Anastasius took charge of me. I was bathed, groomed, curried, required to swallow an oily, bitter potion that he claimed was an aphrodisiac. And an hour before midnight I was ushered into the bedchambers of the Empress Theodora.
Cleopatra… Delilah… Harlow… Lucrezia Borgia… Theodora…
Had any of them ever existed? Was their legendary wantonness real? Could this truly be Judson Daniel Elliott III standing before the bed of the depraved Empress of Byzantium?
I knew the tales Procopius told of her. The orgies at dinners of state. The exhibitionist performances in the theater. The repeated illegitimate pregnancies and the annual abortions. The friends and lovers betrayed and tortured. The severed ears, noses, testicles, penes, limbs, and lips of those who displeased her. The offerings on the altar of Aphrodite of every orifice she owned. If only one story out of ten were true, her vileness was unequaled.
She was pale, fair-skinned, big-breasted, narrow-waisted, and surprisingly short, the top of her head barely reaching my chest. Perfumes drenched her skin, yet unmistakable fleshy reeks came through. Her eyes were fierce, cold, hard, slightly hyperthyroid: nymphomaniacal eyes.
She didn’t ask my name. She ordered me to strip, and inspected me, and nodded. A wench brought us thick greasy wine in an enormous amphora. We drank a good deal of it, and then Theodora anointed herself with the rest, coating her skin with it from forehead to toes.
“Lick it off,” she said.
I obeyed. I obeyed other commands too. Her tastes were remarkably various, and in my four hours I satisfied most of them. It may not have been the kinkiest four hours I ever spent, but came close. And yet her pyrotechnics chilled me. There was something mechanical and empty about the way Theodora presented now this, now that, now the other thing, for me to deal with. It was as if she were running through a script that she had played out a million times.
It was interesting in a strenuous way. But it wasn’t overwhelming. I mean, I expected more, somehow, from being in bed with one of history’s most famous sinners.
When I was fourteen years old, an old man who taught me a great deal about the way of the world said to me, “Son, when you’ve jazzed one snatch you’ve jazzed them all.”
I was barely out of my virginity then, but I dared to disagree with him. I still do, in a way, but less and less each year. Women do vary — in figure, in passion, in technique, in approach. But I’ve had the Empress of Byzantium, mind you, Theodora herself. I’m beginning to think, after Theodora, that that old man was right. When you’ve jazzed one snatch you’ve jazzed them all.
42.
I went back down to Istanbul and reported for duty, and took a party of eight out on the two-week tour.
Neither the Black Death nor Theodora had burned away my passion for Pulcheria Ducas. I hoped now that I’d shake free of that dangerous obsession by getting back to work.
My tour group included the following people:
J. Frederick Gostaman of Biloxi, Mississippi, a retail dealer in pharmaceuticals and transplant organs, along with his wife, Louise, his sixteen-year-old daughter Palmyra, and his fourteen-year-old son Bilbo.
Conrad Sauerabend of St. Louis, Missouri, a stockbroker, traveling alone.
Miss Hester Pistil of Brooklyn, New York, a young schoolteacher.
Leopold Haggins of St. Petersburg, Florida, a retired manufacturer of power cores, and his wife Chrystal.
In short, the usual batch of overcapitalized and undereducated idlers. Sauerabend, who was fat and jowly and sullen, took an immediate dislike to Gostaman, who was fat and jowly and jovial, because Gostaman made a joking remark about the way Sauerabend was peering down the neckline of Gostaman’s daughter at one of our orientation sessions. I think Gostaman was joking, anyway, but Sauerabend got red-faced and furious, and Palmyra, who though sixteen was underdeveloped enough to pass for a skinny thirteen, ran out of the room in tears. I patched things up, but Sauerabend continued to glare at Gostaman. Miss Pistil, the schoolteacher, who was a vacant-eyed blonde with an augmented bosom and an expression that managed to be both tense and languid, established at our first meeting that she is the sort of girl who takes these trips in order to get laid by Couriers; even if I hadn’t been preoccupied with Pulcheria, I don’t think I’d have taken advantage of her availability, but as things stood I felt very little urge to explore Miss Pistil’s pelvis. This was not the case with young Bilbo Gostaman, who was such a fashion-plate that he was wearing knickers with padded groin (if they can revive Cretan bodices, why not the codpiece?) and who got his hand under Miss Pistil’s skirt during our second orientation session. He thought he was being surreptitious about it, but I saw him, and so did old man Gostaman, who beamed in paternal pride, and so did Mrs. Chrystal Haggins, who was shocked into catalepsy. Miss Pistil looked thrilled, and squirmed a little to afford Bilbo a better angle for groping. Mr. Leopold Haggins, who was eighty-five and pretty leathery, meanwhile winked hopefully at Mrs. Louise Gostaman, a placid and matronly sort of woman who was destined to spend most of our tour fighting off the old scoundrel’s quivering advances. You can see how it was.
Off we went for two happy weeks together.
I was, again, a second-rate Courier. I couldn’t summon up the divine spark. I showed them everything I was supposed to show them, but I wasn’t able to do the extra things, the leaping, cavorting, charismatic, Metaxian things, that I had vowed I would do on every trip.
Part of the trouble was my edginess over the Pulcheria situation. She danced in and out of my mind a thousand times a day. I pictured myself dropping down to 1105 or thereabouts and getting to work with her; surely she’d remember me from the spice shop, and surely that was an open invitation she had given me then.
Part of the trouble was the ebbing of my own sense of wonder. I had been on the Byzantium run for almost half a year, and the thrill was gone. A gifted Courier — a Metaxas — could derive as much excitement from his thousandth imperial coronation as from his third. And transmit that excitement to his people. Maybe I just wasn’t a naturally gifted Courier. I was becoming bored with the dedication of Haghia Sophia and the baptism of Theodosius II, the way an usher in a stimmo house gets weary of watching orgies.
Part of the trouble was the presence of Conrad Sauerabend in the group. That fat, sweaty, untidy man was an instant turnoff for me every time he opened his mouth.
He wasn’t stupid. But he was gross and coarse and crude. He was a leerer, a gaper, a gawker. I could count on him to make some blunt and inappropriate remark anywhere.
At the Augusteum he whistled and said, “What a parking lot this would make!”
Inside Haghia Sophia he clapped a white-bearded priest on the back and said, “I just got to tell you what a swell church you got here, priesto.”
During a visit to the icon-smashings of Leo the Isaurian, when Byzantium’s finest works of art were being destroyed as idols, he interrupted an earnest iconoclastic fanatic and said, “Don’t be such a dumb prick. You know that you’re hurting this city’s tourist trade?”
Sauerabend was also a molester of little girls, and proud of it. “I can’t help it,” he explained. “It’s my particular personal clutchup. The shrink calls it the Lolita complex. I like ’em twelve, thirteen years old. You know, old enough to bleed, maybe to have a little hair on it, but still kind of unripe. Get ’em before the tits grow, that’s my ideal. I can’t stand all that swinging meat on a woman. Pretty sick, huh?”
Pretty sick, yes. And also pretty annoying, because we had Palmyra Gostaman with us; Sauerabend couldn’t stop staring at her. The lodgings provided on a time-tour don’t always give the tourists much privacy, and Sauerabend ogled the poor girl into despair. He drooled over her constantly, forcing her to dress and undress under a blanket as if this was the nineteenth or twentieth century; and when her father wasn’t looking, he’d get his fat paws on her behind or the little bumps of her breasts and whisper lewd propositions in her ear. Finally I had to tell him that if he didn’t stop bothering her, I’d bounce him from the tour. That settled him down for a few days. The girl’s father, incidentally, thought the whole incident was very funny. “Maybe what that girl needs is a good banging,” he said to me. “Get the body juices flowing, huh?” Papa Gostaman also approved of his son Bilbo’s affair with Miss Pistil, which also became a nuisance, since we wasted a terrific amount of time waiting for them to finish their current copulations. I’d be giving a preliminary talk on what we were to see this morning, get me, and Bilbo would be standing behind Miss Pistil, and suddenly she’d get this transfigured look on her face and I’d know he’d done it again, up with her skirt in back, wham! Bilbo looked pleased as hell all the time, which I suppose was reasonable enough for a fourteen-year-old-boy having an affair with a woman ten years his senior. Miss Pistil looked guilty. Her sore conscience, though, didn’t keep her from opening the gate for Bilbo three or four times a day.