The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (48 page)

“I don’t expect flattery from a woman carries much weight.”

He pondered it. No doubt she was right. Though he was naturally suspicious of flattery from either sex.

“I’m so worried.” She sobbed suddenly. “Trout, the poor old battle-ax. She never harmed a fly, really, and never would.”

As he reached to comfort her, she snuggled her face and fists into his shoulder without protest, rather like a squirrel with a nut. Patting her in a way he hoped was supportive, he couldn’t think of anything clever or comforting to say. Drinking could leave him stupid and boorish, inclined
to recitations of Corneille, the theorems of Pythagoras, smutty ballads, or the conjugation of irregular verbs. And so he said nothing. Eventually they dozed off, each of them a lump of incoherence.

He awoke to find her beside him, sound asleep. What luxury, what privilege to observe her at his leisure! It felt almost illicit. But since he suspected that a sleeping person could sense another’s gaze—the heat of it—instead of staring, he stole long, furtive glances at the individual hairs of her brows, the whorls of her ear, which were less fleshy than his, her smaller earlobes. Her eyelids were shiny and translucent, with faint pink squiggles that were invisible when her eyes were open. A brown smudge in the shape of a pickle covered part of one cheek. Her hands were ravishing, as if a sculptor had idealized them, the fingers slender and tapering, the skin creamy as vellum.

Moving quietly as a breeze, he gathered half a ream of paper and some flour, then crept outside the tent so as not to disturb her. He tore the paper into tiny shreds, added the flour, and reentered the tent to moisten the mixture. It was an act of faith to use so much of the rakı.

Sitting beside her prone figure, he applied the mixture to her hand, molding it to the bones. He worked deliberately, with focus and delight. His head was buzzing. The gluey stuff smelled like a cabinetmaker’s shop. Plaster of Paris would have been better, but this would suffice.

“Oh, my.” She opened her eyes. “What are you doing?” She sounded drunk, her words slurred.

“Making a model of your wrist. Then I’ll have it cast into an objet d’art for my study at home.” A sculpture of her wrist arranged on his desk alongside his dictionary and inkstand, his travel treasures—
a mummy, stones from the Parthenon, egret feathers, Rossignol’s note to God. . .

“Mmm,” she hummed, closing her eyes again.

He remembered the process exactly, as if no time had passed since he and Caroline fashioned heads for their puppets. The papier-mâché squeezes he’d made with Aouadallah at Abu Simbel had been something of a refresher course, though they’d cracked and had to be redone in the usual way. Max had been displeased. Yes,
displeased
was the word he used, as if Gustave were his employee.

“It feels very nice. Cool.” She rearranged her feet and sighed. “Have you noticed that the worst loneliness is to be in the wrong company?”

“True.” He could not divide his attention, not when he was on the verge of achieving a perfectly smooth surface. Was this not what Bernini experienced, releasing the figures yearning to be set free from the carrera? Though that was sculpture, of course. So, not freeing a figure, then, but catching one—a living, breathing subject—and fixing it in time.

“You went away,” she said vaguely. “People I wish to leave me never do. But I didn’t want
you
to.”

He was ecstatic, the strands adhered to the pads of his fingers all of a sudden imbued with the spark of life. “I never left you, Rossignol. And never would. We are in Egypt, after all. Where would I go?” Indeed, in this moment, she
was
Egypt. And in Egypt their friendship would likely remain. Any future they had was dim, inscrutable. Letters arriving in the post with talk of Shakespeare.

“You did.” Her eyes were still closed. “You went to Old Koseir. And then I lacked the nerve. Though I was
planning
to, thank you very much.” She opened her eyes and, with her other hand, moved the lamp closer. “That is
so
kind!” she marveled, her voice high and incredulous. “You are making a squeeze of my hand?”

“Of your wrist, actually. But not a squeeze—a cast.” He explained again that he would have it fashioned in bronze, for his desk.

“What a lovely thought.” She stifled a yawn. “So full of sentiment. I quite like the idea of my hand being a guardian angel on your desk.”

He’d commission Pradier to cast it. No, not bronze. Alabaster or marble—like the bust of Caroline—the veins in the stone suggesting the delicate tracery within her flesh.

“I think you’ve forgotten about it.” She pretended to pout. Whatever her complaint was, it didn’t seem serious. She was giving a comical performance of herself. Starring, directed, and adapted for the tent by that master storyteller, rakı.

“I most definitely have not,” he insisted, playing along.

“I think you
have
.” At this she wagged her finger at him playfully. What a mild inebriate she was.

“Well, then, I apologize if I’ve offended you,” he said, propping her arm on a shallow box to dry.

“
Merci beaucoup
. I accept.”

It would be so easy to take advantage of her while she was sauced. He pictured what lay beneath her skirt, another entry in the encyclopedia, a cunt to match her adorable chin and lips. The size of a mouse, he thought, warm and pink and furry—

But no, he knew her too well. Whenever he felt a deep bond, it was impossible to violate it, to inflict harm. For alongside his cynical pronouncements, he was hopelessly loyal, extravagantly forgiving to the point of weakness. He couldn’t hold a grudge. Though Alfred had ended their friendship without explanation, he had sat holding the man’s hand at his deathbed, and guarded the body all night. He’d never felt a moment’s anger either—just grief. To seduce her now would be betrayal. He’d always known that friendship carried a high price. He was glad she had no inkling of her power over him.

“Trout has a lover,” said Flo abruptly. She tapped on her glass.

“Good Lord! What makes you say
that
?”

“Promise me you won’t tell anyone, though—especially Max.”

“I promise, on my dear mother’s life.” Suddenly he ached for his mother. She must miss him terribly. He’d nearly canceled the journey at the outset, weeping prodigiously on the train from Rouen to Paris, the anguished indecision continuing for hours at Max’s apartment. Then he’d written her to tell of his upheaval, and somehow that had helped.

“I read her journal. She seems to have written him love letters she never mailed. I suppose she didn’t want to provoke my suspicion.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know.” It was clear from her tone that she hadn’t yet posed this question of herself.

He blew on her wrist and fanned it.
“Je suis desolé. La pauvre Truite. Et la pauvre Rossignol.”

• • •

Again, he woke first. She lay sprawled on the carpet. The cast had dried. He leaned down, preparing to cut it off, when she opened her eyes and fastened on him. She studied him unself-consciously, indeed boldly scrutinizing his face. It was like being admired, he thought. “Don’t move,” he said, sawing carefully through the cast with his pocketknife. He lifted the cast off. “Thank you.”

Again, that series of shifting expressions that denoted she was about to change the subject flickered across her face. She would have made a terrible liar, a worse card player.

She rose up on one elbow and leaned toward him so close he could see the aura of fine hairs on her cheek in the lamplight. He smelled liquor. Her breath? His? They were besotted with rakı, pickled in it.

“Would you pass me the bowl, please?” she said.

He handed it to her. She picked up the spoon still stuck in the pa-pier-mâché and stirred it halfheartedly. “Do you think it needs more rakı? That is what you used, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And yes.” He scrambled on his knees to retrieve the bottle and gave it to her. She tipped a few more drops into the bowl.

“I should like to make a mold of your face, Gustave. Would you mind?” Her lips, he noticed, were chapped and starting to peel.

He liked the idea, just as he liked it when she stared at him. “Please do.”

Neither of them moved.

Grinning, she said, “I think you should lie down, don’t you?”

If she were any other woman, he’d have thought she was seducing him. Which she wasn’t, but the thought set him tingling anyway as he reclined on the kilim rug.

Kneeling above him, she covered his face quickly, spreading the mixture in globs cold and slick as
Maman’s
cold cream. Did skin absorb liquid through the pores? The mere possibility soothed him; he was parched again.

“I think I shall die of boredom.” She smoothed his laden forehead. “Or of idleness.”

“Nonsense. You shall live to be a hundred.”

“What’s the use if I spend it ordering mutton chops and listening to empty chatter?” She tilted his chin up. “Hold still, I’m going to do your nose.”

He had no desire to move. Her touch was exquisite, hypnotic. Delicate as baby Caroline’s, the sort that relaxed every fiber and nerve. He felt all of a piece, one calm texture, like a bowl of pudding, or the sea.

“But if I don’t marry, I have a chance of a better future.”

The masque was tightening, making his skin tingle. It occurred to him there might not be a future. They might not live to reach Kenneh. Max and Joseph might already be dead in their tent while he himself was nothing but hardening dust, a man lying on his back while an attentive and lovely woman rimmed his nostrils with glop. Was it a mere accident that they were alone and completely soused? Though he didn’t believe in God, he’d always allowed himself a secret, halfhearted faith in destiny, in the dexterity, pointedness, and utter appropriateness of fate. If it was good enough for the Greeks . . .

Perhaps he could allow himself to bed her after all. Orgasm was the only thing that silenced his mind, the closest thing to godliness he knew—each
coup
, Creation repeated anew.

Now there was some gorgeous garbage!
Je mérite le premier prix de la merde
.

She turned and scrutinized him. “One more bit.” She reached for something with her hand.

In the next moment, she smeared the mixture over his mouth, blending it into his cheeks and chin with quick, feathery strokes. It felt pleasantly sticky, like jam. Twice, in a gesture he found arousing, she inserted the tip of the spoon to fashion a slit so he could breathe and talk. “There, it’s done,” she said softly. “Now we wait until you are dry.”

“I’ll just lie here,” he muttered through the mask.

“I’m afraid I shan’t be able to capture your eyes or mouth. You’ll have holes there instead.”

This hardly sounded appealing. Weren’t the eyes the portal to the soul?

She wiped her hands on her skirt. “And now I am going to give you my profile.”

Did she mean a drawing of herself? Perhaps by Selina? He’d hang it above his desk, near the
mummy, egret feathers—

“
Look
at me,” she commanded.

He obliged. Turned to the side, she sat stiffly erect, her neck regal, only one eye visible, like the jack in a deck of cards.

“I’m looking.” Was
he
to draw her silhouette?

“If you wish to talk to me, you must address my profile. This is how Sultan Abdulmecid conducts audiences.”

Gustave did not know how to respond.

“I wish I could speak with my family like this,” she went on. “You see, a face in profile is powerful because it’s inscrutable.”

True enough, he thought. It was a wonder the European monarchs hadn’t hit upon this trick. Nothing of her affect was revealed. He might as well be talking to a postage stamp.

“Also, the sultan is frequently seated behind a carved screen, making it even more difficult. I know you are going to Constantinople, so—”

“Mmm.” He had to mutter like a ventriloquist or risk breaking the mold. “I don’t expect to be granted an interview”—he took a breath through his nose—“with the Sublime Porte.”

She leaned over him and dabbed more plaster on the rims of his nostrils. “I want to know how it feels to be so superior that one doesn’t have to look another in the face.”

“That tickles.” His eyes watered from the effort of suppressing the itch.

“I’m sorry. Try not to sneeze.” She resumed her imperial posture. “You may address me now,” she said, with the hard perfection of a struck coin.

“I cannot think what to say.” A wave of desire passed through him.

“Imagine that I am your ruler, your Solomon,” she said to the side of the tent. “What dispute shall I settle for you then?”

He did have a problem. Suddenly he wanted her. But how to plead his case, how to ask her?
I come to you with a rising cock that all day has wanted to crow
. “I can’t think of a thing,” he mumbled, taking care not to open his mouth.

“Then I shall question you. But do try not to move your face.” She asked his age and height, the names of his parents, how many cousins he had. (He was astonished to learn she had twenty-seven first cousins.) She wanted to know if he’d ever been engaged. She told him she wished he were her brother.

Her mouth was neither full nor meager, with a well-shaped upper lip. He wanted to kiss her, a desire perversely strengthened by his inability to do so from behind his mask. She chattered on without emotional force about her relatives and pets.

He dozed off and woke to feel her working the mask free from his mouth. “I would like to kiss you,” he said drowsily.

“My father kisses me on the cheek.”

As she popped the mask free, his face felt suddenly refreshed. “Then I shall kiss you on the mouth, Sultan Abdulmecid.”

Behind her closed lips, her teeth were a fortification. Obviously she didn’t know she was supposed to open her mouth. Drawing back, he lifted her hand and placed her fingers in his mouth. She shivered. Then he reached forward and placed his own finger in her mouth. When he kissed her again, her lips were pliant, her mouth open. She held her breath.