The Last Maharajan (Romantic Thriller/Women's Fiction) (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Geoff burst through the door when he came home that day. He walked up to Euly, wide-eyed, smiling and grabbed her around the waist then gave her an extended kiss.

“Wow. What did I do to deserve that?” It reminded Euly of when he’d gotten up the nerve to ask her to marry him.

They’d talked about a trip but never made any firm plans. The idea hung around them and every once in a while they’d comment, “Wouldn’t it be nice…” but nothing ever came of it. With Euly’s mood becoming darker these days, Geoff had taken a bold step to push forward with the notion and make the idea real.

“What’s going on?”

“Well, you know how we’ve talked about taking a trip...” Geoff looked like he would split at the seams.

“Yes.” Her voice swung up in a quizzical manner and she shut off the water she had running. “I did it.”

“Did what?” She tried to control her demeanor, her apprehension about his coming declaration.

“I got us two tickets to Beirut. For the spring.”

His eyes widened and he frowned when he her face went deadpan. She wanted to recover, make him feel good about his surprise, but she failed him.

“Well, uh, I don’t know. I might be busy then.”

Geoff tipped his head and squinted in disbelief. His blue eyes seemed to lint over. It was obvious to her he expected Euly to respond differently.

“I thought you wanted to go. We talked about it.”

“Oh. Well, yes, I do but I just didn’t think it would be so soon.”

“Soon? We’ve been talking about it for five years. Anyway, better now than later, right?”

"Oh, yeah, urn. Oh, shit. Of course, it's okay. I mean, it's great, right?" She hugged him around the neck. ''I'm sorry. It's great, really. I guess we’ll just have to make plans, now, won’t we?"

CHAPTER FOUR

When Euly turned her head back from the chatter of the birds, she caught a faint dank mustiness emanate from around her. The couch was damp to the touch. One of autumn’s generous rains, dragged into the house by the animals, had been tracked onto the sofa’s jade upholstery and smelled somewhere between wet fur and moldy earth. But, a load of clothes tumbling in the dryer wafted in and balanced out the sofa’s bawdy tang. The sofa could wait for cleaning after her morning routine and certainly until the light of day.

Lately, Geoff had taken to complaining about her sloppy habits, the books piled on the wooden floor, the heap of newspapers a foot high on top her desk, and the mountain of laundry waiting to be washed, dried, folded, and put away. Even her library wall looked disheveled. Books she’d read were replaced in careless disarray on shelves, and not properly slotted into each author’s spot. After looking around the room, she realized she’d chewed her thumbnail down to a jagged quick – a nasty habit she could barely abide in herself. She examined it and then used the ragged thing to pull a cord of hair behind her ear – another nervous habit. Then, she shoved her hand under her arm to stop all of it.

With fall well underway, she made a silent promise to spend the season becoming more organized, more thoughtful about her husband’s wishes. That, of course, meant taking time out of her busy workday – writing obituaries for a mid-size newspaper’s online service – to do household chores. Her anger flared when she considered

Geoff’s ability to make cleaning and cooking her responsibility alone and not his own. She rolled her eyes and the steaming subsided into a simmer. Anyway, writing obits wasn’t exactly what she’d intended when she set off on a career as a writer. The book she’d embarked upon at forty came to a cold stop before it ever got off the ground. Still the idea of writing something longer like a novel tugged at her. And, since her mother’s illness turned critical, she contemplated writing a memoir. Although she wasn’t clear her motives were pure – if writing the memoir was appropriate in light of her mother’s coming death (at which point she could use stories she might not if Belle was still alive).

Even so, she figured the story could be truthful without being cruel and so resolved that now was just as good a time as any. She could squeeze the memoir into her workday even if it meant forgoing an extra load of laundry.

Damn! How did laundry become more important than her own work?

She realized she’d flitted from Lebanon to the laundry within a matter of seconds. Maybe hormones were controlling her feelings this morning. Then she reconsidered. Maybe her mood was the rumbling from some of old history in her life giving way to her emotional unrest.

In a matter of minutes, the day had turned a grizzled haze. She watched a flurry of soft winds sway the trees and imagined herself rocking in a cradle. She wished for a time before, an easier time from her youth.

A remembered dream snuck into her mind from the night before and muzzled Euly’s swelling animosity to those things, those people, outside her control. In the dream, her ex-mother in-law, Sharice and she were locked in an embrace and profoundly happy to see one another after so many years. The mirage slid from a dream into a nightmare when she considered some virulent manifestation of her subconscious creating the vision – perhaps some hidden meaning about Belle’s deteriorating health. She’d always gotten along well with Sharice but after the divorce from her first husband, she’d lost track of her. So, why then would she let this memory crop up now? Guilt socked her in the gut and shuddered through her body.

Sharice and Belle were vastly different from one another, a Mutt and Jeff of mothers. Euly remembered how they talked together one Christmas. Sharice sat nervously next to Belle who seemed to be conducting her own version of a cross- examination. The only things missing were a hard wooden stool and a flashlight. She remembered approaching the women. Belle’s smile appeared trite and fake. Sharice turned her head away. Euly knew by her mother’s pinched face, she didn’t approve of Sharice. At that point, Euly had pinpointed a disparity. When Belle smiled, she smiled only with her mouth not her eyes.

Euly’s tea was still searing hot. She blew on the brew before each sip, trying to divert a sting on her tongue and sucked in cool air along with each thorny snap of bergamot.

Her cat, Raz, jumped onto the arm of the couch where she sat startling Euly back to the present. When she jerked, tea spilled on her sweatpants boiling through to her legs.

“Raz.” She squawked quietly pulling up on the hot wet spot and blowing at it.

Finally, Euly stretched out crossing her legs over the ottoman. She patted her lap in a welcome for the cat. The cat coyly placed a single paw on one of Euly’s spreading thighs.

The earliest part of mornings were the few hours of the day she didn’t mind her recent weight- gain – in the dark, and for the cat. Menopause, so far, had been kind to her. Anyway, she decided, she could use a pound here and there, for the cat, if nothing else.

It wasn’t that she was overweight. She just wasn’t her prime weight any longer. Her dog, Jonathan, lie quietly next to her and didn’t stir, not through the shift of their positions nor through the cat’s motor-like-purr drumming like a soft muffled alarm clock stuffed somewhere in a drawer.

Euly sat alone in the fog the morning provided. She wondered if she could ever remember a time when things were happy in her small family. She desperately flipped through pages of her history trying to recount happy moments, if only just one. Her heart pounded as page after troubled page elicited heartache, bitter scenes of accusation, threat and tears. She rubbed her eyes in order to thwart an onset of emotions but already felt a dewy film under her fingertips.

Then, what brought her to this point, returned her yet again when she remembered another childhood memory, the memory of a party and how that party was the last one like it they would ever have.

Her father’s family was of Arabic descent and it was this side Euly most identified. The Maharajan was an annual bash. Euly remembered going to several when she was young, but that was a good forty years before. That was when the parties ended too. Euly remembered a younger version of herself then, an innocent version – lost and forgotten – and maybe it was that girl’s voice when she heard herself utter a prayerful,
Jesus
.

The day was a Saturday, a morning one summer during the middle 1960s. At Maharajans, people of Middle Eastern descent – and for Euly, Lebanese people – reconnected, caught up on lives, and felt some sense of unanimity in their heritage. People met, laughed, sang, danced, and gossiped.

Belle, fair-skinned and blonde, went along to these parties out of marital obligation. Others thrilled to join in the times meant for heritable camaraderie.

Everyone drank punch or beer, if old enough. People ate, drank and sang by a deep winking pool that seemed to laugh.

By shaking her head, Euly tried to derail the memory and where it would end, but it didn’t work. She understood these early morning hours were saved for past acquaintances, those tortured visions of life we stuff under a rug and then shake out when the filth reaches a critical point. Euly winced at the metaphor, how a dirty rug might relate to her past.

Still, Euly let the vision of the pool ebb out and return. The cool offender, adorned with sapphire tiles demarcating a high fill-line and ochre-stained cool deck from years of dirty feet on it, summoned its visitors.

Aunt Moon’s son was there, Micaiah. He had he showed her how to roll her towel in order to carry it under one arm instead of holding it awkwardly in front of her like a doll at her chest while she walked. He was the closest thing she had to a brother. Anyway, he felt like a brother. She was only six-years-old at the time and small for her age. She remembered bouts with allergies and a variety of illnesses that kept her body from growing. Like that old cartoon character she recalled, an alligator – a sadly distorted fellow – only its large head scene out of the water swimming across a river. He crawls out and reveals a comparatively tiny body. The alligator then looks straight into the camera to explain his odd shape and says I’ve been sick. Somehow Euly identified with the sickly alligator but Micaiah did a great thing when he showed her how to roll her towel. He made her feel normal.

Euly staved off the memory a few seconds longer by looking out toward the lighting sky. The tea’s scent taunted her senses and helped yank her back into the present. She dragged in another deep breath and held it for a second before shooing Micaiah out of her mind. A thin line in the East’s horizon meant only minutes until dawn.

However, when she turned her head back, she was with Micaiah.

He was about ten, a year older than Enaya, Euly’s sister. He was a big brown boy with thick black whorls of hair. Yet, Euly couldn’t help going back to that day at the Maharajan.

The day sweltered. The sizzling blacktop glistened from heat. The shiny tar softened under their feet when Micaiah, Enaya, and Euly ran from the broiling car toward the coolness of the hall inside. The party was already under way.

A sense of great promise bubbled up in Euly, especially when she thought about the crystalline water of the pool. Ready for a swim, she and her sister donned bathing suits showing-off shapeless fledgling bodies – tube-like figures of childhood, lean legs prickled with blonde peach-soft hair, red and tanned skin, and Micaiah in his boy swim trunks and round barrel chest.

They wore faded, yellow rubber thongs on their small feet.

The exact point in time?

When thongs were made of flimsy rubber. When the Beatles and Frank Sinatra mixed into a medley of songs. When vendors drove in lazy vans through the neighborhoods playing plunky ice cream tunes. And, when a quarter bought a 50-50 bar.