The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  No need for that tonight. I order seafood crêpes, and fillet of beef and peach melba and expensive wine. When I’m through I’m still hungry so I start all over again. I have a couple of brandies with my coffee, and then I’m off to the Stagecoach – the Stagecoach, on my first night in Europe – for a ‘number’ of Margaritas. I sit, undisturbed, on the edge of a loud US Embassy conversation which brings back other, more difficult memories – not of the years when you and I were living here together, but of those earlier years when I belonged to the diplomats.

  Because they haven’t changed, these people. The women are still talking about the drape allowance, the latest scandal at the community school, the problems with maids, and what so and so saw an NCO’s Vietnamese wife do at the Commissary. The men are talking American sports and American politics – in confidential whispers even though their every word spells obedience. I almost wish my father were here to needle them.

  Then I look down the bar and see that he is here. He is sitting at the last stool doing a crossword puzzle. His hair is white, but he looks younger than I remember him, and neater – he brings to mind a schoolboy actor who has made himself up to play an old man.

  He looks up and sees me. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’

  He gets up and comes over and hugs me. Stands back, chuckles, hugs me again. ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

  He makes me sit down, buys me a drink, tells the bartender who I am and how many years it has been since we last saw each other. ‘But he sure knew where to find me, didn’t he, Gus?’

  He asks after you and the children. Neither of us mentions Mom. He says my sister has kept him posted about my various achievements. Wonders if I had any photographs of his grandchildren but nods too readily when I say I don’t. ‘Oh well.’

  ‘Maybe I could send you some,’ I say.

  ‘That would be great. Here. Let me give you my address before I forget.’ He writes it out on a napkin and as he does I notice how shaky his hand is. ‘In fact, you could come back and stay with me. I have a spare room. I’m sure the GB is costing you something terrible.’

  I lie and tell him it’s expense account. I explain I’m here on business. He accepts my excuse although I can tell he sees through it. I ask him how he spends his time these days, and so he talks for a while about his various little research projects, and the tutoring he does, just for the human contact. ‘And then someone comes through from the old days and I get to go out on their yacht.’

  He goes on to say that he had run into your parents recently, and that they hadn’t changed. ‘I can’t remember which cruise line they were working for, but it was in Lindos. I was there with the Gilliots – you remember, he used to be the commercial attaché – and suddenly this ship appears and unloads two hundred Middle-American idiots who thought they had landed on the moon. And Laura’s father was their tour guide. Going crazy with the questions the idiots were asking him but they loved him to death. I don’t think I could do it.’

  ‘But you’re happy doing what you’re doing,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, and why aren’t you?’

  This takes me by surprise.

  ‘You aren’t in trouble, are you?’ he asks.

  ‘What makes you think I am?’

  He takes me by the arm and says, ‘I know my boy.’

  This is unbearable. I stare into my drink so as to avoid looking at him. He tightens his grip and says, ‘Junior. Look at me. Look into my eyes.’ Against my will, I obey him, but it’s horrible, horrible.

  ‘Junior. I know I let you down. But you ought to know by now that these things happen. Men take jobs and then lose faith in them. They find out they’re working for an outfit of crooks but they have a family to support. And then the marriage goes sour and they want out but then they’ll never see their kids again. So they start compromising. You know all that by now, don’t you? Even in California, people get stuck, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t all keep a bunch of fascist colonels in power while they’re at it.’

  ‘I lost my job, didn’t I? Isn’t that enough for you?’

  He looked at me with that same horrible mixture of hurt and affection. It made me want to kick him.

  ‘Look,’ he finally says. ‘It happens all the time. If you divide your life into compartments, one day one of them takes over. You forget who you are. Until one day you get a jolt – like the one you gave me. Don’t you know what you did to me that day when you walked in on me? When I tried to put things right, it was for you.’

  ‘That’s really great. You walked out on Mom because you were trying to put things right.’

  ‘I still supported her. And supported her well.’

  ‘If you had supported her well, she wouldn’t have ended up the way she did.’

  He slammed his drink down on the bar. ‘For crying out loud. Don’t you understand yet that it was the best I could do? Don’t you know that yet – that if you do one thing right that late in the day it means doing everything else wrong?’

  ‘I thought they fired you because you drank too much.’

  ‘That, too, my boy. That too.’ He knocks back his drink, looks for a long time at the bottom of a glass, and then he says, ‘I’ve waited fifteen years to tell you that.’ And then he gives me the same look he gave me the day I walked in on him. Please, it says. I’m a bastard and I know it – I just didn’t want you to know.

  And I do the same thing I did then: I walk out. For the same reason. I can’t take it. I hail a taxi and as we pass the Embassy I look up and try to remember which pinhole was his office, and I ask myself why my father has settled so close to the place where his life came apart.

  When I return to the hotel there is no one to ask me if I know what time it is. When I wake up groggy the next afternoon, there is no one to blame for having missed the morning flight to Mitilini. I treat myself to room service. I eat my toasted cheese sandwich in the tub. Then it’s more accommodating bellboys, deferential doormen, exorbitant tips and lightning taxis to the airport for a thirty-five-minute flight over an Aegean it used to take us fourteen hours to cross deck-class on a ferry.

  Once in Mitilini there is – again – no need to kill time waiting for the bus. I fling my nine matching suitcases into the back of yet another grey Mercedes. I doze in the back seat as we speed past the olive groves, through salt flats and over mountains. We reach the north coast just as the sun disappears into the sea. We pass Petra, round the promontory … and there it is! Molivos, just as we left it. The hill of stone and pastel-coloured houses crowned by the castle. The claw of land extending out to sea, curling itself around the harbour. The curving beach, the olive-oil factory, the fishing boats in the bay …

  I go straight to the house I still cannot believe we have the good fortune to be renting. The view takes my breath away. I exchange smiling nods with the owners, take my bags inside and off I go into town.

  The same vines hang over the main walking street. The same grocers are selling the same boxes of Tide and cans of Californian squid. The hardware store has the same display of flippers and beach toys. The one-eyed butcher is still hacking away at the same side of beef, and his cronies in the café opposite are still engaged in the same game of backgammon, while younger men stare darkly at the television on the wall. The only thing that has changed is Costa’s taverna. It has doubled in size and seems to have a roof garden, but in the kitchen Costa is still frying keftedes. His mother is still washing dishes, his wife is still drying them. His father is lingering over a Henniger at the table next to the juke-box and his father-in-law is still hunched over a bowl of water, peeling potatoes.

  Costa gives me a quick, appraising look when I walk into the kitchen. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ I reply – the way I always did. It doesn’t seem to ring any bells with Costa.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asks.

  ‘What you can do for me,’ I said – because I have decided he’s pulling my leg – ‘what you can do for me is wipe that
half-assed expression off your face and tell me what you’ve been up to all these years.’

  He peers at me with raised eyebrows, takes a drag from his cigarette, and puts it into the ashtray next to his elbow. ‘So,’ he says, ‘you want me to tell you what I have been doing all these years. There’s only one problem.’

  He beams at me. ‘I don’t know who you are.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ I say. ‘You’re trying to get even with me for not writing, aren’t you?’

  ‘Tell me your name,’ Costa says.

  I tell him.

  He thinks for a moment and then shakes his head.

  ‘You can’t be serious!’ I say.

  He shrugs his shoulders. ‘What can I say? It happens all the time.’

  The awful thing was, I could tell he was trying. After he closed the kitchen that night, he came over to my table with two Hennigers, one for me and one for him, just like the old days, and listened with baffled interest as I supplied him with details of the three summers you and I had spent in Molivos. I described you, said you spoke Greek, mentioned that we had both been working on books. (‘You think that makes you different?’ he laughed. He gestured at the other tables. ‘You all bloody write books, didn’t you know that?’) I tried another tack.

  I pointed out landmarks. That was the table where he had served us lobster on the evening of his daughter’s christening – we had been the only foreigners to be included. And that was the table where he had served us rotten squid one night when he was angry at us. I mentioned friends’ names – George, Ellen, Barbara, Cynthia, Rod, Chris. None of them meant a thing to him.

  And so I dragged out the scandals. These he remembered. The Athenian musician and his American wife flipping their Volvo on the road to Eftalou. ‘She was a drug addict,’ Costa recalled. ‘She wore long sleeves on hot days.’ The Canadian poet whose wife ran off with the English Buddhist: ‘He would sit on the beach all day’ – he pronounced it ‘bitch’ – ‘but he was always saying he was bloody writing a book.’ From time to time he would look at me and say, ‘And you were here that summer?’

  By now I was beginning to get upset. When he offered me a cigarette, therefore, I accepted one. I told him how old he was, how many years he had spent in Australia – even how long his wife had been in labour with his eldest daughter.

  ‘What are you anyway?’ Costa laughed. ‘Some kind of bloody computer?’ He called over his family, explained the problem to them in loud, laughing Greek. They looked me over. For a moment his wife thought she saw something familiar. ‘Your wife has short blonde hair?’ Costa asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Then my wife must be thinking of someone else.’

  I wake up the next morning with a hacking cough. I am distressed by the disorder – balled-up socks in one corner, shoes and underpants in the other, pants draped over the wardrobe door, tweed jacket draped over the foot of my bed, keys and coins strewn over the floor and the bedside table.

  I am slipping into bad habits. I must exert my will. I am not going to allow myself a swim until the house is in perfect order. I unpack my clothes, arrange them neatly in the wardrobe. I give the only hanger to the tweed jacket –

  Of which more later –

  And then I take the toilet articles into the bathroom, put the shampoos and shaving equipment on the ledge, the shower caps on the hook behind the door, the aspirins and Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet. I find a cup for the toothbrushes. I put away the children’s clothes, arrange their shoes underneath their beds, their books on the bedside tables, their stuffed animals on their pillows. At first I am going to leave your clothes for you to take care of – why should I put myself out? – but then I relent and give you the best shelves in the wardrobe. I even double up two of my suits so that I can hang up your good dress.

  I go into town to stock up on necessities. I have to fight my way through hordes of bronzed German lesbians and sunburned Scandinavian families, fat Canadians, morose Frenchwomen, jocular Italian students, pensive English students, half-nude, middle-aged German couples … They are swarming into Costa’s taverna. Wave after wave of them packing into it as if it were a train at rush hour…

  Costa gives me a friendly wave. He has decided he likes me. He invites me in for a beer, but what’s the point of having a conversation with him if he’s only going to forget it? I opt, as I will continue to opt, to go back to my villa, where I make myself a sardine sandwich and look down at the beach on to which wave after wave of newcomers is spilling. With their beachballs, their flippers, their pails and shovels, their tubes, mattresses and children …

  The one o’clock bus arrives. I’m just about positive you’ll be on it. I consider starting down to the beach and meeting you half-way but then I think: No, why lose points by looking eager. Let her come to me.

  Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five. Maybe you’ve decided to spend a night in Athens. Maybe you’ll be on tomorrow’s bus.

  But you’re not.

  I make some half-hearted attempts to get in touch with you in San Francisco. I try our number, but it’s disconnected. I try the office and get the answering machine which cuts off before I can leave a message. I consider calling your friends, but I don’t have their numbers, and the operator is unhelpful. Becky and Ophelia are unlisted, and there is no number at all for Charlotte under either her professional or her married name. I try leaving a message at Kiki and Ophelia’s office, but I keep getting through to some other doctor on call.

  I am still convinced that you are on your way. On Day Two, at one in the afternoon and then again at six, I watch the bus come and disgorge swarms of bronzed and sunburned tourists – but never you. My hopes diffuse to include taxis on Day Three. As I sit on my verandah with my breakfast, my lunch, my cocktail and then my supper, I crane my neck as cars round the point at the far end of the bay.

  I call up the airline. They cannot find you on any of their passenger lists. I take this to mean you have already travelled. So where are you? I lower my standards and call up the Consulate. They tell me you are neither in jail nor in the hospital. I tell myself you’ve given yourself a few days on another island, just to teach me a lesson.

  But the deadline keeps extending itself.

  Are you still in San Francisco? I leave a message on my office answering machine – it works this time – asking Mitchell to tell you to cable me at poste restante. I pay two visits daily to the post office. No reply. I leave a message with the receptionist at Ophelia’s office, and when I still hear nothing, I tell myself you must be in Greece.

  I decide you will only come if I’m out at the beach, and so on the fourth day I stop waiting for the one o’clock bus. I leave a message tacked to the door for you, but it’s always there, untouched, when I return. I think that maybe I should go back to Athens, and station myself at the airport, but what if our paths cross? I have no option but to sit here and wait, and, while I do, I have to stop dwelling on my memories.

  I take my spear-fishing equipment down to the beach. I fight my way through the mothers, children, Germans, lesbians, husbands, wives, students, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Canadians and Italians to get to the water, and then I fight my way through the buckets, shovels, beachballs, tubes and airmattresses to the place where the sand floor ends and the rocks begin. I submerge myself and drown out the rock music from the beach taverna juke-box. I listen to my own breath bubbling up to the surface and swim towards the harbour.

  I run into a school of fish. I corner a big one, aim and pull the trigger. But I have lost my underwater judgement: the fish is nowhere near where it should be.

  I try again. It’s as if they are taunting me, magnifying themselves and then defying the laws of optics and gravity, shrinking to the left if I have made allowances for the left, to the right if I’ve made allowances for the right. One second they are eyeball to eyeball with me, and the next moment, when I release my spear, they are gone, and wherever they were is a moss-covered boulder that bends my
spear and pushes it bent and pathetic back into my face.

  I throw it down to the sea floor. Quickly regretting this gesture, I dive down to retrieve it. When I look up at the surface, I see an army of hulls and rudders mashing up the sea, and no way out. I stay underwater until my lungs are about to burst. I come up in the middle of a fishing fleet. The boats zoom past me, oblivious of my bobbing head.

  So much for spearfishing.

  I go back to the villa to take a nap. When I wake up I go into the kitchen to make myself a drink. The refrigerator is larger than I remember it, the soda bottle smaller, and the Campari bottle almost too high up to reach. The ice cubes slip too easily from the tray. The knife hits the side of the lemon with the thud of rubber. A wedge of lemon falls with a slap on to the undulating floor.

  Something – there must be some mark we made here. But, when I wander up to our old neighbourhood, it, too, seems distorted. The children have faces that are enlarged and elongated versions of the ones I remember. And the house …

  Do you remember how we used to look down at the courtyard from our studies and see the landlord standing there with his head cocked to one side staring at the walls? How could he stand there so long? we would think. And why waste the time? I understand why now.

  I go into the landlord’s garden and knock on his door. In a garbled mixture of English and pidgin Greek, I try to explain that you and I once lived in his other house. I point up to the door on the second floor leading nowhere, the door with the screen in it, the screen I made. I mime us sitting at our typewriters. Tak tak tak, I say. He lets out a howl of recognition. He hobbles into his house and returns with a box.

  It contains: your old Olivetti portable; four plates; three sets of knives and forks; six glasses; two coffee cups; a salt shaker; two inflatable armchairs; one dented pot; one bent frying pan; a set of watercolours; two chapters of my thriller; a hundred and four pages of your romance; a pair of flippers; two masks; one snorkel; and my old Safari jacket.

  I put away the kitchen things. I can’t bear to have them there on the table, mocking all the meals we made with them – the chicken soups that had to stretch for days, the ever simpler spaghetti sauces as we could no longer afford meat, onions, canned tomatoes … I inflated the armchairs, and sat down in them, and remembered that last fall, the cold cold days without heating, the long long days without even enough money to spare for a chicken if we bought coffee, for coffee if we bought chicken. Running out of paper, running out of ideas. Getting rejection letters from offices five, six, seven thousand miles away. I reread the thriller – puerile. I reread the romance – half-hearted.