Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  That’s not going to work. There’s no place for the Enfant Chic in this story. Yet he lives here. Orson Orestes could have to reckon with him, & for O. he’d be a rather different person, able to speak his own language, dispense with those airs of complicity, of knowing more than he tells, put on by his utter ignorance—of me, of English, even of French—like one more piece of smart clothing.

  I touched one glass too many with other revellers, & cannot account for a big blue bruise below my hip.

  What one can use is the poetry of the night, the lights running across black water toward us from the mainland, the music dwarfed, though at top volume, by the immense starry silences around it. To swim then: one’s limbs, stippled with phosphorescence, bringing to mind—to my mind—ectoplasm, the genie conjured up out of oneself, floating & sporting, performing all that’s asked of it before it merges at last into the dark chilled bulk of its master’s body stumbling over stones to sleep.

  19.vi.61

  “Come in here.” She opened the door. Orestes followed her into a sunny library. Lamplight revealed

  Near the bright window, but lamplit as if for a faint increase of warmth, a shrunken old man lay on a chaise longue. A blanket covered him to the waist. “Tasso,” she said, “we have a guest.”

  A second figure replaced a book in shelves near the door and turned. He was a handsome, heavy man of about thirty, dressed in a sheer white shirt Sc white trousers. “This is my son Byron,” said (Dora). And in another voice, “There is my husband.”

  Orestes gazed at her with admiration. He had talked so much about himself the previous day, and only now realized that she, too, must have a life worth hearing about.

  The old man, holding O.’s hand, stared up at him from over a full white and yellow beard. “Siate voi il poeta?” he breathed reverently.

  “Oui,” said Orestes. “You must forgive me I do not speak French.”

  Byron on whose face a look of petulance walked over, looking amused. “My father paints, you know. He terribly enjoys meeting a fellow intellectual. We get few visitors of any sort nowadays.”

  “Solitude is the price the artist pays,” said Orestes, mechanically rhyming.

  “I would prefer to pay it in Paris,” said Byron.

  “And I in Rapallo Fiesole,” said the old man. “For 32 years I have not left Greece. But small countries make delightful prisons.” Although he still had hold of Orestes’ hand, he seemed to have mastered his initial emotion.

  We should have had a glimpse of Orestes before this—at the café?

  He was a slight, graceful

  a spare, nimble man in sandals, white trousers, & a white drip-dry shirt through which his undershirt and lean darkening shoulders could be seen. Already balding, his square brow gleamed like beeswax above brown deepset animated heavylidded triangular brown eyes. He rarely wore the sunglasses in his pocket. On his left wrist, a bracelet of paler skin; he had left his watch off, for the sake of an even tan. Below the moustache of a “sharpie,” his lips, thin & curveless, tinged with purple, appeared unexpressive in repose. He was at his best when talking. Presently, looking up from his book, he

  20.vi.61

  Something too odd has happened. The Enfant Chic knows me. He has a photograph of me.

  The coincidence tells me I must face up to the “reality”—actual events & people—behind my story. How much to conceal, how much to invent? The name Orson, which still, to my ear, sounds truer than Orestes, has had to go already. But who he is (Orson/Orestes)—and by the same token, who I am—ah, that I keep on evading.

  At least I understand the E. C.’s picture-snapping pantomime at the taverna. He had recognized me, he knew I was Orson’s brother. (“Couldn’t the Tourist Police have given him your name?” asked Lucine later, missing the point: we had different names, were only half-brothers—she found it strangely difficult to grasp.) Anyhow, today, when I looked in on the Enfant’s lair of fishnet, handwoven skirts, sandals, postcards & shells, he was ready for me. He had the snapshot to show.

  He asked eagerly where Orson was & wouldn’t believe I couldn’t tell him. He had known O., then? Yes, yes. He had known him. Z’étais grande ami de maison. Próto—avant. Après, pas. Tu comprends? I understood mainly how Orson would have loathed him on sight. Small wonder I was never taken to call. The E. C. admits that he doesn’t remember me from 7 years ago, but at that time he had had no shop, he hadn’t (adusting imaginary furs) needed to work.

  The E. C. can be present at Orestes’ 1st visit to the House?

  But how did he get the snapshot?

  Oh yes, & as I am leaving, in a tone of benevolent confidence: Tell your brother to stay away from Diblos—ne pas revenir, O. K.?

  I guess I was right. The Enfant Chic has a place in the story.

  Leaving the shop, they shook hands. Orestes was revolted to feel revolted but not surprised to feel his palm tickled by the proprietor’s moist, long-nailed finger.

  On the street I met Lucy, or Lucine as she turns out to be called (name misheard at the N.’s). Still in state of mild shock, suggested swim. She considered at length, then said yes with air of an earnest, headstrong 10 year old. Marvelous water, marvelous air. She doesn’t know the N.’s any better than I do. Thought her mother had gone to school with Mrs N. She seems independent. (Parents think she’s traveling with chums.) She must paint—funny little hands stained orange & blue, nails bitten.

  A more formal opening: O.’s arrival in Athens.

  No sooner had Orestes

  The snapshot seemed at first to show Orestes & his brother, in profile, face to face. But a closer look revealed that Orestes was there only in plaster effigy, as if transformed by something in the young, inexperienced

  the barely formed, mindless features of the other.

  22.vi.61

  Dusk of another day. Café awnings rolled up. Ouzo ordered.

  Earlier, thinking I’d walk out to the House, I passed the beach. Lucine sketching, oblivious to the 4 young men not far off who grind their bellies into the sand & fix her with burning eyes. The Enfant Chic oiling his plump limbs in the center of a huge blue & white towel—the Greek flag? He has a few young men of his own. “Bon zour, où vous allez madenant?”—and when I don’t stop, makes elaborate gestures 1st in my direction, then towards the distant, invisible House. His friends, too, waved & smiled—ah, they know me from that night at the taverna. Angry, I did a childish thing: branched off the path—the House would keep—and struck out up a wooded slope in the direction of, well, nowhere at all. Fields, olive groves, lots of burs. And were the E. C. and his friends deceived? Ha! Not likely.

  To reconsider:

  1) Orestes has come to (Diblos) for a week. Meets (Dora). The card game, etc.

  2) Back in Athens, he runs into (Byron) on the street & hears that his father has died.

  3) In reply to his letter of sympathy Dora, now left alone—Byron works in Athens—impulsively offers Orestes the cottage on her property.

  Yes. So we see him in residence by early fall. They can have all winter to reach the point at which O.’s brother finds them when he comes in April.

  But must the brother really be in the story? If he is, a terrific lot of back history will have to be put in. The Greek father, the American father, even the old godfather, Arthur Orson (who might be useful, though, in New York—someone for Dora to turn to). How much I’d rather there weren’t this complexity! I wanted a tale light as air, lightly breathed out, 2 or 3 figures only, in clear, unexpected colors. And now look.

  They needn’t be brothers! Wouldn’t that solve everything?

  24.vi.61

  A Monday. Father’s seasonal letter. When was I returning, money not grown on trees, enclosed check the last. “Mother joins in love to you & Orson.” Let them think we are together. I need time here, now; the book is starting to take hold.

  Yesterday noon, on the bus to the monastery where a festival (panegyri) was being held, Lucine rambled on in her soft sleepwalking away.
The Greek boys, she didn’t know if she liked them, they followed her about so. She must be almost as young as she looks to expect one to care for her trivial plight. Nobody, that is, has done her wrong. Still, I spent most of the day at her side, pretending a protectiveness not too surprisingly felt by early evening when, full of wine, we reeled the 6 kilometers downhill into the moonrise.

  “Have you shown your paintings anywhere?”

  “No. Have you had anything published?”

  “A few things.”

  “That’s too bad. I think everyone should be unknown.”

  It may have been then that I kissed her.

  Orestes: I have had more experience than you.

  (Name): Must it follow that leads to wisdom?

  26.vi.61

  I want to say something about loneliness and distance. Already I’m not lonely enough. There is L., there is the Enfant Chic, there is a body named Giorgios who asked me for a cigarette on the beach and said “You good man,” as he went off with two. In the hotel, there is Chryssoula. However slightly they know me, I find I must avoid them if I am to accomplish anything.

  This morning I wrote letters in my room’s airless, viewless heat. Chryssoula exclaimed with dismay, seeing me emerge; she had thought I was on the beach, otherwise she would have kept me company! Now, this afternoon, I have picked my way along what can’t be called a path, out beyond the edge of town (direction opposite from that of the House). Here it is wild & stony, there are goats high up behind me, some savage green flies. I’ve had to cross a gulley blackened with human excrement. It may be where the fisherman come to swim, though the water looks unclean & choppy, and nobody is in sight.

  Naturally one would prefer the sweep & style of the port, to have a place among the tiny foreground figures (netmenders, women with jars, checkerplayers, coffeedrinkers) beyond whom the lagoon, its silk-pale perspective, leads to the symbolic sleeper—one would prefer that to the awful spot I’m in now. Yet here, in spite of flies, smells, nowhere comfortable to sit, I am somehow able to dwell on that other scene as never before. The region the Sleeping Woman dominates is Troezen—l’aimable Trézène, Phaedra’s last home—

  not that (Dora) is Orestes’ stepmother, but he himself can wax articulate over the ambiguous emotions each rouses in the other.

  A sudden attack of diarrhea took me to the water’s edge. Instead of climbing back to my rock, or heading back to town for medicine, I went on to the next cove where the channel is narrowest & the water roughest. Here was standing some kind of absurd house, or shed, half built into the water, a mess of rotting boards & plaster. A truly hideous smell came from it. I thought I was dreaming: the steps, the doorless threshold, the nearby rocks, were all spattered & stained with blood. One felt it dripping from within, into the current—some of it fresh enough to have been this morning’s. I gathered finally that I had found the slaughterhouse. I’d never thought of islands’ having slaughterhouses! There was a dog, even, yellow, filthy, cringing among remnants of God knows what. A 2nd attack of cramps kept me there, unable to move. Like blood my own excrement ran glittering down the rocks into the sea which feinted & struck back, hissing. Further out—there are meant to be no sharks in these waters—I’m sure I saw fins.

  Now, back in the hotel. It is evening, a soft, sweet breeze fills my room. Chryssoula sent out for pills. They are working. But I remain grateful for what I have seen. I have been shown something that my story needs.

  Years ago, in his lecture on Darwin & the Poetry of Science, Orestes made much of the chemical affinities of blood and seawater. If he, with his passion for dialectic, ever takes that walk, will he find in the slaughterhouse an antithesis to the serene harbor view, or a synthesis of that view & its beholder?

  Something to be concealed by the story, by the writing—as in Phèdre where the overlay of prismatic verse deflects a brutal, horrible action.

  30.vi.61

  The dream continues. Days have passed. I am sitting on the deck of the N.’s caïque which swooped down upon Diblos Friday like a Machine, gathered us up (L. & me) and swept us off to Epidauros where we have now sat through 2 nights of Drama with nothing but foam rubber between ourselves & antiquity. On our return to Diblos this afternoon we shall find Mrs N.’s telegrams warning us of the evacuation.

  It was dazzling. The child, L.’s landlady’s grandson, discovered us first, on the beach at noon. Within minutes he’d been joined by 2 of Chryssoula’s children from the hotel. In unison they delivered the big news—our friends from Athens had arrived, were looking for us!—before a rapidly forming chorus of beach-boys wearing, like identical costumes, an obligation to share the news at once with their Leader. We ourselves scarcely registered what was up, before some of them were sprinting toward his shop.

  We slung our clothes into towels and followed, conscious of the town’s impatience. On the waterfront, Lucine stopped: we were still in bikinis, she’d been scolded once already by the Tourist Police for wearing an immodest garment off the beach. Precious moments elapsed while Adam & Eve covered their nakedness before entering His presence who had brought them together in the 1st place.

  Mr N. was pacing the quai. The blue & white caïque with its linen awnings and mahogany gangplank lay creaking in its sleep beside him. He is about 60, bronzed, black-browed, silver-fringed; he had on a very elegant pale gray suit, white moccasins, a foulard at his throat. “Here you are, splendid,” he hailed us. “But aren’t you ready? Weren’t you expecting us?” Explanations; amazement; the telegraph service deplored. “No matter. My wife says we’re ahead of time. Run along, put some things together & meet us at your convenience. Here or at the café—or in one of those shops”—for we had just glimpsed Mrs N. waving from the Enfant Chic’s doorway. Her husband motioned her to stay where she was, incidentally sparing her L.’s fingernails & my unshaven face. We made bright signals back, then followed Mr N.’s instructions.

  At the hotel (L.’s room is 5 minutes up the hill) we hesitated. It was a moment for consultation. To what end? Had we been sleeping together, we would have had to agree on how to act for the next 48 hours, to which of the numberless halftones between frankness & artifice we should try to tune ourselves. How charming such moments can be! As it was, I merely said I wasn’t sure I felt like going on an excursion, & did she? The question baffled her, she knitted her brows at the sky. Now that the N.’s were here, had we any choice? So it was decided. I mentioned her nails. Within the hour we had left our sparse baggage aboard & were pushing our way through the onlookers that clogged the Enfant Chic’s doorway.

  He had sent out for coffee. Mrs N. (sleeveless lilac dress, sandals) had drunk hers & was wielding an honest-to-goodness fan of stiff silver paper. She rose, greeted Lucine with a kiss and me with a peculiar ironic gaze that trilled above her easy manners like an oboe above a string quartet. I understood it better later. At the time, it seemed, once again, that we ought to have been lovers, L. & I, in order further to feel that with charming, civilized people like the N.’s no pretense to the contrary would be called for. The Enfant gave me his left hand. Our coffees were cool, we drank them on our feet. A merry rapid conversation in Greek was pursued onto the blinding whitewashed steps. Our exit causing the teenage chorus to withdraw somewhat, the E. C. had to raise his voice to show how well he knew his smart guests from Athens. One final sally from Mrs N. made him turn & cover his face with a dimpled hand. The audience broke into laughter. “Really!” Mr N. murmured, taking his wife’s arm as we walked away.

  Lucine: What was the joke?

  Mrs N. (smiling): Nothing. Pure nonsense.

  Mr N.: Nonsense indeed. My impossible wife said it had been a pleasure, an honor, to visit that gentleman’s boutique, and that she fully intended to come back & spend thousands of drachmas there—only she would have to come alone, without any men to distract him from making a sale.

  Mrs N. (with profound conviction): But you saw, he was thrilled! It made his day!

  On the caïque—which is quit
e grand inside: fox-fur rugs on the divans, & French pictures, & a crew of 5—we changed into bathing-suits and ate lobster salad on deck. We had gotten under way.

  The meaning of the look Mrs N. had given me was duly, ever so diffidently & amusedly, explained. They’d just learned from the Enfant Chic that I was Orson’s brother, and were astonished. So was I. I couldn’t believe that they hadn’t known, that Dora’s letter asking them to be nice to me had described me simply as a “young friend” of hers. Well, the kaleidoscope has turned with a vengeance.

  They were now slightly on guard. I was made to feel that I should have found a way to enlighten them upon our first meeting—despite there having been other guests at lunch and the N.’s not having opened the subject.

  However, here I was. Perhaps something could be learned from me.

  “You see,” said Mrs N. uncrossing her smooth brown legs to hand me coffee, “while we’re old friends of Dora’s—Akis especially, I am younger” (as if one hadn’t noticed)—“we left, a week after her husband’s death, for 2 years in London & Paris. I am French by birth, and Akis was an adviser to the X. Y. Z. You can imagine our amazement when letters from Athens began to pour in, telling us that she had gone to America with this man, with your brother who I’m sure must be perfectly charming (I’ve seen the film he worked on twice, and he was also a great friend of some people we know intimately). All I mean,” very apologetically, “is that, absurd as it must sound to an American, Dora had a position here in society. Her father was an ambassador, her aunts were ladies-in-waiting to the old Queen. Her husband belonged to one of our best provincial families. Also, Dora had reached a certain age. One wouldn’t have cast her in the role of Anna Karenina.”

  “You exaggerate,” said Mr N. with a smile. “Remember, she was free to do as she liked.” Then, turning to me, severely: “She worked as a governess for over a year. Did you know that?”

  I nodded. He went on, speaking in a legato tenor voice lovely to hear. Things were different in America. Married women worked, enjoyed independence unheard of in Greece where no husband would permit, etc.