Everything Beautiful Began After

by Simon Van Booy

  “We’re not about need in here,” the saleswoman laughed, “we’re about want, and everybody wants something beautiful—if only to remind them of someone beautiful.”

  Henry shrugged. “That’s the best sales pitch I’ve ever heard.”

  “How about a man’s shirt?” Rebecca said.

  The saleswoman led Henry and Rebecca to a wall of dress shirts.

  “Pure mother-of-pearl buttons, and barrel cuffs,” she said, taking one down.

  “Interesting,” Henry said, taking it from her. “It’s so simple.”

  “If you understand that,” the saleswoman said, “then you understand the most important element of style—which would explain why this young lady has taken a keen interest in you.”

  “I’m not keen,” Rebecca said. “But I’m certainly interested.”

  The saleswoman laughed and walked back to answer a ringing phone.

  Henry chose a white, cotton poplin shirt with an Italian collar. The saleswoman shut the lid of the orange box and tied brown ribbon around it.

  “Very pretty,” Henry said.

  “And practical,” Rebecca added.

  “Like the two of you,” the saleswoman said, handing them the box. “Put it to good use, please.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Henry decided to pick dinner up from the restaurant on the corner. He suggested eating on the balcony again.

  Once in the street, he stopped and looked up at his own apartment. Rebecca was inside.

  A couple of lights were on.

  He wondered if he could ever confess how his brother had really died. It wasn’t his fault. Everyone had said so. And when he woke up screaming, Dad always came in and held him.

  Rebecca was upstairs. He wanted to love her, and almost could—but something restrained him. He’d felt it all his life, like arms holding him back from the happiness that would destroy him.

  Soon, Henry thought, we’ll be eating on that balcony. And even though they would spend the night in each other’s arms, he would yearn for her.

  Walking slowly back from the café, he recognized the moment he felt something other than lust. It was in the museum, when she lingered over the remains of the child. He could see that it upset her, and it was when he felt closest to her—when he knew she was capable of understanding him. She had anticipated the event that rooted him to loneliness. She could feel the winter that defined him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  After Rebecca left the station, George sat back down and lit a cigarette. Then he sobbed a little more. The scent of her perfume lingered, deepening his sense of loss.

  A train pulled in. George stood up and stepped forward.

  People rushed from the carriages and pushed past him. He felt the urge to fall over and be trampled, but instead moved to the side of the platform and sat down again.

  He listened to the sound of footsteps fading.

  A man stopped walking to look for something in his pocket.

  Another train in the distance. No one on the platform in front of him. An easy lunge. But deep down, he knew it was the impulsiveness of being drunk. For like the Russian petruska dolls that fit one another in varying degrees, the real, sober George lay still, at the core of his life—the true self from which all the other likenesses had been fashioned.

  When it got dark, and he felt cold, he decided to walk to an area north of the city center, a dangerous place of broken-down houses and drug addicts. The sort of place where only the boundaries are patrolled by city police.

  It took George about two hours to get there. Once he had entered the narrow labyrinth of streets, he stopped walking and lay down on the ground. The small bottle of vodka he had bought was empty, and he could barely walk anymore.

  There were people in the shadows. They seemed to move very slowly, until he was completely surrounded. He withdrew his wallet and threw it at them. Shadows moved quickly to pick it up, while others pulled and dragged George over to a wall.

  The shadow holding him said something in Greek. Someone in the background laughed. And then he felt a crushing blow above his eye. He looked into the darkness, dumbly aware of a distant silvery thread that flashed with every blow. Something smashed against the top of his head and then a force to his back. And then, as he lost consciousness, a familiar voice.

  When George awoke, he was on a mattress in a very dark room. Someone was sitting beside him. When he turned his head, a glass of water appeared, and he took it shakily.

  “It’s me, George,” Costas said.

  “What happened?”

  “You got beaten up on your way to my house.”

  “Beaten up?”

  “Yes, quite badly.”

  “How did I know where you lived?” George said.

  “Because I gave you my address.”

  “But I don’t have it.”

  “Don’t worry about it, I had to give you some stitches.”

  “Stitches!” George said. “Did I go to hospital?”

  “No, no, I used to be a doctor in another life,” Costas said.

  “You were a doctor?”

  “That’s why they didn’t kill you, because without me they would have no one to help when they overdose or get stabbed over squabbles. So I have a little pull here, but not much—if they were sane they wouldn’t be here, remember.”

  “Where am I?”

  “In the house I share with a few harmless junkies.”

  George opened his eyes. “Why aren’t you wearing the suit I gave you?”

  “Because I sold it,” Costas said. “To buy alcohol. You of all people should understand that. But I was touched, George, by your generosity.”

  George lay back down. They talked for a bit longer, and then he went to sleep. He wondered what Rebecca was doing and remembered their night together. Her slow breath and silent eyes. Morning not quite sketched against the window. The happiness of breakfast and the unfolding of a day.

  All things, George suspected, that he would never have again.

  In the morning he saw that he was in a room with about twelve other people, but Costas was not one of them. He quietly stepped between the sleeping bodies, each on their mattress. Then he climbed through the ground-floor window that functioned as a front door, ripping the lining of his jacket in the process. On the way home, he inspected his injuries in the reflection of car windows. He fingered the stitches on his cheek that Costas said would dissolve and wouldn’t need taking out. One of his eyes was badly swollen. With each step, he tried to retrace his final conversation with Rebecca on the platform, still utterly perplexed as to why she was committed to never being his girlfriend. He thought about her all the way home to his chic but empty apartment in Kolonaki Square.

  Then he put himself to bed and hoped never to wake up for a very long time.

  Chapter Twenty

  Over the next several days, Rebecca made sketches she thought were getting close to what she wanted. Her pencil scratched the canvas paper softly while her mind wandered over moments shared with Henry on his balcony.

  After each drawing, Rebecca took a cold shower to wash away sweat that had formed on her body. Then she started to feel lonely.

  She sat on her balcony thinking about her mother.

  In the evening when the heat broke, Rebecca smoked cigarettes and imagined her mother getting home from the office. The clack of glamorous shoes on a tile floor. Something cooking. Voices from the television. Her boyfriend not home yet. He rides a scooter with fairing. She takes her shoes off and stands beside the microwave in her tights. An expensive cheap pocket-book with loose coins and gum inside. Rebecca wondered if they even looked alike.

  The last Christmas card she received from her mother was six years ago. She had brought it with her to Athens. There was a letter missing from her name, but it sounded like “Rebecca” if you said it aloud. Her sister had received one too, but recognized the handwriting on the envelope and threw it away without opening it.

  The next day, Rebecc
a was on her final sketch of the laturna man from the marketplace when something strange happened. Instead of drawing his shabby overcoat and weathered face, her pencil began to move with its own intelligence. Like a newborn animal learning to take a few steps outside its cage, she let her hand carefully and slowly impress upon the canvas paper its own vision. She lost herself, and after several minutes she realized she was no longer drawing the organ grinder, but the topless man who lived opposite Henry’s apartment. From what she could remember, her sketch was the keen likeness of someone from a distance—but it lacked the intimacy she prided herself on with other subjects.

  As the pink flesh of dusk swallowed Athens, Rebecca cooked several small fish in a frying pan, and then ate them with hummus she’d made from grinding chickpeas in a bowl with a squeeze of lemon, salt, oil, and tahini. There was half a bottle of wine left in the refrigerator, and so Rebecca (wearing nothing but Henry’s white shirt) took the cold bottle into her studio and drank it down like water, looking at her sketches.

  She thought how perfect it would be if Henry were to show up at that moment with more wine and cigarettes. Then she took off all her clothes and went to bed.

  The next morning, Rebecca drank milk on her balcony and sketched from memory the topless man standing over his steaming pots. When she stopped to make coffee, she decided that her exhibition would consist of a series based on modern Greek tragedy.

  The topless man would be her first subject.

  She quickly dressed, packed her pencils into a box that she strapped to an easel—then slipped several sheets of paper between the straps. It was a sweltering noon, but she hoisted the gear onto her back and set out across the city.

  On the metro, her mind cast back to one of her first memories, and one of the only moments with her mother.

  They were at home. Her mother had come down from Paris for a few days.

  One night, unable to sleep, Rebecca crept out of her room and saw a light on downstairs. She was six or seven years old. Her mother was on the couch smoking. When Rebecca peeped her head around the door, her mother smiled.

  “Come,” she said.

  Rebecca remembered walking slowly toward her, anticipating at any moment, that her mother might just as easily dismiss her back upstairs.

  She was leafing through a book of paintings.

  They read the book together. It was very quiet. Rebecca hoped her sister wouldn’t wake up.

  “Look at this one,” her mother said. “Aren’t the colors pretty?”

  Rebecca nodded. Her mother turned the page.

  “I used to paint, Rebecca.”

  “I can paint too!”

  She dragged slowly on her cigarette.

  “This one is nice,” Rebecca said.

  “That was one of my mother’s favorites,” her mother said. “She died long before you were born. I can barely remember her myself.”

  Rebecca nodded. “But you’re not going to die?”

  Her mother stubbed out her cigarette.

  “You never know.”

  Their eyes went back to the book of paintings.

  “I love this one,” her mother said. “I really, really love it.”

  Rebecca stared at the painting. A girl in a pretty pink dress lying in a meadow. A farmhouse in the distance.

  “Is she trying to run away or trying to go home?” Rebecca asked.

  “Both,” her mother said softly. “She’s trying to do both.”

  She drew on the cigarette, tapped her ash directly onto the picture, and closed the book.

  Sometimes children, not long exiled from that silent world of softness and gesture, can feel in their tiny hearts the nuances of what adults say; and though powerless to act, they sense fully those feelings that creep like figures behind the veil of language.

  And though Rebecca would never admit, even to her sister, the feeling that passed over her at that moment, she knew with certainty that something was terribly wrong. And though in the coming years she would yearn for her mother, in truth, it was not this woman she yearned for, but the idea of her—without the terror she was too young to recognize as madness.

  It was easy getting into the topless man’s building, as the door had been propped open. People were making their way home for siesta. Small children peddled their bicycles barefoot on the street outside.

  Rebecca ascended the stairs that led to his front door.

  The echo of children’s voices lessened.

  Then, by the time she reached his floor, she could no longer hear the children, nor the low hum of distant traffic, nor other voices—just her own breathing and the tapping of her easel as she conquered each step.

  The hallway was heavy with steam. There were two names scrawled on his door in blue pen. Rebecca listened. She could hear him inside walking around.

  She knocked.

  The walking stopped. But nothing happened.

  She wondered if he would answer at all, then a voice.

  “Neh?”

  “Hello,” she said. “Hello, monsieur.”

  The door opened.

  He was topless, and hot steam poured into the hallway.

  “Neh?” he said, but with more gentleness.

  Rebecca smiled broadly and motioned with her hand that she wanted to come in. For a moment he didn’t move. Then he turned slowly so that she might enter his apartment, but she froze and felt suddenly faint.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Henry was a child archaeologist.

  At nine years old he dug up a piece of flint that resembled an axe head. His father took him to the University of Swansea. They asked for the archaeology department and were directed to a tall concrete block with untidy rows of bicycles outside.

  A long-haired student asked if they were lost. Henry produced his flint, as though it were proof of something. The student stared at it.

  “Do you have an appointment?” he said.

  “No,” said Henry’s father. “We thought we’d just pop in.”

  “Well, I suggest you look for Dr. Peterson’s office,” the student said, tossing his mane. “He’s good with this sort of thing.”

  Professor Peterson was much younger then, but to nine-year-old Henry he seemed a very old man. He scrutinized the artifact with a magnifying glass. Then he looked at Henry with his magnified eye.

  “I can deduce that it’s extremely old,” he said. “May I ask how old you are, young man?”

  “Nine,” Henry said. “Actually, nine and a half.”

  Professor Peterson set the magnifying glass down on a piece of felt and looked at the artifact again. “I’m afraid it’s a great deal older than you.”

  “I knew that,” Henry said excitedly. “Is it as old as dinosaurs?”

  “Older,” Professor Peterson stated without flinching. “Your artifact would have been used to hunt them.”

  “To hunt them?”

  “Oh yes,” said Professor Peterson. “Not only for food, but for their pelts.”

  “Their pelts?”

  “The ancients wasted nothing.”

  “What should I do with it?”

  “There’s really only one place for it.”

  “Where, Professor?”

  “In your bedroom under a glass bowl for protection.”

  Professor Peterson handed the flint back to Henry.

  His father stood up to leave.

  “Actually,” said Henry, “I want you to have it.” He held out his rock to the professor with two small hands.

  Professor Peterson blushed.

  “You should keep it, Henry.”

  “But don’t you need it for research?”

  “But, Henry—you found it—it belongs to you.”

  “But if it’s so precious, doesn’t it belong to everyone?”

  Professor Peterson took the flint and set it on his desk.

  “Please sit down,” he said to Henry’s father.

  “Years from now, I want you to look me up, and when this young man is older, I
’d like to help with his education—if he’s still interested in all this.”

  “I definitely will be,” Henry interrupted.

  “That’s nice of you, Professor,” said Henry’s father.

  “Nice has nothing to do with it,” Professor Peterson snapped. “I need men like your Henry. People with faith.”

  Henry’s father looked away. His wife would be at home in the bedroom they use for storage, sitting on the carpet. She would be out when they got back—walking in the fields beyond the house.

  He would fry eggs and make toast. Henry would watch. They would eat together in front of the television, watching Blue Peter.

  Professor Peterson took the flint and set it next to an ashtray of old stamps. Then he took a key from his waistcoat pocket and opened a glass cabinet behind his desk. It was full of strangely shaped things. He carefully removed a fossilized dinosaur egg and turned around.

  “Here,” he said, handing it to Henry. “I was given this when I was your age by my father. It belongs to you now.”

  For the next twelve Christmases, a box of the year’s archaeological books and journals would arrive by post to the small semidetached house in Wales where Henry spent his childhood.

  After about three years, however—Henry realized that all he’d found in the garden that afternoon was a flint in the shape of an axe head.

  He wrote this in a letter to Professor Peterson, who was in the Middle East at the time. A month later, Henry received a postcard from somewhere very far away with writing he didn’t recognize.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  On a mountain high above Athens, two figures leaned over a kitchen table in the blazing sun.

  “This is peculiar,” Professor Peterson said, handing a magnifying glass to Henry. “I have a funny feeling it might be Lydian.”

  “That doesn’t seem likely.”

  The professor was referring to a discus the size of a dinner plate.

  Henry spent the afternoon not thinking about his work. His old British dental tools scratched the ground but revealed only more questions about Rebecca. About eleven o’clock, Henry washed his hands over the sink, pumping the foot pedal to draw water. The professor appeared from the tent.