by Peter Selgin
Her father, Andrew learned as they drove on, imported chemical compounds, and her mother was a celebrated literary agent, numbering García Márquez among her clients. The more he learned about her, the more Andrew questioned his musings. Perhaps Karina was more worldly and sophisticated than he suspected. With that thought came another: that he’d been looking for just such a woman, childlike, beautiful, independent, curious, foreign, willing. Andrew had grown heartsick over the hypocritical bearing of many American women, who lulled men by assuring them that they weren’t necessary, until the trap was sprung and the burlesque of independence ended. Or maybe he’d just chosen badly.
As they wound up the coastal highway, Andrew heard about George, the lover left behind, the investment banker who’d brought Karina to Zurich and set her up in a high-paying job and a cushy apartment; and Peter, the British lawyer who’d courted her with a box of roses — not six roses, or ten, but a full dozen (“And you know how expensive roses can be!”) — and awaited her now in London. The problem with George was that he wasn’t Jewish. The problem with Peter — and it was a big problem, a potentially insurmountable problem, a problem that Karina, the paragon of a noninsomniac, had apparently been losing sleep over — was that Peter was old. Karina was twenty-nine, and Peter had recently turned forty. Two weeks shy of his thirty-ninth birthday, Andrew had a hard time appreciating the gulf between these two numbers, each of which seemed to him safely removed from death. “Eleven years — that doesn’t exactly make him old enough to be your father.”
“That is not the problem.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
“Sex. With someone so old there will be difficulties, no?”
“I beg to differ,” said Andrew.
“Well, let me ask you then,” said Karina. “Are you as enthusiastic a lover as you were when you were young?”
“I am young.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t. And I’m not sure I want to.” He floored the gas and shoved the little Fiat into second up the first in a series of steep, green-carpeted hills. Finally, he said, “I’m a much better lover now than I was at thirty, let alone at twenty or twenty-five.”
“Really?” This interested her. It interested her greatly.
“I’m a lot more patient. I know what a woman’s needs are, and how to satisfy them.”
“But what about you?” said Karina. “Are you as … you know.”
“As virile? As horny? Can I still get it up? I’m thirty-nine; I’m not dead!” But the fact was that even now, alone on a Greek island with this sexy Brazilian, he wanted sex less than he would have at twenty or even at twenty-five. Then he would have wanted it desperately; it would have filled the pit of his thoughts. Now he considered it an interesting possibility among possibilities. He certainly wouldn’t push the issue.
“Peter is not like you,” Karina concluded. “But I trust him. And he takes care of me.”
Andrew began to not like her so much. He turned his attention to the increasingly rugged landscape as they climbed into the clouds and he white-knuckled the steering wheel. Finally, he couldn’t resist asking, “Why should some man have to take care of you?”
“He doesn’t have to. I like to know that he can.”
“You fascinate me,” said Andrew, lighting a cigarette.
“You don’t approve?”
“Approve? No. No, I don’t.”
“Well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?” said Karina.
They rode on in silence; Andrew tried to screw up some enthusiasm for sightseeing and considered using an excursion to the palace of Malia — in the town of their destination — as an excuse to dump Karina. But just as he thought so, she pointed to a scruffy side road banking into a field of poppies. “Oh, please, take that road!” she exclaimed with such dire enthusiasm Andrew hit the brakes and fishtailed onto it through a patch of sand. Soon the Fiat, which they had already dubbed “the green frog,” twisted up one hairpin turn after another, past Moho and Krassi, towns clustered around Byzantine churches with red-tiled domes like pigeons clustered around a hag with breadcrumbs. They drove through Tzermiado, where women wrapped in shawls ran from their shops, squawking, “Come! Look! Stop! Stay a while! Buy a tablecloth!” waving bottles of homemade wine and baskets of lemons and other fruit. “For your wife!” one woman shouted. “For your daughter!” shouted another. Karina looked at him as if to say, there, you see?
From Tzermiado they coasted down through a river valley, between wall-like rows of towering eucalyptus, along hillsides bristling with daisies and arthritic-looking olive trees. Every few kilometers they passed the same old farmer side-mounted on his burro, his mustache as big as his face. Sometimes they pulled over, and Karina took photographs while Andrew sketched. She peered over his shoulder, holding her breath, watching him crosshatch.
“I love watching you draw,” she said. “It is like watching a bird build its nest.” And suddenly Andrew liked her all over again.
They decided to spend two more days together. “But that is all,” said Karina. “No matter what. Even if I like you.”
A moment later she said, “Since we are going to know each other for only two more days, and since we are not going to be lovers and will probably never see each other again, we can be totally honest, no?”
“Totally honest,” said Andrew. Except for the part about them not becoming lovers, he liked the plan. If good for nothing else, honesty could be diverting. As they rolled from town to town, Andrew did his best to answer her questions sincerely.
“So you are saying,” said Karina, “that there is no limit to how many women you would make love to, if you could?”
“Physically?”
“Emotionally. No limits?”
“There are always limits.”
“Have you never wanted to be faithful?”
“I don’t define faithfulness in terms of monogamy.”
“How do you define it?”
“As how you feel about someone. If my love for a woman reduces my desire to make love to others, that’s wonderful. But the idea that one’s love for another is enhanced by suppressing or, worse, denying the desire to be with others, that’s just plain foolish.”
“Many of my friends say this, too,” said Karina. “You would be happy in Brazil. Especially because you are a man.”
Andrew told her of his uncontrollable lusts, of the attacks of desire that had driven him to distraction in his twenties and even later, into his thirties.
“So you have been unfaithful?” she said.
“By your definition, yes.”
“And you did not feel guilty?”
“I would have felt just as guilty harboring the desires, even if I didn’t act on them. What about you?”
“Never.”
“Don’t you think about sex?”
“Of course. I think about it with Peter.”
“The Rose Giver.”
“Do not make fun of him!”
“I wasn’t making fun of him. I’m making fun of you. A guy hands you a dozen roses, and you fall in love. If I were to run out and pick a dozen poppies —” the hillside was still covered with them “— would you fall in love with me, then?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
“True, a poppy’s not a rose.”
“Do not be presumptuous. You are not my type.”
“You’re right. I’m not respectable. And I’m not Jewish.”
Karina said nothing. She shifted in the passenger seat, offering him as much of her back as possible, while he considered what his “type” might be. Age: between thirty-five and “middle.” Lineage: Italian (though he could pass for Greek, he thought). Face: belonging to a country by the sea where thick coffee is sipped from skimpy cups. Profession: drawing storyboards for tv commercials. A Renaissance man. Ads for sneakers and soft drinks. A hack.
“Since you’ve been here, you haven’t wanted a man?” asked Andrew.
“Natu
rally.” She kept looking out the window. “But only to look at. I like to look at men. For me they are part of the scenery.”
In Ano Viánnos, a market town high up in the mountains untouched by tourism, they strolled. In a hundred kilometers they’d revealed too much too quickly, and now they were road weary, sick of each other and themselves.
Ice-cream bars in hand, they roamed past battered shops selling fruit and bread, unlit hardware stores where the hardware looked used, cafes with birdlike old men in dark shirts picking at worry beads. Here, at last, was the real Greece: no signs in English, no discos, no loudspeakers, no mopeds. No cement. No young people either, Andrew noticed, only middle aged and old, all dressed in dark clothes, seeking refuge from the sun. The only signs of activity were the women selling pistachios, baskets of lemons, serving coffee and ouzo to men who seemed neither happy nor sad as they chewed their mustaches, worried their beads, and watched the earth spin. For the first time in Greece, Andrew felt as if he’d arrived somewhere authentic. Karina went for a stroll as he took a seat. Unlike his world, where everything was measured in dollars and convenience, here was a poor, gentle, inconvenient world. He could grow old in a place like this. Everyone else had.
He pulled out his pad and began sketching. The man nearest him, with an oxlike face and missing tooth, turned red, then hauled himself out of his chair, shook his head, and walked away — but only a few steps. Then he stopped and watched as Andrew kept drawing.
The two men at the same table gazed past Andrew as he sketched their contours, outlined long, hairy ears, bristling mustaches, knobby fists gripping cups and canes. Eventually the ox-faced man made his way to where Andrew sat working and sidled up behind him, watching over his shoulder, rubbing his chin, nodding, snorting. After a while he walked past Andrew and retook his seat, where he resumed his former pose.
Finished, Andrew held up the sketch for them to see. The three men nodded solemnly, then, little by little, they smiled and looked at each other. One pointed to the pad, then to his friend, and laughed and slapped the other’s back. Soon they were shaking Andrew’s hand, slapping his back, calling for raki. All three men turned out to be named Yanni, and so Andrew titled his sketch The Three Yannis of Ano Viánnos.
“For you,” he said, tearing the page from his sketchbook and handing it to them. One of the Yannis hurried across the cobblestones to a small shop from which he emerged with a big jar of honey that he presented to Andrew. More laughter, more back-slaps, more toasts. To the Virgin Mother. To Crete. To the Great Hereafter. To Zeus. Karina returned, saw them all laughing, and clasped her hands in delight. “To your wife!” one of the Yannis shouted. “Yes,” said Andrew, hugging her. “To my wife. We’re on our honeymoon.”
“He is lying,” said Karina, laughing.
“We are going to make many babies.”
To procreation! And to your children’s children! Stinyássas!
A half hour later, as the Yannis slipped into the advanced philosophical stages of drunkenness, Andrew and Karina got up to leave. They had to fight their way through the shaking of hands and patting of backs and gestures indicating to Andrew that he should sketch them all over again.
“Hold me,” said Karina as they stumbled toward the green frog. “I am so drunk.”
Andrew drove over washed-out roads, scaring up starlings and seagulls, up sheer cliffs, down windmill-studded valleys, through brown towns huddled like grazing goats around red stone churches. Twice they took wrong turns and had to double back to their junction. By late afternoon they reached the windswept coast town of Áyios Nikólaos, built around one of Crete’s two freshwater lakes and linked by canal to the Aegean.
On a small public beach, Andrew dove into the brackish water. But his limbs felt too heavy to swim, so he got back out and lay on a long chair next to Karina, whose purple bathing suit set off the pale contours of her flesh and kept Andrew from concentrating on the scenery or sleeping. After only twenty-four hours, they had reached that stage of a relationship where talk is unnecessary. While she dozed under a shade umbrella, Andrew stared at her full lips and at the gentle dip and curve of her belly. He realized then that he wanted to make love to her and had wanted to all along.
“Loneliness is an adventure,” he said, lying there with his eyes closed, the world a vermilion blur behind his eyelids. “Possibly the greatest adventure of all.”
It was nearly dark. The sky had turned violet; the waves curled iridescently on the shore. They had driven another fifty kilometers, across the narrowest part of Crete to its opposite coast, to Ierápetra, with its greenhouses and pickling factories, then east along the coast road to Makrigialos, where, as the sun set, they found two rooms in a green wooden house set back from the beach. As the last drop of molten sun dissolved into the sea, they lay dripping like a pair of spent lovers, but (Andrew reflected) instead of making love to each other, they’d been making love to Crete and to the sea.
Andrew asked, “Do you know who Ambrose Bierce was?”
Karina shook her head.
“Ambrose Bierce was an American journalist, a contemporary of Mark Twain, but even more cynical. One day he went to Mexico and was never heard from again. Some say he was kidnapped by Pancho Villa’s troops, but no one really knows. Anyway, Bierce wrote a book called The Devil’s Dictionary, in which he defines ‘alone’ as meaning ‘in bad company.’ That’s what loneliness is. No longer being able to enjoy being alone with yourself. When you’re lonely, the person you really want to be with is yourself.”
“That is an interesting theory. And how does one learn to do that?”
Andrew shrugged. “Go for a walk, eat a nice meal by candlelight; romance yourself. Ask yourself, ‘What do I feel like doing today?’ It sounds strange, but why should it? Why should it be so strange to do with ourselves what we think nothing of doing with others? Why — for example — should I be more courteous to you, whom I barely know, than to myself, whom I’ll know for the rest of my life? It doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re right,” said Karina. “It doesn’t.”
“The fact is, most of us are our own worst enemies. Instead of being kind to ourselves, we go out of our way to be cruel, and that leads some to think of suicide.”
Karina asked, “Do you ever think of suicide?”
Surprised, Andrew nodded. “Sometimes I think it’s why I took this trip.” The surf hissed. “I guess I’ve thought about it at times in my life. Maybe a little too many times, lately.” He was going to leave it at that, but then he remembered their vow. “But for no reason in particular, which is the worst of all reasons, since you can’t get around it.” Now he’d said both too little and too much, and regretted it.
“I, too, have thought of suicide,” said Karina. “I don’t know why. When I was four, my father was run out of town by the Mafia. They made him take his pants off and run through the village. Respectability is everything in Brazil. That is why we moved to Niterói.” She leaned up, drank her water. “Why do you think of suicide?”
“Because no one has ever bought me roses.”
“I wish you would forget about roses. You are an angry man, I think. What has made you so angry?”
“I used to take myself to a barber and get a shave,” said Andrew. “I loved the feel of warm shaving cream, the stropping of the blade on leather, the clean, efficient rasps of the razor as the barber stretched my skin, the touch of efficient but caring fingers. Unfortunately, barbers no longer shave people. Matters of insurance. Maybe that’s why I’m suicidal.” He yawned.
“I’m not ready to sleep,” said Karina. “Come, let’s go to town.”
In the dark, they picked up their towels, rinsed the sand off their feet, and made their way to the green frog. They drove to the center of Makrigialos, a kind of Ocean City, New Jersey, but with pine trees and mountains, where they dined at a seaside taverna to throbbing disco music and Karina looked at Andrew’s sketches. Meanwhile, he watched the dark sea lap at the pilings and realized h
e hadn’t felt lonely once since meeting Karina on the dock. Her sparkling, yellow blue openness balanced his brooding, wine-dark depths. He felt as if he’d known her forever.
Back at the house, on a terrace draped with bougainvillea, they shared a bottle of retsina and cookies from the taverna. Andrew sniffled: he was catching a cold. Karina proclaimed that with his sniffles Andrew had eliminated any possibility of their being lovers. “So now we shall never know if what you say is true,” she said, smiling.
Just after the moon set, Andrew woke. His cold had gotten worse, and his stomach growled: wine and cookies. He blew his nose, gulped down two aspirin and half a Valium with some water, and tried to go back to sleep. When he couldn’t, he pulled on his slacks and walked along the beach. Pelicans and seagulls glided down the cliffs; the shore smeared itself with fog. He walked a long way, past the lighthouse and tied-up fishing skiffs, until dawn stained the eastern sky. Bierce had it right: it was easier to look elsewhere for comfort, even to inanimate things, like paintings or the sea. He walked, sandals in hand, kicking at stones. Now he was lonely. And what did loneliness consist of? Dashed hopes? Disappointment? The total absence of passion or pain? The loss of something one never had to begin with? She thinks I’m angry. Even in sketching, Andrew looked outside himself, to other objects, other people, as if they were mirrors, showing him who he was, giving him back to himself. The sea is a big mirror, he thought. A vast, nauseating mirror that gives us back to ourselves clean and refreshed, like a box of shirts from the Chinese laundry.
When he returned, he found Karina drinking orange juice on her balcony. She smiled and waved, the morning breeze fluttering her hair. “Where are we going today?” she called.
“We could keep going east,” he shouted up at her, “to the tip of the island, or head back through the mountains.”
“Let us head back,” said Karina. “I am sick of the sea.”
