As Rebecca set up the easel and unpacked her pencils, she noticed her fingers were trembling.
He remained naked from the waist up, and his flesh hung lazily from muscles that still bore the frame of muscular youth, like something beautiful in the early stages of decay. His face was poorly shaved. His cheekbones were high, almost regal.
After an hour of silence, he asked if he could smoke again. Rebecca put down her pencil and they both lit cigarettes.
“I unlucky,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Tragic things happen.”
“I understand,” she said. Her tragedy had been slow, whereas his needed only a few seconds.
“It was my fate,” he said.
“I’m sorry for you,” Rebecca said.
“Yes,” he said. “Like Oedipus—it was my fate.”
He lit another cigarette.
“You cannot change fate,” he added.
Rebecca nodded.
“It’s set, you understand? Like the weather.”
Rebecca nodded again and raised her eyebrows as if she had just understood. He seemed pleased and went into the kitchen, where he began feeding towels into hungry pans of boiling water. He returned after a few minutes and sat back down.
“I’m ready,” he said.
Rebecca told herself that she did not believe in fate. She believed that she alone was responsible for everything that happened to her. If there was such a thing as fate, she thought, her mother would be blameless. It would have been her fate to abandon her daughters.
But it was not her fate.
It was her decision.
Fate is for the broken, the selfish, the simple, the lost, and the forever lonely—a distant light comes no closer, nor ever completely disappears.
The topless man was a good subject, except for the occasional twitch the way a person does when falling asleep. After two more hours, he held an invisible cigarette up to his lips.
“Smoke?”
“Yes,” she said. “Smoke, I’m almost finished.”
Rebecca dabbed the sweat from her face with a linen scarf. He did not sweat, though his skin maintained a constant level of moisture that contrasted with the hard black of his hair.
The man held his cigarette by the neck as though it were an insect he had caught. When the paper and tobacco had burned away, he didn’t stub it out, but just lay it flat in the saucer he was using as an ashtray.
After a few final strokes, Rebecca motioned for him to come around to her side of the picture.
“No,” he said, shaking his finger.
“But don’t you want to see how I’ve drawn you?”
“No,” he said. “You see any mirrors in here?”
Rebecca looked around, embarrassed by her sudden vanity.
She removed the paper and sprayed it with a substance that would ensure it didn’t smudge. Then she packed away the easel. The man fetched her a fresh glass of water.
“You come back if you want to draw me again.”
“I will,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
He made her promise that she would come back.
As she was leaving, he put his hand upon her shoulder. Then he took it off.
“Wait,” he said. He ran back into the apartment. Rebecca was holding the front door. She heard the slamming of cupboard doors and he was suddenly back.
“Take these,” he said, thrusting a few pieces of paper into her hand.
Rebecca looked down at three children’s drawings. In each one the sun dominated the sky. The people on earth were drawn as little sticks with stubby lines for limbs. Flowers as tall as people with drooping heads. Cars bouncing along in the background with stick drivers.
“I too like to make art.”
Rebecca looked at them, trying to think of something to say.
He mistook her silence as awe.
“You’re kind,” he said. “When you come back, I make more for you.”
It was late when Rebecca stepped onto the cool street. The drawing was under her arm. Her first serious work.
Chapter Twenty-Five
She lingered momentarily below Henry’s balcony, hoping that perhaps he might see her. But it was cool and walking for a while would feel good after being inside for so long.
Then a voice called out.
“Rebecca!”
“Hello,” she said, looking up.
“What are you doing?”
“Why don’t you come down and get me,” she said.
“Okay, let me put some clothes on.”
“Don’t come down, Henry, I’m coming up.”
Then suddenly a voice from another balcony.
“Make your minds up! My children are trying to sleep. And let him come and get you,” the voice commanded. “You shouldn’t be chasing men at your age.”
A pair of shutters slammed.
She entered his building and waited for the elevator. When it arrived Henry was in it wearing pajamas.
“I told you I was coming up,” she said.
“But the voice—”
When they reached his floor, the door was open. From the bathroom, Rebecca could hear rushing water. She set down her easel and her drawing on the couch. Henry explained how he was trying to get a few spots of blood out of his clothes.
“Did one of your specimens come back to life?”
Henry laughed and she followed him into the bathroom, where a shirt was slung over the side of the bathtub. He kneeled down and continued scrubbing. Rebecca watched.
Henry turned off the faucet and explained what had happened.
Rebecca listened and then fetched salt and lemons.
She touched the back of Henry’s head. His hair was soft. She fingered the bumps of muscle between his neck and shoulder. She wondered if she would ever truly know him, if their togetherness would shape her life, or if, like the summer, he would fade into the beauty and sadness of all summers.
There was no way to know the future. At times she felt she might open to him, but then something he said, or a subtle change in mood—and she would close again, very suddenly.
In the end, they hung his sopping clothes on the balcony. Faint dark spots remained where the blood had soaked in.
Henry was very moved by her story of the topless man. He made her a sandwich with cold strips of lamb which he smothered with tzatziki.
“It felt as though he’d been waiting for me—as though he’d been waiting for someone to draw him.”
Henry nodded.
“But then just as I was leaving,” she went on, “I understood why he had allowed me to come in.”
Rebecca showed Henry the three childlike drawings presented to her.
“Jesus,” Henry said. “What are these?”
“He’s an artist too,” she said.
Henry gave the drawings back to Rebecca.
“He told me that he believed in the idea of fate,” she said.
Henry sneered. “I’m sure he does, but the truth is probably that his wife just wasn’t looking where she was going. The idea of fate is for cowards.”
“I’m not sure I think that anymore,” Rebecca said. “Do you know the truth of what happened to that man? Do you know what it’s like to find someone you love dead in front of you?”
Henry’s eyes dimmed.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Henry said. “It was such a long time ago anyway.”
“You don’t have to say that.”
“What do you mean?” Henry said fiercely.
“I mean that it’s who you are.”
Henry snatched his wineglass and smashed it against the floor. For a moment, he just stood there. Then he stepped over the broken glass and went into his bedroom.
Rebecca found the broom and cleaned up the glass. She thought about what happened. Ten minutes passed. Then she saw Henry standing in the doorway.
She continued sweeping.
“Did I scare you?”
She nodded.
“Are you going to tell your mother I turned out to be crazy?”
“No,” Rebecca said plainly, “because my mother abandoned Natalie and me when we were seven.”
“Natalie?”
“My sister, didn’t I tell you that—”
“She abandoned you? Your father had to bring you up?”
“We never knew our father. My mother wouldn’t tell us, so no French house with shutters, no garden hose, no wine cellar, no vintage Citroën. We lived with our grandfather, and we took care of each other. And now she’s gone off with some bastard in the south of France, and I’m here cleaning up your broken glass.”
Henry just looked.
“You’re not the only one with tragedy,” she said and then started to cry. Henry held her and then walked her gently into his bedroom, where they lay down in the darkness.
A few hours later, Rebecca’s life was spread before him like models of each event.
Henry would never know exactly how she felt when she remembered those moments of her life, but his desire to know was the beginning of a seriousness he had never known before with a woman.
After, he made chamomile tea. It was very late. The flowers softened in boiling water. They sipped it slowly with honey.
Then they kissed. Her necklace caught between their lips. Moonlight spilled across the bed, purifying them with its pale fire.
They fell asleep without making love, but were closer than ever.
The shutters were open, and a stiff breeze had claimed Athens, filling bedrooms, rearranging the tops of desks, touching everything and nothing, as if searching for something it no longer recognized.
Then Rebecca woke up. She wondered how much time had passed. She turned to Henry’s sleeping face. It opened and closed with the shadow of her watching.
Rebecca wondered if her mother had once lain in bed with her father under such a spell of happiness. She imagined swimming with Henry in the steaming waters of the Aegean. She would take him to Aegina. His hands on her waist, guiding her through the water. Then his cool brown flesh after swimming—his beaded skin not quite dry.
She imagined taking him home to France.
A flock of bending trees.
Orchards.
The telephone about to ring.
Her grandfather cutting an onion with the slowness of age.
The bag of bags behind the door.
Sitting in the garden together—maybe her sister would come.
All the different cheeses. Plums from a tree in the garden.
Then driving back to Paris on the A11. Speaking English in the car.
Walking in the courtyards of the Louvre Museum. It was a place she had always dreamed of going, but she had never found the courage to enter central Paris in case she saw her mother.
The crunch of stones beneath her feet.
The excitement of doing nothing.
New sandals.
Cool marble steps.
A few clouds unfurling against the porcelain blue of dusk.
A bath together in the hotel on Rue du Bac.
The sense of something larger, something grand and overpowering, like some great historical event unfolding silently around them.
What happens to one person is felt by everyone. The time to hide has come and gone. She must give everything to survive.
But then she fell.
Like a statue falling off a ledge into its own reflection, Rebecca plunged headlong into sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Morning felt like a different life.
The curtains had stilled to a slow blaze.
Her thoughts somehow washed away by the currents of sleep.
She woke to a room on fire with pools of morning. Henry lay on his stomach with his palms against the sheet.
And then his eyes opened.
He looked at her without smiling.
“You’re here,” he said.
“Me?”
“I’ve been waiting.”
Rebecca put her hand on his forehead. “Are you dreaming?”
Henry sat up quickly.
“Were you dreaming?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Was it bad?”
“I don’t know. I’ve forgotten it.”
“Would you tell me if it was bad?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Funny how we feel emotion when we’re asleep,” Rebecca said, turning away. “I wonder if we can when we’re dead too.”
It was still quite early, and so they didn’t have to rush.
They mounted the Vespa around nine o’clock, and then joined the stream of traffic that would carry them past the towers of apartment blocks and factories, under the peeling bridges, past smashed cars rusting, past inaccessible fruit trees high up in the jutting rocks, and then out into the open heat of sand and scorched trees.
Rebecca rested her head on Henry’s back. She could feel the vibration of the motor in his body. She felt very tired. Dreaming must have kept her up.
She was wearing the same clothes as when she painted the topless man. She imagined him in his kitchen boiling towels. The hospice van picking up the clean and dropping off the dirty. That would be the next drawing. The steaming pot. She wondered how she might sketch the steam. She thought of Edward Hopper struggling with the angle of his brush as he curved the glass in Nighthawks. Steam from the drinks machine. It was raining the day he painted it. He was drinking coffee for sure. His wife, Jo, asleep in the next room with one leg outside the covers. His brush kept time to her breathing.
When they arrived at the dig, the Renault was not there. Henry parked. They pulled off their helmets and carried them up to the tent.
Inside it was cool and dark. The artifacts lay in their bins as if in a deep sleep.
Henry pumped Rebecca a glass of water from the plastic barrel. Then he pumped himself one.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said.
“A lot came out.”
Henry set down his glass gently and admitted that he felt very close to her, closer than he had ever felt to anyone.
“Make love to me,” Rebecca said. Henry picked her up and lay her down on the long bench.
When they heard the Renault clunking its way up toward the tent, he didn’t stop.
“Henry, I hear something,”
“Don’t worry, they have to find the bricks for the wheels.”
Outside the tent, in a world that was somehow disconnected to their lovemaking, Rebecca heard one car door shut, and then two distant voices.
One was the professor’s, while the other lighter, younger, less certain.
Afterward, as they dressed quickly, Rebecca strained to hear the voices outside. Henry kissed her slowly on the lips.
“Thank you for telling me about your childhood last night,” he said. “Now come and meet the genius we almost killed.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rebecca opened the tent flap, but was blinded by the sun. George stopped walking when he saw her. Dust rose around his feet.
“Rebecca?”
Blinking wildly, she walked toward George, but stopped a few feet away.
“What happened to you?”
Then Henry came out.
“George!” he said. “This is my girlfriend.”
The professor shook his head. “I may be old, but this is all very confusing—George seems to know Rebecca—which means that we all know each other already.
Henry gasped. “How do you know each other?”
George simply stared.
“Well—” Rebecca interrupted. “We’ve been friends for a while—pretty much since I moved to Athens.”
“And why have you never told me about him?” Henry said in mock reproach.
“I did,” Rebecca said. “The American.”
“Jesus,” Henry said with a laugh. “You were talking about George?”
George stared at the faces around him, not completel
y understanding what anything meant.
Time passed, in which George was dimly aware that through some strange coincidence the two main characters in his new life, the two people that he cared for the most, would soon be forced to wash him away for the sake of clarity. He felt the deep bite of loneliness. He thought of the cemetery in New Hampshire, and he longed for the cold simplicity of it. Fractured sunlight through the orchard. The eternal sea beyond, churning the names of the dead.
George followed the professor into the tent smiling weakly, but Henry reached out and took his arm.
“I had no idea she already had a boyfriend,” George said. “She didn’t tell me.”
Henry just looked at him. “We can talk later.”
“Okay,” George said.
“I don’t want our friendship to suffer,” Henry admitted.
The small fist of anger in George’s throat loosened.
“I’m just sad, is all,” George said. “I really—”
“I know,” Henry said. “But let’s try and work it out.”
For the rest of the morning, the professor made continual remarks about what a coincidence it was that George and Rebecca knew each other.
Then over lunch he went on about the various coincidences he’d encountered in his life, and how he’d experienced several especially complex ones in the Sinai Desert in 1974—which to this day, he had no explanation for but which continued to plague him.
George laughed out of courtesy.
Rebecca spent part of the morning with Henry in his pit, watching him scrape away the dirt with patient hope. Then she went to visit George in the tent.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” George said without looking up from his dictionary.
“Are you okay?”
“Not really,” George said. “But it’s clear why you like him.” Then he looked up at Rebecca. “I’d break up with me for him too.”
“Oh, George, I never broke up with you.”
“I know,” George sighed. “Even though we slept together, we were never together.”
Rebecca wanted to touch his hand, but was too afraid of what he might say next.
“And I’m not ready to give up drinking,” he said.
She stood over him for a few moments and then went back outside.
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