Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  It was Aesop’s fox and stork all over again. Arthur lapped a bit from the top of the jar; Orestes stabbed guardedly at the shallow dish. Their partings were warm with relief. And when Orestes finally sailed for Greece, Arthur gave him a larger check than he had intended.

  At last the doorbell rang. Here they were. As he hastened to admit them, Arthur’s numerous misgivings about Dora shrank to one childish prayer: “Let her be able to appreciate me, let her see that I have taste!”

  His living room was painted dark red and ivory. It had one antiqued-mirror wall, a piano (Arthur had resumed his lessons, after fifty-five years), velvet chairs, gladiolas in silver vases. There were many Greek objects: amber rosaries, a good ikon, and some large, prominently hung sepia photographs of sculpture—the Charioteer, the Hermes at Olympia, the Ephebe at Constantinople. Indeed, Dora exclaimed with pleasure. She did feel at home, she had had no idea from Orestes that one could be so comfortable in New York; so that, with no further thought given to the qualms each had felt with respect to the other (for Dora, too, had begun to sprinkle large grains of salt on Orestes’ judgments of people), she and Arthur sat down, vastly pleased with their mutual surfaces, to Turkish coffee and a sweet on a spoon. Orestes, overexcited, paced the room. They watched him indulgently, like parents whose child has come home.

  Arthur, a little man, sallow and vain, with a mole on his forehead and eyebrows long as antennae, was presently dreaming of taking her over, introducing her as his friend and sharing in the invitations she would receive. Orestes wanted her to see things; he had been picturing her excitement in zoos, on the top of skyscrapers, in the subway. Dora obliged them both.

  Within a few days she had been to Chinatown, Bloomingdale ’s, the Frick, Staten Island, had watched TV and been given an evening party. Arthur spent most of that day polishing silver candlesticks, washing long-stemmed glasses he hadn’t used for months, and arranging flowers. “You’ve gone to too much trouble,” said Orestes, inwardly delighted, on his return with Dora from their apartment hunt. Arthur merely shrugged. He knew no other way to give a party. Certainly the surer thing was to prepare one’s background, order things to eat, serve champagne—domestic, if need be—in thin crystal, than to rely on kind words and gestures. What if the heart were not inspired to warmth, the tongue to liveliness? One must provide against that kind of failure. And the party, considering that most of the people Arthur knew were dead or out of town for the summer, went off quite passably. Nothing was broken. The handful of Bohemians invited by Orestes stayed too late but otherwise behaved. Cold cuts and petits fours remained which would do for Arthur’s lunch the next day. And he felt that his guests (the museum director, the piano teacher, ten all told) had got the point of Dora. Despite her costume.

  Orestes had had her wear an ankle-length black lace dress, old yet in itself becoming. Then, horrors! minutes before the first arrivals, he opened a paper bag and took out a yard of broad crimson moiré ribbon. This he draped Dora with, diagonally, like some ambassadorial decoration fastened by pins at shoulder and hip, and at the breast by a brooch of her own. It cost Arthur an effort to smile and say nothing, as Dora herself did, and wait for the first person to whom Orestes introduced her as the “Greek Ambassadress” to see the joke before he, Arthur, allowed himself to remark that fun was fun but decorations were decorations.

  Dora would have agreed with him on a different occasion, but she felt more warmly toward Orestes now than she had in the weeks before they reached New York, and she had resolved to take pleasure in whatever made him happy. Watching him in relation to Arthur, it gratified her to see, as with Orestes and his brother, that two highly dissimilar individuals were drawing closer through her, and was European enough to wonder, where Arthur was concerned—an elderly man, without heirs—if this increased closeness mightn’t lead to something rather agreeable for Orestes. For herself, she objected not one bit to dressing up as grander than she was. We all dream of coming back from the Flea Market with a Fragonard. If Orestes wanted to have brought from Europe something more than an old island woman, she would lend herself to his plot, she would impersonate the fabulous souvenir. Meanwhile, her eyes had been open. Beginning with that green, torch-bearing giantess in the harbor, all militant wakefulness compared to her sleeping, natural sister viewed from Diblos, Dora had taken in a type of New York woman—in the street, in the pages of Vogue—angular, high-heeled, hatless, being dragged hilarious down the pavement by a huge shaven dog, or squinting heavenwards with a look of utter, harrowed anxiety which must be, in this city at least, as much beauty’s indispensable earmark as an enigmatic smile had been in Leonardo’s Italy. It was not a type Dora cared to resemble. Yet she already knew, from being dragged down pavements by Orestes, something of what lay in the heart of the woman with the poodle, and beneath Dora’s tanned, lined face and fingers placidly, clumsily mending a tear in the black lace dress, had already appeared the psychic counterparts of furrowed brow, strained, painted mouth, knuckles clenched white—all ignored, all nonetheless ready for use at the first proof of her own total folly to have considered (at her age!) making a life among the barbarians.

  There, then, she stood among them, the Ambassadress, sipping the Great Western champagne. Compared to her, the others were friendlier, better informed, more intense, or more talkative; her failure in these respects seemed rather to strengthen her position. To have been European and immensely charming might have been more than the company could bear. She raised her glass to Orestes across the room.

  His eyes had been on her. It had just entered his head to have her talk to his mother on the telephone. In Greek, naturally! “What a good idea,” said Dora. Soon she was called into Arthur’s bedroom. Eleni, in Texas, was already on the line and Orestes—talking English—had finished what he had to say. Dora found herself uttering a tentative “Hello” into the receiver. “Talk Greek! Talk Greek!” cried Orestes. She did so, found easily a number of cordial phrases, mentioned her fondness for both Eleni’s sons, hoped before long to know her as well—but then, as Eleni replied, it became plain, with every allowance for fluster, that Greek was no longer a tongue she could speak to any useful degree. It made no difference; Dora slipped back into English, remarked the extent of Eleni’s, modified her own to suit it, and so ended the conversation.

  “She sounds very nice,” she told Orestes. “I should love to know her. What an absorbing life that must be!” He, however, dragged her back to the party. “I couldn’t believe it!” he told group after group. “My mother can’t speak Greek any more! I was amazed! She and I speak English together—my Greek was lousy before I went to Greece. But imagine! She’s forgotten it! And her English isn’t fluent, is it, Dora? Do you see what that means? My mother has no language!”

  “There must be more important things in life,” said Dora, embarrassed. He had made it sound very dire.

  “Than language?”

  “Than languages, surely.”

  “That coming from you who speak four perfectly! Ha ha!” cried Orestes throwing his arms around her and her enhanced value. People did that in America, she had noticed, though he had now gone on to tell some others how physical the Greeks were, how they couldn’t talk without touching or hugging each other. “Yes,” said Dora, “but you’re talking of a certain class. Tasso could never bear to be touched, neither could Byron, even as a child.” But anything she said made him like her more. “You see,” his smile told the room, “she knows, she’s the genuine article.”

  That evening, for the first time in their friendship, Orestes became “an American” in Dora’s eyes. She glimpsed the larger, national mystery behind his manners, that pendulum swinging from childish artlessness to artless maturity and back again. She welcomed the insight gaily, secure in her resiliency. When the museum director, saying goodnight, promised to telephone in the morning to give her the name of “a really dependable rug man” through whom to sell her Bokhara, she begged him not to go out of his way. “Oh well, yes, the rug must be
sold eventually, but I won’t have my friends feeling responsible for me. I’d be happy on the corner with a cart full of apples!”

  Dora and Orestes found an apartment, no floor of a brownstone house, as recommended by Arthur and which was available at great cost (unless in such poor condition as to remind Orestes of the primal tenement he was still running away from); instead, three rooms in a new, mountainous “development” overlooking the East River. It had a uniformed doorman—whom Orestes trained, without letting him in on the joke, to call Dora “Baroness”—and a lobby decorated by Dorothy Draper. There was Musak in the self-operated elevators. The riverfront apartments, it turned out, cost ten dollars per room more each month than those facing other tall buildings. “We’ll know the river’s there,” Dora said.

  On the eighteenth floor they had plenty of light. Their living room was too large, the bedroom and kitchen too small. When it came to furniture, Orestes developed a violent phobia of anything secondhand, so that for their first dinner at home they drew two shiny metal and leatherette chairs up to a vinyl-topped cardtable. Dora switched off a three-headed lamp. Candlelight richened the Bokhara and blurred a pattern of orange and green boomerangs on the sofa bed and the wall to wall, ceiling to floor draperies installed that day against the cruel afternoon glare. The friends drank to their new home. It was costing a lot but they had done it, it was theirs, and Orestes, for one, felt that these new, durable, practical possessions would save expense in the long run. Three months passed. The chair seats were cracking to reveal gray cotton wadding, somebody’s cigarette had blistered the table. The Bokhara was still on the floor but the curtains did not close, or the bed open, properly, and Dora was working as a governess in New Jersey.

  It was better than it sounded. The family was Dutch, the daughters twelve and fourteen. Dora walked them to school, returned to the house, made a bed or two, ate on a tray with the grandfather in his room, read, fetched the girls, took one to her music lesson and did Greek or Italian conversation with the other. The family dined together, Dora with them. Both parents were translators at the United Nations. On weekends Dora was free to join Orestes.

  She tried not to feel it as an obligation, those Friday evenings, re-entering the apartment. She was paying her share, true; but more and more it seemed, as she gave him the money each month, that she was buying her own privacy from Orestes. For two nights he would move onto the sofa bed, giving up the bedroom to her. On one night they would go to the theatre; on the other, receive friends. It soon appeared that these sleeping arrangements were unsatisfactory. The weekend found Dora refreshed, ready for the diversions it was thought better to have earned, in America, than mere money; while Orestes, exhausted by work, face green and long as the face in an ikon, might have been happy to slip into his relinquished bedroom somewhat before the last guests had left.

  To his regular lectures had been added a weekly TV program, “The World of Poetry.” Produced with a minimum of fuss over an educational channel, at the wrong hour of the wrong evening, it nevertheless by spring had gathered a faithful public who wrote letters, telephoned the station, sent Orestes their photographs and sonnets. He took it all very seriously. Wearing a new pale blue shirt, he had arrived for his debut an hour early, ready to put himself in the hands of the cosmeticians. There were none. His disappointment, though concealed, was justified; on the screen he looked unwell and weird. His programs tended to fall into two halves: the classic, the contemporary. After an initial talk on, say, Shelley, with resonant quotation prefaced by sips of water, he would try to wind up with “a Shelley of today”—some odd young man he would have met, who was meant to give the viewers an absolutely authentic image of genius struggling from the chrysalis of society. Orestes relied perhaps too heavily upon his friends to perform, rather than poets whose names were better known. But the public seemed ill-equipped to tell the difference. So much so that, today in New York, these discoveries of Orestes, published by now and with their own disciples, make up a clearly defined battalion in the endless literary wars of our time.

  There was the film, too. In these months Orestes was writing the first of six complete scripts. A week in Hollywood, the frequent telephone conferences thereafter, had not helped him form a notion of how to proceed. Each month, when the producer came to town, a big black car would call for Orestes and sweep him, in evening clothes at first rented, eventually his very own, into the countryside for a party with starlets and bigwigs. From one such dinner, near Christmas, he returned with a pair of gold and sapphire cufflinks. It was hard to resist, for Orestes, a little gentle namedropping; and, for others, a little gentle irony at his expense. Certain young poets—infants in Dora’s eyes—so devoted to their calling as never to have heard of selling one’s talents, dipped into the punchbowl and came up with a hesitant question. Wasn’t that what Orestes was doing? Wasn’t his time too precious for this kind of drudgery?

  He would admit it himself some days. He rose at seven, never retired before midnight.

  Only once, one miserable midweek night before Dora had found work, did she and Orestes try a Greek restaurant. A new one had opened near Times Square, and the idea had been to go forth, a company of poets, to taste the richly restorative food and society of Greeks.

  The place seemed large and crowded. They were put at a recently vacated table.

  “This is strange,” said Orestes, moving his face about. “Can you see, Dora?”

  The lighting was dim but might not have existed, to hear him talk. “I’ve never seen a Greek restaurant,” he went on, “that wasn’t a blaze of electric light. The Greeks love light. In Athens, in broad daylight, the butcher stalls are outlined and festooned with lighted bulbs. They are theatres in which brains and hearts have literally been laid bare, all buzzing with flies. And the crowds!” He asked their waiter in Greek, good-naturedly, why it was so dark in the restaurant.

  “How’s everybody tonight?” said the waiter, removing soiled napkins and glasses. “A cocktail before your meal, folks?”

  Dora wanted a Manhattan. Orestes told the young poets to try ouzo, then repeated his question in English.

  “You got me,” came the answer. “Unless it’s the ladies. They often like not too bright a room.” He handed round red and gold menus.

  “It’s true,” said Dora, “you see very few women eating out in Athens, except in summer. Here, everyone’s brought his wife along.”

  “Wait,” said Orestes to the waiter. “What part of Greece are you from?”

  Eager to leave, the waiter admitted Sparta.

  “But you don’t speak Greek? I’m amazed!”

  “Oh, I’m Greek, I speak Greek!” and with a smile of reassurance he escaped.

  “That was childish of me,” Orestes laughed. “But he should be prouder of his heritage.”

  As he peered into the dim hubbub, Orestes said goodbye to any hopes of reliving those brilliant evenings in taverns across the water. The crossing itself had wrought a sea change upon the other Greek customers. Young men who, on native ground a few years earlier, would have listened to Orestes with dreaming eyes had already watched dream after dream sinking into a parody of its fulfillment: fortune, family, the wife to dress (or overdress), the child to educate (or worse, since this was America, to be educated by)—and all these lives at once insured, reflected, and corroded by conveniences bought on time, in time, with time, payments the receipts for which could be examined even here, through smoke, in the form of sallow, untended flesh and the delusive mannerisms of the insider. Dante might have spoken to these diners, gone over the receipts, shown them where they had paid too much; not Orestes. With a shudder of horror and identification he turned back to his party.

  “No, but really,” Dora remarked when he had said his piece, “you’ll see the same class of people in Athens, if you know where to look.”

  “I give you the light of Greece, then,” smiled Orestes, lifting his glass. “Once you have had your vision, no lesser world is altogether tolerable.
I used to enjoy places like this. But I’ve been there, I’ve felt the sun licking at my wings. If I were Icarus, I would set out tomorrow—to melt in that sun, to drown in that sea!”

  At least they would have a good meal. Turning to the menu, Orestes ordered portions of souvlakia, moussaka, stuffed vine leaves—ah, and there were calamarákia! Nothing was more delicious (he told the poets) than these little squid, crisp with golden batter. Did they come from Florida? The waiter couldn’t say. “Well, two portions of those,” said Orestes. “And of course, wine.”

  “I’ll bring the wine list,” said the waiter, by now speaking Greek to oblige him.

  “Don’t bother. Just two large cans of retsina.”

  “We have only bottled wine.”

  “Bottles then,” said Orestes with an indifferent wave of his hand.

  The bouzoukia orchestra, which had been resting when their party arrived, began to play. Eight men sat in a row, gazing nowhere and deftly worrying their instruments. A soloist advanced to the edge of the platform. Her body, barely contained by a white and silver dress, might have been artificially matured so as to be recognizable as female at immense distances. Black, platinum-streaked curls spilled onto fat shoulders and quivering arms. She held a cloth orchid concealing a microphone. By turns sweet, hoarse, piercing, dripping with ornaments and imperfections, her voice reached them as an aural equivalent of the many-layered, honey-soaked baklava Orestes intended ordering for dessert. This much, surely, was authentic—or was it? One poet thought he recognized an Italian hit of the year before.

  Nobody got up to dance. “But nobody’s dancing—why?” asked Orestes when the waiter brought their orders.

  “It is not permitted.”

  A plate set before Orestes seemed to contain five or six fingers, swollen purplish pink and trailing oil black roots. What was this? His calamarákia.