Free Lulu in Marrakech by Diane Johnson Page B

Essaouira, never including Posy or me. I was not sure of their status—if one or the other was an artist, it wasn’t apparent, and Ian was somewhat taciturn: “Nancy is an old friend” was the only explanation. David seemed to be staying somewhere else but was always around.
    In just a few days roaming in the souk with Posy, we had nearly mastered its geography. I tried to learn all I could about my companions and wrote meticulous reports of them to Taft, in the guise of chatty notes to “Sheila,” or, more usually, I reported that I had nothing to report. Sometimes I telephoned, often to ask how to proceed, but telephoning was cumbersome, involving pay phones and absences that must have seemed mysterious to the others. I couldn’t believe that all I was expected to do was to be me, and yet that was pretty much all I was doing. Taft was probably used to people not having much to report; he ran a number of agents, and real information is rare even if you have much of an idea of what you are looking for.
    As for Aladdin, my contact, I wished he would be in touch again, but as I had nothing special to communicate to him, I did nothing about contacting him. Nothing had changed in Rashid’s manner to indicate he had any understanding of the little piece of paper with Aladdin’s message on it.
    Posy and I spent a lot of time together. Posy was the daughter of an English publisher, now dead, and her stepmother lived in a castle in France, or something like that. Her background was not unlike that of Ian himself, whose father I thought I had heard referred to as a “press lord,” though I was unsure if that meant he was called Lord Drumm or whether “press lord” was just a descriptive term, like “drug mule.” I had heard that pregnant women think of little else but their pregnancies—my sister was like that—but Posy seldom mentioned her clumsy shape and swelling ankles. She had read literature at Oxford or Cambridge and preferred to discuss arcane topics like water imagery in Moroccan poetry; that topic sticks in my mind because it had occurred even to me that for a country hard up for water, there was everywhere an oddly ambivalent obsession with it. There had been, for instance, the strange reluctance to expend it at Ian’s fire, yet there were fountains everywhere.
    Water came up over and over in stories and poems (for, as an aspect of tradecraft, I was reading anything that would help me understand the Moroccan culture) as a distrusted force ready to overwhelm, drown, suck away, and engulf its helpless victims, beckoning the distraught to their fates, a “mer dévoreuse,” a metaphor for oblivion. These poems recognized that given the caprices of fate, you might be tidal-waved, rip-tided, broken in the surf: “The thirst of the sea was stronger than mine,” sang the poet, though not the Prophet—he was a desert chieftain and maybe had never seen the sea, so he says very little about it. Their fascination or aversion to water was what probably made them have fountains and gurgling, trickling water sounds everywhere. For me, a conscientious Californian from the land of periodic drought, for whom even extra toilet flushes are slightly wicked, the constant splashes of some fountain somewhere in earshot wherever you went was a little distressing.
    By now I had gotten to know a few of Posy’s secrets: that she was not entirely thrilled to become a mother, and that she believed her baby had been conceived on the Eurostar—so that technically it might be either French or English—she would always wonder which. Robin Crumley, with his graying hair and pale eyes, was anyone’s idea of a distinguished poet, but it didn’t seem to me he would be a very satisfactory father, and it was certainly impossible to imagine him fucking in a train. He was always to be seen on the patio shifting cushions, looking for his pen or glasses, distracted by some poetical conundrum from the business of real life or even