The Wrong Villa

The suitcase wheel caught on the cobblestone for the tenth time and I nearly cried. Seriously, I nearly stood there in that narrow medina alley and cried like a toddler. Thirty-six years old, a professional photographer, and I was ready to have a full meltdown over a suitcase.

But in my defense, it had been a day. The flight from New York got in late, the passport line was brutal, and my fixer Eleanor had texted me a photo that was apparently taken with a potato. Then a driver dropped me at what he swore was the right address, and now here I was, dragging my whole life through a doorway the size of a mailbox.

Inside, though? Oh my goodness, inside was gorgeous. A courtyard with a mosaic fountain that actually burbled, orange trees, lanterns throwing little stars across the tiles. The heat outside had been slapping me around all afternoon, but in here it was cool and it smelled like orange blossom and mint.

There was a woman by the fountain.

She was maybe thirty, dark blonde hair pinned up with a pencil stuck through it, wearing a linen shirt over a tunic that cost more than my first car, holding a glass of something pink and looking at her phone.

"Hi! Oh thank god," I said. "Are you Eleanor?"

She looked up. I'll say this for her, she recovered fast. Her eyebrows did a little hop and then she smiled like we were old friends.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, I am!"

"Carolyn! Carolyn Raymond, the photographer? You've been so patient with all my emails, I am so sorry I'm late, the flight, the traffic, the cobblestones are trying to kill me, honestly."

"Of course," she said, setting her phone face down on a little table, which I now realize was her putting away the evidence. "You must be exhausted. Come, sit. Can I get you some tea?"

"Tea would be amazing. Or water. Or honestly a bucket of anything cold."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, and waved me into a low cushioned chair by the fountain. I dropped my camera bag next to it like it was a beloved pet and sank down with a groan that I didn't even try to make dignified.

"You've had a day," she said, and rang a little brass bell.

A young man appeared in seconds and she spoke to him in rapid French, too fast for my rusty high school skills. He vanished and came back with a tray: mint tea in a silver pot, a glass of water with condensation already forming, and little almond cookies.

"You are so prepared," I said. "This is exactly why I booked through the agency. Eleanor, I have to tell you, my editor saw your name and said, oh, she's the best, don't argue with her about the shot list."

"Mm," she said, and poured the tea from a height, which is a whole art form apparently, the stream going up like a little fountain of its own. "I do try to be thorough."

"Did you always do this kind of work? I read somewhere you ran a hotel in Paris?"

For a second she went very still, and I thought, uh oh, wrong detail, you researched the wrong fixer, Carolyn. But she smoothed it over.

"A while ago," she said. "Things change. Drink your tea before it goes lukewarm, that would be a crime here."

The tea was incredible, sweet and so minty it felt like brushing your teeth in reverse. I drank half the glass in one go. She watched me with this look, sort of delighted, like I was a stray cat that had wandered into her living room.

"So," she said. "Tell me about this shoot. Rooftop terrace at golden hour, yes? I know just the spot. We can go up now, actually, the light is perfect and the tourists are clearing out of the souk."

"You're already working? Oh no, I feel terrible, you were having your drink and I just barged in."

"I was bored," she said, with a shrug that seemed very honest. "You rescued me. Truly. Some of us come to Marrakech to work and end up talking to a fountain instead."

"Okay, if you're sure. Let me just grab my camera."

"You don't need it yet," she said. "Come. Let me show you the house first. A tour, then the light."

I grabbed the tea anyway, because priorities.

***

She led me up a staircase that wound like something out of a fairy tale, all carved plaster and cool stone under my palm. Every landing had a different tile pattern and I kept stopping to take mental pictures. She waited without rushing me, which already put her ahead of half the people I've worked with.

"How long have you lived here?" I asked, huffing a little on the stairs. I do yoga, I swear, but that staircase seemed to have its own will.

"Three years. I came for a month and stayed."

"And stayed?"

"And stayed," she said, like that explained everything. Maybe it did.

Then we came out onto the roof and I actually said "oh." out loud like a tourist, which, fine, I was being one. The whole city spread out below us, flat white and pink rooftops, the minaret of the big mosque glowing in the slanted light, swallows cutting back and forth overhead. The evening call to prayer started somewhere off to the east and rolled across the rooftops in layers, one voice, then another answering, and I just stood there with my mouth open.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, wow. I've been in this city for six hours and I already want to move here."

"Everyone says that."

"And you did it. You just stayed."

"I did it," she agreed, and we stood at the low wall, shoulder to shoulder, drinking it in. Her arm was warm near mine. She had on some perfume, something woody and expensive, and I was aware of it in a way I hadn't let myself be aware of a stranger's perfume in a long, long time.

Look, I'm recently divorced. Like, divorce-finalized-in-March recently. My ex-husband and I are friendly about it, we still send each other memes, but there's a specific kind of lonely that comes with standing on a rooftop in a beautiful city next to a beautiful woman and realizing nobody on earth is waiting to hear about your day.

"So the shot list," she said, tapping the low wall. "Sunset from here. Tomorrow, the dye pits early, before the crowds. The spice sellers want afternoon. And you wanted people, real faces, yes? Portraits?"

"Portraits are the whole point," I said. "My editor wants 'authentic Morocco,' which, you know, is a nightmare brief, but I'm gonna try."

"You will get it," she said, with such confidence that I believed her. "You have the eye. I watched you come through the courtyard. You looked at the fountain tiles before you looked at me."

I laughed. "Caught. Yeah, I'm terrible at parties. I stare at light fixtures."

"A useful flaw."

The sun was going down properly now, and the sky did that thing it does in warm countries where it can't decide between orange and violet. Below us in the souk someone was hammering metal, and the sound came up clean and musical.

"Can I ask you something kind of unprofessional?" I said.

"You may."

"How did you end up doing this? You seem like someone who could do anything, honestly. You've got that energy."

She turned her glass in her hand and looked out at the city, and there was a pause that I couldn't read at the time. I thought she was deciding what to share with a client. Now I know she was deciding how deep to dig the hole.

"I was tired of other people's schedules," she said finally. "So I made my own. It's worked out. Mostly."

"Mostly?"

"Mostly," she said, and smiled, and that smile did something warm right down my spine. "But tonight the schedule is you. Are you hungry? I can feed you. The restaurant downstairs is very good, I've heard."

"You don't have to keep working, seriously."

"Carolyn." She said my name like she was trying it on. "I am offering you dinner and good company in Marrakech. Say yes."

"Yes," I said, way too fast. "Obviously yes."

She laughed again, and we went back down the stairs together, her hand hovering politely at my elbow on the narrow turns. It was just a fixer being attentive. That's what I told myself. Just a professional being professional, on a rooftop, at sunset, with that smile.

God, I'm such an idiot.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First there was dinner.

Dinner was at a little table in the courtyard under the orange trees, lanterns swinging gently above us, the fountain doing its trickling thing. The owner turned out to be a compact man named Rachid who greeted us warmly with a running commentary in French that I caught maybe one word in ten. He brought us a parade of small dishes without us ordering anything. Salads, a tagine that fell apart when you looked at it, warm bread.

"Okay, this is the best meal I've had in a year, and I'm including my birthday," I said, and I meant it. "What is in this tagine? Crack, probably. It's crack."

"Prunes and lamb and about forty things I will not tell you, because then you would ask Rachid and he would be insufferable about it," Eleanor said, and speared a prune from my plate without asking, which felt weirdly intimate, and I noticed that I noticed.

Somewhere in there the conversation slid from the shoot into actual life stuff. It happens on trips, right? You're tired, you're fed, somebody hands you a second glass of wine, and suddenly you're telling a stranger things you haven't told your sister.

"So," she said. "You said 'recently divorced' on the stairs. You said it in the way people say a thing when they would rather not unpack it."

"Wow. Straight to it, huh?"

"I am paid to read clients. It is a flaw of mine, reading them off the clock too."

I looked into my wine glass, which was a very convenient place to look. "It's fine. It's been a year of fine. He's a good guy, we just, you know. We stopped being a we. We're that divorcing couple that sends each other memes about raccoons. Very healthy, very sad."

"That is not sad. That is rare."

"The sad part isn't him. The sad part is..." I waved my hand around at the lanterns. "Okay, no kids. We tried, it didn't happen, and then I turned thirty-five and we were two people in a nice apartment with a lot of expensive camera gear and nothing to say at dinner. And I kept thinking, when did we stop asking each other questions? Like actual questions. And I couldn't remember. That's the part that got me. Not remembering."

The fountain went on trickling. Somewhere in the riad a door closed softly.

"You are on the other side of it now," she said. "On the side where you ask questions again."

"Am I? I'm on the side where I fly across the ocean alone to photograph strangers."

"That is a very good side. Strangers are the best people to ask questions."

She should know, I thought. She'd asked me four already and the wine was barely gone. But I liked it. I realized I'd been talked at for years, mostly, and asked almost never, and here was this woman leaning forward with her chin on her hand like my answers were the evening's entertainment.

"Your turn," I said. "Tell me a travel disaster. You've clearly got a hundred."

"Oh, hundreds. Once in Havana I was put in a hotel that turned out to be a private home, and the family would not admit it for two days. They served me breakfast in their living room."

"They just... fed you breakfast?"

"Every morning. Like a cat that had moved in. Eventually I paid the grandmother directly and we were all much happier."

I laughed so hard the couple at the next table turned around. "Okay, top five. Go."

And she went, story after story, her hands doing half the talking, and I watched her and had the small warm thought that this was exactly the kind of night I'd stopped believing I'd have again. Good food, good wine, a funny beautiful person across the table, nobody checking a phone. She didn't check her phone once. I noticed that too. Noticing was becoming a habit.

* * *

Afterward we took our glasses up to the roof again, because Eleanor said the city at night was the whole point of having a roof, and who was I to argue with a professional. The stars were out in force, more of them than I ever see in New York, and the air had cooled to that perfect barely-there temperature. Down in the souk the metal hammering had stopped and the noise was just people, hundreds of them, a soft roar like the sea.

And then the call to prayer started again. The last one of the day, Eleanor said, and it was different at night, closer somehow, like the minaret was just over the wall.

I don't know how to explain the next part without sounding like a person who has been alone too long, which, fair. But she was standing next to me at the low wall and the singing was rolling over us and I turned to say something, I honestly don't remember what, some dumb photographer thing about light, and she was already looking at me, and the whole city went quiet behind her voice.

"You have been looking at me all night," she said. Not accusing. Amused, almost.

"I have not."

"You have. It is all right. I am easy to look at." And she laughed a little, but she didn't look away.

My heart was doing something unprofessional. "Okay, look, I'm just, I'm new at this, right? Back in college I dated, you know, women, but then I didn't, for a long time, fifteen years basically, and I'm rusty at everything, flirting included, so if I'm staring it's because I'm out of practice at being a person at dinner."

"Carolyn." She stepped a little closer. "Would you like to kiss me?"