Cheyney Fox (25 page)

“I would like to play coy, flirt with you, say something dazzlingly female, coquettish, like, ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ but it would sound pathetic, cheap, and there is nothing cheap about how I’m feeling, standing here talking to you. And if I did do that, I think you just might turn your back and walk away from me.”

A look of pleasant surprise lit his face as he said, “I’ll take that as a yes, then. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“To go where, at this hour?”

“A night club where we can drink and hear Arab love songs sung by a woman with a voice to melt your heart and something special in sensuality. And then to a very private place where I can make delicious, depraved love to you. You, Cheyney Fox, and I are going to have a wonderful time.”

“Such promises. Clearly I am with a deceiver,” she said, falling in unresisting step with him.

“I am. I feel an amazing intuition about you. No, it’s more of an insight, the inner you that is rarely if ever revealed to others. It excites me, makes me feel good. I almost know you better than you do yourself. Don’t be frightened,” he whispered in her ear, “I’ll never harm you.”

She watched him haggle with a taxi driver. A promising start, if this man was her destiny. The whys and wherefores of a relationship with him were irrelevant. She only knew that
she wanted to be a part of his flesh and to give herself up to him.

After the haggling was over, they climbed into the backseat of the old black Buick. It sped them through the near-deserted streets of Cairo toward Giza and the Sphinx and the three great pyramids of Egypt.

Just before dawn was no bad moment to feel the sensuousness of Cairo as a city. A night sky full of stars, and a nearly full moon slipping in and out of a few low clouds. A cool breeze drifted through the hushed city, raising more of the powderlike dust off the sands of the desert. They rode down the Sharia el Nil and watched the the dark silhouettes anchored in the Nile. The Egyptian feluccas that have plied the length of the river for as long as man has navigated the Nile. A caravan of camels being driven to market had to be negotiated. The sound of tinkling bells on maltreated, apathetic donkeys pulling flat carts of produce in from the country. The odd taxi or car was all the traffic at that hour. A city asleep, that from sunrise to sunset was usually teeming with people and whose life’s force was one of the sacred rivers of antiquity, the Nile.

Cheyney felt the heartbeat of Cairo. She knew she would love it all her life. Just as she would the heartbeat of the man next to her. She made up her mind not to hold back with Grant Madigan.

“I want to know everything about you,” she said. “How tall you are, how much you weigh, what your politics are, have you ever slept with a black woman, a man, a Chinese, been in love, been hurt by love, whether you like escargot, steak, ice cream. Where you live, has there been a wife, children, is there a dog, a cat in your life. Do you play poker with the boys, are you wealthy, mean with money? Everything, even some serious things …” He kissed her quiet. And she happily gave in to his kiss.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know. But not all of it here or now. Now I want to tell you how much I want to make love to you. No, that’s not wholly true. I want that and more. I want to plumb the depths of life with you, to have the raunchiest sex with you that either of us has ever experienced. I want to do things with you, have experiences with you that I have never had with any other woman. I want us to die together
in our orgasms to everything in the world again and again. And to rise together, to be fresh and renewed. And I want to know everything about you. I want us to talk and talk and hold back none of what we feel.

“And I don’t want to be dishonest either. I want you to know the dark and the light side of my nature and for you to understand my worst faults and to love me in spite of them. And I need you to be big and brave and strong and independent because I’m a cad when it comes to women and commitment. I don’t make bonds for myself ever. I don’t want a home, I like living in hotels. Room service and restaurants might have been invented for me. I live by them. I hate anything that reeks of domesticity, babies, wives, and children, no home or hearth for me. Traps, I see them as mantraps, except for other men. I enjoy being part of those things in the lives of my friends, but only there. And when I am old and still a crusty bachelor, there will be no regrets because I will have chosen to do other things as rewarding as those I gave up. My love affairs are short-term, Cheyney, because I make them that way. They are numerous because of a strong libido and an admiration for women in general. I especially like beautiful women like you. But I could easily walk off with an ugly duckling of a lady, if there was a sexual rapport between us. When I am with a woman, I become everything to her because she becomes everything to me. And when it’s over, the taste always lingers. But I still get on with my life. Until a time when we can come together again.

“I sense a kind of destiny for us. But I want you to know right off what that destiny does not entail. When we have to part, I don’t want you to feel a moment of misery, never mind the overwhelming misery I have seen other women suffer for some men. I have the uneasy feeling that ours could be a lunatic love, for both of us. We were bound to meet. Cheyney, I don’t usually pick women up as I have done with you this evening, in two minutes flat. Or spill all this out to them.”

“No? How long does it usually take? An hour?”

He liked that. That she doubted him and was not afraid to tell him. That she, like him, cut past the chase and got right down the path to where they were headed. She excited him
with her emotional stability because here was a woman he was less likely to hurt.

“Look, Grant, we’re safe, maybe not from wanting each other, but certainly from wanting to destroy each other’s lives. I have a friend who taught me something I never knew before. ‘You don’t have to fall in love to have a happy fuck with somebody.’ She and this liberated age of the hippie sixties have set me free. I have even learned that you can not only fuck ’em, but you
can
love ’em, and still let your partners go free. My days of a lunatic love are over. So don’t give me that speech.”

“You’re angry.”

“No. Not angry, a little embarrassed by your pomposity. If I didn’t want to be here, then I wouldn’t be here. In fact, I am not so sure I do want to be here. Not sure in my head anyway. But my body, my heart, my lust, say something different.”

“You are one terrific lady. Absolutely terrific. I think I am already talking myself into love with you. You’re up-front. You deal a straight hand. I like that. Cheyney, I don’t mean to be pompous, even if that’s the way I came across. But it is something I am adamant about, not hurting women. When I get something going with a woman, I don’t want to play the cad. I know who I am, what I am, and my image can stand up to the truth, just as I am certain yours can. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But there are a great many people, more people than not, who can’t. Not truth about themselves or those they want. I have the right to the life I want for myself, and some women don’t want to believe that.

“There are men, many men who do not want marriage and children and the responsibility all that entails. But they still want a woman to make passionate love to. They want her to want them, it inspires them to give themselves up to her. I’m one of those men. The greatest ambition of women is to inspire love. It was Molière who put that across. And he still gets my vote. I also believe it is the greatest contribution to man that a woman makes. Where would we be without women who inspire love? I’ve covered enough wars as a journalist, seen enough gore, listened to enough dictators and world leaders, interviewed enough wealthy power players, to tell you that,
without that, the world would be a burned-out, hollow place. Even more than it already is.”

“And I inspire love in you!”

He pulled her across the seat, tight up against him. “You know you do, or I wouldn’t have you here.”

“That was not a question, just a statement to let you know I know where we are with each other, Grant Madigan. And I like it very much.” He squeezed her hand.

“This is the best I can do,” he said, “for the moment, anyway.” They rode in silence for a short time, and then he added, “I think you are a beautiful and exciting woman, and I want you, and I know we will never ruin what we will have together.”

The night club was in a large tent in the desert some distance beyond the great pyramids. On the way there they passed the Sphinx, bereft of tourists, with only the moonlight and the stars for company. She looked like something that transcends time and place. She was magnificently mysterious, and her silence spoke to Cheyney’s imagination and probed her heart. The Sphinx, this ancient creature of stone who had for thousands of years probed the hearts and minds of other humans, so stoic and alone, who had withstood so much, and might for thousands more, fixed its questioning presence in Cheyney’s soul.

Grant was not an insensitive man. He watched her being seduced by the Sphinx, then drew her roughly to him and onto his lap, and filled himself with her scent of jasmine and roses, while she watched the colossal statue turn from seeming some intangible thing that was more than stone back into the Sphinx of Giza, loom smaller and fainter, and finally disappear from the rear window of the old Buick.

The largest of the three pyramids rose up in front of them. The moon cast a white light down the edge where two sides of the pyramid met. Cheyney actually gasped, so powerfully dramatic and magnetic was it. It kept drawing her back in time, reminding her how transient her stay on earth was. Yet it reminded her, too, to live to the very fragile edge, like the edge accentuated by that shaft of moonlight running down the pyramid.

He laughed at her. It was a laugh of approval over her sensibilities. It was cold in the desert, and black, black night,
with little but the sound of the Buick. He rolled down the windows, wanting to listen to the nothingness and keep her warm with his body. The taxi sped crazily across the sand at high speed. Ten minutes later they were there.

A huge tent with crazily parked Rolls Royces and Bentleys and extra-long Mercedes by the dozen, and a few taxis. Out here they were nothing but dark forms in the desert. It was so still nothing moved, not even half a dozen camels squatting in the sand — their drivers rolled up asleep in mats next to them. So quiet even there, except for a faint hum coming from the tent. It chilled and excited the senses; Cheyney clung to Grant’s arm. They found the entrance. Someone heard their arrival. Two men flung the huge tent flaps back and bowed them in.

The contrast was astounding. The tent was filled with men and only a few women sitting at tables that circled the room. Desert lanterns of candlelight hung from the tent’s ceiling and were set on the tables. Aisles radiated to the center of the tent where the carpeted desert floor was empty. The Arab sheikhs and Saudi princes, Egyptians and Kuwaitis, Iraquis and Iranians, the wealthiest of the Arabs who came to Cairo to play, were there to hear the singer they were passionate about. The air was aswirl with smoke from hookahs. It smelled of hashish, and Indonesian grass, expensive cigars from Havana, or just plain tobacco. It mixed with the scent of a rose garden and roast lamb. A room of talking, laughing, sex-hungry men waiting to have their emotions stirred by the sensuous voice of Shammamam.

The owner rushed toward Grant, recognizing him at once, and found them a table after shifting and moving several other tables and people. Fifteen minutes, she was to sing in fifteen minutes, whispered the
sufragis
from table to table, and that generated more excitement. A bottle of Krug, an excellent vintage and chilled perfectly. A heaped platter of lamb cutlets grilled over charcoal and herbs, another of crisp fried potatoes and onions, were placed on the white damask cloth. The only fare served at the club. Except for platters of fresh fruit, peeled and sugared, and bowls of dark, rich honey to dip them in, which came later. A hookah was made ready for them and brought to the table, a lump of hashish, Lebanese gold, smoldering in the embers.

“I’m not the only civil barbarian in this room who thinks you’re a beauty and would like to ravish you. I dare say there’s not a man in this room who doesn’t envy me.”

“Ah, then you really do find me beautiful,” she teased, knowing very well that he did.

“Oh, yes, and more. But you know that.”

“Yes, I guess I do,” she said. “But I certainly didn’t the first time we met. And I don’t mean at the Gezira Club.”

“But we have never met before.”

“Oh, but we have. You knocked me down in a rainstorm. In New York, in front of FAO Schwarz’s toy shop.”

He recalled nothing about the incident. She told it to him, and they laughed together about the rude things he had said to her when he took her home in a taxi. About the way he behaved toward her, his kissing her, and fondling her breasts, how angry she was with him because he assumed he understood her. She was gracious enough in prodding his memory to add, “As it turned out, you did understand me better than I did myself, but that is another story. And that was years ago, and this is now.”

They were distracted from themselves by: “She comes now, she comes.” Word spread around the tent. The
sufragis
stopped serving and rushed to stand mutely against the black cloth walls of the tent. A hush like an indolent wave rolled slowly across the room. Complete silence for several minutes, and then a spotlight beamed a path for her down one of the aisles. She entered the tent and walked slowly, seductively through the light. Men reached out to touch her, pick up the hem of her skirt to kiss it as she passed by them. With one voice, a roar of admiration for her filled the tent. Men stood up, some clapped, others waved their arms, others called out in curdling noises, or banged their fists upon tables. She stood in the center of the tent and made a full circle, bowing to them, her arm gestures bidding them to calm down.

Her skin was a coffee color, green eyes outlined heavily in black. A face of sensual beauty with its high cheekbones and pointed chin, its long slender nose. A feline, fox-like face with an expression of sweetness that could melt the coldest of hearts. Her lips, large and fleshy, were crimson. Her hair long and bushy, a mass of crinkly waves, stood out like a seductive
snare. Over it, pinned on the top of her head, a traditional black head-scarf that fell over her shoulders and flowed down to the ground as it billowed out around her, emanating a dark seductive aura. Her dress, again black, fitted tightly across an ample bosom and a narrow waist that accentuated wide, fleshy hips and a voluptuous bottom, such as Arab men favored. The black braid of the bodice of her long dress was buttoned tight up to a long and slender neck. On her ears, large golden earrings set in diamonds and rubies.