Crook & Flail

by Maira Isabel Pita

  She had managed not to look directly at this thought but, forced to confront it, her emotions just seem to stop running and let despair catch up with her like a predator there is no hope of fighting.

  “Look, Lucia, if you decide you want to stay with your husband I’ll convince Mark to keep his mouth shut. Don’t let him rush you into anything. Take all the time you need to think about things and make your own decision.”

  “It’s not my decision to make anymore, Ian. I’ve never kept anything from Richard and I’m not about to start now. It’s not possible anyway. He’ll know,” she sighs. “He’ll just know! I love him too much to hide anything from him.”

  “I think,” he lets the cigarette fall to his feet and steps on it, “I want to kiss you again.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Lucia spends the rest of the day crying.

  After asking her six times what is wrong, his tenderness and patience gradually drying up, Richard finally leaves her alone in their cabin.

  Once the dam breaks she can’t stop herself as all the reasons for her misery keep crossing her mind like debris carried by a flood. There is the tree, roots straining tragically up into the sky, of her marriage, which her actions that morning have fatally uprooted. She can no more save her relationship now than she can replant an eight- hundred-year-old oak. Richard’s heavy granite urn also keeps floating by behind her eyes, empty except for her grief and the shattered egg of his car and the lightly bobbing black scarab of the holographic projector…

  She realizes she was wrong to believe she had assimilated it all, wrong to think she had accepted what he did and forgiven him for it. She hadn’t forgiven him, not at all, and she had punished him by betraying him. She never would have done what she did if he hadn’t let another man use her. And this is the real root of her boundless misery, the fact that she had lost her faith in him.

  When at last she sits up, there is a dark wet spot on the pillow and her temples are throbbing.

  The cabin is disturbingly silent and she realizes the engine has been cut. For some reason the Sistrum seems to have come to a dead stop.

  She cannot put off facing Richard much longer, yet there is no way a description of what she did can pass through her lips in his presence. It would be easier to stare at a knife and stab herself in the womb with it.

  “What am I going to do?” She pushes away the damp hair clinging to her hot cheeks. “What am I going to do?!”

  * * * * *

  Taking temporary refuge in a hot shower, Lucia imagines they are docked at Dendera. She can sense Hathor’s temple, with its columns crowned by a woman’s head morphed with the floppy, oddly stylish ears of a cow.

  She quickly dries herself off and flings the towel away.

  “That’s all I am, just one of Hathor’s whores.”

  She takes a long time putting on her makeup, doing her best not to wonder where Richard is or whom he might be talking to.

  With the reverent sense of standing at an altar, she begins by caressing a moisturizer equipped with sunscreen into the skin of her face, neck and chest. She follows it with a fine coat of liquid foundation and a dusting of powder, including her lips and eyelids. Then, with a thick brush, she applies a dark blush to her cheekbones and with a dark brown pencil defines her eyebrows, extending them slightly to form a defining arch over her eyes. She smoothes dark gold powder over her eyelids, accents their creases with jade-green and further deepens her gaze with a translucent white shade just beneath her eyebrows. She draws a black line inside her lower lashes then finally outlines her lips with a pencil and fills them in with a deep burgundy color.

  She is brushing out her hair when the cabin door bursts open.

  She cries out in surprise and turns to face Richard’s faceless silhouette, drawn against a stunning violet sky.

  She always wanted death to look like this.

  He slowly enters the dark room and closes the door behind him. His eyes are invisible as he stares at her where she stands motionless as a statue in the bathroom’s luminous little shrine. “Is there something you need to tell me, Lucia?” His voice is scarcely audible.

  “Yes… I saw Mark today. He was at the temple.”

  “I know.” He begins walking toward her. “Ian and I had a long talk.”

  She asks faintly, “You did?”

  “Yes and something he said confirmed my suspicions. I would owe him another favor for coming clean but I think you’ve done a nice job of paying him back already.”

  Words fail her completely.

  “Get dressed.”

  She can’t seem to move.

  He grabs one of her wrists and pulls her into the bedroom. “Get dressed,” he repeats coldly. “We’re going out.”

  “Out?”

  He slides open the closet door. “Here,” he flings a long black dress at her, “wear your priestess of Hathor dress.”

  “Richard.”

  “Don’t say a word, Lucia. Just do as I say.”

  She unzips the garment and steps into it but she can’t close it without his help. Praying he will realize this, so she doesn’t have to disobey him and speak, she turns her back on him.

  He zips her up as swiftly as lightning ricocheting off the earth. “Wear the highest heels you’ve got. You’re not running from the truth anymore.”

  What truth? She wonders numbly. First it was true that he was dead now it’s true that he is alive. Maat’s feather of truth is soaked with the blood of her heart.

  Her back still to him, she puts on a pair of black sandals with treacherous stiletto heels and then she turns and watches him slip on his watch and thrust his wallet into a back pocket.

  He seems ready to go so she reaches for a small black purse on the nightstand.

  He snatches it out of her hand and flings it across the room. “You won’t be needing that.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t you understand the effort I’m making right now, Lucia? Don’t say another word.”

  “Richard, I can’t live without you. I can’t, not again.”

  His face as expressionless as a funeral mask, he says quietly, “Let’s go.”

  * * * * *

  The Sistrum has come to a dead stop in the middle of the Nile and its tall, handsome captain is standing at the railing near the bow, fidgeting with the collar of his dark jacket like an ancient nobleman forced into strangely uncomfortable clothing.

  Lucia discovers that shutting down her mind intensifies her senses to the point where they bleed into her feelings and she can’t tell the difference between them. The subtle yet all-pervasive scent of the river is the smell of her own fear and the oppressive stillness of the air is the freshly laid out corpse of her happiness.

  Without a word the captain opens a small gate in the railing and, clutching her arm, Richard forces her to the edge of the deck.

  She lets out her breath only when she sees a small boat bobbing like a cork on the water below her.

  A native man clad in the evening’s deepening shadows reaches up for her and she lets him lift her down into the boat. He immediately lets go of her as Richard jumps on board and keeps her from losing her balance by pulling her down onto the hard seat beside him.

  They glide slowly toward the East Bank and she feels the Nile might as well be the river Styx as she floats toward the hell of a loveless future accompanied by the deathly quiet shade of the man she once loved.

  “Where are we going?” she whispers desperately.

  Her husband’s silence is the emotional equivalent of stone.

  By the time the boat docks his silence has seeped into her blood like a cold anesthesia, numbing all her emotions, which for the moment is a blessing because they were all painful.

  He leaps out onto the wooden platform while she balances awkwardly on the gently rocking surface.

  “Give me your hands,” he orders.

  She lands against his chest as he pulls her up out of the boat and his closeness awakens her for an ago
nizing moment to what she has lost. “Oh God, Richard.”

  “Don’t say a word.” He makes her walk ahead of him across the wooden platform.

  She assumes the scattering of lights ahead of them is a village and suddenly she no longer feels protected by the twentieth century, as though she has been transported back to a more brutally honest past where men dealt very harshly with unfaithful women like her.

  When a car abruptly catches them in its headlights she stumbles on the uneven ground. He was obviously expecting it however because he walks straight into the light without hesitating and opens one of the back doors for her.

  She quickly slips into the car before he has the chance to push her in. She catches the young driver’s oily black eyes in the rearview mirror and sees them ignite with angry lust at her shameless attire.

  Richard slams his door closed, mercifully killing the light exposing her. “Luxor,” he commands. “Dilwaattee!”

  Their driver floors the accelerator and turns the wheel sharply to the right at the same time, throwing her into her husband’s arms.

  She quickly slides away from him. “You said,” she dares to speak, “Ian confirmed your suspicions.” She has no idea how much English their driver speaks and she doesn’t care. “Would you mind telling me what suspicions?”

  He stares out at the formless darkness as if she hadn’t spoken.

  “This was all your fault,” she accuses him, but she might as well be stabbing a corpse. His love and his anger have both died and she is nothing to him now. The possibility that Mark loves her is no comfort at all. It is a useless balm over the fatal wound of her loss. Richard’s anger had been an excruciating, yet also mysteriously cauterizing, heat. His indifference now is the hopeless peace of the grave.

  “Why?” she pleads. “Why are you reacting like this when you’re the one who let another man keep fucking me?”

  “Because,” he informs the stars, “by the time I found out it was too late. You were fucking him before I even got to Luxor. It isn’t easy playing dead and it’s even harder to legally resurrect. When you left for Egypt I was hip deep in paperwork so I sent Julian on ahead of me. I arrived three nights after you did and only a healthy fear of Arab prisons kept me from killing Mark, or from at least maiming him in the right place. Did you really believe I would let another man touch you, Lucia? To let a complete stranger violate what I consider my sacred space?”

  She gasps as if shot through the heart. “But you said…”

  “I know what I said.” His voice is deeper than normal. “It was my pride saying it. There was no way in hell I was going to give Mark the satisfaction of knowing he’d snatched you from me just days before we would have been together again. You probably think it was Fate getting back at me for putting you through hell, Fate punishing me for cutting you out of my life because I was too proud to let you see me that way and maybe you’re right.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell me, Richard!” She imagines this is what bleeding to death must feel like. Fingers can’t staunch the vital flow and she can’t think of anything to say that will help at all. “Why didn’t you tell me?!”

  “You keep repeating yourself, Lucia. Just like this morning, when you betrayed me twice.”

  “If you had told me how you really felt,” her voice rises hysterically, “I never would have.”

  “You never would have what?” he finally looks at her. “Come on, let me hear you say it. I think I’m entitled to a blow-by-blow description.”

  He slides across the seat toward her and drapes a heavy arm over her shoulders. “Come on,” he yanks her dress down to expose her breasts and give one of them a painful squeeze, “tell me what you did this morning. Give him all the juicy details.”

  Their driver yells “By Allah!” and hits the break.

  “Keep driving,” Richard commands, but he lets go of her.

  “Why are we going to Luxor?” she finally dares to ask, avoiding the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror as she hides her breasts again.

  “To pay my little brother a visit.”

  “Julian’s still in Egypt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Richard…is it over between us?”

  “What do you think?”

  “All I know is that I love you more than anything.”

  “Too bad you didn’t remember that this morning.”

  “I would never have done…what I did, if I had believed you really cared.”

  “Or maybe that’s just the excuse you needed to be yourself.”

  “Maybe. But I also know that I love you and that I’ll never love anyone else the way I love you.”

  “How sweet.”

  “It is over then.”

  “It’ll never be over between us, Lucia. I may leave you, you may leave me but it’ll never be over between us. I’m sorry about this, I realize you must be starving. You haven’t eaten since this morning, have you?”

  “Stop it!”

  Their driver glances anxiously back at her.

  Richard unbuckles his belt. “Come here.” He unzips his pants and pulls his soft cock out through a slit in his black underpants. “I know how frustrated and miserable you get when you’re not properly nourished.”

  With a faint sob of grief and gratitude, she lets him grab her by the hair and pull her face down into his lap.

  “Don’t stop,” he commands.

  She knows he must be speaking to their driver because nothing could stop her from breathlessly savoring what she thought was lost to her forever. She doesn’t give their captive audience another thought as her lips slowly slide down his limp, seemingly indifferent penis. She nurtures him lovingly on her warm tongue as he swells like a magical seed, his feelings rooting themselves in her open mouth. She feels intense relief that she can still arouse him. Even after all the times she has sucked him, it still gives her a profound thrill every time she feels him stiffening between her lips. When he is fully erect she caresses him more passionately, slipping the tight red ring of her lips up and down his full length, making his pale skin rosy as she rubs all her lipstick off on him. She pauses only to suck on his head now and then like a baby on her bottle, blind with contentment. She holds his underpants open with both hands to savor every last bit of him, not satisfied unless she takes absolutely all of him into her mouth every time. He doesn’t speak or touch her with any other part of his body. Only his cock punctuates her wordless expressions of devotion with pulses of pleasure, an inexorable physical response that hardly means he still loves her. Nevertheless, as always, she takes a profound pleasure in making him come. Tonight, especially, she longs to purify herself with his uniquely satisfying joy juice, the mysterious formula of her happiness.

  “Mm, very good,” he finally deigns to address her. “I can tell you’ve been practicing. You give much better head now.”

  The cold compliment brings hot tears to her eyes that flow down her cheeks and mingle the salty depth of her love for him with his sweet semen.

  “That’s right, show me how much you love me, Lucia. Choke on me! Did they both come over your face like in some cheap porno movie? Answer me and tell me the truth! I’ll know if you’re lying to me!”

  She lets him slip out of her mouth just long enough to gasp, “No!”

  “They both…” his breath catches, “they both came in your mouth?”

  She moans.

  “God,” he grips her head with both hands, “you whore!” Burying her face deep between his thighs, he nearly drowns her with his climax.

  * * * * *

  When their cab pulls up in front of the Winter Palace hotel in Luxor a little over an hour later, their driver leaves the engine running and sits staring into space, both hands gripping the steering wheel. Richard has to shake him to get him to accept an impressive wad of Egyptian money, which he manages to do without making eye contact, as if he has decided they are both demons that will capture his soul if he looks at them again.

 
; People are walking up and down the avenue but no one notices them as they get out of the cab, except one man standing at the foot of the steps leading up into the hotel. He tosses his cigarette away and approaches them.

  Richard says, “Tell me they haven’t seen you.”

  “They haven’t seen me,” Ian replies just as tensely.

  “But they’re here?”

  “In the bar.”

  Taking hold of her arm, Richard cuts rudely through a flock of nuns in knee-length blue dresses who are innocently blocking their way into the hotel.

  Lucia glances over her shoulder to make sure Ian is following them. She can hardly believe he and Richard have become allies and it excites her even beyond hunger and despair to be swept along between them. That they seem to have something planned thrills her. Maybe Richard isn’t planning to leave her after all. Sucking on this small morsel of hope is all she has the energy left to do. After the past thirteen vitally draining hours, the confrontations about to take place are too explosive for her to contemplate.

  Ian falls into stride beside her.

  “What are Mark and Julian doing together in the bar?” she asks him, hoping he will be more forthcoming than her husband was.

  “Getting drunk, I suppose.”

  The bright marble expanse of the lobby ends as abruptly as the desert giving way to a softly carpeted, shady realm grown up around alcohol’s timeless flow.

  “Over there,” Ian says and immediately she spots two tall, slender figures leaning against the bar facing each other.

  Mark and Julian.

  She can’t be sure but they seem to be smiling at each other.

  Richard lets go of her arm. “Should we pat the mice around a little and watch them squirm?”

  “Just get it over with,” Ian says impatiently. “Lucia’s been through enough already.”

  “What’s going on?” she demands.

  “You mean you haven’t explained it to her yet?” Ian walks over to a column in the lobby, out of sight of the bar, and they follow him. He thrusts his hands in his pockets, closes his eyes and rests his head against some gaudy hieroglyphs. “Tell her,” he says wearily.