At the wheel of our battered Jeep was our rent-a-cook, a fat, mustached Moroccan man of around thirty-five, who cracked dirty jokes in French and chain-smoked. His fingernails needed a good scrub. Beside him rode our guide, a Tuareg (or so he claimed…), with blue facial tattoos and a dark blue veil covering the lower half of his darkly tanned and unfairly handsome face. He didn’t smoke, saying it was a violation of the Tuareg social code, or something, but he laughed lazily at the rent-a-cook’s dirty jokes.

In the back seat behind them, I made small talk in Spanish with the female half of the Argentinian couple with whom, since we’d happened to wander into the seedy, stifling “Desert Tour” travel agency (the head-waiter at our Marrakesh hotel recommended it, it belonged to his cousin) and they were there too, we were spending the weekend.

Behind us, Husband #1 and the male half of our mirror-couple (only difference being they were just married, on their honeymoon, and we had yet to decide to take the step) jostled alongside the food and the water, the sleeping bags and our packs, and the off-brand vodka, brought along specially for us, the infidels. Their conversation was punctuated by che loco’s and boludo’s (the literal translation of this has to do with large testicles) and bárbaro’s (again literally, something that is barbaric, but in the Argentinian slang of the period during which I was immersed in it, it meant “awesome;” perhaps it still does). They were recounting, still incredulous and for the zillionth time, our fortuitous meeting in the seedy travel agency.

As an American who wished to appear travel-savvy and blend in, to the extent that such was possible, wherever I went, when I spotted fellow countrymen in a café or a museum, or on a street corner or in a tourist office, I looked the other way and pretended not to understand English. Husband #1, however, could hear an Argentinian accent across a crowded Madrid nightclub or busy market, or at the other end of a very long urinal, or somewhere behind us in line at a seedy “Desert Tours” travel agency, and that was it, we were having drinks, or dinner, or a weekend, or a month, with whoever was speaking. As I came to learn, and to dread, we would then be in for a very long session of reminiscing about Argentina, where everything was infinitely better than anything to be found within a hundred miles of wherever we happened to be.

Husband #1 couldn’t believe our luck, and I pretended to agree: we had traveling companions! We met at sunrise the following morning, back at the seedy travel agency, and off we went.

The sprawling, messy city quickly left behind, we drove and drove and drove, and the little huddles of flat-roofed buildings dwarfed by mountains far in the distance finally gave way to sand and sand and more sand. Endless dunes, ahead and behind and on either side, golden and monotonous but seductive, suggesting an endless series of variations on the way a waist could curve up into a hip and slope down into a thigh. A female one, but of course.

As the female half of our mirror couple told me about whatever job she did (I would be lying if I said I remembered what it was, so I won’t), I nodded and interjected “sí, claro” or “qué horror” where appropriate. What my brain was really doing, though—and my eyes, of course—was drawing up a checklist. Of points of comparison. Of us.

After the business with Sophie in Ceuta, can you blame me?

Age: roughly the same (29, 30, 31…). Height: advantage, me. Legs, me. Teeth, her. Eyes, tie. Hair, same—she was dark blonde, I a redhead. Breasts, well, her. Hands down. Ass? Me, for sure. But she was Argentinian, so she had that over me and there was nothing I could do about it: I have already mentioned, numerous times, on this little blog of Bad, Bad Love, that I believe that Husband #1 would have had sex with country of Argentina if such were possible. Given that it was not, well, then with every Argentinian woman he could lay his hands on.

When we stopped at a roadside café that seemed to conjure itself out of the sand in the final three or four seconds of our approach (who lived out here? Was this desolate little stake-out, with its stock of dusty bottles of orange Fanta and individual cubes of ice, a primary source of income?), it started.

Opening her Fanta for her. Hands brushing. Her hair was such an interesting color. Not really sure how he’d paint it, had anyone ever tried to? A look, half-a-beat too long, at her sturdy, tanned legs as she climbed back into the jeep. Yes, for those of you with good memories, I was the winner of the legs contest, no question, but that, with Husband #1, was not really the point.

I kept glancing over at the male half of the mirror-couple and he was completely oblivious, totally checked out.

I’m sure there were more upgraded sorts of desert tours than the one we opted for, but I was still trying to maintain some semblance of a budget (remember, we were both traveling on a my travel grant). Ours came with a fake Tuareg (by the time camp was set up, the veil was off, revealing an angry scar that slashed across the unfairly handsome left cheek and made me dwell a little on just how far from civilization we were). And a cook who got drunk on arak and passed out in the Jeep once his kitchen duty was done (dinner: half-hearted grilled eggplant and peppers, stale pita, falafel balls that I was pretty sure had started out their morning as hard, frozen things).

And a fire, which the fake Tuareg maintained, morosely sucking on his own bottle of arak. And the bottle of vodka. And sleeping bags that hadn’t been cleaned anytime recently. With enough vodka, though, you could sleep in them just fine.

After a few hours of sound, drunken sleep, something jolted me awake. The sky above me was vast, clear, studded with more stars than I’d ever imagined existed. The dunes were ghostly and silver-white and as endless as the sky. The sight was indescribable, so I won’t try. I thought to rouse #Husband #1—I was sure he’d want to see. And thought maybe we’d share a moment of beauty that would bind us.

His sleeping bag was empty. Maybe he was peeing?

He was gone too long for peeing (yes, friends, yes, dear readers of this blog of Bad, Bad Love, this is what you think… I think).

We’d done this at Husband #1’s suggestion. So he could see dunes. It would be, he said, mind-blowing for an artist to see, all that empty sand and sky. He wanted to see those things, and he wanted to see them with me.

And yet what I was seeing, finally, from between my almost-closed eyelids, was Husband #1 and his dark-blonde countrywoman, cresting over a dune and descending toward camp—the fire had been reduced to embers, it was their silhouettes I saw, but they were unmistakable.

I think. Or I thought. What I think now: why on earth didn’t I sit bolt upright in my dirty sleeping bag and call him out?

But I didn’t, and a minute later he was back in his sleeping bag. In two, he was snoring.

I didn’t sleep much after that. I lay on my back, and watched the desert prepare for sunrise, which is really a pretty spectacular thing to watch, I highly recommend it, though maybe don’t replicate the exact circumstances.

As I watched, I thought about my disconsolate ancient desert poets, madly scanning the endless sands for traces of the abandoned campsites of their dune-hipped, sloe-eyed beloveds. Chasing mirages.

Like the desert in flower, after rains—the fake Tuareg and the rent-a-cook had waxed wistful about desert spring at the hopeful beginning of our journey, how quickly it happened, how soon it was gone, so fast you weren’t even sure you’d seen it.

Like a lot of things in the desert. I hoped.

The desert was where you lost things, not where you found them. I thought that as I watched the sky lighten, and though my snippet wouldn’t hold a candle to the words of Labid—The tent marks in Minan are worn away,/Where she encamped/And where she alighted,/Ghawl and Rijam left to the wild—I thought it was pretty poetic, as a thought anyway. And I thought I might share that thought with Husband #1 over breakfast, in a few hours, and watch his face, very carefully. Read the traces of whatever he’d found, and I’d lost.

And then I thought, maybe not. Self-deception, denial, just drink your fucking coffee.

It really is a hell of a lot easier to just drink your fucking coffee. As we will see when we end this exotic sojourn and return, with the happy couple, to their little love nest, in the Big, Bad Apple. Having demonstrated to you, dear reader—or at least I hope to have done so—why, when Husband #1 disappeared for three, four, even five hours into the streets of the West Village, Yours Truly got nervous.

Catch you next week, Bad, Bad Love friends… till then, try to be good.