"The longer I live with her the more I tend to androgyny, and the less important clothing comes to seem. I can't remember how I looked any longer, when I was a man."
"I've got a picture of you in my head," I said. "On the shore with Cesaria and Nicodemus and the baby. Dark hair, dark eyes."
"My teeth were good, I do know that," he said. "The widow Passak used to love to watch me tear at my bread."
"So you remember her?"
"Better than most things," Zelim replied. "Better than my philosophies, certainly." He gazed toward the window, and in the wash of light I saw that he was virtually translucent, his eyes iridescent. I wondered to myself if he had bones in his body, and supposed that he must, given the blow he'd delivered. Yet he seemed so very delicate now; like a frail invertebrate visitor from some deep-sea trench.
"I forgot her for a while…" he said, his voice gossamer.
"You mean the widow Passak?"
"Yes," he murmured. "I moved on through my life, and the love I felt for her…" The sentence trailed away; his face fluttered. I didn't prompt him-though I badly wanted to hear what more he had to say on the subject. He was in a deeply emotional state, for all the colorlessness of his voice. I didn't want to disturb his equilibrium. So I waited. At last, he picked up the thread of his ruminations: "… the love I felt seemed to pass away from me. I thought it had gone forever. But I was wrong… the feelings I had toward her come back to me now, as though I was feeling them for the first time. The way she looked at me, when the wind came off the desert. The sweet mischief in her eyes."
"Things come around," I said. "Didn't you teach that to your students?"
"I did. I used the stars as a metaphor, I believe."
"The Wheel of the Stars," I prompted.
Zelim made the faintest of smiles, remembering this. "The Wheel of the Stars," he murmured. "It was a pretty idea."
"More than an idea," I said. "It's the truth."
"I wouldn't make that claim for it," Zelim said.
"But the proof of it's right here. You said yourself that your feelings for Passak have come back."
"I think it may be for the last time," Zelim replied. "I've run my course, and I won't be rising again after this."
"What do you mean?"
"When L'Enfant falls-as it will, as it must-and everybody goes out into the world, I'm going to ask Cesaria to put an end to me. I've lived as a man, and I've lived as a spirit, and now I want an end to it all."
"No more resurrections?"
"Not for me. I think it's what comes naturally, after androgyny. Out of sexlessness into selflessness. I'm looking forward to it."
"Looking forward to oblivion?"
"It's not the end of the world," he said with a little laugh. "It's just one man's light going out. And if it's no great loss to me than why should anybody else be upset?"
"I'm not upset, I'm just a little confused," I said.
"By what?"
I thought about the question for a moment before I replied. "I suppose living here I've got used to the idea of things going on."
"Or rising again, like your father."
"I beg your pardon?"
Zelim's features fluttered again, as they had when he'd first begun to talk. His Socratic calm disappeared; he was suddenly anxious. "I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have-"
"Don't apologize," I told him. "Just explain."
"I can't. I'm sorry. It was inappropriate."
"Zelim. Explain."
He glanced back toward Cesaria's chambers. Was he fearful that she'd come to punish him for his indiscretion? If so, his glance reassured him that he was not being overheard. When he looked back at me, his agitation had almost gone. Apparently Cesaria was off on her way to meet with Cadmus Geary.
"I'm not sure I could explain anything where your father's concerned," he said. "Explanations and gods are mutually exclusive, aren't they? All I can do is tell you what I feel."
"And what's that?"
He took a deep breath. His body seemed to grow a little more substantial with the inhalation. "Cesaria's life is empty here. Completely empty. I know because I've shared it with her, day after day after day for the last God knows how many years. It's an empty life. She simply sits at the window, or feeds the porcupines. The only time she steps outside is when one of the animals dies and we have to go out to bury it."
"I have something of that life myself," I said. "I know how wretched it is."
"At least you had your books. She doesn't like to read any longer. And she can't abide television or even recorded music. Remember this is a woman who has been the toast of every great city in the world at some point in her life. I saw her in her glory days, and they were beyond anything you could imagine. She was the very essence of sophistication; the most courted, the most adored, the most emulated woman in the world. When she left a room, they used to say, it was like a kind of death…"
"I don't see what this has got to do with Nicodemus."
"Don't you think it's strange that she stays?" Zelim replied. "Why hasn't she pulled this house down? She could do that. She could raise a storm and trash it in a heartbeat. You know she raises storms."
"I've never seen her do it, but-"
"Yes you have. It was one of her storms that came in the night your father mated Dumuzzi."
"That I didn't know."
"She was angry because Nicodemus was showing more interest in his horses than he was in her, so she conjured a storm that laid waste to half the county. I think she was hoping the animals would be struck dead. Anyway, my point is this: if she wanted to bring this house down she could. But she won't. She just stays. She watches. She waits."
"Maybe she's preserving the house for Jefferson's sake," I suggested. "It's his masterpiece."
Zelim shook his head. "She's waiting for your father. That's what I believe. She thinks he's coming back."
"Well he'd better be quick about it," I said. "Because if the Gearys get here there'll be no more miracles-"
"I realize that. And I think so does she. After all these years of idling, suddenly things are urgent. This business with Cadmus Geary, for instance. She would never have stooped to meddle with one of the Geary family before this."
"What's she going to do to him?"
Zelim shrugged. "I don't know." His gaze left me; he looked off toward the window again. "But she can be very unforgiving."
If he had more to say on the subject of her lack of compassion, he didn't get a chance to say it. There was light rapping on the study door and Zabrina appeared. She'd sought out, and found, some comfort for her anxieties about Cesaria. She carried not one but two slices of pie in between the fingers of her right hand, and like a cardsharp manipulating aces at a poker table, delivered first one then the other to her mouth.
"All's well," I told her.
"So I gathered," she said.
"I'm sorry. I should have come to tell you earlier."
"I'm used to being ignored," she replied, and made her departure, pausing only to maneuver the last remaining pieces of pie crust into her mouth.
A I headed back downstairs I found myself in a mingled state of exhaustion and agitation. What I needed was a little entertainment. A conversation with Marietta would have been the perfect thing, but she was off making wedding plans with her beloved Alice, so I decided to smoke a little hashish and let my mind wander over the contents of my conversation with Zelim-the talk of his love for the widow Passak, his hopes for oblivion, his reflections on the loneliness of Cesaria's life, and what her patience really meant-and wondered, in that nonchalant, noncommittal way you wonder when you're smoking good hashish, if I shouldn't have spent less time with the Gearys in my book, and more time here at home. Had I trivialized what might have been a mightier work by following the story of Rachel Pallenberg so closely; been seduced by that most populist of idioms, the rags-to-riches story, when the real meat of what I should have told lay in the troubled body of the Barbarossa dan?