The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [71]
She and I sit on a couch at JP’s, this private club of hers, and she’s stroking my cheek. This is a different evening. She’s very drowsy, and I can see myself, a little hangdog-looking. This is a bit surprising, you’ll agree, under the circumstances, but I don’t take the cheek stroking to heart. You see, she’d left me on the couch for a bit, went upstairs to that balcony—a gigantic Negro guarding the stairs let her by no problem and she pinched his grinning face as she went up. I watched her open a door without knocking and walk into a room at the far corner, turns out to be the office of the J. P. O’Toole who owns the place, the Negro tells me. I return to the couch. Minutes pass. When she comes back down she’s odd, laughing too loud. I look at her eyes, and I know straightaway where she’s gone. She sat next to me for hours, smiled the whole time, stroked my cheek now and again, but never said a single word. Listen to an old man whinge, Macy: my heart was breaking and healing up again with every beat.
But another night, same red sofa, she’s just the opposite, bouncing with a sort of nervous, unhappy energy, explaining to me that she’s only marrying Trilipush because her father wants it so much, but she doesn’t care a thing about any of them, all she wants “is to be left alone to have some fun once in a rare while. Priorities, Daddy says, good name, good alliance. But Ralph can be a dreadful bore, that much stuff about Egypt makes you fall asleep, you know, and that’s just the truth. Nobody could listen to stuff about Egypt as much as he wants to talk about it. Or any topic. A bore, Harry, but men usually are after a while. Are you going to turn out to be a bore, Harry?”
“You don’t want to marry Trilipush?” I asked, amazed at the turn of events, the way this lurking suspicion had suddenly emerged into light, and all at once I was ready to tell her everything I knew about her fiancé, to blow up that bomb and take my chances.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said before I could open my mouth. “I didn’t say that, did I? Let’s not talk about this anymore, how’s that sound to you? Just don’t be a bore, Harry. Can you do that for me? Wouldn’t that be the greatest thing if you turned out not to be an unbearable bore? Wouldn’t that be swell? Let’s shoot for that, Harry, okay? Okay? Okay?” Like this, when she started talking, she didn’t stop, she just kept chattering, whatever idea was in her head tumbled out of her mouth, and she’d just repeat herself until she’d something else to say or do or spend her energy on, and sure enough, when she ran out of words, she pulled me up to dance. Maybe this was a week or two later, when she said all this. I don’t know what to tell you, Macy. I think I probably fell in love with her, you see, at least that’s how I’m remembering it now. And her? Well, I know now she was just a sad, sick girl, too much freedom. I wasn’t anything much to her, something, no question, but not much. What could I have been to her? A man from another world, another class, not rich, not posh enough, nothing. That’s not a tragedy, hardly, is it?
But what I felt then, that’s something else. Maybe completely different. Maybe the “clarity of distance” is nothing at all when compared to what’s been forgotten. Maybe it wasn’t something inexplicable, as it’s beginning to look now, but instead was logical, and I was acting with clarity that should be respected,