by James Lasdun
He had always thought that if he were unfaithful to Antonia, it would be under conditions of frenzied intoxication. But what he felt now was something calmer, more like the acceptance of some impersonal decree. It was simply something that was going to happen, a reality that had established itself.
“So how come you didn’t fuck her?”
“For Christ’s sake, Stewart.”
“I mean you fancied her, right?”
“She was attractive, yeah.”
“She fancied you too.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me.”
It was two days later, and Abel was in a black mood. He looked at Stewart a moment in the mirror but said nothing.
They were on their way to Zagoria, the last leg of their trip. The hills with their knots of dusty-looking olive trees grew taller and greener, the air a little cooler. The rented car slowed to a crawl as the straight road began its switchback ascent into the gorge country of Epirus.
Already his actions of that evening had begun to seem obscure to Abel. He doubted even the accuracy of what still seemed relatively clear in recollection. One moment he had been in the full momentum of a trajectory about to sweep him and Rose out into the warm night; the next, he was lying alone on his bed with the sensation of having just committed some violently unnatural act. Had he said good night or just turned on his heel and disappeared? He had a bad feeling it might have been the latter, though the former seemed hardly less appalling to him. Out through the window of his room he had seen the scattered whiteness of the moon on the leaves of the vine trellis that led up from the hotel. Grapes hung in shadowy clusters. At that moment, had he not disappeared, he and Rose would have been walking slowly right there, perhaps reaching up to pluck one of the ripe bunches … He had almost felt that they were out there, that his being alone on his bed was a minor anomaly of nature, like the alleged ghostly presence of a particle in one place at the same time as it is being definitively observed in another. The version of himself out there with Rose had a far denser reality about it than this one did. But here he was … What he felt, more than the embarrassment at his own behavior, more even than the aborted desire ricocheting around inside him, was a feeling of loss. Life offered up so few human beings you could contemplate any intimacy with that to turn your back on one seemed an insane and profligate waste. He summoned the winter-lit image of his wife and child in the barn at home in Connecticut. For once nothing stirred in him. The image seemed flat, as though it had spent all its powers bringing him back from the brink of some abyss and was now just a lifeless reproduction of itself.
“When did she …” Abel heard himself begin to ask, though he had resolved not to. “When did she tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That she … found me attractive.”
Stewart gave a lopsided smile.
“Oh, after you left her.”
“I thought you’d gone to bed.” Drop it, Abel admonished himself.
“I saw her down on the terrace, sitting there all by herself. She looked like she could use some company.”
“So you went down?”
“Yeah, I went down.”
Stewart eyed him in the mirror: a semblance of laconic friendliness, but under it something remote, self-possessed, almost haughtily indifferent. He offered no further comment, and Abel tried to refrain from further questions.
“Did you fuck her?” he blurted.
Stewart was silent a moment. Then quietly, almost gently: “What can I tell you? She wanted getting laid.”
“I see.”
“Does it bother you?”
“No! You can fuck whoever you want. Why would I care?”
“I get the feeling you do care.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t.”
In the evening they arrived at a village above the gorge. Picturesque enough for their purposes but desolate. There had been atrocities there in the civil war: a massacre, then reprisals. The place was subsiding—willingly, it almost seemed—back into the mountain rubble it had risen from. Black-shawled old women stared from the doorways of the few houses that hadn’t been boarded up. Scrawny poultry roosted on the stone path leading to the hotel where Abel and Stewart checked in, the only guests.
The next morning it was raining. Abel stayed in his room, working up the cheery platitudes required by his father-in-law’s “Wild Europe” series: “From the slit-windowed fortress of a hotel, its stone tiles ragged-edged as the scales of a venerable old carp, you wind down steep cobbled alleys (watch out for guinea fowl!) to the lovely basilica of St. Nikos Dukas, a gem of Byzantine architecture …” As a younger man he’d had ideas of becoming a playwright, and although he’d long ago made his peace with the failure of that enterprise, shifting the basis of his happiness from the withheld trophies of the outer world to the freely given bounties of his domestic life, he took a perverse satisfaction in perpetrating these verbal banalities. Revenge by cliché …
But after a couple of hours he found himself yawning. He felt simultaneously restless and torpid. He wanted to be elsewhere, without knowing where. Home? It didn’t seem so. The thought of home felt thin and theoretical. He would be back there in three days, and then, he supposed, it would all be real enough. But for now the whole notion of it—wife, child, in-laws, the peaceful routine of their days in the old farmstead—had gone dormant in him. He was bored too, without knowing what he wanted to do. Big airy columns of rain floated down against the mountains and on into the distant gray depths of the gorge. He found himself thinking of Rose. He saw again the look of warm, candid welcome in her blue eyes. A helpless yearning came into him. Apparently she really had been offering herself to him. He had wanted her and yet had refused her. The correct thing for a happily married man to do. But it seemed to him, now, that in observing the human protocol, he had violated some wider law of nature. Why else the obscure, dank sensation of shame clinging to him?
He saw that the encounter was going to take its place among the events that made up his fundamental sense of what he was. A depressing thought, given the distinct mediocrity of spirit it seemed to manifest … He got up. Maybe a walk in the rain would do him good.
There in the drawer lay his trusty anorak, self-effacingly pouched into one of its own pockets. He put it on, the beige nylon as forgiving and shapeless on him as a dust sheet on an old chair, something insidiously reassuring about its familiar embrace.
As he came down the stairs, he heard laughter, female, ringing loudly over the unadorned stony surfaces of the hotel. Stewart was at a table in the lobby, opposite two women.
An incredulous jolt, a kind of pang, went through Abel. He had heard no car pull up, no bustle of arrival … Where on earth had the man conjured these creatures from?
“Come and join us,” Stewart called, waving him over.
“Well, I was just going for a walk.”
“Ach, we’ll go later. Melina here says it’s going to clear up in an hour. Right, Melina?” He grinned superciliously at one of the women. “Melina’s a psychic prophet. She’s been reading the coffee grounds. She can also read your mind, so don’t be having any dirty thoughts.”
The high, full laughter rang out again. Abel saw glasses of ouzo on the table, along with cups of Greek coffee. He wasn’t in the mood for a party. But short of maintaining an attitude of extreme churlishness, he was clearly going to have to join them sooner or later.
He went reluctantly over to the table. Stewart introduced them. Melina was fair-haired and large—not fat, but swollen-looking somehow, as though by a superfluous creaminess in her silvery-pale flesh. Her soft white arms were dimpled at the elbow, and there were dimples either side of her pale lips. Her eyes were a deep green color. Abel watched them travel over him briefly, taking in his sparse hair, his lined face, the toggled and zippered shroud of his beige anorak. She turned away. At one of her wrists was a frill of pink silk. Her plump hands and tapering, jointless-looking fingers had the smoo
th solidity of limbs cast in wax. Rings of opal and tiger’s-eye glimmered on them, and with some fascination Abel noted a curious, two-fingered diamond-encrusted ring joining together the third and fourth fingers of her right hand.
The other woman, Xenia, was sallow and angular, with a bony, almost cartilaginous face, the olive skin taut over her little, sharp nose, her ears small but protuberant, like the ears of some nervous tree creature. They looked as if they might swivel. Her dark eyes settled a moment on Abel’s.
Stewart ordered him some coffee.
“We’ll have Melina read your fortune. She’s been predicting all kinds of catastrophes for yours truly. Tell him what you told me, Melina.”
Melina turned lazily to Abel. “He’s going to be married before the year’s over.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes. He’s going to settle down in a big house with a view over a harbor, and he’s going to be faithful to his wife for the rest of his life.”
“Apparently I’m to marry the next woman I kiss,” Stewart said with a chuckle.
The woman turned back to him: statuesque, at ease in her slightly bulky softness.
“Well, it’s true. You are.” She smiled complacently at him.
A one-armed old man brought coffee for Abel. Melina spoke to him in Greek, and he nodded.
“Drink that up,” Stewart said, “and Melina’ll tell us what the future holds for you.”
“I don’t think I want to know.”
But he drank the grainy syrup and let Melina take the cup. She swirled the dregs so that the grounds clung to the inside of the white china. For a long moment she stared without expression into the cup.
“It’s not good news,” she said.
“Then I surely don’t want to hear.”
“Ah, come on,” Stewart said. “It couldn’t be worse than my little death sentence.”
“He’s going to be divorced. He’s going to lose his home and his child. Also his job.”
“Well, thanks,” Abel said. “Lucky I’m not superstitious.”
Melina looked at him. She seemed in a luxuriant stupor of indifference toward him.
“That’s good,” she said. “Then you don’t have to believe it.”
She ran her pampered-looking hands through her thick, soft wings of hair, one hand, then the other. A sweetish perfume wafted from her. The bunched silk on her wrist reminded Abel of the paper frills you used to see on the stumps of roasts in glossy food magazines.
The one-armed man returned to their table with a tray of pastries: baklava; little pistachio-eyed turbans; something that looked like a small manuscript dipped in custard. One thing Abel and Stewart were agreed on was their dislike of Greek pastries, and they both declined when Melina offered them around. She shrugged, unperturbed, and began eating them herself. Hampering her third and fourth fingers, the double ring looked less like jewelry than some curious splint. Xenia nibbled on one of the turbans.
The weather cleared abruptly. Stewart glanced at Abel. “We’ll go check out the ridge then, shall we?”
As the men stood to go, the two women spoke to each other rapidly in Greek. Melina grinned at Stewart.
“We’d like to invite you to dinner tonight. Both of you.” She spoke with the token coyness of someone evidently used to getting what she wanted. “We’ll have the hotel prepare a little feast. Our treat, of course.”
That had been yesterday. They had left the village this morning. Tomorrow they would be back in Athens, the next day home.
They came to a turning in the narrow road.
“Shall we go on here or up to the gorge?”
“The gorge.”
Abel turned onto the smaller road.
“And you’ve never actually been unfaithful to Antonia in all the time you’ve been married?”
“No.”
“Not even last night, eh?”
“What?”
“Just asking.”
Here were the strange-looking wind-eroded rock towers.
“Mind stopping a moment? I should get some pictures.”
Alone in the car, Abel watched Stewart jump between the rocks with his camera and tripod. He was in a state of tumult, glutted with sensations. It had been a warm evening, and they had dined outside. After keeping Abel and Stewart waiting an hour, the women showed up on the terrace in extravagant, gleaming outfits: a laced silver bodice on Melina, her midriff bare like a belly dancer’s, loose linen pants flowing from her broad hips, silk frill at her wrist; Xenia in a mauve leather skirt and satin halter top, her freckled, bangled arms looking almost childlike in their thinness. They both wore high heels and makeup. Their hair had been freshly washed and set, and their mingled perfumes billowed ahead of them through the warm air, soft but full of forceful intent, like the scent that hits you as you enter the cosmetics section of a department store.
“What’s this, singles night in the wilderness?” Stewart had asked.
Melina laughed and sat next to him, Xenia seating herself by Abel with a nervous smile that he interpreted to mean that she wasn’t at ease in her getup.
“You look nice,” he heard himself say, an uncharacteristic gallantry that sounded very strange to him as it came out, but for which she seemed grateful.
The women had laid on quite a feast. Champagne and island wines had been procured from the nearest town, fifteen miles away, and a young goat had been slaughtered.
They went rapidly through a couple of bottles of champagne, while the one-armed man brought out dishes of octopus and fried cheese.
“So we were wondering what you guys think we do, for a living,” Melina said. “What do you think, Abel?”
Startled at finding himself for once being addressed by her, Abel blustered. “I—I have no idea …”
“You’re a madam in a brothel,” Stewart said, “and your friend here’s a freelance assassin.”
They shrieked with laughter. Jesus, Abel had thought, what kind of witless jackass have I turned into? He downed his glass while Melina continued: “Actually, we both work on Wall Street. We’re investment consultants for a Greek bank. Would you like to guess how much we make in a year?”
“No,” Stewart said, “but I think you’d like to tell us.”
“A little over a million dollars.”
“That’s all?” Abel jumped in, seeing an opportunity to redeem himself. “I pay my driver more than that.”
For this he earned an enthusiastic laugh from Xenia and a faint smile from Melina.
Xenia was smoking while she ate, and after his fifth or sixth glass of champagne, Abel decided to ask her for a cigarette, though he hadn’t smoked in years. She gave him one, took another for herself, and handed him her lighter to light them both. As he held the flame to her cigarette, she cupped his hand, even though there was no breeze to speak of. He was aware of the ridiculously hackneyed nature of the little routine. At the same time—such, apparently, was the hackneyed nature of his response mechanism—he felt a jolt of desire go through him.
He looked into her strange face as he inhaled on his cigarette. She had a slight prematurely wizened look, as though she might have once been undernourished or anorexic. She wasn’t in any sense his type, but he found himself drawn to her, narrowly, as though on a thin thread of mysteriously aroused erotic curiosity. The nicotine swam dizzyingly through his head. The sky had turned violet over the mountains. The one-armed man began hacking up the goat, which had been spit-roasting on a brazier.
“How d’you reckon he lost his arm?” Stewart said.
Melina at once asked the man. His weathered, wrinkled face whorled into a grin as he answered. He was fighting Communists, Melina translated; he was a sniper, used to pick them off in their fields from high in the mountains. Then they captured him, smashed his trigger finger. They were going to execute him, but he escaped. His hand got gangrene while he was hiding in the mountains. It spread all the way up his arm … The man burst into laughter and served up the goat.
“K
illing Communists, eh?” Stewart said. “Serves him right then.”
“The Communists were worse than the others,” Melina retorted.
“What, are you a Nazi apologist as well as a capitalist pig?”
Stewart said this with a smile, and Melina responded with delighted outrage. They finished the goat, going through several more bottles in the process. Melina spoke to the one-armed waiter, who nodded and disappeared. A moment later there was a bray of harsh, rhythmic music—clarinet, accordion, drum—and a band of ragged-looking musicians appeared on the terrace.
“They’re Albanians,” Melina said under the din. “We found them in Ioannina.”
“Jesus, it really is singles night,” Stewart said.
“We thought you guys might like to dance.”
“I don’t dance with Nazis.”
Melina opened her mouth to laugh but, seeing that Stewart wasn’t smiling now, closed it and looked for the first time unsure of her ground.
“I will drink some more of your booze, though. Not that crappy vino. The Mumm’s.” He held his glass out to be filled. Instead of filling it, Melina passed him the bottle, frowning.
“Oho, a pouty Nazi!”
She said nothing. It wasn’t clear to Abel if this was just Stewart’s usual lovers’ quarrel gambit. The idea of his not wanting to sleep with a woman because of her politics struck Abel as unlikely, but there was a glint of what seemed real malice in Stewart’s eye. The four sat in silence. The musicians began stamping their feet and hooting, as if afraid of being dismissed if their patrons didn’t liven up. More to break the tension than anything else, Abel invited Xenia to dance. She accepted with alacrity, and to the delight of the Albanians they took to the floor.