“The Mysterious East,” I said at last. We wandered on. After the airless inferno inside the museum, the Mall felt comfortable, although the temperature was well into the nineties. Dylan removed his tie and slung it around his neck; I took off my linen jacket and was glad that I’d gone bare-legged that day. Our museum IDs still were clipped to our breast pockets; apart from that, we might have been any two tourists goggling at the acrobats and sitar players and contortionists at play in the shadow of the Washington Monument.
“So, Boss,” Dylan finally asked, “what do I do to earn my keep?”
I shrugged. “Not much.” Summer interns weren’t actually paid at all; the exceptional experience of working at the museum was supposed to be worth far more than any one person could possibly earn in the space of six short weeks. “To tell you the truth, interns don’t actually do very much. At least mine never do. Laurie’ll show you around the archives, I’ll show you how the videodisc system works. I’m sure we can find some stuff to keep you busy. There’s a new collection of photos that came in last week that needs to be cataloged; I’ll get you started on that. But mostly just have a good time, take advantage of being here.”
“I’m already doing that.”
I blushed, glanced over to see if he was being smarmy. But no, Dylan had the same earnest open look as before. As a matter of fact, the way he was staring at me was pretty dopey: like a kid longing for a new skateboard or the latest Boink CD.
“So,” I asked hurriedly, ducking into the shade of a great oak tree. “How’s your mom?”
“My mom.” Dylan kicked up a cloud of dust, flicked a strand of hair from his intense blue eyes. “Well, you know my mom.”
“Actually, I don’t. I haven’t seen Angelica since—well, since before you were born. I really only knew her for a couple of months.”
He stared at his feet. “I guess she’s okay.” He flashed me a crooked grin, a look that was so much like Oliver’s I felt a stabbing at my breast. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t seen her much since I’ve been born. My dad and I, we used to do a lot of stuff together. Riding, sailing, flying—my dad had a Cessna 150, he was gonna teach me to fly. But my mother—well, you know she’s always been into all this strange stuff. Like digging up our place on Santorini, looking for tombs and artifacts. She’s a real field archaeologist, at least she was until my father died and she started getting more into her books. I mean, she’s a great mom and all. But I’ve always gone away to school, I liked going away to school; and so I didn’t see her much except at vacations. And summertime she was always off on her digs, and Christmas we’d go see my grandfather…”
He leaned against the oak tree, staring across the long downward slope of green leading to the Tidal Basin, where little paddleboats like fat blue beetles swam through the water. “She’s just one of these driven professional women you read about,” he said at last with a sigh. “Over here, at least. In Italy you don’t read much about them, because there aren’t any. Not as many, at least.” He fell silent again, gazing into the hazy distance.
“So,” I said. So maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to talk about Angelica. “So you like UCLA?”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s a lot of driven professional students. I guess I’m just not as motivated as I should be, I dunno.” He looked at me sideways and smiled. “I actually wanted to take the summer off and go cross-country with these friends of mine to Nantucket, but my mother had other plans. It was her idea to apply for this internship.”
“Well, I’m glad you did,” I said, and grinned. “Really.”
“Me too.”
His voice was sweet, with that hint of an accent and Angelica’s theatrical phrasing. His glittering green-flecked eyes remained fixed on me. I wiped a bead of sweat from my nose.
This is insane, I thought. I’ve known this kid for, what? an hour? ninety minutes? and already I’m totally wiped out by him.
Although he is incredibly fantastic-looking, I told myself, like that was a good excuse.
Although he is exactly half my age, and I am his supervisor, and old enough to be his mother.
Shit, if I’d had my way with Oliver, I would have been his mother. I shook my head, feeling slightly delirious.
“You okay?”
I started. Dylan was just inches from my face, his sea blue eyes wide with concern. “Sweeney? You look a little—I dunno, sunstroked maybe. Maybe we should go inside—”
Gently he pushed the hair from my eyes. I felt as though I might faint.
I am losing my mind, I thought. Or else this kid is losing his.
“Uh, sure,” I stammered. “We could duck in there—” I cocked my thumb at the Museum of American History. “—it’s air-conditioned, we could just kind of cool off and decide what to do next.”
“Sure. Here, let me take your bag—”
He reached for my briefcase but I tugged it from his hand. “That’s okay, it’s not heavy—”
“Really, I don’t mind—”
“No, it’s—”
I clutched my briefcase like it was the only thing keeping me from falling. “Right in here,” I babbled, hurrying up the steps.
Inside we wandered through throngs of tourists gaping at the first ladies’ gowns, Stanley Steamers, Fonzi’s leather jacket, the nation’s largest ball of string. We walked to where the doors opened onto Constitution Avenue and tourists crowded the gift shop and water fountains. All of a sudden I was noticing young girls—high school girls, college girls, mere children of twenty-five and -seven and thirty. All of them antic and colorful as guppies.
All of them younger than me.
The girls of summer everywhere and this poor kid was stuck with me, Electra on a coffee break.
But Dylan had inherited his mother’s ability to confer invisibility upon his companions: no one noticed me at all. The girls saw only Dylan. He ignored them, doing his best to carry on a serious conversation with me, which was difficult since what we were trying to talk about was what the floors were made of:
“Marble, you think?”
“Maybe just marble-colored linoleum.”
“Congoleum?”
“No, not linoleum, this is—”
This was nuts. We were acting like two people who were nervous because they were thinking about going to bed together, and I for one had always made it a policy not to sleep with someone until I had known him for at least twenty-four hours. Actually, in the last decade I hadn’t had much cause to implement that policy, or any of the others I’d made up over the years. And yet here I was, stumbling along in a daze beside someone half my age, who, to his credit, seemed to be equally nonplussed by the situation.
Probably he’s just embarrassed, I suddenly thought. The notion made my heart sink; but I knew it had to be true. He wanted to take off, meet some friends, make some friends, nice young people with tattoos and multiple body piercings; not hang around with a woman wearing sensible white tennis shoes and a Donna Karan suit.
“Listen, Dylan, do you want to go?”
We were outside now, balancing on the curb and feeling the last atoms of cool air plummet from our bodies onto the sweltering concrete. “There’s really no reason for us to go back to the museum today, they won’t get the a/c fixed till this evening and there’s no way to work there without it. And I know you probably have stuff to do…”
Dylan stared at the sidewalk, his long hair draping one side of his face. When he glanced up at me a moment later he looked crushed.
“Well, no,” he said. “I mean no, actually I don’t. I don’t know anyone here.” He rubbed his nose and coughed self-consciously. “Actually, can I take you to dinner?”
“Dinner? It’s only eleven o’clock.”
“Lunch, then, can I take you to lunch?”
“Uh—”
“Coffee, we could get espresso somewhere?”
I started to say no, but then there was that earnest face—that earnest, beautiful face—and the earnest, beautiful bo
dy it was attached to, now leaning rather precariously from the curb into Constitution Avenue.
“Listen, you don’t have to pay,” he said, a desperate edge creeping into his voice. “I have my own Visa—”
I started to laugh. Trust Angelica to send her only child into the big scary world with his own Visa.
“Or we could—”
“Okay, okay!—let’s go have lunch. Or espresso, or something. Only, no, you can’t pay for me—even though you have your own Visa. Christ, Dylan, get out of the road, you’re gonna get flattened by a Winnebago!”
I grabbed his arm as a land yacht roared past. For a moment we teetered on the edge of the curb, dust and smoke curling around us. He was tall enough to look down at me, he gripped my arm and held me tightly and I still hadn’t let go of his hand. Very dimly I could hear the distant skirling of a sitar fading into the drone of traffic. Then Dylan was pulling me closer to him, and before I could yank away he had dipped his head to graze my cheek with his lips. He smelled of car exhaust and sweat, and the faintest breath of sandalwood.
“Wow! Sweeney. Thanks. But you’ll have to tell me where we’re going.”
“Where we’re going?” I swallowed, my mouth dry and my heart pounding like I’d just run a mile. “I guess—we’ll go—well, somewhere that’s not around here.”
I looked over my shoulder at the museum. I unsnapped my ID and shoved it into a pocket, turned to Dylan and did the same to his. “Let’s see. Uh, we’ll go to—”
I frowned, staring out at the traffic, the tourists running to make the light. Then like a swallow lighting upon my shoulder it came to me.
Of course! Where else?!
I laughed. “We’ll go,” I said, grabbing his hand and pulling him after me into the crosswalk, “to Dumbarton Oaks.”
We spent the entire afternoon there, until the gates closed at five. We wandered across the lawns and through the boxwood labyrinth; gazed into the shallow pool with its mosaic of Bacchus and the grape arbor nearby; shook our heads at the grim remains of the bamboo garden that had flourished for so many years and had finally flowered, as bamboos do once a century, and then died. We ended at the trompe l’oeil wooden gate depicting a fountain, its splashing waters done in precious stones and mother-of-pearl, then found our way back up a narrow flagstoned path. We stopped to watch a small girl dart beneath a grove of miniature fruit trees, plucking kumquats and running to give them to her mother, a very proper Georgetown matron who promptly hid them in her Coach bag.
We wound up on the stone ramparts overlooking the pool. Dylan gazed longingly into its depths: a lozenge of purest turquoise shot with glints of gold, like the pool in the garden of the Hesperides, like the pool in a dream.
“Does anyone ever swim in it?”
“Maybe visiting Harvard horticultural fellows. I’ve never seen anyone.”
“It’s so beautiful. It reminds me of the pool at Keftiu—”
Keftiu. I gazed across to where wisteria bearded the high stone walls opposite. Where had I heard that before?
“What’s Keftiu?”
“My mother’s house on Crete. She always says it’s her favorite place in the world. I think sometimes that’s why she married my father,” he added softly. He rested his chin against the stone, his blue eyes wistful.
Keftiu. And I remembered the butterfly I had shown to Maggie that morning. The word had been part of its name.
“What does it mean?”
“It’s what the Egyptians called ancient Crete. Keftiu, or sometimes just Kefii.”
I was silent. Then I asked, “Why do you think it’s why she married your father?”
“Because he always said she loved that place more than she loved him. And I believe him. They met at a party on a yacht moored off the north coast of Crete. He took her to his place the next day—it’s not far from Knossos, and she’d never been there. She wanted to see the temple restoration, and she wanted to see Keftiu.”
His voice cracked as he went on, “He—he told me once that he had never seen anything like the look she got on her face, the first time she saw his villa there. It really is beautiful, it’s right on the coast and there are ruins all around it, and at night you can hear all these wild birds, and the wind on the water. But my father said that he had never seen anyone look as beautiful as my mother did when she first saw Keftiu. He said that from then on, all he wanted was to get her to look at him like that, just once.”
I smiled, but when I glanced at Dylan I saw that his face was sad.
“And did she?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know. My father never told me. He didn’t like it out there as much as she did. There’s no running water or air-conditioning, it’s rather primitive. He never wanted to stay very long—he preferred our villa in Florence, or the Milan apartment.
“But Mom loved it. She never wanted to leave. But after he died there, and her father… she’s only gone back a few times since then.”
We turned and left the pool, walking down to the formal gardens, where swallowtails and tiny hairskipper butterflies fluttered everywhere, so that it looked as though someone had shaken all the rose petals from their beds. The air had a sweet, powdery smell. Beneath our feet the grass was lush and damp from hidden sprinklers. A woman held a baby out to admire a huge rose, and the baby laughed. For a long time we wandered in silence, Dylan stopping now and then to watch the butterflies on the roses, or bending to sniff delicately at a dianthus blossom like a fragrant pink spider.
At last I said, “How did they the? Or—never mind, you don’t have to—”
“No, that’s okay. It was a while ago. We were at Keftiu, my grandfather had come for the winter and they were out sailing, my father and him. It was kind of strange. My grandfather was this great sailor, and my father was too, he never had any trouble in the water. He used to take us sailing at night, in the middle of winter, anytime; but he was careful, he’d never go out if there was any danger, if there was a storm brewing or something. And he was very careful with my grandfather, because Grappa was so old—almost ninety.
“But anyway, they went out, just for a few hours. It was morning, a beautiful perfect clear day, there was nothing on the weather about a storm or anything. Then out of nowhere this gale came up—there were people out on the water who saw it happen, they said it was like these clouds just boiled over the horizon and overtook them and that was it. Their boat capsized, they couldn’t get to their life jackets, and—”
He stopped. He was staring at the broken stalk of a yellow daylily, the flower’s long petals wilted in the sun.
“Oh Dylan,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked, I’m sorry—”
He turned to me and shook his head. “It just makes me sad, that’s all. They never recovered the bodies. Some people—friends of my father, who never really liked my mother—they said it was like in Rebecca. That Hitchcock movie…”
I looked away, stunned, and pretended to examine the broken lily. It wasn’t the notion that Angelica might have killed someone. I could imagine that; I could imagine almost anything of her. That golden faithless creature, beautiful and amoral as a fox, having another man act as father to Oliver’s child (and had her husband ever known? had he even suspected? had Dylan?), dreaming her mad dreams of apocalypse in her million-dollar houses…
But killing her own father! One of the Benandanti?
“I—I—”
Suddenly Dylan grabbed me by the shoulders, so hard that I gasped.
“‘Rebecca? I hated Rebecca!’” he hissed, then laughed sharply as he let me go, his face bright red. “Forget I ever said that! You must hate me, for having said that about—”
“No—really, of course not! It’s—I should never have brought it up. It’s none of my business, I don’t even know you—”
“But I want you to know me,” he said, with that same wistful earnestness. He took a deep breath, smoothed his hair from his face, and stared at his feet before looking up at me
sideways. “I know this might sound strange. I know I just met you this morning and I know that you’re—well, I know that you’re older, okay? But—
“But this is really weird, Sweeney. I just have this amazing feeling about you. This incredible feeling that I know you. I mean, really know you.” He tugged imploringly at my wrist, his eyes wide and beseeching. “Does that sound ridiculous?”
He sighed and gazed at the neatly clipped lawn, then shoved his hands disconsolately into his pockets. “Shit. I guess I should have gone to Nantucket.”
I stared at him: his lanky body slung into its chinos and neat white shirt as into a prison uniform, the late afternoon sun glinting off that tiny constellation of gold and silver in one ear, his long hair slipping from its ponytail to spill across his shoulders. In the golden light he looked like someone who was melting, a wild boy poured into one careful upright mold but now slowly reverting to his true self. Not Angelica’s Good Son, with his museum internship and Visa card and italicized list of contacts and places to go; but a wild boy, like Oliver himself had been. Maybe not truly crazy as Oliver was, but fey enough to be talking to me like this. Fey enough to sense the same eerie quality that had colored our afternoon together, that made me so reluctant to leave.
Unless, of course, it was all my imagination. Unless he was so much Angelica’s child that she had put him up to this, to fit into some mad scheme of hers that I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
But Dylan didn’t look like he was playing a part. He looked stricken and lost, almost angry.
“No,” I said at last. “You’re supposed to be here, Dylan. I don’t know why, but I feel it too. You—you remind me of someone I knew once, a long time ago. Someone I—somebody I was in love with.”
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