by Don DeLillo
“Is he adding years to your life?”
“I enjoy it. It’s an interesting part of the world. I feel I’m involved in events. Sure, sometimes I see it from a different perspective. Yours, of course. It’s just insurance. It’s the world’s biggest, richest companies protecting their investments.”
“Is that my perspective?”
“Don’t I know what you hate by this time?”
“There ought to be something higher than the corporation. That’s all.”
“There’s the orgasm.”
“You’ve had a long tiring trip.” She drank from the bottle. “I think I distrust the idea of investing, somehow, more than corporations themselves. I keep saying ‘somehow.’ Tap catches me at it. There’s something secret and guilty about investing. Is that a foolish thing to believe? It’s the wrong use of the future.”
“That’s why they use small print to list stock prices.”
“Secret and guilty. How’s your Greek?”
“Terrible. I leave the country for three days and forget everything. I know the numbers.”
“Numbers are good,” she said. “They’re the best place to start.”
“At dinner the other night I asked for chicken shit instead of grilled chicken. I got the accent wrong so the waiter didn’t know what I was saying anyway.”
“How did you know you said chicken shit?”
“The Maitlands were there. Charles pounced. Are we having dinner?”
“We’ll go to the quay. Did you get a room?”
“There’s always a room for me. They fire the cannon when they see my boat rounding the point.”
She passed the bottle across to me. She looked tired from her work at the excavation, physically beat, her hands full of marks and cuts, but she was also charged by it, bright with it, giving off static. There must be a type of weariness that seems a blessing of the earth. In Kathryn’s case it was literally the earth she was combing so scrupulously for fire marks and artifacts. I saw nothing in it myself.
Her hair was trimmed to the nape and she was brown and a little leathery, wind-seared around the eyes. A lean woman, small hipped, agile and light in her movements. There was a practicality about her body. She was built to a purpose, one of those padders through rooms, barefoot, in swishing corduroys. She liked to sprawl over furniture, arms dangling, legs stretched across a coffee table. She had a slightly elongated face, sinewy legs, quick deft hands. Old photographs of Kathryn with her father and her sisters showed a directness that caught the camera, engaged it fully. You felt this was a girl who took the world seriously. She expected it to be honest and was determined to be equal to its difficulties and testing times. She gave an unbalancing force and candor to the pictures, especially since her father and sisters customarily wore expressions that were studies in Canadian reserve, except when the old man was soused.
Greece, I believed, would be her shaping environment, a place where she might carry on the singleminded struggle she’d always thought life was supposed to be. l mean the word “struggle” as an undertaking, a strenuous personal engagement.
“I’d like to take Tap to the Peloponnese with me,” l said. “He’ll love the place. It’s haunted. All those fortified heights, the mist, the wind.”
“He’s been to Mycenae.”
“He hasn’t been to Mistra, has he? Or down to the Mani. Or to Nestor’s palace. Honest-hearted Nestor.”
“No.”
“He hasn’t been to sandy Pylos, has he?”
“Relax, James, would you.”
“Come September, what happens? I think we ought to know where he’s going to school. We ought to be making arrangements right now. When do you stop digging? Where do you plan to spend the winter?”
“I don’t have plans. We’ll see.”
“What have you found here anyway?”
“Some walls. A cistern.”
“Were the Minoans as bright and gay as we’re led to believe? What have you found besides walls?”
“It was a small settlement. Some of it’s under water. The sea’s risen since then.”
“The sea’s risen. No frescoes?”
“Not a one.”
“What pickups? Coins, daggers?”
“Storage jars.”
“Intact?”
“Fragments.”
“Big jars? Big as the ones at Knossos?”
“Not nearly,” she said.
“No frescoes, no silver-inlaid daggers, tiny broken pots. Are the pots unpainted?”
“Painted.”
“Dumb luck,” I said.
She grabbed the bottle and drank, partly to conceal traces of amusement. Tap came in, a little shiny after his bath.
“We have a brand new kid,” she said. “I’d better hurry and take my bath so we can feed him.”
“If we don’t feed him, he’ll blow away in this wind.”
“That’s right. He needs ballast. Do you think he knows what ballast is?”
“He’s writing a prairie epic, not a sea epic, but I think he knows anyway. Five drachmas says he knows.”
He turned on a light. I’d arrived expecting him to be changed in appearance. He’d always seemed vaguely delicate to me, small boned. I thought the open life would transform him physically. There might be something of the wild boy about him. The sun and wind would crack his skin a little, mark up the tidy surface. This unpremeditated life of theirs would break him out of his containment, I thought. But he looked about the same. A little darker, that was all.
The essential Thomas Axton now stood before me. Arms crossed on his chest, left foot forward, he spoke in his uninflected manner about ballast in ships. He seemed to be speaking through a hollow stalk. It was the perfect voice for Ob.
When Kathryn was ready we walked down to the harborfront. This wasn’t an island abandoned to tourism. It was hard to get to, had one shabby hotel and a few rocky beaches, the best of them inaccessible except by boat. Even in midsummer there were only a couple of orange backpacks propped against the fountain, no wandering shoppers or places to shop. We would eat in one of the two identical restaurants. The waiter would spread the paper covering and drop utensils and bread onto the table. He would bring out grilled meat or fish and a country salad and some wine and a soft drink. Cats would appear under the chairs. The wind would shake the canopy and we would tuck the paper covering under the elastic band beneath the table top. A plastic ashtray, toothpicks in a glass.
She preferred satisfactions that were basic. This was Greece to her, the burning wind, and she was loyal to the place and the idea. At the site she worked with trowels, root clippers, dental picks, tweezers, whatever else they used to move dirt and extract objects. Inches a day. Days the same. Stooped in her five-foot trench. At night she wrote reports, made charts, mapped out the soil changes and heated water for her bath and Tap’s.
She’d started out washing clothes for the dig director and fieldworkers. She also prepared lunch from time to time and helped clean the house where most of the staff lived. After budget cuts and defections, the director, Owen Brademas, gave her a trench. That’s the kind of operation it was. The director wore bathing trunks and played the recorder.
This was her first dig. She had no experience and no degree and was paid nothing. After we split up she’d read the details of this excavation in something called a fieldwork opportunities bulletin. Volunteers accepted. Travel and lodging paid by individual. Field gear provided.
It was interesting to see, back then, how progressively certain she became that this was the future. Other jobs she’d had, good ones, jobs she liked, never took hold so powerfully, the way this mere prospect took hold. The event gathered force. I began to understand it wasn’t just a reaction to our separating and I didn’t know how to take this. It’s almost comic, the number of ways in which people can find themselves diminished.
Against my lassitude she operated at peak levels. Sold things, gave things away, stored things in people’s garages. It had struc
k her with the pure light of a major saint’s vision. She would sift dirt on an island in the Aegean.
She started learning Greek. She ordered tapes, bought dictionaries, found a teacher. She went through a couple of dozen books on archaeology. Her study and planning were carried on in a fusion of anticipation and controlled rage. The latter had its source in my own living person. Every day made her more certain of my various failings. I compiled a mental list, which I often recited aloud to her, asking how accurate it was in reflecting her grievances. This was my chief weapon of the period. She hated the feeling that someone knew her mind.
1. Self-satisfied.
2. Uncommitted.
3. Willing to settle.
4. Willing to sit and stare, conserving yourself for some end-of-life event, like God’s face or the squaring of the circle.
5. You like to advertise yourself as refreshingly sane and healthy in a world of driven neurotics. You make a major production of being undriven.
6. You pretend.
7. You pretend not to understand other people’s motives.
8. You pretend to be even-tempered. You feel it gives you a moral and intellectual advantage. You are always looking for an advantage.
9. You don’t see anything beyond your own modest contentment. We all live on the ocean swell of your well-being. Everything else is trivial and distracting, or monumental and distracting, and only an unsporting wife or child would lodge a protest against your teensy weensy happiness.
10. You think being a husband and father is a form of Hitlerism and you shrink from it. Authority makes you uneasy, doesn’t it? You draw back from anything that resembles an official capacity.
11. You don’t allow yourself the full pleasure of things.
12. You keep studying your son for clues to your own nature.
13. You admire your wife too much and talk about it too much. Admiration is your public stance, a form of self-protection if I read it correctly.
14. Gratified by your own feelings of jealousy.
15. Politically neuter.
16. Eager to believe the worst.
17. You will defer to others, you will be acutely sensitive to the feelings of strangers, but you will contrive to misunderstand your family. We make you wonder if you are the outsider in this group.
18. You have trouble sleeping, an attempt to gain my sympathy.
19. You sneeze in books.
20. You have an eye for your friends’ wives. Your wife’s friends. Somewhat speculative, somewhat detached.
21. You go to extremes to keep your small mean feelings hidden. Only in arguments do they appear. Completing your revenge. Hiding it even from yourself at times. Not willing to be seen taking your small mean everyday revenge on me, which, granted, I have sometimes abundantly earned. Pretending your revenge is a misinterpretation on my part, a misunderstanding, some kind of accident.
22. You contain your love. You feel it but don’t like to show it. When you do show it, it is the result of some long drawn-out decision making process, isn’t it, you bastard.
23. Nurser of small hurts.
24. Whiskey sipper.
25. Underachiever.
26. Reluctant adulterer.
27. American.
We came to refer to these as the 27 Depravities, like some reckoning of hollow-cheeked church theologians. Since then I’ve sometimes had to remind myself it was my list, not hers. I think it was a fair analysis of her complaints and l took a self-destructive pleasure in calling out the accusations as if from her own unforgiving heart. Such was my mood those days. l was trying to involve her in my failings, make her see how she exaggerated routine lapses, make her appear shrewish to herself, the bitch of legend.
Every day I’d recite a few entries, go into deep meditation, working up new ones, polishing old, and then come back at her with the results. For aggravating effect I’d sometimes use a female voice. It was a week-long operation. Most of the items brought silence. Some made her laugh sarcastically. I had to learn that people who try to be perceptive about themselves are taken for self-hectoring fools, although it’s more accurate to say I was trying to be perceptive about her. The oral delivery was a devotional exercise, an attempt to understand through repetition. I wanted to get inside her, see myself through her, learn the things she knew. Thus Kathryn’s cutting laughter. “Is this what I’m supposed to think of you? Is this the picture I have in my mind? A masterpiece of evasion. This is what you’ve compiled.”
What a funhouse mirror is love.
By the end of the week I was using a vibrant liturgical voice, sending it toward the distant ceiling of our renovated Victorian house in Toronto’s east end. I sat on the striped sofa in the living room, watching her separate her books from mine (bound for different garages), and I stopped reciting long enough to ask casually, by the way, “What would happen if I followed?”
Now, six thousand miles from that cobblestone street, the family sits down to dinner. Ten octopus carcasses hang over a clothesline near our table. Kathryn goes into the kitchen to exchange greetings with the owner and his wife and to look at the heated trays, the meat and vegetables lurking beneath oil slicks.
A man standing near the edge of the quay lifts his cane to waggle a warning at some children playing nearby. Tap would use this detail in his novel.
2
Owen Brademas used to say that even random things take ideal shapes and come to us in painterly forms. It’s a matter of seeing what is there. He saw patterns there, moments in the flow.
His pain was radiant, almost otherworldly. He seemed to be in touch with grief, as if it were a layer of being he’d learned how to tap. He expressed things out of it and through it. Even his laughter had a desolate edge. If it was all sometimes too impressive, I never doubted the unsparing nature of whatever it was that haunted his life. Many hours we spent in conversation, the three of us. I used to study Owen, trying to figure him out. He had an unsettling mental force. Everyone was affected by it to one degree or another. I think he made us feel we were among the fortunate ordinary objects of the world. Maybe we thought his ruinous inner life was a form of devastating honesty, something unique and brave, a condition we were lucky to have avoided.
Owen was a naturally friendly man, lank, with a long-striding walk. My son enjoyed spending time with him and I was a little surprised at how quickly Kathryn developed a fondness, a warm regard, whatever a woman in her mid-thirties feels toward a sixty-year-old man with a western voice and a long stride.
Her eagerness to work amazed and confounded him. She went at it like someone half her age. This was inconsistent with the style of a fading operation. It was a dig that would never be published. From forty people, the first time I visited, they were down to nine. Still, she worked and learned and helped keep things going. I think Owen enjoyed being shamed. He’d emerge from one of his midday swims to find her at the bottom of an abandoned hole, swinging a railroad pick. The high sun funneled in on her, the wind passed over. Everyone else was in the olive grove, eating lunch in the shade. Her attitude was a precious dissonance, something as intimate, pure and unexpected as a moment from his own past, flaring in the mind. I picture him standing at the edge of the pit with a bath towel fastened at the waist, in torn tennis sneakers, breaking out in abandoned laughter, a sound that always struck me as a cue to some deep and complicated passion. Owen yielded himself completely to things.
Sometimes we talked half the night. I felt these were useful hours beyond whatever rambling things we found to say. They gave Kathryn and me a chance to speak to each other, see each other, from either side of Owen’s intervening position, in Owen’s refracting light. They were his conversations really. It was mainly Owen who set the tone and traced the subject matter. This was important. What she and I needed was a way to be together without feeling there were issues we had to confront, the bloody leftovers of eleven years. We weren’t the kind of people who have haggard dialogues on marriage. What dulling work, all ego, she would
say. We needed a third voice, subjects remote from us. This is why I came to put a high practical value on those conversations. They allowed us to connect through the agency of this wan soul, Owen Brademas.
But I don’t want to surrender my text to analysis and reflection. “Show us their faces, tell us what they said.” That’s Owen too, Owen’s voice coursing warmly through a half-dark room. Memory, solitude, obsession, death. Subjects remote, I thought.
An old man came with breakfast. I took my coffee out to the small balcony and listened awhile to French voices on the other side of the partition. A white ship crossed in the distance.
I saw Tap walking across the square to get me. Sometimes we walked to the site, going the first part of the way along a walled mule path humming with flies. The cab route was roundabout, a dirt road that skirted the higher parts of the island and never lost the sea. It was possible, if you looked to your left about halfway along the route, to get a distant glimpse of a white monastery that seemed to hang from the top of a rock column in the middle of the island.
We decided to take the taxi. It was outside the hotel, where it always was, a grayish Mercedes that sagged badly. The roof light was busted and one of the fenders was orange. In ten minutes the driver turned up, sucking his gums. He opened the door. A man was lying across the back seat, asleep. We were all surprised. The driver shouted at the man to wake him up. Then he went through it again to get the man off the seat and out of the cab. He kept talking and shouting as the man wandered off.
The taxi smelled of ouzo. We rolled down the windows and settled back. The driver headed along the harborfront, then turned up the last of the streets and went south. It wasn’t until we’d been on the dirt road for live minutes that he said something about the sleeping man. The more he talked, the less irritated he became. As he unraveled the event and analyzed it, he began showing amusement. Whenever he paused to think back on it, he couldn’t help laughing. The event was a funny one after all. He grew more animated and seemed to be relating another incident involving the same man. Tap and I looked at each other. By the time we got to the excavation we were all laughing. Tap was laughing so hard he opened the door and almost tumbled out of the car.
