AEgypt (8 page)

"Oh,” her father said (standing a little apart in the doorway, one hand except for the thumb inserted in his blazer pocket, the other holding champagne), “that's how you know Sid? The movies?"

"Sort of,” Pierce said, no actor at all in fact, though when Sid had recruited him for a day's work, he'd assured Pierce that didn't matter a bit. Sid himself, though he could convincingly, even with a certain air, describe himself as being “in films,” was in actuality a landlord, a born landlord in every sense, which is how Pierce had come to know him, Pierce's building required minute and constant attention from Sid, who would far rather have been at work on his other enterprises, in films.

"A dream sequence,” Sid had explained to him as he tried to conjure heat from Pierce's stricken furnace that November. “A day's work is all. Less. And twenty dollars in it for you too, not that you need the money.” Sid had just acquired the rights to a Japanese film, a piece of mild erotica that he thought might appeal to a certain audience, only it included no male nudity; a high court had recently allowed as how male nudity was not in itself grounds for prosecution, and Sid was sure his film could make money if it went to the absolute limit and could be so advertised. Noticing a scene where his much-tried heroine collapses into a deep sleep, Sid had thought of inserting a dream sequence just at that point, as full of naked men (and women) as he could make it, an Orgy Scene in fact, though “all simulated, all simulated,” as Sid said, gesturing
No
with the wrench in his hand. And masked: the masks disguising the fact that the dream-revelers Sid had hired were neither Oriental nor appeared anywhere else in the film—as well as giving the proper surrealistic touch.

She was masked, then, when he was paired with her, and abstracted further by harsh lights that paled her tawny skin almost to transparency, unreal as a doll. Her mother, an amateur of several arts, had made the masks, and they were clever: just scarves of thin, silky stuff, almost transparent, on which Effie had painted Kabuki faces, beetling brows and outthrust chins. When the scarf was tied over the face, the features beneath gave some life and movement to the painted features—spooky and dreamlike indeed. Her mother had also, out of some fund at her disposal, paid for the shooting. Her husband knew nothing of it.

Pierce understood nothing of this at the time, they were all strangers to him then but Sid, it was only explained to him by Sid in a hurried whisper as they mounted the stairs together to her apartment at Christmas. Sid didn't whisper, though—Pierce couldn't remember him ever mentioning it—that Effie's own daughter had been among the dream-revelers. Or perhaps he
had
mentioned it, at some point, only it had not struck Pierce as it did now, among the family, at Christmas, drinking her father's champagne.

"Oh,” she said, “there's the bell.” She got up from her mother's bed with a bounce and went to answer it.

"Are you going to play later?” Effie asked her husband, who struck a new pose, shy, coy.

"Oh sure,” Sid said. “You must,
must
. It wouldn't be Christmas."

"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."