Cast in Doubt

by Lynne Tillman

  Helen has reminded me there is no word in English for man-hating, no equivalent to the Greek misogyny. This bothers her but she is careful not to seem as if it really matters to her. I appreciate her sangfroid, because I would hate to have to minister to her. She never makes this necessary, however, although from what I hear from Yannis, much occurs in her life, as if she were a contemporary Colette. I wonder what that woman was truly like. I’d rather know Jean Genet, but I don’t think he’d be interested in me.

  I walk to the restaurant where my usual table awaits me. Christos brings a bottle of wine and opens it with a flourish. Kali spera, Horace, he exclaims. We exchange pleasantries. I look up and see Helen on her terrace. It’s just after five. The fishermen are doing what they do with their boats and talking among themselves. Their faces are brown and their skin, even from this distance, seems thick as hide. I’d like to pinch one of their cheeks, to see if he feels it. To me these men are impervious. I pour myself a glass of wine. The wine is cold and dry, much needed after a frustrating afternoon of work on Household Gods. It is so difficult to understand the mind of a woman of that time, perhaps a woman of any time. Like Helen. Though my Helen is, in so many ways, sympathetic and, of course, present. But trying to conceive and fashion the sense and sensibility of a nineteenth-century feminist abolitionist temperance reformer, and fold her character into a modern novel—it’s Great-Aunt Martha who drives me to drink.

  That miserly Roger has taken a table near me, not with me; we are cautious about possible presumptions. Yannis hardly glances at him, the other American with whom he once lived, very briefly. Roger sucks on his cigarette, looks toward Helen’s house, and through his small teeth hisses a distasteful remark about her. I declare him a Nelly, and he waves me off with his hand, as if it were possible to banish me. He is not alone in his contempt for Helen. Of the expatriates I am the only one who spends time with her. She doesn’t seem to mind and has indicated that she finds the others very uncool, which is how she put it. When someone speaks like that, uses words such as cool and so forth, I think of the forties and fifties and clubs in New York and Boston where I heard jazz played by excellent musicians, Negro musicians, who seemed indifferent to their white audiences. Black musicians. When it came into existence not so long ago, the phrase “Black is Beautiful” delighted me. It still does. Black is beautiful.

  Roger shifts in his chair and pretends to write in his journal. We are, unfortunately, almost all of us here, writers. This is a curse at times though relatively amusing at others, especially after I’ve had a few glasses of wine. Roger had a minor success with his first novel, set in the South, a coming-of-age drama that elided his homosexuality, masking it through other characters that the cognoscenti recognized. Then he received a good advance for his next, which is what he’s still working on, and left the States. Years ago. Even in this place he lives somewhat in the closet. I don’t know why he is here. The Greeks don’t care, not about us. I’ve even seen him flirting with Helen as if he might actually want her.

  It was late one night in Christos’ restaurant and one of the waiters had taken out his guitar and was playing bouzoúiki music. There were very few people about. Bouzoúki music has an insistent, demanding sound, and its nervous rhythm set the tone that night. Roger bowed to Helen and fairly lifted her out of her chair, waltzing her around the room while gazing ardently into her eyes as he moved her this way and that. It was quite a performance. That was in the first month she was here.

  I don’t know if Helen was taken in. He can be charming and has the foulest mouth. Again Roger says something about Our Miss Helen and The Sailors. Roger gets so Tennessee Williams, more Tenn than Tenn. He’s not from the Deep South, but from North Carolina only, yet he taunts me with his Southern drawl. When he feels he’s scored a point—Roger surely keeps score—his bright blue eyes flash triumphantly. His eyes are much more beautiful than my own, which pale by comparison. So bright shines our Roger. Oh, shut up, I hiss back. Tsk, tsk, Roger responds. I close my eyes, like a turtle in the sun, and turn away to show my disdain. But now Alicia arrives and walks our way. Her presence has an immediate salutary effect. Around Alicia, we keep our gloves on, so to speak.

  Alicia has had affairs with a few important literary men, who have deigned to write about her, one salaciously, in fact, and though well past fifty, I’d say, Alicia moves like a much younger woman. She is subtly sensual. Her operatic past surrounds her, and she’s dramatic without being oppressive. A tall, athletic woman, Alicia nevertheless gives the impression of fragility, a fragility that is generally contradicted by her rough-minded, though gently spoken, discourse. Alicia nearly escapes the categories I ordinarily place people in. Her conversation is often elliptical, and like Roger, she can be sharp-tongued; but she is never as vulgar as he. Alicia is suspicious of Helen, whom she’s had for tea and to whom she has offered piano lessons, should Helen want them.

  I’d like to find out why Alicia suspects Helen and what she suspects her of. But not in front of Roger. And why has Alicia offered Helen music lessons? What happened at that tea?

  The Maori love, Roger is saying, just as we do. The aborigines love as we do. Love, Roger is saying, is universal, whatever form it may take. Alicia interjects liltingly, Yes, dear, but who are we and what do we love? Roger’s cunning eyes take her in joyfully, as if they are, and he is, eating her up. Then he clasps one of her pearlescent hands in his and kisses it. Why, Alicia, we love each other, he says. I love you, dear. Alicia taps the filtered end of her Greek cigarette. She taps it incisively, as if to signal that she is about to make her point. Ever so distinctly she whispers, Roger, I haven’t a clue what love is. Do you want to teach me? Alicia calls his bluff every time, but so gracefully, Roger cannot figure out how best to respond. He has never reviled her with his wicked tongue. I am sure he would like to. Alicia’s mouth asserts her intelligence, curving into a calculated smile that sets Roger back a drink or two.

  Tonight I am annoyed by this charade and bored. Sometimes I don’t mind repetitions, but I always prefer originality. I look toward Helen’s terrace, and this time her head bobs up. She waves her tan arms above her head energetically, calling to me. There’s your Psyche, Alicia says. Perhaps you’d better go to the sweet girl, all alone. Roger howls. Alicia exhales a mouthful of smoke. You two, I say waspishly, are unkind, despicable.

  I am shaky on my feet. The water slaps against the harbor and the blue sky is under my feet as well as above my head. My legs have gone numb again. Yannis helps me walk away from the table. I believe I’m leaning on him coquettishly, like some Southern belle, or perhaps I’m merely an old drunk, a silly aging queer. I don’t care what they think. Sometimes I hate everyone but Nectaria, Helen and Yannis. Yannis is quite solicitous this evening. I wonder what he wants. Or how much. I rest my head on his broad shoulder—he is short but muscular. I thank the gods for my family’s ingenuity which has provided what I have, such as it is. I can keep Yannis and myself. Alicia and Roger are laughing in the background. I simply don’t care.

  Chapter 2

  Bring me my slippers. Give me my robe. Coffee. Yannis hands these to me sulkily, and as it is early, and as I am barely awake, barely alive, and cannot face an argument with a boy a good deal less than one third my age, not at this hour, I do not complain, do not comment on his surly manner. The coffee is lukewarm. I pull myself together, like a shanty thrown up against a storm, and look instead toward Helen’s terrace.

  There she is. She glances up as if I had in some magical way contacted her. She waves her hand above her head and points toward the sea. I suppose this means she is going to go to the beach. And now—at this I lean forward against the rusty railing—she thrusts her arms out in front of her as if gripping a wheel, a steering wheel. She’d like to go for a drive with me. I nod yes and indicate with a flourish of the hands—not this minute, later. She looks down at her book.

  She is a trusting soul. Of course that is the way to get hurt. Presumably she has been. Even a gi
rl that age—twenty or twenty-one—could be indelibly marked by painful events and circumstances, blown by misfortune and regret this way and that. Or bounced this way and that. I don’t know which I prefer. The coffee is cold and my hands are numb. I don’t feel the cup between them. A bad sign. Not like chicken entrails spilled on one’s front door, or whatever, but a bad sign nonetheless.

  I don’t know why everything seems so funny to me this morning. I suppose I dreamed something that delighted me, some absurdity, some revenge. Perhaps I murdered Roger and got away with it. The perfect crime. He will figure in my next crime story—the unsuspecting victim. He won’t be Roger completely—Roger is not unsuspecting—but a writer on an island who finds out something he isn’t supposed to know, and before he does, is embroiled in The Situation, from which he can’t extract himself except by spilling the beans. I will model him on Humphrey Bogart as he was in Beat the Devil, a favorite movie of mine, in which Bogart’s character is something of a joke but still knowledgeable, savvy. Death by garroting, I think, Roger with a rope around his neck. Old-fashioned but mean. I prefer it to knives and certainly to guns. The sky is so blue today I can scarcely bear it.

  The post has fallen with a thud at the front door and Yannis, penitentially, leaves the room to run downstairs and fetch it. Probably he will gossip with Nectaria. From the force of the drop, I’d say magazines and newspapers have arrived as well as a book or two. Now I have time to look at my face in the mirror. I am embarrassed to engage my narcissism in front of Yannis, for he must know I find myself ugly or he must find me so, even though he is, by no stretch of the imagination, a Greek god. Not at all. His nose was broken in a fight, one of his eyes crosses and seems to seek his nose, and he walks oddly because he is so bowlegged; but it doesn’t matter at all. He is better-looking than I ever was at his age, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is just that he is not me, and that is enough. I drink all the coffee even though it’s cold and leaves a flat, repellent coating on my tongue. I’d like to spit it out but I’m too lazy to leave my chair. Helen hasn’t left hers. What taste is on her tongue?

  The post brings a pleasant surprise, a droll événment. Alicia has invited me to tea. She must not have minded my mood of the other evening, last week. Was it that long ago? Time races so. I too am repetitive, my little habits and eccentricities, even my bitchiness, are so well known to Alicia and Roger that they may even be appreciated. I don’t really feel judged by them. That would be intolerable. Alicia’s invitation is clever and charming. She says we will be alone. She must have something up her sleeve, prosaic as that sounds. I will pen a note, a charming response, and give it to Yannis to deliver by hand. She’ll appreciate that and invite him to tea, and he’ll be flattered to have small cakes served to him by a lady. He’ll be there an hour or so during which time I can collect myself, shower and wake enough to take Helen and him, if he wants, for a drive. I’d like to show Helen a small village where I know one of the peasants. He fought the Turks and is, as Yannis would put it, “strong like bull.” of course, I write to Alicia in my best hand, I’ll be there. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I can see her fluff her hair, her long fingers coiling rapturously around her thick curls—no gray yet. I see her smile to herself, containing the secret within her until she has me alone in her lair.

  Generally I like women. Roger says that is because I am part woman, whereas he, he implies, is not, since he doesn’t enjoy their company as I do. I think that is pure foolishness. And besides, we are all part male and part female. I don’t like all women, naturally. For a time I loitered on the fringes of a group—in college and after, around Cambridge—which was united not just by its love of literature and each other, but also by its contempt—even hatred—for women. I didn’t and don’t feel this, not at all. I like women but I am glad to be a man. I identified strongly with my mother when I was very young, and even as I grew away from her, I maintained an atavistic sympathy for her, oppressed as she was by my father, who was the classic cold and distant patriarch, absorbed in his business—trains.

  In company with them, Roger pretends to like women, to flirt with them, to seek their approval and admiration, and I’m sure that the wiser ones see through him as if he were a flimsy curtain. I could have Roger murdered, in the book I’m planning next, when he is living in a dreary, rented room decorated with cheap curtains. The curtains could be a filmy nylon, reminiscent of the lingerie Lana Turner might have worn, in the movies, when she beckoned to her gangster lover. In a sordid hotel room. In the forties. The forties. A wonderful, terrible time, but a time of right and wrong. We all knew where we stood, even if we were all a bit anti-semitic. Roger, I believe, is half-Jewish, and Harvey is not his real surname, but his stepfather’s name, and for the life of me, or his, he won’t tell me with what name he entered the world.

  The fishermen are calling to each other. They’re sailing into the harbor with their catch, and they’ll disgorge the octopus and squid they trapped pitilessly. The creatures are flung onto the concrete and lie there grotesquely, like bulbous sacks of wet clay no one wants. The octopuses’ slimy gray pockmarked tentacles are disgusting to me as they cook under the hot sun. They’ll lie like that, the fishermen passing the time, smoking and talking, until the restaurants have taken their pick of the catch. I vomit at the merest taste of octopus, almost at the sight. But I perversely enjoy looking at them as they die. I am fascinated after all this time. Watching the octopus is a habit of the day. And sometimes, much as I hate them, the sight of them lying there, those ugly beasts, makes me want to cry.

  I open a New York Times that Gwen, my best friend in Manhattan, mailed months ago by boat, along with other magazines and clippings, news items culled from diverse sources. Watergate is dragging on even now; Nixon is supposedly anguished about the men who were sentenced. President Ford, who pardoned him, has formed a commission to investigate the CIA’s spying on citizens, domestically, under Nixon’s administration. It is vile. I find Ford’s naming Nelson Rockefeller as the commission’s chairman entirely dubious, even though he is Vice President. I’ve always disliked Rockefeller. The story goes—Alicia told me this—that years ago he was at a meeting with some of his employees, and one of them mentioned “take-home pay.” Rockefeller asked, What is take-home pay? And this man became governor of the state of New York. And then there was Attica. A horrible man. A small item catches my attention. A man has been found strangled in his Upper East Side apartment—no sign of struggle, no forced entry, no robbery. There is a story there. I clip the article and put it into my story file.

  Tea with Alicia tomorrow. A drive with Helen today. It’s all right that I’m not working. I can take the weekend off, and if I don’t drink much at dinner, I might get something done tonight. What does Alicia want to chat about? Wouldn’t it be strange if Helen were Alicia’s given-up-for-adoption child? There was one, years and years back, I am almost certain of that. Perhaps this is why Alicia dislikes Helen. She might be her child, the child that represents a rebuke to Alicia, and Alicia may be more like a mother cat than a human being who, finished with the child/kitten, wants nothing more to do with her. Helen has never mentioned her mother. Never her family, not really, now that I think of it, maybe something about her parents once, the source of many of her problems. Of course. I am so glad not to have children and not to be a father. Except to Yannis but that is different. I don’t even know if Helen has siblings. I’ll try to ask her this afternoon.

  Helen is wearing leather flats, with slippery soles, and the shoes are entirely unsuitable for climbing. In some ways she has no sense. But I say nothing to her when she gets into my car. Yannis has stayed home. So be it. He’s in a bad mood. Helen is less than talkative, and to draw her out, I ramble on about Roger. He is, I tell her, no bon vivant. He’s not rich enough. His Greek is better than passable and he lords that over the passersby, the tourists, to make himself a bigger Roger. She asks if I like him at all. I love Roger, I say, surprised. He is like a brother to me. This is
not precisely the truth, and as I don’t particularly like my own brother, nor have I actually ever felt that any other man was one, in the spiritual sense, I am dissembling. Or, as they say, lying through my teeth. But why do I? I want Helen to think I am a good person, I suppose. I don’t want her to know that I can be mean, even monstrous. I’d like her to think I am above all manner of pettiness. But obviously, since she thinks I hate Roger, she has already discovered the truth, or part of it. I sense she has already known bad people, evil ones. Why else would she have such an enigmatic smile and be so uneasy with her laugh, clapping her hand over her mouth just as she begins to chortle. Not chortle. I don’t know what to call it.

  She’s looking out the window now. The donkeys dot the rough landscape. The women who walk on the side of the dirt road and whom we pass rapidly, though I drive slowly, are wearing black and carrying bundles, faggots, on their backs, as if they too were donkeys. Beasts of burden. They are solid women, of the earth, whom young Helen must view with as much sense of mystery as I. I ask her, Do you have anything in common with these women? She tells me that she has made contact with a Gypsy, a woman who recently came into our town. Contact? I wonder aloud. Daily, they pass each other near the baker’s shop. And they stare at, Helen says, look at each other. The Gypsy knows something about her, Helen thinks, and she knows something about the Gypsy. That sounds mystical, Helen, I didn’t suspect you went in for that sort of thing. She smiles and claims that she doesn’t.

  How Helen’s young skin glows! It is so clear and clean, unsullied, without a sign of adolescent disruption. A smooth, cool surface. I had terrible skin as a boy and always thought it had to do with evil thoughts or how I reached for my secret part much too often, to stroke it and comfort myself and bring myself to what pleasure I could. My dog, I called it, because I wasn’t allowed to have one. Will you lick my dog? I once asked Yannis. I was drunk, of course. Nowadays people are much more liberal about masturbation, but all of us then were in desperate conflict about its odious consequences.