Collected Novels and Plays
Page 42
“Ah no. I wanted them fried. I’ve never seen squid served this way. They’re not even hot. Take them away, ask the cook to fry them properly.”
The waiter removed the two portions.
A second song ended to loud applause. The singer blew one kiss and ambled pouting from the stage. “One likes her,” Orestes explained, “because she is the essence of voluptuous femininity.” Then he noticed that the vine leaves had come out of a can. He could tell by a certain green dye mixed with the oil. “As a rule I don’t let trivial details upset me,” he said. “It’s not like me to lodge complaints—is it, Dora?”
It was not, and she said so.
“Forgive me, then, if I do this once. It will be for the glory that was Greece.”
So the drama moved inexorably to its close. The wine was wrong. The same calamarákia returned, perhaps hotter. Meanwhile, a child-faced poet had been made unwell by a single glass of ouzo. The waiter offered to show Orestes the brine vat in the kitchen, out of which the vine leaves had been taken. Orestes waved him away, calling for the manager.
“Oríste!” cried this person when he appeared.
“He knows you …?” the sick poet moaned, mistaking for Orestes’ name the conventional Greek reply to a summons.
“I ordered fresh calamarákia, fried,” began Orestes. The manager regretted; there was no fresh squid at this time of year. Then why had it been on the menu? Ah, the menu did not say fresh squid. Here as in any Greek restaurant, one basic menu did for all seasons. And some people preferred their squid canned, yes indeed! The two portions in question, however, would not appear on their check.
This concession failed to satisfy Orestes.
“Another thing,” he said, shifting to English. “This wine tastes funny, and the ouzo can’t have been good. It has made my friend ill.”
The manager took a sip of wine, then looked closely at the poet. “He’s under age, isn’t he? Did he show any identification?”
“I’m surprised you can see him at all in this light!”
“Look, Sir, don’t blame me for the New York State Law. I’m just the guy who gets his permit taken away.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Orestes. “No Greek has ever come within five years of guessing an American’s age.”
Dream—Venice, a Hospital. O. is to undergo surgery. Reception desk very crowded. Old woman edges in front of him. I make her yield her place & try to tell the nurse O.’s name. We are separated at the elevators. Mine: a moving wooden room like a rustic privy. Hot sun through a knothole burns my wrist (redder & hairier than mine) & I think, Summer at last! Now we move sideways like a train. At the end of a vast streaked palazzo (the Hosp.) I get off. I wear black trousers, black turtleneck, am barefoot. While I wait for O., an attendant—older, heavy accent—talks to me. He cannot belive I’m born in Taxas, says there’s something “Italian” about the back of my head. I say, conscious of speaking a highly artifical language, “Perhaps I have foreign blood.” He: Beg pardon—what? I: Foreign blood. He: Foreign what? “BLOOD!!” I shout. And O. comes limping into view.
“I am nineteen,” declared the poet haughtily.
“I’m not asking for the gentleman’s word,” said the manager. “I’m asking to see his driver’s license.”
“I don’t drive.”
“It’s a matter of principle,” said a second poet, beginning to laugh.
Orestes struck the table lightly with his palm. Until now, only his Greek pride had been offended. But the appeal to local ordinances aroused an American dander he hadn’t known he had. “Ask the waiter to bring our check.”
The manager hesitated. Suppose these were well-connected people? In that brief interval Dora spoke up.
She didn’t feel like leaving, did they mind? She put her hand on Orestes’ and smiled up at the manager. If they could just have some bicarbonate of soda? She said in her plainest, most motherly Greek. It was wet out, the rest of the dinner was so good! “Orestes, you must try my moussaka, they’ve given me far too much.”
It worked. The manager melted away. Orestes let himself be calmed.
The worst, from her point of view, was simply to have lost control in front of the young. Luckily they were poets. Abstractor topics presented themselves, the music continued to please, the baklava was a success. So, perhaps, was the evening as a whole, in every mind but Orestes’. Into him the half averted scene kept biting deeply. What had he expected? Greece in America? He was not used to this grinding confusion of loyalties. Either, it seemed, one was Greek and unfortified against the virus endemic here, or American and a carrier. The two natures absolutely did not mix. To emerge at last, twenty dollars poorer, onto the neon-streaked, puddle-paved streets came as no relief. People of every description jostled them. It was the melting pot with a vengeance. Dora took his arm and led him, the poets following, calmly through the flashing, shrieking labyrinth. She seemed actually to know where they were.
More and more she was coming to baffle a possessiveness he felt for her. From the start it had been of absurd yet paramount importance that she see and feel New York. After her maiden trip on the subway, he had turned to her, ready for superlatives. But what was Dora to say who had ridden the Métro a month before, who had gone by train under the Alps, for that matter? This was no typically “New York” experience. Orestes looked away in frustration. The contest recurred daily. She had been in department stores, she had already tasted doughnuts. She had seen crowds almost as huge crawling at the bottom of chasms less deep, perhaps, than these—but she was no judge of depth. The Louvre allowed her to be critical of the Metropolitan, the Comédie of Broadway. Orestes could teach her nothing. It was as if his very virility were being challenged. Wasn’t there something, he asked one day with desperate lightness, something singular about his home-town that had struck her, that she hadn’t foreseen? “Ah yes!” she exclaimed, then had to think. “Well, there are many more Negroes than I’d imagined. And many more antique shops.”
Reluctantly he evolved the theory that it was too much for her. No woman her age could cope with a world so drastically at odds with all she had known. Her serenity was a defense, a symptom of shock. Neither then nor later when events bore it out did this view of Dora comfort him.
The matter of her finding work arose, horrifying Orestes. He had no claims, could not forbid her (his former hostess, now less than a guest) to look for a job. So he retreated into a childish coldness—let her just try independence, she would see her folly—broken by spells of frenzied rationality, budgets littering the vinyl table, aimed at keeping her by his side.
Dora had taken to going to Arthur Orson’s for tea every few days. Here her instinct was applauded. New York without a job could be a living hell—ask him, the idle old man chuckled, he ought to know. They put their heads together over the difficulties. She had come to America on a visitor’s, not a worker’s, visa—which by the way was due to expire in three months. She could renew it for another six, and would no doubt be quite ready for repatriation at the end of them. “But suppose I’m not,” she asked Arthur, “suppose I want never to leave?”
“Then you will simply have to stay.”
“It’s not that simple. I should have to marry an American.” She was joking. “Can you picture it? At my age?”
Arthur looked at his chrysanthemums.
“Why not marry me?” he finally said.
When she told Orestes, he went all to pieces. “You aren’t serious,” he kept saying.
Dora asked if he could think of a more suitable arrangement.
“I wasn’t aware that your fondness for my country had reached such a pitch,” he said with the elegance of hurt feelings. “Or should I take it as a personal compliment?”
“If you like, my dear,” she replied gently. “Or think of it as self-indulgence.” She let her hand rest upon one of that year’s anxiety-packed headlines. “I might not care to live through another war in Greece.”
“But with Arthur!”
“You’d go on living here with me? Would that look proper?”
“Does it look proper now?”
“This once, Dora, don’t be witty, I beg you. Marriage is a human sacrament,” said he who knew nothing about it. “I’m profoundly shocked to know that you would consider Arthur as a husband.”
She saw then and there that it would have to be Orestes whom she married.
Arguments came to support this daring notion. Under scrutiny the margin of years between them changed into an advantage. Arthur, despite his talk of living apart, was old and fragile; age could turn overnight into helplessness. As his wife—for Dora also took marriage seriously, having had thirty-eight years of it with Tasso—she would run the risk of becoming his companion, his nurse. No thank you! Then, Arthur’s world. It was too close to Athens society—small, elderly, proper; a little went a long way. She had developed a taste for long bare avenues, glass buildings the light bounced off. With Orestes, now that the dawning on the terrace at Diblos lay behind her and, believe it or not as he pleased, no shred of longing remained, it seemed to Dora that this love overcome—if it had been love, there was no saying now—had earned her certain rights, that he owed her compensation, as if she had hurt herself in his service. And she, why, she owed it to him to marry him! Who had wanted her here? Who had escorted her to this huge, glittering American function? It went against her upbringing to desert him now. No, while the chandeliers blazed, she was under Orestes’ protection; while the music played, she would face it at his side.
They exchanged vows and rings in a civil service in January. This time, at the party Arthur gave, the champagne was imported.
That night, a Saturday, Orestes, dressed in red silk pyjamas, knocked on the bedroom door. He was now The Bridegroom; he would have knocked at a cotton-gin’s door if he had just been married to one. As it was, his feelings for Dora had deepened and widened under
A miserable moment. Returning unexpectedly after starting for the beach, I found Chryssoula in my room. Cleaning? Something crackled guiltily, she was thrusting her hand into her blouse. I thought of the 500 drachma note hidden in this book. I questioned her. She showed her empty hands. I asked what was hidden in her blouse. Nothing! I knew she was lying. Suddenly she was in a fury. You think I’m a thief, search me! Eyes blazing. She seized my hand & thrust it into her bosom where, along with everything else, was indeed a square of paper. It was my passport photo; there had been several in an envelope in my drawer. C. was in tears. I wanted to comfort her. Her lips compressed, she turned proudly aside. Now she has left. My image lies curled & damp on the table. “Sei bello,” she said, “ma non hai cuorc.” The lagoon shimmers. The torso lies outstretched at its far end. The money was of course safe between these two blank pages. Her scent is on the palm I raise to hide my face. “The only solution is to be very, very intelligent.”
the spell of having a sacramental role to perform. He had also drunk wine. Their relationship seemed to him one of infinite possibility.
She was still up and about, in her hairnet and old blue wrapper. “How smart you look,” she said, missing the import of his appearance.
“I wanted you to see that I was proud to be your husband,” said Orestes, smiling.
“Thank you, my dear. I’m very happy too.”
“Let me kiss you good night, Dora.”
“Good night, Orestes.” She gave him her roughened cheek. He held her a moment, weighing her unreadiness.
“Dora …?”
She drew back. When she raised her eyes it was in a slow look brimming with comfort. She pressed his hand, then let go gently. Speechless, he took his leave.
Man and wife at last, their relationship was virtually at an end. No scenes, no recriminations, only this gradual firm gentleness on Dora’s part, and the difficulty of meeting her eyes for long. Who did meet those eyes, or what? The Dutch family’s cat. A stand of yellow, shuddering bamboo in a southerly angle of their house. Gray skies. Windows reflected in water.
One morning in March she discovered herself walking along a canal, an embankment anyhow, shining with frost and strewn with rusted fragments of machinery. It would have been quite early. The sun, low and mild, startled her, now in the sky, now glancing off the windows of a warehouse opposite. “But what am I doing here?” she said to herself in Italian. “Tasso will be furious.”
She tried to concentrate upon the cryptic litter of metal. A filthy yellow dog squatted in its midst, trembling violently; risen, it sniffed the steaming earth. When it turned to her, she saw a fresh wound on its head. “Cosa vuoi?” she asked it in a sweet, croaking voice, her hand held out appealingly. The air had grown warmer. Smells reached her; it was spring. The dog, grinning like a shark, had not moved. She walked deeper into the scene.
Later she was extremely tired. The police had odd uniforms and spoke English. She answered what she could of their questions. Her name? She gave it calmly. Yes, married; there was the ring on her finger. She told them Tasso’s name and where they lived. Was that in New Jersey? Doubt must have crossed her face. Next, they wanted to know what year it was. Really, how stupid! But she couldn’t tell from their faces whether her answer was right or wrong. She begged their pardon, adding that she had had little or no sleep. The coffee they gave her was weak but delicious.
In the next room an officer was saying, “… Yes, come on down.… Legally, you understand, we ought to.… Yes … all right … O.K.”
Soon a fair woman who spoke French arrived at the police station, and kissed her. When Dora had not returned last night (the woman said) they had telephoned Orestes to find out if she had missed her train. Whom had they telephoned? Never mind. Hush. The panic was over, they had found her. A doctor was waiting to see her. Hush. Come.
Dora’s amnesia disappeared by evening and never recurred. The doctor saw her several times. He asked, had there been any recent shock or upheaval in her life? She told him no.
Orestes said, “Ah, Dora, I understand these things. It’s me you’re trying to forget. You want to blot out everything that has to do with me.”
Arthur said, “If my memory went, where would I be? Who would look after me? The very thought sends chills.”
On her next weekend in New York, Dora went to a hotel.
Shame was what she felt. To be found wandering, a derelict; anything might have happened. To be faced with the frailty of one’s reason, there among the rusted parts, the filth, in a glare that assailed one like the dog’s gaze, wherever one turned. As she stripped these painful details of a certain prismatic beauty that had overlaid them at the time, she recognized in their poverty, their menace, more and more of her situation with Orestes. Her shame widened to include this, too.
She felt she had had the narrowest of escapes.
“I shall go back to Greece,” she said aloud to the hotel wallpaper. But her mistake, if it was one, seemed at once too grave and too recent to acknowledge by such a step.
“If it were not for Byron,” she told a tired, sympathetic face in the mirror.
On Sunday she forced herself to visit the apartment.
“Good evening, Baroness,” said the doorman.
“Dora!” exclaimed Orestes dramatically. “Are you all right? I’ve been terribly anxious. We all have. Arthur just phoned. I’ve had no sleep—”
She pressed his hand, nodding. It was the morning on the terrace, only he had slipped into her role. Well, he was welcome to it.
“We thought it must be another attack of amnesia.”
“No.”
“Where have you been, then? Arthur was calling the hospitals.”
She explained and begged his pardon.
“Give me your coat. Have you eaten?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Still, rather than look at her just then, he went to make her a sandwich
.
“You are usually so thoughtful,” said Orestes, returning, with a smile of awareness. “Believe me, Dora, I understand more than you think.”
“Thank you, that looks delicious.”
“How you must resent me,” he went on. “How guilty you must feel for having used me.”
“What do you mean, Orestes?”
“For marrying me,” he said carefully as to a child, “so that you could stay in America.”
She watched him, wondering how much of the truth it was needful to point out.
Orestes blushed.
“I don’t know what I’m saying,” he said sadly. “Both of us wanted …”
“Go on. Tell me, please.”
“The experience. The insight. What else should one want, Dora?”
He had spoken simply. She shut her eyes, touched.
“Your generosity to me,” he said, “is something I can never forget—or, it would seem, repay.”
“Generosity, I don’t know …” she echoed vaguely in order not to be silent.
His silence made her look. It was his turn to avoid her eyes. Ah!—“his” cottage on the property at Diblos. She smiled partly with irony—was he afraid she would ask for it back?—partly with pity. How much it must mean to him, if he could think of it now.
The mood changed. Out of habit, Orestes told Dora what he had done and whom he had seen during the week. She listened and commented, then:
“I ought to go now,” she said, rising. “I shan’t come to town next week. The week after, probably.”
What was happening? Orestes looked at her untouched sandwich, at the cracked leatherette seats of his chairs. The phrase, “the mother country,” lit on his mind like a flake of soot. He had been waiting for Dora to deny that she was through with him; instead, she stood at the door, an expression of perfect good nature masking her decision and conveying it in all its firmness. Her lover, he thought, the manager of the olive groves, dismissed.
In the days that followed, Orestes tried to reason that Dora was suffering from strain or fatigue or at worst from some passing mental illness; her mind had caught cold; soon she would be cured, they would again be friends. But his fantasies took off from a contrary assumption—she was in her right mind, she had dismissed him. He woke, weeping, from nightmares he hadn’t had since his analysis, dreams of falling in which balconies crumbled from his grasp like birthday cake. What was this? He bent a sharp ear to his motives. The rupture evidently meant more to him than he knew.