The Uncertain Hour

by Jesse Browner

  It took a moment or two for her to place him, and when she did her expression changed in only the subtlest of ways, registering neither shock nor triumph nor delight, but simply acknowledgment of his presence, the way one might look at a pair of scissors that one had misplaced and found again. It was an extremely gratifying way to be looked at, at least for Petronius, and it was all he could do to keep from blushing.

  “Well,” she said at last. “Have you come for me?”

  He nodded stupidly and followed her, not altogether discreetly, as she led the way from the market, up the steep cobbled streets, and out the eastern gate of the city that opened onto the lower slopes of Mount Olympus, planted with flowering cherry trees in walled orchards and, higher still, with dark groves of filbert, heavy with pale yellow catkins. Beyond were the saffron slopes, fallow until the summer planting. At last she stopped where the path took a sharp turn to the north, and turned to him, her hands folded demurely in front of her.

  “Here I am, Governor,” she said. “What is it that you want with me?”

  He did not know what to do, or what to say to her, so he had her right there, in the shadow of an overgrown embankment. With her left hand she stroked the hair at the back of his head, smiling indulgently as one might at a child who had just said something clever and poignant, while with her right she pushed at his shoulder, preventing him from kissing her. Although he gave no thought to anything but his own pleasure, or to prolonging the encounter beyond his own satisfaction, she maneuvered herself beneath him with practiced self-interest, as if she were alone with her hand, and climaxed before he did, shuddering throughout her entire body yet exhaling the very barest whimper, and maintaining an enigmatic smile throughout. That smile, tender and superior at the same time, as though she were gratifying the whim of a sensitive boy, was both shocking and intensely, almost painfully, arousing.

  Afterward, he watched her as she lay on a bed of moss absorbing the sun, deep in thought. He was captivated beyond words, and, despite his earlier promise to himself, he struggled to find something to say about his nascent feelings that would not sound trite or precipitous.

  “What it is that you’re about to tell me,” she said without turning her head, “I urge you not to say it.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

  “I’ve been married since I was sixteen, Governor, and my husband still tells me he loves me. It doesn’t help.”

  “You don’t believe in love?”

  “I don’t believe in talking about it. Whenever I hear a man say the word ‘love,’ I check my ankles for leg irons.”

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, then?”

  “No.”

  “And you suppose all men are the same, do you, Melissa?”

  “Oh, I’ll admit you have more money and power than Junius. You’re better looking, more educated, and infinitely more sophisticated than he is. You are certainly more intelligent, and you do make love better than he does. Perhaps you’re even a little more subtle. But in everything that’s truly important, I dare say you are just the same.”

  “And yet you gave yourself to me.”

  “And yet I gave myself to you. Just please don’t talk to me about love.”

  He remained in Prusa for another week, delaying his return to the capital and his official duties on the feeblest of pretexts. They met every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for an entire afternoon, always in the same deserted spot below the saffron fields. It was she who made the appointments, she who determined the amount of time they spent together, she who wordlessly dictated every variation in their lovemaking. Identified from the very outset as a supplicant, he had no say in the matter, instantly relinquished all his authority, so that when she continued to address him as “Governor,” the title assumed an aura of gentle, ironic contempt that he relished. When he had exhausted every possible excuse to the town fathers, whom he nominally continued to consult as his reason for remaining in Prusa, he simply stopped attending their meetings altogether. It must have aroused their suspicions; they could easily have had him followed, but he didn’t care. He would have met her in the central forum, had her straddle him on the steps of the temple of Isis if she had asked him to. Who knew what she told her husband? Petronius never gave it a thought; from the moment he was with her, he was nothing, he disappeared, he was a crumb at the corner of her mouth, thoughtlessly licked away by her indifferent tongue. He was in thrall to her benevolent disdain.

  Was it improbable that he should have succumbed to her so thoroughly, so suddenly? It was not sudden at all—Petronius came to believe that he had been waiting for her all his forty years. As for the intensity of his passion, he had never believed in romantic love, had had no interest in its vocabulary or conventions. Now, wary of exploring the nature of his feelings for his lover, all he knew and all he cared to know was that he was consumed by desire that, in the consummation, made him feel consummately known by the consumer, in a way that he had not even suspected he wished to be known by anyone. He felt like a piece of fruit, a most delicious apple whose sole reason for existing is to be eaten, and that some miracle allowed him to be reborn each time he was devoured, only to be devoured again and again. If this was love, he thought that perhaps it was indeed best that he say nothing to her about it.

  Despite his age, his travels, and his accomplishments, Petronius was strangely inexperienced in the ways of love. Like many men of his class—like Nero himself—he had been debauched by an older woman sent to him by his mother. She had been perfectly competent, and not unattractive, but he had been only fourteen years old and had found the whole thing unpleasant and unnerving, especially when she’d screwed up her face as though she were in pain and howled like a stuck cat in an orgasm that he saw, in retrospect, was surely faked. After that, his experience of physical relations with women had been essentially limited to assignations of convenience with patrician wives either bored with or ambitious for their husbands, and prostitutes of the high and low kind alike—all of whom had every motivation to be pliable and obliging. It was not that he had not had ample opportunity, should he have sought to exploit it, or that women did not find him attractive, which was a matter of indifference to him. It was simply that he had no interest in procreation, no inclination toward marriage (despite its evident benefits for his political career), and no particular talent for emotional intimacy. Other men, he gathered, used sex as an instrument of power, revenge, violence, communication, perversion, or the stroking of their tender egos. For Petronius, it was an instrument of release, and nothing more. He had found it to be extremely useful when trying to unwind after a day on the Senate floor or the battlefield, and at its very best the act might perhaps evoke certain transient feelings of invincibility or belonging, but not for long and certainly not for keeps.

  But all that changed irrevocably in Prusa. It was her he needed, not just anybody. It was her body, and her body alone, that he craved. In her arms, he soon found it almost inconceivable that he had ever managed to perform sexually in anybody else’s. Every detail of her body seemed to have emerged fully formed from the workshop of his imagination. More than anything else, it was her smile, the mere thought of which, in the sleepless hours before the dawn of a new day would find him pacing the floor in anticipation of their next meeting, would bring him to tumescence. Like the Christians, who were said to confess their sins to their priest in return for absolution in their god’s name, their lovemaking felt like a form of confession, and he emerged from it each time in the serene confidence that his priestess had peered into his soul and found evidence of his every weakness, his every act of dishonesty and deceit, his every unwholesome impulse. Far from absolving him, however, she delighted in each discovery of his degradation, she was charmed and flattered by it, because each was a tribute and a prayer to her power and beauty.

  She was always there at the saffron fields when he arrived, because she knew how arousing he found it to be observed upon his approach.
Still fifty paces away, he found himself stiffening, and he often took her where she stood, leaning against the embankment, without so much as a word passing between them. Indeed, it was not until their third day together that he even saw her naked body, and when he did it reinforced everything he thought he already knew about her. Hers was not like any female form he had ever seen. Far from the Roman ideal of plump, rounded curves and soft, yielding surfeit, she was all angles and hard surfaces. With almost no fat to cushion them, the tight muscles of her abdomen and buttocks crowded and throbbed against her skin. Her breasts were small, hard, and pointed, her nipples like tiny, rough-edged pebbles, her hip bones jutting scimitars. Her pubic mound was a clenched fist. She seemed to him like the demon goddess of some arcane Eastern cult, ever ready to demand the sacrifice of flesh from her worshipers.

  When their time together was limited—and she never bothered to explain the circumstances that dictated her timetable—they would make love twice, the first time at his furious, incontinent pace, the second at hers, far slower and more deliberate. If they had an entire afternoon together, they went at it three, four times, he glorying in his gathering exhaustion, she unchanging and inexhaustible, as if even his most titanic effort—even had he been able to move mountains or summon earthquakes on her behalf—were a matter of mere mortal busy-work, perceived in all its self-importance from the heights of Olympus. She climaxed as often as he did—she made very certain of that—but it was never accompanied by loud frenzy or followed by languor. Instead, while he lay still prone and panting, she would stretch out on her back, cradling her head in the palms of her hands, and direct her gaze skyward, her eyes darting back and forth, like a philosopher pondering an issue of great moment. At such times, he learned better than to interrupt her thoughts. Once, when he had sought awkwardly to express the emotion that was pressing painfully against his ribcage, she had turned upon him the most chastening of scowls.

  “Words are for speaking the truth, Governor,” she’d said coolly. “If you insist on loving me, you are far more likely to express it honestly in your silence.”

  He never learned more about her personal history than he had on their first walk together, nor did she ask him any but the most superficial questions about himself, his history, his ambitions. He could not say whether her cool detachment was a form of self-defense or a proclamation of invulnerability. He knew that he was at fault in this—that a more experienced man would not require such things to be explained to him—and his lack of insight made him feel blundering and stupid in her company, but she still made no concession to his confessional urges. That she was unhappy in her marriage, or at least infinitely bored, was a given; that she despised barracks and provincial existence was equally evident; but concerning what she might reasonably expect from the rest of her life, or what she would change if she could, she never spoke at all. Was her marriage childless by choice, accident, or nature? Who were her other lovers, her friends? If asked, she pretended not to hear, or changed the subject, or responded with some irrelevancy. And as for her expectations of him, or of any potential advantage a centurion’s wife might derive from her liaison with the most powerful man in the province, she was as silent on that score as if he were merely a figment of her imagination, as he sometimes felt himself, with perverse, submissive gratitude, to be.

  So it came as some surprise, not long before he was due at last to return to Nicomedia, that she arrived bearing a gift wrapped in muslin.

  “What’s this?” he asked as he unwrapped it.

  “Keepsake,” she shrugged.

  It was a ladle, some eighteen inches in length, of the most translucent, transcendent myrrhine, yellow-green with veins of purple and white. As he slowly turned it in his hands, the purple veins grew fiery in the sunlight, the white alternately milky and tinged with bloody red. The craftsmanship was flawless, the crystal polished to an icelike sheen. Although Petronius had no expertise in such matters, he knew immediately that it was a priceless artifact of some ancient Eastern campaign, for nothing so beautiful had ever been made by Roman or even Greek artisans.

  “Where did you get this?” he asked incredulously.

  “Aulus picked it up years ago at a bazaar in Arrabona. He thought it was pretty, and he passed it on to me to serve wine at drinking parties.”

  “It’s worth a fortune. Did you know that?”

  She shrugged again. “I’ve already given it to you. I can’t ask you to buy it from me now.”

  “Won’t he miss it?”

  “He misses everything, but he won’t miss that.”

  As he cradled it gingerly in his hands, Petronius considered what a perfect, typical gift it actually was, coming from her. It was of immense value—undoubtedly worth enough to change her life forever, had she chosen to sell it—and yet she had given it to him so casually, as if, for foolish, sentimental reasons, he were overestimating its significance. It was the way she gave Petronius everything. It meant nothing to her; whether or not she grasped how much it meant to him—and he was never quite sure that she did, despite the fact that he made no effort to conceal his dependence on her charity—his avidity for every crumb she threw him was a source of endless, titillated amusement to her. That, needless to say, only made him more greedy of her.

  What did she feel for him? Petronius told himself that he did not care, so long as they were together, but it was a lie so transparent that he could not maintain it even to one so beguiled as himself. He must know, but she was consummately evasive. Perhaps, despite her protestations, she was really waiting for him to declare himself first? That he must not do, though his enslavement must have been so perfectly evident that such a declaration would surely have been redundant. In her presence, scanning her face for any sign of weakness and parsing her words for a confession of any sort, he felt like a small child among adults who do not wish their conversation to be understood; he felt that she must be saying something, or concealing something. At times, he felt that she was merely interested in his power and wealth, and would continue to seduce him with her opacity until she had obtained what she wanted; at others, it seemed equally plausible that she needed him as much as he had come to need her, but that, as someone whose entire existence theretofore had depended upon the whims of selfish men, she could not bring herself to throw herself upon his mercy, lest it prove no more merciful than the others’. He could not know, and he began to wonder how he could attach her to him. He was prepared, of course, to make the wildest promises, and to keep every one of them, but he could not do so until she asked for them.

  As the day of his unavoidable return to Nicomedia approached, however, his resolve began to crumble. He could not leave without some token of commitment from her. And finally, on the eve of his departure, as they lay together in the gorse, he abandoned the last tattered shreds of his scruples.

  She stared into his eyes and stroked his cheek with her knuckles, a quizzical smile playing on her lips, as she considered her response. The air was faintly laced with lavender and cherry blossom, and the bees busied themselves loudly in the fruit trees. At last, she said: “Is it really so important for you to hear me say it?”

  “It is.”

  “Why?”

  “I live in fear of losing you.”

  “So if I say I love you, that means we are bound together forever? Is that what you believe, Governor?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “You’ll have to wait, then. You need a clearer head than that to love me.”

  The very day after his return to Nicomedia, word came from the west that every province of Anatolia was to contribute a cohort to reinforcing the eastern frontier, where the war in Armenia was threatening to resume. Without hesitation, and despite its patent unfitness for combat, Petronius volunteered the ninth cohort of the Fourth Scythian legion, and within days her husband had been marched off to muster at Caesarea Mazaca.

  NEREUS WAS AT his side with a towel the moment Petronius lifted his head from the water table.
/>   The plunge had not helped; if anything, his head seemed even tighter and emptier than before, and for a brief moment he felt wholly inadequate to the task before him. He had felt the pull of these memories growing stronger every moment as the evening progressed. Was it, he wondered, the loss of blood that made him so vulnerable to them, or the imminence of their extinction? He knew it to be quite true from his experience on the battlefield that men see their entire lives unfold before them in the moments before death, yet it was not by any means his entire life that he was reliving in these transitory visions. He had scarcely had a thought to spare this evening for his parents, his childhood, his lost friends or the men he had killed in battle. No, these memories were more like the coded dreams of a man troubled by an unresolved problem. They conveyed a simple message, a sibylline instruction not at all difficult to decode, if only—as she had suggested all those years ago—he could manage to clear his head. Just then, sensitive as always to his mood, Melissa rested her cool hand against the small of his back beneath the blanket, and his confusion resolved itself into something lesser, something more familiar, like Proteus subdued by Menelaus.

  “You appear to harbor a special bitterness against Seneca, Lu-cilius,” Anicius was saying. He had dropped his voice, in acknowledgment of the fact that Lucilius had, for some reason, decided to cross the line between idle gossip and character assassination, and that his every utterance in this new, uncharted territory was both irrevocable and chargeable against him.

  “You know, I think you’re right, Anicius. I do feel quite bitterly about him. I’m not sure I even realized it until just now.”