"Don't change the subject."
"I'm sure you guys will have a fun day."
"Your attention span is that short? Some blonde bunny shows up and that's it?"
"Um," said Harrison.
"Because mine isn't."
He put his arms around her. She moved against his wiry body, but after a bit, he pushed away. "It's a little too weird," he said.
She touched his hair. "Of course," she said. "You're right. But I'd like to point out that you started this."
"I think I might be in love."
"What happened? Tell me what happened. Did you hold hands? Kiss? Did you make love? Please don't tell me you made love."
He lowered his eyes for a moment. "The first two."
"This isn't fair," she said. "You don't get to reject me, OK? We're on vacation, and vacation time is different. It's like eating standing up in front of the refrigerator—it doesn't really count. You should trust me on this. I know a few things. And I'm quite sure you are not in love."
"How would you know?" He looked at her in a way she'd seen before in men. Already, he was growing into the hardness, the certainty. He had the same square jaw as his father, and his blue eyes.
"You don't have a clue what love is."
"And you do?"
"I know it isn't like some cartoon hammer that materializes out of nowhere and bonks you on the head."
"What is it like, then?"
She pushed at him with the flat of her hand in a way that seemed lame to her—a girly punch. "More like a virus that grows inside of you, slowly, until it has taken over all your vital organs. Until you are nothing but a host."
At the beach, they swam, sunbathed, swam some more. With her goggles on it seemed to Laura that she was flying—she'd had dreams like this—and that the strange, bubbled-rock ocean floor she could see sloping sharply beneath her was actually miles away. Striped fish wandered past her without interest. Face down and floating, she could just bob around in the waves and watch, search for signs of the upcoming eruption. She could also keep her mind off any thoughts of what might be going on back at the hotel.
"You told me something," she said, after they'd eaten the bread, Swiss cheese, and ham Flo had brought along for them in her day pack, "so now I'm going to tell you something."
Flo handed her half a peach, dripping juice.
"Harrison and I have had sort of a thing."
"What do you mean 'a thing'?"
"You know. Like a romantic thing."
Flo took a bite of peach, chewed and swallowed. "What?"
"You, me, Steve Zablatnik." Having come this far, she was incapable of putting the situation into a coherent sentence. "Like on Corfu. Sneaking off."
"You've been sneaking off with Harrison?"
"Listen, I am so, so sorry."
Flo looked at her in disbelief. "Why are you telling me this? Why would you want to hurt me like this?"
"I don't want to hurt you. I love you."
"That's some way of showing it. My son? How could you do that? What kind of person are you?"
"Dumb. Just stupid. Miserable, right now. I don't know what happened. It was sort of an accident. It's over, of course. I know right now you can't, but I hope you'll find a way to forgive me eventually."
Flo took the remaining portion of her peach and threw it into Laura's face. It glanced off the side of her cheek and landed in the sand. "I made this happen," she said. "By bringing up Steve Zablatnik."
"You didn't."
"I know I didn't, but I feel that way. And if I hadn't said anything, then you probably wouldn't have either, and then I wouldn't have to know what a sick, crummy person you really are. I'd still have a friend I loved and trusted."
"You do. Really, you do."
"No," she said, her voice breaking. She began to gather her things. "I don't. I don't have anything. Have you got money?"
"I think so."
"Good. Because you're going to have to take the bus back. I won't be responsible for driving us both, and I don't think I want you that close to me."
"All right," said Laura.
In less than a minute, Flo was back, looking for the keys she'd forgotten. She bent down, momentarily blocking the sun.
"Franz dumped me," Laura said.
"What?" said Flo. "Who?"
"Nothing." She poked her finger into the hot sand. "Forget it."
Laura looked out the bus window and saw the green Peugeot motorbike bent and on its side like a stepped-on insect. The small truck it had collided with had pulled over a few yards past the intersection. A dark, wet patch on the road might have been blood, but could just as easily have been oil or gas. Then they were past the scene, the bus rattling and gaining speed. She gripped the railing in front of her and tried not to think at all.
Harrison met her at the door to their suite. "She doesn't want to see you," he said. "She wants you to find another place to stay. She wishes you'd go home."
"What happened?"
"Wipe out. She hit a truck, or one hit her—I don't know. She's all scraped up, but nothing's broken. She won't go to the hospital. Kelly took a look at her. She's a nurse."
"Well, that's convenient."
"I gotta go see the guy at the bike place." He pushed past her out the door, then turned around, this time looking right at her, his expression full of simple outrage. "You told her," he said.
"I did."
"Why?"
She had no answer for this. "Kelly," she said, feeling the sound of it on her tongue. It was a volleyball name, a parents-have-money, not-too-bright-but-very-nice-and-cheery name. You could have kids with a Kelly, drive them to private school in your new minivan, kicking up dust behind your tires as you crossed the outback, dodging kangaroos.
Laura was able to get another room, a studio at the very top of the steps to which the desk clerk had her things moved, but there was no quick way off the island. She couldn't change her plane ticket back to Athens, and while there were ferries, none had cabins available, and she didn't want to spend an entire night sitting on deck.
At breakfast, Harrison hurried past her without a word, clutching his bowl of granola. Her new room had been dug right into the side of the cliff and felt like a cave. She spent as much of the day as she could there, some of it sitting on the balcony in the sun, the rest sprawled on her double bed with the air-conditioning running. There was no television, just a little speaker with a knob by the bed that had crackly preprogrammed music. In the afternoon, she heard Harrison laughing with the Australian girl as they passed up the steps and out the gate to the road.
She wrote a card to Franz, one she'd picked out for him in Syntagma Square, with a picture of a kouros on it that she thought he might like. An idealized sculpture of a young man. When she read over what she'd written, she was embarrassed at how thin it sounded, how falsely cheerful, and she tore it into pieces. Pretending at being friends after breaking up was just a big lie, a way of prolonging the pain. At least this time, maybe she was smart enough to believe in what had happened and not start telling herself other stories. Of course he still loved his ex-wife. Of course. She wrote another card to her mother in New York, telling her about all the stray cats there were in Greece.
At sunset, she considered going down to Flo's room with a bottle of retsina, but then thought better of it and instead drank by herself, staring out over the water. Time would have to pass, that was all. She tried to decide which Beatles song she'd be, if she were one. "Eight Days a Week," if she had her choice, but "Eleanor Rigby" seemed more likely. Shortly after dark, she went to bed and dreamed that warm, fragrant loaves of bread were flying slowly past her like fat birds, just out of reach.
She was awakened by a tapping at the door. "What?" she said. "Who is it?"
"Me," said Harrison.
She got up and slipped on a big denim shirt, buttoning it on her way to the door, which she unlocked and opened.
"Please?" he said. "Can I come in?"
"How is she?"
"
Doing better. She's got a nasty bruise on her right thigh. The bike's trash, though. I thought the rental guy was going to cry."
"Where's what's-her-name?"
"We went to a club to dance, and the next thing I know, she's with some other guy. I hung around a little while longer, but I felt stupid."
"Sucks to be ditched, huh?"
He said nothing.
"I was asleep," said Laura. "And now I'm going back."
"You look beautiful."
"Oh, cut the crap. You just want to feel better about yourself, and you think sex with me might do the trick."
He sat on the edge of her bed and picked a bag of cashews up off the night table, took one out and ate it. When he looked up at her again, she saw that his eyes were shiny.
"I've got nothing for you," she said. "You know what I said about eating in front of the refrigerator? I was lying. Vacations are as real as anything."
"Kelly told me all about Pelekas beach," he said. "Where you guys were? She's been there."
"No, she hasn't," said Laura. "Not to our beach. I know what it's like now—there's a road to it, and hotels. When we went, you had to climb down a steep, narrow path, through olive trees and brush. There was nothing, just a tiny taverna at either end where you could get an oily omelet." As she spoke other things came to her mind, the strange group of drunken Brits who had built themselves a complex of grass huts, decorated the outsides with animal skulls, and flown a Jolly Roger. The boy she'd made love with in a canvas tent, hearing the sounds of the ocean only yards away. "She's been someplace, I'm sure, but she hasn't been there. The place we went had pirates."
"She said she had," said Harrison. He wore a black T-shirt, baggy shorts, and leather sandals inside which his big, knobby feet managed somehow still to be attractive. Last summer she had grown peppers in her garden, and he reminded her of how they'd looked before they were ready to be picked, pushing hard against the confines of their own skins.
"Kalinikta," said Laura.
After the door clicked shut behind him, she went back out on the balcony with some cheese and crackers and sat staring out over the ocean. Across the water, on the island of Thirasia, a few tiny lights burned. She wondered if someone over there was looking at her right now, seeing the sparkle of her own lights and envying the fine time she must be having. A cat hopped down from the wall behind her and rubbed up against her leg. It was a spindly, beaten-up thing, mostly white, and missing one eye. She put a bit of cheese on the ground, and it quickly gobbled this down. She broke off a bit more, and it ate that, too. She missed her own cat, Spiderman, who used to sleep atop the stereo. She'd only had him a year. As if materialized out of the air, there were two more, a black one and a tabby. "You hungry, too?" she said to them, tossing more cheese. Another tabby appeared, followed by a gray one, missing an ear. All the cats seemed veterans of multiple, vicious fights. "Here, guys," she said. They jumped for the morsels, and Laura began to feel less attracted to them—she wished they would go away. She could smell them. Three more hopped down from the wall, and now her balcony was alive with mewing, hungry cats. One of them took a nasty swipe at the beaten-up white one, and it cringed into a corner, an unreadable expression pinned to the wall by moonlight.
The Naked Man
I hadn't always been The Naked Man. While his head was mine—dark curly hair, glasses, an earnest, somewhat baffled look on a middle-aged face with an almost blue beard line and what I like to think of as a dueling scar on the left cheek (I had a cyst removed there and the doctor botched the job)—the body belonged to my wife's former boyfriend, a man with the unlikely name of Garth, who taught earth science at a high school in Ohio. Garth had posed for other paintings, too, but this was the last, and the only one he'd done nude. To make him feel better about his slight paunch (he probably had ten pounds on me), she'd exaggerated his private parts, but she hadn't finished the painting when they split up. The face was still only blocked in, and for various reasons, she didn't feel right about having it be Garth's at all anymore. "What do you think?" she asked me. "You'll impress the world." And I have to admit, it did enter into my thinking when I agreed.
Tina had been accepted for a show at a nonprofit gallery in Virginia, and though we debated going, when the time came, we'd decided to make a trip out of it. It was probably our last as just the two of us, since our baby, Frick, which was what we were still calling him, was due in May, and it was already February. Now we were at this party at a house right out of the pages of Architectural Digest, planted in the middle of horse country, ten miles from town and at least a half mile from the country road we'd followed to get here. Earlier tonight had been the preopening opening, especially for benefactors and supporters. The gallery had used me, in a detail from the painting, for the postcard advertising the show. My head, Garth's body, this composite naked man standing on a country path holding a shopping bag full of groceries, staring out into space as if trying to remember some item he'd forgotten to purchase. So that the image would be acceptable to the post office, they'd designed a little sticker in the shape of a pair of red boxers to affix to each card. It was pretty cute. All night, people had been eyeing me, trying to remember where we'd met before. Then it would hit them. They'd look at me, they'd look at Tina, with her swollen belly. They'd look back at me and smile.
I rejoined Tina in the living room. I knew she was worried. "You ought to see the bathroom," I said, placing my wine carefully on the glass coffee table. "One whole wall is see-through." In fact, there wasn't a door in the house, other than the ones leading outside.
"Just imagine trying to sell this place," she said. We talked about real estate a lot. We were in a little over our heads in that respect, having bought a row house two years ago, at the top of the market. Our neighbor, an older guy who'd purchased the rental property next door back in the sixties for ten bucks and a carton of Lucky Strikes, was always looking at me like I was Ed McMahon, come to deliver him his Publishers Clearing House check. But I knew—it would be a long while before anything in the neighborhood sold for near what we'd paid. I could hear the value escaping from our walls like air hissing out of a leaky tire. I was upside down on the store, too, and in general, money was keeping me awake nights.
"You couldn't," I said. "It's too strange."
"Anyone who bought it would have to change who they were to accommodate the house."
I moved with her to the floor next to the enormous fireplace, which was not part of a wall, but away from it, with a black metal chimney that shot up a good twenty feet before meeting the steeply angled roof. All around us, the partiers were happily chattering away. The two other artists held court in the opposite corners, enjoying their celebrity. One was an older guy who taught at a prestigious college someplace and did small paintings that seemed to be scenes from a love affair—a messed-up bed, someone peering through Venetian blinds, a half-finished drink sweating on a desk next to a fan. Then there was this tall kid with hip eyeglasses and a ski hat whose six-foot canvases were staged images of his girlfriend and other people in his life in the aftermath of some violent event, sporting bruises, bloody lips, etc. He'd assured us earlier that no one had actually gotten hurt. It was all just theater.
"Anything?" I asked.
"Nope." It had been a few hours since she'd felt the baby. Tina's hair had grown long and thick over the past months, and was now well past her shoulders. Her full breasts pressed against the flower-print top she'd bought to wear for this trip. Back home, when she wasn't going in to teach at the college, she lived mostly in a pair of stripy pajama bottoms.
"Did you drink water?"
"I drank water. I lay down. I stood back up. I did the jerk. It's like he stepped out for a cigarette break."
"Heartburn?"
"No more than usual."
"I'm going to call the store," I said.
"Go ahead."
After a few rings, Hobey picked up. Between the noise of this party, and the one that seemed to be going on in Baltimore
, it was hard to communicate. "You OK?" I shouted. A man across the room with a white suit and a pink tie turned to look at me and I smiled.
"Fine!" sang Hobey. I'd taken her on mostly because she was a wizard at changing guitar strings, and it turned out that this was a service I needed to provide the public on a regular basis. I'd bought a little mom-and-pop music store last year from a guy named Edelman, who was now someplace in Florida, supposedly, although I was having a hell of a time contacting him. It turned out that a lot of the stock I'd paid him for—much of it dusty and dating back to at least the eighties—was in fact still the property of various manufacturers who had given up on Edelman years ago, but now, smelling fresh blood in the water, were circling again, sending me letters suggesting litigation, boycott, and ruin. I did most of my business in lessons, strings, and picks. But I got to be around guitars all day, which was something I'd always thought I'd like, and sometimes I imagined little Frick in there with me, crawling around in the dust balls, knocking over music stands.
"You practicing?" I'd told her Hobey and the Lesbians could rehearse in the shop, so long as they kept it down and quit by eleven.
"Yeah!" she shouted. "How's the show?"
I poked Tina, who was sniffing the cookie I'd brought her. "How's the show?"
"So far, so good."
"Good!" I said. This call was beginning to feel pointless. I imagined the scene back there. Hobey and her girlfriend the bass player, her buddies Jason and Jeremy on drums and keys, working their way through a case of National Bohemian. Hobey fully admitted to needing more lesbians in Hobey and the Lesbians, but Jason and Jeremy were filling in for now, and didn't seem fazed by their temporary status. I envied all of them. They were driven by energy and optimism about the future. They had an actual gig upcoming in the spring, at a women's collective in Greektown.
"And Frick?" she shouted.
"Sound asleep," I said.
"I wish you wouldn't talk to her about us," said Tina, when I hung up. "It feels like bad luck."
The financial advice guy was winding down the speech he was giving to some horsey-set lady who actually had on riding boots, and I could tell he had his eyes on us for next. I'd never been at a party where people wanted to be around me so much.
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