If not for the poise of the new Henry Bliss in the new Athens, this news would have obliterated what was left of you.
You sit in bed with the journal, and then fall asleep around dawn.
On the afternoon of the next day, you go up to the roof for a swim.
It’s hot by the pool and some hotel guests have pulled their sun loungers into the shade. The journal is downstairs on the bed. Perhaps she was afraid you would not love her if she told you. You could have become a father to two children within the year. You could have become the family Rebecca never had.
You’ll never feel the comfort of resolution now, and your Greek love affair will be playing itself out inside you forever—silently spinning around your heart like a web with no beginning or end.
All you can think of now is the child.
A fragment of Rebecca that’s living.
What is this child like?
You know that Rebecca had a sister. Perhaps the child is with her?
You spend the entire afternoon by the pool.
You swim for a while and then go back to your seat. The waiter brings you ice-cold orange juice. You roll the glass on your chest because it feels good. The other guests are Polish couples and slightly older than you. The women talk in the pool while the men drink beer and laugh. They must be on vacation and having a good time.
By the late afternoon, you’re tired and want to look at the journal again.
As you wait for the elevator, you notice a marble relief attached to the wall. You step closer to inspect it, holding the towel around your neck the way George used to. This marble relief is a copy of the relief from the museum, the one with Asklepios raising a woman from the dead as the two men and the child watch.
You ignore the elevator and study it, marveling at the coincidence of its presence in your hotel.
The small marble child is watching the resurrection of her mother as two men stand on either side. The child’s mouth is open in awe. She is standing on tiptoe. Asklepios is exchanging his life for hers.
The child’s hands are clasped.
The woman is coming back to life.
You imagine her eyes impossibly wide.
Screams of joy.
Screams of fear.
Her heart is pumping again—her lips go from gray to burgundy.
In an instant, her body is light and supple.
But the dead don’t come back to life. They sit frozen in our minds, finally free, capable of everything and nothing in a paradise where they can do no wrong.
When the towel falls from around your neck and the elevator returns full of people, it’s suddenly clear what you must do. Even if it’s only anger driving you, you envision yourself in France looking for Rebecca’s child, scouring bakeries, schoolyards, coin-operated rides outside supermarkets, swings and slides, public pools, the empty fields where children play games.
You wish you’d saved a few of Rebecca’s things. You wonder if George has any. You rush back to your room and turn on your mini-satellite fax machine. It beeps, rattles, and then spews out messages. After five pages of worry from George, you press reset and take the machine over to the desk.
You reach for a leaf of hotel stationery and begin composing a fax.
Two hours later when you return from dinner you notice your telephone light blinking. You pick up the handle and press the square button.
It’s a voice message from George. He says he can’t believe it. Then he doesn’t say anything. Then he wonders if it’s true, and if it’s even Rebecca’s journal in the first place. He still doesn’t have a telephone but will call back from the place on the corner.
You compose a fax, telling him that the journal refers to the village and her grandfather and her sister—and that it has to be her and not to call because you’re leaving for France immediately.
George replies within seconds.
He wants you to come to Sicily and discuss it.
He’s very worried about you.
He can’t believe it, he writes. He wants you to fax proof.
You write that it’s all in a journal and can’t be faxed, but that it’s true and that all the time you knew Rebecca, she had a child in France that she’d run away from.
George faxes back to say that he still can’t believe it. That there must be a mistake.
He also tells you that he was married last month. You fax back asking why you weren’t invited to the wedding. George replies that he thought it might upset you.
You reply that it would not have. You explain that you want him to be happy. He writes back that he is and he wishes you were and is there really a “phantom child” of Rebecca or are you having an anxiety attack?
Both his parents are coming to Sicily to meet his new wife.
You think of your own parents. Your mother will be washing her hands in the kitchen sink, looking at the tray of violet flowers she has yet to plant.
Your father is drinking coffee and reading the Radio Times.
You sign off with George and then telephone them from the hotel.
You tell them you have just enough money to get home but have one more thing to do before you return for good.
Your father says he can’t wait to see you, and that there are about two dozen letters for you from the International Mini-Satellite Fax Corporation in Shanghai, and they look quite urgent.
As you close your case and check the room you notice something happening in an apartment across the courtyard. A child’s birthday party. The adults are wearing paper hats. You open the door and the distant sound of party music fills your room.
You continue searching, and then look again, drawn by the sound of applause. Somebody opens the balcony door. It’s a man. He’s wearing a white shirt that is too big for him. He sees you looking and you realize that it’s your neighbor, the one who left the fish—the one who boiled towels from the hospice—the one Rebecca sketched before coming over.
He smiles at you and then bends to pick up a small boy at his feet. He says something and the boy waves to you. Then they turn away and fall back into their lives. You wonder how long it takes to be happy again.
You keep watching.
The cake arrives.
Wishes are cast like nets.
Chapter Fifty-Three
None of the drivers want to go to the airport because it’s fifteen minutes before midnight and the rate doubles after. This is the old Athens. You say it’s an emergency, but no one cares. It’s not their emergency.
You look around for the x95 bus that used to leave for the airport every hour. But there are so many buses now.
And then a driver gets out of his taxi and shouts that he’ll take you.
Like most Greek cab drivers, he doesn’t wear a seat belt. He is driving faster than everyone else on the road, as though he senses your urgent desire to escape. There is bouzouki on the radio. You are flying through Athens. The car vibrates as you roar past the Athens Hilton at 150 kilometers an hour. Then a red light and the car shudders violently, skidding to a line of scooters. Old Athens has come back to kill you—to hold you in its memory like a fly in amber.
And then traffic thins out as the highway branches into several lanes. Lines of flower shops, cell phone shops, bakeries with their doors open, sex shops, hardware stores with mops hanging in the window like funny heads, concrete apartment blocks, offices, parking lots, factories, bridges, warehouses with bright signs.
Once you enter the airport, you don’t need to turn around. The blinking city in the distance no longer belongs to you.
For on some noisy street of cooking and kiosks and children out late, there is another Henry Bliss—another dreamer in the last days of youth—somewhere between enthusiasm and disaster, not yet in the shadow of paradise, not yet in the bounty of its ruins.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Circling Paris at dawn.
A measured spin.
Waiting for the right moment to descend.
You wonder who is watching�
�whose eyes you have crossed. Perhaps someone through an early window is distracted by a distant smudge, a dot of beating hearts in the sky.
Below your seat, morning has uncloaked millions of different lives. As you swoop down over the Seine, you hear a couple arguing but still holding their cups of coffee . . . cars reversing out of garages into small clouds. You see men with brooms in empty classrooms . . . the bright window of a bread shop and its tired girl . . . a child with messy hair hiding under the covers . . .
Another day has come.
The engines are slowing. Wheels underneath unfolding with a yawn. The stewardess buckles into her seat. Her hair is tied above her neck. She is staring at you.
You are in Paris.
A single city with a thousand names—it stretches over miles and miles engulfing villages and towns in one slow breath.
A city dissected by water.
People walk along its edges, full of thoughts.
The heart of the city is a church, a place where wishes are scattered by tolling bells.
And the parks are quartered by trees and ancient statues of vague proclamation.
You spend the morning in the business section of the Air France lounge printing off maps, hotels, and addresses. An Indian woman in an apron brings you curry sandwiches and glasses of tonic.
Then you stand in line at the rental car desk for an hour.
The woman looks flustered. She has one car left when it’s your turn—an executive sedan. She hands you the keys and a piece of paper to initial. It’s impossibly expensive—but your credit card, as if sensing the urgency of your quest goes through without complaining.
On the contract is the number of the parking space where the car is. The key is a small black cube with four rings on it.
When you go outside, you see three damaged Fiats and what looks like a spaceship.
You put your briefcase in the backseat and start the engine by slipping the key into the dashboard. Everything comes to life. A monitor flips out. A prompter on the screen asks you in French to input your name and then set the language. You don’t understand how to do this and so you write Henry and then press enter without reading the instructions.
The side mirrors fold out by themselves like ears. You wonder how you’re going to go unnoticed in a tiny French village with a car that has a top speed of 200 mph.
You turn on the navigation system and key in the name of her village—but somehow you set the car into a language you don’t understand.
After adjusting your seat, the car says:
The navigation system is also a map. You decide to follow the arrow on the monitor.
Navigating the roads outside Paris is fairly easy.
There are billboards everywhere for milk or chocolate or socks.
When traffic stops in a five-lane tunnel, you look into the car next to you and see five children in the backseat of a battered Citroën. Their faces are gaunt and handsome. An Ethiopian family. You smile at them. One waves back. You wish you knew his name.
Two hours south of Paris, you stop to fill up with diesel. Then as you pull away, the car says something else:
“Sorry,” you say to the monitor. “But I don’t understand anything you’re trying to tell me.”
Then you say, “Reset, reset,” in a French accent.
“Reset.”
“Okay.”
“Goddamn it.”
After two more hours you stop at some roadside services to use the restroom. Families sit on the grass chewing baguette sandwiches. It’s quite windy.
There is a restaurant inside a bridge that connects one side of the A11 motorway to the other side. People going in opposite directions sit beside each other and eat.
In theory it’s a brilliant concept. The bridge has glass sides. But the salad you ordered gave up long ago. Leaves hang off the plate as if drowned. After, you sit outside and listen to the sound of laughter. There are children climbing all over the swings, some hang off shouting.
None of them know each other in real life.
You look around at the world—at all the strangers and all the cars lined up and packed up with tents and coolers and bicycles and sleeping bags. It’s wonderful. And your journey is one of many.
And there is no real life, except what we imagine.
Maybe the little Rebecca you so desperately wish to find watched you circle the city from a concrete tower of small rooms and boiling pots. It’s impossible to know if you will ever find her.
You drive another hundred miles, then stop at a gas station.
The hand dryer comes on by itself. There is also a vending machine for balls of toothpaste that you are supposed to chew and then spit out. You buy five to give yourself something to do in the car.
You learn quickly that the toothpaste balls are a big mistake. You put two in at once and within a few minutes, a dense cloud of minty foam is flowing from your mouth and into your lap. You open the window and spit everything out. Then you scoop a few handfuls of foam out the window. You haven’t seen any other cars for some time.
After another hour of silent driving, the car starts talking again:
“Thank you for saying that, car—you’re right, it has been very hard for me over these past two years.”
“I still don’t know, but at least I’m trying.”
And then finally you reach your exit for the road to Linières-Bouton.
It is very late in the afternoon. You’ve passed several rivers. The headlights have come on by themselves. You are on a narrow road, the sort that was designed for horses and people waving—not supercharged German automobiles.
You drive for another hour, slowing down for very long curves and speeding up for hilly straights. There are no other vehicles but for the occasional tractor, throwing up dust as it grinds home through afternoon fields.
You enter Rebecca’s village at dusk.
You plan to sleep in the backseat of the car, which is large enough for two.
You drive slowly past a small church and a boulangerie with the shades pulled down.
The village of Linières-Bouton is nothing more than an open mouth of crooked houses, a few blowing trees, a slow high river, and a café–post office.
Old people in gardens wave to you. They are picking things for supper.
Their lives are slow and calm.
Nothing but the quiet fantasy of guessing what comes next.
Long walks through changing fields, and that softly falling question: where are the hearts that once loved us?
There are early lights on in some of the houses. Others look abandoned—their shutters closed like blank pages for night to fill.
You cross a railroad track overgrown where it extends past the road. Then you notice how it ends abruptly at the edge of someone’s garden.
Then 1930s advertising in fraying sheets on the side of an obsolete barn.
Little Rebecca might be at home in any one of these houses.
She has inherited her mother’s ability to wait.
You imagine a girl at the edge of hayfields, thinking about her mother in the last golden moments of day. You see her small shoes—dirtied at the toe from running. In the morning they sweep the grass with dew.
You know you must be tired because these thoughts make you stop the car and open the window.
You haven’t smoked much in the last few years but wish you had a cigarette now.
You feel your own pain shrink in the presence of this child’s.
Such relief in humility.
You think of George, how difficult his life has been. You want to drive to his boarding school in America and eat ice cream sitting on the wall with him. You want to give him a scarf and gloves, his first Latin dictionary, a winter coat.
And then you toy with the fantasy that if there is a child you could become its father.
When you touched down in Paris, you sent George a quick fax to tell him what was going on. He wrote that he was coming—but you told him to stay in Sicily with
his parents and wife and keep swimming.
Another hour of driving around you decide to find an empty field outside town. As you pass a sign with a red stripe that says you’re leaving the village two bloodhounds run out and stand in front of the car. You brake hard. Their eyes, like marbles, are held steady by the Audi’s blue headlights.
The dogs won’t move.
Then the car says something to you.
“Yeah, I see them—thanks, car.”
When you get out to shoo them away, you notice a poster stapled to a telephone pole.
A circus tonight at 9:00 p.m. in a village called Noyant.
The poster has a clown smiling and a lion standing up on its back legs as if asking for a cookie.
You glance at your watch.
The show will begin in ten minutes. Every child in the area will be there. All you have to do is look for an approximately four-year-old girl and an old man—Rebecca’s grandfather—or a woman who could be Rebecca’s sister. You feel a burst of adrenaline.
Cows bolt as you swish by.
You arrive in the village of Noyant a few minutes later and park outside a small supermarket.
Circus signs point toward the grounds of a church.
The tent up ahead is a blue and yellow miniature version of a big-top. Its sides are tied with long ropes and staked with wood.
Outside the small big-top is a miniature pony, a baby goat, and a large Alsatian tied with a rope. You can hear grass being ripped by the two small mouths as you pass. The dog wags his tail and looks at you but does not stand up.
Beside the tent is a red van.
As you near the tent entrance, you notice several children hanging about. They stop talking and look at you. Your first instinct is to turn and walk away, but then you would appear even more suspicious. You have no choice but to keep walking and say hello. One of the children asks you in French if you’re here for the circus. You say you are. It seems to be the correct answer because the other children cheer among themselves.
Everything Beautiful Began After Page 19
