Cairo (20 page)

And then I listened some more, imagined her (shoes in hand) creeping along the walkway to her apartment, a glance over her shoulder, the key in the lock, gone.

But I kept listening, in case she should change her mind and return.

*

Despite her warnings we managed to steal a few more times together in the next week or so. The pattern was the same each time. There would come a knock at my door at obscure times — ten in the morning, four in the afternoon — and I would open it to find Sally there, eyes shining. ‘Max will be out for a few hours,' she would say as she slipped inside, taking off her coat.

It was on one of these visits that I made the mistake of asking her what we were going to do. We were lounging in my bed, naked, awash in the peculiar melancholy of those whose desire has been sated. The day was nearly over, and the light was fading. Soon it would be dark, and I would have to leave for work, and Sally would go back to her apartment and tell Max whatever it was she told him of her day, of where she had been.

Without bothering to cover herself, Sally walked over to the armchair where she had slung her jacket. She scrabbled around in a pocket for her tobacco.

I waited for her to answer and then, thinking she hadn't heard me, I opened my mouth to ask her again.

She coughed as if to forestall my query. ‘Don't ask me again. Not now.'

I sat up, filled with the dread that arises from asking a question
to which one is unwilling to know the answer. But I couldn't help myself. ‘Then when?'

She sat in the armchair, legs crossed, luxuriating in her nakedness, and I understood I would never again witness anything so wonderful as long as I lived. Her cigarette smoke trailed upwards, and her watch glinted in the pale afternoon light. She observed me for a long time. For a minute it seemed she was preparing to reveal something serious — a secret, perhaps — but instead she said, ‘You're nice, you know that? I read somewhere that writers are liable to become corrupt.'

I didn't know what to say.

‘Don't become like them.
Us
. Don't become like us.'

There was an uncomfortable silence — charged with sorrow, desire's inevitable twin.

She rolled her cigarette, raising her eyes to mine as she licked the gummed edge of the paper. ‘I know that we're not supposed to talk about it, but I'm glad you're helping with … you know. It makes me feel safer, somehow. And it'll be so great in France. Imagine it. All of us there, eating baguettes. The house looks amazing, doesn't it?'

Aside from the chat with James after seeing
Blue Velvet
, none of us ever talked in any explicit fashion about the proposed theft of the
Weeping Woman
. In some ways it was as if the conversation had never happened; in other ways, that afternoon was on a continuous loop in my mind. Certain phrases returned to me, especially when I was attempting to sleep at night; they floated up like phantasms through the darkness.

Now and again, we did, however, discuss our proposed life in Europe, details of which had begun to come into focus. While Edward and Gertrude went to live in Berlin, James, Max, Sally and I would live in a house owned by Max's Uncle Carl. His father's older brother had bought the fourteenth-century farmhouse five years earlier but had only lived there for six months before
deciding a life in the French countryside was not for him, whereupon he decamped to New York. The place was empty, and we were welcome to live there if we took on the responsibility of undertaking minor repairs and tidying up the grounds.

Max had once produced from his wallet a crumpled photograph of the farmhouse (ramshackle flower garden, shuttered windows, woman in a white dress standing at frame's edge shading her eyes), and I at once understood the dream into which I had been co-opted. The place was shimmeringly beautiful and the tantalising lack of detail — not only in the photo but also in anyone's specific knowledge of the property — encouraged us to embellish the fantasy with our own elements. In those blank spaces we built an artists' studio in the large barn on the property; dreamed up a grapevine arbour under which a table groaned with plates of food and bottles of red wine; conjured a nearby creek in which we might swim; and whiled away summer afternoons, trembling with creativity.

Over the months, the farmhouse assumed a place in the halls of my imagination more akin to a memory than a wish. The rational part of me didn't believe the plan to take the
Weeping Woman
would ever be enacted, but this vague but persistent assumption was overwhelmed by my constant brooding over our exotic life in Europe until my participation in the heist became a fait accompli. It was as if I had agreed to it behind my own back.

‘I have to go,' Sally said, squashing her cigarette out in an ashtray and bending to collect her clothes. ‘We can't do this again, Tom.'

‘That's what you said last time. And the time before that.'

‘This time I'm serious,' she said, and I understood that she was.

Unable to speak, I nodded and watched her dress. Sally Cheever: I loved her from the time I first saw her, and for the rest of my life, but I loved her most intensely on that afternoon. And, perhaps
more naively, on that day — despite what she said — I believed she loved me back.

The visits from Sally stopped, as she said they must. It was no great surprise, but I was wounded and terribly sad. The first flush of love is like a nostalgia for the present; we know, on some molecular level, that it cannot be repeated. The tragedy is that one can never calculate such instances until one knows there will be no more of them.

A FEW DAYS LATER I RAN INTO JAMES AT THE CORNER OF
Gertrude and Nicholson streets. I had been to see a movie in the city and decided to walk home and get some air rather than catching a tram. James was heading in the opposite direction, towards Carlton Gardens. It was a grim evening, the clouds low and threatening. He looked embarrassed to see me. We chatted briefly, each of us huddled under our respective umbrellas. I told him that I had been to see
The Hitcher
.

‘What's that?'

‘A movie.'

‘What about?'

He listened without interest as I recounted the plot of the film, which concerned a sociopathic hitchhiker who frames an innocent man. It has always been a childish weakness of mine, this tedious relating of films my listener has not yet seen.

‘Right,' interrupted James. ‘I see. That sounds pretty …
violent.
'

‘Well, it's about a serial killer.'

A tram lumbered around the bend, like a thick-set man angling through a tight spot. Its windows were fogged with the breath of those inside. Gloomy faces stared out. I imagined what they saw — a wet and dismal street corner, two men cowering under
umbrellas, the jaundiced glow of a streetlight.

‘Max tells me you've been down in the dumps these past few weeks?' James said.

I started. ‘What? But I've hardly seen him.'

He eyed me warily from beneath his soggy fringe. ‘Drifting around the place. He thinks it's over a woman. Then again, he thinks everything is about women. I hope you're not doing anything dumb?'

I thought it judicious to refrain from offering any response, and instead muttered about getting out of the rain.

‘Why don't you come with me?' he said. ‘There's a good chance of finding an eligible lady where I'm heading.'

I prevaricated but, as usual, James talked me into walking with him. I figured the company would do me good. Besides, it delayed my return to Cairo, where I would have nothing to do other than brood over the nights Sally and I had spent together. I feared my untreated feelings for her were festering into emotions altogether less pleasant; I listened when I thought she might have been walking past and lay awake at night wondering if she were lying awake thinking of me. I didn't want an
eligible lady
, as James had so crudely put it; I wanted Sally.

‘Where are we going?' I asked when we had crossed Nicholson Street.

He stopped. ‘Can you keep a secret?'

‘You know I can.'

‘To an AA meeting,' James whispered, although there was not a soul (certainly none who cared) in earshot.

‘What's that?'

He chuckled and set off walking. ‘Ah, yes. A nice country boy like you wouldn't know about these things. Alcoholics Anonymous.'

I stopped in my tracks. ‘What? I thought we were going to a bar or a party.'

James grabbed my elbow and eased me onwards. ‘God, no. Listen, AA meetings are absolutely full of lonely women. Lots of failed marriages and so on. And most of the men who go along to these places are complete Neanderthals. Jailbirds and the like. I was at a meeting once, years ago now, and saw that fat grub who used to host that game show, the one with the ponytail. What's his name? Edward used to watch it all the time, claimed it was rigged, which it probably was. Had a spinning wheel, a woman in evening wear, even though it was screened in the middle of the afternoon …'

‘
Wheel of Fortune
.'

‘God help us. So you're already streets ahead if you don't have some sort of sexually transmitted disease or a tattoo of barbed wire around your neck. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, right? Half those people only go to, you know, pick up.'

‘Are you serious?'

‘If there is one thing women love even more than a troubled man, it's a troubled man who is trying to improve himself.'

‘I don't know about this, James. I might go home. I'm pretty exhausted.'

‘And let's face it, they're complete
soaks
, so their judgement isn't spot on, either.'

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. Besides, I'm not an alcoholic.'

With one hand, James pinched his worn velvet jacket tighter around his torso. He scowled when a bitter wind buffeted us as we walked alongside the Carlton Gardens, bringing with it the scent of rotting leaves and chlorine from the fountain.

‘That doesn't matter,' he yelled above an ambulance careering out of nearby St Vincent's Hospital with its siren whooping. ‘No one will know. It's not as if they give you a breath test before letting you in. Half of them aren't even true alcoholics; they're
stupid, boring people who got drunk three weekends in a row and love the idea of having a distinguishing problem. It's a badge of identity. Everyone wants to be a victim these days. It's part of the culture. People don't want to be better than the next person; they want to be
worse
. Honestly, Tom. Come on. It'll be fun.'

‘How long have you been doing this?'

‘Oh, years, I guess.' He hesitated. ‘My psychiatrist recommended meetings as a way of coming to terms with myself. After I, you know, tried to do away with myself. And it was useful for a while. Made me see there were people far worse off than me. Sometimes it helps to talk. Dispels the loneliness. That's good, isn't it?'

James, who was so forthcoming about the personal lives of other people, was notoriously secretive about his own, and I was taken aback by his unexpected candour.

‘But aren't you supposed to stop drinking there?' I asked.

‘Well, I've never been drunk
at
a meeting,' he said, scandalised that I should think him capable of such blasphemy.

I stopped walking. ‘James, I'm serious. I'm going home. I'll see you later.'

But he was reluctant for us to part company. He grabbed my arm. ‘Alright, then. Let's go and get a coffee.'

I relented and we walked back through the drizzle to Cafe Rhumbarella. The waiters milled around the bar, preening and gossiping. We took a table at the rear and ordered drinks. The cafe was only half full, but snug. The coffee machine hissed; plates clattered. From our position, I could see through the large front window to the rain-streaked street outside, where trams and cars passed by like undersea machines prowling an aquarium floor.

We didn't speak until we had sipped from our coffee and lit cigarettes. Only when these two rituals had been enacted, it seemed, had we truly settled in. James nibbled at a fingernail. A bead of rainwater trembled at his jaw.

‘I'm sorry,' he said after several minutes, ‘I shouldn't have even mentioned that to you. It was stupid of me. Very inappropriate. But please, don't tell anyone I still go there. Max and Edward would laugh me out of town. I couldn't stand it. I …'

‘What?'

‘I'm scared.'

‘Scared of what?'

He rubbed a hand over his face, chewed on his lower lip. He looked tormented, but explained no further. ‘Nothing. It's nothing.'

Although perturbed by his behaviour, I didn't press him further. I went to the bathroom. On the wall above the toilet was scrawled a crude joke —
Why did they have coke on board challenger?? Because they couldn't get 7-up
— under which was written, in a different hand:
it was a CIA Plot
.

When I rejoined him, James was lost in thought, almost unaware of my presence. He stared forlornly over my shoulder, and I realised it was from this table that I had admired Sally all those months ago as she sat reading and smoking. It occurred to me, quite unbidden, that James was in love with her and had perhaps been so afflicted for many years. This thought prompted in me a poisonous jolt of jealousy. I recalled the afternoon Sally and I had danced together, when he had been so sullen. Was that why he had been so eager to warn me away from her?

‘Never mind,' he said after a few minutes, as if in response to my unspoken thoughts. ‘Shall we get a bottle of wine?'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Oh, I'm sure.'

James was an excellent drinking companion, and I reeled home two or three hours later, giggling to myself all the way at how the night had developed. As usual since the time Sally and I had spent together, my heart thudded with anticipation at the
thought that, somehow, she had changed her mind and found her way into my apartment to wait for me.