Greek to Me

by Mary Norris

  Not long afterward, I got an answer. It was a typewritten note on letterhead stationery, dated January 15, 1985, with the name Katharine Houghton Hepburn engraved in red. “Dear Mary Jane Norris,” it began. (I had insisted on using my Catholic-school name on this occasion to distinguish myself from my grandmother, Mary B. Norris, although she had not been known as an actress.) “I’m sorry that you missed the movie of The Trojan Women,” Hepburn wrote, and I could picture her chin quivering and hear her intonation. “Of course, we played it for laughs. It’s the only way – Especially Hecuba –” She signed off, “Good luck and you are certain to be a big hit.” It was liberating to know that Hecuba could be outrageous.

  Again, Ed Stringham drew on his friends and colleagues to swell the audience. He persuaded Beata to come; a woman who had worked for him back in the sixties—they had studied Greek popular music together—drove down from Rhode Island with her husband. Someone from the managing editor’s office came, and even a guy from the makeup department. The office was now in the throes of the takeover by Condé Nast, and this state of emergency may have contributed to the sudden interest in the fall of Troy.

  The chorus in this production numbered two; between them, they encompassed all manner of feminine extremes. They were Italy and France, the moon and the evening star, Artemis and Aphrodite. Offstage, they referred to our costumes, flimsy peach-colored shifts, as Burger King uniforms. Hector’s shield was molded plastic. So was the prop rock that stood for all Troy: when I leaned on it, the earth moved. My brother, as usual, gave commonsense advice: “Don’t waste your time worrying about anything that’s not under your control.”

  The undergraduate who played Helen, an international student from Germany, had long red-gold hair, which she chopped off the week before the performance, so that our Helen looked like a punk rocker. Hecuba loathes Helen. She hurls at her a polysyllabic insult— κατάπτυστον κάρα—best translated monosyl labically as “You slut!” Refuting the rumor that Paris/Alexandros abducted Helen against her will, Hecuba says, “Who among Spartans heard you scream?” A woman in the audience laughed! (Hepburn would have been proud.) Menelaus told me afterward that he almost went off script and handed Helen over to me—“You were so angry!” During that speech, I felt the last drop of bile leave my liver. I had used up all the hate and bitterness in my system.

  Two young boys alternated in the role of the dead Astyanax. One was a Puerto Rican child, a wisp of a boy, who was easy to take into my arms, and he lay limp and sweet on the stage. The other was a solid lad, the eight-year-old son of a classics professor. When I laid him on the stage to deliver my last speech over his lifeless body, he crossed his feet. He did this at every rehearsal. We begged him not to—the director asked him, his father commanded him—but he could not help it. He was afraid I was going to castrate him. The audience tittered. At the last performance, after I laid the boy down, I crossed his feet deliberately, as though this arrangement of limbs were a funeral rite of the Trojans.

  In the last scene, Hecuba bids farewell to Troy, a “bastion against barbarians.” She utters the lament to end all laments: “ότοτοτοȋ!” She tries to throw herself on the burning city, but Talthybius objects and the chorus blocks her. My motivation here had been a puzzle. What in my experience could possibly measure up to that of a queen being banished from her fabled city? My grandmother, in her eighties, had had to leave Cleveland for Clemson, South Carolina, to live with her widowed daughter. That was sad but not tragic.

  And then I got it. As The New Yorker was being taken over by Condé Nast, I had seen how hard it was for my friend Peter Fleischmann to lose control of the company that his family had built. His father, Raoul Fleischmann, was the original backer of The New Yorker, beginning in the 1920s. Peter was proud of the magazine, and of the traditional separation between business and editorial that he had inherited and fostered, and of his relationship with William Shawn. He loved the writers. Peter, like J. D. Salinger, had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, an experience so demoralizing that few of the veterans ever talked about it. After the Liberation he drank champagne in Paris with A. J. Liebling. I loved listening to Peter’s stories. He had had throat cancer (he was a heavy smoker), and the surgeons had saved his life but could not save his voice. After that, he was mute unless he used a speaking tube. This gadget was a medical marvel. It looked like an ordinary microphone, but when he pressed it to his throat its vibrations allowed him to say anything he wanted to, albeit in a voice that sounded like a robot’s. He called it his tooter. Peter was terse anyway, and could curse with the best of them, so it was especially funny when he picked up his tooter, nestled it against his throat, and uttered one of his favorite phrases: “YOU’RE FUCKING WELL TOLD.”

  Peter got angry once when I referred to the “sale” of The New Yorker. “I did not sell the magazine,” he said. “It was taken over.” Someone on the board had sold a significant number of shares to the Newhouse family, who had bought still other shares, and suddenly Peter and his loyalists no longer held a majority. He chose to accept the takeover as gracefully as possible. People assumed that, as a businessman, Fleischmann “the yeast magnate” was happy to cash in. But Peter was a principled businessman with a gift for friendship, and he saw it as his duty to make a profit for the shareholders. For Peter the takeover of The New Yorker was a profound loss. So that was my farewell to Troy and Peter’s to The New Yorker, a bastion against barbarians.

  At “the last and final terminal end,” as Hecuba puts it, in a typical Greek pileup of synonyms, the Trojan women are led to the ships (or, as the program put it, “the chips”; I was not the proofreader for the production), and Hecuba tells the chorus that the only thing they have left is the knowledge that someday their losses will make good stories. “What a bitter speech!” one member of my chorus said when I translated it for her. I thought it was beautiful, a moment of acceptance for Hecuba, a small, cold consolation. But I think I was wrong. Hecuba is like her great enemy Achilles in that she would rather have lived a long, uneventful life and died in obscurity than be immortal in plays and poetry.

  When I went back to work the following week, someone at the office asked, “How was the play?” I said, “It was great,” and he responded, archly, “If you do say so yourself?” I didn’t bother to explain that I didn’t mean I was great but that the play had been a great experience for me, the best possible therapy. For days afterward, I felt clean and empty. A rival at the office, someone I had formerly wanted to hang by her ankles from the window of the nineteenth floor the way Zeus hung Hera from Olympus (it was her I raged at when I yelled at Helen), was a harmless colleague with pixie ears and a jaunty wardrobe. I had put myself at the service of Euripides, and of Apollo and Dionysus, the gods of theater, and they had accepted my tribute.

  CHAPTER 6

  SWIMMING WITH APHRODITE

  “WHY WOULD ANYONE want to go to Cyprus?” the man asked. He was a friend of a friend, and he happened to be a psychiatrist.

  “Because it’s the most beautiful place in the world,” I answered, unhesitatingly. Cyprus was the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love and sex and desire—how could it not be beautiful? And why would anyone not want to see that? I was fresh back from Greece, at a pool party in Princeton. The psychiatrist traveled only in August and preferred guided tours. He had been hot-air ballooning in the Sahara. If I had been trying to impress him, I would have washed my feet. I had gotten caught in a downpour the day before, and the dye from my shoes had turned my feet purple. But I wasn’t, so I jumped into the pool.

  Of course, Cyprus was a war zone: the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots had been fighting over it since 1963, in what was only the latest skirmish in a long, long history of conflict. In a way, that made it more attractive to me—magnetic, even. Cyprus was the very nexus of war and beauty, conflict and desire. In the words of the Michelin Guide, it was worth a detour—in my case, a seven-hundred-mile Mediterranean detour on the way from Athens to I
stanbul.

  My relationship with beauty (and love and sex and desire) had always been fraught. I was unable to look in the mirror without finding fault. I had a moon face and a red nose and a double chin and a space between my two front teeth. In makeup I felt like a clown. Cosmetics only emphasize one’s natural features, and unless these have some allure to begin with, what is the point? I’d seen the plainest-looking women at the office primping in the ladies’-room mirror, and wondered, Why are they wasting their time?

  Beauty requires grooming and bathing. Beauty parlors and dry cleaners are named for Aphrodite (and for her Roman counterpart, Venus). Her name, by folk etymology (which is my favorite kind), means “foam-born”—Hesiod describes how she sprang up from the sea when the detached genitals of Uranus, the original sky god, sickled off by Kronos, hit the water sizzling. But when the goddess of love has risen from her bath, who cleans the tub?

  When I poured libations to the gods and tried to cover the entire pantheon, to get them all on my side—Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Hermes . . .—often I would forget Aphrodite. Sometimes I dared to invoke her when I embarked on a thorough housecleaning. What other goddess might look with favor on the lifelong project of cleanliness? Was Aphrodite the patroness of charwomen? If I had a vexed relationship with beauty and love and sex, it was my own fault for entertaining thoughts like this.

  Cleaning is serious business in Greece, thanks to all those crumbling ruins. Housewives are forever sweeping the floor. The Greek word for broom is skoupa, and on islands in the Aegean the σκούπα has its own aisle in the soupermarket. I had a Greek landlady in Astoria (having moved on from the Italian-American brothers) who saw rain as an occasion to take her broom outside and scrub the sidewalk. Through her and the sound of her infernal sweeping I made the association between brooms and witches. In Homer, Calypso, the nymph who keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years, bathes her captive, and one can imagine her blissfully sweeping out her cave, twirling the broom to make patterns on the earthen floor, as a prelude to seduction and lovemaking.

  Many of the labors of Herakles involved cleaning, and his trick was to make it look easy, by, for instance, diverting a stream to muck out the Augean stables. In the aisle of cleaning products, this demigod is represented by a superior-strength brand of clothesline. But it is a mortal who gained worldwide fame as an all-purpose warrior against dirt: Ajax. He does dishes, he does laundry, he removes the bathtub ring—he even does windows. The great hero of the Trojan War resides in a spritzer bottle under the kitchen sink or a can of cleanser behind the toilet. Small wonder that Ajax committed suicide.

  The traditional birthplace of Aphrodite is the island of Cythera, off the coast of the Peloponnese. It’s not a very big island, and she didn’t stick around. Aphrodite needed a bigger stage. She chose Cyprus, or Cyprus chose her. It is a strikingly beautiful island, girdled in blue, with voluptuous rocks and veins of copper. I went there intent on seeing as much as I could in a short time. There were Roman mosaics in Paphos, a city sacred to Aphrodite. There was a cedar tree endemic only to the valley of the Troodos Mountains, and a species of wild sheep called the mouflon. There was a monastery, Stavrovouni, that was overrun with cats (and is said to have a fragment of the True Cross brought from Jerusalem by Saint Helena, Constantine’s mother). I hoped to make it to the capital, Nicosia, where the war was most visible; a peacekeeping contingent from the United Nations guarded a buffer zone that cut through the capital, from city gate to city gate, like a jagged blue-and-white scar.

  The true border of an island is its coastline, and that’s what most interested me in Cyprus: the surrounding sea. I had been to only a handful of beaches—Edgewater, on Lake Erie, of course, the Jersey Shore, Long Island, the Gulf of Mexico at Veracruz. Cyprus promised to have vast stretches of dazzling beauty, with sun twinkling on the water, and foam frilling toward the shore in choreographed lines of scalloped waves. I set my sights on a “beauty spot” that my guidebook said was “by legend the bathing place of the Goddess of Love.” It was near a beach, and word was that if you swam out to the rocks at Aphrodite’s beach you would be transformed into a beauty forever. I wanted to baptize myself in the waters of Aphrodite.

  THE SOL PHRYNE had come from Venice and was bound for Haifa. I boarded in Rhodes with a deck-class ticket, after getting off a ferry from Crete. A backpacking elite—beautiful people with deep tans and tiny orange bathing suits—had staked out the sundeck: they had pitched tents and strung up clotheslines and were tossing a Frisbee for their dogs. It was as if the Sol Phryne were their personal chartered vessel. My own style of travel combined the spirit of backpacking with the burden of conventional luggage: I traveled light, but I had no sleeping bag or bottled water. Instead I had a striped cotton blanket I’d bought in Crete and a flask of whiskey.

  I found a spot on a slatted bench outside the lounge, under an exhaust pipe. I needed to sleep, having stayed up all night on the ferry from Crete to Rhodes, flirting with sailors. The captain had invited me onto the bridge, with its vast array of gauges and gizmos and its unrivaled view of our path through the sea. The chief petty officer, a curly-haired young guy, tried to impress me with his worldliness. “I have been 46 days in Flussing,” he said, referring to Flushing, Queens. Once again, I had to explain that I was traveling alone, but I put the accent on the wrong syllable. “Don’t say that,” the young officer told me. I had said something like “I am a traveling cunt.”

  He showed me his cabin and was playing with the buttons on my sweater when he was summoned to the bridge by the public address system. Returning to my seat, I fell in with an able-bodied seaman who took me down to the car deck, where we sat in a passenger’s Saab and listened to Greek music on the radio. He also showed me his cabin, which was way, way below, and had pinups on the walls and dirty magazines, and there ended—at least, for me—a dry spell. He was in charge of the anchor, so at every port he had to go up on deck and lower away. In the morning I wanted to be on deck again, and that’s when I discovered he had locked me in for safekeeping. I tried not to panic—surely he would be back soon. Finally, I managed to jiggle the hook out of the eye from inside and escape, climbing the ladderlike stairs and popping out of the hatch, to the amazement of the captain at his post on the bridge.

  On the Sol Phryne, wrapped in my Cretan blanket, I dozed off on the slatted bench, and was woken by some young men who were standing on the bench at my feet, reaching through a porthole above me. They pulled out a square, flat package, like a brown paper pillow, and slapped it onto the deck. “Is that yours?” I asked, in Greek. (I wasn’t sure whether one addressed a suspected burglar in the formal or the familiar.) “You speak Greek?” one of the boys asked. “A little,” I said, and then demonstrated exactly how little by not understanding what he said next. He translated: “This crazy boy has a snake.” He toed the package, and it moved. I reverted to English—primitive English—bellowing “No snake!” as I gathered my belongings and moved.

  I found a spot on a lower deck outside a nightclub, where an Israeli youth group was having a party. A band was playing American hits from the early sixties, my pajama-party years: “Let’s Lock the Door (And Throw Away the Key).” When the band finally quit, the kids took over, singing and beating tambourines. There was an explosion—my first thought was that someone had shot the snake. But a man who was strolling past had investigated, and he reassured me. “A bomb,” he said. Bombs were apparently not unusual on ships in these waters, but on this occasion the Sol Phryne did not sink.

  At dawn, Cyprus was in sight.

  IN THE PORT OF LIMASSOL, on the Greek Cypriot coast, I rented the only car they had left (or so I was told)—a yellow Fiat 500 Mini—and headed for Paphos, forty miles west. I studied the map. Cyprus, solid black, was inset against the white of the Mediterranean, with Europe, Asia, and Africa sketched in. She looked like a witch flying east, the curve of her tall pointy hat following the Turkish coastline, aimed at an inlet that would gladly receive her. Turkey could
inhale Cyprus. Although it looked as if the island might have broken off of Turkey, Cyprus was created separately, heaved up from the depths of the sea. The rocks there are unique in the world. Because of its strategic position in the Mediterranean, Cyprus has been occupied by nearly every successive power in the region: the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Persians, the Greeks again (Alexander), the Romans, Constantine (the Byzantine Empire), the Crusaders, the French Lusignans, the Venetians, the Ottomans, and the British, until finally, cataclysms later, it became an autonomous state, which then became a battleground of Cypriots, falling into their own nationalist Greek and Turkish camps.

  They drive on the left in Cyprus, a legacy of the British. The signs were in Greek and English, sometimes in Turkish, and, near the port, in German, French, and Hebrew. Distances were measured in miles, not kilometers. Gasoline was sold in liters, not gallons. I came of age crossing Pennsylvania on I-80 at seventy miles an hour, so I calculated that I could make it from Limassol to Paphos in less than an hour. I stopped at Ancient Kourion, which had a sanctuary to Apollo and a theater built on a slope with a jaw-dropping view. The Greeks had a genius for knowing where to build. A teenage boy was in charge of the sanctuary. A radio hanging outside the ticket booth was blasting pop music. I would have preferred meditative silence, but Apollo was the god of music; this young man was his proxy, and I was on his turf. I had the sensation, walking on what was left of the temple walls— low stone dividers between long-gone rooms—that, instead of the ruins’ evoking history, I was a ghost haunting the past.

  When I got back on the road, the sun was starting to set, and I worried about finding my way to Paphos in the dark. I wasn’t sure the headlights were working, so I pulled off the road to check. The road hugged the sea, and what I saw when I turned to get out of the car made me forget about checking the headlights. White rocks studded the water, extending the land into the sea, which was a deep, pure blue, and the road behind me curved along the shore, a black ribbon threaded between low green hills—even the freshly painted white stripe down its middle looked like an adornment. All was still and silent. The place spangled, every element expressing its essence in shape and color: natural beauty meticulously groomed. The place was called Petra tou Romiou, and it was the celebrated birthplace of Cyprian Aphrodite.