by Mary Morris
She reached her hand so that it curled around the rail of Bill’s berth, and Bill played with her fingertips for a while until she scurried up the ladder into the narrow bunk beside him. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He moved nearer the wall, but his eyes stayed closed. “You wanta snuggle?” He tucked her in the space of his arm, but said no more. Clara looked over and saw Bill’s jacket, wrapped around the typewriter. She looked away. “Can we go to San Marco tomorrow?” she whispered in his ear, as if she didn’t want to be overheard.
“We can do whatever you want.”
“Maybe three days won’t be enough there.”
“Honey”—he kissed her on the forehead—“I don’t think I’m over my jet lag. Can we talk in the morning?” She huddled closer but felt cramped.
“Sure, we can talk in the morning.”
Clara went back to her berth, but she stared out the window for a long time. The typewriter rattled back and forth in the overhead rack like a restless person trying to sleep, and she wished Bill were awake, reading the guidebook with her, so that she could forget about it again. Ten days before they left on this vacation, Bill had told her not to get upset, but he was going to bring a typewriter along. Clara didn’t get upset. She’d just inquired, “Does that mean you plan to work? On our vacation?”
Bill, a reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper, had shaken his head. He told her the typewriter wasn’t for him. It was for an old friend of his family. “She’s going blind and she wants to write, so my mother asked me if we’d take her a typewriter.” Bill told Clara her name was Madame Estella and she lived on an island off Greece.
For ten days Clara had tried not to dwell on the typewriter, but something about it bothered her. Clara made a lot of money writing scripts for movies that never got made. She was starting to feel like a failure, so they’d decided to take some time off and go on a vacation. For six weeks they had planned not to plan their vacation. They were going to travel without an itinerary. They’d start in France and end up in Spain, but that was all they knew. Their luggage, packed weeks in advance, consisted of two backpacks.
Finally one night Clara had got up the nerve and said to Bill, “Darling, what if we don’t want to go to Greece? What if we want to go to Sweden?”
But he’d replied, “How could anyone not want to go to Greece.” She’d told him that wasn’t the point, and Bill had stared at her. They rarely fought, but that night they did. Clara told him he put everybody else before her, or at least she felt that he did. Bill said he didn’t. Then she found herself reminding him of the night when they were just starting to make love and his ex-wife, Patti, called. Her brakes had failed on the coast road and she needed a tow getting out of the sand dune, so Bill went right over to her. “You could have said no to Patti that night, couldn’t you? You could have told her to call a tow truck or that actor she’d been seeing.”
Bill had defended himself. “Patti doesn’t make the kind of money you do, and the actor was on location somewhere. There wasn’t anyone else she could call.” His face had reddened as he’d argued with her. He didn’t like to argue. “I suppose I could have told her to call a tow truck,” he said finally, for the sake of harmony. “But this is different.” He just wanted to bring a typewriter to a poor old woman who was going blind and couldn’t afford to buy one for herself.
At last Clara admitted her problem to him. “Having a typewriter with us will only remind me of what a flop I am.”
And he’d kissed her. “Oh, darling, you aren’t a flop.” She had wanted to discuss in greater detail how she felt, but for Bill the problem was solved. “Don’t worry.” He’d kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll carry it.”
The next morning in Venice they went for a long gondola ride and saved a pigeon that was drowning in the canal. They walked through a huge palace and made love fiercely before dinner. After they made love, Clara pointed to the typewriter. “I want to look at it,” she said. They’d had it with them for almost a week, but she’d never looked at it. Bill put the case on the desk and Clara opened it. Inside sat a small Olivetti manual. It was ordinary enough. It was brown, the color of mud and excrement. She closed it quickly.
As they walked along the canals, heading to a seafood restaurant, Clara complained that the things she wrote never got made into movies and that she hated L.A. “But,” she went on, “I make so much money. It’s not easy to give it all up.”
Bill held her hand, trying to act as if he hadn’t heard her talk about this a hundred times before. “But you’ve got talent. You could do something besides disaster films and episodes of ‘Life with Lily.’”
She stared at him, wide-eyed. “You really think so?”
On a little bridge he kissed her as a gondola sailed by. “I’m sure of it.”
When they got to the restaurant, he hoped she’d drop it, but as soon as they sat down, Clara said, “Can we talk about the typewriter?”
Bill felt his stomach tightening. He watched her sitting there. She wasn’t the prettiest woman he’d ever been with. Patti was a knockout, but he’d been struck by Clara right away. Her green eyes, her salt and pepper hair, her smooth skin, had enchanted him two years ago when they met at the beach bar. But she was driving him nuts with the way she dwelled for days on some insignificant thing, to the point where she could think of nothing else. “You always need to talk about things. Let’s have a nice dinner?”
“Look,” she said, “I understand why you brought it. I understand that that poor old woman needs it. I only want to explain to you how I feel.” Clara knew something was wrong, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. “I feel like a failing law student taking a trip with all her law books. As if I have to study all the time. As if it’s reminding me of how badly I’m doing. I’d wanted to get away on this trip. And now we’re traveling with that stupid typewriter.”
Bill didn’t think the law student simile was very good. Maybe she was a flop, as she said. “You’ve got only one problem.” He patted her hand. “You dwell on stuff too much.” They walked back to the hotel without saying more, but when they got in their room, he held her. She felt safe. She knew that this was his way. This, she knew, was the best he could do. In bed, he made her forget whatever had been on her mind.
In the morning Bill woke to the sound of the typewriter. He was a heavy sleeper and could sleep through almost anything, but the typing went on for so long that he was finally aroused. He opened his eyes and saw Clara, hair disheveled, in a cotton nightie, pecking away. “What’re you doing?”
“I’ve got an idea.” She didn’t pause from her typing. “For a screenplay. It’s about two people on vacation.”
“Oh . . .” He watched her breasts bounce as she wrote. He got up and kissed her on the back of the neck. “Come on. Let’s get some breakfast.”
“Why don’t you go without me?” Clara said. “I want to work on this.”
“Clara, we’re in Venice. You can type any time.” But she was adamant, so Bill went down to San Marco without her. He ate a roll and drank two cups of coffee. He walked along the Grand Canal and bought postcards. He sent his mother a card of a little boy covered with pigeons. He sent Patti a card of a nighttime gondola ride and said he’d never felt better. On the back of a picture of Venice under water, he wrote his best friend that he was thinking of coming home early. Then he went to a museum and looked at frescoes he didn’t understand.
He went to American Express and purchased two first-class tickets on a boat the next afternoon for the coast of Yugoslavia. He would surprise her. When he got back to the hotel, Clara still was typing. He showed her the tickets. She said she wasn’t sure she wanted to leave Venice. She had a lot of work to do.
He managed to get her packed and onto the ship. He folded the pages she’d written and put them into a pocket of his backpack. They had a lovely cabin with a queen-size bed and a porthole. Together they watched the yellow lights of Italy disappear. Then they closed the porthole and made love as the ship rocked
back and forth.
In the morning Bill found Clara reading the pages she’d written in Venice. She’d dug them out of his backpack while he slept. “Can I read what you wrote?” he asked. Clara handed him the pages. The piece was called “The Journey,” and it was about twenty pages of their trip thus far. It wasn’t very good. “Do you like it?” Clara asked.
“It’s very interesting.”
She knew he was lying. “What’s wrong with it?” Bill picked at some lint on the covers. “If you don’t like it, can’t you say why?” He kept picking at the covers, so Clara took the pages from him and tore them up. Then she opened the porthole and tossed them into the Adriatic near the shores of Yugoslavia.
They didn’t say a word to each other during the drive along the Dalmatian Coast. Bill wrote in his journal and Clara stared blankly out the bus at the turquoise waters of the sea. The bus was hot and she tried to open a window, but the man behind her pulled it shut. Another man in the back of the bus smiled at her and motioned for them to change seats with him. He put his hand over his heart, then shaped his hands into a pleading sign.
Clara traded seats with the deaf mute because he insisted. He wrote his name, Piro, on a piece of paper. When the bus made a pit stop, Clara, Bill, and Piro went to have a cup of coffee. Piro talked to Clara with his hands. He told her he had two wives and five children. One of the children was also a deaf mute. He told her he had divorced one wife because she nagged him. The divorced wife lived in a city to the north. He told her he had a house in the woods and worked as a blacksmith. He liked Americans and he wanted to travel to America someday. He wrote his address on the piece of paper with his name on it and asked them to send him a postcard from New York. He asked Clara if he could find work in America as a blacksmith and Clara told him he could.
When the bus reached Dubrovnik, Clara finally spoke to Bill. She said to him, “I can find more things to say to a Serbo-Croatian deaf mute than I can find to say to you.”
They spent Easter in Crete. They wanted to see how the real Cretans lived, so they asked around and someone told them about a little town on the west shore. But the bus, they were told, stopped three miles from the town. So they hired a cab and figured they’d find a way out when the time came.
The drive from the main road to Bahia was steep and dusty. As they came closer, Clara’s heart sank. The little village was dotted with slums and construction sites. Dust and garbage littered the side of the road. It wasn’t what they’d had in mind. The town had no hotels, so they checked into a guest house that was on the water. Their room was dirty and filled with cobwebs and the smell of mildew.
On their way to the beach, they stopped in the souvenir shop to buy postcards and suntan lotion. The man who ran the shop spoke a broken English. His in-laws ran the guest house where Bill and Clara were staying. His wife had gone for the day with his son to a nearby town.
Clara leaned forward. “How’d she get there?”
“She took our car,” the man told her.
“Oh,” Clara replied, and she asked him very politely if he would consider driving them back to the main road when they were ready to leave the town. The man said he would drive them. Clara smiled at Bill as she walked ahead of him. “See? I told you we’d get a ride.”
They descended the hill to the beach and saw that everyone was naked. Bill hesitated, but Clara said, “Come on, don’t be so uptight.” Clara took off her suit right away and ran to the water while Bill waded slowly toward her. She tried to pull off his suit when he got near, but he swam away to a rock about a hundred yards out to sea. Clara swam after him to the rock, and when they reached it, Bill took off his suit, tossed it onto the rock.
The water was very cool, and Bill felt the cold water moving between his thighs. He put his hands around her waist. He thought how perfect it all was. How simple things could be. Here he was, naked, treading water in the Aegean, with his hands wrapped gently around Clara’s waist.
Clara pressed her body against his. She tried to move his hands up to her breasts. Bill didn’t know how to explain it to her. He felt closer to her with his hands resting on her waist. He felt closer just holding her hand as they swam. “No,” he muttered, taking his hands away, “I don’t want to.” He didn’t mean to sound so abrupt. “I just want to swim around,” he added gently.
“You never want to,” Clara said as she swam to shore.
That night they got drunk on ouzo. Bill passed out as soon as his head hit the pillow, but Clara tossed in damp sheets and swatted mosquitoes. She thought that there was something about him that he always kept to himself, some part of him she could never reach. She looked at him sleeping, his back to her, and felt alone. She got up and saw the moon over the Aegean.
She decided to work on the story she’d begun about the two people on a journey. She tried to begin in Paris, but she found herself writing about the night when she and Bill were going to make love and Patti called to say her brakes had failed on the coast road. She was writing that Bill had shuffled his feet and turned away from her when he spoke on the phone so that she couldn’t see his face.
She tried to get the typewriter back to the story of the two people on vacation, but it wouldn’t go back. It followed Bill as his eyes glanced at her, then back at the phone, as he dressed slowly, methodically tying his shoelaces. It followed him as he walked to the door, as he kissed her on the cheek, then waved sheepishly from his car. The typewriter described Clara standing at the door, naked, the breeze from the Pacific blowing in as she’d watched him drive away.
The next day as Bill held Clara’s breasts up in the water, she decided to ask him if anything had happened that night when Patti’s car broke down. She was about to ask when he banged his foot into a rock. She counted twenty-three sharp black spines embedded in his heel. While Bill hobbled back to the guest house, Clara wandered through town, trying to find first-aid cream, but she couldn’t find any. When she got back, their landlady, her hair wrapped in a bandanna, was frying fish.
“Excuse me,” Clara said. She pointed to her heel, then pointed upstairs. The woman nodded. She had seen Bill hobble in. Then Clara made sharp staccato jabs with her index finger into her palm. The woman nodded again and laughed. Clara understood that this must happen often to tourists. Then Clara made a sewing gesture and the landlady went into a box and handed Clara a needle.
As Clara headed up the stairs, the woman caught her by the arm. She had a round face and bright blue eyes. She smiled, pointed to her crotch, and then to Clara’s foot. Then she said, “Psss.” Clara watched as the woman made a long stream of water with her hands.
“Psss?” Clara repeated out loud. The woman nodded, laughed, and went back to her fish.
Bill was examining his foot when Clara got upstairs. The spines were hurting and the heel was beginning to swell. Clara passed the needle through a match flame. “The woman who runs this place told me to piss on your foot.”
Bill looked stunned. “Why, for Christ’s sake?”
“I guess it’s supposed to take the spines out.” She turned his foot over. She picked the few spines that were on the surface with the needle.
Bill shook his head. “Uric acid? You think it would work?”
Clara laughed. “I don’t know, but I’m not pissing on your foot.”
In the morning Bill’s foot was puffed up and an odd shade of gray. He could hardly put his shoe on. Clara was worried. “You should see a doctor.”
She ran over to the souvenir shop and told the man there that they needed a ride as soon as possible to the main road. He seemed annoyed but said he’d be over in half an hour. While Clara packed, Bill sat downstairs on the porch, waiting for the man. Finally he came by. He told Bill he was sorry, but he was out of gas. Bill looked at his pack, at the typewriter. “All right,” he said to the man, “thanks anyway.”
When Clara came down with her pack, Bill told her that the man from the souvenir shop was out of gas. Clara didn’t believe the story. “Didn’t you
argue with him?” She looked at the dirt road, twisting up the mountain to the main road.
“He said he was out of gas.” Bill pulled on his pack and grimaced. He picked up the typewriter.
Clara strapped on her pack. “He lied to you,” she said. “Don’t you know when somebody is lying to you?” Bill started walking. “It’s a three-mile walk out of here,” she called out to him. “Here, let me take it.” She reached to take the typewriter from his hand, but he walked ahead, trying not to limp.
“I said I’d carry it,” he shouted as he moved up the road. “And I will.”
They missed the three o’clock bus and got to Heraklion late. They checked into a pension, and while Bill soaked his foot, Clara said gently, “Tell me, that night when Patti called, you were gone a long time.”
Bill was concentrating on trying to squeeze one of the spines out of his heel.
“Is there anything you want to tell me?” Clara asked. “Did anything happen?” Bill’s eyes flitted back and forth. He said nothing, so Clara continued, “If something happened, it’s all right. I mean, it’s not completely all right, but you two were together a long time and those things can happen. But do you want to tell me about it?”
Bill looked up, a wide smile on his lips. “Who puts such things in your head? You should save them for your scripts.”
“I’d feel better if you told me.”
But Bill just shook his head. “Save your crazy ideas for your scripts.”
When Bill got in bed, Clara began a letter, explaining why she was leaving him. She told him how he’d grown so remote, so detached, how they didn’t share things anymore. Clara began to tell him that it didn’t really matter if something had happened that night with Patti; what mattered was he wouldn’t talk to her about it. She paused to think, but now the typewriter typed on its own. She watched as its keys clacked away without her fingers touching them. Terrified, not knowing what to do, Clara put her hands back on the keys, and her hands followed the typewriter. It told how Patti’s car hadn’t broken down at all. It told how she’d just pleaded with him to come over, how they’d made love on her living room floor.