The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  And so, as I was saying, one night we stayed late. For me, the party was murderously dull. Tuka’s wit was, as usual, flashy, but I knew the stories. Hamrah drank heavily, as usual, and as usual showed no sign of drunkenness. He talked with his Athenian friends of the “art of business.” It was characteristic of all of them to abstract real transactions to theory: even among fellow maggots it would have been awkward to talk of what they really sold, or where, or how. They all talked in the same way, holding forth loudly while they had the floor, gazing off into the corners of the room like ill-arranged statues when they had to give way to some other’s oratory. I listened absently, moving my eyes from group to group, picking up without interest, like shopworn trinkets, bits of their inflated language—“customer extinction,” “impetus diffusion”—and I drank. On the wide stone terrace opening out toward Hamrah’s large pond, a group of Helot instrumentalists played lugubrious dances, and couples drifted past the open doorway embracing, moving vaguely in time with the music.

  Hamrah’s wife came with a pitcher to offer more wine. She was small, buxom, with a face like a child’s—pretty mouth, a slightly turned up nose, shy eyes. I held up my cup and she filled it.

  “I’m Thalia,” she said. “Remember?”

  I grinned. “It’s beginning to come back to me.”

  She laughed, holding off. “Wonderful.”

  “Come sit,” I said.

  She glanced around the room. There were plenty of empty wine cups, but there was nobody there not able to serve himself. She set the pitcher on the carved center table, came back with her cup, and sat down on the floor beside my cushion. When she’d arranged herself, feet tucked under her to one side, chiton flowing smoothly over her knees, she looked up, smiling, as if for some new command. Since I had none to give, she said with pleasantly childlike irony, “You look like you’re having a wonderful time.”

  “I’ve been listening and learning,” I said solemnly.

  “Wonderful!” She looked over at the group around her husband. A short, thick man like a sawed- off column with a black, short beard and eyes large as hen’s eggs was talking about market- seizure modalities. She looked back at me, serious. “I hear you write poetry.”

  “At times. I’m a degenerate.”

  She drank and thought about it. “Really?” she asked.

  I understood all this, of course. The womanly flirtation, the hostessly flattery, and, alas, the serious child peeking out behind.

  “Very, very degenerate,” I said. I glanced at her husband, clean cut, erect as a general. “Now Solon’s poetry is something else. It’s public, rhetorical, designed to sway the community to good. But mine—” I shook my head in mock despair. “Pure anarchy. If I had any character I’d burn it.”

  Thalia lifted her head and laughed, self-conscious but also amused, curious. “Are you serious, Agathon?”

  I slid off the cushion, pushed it away, and sat beside her on the floor. Tuka and someone I didn’t know drifted past the doorway, dancing. (“Nice enough, yes,” Tuka was saying. “You know the kind. Sex makes her seasick.”) “Never more serious in my life,” I said. “All poetry, good or evil, works by the same process. Solon writes good good poetry, I write good evil poetry.”

  “You must let me see it sometime. Is it naughty?”

  “Alas, no. Aseptic.”

  She smiled and glanced over at her husband. “What’s the process?—What you were talking about.”

  “You want the whole lecture?”

  She nodded happily. “While we dance.”

  “Good idea,” I said, “but unluckily—”

  “Oh.” She glanced at my bad leg. “How stupid!”

  “How about I lecture while we go for a walk?”

  “Wonderful!” she said.

  I set down my cup, labored to my feet, and held out my hand. We walked, and I gave her the lecture I used to dazzle students with, about philosophy by exclusion (logic) and philosophy by inclusion (poetry), and poetry for the common good (Solon’s) and poetry for sickly self-congratulation (mine). We ended up sitting in the tall, soft grass by the pond, holding hands. Looking at the wide, unmoving pond, you couldn’t tell whether the water or the shore was more still. I put my arm around her. Her back was softer than Tuka’s, less sharply cleft at the spine. She told me about her father. Once when he was drunk and she was bringing him home, he tried to push her in front of a carriage team. All her life she’d been afraid to go to sleep at night. I moved my hand on her back. It was very unusual for her to talk seriously with anyone, she said. She felt like a prisoner sometimes. Life seemed huge when you were sitting out here by the water, looking up at the stars, and it made her feel cheated not to be able to see everything, know everything there was. I thought fleetingly about my old book—a thing I rarely mentioned to anyone—and moved my hand on the far side of her back, slowly. I was thinking now of Iona. “Will you show me your poetry?” she asked. I said nothing, and when she turned to look at me I kissed her. She didn’t exactly return the kiss, but she didn’t pull away either.

  I said, “Let’s swim.”

  “Here?” she said, incredulous. But it wasn’t the pond’s stagnation she was thinking of.

  Quite casually—because, though ray tongue was glib, I was too drunk for any ghost of inhibition—I stripped and dove in. I hit my head on a stump but hardly noticed. The water was warm as soup. After a moment she too was in the water, laughing, calling out to me about the water’s warmth. She swam beautifully, as graceful as an athlete, and after a time I crawled out on the bank to sit and watch her. Blood ran down into my eyes from where I’d hit myself on the sunken stump. At last she too came out, shyly, her body white in the moonlight—hips and breasts far sweeter, it seemed to me, than those of any casually, habitually naked Spartan girl. She sat down beside me, shook her hair, and laughed. “Marvelous!” she said. I put my arm around her, laid her down, and kissed her. Blood fell on her from my banged-up forehead. She was smiling, and whispered, “Marvelous.” It was, but I could do nothing, my body wine-logged. And perhaps something else. Wine doesn’t usually defeat me at such moments. “We’d better go back,” I said. She nodded. After a while, still not speaking, we got up, dressed, and, holding hands, went back up to the house. Hamrah and Tuka sat on the terrace, in the shadow of the cypresses, talking. (“…is, there’s no such thing as a grown-up,” Tuka was saying. “I imagine it’s especially sad to people who are really, really old.”) Thalia and I went inside, refilled our cups, and drank. Not long after that, I fell asleep. I slept like a boulder.

  A week later, Hamrah told me solemnly, his big hands closing and opening around each other, that his marriage was on the rocks because of “what happened the other night.” I was astonished. “Hamrah,” I asked, “do you think I made love to your wife?” He tipped his head down and rolled up his eyes, full of gloomy guilt “No,” he said, “but maybe it would have been better if you had, because I did with yours, and now Thalia hates me.” “But that’s absurd!” I said. His news surprised me, to say the least, partly because it came from such a fine, antiseptic, military-looking man, but I wasn’t shocked, certainly not wounded. I was partly surprised that Tuka had failed to mention it, and partly I was surprised at Thalia, if what he said was true. I could understand well enough why they’d done it. They’d thought we had. It was mere chance that we hadn’t. I remembered what Thalia had said about the hugeness of life and her feeling cheated. I could have laughed, now, but I didn’t. “It’s ridiculous,” I said. I sounded to myself like Solon, filling the air with noises while he thought about his next move. “I could have had her,” I said. “I suppose it was stupid of me not to.” He looked mournfully toward the house, like a warrior surveying the ground of his defeat. Inside, Tuka and Thalia were talking. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. And so that night I went swimming again with Thalia, pristine Athenian girl, and our naked bodies would brush together from time to time and she would raise her arms, reaching for her stroke, so that her brea
sts moved against my chest, and afterward (goose pimples rising on my skin, my teeth chattering) we made love on the bank where we’d sat looking up at the stars. When we went to the house, Tuka and Hamrah were in bed. Hamrah pretended not to see us at the door. I took Thalia’s hand and led her to the second bedroom. Toward daylight, Tuka came to our bed.

  All this happened more than once. I understood, well enough, that it was destructive. Hamrah was a good lover (Tuka told me in great detail), and I, as a matter of fact, was far from spectacular in bed, especially with Thalia. Nearly always, in fact, I was impotent with her, and she would say things like “Agathon, Agathon, what have I done wrong? Why can’t you love me?” and would talk of suicide. Hamrah, meanwhile, would be firm as a rock for hours, mumbling, “Tuka, Tuka, I love you, I love you,” to which Tuka would answer, sensibly, “Don’t be silly, dear, it’s just a friendly fuck.” And they would laugh. But for all his physical superiority, I had him cold: I loved his wife better than he did—or, anyway, I understood her better than he did, cared more about what she thought. I could offer her pieces of this huge life that Hannah had never heard of. What had started, between me and Thalia, as a friendly fuck became something else. Though I liked being in bed with her, even when I was impotent, what I liked best was walking and talking with her, telling her about politics and philosophy and poetry, or listening to her stories about her childhood. I wrote poems for her, degenerate, of course. But whatever of the degenerate there may have been in the poems, it was mine, not hers. She was the gentlest girl I’d ever known. Certainly gentler than Tuka, gentler than Iona. When Tuka was angry she would cut with her tongue, lash out with her fists, at last go rigid with fury. As for Iona, she had the mask of gentleness, but I guessed from the beginning that it was a mask. She almost never raised her voice at her children, but once when she was slightly drunk and her second oldest son was screeching, shivering the night with his pointless, now merry, now cantankerous noise, I watched her smash a cup on his skull (almost without expression). Another time, when I stood behind her and bacon grease spattered on her arm—no fault of mine—she turned and meant to brain me, merely because I was handy, then thought better of it Thalia, when she was offended, withdrew or wept. The best of them all, perhaps. Yet Thalia never possessed me, body and soul. For her, as for them, I felt tenderness, respect admiration. Like theirs, her unexpected appearance in a room gave my heart a sudden leap of pleasure and, needless to say, desire. But she was never inside me like an incubus bent on my destruction. It was like the difference between a reflection in a clean pool and a reflection seized by a water spirit as a mask for her deadly courtship. What it was that made the difference I don’t know.—In any case, Thalia stopped loving her husband. Tuka, for her part, loved me more than ever, it seemed. She had never been awed by Hannah’s intellect or his worldly aplomb, and I was a gentler, though not a more robust, bedfellow. But while her nights with Hamrah intensified her love for me, they also had on her an effect she had never expected, though I could have warned her of it. Sometimes when we were talking happily about this or that, her eyes would move away, and I knew she was thinking of him. I was sorry for her, as I was for Hamrah and Thalia, but I said nothing.

  And so at last, inevitably, Hamrah looked at me in rage and said, “All you’ve left me is a piece of ass that wants no piece of me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I could see it was a little inadequate.

  He lifted his fists, not as if to hit me, as if looking for something somewhere to hit. “Get out of here,” he yelled. “You’re evil. All of you! Buzz off!”

  Tuka cried. We left.

  Two hours later, Thalia came. Tuka was asleep. We went for a walk and, for the last time, made love. I neglected to mention her visit to Tuka. Thalia told Hamrah, and he was aflame with moral indignation. He ordered her out of the house forever, then changed his mind and ordered her out for a week. (He took in a girl friend while Thalia was away. A man needs comfort at a time like that.) She was never to see either one of us again. She came to Tuka to apologize for her sin and weep, and Tuka, aflame with, possibly, moral indignation, raged and swore and ordered poor Thalia from her sight. Then she—Tuka—called me from my work and demanded an explanation. I evaded, then finally made something up, heavy, heavy with weariness.

  Later I told Iona that I had slept with Thalia. She wept. She shook violently, holding me and weeping, as if her pain went into the ground below her feet and made the earth shake. I felt no guilt, felt victimized by other people’s foolishness, or anyway their self-made traps, but it wasn’t comforting. Thalia, from that day on, was Hamrah’s slave. It was senseless, but I could do nothing for either of them. Tuka went to bed for three days. As she’d done with her brother years ago, she’d passed all human limits in her outburst at Thalia, and now, because Thalia had made herself Hamrah’s prisoner, Tuka couldn’t take it all back. She would sit very still, looking out the window, with tears on her cheeks, remembering the friendship as a woman remembers her childhood. I couldn’t help her either. I went once to Hamrah’s house when I knew he was out. Thalia came to the door and opened it partway. Her face was puffy, remote. The room behind her was full of shadows. “Are you all right, Thalia?” I said. She nodded. “Is there anything we can do?” I asked. Without thinking, as if she were past all thinking, she shook her head. I looked at my feet, trying to think what else to say. The door closed softly.

  Soon after that—I went on a trip for Lykourgos in the meanwhile—Iona began to joke, from time to time, about leaving Dorkis. Her oldest son, Miletos, watched her uneasily. I too watched. I had drifted into a strange indifference about my life. It was not, I thought, that I no longer loved Tuka—whatever that might mean. But I couldn’t help her. The lethargy she’d fallen into wasn’t guilt—she knew that all of us and none of us were guilty—and not anger except at the injustice of life itself. Something had snapped, in all of us; whatever it was that had held things together—some illusion upon which we’d agreed—had lost its power. For hours at a time I would wander vaguely about my business, entertaining the thought of going away somewhere, turning to philosophy or poetry or simply observing the seasons, maybe at Krete. Iona knew. When I mentioned the feeling, she spoke obliquely of thinking of going away somewhere herself. We tempted each other toward the idea that we’d go together, without hope of joy or permanence, merely seizing the moment without demanding much; but neither of us would express the temptation in words. Dorkis observed us, while playing with his children or tallying his accounts, and waited. Hamrah became a new man. While we drifted outward, slipping from each other, each of our selves breaking up like old floatage, Hamrah dug in like an anchor, became his own man. When we met at large parties, as we sometimes couldn’t avoid doing, I found him a man profoundly convinced of all he said, all of which was wrong. “People do two things,” he said, and raised two fingers. (I was across the room, half turned away.) “They think and they feel. When what people think goes against what they feel, feeling should be slapped unconscious. That’s humanness. Think of wily Odysseus! That’s what’s made me what I am.” He lifted his brown marble chin.

  “And what do you do?” the lady at my elbow said.

  “I’m a Seer,” I said.

  “Ah!” She raised her eyebrows. “Do you have visions?”

  “Never,” I said. “That’s the difference between you common people and us Seers.”

  But I was lying, of course. I had a vision of old Klinias with his scraggly, yellow-red speckled beard and his sharp Adam’s apple and his hairy, skinny legs, pausing on the mountain path to look myopically upward at the boulders beetling over us, and drawing their morality down for me. His eyes twinkled as he teased and lectured and comforted me. He loved me. And so, once, Solon had loved me, smiling at my youthful rigidity, boundlessly confident of my talent, it seemed, and as pleased by my faults as by my virtues. And effortlessly, without a flicker of thought, I had returned their love. Could I ever love anyone as simply and clearly as tha
t again? Was it mere self-love—my unspeakable pleasure in happening to be myself—a pleasure I’d lost? The question was arrogant, of course. A man must study to make himself more like boulders or, say, garbage.

  20 Peeker:

  Everything’s going from bad to worse. I begin to suspect that my master was right in abandoning hope long since. New divisions move out to the war every day—it’s broken out on all sides of us now, north, south, east, west. We watch them lumber past in the valley, riding along the river, caravans stretching out mile on mile, the hoplites in front riding four abreast, naked except for their armor, their plumes, their streaming hair, and then after them the foot soldiers, the archers, the company of runners, and then the mulecarts and handcarts, the cooks, weaponsmiths, carriers, the pack animals, the herders with their wide herds of sheep and goats. The caravan’s there when we look out in the morning, and it takes all day to pass. Who would have believed that the city could pull together such forces? Sometimes when a caravan’s moving out it meets with another one moving in, wagon on wagon of wounded and dead, sick men shuffling and limping behind them, gashed, limping horses, and lines of half-starved men in chains. The two armies pass without a word, as far as you can tell from here, as remote as living men and ghosts. Meanwhile in the city there are fires day and night, and sporadic noises of rioting. Some god must have gone mad. There was an earth tremor day before yesterday. Perhaps it’s Poseidon himself, master of all things that thunder and shake, who’s gone mad. But I haven’t told the worst of it. The Spartans have introduced a new horror: mass executions. According to Agathon, no man has ever been executed for a political crime in the whole history of Athens. Here in Sparta they herd a whole crowd of Helots, gray-faced, bruised, sickly—and there are women and children and old people among the crowd—herd them into a sloping field and shower them with arrows, and then when none of them are moving anymore, a few soldiers walk among the corpses with swords and finish off any they find still breathing. We can’t see it from here, and no one tells us about it, of course, but Agathon says it’s happening, and he seems to know. There’s a look he gets—as if his spirit has abandoned his body, leaving it old and indifferent as a mountain. He’s going to make me a Seer, he says. I’ve believed it sometimes, but not at those times when that thing comes over him, that deadly, heatless clarity of Apollo’s light. There’s some secret he’s forgotten, some trick to it, something maybe that he found in that book he used to have, or says he had: I never saw it, and it’s a hard thing to believe. Who would ever have lost such a thing if he had it? He stands at the door with his hands behind his back and his legs aspraddle, watching the guards lead another crowd of prisoners away—to their death, I finally understand; that much you can see in the guards’ eyes—and his stance, his face, have no expression, not pity or disgust or fear or anything: he’s like a man at a play he’s seen five hundred times. “What do the gods think?” I asked him once. He tipped his head. A tic came over him, or two of them, one on each cheek, trembling like two different zones of lightning in a night sky, and he gave a sort of apologetic, fearful smile. “The gods never die,” he said. “It makes a difference.” It was evening—twilight—when the earthquake came. Agathon was in bed. He hasn’t been feeling up to snuff lately. As soon as the table began to shake and the noise started—a terrible, vaguely human noise like the whole world groaning—the old man popped up on one elbow quick as a puppet, eyes wide, mouth open, ears cocked—I swear it—like a dog’s. “It’s an earthquake,” I said. But I’d misunderstood his look. It wasn’t fear, or not merely that “It’s come,” he said. “What’s come?” He said, “The plague.” He was crazy. It sent a shiver through me to see him staring there, out of his mind. He couldn’t explain to me later what he meant. When I pressed him he said only—crossly, impatiently—“Plagues are Apollo’s doing. Go ask him.” He wanted to get back to his writing. That’s all he does these days, write and write. I can’t even read what he puts down, though he says it’s all for my benefit. He’s fallen into using some obscure grammata I can’t make heads nor tails of. I said, “But earthquakes come from Poseidon.” He refused to think about it. “Tuka,” he said, eyeing me narrowly, “suppose I was wrong from the beginning. Suppose I misread, exaggerated trifles….” I realized he was once more out of his mind. Senile. My grandmother used to flick on and off like that. He shouted, “Look out!” I ducked. But there was nothing visible to duck from. He did that once before, when he was having a nightmare. He told me afterward that he’d had some friend or something that was killed by a horse. It scared me, this time, hearing him yell, “Look out,” when he was supposedly awake. I called for the guard, but no one came. It took him about five minutes to come back to himself.