Sleeping Beauty (83 page)

“After we go to the tomb,” Anne said. “I brought your letters and pictures; it's hard to believe I'm really going to walk through it. It's hard to believe I'm here at all.” She gazed through the window at the scattered lights, feeling a strange kind of calm excitement. Until now, she had always traveled alone, entering each new city with her own eagerness and her own agenda, and she had been filled with doubts as she flew to meet Josh. But his letters were in her shoulder bag, and she had reread them as she changed planes in London, and then Cairo, and finally reached Luxor. He had been called back to Egypt the day after she went to Chicago to see Charles, and since then he had written every day, warm, friendly, noncommittal letters spilling over with enthusiasm for what the tomb was revealing as it was slowly being cleared. And each time he had urged her to come to Luxor and be a part of his adventure, she found fewer reasons to say no.

And now that she was here, driving down the dimly lit street lined with hotels on one side and docked tour boats on the other, she felt the excitement of being in a place unlike any she had visited in Europe, and of sharing Josh's great find, still being written about in newspapers all over the world. Sitting beside him, she felt calm and unafraid, and filled with anticipation.

“The Winter Palace,” Josh said, pulling up at a square building flush with the sidewalk. “We can get dinner in one of the cafés around here if you're hungry.”

“I'm not, thank you. The steward on the plane from London recommended a restaurant in Cairo, and I had so much time between planes I had dinner there.”

“Which restaurant?”

“Mahfoud.”

“One of my favorites.” He smiled ruefully. “I imagined
myself leading you by the hand through the strange, murky streets of Egyptian cities. You seem to do very well on your own.”

“I've done it for a long time,” she said, her voice suddenly cool. She stepped out of the car and waited while Josh took her bags from the backseat. They walked into the lobby of the hotel, and Anne filled out the registration form the manager gave her. “Do we leave early in the morning?”

“Seven, if that's all right. Breakfast at six-thirty.”

“Fine.” She handed the form back to the manager with her passport and credit card.

“We're delighted to have you with us, Madame,” he said in flawless English, showing none of his curiosity, and handed her a key. “Your room overlooks the Nile. I trust you'll be comfortable.”

“Thank you.” She turned to Josh. “Could we have coffee? I'm really not hungry, and I haven't slept since yesterday sometime, but I can't bear to shut myself into a hotel room, at least not yet.”

“Good idea,” he said. He asked the manager to take Anne's luggage to her room, and they went out again into the soft night air.

“Oh, is this all right?” Anne asked, looking down at her light wool pants. “I brought a skirt, if I need it.”

“You're fine,” Josh said. She wore, with her dark gray pants, a pale gray silk blouse, open at the neck to reveal a silver necklace, and a red leather blazer. After fourteen hours in three airplanes, her clothes were unwrinkled, and she had none of the pasty look of fatigue so many travelers have when flying halfway around the world. “In fact, you're perfect. Sometimes there's a problem here if women wear very short skirts or very low necklines, or shorts, but even that's fading away; they need tourist dollars too much to alienate anyone who comes. You'd be amused at how many of their concerns sound like Tamarack's.”

They walked away from the hotel, past men drinking coffee in tiny outdoor cafés of three or four tables, and groups of men sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, talking animatedly and smoking water pipes. A child came up to
them, her hand out, fingers rubbing together. “Baksheesh,” she said. She was very pretty, with a colorful scarf over her head, a long flowered skirt, and Nike running shoes. She kept pace with Josh and Anne, bumping into them, her hand out. Nearby, her mother, swathed in black, watched somberly. “Baksheesh,” said the little girl. “Baksheesh.”

“No,” Josh said.

“Baksheesh,” the child said as if he had not spoken. Her eyes were blank, looking at them but not seeing them.

Josh looked down.
“No,
” he said. It was the voice a parent uses to a child. The little girl turned away without a sign of disappointment, and crossed the street, looking for someone else to accost. Her mother followed.

“I could have given her something,” Anne said.

“So could I,” Josh replied. “And then fifty of them would have been all over us. And tomorrow another fifty and then another and another. They're bright and funny, with a lot of charm, and they do pretty well with the tourists. The first time I came here I emptied my wallet the first day. After that I learned how to say no. Let's walk through the market.”

They walked up a short alley and suddenly were plunged into the noises and smells of the market, just closing for the night. Vendors on both sides of the narrow street were moving their wares into minuscule sheds that could be locked up: barrels of spices, bolts of fabric, blouses and
gebalas
hanging from racks, tightly rolled carpets, displays of scarab paperweights and small carved pharaohs to sell to tourists. Others were preparing to push huge carts out of the market area with what was left of the day's fruits and vegetables, while the bakers were putting out the fires in their ovens and closing up their small shops. Children in the uniforms of their schools walked hand in hand, whispering and giggling; women swathed in black or dark purple did the last of their shopping, balancing on their heads high woven baskets or plastic laundry baskets; tourists took pictures, posing beside a donkey or a table of cone-shaped piles of herbs that had not yet been put away.

Anne looked from side to side, enjoying the color, the lyrical rhythms of Arabic, the high voices of the children,
the smells of spices and coffee, breads and ripe fruit, wool and dust, and woven through it all, the clip-clop of horses pulling open buggies along nearby streets and the incessant punctuation of horn-blowing from drivers who enjoyed the din and would feel inferior without contributing to it.

“Let's cross here,” Josh said. He took her hand. “Stay close; crossing streets is an art around here.” They waited until a break came in the stream of cars with headlights off and horns blowing, and dodged between two of them and an aggressive horse-drawn buggy, to the corniche on the other side. “Nimble feet and a casual attitude toward a long life will get you across any street in Egypt,” Josh said. “Though Luxor is a breeze compared to Cairo.”

“And Rome,” Anne said, and they smiled together.

It was quieter now; they were on the broad corniche that ran the length of town beside the Nile. Anne contemplated the dozens of boats docked stem to stern beside them. “Are there always so many?” she asked.

“Not in the summer when it gets too hot for most tourists, but in the winter they're all out, almost two hundred of them up and down the Nile. I can remember when there were only four, just a few years ago.”

Voices in several languages carried in the still air from the top decks of the boats where men in dark suits and women in silk dresses sat at tables with drinks and coffee. From some of the boats, music came: a French chanteuse, a German band, an Italian tenor, an American folk singer, blending with the Arabic of the town. It seemed to Anne that she and Josh were completely alone: two Americans in Luxor, Egypt, in mid-February, separate from the tourists on their boats, separate from the market, separate from the culture through which they walked. It was as if the two of them were in a small magic circle that kept them apart from everything else.

“Down here,” Josh said as they came to a stone stairway. The steps led to the riverbank and the tour boats, but on a broad landing halfway down was an outdoor café with blaring Arabic music and the pungent smell of Turkish coffee. “I took you at your word,” he said. “This is a
gahwah;
they only serve coffee. If you change your mind, there's a good place farther down where we can get dinner, but no coffee. We'd come back here for that.”

“No, this is fine; I like it,” Anne said. She sat on one side of the café, at a small round table with a checkered cloth, and studied the lively groups of men at other tables gesticulating as they talked, while Josh went for their coffees. He brought the cups to the table and sat beside Anne, pulling his chair close to hers so they could hear each other beneath the wail of the singer.

“This is a new feeling,” he said. “Usually when I wander around Luxor, I'm with locals and they're like camouflage. But here we are, two people so obviously American we couldn't be missed by anyone, and wherever we go, we're separate; not even part of the Americans on that boat next to us. They've got their boat and their guide and their group; we've got our feet, a car, and each other. I've felt close to you for a long time, but this is different, as if we're on our own island, and no one can really touch us. Do you feel that?”

Anne felt a rush of pure happiness. She wanted to touch Josh, to put her hand on his and thank him for being with her and seeing the world as she did. But she could not do it; her hand stayed in her lap. “I was thinking the same thing on the corniche,” she said. “A magic circle.”

He smiled. “I like that better than an island.”

The smells of strong coffee, tobacco, and sweet fumes from water pipes curled around them; music pounded over them. It wove in and out of the waves of sleepiness that swept over Anne, then receded, then returned. She sipped her coffee. “Shall I tell you what's been happening since my last letter? It seems so far away it's like trying to remember a book I read a long time ago, but I could try.”

“Yes, tell me,” Josh said. “Then we'll forget it, at least for as long as we're here.”

“I'd like that,” she said. “I'd like to forget a lot that's happened since Christmas.” She paused. “You know about the newspaper stories on Vince.”

“Only the one you sent me from the
LA Times.
I assume it was all over the country.”

She nodded. “And on television.” She shook her head. “It never occurred to us that he'd turn it into one of his greatest triumphs.”

“But it doesn't make any difference to the family, does it?” Josh asked. “If he was responsible for even half of what we think he did, it might have been satisfying to see him grovel, but we don't have enough to convict him of anything, so isn't the most important thing that Charles has the money, and the family still has Tamarack?”

There was a pause. “Yes,” Anne said. “I'd rather he wasn't in the Senate, but—”

“But that isn't what you were thinking of,” Josh said.

“No. He's evil. And it's terrible to see an evil person always come out on top, always finding ways to turn whatever he does to his own advantage, no matter how awful it was.”

Josh did not ask her why she said “always.” He thought he could guess, but he could not tell her that, or comfort her for the anguish in her voice; he could not say anything until she confided in him. Instead he asked casually, “But he didn't come out on top, did he? He's lost his fortune and any chance at being president, and I thought those were the two things he cared about the most.”

Anne nodded. “Of course,” she said quietly. Her voice was almost drowned out by the music. She sipped some of her coffee. “Let's see, what else has been happening? Charles has interviewed a few people for vice president of Chatham Development; he won't try to get rid of Fred, but he says he wants a powerful counterweight to him. I think if he can have one successful project, he'll retire. And then I think he'll move to Tamarack. Not because he wants to be Ethan Chatham, but because he has a family there and he really doesn't have anything left in Chicago. What else? I wrote you that the Tramway Board closed its investigation with a finding of sabotage, but no finding of guilt. Nobody liked that, but there wasn't anything else they could do. Tyler is keeping the investigation open, but no one has much hope of finding the person who caused it. The best part was that Halloran wrote a separate report commending the company
for what he said was a thorough, highly professional maintenance program that wouldn't have failed if it hadn't been sabotaged. Leo is using that in a series of new ads; he's hoping to salvage the rest of the season. I think he will; Gail said a couple of days ago that the resort association was already getting calls for reservations.”

“And Robin and Ned aren't worried about leaving Tamarack,” Josh said.

“No.” Anne smiled. “They're planning a celebration for whenever we come back. They're very excited; it seems that the town thinks it's because of Leo that they won't have high rises and neon signs, so all the Calders are heroes, and at school that means Ned and Robin. So, no more fights to prove they belong there.” She paused, remembering Robin clinging to her the last night she was there. “Robin told me that ever since I came back, her family's gotten bigger. They all used to be visitors, she said, and now they come more often and stay longer. As if”—Anne's voice dropped and Josh leaned closer to hear her—“everybody belongs.”

“She's right,” Josh said. “They used to avoid each other. They didn't know how to be a family; they needed someone to hold them together. Ethan did that, when he was alive. And now it's you.”

“And Tamarack,” Anne said. “I think they feel now, after we almost lost it, that it's home, and a place to be at peace.”

They sat quietly for a moment. Nothing seemed farther from the dust of ancient Egypt than Tamarack, nestled beneath glistening snow and a crisp blue sky, but they both could envision it. A place to be at peace. Their eyes met. There were many places to be at peace.