Chimera Read online

  “The Genie smiled; even I saw what he was thinking. ‘But you say you’ve read the book!’ Sherry exclaimed. ‘Then you must remember what stories are in it, and in which order!’

  “ ‘I don’t have to remember,’ said the Genie. ‘In all the years I’ve been writing stories, your book has never been off my worktable. I’ve made use of it a thousand times, if only by just seeing it there.’

  “Sherry asked him then whether he himself had perhaps invented the stories she allegedly told, or would tell. ‘How could I?’ he laughed. ‘I won’t be born for a dozen centuries yet! You didn’t invent them either, for that matter; they’re those ancient ones you spoke of, that “everybody tells”: Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin’s Lamp, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves…’

  “ ‘What others?’ Sherry cried. ‘In which order? I don’t even know the Ali Baba story! Do you have the book with you? I’ll give you everything I have for it!’

  “The Genie replied that inasmuch as he’d been holding her book in his hand and thinking about her when he’d written the magic words, and it had not been translated to her library along with him, he inferred that he could not present her with a copy even if the magic were repeatable. He did however remember clearly what he called the frame-story: how Shahryar’s young brother Shah Zaman had discovered his bride’s adulteries, killed her, abandoned the kingdom of Samarkand, and come to live with Shahryar in the Islands of India and China; how, discovering that Shahryar’s wife was equally unfaithful, the brothers had retreated to the wilderness, encountered the ifrit and the maiden, concluded that all women are deceivers, and returned to their respective kingdoms, vowing to deflower a virgin every night and kill her in the morning; how the Vizier’s daughter Scheherazade, to end this massacre, had volunteered herself, much against her father’s wishes, and with the aid of her sister Dunyazade—who at the crucial moment between sex and sleep asked for a story, and fed the King’s suspense by interrupting the tale at daybreak, just before the climax—stayed Shahryar’s hand long enough to win his heart, restore his senses, and save the country from ruin.

  “I hugged my sister and begged her to let me help her in just that way. She shook her head: ‘Only this Genie has read the stories I’m supposed to tell, and he doesn’t remember them. What’s more, he’s fading already. If the key to the treasure is the treasure, we don’t have it in our hands yet.’

  “He had indeed begun fading away, almost disappeared; but as soon as Sherry repeated the magic sentence he came back clearly, smiling more eagerly than before, and declared he’d been thinking the same words at the same moment, just as we’d begun to fade and his writing-room to reappear about him. Apparently, then, he and Sherry could conjure the phenomenon at will by imagining simultaneously that the key to the treasure was the treasure: they were, presumably, the only two people in the history of the world who had imagined it. What’s more, in that instant when he’d waked, as it were, to find himself back in the marshes of America, he’d been able to glance at the open table of contents of Volume One of the Thousand and One Nights book and determine that the first story after the frame-story was a compound tale called ‘The Merchant and the Genie’—in which, if he remembered correctly, an outraged ifrit delays the death of an innocent merchant until certain sheiks have told their stories.

  “Scheherazade thanked him, made a note of the title, and gravely put down her pen. ‘You have it in your power to save my sisters and my country,’ she said, ‘and the King too, before his madness destroys him. All you need to do is supply me from the future with these stories of the past. But perhaps at bottom you share the King’s feelings about women.’

  “ ‘Not at all!’ the Genie said warmly. ‘If the key trick really works, I’ll be honored to tell your stories to you. All we need to do is agree on a time of day to write the magic words together.’

  “I clapped my hands—but Sherry’s expression was still cool. ‘You’re a man,’ she said; ‘I imagine you expect what every man expects who has the key to any treasure a woman needs. In the nature of the case, I have to let Shahryar take me first; after that I’ll cuckold him with you every day at sunset if you’ll tell me the story for the night to come. Is that satisfactory?’

  “I feared he’d take offense, but he only shook his head. Out of his old love for her, he gently declared, and his gratitude for the profoundest image he knew of the storyteller’s situation, he would be pleased beyond words to play any role whatever in Scheherazade’s story, without dreaming of further reward. His own policy, moreover, which he had lived by for many nights more than a thousand, was to share beds with no woman who did not reciprocate his feelings. Finally, his new young mistress, to whom he had been drawn by certain resemblances to Scheherazade—delighted him utterly, as he hoped he did her; he was no more tempted to infidelity than to incest or pederasty. His adoration of Scheherazade was as strong as ever—even stronger now that he’d met her in the lovely flesh—but it was not possessive; he desired her only as the old Greek poets their Muse, as a source of inspiration.

  “Sherry tapped and riddled with her quill. ‘I don’t know these poets you speak of,’ she said sharply. ‘Here in our country, love isn’t so exclusive as all that. When I think of Shahryar’s harem-full of concubines on the one hand, and the way his wife got even with him on the other, and the plots of most of the stories I know—especially the ones about older men with young mistresses—I can’t help wondering whether you’re not being a bit naïve, to put it kindly. Especially as I gather you’ve suffered your share of deceit in the past, and no doubt done your share of deceiving. Even so, it’s a refreshing surprise, if a bit of a put-down, that you’re not interested in taking sexual advantage of your position. Are you a eunuch?’

  “I blushed again, but the Genie assured us, still unoffended, that he was normally equipped, and that his surpassing love for his young lady, while perhaps invincibly innocent, was not naïve. His experience of love gone sour only made him treasure more highly the notion of a love that time would season and improve; no sight on earth more pleased his heart, annealed as it was by his own passions and defeats, than that rare one of two white-haired spouses who still cherished each other and their life together. If love died, it died; while it lived, let it live forever, et cetera. Some fictions, he asserted, were so much more valuable than fact that in rare instances their beauty made them real. The only Baghdad was the Baghdad of the Nights, where carpets flew and genies sprang from magic words; he was ours to command as one of those, and without price. Should one appear to him and offer him three wishes, he’d be unable to summon more than two, inasmuch as his first—to have live converse with the storyteller he’d loved best and longest—had already been granted.

  “Sherry smiled now and asked him what would be the other two wishes. The second, he replied, would be that he might die before his young friend and he ceased to treasure each other as they did currently in their saltmarsh retreat. The third (what presently stood alone between him and entire contentment) would be that he would not die without adding some artful trinket or two, however small, to the general treasury of civilized delights, to which no keys were needed beyond goodwill, attention, and a moderately cultivated sensibility: he meant the treasure of art, which if it could not redeem the barbarities of history or spare us the horrors of living and dying, at least sustained, refreshed, expanded, ennobled, and enriched our spirits along the painful way. Such of his scribblings as were already in print he did not presume to have that grace; should he die before he woke from his present sweet dream of Scheherazade, this third wish would go unfulfilled. But even if neither of these last was ever granted (and surely such boons were rare as treasure keys), he would die happier to have had the first.

  “Hearing this, Sherry at last put by her reserve, took the stranger’s writing-hand in her own, apologized for her discourtesy, and repeated her invitation, this time warmly: if he would supply her with enough of her stories to reach her goal, she was his in secret whenever he
wished after her maiden night with Shahryar. Or (if deception truly had no more savor for him), when the slaughter of her sisters had ceased, let him spirit her somehow to his place and time, and she’d be his slave and concubine forever—assuming, as one was after all realistically obliged to assume, that he and his current love would by then have wearied of each other.

  “The Genie laughed and kissed her hand. ‘No slaves; no concubines. And my friend and I intend to love each other forever.’

  “ ‘That will be a greater wonder than all of Sinbad’s together,’ Sherry said. ‘I pray it may happen, Genie, and your third wish be granted too. For all one knows, you may already have done what you hope to do: time will tell. But if Dunyazade and I can find any way at all to help you with your tales-to-come in return for the ones you’ve pledged to us—and you may be sure we’ll search for such a way as steadfastly as we’ve searched for a way to save our sex—we’ll do it though we die for it.’

  “She made him promise then to embrace his mistress for her, whom she vowed to love thenceforth as she loved me, and by way of a gift to her—which she prayed might translate as the precious book had not—she took from her earlobe a gold ring worked in the form of a spiral shell, of which his earlier image had reminded her. He accepted it joyfully, vowing to spin from it, if he could, as from a catherine-wheel or whirling galaxy, a golden shower of fiction. Then he kissed us both (the first male lips I’d felt except Father’s, and the only such till yours) and vanished, whether by his will or another’s we couldn’t tell.

  “Sherry and I hugged each other excitedly all that night, rehearsing every word that had passed between the Genie and ourselves. I begged her to test the magic for a week before offering herself to the King, to make sure that it—and her colleague from the future—could be relied upon. But even as we laughed and whispered, another of our sisters was being raped and murdered in the palace; Sherry offered herself to Shahryar first thing in the morning, to our father’s distress; let the King lead her at nightfall into his fatal bed and fall to toying with her, then pretended to weep for being separated from me for the first time in our lives. Shahryar bid her fetch me in to sit at the foot of the bed; almost in a faint I watched him help her off with the pretty nightie I’d crocheted for her myself, place a white silk cushion under her bottom, and gently open her legs; as I’d never seen a man erect before, I groaned despite myself when he opened his robe and I saw what he meant to stick her with: the hair done up in pearls, the shaft like a minaret decorated with arabesques, the head like a cobra’s spread to strike. He chuckled at my alarm and climbed atop her; not to see him, Sherry fixed her welling eyes on me, closing them only to cry the cry that must be cried when there befell the mystery concerning which there is no inquiry. A moment later, as the cushion attested her late virginity and tears ran from her eye-corners to her ears, she seized the King’s hair, wrapped about his waist her lovely legs, and to insure the success of her fiction, pretended a grand transport of rapture. I could neither bear to watch nor turn away. When the beast was spent and tossing fitfully (from shame and guilt, I hoped, or unease at Sherry’s willingness to die), I gathered my senses as best I could and asked her to tell me a story.

  “ ‘With pleasure,’ she said, in a tone still so full of shock it broke my heart, ‘if this pious and auspicious King will allow it.’ Your brother grunted, and Sherry began, shakily, the tale of the Merchant and the Genie, framing in it for good measure the First Sheik’s Story as her voice grew stronger. At the right moment I interrupted to praise the story and say I thought I’d heard a rooster crowing in the east; as though I’d been kept in ignorance of the King’s policy, I asked whether we mightn’t sleep awhile before sunrise and hear the end of the story tomorrow night—along with the one about the Three Apples, which I liked even more. ‘O Doony!’ Sherry pretended to scold. ‘I know a dozen better than that: how about the Ebony Horse, or Julnar the Sea-Born, or the Ensorcelled Prince? But just as there’s no young woman in the country worth having that the King hasn’t had his fill of already, so I’m sure there’s no story he hasn’t heard till he’s weary of it. I could no more expect to tell him a new story than show him a new way to make love.’

  “ ‘I’ll be the judje of that,’ said Shahryar. So we sweated out the day in each other’s arms and at sunset tried the magic key; you can imagine our relief when the Genie appeared, pushed up his eyeglasses with a grin, and recited to us the Second and Third Sheiks’ Stories, which he guessed were both to be completed on that crucial second night in order, on the one hand, to demonstrate a kind of narrative inexhaustibility or profligacy (at least a generosity commensurate to that of the sheiks themselves), while, on the other hand, not compounding the suspense of unfinished tales-within-tales at a time when the King’s reprieve was still highly tentative. Moreover, that the ifrit will grant the merchant’s life on account of the stories ought to be evident enough by daybreak to make, without belaboring, its admonitory point. The spiral earring, he added happily, had come through intact, if anything more beautiful for the translation; his mistress was delighted with it, and would return Sherry’s embrace with pleasure, he was confident, as soon as the memory of her more contemporary rivals was removed enough, and she secure enough in his love, for him to tell her the remarkable story of the magic key. Tenderly then he voiced his hope that Scheherazade had not found the loss of her maidenhood wholly repugnant to experience, or myself to witness; if the King was truly to be wooed away from his misogyny, many ardent nights lay ahead, and for the sake of Scheherazade’s spirit as well as her strategy it would be well if she could take some pleasure in them.

  “ ‘Never!’ my sister declared. ‘The only pleasure I’ll take in that bed is the pleasure of saving my sisters and cuckolding their killer.’

  “The Genie shrugged and faded; Shahryar came in, bid us good evening, kissed Sherry many times before caressing her more intimately, then laid her on the bed and worked her over playfully in as many positions as there are tales in the Trickery-of-Women series, till I couldn’t tell whether her outcries were of pain, surprise, or—mad as the notion seemed—a kind of pleasure despite herself. As for me, though I was innocent of men, I had read in secret all the manuals of love and erotic stories in Sherry’s library, but had thought them the wild imaginings of lonely writers in their dens, a kind of self-tickling with the quill such as Sherry herself had fallen into; for all it was my own sister I saw doing such incredible things in such odd positions, it would be many nights before I fully realized that what I witnessed were not conjured illustrations from those texts, but things truly taking place.

  “ ‘On with the story,’ Shahryar commanded when they were done. Unsteadily at first, but then in even better voice than the night before, Sherry continued the Merchant-and-Genie story, and I, mortified to find myself still moistening from what I’d seen, almost forgot to interrupt at the appropriate time. Next day, as we embraced each other, Sherry admitted that while she found the King himself as loathsome as ever, the things he did to her were no longer painful, and might even be pleasurable, as would be the things she did to him, were he a bedpartner she could treasure as our Genie treasured his. More exactly, once the alarm of her defloration and her fear of being killed in the morning began to pass, she found abhorrent not Shahryar himself—undeniably a vigorous and handsome man for his forty years, and a skillful lover—but his murderous record with our sex, which no amount of charm and tender caressing could expunge.

  “ ‘No amount at all?’ our Genie asked when he appeared again, on cue, at sunset. ‘Suppose a man had been a kind and gentle fellow until some witch put a spell on him that deranged his mind and made him do atrocious things; then suppose a certain young lady has the power to cure him by loving him despite his madness. She can lift the spell because she recognizes that it is a spell, and not his real nature…’

  “ ‘I hope that’s not my tale for tonight,’ Sherry said dryly, pointing out that while Shahryar may once upon a time have been a lov
ing husband, even in those days he gave out virgin slave-girls to his friends, kept a houseful of concubines for himself, and cut his wife in half for taking a lover after twenty years of one-sided fidelity. ‘And no magic can bring a thousand dead girls back to life, or unrape them. On with the story.’

  “ ‘You’re a harder critic than your lover,’ the Genie complained, and recited the opening frame of the Fisherman and the Genie, the simplicity of which he felt to be a strategic change of pace for the third night—especially since it would lead, on the fourth and fifth, to a series of tales-within-tales-within-tales, a narrative complexity he described admiringly as ‘Oriental.’

  “So it went, month after month, year after year; at the foot of Shahryar’s bed by night and in Scheherazade’s by day, I learned more about the arts of making love and telling stories than I had imagined there was to know. It pleased our Genie, for example, that the tale of the Ensorcelled Prince had been framed by that of the Fisherman and the Genie, since the prince himself had been encased (in the black stone palace); also, that the resolution of the story thus enframed resolved as well the tale that framed it. This metaphorical construction he judged more artful than the ‘mere plot-function’ (that is, preserving our lives and restoring the King’s sanity!) which Sherry’s Fisherman-tale and the rest had in the story of her own life; but that ‘mere plot-function,’ in turn, was superior to the artless and arbitrary relation between most framed and framing tales. This relation (which to me seemed less important than what the stories were about) interested the two of them no end, just as Sherry and Shahryar were fascinated by the pacing of their nightly pleasures or the refinement of their various positions, instead of the degree and quality of their love.