by Tosca Lee
All this time we had been alone, the museum unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon.
“By now Lucifer was no longer content to sit by. The earth was his, had been since its inception. He meant to inspect these new creatures and all this strange life now roving about and sprouting from this planet of his jurisdiction.” She stopped to peer at an assortment of jewelry: shell bracelets and necklaces, their tiny conches perfectly intact. “From the Red Sea,” according to the numbered notation.
“There had never been any question, in Lucifer’s mind at least, as to who would rule this place, this new life, the creatures. The earth—all of Eden—belonged to him. He might disdain this refurbished Eden and its new tenants, but it was his. But El wasn’t finished.”
She moved farther to my left to gaze intently into the exhibit case, and I saw the object of her interest: an ivory comb. For several moments, she stood unmoving, her expression thoughtful, her lips pursed. And then she tilted her head and said with what I thought was sadness, “I knew the woman this belonged to. She used to sing to the moon at night, and I used to stop to listen to her, this human who seemed to see in that pale light the very thing I did.”
I could not help but wonder if some accident had befallen that woman—the 2200 BC equivalent of being run down by a car. Just then it hit me: I stood shoulder to shoulder with a being older than any item in this room. Or the next. Older, even, than the very soil it was built upon.
She touched the Plexiglas. “How odd that I should share sentiments with a human. It was, I think, the most kinship I have ever felt with one of your kind.” Her fingers fell away. “Of course, I realized sometime later that it had not been the actual woman I was drawn to, but those qualities within her that were the earmark of El. In the poignant yearning of her psyche, in the loveliness of her voice, I had heard El.”
She fell quiet after that, her lips moving slightly, emitting no sound. And I realized that she mouthed the words to a song.
“You said El wasn’t finished,” I prompted.
She sighed. “No, he wasn’t. In a sudden, great blow to my prince, he gave the animals to the man and told him to rule over them. Do you understand what I’m saying, Clay?” She leaned against the case, her face turned up toward mine. “Gave them to the clay man! He brought them to the man and gave him the power to name them. And the man, oblivious to what he did in usurping Lucifer’s rightful place, did it. But it got worse.” She shifted her coat, lifting a finger for emphasis. “For every animal there was a counterpart.” She added a second finger and turned her fingers this way and that. “But for the man—nothing. Naming the animals took a long time. Caring for the garden was no small task. The man needed help. And he was lonely. Communing with nature is only novel for so long.”
“He had El,” I offered, wondering that such pious-sounding words should come out of my mouth.
“True, and that ought to have been enough. But El is extravagant. And what was good enough for us positively paled beside what he was willing to do for the mud race.” There was a strange, ironic tinge to her voice.
“And so, like your bakers, who pinch off dough from one loaf and set it aside to leaven another, El took out a part of this man—no flesh, but fine, sleek bone—and crafted a new thing.” She moved on toward the next room but glanced over her shoulder as though to see if I followed. I noticed that the smooth skin bore a small tattoo: a falling star. “And she rose up, a counterpart to the man, the female to his male.”
She smoothed her hair back with her hand, her fingertips brushing absently against the side of her neck, pausing to trace the line of it, to feel, perhaps, the faint pulse there. “They were as regal a pair as could ever hope to spring from the mud. Both unique from all creation, both uniquely created in person by God and after his own image. I actually forgot, as El gave them the green things to live on and told them to fill the earth, that they had been born of the dirt.”
She stopped to check her watch. I was accustomed, by now, to this ritual—and to the fact that it might signal her imminent departure. She tapped it as I had seen the demon do in the taxi with the dashboard clock. When it seemed to work to her satisfaction, she looked up at me.
“And?” I hated the way she made me wait on her. But I did it. I did it because I wanted as much to take back to my desk, to my expanding stack of pages, as possible. I did it in the hope of having more from which to glean her purpose, her unspoken reason in sharing her story in the first place.
She shrugged. “He sat back, called it good, and rested.”
I waited.
She waited.
I raised my brows. “And?”
Her mouth curved into a smile. “You think I’m pretty, don’t you.”
THE “MUMMY” ROOM WAS dimly lit, miniature track lights shedding halogen pools onto giant sarcophagi and burial masks that were never meant to emerge from darkness. It was cooler, too, the change in light and temperature making for an appropriately tomblike atmosphere. Along the far wall, a small pantheon of gods stood sentry over the dead: Isis, Anubis, Maat, Thoth. Sections of an actual burial chamber adorned the adjacent wall, etched with symbols to protect the dead.
Thinking of the Arabic calligraphy and the amulets to ward against evil in the Nubian room, I wondered what the deceased had used to protect themselves while they lived.
Lucian sauntered through the display of sarcophagi, caressing the Plexiglas cases in a way I found thoroughly unsettling.
“I know this seems like a myth to you. Ancient history at best. But can you imagine, Clay, that all of this”—she gestured around the chamber—“stemmed from them, the original two?”
I assumed what she meant by “this” were the vestiges of an elaborate culture. Otherwise, for all practical purposes, this room was a cult tribute to death.
“After that,” she said, “we waited. Even as the man began his life with the woman, feeding her and lying down with her, we waited to see what they would do, sure there would be more. But El was finished. And there was nothing for us.”
She leaned over the sarcophagus of a princess, turning her ear to it as though to listen for tapping on the inside. “I wonder, sometimes, what it must be like to die.”
I turned away.
“Oh, don’t.” She was at my side again, her arm twining through mine.
“I want to know what this has to do with me.”
“If you don’t understand the beginning, the rest will mean nothing to you, and we’ll have wasted our time. And neither of us can afford that.” She picked a piece of lint off my sweater.
A few other patrons drifted through the mummy room as I remarked again to myself at the lack of traffic. I wouldn’t have minded more; a shallow part of me felt gratified to be seen like this with such an obviously beautiful woman on my arm. And another part of me remembered that this was no woman, no human, at all.
Wheels, skidding on pavement . . . blonde hair and blood . . .
“You picked the perfect place for me to tell you all of this. Here, among your artifacts that have managed to outlast millennia of humans like you. Can you grasp what I’ve told you? That I watched the first rising of the sun, strolled the best beaches on earth before human feet soiled the sand?”
Her head tilted toward my shoulder. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “I’m giving away my age.”
HER VOICE DROPPED TO a conspiratorial whisper. “Lucifer claimed it was spite.” She might have been any woman gossiping to a friend. Across the room, a man in his twenties tried not to openly stare at her. He mostly failed.
“It was spite, he said, that El communed with these new creatures as though they were more than walking mud, as though they could ever be worthy of anything. He knew then what we hardly dared believe: that El had created a new favorite. I have a present for you, Clay.”
I was startled by the sudden sound of my own name. “You do?” I frowned. “What is it?”
“You’ll see.” Her lips curled up, catlike.
I didn’t like that smile.
She tightened her arms around mine, hugging it to her. “Now Lucifer addressed the Legion: ‘What is to stop us from becoming their kings? Their gods? What else could we possibly be to these new creatures? Let us walk in the garden as he does. Let us be as gods to them and exercise our influence over them and turn them away from this fellowship with Elohim, as we have turned away.’”
We paused before a statue of the falcon-headed Horus. I hesitated and then marveled at her implication. Did I imagine it, or had she winked at it? I shuddered. She nuzzled my shoulder, her eyes on the statue. My head was spinning.
“Lucifer became obsessed with the humans. I didn’t know what to make of his fixation. I had never seen him like this. Even in the throes of his failed ascent, he had never been so intent, driven by such singularity of purpose. He studied them. He lost interest in the new world. He forgot us and even ceased to taunt El. The whole world had shrunk to this one thing: the humans.” She leaned away, her arm never leaving mine, to inspect a burial mask with vacant eyes and dark, curling hair, to trace its shape on the Plexiglas.
“He prowled the garden, inspecting for himself the handiwork of El like the jealous critic who judges the craftsmanship of the master, turning the work slowly between his hands, searching for the slightest weakness.” Her finger squeaked down the front of the display case. “And who, after long days and years of searching, finds it at last.”
For the last ten minutes or so there had been a new flow of visitors circulating through the room, coming in and out of the entrances on adjacent sides of the gallery. And so I paid no particular attention to the couple that entered the room just then until I felt, rather than saw, one of them falter. I glanced up just as Lucian twined both arms around mine once more.
Aubrey.
I HAD DREADED AND anticipated this day. Would it be at Old Beijing on a weekend? On the pedestrian mall outside Macy’s, or coming out of Peet’s? Would I look up in the T station to see her waiting across the track . . . or would it happen at all?
In the weeks since Lucian’s intrusion into my life, I had found new fears to rival my dread of running into Aubrey. Since then there had even been a growing number of days when I thought about Aubrey only once or twice. I panicked upon realizing this at first, feeling that the last traces of her were slipping away from me completely, too quickly. Later I tenuously congratulated myself, thinking that in the midst of this new madness I had begun to move on.
Even so, I was invariably conscious of her specter almost every time I left home—following me down Tremont or into the Harvest store in Cambridge, seeking me in places we had never been together before—whispering in my mind, Is today that day? And though I had exhaustively premeditated it, I knew when that day happened, I would not be prepared.
But I was less—so much less—prepared for it today. Especially upon seeing her with a man, the arm of whom she had instinctively clasped upon seeing me.
Richard.
Now at last I would confront him. But what I saw confounded me more than the faceless man he had been to me all these months: Other than his height, he did not resemble at all the chiseled-featured lothario of my imagination. Granted, he was tanned as if he had just come in from Saint Martin, and he had a full head of sporty brown hair. But his features seemed somehow soft, his eyebrows ill-formed over the pale color of his eyes. I thought his chin receded a little bit as well. In fact, other than the obvious understated quality of his clothing, he was disappointingly average, which evoked in me first relief and then incredulity. And I wondered, as I had a thousand times before, what the draw had been, that thing that caused Aubrey to gravitate toward him when she compared the two of us side by side as she must have done.
As I did now.
I noticed the black cashmere scarf draped around his neck: Aubrey’s trademark gift. She had given one to me and her boyfriend before me. I wondered if he knew that.
Aubrey was tanned, too. They must have just come from some no-doubt exotic location. And it irritated me to think that as I wondered almost daily if and when I would run into her, for part of that time she had not even been in the city.
The introductions went smoothly—thanks, surprisingly, to Richard. The Richard. Smooth as Richard. To his credit, he stuck out his hand, congenially and formally, as though it were a peace offering. I saw my hand clasp it, heard myself say something not nearly as clever as I had said in my rehearsals for this moment.
It was then that I caught the scent of her perfume, the bottle of which, shaped like a blue star, had sat every day on the bathroom counter. I was suddenly besieged by memories: her shoulders in the dress she wore to her office party our last Christmas together, the indentation of her pillow in the morning, the hair across her face as she slept, her clothes, pooled by the side of our bed.
“Clay,” Richard said. I detected, in the single syllable of my name, a slight accent. British. Wouldn’t you know it.
“You look good,” Aubrey lied. She seemed flushed, as though too warm in her cable-knit sweater and corduroys, a mixture of slight confusion and what I would recognize later as benign detachment in her eyes. Her lips, glossy and pink, were parted, as if on the cusp of a remark. I remembered the shape of that mouth, found myself first gazing and then staring at it. She had a front tooth that had always been at a slight angle so that it nudged her upper lip. She had been self-conscious of it, but I had thought it endearing. It kept her otherwise aristocratic look somehow approachable, more human. But now I was certain there was no discrepancy between those white edges. She had gotten it fixed! The lips closed, parted again as her blue gaze flitted from me, to Richard, and back like a moth, settling at last on the woman coiled at my side.
“Yvonne.” The demon smiled in that magnanimous way women do when they know they’re the prettier of the two. Her head tilted just perceptibly then, and I recognized with alarm a faint buzzing in the air. Her smile broadened. “Clay was just telling me how you used to come here together.”
I was mortified. I wrapped my arm around her. Aubrey gave a slight smile.
“I’m surprised to see you in the mummy room.” I wanted to accuse her—of getting her tooth fixed, of coming to the mummy room though she didn’t like it.
“I insisted, having never seen it before. Quite spectacular, really,” Richard said, coming to her rescue.
I hated him.
“So nice to meet you, Yvonne.” Aubrey’s expression was benign, betraying no insecurity or envy, only a bare hint of surprise. “Are you from the city?”
“Yes. I’m an attorney,” the demon said.
“Ah.” Aubrey was obviously impressed, her gaze bouncing from “Yvonne” to me, and back. And with ex-husband perception I heard her thinking that she would never have thought an attorney to be my type. “What kind of law?”
“I litigate product liability lawsuits,” Lucian said with a smile. I had no idea what that meant but felt an instant alignment like gratitude toward her that both surprised and unsettled me.
Richard checked his watch. “Well, I’m a bit peckish. Do you mind much, Bree, if we head up to the restaurant for some lunch?”
Richard to the rescue again. Aubrey excused them both with a smile and nod. “It’s good to see you, Clay.”
When their footsteps had receded out into the American galleries, I turned on Lucian. “You had no right,” I hissed, feeling the heat of the initial meeting still in my face.
“I think that went quite well.” She let go of me. I stared past the funerary mask of the dead princess, quite unable to believe that it had finally happened and happened so uneventfully that they were even now walking into Bravo, the upstairs restaurant, as I stood blinking in the middle of the mummy room.
But now that it was over, I was angry. Angry at Aubrey’s detachment, at being caught off-guard, at Richard’s heroics. I hated Richard for stepping in the way he had, first into our marriage and now today, for saving her from the need to answer for herself, as tho
ugh to protect her from me.
“Is that why we were here?” I asked Lucian finally.
“You chose to come here, Clay.” She was smoothing her hair back in a way that reminded me of a Siamese cat. She peered up at me, then, her expression indulgent, the smile I hated was back again.
12
I could not sleep the night after the museum—not until I transcribed every word and expelled every nuance of that otherworldly drama from my memory. This process, normally focused to the exclusion of even hunger and fatigue, was interrupted regularly that night as I stared out the window or at the wall, seeing neither, seeing only the image of Aubrey’s hand on Richard’s arm, the pink curve of her lips over those perfect teeth, the imperfect shape of Richard’s face, Aubrey’s gaze fluttering between Lucian and me. And I searched that memory for any glint of her reaction to the sight of Lucian and me together.
Richard had called her “Bree.” Aubrey used to hate that.
I replayed the scene in my mind, outfitting it with every witty rejoinder, smug comment, and cryptic well-wish I had rehearsed for months. But finally, upon contemplating yet again the distance in Aubrey’s gaze, the fixed front tooth, I decided that she had retreated too far beyond me to be touched by any of them.
The image of them together, of the formerly faceless Richard, had preyed upon me in waking and dreaming moments for more than a year. But now that it was over, I found something disappointingly unremarkable about the reality.
I had always assumed he and Aubrey had no chance of making it, having started the way they had. But thinking back to Richard’s quick rescues, I wasn’t so sure. She had seemed in utter possession of the situation despite his protection of her. And I found something pathetic in his safeguarding her, in his willingness to be fitted into the mold of her expectations like a mummy in a coffin made for someone else.