Read Lulu in Marrakech for Free Online

Shakespeare plays aloud on the first Wednesday of every month, an inviolable date.
    “I see her as Emilia, definitely,” cried Robin Crumley, the poet, with a gallant gesture toward me that seemed to irritate his wife.
    Lunch was a somewhat stringy chicken au poivrons rouges —I supposed there was a Moroccan name for this dish—served by the man who had answered the door, Rashid. Throughout the meal, I felt Ian’s eyes on me, and when I met his gaze he gave a little smile, as if to affirm that we were a couple and that he was glad I had come. This made me unexpectedly happy; I was finding my whole reaction to Ian stronger than I’d imagined it would be, and I longed for the sex scene to follow.
    It was a long lunch, with lots of a Moroccan rosé, and I was grateful when we rose from the table to take a turn around the gardens outside. Ian was extremely proud of them. “I was influenced by the Persian chahar bagh, a private and restful garden space, as you can see, but fruitful too,” Ian had been saying. “The pools in the center and the jub —that ditch—running around the edge, are actually for irrigation, but strongly decorative, I like to think. Those are flowering cherries; they’ll be beautiful in the spring, but these are lemons and limes.…” This new botanical Ian surprised me very much.
    It seemed no time until the Shakespeare club began to arrive. Some of the members I had met already—Tom Drill came in with his partner, who proved to be a younger, attractive black guy named Strand Carter, with their little skinned-knee girl, Amelie, and the bony, imposing Cotters, Sir Neil and Marina, who were dressed as they might have dressed in England, in tweed and leather. They didn’t have their new employee Suma with them.
    “We have an apartment in London,” Sir Neil found an occasion to tell me at once, in a confidential tone. “But as we spend a lot of time here, we sometimes let our London place on very reasonable terms— you must tell me if you ever want a stay in London.” I was somewhat nonplussed to have this either invitation or commercial proposition put to me in Ian’s house, as if I were a paying guest here whose whims might soon require her to rent a place somewhere else. I thanked him but said I didn’t expect to get to London.
    I did have a chance to speak to Lady Cotter—Marina—about Suma. “Yes! We’re so pleased! She seems a charming girl,” she said.
    “How is it you are in touch with SOS Femmes?” I asked.
    “Actually, I’d never heard of them,” she said. “A friend in Paris knew how desperately I was looking for an au pair. It’s a godsend. Of course, I didn’t realize she’d only speak French.”
    “Does she speak Arabic?”
    “Yes, I suppose it will be good for the children to learn both, since they have to live here. My daughter-in-law…” She told me something of the story, the tragic death of her daughter-in-law in the mountains of Nepal, leaving these young grandchildren. The daughter-in-law suddenly couldn’t breathe, in her tent, lost consciousness and died before anyone could do anything, and was cremated on the spot. That sounded odd. I suppose it is what they’d been told.
    “Didn’t they try to take her down to a lower altitude?” I asked.
    “Well, yes, I imagine so,” Marina said, but looked dismayed, as if thinking they might not have. I suppose some people are more fatalistic about death than Americans are.
    “Suma seems a nice girl. I don’t think she’d done anything very shocking, dated a boy and went on his motorbike or something. She wears the head scarf. The brother tried to kill her. We forget how primitive some of these people are, even if they do live in Paris.”
    “I’ll come visit her one day, if I may,” I proposed, and Marina assured me she welcomed the idea.
    “I’m sure you speak more French than we do. We learned it at school of course, and to speak to vendors and such, but not for proper conversation; how it fades