Rebecca stayed in his apartment until noon. She washed in his hot yellow bathroom, then cleaned the dishes from supper. After dressing, she bought oranges from an Albanian in the street, propping open the front door with an empty wine bottle. She put the oranges in a small bowl and left them on the kitchen table next to the lemons with her address. Before closing all the shutters for the day, Rebecca noticed the topless man who had been boiling towels in the building opposite. He was sitting at the kitchen table with a cigarette and pulling at his hair.
Chapter Eleven
George spent most of the afternoon in bed, a bilingual volume of poetry by Kazantzakis split over his body like a small church. It was open on a page that read:
Beauty is merciless. You do not look at it, it looks at you and does not forgive.
It was about a week since he had seen Rebecca. His apartment smelled of spilled wine. Wilting vines of dill lay on the kitchen counter in thick bunches, while empty wine and liquor bottles occupied most corners and areas where George didn’t need to walk. He repeated the line of poetry a few times until he knew it by heart.
He was meeting someone at noon, and so got up, dressed, and made his way to a popular café on the corner of his street. George’s lunch companion was early, and stood to greet him. They did not shake hands, but were pleased to see one another.
“How are you, Costas?” George said. “Did you order?”
He shook his head.
“Thanks for meeting me. Here are cigarettes and the bottle of ouzo, before I forget.”
The man’s look of dull shame brightened for a moment. He tucked the cigarettes into one of the many pockets of his heavy coat, but held up the bottle of ouzo and made a great pretence of reading the label. This was an attempt, George suspected, to hide that fact that he was actually illiterate.
“Looks like a nice one, interesting history,” the man said.
“It’s excellent, just like your English.”
Costas nodded appreciatively. He was a dark-haired man of about fifty, but due to his circumstances he looked considerably older.
“So what have you been up to since our encounter?”
“Honestly?” said George.
Costas nodded.
“I’ve gone and fallen in love with someone.”
“A woman?”
George nodded.
“Greek?”
“French.”
“Oh,” Costas said. “Very nice.”
“But,” George said, “I haven’t heard from her in a week.”
“Have you telephoned?” Costas suggested.
“She doesn’t have a telephone, but I’ve been round a few times and she doesn’t appear to be home, or if she is, she doesn’t open the door when I ring.”
“Maybe she’s busy,” Costas said. “But then all women are mysterious, no?”
Costas scratched his chin, then reached for one of George’s cigarettes. “May I?”
George nodded. “Of course.”
Finally the waiter approached along with the owner—a stout man with a heavy gold chain.
The owner stood at their table, arms akimbo, and glared angrily at Costas.
“Sorry, we’re closing,” he said.
“Closing?” George said incredulously, “But you’ve just opened.”
Costas laughed heartily.
“Both of you get away from here,” the owner said.
“But why?” George said. “We’re only here for lunch.”
“Well, this is a neighborhood café, not a charity kitchen.”
George stood his ground. “I’ve always paid my bill, and tipped you generously.”
“This is true,” the owner said. “So why you know this man if you’re so respectable,” he said, pointing to Costas—who was already packing up and getting ready to leave.
“I’m very disappointed,” George said, standing up, “that you’ve lost the nature of what hospitality is. You guys invented it.”
The owner’s lips trembled slightly, but he said nothing.
As they walked away George turned around and waved. It was a peculiar habit of his that often confused people. The waiter, who had said nothing, waved back, and the owner gave him a few harsh words.
“Sorry about that,” George said. Costas smiled magnanimously and asked George for another one of his cigarettes. They smoked at the edge of a fountain and watched people pass.
“Strange world we live in, isn’t it?” George said.
Costas nodded. “Very strange.”
“Look,” George said, turning to face his friend, “I promised to buy you lunch, so how about we just get some souvlaki sandwiches and take them back to my place.”
“I don’t know,” Costas said, “I really should be going soon.”
“I know,” George said. “There’s nothing like being waited on. We could also pick up some wine to drink with our meal—I know you like a drink as much as I do.”
“Okay,” Costas said. “That sounds nice. Then maybe you could tell me more about the French girl you’re in love with.”
George purchased two sandwiches and a bottle of wine from a kiosk, then led Costas up to his apartment, which overlooked Kolonaki Square.
“I don’t much come to this area,” Costas said.
“Why not?”
“Because the police don’t like people like me here with all these beautiful foreigners spending money.”
“But it’s your country,” George said, “and you have a right to go where you please.”
“You’re a nice boy,” Costas said. “I wish you were Greek.”
When they were inside, George helped Costas take his knapsack off. It was most awkward to maneuver on account of two thick blankets strapped to the bottom with rope.
George asked Costas to sit down and then served him some wine.
“Just a cheap house red,” George said, “but it’s wet.”
“It’s wet, yes,” Costas repeated after a long gulp. He held up his glass for a refill.
During lunch, George told him all about Rebecca—the late dinners, the long romantic walks, her ambition to be a great artist, the awkward lingering on her steps. Costas listened politely, and nodded where was appropriate.
After lunch, they drank Armagnac and George thanked Costas again for his generosity the previous week. Costas shrugged. Then he wrote down the address of a derelict house in Athens, where he’d made a bit of a home for himself with a few others.
“If you get lost, come to this address and ask for me.”
Chapter Twelve
To celebrate his night of passion with Rebecca, George had decided on an all-day drinking session. After leaving Rebecca’s apartment that morning, he spent the afternoon flitting from café to restaurant, nibbling on sandwiches and small pies, reading, and drinking as much as he could without drawing attention to himself.
By the early hours of the morning, however, the only bar open was an Internet café. It served until 5:00 a.m. and generally catered to backpackers from a nearby hostel.
George paid to sit at a computer, where he sat drinking and feeling sleepy in the bright glow of the monitor. If people were watching him, he was certainly not aware of it.
When the Internet café closed, he decided to sleep in a park. Morning was almost upon the city, and despite the inevitable but harmless advances of men who lurked in the bushes, he was comfortable and safe.
He crossed a bridge over the railway lines toward a mass of trees and empty paths. He skirted the edge of the park railing—hoping he would come upon an opening. Then he suddenly realized that he was surrounded by a group of men. Something poked into his stomach and George looked down to see a sort of pipe, which he later realized was a gun. The men went through his pockets quickly. He could feel their hands upon him like mad animals. Despite the violence of what was happening, however, George was quite relaxed. It was an event beyond his control, and so all he had to do was surrender to it and wait for it to be over. Afterward, they musc
led him to the floor and ran away. George lay there, unharmed but in shock.
A homeless man under some cardboard boxes witnessed the incident and took pity on George, who, like himself, he judged to be nothing more than a harmless drunk. Costas helped George to his feet, brushed him off, and offered him a place to sit down with some wine and something to smoke.
After a few swigs of liquor and the remains of a cigar that Costas kept for emergencies, George fell asleep on the cardboard. Costas covered him up with one of his blankets and covered himself with another.
The next morning, George thanked Costas for his generosity and begged him to be his guest for lunch in a week after he’d sorted himself out. Costas accepted, and George told him the address of a café on his block that served excellent fish and even more excellent wine. Costas nodded politely and said he would see George then. George also promised a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of ouzo as a return gift for the wine and cigar stub he’d smoked at Costas’s expense.
Chapter Thirteen
As Costas packed up to leave, George had an idea.
“Listen,” he said. “If the police don’t like the look of you, then let’s change the look of you.”
George disappeared into his bedroom and returned with a suit and a pair of loafers.
The suit was a little baggy, but the shoes fit with three pairs of socks.
“It’s very nice,” Costas said, stroking the fabric. “It’s been twenty years since I wore a suit.”
“Splendid,” George said. “Fits you very well, and actually looks good with your T-shirt underneath, like you’re from California.”
“I’ll take these,” George said, pointing to Costas’s old clothes, which lay on the floor in a dark heap. The smell of sweat and urine was quite strong, and for a second, George was reluctant to pick them up.
“No, no,” Costas said reaching, “I’ll take them—you can never have too many clothes.”
George saw Costas to the front door, and they shook hands. There was a dignity in fine clothes that George felt was vital to a person’s sense of self.
Many of George’s heroes—archaeologists and linguists from the 1930s—wrote in their books as much about their tailors as they did about their expeditions. They climbed blazing hot sand dunes in linen suits from Savile Row. They explored Himalayan caves in tweed with full brogues and sock garters—and but for some grave injury or temporary paralysis, they were never unshaven.
The suit George gave Costas was one of several tailored for him in Paris. His button-down shirts had been sewn on Jermyn Street in London, and his shoes were from Alfred Sargent. In George’s opinion, bow ties had never gone out of style, and his shaving accoutrements were from Geo. F. Trumper, as were a few of his more eccentric possessions—such as a narrow silver device meant for making Champagne less fizzy.
Chapter Fourteen
George’s father left Saudi Arabia and returned to his home in the United States when George was in his final year at Exmouth, about three years before he went to Athens. He wrote to George and said he wanted to be his father again.
He said he also wanted to give George money—to make his life more comfortable, to do fatherly things and make sure he was a well-set-up young man for the future.
For the past three years, he visited George when he felt like it, about twice a year. Five months ago, his father had come to Athens.
After a long dinner with several bottles of wine, George had walked him back to his hotel through Syntagma Square—past the Parliament Building and up that long stretch of boulevard to the Athens Hilton. He then helped him upstairs, and waited in the sitting room part of the suite as his father knocked about in the bathroom. After ten minutes, George went to see what he was doing and found him asleep on the floor in his clothes. George unknotted his tie, loosened his shirt collar, unhinged his belt, took off his shoes, and pulled a blanket over him.
On the dresser was a large envelope with George’s name on it. Inside, a wad of bills in U.S. dollars and, as always, a gift certificate for Hermès—his father’s idea of tailoring.
Before leaving, George folded his father’s clothes and tidied up. He also set some empty vodka bottles outside the door for the maid. He straightened up the golf magazines on the desk. He drew the curtains against the city and sat on the bed. For a few minutes he watched his father sleep. Then he got up and left, closing the door quietly behind himself.
George stopped to chat with the desk clerk on his way out, and asked that they check on his father in a few hours, as he hasn’t been feeling well. Then George took a taxi home and put himself to bed.
Homer’s Odyssey was George’s favorite poem of all time. He had copied it out and translated it into English. Part of the story is about how a boy’s father goes missing.
Chapter Fifteen
George woke up in the early hours of the morning. It was still dark. The liquor store would not be open for several hours. He read a little of the poetry from the book on his bedside table.
There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces.
Then he got up and ate some cold potatoes with yogurt, lemon juice, and chives.
He had written Rebecca’s name in ancient Greek and taped it on his refrigerator. He had even tried to compose a few lines of poetry for her, which he kept in his pillowcase with an emergency packet of cigarettes and the birthday cards from his father, which went back as far as his seventeenth birthday.
George unwrapped a bar of chocolate. He hoped the sugar would make him feel better. The world was too hard to live in when he was sober, because everything felt precious. Like some devout follower of an obscure religion, he was moved to tears frequently by what he perceived as divine moments—like rain on the window or the smell of apples, or a man reading a book with his daughter in the park; a flock of birds, the flash and clatter of a passing train, and the silent beauty of faces.
Booze washed all that nonsense away. It shallowed his perception. As a drunk, he was free to explore the earth without having to digest every moment as if it were his last.
Outside the window above his bed, a dull blue sky meant dawn was near.
Somewhere across the city, among the thousands of thumping hearts, was the one he wanted.
After thinking about it for a minute, George decided it had been much too long and that he should walk several miles across Athens to her apartment where he would smoke, swig from the bottle of ouzo he would buy when the shops opened, and then soak up the imagined impression of her slumbering body from beneath her balcony.
Perhaps he would even ring her buzzer and then run away (if he wasn’t too drunk to find it). He imagined leaping into a bush as she rushed down to see who was there.
George was in the habit of leaving his apartment with everything on, including lights, the radio, and once even the shower—which he’d drunkenly forgotten to get into in the first place. Without turning around, he found his keys and took from a drawer the gift certificate his father had left him—an orange envelope with a horse and cart engraved upon it. He thought it might be a nice impromptu gift, or serve in place of an excuse should his presence be discovered.
The elevator tapped quickly in its descent, and George remembered the sound of housemasters’ shoes echoing through tall arched corridors of the dormitory.
A year before he graduated from Exmouth, his only real pleasure, aside from translating ancient texts and music, was drinking single malt against an obelisk set in the manicured grounds of the school. He liked to sit there, drink, and hum Bach. The obelisk was known as the Exmouth phallus. Once, drunkenly, George wrapped his body around its base and screamed:
“Thrust me deep inside, O great Exmouth cock, where no mortals dare spread fragile wings.”
If it hadn’t been parents day, nobody would have heard and George wouldn’t have got into any trouble.
Some of the colder mornings brought great joy. Before dawn, after a night of heavy frost, George wandered the white dreaming ga
rden through clouds of breath and the forever nothing of stars. Like a silk puppet, he glided through the grounds, the only living witness to that day’s birth.
George had entered boarding school when he was seven, soon after his family split up.
The flight from Lexington to Boston was uneventful. He was served a bag of animal crackers and the beverage of his choice (Fanta). Someone from the school named Terrence drove to the airport to pick him up.
By the time George reached Rebecca’s apartment building around seven in the morning, his memories of Exmouth lay scattered behind him. He had bought some liquor on the way and was now too drunk to focus on anything above the second floor. He simply stared at her building and tried to make sense of the blurred colors.
When George eventually found the courage to cross the street, he realized he had been staring up at the second floor of the wrong building, and so he gave up and fell asleep in a park nearby.
He slept unceremoniously until early afternoon.
When he woke up, he walked carefully through the bright sunshine to the closest metro station. He felt ragged and nearing sobriety. His lungs ached for the heaviness of smoke. Like the veteran of his own private war, he painfully and crookedly ascended to the platform.
A train pulled in.
He watched people spill from the doors, waiting for an opening so he could board. Suddenly, Rebecca was in front of him, with a bouquet of white flowers.
“Rebecca!”
She seemed surprised. Her eyes were a beautiful shape.
George tried to stand straight. “Sorry if I frightened you,” he stammered.
“What are you doing here, George?”
“Oh, well, I had to collect some official documents from the library up the road.” He motioned one way and then looked in the other direction and motioned that way too.
“Have you ever been there?” he asked, touching the heads of her flowers.
“Where?” she said.
“You live here?” George asked.
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