Would you believe Morocco has a Swiss ski town? For that is where Mohammed has taken them, driving them out of the sandstorm and through deep canyons where hotels are carved into the rock and Germans, ignoring the hotels, camp beside the river in beat-up Westfalias; past villages that, as in a folktale, seem inhabited only by sheep; past waterfalls and weirs, madrassas and mosques, casbahs and ksars, and one small town (a lunch stop) where the next-door wood-carver is visited by a woman all in teal who borrows his shavings to sprinkle them on her doorstep, where, it seems, her cat has peed, and where boys are gathered in what at first seems to be an outdoor school and later (when the cheering starts) turns out to be a televised football match; through limestone plateaus; up the spiraling ziggurat roads of the Middle Atlas until the vegetation changes from fronds to needles, where, passing through a chilly pine forest, Mohammed says, “Look out for beasts,” and at first there is nothing, until Zohra screams and points to where sits, on a wooden platform and turning as if interrupted at tea (or déjeuner sur l’herbe), a troop of poker-faced Barbary macaques, or, as she puts it: “Monkeys!” Their own troop is now far away, in M’Hamid, and Less and Zohra are alone, seated in the dark scented bar of the alpine resort, in leather club chairs with glasses of local marc, below a crystal chandelier and before a crystal panorama. They have eaten pigeon pie. Mohammed sits at the bar, drinking an energy drink. Gone is his desert costume; he has changed back into a polo shirt and jeans. It is Zohra’s birthday; it will be Less’s at midnight, in about two hours’ time. Satisfaction has arrived, indeed, on a later camel.
“And all this,” Zohra is saying, brushing her hair out of her face, “all this travel, Arthur, just to miss your boyfriend’s wedding?”
“Not a boyfriend. And more to avoid the confusion,” Less answers, feeling himself blushing. They are the only guests in the bar. The bartenders—two men in striped vaudeville vests—seem to be deciding on a cigarette break with the frantic whispered patter of a comedy routine. He has been telling Zohra about his trip, and somehow the champagne has let his tongue get away from him.
Zohra wears a gold pantsuit and diamond earrings; they have checked into the hotel, showered, and changed, and she smells of perfume. Surely, when she packed for her birthday trip, she picked these things for someone other than Less. But he is who she has. He wears, of course, his blue suit.
“You know what?” Zohra says, holding out the glass and staring at it. “This hooch reminds me of my grandmother in Georgia. The republic, not the state. She used to make something just like this.”
“It just seemed better,” Less continues, still on Freddy, “to get away. And bring this novel back to life.”
Zohra sips her marc and stares at the view, such as it is at this hour. “Mine left me too,” she says.
Less sits quietly for a moment, then says suddenly: “Oh! Oh no, he didn’t leave me—”
“Janet was supposed to be here.” Zohra closes her eyes. “Arthur, you’re here because there was an empty space and Lewis said he had a friend; that’s why you’re here. It’s lovely to have you. I mean, you’re all that’s left. Everybody else is so fucking weak. What happened to everybody? I’m glad you’re here. But I’ll be honest with you. I’d rather have her.”
For some reason, it never occurred to Less that she was a lesbian. Perhaps he is a bad gay, after all.
“What happened?” he asks.
“What else?” Zohra says, sipping from the little glass. “She fell in love. She lost her mind.”
Less murmurs his sympathy, but Zohra is lost in herself. At the bar, the taller man seems to have won and heads out in long strides to the balcony. The short man, bald on top except for a single oasis, stares after his friend with unconcealed longing. Outside: a view perhaps of Gstaad or St. Moritz. The dark rolling forests of sleeping macaques, the Romanesque steeple of a skating rink, the cold black sky.
“She told me she met the love of her life,” Zohra says at last, still staring out the window. “You read poems about it, you hear stories about it, you hear Sicilians talk about being struck by lightning. We know there’s no love of your life. Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning. It’s what she always had with me. Isn’t it? But what if she’s right, Arthur? What if the Sicilians are right? That it’s this earth-shattering thing she felt? Something I’ve never felt. Have you?”
Less begins to breath unevenly.
She turns to him: “What if one day you meet someone, Arthur, and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetize every fucking book or organize the dishwasher in some way you just can’t live with. It’s because they aren’t this person. This woman Janet met. Maybe you can go through your whole life and never meet them, and think love is all these other things, but if you do meet them, God help you! Because then: ka-blam! You’re screwed. The way Janet is. She ruined our life for it! But what if that’s real?” She is gripping the chair now.
“Zohra, I’m so sorry.”
“Is it like that with this Freddy?”
“I…I…”
“The brain is so wrong, all the time,” she says, turning to the dark landscape again. “Wrong about what time it is, and who people are, and where home is: wrong wrong wrong. The lying brain.”
This insanity, the insanity of her lover, has her bewildered and hurt and incandescent. And yet what she has said—the lying brain—this is familiar; this has happened to him. Not exactly like this, not utter terrifying madness, but he knows his brain has told him things he has traveled around the world to forget. That the mind cannot be trusted is a certainty.
“What is love, Arthur? What is it?” she asks him. “Is it the good dear thing I had with Janet for eight years? Is it the good dear thing? Or is it the lightning bolt? The destructive madness that hit my girl?”
“It doesn’t sound happy” is all he can say.
She shakes her head. “Arthur, happiness is bullshit. That is the wisdom I give you from my twenty-two hours of being fifty. That is the wisdom from my love life. You’ll understand at midnight.” It is clear she is drunk. Outside, the shivering bartender smokes like he means it. She sniffs the glass of marc and says, “My Georgian grandmother used to make booze just like this.”
It keeps ringing in his ears: Is it the good dear thing? Is it the good dear thing?
“Yes.” She smiles at the memory and sniffs the glass. “It smells just like my grandmother’s cha-cha!”
The cha-cha proves too much for the birthday girl, and by eleven thirty, he and Mohammed are leading her up to her room as she smiles and thanks them. He puts her, happily drunk, to bed. She is speaking French to Mohammed, who comforts her in the same language and then again in English. As Less tucks her in, she says, “Well, that was ridiculous, Arthur, I’m sorry.” As he closes her door, he realizes that he will spend his fiftieth birthday alone.
He turns; not alone.
“Mohammed, how many languages do you speak?”
“Seven!” he says brightly, striding to the elevator. “I learn from school. They make fun of my Arabic when I come to the city, it is old-fashioned, I learned in Berber school, so I work more hard. And from tourists! Sorry, still learning English. And you, Arthur?”