The Uncertain Hour

by Jesse Browner

  “What have you come to say to me, Governor?” she asked, keeping her back to him.

  “I’ve decided to do whatever you tell me to do.”

  Her shoulders heaved once or twice in silent laughter. “You know I can’t do that,” she said at last.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with telling someone, directly and frankly, what you expect of him?”

  “I’ve told you before. Unless you already understand it, no words can ever explain it, and once you’ve understood it, no words will be necessary to explain it. Just keep trying. It will come to you eventually.”

  “What will come to me? Why must it be so impossible for you to tell me how to love you?”

  She snorted through her nose. “And that is precisely what you must learn for yourself. I’ve waited twelve years for my husband to learn it, and I’ll tell you something—I don’t hold out much hope for him, but if he were to learn it tomorrow, I’d turn you away and never give you another thought. I won’t go to Nicomedia or anywhere else with you until you can prove to me that you are not exactly like him.”

  She went on with her washing. Petronius considered the possibility that all she really wanted was to be made to obey, that somehow, miraculously, if he were to stride across the room, bend her over the trough, raise the hem of her dress, and take her forcibly, he would actually be giving her exactly what she wanted. It seemed improbable, but what did he know? It was as likely as anything else, he supposed; as likely as her extorting him for money, or wanting no money at all, or suing her husband for divorce, or remaining with him for the rest of her days, or learning to be docile and compliant, or sending Petronius away forever without an explanation. He advanced upon her in anger and lust, but stopped after only two steps.

  “Wait,” he said. “What if I ask nothing of you at all? No promises, no declarations until the day you say you love me?”

  She stopped washing and raised her chin. “You don’t have it in you, Governor,” she said thoughtfully. “I know you—you won’t be able to help yourself.”

  “You can leave any time I fail.” Another silence.

  “You promise never to say you love me until I give you leave to do so?”

  “Never.”

  “Never to ask me to say I love you?”

  “Never.”

  “Never to talk of our future together, or of all that you will give me, or of how happy you’ll make me?”

  “Never.”

  She sighed, dropped her shoulders, and cocked her hips. The sheet floated to the far end of the trough, where it bunched up against the drain. A few moments later, the water began to overflow the entire length of the trough, splattering her dress and crawling in a steady sheet toward Petronius. Barefoot, she seemed not to notice, to have lost herself in thought as she did after sex, but then she straightened her back, leaned across for the sheet, unplugged the drain, and resumed her scrubbing.

  “Go back to Nicomedia,” she said. “I’ll make my decision by morning.”

  He awaited her in the interior courtyard of her new house, standing beside the kouros. She was wearing the synthesis of cream-colored Indian silk that he had personally selected for her in anticipation of this moment, along with strands of Arabian pearls that she had woven into her hair. His eyes filled with tears when he saw her, and he fell to his knees and pressed his face into her belly when she joined him in the garden. Her hands gently stroked the back of his head.

  “Now, now,” she said gently.

  The next few months were the most joyful of his life. At last he let fall all pretense of attending to his duties, and devoted almost every waking hour to Melissa. There was no question of her living with him in the palace, but there was nothing unusual or scandalous about an unmarried official keeping a mistress, so he was able to come and go from her house as he pleased—a most gratifying change from the secrecy and paranoia of their trysts in Prusa. She, on the other hand, remained a married woman, and there was always the slim but real chance that she would be recognized in the streets by one of her husband’s comrades in arms or his spouse. To protect her reputation and his own, her forays into the city, either in Petronius’s litter or strolling on his arm, her face veiled, were limited to the early morning or midafternoon, when most shops were closed and citizens at their midday meals and rest. Occasionally, to escape the increasing oppressiveness of the summer heat, they would arrange to meet outside the city walls and take long walks in the hills or along the seashore, admiring the cargo ships, laden with Bithynian pine, boxwood, sour cherries, and saffron, as they plied their way through the gulf to the Marmara, the Hellespont, and the wider Aegean beyond. Finally, when July grew murderously hot, he took a modest villa for her on the shore of Lake Sophon, just a few well-paved miles east of the city, where they would meet uninterrupted for days on end. What his deputies and the citizenry thought of these absences, he never discovered and didn’t care.

  She awaited him in bed each morning, confident that he would arrive long before breakfast, and he always did. With the harsh, particulate light and the noise of awakening commerce filtered by curtains of the lightest undyed cotton sheeting, he would shed his tunic at the door and join her on the linen bedclothes without so much as a greeting. She might conceal herself beneath the blanket, or he might find her naked on her stomach, the top sheet thrown back, her legs spread, a bolster wedged under her midriff. At such times, foreplay was entirely superfluous. With her cool buttocks pressing into his abdomen, she would turn her face to the side and look off into the middle distance; should he attempt to meet her gaze, she would turn her head in the opposite direction. And always, that contented yet ungiving smile played on her lips, as if she were contemplating her next move in a game of robbers and soldiers against an overmatched opponent. Never a moan, never a term of endearment, never an abandoned exclamation of release. The closest she ever came to demonstrating unmediated passion was when she had her little Numidian maid warm a cruet of honey and saffron, which she would slowly pour over him and even more slowly lick off. He tried this trick on her once or twice, but found that he far preferred her natural taste, which was sweeter to him than any honey.

  He tried always to be mindful of the rules, but so delightful were their hours together that he occasionally lost himself in a stupor of contentment. Mealtimes, often following upon long, timeless sessions of lovemaking, found him at his weakest and most forgetful. They sometimes ate at the palace, secluded behind billowing muslin curtains on the great terrace overlooking the harbor; more often than not, they took their meals in the townhouse garden—cool, shaded, and scented with verbena and rosemary—because they both preferred the cooking of her Persian chef, purchased at enormous expense in the slave market of Ephesus, to that of the proconsular kitchen.

  It was the Persian who introduced her to the miracle of saffron, the taste of which would forever recall Petronius to those early months of first love. Lingering in comfortable silence over great platters of rice steamed with raisins and mint; cold salads of parsley, cracked wheat, olive oil, and citron; chilled oysters and urchins scooped raw from the shell with warm scraps of fragrant flatbread; grilled cubes of spring lamb marinated in cumin and allspice; and green Lebanese wine iced with shavings from the Taurus mountains, Petronius was at his most vulnerable to his unspoken yearnings.

  “Do you know?” he said one day, in what he took to be a clever circumvention, “I believe I could go on like this forever. Couldn’t you?”

  She hesitated a moment, then spoke in a noncommittal monotone. “I could certainly go on like this for the rest of the afternoon.”

  “Why not for the rest of our … of your life?”

  “The afternoon is good enough for me.”

  “Must you always be so casual about everything?”

  She closed her eyes and sighed with resignation, then sat up on her couch and leaned across the table to grasp his free hand in both of hers. She stared him intently in the eyes as she spoke.

  “I am truly sor
ry if you think I’m being casual. That is your mistake, Governor. I am anything but, I assure you. I am weighing everything in the balance, everything. And that is why it is so important that you learn to respect my wishes. Can you please do that for me?”

  Throughout that hot summer they fucked in the house, on the waterfront shingle, on the lakeside veranda. It was always the same from their very first encounter: she cool and detached, he desperate to penetrate deeper than it was physically possible to penetrate. What kind of a man is excited by his lover’s indifference, he asked himself? Every time they fucked, it was an opportunity to pose the question in a slightly different way, but the answer lay always just beyond his reach. In someone else’s hands, would this be a difficult riddle to solve? Would it be a riddle at all? For Petronius, it was as unfathomable as the Eleusinian mysteries, and just as foreign.

  Somehow, he came to see, it was himself that he was seeking to penetrate, down to the roots of his need, to where humiliation and shame became the catalysts of pleasure and self-knowledge, but the unbearably intense sensual gratification he derived from feeling perfectly superfluous to his partner became an insuperable barrier to its own understanding, like a fortress made entirely of ramparts but no keep. The arousal was so strong that it made all intellectual effort invalid, distracting, and coarse, and when it was spent its memory was furred with languid regret. Climax was the least rewarding phase of love-making for Petronius, because it brought to an end the blissful oblivion wherein her strength and presence reduced him to the state of nothingness that he had come to crave beyond all things. Did she want him for his money, his power, his name, his learning, his conversation, his devotion? When, in rare moments of lucid solitude, he reasoned with himself that she must want him for something, he found that he didn’t care to consider what it might be, lest the knowledge shatter the delicious illusion that she wanted him for nothing at all.

  He understood quite clearly what he wasn’t to say or ask, but there were peripheral subjects that might be safely broached. He was curious about her husband, a man whose very existence baffled him and about whom she always spoke with a kind of generous resignation, as if he were a troublesome but fondly tolerated pet dog.

  “He’s the kind of man who will stick his face right up into yours and spend the next hour talking about fishing tackle or the best way to polish bronze. He gets so close you can’t even turn your face to breathe. And yet he always means well.”

  “He has never abused you, then?”

  “The only wrong he has ever done me is to marry me. After twenty years of marriage, he still can’t believe his luck. His gratitude is a tomb.”

  “You might have divorced him at any time.”

  She sighed and turned away. It was one of the very few times he had ever seen her give in to sorrow. “It would kill him. And anyway, where would I go, what would I do?”

  “I suppose I’d take you in.”

  She shook her head without turning around.

  But there were moments, many of them, when the urge to speak out, and to test the limits of her proscriptions, was almost too strong to bear. Had she perhaps forgotten what she had made him promise? Had the good life, and the prospect of so much more to come, not weakened her resolve? And did she not recall, as he did with a terrible sense of foreboding, that his term as proconsul would lapse in the early autumn, and with it all this blithe, careless pretense?

  One blistering afternoon of early August, they sat naked on the steps of the boat landing at their country villa, chest-deep in the cold, viridescent water of Lake Sophron, each in a broad-brimmed straw hat against the hazy white sun. They watched a family of swans ease its way along a thicket of bulrushes. Of all the world’s creatures, the swans seemed to be the only ones awake.

  “Have you heard from Junius?” he asked absently.

  “My friend forwarded me a letter from the barracks last week. The ninth is on maneuvers on the Armenian border. Minor skirmishes, he tells me. Nothing dangerous.”

  “He may be there for years, you know.”

  “He retires in a year.”

  Petronius allowed a minute or two to go by in silence, as if the subject had entirely faded from his thoughts. Then he spoke again, in what he hoped was a convincing quintessence of nonchalance.

  “I’ll be leaving Bithynia in a month or two myself, you know.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Have you given any thought, you know, to … to what you might do?”

  “About what?”

  “About coming with me?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think you ought?”

  “Careful, Governor.”

  “Why should I be careful? I’m not exacting any promises.”

  “You’ve done so well up to now. I know what an effort it’s been. I’m genuinely proud of you.”

  “You can’t honestly tell me you haven’t given it any thought.”

  She slid beneath the waters, and there was silence on the hot surface of the lake. She reemerged some six cubits out, her lovely flaxen hair plastered to her head, one onyx earring flashing. She was just close enough to be able to speak without raising her voice, just far enough for her voice to be oddly amplified by the water’s agency.

  “Anything I might say now, you would misconstrue. You’re not yet ready to hear me speak. Please be patient, Titus. There’s time yet for all to come out right.”

  “You called me Titus.”

  “There, do you see now?” And this time, when she submerged herself, she resurfaced beyond earshot.

  PETRONIUS WAS FEELING stronger now. The buzzing in his ears had subsided; his face no longer burned. He pushed himself to his feet, where he remained for several moments, unsteady but relatively clear-headed. Melissa had left the wine bowl on the side table, but he did not yet trust himself to reach for it. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, tried one step, then another, and found that he could manage well enough. His left hand was quite numb, but otherwise he seemed to be in working order still. With his arms braced against either wall, he guided himself toward the center of the house, revived by the feel of cool, smooth plaster against his palms. In the inner atrium, he paused to splash his cheeks with water from the fountain, and presently found himself sufficiently fortified to consider returning to his guests.

  Drying his face against the fragrant yellow wool of his tunic as he crossed the reception hall, Petronius stopped at the top of the stairs that led down to the terrace. The night had turned positively chilly; in setting below Gaurus, the moon had stolen away with any vestige of warmth left behind by the long-departed day, and the stars now glistened in the bed of the night like ice at the bottom of a mixing bowl. The braziers blazed, bright wasps of flame and spark rising on the wind, and a second counterpane of dully gleaming red silk had been overlaid upon that of purple, yet the guests huddled beneath them seemed drained of their party spirit by the labor of feigning to ignore their discomfort. Of course, they would not have presumed to adjourn to the dining room in the absence of their host, but they were clearly ready to move indoors. Well, it wouldn’t hurt them to wait a while longer.

  They were being entertained by a soldier in a hooded military cloak buckled at his right shoulder, revealing the short leather arm-straps of his cuirass and the bronze greaves strapped to his shins. His Praetorian helmet was tucked beneath his left armpit, and the bulge of a short sword was evident at his right hip beneath the fabric of his cloak. Gnipho was dressed for battle, entirely unnecessarily in this posting, yet a touching token of respect for his former commander. He stood at ease on the far side of the water table, his back to the house. Martialis and Pol-lia had noticed Petronius loitering at the top of the steps, but the others were listening raptly to Gnipho, who was no doubt retailing grossly exaggerated tales of his exploits in Asia. Indeed, so thoroughly absorbed was he in his storytelling, and enthralled in his novel role as center of attraction to an audience of the high and mighty, that he failed in a very unsold
ierly manner to register Petronius’s approach. Petronius briefly considered disarming him from behind, a prank that would be much appreciated among the ranks but that would certainly be deeply humiliating to the centurion in present company, and instead cleared his throat at several paces’ distance. Gnipho snapped to attention with barely a glance over his shoulder, and Petronius slapped him on the back.

  “At ease, centurion.”

  “Hail, General.”

  “It’s good to see you, Gnipho. How long have you been back in Italy?”

  “Almost two years now, general.”

  “Left the Third, have you?”

  “Once we took care of Tiridates, there didn’t seem much point in sticking around Armenia. Too much loot and not enough to spend it on.”

  “So you bought yourself a commission in the Praetorians. Splendid.”

  “Wasn’t cheap, but worth every penny, sir.”

  “Captain Gnipho was just regaling us with your exploits in the war, Petronius,” Cornelia said.

  “Was he, now? Did he tell you about the time he saved my life outside Artaxata?”

  “Thrilling!”

  “All lies. It was I who saved him. He’d impaled himself on a broken ox-cart trace, trying to make off with his booty.”

  “The general was the best legate ever served under Corbulo, ma’am, and it was an honor to save him from drowning like a kitten in the frozen Araxes.”

  “Two years the Third Gallic spent under canvas. Murderous heat in the summer, winters so cold men snapped their own fingers off like icicles, up and down the Armenian plateau, the enemy always just over the next hill. Never enough food, never enough water. A grand time was had by all.”

  “All that lived, and some that didn’t. You were sorely missed after your transfer to Bithynia, sir.”

  “How are your men set up at the gate? Have everything they need?”

  “They thank you for the feast, sir, and for the blankets. It’s a cushy posting for them.”