Beautiful Animals

by Lawrence Osborne

  “No, my father runs a drug company. We’re not really the creative type. Anyway, I think a lot of the artists have left now. It’s gotten too expensive. There must be another island they’ve moved to without telling anyone. When I find out where it is I’ll let you know. But I don’t think you’ll want to go there.”

  “Oh, but I will,” Amy burst out.

  Sam took him down the steps afterward and along the path toward Kamini. They sat on a wall and kissed and reviewed the odd evening. They both knew that he had performed well, but that it was of no importance to either of them. She was already imagining how their relationship would be on home soil, thousands of miles away, surrounded by their common language. It seemed to her that it would be better, finer. And in some way easier. Her certainty about it was still growing.

  “Let’s go swimming tomorrow at Vlychos,” she said before he left. “Come and get me around ten. I want to sleep in.”

  “I’ll come and have your mother’s pancakes, like she said.”

  “She’ll love that.”

  There was lightning at the horizon later that night. She lay awake, letting the wind pour through the open windows and scatter pieces of paper around the room. After midnight there was a text from Naomi, the first in more than two weeks.

  I’ll be there soon. Will be on the mainland at Ermioni. When are you leaving for New York?

  She didn’t answer immediately. The idea of Naomi returning filled her with dread, but at the same time there was the companionship and the complicity, the easy exclusivity that they enjoyed between themselves. These were things she missed. But she wasn’t sure and she decided to sleep on it. In the morning Toby came with oppressive punctuality at ten and they walked to Vlychos in a terrible heat with their bathing gear. They climbed down to a rough beach and swam out into the pale-lime water up to the edge of the dark shelf. She thought he had been up all night for some reason, and she hadn’t slept particularly well herself. When they were back on the beach she snuggled up against him and they enjoyed what would likely be the only moment of cool in the day.

  “I’m so looking forward to air-conditioning again,” she said.

  “You can live without it.”

  “I really can’t. If we come back next year, let’s stay at the Bratseras.”

  She rolled onto her back and stretched out her arms until her fingers were driven into the loose shingle. She was even more sure that a fine, invisible sand was falling through that clear sky onto her body.

  —

  Four days later, Naomi sent another text. She asked Sam to get the morning ferry to Ermioni, a short crossing on the SeaCat, and to meet her on the dock in the middle of the village. Twenty minutes west of Metochi, it was the alternative landing on the mainland for day trippers. Reluctantly, Sam agreed. She could see why it would be a better idea not to be seen together on the island and Naomi knew that she was leaving at the weekend. She took the fast mid-morning ferry and came into the quiet and lovely bay of Ermioni, a place she had not visited during her time on Hydra, and there on the quay among a few fishing boats—but no obnoxious yachts—stood a thin and feverish Naomi in a blue-and-white-striped T-shirt and espadrilles. She looked changed. It was not for the better, but she was tanned and fit-looking nevertheless and Sam had the immediate feeling that she had already been in Ermioni for a number of days. So she was observing things from a safe distance.

  They hugged and there was a sudden moment of tears as Naomi took her hand, as if taking charge of them both and pulling them into a patch of sunlight.

  “We need coffee and sweets!” she cried.

  Next to the port ran a single road. On the far side of it were the cafes and tavernas, most of them still closed. They found a bakery called Drougas with stools on the pavement, cool in the shade, where they sat with slabs of bougatsa filled with custard and covered with confectioner’s sugar and cups of Ipanema coffee. Bare-shouldered, they touched lightly; the frisson was still there. Naomi recounted the most recent events in London.

  She told everything truthfully because she thought it was better that way. It was a way of expressing trust in Sam, because the latter would only react badly to a lie. The truth would make her loyal, even more loyal than she already was. She then said that she was renting a forty-euro-a-night room on the same waterfront and that she would stay there until the Haldanes left for America.

  “So the investigator is dead?” Sam said.

  “It seems like everyone is dead. It was all an accident.”

  Naomi’s eyes were dry, but Sam thought she probably cried it all out of her last week.

  “It doesn’t seem real,” Sam murmured.

  Naomi agreed. “It doesn’t. But it is.”

  “And your relatives went along with our story.”

  “They had no choice.”

  Sam nodded. “That’s how it is. They have no choice. But you can’t go back to the house.”

  “Why not? I don’t believe in ghosts. I can’t sell it.”

  “Why not?”

  “The risk is too great. Someone might get it into their heads to dig up the garden.”

  “So you’ll keep it.”

  “Of course I’ll keep it. I’m going to live there. I’m going to repaint it.”

  “And live—”

  “Unhappily ever after. I guess you won’t visit.”

  Sam shrugged. “Probably not.”

  “I’d be sorry not to see you again.”

  “I would too,” Sam said.

  “But it might be for the best.”

  Naomi cut a strip of bougatsa and held it up to Sam’s mouth on a fork.

  “Eat, mummy says. Que será será.”

  They walked along the road that led eventually to both Naomi’s temporary digs at a place called Xenophilia Ganossis and a peninsula covered with pine groves. It was the site of the ancient city of Hermionis, long vanished. The path went around its perimeter, the cliff to the left plunging down through fragments of ancient wall to the water. They passed a pile of dark stones. It was a Temple of Poseidon worn down to its elements. In the woods there were more stones, unmarked and unvisited, slabs laid into the ground. Collared doves called through the trees, and at the tip of the peninsula spearlike agaves stood at angles against the brilliant glare of the sea. At the far side of the water the mountains were layered against each other, dark with their own forests. They sat on a bench and looked out across the water. It was a moment of complete confusion. Sam thought she might say something about Toby, as if it was relevant, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. But perhaps a farewell was in order. She didn’t know. What she wanted to know was whether she was safe and the future was secure. Her future now depended in some measure on Naomi and her ability to keep up the secret. Mutual blackmail, she thought, but it was a vicious thought that wasn’t even necessary. They both knew what to do. But what was not decided was how long it would last. There was no possible term that could be set to the secret—and so it would last forever. That implied a bond that would also last forever. It was calamitous and sweet. Realizing it, then, at the same time, they turned to each other and there was the horror in their eyes, as bright as all the other buried feelings.

  “It’s going to be horrible to be away from here,” Sam said, half truthfully. “But I can’t come back. There’s no way.”

  “I know.”

  But Naomi was smiling, she was forgiving. “We’ll find a way to meet again one day. Maybe in London if you ever come there.”

  “I’d like that. But you know how it is.”

  Sam had already begun to imagine a future without Naomi at all. They would never meet again, and it would be a relief that they didn’t. A summer was just a summer, and its dead bodies should remain confined to it.

  Naomi took her hand.

  “I know how it is. I’ll be here anyway. I’m going to take up painting. I may as well. It’s what I always wanted to do.”

  “You told my mother you weren’t a painter.”

>   “That’s right, I did. But I wasn’t lying. I’ll make myself into one.”

  “Is that what you wanted all along—a room of your own?”

  “It’s a cliché, but why not?”

  “Or just a place where no one can look up your lies?”

  “They’re your lies too,” Naomi retorted. “They’re ours. Anyway, why shouldn’t I want a place where no one can look up my lies? It’s what all human beings want, in my opinion.”

  “It’s the last thing I want.”

  “Then you’re a very special person.”

  “I’m not special. I’m just gullible, apparently.”

  “You’re still a fantastic liar—a virtuoso, in fact. I think you enjoy it. So that makes two of us.”

  The subtle malice made Sam recoil a little, but she calmed herself. She realized now that she knew nothing about Naomi or her past, let alone what tortuous road had brought her to this spot at this moment. It was all unknown, a shadowed story that was not her own and which she had probably misinterpreted. But she let Naomi embrace her and suddenly they were locked together in silence, baked by the sun, half blinded by the sea, and it was a long time before they disengaged and Sam laid her head on Naomi’s shoulder.

  “You know what the Greeks used to say?” Naomi thought aloud. “Love makes the time pass and time makes the love pass.”

  Turning her head, Sam could see the low-clinging pines on the rock shelves, moving slightly as the wind disturbed them. Their sound was familiar, but it was deeper than she remembered and more relentless. She could have changed all her plans in one instant, but the instant came and went and she did not.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In New York, the last days of heat passed slowly for Sam as she caught up on her reading for the next semester. Her parents and her brother went up to Maine to stay with her grandparents, and she stayed in the city at the family apartment in Morningside Heights. After the jet lag had cleared she was able to assess everything and refind her bearings. Gone was the blinding Greek sky and the sun that pierced your mind to the core. Here it was deafening cicadas and a moist, cloying heat with no wind. She got up at first light and ran along the river, her mind cooled by the low forests on the far side and the mechanical motion of the other joggers.

  She had the freedom to see Toby as much as she wanted. During the exhausted late-summer days, with the city emptied out, they laid the groundwork for a relationship that might last for a long time, longer in any case than she had expected on Hydra. In the cavernous apartment overlooking the river they made dinner together with their own groceries and watched movies or made sorties to bars that Toby had personally discovered and which he wanted to pass on to her. They went often to Sakagura on East 43rd Street in the basement below a garage and sat at the long counter with plum blossoms where Toby could practice his Japanese. It was not especially young or hip, but she liked the fact that he knew such places and knew how to handle himself inside them. In the second week of September, her parents still away, he asked her if she had heard from Naomi. His own parents were back in the States and they had finally heard something about the terrible events in Italy with the Codringtons. It defied explanation.

  “I heard about it too,” she said. “It doesn’t seem possible. I can’t say they were nice people—but I only heard Naomi’s side of things.”

  “My parents liked them well enough, though. You can never tell about families. They’re incomprehensible from the outside.”

  “It’s true. Man, mine too—”

  “But Naomi didn’t seem upset beforehand?”

  “She thought they went away for a trip. There’s nothing suspicious about it.”

  “Either way I’m glad we’re here now,” he said. “Away from her.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  He looked down and saw that her hand, as it tried to lift a masu brimming with sake, was causing the liquid to tremble. He reached out and lowered her hand for her.

  “You’re upset,” he said. “Let it go.”

  “Not really upset—”

  Her lower lip went slack and he sensed a crisis suddenly developing.

  “I don’t know what it is,” she went on.

  “Let it go all the same.”

  She picked the masu up again and it was steady. He did likewise and they touched boxes. There, there, his eyes said.

  That night he slept over at her apartment. He thought back to the first night they had spent together on Hydra and the way her face had contorted in her sleep before waking with a scream. He had thought about it ever since. It was a clue to something that he knew he shouldn’t investigate. But press Sam a little and she withdrew. She could not be hustled into confessions, and it was clear by now that she didn’t believe in them.

  When the semester began and her parents returned she began to spend her days and evenings in Bobst Library on Washington Square, sitting close to the glass walls at one of the desks at the end of the stacks and reading with hours-long concentration. It was her last year doing comparative literature and she was reading the French Romantics. The days grew darker, and when Toby was in town from Princeton they went to places in the East Village and then went to his parents’ pied à terre on East 63rd—the Carhargans spent most of their time in Maine now, and only occasionally visited the city. Slowly, she came to know them: they all had Hydra in common and it made it easy to bond. Over the winter she came three times a week and the hospitality was returned in the opposite direction. Toby soon appeared at her parents’ dinner parties when he was down from Princeton, where he was shown off like an adorable trophy who might, by the miraculous alchemy of time, turn into a son-in-law before a single gray hair had appeared on his head. This was, in fact, exactly what happened, and much more quickly than she had expected.

  He proposed that first winter six months before her graduation. Dizzy and alarmed, she panicked, asked for more time, then accepted within a week. Her mother was ecstatic; her father demurred a little, then gave in with unconvincing jollity. The parents met together at a restaurant with the three children and the introductions were made. She was aware that as she and Toby sat together with their parents in the dining room of Ilili in the West Village they looked as perfect as a young couple could look in the first flush of an enviable marriage. She thought, Our future children are already visible like beautiful ghosts to the people around us.

  It was too perfect—and yet didn’t people in perfect situations always think “It’s too perfect”?

  “I must say,” Andrew Carhargan said as the waiter opened a bottle of Musar at the table, “I think it’s an extraordinary coincidence that we were all on Hydra at the same time. I’d say that was as good an omen as one could want. I hope you’ll consider getting a house there every summer from now on. What do you say, Jeffrey?”

  “I’m in! I think Amy and Chris are too?”

  “I think next time I’d rather be in the port,” Amy said.

  “We can help you with that, can’t we, Elizabeth? I’m surprised we didn’t see you at Sunset at all. We’ve been going there for years.”

  “We liked our cook,” Jeffrey said blankly. “It was also a long walk there and back. My leg—”

  They all knew that they were all acquainted in one way or another with the Codringtons, but it was a subject that could not be broached without unpleasant associations and awkward questions. So it was left untouched, though its presence could still be felt. Under the table Sam felt Toby grasp her hand and hold it, as if to steady her through the dinner, and when they were on to the raki at the end Toby’s father asked them where they were thinking of buying a house.

  “Brooklyn,” they said together.

  But Carhargan seemed to be still thinking about Hydra, and failed to follow up on the subject of Brooklyn real estate.

  “All the same,” he suddenly said, “you must have seen the Codringtons fairly often while you were there. I suppose you know the story?”

  “Once or twice,” Jeffrey admitt
ed. “But we didn’t become friends in any way. Did we, Amy?”

  His wife shook her head, and yet her eyes, to Carhargan’s keen perception, suddenly sidestepped to the right.

  “They’re a funny couple,” he said coolly, now interested in their reaction. “Or should I say were? They’re presumed dead, as I’m sure you know.”

  “It doesn’t seem quite real,” Amy said.

  “I never thought Codrington was very real in the first place, to be honest with you. He was a braggart and a blowhard. They told me he had a hard life, though.”

  “Oh, in what way?”

  Carhargan shrugged. “I don’t really know. It’s just what people say. Someone told me he was a mercenary in Angola back in the day. But we all know islanders gossip all the time. Some of the neighbors say—but what does it matter? I’m gossiping now myself.”

  “What?” Amy burst out, but quietly.

  “Nothing, nothing. I shouldn’t talk about the dead. They didn’t deserve to be murdered, if that’s what happened. I suppose we’ll never know. I’m sad about it, to tell you the truth. We had some jolly times back in the day. The story was that Phaine’s family were once friends with Onassis. Can you imagine?”

  At the end of the following summer the young couple moved into their house in Brooklyn Heights and they settled into the lives they had planned for themselves. During the winter, however, she began to feel restless.

  One week in December it snowed for almost three days without stopping. She put on her snow boots one afternoon when Toby was out and walked down to Prospect Park, along the slushy length of Flatbush Avenue with her podcast drowning out the noise of traffic. The park was nearly empty, soundless under the snow, and she walked deep into it until she was alone with the crows and the icicles. Choking and sobbing, she suddenly felt that someone was following her. She took out the buds from her ears, and when she turned she saw two figures indistinct in the falling snow, each moving in a different direction until only one was left. It was a man in a long coat moving toward her along the same path, blurred and lumbering as if he was as blinded as her. She moved on, but now almost running. She came into a grove of black, dripping trees and she wondered if she should call Toby.