Museums and Women: And Other Stories Read online

  “I never did learn to dance,” Clem said, slightly shifting.

  “Yes,” she said, “I saw in you, too, a stern childhood. In a place of harsh winters.”

  “We had two yards of snow the other year,” Clem told her. “In one storm. Two meters.”

  “And yet,” Ingrid said, “I think the thaw, when at last it comes in such places, is so dramatic, so intense.” She glanced toward him hopefully.

  Clem appeared oblivious within his gleaming placenta of suntan oil.

  The German boy who spoke a little English was on the other side of him. By now, the third day, the sunbathers had declared themselves: Clem, Ingrid, the two young Germans, the bald-headed American, the young English wife, whose skirted bathing suits were less immodest than her ordinary dresses. The rest of the British sat on the deck in the shade of the canopy and drank; the three Egyptians sat in the lounge and talked; the supposed Russians kept out of sight altogether. The travelogist was talking to the purser about the immense chain of tickets and reservations that would get him to Cape Town; the widow was in her cabin with Egyptian stomach and a burning passion to play bridge; the French couple sat by the rail, in the sun but fully dressed, reading guidebooks, his chair tipped back precariously, so he could see the gliding landscape.

  The German boy asked Clem, “Haff you bot a caftan?”

  He had been nearly asleep, beneath a light, transparent headache. He said, “Bitte?”

  “Ein caftan. You shoot. In Luxor; vee go back tonight. He vill measure you and haff it by morning, ven vee go. Sey are good—wery cheap.”

  Hatcheapsuit, Clem thought, but grunted that he might do it. His frozen poise contended within him with a promiscuous and American quality that must go forth and test, and purchase. He felt, having spurned so many scarabs and alabaster vases, that he owed Egypt some of the large-leafed money that fattened his wallet uncomfortably.

  “It vood be wery handsome on you.”

  “Ravishing,” the young English wife said behind them. She had been listening. Clem sometimes felt like a mirror that everyone glanced into before moving on.

  “You’re all kidding me,” he announced. “But I confess, I’m a sucker for costumes.”

  “Again,” Ingrid said, “like a Bergman film.” And languorously she shifted her long arms and legs; the impression of flesh in the side of his vision disturbingly merged, in his sleepless state, with a floating sensation of hollowness, of being in parentheses.

  That afternoon they toured the necropolis in the Valley of the Kings. King Tut’s small two-chambered tomb—how had they crammed so much treasure in? The immense tunnels of Ramses III; or was it Ramses IV? Passageways hollowed from the limestone chip by chip, lit by systems of tilted mirrors, painted with festive stiff figures banqueting, fishing, carrying offerings of fruit forward, which was always slightly down, down past pits dug to entrap grave-robbers, past vast false chambers, toward the real and final one, a square room that would have made a nice nightclub. Its murals had been left unfinished, sketched in gray ink but uncolored. The tremors of the artist’s hand, his nervous strokes, were still there, over three millennia later.

  Abdul, the Egyptian planner, murmured to him, “Always they left something unfinished; it is a part of their religion that no one understands. It is thought perhaps they dreaded finishing, as closing in the dead, limiting the life beyond.” They climbed up the long slanting passageway, threaded with electric lights, past hundreds of immaculate bodies carried without swing. “The dead, you see, are not dead. In their language, the word for ‘death’ and the word for ‘life’ are the same. The death they feared was the second one, the one that would come if the tomb lacked provisions for life. In the tombs of the nobles, more than here, the scenes of life are all about, like a musical—you say ‘score’?—that only the dead have the instrument to play. These hieroglyphs are all instructions to the dead man, how to behave, how to make the safe journey.”

  “Good planning,” Clem said, short of breath.

  Abdul was slow to see the joke, since it was on himself.

  “I mean the dead are much better planned for than the living.”

  “No,” Abdul said flatly, perhaps misunderstanding. “It is the same.”

  Back in Luxor, Clem left the safe boat and walked toward the clothing shop, following the German boy’s directions. He seemed to walk a long way. The narrowing streets grew shadowy. Pedestrians drifted by him in a steady procession, carrying offerings forward. No peddlers approached him; perhaps they all kept businessmen’s hours, went home and totalled up the sold scarabs and fish mummies in double-entry ledgers. Radio Cairo blared and twanged from wooden balconies. Dusty intersections flooded with propaganda (or was it prayer?) faded behind him. The air was dark by the time he reached the shop. Within its little cavern of brightness, a young woman was helping a small child with homework, and a young man, the husband and father, lounged against some stacked bolts of cloth. All three persons were petite; Egyptian children, Clem had observed before, are proportioned like miniature adults, with somber staring dolls’ heads. He felt oversized in this shop, whose reduced scale was here and there betrayed by a coarse object from the real world—a steam press, a color print of Nasser on the wall. Clem’s voice, asking if they could make a caftan for him by morning, seemed to boom; when he tuned it down, it cracked and trembled. Measuring him, the small man touched him all over; and touches that at first had been excused as accidental declared themselves as purposeful, determined.

  “Hey,” Clem said, blushing.

  Shielded from his wife by the rectangular bulk of Clem’s body, the young man, undoing his own fly with a swift light tailor’s gesture, exhibited himself. “I can make you very happy,” he muttered.

  “I’m leaving,” Clem said.

  He was at the doorway instantly, but the tailor had time to call, “Sir, when will you come back tomorrow?” Clem turned; the little man was zipped, the woman and child had their heads bent together over the homework. Nasser, a lurid ochre, scowled toward the future. Clem had intended to abandon the caftan but pictured himself back in Buffalo, wearing it to New Year’s Eve at the country club, with sunglasses and sandals. The tailor looked frightened. His little mustache twitched uncertainly and his brown eyes had been worn soft by needlework.

  Clem said he would be back no later than nine. The boat sailed south after breakfast. Outside, the dry air had chilled. From the tingling at the tip of his tongue, he realized he had been smiling hard.

  Ingrid was sitting at the bar in a backwards silver dress, high in the front and buckled at the back. She invited herself to sit at his table during dinner; her white arms, pinched pink by the sun, shared in the triumphant glaze of the tablecloth, the glowing red lamp. They discussed religion. Clem had been raised as a Methodist, she as a Lutheran. In her father’s house, north of Stockholm, there had been a guest room held ready against the arrival of Jesus Christ. Not quite seriously, it had been a custom, and yet … She supposed religion had bred into her a certain expectancy. Into him, he responded, groping, peering with difficulty into that glittering blank area which in other people, he imagined, was the warm cave of self—into him the Methodist religion had bred a certain compulsive neatness, a dislike of litter. It was a disappointing answer, even after he had explained the word “litter.” Reckless on his third pre-dinner drink, he advanced the theory that he was a royal tomb, once crammed with treasure, that had been robbed. Her white hand moved an inch toward him on the tablecloth, intelligent as a bat, and he began to cry. The tears felt genuine to him, but she said, “Stop acting.”

  He told her that a distressing thing had just happened to him.

  She said, “That is your flaw; you are too self-conscious. You are always in costume, acting. You must always be beautiful.” She was so intent on delivering this sermon that only as an afterthought did she ask him what had been the distressing thing.

  He found he couldn’t tell her; it was too intimate, and his own part in provoking
it had been, he felt, unspeakably shameful. The tailor’s homosexual advance had been, like the child’s feigning a crippled arm, evoked by his money, his torturing innocence. He said, “Nothing. I’ve been sleeping badly and don’t make sense. Ingrid: have some more wine.” His palms were sweating from the effort of pronouncing her name.

  After dinner, though fatigue was making his entire body shudder and itch, she asked him to take her into the lounge, where a three-piece band from Alexandria was playing dance music. The English couples waltzed. Gwenn, the young wife, Frugged with one of the German boys. The green-eyed Egyptian woman danced with the purser. Egon, the German boy who knew some English, came and, with a curt bow and a curious hard stare at Clem, invited Ingrid. She danced, Clem observed, very close, in the manner of one who, puritanically raised, thinks of it only as a substitute for intercourse. After many numbers, she was returned to him unmarred, still silver, cool, and faintly admonitory. Downstairs, in the corridor where their cabin doors were a few steps apart, she asked him, her expression watchful and stern, if he would sleep better tonight. Compared with her large eyes and long nose, her mouth was small; she pursed her lips in a thoughtful pout, holding as if in readiness a small dark space between them.

  He realized that her face was stern because he was a mirror in which she was gauging her beauty, her power. His smile sought to reassure her. “Yes,” he said, “I’m sure I will. I’m dead beat, frankly.”

  And he did fall asleep quickly, but woke in the dark, to escape a dream in which the hieroglyphs and pharaonic cartouches had left the incised walls and inverted and become stamps, sharp-edged stamps trying to indent themselves upon him. Awake, he identified the dream blows with the thumping of feet and furniture overhead. He could not sink back into sleep; there was a scuttling, an occasional whispering in the corridor that he felt was coming toward him, toward his door. But once, when he opened his door, there was nothing in the corridor but bright light and several pairs of shoes. The problem of the morning prevented him from sinking back. If he went to pick up his caftan, it would seem to the tailor a submission. He would be misunderstood and vulnerable. Also, there was the danger of missing the boat. Yet the caftan would be lovely to have, a shimmering striped polished cotton, with a cartouche containing Clem’s monogram in silver thread. In his agitation, his desire not to make a mistake, he could not achieve peace with his pillows; and then the telegraphic staccato of sunlight appeared on his ceiling and Egypt, that green thread through the desert, was taut and bright beyond his blinds. Leaving breakfast, light-headed, he impulsively approached the bald American on the stairs. “I beg your pardon; this is rather silly, but could you do me an immense favor?”

  “Like what?”

  “Just walk with me up to this shop where something I ordered should be waiting. Uh … it’s embarrassing to explain.”

  “The boat’s pulling out in half an hour.”

  “I know.”

  The man sized Clem up—his clean shirt, his square shoulders, his open hopeful face—and grunted, “O.K. I left my whisk in the cabin, I’ll see you outside.”

  “Gee, I’m very grateful, uh—”

  “Walt’s the name.”

  Ingrid, coming up the stairs late to breakfast, had overheard. “May I come, too, on this expedition that is so dangerous?”

  “No, it’s stupid,” Clem told her. “Please eat your breakfast. I’ll see you on the deck afterward.”

  Her face attempted last night’s sternness, but she was puffy beneath her eyes from sleep, and he revised upward his estimate of her age. Like him, she was over thirty. How many men had she passed through to get here, alone; how many self-forgetful nights, traumatic mornings of separation, hungover heartbroken afternoons? It was epic to imagine, her history of love; she loomed immense in his mind, a monumental statue, forbidding and foreign, even while under his nose she blinked and puckered her lips, rejected. She went into breakfast alone.

  On the walk to the shop, Clem tried to explain what had happened the evening before. Walt impatiently interrupted. “They’re scum,” he said. “They’ll sell their mother for twenty piasters.” His accent still had Newark gravel in it. A boy ran shyly beside them, offering them soudani from a bowl. “Amscray,” Walt said, brandishing his whisk.

  “Is very good,” the boy said.

  “You make me puke,” Walt told him.

  The woman and the boy doing homework were gone from the shop. Unlit, it looked dingy; Nasser’s glass was cracked. The tailor sprang up when they entered, pleased and relieved. “I work all night,” he said.

  “Like hell you did,” Walt said.

  “Try on?” the tailor asked Clem.

  In the flecked dim mirror, Clem saw himself gowned; a shock, because the effect was not incongruous. He looked like a husky woman, a big-boned square-faced woman, quick to blush and giggle, the kind of naïve healthy woman, with money and without many secrets, that he tended to be attracted to. He had once loved such a girl, and she had snubbed him to marry a Harvard man. “It feels tight under the armpits,” he said.

  The tailor rapidly caressed and patted his sides. “That is its cut,” he said.

  “And the cartouche was supposed to be in silver thread.”

  “You said gold.”

  “I said silver.”

  “Don’t take it,” Walt advised.

  “I work all night,” the tailor said.

  “And here,” Clem said. “This isn’t a pocket, it’s just a slit.”

  “No, no, no pocket. Supposed to let the hand through. Here, I show.” He put his hand in the slit and touched Clem until Clem protested, “Hey.”

  “I can make you very happy,” the tailor murmured.

  “Throw it back in his face,” Walt said. “Tell him it’s a godawful mess.”

  “No,” Clem said. “I’ll take it. The fabric is lovely. If it turns out to be too tight, I can give it to my mother.” He was sweating so hard that the garment became stuck as he tried to pull it over his head, and the tailor, assisting him, was an enveloping blur of caresses.

  From within the darkness of cloth, Clem heard a slap and Walt’s voice snarl, “Hands off, sonny.” The subdued tailor swiftly wrapped the caftan in brown paper. As Clem paid, Walt said, “I wouldn’t buy that rag. Throw it back in his face.” Outside, as they hurried back toward the boat, through crowded streets where women clad all in black stepped sharply aside, guarding their faces against the evil eye, Walt said, “The little queer.”

  “I don’t think it meant anything, it was just a nervous habit. But it scared me. Thanks a lot for coming along.”

  Walt asked him, “Ever try it with a man?”

  “No. Good heavens.”

  Walt said, “It’s not bad.” He nudged Clem in walking and Clem shifted his parcel to that side, as a shield. All the way to the boat, Walt’s conversation was anecdotal and obscene, describing a night he had had in Alexandria and another in Khartoum. Twice Clem had to halt and shift to Walt’s other side, to keep from being nudged off the sidewalk. “It’s not bad,” Walt insisted. “It’d pleasantly surprise you, I guarantee it. Don’t have a closed mind.”

  Back on the Osiris, Clem locked the cabin door while changing into his bathing suit. The engines shivered; the boat glided away from the Luxor quay. On deck, Ingrid asked him if his dangerous expedition had been successful. She had reverted to the orange bikini.

  “I got the silly thing, yes. I don’t know if I’ll ever wear it.”

  “You must model it tonight; we are having Egyptian Night.”

  Her intonation saying this was firm with reserve. Her air of pique cruelly pressed upon him in his sleepless, sensitive, brittle state. Ingrid’s lower lip jutted in profile; her pale eyes bulged beneath the spears of her lashes. He tried to placate her by describing the tailor shop—its enchanted smallness, the woman and child bent over schoolwork.

  “It is a farce,” Ingrid said, with a bruising positiveness, “their schooling. They teach the poor children the langua
ge of the Koran, which is difficult and useless. The literacy statistics are nonsense.”

  Swirls of Arabic, dipping like bird flight from knot to knot, wound through Clem’s brain and gently tugged him downward into a softness where Ingrid’s tan body stretching beside him merged with the tawny strip of desert gliding beyond the ship’s railing. Lemonade was being served to kings around him. On the ceiling of a temple chamber that he had seen, the goddess Nut was swallowing the sun in one corner and giving birth to it in another, all out of the same body. A body was above him and words were crashing into him like stones. He opened his eyes; it was the American widow, a broad cloud of cloth eclipsing the sun, a perfumed mass of sweet-voiced anxiety resurrected from her cabin, crying out to him, “Young man, you look like a bridge player. We’re desperate for a fourth!”

  The caftan pinched him under the arms; and then, later in Egyptian Night, after the meal, Ingrid danced with Egon and disappeared. To these discomforts the American widow and Walt added that of their company. Though Clem had declined her bridge invitation, his protective film had been broken and they had plunked themselves down around the little table where Clem and Ingrid were eating the buffet of foule and pilaf and qualeema and falafel and maamoule. To Clem’s surprise, the food was to his taste—nutty, bland, dry. Then Ingrid was invited to dance and failed to return to the table, and the English couples, who had befriended the widow, descended in a cloud of conversation.

  “This place was a hell of a lot more fun under Farouk,” said the old man with a scoured red face.

  “At least the poor fellah,” a woman perhaps his wife agreed, “had a little glamour and excitement to look up to.”

  “Now what does the poor devil have? A war he can’t fight and Soviet slogans.”

  “They hate the Russians, of course. The average Egyptian, he loves a show of style, and the Russians don’t have any. Not a crumb.”