Everything Beautiful Began After

by Simon Van Booy

  Away from her twin sister for the years she spent flying, Rebecca had become her own person. No longer one of a pair, and no longer responsible for her sister’s strange outbursts, which, growing up, had scared and repelled her.

  If anyone asked whether she had siblings, honesty compelled her to admit the presence of a sister. She veiled the subject by turning away. It was her life after all—and it was all she had.

  Rebecca found her grandfather’s house as she had left it: the same pictures on the walls; the same things in the refrigerator; the same noises coming from the television; birds nesting in trees; the cough of a distant tractor; cool soundless nights, then morning’s cheek against the curtains; the sound of water rushing from a faucet; her grandfather whistling in the kitchen as he snipped pieces of mint leaf into a cup.

  She drew either in the morning or in the late afternoon. Her grandfather watched from the kitchen window if she was in the garden. Sometimes he’d come out with coffee and a Madeleine cake. It was very quiet. Sometimes a small airplane would pass overhead. Sometimes just wind and the chatter of clothes-pegs on a swaying line.

  Most of Rebecca’s friends from school had moved to larger towns in search of work and adventure. Some had enrolled at universities in small cities.

  Occasionally, Rebecca would venture into the dark shed at the end of the garden. Inside was a black bicycle with flat tires, oil cans, rotting window frames, cobwebs, and a tea chest of watercolor paintings, signed by Rebecca’s mother with two initials.

  Her sister knew about them, but by fifteen she had shed any artistic ambition and took very little interest.

  They made Rebecca feel an immediate intimacy with someone far away. They all depicted the lake that was a short walk from their cottage. In the paintings the water was calm, with two figures on a grassy bank—as though waiting for something to break the surface of the water. The sky stuffed with cloud. Tiny specks for wildflowers, and always the same two initials in the bottom right corner in red.

  After a quiet year in the cottage—a year spent in the relief of not flying, of not being pretty; a year of gathering strength, painting, mustering bravery—Rebecca decided to use the last of her savings and move to Athens. She knew nobody there. She would take her sketchbooks, her oils, and a few other things from home that she thought might inspire something.

  She would live in exile with her desires. She would live as she imagined them on canvas, like faint patches of starlight: hopeful, but so far away; compelling, yet dispossessed of change.

  Chapter Two

  Not long after settling into her own, small corner of the city, Rebecca met a young man called George. He was very lost and lived alone. She had seen him strolling through the square outside Monastiraki Station—close to the narrow entrance to the flea markets, where she liked to sit and watch people.

  He was always overdressed, not only for the climate but for his age.

  Street children followed him in cheap clogs playing toy accordions, pulling at his jacket and jumping in front of him. He was perturbed by them, but never unkind—like some uncle with a great many nephews and nieces whom he loves but hardly knows.

  He looked the sort of man who had read all of Marcel Proust in bed. The sort who wanted to get up early but chronically overslept. And he waked slowly, hunched into a cigarette.

  One day, he unknowingly sat next to Rebecca on the low marble wall where the locals sit and close their eyes. She sat still without saying anything. His shoes were deep brown. And then the street children recognized George and raced over, their clogs echoing through the square.

  They eyed Rebecca with suspicion.

  “Is she your girlfriend?” one of the children said in English.

  George flushed with embarrassment. Rebecca noticed lines at the edge of his mouth quiver, like parentheses around what he felt but couldn’t say.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” George said, blushing.

  “She is pretty,” one of the Romany girls added.

  “That’s probably why she’s not my girlfriend,” George said.

  The children stared at him, mulling over the idea. Then one of them yawned.

  “Got any sweets for us, Mr. George?”

  George removed a bag of sweets from his briefcase and handed it to one of the children. They skipped off laughing.

  “Did you buy those especially for them?” Rebecca said.

  He seemed surprised she had spoken to him. He said he couldn’t eat sugar, so they were doing him a favor. Then they chatted a little about the weather, then the Greeks, and the flea markets that managed to draw them both in from time to time. It was better on Sundays, they agreed, when things were spread out on blankets and people had the time to stand around.

  Each blanket was a sea of lost things, George said. The relationship between the objects was what the passerby cared to make of them.

  He was American. From the South. Rebecca told him she had read Gone With the Wind, but a long time ago, and in French. George said that his grandfather was in it somewhere—in the background, a minor character riding by on a lazy horse. Rebecca thought that was funny. His voice was slow, and his mouth held on to the words for as long as they could.

  They continued talking. One conversation led to the next. Hours passed. Rebecca admitted she had noticed George before. She thought he looked friendly. George admitted that he was a bit shy.

  “I’m shy too,” she said.

  After some time, George had to get going and abruptly stood. Instead of kissing her on each cheek, he simply raised his hand and then bolted—looking back once to wave again.

  Some weeks later, neither would remember exactly how long, they spotted one another on the fringe of a café, and like before they exchanged a few words. As their impromptu chat deepened into conversation, Rebecca sat down. A waitress wandered over with two glasses of water, thinking they were customers—and slightly annoyed they had chosen the farthest table.

  And so their first meal together was an accident.

  An unplanned ritual began to take place where they would meet close to Monastiraki Station, eat supper, drink too much, and then George would walk her home, sometimes putting his arm across her shoulders.

  Two months after their initial meeting, their friendship consisted of long flowing conversations, smoking, late-night drinks, and then slow walks home. He was always smartly dressed, and always likable, despite a tendency to get very drunk. When they arrived at her apartment, Rebecca would always stand outside her building with him for longer than she wanted, lingering somewhere between fatigue and awkwardness.

  One night, he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

  She bowed her head slightly, as if in prayer. When he dragged his lips toward her mouth, she drew back. He pulled back too with a jerk, as though his body had been acting independently of what he wanted. He fixed his gaze on some low steps, upon a tangle of plants that climbed the outer walls of her building—absorbing all they could from the dry soil below.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It was too forward.”

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  Rebecca lost her virginity in Moscow, at the hotel where the Air France team is kept overnight. It wasn’t far from the Kremlin. She was twenty-two.

  They drank vodka on the bed and laughed. He had white socks. It was very cold outside. They started talking on the bus that ferries staff between the airport and the hotel. He was from Holland. Afterward, he kissed her forehead and then rose to open a window. Freezing air poured in. He smoked and nodded at everything she said. Then they took showers and dressed. He watched as she waved the hairdryer around. His wife was Dutch too. They had no children. He was the sort of man she could never love, but she allowed her body to want him.

  Her body did not change when George was close. She did not feel the calm violence of attraction she had felt with the Dutch pilot in Moscow. That was something outside of themselves, something to which they had mutually conceded—like a particular h
unger, brought on and satisfied only by one another. Rebecca did not feel that sort of visceral intensity with George, but his arms on her shoulders made her feel safe. And his torso was soft. George was a calm sea upon which she could have floated forever without ever going anywhere. And she would have to tell him sooner or later so that his feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

  “Do you always wear a tie?” she said.

  The city around them disappearing under nets of evening.

  The streetlights had not yet come on.

  People carried out garbage in small bags tied at the top.

  He was more drunk than usual and had trouble standing still. “Oh, I just like to, that’s all.”

  “Actually, it suits you.”

  George looked down at his pale orange tie—raising the bottom of it with his hand. Printed on the fabric were little hands clapping.

  “They’re applauding.” He smirked. Then he turned away. Rebecca wondered if he might cry. She tried to imagine it.

  That evening in Athens was very quiet. Only the hollow clunk of backgammon pieces thrown across a board from a nearby balcony.

  A barking dog somewhere else.

  A scooter, then footfall.

  “Hug me, George.”

  Stiff arms wrapped about her waist, then rested lightly on the climb of her hips. He was barely touching her.

  “Don’t hate me,” she whispered.

  “I hate myself,” he said. She could tell he was very drunk.

  “For wanting me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Then he withdrew his arms as if untying something from around her waist. His shoes made noises on the stone, rearranging themselves, anxious to leave and begin walking away.

  “I’ve spent my childhood learning to be alone,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “Then you can’t hate either of us,” she countered with sudden grace.

  Rebecca continued chatting as a way to dispel the awkwardness that threatened to linger until their next meeting. Then she kissed George on the cheek, again and again, until her kisses, like empty words, carried only the weight of consolation.

  She could feel the heat on his forehead, the faint aroma of salt.

  A car slowed as it approached them. When they didn’t turn around, it sped up again. The heat of an approaching summer was something they would have to endure, for better or worse.

  Rebecca stared past George at a kitten sleeping under the wheel of a parked car.

  “If you need a can opened or something stirred, or to borrow a hairdryer, I’m not too far away.”

  “Thank you, George.”

  “Actually, I don’t have a hairdryer, but I have some sublime recordings of the Bach partitas.”

  Rebecca shrugged.

  She did not know when she would wish to see him again. In some ways he was an easy escape from her old life: he knew her simply as a French painter in Athens. She had come to Greece to paint enough work for an exhibition, which she hoped to have in Paris, to great acclaim.

  Maybe her mother would stumble into the gallery by accident, unaware of her unofficial biography on the walls—the narrative of absence.

  Before climbing the steps to her crumbling apartment, Rebecca turned in time to see George scoop out the kitten she had forgotten about. He set it down beside a bush and turned to walk away.

  Then suddenly she felt the weight of emptiness upstairs. Her things still and heavy, as if underwater. She was in a city where she knew only one person.

  “George!” she shouted. He turned to face her.

  “Why don’t you come and see my place?” she said, then smiled weakly and motioned with her hand. He followed her up the stairs to her apartment.

  Her shoes made gentle claps on the marble steps.

  They drank coffee on the balcony. Rebecca’s limbs were already half-asleep. George reached over and began to massage her neck and shoulders. She closed her eyes and sighed deeply.

  George got up and stood behind her. She could feel his breath on the back of her head, and the city was suddenly quiet then, somehow emptier than it had ever been.

  “Stay,” she said.

  The hands on her shoulders stopped.

  “Tonight?”

  Later it was very hot.

  George caressed her bare back with his fingertips.

  “That’s nice,” she said. Streetlight fell across the bedsheets.

  He moved closer. She felt him press against her. Half asleep, she shifted her body to accommodate his intent. Then she closed her eyes for a few minutes. He kissed her back with deliberate slowness. It was sweltering, despite the open shutters.

  She saw that his eyes were wide open, drawing what little light there was in the room. The weight of his body drew forth her physical desire, and she opened her legs. Then, barely inside, George fell back with a gasp.

  For a few minutes he didn’t move. Then he pulled the sheet over her slowly, as if covering something delicate he wouldn’t see for a long time. He kissed her once on the lips and lay down without saying anything.

  She was very thirsty, but too tired to reach for anything. Morning was only a few hours away.

  Chapter Three

  Whilst vacuuming, Rebecca once found a shoebox under her grandfather’s bed. Inside were photographs from 1957 of a vacation in Cannes. His handsomeness startled her.

  It was amazing to think that once, her grandfather had been young. In many of the pictures he was wearing a black tie and dinner jacket. In another picture he was putting the top down on an old Porsche with a cigarette in his mouth. The Porsche was matte silver. It had a Swiss license plate and thin wheels.

  Each photo caught him in the middle of something: unfurling a sail, uncorking champagne, changing a wheel on the car, taking suitcases from the trunk, petting a dog.

  Some photographs featured the woman who would become his wife, Rebecca’s grandmother. Rebecca’s life was the history of missing people. She didn’t even know her own father’s name. The one her mother had written on the birth certificate was made up, named after a French pop star killed in a crash.

  Inside the shoebox, she found all that remained of her grandparents’ happiness.

  Her grandmother had been very beautiful, but her eyes carried the haunted look Rebecca had seen in her sister. In one photograph, she descended the steps of a small airplane. A man behind with black spectacles carried two suitcases. It was the only photograph Rebecca took from the box. A year later, she wrote away to Air France. It was the closest she could get to her grandparents’ early life without money or education.

  She wondered who would discover her shoebox. In the village of Linières-Bouton, the only glamorous men were the ones who sometimes appeared in summer from Paris on vacation with their wives and children—or visiting elderly relatives who otherwise annoyed them.

  Rebecca dwelled on how everything had changed for her grandfather after her grandmother drowned and left him with a single daughter to raise that was her mother.

  Did he consider the second half of his life a failure? He was unable to travel because of the burden of child care, and so worked with local businesses, rather than the bigger sales contracts in Paris, Tours, and Nantes that he’d been so successful with. He had also lost the woman he loved to a freak accident.

  Rebecca felt it was too harsh to think about. Did he remember the moment that everything changed, like a subtle shift in light? Morning, and then a long afternoon of darkness.

  She wondered how much of it was still with him. Was that man trapped inside the slow, sighing grandfather with unsteady hands?

  Rebecca was too young to understand the conditions and the feelings that come with age. “The Quiet Story of a Sleeping Man” was the title of a sketch Rebecca had made of her grandfather one afternoon. When she showed it to him, he nodded and patted her head gently. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door. The hollow clank of his belt hit the floor. Then a long sigh. A newspaper rustling.

  L
ater that afternoon, during a game show on the television, he mentioned that Rebecca might like to hang her sketch in the hallway.

  “Use nails from a jar in the shed,” he said. “There are plenty, and they’re all the same.”

  Chapter Four

  Bands of wasteland skirt the city of Athens. Sometimes people wander there, looking for things of value to sell in the flea markets of Monastiraki. Bend down and brush away dry soil to reveal a single tile, laid two thousand years ago.

  About four hundred years later as the Roman Empire crumbles—cheering as a baby takes his first steps across the very old tiled floor. Centuries on, stories of a new world fill the house, as honey spills from a jug and is lapped up by a hungry dog.

  There were more trees then.

  The air heavy with dry grass.

  Birds came and went.

  Now, just yellow rocks, a couch, and a mattress abandoned in the dead of night. Broken glass blinks in the sun. The only shade is from a low crumbling wall—pieces spat out like rotten teeth. The wall was once smooth. An architect fingered the seams then blew the dust from his hands. His horse was outside, drinking loudly from a deep bucket.

  Athens is a world of despair and sudden beauty.

  And it was from these two conflicting moods that Rebecca found her way as a woman.

  It wasn’t long before she loved the city.

  And the ability to love Athens, like all love, lies not in the city but in the visitor.

  The city matched Rebecca at every turn. Her moods reflected in the things that took place around her—things that she noticed: a cigarette vendor giving bits of fish to cats, a sudden shower of rain, deformed children sitting calmly on the steps of churches as their mothers shook their fists at God and then opened them to passing tourists.

  Rebecca felt a physical part of the city, and sensing such blind devotion, it embraced her as its own.