An End To The Tedium Of Marriage - A Return To The Delights Of A Pasha's Harem

Sultan Ahmed of Izmir once had the most splendid harem in all of the Middle East, the envy of pashas, princes and emirs from the Bosporus to Jeddah. He lived in gold-bedecked, bejeweled palace high on a hill overlooking the Aegean.  He was attended by young boys, nubile girls, and the most beautiful concubines of the Empire. Massaged with oils of frankincense and myrrh, lying on pillows of silk and muslin, he was pleasured every night by Fatimah from Baghdad, Emriye from Amman, or Usha from Lahore. 

 

Ruling a great kingdom, feasting on roast pheasant, sweetbreads of boar, and the cutlets of Asian fowl; fed the sweetest dates from Tunisian oases, the most succulent figs from Cappadocia, and pomegranates from the Levant, and loved by the most beautiful women of the realm, he could not ask for anything more. He was a happy man. 

Harry Bindham looked up from The Splendors of Pashas, Sultans, And Emirs and was not happy with what he saw - the sound-dampening, coruscated separators of his cubicle, the fluorescent ceiling light stands over from division to division, department to department in an endless, uniform glare.  The hum of copy machines, coffee makers, air conditioning, and elevators sealed the floor in a uniformity of sound and absorbed every odd click, and gave all a supernal quiet. 

Gone were the perfumed scents of the harem of the Pasha of Antalya and the Princess Songul; gone were the lambent melodies of the lyres of court, and all that was left was Betty from Bayonne. 'Would you please look these over, Mr. Bindham?', she said, holding out three large spreadsheets accounting for the sales, inventory, gains and losses of offices in Kearny, Woodside, and Elizbeth. 

'I'm sure they're fine, Betty', he said, finding a place for them on his settee, one of Rhode Island cabinet maker Townsend's finest works. His highboys, chairs, settees, and end tables were the best of a generation - delicately hand-tooled, polished and carefully finished pieces.  

Harry left the office at five and drove the short distance home - past Montgomery Mall, the fast food places, Verizon, car rentals, and discount big boxes on the pike, into Brierly Village, his gated community of Georgian-style homes, far enough back from the strip to give an illusion of social position if not wealth.

His wife, Amanda, was busy in the kitchen - a more wifely occupation than she had ever imagined, and so did the scut work with an attitude - not quite resentment, but bordering on a suburban angst she had associated only with the Fifties, dead and gone in the ages of feminism. She saw herself as a dutiful,  obedient woman slavish to the Kinder, Kuche, Kirche of her mother's generation.

Amanda had been a K Street lawyer for the years before the birth of Robbie and Lisa, hadn't missed it in the first few years in the suburbs, but now was desperately anxious to trade diapers and bottles for accounts, billable hours, and the boardroom.  

Sex was desultory at best, and now that both Harry and Miranda were approaching sixty, it was limited to Saturday night deadened by two bottles of Chardonnay, a social sealant, an obligatory dance to confirm marriage but nothing more. 

And so it was that Harry Bindham, a man ordinarily of sexual rectitude and propriety became a regular customer at Mrs. Finchley's, a premier brothel serving the K Street and Capitol Hill crowd. 

It was not his first choice, so enticed was he by the beauties of the Levant, but he needed a respite from the tedium and deadening ordinariness of his marriage. He settled for Chantal, an octoroon from New Orleans with a touch of the East left in her ancestors' native Haiti, product of one of any number of slavers from an Arab mission which made the trip through the pirate-controlled waters of the eastern Caribbean on a monthly basis. 

 

Chantal had the cafe-au-lait complexion, dark hair, and almond eyes which could have come from anywhere east of Rhodes or Cnossos, a high-priced beauty, top-of-the-line consort but still with the innocence of a young girl.  She was not one of the pasha's concubines, especially those from Yerevan prized and never sold or bartered; but still a remarkable mixed blood beauty who was enough to satisfy his fancy. 

Chantal was a professional and teased out his most exotic fantasies.  She dressed in silken pantaloons, tied her hair with jasmine, bathed in rose water and hibiscus and disrobed with subtlety and grace. 

His wife never questioned his unaccountable absences.  She had herself become completely disenchanted and wholly dissatisfied with the life she had chosen, felt beyond despair, moping in a state of lethargy, waiting for a chance happening but retreating so far away from opportunity that it would never arise, 

There was Jonathan, their young estate lawyer, Reginald, their accountant, and Benedict the priest all of whom had made their sexual interest clear; but none fit the category of Prince Charming; for Amanda like her husband was smitten with what might have been, lost in former times, hers being the Medieval England of knights, sexual favors, maidenhood, fortune, and shining armor.  

So Henry came home to the smell of pot roast on the stove and the taste of his octoroon lover on his lips, the disconnect making the candlelit dinner all the more painful, sitting across the linen tableclothed, silvered table from his wife, both as silent as an old growth forest but seething with resentment, frustration, and some inchoate desire - inchoate and dissolved because both knew that this was the end of the line, too late for a new partner, too soon to die, too unsettled in all affairs to go quietly.  

Did it have to be this way? Wasn't a pasha's harem to best way out of sexual indignity? Or a Mormon's polygamy? Or a Frenchman's cinq-a-sept - she with Monsieur le Comte at Versailles and he with Madame de Merteuil in the 16th - returning to the Chateau de Longworth or an elegant Hotel de Ville in the 5th where wives were fixtures, part of a mutual agreement without entanglements?

Millions of men were punching the same clock, Harry thought as he boarded the N6 for town, the same ticket, filling the same time sheets - 6 1/2 hours on McDermott, 3 on Callahan, 12 with wives - his few hours with his octoroon left out but made up with a few uncounted on Harris.  Whatever he did, the collar of metro, boulot, dodo never loosened.  He would forever be headed in the same direction, picking up the same pen, and turning his wife over to the beat of a metronome. 

Nothing was left, and the obituaries were kindly without reference to his suicide or to the rather detailed note left for his wife, an indecipherable mess of references to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the palace of Versailles and a woman named Chantal de Miramon.  'Let it be', said the editor of the Washington Post.