Later, when Amanda was straddled across me, leaning on my wrists, with her breasts hanging near my face, I asked her, “Why are you with Kiplinger?”
And she said, “Because you won’t have me.”
A part of me wanted to believe her, but I knew it was bullshit.
The light woke me up first, flaring and flashing on the far wall. My eyes were barely open when I heard Neftali screaming in Greek. I threw Amanda’s arm off and got out of bed. I had just pulled my shorts up when Neftali ran into the room in her bathrobe.
“Rupert!” she said. “Your barn!”
I ran downstairs in my underwear, wrapped in a blanket. I got my boots on in the hall and slammed the door open. The sky was heated and glowing. Flames quivered and flared out of the roof, and the hot breath of the barn’s burning warmed the night. There was a tense creaking, an agony of wood, and then a loud crash as the roof collapsed. On the hill, a few neighbors had gathered to watch, to listen to the groaning timbers and shattering glass, occasionally a splintered explosion as something blew. I held my breath. Neftali came beside me and squeezed my arm.
“Quite a spectacle, isn’t it?” I said.
“Oh, Rupert, all your beautiful things.”
My barn, courtesy of Veronica, was going up in flames.
Of course, I never pressed charges. A man from the insurance company came to call. I’d only gotten around to insuring some things—not all—in the weeks before the fire, and I suppose this looked suspicious. I asked Uncle William to call one of the higher-ups in the insurance company. I thought he might know someone, and he did. Then the police found a gas can, but they must have known it wasn’t mine. I wasn’t sure what to do with the house. As I packed up my things, I wondered if I’d ever live in it again. The house already had a deserted feel.
I stood by the window taking a last look around my bedroom. There were no real memories here, and the view of the stark horizon depressed me. I wondered why I’d ever found it comforting. The curtains had been taken off the windows by the cleaning woman, to be stored until a tenant could be found. And that was why I saw the earrings—Amanda’s—that she had left on the windowsill a week earlier. They were large emerald-cut solitaire diamonds. They made an extravagant present, one I immediately attributed to Kiplinger. I wondered if Amanda remembered where she’d left them and she must have, but she was probably waiting for me to straighten it out.
I suppose I could have met up with Amanda in New York and returned the earrings over dinner. That would have been polite, but then I remembered—with a measure of relief—that she was still seeing Kiplinger. Our having dinner was not exactly proper. Mailing the earrings would be not only easy but discreet. I looked through my address book, found the ferry ticket with Amanda’s number, and dialed. The phone rang a couple of times. I flipped the ticket over and began reading it. I would not have done this, but I wanted to read the Greek letters as practice for my impending visit to Nikos. This ticket was from Piraeus—I could see that much—but the destination was not Aspros but rather Hydra. The date was the fourth of August. There was something significant about it; maybe it was a birthday. What was the fourth of August? And then I remembered. I hung up the phone.
The fourth of August was the day Jack had been murdered.
15
p
Nikos and I spent the first week of my trip in Athens. There weren’t that many tourists yet, and whoever had made the journey was serious, middle-aged, or unattractive, and usually a combination. Knee socks were popular. So were maps. I made a call to Steve Kelly and was told by someone at his office that he was out of town. When I asked them where he was, they wouldn’t tell me. I left my number. He never called. I thought of dropping by the hotel to look for him—I was staying with Nikos at his house—but somehow never did.
By myself, I walked up to the Acropolis. I had a sketch pad with me and I saw a little boy pointing at it. Maybe he thought it was funny that a grown man would want to draw. Maybe he was jealous. He had his finger raised and held it, and I looked into his wide face, his blue eyes.
“Stop pointing,” said his mother, or something close in French, and hurried him off.
I continued up the slippery marble walkway, up the steps, trying to imagine someone from the deep past making this same trip in leather sandals, someone whom the heat did not bother: Socrates, pre-hemlock. I felt I was being followed and looked quickly over my shoulder, but the stairs descended in emptiness, until a dog crossed on its way to somewhere else. The shadow of a dove flying, a brief darkness on the yellow stone, crossed after. There was no one in sight. On my right was the Agora, a peaceful dusty meadow, a few pieces from monuments strewn around, but they didn’t suggest greatness, only monumental decay. An Asian man with a camera snapped a picture. He sensed me watching him and turned around. He was wearing sunglasses and I couldn’t see his eyes. If I had been closer, I’d have seen myself reflected and staring back.
It wasn’t that hot, but I was dizzy. I remembered the café where I had sat with Steve. I pictured his red hair and the bougainvillea falling over him, and the ice in the glasses and his beautiful friend. I took an alley to the left which, in my invented map, led to this same place. I wandered on, but here it was deserted and dirty. I stopped to think. An ancient wall was marred by a rotting wooden door. Graffiti in wavering Greek coursed over the rock in a perversion of hieroglyphics. Twitching on the doorstep, a needle still in his vein, a young man groaned in a combination of pleasure and grief. He didn’t notice me, and I walked past quickly.
I was not going to find my café. I headed upward, upward. The path curved to the right. At a distance I saw a man walking with a cane. He was wearing a hat. He was old and walked slowly, but I couldn’t catch up with him. I walked faster, but the distance remained between us. I wondered why I was chasing him, and then I realized I thought he was Michaud, the French archaeologist I had encountered in Delphi. But Michaud was dead. And this man, with his cane, disappeared around a bend in the road, and when I finally rounded it he was gone.
I bought a bottle of water at a shop that sold cigarettes and lottery tickets and drank half.
The Acropolis had many people wandering it, climbing on the rocks, looking up at its curving pillars as if somewhere there, contained in the language of the metopes, was an explanation of the nature of man. Why, despite what we knew of the battle, savagery versus reason, our Centaurs always triumphed over our Lapiths.
I felt very lonely as I walked back down the mountain. Everyone seemed to be a couple or a part of some other gathering of souls. A little boy stood screaming, mouth wide, his hands fisted at his sides as his mother, a beautiful anachronism in black, heeled oxfords, and hat, did her best to wipe the tears. Two priests in front of me, like chess pieces in their matching black, glided down the path. The whole walk down seemed strange as if I’d wandered into a hall of mirrors, able to see yet not be seen—not seen by the couple embracing on the ancient wall, or by the two little boys chasing each other, or by the old man talking to his cat. Ahead there was a young man with his wife, and they had a little boy, and I wondered if that’s what I would look like walking with Olivia and Michael. But we had never walked together.
Suddenly I had to sit down. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be anywhere. And I remembered why Uncle William had sent me to Greece, nearly a year ago. He thought it would heal me. He couldn’t bear to see his “golden sunshine” so extinguished. He’d told me years ago that I had saved him. He had been lost. He had destroyed a string of lovers and felt so alone that he traveled and traveled and traveled, always two steps ahead of that one who was stalking him: himself. This was when I was in college, just accepting that I could love this man and learning to enjoy him. The whiskey had him but his words were sublime and pounded on my eardrums, unlike anything he’d said before.
I stood up from the wall. I was sweating. I had to get something to drink. I took a few cautious steps, conscious of the blood humming in my brain and t
here were dark purple splotches dancing in my peripheral vision. I placed my feet on the ground in front of me, one after the other. I had a moment of consciousness, where I remembered wondering why people didn’t just sit down when they felt this way. Why they pretended that they could stand and walk and function. But I couldn’t bring myself to sit down. I just wanted to get away from the ancient buildings, the churning eternity of people. I thought of all the bones beneath my feet, all those dead philosophers and ordinary Greeks. I thought of my house on its bald hill with its one tree and wondered if this hill had once looked like that. Once a hill, but now choked with buildings, some falling in disrepair, all rotting window grilles and splintered wood held whole by glossy paint. I stopped to rest and then I saw someone, reflected in a dirty window, looking over my shoulder. I turned quickly, but there was no one there.
It was just a reflection, ungenerous, altered by mood.
Something in the shading of this blackened glass aged me. I looked heavier. My hair was pushed off my forehead with sweat and looked as if it had thinned. It was me, older, less handsome, in a wrinkled suit.
Back at the Nikolaides house, I fell into a deep sleep, and when I woke up it was ten-thirty. Nikos was waiting for me, waiting to eat. We sat on the terrace on the roof. The food smelled of olives and dill. I realized that I was starving. Nikos had spent the day trying to get a form through some ministry, which seemed to be a ministry set up to stymie the progression of forms of its invention.
“I need a break,” said Nikos. “I’m glad we are getting out of Athens.”
A light breeze scattered the paper napkins. On the street, unseen but loud, two young girls gossiped back and forth.
“You’re wrong about the Acropolis,” I said.
“Why? What did I say?”
“You said there was nothing to see there.”
“When did I say that?”
“It was the first time I met you. You said, ‘Every Greek has the Acropolis at his back.’ And then you said something about wanting to know the future.”
“I don’t remember saying that,” said Nikos. He gave me an incredulous look. “How can you walk around with all those things in your head? Memories are for old people.”
After dinner, Nikos asked to see my sketches. At first I resisted, but then I remembered Olivia with her poem, who had read it just to avoid appearing too serious about it, and this seemed a wise course of action. I went upstairs and got the sketchbook.
“Very nice,” he said. “But this is just your hand.” He flipped up the pages, over and over, and there were maybe fifty studies of my left hand at all different angles. I had stayed sketching at the Acropolis for hours.
“It’s the only thing I can draw,” I said. I flipped a few pages later and there was an attempt at one of the caryatids of the Erechtheion. I had imposed some sort of sensibility on her because I hadn’t trusted a nose that big to be beautiful. The eyes were round and bulged out over her other features, and I had flattened the whole. Nikos flipped to the earlier pages, to a sketch of the octopus bowl that we’d excavated from Aspros. I had put all the fragments together on the page in a way that I thought made sense.
“Maybe there’s a part of you that is an artist,” said Nikos.
“No, Nikos,” I said. “There’s a part of me that wants to record. I like to hold on to things. I never think of something and want to draw it. Or want to make something.”
“No imagining of things?” asked Nikos.
“No creative urge. No obsession. No glorious dementia.” I took back my book. “No gift.”
Nikos nodded at me thoughtfully. We had had a few drunken, carousing nights, but both of us were a bit subdued, Nikos because of his impending wedding and me because being in Greece reminded me of the previous summer and Olivia. And Jack, whose death was bothering me.
I asked, “Are the police still investigating Jack’s death?”
Nikos shrugged. “They can investigate all they want, but if they were going to find the killer, they would have already done it.”
“So the killer gets away with it.”
Nikos was surprised at my concern. “Does this upset you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. Because I wasn’t.
Nikos thought my depression would pass. He had decided to get married and was of the opinion that I should get married. What was good for him was good for me. Number three is the charm. He thought I should go back to work. He didn’t seem to think my business in Vermont qualified and, much as I protested, I rather agreed. He kept looking at my sketch of the bowl and saying how very good it was, how I’d impressed him in Aspros, sitting in the violent heat with my basins and bowls, patiently looking at all the fragments. He sounded vaguely parental on this point. I really didn’t need that kind of attention, not from Nikos, but I had a suspicion that later in life I would revisit this annoying episode in our friendship with a certain amount of affection.
After I’d left Vermont, I’d been nagged by a desire to learn more about Jack. I met Neftali for coffee the day before she was to return to Greece. Neftali and Jack had been close once, long ago. I wondered how she tied in with Jack’s fascination with Greece. They might have been lovers when Neftali was in her twenties, although she said nothing to confirm this. Their involvement, although it had never previously entered my mind, now seemed certain. Despite—or perhaps because—of what they’d been to each other, they remained friends. That’s why she’d had him at the house in Aspros, and it was Neftali who’d helped Jack and Amanda move to Hydra. Yes, his drinking had bothered her, and the young wife sleeping with everyone, but artists were like children. Sometimes you had to look the other way.
Jack was born in 1916, somewhere in Missouri. A sister and a brother had died during the Depression, the sister from pneumonia, the brother from a tractor accident that had left him with one arm for the last two days of his life. Jack had nursed the brother through this, and apparently, although I’d never seen it, Jack’s breakthrough exhibit was a series of male figures all with one arm. Jack’s coming to art was something of a mystery, but he’d had some formal training at the Art Institute in Chicago. He painted for a while and some of the canvases survived.
“But he loved sculpting things,” Neftali told me. “He liked to put something into the space, and see it move out all the air.”
I hadn’t seen anything of his, other than his replicas, but from the way Neftali was shaking her head, it was clear that she’d been impressed.
“You know, Jack was in the war, in France. There was a grenade that landed somewhere close. It killed everyone but him. He stayed in a ditch with his leg broken up, the bone sticking through, for four days, waiting for death. Waiting. And someone came and saved him. And then one day he is killed by a man with a hat.” She was angry. “That’s all we know. But this great artist is dead, dead, and he was only forty-seven.”
Of course I wanted to tell Neftali this “man with a hat” had actually been Amanda, that the hat was Olivia’s missing donkey-driver straw. If I’d shown Neftali Amanda’s ferry ticket to Hydra, she would have come to the same conclusion as I had. After all, Amanda’s only alibi had been Tomas. But I didn’t want to torture Neftali with this information. She was better off without it.
“I don’t hate Jack anymore,” I said. “I don’t know what he meant to accomplish with his little army, but there’s something sincere about it.”
Neftali put her hand on mine and squeezed. “Rupert, you think you’re worse than you are.”
I wondered why Jack had chosen Hydra as his home. Why not be closer to his rebels up in Macedonia or Thrace—or anywhere, for that matter, on the mainland? I sipped my coffee and looked at the harbor. The sunlight hit the surface of the water and was shattered into a million brilliant pieces. Boats came back and forth. Workers leaped onto the hard brick of solid land. Convoys of horses, standing patiently, all strung together, waited for their loads. There were no cars and no bicycles on Hydra. People walked everywhere or
rode horses. The place was too quiet, which made it seem as if everyone were shouting. A few elegant yachts were at anchor in the harbor, and I could hear a volley of accents: English, Danish, and American.
Nikos came out of the café and sat down. He fixed his eyes on me in that overly patient way that let me know he was prepared for an argument.
“Tell me we’re not here to see Amanda,” I said.
“We are not here to see Amanda,” he said.
“Why are you even in contact with her?”
“She’s selling the house. She needed someone to help her.”
“And you agreed?”
“She has an agent,” said Nikos. “She just wanted to check with someone she trusted.”
“And why am I here?” I asked.
Nikos shook his head in a patronizing way. “Look,” he said, pointing at some sort of old fort. “Look,” he said, gesturing up the hill at a bank of mansions. “Look,” he said. He grabbed my head and turned it toward an old clock tower that looked vaguely German. “Water,” he said. “Boats.” He looked around. “Horses! Lots of horses.”
“I’m looking,” I said.
“This is Hydra,” said Nikos. “Even the Greeks come to look.”
“Very pretty,” I said.
Nikos put the paper down. “It’s not far away, just up there. Five-minute walk.”
“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll follow in about an hour.”
“You are angry,” he said. “She’s all alone here. She’s helpless. Her husband is dead. Why don’t you like her?”
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