Sleeping Beauty (85 page)

“I'm going to change for dinner,” Anne said. She stood up, stretching; she had sat unmoving for the whole afternoon. “Is that all right? I'd like to.”

“Of course,” Josh said. He stood with her. “Eight o'clock? We can eat out here or in the lounge.”

“Here, please. And eight o'clock is fine.” She went through the lounge to the stateroom where Josh had put her things. It was a small room with a double bed covered with a white eyelet quilt, an olive-wood desk and armoire, and a blue chintz armchair. The window was the width of the room, and was slightly open; Anne could hear the quiet slap of waves against the boat. A door led to a tiny bathroom tiled in pink marble, with a tub just large enough for a child, or an adult with knees steeply bent. Anne smiled. She liked everything she saw. She liked everything that was happening.

But her smile wavered.
This is a good place to be reminded
that it's best if we remember our past and come to terms with it.
Yes, she thought. I know. Just give me a few more minutes.

The bath water was steaming, and she sat with water to her chin, washing off the dust of the morning, feeling exhilarated by cleanliness. She dried her hair and left it loose, a little wild, and slipped on a gold silk caftan as fine as tissue. When she returned to the deck, Josh was waiting for her, dressed in slacks and a dress shirt, open at the neck, and a dark blue blazer. His eyes admired her as she came to him. “You look wonderful.”

“So do you. But this boat deserves our dressing up, Josh; it's so fine.”

He smiled. “I think so, too. A number of my friends have boats, but this is my favorite. And it had to be the best, for you.” He contemplated her. “I bought you something in Luxor, before you arrived.” He took a slim box from his jacket pocket and watched Anne open it. Nestled on a bed of velvet was a necklace of oval cabochons of lapis lazuli joined by thin gold rods. Anne drew in her breath. “Lapis and gold,” Josh said. “The colors of the pharaohs. If I could have chosen something for you to wear tonight, I would have chosen gold silk.”

“It's so beautiful,” Anne said, and handed it to him so he could fasten it behind her neck.

He stood back, studying her. “A pharaoh's queen,” he said softly, “though far more beautiful. And very much alive, not mummified, and therefore, I would guess, ready for dinner.”

He took her hand and they crossed the deck to the dinner table, moved since that afternoon to a spot sheltered from the breeze that now and then gusted to a wind. Josh filled their wineglasses and raised his. “I'm glad you're here; I'm glad we're here. I like seeing Egypt through your eyes. It's good to be reminded how it looked when it was brand-new; we forget too quickly. So, thank you for helping me look with fresh eyes at a place I love.”

“Thank you for getting me here.” Anne touched her glass to his. “I'm having a wonderful time.”

They ate slowly, sitting close together, their voices low, while the steward brought each course, beginning with
tahini
and soup, and then a spicy stew of rice and beef served with large circles of flat bread. “I always liked to experiment with food,” Josh said as he helped himself to more stew. “Dora never did.”

Anne gave him a swift, startled glance. He had not talked about Dora for months.

“She had a fine palate and she was never willing to chance a less than excellent meal.” His voice was casually reminiscent. “I think what gave her a reason to leave me was her discovery that I was a less than excellent man.”

Anne's eyebrows rose.
“She
wanted to leave?”

“She forced it. She told me with amazing regularity that she'd stay if I would change and become what she wanted. I wouldn't do it, and she wouldn't stop demanding it, so finally I said she had to leave.” He leaned forward and refilled their wineglasses. “It sounds dreary and trite, even to me; I can imagine how often you hear variations of it in your office. But it seemed important to me. I'd lived with two other women, and both times it hadn't worked out; they were sorry and so was I, and we're still friends. I'd known I didn't want to marry Dora, but for a while we'd enjoyed each other, so it was another failure. I knew there were ways I could have changed to satisfy her if I'd wanted to, but I didn't want to. That told me more about my feelings for her, or lack of them, than anything else.”

“What did she want you to do?” Anne asked.

He smiled wryly. “There was a long list. In Dora's self-centered world nothing was ever enough.” He paused, his mouth somber. “What I thought I saw in Dora at first, and for some months after she moved in with me, was an insatiable desire to experience everything. But that turned out to be an insatiable desire to possess everything. No, it was more than that. It was a compulsion to possess and manipulate, to bend everything and everyone to her will.”

He paused. “It seems she takes after her father in that. Anyway, after a while, in spite of her sweetness and charm, all I saw was that drive to manipulate, and her endless
fascination with herself, and that was when I went back to working my regular schedule, fourteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. Dora wanted me to stay home more. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask, and of course I could have done it. But by then I didn't want to. I'd always worked those crazy hours before we began living together, and I couldn't see any reason to stay home.” He contemplated his wineglass. “To be accurate, I hadn't always worked like a madman. I started cramming my days when my parents were killed and it became a way of life. First the past was an escape and then it was where I was most content. I always knew how it would come out; there were no surprises. That seems extraordinarily weak now, but for years it satisfied me and I didn't question it.”

He leaned back, stretching his legs along the side of the table. The candles in the hurricane lamps had burned low and there were deep shadows on his face. “For all those years, I never was in love with anyone. I'm not sure if that was because I was involved in the past, or if I was involved in the past because I couldn't fall in love. What I do know is that the past isn't enough for me anymore, and that means my work isn't enough. There was a time when finding Tenkaure's tomb would have been the greatest event of my life; it would have been the measure of my success as a human being and the purpose of my days. But right now it isn't any of those things. It's important to me, but nowhere near as important as you are.”

He was silent for a moment, his eyes holding Anne's. She did not move. Except for the faint vibration of the boat beneath them, it seemed to her that the whole world was still.

“I love you, Anne,” he said quietly. “I think I must have made that clear in a dozen ways by now, but I haven't let myself say it; there seemed to be too much going on in your life, and God knows there was plenty going on around us. But I want you to know that once I knew I was in love with you and that I wanted to bring you into my life, and make myself a part of yours and your family's, the past slipped away to the background. Where it belongs.”

The steward brought coffee and cognac and a tiered plate of cookies. “Over there, please,” Josh said, gesturing toward a low wicker coffee table, and when the steward had left, he and Anne moved to a cushioned love seat and pulled the low table to them. Anne poured coffee. She could not speak. She was in turmoil.
Sweet little Anne. People should love you.
No man had spoken to her of love since she had left home. But in Josh's voice, it had not sounded anything like the word in her memory. It was as if she had never heard it before; it resonated like a foreign word with new layers of meaning. And even as she had felt herself tighten and shrink back, she had felt a small spark of excitement, a sense of possibilities, and she wanted to hear him say it again.

But she did not know how to talk about love. I wish, I wish, I wish. She ached with wanting to be able to talk to him. But she was silent.

Josh had leaned back, holding his cup. He looked relaxed, but Anne felt the pressure of his waiting for her to speak, and she felt a flash of resentment. He had no trouble speaking of love; he'd had plenty of practice, and no memories crushed him, leaving him breathless and sick, whenever he thought of all the things that love could mean.

“We're docking,” he said, and at that moment the boat's engines cut back to an idle.

Startled at the sudden drop in the steady hum she had heard all afternoon, Anne looked at the lights of the bustling trading town on the shore, and the familiar lights of tour boats docked along its corniche.

“Edfu,” Josh said. “We'll dock here tonight, a little farther up, away from the tour boats. We can go ashore tomorrow, if you want—if we go early, we can avoid most of the crowds—or we can sail before breakfast. The only schedule for this trip is what we want to do.”

The
Hapy
glided silently along the dock, away from the other boats and the center of town, until they came to an empty section of shore. A group of men, waiting for them, grabbed the rope flung by the crew and fastened it to an iron stake embedded in the ground. Music drifted from the cafés, as it had in Luxor; voices and the heavy scents of coffee and
spices, baking bread, and smoke from water pipes floated on the breeze as they had in Luxor. Anne had the feeling that time and space had blurred. She was in one place and many places; she was in an ancient land and her own modern world; she was in Egypt, or she was on a river without beginning or end, flowing or standing still.

She and Josh were the stable center. Once again, she felt alone with him, separate from everything else. Whatever happened beyond this boat, in the past or the future, this was her stable center. It seemed to her that she had never before known this feeling of coming to the center of her life.

She did not know what to do with that, yet. When she thought of saying it to him, simply and straight out, the words would not come; she was afraid of opening the door to something she could not control.

But even if she could have told him, it was not the time. She knew that. There was something else she had to tell him first.

He had helped her, by talking about Dora. He had done it casually, but he had had a reason.
The past slipped away to the background. Where it belongs.
That was what he wanted her to do. Force it to the background. And it was time that she did.

She put her cup on the coffee table and turned to him. “I want to tell you about something that happened to me a long time ago. I haven't ever talked about it; I haven't been able to. I was thirteen. My mother had died when I was seven, and Gail and I were living with Marian and Fred. Everyone in the family had houses within a few blocks of each other, and we almost always had Sunday dinner at my grandfather's. It was a command performance, but I think everyone liked it. Except Vince. He hated rules, anyone's rules, and I'm sure he wouldn't have shown up at all except that he was afraid of confronting my grandfather. I think Ethan Chatham was the only man Vince was ever in awe of.”

She gazed into space, at the lights of Edfu some distance away, and the blackness of the river all around them, but what she was seeing was Marian's house, the dining room
with the flowered wallpaper, the long yard beyond the French doors, stretching smooth as green velvet to the lake, and the forest where she had talked to her made-up friend. What was her name? She had forgotten. She'd been talking to her, she remembered, and writing in her notebook, when Vince—

“What happened when you were thirteen?” Josh asked, bringing her back.

“Vince raped me,” she said. She gasped with pain and shame, and with the shock of hearing herself say the words aloud for the first time.

Josh sucked in his breath. “My God, my God,” he breathed. He had guessed, but there was no way to be prepared for the impact of hearing her say it, nor for the agony in her voice, nor for the murderous rage that swept through him. He saw Anne with Vince—he tried not to picture it, but it was there, driving into him—Anne's head falling back, Vince making her bend and yield, forcing her . . . He could not stand it. “My God,” he burst out in fury, and reached for Anne, to snatch her from that image in his mind.

Anne jumped. She leaped to her feet and moved away from him, and stood beside the railing, nervously running her hand along the smooth brass. “I have to tell all of it,” she said. Her voice was low but clear across the space between them. She had made up her mind, and with the same steely drive that had taken her from Lake Forest to Haight Ashbury, and then to Berkeley and Harvard and the law, she would see it through. “He raped me for a long time. He came to my room. At first he was always there, and then he had a schedule and I had to be ready for him. And act a part, and say words that meant nothing to me. That, ever since then, have meant . . . nothing to me.”

She closed her eyes briefly. She could feel his hands on her in the prison of her bedroom, she could hear him giving orders, commanding her to respond, hissing furiously when she did not.
God damn it, feel something when I play with you!

I can't do this, Anne thought, I can't, I can't. Her breathing was sharp and painful, as if she had been running for too long. Her hand clenched the railing.

Josh held himself in, torn by anger and pity. “And you didn't tell your family,” he said quietly.

Anne's eyes flew open in surprise at the sound of his voice in her recollecting. There had never been another voice when she fought with her memories; it had always been hers alone.
But I'm not alone now.
She looked for a long moment at Josh. His eyes were on hers, dark with anger and pain, and she knew it was her anger and pain as well as his own that he was feeling.
I'm not alone anymore.
She began to understand how that could mean a sharing of horrors, and pain.