Free AEgypt by John Crowley Page A

recital on the violin). She lifted a cracker and caviar to her lips with her ringed hand; her breasts were free beneath a cashmere sweater, breasts he knew. She caught him looking. “Kind of funny, isn't it?” she said, smiling her frank sly smile.
    He had writhed with her in exaggerated lust all morning, on hard platforms draped in dusty black theatrical velvets (the scene was laid in Nowhere, which was cheap). The action Sid had devised seemed to have been derived from the antique avant garde crossed with de Mille depravities, cavorting in abandon, and struck Pierce as operose and quite unerotic, but between takes he could simply look at her, absent behind her mask (once tied on, the masks were in place for the morning), and a strange jaybird freedom rising in him nearly made him giggle. She said she could use a smoke; she wondered what they were to do next; Pierce said he wasn't sure, he thought now all the men together were to menace the heroine, sort of set upon her—a dark-skinned girl whose mask wore sad raised eyebrows and a red anguished mouth. He wondered aloud if part of the terribleness of this poor Japanese girl's nightmare was that all the men she dreamed of were both hairy and circumcised. From behind her own painted cat's eyes—she was a Kabuki sphinx, only lacking wings—his partner looked them over, and laughed, seeing that it was so; she brushed, absently, with her Florentine-ringed hand, the glittering sweat from her breasts (this was hot work), and though with a delicacy of its own it had remained unmoved through all its appearance on film, Pierce's penis flexed and started.
    "I remember the ring,” he said, taking a cracker from her. Still Sphinx-like, more like her mask than he would have thought. “It's an interesting one."
    "Ugly, isn't it?” she said. “But it's got a secret."
    "Oh?"
    She looked at him in an assessing sort of way for a moment, and then around the apartment. Sid and her father were greeting new guests (grandparents? one walked with a triple-footed cane). “C'mere,” she said.
    She led him down a corridor, past Effie's door, which was partly open; Olga and Effie, hands clasped, were talking in low voices.
    "She'll tell your fortune later,” she said to Pierce. “Really.” She pushed Pierce through another door, into the bathroom, and closed the door behind them. “She's got cards, too, if you want cards.” She extracted one dangling earring and laid it on the top of the toilet tank. Then she raised the hand that bore the ring, looking intently at its stone as though it were a fortune-telling crystal, and with the thumbnail of her other hand she opened a catch and lifted back the stone.
    "A poison ring,” Pierce said.
    "Carefully, carefully,” she said. Within the ring was a dab of white matter. Moving with skilled care she took up the earring, and with its shovellike silver pendant she dipped into the ring, brought out a load, and lifted it to her nostril; watching herself in the mirror above the sink, she inhaled it in a quick sniff, her nostril collapsing as though grasping it. “Why is it,” she said, “I wonder why it is, that people think Gypsies can tell fortunes. Why is that?"
    He could explain that. He watched, eyes wide, this bathroom a stranger place by far than that loft with its ersatz sex had been. She dipped the earring again and lifted it to him, feeding him, her mouth slightly open, kind nurse administering a powder, patient to sniff it all up, what a good boy. And again. “I could explain that,” he said.
    "What?"
    "Why Gypsies can tell fortunes."
    "Olga's good,” she said. “You might learn something."
    He could explain, he could explain, it was not that he knew nothing else but for sure he knew the reason for that, even as he watched her treat herself again he felt doors within him, behind him, blowing open one by one, doors into the country of that explanation, and it made him grin. She closed the ring, and looking in the mirror she put back