The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (40 page)

“You must never be embarrassed with me. Will you try?” The arm upon her shoulders went suddenly limp. He lowered it to his side. “I said those same words to my darling Caroline, who died so young.”

“Oh, your poor sister. I am sorry.” They had returned to familiar
ground, to the world of the loved and lost where she felt more herself, more normal.

“I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the idea.”

“Surely, with time.”

“I expect to see her running to greet me when I get home. I keep imagining it. And then”—he choked up—“I stop myself and grieve all over again.”

Parthe would race to greet Flo when she returned, and Flo would be elated to see her, for despite their differences, she loved her sister.

Gustave’s face was wet. He let out a low moan, then lay his head on her lap, crossing his arms awkwardly at the chest, as if he didn’t know where to put them or didn’t wish to impose the bulk of himself on her.

He was so genuine, she thought, patting his wide, sunburned, and surprisingly hairy back. “There, there,” she murmured. “It’s good to cry, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he blubbered into her dress. “Yes.”

He was so quixotic! Listening to him sniffle and snob, she marveled at the openness of his emotion and felt honored by his trust. He pulled a handkerchief with difficulty from his back pocket and blew his nose in three short bursts. Then he was quiet. They sat breathing together, each in a world of private contemplation. She watched the waves rushing toward her. One might think of them as hopeless, their furious repetitive energy spent and spent and spent. Or one could find them cheerful, full of merry abandon. They were a mirror, she decided, of their observer.

Precisely because she was reduced to meekness and shame, she wanted to ask more about the pleasure center, but surely, after his outpouring of grief, it would seem selfish. There would be other occasions. Maybe they could talk in the evenings on the return trip; perhaps he’d be less occupied with other things. In some ways he was like a sibling to her, an intimate completely different from Parthe, who was tentative and fearful, waiting to follow Flo’s example, while Gustave was an explorer and guide who presented her with curiosities and oddments from the larger world.

He sat up and moved closer, cupped her ear with both hands, and whispered a single word into it. As she’d feared, it was a word she’d never heard or read. She couldn’t bear to repeat it in the silence that followed. But being polite and kind, he said it again—louder, slower, clearer—as if inscribing it on her brain.

Oh, Fanny, she thought, what have you done to me?

• • •

That evening, Flo sat in her nightgown on the edge of the bed and watched the flimsy white curtains at the windows billowing like the waves they framed in the moonlight. With the lightest touch, the breeze tugged at everything in the room.

She was a mystery to herself. In her monthly bath, she was a slick object that sank in the zinc tub except for ten nursery-rhyme toes. She’d never seen her whole body naked in a mirror, and her backside not at all.

After removing her slippers, she turned down the bedcover, stretched out flat, and pulled it to her chin. She extinguished the oil lamp and lay listening to the sea’s pulse, the regular whoosh and pause.

It was a luxury to be alone in the dark. To be alone. At home, Parthe was always in the room. Seventeen bedrooms and still they shared. At her cousins’, too, it was unsociable—egotistical, by Fanny’s lights—to sleep in a room by oneself. One mustn’t do anything that was too important to be interrupted, not even sleep. One must be ready to offer companionship and comfort to others around the clock. From this single restriction she might go mad. But since the caravan began she’d had her privacy, and tonight Trout was sleeping downstairs, in the servants’ quarters. Max and Gustave shared the chamber next to hers, but the walls were thick as a tomb’s.

Gustave’s contention that the English were prudes seemed plausible enough. But there was the evidence of Mary Clarke, a Scots woman who, for all her propriety, had chosen to live in Paris, where she kept company with two men night after night for a dozen years
without marrying either man. Why hadn’t Clarkey told her about the pleasure place? If anyone knew, she did.

Perhaps customs were different on the whole of the Continent. When doctors in Italy and France attended on WEN and Charles, both men had undressed. But when Great-Grandmother Shore lay dying, the doctor literally didn’t
see
her. Modesty could not be dispensed with, even at the risk of death! He had merely examined her head, hands, feet, and a few inches of what was politely called the décolleté. Everything else was a guess.

Flo.
Flo
. When she thought of herself, the image in the tilting looking glass of the mahogany dresser came to mind—the top half of a creature corseted and laced into an unchanging shape. Rather like a vase when you got right down to it, the arms being handles, the head a single blossom, like a peony. How did she look from an angle? Was her profile strong? When Parthe sketched her reading on the settee, she was shocked to see the length of her own nose.

She might as well live in a rented costume. The drawings in her medical books were no help either, with their stylized ovals, circles, and wands for the innards, and their doll-blank exteriors. The spark of life was planted in a place too deep for her to see or touch. No one could. Her torso and legs? A small Antarctica, where she didn’t trespass. Why had it never occurred to her that she could lock herself in a room and place a hand mirror between her legs?

The thought made her shiver.

An owl pierced the quiet, its downward-sliding
whu!
so sharp it blotted out the crashing surf. It took a moment to collect herself, to sink back into the lumpen mattress and close her eyes.

She began with her breasts, small by any measure, tracing lightly, raising gooseflesh, the nipples quickly shriveling into points as if with cold. But it felt wrong to touch them. Were they not God’s design, intended for an infant‘s nourishment?

She curled her hand into a fist and placed it by her side.

Yet, perversely, there they were
all
the time, as if at any moment she might be called upon to strip off her camisole and feed a regiment.
Some men found them stunning, stirring. Naughty. Richard had several times managed to fondle hers, pretending it accidental, but coloring furiously.

Her fingertips barely alighting, she pulled on them, gathering a funnel shape. She felt a tug deep inside, in a place she’d never felt anything and couldn’t identify. A radiating twinge like a flame inside her flared and dimmed.

The desert sand had lent itself to astounding textures, tawny curves and scoops so like flesh one could hardly believe they were just mounds of dirt. The dunes’ shapeliness pleased the eye the way the hollow of her belly and the jutting swells and slopes of her hips pleased her roving hand. There were massive drifts like the thighs and shoulders, breasts and buttocks of a giant race that slept beneath the sand, that
were
the sand, figures defined by clefts and ramparts of unmitigated, velvety black. For five days she had marked time by their expanding and subsiding shadows, watching them ripen from palest gold through deep persimmon to ebony. Gustave had pointed out plaques where camel urine had dried to a varnished gloss. Elsewhere, the sand gleamed in creamy tufts, like frosting. Tier after tier of caramelized sugar. If you looked long enough, you felt sick, as if you’d eaten a gouty meal.

All this accidental sculpture at the wind’s decree, she thought, pulling up a knee and turning onto her side, resting there.

Beneath the coverlet, the air was close, humid with sweat and bodily exhalations. In the desert, her sense of perspective had vanished until a distant pit could be the dimple of an elbow or a mile-long crevasse. The soft down of her thighs, the softer skin inside them. Move my hand away. Don’t.

Don’t! She felt so guilty. Was her body not hers? Apparently it was not. In the darkness, she resolved not to care.

She was too shy to sleep naked, and wore a nightgown and drawers on the hottest nights. The slaves, the destitute hajjis, the Ababdeh in their mud huts—all seemed less naked, less ashamed, than she was in her nightgown. Their skin seemed a more natural covering than
hers, which was the pallid, sickly shade of animals you found when you turned over a rock.

She must get a French medical text. A text would be proof beyond the nudes so beloved by the French, who thought it perfectly acceptable to
draw from life
, which she’d always suspected was a ruse for men to ogle naked girls. A
fine art tradition
, Clarkey had said at the Louvre when Flo turned away from Ingres’s painting of a naked Turkish concubine sprawled on one haunch, defiantly gazing over her shoulder at the gallerygoers.

She tried to imagine a long nail drawn across the different folds and bulges. Or a finger. If only she knew where to touch—how to touch—so that the unpredictable trickles of pleasure—they felt like music swelling within her—would continue.

It was very hot in the room. Suddenly she wanted nothing but to sleep.

Tomorrow she would unpack the hand mirror—she couldn’t possibly use the one she had borrowed for her coiffure from Charles. Tomorrow she’d look.

• • •

The next morning she awakened before sunrise and worked on a letter to her mob based on notes she’d scribbled in
Lavie
each night. Fanny and Parthe would be incredulous—aghast—at her descriptions of the journey’s hardships and splendors. (Hopefully, Fanny would not hold it against the Bracebridges, whose reputation for mildness verging on laxity was well known.) And while Flo hadn’t intended to scheme, as she wrote she realized that once the family learned she’d caravanned through the desert, Kaiserswerth would seem tame to them in comparison. They might even welcome the news.

The past five days had been more stimulating than five
years
in England. Life had flown at her in such a welter of color and pity and threat, she’d been unable to absorb it all—the indescribable palette of earth and sky, the sandstorm, the death rattle of a dying camel. Now she took her time to catalog the details, to chew things over lest she forget them.

Never before had she seen human beings so debased, whether the buck-naked Ababdeh children, or the skeletal Ethiopes with pendulous breasts that reached their waists but were no thicker than a tea towel. Most appalling were the pilgrims who wandered for months or years en route to Mecca with nothing but a begging bowl, all the while marrying, dying, giving birth. Yet, in all this blaring cornucopia of sensation, the conversation with Gustave the previous afternoon loomed foremost in her mind. Assuming she could ever articulate her thoughts about it, there was no one—not even Mary Clarke
Mohl
—to whom she could confide the sensations on the beach. Between herself and Gustave an electric current like Mr. Faraday’s had jolted on and off, now emitting pretty glimmers, now hot sparks, now a skywide aurora borealis. All of which lay beyond her powers to probe and understand.

Except for one simple but enormous realization that had surfaced like cream in a jug of milk when she opened her eyes that morning: Gustave seemed to have forgotten that she was a woman! Or chosen to disregard the fact. Oh, there were the customary displays of chivalry, as on the third day when he and Max tramped on foot to guide her and Trout on camels through a steep pass. If the desert had had doors, surely he would have opened every one for her. But when they were alone, he no longer made allowance for her sex. And she had felt this difference as a bodily excitement just short of terror—a quivering in her belly and limbs—as if someone had set her down in front of footlights without telling her the play, or what role she must act.

Was this not what she had always wished and railed for and dreamed of? To be treated no differently than a man? And yet she found herself in foreign territory, ignorant of the language and customs, unsure how to react. Should she have taken offense when he spoke so frankly of carnal matters? Did she dare show enthusiasm for things she barely comprehended? Certainly she didn’t know how a lady would have responded. She did not know how a gentleman would have responded either, “gentleman” being a pretty word for a stranger with secrets. In her opinion, a gentleman was like nothing
so much as the man in the moon. He revealed always and only the same distant half of himself to her, while his male friends were privy to all of him at gatherings after dinner in WEN’s paneled library. Sometimes, after everyone had gone home, she stood alone in this room which, despite regular airing, reeked of pipe smoke fixed with the antiseptic bite of brandy—pungent traces of the male of the species, like the footprints of a rare animal never observed in the wild.

It was too much to think about all at once. She set aside her paper and pen, crossed to the window, and peered out. The sea provided instant comfort, enfolding her with hypnotic insistence as the waves unwound onto the beach, dragging with them the solacing sight and sound of gulls wheeling overhead, herons hunting along the strand with deliberate, stately steps.

It’s a misnomer, she suddenly thought. The water was a sparkling aquamarine, as clear in the shallows as a polished jewel. Had it ever been red? Chevalier Bunsen proposed the name resulted from a clerical error, “reed” having been shortened by mistake over the centuries to “red.” So: the Reed Sea.

Her head swam, her temples pulsed. From the multitude of rollers in the distance she settled on a particular foment of whitecaps peeling toward the shore and watched until it dissipated in the sand. And there, beyond the boats, another string of white curls. Then another.

20

THE DYING SUN

T
rout had stopped complaining, but Flo knew she wasn’t feeling well. At least the toothache hadn’t returned, though neuralgia and eyestrain were obvious the next morning at breakfast, which they took on the terrace at eight-thirty, later than usual. Flo, too, was spent after four parching days in the desert.