Free Toward the End of Time by John Updike Page B

museum guard is not looking.
    We go up the cellar stairs. Naked we move through the main floor, past Gloria’s Chippendale dining chairs and mahogany table of many leaves and teak-veneered breakfront laden with Meissen and Limoges china and filigreed Victorian wineglasses with ruby-red stems, our dirty feet tracking cellar crumbs over the blue Tabriz. I inspect the rug for bloodstains but can see none, in the bald winter light. I exultantly, fearfully feel our joint intrusion as systematic desecration. Our filthy bare feet, our Edenic nudity. If the white FedEx truck were to flash around the driveway, the driver would see us through the Palladian windows. I am getting an erection, mounting the carpeted stairs with this body lithe as a boy’s beside me. When I glance down at her, she has sullen, swollen lips and a blunt blob of a nose—an obtuse muzzle. We survey the second floor, the rooms the boys lived in before they went off and got married. Some rock posters and car posters are still up. My mistress is younger, I realize with a start of shame, than even the younger of my stepsons. Our relationship abruptly seems exploitive. I take her cool sharp elbow and lead her up the back stairs, to the third-floor “safe” room, with its special alarm that must be deactivated with a switch in a closet, where Gloria keeps or kept her special family treasures— jewels inherited, in unwearably ornate settings, from great-great-grandmothers; silver platters and teapots too heavy to use at less than a state banquet; vast punchbowls of cut glass; boxes of turn-of-the-century first editions that her maternal grandfather paid to have shipped from England, along with his Savile Row shoes and dinner clothes, and that he slit, as he read, with a little ivory paper knife tilted in his signetringed right hand. Even men, men of means, attended to books then as if to carven caskets in which a crucial secret, a key to living, might be locked.
    Another capped steam pipe hisses in here, overheating the slant-ceilinged small chamber. Its single window, a dormer, overlooks the lethal sea, with its ragged islands and pewter glare of shrouded sunlight. Deirdre, amid all this treasure, is frightened by something within herself—perhaps a chemical need, for a quick pipe of crack, or a surge of covetousness. I have shown her too much. I make a mental note to change the padlock, lest she and that pimp of a taxi driver return with criminal intent. Gloria’s splendid ancestors, so confident in their luxurious appropriations, hiss crushingly in our ears. As if ashamed of her meagre assets— her momentarily young and healthy body, her willingness to play the whore—Deirdre folds her thin arms tight across her small breasts. Her wine-dark nipples are taut, as if from a chill. Fear like an odor leaps from her skin and clings to me, softening my erection.

    What do we know about the Egyptian grave robbers? We know, by inference, that they were brave, risking the anathemas of the gods and execution by torture. They were clever, breaking into even the center of the great pyramid of Cheops and emptying it before the archaeologists arrived a millennium later. They were persistent, gutting of treasure, by the year 1000 B.C., every known rock tomb save that of the golden-faced boy-king Tutankhamen, which had been haphazardly concealed by a pile of stone rubbish from the excavation of another tomb. Tomb-robbing was a profession, a craft, a guild, practiced by whole villages such as thatof Gourna, located above the Valley of the Kings, and connected, possibly, with the honeycomb of royal tombs by deep-dug wells. The thieves’ tunnels rival in extent if not finish the sanctioned passageways of the pharaohs’ engineers. The divinely inspired technological achievements of the tomb-builders—false stairways, monolithic booby traps, passageways hundreds of feet in extent—were matched by those of the sacrilegious thieves, who conquered even the labyrinths of