by John Updike
“That’s how you always were, Alexandra. Always. You hated to take any initiative. Look how long you let that ridiculous fat Italian plumber ssscrew you. I forget his name, he always wore that hat with the stupid little brim, as if to say he wasn’t really a plumber but a country ssquire.”
“Joe Marino,” Alexandra reminded her, and the very name warmed her with the memory of his body, the butterfly shape of dark hair on his back, the salty-sweet taste, like nougat, of his abundant sweat. She pictured his fleshy face when he would furtively arrive and then when, sated but still furtive, he would leave—though what was wrong, in the eyes of the town, with his plumber’s truck parked in front of her old house on Orchard Road, with all its decrepit pipes and fixtures? His face had the hook nose and debauched eyes of a Renaissance prince but wore a slightly baffled look, whether he was plumbing the mysteries of an antique shutoff valve or trying to fit her, his bewitching mistress, into the web of family loyalties that dogged his Catholic conscience. She would tell him not to bother, just enjoy her: she was a gift, Nature was full of gifts, enjoying her took nothing away from Gina, his wife and the mother of five children; but he couldn’t quite let go of the Christian baggage, the great No spoken to our conscienceless appetites. “I always thought the brim was cute,” she said, defending Joe.
“You would. Let’s face it, Gorgeous—you were a pushover. Not as bad as Sukie, but ssleeping around for her was a kind of news-gathering. For you, you put yourself on the line, and it kept breaking your heart. Darryl broke your heart, by never popping the question.”
“I never expected him to.”
“My heart, too. He never popped the question to me, either. Then it turned out he wasn’t a popper gentleman.”
“Ha. Just thinking about those days—aren’t you glad all that’s behind us? Sex, and all that lost sleep, all that hardhearted scheming that went with it.”
“Is it?” Jane asked ominously.
“Jane, we’re old. Nobody wants us, except our grandchildren for the first half-hour of a visit. It’s very freeing, I find.”
“We’re not free. You’re never free of wanting. Sam Smart used to tell me, the cunt is very sensitive, but not very smart. It doesn’t know enough to quit.”
“Oh, that Sam. Frankly—forgive me, Jane—I never could take to him. He was—”
“A ssmarty-pants,” Jane inserted.
“But Sukie—I’m so glad you mentioned her. How is she doing? You must see her now and then, Connecticut being so close.”
“Not as close as you’d think. We have Rhode Island in between. She and I had ssocial differences that were awkward. That clown from Stamford she married—he was in computers when they came in big boxes and nobody but the government could afford them, and then they got smaller and cheaper and he made a fortune in the early Eighties with one of the first word-processors, but then IBM moved in with dirt-cheap PC’s and he was struggling again. Anyway, he was too nouveau and pushy for Nat, and the few times we got together as couples fizzled—upstairs at the Ritz on Arlington Street, when it still served upstairs, I remember as very stilted—and in New York City once when Nat had one of his pompous board meetings, eating up the stockholders’ money with fancy meals and travel tickets. Lennie—that was his name—struck us as cocky and nouveau and I don’t think bothers to be faithful to Sukie. As an escape for herself she’s taken to writing these romances I just can’t believe, they are beyond awful, pornography really, an utter embarrassment, though she keeps sending me copies. So we’ve let each other drop, ever so sssubtly.”
“Is her husband still alive?”
“Why wouldn’t he be? He wasn’t, frankly, classy enough to die.”
This remark stung, implying that Jim’s dying had been, like Nat’s, a tactful withdrawal. Jane didn’t want Alexandra to love anybody. Out of loyalty to Jim, then, and to Joe, she found courage to say bluntly, “Jane dear, I just can’t see going to Egypt with you. It’s too scary and, frankly, too expensive.”
“Oh, but it’s not expensive. Cruises on the Nile, they’re almost giving them away to keep Westerners coming. Think of it, Lexa, floating through the Sahara when it’s below zero in Boston and Taos is all noisy sskiers and ssnowboarders. Snowboarders drove us right out of our ski lodge at Loon Mountain. Nat was doing one of his slow traverses when two boys made him the meat in a snowboard sandwich. He survived, but that was it for skiing at Loon. The ski patrol took him down in one of those toboggans, all swaddled like a baby or a mummy—it was the affront to his dignity that I think he couldn’t get over. Oh, please, Lexa, be a pushover for me. You mustn’t abandon me; I’ve been virtually living at the travel agency. They said if we sign up now we can get there in time for Ramadan. Egypt is most romantic during Ramadan. What with that terrorist nest exposed in Canada, or was it New Jersey, there’ve apparently been cancellations.”
“I bet,” Alexandra said. “Jane, what’s there for us? Why don’t we go to Italy and look at art and little hill towns for ten days?”
“Myssstery,” Jane answered in a travelogue baritone. “The Sssphinx, and the meaning of the Pyramids. Don’t they fascinate you—the biggest buildings ever built, right there at the beginning of civilization, and how and why?”
“I thought those weren’t mysteries so much any more. Stone by stone dragged from quarries is how, and to get the pharaoh into the afterlife was why.”
“Really, Lexa, you’re such a sscoffer. The purpose was to preserve the dead person’s body from damage or disturbance, and to house all the supplies that he, or to be exact his ka, would need.”
“His what?”
“His ka. His soul, you could say, although it’s rather more practical and complicated than that. There’s also a ba. If you’re an ancient Egyptian, your ka is created at the same time you are, on a different potter’s wheel, by the god Khnum—I think I’m pronouncing it right. It’s not exactly the same as the ba, your spirit, which is pictured as a bird, a stork. The ka appears in the hieroglyphs as a bearded human figure wearing a crown consisting of two bent arms. Sometimes it’s represented simply as the two arms.”
“It sounds very depressing, Jane. Other people’s religions tend to be, don’t you think? Other people’s make even your own seem ridiculous.”
“I’m just answering your question, not trying to convert you. You don’t have to know or do anything, just sit on the boat and watch the scenery go by, getting off at various temples, one or two a day. The climate will be divine, and the food, if you absolutely don’t eat ssalad or any raw vegetables and brush your teeth in only bottled water.”
The more Jane said, the realer this un-asked-for trip became. Alexandra liked the idea of our being created on a potter’s wheel, spinning wetly away in its brown juices. The pull of this other woman’s need, when nobody else needed her as much—not even her enchanting little granddaughters, with their long lashes, bright eyes, amusingly expanding vocabularies, and powder-soft, silky warm cheeks—moved her to consider Jane’s plea. The cruise part, sharing a cabin, only cost $795. Jim’s dealings in more or less authentic Native American jars and bowls had generated more savings than she had realized while he was alive. He had tucked money away. He would want her to be comfortable—to have enough room in her widow’s pinched life for a whim now and then.
So there Alexandra sat, she and Jane Tinker, having tea in a British-style hotel behind a large pane of glass in which loomed a huge triangular shadow, the Great Pyramid of Cheops. This august view was vertically sliced by vaguely Arabic strands of colored glass capturing the bright sun outside. Silverware and cups clattered around the two women as they tried to remember what they had just learned. Jane said, “Let’s ssee. The greatest, and earliest, was by Cheops, and the slightly lesser, with its cap of surviving limestone facing, by Chephren, and the much lesser, begun in granite but finished in crude brick, by Mycerinus. What did the guide say?” Jane asked. “His was the smallest pyramid but he was the nicest pharaoh.”
Alexandra respon
ded, “Niceness wasn’t I think paramount for the pharoahs. The guide said, if I heard him right, that the other two, Mycerinus’s father and grandfather, were tyrants, but the gods had decreed that Egypt would have tyrannical rulers for a hundred fifty years, and the quota hadn’t quite been reached, so an oracle told him he would only rule for six years. So they would feel like more to him, he spent them drinking and eating all night, every night. It makes you tired, doesn’t it?” she went on. “All this superstition and oppression, and so long ago, when the world should have been still innocent.”
For the Pyramids, the two women had learned, had been erected near the outset of Egyptian civilization, in the Fourth Dynasty, twenty-five hundred years before Christ. “I don’t see why that would make you tired,” Jane said, faithfully contrarian. “You could just as easily be cheered up by the fact that the Pyramids are still here. Think of it. What in the United States is going to still be there forty-five hundred years from now?”
The two women, jet-lagged, felt transparent and weary in their clothes. It was hot, with a gritty desert wind hard to breathe in. Yesterday, the Cairo airport, to their sleepless senses, had been a nightmare of haggling and shouting, and the tour representative who greeted them seemed suspect, his large dark eyes and sharp small smile darting everywhere but directly at their faces. Even when he had busily corralled a few others belonging to the tour, these were French speakers, boarded at Paris and full of unintelligible questions and complaints, and no comfort to the two American widows. Warned of chicanery in third-world airports, Alexandra and Jane exasperated their hurried escort by being reluctant to part with their passports and return tickets. They were slow to obey his command to follow him, as he threaded a devious path, marked by furtive donations of pastel paper currency, to the baggage belt and the bus waiting, engine noisomely racing, outside in a dusty jumble of traffic. The bus stopped and started, breaking the jammed streets into a sepia album of exotica, of biscuit-colored buildings either delapidated or unfinished.
In the hotel room, the pair of women discovered that they had different philosophies concerning jet lag: Alexandra longed to sleep, if only for an hour, in her bed, whereas Jane insisted that you should be ruthless with yourself, pretending that Egyptian time is now your body’s time. Groggily Alexandra wandered with her on the streets outside. There was something delicious in the air of the foreign metropolis, scented with cooking odors and engine exhaust and a spicy tang like that of mesquite smoke, but she felt helplessly more conspicuous, large and foreign and female, than petite, quick, impervious Jane. Alexandra attracted stares, and felt them cling, where Jane crossly brushed them aside and plowed on. Thus far, Alexandra had been grateful for the other woman’s company: Jane relieved her of the constant decisions and calculations incumbent upon a lone woman. Now she felt, instead, the fear of desertion and betrayal that linking yourself with another person brings. Jane was hard to keep up with as she pushed through the afternoon crowds, a bobbing mass in caftans and galabiyahs, burqas and veils out of which lively liquid eyes glared like the bright backs of captured beetles. The streets narrowed, more tightly lined with assorted wares—intricately worked copper pots and platters, dried herbs in glassine envelopes, miniature Sphinxes and Pyramids in lustrous lightweight metal and lurid plastic, scarabs carved from gray-green soapstone, and, in several successive stalls, in the full flat rainbow of tinted plastics, utilitarian household equipment such as tubs and buckets, dustpans and scrub brushes, scouring pads and wash baskets whose mold imitated the flattened weave of organic wicker. The humbleness of these domestic items, much as one would see gathering dust in a failing small-town hardware store in New Mexico, stirred in Alexandra a sense of common humanity but with it, too, a heightened sense of herself as a blundering, conspicuous alien. Out of these swathed and veiled multitudes around her a knife might flash, as it did years ago for that Nobel Prize–winner one of whose novels she had begun to read for her book club in Taos but never finished. Or a bomb planted to some obscure fanatic purpose might erupt, flattening and scattering all these packed and fragile stalls, her poor body, shredded by steel fragments, exploded with them.
But no Islamic violence disrupted their exploratory walk, which ended where the stalls thinned, and when the city lights dimmed to a few bluish streetlamps, not so much illuminating the pavement below as adding a lighter shadow, as it were, to a darkness of bricks and cobbles and crumbling stucco wherein a few sallow windows glowed with hints of occupancy and pedestrians in pale robes quickly and silently sidled past. The two American women found their way back to the hotel and, squandering one of the few, carefully contemplated “dressy” outfits they had packed, attended the tour’s get-acquainted cocktail party and Western-style welcoming dinner. The other tourists, it turned out, were mostly European—French and German and Scandinavian, plus a cluster of Japanese. Some of the Germans with mannerly stiffness came forward to offer pleasantries in their very adequate English, and several English couples, occupying the same snug niche of insular jollity that the Australians had filled in Canada, did introduce themselves. But the few Americans present, Jane confided with a hiss, were all “assholes.” Their compatriots’ overheard conversation, full of barking, lewd laughter from both sexes, seemed to be mostly about their own crazy bravery in being here, in this hostile Muslim world, at all.
Safe in their own room, Jane and Alexandra agreed they were on their own and would ignore everybody else. Jane swiftly undressed and inserted herself in the bed away from the room’s one window, and five minutes later Alexandra discovered something she had never known about her old friend, for all the hours, at parties and committee meetings and sabbats, over coffee and tea and cocktails, they had spent together in Eastwick: Jane snored. In Alexandra’s experience, Ozzie Spofford, a seasonal hay-fever sufferer, had snuffled in his sleep, and Jim Farlander, especially when loaded for slumber with whiskey and beer, could descend into a snort so loud it would wake him before she resorted to an exasperated poke that would produce, within his cocoon of dreams, a muting change of position. Husbands you could poke; lovers left you before falling asleep. Jane, out of reach in her own twin bed, deep-breathed with an audible friction of inner membranes that knew no let-up. Each long intake arrived at a place of reverberation, a dip into nasal resonance at the exact same insistent pitch, it seemed to Alexandra, as her daytime conversation. Awake or asleep, Jane insisted, with a relentless, unforgiving will, on being heard; there had always been something unstoppable about her, whether she was playing the cello or making a pun or casting an evil spell. As Jane slept, she sucked the oxygen from the air in the inflexible rhythm of a mechanical pump, monotonous and insatiable, each breath attaining a kind of abrasive wall where it scraped and dipped before turning back in the shape of a hook, tugging Alexandra’s brain another notch wider awake; she tried putting herself to sleep by counting these breaths, and then by focusing on the ceiling floating above her as it received, ever fewer, the flickering, wheeling traces of taxi lights on the streets below. But nothing distracted her enough from the sibilant insult of each emphatic snore as Jane’s body steadily rowed its way through the night, storing up energy for the coming day’s strenuous, once-in-a-lifetime sights. Such unconscious self-assertion betrayed, it seemed to Alexandra, a ruthless animus; it came clear to her, in her woozy and infuriated state, that Jane had murdered her husband, by keeping him awake listening to her snore year after year. Remorselessly she had ground little Nat Tinker, with his carefully assembled antiques and memberships, into the dust of the grave.
At last, at an unknowable pitch-black hour, Jane’s sheets rustled and her bare feet padded on the floor. Her elderly bladder had roused her to empty it of the night’s cocktails and wine, and Alexandra, like a naughty child in the mere moment when the teacher is not looking her way, sneaked, as the toilet distantly flushed, into healing oblivion.
Nevertheless, it was not with a fully rested brain that she tried to confront the riddle of the Great Pyramid through the int
ervening glass and dust. She had already ridden around it. Their bus had parked, and the group had made its way across flat terrain, part stone and part sand, that reminded her of the alien surface of the Athabasca glacier. Boy peddlers kept snapping accordion-folded chains of postcards at her; blond camels in a weary finery of blankets and tassels were offered to her by hungry men in dirty gowns. Thinking in her daze to escape this inhospitable environment and perhaps relive her exalting stroll on the boardwalk to Sanson Peak, triumphantly treading the air above a vast spread of dove-gray mountains, she had opted, when pressed by an especially piteous camel-driver, to take, for a number of Egyptian pounds amounting to less than thirty American dollars, a camel ride around the Pyramid.
But sitting on a camel, in the crude carpeted wooden seat that did for a saddle, was nothing like striding along a broad boardwalk on her own two feet, and the four-footed creature beneath her felt a world removed from the thoroughly broken and tractable horses she had ridden as a girl in Colorado and then as a second wife in New Mexico. The camel’s knobby knock-kneed legs lifted Alexandra up too high, with no reins to grip. She was pitched back and forth as if the beast wanted to throw her off, to snap her into space with his hump’s catapult. This camel had too many joints, and his brain, like hers, was only half on the job. She felt mounted, while Jane’s tiny white face far below mirrored her alarm, on pure, pungent, hairy turbulence—the rapids of evolution as it swung around a corner to cast up a quadruped that could cope with the desert. Yet out of politeness and pity toward the camel driver, whose missing teeth possibly made him look more pitiable than he really was, she held on unprotesting as the horizon pitched like an enraged sea, and sand got into her eyes, and the giant cubical stones of the Great Pyramid as they lunged closer seemed about to burst the bonds of gravity and tumble down upon her.
