable to sleep, passed an hour or two by the window, looking out at Tangier, at the city that had somehow become my home. In the quiet, I allowed myself to wonder whether I could ever love it, wondered whether I could ever really be happy if I was to remain, with John. Our life was already so different from the way I had imagined it, and now that Lucy was gone, now that it was done with at last, I did not know what that would mean, for John and me, whether we would be able to slip back into the normalcy that we had created together—whether that was something that either of us even wanted. I had retired to bed early then, anxious to still the swirling thoughts in my mind, if only for a moment or two longer.

The knocking grew louder.

I pulled my dressing gown tighter and hurried down the hallway. “Coming,” I called, my footsteps sounding against the cool tiles. I reached down and touched the brass knob, already convinced I would find John on the other side, back from gallivanting with Charlie, sulking, most likely, having misplaced his keys somewhere during his adventure and ready for a hot bath and a cup of tea. I smiled at the familiarity, eager to dispel the image of the John from my dreams, and opened the door.

It wasn’t him.

Instead a man I did not recognize stood before me, a hat clutched between his hands. He was tall, his stature filling the doorway, his body, it seemed, expanding on each inhale. A scar, I noted, cut through his eyebrow, such that a patch was missing, and the smooth sheen of it, stark white against his skin, seemed to be illuminated in the darkness.

I frowned, peering through the dim light into the corridor, trying to place the man in front of me.

“Pardon the early hour, Alice,” he began, his accent indicating he was a fellow countryman.

I started at the sound of my name. “Yes?” I asked, regretting how small, how tentative I knew my voice sounded.

“I’m looking for your husband. He wasn’t in the office yesterday. Or today, in fact.” He paused, looking over my shoulder, into the flat. “As you can probably imagine, we’re a bit concerned at his absence.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling, as I did, the relief that surged through my body at the realization it was only a concerned colleague from work that stood on my doorstep, not a policeman out of uniform, carrying with him bad news that would transform my morning nightmare into something real. “He isn’t here. In Tangier, I mean. He went with his friend Charlie to Fez,” I said, giving him a tentative smile.

The man frowned. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“He left yesterday afternoon, after breakfast,” I said, ignoring the tiny pinpricks starting in the tips of my fingers. “Can I ask what this is about?”

“But you saw him?” he asked, ignoring my question. “Yesterday, I mean, before he left.”

“No,” I admitted, the word leaving my mouth slowly. “We had a bit of a night out and I’m afraid I slept rather late the next morning, so I didn’t see him off.” It seemed important, somehow, to explain how it was that I could be so unsure of my husband’s movements, to this stranger who stood before me, assessing.

The man looked behind me again. “But he was here with you, afterward?”

I frowned. “I was asleep when he arrived home.”

“Then how do you know he did? Arrive home, I mean?”

“I heard him,” I said, defensive. But I wondered then what it was that I had in fact heard, whether it had been John after all, making breakfast the previous morning. I felt my stomach contract and worried, for a moment, that I might be ill. “It was him.”

The man smiled, but there was something about the expression that made my insides clench further still, made me shrink backward, into the apartment. I thought about all of John’s allusions to his cloak-and-dagger work. I had often scoffed at his stories, believing them to be exaggerations built on insecurity and pride, the result of having nothing but his name to cling to, but now I was seized with the thought that there might be some form of truth in them, and I wondered what that might mean about the man in front of me.

“And did anything out of the ordinary happen?” he asked, not responding to my admission. “That night, I mean?”

“No, of course not,” I said, taken aback by his question. “Nothing at all.” Then I thought of Lucy, our argument, and my breath caught in my throat. I was certain he had noticed it, by the way his eyes narrowed. Still, after a few moments of silence, when I said nothing further, he nodded, thanked me for my time, and turned, as if intending to leave.

I began to close the door, anxious now for the man to be gone—but then he paused and turned back, his face pinched in concentration. “Forgive me,” he said, “but what time did you say he left?”

I crossed my arms tightly across my chest. “Sometime in the afternoon. I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps late morning,” I said, unsure just how long I had actually stayed in bed the day before. It had felt like ages and only seconds, all at once. I shook my head, looking up at the man now staring intently into my face. “I don’t know, I’m afraid.”

He frowned, as if my uncertainty displeased him. “I see,” he said. “Well. If you hear from him.” He withdrew a card from within his suit pocket. “Please be in touch.”

I took the proffered card and frowned, thinking again of that morning’s dream. “Is he—has something happened?”

He fixed me with an odd expression. “Do you think something has happened?”

“What?” I felt my face flush. “No, I only thought, I mean, I thought you were implying—” I stopped, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t. Instead he pointed to the card in my hand and then started to leave once more. “Wait,” I said, my voice trembling. “Should we—I mean, shouldn’t I telephone the police?”

His brow unfurrowed, the scarred white stretch expanded, and his mouth slipped into a wide grin that made me want to do nothing so much as shut the door between us, firmly, not waiting for his response. “I don’t think there is any reason to do that,” he said, his voice low, placating. “After all, we wouldn’t want to involve the locals in our business, would we?”

I heard the force, the threat, implicit in his words, despite the odd smile that clung to his lips. He turned, and at the sound of his retreating footsteps, at last I closed the door.

John wasn’t in Fez, then. Wasn’t with his friend Charlie. Surely the man—I was unsure whether he had given me his name, and looking at his card realized it was nothing but a telephone number—had already spoken with him. I thought about ringing Charlie, just to make sure, before realizing I didn’t actually know how to get in touch with him. I had met Charlie only a handful of times, at one party or another, and in those moments, I had been convinced that he did not have a sense of who I was, not really. He knew that John had married, knew that he was bringing his wife with him to Tangier. But my name, my face—both of these were a mystery to him, and ones I suspected he was not intent on solving.