Collected Novels and Plays

by James Merrill

  All his life, Orestes recognized, he had been oftener at home with disciples than with friends or lovers. The last year was a remarkable exception, having brought him not only Dora but Sandy. After a certain age, however, the heart gives itself, if at all, too easily; the gift can be taken back. Orestes was nearing forty. His prime allegiance remained to his ideals or (if ever they conflicted with it) to his career.

  He concluded tough-mindedly that it wasn’t Dora alone he would miss, but also the security she had given him and might now withhold. He considered, marveling coldly, how much self-knowledge had brought his cottage to mind at the crucial moment, and how much delicacy had kept him from mentioning it.

  He oversimplified. Years later when, back in Greece, Orestes tried to take possession of his cottage pride barely colored his motives, greed not at all. Nor did he expect, with his magic figures absent, to recapture the bliss of that time. But his tiled floor, his rock garden, his cove, the eucalyptus trees veined with leaf-gray and distant azure—a longing for these things, that is, for the sentimental truths they would still bear witness to, had been welling up in him like a madness. He was actually relieved to learn, from Dora’s lawyer, that he had no claim on them whatever. It made the spirit purer in which he wrote his last letters to her. Even in America, at the time of their separation, Orestes had principally needed—since he wasn’t to have her love—a view of himself as morally finer than Dora.

  She had shown him her way of ending an intimacy. He wished her now to sample his. Therefore, on her next coming to town, he arranged an evening. Ceremoniously he called for her at the hotel, pinned a flower to her coat, carried her suitcase—it was Sunday. After dinner in a French restaurant, through which both talked calmly if relentlessly of joint tax returns and not bothering to divorce and a novel Dora had liked and the still unsold Bokhara, he took her to the theatre where they could hold their tongues in peace. The play was Othello. “It seemed more fitting to let art have the last word,” said Orestes in the taxi, although by then she had seen what he was up to. In due course the beautiful words began to sound, the play to unroll like a great Venetian curtain, first abstracting their life together, then enveloping it. By the last act, Dora was asleep, muffled in gold. Her gentle snores brought it to his attention; as a detail, it seemed ironically right. In the end, screams woke her. The black actor was strangling the white actress. A violence to which all the words had been leading. She turned to Orestes, her eyes opened, inquiringly but with no single inquiry. Would it end in time for her train? Came to mind along with, Would it not have helped to strangle her?—both frivolous questions, she knew, seeing his face lifted calm into the bluish light of the stage, the shining snail’s track of a tear drying along his nose. Soon after that it did end; she was early for her train. On the platform he remembered to give her a letter, addressed to them both, from Sandy in Colombo. Dora promised to return it, thanked Orestes for the evening, without reflecting offered him her cheek to kiss, did not take in the proud averting of his lips, and entered the coach. He stood watching her framed by her window’s lighted oblong. She had made herself comfortable. Her eyes were meeting his with as much gravity as he could have wished until, the train filling up, a Negro sailor took the seat next to her, and she, hoping to make Orestes smile, raised both hands to her throat and pretended to squeeze. Through the glass she felt his sad impatience, dropped her hands, began to glide, before he could think what was happening, out of his sight.

  4.viii.61

  What has happened is still too strange. I can’t

  5.viii.61

  I’ve seen Orson. He has come at last, and gone.

  Now & then, as I’ve sat gazing down the lagoon toward the Sleeping Woman, something has taken place within me like the blowing of a fuse when too many lights are turned on for the current to bear. The house of these weeks has gone suddenly, magically dark, & a joy entered me, as my eyes heart adjusted to familiar shapes, & the square of moonlight brightened on the floorboards. What I knew then reached back beyond anything I could see or remember, into a world even my mother has forgotten, though she lives in it, too, joyous, forever young. I have felt tremendously at home in this knowledge. Part of me does belong here. There has been no need to use words. But the lights, each time, have had to go on again. I had been looking for something. Soon once more the house has blazed & the voluble search been resumed. That is ended now. I am switching them off one by one. Have I found whatever it was? Probably not. I know chiefly that I am no longer looking.

  In fact I’m leaving. Tomorrow, Tuesday, Diblos will lie behind me. America lies ahead, the land of opportunity. I have vowed to find a job before Labor Day. I should be able to make myself very useful in a travel agency.

  I reached a standstill after copying out these last pages, plotted & written & rewritten over 3 weeks on separate, unlined sheets. I had hoped to escape the tyranny of the Notebook—all my false starts, contradictions, irruptions of self, bound together, irrevocably. Books ought to consume their sources, not embalm them.

  These “finished” pages are the best I can do. They have their own movement, & are often believable. But they have become fiction, which is to say, merely life-like. I nearly stopped transcribing them when I came upon that upside down, how-many-weeks-old dream (whose meaning is so plain disturbing today) & again when that most recent entry turned up—I’d have ripped it out but was too tired & indifferent to recopy one side of the page already covered.

  Yesterday & today I read the whole notebook through. Actually, this last passage struck me as less artful than the earlier ones, with all their indecisions, pentimenti, glimpses of bare canvas, rips & ripples & cracks which, by stressing the fabric of illusion, required a greater attention to what was being represented. (How telling my never finding a name for Dora—only parentheses as for something private or irrelevant; and my reduction of Orson/Orestes, oftener than not, to his initial: a zero.)

  When I reread it, the finished section troubled me. It has Dora & Orestes separating at the end of 8 months in America, instead of the nearly four years it took them to reach this decision. Their visit to Houston is not described, or Sandy’s to New York. I leave out dozens of people, notably O.’s student Harriet, & their affair. This telescoping produces a false perspective. The characters, hurried through what was in fact a slow, painful action, become often trivial, like people in a drawing-room comedy. With Sandy absent, his viewpoint gets transferred, and a lot of valuable space given, to another 3rd person, Arthur Orson, who is unnecessary to the story, or at least figured in it differently, having refused—but who cares! My point is that I did do my best, but, as the Gorgon’s face was mine, never succeeded in getting a full view of it.

  Throughout, I observed considerably more interest in D.’s & O.’s estrangement than in their love for one another. Why? Did their love threaten me, or their estrangement comfort me? It was surely no fault of theirs if I were still on this island playing with them in effigy, loving the effigies alone, masks behind which lay all too frequently a mind foreign to them. Dora’s amnesia—which comes off as well as anything—is largely my experience at the slaughterhouse (p. 17) transformed. Would I have thought to make her feel shame afterwards, if I hadn’t felt it myself vis-à-vis Lucine? I was “Dora.” I was “Orestes.” They—whoever “they” were—kept mostly beyond my reach.

  “The sun & moon together in the sky.”

  I wanted to set down these thoughts first, before seeing if I can write what happened on Saturday. Then I will (figuratively) drown my book. Blind I go. Love hasn’t worked, not this year, & art isn’t the answer.

  I hadn’t slept well. Around 11:00 I was still half in bed, thinking of nothing, when Chryssoula knocked (she no longer enters my room, except to clean it when I’m out, there are no more bunches of basil, only a reproachful, red-eyed mask; little Theodoros brings me my tea) & deposited George eager on the threshold. Before I could catch her eye, she was gone. My first mistaken thought was that G. had come to repai
r his behavior of several days earlier, when, having got 200 drachmas from me on a pretext so ridiculous I believed him, he foolishly pressed his winning streak by asking outright for my pale blue slacks. “Never mind,” he said—but a friend would not have refused him, as had I; this judgment hung in the air of our parting. I’d known all along what kind of person he was. I’d even made out through his complacency & opportunism the milky negative of those traits: loyalty to a code no middle-class foreigner would ever understand. I was sorry that things had come to a head, but relieved. Now, with my initiation into 1 local mystery (George’s friendship), it seemed the exorcism of the place could begin. Those last days, I caught myself looking at Diblos as if before long I would never see it again.

  “Your friends are here, get up, come quickly!” he announced with words & gestures. Friends? What friends? George groaned, cast about, pounced upon L.’s watercolor which I’d slipped into the framed hotel regulations behind the door. Those friends: the caïque! Yes, and the girl!

  He sat on the bed, bouncing with excitement while I washed. I hesitated over a clean shirt; cleverly, with his hands G. shaped Lucine out of thin air—I was dressing up for her? To dampen him, I put on the pale blue slacks. We go caïque Athens, olla mazi, to-geth-er? No, my Giorgios, we do not go Athens.

  Another knock—Chryssoula, dead-pan, with a scented note signed “Nicole N.” They had been fleeing the heat in Hydra, could stop only an hour at Diblos, wouldn’t I join them for an ouzo on the caïque? I asked her to send word back that I would be along fra poco.

  Rescued!

  I got rid of G., considered shaving my beard, decided to face them with it, & tumbled out of the hotel.

  On the waterfront the news greeted me.

  As before, Mr N. was striding up & down, and his wife emerging from the Enfant’s shop. Waves of excitement. Orson had appeared! Not 15 minutes earlier, he had been rowed across from the mainland. Under the eyes of everyone but the N.’s (who were hearing about it now, at the moment of my joining them) he had sent away the boatman, left his knapsack at the café, set out on foot for the House.

  A flurry of speculation & rumor. Was Byron on the island? Yes. No. He had/had not been on yesterday’s boat, been seen in town earlier this morning. Was it not rather his old serving woman who had come to buy fish? Ah, but fish was not for old serving women. Byron himself had therefore to be in residence.

  We boarded the caïque to escape all this. I asked Mr N. how Dora had responded to the letter from his office.

  “The letter? We have written 4. Your brother has written, I should think, daily. Dora has never replied.”

  Had she received the letters, I wondered, or been ill?

  She had received them, Mr N. was sure. Other letters sent to the same address had been answered. Byron, too, she had written—without (according to him) one line about Orson or his cottage. As for health, who knew? She was well enough to be spending the summer on Cape, what was it called? Morue in French.

  Mrs N.: Cape Cod! Thoreau! Emily Dickinson!

  Orson, it seemed, had pretty much grasped the situation, seen that he was making himself a nuisance, wanted to let matters drop. He had telephoned Mr N.’s office some 10 days before to say that he was leaving Athens on a walking tour & might, if he passed nearby, cross over to Diblos to pick up a few belongings he’d left there.

  I told the N.’s about seeing Byron, & his hoping that O. would stop by for some books.

  Mr N.: Ah well, then, that explains why he’s here today.

  Mrs N. (busy with ice & ouzo): The Greeks are impossible. Admit it, Akis! My gossipy shopkeeper has invented such a drama you can’t imagine. If—how did you call him? If the Enfant Chic is to be believed, your brother has only to set foot on Dora’s land to be driven off with a cravache by Byron.

  I thought I’d misheard her. “A what?”

  Mrs N.: A cravache. A whip.

  Mr N.: A riding crop. May I say that your shopkeeper, Nicole, is not one’s ideal of the reliable informant?

  We sipped our drinks. I was visited by the odd notion that my (Dora), too, would have left those letters unanswered, & that my Orestes would have set out, on foot, at Orson’s side. There had been that much truth, after all, behind those masks.

  And my Byron? Would he be waiting on the terrace with a whip?

  A terrible guilty excitement slowly filled me. I knew that the Enfant had spoken the truth, & that I’d done nothing to prevent what was going to happen. A brutal, horrible action (p. 18). How could I have prevented it? In countless ways. By making friends with the E. C. By having gone to Byron’s for a drink that day. By writing O., even, and trying to warn him, since I must have known in my heart that he would come to Diblos sooner or later. By not keeping this notebook! Out of myself, my inertness, as well as a few things Orson had given me (nail parings, his secret name, a drop of his blood) it came over me that I had constructed a magic doll called Orestes, which had drawn him here. I had wanted Awake & asleep, I had dreamed of his punishment.

  In French Mrs N. asked her husband how long a walk it was to the house. He answered.

  We each calculated silently that O. would be there by now.

  I looked up, needing to escape from my thoughts. Where was Lucine? It struck me that we had been sitting here on deck without her.

  “Ah, Lucine,” said Mrs N. “Let me see, they would be arriving in Paris tomorrow. No, today.”

  I felt my face change. I thought she was joking. Hadn’t George seen L., said she’d come as well as the caïque? As I took it in, I had a rush of silly annoyance with him. And who were “they”?

  I asked, hadn’t L. planned to be in Greece the whole summer?

  “In Europe,” said Mrs N. “She left Greece, oh, 3 weeks ago. You received the aquarelle from her? It was charming, I must say I hoped she had painted it for Akis and me, but she wanted you to have it. I promised to keep it for you, then sent it by mail because how did I know when we’d ever see you again?—what with your deserting us after Epidauros. I mailed it myself, the day after she left. What? Ah, your charming note. Yes, it pleased us so much. No, not alone. With a red-haired girl from Charleston or Galveston & a boy named Rob whose father is a bank president. First to Venice, then Munich, then Paris. So you’ve missed her!” She was bright & decisive throughout. I am still a fortune hunter in her eyes.

  She had forwarded my letter about the watercolor, & will give me an address in London good through August.

  “If you were really interested you could have shown it more,” said Mrs N. gaily with her eyes on my face. “Girls today don’t sit in their parlors waiting for the man to make up his mind.”

  It was long past twelve. The heat burned through the awnings, melting our ice. The E. C. stood in his doorway. George had found several excuses to pass back & forth. By now I would surely have pointed him out to the N.’s who at any moment were going to invite him on board, offer him a drink, take him to Athens, Paris, New York. It was for our convenience, really, that he kept in sight.

  His expectancy was easier than my own to understand.

  A deep breath, one might have said, had been indrawn by somebody whose attention was at the same instant so caught & held by 1000 details of the scene—a hot sun-shaft, Mrs N.’s elbow corrugated by the wicker she had leaned upon, a dog on the quai, the dog’s reflection in water—so held that he, the breather, simply kept forgetting to exhale. In the harbor a mullet leapt, realized its error, flopped back stunned. The N.’s themselves, who according to her note had been all eagerness to depart, sat becalmed. I cannot think what more we talked about. They did not, I know, suggest my accompanying them to Athens that afternoon. And in the end it was Orson they rescued from this island.

  The scene kept brightening & darkening around me. Under his sign (“Tout pour le Sport”) the Enfant’s pitted moon-face shone—the face of Herodias when she says: My daughter has done well. The Sleeping Woman stirred, at intervals, on her mirror mattress.

  Orestes


  Orson appeared at the far end of the waterfront. Mr N. had said, “I believe …” The rest of us looked up.

  His approach was, or seemed, slow. Something about it had caused a number of little boys to leave the beach & follow him. He couldn’t have been walking too slowly; they were having to trot to keep up. From town, a handful of adolescents, as on the green radio beam of the Enfant Chic’s gaze, ambled forth to meet him.

  “C’est donc lui? Comme il est bronzé,” said Mrs N. “Vraiment, on dirait un grec.”

  Mr N. (God love him): Mais, c’est un grec, idiote. Tu n’as rien compris?

  He had been whipped He had evidently Byron had

  We could now see the red weal on Orson’s face, & stripes of red on his shirt where he had lifted his shoulder to blot it. He had on walking shorts but carried a jacket over his arm. The visit had been formal.

  15 or 20 children and boys completed the procession. The Eumenides—only in this instance they were, without irony, “Kindly Ones.” Their faces expressed pity & wonder, they kept pace in silence. Greeks, unlike Americans, are not thrilled by violence. Alone, the Enfant Chic called from his doorway, sarcastically, “Bon zour, Monsieur. Vous voulez quelque chose?”—and somebody did laugh.

  “Ftáni, putana!” shouted an angry voice at the foot of our gangplank. It was George. The E. C. (who had been addressed) smirked & looked debonair.

  Orson was not looking our way, though close enough to have seen us on the shaded deck. Soon he was abreast of the caïque. His face was calm & exalted.

  I rose from my chair. I felt the N.’s glance at me.