Beginner's Greek

by James Collins

  Finally, he managed to say, “Work.” (More accurately transcribed as “Grk.”)

  Now Peter braced himself for the inevitable: What sort of work do you do? New Wave, West Coast jazz pianist. Vintner. Assassin. No, he would have to say that he worked for a Wall Street firm and right now was in the corporate finance department — and therefore was the most boring human being you could possibly meet on a plane flying to Los Angeles. Corporate finance. My God. Well, you see, right now we’re issuing some convertible debt for a midsized bank . . . In fact, there were aspects of it that were interesting to him, but no regular human being, and certainly no beautiful young woman, would ever want to have a conversation about such a subject or believe that a person so employed was worth talking to about anything. He would tell her what he did, and the remaining four hours and fifty minutes of the flight would pass in silence.

  But the young woman didn’t ask about his job. Instead, she asked, “Do you like Los Angeles?”

  “Do you like Los Angeles?” Another impossible question! He knew that the accepted thing was to hold “L.A.” in contempt. Still, you couldn’t act too proud of yourself for bashing the place, since that was so conventional. If you made a smug wisecrack about it — “Breast implants? Those people need brain implants!” — you risked sounding like a very tiresome person eager to beat a horse that had already been turned to dust. Yet you couldn’t actually say you liked L.A., could you? What pressure. Pro, con? Funny, serious? Knowing, naïve? Good, bad? Yes, no? Zero, one? Up, down? Back, forth? He toggled between responses and finally produced a sort of ingenious synthesis: “L.A. is all right.”

  He watched the aperture of the young woman’s lovely face close ever so slightly and felt a pang in his heart. Two nearly monosyllabic responses did not exactly encourage further conversation. He was losing her. So he said, “I guess I really don’t know it very well. I guess you do a lot of driving.” This was brilliant stuff! He continued: “I know there’s a whole world of young movie stars living in old movie stars’ houses and spending millions on thirties French furniture, but that’s not what I ever see. From what I see, Los Angeles is like any other city where they have lots of highways and air-conditioning. The tables in the conference rooms where I spend my time have the same executive walnut veneer. Otherwise, I’m in my rented car or at the hotel. I guess there are palm trees. I guess there is this tremendous myth of Los Angeles: you’re with your girl by her pool at her huge place, built by a silent-screen star; you are both as beautiful as a youth and maiden in a heroic painting; the beads of water on your skin are glittering in the sun. There’s that sealed-in, airless feeling you get that makes you think you’re isolated even though millions of people surround you. It’s a bright, still Wednesday afternoon, and naturally you don’t have anything else to do on a Wednesday afternoon but look great with water beads glittering on you. But the Los Angeles I see, it’s like a city in the Midwest in summer, just with palm trees and longer distances to drive.

  “I do remember once going to a bar with some people after a dinner meeting. Hi ho, let’s have some fun. One of the people who lived out there took us to a place, and some young movie stars were there playing pool. They were all so good-looking that just looking at them was completely engrossing. Anyway, one of them, an actress, took off her gloves — she was wearing these old-fashioned gloves with cross-stitching on the fingers — and set them down by her beer and started to play. She was very good, actually, and she had these long, lithe arms, which she was definitely showing off while she played. She seemed haughty and shallow. Simply from watching them play pool I knew that neither she nor her friends were possessed of any civilization or culture or charity or seriousness. And I thought to myself: God, I wish I were one of them.”

  He stopped, out of breath and in a state of panic. How could he have kept babbling on nonsensically like this? During his speech, he had been addressing the back of the seat in front of him. Now, fearfully, he looked over at the young woman, and — her expression was not so discouraging! She seemed to have been listening intently. Her eyes were wide and her lips were apart. She almost seemed transported by what he had said. Encouraged, he gave her a smile indicating his appreciation of her receptiveness. She lowered her eyes for a moment and then looked up at Peter and said, “That is the most beautiful, the most inspiring thing I have ever heard in my life.” Then she began to laugh. She raised one long-fingered hand to cover her mouth and turned away.

  To his surprise, Peter noticed that this response had not caused him to blush hotly; rather, something in the young woman’s tone and manner emboldened him.

  “Okay,” he said, “since it worked out so well for me, maybe you can explain why you are going to Los Angeles.”

  The young woman didn’t answer right away. She ran her finger down the lock on her tray table. Looking at the lozenge of her nail, Peter thought about the soft pad on the other side. The pause grew longer. Peter waited. She turned to him with a dimmed smile, as when the edge of a cloud passes over the sun.

  “I’m going to visit my sister,” she said. “She just had a baby, a girl named Clementine.” She laughed. “It’s going to be a little strange being Aunt Holly.”

  Holly.

  “My sister’s living with my father at his house. It’s in the hills behind Malibu. My sister and I lived in L.A. when we were little, but then my parents got divorced when I was three and my sister was five, and my mother took us back to Chicago, where she was from. My father was a director. Once in a while, he still rolls down the hills and goes into town to let some old producer pal buy him lunch. Mostly, though, he spends his time drinking schnapps and reading detective stories.” She paused. “He made some okay pictures,” she said. She paused again, before continuing. “We’re a little cross with my sister. She naturally didn’t think it was really necessary to have a husband to go along with the baby. The father is living with somebody else in Hawaii. He’s all excited about the kid and was in the room for the delivery. The only thing that surprises me is that he didn’t insist on his girlfriend’s being there, too.” She sighed, then looked at Peter. “Hey, here I am telling you all my family problems and I haven’t known you for five minutes.”

  She smiled and studied him. She was looking at his eyes and he looked back at hers. Then their focus shifted, and they were looking into the other’s eyes, rather than just at the surfaces. For that instant, Peter felt that the whole universe simply stopped, as if its entire purpose had been to whip out its material until it had reached this perfect point of equilibrium. They both forced their eyes to dart away, and matter and time took up where they had left off.

  Holly insisted that Peter tell her something about his family and his childhood, despite his protests that it was all very dull. He had grown up in New Jersey and had two older sisters, and he was the son of a business executive and a mother who was passionate about three things (aside from her husband): her children, her charities, and her garden. Holly succeeded in forcing Peter to talk about corporate finance and she actually managed to seem interested in it. He even showed her a tombstone ad in the paper announcing a deal he had worked on. Holly, meanwhile, was not really sure about her career; right now she was teaching high school math in the Dominican Republic, and this was inspiring on some days and incredibly depressing on others. She got to New York fairly often because her aunt lived there. They talked about a lot of things. And for periods they were quiet. She read and he looked at spreadsheets. Then one of them would say something, speaking the words aloud as naturally as he or she had thought them. They would talk for a time and then once again fall into a friendly, active silence. As in a painting, the negative space counted.

  “Well,” Holly said after a long period of quiet, “that’s enough of Hans for a while.” She turned to Peter. “Have you ever read this?”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “It’s a Bildungsroman.”

  “Correct.”

  “Do you like it?” Peter asked.

  Holly t
hought for a moment. “Do I like it? I don’t know. It’s not exactly one of those books you ‘like’ or ‘dislike.’ Reading it, I feel as if I’m attending a very, very long religious ceremony, which sometimes seems ridiculous and at other times is tremendously absorbing and disorienting. But ‘liking,’ as in ‘enjoying,’ doesn’t really come into it.

  “I guess I do like being plunged into this totally serious — even if it does have its ironic bits — profound, ultraprofound consideration of all the big things. Life, love, death, art, freedom, authority. It’s like being transported to a different planet. And then, when you think about what eventually really did happen to Europe, it’s hard to complain that it’s portentous.”

  “I totally agree,” Peter said. “But I have to admit that the thing that struck me most, even though I knew that I was supposed to be thinking about all that big stuff, the thing that struck me most was —”

  “Second breakfast,” Holly interposed.

  “That’s right!” said Peter. “That’s right! How did you know?”

  “Well, come on,” Holly said. “Who reads that they have a meal at the sanatorium called ‘second breakfast’ and doesn’t think that, tuberculosis or not, it sounds like paradise? With a mild case like Hans’s? It would definitely be worth it.”

  Two minds with but one thought! Peter felt faint, but he carried on.

  “Where are you now?”

  “I just finished the snowstorm.”

  “My favorite part.”

  “A little gruesome. The dream about the old ladies dismembering a child . . .”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “But, you know, despite that sort of thing and the incredible thick soup of philosophizing, I was surprised that the book does have moments that are romantic, actually. When Hans is thinking about Clavdia’s wrists. And even though she is a complete drag, you can see how she gets under his skin. The love thing, it manages to sprout a few blades through the cement.”

  Holly turned toward him and tilted her head. “So you’re a romantic?” she asked.

  Peter blushed. He couldn’t answer or look at her. Eventually, clenching his hands together and staring in front of him, he managed to say, “I guess. Kind of.”

  He could see Holly out of the corner of his eye, still looking at his profile.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s not a fair question to ask a male. Sorry. But anyway . . . me, too.”

  Peter turned to her. “Could I see the book for a second?” he asked. She handed it to him, and he flipped through the section she was reading.

  “Here it is,” he said. “Here’s the line I remember, a couple of pages back. Since it’s italicized, it’s easy to find.” He swallowed and then read. “ ‘For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.’ ”

  “Yes, that’s the one,” Holly said.

  They were silent for a time. Holly’s hands were resting in her lap, with the back of one in the palm of the other. Slightly bent and turned upward, her fingers looked like fronds. Eventually, to Peter’s relief, for he feared that he had put a permanent stop to the conversation, she asked him what book he was reading now (David Copperfield, which he explained that he had never gotten around to as a boy), and after talking about that they ranged over a number of topics: hockey, why famines occur less frequently under a democratic system of government, more about her family, the schools they had attended, the music they liked (a striking conformity of taste in that crucial area), the differences between Third and Second avenues, books, TV shows of their childhood, economic growth rates in Scandinavia and the Netherlands . . .

  So while the plane cruised over the flat, unchanging Midwest, the prairies and the desert, Peter was in a state of serenity and bliss. The spark had flashed, but there was no explosion. Rather, all had undergone an invisible change of state like magnetization. As soon as they had begun talking, all the momentousness of the occasion had melted away and he had felt unconsciously happy. He looked out the window and saw the mighty and forbidding Rocky Mountains. Mighty and forbidding? Maybe to Lewis and Clark. He was soaring thirty thousand feet above them.

  How did he feel? It was interesting. He felt sort of the way he did when he floated on his back in cold ocean water on a clear hot day and aligned his body with the sun. The cold wavelets lapped up against him; the sun warmed his face, and he felt deliciously stimulated and calm. They had not talked about anything particularly intimate. They had not fused their identities with the force of smashed atoms. They had come together as simply as two flowers intertwining. How happy he felt. And then, once again, that wet-blanket voice piped up in the back of his head, telling him that it was absurd to feel “happy” under these circumstances. He didn’t know this young woman at all. In relations with another person, “happiness” is not the by-product of superficial impressions. Rather, “happiness,” so-called, in a committed relationship was the result of grueling, arduous, unrelenting effort. Maintaining a committed relationship is hard. It requires courage, forbearance, stamina, sacrifice. A useful comparison would be working in a leper colony. The notion that you could meet a beautiful and sympathetic young woman on an airplane and chat with her about the subtle differences between Third and Second avenues and that this could produce “happiness” that was any more meaningful than the happiness produced by licking an ice cream cone, this notion was, frankly, rather childish. And in any event, if he thought that his life could be “fixed” by another person, rather than by dedication to his own growth, then he was sadly mistaken. Peter knew this argument. He knew it very well. And he knew that he was in love with the beautiful, sympathetic young woman beside him and that his life would be changed forever.

  Peter looked at her. She was explaining something to him about Mary Queen of Scots. “So,” she said, “she was visiting Darnley’s bedside and a couple of hours after she left, the house he was staying in blew up, and it was obviously Bothwell . . .” When Holly talked, she moved her hands, as if she were juggling, a trait that Peter found endearing.

  And did not the question of lust come into it? Yes. Usually, desire made him feel more tense than a sapper defusing a bomb. Curiously, in this case he felt different. He didn’t feel the incredible excitement mixed with terror that one succumbs to when anticipating the possibility of sleeping with a woman for the first time. Rather, he felt desirous, infatuated, stimulated but not agitated — as if he were anticipating sleeping with a woman for the second time. It all seemed so right, certain and pleasurable. He looked at her hands, now in her lap again, and the V-shaped creases made in her jeans by her crossed legs, and the curve of her hips, which was barely perceptible.

  “Hey! You’re not listening,” Holly said.

  “Uh . . . uh . . . yes, I was! Uh . . . Ridolfi . . . you know . . . Ridolfi — ”

  “Well, you seemed to be thinking about something else.”

  The pressure in the cabin changed. The captain had made the announcement that they were beginning their descent. A general stirring rippled through the passengers, sounds of clasps opening and closing and papers being redistributed. The atmosphere had changed literally and figuratively. The shadows, figuratively, were getting longer and there was a little chill in the air and the sun was setting earlier — all announcing to Peter the end of the warm, fat, unchanging summer days that had been his for the past few hours. Their time was up.

  Accordingly, the moment had come to ask Holly her full name, her address, and her phone number, and to ask her if he could call her sometime. All that. Yet it seemed so contrived, and embarrassing and horrible and jarring, to introduce a “dating” note into their sweet communion: Can I call you? Yuck. They belonged together like the ocean and the shore. To present himself to her as a guy who wanted to buy her dinner at a Mexican restaurant would ruin the state of grace they had miraculously achieved. But there was no way around it, he would have to say something. He tried to put the words together in his mind and finally he settled on a formulation. He took a deep b
reath. He cleared his throat.

  “I guess we’re going to land soon,” he said. “I wonder if, when you’re back in the city sometime —”

  “No, look,” she said, “how long will you be here?”

  “Uh . . . I’m sorry?”

  “How long are you going to be in Los Angeles?”

  “Um, until the end of the week, actually.”

  “Do you think you’ll have any evenings free?” Holly asked.

  “I think so —”

  “Then would you like to come out to my father’s for dinner some night?”

  Peter detected vulnerability in Holly’s eyes. Her voice had the slightest quaver. His own nervousness was immediately replaced by a desire to reassure her.

  “That would be great!” he said. “I would love to do that!”

  “Great!” Holly said.

  “How should we —”

  “Why don’t you call me and tell me what night is good? I can promise you that whenever it is we won’t have any plans.”

  “Okay, sure,” said Peter. He made a searching movement with his hands and glanced around for a moment. “Oh, my book, it’s in my briefcase, up in the thing . . .”

  They both looked about them.

  “Here,” said Holly, “let me borrow your pencil.” Peter had been making notes with one of those plastic mechanical pencils, and he handed this to Holly. She opened her book and wrote something on the title page, which she then tore out. “Here you go,” she said. “There’s the number.”

  Peter looked at the page. Under the title she had written “Holly” and a phone number below it.

  “Good. Thanks,” Peter said. He folded the paper and put it in his shirt pocket.

  “You can call us basically anytime,” said Holly. “My father gets up at five, but Alex and I are night owls, and with the baby, who knows.”