Read Online Chimera by John Barth - Free Book Online

brother’s, about half the girls were volunteers—from all which, I infer that their actual fate was an open secret. For all I know, my original mistress never truly intended to found her gynocracy; the whole proposal was perhaps a ruse; perhaps they all slipped back into the country with their phials of gems for dowry, married and lived openly under my nose. No matter: night after night I brought them to bed, set forth their options, then either glumly stripped and pronged them or spent the night in chaste sleep and conversation. Tall and short, dark and fair, lean and plump, cold and ardent, bold and timid, clever and stupid, comely and plain—I bedded them all, spoke with them all, possessed them all, but was myself possessed by nothing but despair. Though I took many, with their consent, I wanted none of them. Novelty lost its charm, then even its novelty. Unfamiliarity I came to loathe: the foreign body in the dark, the alien touch and voice, the endless exposition. All I craved was someone with whom to get on with the story of my life, which was to say, of our life together: a loving friend; a loving wife; a treasurable wife; a wife, a wife.
    “My brother’s second message, when it came, seemed a miraculous reprise of that fatal first, six years before: I turned the kingdom over to my vizier and set out at once, resolved to meet this Scheherazade who had so wooed and yarned him back to the ways of life that he meant to wed her. ‘Perhaps she has a younger sister,’ I said to myself; if she does, I’ll make no inquiries, demand no stories, set no conditions, but humbly put my life in her hands, tell her the whole tale of the two thousand and two nights that led me to her, and bid her end that story as she will—whether with the last goodnight of all or (what I can just dimly envision, like dawn in another world) some clear and fine and fresh good morning.”
    Dunyazade yawned and shivered. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about. Am I expected to believe that preposterous business of Breastless Pilgrims and Tragic Views?”
    “Yes!” cried Shah Zaman, then let his head fall back to the pillow. “They’re too important to be lies. Fictions, maybe—but truer than fact.”
    Dunyazade covered her eyes with her razor-hand. “What do you expect me to do? Forgive you? Love you?”
    “Yes!” the King cried again, his eyes flashing. “Let’s end the dark night! All that passion and hate between men and women; all that confusion of inequality and difference! Let’s take the truly tragic view of love! Maybe it is a fiction, but it’s the profoundest and best of all! Treasure me, Dunyazade, as I’ll treasure you!”
    “For pity’s sake stop!”
    But Shah Zaman urged ardently: “Let’s embrace; let’s forbear; let’s love as long as we can, Dunyazade—then embrace again, forebear and love again!”
    “It won’t work.”
    “Nothing works! But the enterprise is noble; it’s full of joy and life, and the other ways are deathy. Let’s make love like passionate equals!”
    “You mean as if we were equals,” Dunyazade said. “You know we’re not. What you want is impossible.”
    “Despite your heart’s feelings?” pressed the King. “Let it be as if ! Let’s make a philosophy of that as if !”
    Dunyazade wailed: “I want my sister!”
    “She may be alive; my brother, too.” More quietly, Shah Zaman explained that Shahryar had been made acquainted with his brother’s recent history and opinions, and had vowed that should Scheherazade ever attempt his life, he’d manage himself somewhat similarly: that is (as he was twenty years older, and more conservative), not exactly granting his wife the power to kill him, but disarming and declining to kill her, and within the bounds of good public relations, permitting her a freedom comparable to his own. The harem was a royal tradition, necessarily public; Scheherazade could take what lovers she would, but of necessity in private. Et