Free The Ambassador's Wife by Jennifer Steil Page A

diplomatic interns passing through for a month or three. Yet the house never felt crowded. Not only was it plenty big enough to accommodate them all but they were all so busy they were rarely home. Miranda was there most often, because she worked at home, in the airy
diwan
that made up her top floor. Boy-crazy Madina was out nearly every night with a series of Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, Mazrooqi, and Syrian men. Theywent to the city’s sole nightclub in the basement of the InterContinental, took all-night drives to the beaches of the South, and threw impromptu parties at their homes. Rare was the night she did not come home in love. “I didn’t even know there
was
a nightlife here until you moved in,” Miranda told her. She worried over Madina’s safety, but Madina assured her they were all gentlemen; she remained a virgin. And then Madina adopted Mosi as her protector. Every evening she would model her spangled skirts and tight jeans for him, soliciting his advice, before dragging him out of the house with her. That she actually got him to leave was impressive; Mosi loathed nightclubs and preferred to keep his own company. But he loved Madina, taking a fatherly interest in her well-being. At first, they had invited Miranda along as well, but she always begged off so that she could work while the house was empty. It was also the only time she could pay serious attention to her students’ artwork.
    The house was peaceful now. The kettle had boiled, and Miranda poured the water over a cup of green tea leaves and sat down at the kitchen table. They had only two hard plastic chairs, but on the rare occasions that there were more than two people in the kitchen, they sat on the counter or the floor.
    Miranda wondered how long she should wait before e-mailing Finn. Three days? The same number of days she used to wait in Seattle before calling someone she’d met at a party? A ridiculous waste of three days, really. She would have Googled “how to invite an ambassador for tea” or something like that if she’d had Internet access. But she did not have Internet access. Wireless did not exist yet in the Old City, and what little wiring could be strung up in these impenetrable houses could not be trusted even to keep the lights on for an entire evening.
    To check e-mail Miranda had to walk out of the Old City to a grimy little Internet café in Shuhadā’ Square. She didn’t do this very often. Squeezing in between two adolescent boys both covertly downloading porn was not her idea of a good time. Every Internet shop in the country was like this, with the young men doing their best to hide their illicit searches from each other, shrinking the images of copulating couples until they were tiny figures in the corners of theirscreens. Still, Miranda didn’t have to look hard to figure out what they were. All of the fevered and covert behavior around her made it kind of hard to focus on writing to family. Mostly she wrote letters at home and then uploaded them at the café from a flash drive, as quickly as possible.
    Why was she so interested in this man anyway? She had no ambassador fetish—the few she had met were terribly worthy and dull—and, well, he was a
man
. Not that she hadn’t fallen in love with men before, but not often, and it had been a while. Six years at least. Not since she met Vícenta.
    It was, in fact, three days before she managed to get herself to the Internet café to write to Finn. Whether that was due to ambivalence about jumping off this particular cliff or a simple lack of time was anybody’s guess. Miranda must have done a passable job with her note, as he wrote her back about seven minutes later to see if she might be free for tea the next day. She replied to say she was, pretty much any day, and would he like to have tea at her place? After all, Finn was new to the country, and had the misfortune of living outside of the Old