Her husband is a landscape designer, and he’s making sketches and notes as they visit the gardens of Spain. It’s his first trip to Europe, and he was reluctant to leave the United States at all after 9/11 until Susan convinced him that he could pick up ideas for his business, and write off the whole trip on his income tax. They’ve already toured the Alcazaba, the Palace of Charles the V and the Moorish courtyards of the Alhambra Palace. Susan sent Paul off to the upper gardens of the Generalife with his notebook and camera, while she stayed here, wandering different paths for a while and then deciding to sit in the shade by my tower to indulge in what-might-have-beens. If she’d stayed in Granada, like Juan wanted her to, instead of flying home with the other students, her whole life might have been different.

She’s staring past the glossy bright green leaves of the orange trees, fascinated by my tower, and images of silky veils and jeweled velvet slippers and gilded ottomans are passing through her head…

She’s tilted her head now, and I’m dismayed to feel the thick wedge of flesh under her chin. She’s staring past the glossy bright green leaves of the orange trees, fascinated by my tower, and images of silky veils and jeweled velvet slippers and gilded ottomans are passing through her head, familiar details from my own past, of course, but she believes she’s indulging in day dreaming. And, oh really! Now this is too much. Because of some half-remembered theory class she took in college, she’s accusing herself of orientalism, of indulging in romantic notions about the “other.”

Well, I’m the other, and I feel sick at heart, sensing the danger I’m in. If she blocks me from the conscious part of her brain, I’ll smother down here with all the other things she’s forgotten, or won’t allow herself to think about because of political correctness — the sweet taste of her mother’s nipple, her scratchy wool baby booties, the tickle of a fly on her face, the feel of pee running down her leg when she was three years old, the clammy taste of her first kiss in second grade, her shameful nervousness when she saw an Arab man walking down the aisle of the airplane on the flight over, and her silly old day dreams of Lord So and So asking her to dance at a ball as if she were a character out of Jane Austen.

I flood her with scenes from my life before the enchantment. I let her see the sandalwood box in which I kept my pearl necklace, and the little trellis work gate that led to the courtyard with the myrtles and stork fountain, and my little black-eyed maid who played the lute while I soaked in my bath, and later smoothed out my long dark tresses with a comb encrusted with pink shells. Orientalism! Does she think she’s imagining all that! Well, here comes my father, the chief counselor at court, striding across the tile floor in his rich robes, his face pale as death (for he knows my feelings) to give me the bad news that Prince Ahmed has just arrived on a magic carpet with a blond princess from Toledo. Let’s see how she feels about that!