Beginner's Greek

by James Collins

  Good old Peter was sitting across from good old Otis Bell, whose importance in the world of finance was to Peter’s as the sun’s light was to a match. A lanky black man in his sixties, he had short hair that looked as if it had been dusted by snow. Everyone knew Bell’s story: he had grown up in some godforsaken, gnat-infested county with bad soil in the Deep South. When he enlisted in the air force, he was given an intelligence test, and on the quantitative section he received one of the highest scores ever recorded. The air force sent him to college and graduate school, and after he finished his tour he went into academia, with periodic jobs in Washington. Previously, he had been head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and even when he had held that position, Peter, of course, would have been unworthy to touch the hem of his garment.

  As he would also be in the case of Athina Kakouilli. A slim woman in her fifties with dark circles under her eyes, she carried her large nose with regal dignity. What did Peter remember about her? From a middle-class family in Greece. She had come to the United States to live with relatives in her teens. She wrote poems of every variety, and — this had stuck in Peter’s mind — her favorite modern poet writing in English was Robert Frost. Under the dictatorship, her family had been forced to leave the country.

  Then came ruddy, big-boned Jack Thorndale. He was probably over seventy, and he had thick white hair that was unkempt. His evening clothes seemed to have been thrown on and to be too small; Peter noticed that he gave the impression of bursting out of them on account of his strength, not flab, and that this effect was not entirely undesirable. Dick Montague knew Thorndale and had talked about him once in a while. He had married a couple of heiresses, and he was a hard drinker, a Don Juan, a fine horseman, a crack shot. Wherever there was game to kill or a fox to chase he could be found. He had big, horny hands that looked as if they had worked an infinite number of snaps, cleats, hinges, buckles, clasps, bolts, winches, ropes, and toggles. He was famous for his molasses-voiced seductiveness, as he played against his rough type to lure countless women of all stripes (including, of course, the wives of his friends) into his bed. In fact, he probably spent less time tracking in the bush than he did going to parties in London and cruising on someone’s yacht and visiting rich bohemians in Marrakech. Behind his back, people called him “Papa,” but he had the last laugh, since he was the one waking in the arms of a nineteen-year-old beauty. As Thorndale looked over at Isabella, Peter could see him lick his chops.

  Finally, to Peter’s immediate right sat Lisa Eisler. She had a dark complexion and long, graying, curly hair, which she had worked into a thick braid. Her face had some wrinkles and sags, but she was attractive. She must have been in her fifties and she looked like one of those older models who are sometimes used in fashion advertising. She wore a simple black dress, hardly any makeup, and no jewelry. Her hands were weather-beaten, with prominent veins that looked like the roots of a tree. As Peter remembered, Eisler had grown up in New Jersey, the daughter of an optometrist. She had been smart enough to get into a very good university, and from there she had planned to be a lawyer, but she got married young. She had a couple of children and did volunteer work. One day after her divorce and when her children were grown, she was reading about the victims of famine and war and had the overpowering conviction that she had to do more. So her life took that path. She now spent months at a time in places that were dangerous, diseased, and impoverished. She did not eat meat; she refused to take any but the smallest salary; she liked old-fashioned rock and roll. Peter often wrung his hands about whether the work he did had any real value. Now he was sitting next to someone whose example made him feel depraved.

  So here we have a portrait of everyone at the table — oh, but let’s not forget Isabella, the leanest, lithest, most silky-skinned, most revealingly dressed, most beautiful (in her way, which was not Holly’s), sexiest, most frankly available-seeming woman Peter had ever sat next to in his life. Isabella always cast a spell on him, but tonight the effect was overpowering. Here was a young woman for whom any man would gladly toss away an empire.

  And then there was: Peter. Peter knew, of course, that it was pretty pointless and immature to compare yourself to other people. What mattered was whether you believed that you were using your own capabilities to the fullest. He also knew that it was of no importance whatsoever what other people thought of you. As long as you were comfortable with yourself and believed in yourself, then you could just throw out all that nonsense of worrying about your status and “success” and other people’s opinions. Peter was a valuable, worthwhile human being in his own right! There was no reason whatsoever for him to feel inferior to anyone else at this table. Except that he was inferior to all of them.

  Peter had studied the menu card long enough to memorize it. Pretty soon he was going to have to say something to someone, or someone was going to say something to him. He looked over to his left, where Isabella and Bernard were talking. Peter smiled and leaned in their direction, but he hoped his manner conveyed the message Don’t worry about me! I am just parking myself here on the edge of your conversation. He couldn’t quite understand what they were saying, and he found his attention drawn to the smooth channel between Isabella’s breasts.

  Then, from his other side, he heard a voice say: “It looks as if you’re going to have to settle for talking to me.”

  Peter did not understand. He turned to his right and saw Lisa Eisler looking at him with a friendly smile.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I didn’t —”

  “It wasn’t anything important,” Eisler said. “I only said, ‘It looks as if you’re going to have to settle for talking to me,’ ” and she nodded toward Isabella.

  Peter glanced to his left and then looked back at Eisler. “Oh, uh, she — Isabella — actually, we’re friends. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding.”

  “I see.”

  “It was last June. We haven’t seen each other since then.”

  “I understand,” said Eisler. “But please, even if you’d never met I’d think there was definitely something wrong with you, a young man your age, if you would rather talk to me than to her!”

  “Well,” Peter said, “I hope you’re also willing to make allowances for Mr. Bernard and Mr. Bell and Mr. Thorndale. They probably think of themselves as being my age, or younger.”

  “Hmmm,” Eisler said, glancing around at the other men. “Okay.” She shrugged. “High-status male primates. What can you do?”

  There was a pause. Peter swallowed. He figured he might as well just plunge right in. “Ms. Eisler,” he said, “I . . . that is . . . when you tell people you admire them, I’ve usually found that they don’t take it too well. They usually look down their nose at you as if to say, Why do you imagine I could care less whether you admire me? So I hope you don’t mind if I say that it is really an honor for me to be sitting next to you. I’ve been reading about all your work, and, well, with what you are doing and the people you are helping, it seems ridiculous of me to think that whatever I said would mean a thing, but, anyway, it is an honor.”

  “Please call me Lisa,” Eisler said. “Thank you. I do appreciate what you have said very much.”

  Peter thought for a moment. “You know, I feel like kind of a hypocrite saying that. I don’t actually do anything that reflects the beliefs that I’ve just implied that I have. I mean, I give a few hundred dollars, or, okay, even a couple of thousand, to something here and there, but really . . .” He switched gears. “Does it often happen that people you’ve just met start justifying their lives to you?”

  Eisler laughed. “I have never thought about it quite like that, but yes. I suppose I do have that effect on some people.”

  “Because, boy, I have to be honest, it seems very important for me to convince you that I’m not a bad person. Really, I’m not!”

  She laughed again. “Peter, you shouldn’t feel that way. You don’t need to prove something to me.”

  “Yes! Yes, I do!”<
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  “No, really. It’s true that when you’re in my position, you can make people feel guilty just by saying hello. It’s as if the rabbi or the minister showed up. ‘It’s Lisa! What if she sees our SUV?!’ I get very, very angry when I’m in the States and I see all the waste and the overconsumption. Going into a supermarket, seeing the fruit they throw out because it has one little blemish. It makes me mad because of all the people who could be helped if the waste were used properly, and it just disgusts me, on principle, and even aesthetically, if that’s the right word. It’s not so bad for me now, coming back. But the kids I work with, after they’ve been doing something overseas for a couple of years in a really poor country and they return, it can be really hard.

  “But with individuals I’m not that judgmental. The point is, Peter, if you are giving money and doing what you can and living a good life, that’s all anybody can expect — although you probably could give more money!” She smiled at him.

  “You know, I’m not against pleasure. In my own way I’m not even against luxury.” She motioned with her hand around the room. “Take all this. Look at that painting.” It was a painting of Mars and Venus, both naked except for a robe draped across her lap; with their arms spread out, they held each other’s hands. Venus was plump, and she wore a pearl choker, pearls in her blond hair, and two ruby, pearl, and gold bracelets; she was in profile and had a straight nose and delicate lips and chin. Mars’s muscles in his shoulders and arms bunched up as he leaned toward Venus. You wanted to finger the blue robe, to touch their rosy flesh.

  “You could sell that painting for a few million dollars and provide food and medicine to thousands of people,” Eisler said. “But do I want to hector Arthur to sell it? No. Why? Well, there’s a place in the world for beautiful things and people who own them, protect them, and enjoy them. I haven’t gotten it all sorted out, but in the great scheme of things, I figure that somebody should lead the life Arthur does. He almost has an obligation to the rest of humanity to do that. It’s not the Arthurs who bother me; it’s the millions of people who waste money and resources on crap. So you see, I’m really quite a snob.

  “But the other thing is, I’ve managed to soak Arthur for a lot, a whole lot. I sure don’t want to get rid of the Arthurs and kill the golden goose.”

  “Yes,” Peter said. “I suppose that if you want to take from the rich and give to the poor, you’ve got to have the rich.”

  Eisler laughed. “Yes, I guess that’s true,” she said. Peter had not even intended for his remark to be funny, but a booming laugh came from across the table. It was Otis Bell.

  “Now what was that?” he said. “ ‘If you want to take from the rich and give to the poor, you’ve got to have the rich’? I hope you don’t mind if I steal that, young man. I know several people whom I can use that with.” He laughed again loudly. The others asked what it was all about, and Bell told them, and there was a murmur of amusement and approval.

  “Well, Otis,” said Seth Bernard, “I’m glad to learn that you see your job as preserving the rich.”

  “Oh, no,” said Bell. “But I don’t see it as eliminating them either.”

  Thorndale piped up. “It seems to me,” he said, “that rich people are a necessary evil.”

  “It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it,” said Eisler. “You guys don’t get enough credit.”

  “Well,” said Peter, “that’s really up to Mr. Bell, isn’t it, how much credit we get?”

  Ha ha! Otis Bell laughed at this heartily.

  The conversation eddied among two or three people, flowed crosswise, split into branches, then formed pools that included everyone. As it did so, Peter emerged as sort of a mascot of the table. Two people would be discussing something — a movie, a political issue, the economy, the human condition — and then they would turn to him and ask him his opinion. Peter found himself able to talk with perfect ease on any subject at all.

  Mrs. Beeche and Otis Bell, for example, got onto China. What did Peter think, Mrs. Beeche wondered. “I really don’t know much about it,” he said, “but it’s a country that has several thousand riots a year, that has a seriously aging population, that is an environmental disaster, that suffers from massive corruption, that has a completely screwed-up banking system, that is seeing speculation run wild, and that is tyrannical. Rather than seeing it as a threat, I worry that it will all fall to pieces.” “Exactly,” Bernard chimed in. Or, at another point, Thorndale and Isabella were trying to figure out the domestic arrangements of a movie-star couple and became hopelessly confused. They appealed to Peter, who lucidly catalogued the relevant pregnancies, adoptions, marriages, out-of-wedlock births, third parties, divorces, and box office. “The judge said he wanted to give custody to a screenwriter, since that way, with two stars and a director already attached, the kid would have a package.” Having gone shooting once in his life, he was able to discuss with Thorndale the tricks of working setters and retrievers together; he made an apposite comment when Bernard, a philatelist, mentioned that he had just acquired a misprint from the Kingdom of Naples.

  Later on Bernard and Bell were talking. Bernard asked Bell about measuring the effect of Federal Reserve policy statements on markets. “How’m I going to fool you if I tell you that?” Bell said. “Why don’t you ask your colleague here? Or, I’m sorry, Peter, maybe you’re off-duty?”

  “Never!” said Bernard.

  Peter took a sip of wine. “I guess,” he said, “you could start by using a Cholesky decomposition to construct some indicators of how policy expectations change.” He carried on for a bit, describing the indicators he might use. “You could follow Kohn and Sack, maybe, and regress the squared values of each of the factors on several dummy variables. You’d get into some equations.”

  “Gurkaynak, Sack, and Swanson,” Bell said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Peter.

  “Jesus Christ!” Thorndale cried from the other side of the table. “If you guys are going to keep this up, you can take your damn slide rules someplace else.” He and Kakouilli began conversing in Greek. They knew each other, it turned out, because both were friends with an American poet who had lived in Greece much of the time. They were talking about him and switched to English. What was that very early poem, something about learning Greek? How did it start — smelling the sun? They both turned to Peter. Miraculously, Peter remembered this work and was able to recite it.

  “You mean ‘Beginner’s Greek’? Let’s see . . .

  To one

  Who smells the sun,

  Eyes shut, and tastes that rain is sweet;

  Who hears

  Music, but fears

  Its presence in empty gardens; or, discreet,

  Only observes

  The nerves

  And fibers of a painting — shade, technique;

  What is

  Beyond analysis

  Is perilous: we must not wish to seek

  And cry

  ‘This is what I

  Love, what I cherish!’ Instead, be wary of such

  Intensity

  That we

  May never be hurt or happy or anything too much.”

  Isabella had been listening intently. “Oh, Peter, that’s so beautiful,” she said in a whisper.

  “He was twenty,” Peter said.

  Kakouilli and Thorndale just stared at him.

  Filling himself with good wine and food, laughing with his new friends, hearing the burbling of the other conversations in the room (not a cacophony, more like the sound when all of a city’s churches ring their bells), seeing the carved birds and hares on the wall seem to grow fatter and fatter, Peter felt as if he had lowered himself into a warm bath of well-being. Responding to such global deliciousness, all his senses had become more acute. To his touch, the table linen had an unusual density and thickness. Isabella’s scent almost made him swoon, as if he were in a hothouse filled with orchids. Although silver, the forks and knives had the heft of solid gold. Looking at
the painting nearby, he could see the colors pulsate. Beautiful and rare, all the objects in the room seemed to hum.

  What a wonderful world it was!

  By the time dessert (reine de saba) was served, Peter had decided that he loved everyone at the table, that they all loved one another, and that they all loved him. This feeling was enhanced by the knowledge that they had various overlapping connections, and so they were friends meeting over dinner, not just posturing guests at a party. Peter felt he had been welcomed into an intimate circle and loved them all the more for that: unlikely as it might have seemed, Thorndale and Eisler knew each other well; he was close to an older man who had been her mentor. “Sure, Ben would let me come out now and then, and even though I wasn’t good for much I’d try to help.” “Not good for much!” Eisler said. “You saved his life!” “Rubbish! Nonsense!” Thorndale wouldn’t let Eisler tell the story to the table, but she whispered to Peter that Thorndale and the other man had been captured by members of a particularly brutal rebel army and Thorndale had killed two men in order to effect their escape. Thorndale had known Bernard for decades and he knew Bell because he knew everyone. Meanwhile, Bell had taught Arthur Beeche and Bernard and had known Arthur’s father. Bell knew Mrs. Beeche because he was also on the board of the opera; he had become a fan as a boy because his mother took him along on Saturdays when she worked at the house of a white lady who unfailingly listened to the opera broadcast. Then Athina Kakouilli and Lisa Eisler had been college friends of Arthur’s late wife, Maria.