The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (56 page)

“You can’t take life seriously if you can’t enjoy it.” It had never once occurred to Gustave that the commission might actually be important, that it might impress people in Paris.

“You are mad, you filthy cunt licker!”

“Shithead!”

“Asswipe!”

Max slapped Gustave’s head so hard it stung. His skull vibrated like a cello string.

“Shit-eating bourgeois bung hole.” Gustave swatted at him. He would have killed him if he could, he thought with the stirring clarity of rage.

He felt his left shoe pop off. Joseph ran his thumbnail down the sole of his foot, the same way his father used to check reflexes. The foot jumped. He lurched forward involuntarily.

“Enfin!”
Joseph cried. “Keep going,
monsieur
.”

Max grabbed both arms and pulled. “You accomplish nothing but
jackassery,” he said, grunting. “You have squandered your money and opportunities. And I am the one who pays for it, you idiotic prick.” Holding fast to Gustave’s arms, he paused to catch his breath. “Because of you, I have lost Persia.”

Gustave yielded against his will, dragged toward the corpse’s face, that mouth through which every iota of human strength had been mustered in a final cry of pain or plea for help. The mouth would swallow him whole! He bumped along the sharp stone floor, bruising and scraping himself.

“No, the great Flaubert is too refined!” Max shouted. “You whoring wretch! You wanker! If only you would write some reports for the Ministry of Agriculture”—he paused his tirade to pull once more, like a midwife helping to birth a child—“then at the right moment, you could trade your commercial reputation for something more literary. One must make a name. It doesn’t matter what
for
!”

What if Max were right? What if writing well were not enough to ensure success? If the salon were more crucial, if social demerits outweighed the fruits of his desk? “All right!” he muttered. “Enough. I am coming out.”

Max let go of his arms. Joseph released his foot. He looked at the wall; the dead man was behind him.

• • •

The guides stood to one side, hawking up brown phlegm.

The sun was high in the sky, heating the barren cliffs. Gustave, Max, and Joseph lay flat on their backs, unmoving, until vultures began to circle overhead.

“Jesus Christ,” Gustave muttered after a long time. “That was as bad as the night in the wagon with Achille. Worse, because I remember it all.”

Max sat up. “You were scared shitless in there, goddamn it. Just admit it.”

Gustave sat up, too, resting his arms and head on his knees. “Shut your mouth, will you?”

Joseph pricked up his ears. “
Messieurs
, no more.
Je vous en prie!”

“He is right.” Gustave said.

“Just admit your were stuck. Be humble for once in your life.”

“About my commission,” he began, getting to his feet.

“What about it?”

He sensed Max’s eagerness. “Did you actually expect me to go from city to city, asking ‘How much oil do you shit out here? How many potatoes do you cram into your trap?’ You have a legitimate project of interest, while I—”

“While you were treated like a king because of your commission? Did you keep that in mind when you decided to do nothing in exchange for the protection and largesse of your country?” Max stood and brushed off his trousers with no effect. The dirt was oily and ground in.

Watching Max’s futile gestures, it occurred to Gustave that his friend was even stupider than he’d allowed. Suddenly he found himself succumbing to laughter, shrieking like a maniac. “My commission?” he finally managed. “No one cares about that, you idiot. We were treated well because we are
French
, not because of a wad of paper. Have you never noticed that the Egyptians revere Napoleon like a god?”

Joseph stepped between them. He came up to Gustave’s nose.
“Messieurs—”

“Must you always bellow like an ox?” Max asked, plainly at his wit’s end. “You are a bumpkin, and you will always be a bumpkin.” He scuffed at the gravelly ground. “Anyway, this is not about our commissions,” he added cryptically.

Gustave couldn’t resist. “Then what is it about?”

“Here’s a hint,” Max said, dripping contempt. “What is the one thing that can ruin the friendship between two people?”

Two’s company, three’s a crowd. Wasn’t that the old saw?
It had no bearing on their situation, though. Not wishing to venture a stupid guess, he waited for Max to answer his own question.

“A third person. Particularly a woman.” Max glared at him. “You have been distinctly selfish about the lovely and lonely Miss Nightingale.
Am I blind? What in Christ
is
it? Are you, perhaps, taken with her? Have the lovebirds had a spat? Did you fail to fuck her?”

Gustave’s fist was five centimeters shy of Max’s jaw when Joseph’s forearm intervened. The guide screamed in pain and clutched his elbow. Gustave immediately apologized to him. Glowering, Max mounted his donkey and started down the trail in a silence broken only by the clatter of hooves on rock.

• • •

That night on the
cange
, Gustave and Max slept like a young couple feuding after their first fight. In their separate berths, they turned their backs to each other and hugged the walls, pulling up the covers around their ears.

Max was right about one thing: he had certainly not shared Miss Nightingale with him—not one word of what they had discussed or written, nothing about their walks on the beach at Koseir, at Philae, at Kenneh, and nothing of what transpired in the desert while Max was ill. But the source of the venom he regretted spewing at Max, was, he realized, much simpler: he hadn’t the least desire to be with him, in the grotto, even on the
cange
. He would have preferred to spend his time with her, as ridiculous as that was. A woman never could have squirmed through a tar pit, nor endured his lubricities when the spirit moved him, nor accepted that lasciviousness was merely beauty with a hard-on. Though she was neither an entry in the
Encyclopedia of the Cunt
nor a potential reader for it, at the moment she, not Max, was his closest friend. He could say things to her without being attacked or made fun of. He thought she understood him, and he was beginning to understand her.

The question was whether he should make the effort to continue their association. And if he did, what would be the result? Even with the mercury treatment, the syphilis might preclude a normal sexual bond. He couldn’t stand the thought of passing her the disease. On the other hand, he couldn’t bear the thought of
not
seeing her again. And if he saw her once, he’d want to continue seeing her, talking to her, reading to her, receiving letters, replying to them. Could he
control his desire as well as flaunt the proscriptions of the civilized world? There would be so much to explain, so much to overcome. The task would never end or it would end badly.

Debauchery, which he had practiced so assiduously, was not always satisfying. Perhaps that was why one of the things he liked about her was the way he was in her presence. Not that he was smarter or more high-minded, but he was different—more trusting, more trusted. Still, he couldn’t always be the sensitive soul she found so endearing and that was such a refreshing change for him. What if she began chattering again, for example? One way or the other, she would wear him down. He would hate himself for disappointing her, and yet it seemed inevitable that he would.

First Kuchuk Hanem, now this. He was sick of romance. Love, he reflected abruptly, seemed to be a form of perfection akin to art and, therefore, largely unattainable. Indeed, rarity was essential to its power and appeal. This thought had vast ramifications, he realized. For one thing, his second visit to Kuchuk Hanem appeared in a new light. He could actually
relish
his bitterness now without feeling like a fool. Every love he’d ever known, beginning on the beach at Trouville, pointed toward it: love was something to anticipate and recollect, to aspire to, but not to expect or rely on.

• • •

The rest of the Nile trip passed quickly: Hamarna; then Antinoöpolis, a city reduced to a few ancient marble columns where he made squeezes; then Asiyoot and Benisoof, where Joseph presented a final letter from his wife for translation. Gustave took his time mulling it over.

“
Vite, vite
, read her to me,” Joseph urged.

Unlike its fellows, it contained no mention of money, but rather a list of what she wished to do upon Joseph’s return: take me to hear music, take me to Stars and Moon, the new café in the Greek quarter. Did you buy me any gifts?

“I am a bit embarrassed,” Gustave said, “it is so personal, so intimate.”

“Just read to me,
monsieur
. I excuse you.”

“She says she is going to fuck your brains out when you get home.”

Joseph shrieked his happiness.

“And she asks you to please burn her letters.”

Joseph’s eyes glittered as he dutifully lit a small bonfire on the brazier that evening after dinner.

• • •

On the twenty-fifth of May, Cairo glimmered into view. As they glided past Giza, the pyramids seemed to float, suspended in the clouds. They reached the yellow walls of Solimon Pasha’s garden and the Grande Princesse’s palace, then docked at last at Bulak, the westernmost fringe of the city sprawl and home to most of the sailors.

Breasts, thighs, scented hair: Cairo, he mused, meant a return to the world of women. Miss Nightingale was not the only one awaiting a man in the glorious city. In rooms with carved wooden grilles beyond the grimy harbor, freshly depilated wives, daughters, whores, and mothers awaited the crew. Plots would thicken, pleasures and problems bubble up. Daily life could resume in its endless chain of caprice.

In Bulak the first evening, they dined with Rais Ibrahim’s uncle. Bad news, however, greeted the captain. The new wife with whom he’d so ardently anticipated reuniting had tried to murder his younger brother by secreting a needle in a piece of bread. His uncle had sent her packing to the house of her father. After dinner, the captain decided to divorce her.

The next day was taken up with pay calls on the
cange
and gut-wrenching farewells to the crew. To Hadji Ismael, Aouadallah, and Rais Ibrahim, Gustave gave big baksheesh. He wept, knowing he’d never see them again. The crew scattered, some bound for home, others for drinking, whoring, and gambling binges while the two Frenchmen set off on donkeys for Cairo proper.

29

CALL FROM GOD

N
early the end of May and still no word from him. Charles was kinder than usual, so solicitous he embarrassed her. Such a public event, her disappointment. But she would be strong; she would not succumb, she had promised herself. It was just a trial like all the others. She never expected to be happy, like other people. Did God even
care
about happiness? She thought not. What was love anyway but a frivolous yielding of oneself to another, just half a step from willing ignorance!

Three days before her departure for Greece, her dreaming returned with a vengeance. She lay abed, lost in her reveries, which negated utterly her situation. Her dreams were not of her storied greatness, or her desire to be of use in the world, but of
Mme. Florence Flaubert
. No. Not that, not marriage. But they did meet again. And after that, there were many trysts, twice a year in Paris alone, where Clarkey was an accomplice or, alternately, a married matron who, regressing to her Scottish roots, betrayed a newly happy Florence. Cut dead by the blood mob, Flo took a position in Margate as a governess, an even more embittered Miss Christie. And crueler, it turned out . . .

No. No! In Paris, they ate at the best restaurants, joking and plotting over wine. By then they had their own private and sophisticated
language. They’d invented an entire culture!
We are the Floflau tribe
, giggling behind everyone’s back. He introduced her to clergy, which he had no use for, but was acquainted with from writing
Saint Anthony
. She visited convents and spoke at length with nuns and mothers superior, picking their brains for projects to secularize or, more accurately, Protestantize.

His mother, conveniently, soon died, and she took up residence in Croisset. They engaged a nursemaid for baby Caroline and she became the dead Caroline, not to the child, who had never known her mother and thus had no expectations, but to Gustave, who still mourned his best playmate. Now he had Rossignol instead. They had separate apartments with separate bedrooms:
amitié amoureuse
. Each afternoon he read aloud what he had written while she had slept the night before. And each evening, after dinner, she shared her schemes to improve the world, though these remained vague, overshadowed by their consuming friendship, by love. Sometimes theirs was a bodily love; at other times it remained platonic. This was the most perplexing aspect of the lives she lived, lying abed at the Hôtel d’Orient.

Would she become as precious to him as his whores? Would she overcome her bodily discomfort and shame? Their relationship was easiest when the night in the tent was not repeated. But in sweeter dreams, they lay in bed together as he gently stroked every inch of her, fondling her hair, tracing her eyebrows, her umbilicus (“Yours is folded like a camellia bud”), examining the inside of her mouth, the bottoms of her feet, places she’d never seen or wondered about. She loved it when he studied her as closely as a jewel, when he called her his most precious artifact from Egypt. One day he shyly asked if he might look
there. Oh dear God
. Coyness did not suit her. She hadn’t pretended not to understand, but turned her head, pulled down the cover, and parted her knees.

Then his desire asserted itself, and . . . what happened next? She could easily evoke his chest, arms, legs, and back because she‘d seen some part of them. (Never his underarms, it saddened her to realize.) She liked all of him—the way he walked, rolling slightly forward on
the balls of his feet, as if he were excited to see where they led him; his hands, with their no-nonsense fingers and powerful wrists. Yes, she enjoyed the
thickness
of his body, his meaty calves, the curving and angled planes of his knees glimpsed only through his trousers or robe, like a piece of sculpture under a drape. He kept his beard scrupulously clean even when the rest of him wasn’t, not like those men whose whiskers bore a scrapbook of the week’s meals. But the parts of him she hadn’t seen frightened her. They might be ugly, if nephew Shore were any indication. Two sacs like a bull’s. A flaccid hose without symmetry, nothing to admire from the point of view of pure
form
. She tried to imagine seeing it for the first time, before it engorged. (She knew the technical terms, had seen the farmyard examples. They were not reassuring.) Would it pale as it stretched or flush a dull purple with the added blood? Or was the adult penis sheathed and bright pink when it emerged, like a dog’s? It might not match the rest of him, the way some black-haired men grew auburn mustaches. It was all so horrid, so irregular!—at odds with the rest of his beauty and yet, she knew, the most important part. His maleness itself. His . . .
member
? Such an odd appellation. If only she had a brother, she’d know so much more about the mysterious thing. That was what she and Parthe called it when they were younger: the
thing
. Baby Shore was cute except for his little
thing
. Was WEN’s thing long and slender as he was? Small or large, fat or thin, she wouldn’t care. It was not the part of Gustave she loved most, merely the part she would have to tolerate. If he chose to parade about naked in her presence, which she imagined he would do quite naturally—she’d look elsewhere. But oh! Ugh! The thought of them joined by this finger of flesh, of the grunting urgency that would overtake him, turning him into an animal, every bit of his finer self subsumed once they were doing it—