Aegypt

by John Crowley

‘Olga’s here,’ his daughter said, looking in.

  ‘Oh, tell her to come in,’ Effie said. ‘I have to talk to her. Alone. Just for a while.’ She passed the box of chocolates to Sid, and tidied herself.

  Olga was old, a sharp-eyed scarved head necklessly atop a tiny and plump figure, a beachball in flowing garments and heavy gold. Pierce was briefly presented, and was offered a ringed child’s hand and an absurdly deep, grandly accented ‘How do you do’ that might have come from Bela Lugosi.

  ‘My mother’s cousin,’ she told Pierce when Olga had swept on into Effie’s room. ‘From the Gypsy side.’ She took Pierce to the sideboard, where food was displayed, catered, she said, nobody in this house could cook. She talked rapidly, her long earrings that might have been Olga’s trembling as she laughed or bent to the table, explaining family history, Christmas customs (Olga’s visit, her father’s recital on the violin). She lifted a cracker and caviar to her lips with her ringed hand; her breasts were free beneath a cashmere sweater, breasts he knew. She caught him looking. ‘Kind of funny, isn’t it?’ she said, smiling her frank sly smile.

  He had writhed with her in exaggerated lust all morning, on hard platforms draped in dusty black theatrical velvets (the scene was laid in Nowhere, which was cheap). The action Sid had devised seemed to have been derived from the antique avant garde crossed with de Mille depravities, cavorting in abandon, and struck Pierce as operose and quite unerotic, but between takes he could simply look at her, absent behind her mask (once tied on, the masks were in place for the morning), and a strange jaybird freedom rising in him nearly made him giggle. She said she could use a smoke; she wondered what they were to do next; Pierce said he wasn’t sure, he thought now all the men together were to menace the heroine, sort of set upon her – a dark-skinned girl whose mask wore sad raised eyebrows and a red anguished mouth. He wondered aloud if part of the terribleness of this poor Japanese girl’s nightmare was that all the men she dreamed of were both hairy and circumcised. From behind her own painted cat’s eyes – she was a Kabuki sphinx, only lacking wings – his partner looked them over, and laughed, seeing that it was so; she brushed, absently, with her Florentine-ringed hand, the glittering sweat from her breasts (this was hot work), and though with a delicacy of its own it had remained unmoved through all its appearance on film, Pierce’s penis flexed and started.

  ‘I remember the ring,’ he said, taking a cracker from her. Still Sphinx-like, more like her mask than he would have thought. ‘It’s an interesting one.’

  ‘Ugly, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘But it’s got a secret.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She looked at him in an assessing sort of way for a moment, and then around the apartment. Sid and her father were greeting new guests (grandparents? one walked with a triple-footed cane). ‘C’mere,’ she said.

  She led him down a corridor, past Effie’s door, which was partly open; Olga and Effie, hands clasped, were talking in low voices.

  ‘She’ll tell your fortune later,’ she said to Pierce. ‘Really.’ She pushed Pierce through another door, into the bathroom, and closed the door behind them. ‘She’s got cards, too, if you want cards.’ She extracted one dangling earring and laid it on the top of the toilet tank. Then she raised the hand that bore the ring, looking intently at its stone as though it were a fortune-telling crystal, and with the thumbnail of her other hand she opened a catch and lifted back the stone.

  ‘A poison ring,’ Pierce said.

  ‘Carefully, carefully,’ she said. Within the ring was a dab of white matter. Moving with skilled care she took up the earring, and with its shovellike silver pendant she dipped into the ring, brought out a load, and lifted it to her nostril; watching herself in the mirror above the sink, she inhaled it in a quick sniff, her nostril collapsing as though grasping it. ‘Why is it,’ she said, ‘I wonder why it is, that people think Gypsies can tell fortunes. Why is that?’

  He could explain that. He watched, eyes wide, this bathroom a stranger place by far than that loft with its ersatz sex had been. She dipped the earring again and lifted it to him, feeding him, her mouth slightly open, kind nurse administering a powder, patient to sniff it all up, what a good boy. And again. ‘I could explain that,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why Gypsies can tell fortunes.’

  ‘Olga’s good,’ she said. ‘You might learn something.’

  He could explain, he could explain, it was not that he knew nothing else but for sure he knew the reason for that, even as he watched her treat herself again he felt doors within him, behind him, blowing open one by one, doors into the country of that explanation, and it made him grin. She closed the ring, and looking in the mirror she put back on her earring, not before touching its powdered tip with the tip of her tongue.

  She was turning back from the mirror when he caught her up, easily and not swiftly but neatly, as in a dance or an embrace of stars on film, and she melded with him as she had not ever quite done in Sid’s dream though willing enough it now seemed. Pierce marveled: it was as though he had been granted a wish, one of his adolescent wishes: that he could by some means know for sure beforehand that if he embraced a woman he would be welcomed; that he could somehow have already embraced her when the time for the first embrace was at hand.

  There was a knock on the door. ‘Just a sec,’ she said over Pierce’s shoulder. They held each other, listening to the footsteps recede; they kissed again, turning now irrevocably to fire and ice.

  ‘Better go back,’ she said.

  The living room was a new place, the books and pictures and the holly wound with tinsel and twinkling lights gayer now though somehow far off, amusing, richly festive.

  ‘This lady is amazing,’ Sid said, passing them on his way to the buffet, and indicating the old Gypsy aunt with his thumb. ‘Don’t miss her.’

  Olga had set up in a lamplit corner, a little table by her where she spread and gathered and spread a deck of cards.

  ‘I’m next,’ she who had just been kissing him whispered to Pierce. ‘I’m going on a trip.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Pierce said. ‘Isn’t that what she’s supposed to tell you?’

  ‘I need advice. I’m going to be gone a long time.’

  A sense of loss absurd and total fled over Pierce’s heart, somehow only supercharging his present glee.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Europe. With a theater and mime troupe.’

  ‘Mime troupe?’

  ‘Did you forget I’m into acting?’ she said with a grin. ‘Sort of mimes. Spontaneous theater. We’ve got dates and everything.’ She took his arm. ‘I have a stage name,’ she whispered.

  ‘What is it?’

  A superstar expression, dreamy and self-mocking, came over her intelligent fox mask. ‘Diamond Solitaire,’ she said.

  Olga beckoned from her corner with a hand, her other hand fanning and gathering her cards. ‘Listen,’ Pierce said. ‘Can we go someplace?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Later. Where?’

  ‘My place.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Sure. He let her go, and went to look for more champagne; he was thirsty and gloating. There had come to be a steady tremble to him, a tremor, a standing wave of glee and triumph like the wave that stands in a silk banner in the wind.

  What had Olga told him of himself that night? He couldn’t afterward remember clearly; sitting by her he had felt himself for the first time to be truly an actor, and in a play witty and brilliant, which he also watched, a box-holder, first-nighter, wondering what turn the plot would take next and having loads of fun.

  A hiatus in his work: he remembered something about that: an uncompleted thing, she wasn’t sure what, a titanic sculpture (his thought, at her suggestion) which was to take far longer to complete than he had at first supposed, he should be patient. And – since he was thinking of moving far away (he didn’t know that he was) – she gave him a piece of advice, that he should write away to the chambers of commerce in the towns he was
considering, and ask about job opportunities and housing and so on there; which struck him as sensible, as eminently sensible and a surprise coming from an old Gypsy woman in what appeared to be a semitrance. He remembered snow falling outside the window in which the lamp stood reflected.

  Snow was falling too outside the window of his own little bedroom hours later, a silk banner of snow standing in the ghostly streetlight, filling the night with its waving.

  Sid’s movie never opened. It was in that month or the next that there appeared in commercial theaters, uptown theaters, movies that broke open the whole box Sid was promising a quick peek into, broke it all open at last, and nothing done masked, nothing.

  Oh antique innocence, Pierce thought, watching dawn come from the high tower to which she had at last led him; oh lost innocent days that we thought were so utterly, so brutally unrestrained.

  Diamond Solitaire.

  She had left for Europe in the spring, but she had come back; she had danced toward and away from him for a year before they became partners, and often enough had do-si-do’d away again thereafter, only to end up at the end of every figure facing him again, clap hands and promenade.

  Not this time though. Why he was sure of it he didn’t know, but he was sure.

  He went back to the Barnabas credit union to ‘renegotiate’ his loans, to sell, if they would take it, his soul to the company store. There was an anxious wait of a week or more while they studied his whole financial and academic picture (Pierce groaned aloud sleepless on the bed, thinking of the classes he had missed, the office hours he had canceled, it had all got to be a little too much in the past months, too many ashen dawns, too wide and safe a bed) and in the end the news, in two parts, was given to him by the dean of arts and sciences, Earl Sacrobosco.

  The first part of the news was that they would be willing to renegotiate his loans, though on harsher terms than he had hoped for.

  ‘What’s with the money problems, Pierce?’ Earl asked. ‘It really doesn’t look good. You taking flutters on the market?’

  Pierce was mum. Never complain, never explain.

  The second part of the news was that a special course that Pierce had long brooded on, a syllabus for which he had recently devised and which he wanted to try out on young minds the following semester, had been turned down by the curriculum committee. Which in turn, Earl had to be frank with him, was not going to help him with the tenure committee, not combined with this loan business and, let’s face it, Pierce’s continued difficulty in playing with the team, so to speak. A word to the wise; it didn’t appear at this juncture that Pierce had a good chance of being offered tenure at Barnabas.

  ‘I get the general impression,’ Pierce said, ‘that I’m being fired.’

  ‘You have an assured contract for the next academic year,’ Earl said gravely. ‘I’m sure the whole picture will look different by then. Your coming in to see me is a step in that direction. The way I see it.’

  ‘On probation.’ A cold rage was blossoming in Pierce; fled, discarded, and now to be caned and humiliated – he had stood sufficient. ‘It’s inadequate, Earl.’

  ‘Once these present difficulties have been . . .’

  ‘It’s just inadequate. I have taught here for some years, Earl. I don’t really feel I need to prove myself as some kind of slavey.’

  He was trembling, and Earl saw it. Abashed, he said, ‘Well, let’s get it all on paper. And think further . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Pierce. He rose, almost knocking over his chair, anger always exaggerated his natural clumsiness. ‘Nope,’ he said, towering over Dr. Sacrobosco, who looked gratifyingly alarmed. ‘Forget it, Earl,’ he said, ‘that’s it,’ and without another word – he could hear, through the roar in his ears, himself say not another word – he went out.

  That’s it, he said to himself as he went down the terrazzo halls of Barnabas unseeing; that’s it, that’s it, that is it. With this last iteration, though silent, went a sharp downward chop of his hand, as though he were cutting an invisible partner from his side.

  In his tower again, he took out the slab of black obsidian and with a single-edged razor blade crushed on it the glittering crumbs of the last of his store, more precious than gold, by weight far more precious. He took a crisp new twenty from his wallet, not many more where that came from, rolled it into a tube, and with it up his nose he inhaled the matter on the stone in long ardent sniffs, exhaling carefully away from the stuff, and then wiping up the powdery remainder with a fingertip to wipe on the inside of his lower lip, where there were fine capillaries to absorb it.

  God damn Earl Sacrobosco, he thought. Tenure committee. That was Earl and who else. No, he only wanted Pierce for his proletariat, that’s all, piecework, day wages. And then the ax in June no doubt.

  And he thought Pierce would sit still for that, because of the loans.

  Well, he’s wrong, quite wrong; quite, quite wrong.

  He took from the freezer a bottle of vodka – the champagne was gone, all gone – and uncapped it. Outside, green lights like Japanese lanterns were coming on, outlining the bridges, and orange lights outlining the expressways east. Pierce opened the windows and inhaled a tepid and brackish breeze.

  May, the merry month of May.

  On the long radiator that ran beneath the window a copy of the proposal he had written up for his new, now rejected course opened its pages one by one. Pierce picked it up and began to read, champing his teeth, which were as numb as for dental work.

  The course was to have been a complement to History 101, its contents standing in relation to the contents of his history course as dreams stand to waking. History 101 would be a requirement for it. Better yet, History 101 should be taken simultaneously with it.

  The first sentence of the proposal was this: ‘Why do people believe that Gypsies can tell fortunes?’ And the last sentence was this: ‘There is more than one history of the world.’

  Pierce sat cross-legged on the bed, tugging at the vodka, the pages of the proposal spread out around him. At his present height (heart small and hard, ticking loudly in his breast) he felt no self-pity. He felt spurned but potent, Manfred in the Alps, Prometheus on the rock.

  He thought: there’s more than one university in the world, more than one job on offer. There is more than one fish in the sea.

  The closet doors stood open, and he could see the sleeves of her coats and sweaters, the tips of her shoes; in the drawers of the bureau were underthings, jewels, passport, a Florentine ring that had ceased to be capacious enough to bother wearing. He supposed he was to hold these things as hostages, or in trusteeship indefinitely. He supposed if he waited long enough she would at least return for them.

  Change the locks, change the phone. He would do more than that. He would do as he had been done by. They can take nothing further from me, he thought, nothing.

  In the morning though he felt only spurned, not potent; shipwrecked and at sea.

  Spofford and he ate a simple meal, taken mostly from Spofford’s vegetable patch, and when it was finished and the dishes washed up, Pierce retired to the bedroom, the smaller of the little cabin’s two rooms, and lay on the sloping bed which Spofford insisted he take. Spofford took out paper and pen, and by kerosene lantern he wrote (with much pausing for stolid thought) a letter to his Rosalind, while Pierce looked through the introduction to the Soledades of Luis de Góngora, composing mentally the beginnings of his review. The Solitudes are the, are perhaps the best-known, least-read poems of the, de Góngora is perhaps the best-known, least-read poet of his age. Despite the enthusiasm of Shelley, and despite the enthusiasm of such poets as Shelley. ‘Gongoristic’ and ‘Gongorism’ are terms we all think we, we all use thinking we, are terms everyone uses, but the poems themselves and their peculiar, their elaborate, their peculiarly elaborate, the poems themselves are. He turned to the First Solitude. In the sweet flowery season.

  ‘How do you spell idyllic?’ Spofford asked.

  Pierce spelled it. Spo
fford wrote. Pierce read, trying to pick apart the monstrous metaphors that lay in the text like knots of varicolored string, comparing the clever verse translation to the Spanish opposite.

  Now what, he wondered, could be meant by a ‘stone whose light/ Is beautiful, however dark the night,’ which crowns the unworthy head of a dark beast, whose temples (‘it is said’) seem the bright chariot of a midnight sun? The moon, evidently; was this beast then Draco? Who knows? There were no helpful footnotes, footnotes would help the uninitiated reader, the absence of footnotes is. He turned the page. The broken-hearted Youth, shipwrecked while fleeing the wicked City, comes upon help and comfort among simple shepherds. The nerve of this Baroque tongue-twister, emblem-braider, gem-cutter, to imagine simple shepherds.

  O fortunate retreat

  At whatsoever hour

  A pastoral temple and a floral bower!

  ‘Listen,’ Spofford said, leaning back in his creaking chair. Pierce listened, hearing nothing but the constant night; and then, faint but near, like a whisper in his ear, a spooky hollow hoot.

  ‘Owl,’ said Spofford.

  Who?

  ‘Owl,’ Pierce said. ‘Nice.’ He read:

  Here is no lust for power

  Nor thirst for windy fame

  Nor envy, to inflame

  Like Egypt’s aspic race

  Aspic race? Snakes. Gitano is what the Spanish called them; that was ‘Gypsy’ of course; Gypsy asps . . .

  Nor she who, sphinx-like, wears a human face

  Above her bestial loins,

  Whose wily voice enjoins

  Narcissus’ modern seed

  To follow Echo, and despise the well.

  Unbidden, she came so suddenly and vividly before Pierce that he drew breath: her bronze hair cut short like a soldier’s, her Gypsy skin satiny with oil, just returned from Europe by way of the beaches of Aruba, come to pay him a surprise visit. I’ve brought back a lady friend, she said. Her face clear, guileless, no customs cop could have had a hunch about her, but for sure she was she ‘que en salvas gasta impertinentes/ la pólvora del tiempo más preciso,’ what Góngora could have meant by that he had no idea, she who in impertinent salvos blows away the powder once upon a time doled out more carefully – but that lady from Aruba was white, flaky as frost, bitter in the nostrils, they blew it in impertinent salvos, more where that came from.