Picchvai

For once it was going to be her turn to choose, and Richard could just pretend to go along and like it. Bhutan was her choice, and because the money was no object at this point, she booked the most elaborate and kingliest package tour, which in fact included a session with the king who was, according to the literature, thirty-eight years old, girlish in his enormous golden outfit that in photographs made him resemble, though she would never say so in the royal presence, or so she hoped, a goldfish. Nineteen days. The first few days were intended to acclimate one to the altitude, and in fact Richard did look a little gaspy there on the cobbled roads of the village below the vast jagged mountain whose heights they would eventually mount. Red-faced and wheezing, but not giving up. A far cry from his young self, but who was not! Well, she still looked all right, in fact, despite everything, a sweeping energy to her long step and with her hair still shoulder-length, a graying blonde achieved only by the most masterful techniques, thanks to Jacques. One needed to acquire a gift to bring back for Jacques, indeed for everyone, and these first days were spent investigating the possibilities, but the choices all seemed cheap and fake, even the obviously ancient relics seemed to be just exactly the thing one would find in Bhutan, and therefore not the thing at all. She remained empty-handed and uncertain, while Richard by the third day had become bold enough to explore on his own, and when they reconvened at the leaning pink hotel that evening, some new light had come into his eyes. The next morning, their guide collected them, only them, they were paying enough for that, at the restaurant next door, very good tea steaming dark in its tiny cups and a tangy, musty yak butter that spread itself in clotted clumps, like muscle, but which complemented the dense bread perfectly, every bite a work of a minute or so as the grains permitted themselves to be fragmented and then dissolved. Pushing on, up the high road to the next stop, a caravansary on a sheer cliff where Joshi’s Range Rover shone royal blue beneath the faded flags that beat against the wind. A night here, another six thousand feet attained, before the final push to the royal palace at its monumental heights, visible in the afternoon light as a jewel box fastened to the mountain. Centuries of intrigue and murder and princely misdeeds invisible in the clarity of the air, one only saw what was in front of one. History so dense and present it vanished altogether. In fact they were not only guests of the king but honorary ambassadors, they were informed, a bit of news that brightened Richard’s gaze again, always about him a little creak of baronial

ambition, the gentlemanly games, the lifelong manly and polite indifference toward her suffering. In the presence of the king they would be asked to bow, to not offer one’s hand to shake, Evelyn was to curtsey and Joshi, with a lovely little step, demonstrated the proper depth, not overly deferential but entirely correct. A night alone in a humble chamber that looked out on the golden arm of the palace, the air so still and spare it seemed she could hear the stars fizzing in their sockets. And then the morning audience. A throne room, the king in a yellow tunic, a red plaid sort of shirt beneath, and the niceties completed, Evelyn found a lovely perfect blankness where her soul had once been housed, and so she thought to compliment the country, the palace, the people, news his majesty accepted in silence as his mighty due. So high she had climbed, there was only downward, downward to go, the rest of her days, however few remained, would be spent at a lower altitude. In the end, the gifts she brought home were textiles, easy to fold and transport, imitations of the ones she had seen in the palace, decorative and bright and busy with life, animals and lords and mountains and everything, all of them known as picchvai, a tender strange pungent word, which only later she would learn meant “backdrop,” a bit of the world patched and sewn from silk meant to hang behind a shrine, to give position to the holiest of holies, to the unspeakable crucial true thing, to that one thing, fast approaching now, that could be properly considered only once it was set in contrast with everything else there was in the universe.