“Who’s Olivia?”
“My friend.” Nikos shrugged. “Neftali’s friend, really.”
“How did she know it was me?”
“This thing,” he said. He poked my chin with his forefinger. “She said you offered to buy her a drink.”
“So that’s Olivia,” I said. “Aspros is small.” I wondered how Nikos had described me. “How did you get here so fast?”
“After the boat left, I found another for Páros and then I hired a kaïka. I was here last night.”
“Well, there was nothing to worry about. I can take care of myself,” I said.
“Rupert,” he said, with appalling sincerity, “you got off on the wrong island.”
I looked up the street, then back down. This street, at least, looked much like Sérifos. “What are we waiting for?”
“The taxi. He’ll take us.” Nikos gestured up the mountain. A twisting path of shallow steps marked the ascent.
“He’s going to drive up the steps?”
“Yes. He has one of those Russian jeeps.”
“Couldn’t we stop and have a drink here?”
“Everyone is waiting for you,” said Nikos. “They are not eating their lunch.”
“But what if I hadn’t been on that boat?”
“I had a feeling,” said Nikos. He pinched my cheek.
The Russian jeep, made for hardship, bounced up the steps. The road was made for donkeys, and on the way we passed two of them. First there was a young man on a gray donkey, bouncing along, and then an older man dressed in similar clothes on a slower heavier animal. It was as if I were driving in hyper-time, and that the older man was the younger a few years down the line. I looked back at the port, down at the enchanted harbor, where a few boats bobbed by the pier. The harbor itself protected a shallow lagoon and the water there, underlit by white sand, was an unreal turquoise. Children swam and made sand castles, and a few were wading through the shallows with nets.
We turned a corner and the whole scene disappeared, curtained by the mountain. Now there were steep fields, olive terraces, sheer rocky drops with dirt clinging, and clinging in the dirt everything grew: grapes, figs, peaches, showy bougainvillea, and deadly oleander. We made the hairpin turns, bouncing upward, and Nikos said something to the driver. I guessed it concerned the baggage, because Nikos kept indicating our suitcases with a flat-palmed open hand, a gesture that I used to invite women onto the dance floor. There were a number of Venetian-style dovecotes, host to many doves. A black goat with a bell around its neck appeared at the side of the road, watching us with yellow eyes as we passed. A few dirt roads led off the main thoroughfare, but one sensed, in the tin-roofed shepherd huts and fenced-off caves, that people lived as they had for many years and probably didn’t venture into town all that much.
“This is Stavri,” said Nikos. We drove across a narrow bridge and the driver pulled over. The town square was not much of a town square in the Italian sense. There was no piazza, although there was a small park with a few trees and some dusty lawn, and in this was a cannon and a small pyramid of cannonballs, a memorial to some forgotten or remembered war.
“We get out here,” said Nikos. “He’s going to bring the bags. There’s a back road, but we should walk.”
I got down from the jeep and looked around. There was a restaurant with a grill, a bakery, and a pharmacy, where Nikos stopped. “The one pharmacy,” he said. “If you need anything, maybe you should get it now.” There was also a post office, a bank, and a kiosk. I bought some cigarettes and a package of gum.
“How far is the walk?” I asked.
“Not far, and straight, but people get lost.”
“Is that a definite?”
Nikos shrugged. “Clive got lost the other night, but maybe he was lying.”
“Who is Clive?” I asked. Nikos took a path to the left, and we began climbing the steps.
“Clive is young, in his twenties. He’s traveling with Nathan Hoffman.”
“Why does that name sound familiar?”
Nikos shrugged. “He’s from New York, a publisher. He’s rich. He and Clive are—how do you say ….?” He raised his eyebrows and smiled with significance.
“I don’t think you do,” I replied.
Nikos laughed. “They were fighting last night. I think when Clive gets drunk and can’t find his way home, that maybe he doesn’t want to go home.”
“Who else is in the house?”
“Jack is the artist I told you about in Athens.” Nikos looked to see if I remembered, and I did. “Jack Weldon. Do you know him?”
“The name sounds familiar, but I can’t think of what he paints.”
“He’s a sculptor,” said Nikos. He looked at me with significance and added, “He’s here with his wife.”
“And what does she do?”
Nikos started laughing in a slightly uncomfortable way. “Amanda Weldon. She’s magnificent.” He said this in a very detached way. He was not emotionally involved, and the word magnificent might as easily have referred to a car.
“And they’re all friends of Neftali’s from New York?”
Nikos nodded. “Nathan is one of her best friends.”
“And what about everyone else?”
“Clive is Clive. He’s not from New York. I don’t know if he has any money, but he has that American way that lets you know that, somewhere, someone was rich.”
“You don’t like him?”
“That is not what I said,” said Nikos. “He makes me laugh, but he’s very loud. When Clive is around, everyone is just watching Clive.”
“Who is the woman I met on the ferry?” I asked.
“Olivia? She lives in London.”
“Is she married?”
“Widowed, I think twice.” Nikos laughed. “Stay away.”
“And that’s everyone?”
Nikos thought a bit. He stopped and leaned over a stone wall where a peach tree was dropping its fruit. He picked a peach and handed it to me. “These people have been together for a week, and if they are together, just them, much longer I think they will start killing each other. When I got here last night, I was a hero. No one wanted to talk to the others, just to me. ‘Nikos, where is that jacket made?’ ‘How remarkable to think of getting the kaika in Páros. Tell us again how you did it?’”
“And you and Amanda?” I said.
Nikos raised his finger to his mouth and looked around, hands opening at his sides in mock alarm. “It is stupid of me. Amanda is very beautiful, but this Jack is like a crazy man. He goes and drinks with the fishermen, this one man who is also crazy—an Aspros man named Thanasi who makes pots—he says they are both artists, but this guy has only a few teeth and no shoes. Jack brings him back to the house, yelling something about Thanasi being the only real man. It was funny, because Nathan and Clive like boys, and they started laughing, and maybe he meant to insult me, but I just hid behind Neftali, like I did when we were children. He challenged us to fight Thanasi, but no one wanted to fight Thanasi, and Thanasi didn’t want to fight.”
“What time was this?”
“I don’t know. Three o’clock in the morning?”
“You were all up?”
“Only Neftali and Olivia had gone to bed. I was very happy that he wanted me to fight Thanasi, because when he started screaming outside, I was still with Amanda.”
I started laughing. All this bad behavior was making me inordinately happy. A donkey started bellowing somewhere, and when it stopped I realized there was music in the air.
I listened for a moment and then said, “Is that I Pagliacci?”
“Yes,” said Nikos. “It is coming from the house.”
“Caruso?”
Nikos fixed me with a look. “You care about this?”
I shook my head.
“We are nearly there,” Nikos added.
The path had flattened and was wider. Now the houses were bigger, Venetian style, not the quaint white cubes of traditional Cycladic archit
ecture. Nikos stopped at a house fronted by a tall whitewashed wall. The music was louder here, and I heard someone swearing, and another person laugh. The gate was iron, solid and painted—freshly—in a deep green.
Nikos looked over at me, straightened my collar, and brushed off my shirt. “Are you ready?”
“No,” I said.
He pushed on the gate, which swung inward.
The music was loud and no one noticed us at first. The house was perfectly symmetrical, with wide steps leading up to an enormous wooden door. People were standing in the yard to the left, in the shade of an almond tree, mostly clustered around a small table.
A young man with longish blond hair stood off to the side. He was wearing white pants and a white shirt, unbuttoned too low. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. “Just let the Caruso finish,” he said. This had to be Clive. “Honestly, Amanda, if I have to listen to Lakmé one more time, I’ll kill myself.”
“I like Lakmé,” said a voice, one that I recognized. It was Olivia. She was seated in a lawn chair off to the side wearing a straw hat, the kind used by donkey drivers, and a pair of large sunglasses.
“That’s because you’re a lesbian,” said Clive.
Nikos said nothing but went to his suitcase, which had been delivered and was standing next to mine, just inside the gate.
“Last night you called me the Black Widow,” Olivia said, laughing. “Which is it?”
“You kill your husbands because you’re a lesbian,” said Clive.
A man whom I guessed—correctly—to be Nathan stepped out from behind the table. Seeing us, his face lit up. “Nikos is back, and he’s brought Robert.”
“Rupert, actually,” I said. I walked over quickly and extended my hand.
Nathan shook it. “I am Nathan, and I’m delighted to meet you. I think I know your wife.”
“Ex-wife,” I said. “That’s why I recognized your name. You do that fund-raising thing. Musical instruments for the underprivileged.”
“I’m Clive,” said Clive.
I shook his hand.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he added. “We need some fresh blood.”
“I think the term is new blood,” said Olivia. She got up from her chair. “I’m ready for that drink.”
“What drink?” I said, although I’d anticipated the joke.
“The one you offered me on the boat. What was it, a brandy?”
A woman who must have been Amanda Weldon was standing over Nikos, who had opened his suitcase and was rifling through it on the lawn. She was very tall, nearly six feet in her flat sandals, and was wearing cropped pants. Her hair was a disheveled blond mess. She looked Amazonian. She was standing just in front of the suitcase, kind of hovering over Nikos in a way that looked both threatening and possessive. I looked over at Clive and he raised his eyebrows.
“Did you find what you’re looking for, Nikos?” he said.
“Yes,” said Nikos. “And I think they all made it in one piece.”
Apparently what I had been carrying all over the Cyclades was Nikos’s record collection—or, more specifically, Kostas’s collection of Victrola disks from the thirties and forties. The object of everyone’s attention was a portable Victrola, an old one, with a big horn-shaped speaker and a hand crank. Clive had found it under his bed, along with about ten records, mostly opera, and for the last four days the group had been occupied by a constant bickering over who got to listen to what. Neftali had sent word to Nikos that more records were needed, and he had complied.
“I wondered why your suitcase was so heavy,” I said.
“Why didn’t you open it? It wasn’t locked,” he replied.
I had never considered opening Nikos’s suitcase and I realized this was one of our cultural differences. The Caruso ended then, and Clive went to lift the arm.
“Don’t touch that,” said Nathan. “You’ve scratched nearly all of them.”
Clive lifted his hands and stepped back. From what Nikos had told me of these two, I had expected a different dynamic. I’d thought Nathan would be overweight or bald and that Clive would be his opportunistic boy-man, but it didn’t seem that way. Nathan was the better looking of the two, although he must have been close to fifty. His nose divided his face like a knife and his brow crossed it, making a T. He really did have chiseled features and classic proportions. I wanted to go at his face with a compass. His hair was black shot through with gray; thick, it seemed to stand straight up naturally but was forced along a perfect line of part.
“Is everything all right, Robert?” he asked.
“Rupert, Rupert,” I said. “Yes.”
Nathan smiled, and I was treated to his perfectly square teeth.
“Well, what have you got?” asked Clive.
Nikos was holding about five of the dozen or so records. “Bix Beiderbecke, and this one I don’t know.” He handed the record to Clive.
“Oh my god,” said Clive. “It’s Al Jolson.”
Clive took it quickly to the Victrola and put it on the turntable. He invited Nathan to set the needle down, and Nathan did. After the initial crackle and hiss of the Victrola warm up, the garden filled with Jolson’s warbling, pitiful yowl. The song was “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” to which Clive, apparently being from Virginia, knew every word.
“Carry me back to old Virginny,” he sang in a high-volume whimper, “that’s where the cotton and the corn and taters grow. …”
I looked over at Nathan and he was laughing. Nikos was speaking to Amanda in a rather stiff, overly polite way.
“Olivia,” I said, “I need a drink.”
“I was about to go in and make some martinis. And you should meet Neftali. She’s been worried about you.” I picked up my suitcase and followed Olivia up the steps to the front door. She pushed the door open and it swung inward, silently. Inside the house it was dark and still. Clive’s awful singing and a low, dirty laugh that had to be Amanda’s, seemed instantly far away. Down the corridor, I heard two women conversing in Greek and the sizzle of something cooked at a high heat.
“Neftali!” called Olivia. “Rupert is here to meet you.”
Neftali appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. She was wearing wide-legged white pants and a fitted sailor-style shirt. Neftali was not a small woman, but she was beautiful and she knew it. Her hair was pulled back tightly off her face and she had a thick fuchsia lipstick on. “There he is, the one Nikos loves so much.”
She came up to me and grabbed my upper arms and squeezed. Then she kissed both my cheeks. “Come,” she said. I followed her into the kitchen. She was peeling some charred eggplants while an older woman, probably the wife of the caretaker, tended to something frying in a pan. Neftali looked at me purposefully. “You have to talk to Nikos,” she said, in an anxious whisper. “He must leave Amanda alone. Jack will kill him.”
“Where is Jack?” I asked.
“He’s still asleep.”
I nodded. “Why don’t you talk to Amanda?” I asked.
“I don’t know her,” said Neftali.
“So it’s Jack who’s your friend?”
“He’s a genius,” she said, as if to explain his presence and the possibility that she didn’t like him. “They were supposed to return to Hydra, but Amanda has convinced Jack to stay another couple of days.” Neftali shook her head. “This will only bring trouble. Talk to Nikos. He will listen to you.”
“I’m not really sure he will,” I said. I moved next to her and began peeling one of the eggplants. Olivia was dropping ice in a pitcher.
“You keep doing that, I’ll get the garlic.” Neftali nodded at me. “You’ll think I’m a bad host for making you work, but remember I lived in New York, and she—” Neftali gestured with her head at the woman at the stove—“no one’s really sure, but I think she’s in her eighties.”
The woman looked over her shoulder and smiled at us, and I nodded back.
Olivia had finished making martinis. “First one’s for you,” she said, p
ouring it.
“Thank you.”
“Very handy, aren’t you? Your mother brought you up well.”
I looked at the eggplant, which was turning into a gray and seedy mound of glop on the pan in front of me.
“Actually, I never knew my mother.” I smiled charmingly. “Or my father.”
“Really?” Olivia looked at me, possibly sympathetic, possibly suspicious, but at least interested.
“I was brought up by my uncle,” I added.
I had determined these precise sentences and how they ought to be delivered while still in college. I knew how to say them without being self-pitying or hostile and without divulging too much. I took a sip of the martini.
“What is this?” I said. “This is no martini. This is a glass of vodka and—see—it’s managed to kill this olive.” I pushed the olive down and it bobbed, lifeless, in the glass. “Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“No,” said Olivia. She smiled stiffly and walked out, carrying the pitcher of martinis. I knew other people needed drinks, but I also knew she was fleeing my presence and had some secrets of her own.
Lunch was served in the yard on a wobbly table, covered with a white cloth. Neftali fussed around, shaking her head at the plates, at the table, at the chairs. “This house was built in 1825,” she said, “and we have owned it the whole time and replaced nothing.” She held up a fork that had tarnished to a pinkish sheen. “I wonder how old this thing is?”
“Rupert can tell you,” said Nikos.
“Yes I can.” I took the fork from her and studied the handle, the imprint, the quality. “This is Italian and dates from about 1870, maybe a bit later.”
“That comes in handy,” said Clive enthusiastically.
I handed the fork back to Neftali.
“Well, you wouldn’t want to eat off a fork without knowing how old it was, would you?”
We all turned to see the source of this booming voice, and there he was, standing on the steps of the house in bare feet, rough cotton pants, and no shirt. It was Jack Weldon.
“Well,” said Nathan, who was sitting to my right, “that’s an appealing introduction, isn’t it?”
Jack walked slowly down the steps and took the empty seat next to his wife. He kissed her on the cheek and leaned over the table, his hand extended. “I’m Jack,” he said. “I’m a sculptor.”
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