Pretty Wicked

Eight

I dressed in my fail-safe—a black dress with a demure neckline and a good cut. It was no Jessica Rabbit but I was done with trying to seduce him. I pulled my hair into a chignon at the base of my neck and dressed it with a tortoiseshell comb. I felt strangely calm. The way the air is before a storm. I wore my most expensive underwear. I guess I knew what I was really up to.

Miko rang the bell at five to eight. I opened the door with my purse already in my hand. My eyes widened. In casual clothes he looked very fit and masculine. He was wearing a black shirt with silver buttons and hip-hugging black jeans. The wind had ruffled his hair and the desire to run my fingers through it was immediate. What was it about this man? His magnetic pull on me began from the moment he appeared in my presence.

‘Hello,’ he greeted evenly, but his eyes were devouring me. Whatever it was I felt it was the same with him.

‘Hi,’ I said softly.

‘I guess you’re ready to go.’

I nodded and we walked to the lift. He was different today. That rakish charm was gone. Instead there was caution and a deliberate distance. As if he did not know how far he could go. Once when helping me into his hired open-topped car his hand touched mine, and he retracted it with the same speed that I did. I flushed a sharp shade of red, but he ignored it. Even our conversation was stilted.

‘Up or down?’ he asked.

I thought of my hair. ‘Up please.’

He drove us to Twickenham. In all my years of living in England I had never left London and I gazed at the suburbs curiously. The car came to a stop outside a large detached house with wisteria growing over the front of it.

Miko rang the bell and a tiny, olive-skinned, middle-aged woman opened the door.

‘Ah, Miko,’ she exclaimed happily, and with flying limbs, flung herself at him.

He wrapped her inside his arms with genuine affection. With one arm still around her he introduced me to her.

‘Mysha, meet Lexi. Lexi, meet Mysha.’

Mysha had eyes that were as black and inscrutable as Miko’s. They looked at me shrewdly. ‘Hello, Lexi,’ she said, and nodded approvingly. ‘It’s about time Miko found himself a wife that bore him some babies.’

My eyes collided with Miko’s. His lips had tightened.

As if catching the tension in the air, Mysha extricated herself from Miko and said, ‘Come in, come in. Everyone is waiting for you.’

She took us each by the hand and with a merry laugh sailed down a narrow corridor decorated in the most sumptuous manner possible. It kind of reminded me of the Egyptian room in Harrods. There were paintings of women draped in transparent veils hung on walls covered with rich velvet patterned azure wallpaper. The wall lights were made of cherubs in gilded metal holding red candles.

A sideboard covered with a crimson throw held large crystal bowls full of fruit, nuts, colorful sweets and dates. Two gilt and ebony Au Jeune Nègre floor candelabras stood on either side of the staircase throwing their circles of flickering light into the space.

She turned into a doorway where noise, laughter and music were coming from. There were a lot of people there. Many of them waved and called out to Miko, but Mysha imperviously plowed through the crowd pulling us along into a conservatory where a dapper, small man in a dark evening suit, a yellowing shirt and a red bow tie was nursing a goblet of red wine and holding court over a circle of elegant people. His pale blue eyes noticed us and lit with joy.

‘Miko, Miko, Miko,’ he sighed like a child.

I looked up at Miko and he was smiling with an expression of tenderness I had never thought to see in his face. Surprised, I stared at him.

‘Sobhi,’ Miko said softly.

The man turned toward me. ‘Ah,’ he intoned. ‘Ah, but she is beautiful, Miko. Absolutely beautiful.’

Everyone turned to look at me and I blushed furiously.

‘Come, come,’ he cried genially. ‘Join us. Yusuf here,’ he waved his thin, pale hand in the direction of a tall bearded man, ‘was just saying that the great poet Rumi was a coarse fellow because he wrote bawdy stories of women copulating with donkeys. What do you think, Miko?’

Miko shrugged. ‘I admire Rumi,’ he said. ‘He refused to corrupt the language no matter what the provocation. Telling the truth is often a revolutionary act. If an act can be conceived then it can and should be expressed.’

I stared at Miko, suddenly aware that both of them were speaking in metaphors. I had no idea who Rumi was or what they were talking about.

Sobhi fixed his eyes, quick but full of old sorrows, on me. ‘If I had had a son I would have wanted him to be like Miko.’

I reached out to the warmth and kindness in his eyes and forgot to be shy. ‘Why?’ I asked curiously. It seemed incongruous that a man in a frayed shirt and a theatrical bow tie would desire a barracuda in a city suit as his progeny.

‘Because if there were more men like him there would be no more wars. Earth would be a paradise.’

Miko turned to me. ‘Lexi, meet Professor Sobhi Ageel, a member of the faculty of Palestine Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Professor, meet Lexi, a beautiful contradiction.’

Professor Sobhi Ageel smiled ruefully at me. ‘Indeed, she is that. If I was twenty years younger I’d fight you for her. And I’d win too.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘Alas, I am twenty years older. You, my dear, must not stay with us old fogies. You are young and beautiful. Time is passing. You must dance and be merry.’

He made a shooing gesture with his hands and Miko laughed and took my hand. For the first time since we met at the coffee bar the gesture was natural. I looked at him, surprised by this glimpse into the other side of him. He smiled at me and my heart jumped crazily at the possessiveness in it.

‘Let’s go get a drink,’ he said.

I snagged a glass of white wine and Miko was given a glass of brandy. He swirled it slowly in his hands.

‘What were you talking about back there with the professor?’

‘Professor Sobhi is Syrian. We were talking about the state of his country. The truth that is never told. What peace can there be when we claim to use the ultimate human injustice, war, to instill peace? War after war after war and we never learn that there is no excuse to be inhumane.’

A brown-skinned man came running up to us. He clasped his hands together and bowed his head toward Miko.

‘Thank you, thank you for everything you have done. May God shower blessings upon you…’ He glanced at me and added, ‘And your lovely wife.’

I cringed and would have pulled my hand out of Miko’s, but he tightened his hold on my hand and smiled at the man.

‘It should never have happened this way. I’m sorry it did.’

‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he said as he moved away.

‘What was that?’

‘He is from the Free Palestine society. I guess I am their major donor.’

I frowned and touched his arm, instantly aware of the steely muscles underneath the soft material. ‘But you are Jewish,’ I said.

‘I am, and proud of it, but I am also a human being. When my grandfather dug tunnels to smuggle food and weapons into the Warsaw ghetto, it was an act of justified resistance. How can I condemn the tunnels dug by the Palestinians to smuggle food and weapons as terrorism?’

Dust motes danced in the space between us.

‘Many years ago I made a mistake that changed me forever. It made me the man I am today. It made me seek out injustice and the dispossessed wherever in the world they may be and try to do what I can to alleviate them.’

I stared at him, stunned. How he had changed? Where was the spoilt boy in the sports car? His aspirations were grander than anything I had ever known. In comparison I was nothing but a petty, messed up woman with a taste for revenge.

Yes, it had been a cruel prank, but look at what I had done to myself over the years. Instead of forgiving and moving on I had limited and narrowed myself. I knew right then that I didn’t want reven

ge. But I also knew that I could never tell him who I was. It would be the ultimate humiliation for me to let him see me for the petty liar and schemer I had become. We would have our affair and then we would move apart and I would forget him and start again.

We moved into the large living room where Arabic music was playing. A woman in a red dress swayed up to us. She was as beautiful as a gypsy with charcoal hair and flashing dark eyes that she had thickly outlined with kohl. She turned them upon me. ‘Miko, you have brought a friend.’

‘Lexi, Layla,’ Miko said shortly.

‘You don’t mind if I have one dance with Miko, do you?’

I felt a stab of jealousy, but I shook my head automatically. He did not belong to me. Not now, not ever.

She looked at him beseechingly. ‘They are playing our song. Will you dance with me?’

Miko looked at me. There was a strange expression in his eyes. I ignored it. ‘Go ahead,’ I threw out carelessly, coldly.

Miko nodded slowly and followed the woman to the edge of the dancers. As I watched him leave I felt a painful tightness in my chest. I wanted to turn away but I could not. I had to see for myself that I was chasing a mirage. This man was not mine. He never had been and he never would be.

I watched Layla throw her head back so her long hair gleamed like dark water on her back and slowly, sensuously begin to gyrate her hips. The movements were hypnotic, her limbs molten. She raised her hands slowly over her head and, as if she was making love to Miko, placed them seductively on his shoulders. Her nails were long and red against his black shirt. I knew I could not watch anymore. I stumbled away blindly and almost walked into little Mysha.

‘Sorry,’ I said automatically.

‘Come,’ she said, her eyes dark and full of secrets. Again she took me by the hand and led me away from the party. I followed her past the ebony and gilt Au Jeune Nègre floor candelabras and up the stairs to a bedroom. It was pink and gold and very feminine.

‘My daughter’s room. She is in America now,’ Mysha explained.

I nodded. The civilized sounds of a party, music, clinking glasses, voices, and laughter in the garden rose up into the sultry summer air and floated in through the open window.

Mysha opened a cupboard and pulled out a costume made entirely of fine black netting and thickly embroidered with green and yellow sequins over the breasts and groin and buttocks.