Cast in Doubt

by Lynne Tillman

  Helen is clear and clean. Her dark-brown, nearly black, hair stops just short of her chin and is thick and straight, and her hazel eyes are sometimes more green than brown, even yellow, like her cat Maybelline’s. Her sunglasses—black frames, dark-green lens—perch on the middle of her nose and just now she reminds me of Jean Seberg, as visited by Monica Vitti. I must keep my eyes on the road. I don’t need to look at Helen, she is my tabula rasa. There is absolutely no reason in the world for my feelings for her, but somehow I identify with her completely and feel her as if she lived inside me. It is so odd. My fascination with her is deeper than for the octopus lying, dying, on the wharf. I shoot a glance at her from the corner of my eye, as if she knew how I was comparing her—let me count the ways! Were she to hear my thoughts, would she laugh or be insulted? Would she care at all?

  Perhaps she is something like the girls I went to school with who terrified me with their self-possession and indifference, but in those days they did not hang out in discos or nightclubs or spend nights with men in bars or take men back to their apartments and make love with them. I guess some did but I didn’t know them. Helen makes casual remarks, now and then, about such events, as if they were only in the past and did not enter her life here, as I know they do, as I know men enter her life, enter her door, enter her. Have you any siblings? I ask. Yes, she answers, but then states that she doesn’t really like to talk about her family. I’m sorry, I say.

  There’s a boring silence and she looks out the window again. I feel I have done something terribly wrong. Or she has done something terribly wrong. But what could that be? Finally she insists that we should just forget it, or drop it, as she puts it, because it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t want to think about the past. It’s bad for her. “Bad for me, Horace.” She pronounces my name in two distinct syllables, for emphasis. I love it when she uses my name. From her lips it sounds like an interesting one.

  To mollify me, she tells me that she dropped out of college in her second semester, which is indeed precocious, I remark, but she continues as if I hadn’t said that. Then, in New York, she worked as an artist’s model, posing nude four times a week, three hours each sitting, for students from an art school and also for some private classes. Helen frequented clubs and bars all during that time—Max’s especially. She dyed her hair orange, wore flat white powder on her face, and painted dark red lipstick on her naturally blush pink lips. She acquired a series of musician boyfriends who had apartments; she lived with each for about a month, until it wasn’t cool anymore, as she puts it. But, she states definitively, she’d never do it for money. I am slightly shocked, to hear that she might even consider doing it for money. She’s not romantic, she admits, which I can almost grasp, though it’s difficult to accept from one so young and, in a way, delicate. She is in another league altogether. I think of that—other leagues and other clubs. Twenty thousand leagues under the sea dwell those fascinating and grotesque octopuses. Why do they disgust me so? Has she read Jules Verne? I think not.

  When she and I walk together in town, men watch her move—women too—and I can’t tell if she’s doing something with her surprisingly round bottom or if it’s just the shape of it and her general demeanor. She’s not classically beautiful, but pretty and appealing, I think, and sexy in an awkward, almost androgynous way. She is also knowing, but then that’s an appropriately cool pose. As we get out of the car, having reached the village, which is just a few cottages, she rushes to explain that I don’t have to tell her anything I don’t want to, ever, that that ought to be our rule—no rules but that—our friendship must be different, unique. She says this so earnestly I want to embrace her, but feel that would be more common than unique and not at all hip. I respond pensively and formally, given the gravity of her statements: One should never have to say anything if one doesn’t want to do so. Helen tells me that she knows I want to be a mystery. With her, she asserts, I don’t have to try. I am one. I think quite the same thing about her, but would probably never tell her.

  The sun must be directly overhead. Twelve-thirty or one in the afternoon, and still the women labor in the rocky fields—what is this always called? stubborn earth. Their tanned faces are streaked with sweat and dirt. Kostas, the peasant who fought the Turks, is sitting under the shade of his arbor, the green grapes weighing down the slight structure. I don’t know how old he is but his age has afforded him a respected position in the village, that and his having fought the hated Turks. His BMW motorcycle, a remnant of World War II and the presence of the Germans, is parked next to a small barn where several donkeys bray, annoyed by flies. It is a wonderful, pastoral scene, a scene from the past one thought evanescent. Yet it exists and is untouched, by something. Innocent, isn’t it? Is Helen affected as I am by the beauty of such simplicity?

  Kostas offers us brandy—raki—in small glasses, and though it is too early for liquor and against my rules, I swallow my drink in one gulp. Helen sips hers slowly. Kostas and I converse in Greek and he pats Helen’s knee which, I can tell, doesn’t bother her. She appears to accept everything, almost neutrally. The youngest of the village children gather around us, having heard that foreigners have arrived. We are watched by dark-haired boys and girls who stand mutely by the side of the road. They stare at us guilelessly and as if we were noteworthy. Helen waves to them. Kostas eyes her and tells me, in Greek, that I am lucky to have her. I explain that we are friends, but he does not accept this and wants to know if I will marry her. It is lucky that there are many words for love in Greek, but I think he allows only one, in this case. Helen won’t have understood any of this, but I’m certain she knows we are talking about her. To change the subject I ask Kostas to show us the ruins at the top of the hill or small mountain that is the background to this scene, the backyard to his house.

  He pours us another shot and disperses the children with a shake of his walking stick, perhaps a bull’s penis or some such thing. They scamper away. Helen waves good-bye, something like a queen or more likely a fairy princess, and sips a little more of her raki. I down another. To hell with rules, to hell with noon. It’s a high noon. Kostas takes her hand, which is little in his rough, big one, more like a baseball mitt—a catcher’s mitt—than a hand, and she follows him up the hill, slipping and sliding in his wake. He wears those black leather boots that reach to the knee and that, even though he’s probably worn them for decades, are stiff, very stiff. Most uncomfortable, I should think. But masculine, I suppose, in their stiffness. I’ve never thought of that before. Helen carries on up the hill, struggling but undaunted, Kostas pulling her after him. I trudge behind them silently, and the odd thing is that once we get to the top, nothing memorable occurs. I can’t, now, remember what Kostas showed us. A ruin, of course, which I’d wanted to see, and probably had already viewed, years ago, but we looked around briefly and Helen seemed uninterested, and I’m embarrassed to admit that it all escapes me. I have to admit also that I am a terrible sightseer, for when in the site I have set out to visit I usually experience disappointment, not unlike that which one has after sex. I don’t want to make too much of this.

  But one sight I will always remember has nothing to do with what we ought to have seen. Perhaps the ruin was so ruined it was almost invisible. Perhaps we looked at hallowed, sacred and flat earth. Walking down the hill, Helen slipped and fell. Those stupid shoes of hers. Kostas swooped over to her, lifted her up and placed her on his back, and this ancient man carried her in that manner, on his back like a sack of potatoes, all the way down the mountain. Helen’s legs stuck out from his sides. I wouldn’t tell her so, but in the heat of the day, with her skirt riding up and her bare, tanned legs exposed, it was as if, indeed, Kostas were having her, as if they were making the beast with two backs. At the bottom of the hill, when he bent down to let her slide off his back, he kissed her cheek. It was very odd, and I don’t know what she made of it. Or what he made of it, that peculiar intimacy. She was silent all the way home but kissed me on the cheek when we returned
to town, a kiss that seemed to me a bond. That’s what I thought at the time.

  It’s not yet 6 P.M. The sun has already begun its descent, relinquishing its place at the top of the heavens. I watch Helen walk away, her round bottom swaying or shifting with each determined step. What is she thinking about? I have time to go to a movie, though my head feels dull and my eyes hurt from having looked continuously at the road. Those winding, horrible roads on the sides of mountains. I would leave civilization at the bottom of a hill rather than carry it on my back to the top, the way Kostas carried Helen. Helen is a kind of civilization. I must be tipsy to think that Helen is civilization, for if she is, she is of a different order from any I know. I’m certain she’s a new type, and I am somewhat proud to have discovered her while the others haven’t. This is probably why I want to know her, she who is scarcely more than a child.

  I pass the cafés. The men are playing tavoli, backgammon, at the tables. A few tourists have come into town. I notice their cars first and then I see them, excited and expectant. They depress me, always. I wonder if the Gypsy woman will make further contact with Helen. I pass the theater. The movie’s a Western which I’ve already seen three times so that makes up my mind. No movie tonight. Work. I love decisions being made for me, like the wonderful blizzards that closed school and kept one at home for the day. Sadly this is not unique to me, even here on Crete, and I am not alone in remembering those wintry New England days, remembering them on hot sunny ones and reliving them, even feeling them, with a poignant pleasure.

  My mother never entirely believed me when I announced I was sick; and I never believed her when she took to her bed, saying she was ill. Like all children I certainly didn’t think she’d ever leave me and die—she did, of breast cancer. Poor Mother. Father died years before her, in an airplane crash. He was with his secretary, and she perished too. I suspect she was his mistress. It was an abiding suspicion—the devoted employee is the patrician boss’s lover—but if my mother suspected as well, I never found out. She was circumspect. Father’s office, at his death, was filled with copies of Time magazine. He had subscribed to it from its beginning, from issue number one, and never threw a single copy away. Not one. He was that kind of man, economical and deliberate. He kept all the issues neatly piled and they were in mint condition at his death. Time was the only thing he collected, and in his will he left his collection to me, his younger son, his black sheep, his prodigal and wastrel. To my brother, Father willed his set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, not that my brother was in any way bookish. Mother was to live out her days in the family house, which would one day pass on to me and my brother. According to the terms of Father’s will, after Mother died my brother and I would divide up the estate, and whatever was left would be shared jointly. In the meantime, and until her death, everything was in Mother’s name. I’m happy to say she spent her remaining days in comfort and peace. Generous to a fault, Mother scrupled to leave us as much as she could. Fortunately, I’d already received a reasonable inheritance from my paternal grandfather. I’m not certain what Time magazine meant to my father, why he collected it, or why he left all those issues to me. I got rid of them, of course. Even from his grave, Father may still have been hoping to make, as he would have said, a man of me. He may have thought Henry Luce the right kind to emulate. Indeed! I myself try to make men of boys and to have them make something of me.

  Perhaps my fascination with Smitty is another type of atavism. It may simply be boredom. It’s odd. I don’t consciously worry about men loving or accepting me. I know one did deeply and assume two or three others probably have. Of course I always hope there will be another one or two on the horizon. I have always had male friends, in any case. Yet I am, I think, more comfortable with women; I seek out their company and friendship. Occasionally I fear they won’t love me. Gwen does, I know. And Alicia. I know my mother did. But I rejected her when I was young. Perhaps I am punishing myself, even now. I didn’t visit her when she was in the hospital. I don’t know what possessed me not to fly home right away. I kept saying to myself it wasn’t time yet. Then one day I received a telephone call from my brother, who told me, rather self-righteously, that she had died. I suppose he wanted me to express my guilt to him, in that very moment, but I didn’t. Nor have I. Not at the funeral, not ever.

  Famished and dry as a bone, I enter the restaurant. Some of the excited new tourists are also here. I ignore them, take my regular table in the rear of the terrace, and order white wine and light a cigarette. The wine is just cold enough; it sits dryly on my tongue, prolonging those vapors and bubbles of memory, champagne bubbles of memory.

  Night is now falling, and the moon begins its ascent. The lights glow across the harbor, and one of the fishing boats is making ready to set sail. A slight wind lifts the pink tablecloths, and the water slaps more vigorously against the seawalls. What a strange idea, that night falls. Perhaps not. I muse and sip the cold wine. The moon does go down, the sun does rise. Christos brings me broiled fish-sardines caught this morning, I like small fish-and a salad, some bread and more wine, though I see Nectaria trying to stop him from offering me another bottle. The day has been shot to hell anyway, lost when earlier I broke my drinking rule.

  Roger ambles over to the table, complaining about how the plumber didn’t come again today. It’s Saturday, I remind him. Roger also complains that he couldn’t get any writing done. He heard from his publisher yesterday. I don’t care, I want to say, but don’t, even though the wine has loosened me up. I stiffen instead, smile cryptically and hold myself more erect than usual, to fight the dreadful desire to blurt out something awful. He goes on jabbering. I ought to poke him in the eye or tell him what I think of his petty problems. His conservatism drives me mad. He would be terribly shocked were I to articulate what I really thought. We’ve had so many arguments over the years, the truth is, he must have an inkling, and not care a jot.

  Roger and I have often argued about the terrible imbalance of wealth in our country, with Roger taking the position finally that the poor can shift. I think it is a good thing he is not in the States, though his views are as obnoxious here as they would be there. Poverty is all around us here too. Rich people, I once told him, become lawyers because they know how to defend themselves. He called me a class traitor. Very amusing really, as he is not from my class but wishes he were.

  A privileged lad, I used to cavort on the streets of Manhattan and Boston at 4 A.M. when the police didn’t care what a crazy white boy from Harvard did as long as he didn’t get himself killed. He would never kill someone. That’s what they thought. But rich people do murder, they murder each other the way the poor do—perhaps not in such great numbers—and they make killings on the market that certainly cause great societal distress. Roger hates the flamboyant in me; he likes to imagine he is always in control—of himself, of the conversation and so on.

  Roger suggests that we play chess later. I announce that I’m going home to work. He arches one eyebrow, as if to say, Oh, Horace, poof, you aren’t going to write anything, nothing of value in your current state or, for that matter, ever. He glances at Yannis, who’s sitting nearby, chewing his fingernails, which I’ve told him not to do. Roger is figuring, I can see it in his transparent blue eyes, how to steal Yannis away from me, because though he let Yannis go, or rather though Yannis quickly left him, Roger likes to steal my lovers. He’s done it before. My book, my Household Gods, I insist unsteadily, will be an important work. Roger stands up and flutters his eyelashes at me. Then he most ungraciously laughs and says, while patting me patronizingly on the back, Blow it out your asshole, Horace! Can you imagine?

  Chapter 3

  The walk to Alicia’s apartment is sublime. It’s cool this afternoon and perhaps this means that fall is coming sooner rather than later. I hate thoughts like that. Let fall come when it will. Her house is perched atop a hill, is covered in purple flowers and has a few stone gargoyles shooting out from the roof. Little stones lodge between my toes as I wa
lk up her path, making my entrance less elegant than I had wanted it to be. This is when I feel old, when in bending down to shake out my shoes, I tremble and need to hold on to the side of the front door. Alicia watches this without contempt, I think, and I quickly recover my balance, in all senses.

  Paintings and drawings hang on most of the walls, though the room we sit in, a screened porch, is underdecorated, bare but for the two chairs and small round table on which is set a blue teapot, white cups and saucers, and pastries. Honeyed Greek dainties that eat into the enamel of one’s teeth. The view down the hill to the harbor is magnificent and Alicia gazes at it with the look of someone who has seen this, and it, all before. She owns the view, not because it’s hers—one doesn’t own views—but because she has incorporated it into her being. Today, because of something she’s done with her hair, I think, she reminds me of Maria Callas, were Callas an American of German and Polish descent, not Greek. Alicia’s mother was born and raised in the Polish countryside; and part of Alicia’s inheritance is a broad jaw, prominent nose, and square shoulders. She has always been a good friend to me, though there is a way in which she seems not to need anyone.

  Perhaps this is because there is a Supreme Being for Alicia. She believes in God, but I’m not sure what kind of God, and all around her apartment are religious symbols from the major faiths, and probably from some of the minor ones, too. I can only think, because I think in terms of family and tradition, that Alicia must have had an early religious education from which she turned away—it is hard for me to believe her faith wouldn’t have been shaken at some time—and to which she returned with renewed fervor after a terrible event. The loss of the child I’ve already fantasized for her, the acceptance of great failure on her part, the death of a lover, the loss of her singing voice—something must have made her turn again to God. God is a repellent idea to me, and were Alicia not so spiritually ambiguous in effect, whatever her beliefs, I would not be so fond of her. I would not even take tea with her. But she is and I do, with pleasure.