by Lynn Freed
Bess frowned over her glasses.
“I know, I know,” said Dania. “I’m bitten already. So maybe I do one about the husband who is choking to death on a marshmallow?” She gave one of her hearty laughs.
“A marshmallow?” Bess said. “I thought it was steak?”
“No!” cried Dania, laughing truly now, almost crying with laughter. “I said steak because a marshmallow—” She collapsed into uncontrollable shrieks and snorts. “It’s hard to die a funny death,” she said at last, wiping her eyes.
Bess was laughing now, too. It was the first time, in all our months together, that I’d seen the two of them showing any signs of real friendship. “How the hell do you choke on a marshmallow?” she said.
“He was playing with them a stupid game, like a child, putting so many into his mouth, counting up.” Dania threw up her hands. “Amos was a child. I was married to a child.”
“So, write about that,” said Bess.
But suddenly the joke was over. “Maybe one day an article,” said Dania soberly. “The eternal boy playing the games of children, and Mommy doesn’t stop it.”
“And watches him die?” suggested Bess.
Dania looked up sharply.
“But you did, right?” said Bess. “I mean, marshmallows are soft. You could have tried to pull them out?”
* * *
BY JANUARY GREECE DIDN’T SEEM like Greece anymore. People huddled along, bracing against the wind and rain. Even Bess, who claimed to thrive in cold weather, complained about how bleak it was. “One misses the lights,” she said. “And the furs. And they didn’t do much about Christmas either, did they?”
“They pay more attention to Easter,” I said, looking up from the hideous scarf I was crocheting for Eleftheria. She’d chosen the yarn herself—green, purple, and silver. Since she’d been replaced by Gladdy, I’d gone out of my way to maintain the connection in case we needed her when the children descended.
“Well, let’s hope things cheer up soon,” Bess went on, “or I’m going to go to Athens for a break.” She grumped down under the rug she now used on the window seat.
“Better check the ferries,” I said. “If the wind’s too high, they cancel. FYI, you can wear your furs there.”
“‘FYI’! Next you’ll be saying love you!, and then I really will go to Athens,” she said.
I laughed. “If you go, would you get me some wool? I mean real wool. All they have here is this awful multicolored acrylic stuff.”
She tossed her magazine to the floor. “How many variations on ‘How to please your man’ can they think up year after year? And, anyway, who cares about pleasing them? I’m sick to death of pleasing them! Do they ever wonder about how to please us?”
* * *
à gg, Greece
Stuck in the unheatable marble sitting room, with the rain outside and hours to go till dinner, we’ve all been rather grumpy. Greece in the cold and rain isn’t the Greece we came here for. The restaurants are closed, the beaches deserted, and old men occupy the cafés, smoking like fiends.
This morning, Bess tossed her magazine to the floor, and said, “Why do they keep hammering on in these magazines about how to please men? Who cares about pleasing men?”
Well, none of us, as it turned out. We are all rather sick of pleasing anyone, and dead bored by the subject of sex. So, quite soon we’d meandered away from the idea of pleasing men and onto what men could do to please us.
“That’s obvious,” said Bess, picking up her magazine again. “Romance. It’s sweet, and funny, and gives you something to look forward to.”
Okay, we said, but only for a while. And even Bess had to agree with this.
“Money,” said Dania, “is what most women want. To be secure.”
We discussed this for a while—what we’d be giving up for such security. And, again, we decided it wouldn’t work, at least not for us. We were lucky, we said. Here we were in Greece, each of us independent of those sorts of obligations.
And then it was my turn, and, out of nowhere, came the answer. “Listen,” I said, sitting forward. “All a man has to do is utter four words, and we’d be his completely.”
“Words?” said Bess. “Who wants words?”
“What words?” said Dania, looking keen.
“‘Leave it to me,’” I said. “Just let a man say ‘leave it to me,’ and we’d follow him anywhere.”
* * *
“REX IS THE ONE I MISS,” Bess said one day, “even if he is a crook. I don’t even mind about the au pair anymore, although I was ready to kill him when I found out.”
“You don’t mind the money?” said Dania.
Bess looked out into the rain. Perhaps, after a lifetime of being forgiven for her own desertions, she found it easier to forgive one in a faithless lover, I thought. Or perhaps the one didn’t follow the other. Probably it didn’t, and it was simply that she didn’t suffer as much as other women. I liked this idea. It fitted, somehow, with the way nowhere seemed to hold her too tightly, not even South Africa, where she’d come and gone with neither nostalgia nor regret. Perhaps she was simply deficient in deep feeling, I thought. But if I taxed her with this, she’d only say, Shallow? Of course I’m shallow! I’ve always been shallow.
“He wasn’t even much of a lover,” she said now with a sigh. “This position, that position—like Pilates.”
“To them performance is important,” Dania said. “We must clap.”
“Or shout and scream,” I said. “That was Clive.”
“French men love shouting and screaming,” said Bess. “Very noisy in hotels.”
“Trouble is, he wasn’t French,” I said.
“What about those skinny ponytails that make them feel not so bald?” Dania said.
“Nothing wrong with bald,” said Bess. “In fact, I like bald—all that skull under the skin.”
I looked out at the rain washing across the veranda. It was almost as depressing as the conversation.
And then my phone rang. I looked at my watch—the middle of the night in California. “Hester?” I shouted. “Hello? What’s the matter?”
“So, what’ve you got to tell me?”
Finn? It was impossible.
“Finn!” I said. “For God’s sake! Where are you?”
“Finn?” mouthed Bess, not inaudibly. “The garbage-in-the-freezer man?”
“Where do you think I am, you old cow? Down here at the dock, getting wet. Come and pick me up immediately.”
I hung on, breathing lightly.
“Well? You coming, or do I have to find a taxi?”
“Wait where you are.” I snapped the phone shut.
“Hester must have told him,” I said. “She’s moving from passive to active aggression.”
“But where is he going to stay?” said Dania. She’d never seen the point of Finn, although she stopped just short of saying so directly.
“We can put him down the hill, where Glad was going to be,” said Bess. She’d come alive suddenly with the news. “We’ve got plenty of extra sheets and towels and so forth.”
“No,” I said, putting on some lip gloss. “We’re not putting him up anywhere. He can go to the hostel, it’s the only place that’s open. And probably the only place he can afford.”
“With the students?” Bess said. “Oh, this gets better and better! Let’s all go down to pick him up!”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’ll handle this alone.”
* * *
HE WAS STANDING IN THE wind as I drove up—spare, pale, a little more bow-legged, but still rakish in the battered old safari jacket I’d given him years ago. He peered into the car. “Good,” he said, throwing his bag into the back and hopping in. “Pleased to see me?”
I’d forgotten the ripe smell of him—old sweat, old beer, the fake almond scent of his shampoo. I coughed.
“Got something to eat?” he said as we drove out through the gates. “I haven’t had anything since breakfast.”
I
’d forgotten, too, how sure he was that I would care whether or what he’d eaten. “Why didn’t you have something on the ferry?” I said, knowing perfectly well he must have saved himself even the cost of a sandwich. “We can stop at a restaurant if you like.”
“Somewhere cheap?”
“Everything’s cheap here. But, listen, you’re either going to have to stay in a hotel down here, which is cheap, or at the student hostel up where we are, which is cheaper.”
He looked at me. “You don’t have a couch?”
“Hester told you where I was, I presume?”
“I told her not to tell you.”
“She didn’t.” How typical this was of Hester, I thought—she who’d never much liked Finn, but liked my new unencumbered life even less.
I parked the car. “There’s a nice café along the lane there,” I said, remembering how, suddenly, he would be shot through with romantic largesse and would take me without a thought to a fabulously expensive restaurant. “You can leave your bag in the car. I’ll lock it, but no one steals anything on this island. Finn,” I said, “you’re not going to just pick up here where you left off three years ago, you know.”
* * *
BY THE TIME I HAD dropped him off at the hostel and come back to the house, Dania and Bess were wild with curiosity.
“Where is he?” Bess demanded. “You’re not going to hide him away, are you?”
I fell into a chair and kicked off my shoes. “Hide him? Are you joking? He’s not going to let himself be hidden. Listen, what am I going to do with him here? I’m serious.”
Dania gave me her judicial frown. “Ruthi, you must be clear with him. You must set the limits. He is not here your guest.”
Always, when she started this sort of thing, I longed to remind her of Amos and of all the other leeches she’d carried through the years one way or another. In fact, Finn wasn’t a leech, and I’d never carried him anywhere. “The thing is,” I said, “he’d give me his bed if the situation were reversed, and he’d sleep on the couch himself.”
“I can’t wait to meet this paragon!” Bess cried. “Mine takes my money and charters a yacht, yours gives you his bed!”
“Right!” said Dania. “Finn gives to you something that costs him nothing, Ruthi. And it keeps you where he wants you—in his bed. You can’t see that?”
I waved the question away. If I could have waved them both away with it, I would have.
“And with the breast cancer,” Dania went on, “where was he then?”
“What’s this?” said Bess. “What breast cancer?”
I shrugged. “They caught it early. And he found all sorts of reasons to absent himself. So I absented him permanently. Sort of.”
“But that’s just what men do,” Bess cried. “Of course they’re not there when you need them. That’s where the children come in.”
She was right. It was Hester who’d warmed to the situation, setting up a bed for herself next to mine, driving me to and from radiation.
The doorbell rang, the knocker thumped, and Gladdy shuffled out from the kitchen. But before she could get to the door, he’d tried the handle and come in.
“Who forgot to lock this time?” said Bess, sitting up. “Hello? Finn? My, you’re not at all what I expected!”
He stood where he was, smiling around the room. His hair was completely gray now, but thick and well cut. “Better or worse?” he said.
“Better! Far better! Wow!”
Don’t bother to flirt with him! I thought. He’s appalled by fat women—by fat anyone, in fact.
But then there he was, loping over to the window seat and settling himself opposite her, not even a nod at me or at Dania, whom he’d never liked anyway.
“Seen the rooms in this hostel place?” he said. “Closest I’ve come is the Trappist monastery where Merton stayed.”
“Merton who?” Bess never minded showing off her ignorance, especially in the presence of a man. She tucked her legs up under her dress. “What’s a monk’s chamber like? What are the monks like? Are they all gay?”
Gladdy was standing in the kitchen doorway, observing closely. How many times had she gone through this with Bess? I wondered. Watched her come alive in the presence of a man? And then fly off with him, leaving her to take over?
I stood up, heat rising to my cheeks. “Finn,” I said, “you haven’t said hello to Dania.”
“I’ll say hello when I’m ready to say hello,” he said, still looking at Bess. “You’re English?” he asked her.
Dania pushed herself up and came over to the window. “I haven’t seen you since Ruthi had the surgery,” she said. “You’re going to stay long in Greece?”
“Haven’t decided.” He hardly turned to look at her.
“Oh, stay!” Bess cried. “We’re bored out of our minds here!”
“Speak for yourself,” said Dania, still standing over them. “You’re only bored since Dionysos went away.”
“Since who?” Finn cocked his head.
“The taxi driver,” Bess said. “He’s a darling, but the wife isn’t.”
There’s a misstep, I thought. Finn had an old-fashioned reverence for marriage. In fact, he’d always thought that marrying me would wipe his record clean.
“What’s she look like?” he asked.
“Bleached, fat, almost as fat as me.” Bess looked around. “Is it too early for a drink?” she asked.
* * *
à gg, Greece
Twenty years ago, if a man who had once been my lover took up with a friend of mine, I should have had her eyes out first, and then his. But something wonderful has happened in old age: I look on in bemusement. The fact that Bess, who detests walking, has taken to walks with Finn down to the bar he’s found near the cathedral; that she, who brought her own down pillow because how can she be expected to sleep on anything else, now finds nothing to object to in his narrow pallet at the hostel up the road, and will even climb the four steep flights of marble steps, all 185 plus pounds of her, to get there—well, it has me waiting every evening for what comes next.
How they both fit onto that pallet is another matter. I can’t quite bring myself to ask her this, probably because I have lied, telling her that her size never occurs to me. Maybe there are two pallets that they push together. Whatever the case, I have no doubt that she’s paying for him to stay there. So maybe this is what has made her the exception to his strong aversion to fat women. Even when his own daughter, who’d just delivered a baby, took some time to slim down, he asked me to talk to her about it. “Couldn’t you suggest a diet?” he said.
Well, no, of course I wouldn’t suggest any such thing, any more than I’d now tell Bess to watch out, the man was using her and she was going to land hard—harder for all the weight she carried—when he let her down.
Dania says we should suggest they take off together while the going’s good, taking Gladdy with them. Which would leave Dania and me in the house alone and, really, the more I think about it, the better it sounds.
* * *
WITH BESS GONE MUCH OF the time now, Gladdy was like a lover left behind. She still shopped and cooked, but in a desultory fashion, and largely so that there’d be a cake for Bess when she came back for tea, or soup in the freezer, or the moussaka she’d learned to make from the cook down at the hotel. It was even for Bess’s sake that she’d overcome her suspicion of eggplant. There she was now, salting and oiling it for roasting because Bess had particularly asked for an eggplant and feta salad.
“Gladdy,” I said, “what are you going to do if Bess goes back to America with Finn?”
She clicked her tongue. “I phone Wilfie last night. He says he will come.”
“When?” I said. There were months to go till June.
She shrugged. “Maybe I phone Aggie, too.”
“Glad,” I said, “you know they’re not supposed to be here until June?”
She turned back to the eggplant. “Bessie she must grow up now. She’s an old wo
man, like me.”
This was as close as I’d ever heard Gladdy come to criticizing Bess in earnest.
“Finn he’s your man,” she went on, “not hers. Why she takes someone else’s man?”
“He hasn’t been my man, as you put it, for some years now.”
She looked up. “Someone they need to chase him away.”
Clearly, she’d given it all some thought, and was taking Finn far more seriously than she had Dionysos.
“If she stopped paying for him,” I suggested, “he’d probably have to go.”
She clicked her tongue again, but said nothing. I’d had the feeling from the beginning that she thought Bess a cut above Dania and me, and that the money Bess had been born to had something to do with it.
“It’s funny,” I said, “because he doesn’t usually like fat women.”
She looked up sharply. “Something wrong with him?” she said. “Like Wilfie?”
It was a divine idea. And if Wilfred did arrive, so much the better. Finn found gay men almost as distasteful as fat women.
In the meanwhile, there was no knowing when he and Bess would come back to the house, except in the mornings, when she came back on her own to shower and change. If he came with her, he’d sit in a chair with one of her magazines, flipping through it, snorting derisively, tossing it aside. Then he’d lope into the kitchen to try, yet again, to win Gladdy over. But she pretended not to notice him. Or, if she couldn’t, she answered his questions with grunts and shrugs. If he asked her for some water, she’d give him a glass and point to the tap, no question of his using our store of bottled water.
Strangest of all was that it was Dionysos who was driving both Bess and Finn around the island now. He’d arrive at the front door just as he had in the beginning, reeking of cologne. And then off they’d go in his old Mercedes, the three of them, Finn in front, all talking and laughing as if Dionysos had never been anything more than a taxi driver to Bess from the start.
And yet, watching them, I couldn’t help wondering why I had so steadfastly retired Finn from my life. If Bess was right—if all men let you down when you needed them—might not Hugh have done the same one day? Hugh, who, by dying so soon, had become my touchstone for all things best about men? So, why not this man? This funny, penniless man who had me suddenly feeling robbed of his laughter and his love? Even though I’d been turning him away and away over all these years, and hadn’t missed him until now—now that he was here? It was ridiculous. But here I was, ridiculous at sixty-nine, looking in on their happiness and feeling like an abandoned girl.