The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

8

NOT A WOMAN

Max by his side, Gustave was pleasantly tipsy as he trudged home carrying his portmanteau with the half dozen squeezes he’d intended to show his hosts. No surprise, really, that he hadn’t. He hardly took pride in them or considered them relevant to his identity. He had shown the English party the ridiculous certificate charging him with authoring agricultural reports. The Bracebridges had pored over it admiringly after the meat course. Written the way a puffer fish would write if it could, he had joked, to their delight, it had the single virtue of making him sound like somebody of importance—just not somebody he would actually wish to be.

On the other hand, he had lied to Miss Nightingale when she asked if he were writing anything at present. L’Encyclopédie du Con was proving a marvelous exercise—a treatise on the cunt that would ignite glorious mêlées if it ever saw the light of day. He’d allow no treacly lyricism; neither did purely clinical description appeal to him. Being the son of a surgeon, he’d seen every part of the body on the dissecting table at the Hôtel-Dieu—the unlikely valves and pumps within the fist of the heart, the hinges and sockets of the joints, the fine seams of the skull. He knew that sheaths of muscles overlaid the organs like a divinely stitched corset. The body, even dead, had never frightened him.

In his fantaisie on the p-ssy, images bloomed in his mind, casting a wide net of metaphorical association. Kuchuk Hanem’s mons Venus took its rightful place alongside the warm tints of Provençal houses; her shaved labia plumped into sharp focus alongside sand dunes, plucked chickens, and jeweled glue pots. How had he begun his paragraph on the imagined twat of his brother’s wife? Yes—“a red light that shines on him the way the sun shines on manure.” The writing was not a literal record, but the result of imagination fused with invective and sometimes with love. For surely he had been in love with Louise, hadn’t he? He thought back to his second meeting with her. She had worn yellow leather gloves with a single button at the wrist that left a coin of flesh where he had pressed his finger, then his lips. They’d removed to his hotel for a sexual triumph that lasted two days and nights. Yes, hers was next. Wheat fields after a rain, the open mouth of a chick . . .

The air had cooled as the moon rose in the sky and the wind picked up. Max, toting his unwieldy photo cases, paused to button up his shirt. They picked their way along the shore beneath escarpments that rose up steeply on either riverbank into a wide canyon. They’d moored the boat last in a fleet of dahabiyahs, as far away from their fellow Europeans as possible. Had it not been for Miss Nightingale and her ridiculous maid, he would never have agreed to such a visit. But he could not refuse her. He always found it difficult to be cruel in person (as opposed to in writing). And Max, he knew, welcomed the chance to socialize. His brilliant friend was a gregarious and polished man who enjoyed small talk even if he sometimes approached people the way a dentist eyed a mouthful of rotten teeth.

“I am forced to admit that they were quite pleasant, as pleasant goes,” Max remarked as they emerged from beneath a jutting cliff.

“Yes, they were. But then it isn’t hard to be nice if one is wealthy. I think they must be loaded.” They passed a dahabiyah almost as impressive as Miss Nightingale’s where someone was playing the flute. No, it was a duet. Off-key violin arpeggios reached them on the breeze. The sound was haunting.

“My God, Mozart on the Nile.” Max groaned.

“I don’t think it’s Mozart, Du Camp Aga, though I do detect a melody buried in the whining.”

“What did you and Miss Nightingale talk about off to yourselves?”

The music droned on, fainter and more sour as they passed its source. A swampy odor—the Nile at low tide—filled his nostrils. He’d become fond of the sulfurous fug, which smelled like fish and sex. Slowing his pace, he answered, “What did you and the Brace-bridges discuss?”

“Well, Charles Bracebridge is no slacker. Reads Latin and Greek, has a villa in Athens, loves Byron—”

“Loves Byron?”

“Apparently. They’re both great Hellenophiles.”

“One point in their favor, then.” He made a mental note to ask Bracebridge about the great poet. “That raises them from the ranks of épiciers and drudging professionals, don’t you think, effendi?”

The cange came into view, its upper half pewter in the moonlight, the lower portion dissolved in the black of the river. The sentry called out something in Arabic and Joseph jumped up, tied a blanket around his naked body, and hailed them. With the sentry’s help, he hastily deployed the gangplank.

“They are definitely elites,” Max said. “But I reserve judgment on the young miss since you monopolized her completely. Quit stalling and tell me what you and she discussed.”

Joseph galloped down the gangway and removed Max’s cases to the boat.

“Trouble,” Gustave said, stopping just short of the cange. “We discovered we are both troubled.”

“Sounds like you passed confidences.” Max playfully blocked his way onto the boat and leered at him.

“We were just making idle chatter.”

“She hasn’t got much of a figure, has she?” Max moved aside and they boarded the boat. “Does she even have breasts?”

Max’s taunting annoyed him. He suddenly felt protective of Miss Nightingale’s breasts, whatever their size, whether bee stings (most likely) or lemons. “She isn’t like that. I mean, I don’t think of her as a woman.” He found it difficult to describe her, nor did he want to. “More a kind of presence.”

“What does that mean, a presence? You make her sound like a ghost.”

They unfolded stools and sat down. “I’m not sure.” He lit his pipe. “I said it in jest.”

“Jest my eye. You spent most of the evening with the little English flower.” Max packed his chibouk and lit it.

“Piss off!” Gustave clapped him on the shoulder. “The truth is I was dreaming of Kuchuk Hanem the whole time. And don’t forget, you still owe me a photograph of her.”

“The great alma, Kuchuk Hanem.” Smoking his chibouk, its stem more than a meter long, Max resembled a long-billed bird. “Would she spread her legs, I wonder, for the camera?”

“She might, if we pay or flatter her enough.” With the side trip to Koseir, how many more weeks until they returned to Esneh? Three? Five? He would shower her with gifts. Dates. Ribbons. Henna to decorate her hands and feet and pet sheep. One of his quills? She was illiterate, but might find a sexual use for it. “We should make the picture in her house, not on the boat,” he cautioned. “In public, she tries to pass herself off as a schoolmarm.”

“Good point.” Max yawned, then announced he was retiring. He planned to work the next day. Bidding good night, he descended to his cabin, smoke floating up behind him in a wispy wake.

Gustave expelled a few smoke rings, watching them expand and wobble into nothingness.

He was as surprised by what he had said about Miss Nightingale as Max was. Not a woman! Well, she was certainly not a candidate for a muse or mistress, though he could not help but compare her to Louise, who also had a brain and an education but was devoting her life, it seemed, to the martyrdom of love, sacrificing herself on the altar of his unrequital. In the end, he preferred his prostitutes, who gave a convincing impersonation of undying love and harbored no expectations afterward. Nor any literary ambitions. No, he must never give Louise a foothold again. The gifts he had bought her in Egypt, he decided, were obeisance to past trysts, not an invitation for future ones.

Miss Nightingale, by contrast, was not glamorous or, apparently, amorous. Earnest suited her best. Her gaze was sharp as a falcon’s, and as unsettling. She burned with utter sincerity; commitment to some ideal steadied her gaze. If she knew how to flirt, she hadn’t displayed her talent tonight. But she was kind and sympathetic—her consoling touch on his arm had moved—no—melted him.

He drew one more time on the pipe, then tapped it on the side rail, spilling the embers overboard. Just down the beach, light from a native hut illuminated three camels perched on the sand like unwieldy prehistoric birds. They were tethered to an acacia tree, their slender knobby legs folded beneath them, their long necks tucked against their flanks. He listened to the creaking of the masts and rigging, the soft clatter of the wind in the palm fronds, the lulling slosh of the waves. A bud of joy flowered in his chest.

He was drunk and exhausted. Why, he asked himself, had he offered to teach her about making squeezes when he hated it so?