Read Online An Imperfect Lens by Anne Richardson Roiphe - Free Book Online

he intended to make the most of his time.
    He disliked it when his shirts were placed in his drawer without attention to their colors. He did not want his servants sleeping or smoking, or pilfering from the family kitchen. He believed in history as entertainment, something one enjoys as a schoolchild, but not as a force in one’s own life, which he expected would be as comfortable as the accounts rendered in his office. He was fond of his sister, Phoebe, who would put her soft hands around his forehead and rub gently if he had a headache. He believed in his family, mother, uncles and aunts, cousins and their children as a factual good in the world, worthy of feasts and good wines and entertainments of song, and he was obligated to them as he assumed they were obligated to him. He believed that all men wanted money to preserve what they had and to gain more of the sweet goods of the world. He loved a good brandy, a fine cigar. In other words, he was a happy man, and there can be no doubt that happy men make good husbands. They do not drink themselves to death or challenge the authorities and end up in prison or run away with maidservants or take any steps that would upset the order of things. This is preferable to a revolutionary or an artist dreaming in his garret and losing his teeth to malnutrition and his lungs to the foul air in the alleyway.
    Despite the fact that Albert had made up his mind, one morning he followed Este and her mother to the market and, lurking behind a pile of barrels that contained dried fruits from the farm-lands outside of town, he watched as Este ran her hands over a red fabric. He observed her while her attention was focused on the juice stand at the end of the street, where the Italian vendor was calling out to potential customers, “Cold, cold, refresh your tongue, cold, cold, on your parched lips. Cherry and chocolate, raspberry and lemon.” She would do, he decided. He appreciated her white blouse and the dark blue ribbon that tied her hair back from her face and the heat of the day causing drops of perspiration to appear on her forehead. He also told himself a mate for life should not be picked by appearance alone, character was important, family mattered and good health mattered and good teeth counted, and he considered the question of fertility.
    How could one know if a woman would bear children? “Most of them do,” said his father. “What a question,” said his cousin Martin. “It is bad luck to think up problems you do not have.” Albert went off to dinner, a cigar in his pocket, money enough for the ladies of the night who invited visitors to board their houseboat anchored by the shores of Lake Mariout, where musicians played all night long, one could smoke anything, and strange brews were offered that burned the throat and caused the heart to rush about in the chest. Also the ladies themselves, Arab but speaking French, or French but speaking Arabic, or Greek, or Italian, a breast or a thigh exposed, who laughed at anything said, and danced in ways that were stirring. Albert was particularly fond of Bennu, who had a bright red scar that ran down her back, which she claimed came from a guard at Tewfik Pasha’s palace who had grown angry with her when she refused to marry him. In the houseboat there were private rooms, closed off by thick curtains, in the back and down some little steps, small rooms where you couldn’t stand tall, your head would crack against a beam, rooms in which the beds rocked with the tide, rooms that let a slice of brittle moonlight in through tiny windows, rooms in which the ladies of the houseboat allowed, for a price, almost anything. Not that the young man was imaginative or capable of endless play or needed to extend his time. He flung himself at the women and fell back drunk and exhausted, and went home flapping his arms as if he could fly back to his childhood bed, where a serving girl might bring him a cup of mint tea and some clean pillows on