by Paul Russell
But Africa, the Peace Corps. Such a destination was a distinct rarity among his boys. He found himself oddly pleased with quiet, sad Bobby Wainmark.
Someone was speaking his name.
“Louis,” Claire said, quietly but firmly. She bent over him, gently prodding his shoulder as music played—the Bruckner string quintet he’d received in the mail from the Musical Heritage Society. He lay on the sofa, must have fallen asleep; yes, near the end of the adagio he’d grown so drowsy he’d closed his eyes, started to drift, and as happened whenever he first entered that slumbering state, the music had taken on the most deliciously heightened intensity. Melodies ached along his veins. A chord’s dissonances melted voluptuously somewhere near his heart. Music heard when half-asleep transformed itself into some nearly shameful language.
He’d forgotten they were scheduled for dinner at Reid and Libby’s. Rousing himself from the sofa, he told Claire, “It’s the weather, is all. That’s what’s getting to me.”
She had dressed for the occasion: black skirt, white blouse, a colorful scarf thrown about her neck. She loved dressing for occasions; the social moment still mattered to her. He himself had lost that. She accused him, only half humorously, of having grown curmudgeonly while she had soldiered on, still nursing some hope in the possibilities of human interaction. Perhaps it was their respective careers, the different kinds of human contact they allowed. He seldom found himself brooding over the strange fact that she, who never had shown aspirations toward any such thing in their younger years, had gone on in middle age, after their daughters left home, to finish a Ph.D. in English at the state university in Albany while his own benighted dissertation, abandoned so long ago at Cornell, would never see the light of day. Now she taught courses at the community college, and some nights tutored prisoners within the high, gloomy walls of the nearby correctional facility for women. With the years she had grown liberal, even radical. She helped the poor, the desperate, the disenfranchised—those were her very words—find their way into four-year colleges a rung or two below those his own students aimed for.
He supposed he could genuinely admire all that.
As usual, Claire drove. It had been years since Louis had been behind the wheel, and he was no longer entirely certain he could be trusted there. But Claire had nerves of steel. She negotiated the Taconic and the Autobahn with equal ease, and he admired that about her too. The early evening air was still thick and heavy, but the light their Audi sped through had a kind of magnificence about it. Not like that Greek light Reid had floated in—but then he didn’t envy Reid one bit. This was his light, the tempered, shifting light countless painters on countless canvases (one hung, in fact, in his office) had tried to still. Except for his years at Cornell, he had lived in the Hudson Valley his whole life.
“You’re doing it again,” Claire told him. The sound of her voice made him jump.
“What?” he said.
She held up her fist, clenched and unclenched it several times.
“Sorry,” he told her. “I didn’t realize I was doing that.”
“What are you so anxious about?”
But if he was anxious, he had no idea of it. Yet her accusation sounded exactly right. “Oh,” he told her, “you know how I get every year before school starts.”
“We should have gone away this summer,” she told him. “We should have taken those three weeks in Germany.”
“I don’t think the summer’s been a complete waste,” he judged. But the truth of it bore in on him. Even the landscape, as they passed the new Wal-Mart that would spell the death of Middle Forge’s fragile Main Street, seemed suddenly blighted. He had sat at his desk. Nothing had happened. The summer, like his life, had passed him by.
A developer had bulldozed lots into what had been, at the beginning of the season, a grove of trees. Some miles beyond those suburban ravages, out in the still unspoiled countryside, Reid and Libby lived in the house they’d built when Reid came into his bit of inheritance. At the school, it had caused something of a controversy. Faculty were generally expected to live in faculty housing, either dormitory apartments or, for those married and with families, the row of houses along Academy Avenue. The Forge School was a residential campus. But Reid had been adamant, and Louis, then in his first year as headmaster, had let him have his way. Fifteen years later that moment of weakness still perturbed him. Dr. Emmerich would not have given in. Dr. Emmerich would have maintained faculty discipline. But Dr. Emmerich had died in a rainstorm on a country road at night, and Louis was on his own.
“Reid will be in his Hellenic mode,” Louis observed. “Ten to one we’re having shish kebab or some such thing.”
Claire smiled indulgently at him, as she did whenever she caught him being mean. Weakness and meanness: certainly he had his share of failings.
Still, he persisted. “Too pretentious, don’t you think? Inflicting one’s vacation on one’s guests.”
“He’s only trying to hold on to something before it slips away,” she said. “I think that’s perfectly understandable.”
He felt duly chastened, but perhaps he had wanted that. She always had large sympathies—and who benefited from them more than he?
Castel Fallone, he had privately dubbed Reid and Libby’s dream home. As with most dreams, it perhaps revealed unwanted truths. Behind the grandiose facade lay echoing, underused rooms. Reid and Libby had wanted but failed to produce children, and the house seemed sadly meant to accommodate that nonexistent family. And while Reid delighted in what he pompously called the cathedral spaces—he loved tootling endlessly on his reproduction harpsichord, its busy clatter resonating in the emptiness—Libby had always seemed ill at ease under those vaulted ceilings. She much preferred their dark, cramped cottage on the Cape, to which she fled during the summers when Reid went abroad.
Meeting them at the door, awash in the rose perfume she had been in the habit of dousing herself with for as long as he’d known her, Libby looked flushed, hectic, as if she’d just managed to pull herself together the moment before their arrival. Louis felt fairly certain she had not turned into a furtive drunk on them; it was simply that time and circumstance had taken their toll on a woman who had once been rather beautiful. And summer seemed to have added a few pounds of its own to the weight of years.
“Oh, you’re finally here,” she said, with a nervous buoyancy that, in turn, made him suddenly nervous. “Reid’s fired up the grill. I don’t know why he’s in such a hurry, but he claims he has an important announcement to make at dinner.”
“Libby,” Claire complimented her, “you’re all tanned. Louis and I look like mushrooms.”
“I’m well done is more like it,” Libby said. “Stick me with a fork and I’ll ooze butter.”
For some reason Claire found that funny. She rubbed her friend’s arm affectionately. They’d been roommates together at Barnard, and whenever they were around one another they instantly reverted to some impenetrable banter left over from their youth.
He followed the two women through the blessed air-conditioning of the house, silently irked by the truth of what Libby had hinted at the door: They were, in fact, a good half hour late. And he hated people who were late. Clearly Claire had put off waking him as he lay slumbering on the sofa. It was a strange, inveterate incapacity of hers, far too ingrained to stand any changing at this point.
On the terrace in back, Reid looked comfortable in sandals, baggy jeans, a loose white shirt that failed to conceal his girth. He wore a straw hat. Without any success Louis tried to picture him as the conquering Lothario among the lady archaeologists. From a great bowl Reid lifted skewers dripping with marinade and laid them on the fire. Flames flared up, hissing.
So he’d been right about the shish kebabs. He wondered if Claire would notice, but she seemed oblivious to this proof of his acuity.
“The perfect hot-weather drink,” Reid advertised, holding up a milky glass of ouzo and water. “The Greeks spent three thousand years perfecting
it. I spent all summer drinking it.”
“An ouzo sounds delightful,” Claire said.
“A martini for me,” Louis demurred.
“Ah, the old staple. Some things never change with Louis, do they?” Reid teased Claire.
“Louis is very conservative,” Claire agreed.
“I really don’t care for ouzo,” Louis protested. “I never have. If you don’t mind, I’ll go fix myself a martini.”
“Suit yourself. You know where the makings are.”
Busying himself with the grill, Reid wouldn’t look at his guest; as he made his way indoors Louis noted the avoidance with a quiet sense of wonder. Was Reid regretting the afternoon’s impulsive confession? Certainly such a thing had happened before; after an initial eagerness—even compulsion—to reveal all, he’d withdraw, and an awkwardness would fall between them for a few days. Mentally, Louis upbraided his friend: If you don’t want me to know something, then don’t tell me. But don’t punish me for hearing you out. Surely that was simple enough.
Though Louis knew next to nothing, personally, about sexual regrets, the squeamish morning that followed some sordid night, the thought descended on him that Reid’s sudden awkwardness with him might be said to resemble, more closely than one might wish, exactly such a fit of regret.
The unbidden revelation put him in a very damp mood, and he found himself, in Castel Fallone’s cool and spacious kitchen, going a bit heavier on the gin than he otherwise might. He took a sip, then another. He knew he shouldn’t be drinking alcohol at all in this summer heat: liquor only made him sweat like the proverbial pig. But the promise of an announcement at dinner from Reid had him strangely on edge. He found himself thinking anxiously about that photo, the way Reid’s lady friend looked at the camera, her glare at once fierce and hungering. Were archaeologists really such a sex-starved lot as all that? Did pigs really sweat?
Imagining, suddenly, a vast slurping muck of a mudhole, in a mighty swallow he drank the whole of his martini; then, feeling slightly ashamed, he made himself another. Out the window, he could see the three of them on the terrace, Reid holding forth before his appreciative audience. If any of them wondered where he’d taken himself off to, they showed no sign of it. Surely he wasn’t jealous. Or if he was, then of what was he jealous?
Another phrase rattled around his head: to seize life by the throat. There had always been something vaguely goatish about Reid Fallone; didn’t he, in a sense, devour everything that came his way?
Judging himself sufficiently fortified, he sauntered, fresh martini in hand, back outside. The warm air enveloped him. Reid was waxing apocalyptic.
“I’d sit in the cafés of these prosperous Macedonian cities and feel it all around me in the air: how these people are worried sick about their future. You see on banners everywhere, ‘Pray for the Peace of the Balkans.’ And well they should pray. This time next year, it’s them we could be reading about in the papers, and they know it. Things could happen just like that. Snipers, guns in the hills. Would the rest of the world give a damn? It’s why the Greeks are backing Serbia, and I have to say I agree with them. ‘Greece: Serbia loves you.’ I saw that graffiti everywhere. There’re just too many people out there who want to get their hands on Greek Macedonia. The Albanians, the Bulgarians. The Turks.”
The last word rang in the air ominously.
Louis had tried to follow it all in the newspapers, but the situation left him confused and depressed. Everything was too entangled, too deeply rooted. What had seized him most was the destruction of the beautiful Ottoman bridge at Mostar. Now that had had an awful clarity about it.
“The Serbs have shown themselves to be out-and-out butchers,” he said with sudden certainty.
“There’s plenty of butchery on all sides,” Reid returned just as certainly. “What the Serbs have done is nothing compared to centuries of Turkish tyranny. Islam. That’s the real thorn. A Muslim state in the heart of Europe. It’s in no one’s best interest.”
“Except, I guess, those Muslims who already have the misfortune to be living in what you call the heart of Europe.”
“The entanglements are tragic,” Reid conceded. “And then there’s the whole German angle: Germany recognizing Croatia. All those old alliances and memories. The Ustashe and all that. And now the Germans want to send peacekeeping troops—which of course Serbia will never stand for, given what the Nazis did there. Nor will the Russians.”
Louis wasn’t sure he wanted to know exactly what the Nazis had done. Reid had baited him and he’d allowed himself to be drawn in, only to discover he was at a distinct disadvantage. Reid was the one who had been there, after all. Reid had seen things with his own eyes.
He often felt his erstwhile friend had that particular advantage over him.
With a gesture of resignation, he withdrew, even as Reid announced that the kebabs were done. “I thought,” he said, “we’d eat outside. The evening’s so lovely.” Louis’s heart sank. No one, it seemed, minded this heat the way he did. To the west, he saw with some relief, Valhalla-like thunderheads were rising. A storm’s sudden violence might just cool things off.
From a sweating tin pitcher, another Greek affectation, Reid poured cold glasses of retsina all round. Raising his glass in a toast, he announced, “To good friends, who are the most important thing to me in the world. And so I want to share with my good friends an important development in my life.” He looked at each of them in turn, finally resting his gaze on Louis. And Louis realized that, earlier, he’d been entirely wrong: Reid wasn’t ashamed at all. He was decisive and defiant; he challenged them all to find fault with his reckless way of moving through the world. “I made a very serious decision about my life this summer,” he continued in a grave, measured voice. “What I’ve done, I haven’t done lightly.”
Louis felt his stomach go sour with anxiety. Rather than meet Reid’s unwavering gaze—it was as if Reid meant this announcement for him alone—he stared resolutely into his wine. A film of condensation had settled over the surface of the glass. He waited tensely. He braced himself. He thought he could hear thunder in the distance.
“What I’ve done,” Reid said, “is make a conversion to the Greek Orthodox faith.”
Louis couldn’t have heard that correctly. “You’ve what?” he said, the words out of his mouth before he could rein them in.
“Face it,” Reid told him with a shrug that was suddenly impish, as if the whole thing were some elaborate practical joke. “I’ve been inching toward this for years.”
Libby laughed loudly. “And I was worried you’d been diagnosed with cancer,” she said.
Louis glanced at her with surprise. That had certainly never occurred to him, but perhaps it should have. Things would happen to them, after all. Libby herself had already been touched once by mortality’s dark finger. The smudge remained to this day.
A sudden memory overtook him—from years before, his one visit to Greece. A monastery, unprepossessing outside, claustrophobic inside, floor-to-ceiling martyrdoms of every imaginable variety, all rendered with grisly relish. Suddenly into that dark interior had flooded a group of schoolchildren. Candles were lit. Under the eager eyes of nuns, they lined up to kiss the icon of the Blessed Virgin, two dozen avid young lips giving adoration in a gesture both greedy and cloying. It was to this that Reid had given himself over.
“Libby,” Louis asked desperately, avoiding Reid’s eyes, his smug contentment, “really—what do you think about this?”
“I think he’s quite serious,” she said. She stared ahead with that fiercely distracted look that overtook her features with increasing frequency of late. It seemed unnecessarily cruel for Reid to have exposed her like this, without warning. But she took it admirably in stride. “Not my thing, certainly. But then he’s not asking me to do anything. He isn’t even asking me to understand, particularly. Are you, Reid?”
“No,” he said, gently, almost regretfully, but at the same time with a chilling implacability, “as a m
atter of fact I am not.”
Libby looked at her husband, and then at Louis. She smiled, but her smile was entirely unreadable. Perhaps she was only stunned—as he was—or perhaps truly indifferent. Louis had never in his life understood her. There were times, in fact, when he’d positively feared her incomprehensibility. She was his wife’s best friend. Their enduring admiration for one another much predated his own arrival on the scene.
“The Orthodox Church offers a great many things to admire,” Reid said, though Louis had difficulty focusing on his sentences. “Not the least is the liturgy’s incessant striving for the sublime. Nothing so mundane as human reason encumbers those divine words. It’s not about speaking, it’s about singing. About mystery and miracle and ecstasy. The intervention of the divine in earthly affairs. A kind of cosmic lightning strike on the terrestrial.”
“Ick,” Louis felt he had to say. He could only think of the American woman who led the excavation at Pella. What part, he wondered, did she play in all this ridiculousness? Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.
Reid seemed to sense that. “Not all that different from your Wagner, really. What else is Parsifal, after all?”
