by Don DeLillo
“Ever hit her? I’m serious.”
“No. Ever hit Kathryn?”
“We’ve scuffled. No clean blows. She took a run at me once with a kitchen thing.”
“What for?”
“She found out I went to bed with a friend of hers. It led to words.”
“The friend made sure she found out?”
“She let on, somehow. She sent signals.”
“So you nearly got spiked with an ice pick.”
“It was just a potato peeler. What annoyed the friend was my perceived indifference. It was one of those situations. You find yourself in a situation. Alone with Antoinette. The two of you have felt the usual secret lustings. The normal healthy subatomic lustful vibrations. These are feelings that get acted on when man and wife split up. Suddenly there’s an Antoinette, destiny in her eyes. But Kathryn and I hadn’t split up. We hadn’t done anything. The situation just arose. The combination of circumstances.”
“What situation? Paint a picture.”
“Never mind a picture.”
“Her apartment?”
“Her house. Diagonally across the park from ours.”
“Summer, winter?”
“Winter.”
“The plant-filled parlor room. The glass of wine.”
“Something like that.”
“The intimate talk,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Always the intimate talk. This woman is divorced, right?”
“Yes.”
“The sadness,” he said.
“There was sadness, yes. But it had nothing to do with her divorce. She’d just lost her job. The CBC. They fired her.”
“The sadness.”
“All right the sadness.”
“The longing.”
“Yes, there was longing.”
“The need,” he said.
“Yes.”
“In the starry night, in the parlor room, sipping dry white wine.”
“It was a good job. She was upset.”
“ ‘Comfort me, comfort me.’ “
“Anyway I gave the impression of wavering. I must have drawn back. This was inexcusable, of course. I hesitated, I showed uncertainty. We did the thing finally. We couldn’t end our friendship, commit our crime, without finishing what we’d started. So we did the thing. We eked out a fuck. What an idiot I was. Antoinette got her sweet revenge.”
“She let on.”
“She let on. And in letting on she didn’t fail to communicate this half-heartedness of mine. I don’t know how she did this without being direct, which I gather she wasn’t. I suppose in fables and parables, in allegories. The language of women and children. This is what got Kathryn really furious, I think. Not just the sex, the friend. The way I went about it. I committed a crime against the earth. That’s what made her want to carve my ribs.”
“Did it clear the air? This knife fight?”
“Beginning of the end.”
“We married young,” he said. “We didn’t know anything. You know the story. Little or no experience. Grace said I was the first, more or less the first, really the first, the first in any important way.”
We laughed.
“I knew our marriage was shot to hell when we started watching TV in different rooms,” he said. “If her sound was up loud enough, I could hear her change channels in there. When she went to the same channel I was watching, I switched channels myself. I couldn’t bear watching the same stuff she was watching. I believe this is called estrangement.”
“You’re not going to become a stereotype, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s bad enough you have a new young wife. You don’t want to be thought of as one of these men with an old wife and old kids back in the States. These are the wives who weren’t dynamic enough to keep up with men like you in the great surge of your multinational career. The old wives and old kids are gray and stooped, sitting in front of TV sets in the suburbs. The wives have head colds all the time. The old dogs are listless on the patios.”
“At least my new young wife isn’t a fantasy wife. A stewardess or model. You know Hardeman? His second wife is a former ball girl for the Atlanta Braves. She used to sit along the left-field line waiting for foul balls. I think she found one in Hardeman.”
David was casual about most bank matters. He told me what the bank was doing in Turkey and gave me telexes and other paper that detailed loan proposals. These documents impressed Rowser, particularly the ones marked confidential in block letters. I guess David felt there was little or no danger in giving this particular classified material to a friend. We were serving the same broad ends.
“Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing in some of these places. I can’t get the Empty Quarter out of my mind. We flew right over the dunes, man, nothing but sand, a quarter of a million square miles. A planet of sand. Sand mountains, sand plains and valleys. Sand weather, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty degrees, and I can’t imagine what it’s like when the wind’s blowing. I tried to convince myself it was beautiful. The desert, you know. The vast sweep. But it scared me. This Aramco guy told me he can stand on the airstrip they have out there and he can hear the blood flowing in his body. Is it the silence or the heat that makes this possible? Or both? Hear the blood.”
“What were you doing flying over this place?”
“Oil, boy. What else? Big field. We’re financing some construction.”
“You know what Maitland says.”
“What does he say?”
“Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.”
David went in to get me a beer and another for himself. I was wide awake and feeling hungry. A faint light was visible in the sky, the Parthenon emerging, two-dimensional, a soft but structured image. I followed him to the kitchen and we started eating whatever was lying loose, mainly pastry and fruit. Lindsay came in to complain about the noise. She wore a nightgown with a ruffled hem and we smiled when we saw her.
In these early hours the sky seems very near street level. The street extends from eastern sky to western. It’s always a surprise, entering the boulevard by first light when there’s no traffic, being able to see things as unconnected, the embassy mansions with their period detail, objects coming out of the gloom, mulberry trees and kiosks, and to make out the contours of the street itself, a place of clear limits, we see, with its own form and meaning, appearing in the stillness and marine light to be almost a rolling field, a broad path to the mountains. Traffic must be a stream that binds things to some denser perspective.
The boulevard was empty only momentarily. A bus moved past, drowned faces pressed against the windows, and then the little cars. Four abreast they came, out of the concrete hollows to the west, the first anxious wave of the day.
The way home was uphill into narrower streets, severely graded toward the pine woods and gray rock of Lycabettus. I stood by the bed in my pajamas, feeling vaguely unstuck, my habits no longer bound to hers. The tides and easements of custom. Our book of days. The canaries on the back balconies were singing, already women were beating rugs, and water fell to the courtyard from rows of potted plants, ringing on the bright stone.
That was my day.
4
The body was found at the edge of a village called Mikro Kamini, an old man, bludgeoned. This village lies about three miles inland, among terraced fields that soon give out before the empty hills and the massive groupings farther in, the pillars and castellated rock forms. The landscape begins to acquire a formal power at Mikro Kamini. There’s suggestion of willful distance from the sea, willful isolation, and the fields and groves abruptly end nearby. Here the island becomes the bare Cycladic rock seen from the decks of passing ships, a place of worked-out quarries, goat-bells, insane winds. The villages nestled on the coast seem not so much a refuge for seagoing men nor a series of maze structures contrived to discourage entrance by force, make a laborious business of marauding; from here they are detailed reliefs o
r cameos, wishing not to attract the attention of whatever forces haunt the interior. The streets that bend back on themselves or disappear, the miniature churches and narrow lanes, these seem a form of self-effacement, a way of saying there is nothing here worth bothering about. They are a huddling, a gathering together against the stark landforms and volcanic rock. Superstition, vendetta, incest. The things that visit the spirit in the solitary hills. Bestiality and murder. The whitewashed coastal villages are talismans against these things, formulaic designs.
The fear of sea and things that come from the sea is easily spoken. The other fear is different, hard to name, the fear of things at one’s back, the silent inland presence.
At the house we sat in the slanted living room in low cane chairs. Kathryn made tea.
“I talked to people at the restaurant. A hammer, they said.”
“You’d think a gun. Land disputes between farmers. A shotgun or rifle.”
“He wasn’t a farmer,” she said, “and he wasn’t from that village. He lived in a house across the island. He was apparently feeble-minded. He lived with a married niece and her children.”
“Tap and I went through there my first visit. I took Owen’s motor scooter, remember? You gave us hell.”
“Senseless killings are supposed to happen in the New York subways. I’ve been edgy all day.”
“Where are those people from the cave?”
“I’ve been thinking about them too. Owen says they’ve gone.”
“Where is Owen?”
“At the site.”
“Swimming above the sunken ruins. That’s my image of him. An aging dolphin.”
“The conservator came back today,” she said. “He’d gone off to Crete with someone.”
“What does he do?”
“Preserves the finds. Puts the pieces together.”
“What are the finds?” I said.
“Look, this work is important. I know what you think. I’m feeding some fanatical impulse.”
“Does Owen think it’s important?”
“Owen’s in another world. He’s left this one behind. That doesn’t mean it’s futile work. We find objects. They tell us something. All right, there’s no more money for things. No more photographers, no geologists, no draftsmen. But we find objects, we come upon features. This dig was designed partly as a field school. Help students learn. And we are learning, those who’ve stayed.”
“What happens next?”
“Why does something have to happen next?”
“My friends the Maitlands have entertaining arguments. I wish we could learn that skill. They don’t waver from an even tone. It’s taken me all this time to realize they’ve been arguing since I’ve known them. It’s an undercurrent. They’ve made a highly developed skill of it.”
“Nobody just digs,” she said.
Church bells, shuttered windows. She looked at me through the partial darkness, studying something she hadn’t seen, possibly, in a long time. I wanted to provoke, make her question herself. Tap came in with a friend, Rajiv, the son of the assistant field director, and there were noises of greeting. The boys wanted to show me something outside and when I turned in the doorway, going out, she was pouring a second cup, leaning toward the bench where the tea things were, and I hoped this wasn’t the moment when we became ourselves again. The island’s small favors and immunities could not have run out so soon. Bringing something new into being. After the bright shock fades, after the separation, there’s the deeper age, the gradual language of love and acceptance, at least in theory, in folklore. The Greek rite. How fitting that she had a male child, someone to love fiercely. The bells stopped ringing. Tap and Rajiv took me along a path near the top of the village. The cut-paper brightness of doors and flowers. The curtains lifted in the wind. They showed me a three-legged dog and waited for my reaction. A shapeless old woman in black, with a red clay face, a black head-scarf, sat outside a house below us, shelling peas. The air settled into an agitated silence. I told them every village has its three-legged dog.
Owen Brademas came up out of the dark, striding, his shoulders set forward against the steep grade. He carried a bottle of wine, holding it aloft when he saw me at the window. Kathryn and I went out and watched him take the stairs two at a time.
I had an insight. He is a man who takes stairs two at a time. What this explained I’d no idea.
They spent a moment together in the kitchen talking about the dig. I opened the wine, put a match to the candles and then we sat drinking in the wind-stirred light.
“They’re gone. They’re definitely gone. I was there. They left garbage, odds and ends.”
“When was the old man killed?” I said.
“I don’t know that, James. I’ve never even been to that village. I have no privileged information. Just what people say.”
“He was dead twenty-four hours when they found him,” Kathryn said. “That’s the estimate. Someone came from Syros. Prefect of police, I think he’s called, and a coroner apparently. He wasn’t a farmer, he wasn’t a shepherd.”
“When did they leave, Owen?”
“I don’t know that. I went there only to talk. Out of curiosity. I have no special information.”
“Senseless killing.”
“A feeble-minded old man,” I said. “How did he get across the island?”
“He could have walked,” she said. “It’s what the people in the restaurant think. There’s a way to do it on foot if you know the paths. It’s barely possible. The theory is he wandered off. Got lost. Ended up there. He often wandered.”
“That far?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think, Owen?”
“I saw them only that one time. I went back because they’d seemed so interested in what I told them. There didn’t seem to be a danger in going and I wanted to get more out of them if I could. Obviously they were determined to speak Greek, which was a drawback but not a crucial one. The fact is they probably had no intention of telling me who they are and what they were doing there, in any language.”
But there was something he wanted to tell them. An odd fact, a remnant. He thought they’d be interested in this, being zealots of the alphabet or whatever they were, and he hadn’t thought of mentioning it the first time they talked.
When he went to Qsar Hallabat to see the inscriptions, he’d taken the Zarqa-Azraq road, traveling north from Amman, veering east into the desert. The fortress was in ruins, of course, with cut basalt blocks strewn everywhere. Latin, Greek, Nabatean inscriptions. The order of the Greek stones was totally upset. Even the blocks still standing were out of place, upside down, plastered over. All this done by the Umayyads, who used the stones without regard for the writing on them. They were rebuilding the previous structure, the Byzantine, which had been built from the Roman, and so on, and they wanted building blocks, not edicts carved in Greek.
All right. A lovely place to wander around in, full of surprises, a massive crossword for someone in the Department of Antiquities. And all of this, the castle, the stones, the inscriptions, is situated midway between Zarqa and Azraq. To Owen, to someone with Owen’s bent for spotting such things, these names are seen at once to be anagrams. This is what he wanted to tell the people in the hills. How strange, he wanted to say, that the place he was looking for, this evocative botched ruin, lay between perfect twin pillars—place-names with the same set of letters, rearranged. And it was precisely a rearrangement, a reordering, that was in progress at Qsar Hallabat. Archaeologists and work men attempting to match the inscribed blocks.
The mind’s little infinite, he called all this.
I went inside for fruit. With the bowl in my hand I stopped at the door to Tap’s room and looked in. He lay with his head turned toward me, wetting his lips in his sleep, a sound like a fussy kiss. I glanced down at the papers on his makeshift writing table, a board jammed into an alcove, but it was too dark to read the painstaking loops and slants.
Outside we ta
lked awhile about his writing. It turned out Owen had learned a few days ago that his own early years were the subject matter. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or upset.
“There are many better topics he could find. But I’m happy to learn I’ve kindled an interest. I’m not sure I want to read the result, however.”
“Why not?” I said.
He paused to think about this.
“Don’t forget,” Kathryn said, “this is fiction we’re talking about, even if the nonfiction kind. Real people, made-up remarks. The boy has a fix on the modern mind. Let’s show him a little more respect.”
“But you said he changed my name.”
“I made him.”
“If I were a writer,” Owen said, “how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating, to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.”
“Have you ever written?” she said.
“Never. I used to think it would be grand to be a poet. I was very young, this was long ago, I’m sure I thought a poet was a delicate pale fellow with a low-grade fever.”
“Were you a delicate pale fellow?”
“Awkward, maybe, but strong, or strong enough. In the tall grass prairie what you did was work. All that space. I think we plowed and swung the pick and the brush scythe to keep from being engulfed by space. It was like living in the sky. I didn’t know how awesome it was until I went away. It grows more awesome all the time, the memory.”
“But you’ve taught in the Midwest and West.”
“Different places.”
“Not Kansas?”
“Not the prairie. There isn’t much left. I haven’t been home in thirty-five years.”
“And you never wrote a poem, Owen? Tell the truth,” she said, playing lightly at something.
“I was a plodder, kind of slow, I think, one of those gawky boys who stands around squinting into the glare. I worked, I did chores, a dutiful son, unhappy. But I don’t think I so much as scribbled a single line of poetry, Kathryn, not one.”
The flames went flat, shot down, unstable in the wind. The trembling light seemed to wish an urgency on us. I was taking wine in half-glass bursts, getting drier all the time. The others rambled calmly toward midnight.
