Page 157 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

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PIERRE SAYS it sounds like Aisha “just doesn’t want dick.”
“So she prefers pussy?”
“Perhaps, but the only thing that concerns you in particular is that she doesn’t
want dick. I just mean . . . OK, so there’s some guy, and he’s absolutely
desperate to get inside you. Maybe it’s a bit off-putting?”
I can always count on Pierre to offer his honest opinion. Or to try to give me

some sort of complex. Or both.
Here’s the thing that keeps me from trying anything rash: Aisha’s other
passions expose her. She loves cinema so well that I can find her there, hints and
clues in each of her favorites. I know whose insolent lip curl she imitates when
she hears an order she has no intention of following, and I know who she’s

quoting when she drawls, Oh, honey, when I lose my temper you can’t find it
anyplace! Full carnal knowledge of this woman eludes me, true—yet I know her.
Aisha used to want to write poetry, since she liked reading it. But the muse
spake not unto her. Then she’d wanted to write prose, but had stopped bothering
when she realized she couldn’t bring herself to write about genitalia. “A real
writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It’s where we live.”
So A’s foible could simply be this: She doesn’t want lust to be the one to lead

me in. It may be that lust is a breathtaking traitor, the warden’s daughter seen in
the walled city at all hours of the night singing softly and teasing the air with a
starlit swan’s feather. Lust, the warden’s daughter; a little feckless, perhaps, but
not one to cause injury until the day her telescope shows her that troops are
marching on the walled city. When darkness falls she slips through the sleeping
streets, meets the foe at the city gates, and throws those gates wide open: Take

and use everything you want and burn the rest to the ground . . .
. . . When it’s all over no observer is able to settle on a motive for this brat’s
betrayal, illogical or otherwise. Historians dissect her claims that she was
sleepwalking. Such are the deeds of lust, a child of our walled cities. But say
whatever you want about her, she will not be denied. Or will she???

—

I DRIFTED into unemployment without really noticing; I hung around in the lobby
of the Glissando so much I didn’t have time to go to work. Somebody at the
hotel might need some skill of mine and then I could rejoin the rest of my family
and continue the Barrandov tradition of providing debatable necessities. But