The Idea of Egypt
Tough and lucky rich girls, the sisters claimed to be following a raw broccoli diet, consisting mainly of cigarettes and a bottle of dry red wine the younger of them had brought up on the train from Barcelona. All that was scrapped by late morning, when they sat in the hotel’s dining room complaining about the hashish gum on their fingertips, devouring Nutella with knives, giggling about the situation comedies of their childhoods, flipping through the guidebooks for some place with reliable American-style Chinese.
Their brother, for his part, walked around with his hands in his jacket pockets, surveying, keeping his chin up, his face in a frown designed to appear intellectual. He quoted, with varying accuracy, Jefferson and Morrison and Guy de Maupassant, made some garbled attempts at Baudelaire. Later, drunk on some cheap cherry liqueur he had mistaken for something famous and natively French, he traded twenty Euros to an Estonian in a dirty wig who siphoned his sperm in a dirty, curtained room.
The grand tour as education, not vacation. At the counter of a zinc bar, under framed reproductions of posters featuring similar zinc bars, one sister, the younger, decided to become a lesbian. She announced that she wanted to adopt a less fortunate baby, one with a puckered face and a meditative disposition.
The brother stalked the bookstalls along the Seine, as he had been planning to do since adolescence, mistaking himself for the hero of certain romantic paperbacks to which he’d once masturbated.
The older sister spoke of spirals, descent, a deepening at once more wide. Armed with the rudiments of desire she hung out at trashy blue-lit clubs and waited for some therapist’s case to take her home and abuse her in a way that indulged her peculiar leanings. Stir fry. Chap stick. The younger daughter got drunker and woke with an Italian foreskin in her mouth, unhappily attached. She dreamed of inland cities, Cleveland, Buffalo. In her journal, where she secretly charted her siblings’ spending, she sketched an American scene: newspaper boxes clustered at a street corner, under a bus stop sign.
A leather-bound book of aphorisms. An opera by Gertrude Stein. A monograph on puppet shows and proletariat insurgency. On the graves of certain philosophers, the brother left small stones, not because he or they were Jewish, but because it seemed at once simpler and more exotic, privately cosmopolitan, esoterically refined.
The older sister chipped her tooth on a belt buckle some oil baron’s son handled too tentatively. The idea of Egypt. A libretto in hieroglyphs. The strut of dancers, slaves to the salt mines. Finding a good English-language dentists was not easy, and her rectum was bleeding, an amount that could be called copious.
There was always much explained to be done at the Consulate. Such were their trips, these three.
Then brandy, all around. A gold filling, a stitch or two. Everyone planned to get tested when they returned. In the meantime, they wrote postcards. An obelisk. The catacombs. Every poet slays his model, said the brother, reciting. Benjamin Franklin slept here, the younger sister wrote. Foreskins are interesting in shape and texture, in their inimitable retention of taste. Please send money, wrote the older sister, then, tonguing her new work, added, hoping for a tone of irony or nostalgia, like a line from before the wars, funds depleted, underlined twice.