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Drawn In Slow Strokes by Pink Siamese



Emily smells the city before she sees it.

She is below, flipping through a copy of French Vogue, sitting in the doorway to catch the light. She scans the pictures that drew her attention that morning, while she was still sleepy: a glimpse of civilization, a starving sinewy beauty fashioned of dreams and the madness of money. The carbon tang of combustion drifts on the air. The engines let go and the water takes over, lifting the hull. George’s footsteps reverberate through the fiberglass.

He is quick and light. The weight of his body sounds around her. “Emily!”

She pushes slick pages past one another. She stares into photographed landscapes. The paper is smooth and soothing, cool upon her fingertips. The covers are heavy in her hands. She doesn’t think. A touch of exhaustion clings to her eyes, the resentment of an early morning curled up in her skin.

“Emily.” George’s voice comes into the cabin, less deadened by layers of wood and fiberglass. She looks up at the top of the doorframe. “Come up here.”

She tosses the magazine onto the table and stands, using the frame to pull herself up. She walks up into a flood of slanting orange light. Wind moves through her hair. She glances at the sunset, filtered through distant piles of cumulus clouds. He tosses coils of rope at her and Emily picks them up, walking toward the stern. He turns the engine back on, turns it down to its lowest setting. He guides the big sleek hull into the marina. She braces one foot for balance and glances at the empty slip. It’s far out on the end, closest to the open part of the bay.

“What do you think?” The wheel turns in his hands. “Dinner ashore? I’m starving.” He chuckles. “I don’t want to lay into our supplies while there’s still restaurant cooking to be had.”

“Sure. What’d you have in mind?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” He eases the throttle down and out, lets the boat glide into the slip. The hull bumps up against the rubber like a kitten. “Maybe something new. I haven’t been here in a while and there must be a new restaurant or two. Why don’t we ask around?”

Emily shrugs a shoulder. “Works for me. Should I change?”

“Dress is pretty casual around here.” George gets up. “Help me tie up.”

Her stomach rumbles as she peers into the shallow water. It’s calm beneath the hull and a unique color, a slaty blue tinged with green and enlivened somehow, both old and enduring. Tiny gasoline rainbows float on its surface.

She thinks about Morocco: Tangier, Rabat, Casablanca, Marrakech. They are names written in a dusty hand on the back of her mind. Her memories are like postcards. Hot sun awakens on the surface of her skin.

The water, slapping against the hull and laced with a heavy scent of sweat, makes her think of the Mediterranean.

“I want to, I think.” She swings over the rail and climbs down onto the dock. “Since I’ve had a shower and everything.”

He moves toward the mast. ”Suit yourself.”

She finishes amid the clank of windblown links and climbs back up onto the deck. She descends into the darkness of the bedroom.

Emily clicks on a light. She opens a storage bin and digs. She finds a red skirt at the bottom, folded, smelling faintly of gardenias. She pulls it out, mind wandering back, crossing the long years to Morocco, pre-FBI years, pre-adulthood years; she imagines herself wearing it there, dust clinging to her ankles. In the close air of the bedroom she shakes out the soft cotton tiers, loosening the knee-length underskirt there to keep it decent in the sunlight. Emily takes down her shorts. She leaves them on the floor and steps into the gathered waistband, hauling the skirt up around her hips, and while she does it she thinks of the train to Marrakech, a hasty change of clothes in the gentle rocking of a compartment. She pulls the drawstring tight. A tinkling of tiny silver bells shakes loose a memory of hash candy, the taste of it hazy in her mouth. She remembers a redhead in the bed of a truck, in the middle of the night, gone mad with the heat. It was a long time ago.

She pulls out a clean black tank, tight and spaghetti-strapped, and she tugs it down around herself. On the floor are some canvas sandals and good ones made of dark brown leather. She wishes for perfume and steps into the good ones, bends over to lace them up.

“Are you almost ready?”

“Yeah.” She brushes out her hair, wrapping it into a bun. “Getting there.”

“Good.”

They walk to the street and take a taxi from the marina. The driver suggests they go to the Restaurante Mariserra, but when they get there George dismisses its gloss, its dramatic seaside views.

“But I’m hungry,” says Emily. “I don’t care about authenticity right now.”

George pulls her into a warren of streets. “This is more what I’m talking about.”

She watches storefronts move by: cafes, cantinas, names prefaced by the abbreviation rest. and her hurting feet echo the sentiment. They aren’t used to thin sandals. They aren’t used to stone streets. Tourists dressed in summer linens sit in small courtyards, candles flickering on the tables, fending off the moths and foraging birds. She’s hungry. The mingled scents of food make her mouth water and sharpen her impatience. Everywhere flowers bloom out of the stone, held in deep bowls of earth, confusing the air with sweet scent. The sidewalks are clean. Music pours out of open doorways and into the wandering clusters of people. She lets go of George’s hand, pausing at an outdoor menu written in Portuguese. She concentrates on the words.

“Emily?”

She’s thinking about Morocco, the time she backpacked through. A season between college and real life; in her mind it is a whole other lifetime. She’s thinking about going hungry for four days and daydreams of sizzling garlic prawns. She tries to translate all of her thoughts into broken Portuguese. She looks up and sees Jason. He’s there, breaking out of the human flow. He’s grinning.

“Emily? Seriously?”

His step quickens. He moves in close to shut out the background noise and he looks at her, laughing. His ruffled hair sticks up in the wind. He smiles at her inside a carousel of street scent, wandering people, and the thrumming bass of the bar across the street. Emily turns toward him and he moves into the center of all this activity, dressed in khakis and a thin button-up shirt of white cotton, rolled up at the sleeves; it’s thin enough to see the shadows of his collarbones beneath it, a shadow of chest hair smattering his breastbone. The warmth coming off him is palpable. The air between them trembles with it.

“What are the odds? Hi!”

“Hi,” she says, taking a small step back. Her breath draws out the word. She looks around. “What are you doing here?”

His smile falters. “I could ask you the same. For my part, though, I drove over. Spent the day looking at the countryside.” Her breath revives it. “What about you?”

“Ribeira Grande got kind of boring, so we sailed around the island.”

“Oh, you’re on a yacht, then?”

Emily nods. “Yes.”

George comes up behind her. He stirs the air around her shoulders and puts a firm hand on the small of her back. She hears the smile build up in his face before he opens his mouth. “Hello there,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

Jason’s eyes shift. The weather in his face changes. “No, I don’t think so. My name’s Jason Solomon.”
George laughs, rich and long, all hipshot with relaxed grace. He holds out a hand. A touch of the American South creeps into his voice. “Well I’ll be. My name’s Jason, too. Imagine that.”

Emily half-turns and looks at him. The smile on his face is slow, familiar, like a curtain lifting.

“It’s good to meet you.”

Jason grins and shakes George’s hand. “Hi.” He glances at Emily. “Emily and I met in Ribeira Grande.”

“Did you now?” George’s arm slides around her waist. He leans into her. “I never heard a thing about it. Too bad, too.” His thumb strokes her waist. “It might’ve been nice to share a meal with a fellow American.”

“It wasn’t a big deal,” says Emily, moving away to get a closer look at the menu. “We exchanged a few words in the street. It was yesterday morning, when I was on my way to breakfast.”

“Emmy and I are on the hunt for some supper. You wouldn’t happen to know a good place, would you?”

“Actually, I was heading over there.” Jason turns and tips his head toward the bar. “I had lunch there today and it was so good that I decided to come back for supper, even though it’s loud. At night they have dancing, salsa, tango, stuff like that. It’s different thing, depending on the night.” He shrugs. “I talked to a guy this afternoon. A local guy. He says they have the best bacalhau à brás in the city.”

“I don’t know what that is,” says Emily, “but I’m so hungry that it sounds delicious.”

“It’s salt cod, potato shreds, onion and egg,” says Jason. He flashes her a brief smile. “With black olives and parsley.”

Emily grins. “Have you ever had it?”

“I have,” says George. “It isn’t bad.”

“I haven’t,” says Jason. “But I’d like to.” He glances at George. “Do you want to join me?”

“Yes,” says Emily.

George pulls back and looks at her. “Now darlin. Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” She turns around and looks in his eyes. She shrugs a shoulder. “Why not?”

“Look, it’s no trouble if you want to do your own thing.”

Jason looks back and forth between them, his half-smile hovering. “I totally understand.”

Emily walks toward the bar. She looks at him over her shoulder as she passes. “Come on,” she says. “I am literally starving.”

Except she’s not. Emily remembers what it was like: between the hunger and the relentless heat, the hours ground down into days and she was hungry to the tips of her toes, hungry past hunger pains and growing dizzy on streetcorners, she was so hungry that the food lived in her, memories of flavors hovering in her mouth like a ghost, dancing on her tongue, hiding between her teeth until she smelled the mud in the river and her saliva flowed. She slept a lot. She stayed in during the day, drinking water, and went out only at night. She saw dervishes flickering in the dunes. Banquets constructed out of past meals filled her dreams until opening her eyes turned into punishment.

She is starving for more than simple food. George smells her hunger. Emily sees it in the way his body moves but he cannot read it; she sees that in his body too, in the moving closer and the hardness of his gestures, his surrender to the wake of her body, as if he’s skimming on the disheveled perimeter of her spirit. She sees him hunting for it, feels his scrutiny on her like a memory of the intense sun. He peers into her and stalks its root.

Emily slides ahead and the three of them pass through the street, slipping sideways between the bumpers of parked cars. The name of the bar, Tomate, hangs over the doors on a chipped and faded plank that has been nailed to the wall. The windows are covered with blackout curtains. The doors are painted blue, chocked open, flanked with pots of bright impatiens. Music pours through them, out of singing darkness; it comes in waves, it washes over them filled with driving rhythms, drums beating like a frantic heart.

Jason puts a hand on Emily’s arm and stops her at the threshold. She halts, one foot on the floor and the other in the street. He looks at her and points to the sign overhead.

He leans over, his face close to her ear. She smells the passing of his clean breath. “What does it mean?”

“Tomatoes.” She pulls back. “It means tomatoes.”

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