Beginner's Greek

by James Collins

  It had taken him some time to come to that position. Peter happened to be in love with Jonathan’s wife. Before Jonathan and she were married, Peter watched intently, looking for any break. Yet day by day, month by month, year by year, they moved steadily closer. Had there ever been a sign of trouble? Had Jonathan failed to call? But Jonathan had never been the type who failed to call, and his wife had never been the type to be upset if he had. Had Jonathan offended her family? No. Had the magic simply disappeared? No.

  Jonathan’s wife was very pretty, she was kind, she was smart, she was funny, and she was much too good for Jonathan, who was a fairly despicable character. She and Peter particularly liked each other. That had been true before she married Jonathan, but there were rules about how you conduct yourself around your best friend’s protowife. If they broke up and a decent interval passed, you could then make an approach. But the honorable friend would do nothing to drive the two apart. Really, honor alone had not inhibited him. So had the fear of rejection, and he considered the odds of rejection high. Whatever affection Jonathan’s wife may have felt for him back then, and felt for him now, he knew that, romantically, it meant nothing — to the contrary. They had established the kind of fraternal relationship, perhaps a bit closer than the typical one, that often arises between a man’s girlfriend or wife and his best friend. She took an interest in Peter and in his love life in the way married women, or virtually married women, do with the single friends of their mates, the ones they like. Their “intimacy” had been possible for the very reason that it had no sexual or romantic overtones. If Peter tried to convert intimacy of this type into sexual currency, he knew, he would be met with shock, disgust, pity, laughter, and derision. He would lose his friend, his friendship with his friend’s wife, and his pride. He would have to kill himself.

  Peter had been the best man at the wedding, and after that he had given up on ever marrying someone with whom he was deeply, passionately, heartbreakingly, searingly in love. Then he met Charlotte. They got along. Over time he became attached to her. She moved him. Charlotte was attractive to him, periodically. Charlotte was the kind of person a person like him married, and she wanted to marry him. Love — come on. How many people are really in love when they get married? And if they are at that moment, how many remain so two years later?

  Having allowed matters to proceed as far as he had, Peter would have found it very difficult to break things off. Charlotte had something in her, that fearful look in her eye, that made it hard, very hard, for Peter to hurt her. True, her panic about getting married may have been premature, but in her circle, there seemed to be an unstated agreement that if you let your early thirties go by without settling on someone, then it was a very fast shoot to forty, when you really would be desperate. Peter did not think so well of himself or so little of Charlotte to assume that if he didn’t marry her, she would never be able to find any happiness. Still, she was counting on him. Charlotte had wanted to get married so badly. Steadily applying herself and moving at a pace that was faster than what was natural, she had begun to treat him more and more like a presumptive husband, taking him to events with her family or friends or related to her work to which one would take only one’s fiancé or spouse or the person one had been living with for ages. She would ask him to perform spousal tasks, like picking her mother up at the airport. She used the first-person plural pronoun. Soon enough, Peter found himself in a different country without the right papers to get back over the border. Then, too, like all young people nowadays, they had had a conversation initiated by the woman about whether their relationship was moving forward; they had been seeing each other for about a year at that point, and they’d agreed that it was.

  Over and over and over, Peter asked himself if it was really fair for him to marry Charlotte if he wasn’t truly in love with her. An advice columnist would say it was not, without question, and he sometimes wished he could agree. But this was the real world. Of course the chances of Charlotte’s being happy were better if Peter married her. Or maybe this argument was just a rationalization for his cowardice. But no, it was surely the more loving thing to marry Charlotte. And as for Peter himself? Married to Charlotte or not, he was out of luck. He was due to marry, and he and Charlotte had a pretty good chance of being pretty happy. It would be fine.

  And Charlotte, why did she want to marry Peter? She liked to present herself as being very worldly, always collecting interesting people, scoffing at the bourgeoisie, but she was, in fact, deeply cautious and conventional. Although she would never have admitted it, she was terrified of being either unmarried or married to someone who was odd or ugly or impoverished or who required her parents and grandmothers to make an uncomfortable social stretch. Peter saved her from those fates. Also, she did love him. She liked the feel of his arms around her. He had a comforting, dry smell, like cork. He was kind, and her father, though charming and well dressed, had never been. Once when she was thirteen, she was going to a dance in what was really her first grown-up dress, and she ran into the living room to show it to him and her mother. “Ah,” he had said, drink in hand, “voici la coquette!” She felt as if he had slapped her, but she couldn’t explain precisely why. When she got older, she learned enough from her therapists and her friends and her friends’ therapists to understand that there was a danger that, replicating the relationship with her father, she would marry someone cruel. She had tried to avoid that. Maybe — maybe she had to force it a little bit; maybe she wasn’t “in love” in love with Peter and had to fashion a notion that she was. This she managed to do. In any case, she had already filled in the Passionate, Crisis-Filled, Tempestuous Love bubble on her answer sheet of life. Deep down, she suspected that, probably, Peter was not “in love” in love with her either, but this was a condition she could live with. The marriage problem would be solved, and she knew she could trust him and that he would treat her with kindness.

  So it had come to be that, on an evening in early spring, Peter had arrived at Charlotte’s door with the intention of asking her to marry him. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone on a handsome block uptown between Park and Madison avenues. Peter had come from work and, leaving the subway, he had passed a Korean market, where it had occurred to him to buy some flowers. He decided on daisies; they seemed winningly simple. The daisies smelled of earth and grass; water had dripped from their green stalks onto Peter’s hand when he took them out of their bucket. Daylight saving time had just returned, and the light at that hour, still so surprising, made Charlotte’s street look as if a lid had been lifted from it. The brownstone seemed softer, and the air, a little warm now, seemed to buoy him up gently.

  No young man carrying flowers on an evening in early spring down a handsome street with the intention of asking a woman to marry him can be entirely immune to the romance of the occasion. And indeed Peter did feel romantic, nervous and eager. His jacket pocket held a small velvet box that contained a diamond ring whose stone was not ostentatious but still sizable.

  He greeted Charlotte. She was wearing lighter clothes than she had worn in recent days. She had had her hair cut that day and looked especially young. She had known telepathically that something was up and greeted him with a longer and more than usually tender kiss. “How pretty. Let me put these in water,” she said, taking the flowers from him. “Lots of chances for me to play ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’ ”

  They sat down on the love seat and chatted awhile. For the thousandth time, Peter looked at the framed engravings taken from an eighteenth-century French instruction book on dancing, at the painting above the fireplace that had been a gift from her father and her stepmother when Charlotte turned twenty-one.

  Peter decided to be gay, as the occasion warranted. “Let’s have a glass of champagne,” he said. Charlotte usually kept a bottle in her tiny refrigerator. She looked at him, and their eyes met for a second. “Champagne? What are we celebrating?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Daylight saving time? Your ha
ircut?” She gave a little hmm and went to the kitchen. As she walked away from him, she seemed self-conscious, as if she were thinking that he was looking at her, which he was, and he was reminded, with a trickle of lust, that the back of her neck was a good feature. She returned with the bottle and two wineglasses (champagne flutes were something you got as a wedding present). “Here,” she said, “you know how to do it.”

  It was a little joke between them how her father had once pedantically demonstrated to Peter the best way to open a bottle of champagne. He gently prodded the cork with his thumbs while turning the bottle, as he had been taught, and the cork fell out, rather than rocketing, with a faint, hollow report and a wisp of smoke. The ceremony complete, he filled their glasses halfway; the bubbles tossed up their tiny hats.

  Charlotte and Peter talked a little bit more.

  “We have Moroccan agriculture people coming next week,” Charlotte said. “They’re going to meet with these Quebecois researchers who have done some interesting work on barley, which is about three percent of Morocco’s exports.” Charlotte’s expression became quizzical. “It’s odd that the Moroccans have asked for so much information about golf courses in the area. I don’t think that anyone is coming from the tourism ministry.”

  A breeze entered through the window, bringing a tarry smell from the street. There was a pause in the conversation. Peter refilled their glasses. As he did so, the image of Jonathan’s wife came into his mind, and he felt as if a trapdoor had opened under him. He tried to keep his hand steady as he poured. There she was. Well, never mind. What was not to be was not to be. He glanced over at Charlotte. Her eyes were pretty. The silence lasted a few seconds longer than a normal conversational gap. Peter sipped his champagne and looked over his glass at Charlotte. She looked away. She was nervous, and that made Peter feel warmly toward her.

  “Charlotte.” Peter’s voice had an unusual resonance as he took her hands in his. “I have something I want to say, or to ask, actually. Um . . .” He swallowed. “You know, we’ve been talking about this. And so I was wondering . . . I mean I’d like to ask . . . I wanted to ask . . .” Here Peter paused. “Will you marry me?”

  Charlotte had never received a marriage proposal before, not from her French lover and not even during free-play time at nursery school. In this instance, the man making the proposal was one whom Charlotte would quite like to marry. So she immediately began to cry and let out a large sob. She was reacting out of joy, and also from a release of tension, tension that it seemed had been building in her from the time of her birth.

  “I know this is all rather sudden,” Peter said.

  Charlotte laughed and gulped air. “Yes, why . . . sorry . . . just a second.” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and tried to catch her breath. When she finished she looked at Peter and in her gray eyes there was the glow of love, an effect enhanced by their moistness.

  “Well.” She cleared her throat. “Well, the answer to your question is yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes. Yes. Completely, totally yes.”

  They embraced. The kiss lasted a long time. Peter’s first emotion was faint irritation with the way Charlotte kissed. She didn’t push her lips out enough, or something. Then he immediately began to think that he had made a tremendous mistake, and he wanted desperately to take back the words he had said a few moments before. Then he thought: It’ll be okay. It’ll be fine. I do love Charlotte, really. He felt the back of her hand press against the back of his neck, which produced a stirring of affection and desire within him. And then — and then he thought about Jonathan’s wife, Mrs. Speedwell. Since the wedding, he often addressed her that way. “Hello, Mrs. Speedwell.” “By all means, Mrs. Speedwell.” The bottom fell out of his stomach. And then, again, he recovered and thought: It’ll be fine. Charlotte will be happy enough and I will be happy enough. Parallel to his fundamental disappointment, he also felt a thrill. He had just made a marriage proposal, and he had held this woman unclothed in his arms countless times. He knew the flaws in her body, her bony hips. This accumulation of intimacy had its effect. Smiling, Peter pulled back from their embrace.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he said, reaching into his pocket, “there’s something that goes along with this.”

  Peter finished his conversation with Frankfurt. Already, the departing tide of his day had taken him far from his betrothed and any thoughts of her. As usual, though, from time to time throughout the day’s voyage he saw in the distance the most beautiful mermaid, sunning herself on a rock, plashing into the sea and rising up again. Against the sun her smoothed head looked like a paper silhouette. It must be said that the creature did not resemble Charlotte, nor, however, was she mythical in her appearance. Even at a distance, Peter recognized her. He would be seeing her that evening, along with his despicable best friend, the writer Jonathan Speedwell.

  2

  Peter arrived at the bookstore late. It was larger and more commercial than the venues where Jonathan had read in the past. The crowd was larger too, although its composition was the same: mostly postgraduate women who were mostly willowy, mostly with their dark hair loosely pulled back. One or two of them may have primped for this evening, which meant wearing new sandals and a discreet application of paint. It was June, so they were wearing filmy skirts or short skirts with tops that showed off their slender, downy arms; those who wore jeans looked really good in jeans and wore the same kinds of tops. There were also some older women in modish clothes but with heads of gray hair, coloring it being anathema to them. They kept up with the new books. A smattering of skinny, unkempt, unshaven young men lurked in the back, their sullen faces registering both envy and disgust. Later, at the bar downtown, they would snigger about how Speedwell truly did suck. There were no older males. Only Peter was wearing a suit.

  At first glance, Jonathan himself might have seemed not very distinguishable from his rivals. His dark brown curls fell to his collar without discipline. He too had stubble. He wore a checked shirt over a T-shirt, just as they did. But there were differences. While Jonathan was on the tall side and certainly remained romantically thin, his outline was drawn with a thicker nib than that used for the others, for, unlike them, he had both been partaking of lobster ravioli at restaurants and spending hours each week at the gym. Jonathan’s hair, while tousled, was clean. His jeans were clean. He had clean hands and clean, trimmed fingernails. Indeed, he was certainly the only person in the room who ever received a manicure at the Waldorf-Astoria barbershop. His black shoes, seemingly unremarkable, were custom-made five-hole derbies, which of course he never wore two days in a row.

  More than anything, though, what set Jonathan apart from the other young men in the room was his glorious beauty and the sweet light that surrounded him. Standing before the audience, Jonathan seemed like the most innocent creature of heaven, favoring this base world with a sojourn. His untended curls and blue eyes and fair skin with hints of pink all suggested a person of pure goodness. No snigger passed those delicate, crimson lips. What was most beautiful was that although he possessed such physical charms he appeared to have no knowledge of them. Artless and free! How painful it was then, considering all this, to realize that his work registered so acutely the harshness with which we so often repay love, the cruel deceptions that greet those who trust. Jonathan Speedwell, his readers knew, must feel all that very deeply. And yet, and yet, how much humor and strength were in his work! And in the man himself!

  As Peter arrived, Jonathan was just finishing a story. Here is what he read:

  It was cold. The sky was clear. Dogs growled and barked. The man next door kept three, tied up. A breeze, out of the south now, carried a faint, acrid odor from the plant. The rusty frame of a swing set, with no swings, stood near the fence. Typical Jake, to scavenge the frame and never find swings. At this time of year it was hard to believe that in a few months wildflowers would grow up around it. Dana tried to picture them, and to remember their names: pussytoes, Venus’s looking-gl
ass, cocklebur. The sun rose higher in the bright azure sky. All of a sudden, Dana saw the crystals of frost on the grass glitter with reds and purples and yellows. It was if the entire yard had been scattered with gemstones.

  Dana shivered. She lit a cigarette. On the sofa in the double-wide, Jen was still asleep. Dana should wake her. Jen would say, “Mom, you’ve been smoking!” Dana would wait. She would finish her cigarette and she would wait awhile. This was something Jen didn’t have to know. There were so many things that she did.

  Here Jonathan fell silent. He kept his head down, still staring at the book on the lectern. He tightened his lips. Then he looked up with a distracted, vulnerable expression. The inside tips of his eyebrows were raised, creating an ankh-shaped wrinkle in his brow. When the audience began to applaud, Jonathan lowered and raised his head again. Startled, pleased, humbled, embarrassed. Then he nodded his thanks, as a gray-haired woman stepped up to the lectern.

  “Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you. That was just marvelous.” After a new crescendo, the applause died down. The woman spoke. “I’m sure many of you have questions for Jonathan. And goodness, the hour is drawing nigh, isn’t it? So I think, now, if Jonathan wouldn’t mind, we’ll open up the floor.”

  “Certainly, Martha, thank you,” said Jonathan. A willowy young woman, but they were all willowy young women, raised her hand.

  “Yes, right there,” said Jonathan.

  “Hi, Jonathan,” she said. “Thanks. I’d just like to ask, what do you think about the environment?”

  A question like this, both very heavy and inane, didn’t faze Jonathan for a second. “It’s incredibly important,” he replied in a solemn tone. “I get so angry when I think about what we’re doing to it. I wish my publisher would use recycled paper. There’s no reason that a tree should die for this.” He held up his book, prompting gentle, sympathetic laughter. “Well, they say that trees are one thing that are renewable. I try to do what I can. What I think is very important is . . . mindfulness . . . to have mindfulness about how we are treating our world. You know, there are poets who are known as nature poets, but to my mind, all writers are nature poets, and so have a special interest in protecting nature, and a special duty.” Applause.