Shipwreck

by Louis Begley

  Have you guessed what happened next? he asked me. I am willing to make a large bet you haven’t, although it should be quite obvious.

  I shook my head. I had not even tried to guess. In any case, I dislike bets.

  It should have been easy, North said. Since Lydia refused to accompany me to Spetsai, I invited Léa. Need I say that she accepted? Here is how it came about. Two days before I was to take the direct plane to Athens, Johann telephoned to tell me that Max had suffered a minor stroke, a sort of warning of things to come. His whole right side was affected, including his hand and face. I asked whether that meant he was paralyzed, and Johann told me he wasn’t, not quite; it was a partial loss of mobility and feeling that could quite probably be reversed. Max could speak, but it was hard to understand him. They had gone to Zurich almost immediately, and Max was at the hospital for tests, therapy, fine-tuning of his medication, and so forth. Johann said in these circumstances it was especially important for them that I make no change in my plans, and go to stay in their house as though nothing had happened; Max had insisted on it from the start, making a great effort to speak. It would be a blow to them both if I refused. He, Johann, had already worked out all the arrangements. He described them in detail, down to how he had hired one of those double-ended fisherman’s boats with a primitive but powerful motor that I could use for picnics and swimming, as in the old days. That was a wonderful thing to have done, because some of the best places to swim in Spetsai take too long to reach on foot. He had also drawn up lists of things to do and all sorts of instructions and then realized that they were unnecessary, since I knew the house and the island so well, but there they were anyway, waiting for me. Max knew about everything Johann had done, and it made him happy. Out of the blue, he added that there was great significance in my having announced that I was going to visit them on Spetsai: long ago, they decided to leave the house to me in their testaments, but having done so, from time to time they wondered whether I still loved the island. Perhaps it had been spoiled for me. I was, of course, immensely moved, because it had never, absolutely never, occurred to me that those two old birds liked me quite so much. I expressed my feelings as best I could. As you can imagine, I was upset as well as moved. I told Johann that I would certainly go to Spetsai, if that was what they wanted, although the idea behind my plan had really been to spend that time with them, but I wanted at least to stop in Zurich on my way, to embrace them. Johann said that was out of the question: Max didn’t want anyone to see how his mouth was twisted or how he drooled when he tried to speak; as for himself, he had no time for anyone except Max. He spent all day every day at his bedside and slept on a cot right there. The time to see them would be when Max had recovered. That left no room for argument. I decided I would keep to my original schedule.

  And Léa? After what had seemed a long calm, she had taken to telephoning again, to complain that we hadn’t seen each other, that she had drifted out of my life, although I was a permanent part of hers. She wanted to go on a short vacation with me—anyplace I wanted, provided it was soon. There were all sorts of emmerdesshe needed to tell me about, and it couldn’t be done over the telephone. I wondered what these real or invented troubles might be. I would never have thought of taking her to Spetsai if Johann and Max were going to be there; the danger of the news getting back to Lydia would have been too great. I don’t mean that they would have told Lydia. Nothing that simple, because that is not their way; they could not bring themselves to harm me directly, and they weren’t at all close to Lydia, or even in contact with her. In fact, she had felt uncomfortable on the only two occasions they met, at our wedding and at the dinner after the first show of Max’s paintings in New York. But the Painters entertained every night. We would have seen all their pals on the island, most of whom had been pals of my parents. There would have been a lot of gossip, because of my parents, and because of my having become so well known, and word might have gotten back to Lydia. I would not have risked that, not even if four weeks of sex with Léa were the other side of the bet. There was also the Painters’ uncontrollable urge to meddle. One couldn’t predict what intrigue, possibly well meant, but nefarious in its effects, it might spawn. But with them absent, there was no reason that I should see anyone at all on the island, except the couple who worked for them. I knew them both well. The husband also looked after the Painters’ garden and the gardens of others, including, for a while, my parents’. He would laugh his head off beating Ellen and me and sometimes even my father at backgammon. It seemed that anytime the board was out he would appear from behind the laurel bushes he was watering, sooner or later join the game, and outwit us until we gave up. The wife cooked; not as well as my parents’ old cook, but well enough. After everything these two had seen working for the Painters for so many years, my sexual activities would be of no interest. And whom could they talk to about them? Maybe Max and Johann, on their return to the island, but by then the news that I had brought a young woman with me would be stale, and perhaps the Painters would simply think that Léa was Lydia. So the danger seemed small. The truth is that a rage of sexual longing mixed with a dose of resentment and spite had possessed me. If I wasn’t to work on my book, if there were going to be no dinners and lunches to distract me—parties the like of which no one but the Painters knew how to organize—if Lydia refused to come with me, I would make sure there was another woman’s body at my side that I could plow. I wasn’t about to start picking up German tourists. If not Lydia, then Léa. I told Léa to meet me at the airport in Athens; we would take the hydrofoil to Spetsai together. Her answer was Youpi!We will swim and swim. She said she was jumping up and down, she was so pleased. Siga, siga,I said, which is Greek for “easy does it,” I am taking you with me to fuck, not to swim. But bring a wet suit, just in case. The water will be cold.

  It seems that one can change physically beyond recognition and not be aware of it. In the long years since I had last been on Spetsai, I had not gained more than five or six pounds; my hair was somewhat thinner but hadn’t turned gray; my bearing and the way I dressed had remained the same. I had merely aged. But the context had fallen away: I appeared no longer as my father and mother’s son, the boy from the yellow house on the bluff above the old harbor looked after by Roxane, the best cook on the island. My exploits in the small centerboard sailboat my father gave me for my fourteenth birthday—the wrong craft for the passage, swept by fierce winds, between Spetsai and the Peloponnesus—if not forgotten by the locals had been reattributed by them to someone else, remembered as performed by another kid who, no doubt, had continued to frequent the island and these days sailed over on Saturdays from Athens in one of the chubby ketches that anchored below the terrace of Vasily’s. Close enough so that when Léa and I were at table, drinking retsina and eating little squares of feta cheese, I could think that I saw him, portly and content, cigar in his mouth, disporting himself on the deck of his ship, while an overdressed woman too young to be his mother shouted at him tirade after tirade. Or to a fellow just like him. In a word, I had become invisible. With one exception—a Paris Matchphotographer who dined a couple of tables away from Léa and me at Yiannis’, the taverna we used to call back then the Maxim’s of Spetsai—no one recognized me. Not the old guy who sold newspapers from the kiosk at the new harbor, not the crazy dwarf with a mongoloid idiot’s head and features who used to make faces at Ellen and scare her, not the owners of Vasily’s or Yiannis’, and certainly not the elegant elderly Greeks, snapping their fingers at the waiters because their grilled fish was slow arriving, who used to drink gin and tonics at my parents’ cocktail parties and chatter in thickly accented French with other guests and even among themselves. The one person who would have recognized me and would have been wonderfully happy to see me was my parents’ cook, Roxane, whose keftedes—lamb meatballs delicately flavored with mint and deep fried—will be my madeleine if ever I am lucky enough to taste their equal. She has been dead for years.

  The Painters’ house is on
e of those that sit right on the water, with steps of poured concrete leading from the lower terrace down to a big flat rock from which you can dive into the sea. Climbing out is tricky when the sea is up, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly or you wait until the wind dies down. The view from the bathing rock, the terrace, and the window of the guest room I took for Léa and me is superb. On your left, you see the shoreline of the Peloponnesus. Directly before you, at much greater distance, lies Hydra, like a green mountain rising from the sea with flecks of white foam on its flank that are in fact houses. Once I had shown Léa the Dapia, which is where the hydrofoil and other tourist boats dock, the old harbor, and some of the tiny churches that dot the island, and we had taken a morning walk through the wilderness of laurel bushes and olive trees that begins almost immediately at the end of the road to my parents’ house, which I pointed out after some hesitation, it hurt me so deeply to pass by it, there was really little reason to go out. She asked to visit my parents’ house. I refused, not wanting to make contact with the new owners, a Swiss banker I vaguely knew and his English wife, or if they were away, which was probable, with the servants, to whom I would have had to explain who I was. We stayed at home, which in the end seemed prudent, except to walk over to the old harbor to board the boat the Painters had chartered and return from it to the house in the afternoon, when the torpor of the siesta had already descended on the island and the only living creatures to be seen were donkeys, in one dusty plot or another, picking at the burned grass. We did go to the two good tavernas when we wanted to eat fish. You see, on islands like Spetsai, fishermen sell their catch first to restaurants, then to the locals, then to the cooks of the rich Greeks from Athens, and then they divide what’s left over, which may not be much, among the most prestigious of the cooks working for foreigners. And only those foreigners who are longtime householders. Roxane was such a cook. I would have thought that the Painters’ Marina also enjoyed those privileges. But the few times when, tired of her lamb and chicken, I ventured to ask for fish, she sighed tragically, and, in one of those phrases that begin with the word tipota and that Greeks seem to reserve for discourse with barbarians, made it clear that fate would not permit it. Most likely, she didn’t want to waste her credit with the fishermen on the likes of Léa and me. She would keep it intact until the Painters returned. I couldn’t blame her. But she prepared with gusto the lunch basket of hard-boiled eggs, canned tuna, cheese, wine, and fruit I took with us to the boat. We would leave the old harbor around eleven and chug out noisily to an anchorage at a beach or cove where we were sure to be alone. There were many such places. By noon, the deck was broiling hot. I would cover it with beach towels. We lay on them, making love, then resting from our exertions. Around one-thirty, we ate lunch. I seemed to sleep a lot, especially after the heavy Greek wine. Sometimes a mountainside gave us afternoon shade. Otherwise, I would stretch the awning over the open cockpit, and Léa read there while I slept. I hardly read at all, although I had stuck a couple of books into my duffel bag, and the Painters’ library was full of treasures. My fatigue was far greater than I had thought. I was getting over it very slowly. When I did read, it took me minutes to get through a page and very soon my eyes would begin to close. A strange thing happened. All my life, I have been plagued by nightmares. During that period, on the contrary, my dreams, especially those I had on the boat, were so interesting and unthreatening that I found myself looking forward to them and the intricate high adventures they brought. I tried to prolong certain dreams, even as I felt my grasp of the plot and its meaning was weakening, or the dream itself had faded without resolution. But perhaps the effort wasn’t wasted: after the border between sleep and waking had been crossed, a residue of what I had experienced and perhaps understood left me momentarily encouraged and naively hopeful.

  The truth is that dreams and swimming had become my means of escape. Escape from what? I see the question taking form on your face with such insistence that I begin to wonder whether for once you will find the force to break out of your mutism. Will you ask the question, man? Will you ask, What is it that ailed you, John North, on this paradisial isle? What was there to flee from? I see that you won’t. You would rather remain silent, true to form. Perhaps you think of it as a way of letting me tell my story without interference. I have begun to think it’s a form of disdain.

  It seemed to me that North had become peculiarly agitated. Coming on top of his strange appearance, his nervousness worried me. To calm him, I held up my hands, palms open toward him, outstretched fingers spread wide. I believe that is a gesture universally understood as a plea for conciliation. If necessary, I might even have spoken. But I had succeeded in pacifying North without that. He smiled and said, Don’t worry about my outburst. Just to show you that the tantrum is over, he continued, I will give you the answer to the question you couldn’t bring yourself to put. What I was fleeing, what I was absolutely driven to escape, was the shame of what I had done, the colossal stupidity of having gone on a whoremaster’s holiday with Léa. The most time I had spent with her previously was two consecutive days in Bourges and Vienna while The Anthillwas being filmed in Paris. On those occasions, I was providentially distracted by sex and tourism. Yes, tourism, even though I know Vienna too well to be a tourist. There is always, when you travel, the tourist’s business of actually getting there and arranging to leave, getting accustomed to the hotel room, dealing with the concierge about dinner reservations and the like, and visiting at least one museum. It was a marvel that those occupations left any time for screwing and, conversely, perhaps an even greater marvel that, with the amount of screwing we managed, there was also time for lunch, dinner, and the opera. Certainly, I have no memories of talking to her then at length. But our routine on Spetsai left plenty of time for that, or more precisely for Léa to talk to me. You will perhaps laugh, North said, and then, correcting himself, continued, no you won’t, it’s not your style, when I tell you that I am fundamentally taciturn and tire easily of chatter-boxes. But it’s absolutely true. When I am not on parade, by that I mean at literary dinners or on panels where my job is to shine, I am perfectly capable of saying not a word for hours, and being happy about it too. Is that your case as well, is that why you never speak? North asked me. Then he said, Never mind, I don’t want to force you. But here is the truth: the nymph silence is my ally. Without her, I wouldn’t have written my books. She gives me time to listen and to think. Silence has been one of the cornerstones of my happiness with Lydia. Of course, Lydia is not so averse to speech as I, since my aversion borders on boorishness, while she, as part of the beautiful manners she was taught by that German-speaking grandmother, is able to converse with anyone—with a wall—without falling into despicable small talk. Lydia too needs to think— about her work. Her best discoveries are not accidental. They are the product of long, concentrated reflection.

  We had finished our drinks. North refreshed them and drank his at once almost to the bottom of the glass. That’s much better, he told me.

  A moment of silence followed, and then he said, You see, that is what I was forced to think of while I listened to Léa’s unending chatter, parts of which, by the way, I couldn’t understand, either because I wasn’t paying close enough attention or because of the way she swallowed entire groups of words and radically changed pitch in the middle of a phrase. These oddities seemed to have become increasingly accentuated, as though to keep pace with her growing happiness. Ah, she was happy in Spetsai, and tried to assure me of it by exclaiming, at weirdly inopportune moments, Alone at last! I am convinced that certain odious forms of intimacy she tried to impose were linked to that vision of new bliss. For instance, she took to sitting down on the toilet with the bathroom door open. I discouraged that particular initiative by shutting the door myself, perhaps more ostentatiously than was necessary. More than once, when I was in the bathroom taking a leak, she entered unheard—when she wanted to she could move as noiselessly as a Sioux warrior—and, reaching from behind m
e, without a word took hold of my member and played with it as with a garden hose. I didn’t doubt her good intentions, or that her other great loves were aroused by shared defecation and so forth. The sad or not-sad truth is that I am not; other generally unmentionable activities are more to my taste. In the end she repeated the stories of the various emmerdesshe had been hinting at on the telephone for me to pierce the mystery of her worries. In fact, it had all to do with my least favorite man, Jacques Robineau, who had gotten married with a reception at the Racing; Léa had been planning no such a wedding for herself at the Crillon. You see how completely I sometimes misunderstood her. Indeed, the principal emmerdewas the lack of a serious candidate for her hand. There had been two she took on approval, as she put it, only to return them to the store. A married professor of medicine with a talent for cunnilingus but unwilling to divorce, perhaps because of his children. Another was an Algerian documentary filmmaker. Here the wife was no problem: the Algerian was ready to leave her in a heartbeat. The problem was money. The Algerian hadn’t any, and Léa had decided her husband would have to be rich or at least, like Robineau and me, live as though he were. The woman Robineau had married in the splendor that so impressed Léa was none other than the journalist with whom he was living, according to Marianne. The journalist turned out to be Léa’s best friend. Manifestly, that circumstance had not stood in the way of Léa and Robineau’s relations before the marriage. The question now preoccupying them, or perhaps only Léa, was whether there was any reason that those relations should not resume. Logically, she thought, there was none. She was waiting, though, for him to make the first move, perhaps the next time the journalist was sent off on assignment. But for the time being, the field was pretty thin, just her great love, the physicist, and me. She announced that to me, said North, with the usual Youpi!