“The whole thing was her idea,” Egon says reverently.
Bunny has come in behind us. “That sure is gorgeous white marble,” she breathes in appreciation.
“Genuine Parian,” Egon says. “You see that there are Egyptian murals, but under them is the marble. Not exactly consistent, you know. I mean the Egyptian tombs have terra cotta walls, not marble ones. But the Egyptians loved marble. They used it any time they could. I felt it got the spirit . . .”
Our backs are turned and Egon is gesturing at the wall scene, a handsome depiction of the outfitting of the mummy, with the jackal-headed Anubis leaning over the recumbent figure.
But I have very good peripheral vision and I can see Rita behind us. She has begun poking at the carvings on the sarcophagi. She isn’t using her flashlight, but she appears to be looking for something.
Beside me, Cherie’s brisk little shoulders flex. I think she also has noticed Rita. And I think she decides, like me, to cover for her. The two of us fix on Egon and make a lot of noise about the fascinating mural and does he maybe remember the source, perhaps one of the texts of The Book of the Dead; of course he, Egon, will know.
To which Egon agrees enthusiastically, “Why yes, my dears, yes.” And he’s off into chapter and verse about which text, which page, his whole speech interpolated with comments of, “Wonderful!”
Meanwhile Rita, behind us, appears to be doing a Braille search of the carvings on the sarcophagus. Her nose is very close, her hair stands up very pointy. I’ll interview her later.
There’s an interlude while Egon bleats along about mummification and the cult of the god Anubis, and Cherie supplies admiring Southern comments. Bunny says, “Wow.”
“Hey, Egon,” Rita finally calls out from behind us, “way to go; that was super. God, have I forgotten a lot.”
Cherie squeezes my hand. She announces, “Oh, I just feel so stupid.”
One of Cherie’s methods of dealing with the world is to act dumber than she is. This is disarming and makes people like her. Perhaps I should try it.
“Now,” she says, “we’ll go up into that bright upper world and suddenly we’ll just be sitting under a date palm with a mango drink. Am I right, Rita?”
“Never happened to me.” Rita sounds suspicious. But then she usually does.
“So.” Cherie bustles an arm around Egon and an arm around me. She doesn’t have extra arms to put around Bunny and Rita, but she turns a multimegawatt smile their way. The five of us leave the crypt, the best of friends.
I half hate Cherie for stealing my boyfriend and half am attracted to her for being sharp and interesting. I’ll bet she has a good theory about what Rita was up to.
And I wish I didn’t have to ask her about her theory. When this is all over, I’ll never speak to her again.
But right away we pick up an admiring following of both Egon and Bunny.
“Call you later, darlin’.” Cherie has one foot inside the Mustang; she leans forward to kiss me on both cheeks.
I hope she wants to talk about what she saw in the crypt. If she’s planning a heart-to-heart on Rob, I’m not interested.
Chapter 9
“Well hel-lo. And how are we this A.M.?”
Scott has fallen into step with me beside the wisteria bush, which is as far as I’ve gotten on a tour of the museum garden. The sun is bright; something with a chirpy call is sounding off in the tall skinny bushes beside the walk. Egon has tried to decorate his landscape with a few plants that look Egyptian—as does the statuary positioned in and among these bushes, all stiff-standing gods and monsters. “Not very good, I’m afraid,” my father has judged them.
“We are okay,” I tell Scott. “And how are you?”
“Oh, hell.” He reaches for a wisteria leaf. “Caught again. Sententious, pretentious, yes? Don’t say yes.”
I squint at him. He has posed himself against the bright sunlight, but even without that electric surround, he gives off a kind of energy. A stocky man, vivid, anxious, a little pugnacious.
Was Cherie right, was he really staring at me all during lunch? He certainly is doing it now.
I keep on walking and he does, too.
“Are you settling in all right? No nightmares, sudden alarms? No figures glimpsed around shadowy corners?”
“I’m doing okay.”
“And your dad? . . . Listen, I wanted to tell you . . .” There’s a sizable pause, while we walk and crunch gravel.
Maybe I should say, “Proceed, proceed.” People threaten to tell me things a lot lately.
“I’m sorry if it seemed I was ignoring your dad. Sure, I knew him. Knew him well. We were all together, you know, good friends, one of those intense adult summer-camp kind of deals. That time was a good time, and now it’s hard to remember. And it was extra hard, seeing your dad . . . I just didn’t know how to take it.”
I turn to look at Scott. Now he seems embarrassed. I shouldn’t ask myself if he really feels all this, or if he half believes and half embellishes.
I say, “A lot of people don’t know how to deal with Daddy’s illness.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s no excuse.” Scuff, scuff. He does the bashful penitent act well.
We scrape gravel, moving forward for a while. Finally, I ask the question about the past that I’ve been poking at lately. “Thebes. That’s where you were all together, isn’t it?”
“Thebes? Yeah, sure.”
“When was that?”
“Like, five years ago? Yeah, four, five. But listen, enough of that, too much harking back to the past. You owe me a drink.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Okay. You owe me going out with me to get a drink. You pretty much promised.”
I didn’t pretty much anything, Scott, I think, but I guess I’m flattered. I know I’m flattered. I don’t have time now to stop and analyze how much of that is because I’m mad at Rob and jealous of Cherie and how much is because he is, I guess, attractive. Not my type, of course. Neither was my Habitat friend.
“Tonight,” Scott suggests.
“Nope.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“Okay.”
What in hell is the matter with me?
Let’s face it, it will be interesting to go to the Best Western, where Cherie is staying and, presumably, where Rob hangs out now—it will be interesting to go there and see Cherie and Rob together. Or interesting to have Rob see me and Scott together. Really, really interesting.
“Eight o’clock?” Scott suggests, and I agree, “Absolutely. Eight o’clock.”
We walk back to the Museum Residents’ building with Scott talking about how the sheriff mistreated my father. “I was there. I saw it. You need somebody to testify? I’m your guy.”
He’d be a good witness, eager, alive, verbal. A genuine Hartdale Grant prospect. I guess he’s good at a lot of things.
She is all gotten up in a denim pantsuit with spangles and a denim bow in her hair. She wears her silver sandals and no socks and black toenail polish. It’s a look I would never attempt, but on her it does okay. “Well, hey,” she says. And, “Hi.” She grabs me by the arm.
Lately I am the Object. People keep zeroing in on me and grabbing.
“Rita, hi.” Yes, I want to talk to you, I think. “Come for a walk.”
“Right on. Like, exactly. I got this bottle. See?” She has one of those slouchy over-the-shoulder bags; a bottle neck sticks out of it. “I’m sorta drunk, y’know? No cigs; I’m giving them up, right? So, a lady has to do something.”
A good moment, I think. Rita is the impulsive type. We fall into step on the graveled walk, walking in unison, my Teva sandals contrasting with her silver ones. “Listen, Rita, what were you doing yesterday in the crypt?”
“Yesterday? In the crypt?” Her voice is loaded with total incomprehension.
“We saw you inspecting. Feeling around at the sculpture. We covered for you.”
“Covered? Wow, how sweet! But like, I wasn’t doing any
thing. I mean, I was just looking, y’know?” She waits. I feel her watching me. “I mean, totally nothing. I was counting Egon’s mistakes. That sculpture is so off. He can never get it straight. He doesn’t understand about Egyptian architecture, nothing, no way. He gets it mixed up with Roman and Renaissance.”
Rita, come on. I know what I know. I’m bored with people not telling me things. “I was watching you. I could see what you were doing. You were looking for something; it was pretty clear.”
“Clear?” Rita stops to examine her wine bottle as if an answer hides inside. “You think I had an ulterior motive? For sort of, in passing, looking at a tomb carving?”
“It wasn’t sort of in passing. You were heavy-duty interested.”
Rita says, “Duh,” and takes a swig of her wine. “I’m an archaeologist, remember? Of course I was interested. That stuff is my business. It’s what I do.”
“And in this case you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Who said so? We’re talking now.”
And we’re walking. Slowly down the hill. Merrily, merrily. “I’m getting just a particle frustrated lately,” I say. “There’s a whole list of things people won’t talk about. That you especially won’t talk about, even though you cozy up to me and make like you’re my new best friend.
“First, there was Marcus Broussard you wouldn’t talk about, and then that spring in Thebes thing, and now this.”
Rita says, “Hey, I am your friend; really I am.” She puts intensity into her assertion. She cares, the way people do who’ve been through a bad spell and are coming out of it. It’s underhanded of me to attack her now. You’ve heard about baby ducks and how when they’re first hatched they get imprinted by the first moving object that comes by and then they follow that object? Well, Rita got imprinted by me. When she was coming out of her depression, I was the moving object that came by.
“I am so your best friend,” she protests. “You want me to tell you about something? Okay, I will. Thebes, I’ll talk about Thebes, then, okay. Not that there’s anything much to tell.”
Well, I guess so, if that’s the only subject you can manage this morning. “Okay.”
Rita says oratorically, “Thebes.” Off in the middle distance is something that makes her giggle. “Oh, hell.”
We continue walking, with her occasionally extending the bottle in my direction. It’s a white wine, not too sweet.
“It was a real wild scene,” she says contemplatively. “Hard to boil down. Lots of sex.”
She pauses. I spur her on. “Yeah. Right.”
“Sex and archaeology. Did you know they go together? Like, dig, dig, and then, sex, sex?
“Me and Scott,” she picks up. “Me and Marcus. Everybody and everybody. A lot of people named Fatima and Aisha and Naomi.
“Oh, yes,” she answers my slightly surprised shoulder motion. “Too much testosterone. Too many vitamins, too much archaeology. Gets into your privates. Marcus and me, Marcus and . . .” Rita screws her face up. She looks as if she has bitten into something sour. “Marcus and all the Fatimas.”
“And Scott?”
“Sure. Scott and a Fatima or two.”
“Rita, that sounds racist.”
Rita is a little drunk.
“It is. They were. I am, when I think back at it. Oh, shit.”
“And Danielle,” I supply. “Marcus and Danielle.”
“Where’d we get her?”
“She’s around. Everybody sort of walks around her.”
Rita turns a shoulder. “Walks around? Well, not exactly. You ran, one direction or the other. But yeah, she kept popping up.
“A bitch,” Rita adds.
“What kind of bitch?”
“The man-stealing kind.”
Egon has supplied a red marble bench at a turn in the path. We stop to sit on it.
I press for brighter lights and wilder details. About Danielle—where’d she come from? But Rita just shrugs. “Who knows? That was a hairy time. Like I said, bed, bed, bed. And dope. Not just pot, real stuff. Hard stuff.
“Yeah,” she says, appraising my expression of discomfort, “not good.”
“Why doesn’t anybody want to talk about her?”
“I especially don’t want to talk about her. She stole my guy.”
She holds the bottle up and squints at the light it catches. “She stole both my guys. First she stole Marcus and then she stole Scott. Or the other way around. First she was Scott’s and . . . well, nuts.”
“First she was Scott’s,” I interpret, “and then she left Scott and took up with Marcus. And then she went back to Scott again.”
“Sort of. I hated her.”
“Was she gorgeous?”
“Well, I guess. If you like the type. Something for everybody. Oh, shit.”
“So why won’t anybody talk about her?”
Rita shrugs elaborately.
“Where was Egon in all this?”
“Dithering around. Waving his hands. I think Egon is asexual. One of the few cases. I think he really is.”
Now I have to ask it. “And my dad?”
Rita sort of laughs. “Oh, your dad. He knew some of it; I couldn’t tell how much. He’d start quoting from the ancient Egyptians when things got hairy.”
The ancient Egyptians thought sex was fine. But they also believed in marriage. They were sensible and nice. Even if a little obsessed with the afterlife.
“This dig lasted how long?”
“Two and a half months. We found a lot. Lots of stuff in my area, lots of textile scraps, pictures of whatever; I did notebooks and notebooks full. That spring is the only reason I have a job now. See, they had this tomb that was explored, like thirty years ago. And then, much later on, they found this extra passage, under a lot of rock and rubble. And when it was cleaned up, there was a long tunnel and a room that was bigger than all the rest of it. We were the third team there. They’re probably still doing it, still cataloguing and sifting and brushing. Well, you know.”
“And Scott did okay.”
“Studly did wonderful. That was one reason the testosterone got so dense. His field is supposed to be history, so he’s a dynamite whiz on hieroglyphs and he nearly had a seizure over some of the stuff he found; he was taking impressions and translating and talking and making casts and jumping up and down. And falling in love with anything that moved.”
Rita clinks her teeth against her glass and appears to brood. “Y’know, he’s not too irresistible usually, but when he was fired up like that . . . Well. It was like getting the battery back into the rabbit.”
“And Danielle thought so, too.”
“She sure did. At first. Y’know she was his girlfriend from back in college.”
“I heard.”
“And then they started up again in Thebes. And then they had some really great fights. But not about sex. At least, I don’t think. They fought about his hieroglyphs.”
My surprise shows in my voice. “Really?”
“She was a pretty good Egyptologist. Oh, damn it, she was that kind. She could do anything.”
Rita doesn’t know exactly what it was about the hieroglyphs that they disagreed on. “But he was blathering about how they changed history.”
“And she didn’t think so?”
“Well, she yelled at him plenty.”
“I like the ocean,” Rita says.
I’m sufficiently drunk to skip the oh, so you hate money response and go on to suggest that maybe inherited money corrupts and she says no, institutional money corrupts; she knows this from working in universities. “First they start out with, they think, principles. This money is going to cure AIDS, solve poverty, educate kids, and then in three years they’re dithering around with godawful fake art or fake cures or ghastly publicity. Look at Studly and his world-shaking discoveries.”
Something in her voice makes me say, “You’ve done okay, Rita. How old are you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
Only thirteen ye
ars older than me. “You’ve done great.”
“Scott’s a year older and look at him.”
“Quit thinking like that. Think about you.” I don’t ask how she’s feeling lately with her depression. She seems to be managing okay.
Rita says, and maybe it’s a non sequitur, “I think in a way he really loved that bitch. I mean, like, it was easy to be fascinated by her, so I’m not sure.”
We stare down at the beach and watch the waves. “It does something to you, y’know?” she says. “That rhythm. It replicates the human heartbeat.”
“What happened to Danielle?” I ask after a while of listening to the waves thump. “Do you know where she is now?”
Rita shrugs. “I heard she was at the Luxor Museum. She’s the kind who always lands on her feet.”
Chapter 10
It’s evening, and I am out in front of the residence, washed and scrubbed for my outing with Scott.
His car is a red convertible. Of course, it’s a rental, since his home now is at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut. “Since last September,” he says as he helps me into the BMW. “A weird place to live—crowded, dangerous, slummy, elitist. And boy, was I excited to get there.”
“Well, Yale,” I agree. “Pretty okay.”
“In my wildest. The answer to every farm boy’s dream.”
“You’re not a farm boy.”
“Oh, but I am.”
We have already turned onto Highway One and are zipping along with the ocean off to our left, below some cliffs. “I grew up milking cows in Pennsylvania.”
I don’t pursue this. Scott’s aura makes me want to argue and question. I don’t really have any reason to assume, as I’m doing, that the farm he means is the one with the eighteenth-century stone house and barn and fifty-five acres of graded woodland inherited from dear old Grandpa who got it from his dear old Revolutionary-hero ancestor.
“Why were you so mean to Rita?” I ask.
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“Well, why?” Which is none of my business.
“Reet and I go way back.”
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