I can always count on Pierre to offer his honest opinion. Or to try to give me some sort of complex. Or both.
Here’s the thing that keeps me from trying anything rash: Aisha’s other passions expose her. She loves cinema so well that I can find her there, hints and clues in each of her favorites. I know whose insolent lip curl she imitates when she hears an order she has no intention of following, and I know who she’s quoting when she drawls, Oh, honey, when I lose my temper you can’t find it anyplace! Full carnal knowledge of this woman eludes me, true—yet I know her. Aisha used to want to write poetry, since she liked reading it. But the muse spake not unto her. Then she’d wanted to write prose, but had stopped bothering when she realized she couldn’t bring herself to write about genitalia. “A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It’s where we live.”
So A’s foible could simply be this: She doesn’t want lust to be the one to lead me in. It may be that lust is a breathtaking traitor, the warden’s daughter seen in the walled city at all hours of the night singing softly and teasing the air with a starlit swan’s feather. Lust, the warden’s daughter; a little feckless, perhaps, but not one to cause injury until the day her telescope shows her that troops are marching on the walled city. When darkness falls she slips through the sleeping streets, meets the foe at the city gates, and throws those gates wide open: Take and use everything you want and burn the rest to the ground . . .
. . . When it’s all over no observer is able to settle on a motive for this brat’s betrayal, illogical or otherwise. Historians dissect her claims that she was sleepwalking. Such are the deeds of lust, a child of our walled cities. But say whatever you want about her, she will not be denied. Or will she???
—
I DRIFTED into unemployment without really noticing; I hung around in the lobby of the Glissando so much I didn’t have time to go to work. Somebody at the hotel might need some skill of mine and then I could rejoin the rest of my family and continue the Barrandov tradition of providing debatable necessities. But nobody had need of me. I watched my mother dashing to and fro muttering into a walkie-talkie and my dad and Odette striding about with their thumbs tucked into the vacant loops in their tool belts. Had I missed my chance? As I ran through my savings I decided to work on developing ambition at the same time as amusing myself. I stole expensive items and in the moment of acquisition found that I didn’t want to keep them and couldn’t be bothered to sell them. I returned them before anybody noticed they were gone. The trickiest and most pleasing endeavor (also the endeavor that required going up to London and applying the most detailed makeup and speaking with a Viennese accent that was perfect down to the pronunciation of the very last syllable) was the theft and fuss-free return of a diamond necklace from Tiffany’s on Old Bond Street. I almost didn’t put the necklace back, but Aisha didn’t like it and I couldn’t think of anybody else to give the thing to. The diamonds looked muddy. Upon stealing the necklace my first impulse was to give it a good wipe.