The Blue Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

then threaded his fingers into mine and said, “You are wonderful.” That was the first night we slept together. After all the years with Donald, it was both revelatory and heady to be with a man who was so sexually confident, so adept at giving me pleasure.
    He made me a lamb tagine the second night we slept together. And he made me a lamb tagine just six weeks ago, to celebrate his paying off his debts. That night he also dropped a little surprise into my life.
    â€œWhat would you say to spending a month this summer in Essaouira?” he asked.
    My initial thought was that we’d put five hundred dollars down on a cottage near Popham Beach in Maine. Reading my mind, Paul said, “We can still do the two weeks in Popham. I’ve booked us to leave Morocco on August thirteenth, which is a few days before we’re due in Maine.”
    â€œYou’ve actually bought us two tickets for Morocco?”
    â€œI wanted to surprise you.”
    â€œOh, you certainly did that. But you could have at least asked me if I was free.”
    â€œIf I had asked, you would have found an excuse to say no.”
    He was, alas, right about that.
    â€œDid you even consider the fact that I have a business, and clients? And how are we going to afford this trip to Morocco?”
    â€œJasper sold four more lithographs last week.”
    â€œYou never told me this.”
    â€œThe nature of a surprise is to keep things secret.”
    I was already intrigued. Except for my time in Montreal and a trip once to Vancouver, I had no experience of the world beyond American frontiers. Here was my husband offering to whisk me off to North Africa. But my alleged financial caution was, I knew, underscored by fear. The fear of foreignness. Of being dropped into a Muslim country that—for all of Paul’s talk about its modernity—was (from everything I had ever read about it) still locked in the North African past.
    â€œWe can easily live for a month in Essaouira for two thousand dollars,” he said.
    â€œIt’s too long to take off.”
    â€œPromise your staff a nice bonus if they hold the fort for six weeks.”
    â€œAnd what are my clients going to say about this?”
    â€œWho consults an accountant between mid-July and Labor Day?”
    He did have a point. It was my slowest season. But six weeks away? It seemed like such a huge block of time . . . even though I also knew that, in the great scheme of things, it was nothing—and that, yes, Morton (my bookkeeper) and Kathy (my secretary) could manage to run everything very well while I was away. One of the hardest lessons for anyone with control freak tendencies to absorb is that the world actually goes on very well without them.
    â€œI’m going to have to think this over.”
    â€œNo,” Paul said, taking my hand. “You’re going to say yes now. Because you know this will be an amazing experience which will take you out of your comfort zone and show you a world you’ve only imagined. And it will give me the opportunity to work on a new portfolio, which Jasper assured me he can sell for at least fifteen thousand dollars. So there’s a big financial incentive. Most of all it will be very good for us. We could truly use some time out of here, time to ourselves, and away from all that day-to-day stuff.”
    Morocco. My husband was bringing us to Morocco. To Essaouira. How could I not overlook my qualms and give in to the idea of a North African idyll in a walled medieval city facing the Atlantic? The stuff of fantasy. But aren’t most fantasies all rooted in one great hope: that we will land, even temporarily, in a better place?
    So I said yes.
    The immigration line inched forward, slowly, inexorably. Almost an hour had passed since we’d landed. Only now were we the next in line to have our passports inspected by the police. In front of us the man from Mauritania was being rigorously questioned by