“Stop it,” I said. “Please. Don’t.”
“Where were you?” she repeated.
I had always taken refuge in the fact that this was the truth: the coffee, the café, the location. I suppose I didn’t want to admit that there was anything worse than a father losing his son, but being unreachable when it happened, not knowing for four hours was perhaps just that. “I was there,” I said.
Hester exhaled through her nose. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Of course you don’t, and I’ll tell you why. Because you want to believe I was with another woman. But even if I had been off fucking someone, Michael’s death still wouldn’t be my fault.”
Hester waited.
“Uncle William wanted Michael to call him Grandpa. Of course I told him he was stuck with Uncle William.” I put out the last of my cigarette and immediately lit another. “I took it as an opportunity to ask about my mother, and Uncle William told me. He was—well, uncharacteristically vulnerable the day Michael was born.”
“Why are you talking about this?” Hester asked.
“Haven’t you always wanted to know about my mother?”
At the next table, someone won the backgammon and a small cheer rose out. Hester took another sip of her drink. “Who was she?”
“My mother? A dancer. A waitress favored by Uncle William. A transgression. Here I am.” I smiled sarcastically, which I knew she hated, especially when I was using it to show the dark side of self-pity. “She had no desire to know me. I suppose he thought he was protecting me. He still sends her money.”
“What does this have to do with Michael’s death?”
“The day Michael drowned, I was at the café where my mother works.”
Hester showed a little surprise.
“Where I used to go every Tuesday from about two to four in the afternoon. Sometimes longer.”
Hester took a dry swallow. She tried to look angry; anger was the glue of her dignity. That there had been no other woman was straining her last reservoirs of strength. I watched the reasoning: that I was not the villain, that all the hatred of me that had sustained her since Michael’s death was undeserved. I was not the naked and lunging animal. I was just a curious and sad man sipping coffee, watching a middle-aged and still attractive woman take orders, replenish cups, suggest pie, on what had been—that luckless Tuesday—a sunny day, stiff breeze, good for sailing.
Hester looked like she was appraising me, but she was really processing the information. Who was this ex-mother-in-law, the grandmother who had never—would never—know her own grandchild?
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“About what?”
“Where you were the day Michael drowned.”
“I am telling you now,” I said.
The fact was that Hester had never asked. I’m sure she thought it beneath her to go digging for details of what she was sure were her husband’s transgressions. And a part of her felt responsible for this presumed philandering. What did she expect? She was older than I and on the plain side. I had been attracted to her wit and strength, which were fine for me yet never quite enough for her.
Hester served up a cold smile. “And that’s what the truth sounds like,” she said. That the truth might be unsatisfying had never occurred to her. “So what’s she like, your mother?”
“I never spoke to her,” I said. “I never had the courage.”
Hester waved the waiter over again. She’d drained her wine and I knew—from drinking the stuff—that it wasn’t strong enough. “What he’s drinking,” she said.
We sat there quietly for a while. Hester was wondering what had happened to our marriage. She had wondered for years about this other woman, this cheating wife or stupid girl, who had sabotaged our life and made it unfixable. And I had let the marriage fall apart, because Hester’s grief was frightening and I lacked the courage to watch it. And I had my own grief, of course, but it was quiet, and alone I could take myself apart piece by piece.
“There was hope for us,” she said finally. It was an accusation, but it contained an optimism for our future. “You know,” she continued, “we need you at the shop. Without Papa, we’re short.”
This surprised me. “You’ve kept the books for years,” I said. “You’re better off without me in the way.”
“But you’re the best at appraising.”
“Ah, yes, the foremost expert in dressers, handy to have around.”
Hester shut up. She took a minute pretending to be interested in the ashtray by worrying a flaking chip. She stopped abruptly and trained her eyes on me again. “Nathan keeps talking about his friend Olivia in such a way that I’ve determined she must have some bearing on my life,” she said.
I wanted to lie, but right then I didn’t have the imagination. “I’m moving to Scotland with Olivia after I’m done with my work here.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
“One thing at a time.”
“You look very well, Rupert,” she said. It was intended to humiliate, but I’d seen it coming. “How old is Olivia?”
“She’s a year older than you.”
This made Hester pause. She thought to herself and then started laughing, then laughing louder, hysterically. I watched her without moving. “You don’t love her, and you didn’t love me either,” she said. “All you want is a mother.”
There’s a hit, I thought. “That’s banal,” I said.
“Oh, yes, nothing more banal than analysis.” The alcohol was beginning to have some effect and she had melted ever so slightly. She said, “Don’t you ever miss me, Rupert?”
I looked at her, the heart-shaped face, the weak chin, the once-golden hair that had faded to a pale ashy yellow. The pause bothered her, and she shook her head.
“I do miss you,” I said.
“When, Rupert? When do you miss me?”
I thought for a moment. “I miss you now.”
Hester was booked into a hotel in the port town, a decent place with its own bathroom and a small private balcony. Nathan took a room in the same hotel, since he thought someone should stay near her. Hester seemed on the verge of something that we all hoped was sanity but could easily have been something less desirable. I provoked her, so I was off the hook. Nathan hardly knew her—Hester really wasn’t that close to anyone except her father—but he had met her. Nathan was really doing it for me. And for Olivia, who wanted me around. And I didn’t want to be with Hester. I wondered at that younger self that had found her comforting.
Neftali showed up the next day on the 11 A.M. ferry. I was at the site all day, and by the time I returned home at six, dusty, frustrated, and sunburned, Olivia had filled her in on recent events.
“How was Mýkonos?” I asked.
Neftali shrugged. “I wanted to bring my son to meet you all”—Neftali’s son was eighteen—“but he says Aspros is too boring. Of course, I could tell him some things that might change his mind, but then my husband might disapprove.”
“If you were my wife,” I said, “I wouldn’t let you out of my sight.”
Neftali looked at me with some concern. “I’m worried about you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Please don’t stop.”
“Tomorrow you can borrow my cousin’s car to find a place to throw your father-in-law into the ocean.” She squeezed my arm. “Rupert, Rupert,” she said. I knew I was supposed to tell her I was fine, but I liked her too much to lie.
I was grateful for the car because the thought of climbing around the hills with Hester on the Vespa wasn’t really appealing. Hester wasn’t that old—she was forty-two—but she had embraced middle age while still in her thirties and dressed like a younger Miss Marple. I went to pick her up at seven, and we drove to the one monastery reachable by car. The soil was dusty, like ash itself. We had to park the car by a bullpen, and the fact that an unfriendly bull was contained there by only the suggestion of a fence—he must have had a fear of sticks to stay—sent us back t
o the coast. I returned for the first time to the beach by Faros and we climbed the same hill that Clive and I had climbed on the day we’d seen Jack and Thanasi lurking in the cave.
Hester looked out at the water, the small chapel. A wind had picked up, and she raised her hand to the top of her head to keep the hair out of her eyes.
“I think this will do,” she said.
I didn’t tell her that we were standing just in front of a rock that Clive had urinated on, or point out the small pile of goat dung just to the right of her shoe. The breeze was blowing out to sea and, honestly, Max had been such a delightful person that had he been there he would have said, “Oh, just get it done. Then you can go have a drink before dinner. Hester needs one.” And thinking about old Max saying that made my eyes sting for the first time. And it all came on me at once. There would be no more Tea Room lunches. There would be no more Christmas hams studded with stinking cloves. I would no longer pour out aperitifs into tiny crystal glasses because Uncle William wouldn’t want the toxic syrups, not anymore, not without Max, and who else drank them? No one would yell at me from the back of Grolsz’s, “Another new suit?” when I entered, because no one would care. And he was one less person to remember Michael. And he was one less person to know me, the old me, that for all the booze and sex and love of Olivia, had never recovered.
Hester took the urn, which had been sticking out of her alligator bag, but after twisting off the lid, she hesitated. She wasn’t surprised at my sudden grief. She knew that side of me and it reassured her. She had been waiting for it, needing it, since her arrival. She placed her hand on my arm and whispered, “Who would have thought that a man with a forty-two inch waist could fit in there?”
I took that as my cue to pull myself together. “Better throw it now, Hessie,” I said, “before the wind shifts.”
And when we were walking back to the car, I remembered, and I said, “I missed your birthday this year, but I did think about you.”
And then I took her back to her hotel.
I should never have slept with Hester. I knew it was wrong, even as I took off my shirt and she undressed quickly and neatly, putting her dress on a hanger and that on the curtain rod with the same speed it took me to get my shorts around my ankles. Hester knew what she wanted in all things, and in this arena—the bedroom—what she wanted was quite a divergence from her socially impeccable, unyielding image. I’d wondered what was going through her mind, what she’d made of the last mouthful of bourbon that I took from the glass on the nightstand even as I laid myself on top of her, but she kept her thoughts to herself. I’d appreciated her silence because I was trying to deny that Hester was Hester, not because of her, but because of my son. Because I didn’t want to remember him then. Not when having sex. The connection seemed—at least intellectually—absurd.
I returned to the villa at around nine the next morning. The Vespa was not in sight, and I assumed that Nikos had gone off to supervise the workers without me. I had a hangover and no cigarettes; I could hear Lakmé spewing out over the wall, and it did not fill me with confidence. I pushed the gate open and peeked inside. The familiar donkey-driver hat was visible over one of the chairs, but Olivia was facing the Victrola and didn’t see me. I wasn’t sure what to do when Amanda swiftly and silently—she was barefoot—ran down the steps of the house and ushered me back outside.
“Where were you last night?” she said in a whisper.
I opened my mouth, shut it, and then said, “I was with my wife.”
“Your ex-wife,” Amanda reminded me.
“I take it Olivia’s not very pleased with me.”
“She’s not mad at you.” Amanda glanced at the house. “Olivia thinks she must have been out of her mind to get involved with someone thirteen years younger, who really doesn’t seem the faithful type.”
“But I am,” I protested, “usually.” I pondered this. “It was my wife, for God’s sake. She was grief-stricken, and I was a mess, and it was stupid, but I didn’t see a way out of it.”
“Was she blocking the door, Rupert?” Amanda had a twinkle in her eye.
“What’s the use?”
“I’m not about to give you a hard time,” she said. “Olivia won’t stay mad forever. She really does care about you. In fact”—Amanda moved my hair around; I supposed she was fixing it, but I hadn’t seen it that morning and didn’t know if it was messy—“Olivia thinks she’s making unreasonable demands on you.”
“So what do I do?”
I’d meant it as rhetorical question, but Amanda grew suddenly serious. She moved the gate open so that she could get a clear view of Olivia’s back with her signature hat. “You go in quickly and, without saying anything, you sit at her feet and put your head in her lap. And she’ll probably say your name, and when she’s done that, before she can get another word out, you launch into an apology, and tell her how crazy you’re feeling and how you don’t deserve her.”
I considered this for a moment. “I think you’re right,” I said.
“You’re good for her, believe it or not,” said Amanda. She pushed me through the door. “Quickly, before Clive shows up and ruins everything.”
I did put my head in Olivia’s lap, and she said I needed to wash my hair, and I apologized profusely and then confessed that, although I was apologizing, what I really wanted to do was complain about my wife and how could Olivia stand me when I was so selfish? She agreed that I was selfish. It was undeniable. But she also said she was sick of thinking about herself, sick of other people thinking about her, so maybe it was all right, and I told her I found it offensive that she thought of me as a distraction, which made her throw back her head and laugh, and she called me a wife fucker or WF, and only Olivia ever called me that.
The Vespa was dead the following morning, no clicking, no rattle, so it went to the one person who could fix it and Nikos and I walked. The walk usually took about a half hour and I realized how much I’d wanted time with Nikos. A stiff breeze was blowing off the water and keeping things cool. Hester was to leave on the evening ferry and I was glad for it. I thought of making an offering to Apollo, or perhaps Poseidon, to guide the passage of the Aphrodite, to keep the seas calm and the sun shining. To make it leave miraculously on time. To get her off this island and over to Corfu, where some English friend of hers named Eleanor, who was known to Nathan, kept a house.
We walked for a while in silence, and I could feel Nikos checking me every now and then.
“I’m just a bit depressed, Nikos. It’s understandable.”
“Yes,” said Nikos. “What would make you happy?”
“Small happy? Athens four weeks ago. You and me, Sue and Helen, only this time I get Helen.”
Nikos laughed. “And big happy?”
I shrugged.
“You don’t know what makes you happy, Rupert. To me, if this was my life, I would think it was a problem.”
I wondered. “I’ve never known. I only know when something’s gone, far away, and then I can say it made me happy. I think I’m perverted this way.” I walked a couple of more feet. “Nikos,” I said, “I think I’m going to ask Olivia to marry me.”
Nikos looked at me with concern. “Is that the smart thing to do?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“Why marry her? There are no kids. You are already married once. Why?” Nikos shrugged in an exaggerated way. It made him look like a turtle pulling in its head.
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said.
I was struggling to understand it myself.
Part of it was Olivia’s illness. Her circumstances were, in a fairly operatic way, alluring. Perhaps I could equate this with gallantry. I didn’t want Olivia thinking about us as something with a shelf life. I remembered Uncle William grappling with his father’s impending death, the flotsam of which no doubt clouded my dealings with mortality, any mortality, Olivia’s included. My grandfather had died, shortly after I’d graduated from college, at the age of ninety-two. He wa
s forty years older than Uncle William, and I think this age gap and the fact that Grandpa William was fairly spectral through all the years I knew him—and possibly earlier—might have created certain negative associations with the role of father. Uncle William never liked to visit Grandpa William in the nursing home, but he absolutely refused to go alone, and I was the obvious choice for company. We visited Grandpa William once a week on Wednesdays. His was a slow decline, but at some point after he turned ninety, I did observe that he had become unrecognizable and not quite a man. He was an amalgam of smooth nubs of skin and bone that made me think of heels and elbows. The nurses kept him very clean and his only smell was one that I attributed—although now I wonder why—to the palate of his false teeth, which the nurses must have popped in for our benefit. His constantly open mouth was sort of dry and it seemed unlikely that he used it for eating. He was frighteningly thin and small and reminded me of skeletons of prehistoric people, reassembled on lab tables; there was a certain “this skull goes with this collar bone” unity about him, although the final effect was not exactly a person. His eyes were still very much alive but had only one expression—bewildered fear. He seemed to be in a constant state of awe. At some point he became completely paralyzed. I remember going shopping for one of his final birthdays. I was stymied and called Uncle William for some guidance.
“He doesn’t do anything, and whatever he might use—linen sheets, for example—is a bit macabre,” I said.
“Don’t get him sheets,” said Uncle William.
“What are you getting him?”
“Golf clubs.”
Uncle William saw nothing funny in this, although I did laugh on my end of the phone for a while, but after I hung up I realized he’d managed to convince me. I went out and a got an argyle sweater, a nice green one, that would look great on a golf course. It wasn’t in good taste to remind people of their death when you were supposed to be celebrating their birth. I now saw the stinginess in getting chocolates for little old ladies on their special days, and it wasn’t merely financial: it was a stinginess of spirit. Of course, when Uncle William and I showed up on Grandpa William’s birthday and gave him the golf clubs and the sweater, he responded with the same bewildered terror about the eyes, as well as a moan, which started somewhere in the lungs, losing nearly all its strength by the time it left his mouth, as if it were the echo of something he’d said ten years earlier.
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