Free AEgypt by John Crowley Page B

on her earring, not before touching its powdered tip with the tip of her tongue.
    She was turning back from the mirror when he caught her up, easily and not swiftly but neatly, as in a dance or an embrace of stars on film, and she melded with him as she had not ever quite done in Sid's dream though willing enough it now seemed. Pierce marveled: it was as though he had been granted a wish, one of his adolescent wishes: that he could by some means know for sure beforehand that if he embraced a woman he would be welcomed; that he could somehow have already embraced her when the time for the first embrace was at hand.
    There was a knock on the door. “Just a sec,” she said over Pierce's shoulder. They held each other, listening to the footsteps recede; they kissed again, turning now irrevocably to fire and ice.
    "Better go back,” she said.
    The living room was a new place, the books and pictures and the holly wound with tinsel and twinkling lights gayer now though somehow far off, amusing, richly festive.
    "This lady is amazing,” Sid said, passing them on his way to the buffet, and indicating the old Gypsy aunt with his thumb. “Don't miss her."
    Olga had set up in a lamplit corner, a little table by her where she spread and gathered and spread a deck of cards.
    "I'm next,” she who had just been kissing him whispered to Pierce. “I'm going on a trip."
    "Oh yes?” Pierce said. “Isn't that what she's supposed to tell you ?"
    "I need advice. I'm going to be gone a long time."
    A sense of loss absurd and total fled over Pierce's heart, somehow only supercharging his present glee. “Where?"
    "Europe. With a theater and mime troupe."
    "Mime troupe?"
    "Did you forget I'm into acting?” she said with a grin. “Sort of mimes. Spontaneous theater. We've got dates and everything.” She took his arm. “I have a stage name,” she whispered.
    "What is it?"
    A superstar expression, dreamy and self-mocking, came over her intelligent fox mask. “Diamond Solitaire,” she said.
    Olga beckoned from her corner with a hand, her other hand fanning and gathering her cards. “Listen,” Pierce said. “Can we go someplace?"
    "Sure,” she said. “Later. Where?"
    "My place."
    "Sure."
    Sure. He let her go, and went to look for more champagne; he was thirsty and gloating. There had come to be a steady tremble to him, a tremor, a standing wave of glee and triumph like the wave that stands in a silk banner in the wind.
* * * *
    What had Olga told him of himself that night? He couldn't afterward remember clearly; sitting by her he had felt himself for the first time to be truly an actor, and in a play witty and brilliant, which he also watched, a box-holder, first-nighter, wondering what turn the plot would take next and having loads of fun.
    A hiatus in his work: he remembered something about that: an uncompleted thing, she wasn't sure what, a titanic sculpture (his thought, at her suggestion) which was to take far longer to complete than he had at first supposed, he should be patient. And—since he was thinking of moving far away (he didn't know that he was)—she gave him a piece of advice, that he should write away to the chambers of commerce in the towns he was considering, and ask about job opportunities and housing and so on there; which struck him as sensible, as eminently sensible and a surprise coming from an old Gypsy woman in what appeared to be a semitrance. He remembered snow falling outside the window in which the lamp stood reflected.
    Snow was falling too outside the window of his own little bedroom hours later, a silk banner of snow standing in the ghostly streetlight, filling the night with its waving.
    Sid's movie never opened. It was in that month or the next that there appeared in commercial theaters, uptown theaters, movies that broke open the whole box Sid was promising a quick peek into, broke it all open at last, and nothing done masked, nothing.
    Oh antique innocence, Pierce thought, watching dawn come from