difficult.” His accented English seemed as softly padded as the sound of his footfalls. “It is entirely my fault.” His voice was too sympathetic; I could not look up at him without dissolving in tears.
Focusing on his sandal straps and on the square-trimmed brown-pink toenail of the big toe on one foot, I whispered, “I need to leave here.”
“Of course.” His voice modulated into formula: “I completely understand, and I am so very sorry that you are upset.” Suddenly, in a new rush of emotion, he asked urgently, “But where will you go?”
“Nag Hammadi,” I answered automatically. It was just a name, a place Thom and I had wanted to visit because ancient scrolls pertaining to the gospels had been found close to that Egyptian village. Those pages, as well as the death of my grandfather, had played a role in my rejection of the standard model of Christianity, the ardent faith of my parents.
“There, then,” the faceless foreign voice continued, apparently satisfied. “Nag Hammadi. We have a museum there now. I hope we will meet again.” He turned away to rejoin the symposium.
That night in Cairo—after grief had risen up like a floating stone in my throat, then sunk again—Gabriel and I shared a drink in the Marriott, a hotel with a largely foreign clientele, certainly non-Muslim. The hotel management maintained special permission to set up a bar to sell liquor. The hotel also hosted a gambling casino, which Egyptians were forbidden by Islamic law even to enter. I felt grateful to Gabriel for choosing a liberated hotel. While I was by no means an alcoholic—at least in my own opinion—I had noticed that a private glass of sherry at bedtime did a lot to ameliorate my chronic sadness.
Over drinks, Gabriel encouraged me to take a cruise-and-camp riverboat tour while he participated in the scientific meeting. Tilting my sociable martini glass toward him, I said, “There is a balm in Gilead, thank God.” Wishing that the cone-shaped glass was a cylinder holding three times as much of the potent alcohol, I savored its flavor as I swallowed. I wondered if Gabriel had anticipated I would have a minor meltdown at the opening meeting, that I would need recuperation.
He had already researched the tour: a flight to Luxor to see the temple ruins, a Nile cruise with stops along the way—another flight to the Aswan dam—the gigantic stone figures of Abu Simbel—and a return to Luxor, where he would join me.
“Time in Egypt,” he said, swirling his Manhattan, “casts a very long shadow. When I’m in this country, I always think how short our human lives are. It’s depressing. Think how many of us it would require to lie end-to-end to take us back to the time of Moses.”
The mixture of fatigue and gin allowed me to blurt out, “Moses. You believe in the biblical Moses, and I’m not religious.” Had he actually proposed that we marry? I remembered glancing down at the bony mountains of northern Italy. “What makes you think we could get over our differences about religion?”
“I’m a gentleman,” he answered, wryly smiling. “And an Anglican. We don’t ever need to talk about our religious beliefs.” He glanced up and down my body in a way too intentionally obvious to be offensive. “You might even enjoy High Church ceremony once every few years. At Christmas, perhaps.” He tilted his head, his expression both shrewd and puckish.
For a moment I remembered that Thom had worried that Gabriel’s faith might be threatened by the discovery of extraterrestrial life. I recalled the pro-found repercussions of Copernicus’s astounding notion that Earth was not the center of the universe. Yet the church had survived.
I laughed. “I hate to admit it, but I do like the ceremony sometimes.” On the heels of laughter, I fought down hysteria, my engulfing grief for Thom, who happily celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah. “Religion is always a quest,” Thom had said, though he was not religious. “Stop questing and know you’ve become a fossil.”
“I’m not as dedicated to endless research as Thom was, bless him,” Gabriel went on in his casual, friendly way. “But if we were married, we could travel constantly. Where would you like to go with me?”
“Russia. I loved Tolstoy’s novels. Anna Karenina.”
“The Russian Madame Bovary.”
“Their authors murdered them, don’t you think?” I asked.
He ignored the question. “What about War and Peace? What about Dostoyevsky?”
“Anna K. is a better novel than War and Peace. The characters are more complex. But Dostoyevsky—he’s too extreme for my