The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (39 page)

She’d never seen such a varied and colorful shell assortment. Some looked fresh from the ocean depths or wherever they lived. Did anyone even know? There were turrets and turbans, heavy cones with runelike markings, volutes with fine spires lined in orange and rose. One bivalve had widening purple and gold rays like the sky in a Bible illustration.

Movements at the periphery caught her eye—small crabs scuttling sideways, brandishing single pincers. She tapped his arm and pointed them out.

“I would not like to sit on one of those. They look ferocious.” Whipped about by the breeze, his voice came and went at her like a train whistle.

“Do you suppose they are all right-handed?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Would nature design them otherwise?” He placed an elongated, fluted clamshell in her lap.

“That one looks like a bird’s wing.”

“Or an angel’s.”

“We are alone,” she suddenly said.

“Yes.” He continued to sort his pile.

“Really alone.”

He looked about the beach. There were children and fishermen, a few strollers playing keep away with the surf. “Not to worry—we have some company.”

“I mean we can talk now. Remember?”

His expression remained blank. She would have to prod him. “You said we must be more alone to discuss Père Issa.” She wriggled her little finger under his nose, at last eliciting a flash of recognition.

“I’d forgotten.”

She brushed sand from her lap and placed another shell in the makeshift bag. “His brother has an identical fingernail.”

“Does he? I hadn’t noticed.” He squinted as he lifted a specimen to the light. “Look at this one, so delicate, as translucent as”—he paused and stared at her—“as your earlobe with the sun shining through it.”

Reflexively, she touched her ear, then took the shell, which was ivory with pink undertones. “Isn’t it miraculous—the way spiders spin silk, and shells make this lovely bone china?” She tossed it in the sack.

“And some have portholes and make pearls.” He laid an abalone shell on her lap.

“I wish I could make something out of that one. A brooch. Or a necklace.”

“Be careful not to cut yourself. The edges are sharp.”

“I shall.”

She felt wonderful. There was nothing she had to do, nothing to figure out, no reason to be watchful. She could sleep on the beach, if she wished, like Trout. No, it was better to stay awake and feel this logy, indefinite joy. Though now that they were talking, she noticed,
time had resumed, for the sand had turned a deeper shade of gold, with tiny flecks—mica?—glinting like electrum.

“All right. I shall explain the nail.”

“Good. You promised, so you must.” She folded her hands in her lap like a child waiting for her bedtime story.

“Where to begin?” He sighed. “You know that human habits vary around the world—for example, where we are now.”

“Of course.”

“And it is not a matter simply of dress, language, and currency. Customs regarding matrimony and courtship are different, too.”

Was there some reason he was going back to the story of the Flood? She wanted to hurry him along, but decided not to for the moment.

“And physical customs are also different. Sexual practices, if I may be absolutely blunt.”

“You may.” The door that had creaked open now swung back a tiny but perceptible notch. She pulled herself to a more upright position, her hands flat upon her knees, which were buried in sand under the damp, heavy folds of her dress, bits of which surrounded her like blue flotsam.

“Ideas of pleasure are different, I am told, and I have read and somewhat experienced. . . .” His voice trailed off, as if he had gone down the wrong path. In a second, he resumed. “In the East, pleasure is more highly regarded—”

“Is that why a Mohametan may take as many as four wives?” she interjected brightly. “To increase his pleasure?” She was glad of her candor. Proud of it. She would not be shocked by anything he said. “Or is it to produce more children?”

“I don’t know.”

“We had animals at the Hurst—that’s our summer home in the north—cows and horses. Lots of cats—”

He stared at her, visibly perplexed.

“I saw them whelp and nurse,” she explained. “And mate.”

“Oh,” he said, smiling. “I don’t doubt you know the facts of life.”

“Yes.” She was relieved to have that out of the way. She didn’t want him to think her completely naive.

He threw a handful of rejects to the side and pulled the sack closer. “But, of course, human beings don’t engage in sex merely to procreate. Sex is an expression of love. Of mutual enjoyment.”

She’d always pictured Fanny lying stiff as a board under WEN. Every woman. It was something the man did to the woman. She watched the surf arrive tatted with bubbly froth. “Naturally,” she agreed. “Why else would husband and wife kiss? The lower animals don’t.”

“Kissing.
Exactement
. The nail is like that. Not that it’s used on the lips.” His eyes darted about for a split second. They undeniably darted. Closer by than before, two crabs challenged each other. The crabs were losing their shyness, she thought, ignoring the two of them as if they were permanent fixtures on the beach, like trees.

“In the East, a woman’s pleasure is also highly regarded. The nail is grown to further that regard.”

How did a nail help a woman’s regard? She could not parse the sentence. No, the woman was not regarded, her pleasure was. She remained silent, hoping he would expand upon the point, but concisely. If he could conclude his disquisition in one short sentence, it would be preferable to this gradual seeping revelation. “Further” suggested distance, and she was certain he was speaking of something requiring closeness, something he couldn’t demonstrate.

“Another lovely one.” He placed a reddish-brown shell that resembled a turkey’s wing in her hand.

“‘Further’? I mean, please explain ‘further.’”

“Dear Rossignol.” His voice dropped and his eyes grew soft. “I shall say it plain. The nail is used to stroke that part of a woman’s body that is the center of her pleasure. I’ve been told married men take pride in that nail. So do their wives. When you think about it, the nail is a public declaration of mutual devotion. A
carte d’amitié
.”

“A valentine?”

“Oui.”

The center of her pleasure
. She was blushing, but she didn’t care. Her curiosity, always the source of her boldness, trumped any discomfort. She hesitated over a huge orange scallop. “I don’t quite understand,” she said softly. She emphasized the word “quite,” suggesting her lack of clarity was a matter of refinement, not substance—of inches, not miles.

“My father, by the way, was a surgeon, so I learned about the human body firsthand as a young boy. We lived in a wing of the hospital.”

This was no help, either.

“You mother must have explained it to you,” he said. It was a question.

“Yes.” She saw that his cheeks had turned the color of rouge pots. Her own felt feverish. A match touched to either one of us would ignite, she thought.

“I believe the name for this part of the woman’s body is the same in both languages—”

“Stop!” She nearly grazed his mouth with her hand. “There is no need to say it. I’m sure I know to what you refer.”

She might retch if he named a part of herself she didn’t recognize. Her brain switched on—she actually felt it engage inside her skull like a mouse scurrying in a wall—as she tried to recollect everything she’d read and heard of female anatomy. What had Fanny said? There had been advice about menstrual rags, though Fanny hadn’t used those words, prompted by a collie bitch in heat trailing blood across the rug and hearth. Fanny had called it “a woman’s time of the month.” Parthe had been in the room, too. After breakfast. Fanny was embarrassed and avoided looking at the girls. It was an agony to watch her mother squirm, so Flo had focused on the lime trees just leafing out chartreuse in the orchard.

As she replayed that morning in her mind, she watched the waves curling shoreward, breaking into white freshets. Parthe had sat open-mouthed as a baby bird having food shoved down its craw. And then Fanny had said those dreadful words.
You will bleed every month
. Parthe
was twelve, Flo eleven, leggy little girls still playing with dolls.
So you can have babies
. Fanny had repeated herself about
days of blood
and
rinsing out the rags in cold water so the stain doesn’t set
. At first Parthe hadn’t moved or made a sound. But then she smiled and nodded. Proud, pleased with herself. Not so Flo, who was silent, horrified, her whole body cold. Later, she was sure, they had laughed at her behind her back. Fanny had told all the aunts what Flo had said when she finally spoke. Which was, “Well,
I’m
not going to do it. I don’t
want
any children, so I shan’t have to.” Fanny had regarded her like a cat with a half-dead mouse, with pure power and gratification. “It isn’t up to you. It happens to every woman.” Then Fanny had guffawed and Parthe had mimicked her, their faces twisting up in horrid grins.

But what had any of that to do with Père Issa’s nail?

Gustave was staring at the sand. At a loss for words? Wondering at her strangeness? Regretting the entire conversation?

“Uterus,” she said. “It’s the uterus, isn’t it?”

He took her hand as a big wave far out crashed silently at the limit of her vision. The sea droned on, its boring lesson. “Ah, Rossignol. I am so glad we met. We shall be the greatest of friends.” Was he going to shake her hand to congratulate her for a correct answer? “I’ve never known anyone quite like you,” he said.

Her feet were numb from sitting on them so long, and she felt woozy. A sickening heat proleptic of dizziness spread through her face and chest. Her monster was rousing itself, like a Cyclops in a cave. There was something unspeakably wrong with her, and everyone sensed it. He held her gaze, then looked away.

Like a criminal in the dock, she could barely utter the words. Guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty! I confess I know nothing. I confess my vanity of mind. “Is that it?”

He was still holding her hand, which felt to her detached and dead. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. “It’s not exactly the word I had in mind.”

He was being polite, she knew, when, in fact, he pitied her. His kindness revolted her, or rather she found herself revolting to be the
object of it. She was so humiliated she had to put her head down to avoid fainting. She heard herself whimper.

“Rossignol? Are you all right?”

She couldn’t answer.

“I’ve upset you, I see, when all I wished was to give you a candid answer. When one travels, one learns strange things,” he said more lightly. “One sees strange things. Rossignol?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Are you ill?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice seemed to waft away.

He placed his hand flat upon her back. It was heavy and warm. “Perhaps you’ve never heard of this organ.”

She exhaled and inhaled and felt the ground beneath her once more. Sand had worked its way into her stockings, and each time she moved it grated the flesh. “I don’t know.” If only she could skip the next few moments of her life, but they would pass in perfect agony, one second dragging after another like a bag of rocks as her childish ignorance was revealed. Her stomach felt like sour custard.

“In France, women are taught such things, but in England. Well, I’ve heard rumors that they aren’t.”

If only she knew what he was talking about! Was it one thing or many?

His hand moved in circles on her back, as WEN’s used to do when she fell and scraped her elbows and knees. It soothed her into a sort of trance. If she kept her eyes closed to aid the illusion, she could believe he was stroking her hair, her arm, the soles of her feet.

“I’m sorry your mother or sisters or aunts didn’t educate you.”

She felt stupid beyond measure. Where was her reason, her logic? Where but deep in the well of her shame? And yet, when he soothed her, she cared a bit less. “There are women who cannot bear children,” she tried. “Likewise, perhaps not everyone has this . . . thing.”

“No, everyone has it.” The warm circles stopped. “At least at birth. Though there are places in the world, some not far from here, where they cut this organ out to deprive the woman of her pleasure.”

“Oh, no. Oh, that’s, oh, no.” She felt ill. As if her ears were stuffed with cotton wool, sounds were indistinct, the sea reduced to a faint murmur. She took a breath, then two more.

“Never mind about that.” His voice deepened. “I am an idiot to mention it—”

“Perhaps
mine
has been cut out.” The thought breached her last defenses. She broke down weeping big plinking tears like an overwrought toddler.

“No, no. Definitely no! You are innocent, Rossignol. That’s all.” He patted her back rapidly. “I am sure you are complete. Only barbarians deprive their women of pleasure.”

Pleasure. She understood the word but was certain she’d never known the pleasure he spoke of. She had never felt any particular sensation there, only painless bleeding, the occasional itch. Perhaps she would never feel the happiness women were supposed to feel. She lifted her head and looked at him.
“Mais peut-être—”

“No, I will not hear any ‘buts.’ You have been done a disservice, simply that. Everyone knows the English are terrible prudes.”

“I didn’t know we are prudes.” She furrowed her brow. “But I have often heard it said that the French are the opposite. Loose. Too amorous. Immoral,” she added, hoping it wouldn’t offend him.

“Bollocks! The French are worldlier. I heard of another English-woman your age who knew nothing of her own body, so you are not alone.” He put his arm around her and squeezed her in an avuncular hug. “Promise me you will forget all this.”

She considered the idea and rejected it out of hand. “No. I wish to know about it, if I can bear the added embarrassment.” Actually, she didn’t think she could be further embarrassed. She’d never felt so unsure of herself, so ignorant, so
reduced
in stature in another’s eyes. Yet, at the same time, safe.