Don't I Know You?

by Marni Jackson

  “Yeah, it looks okay,” Nick said. “Although we’ll have to buy stuff to cook with.”

  “Stelios can tell you where to get anything. He runs the Mermaid.”

  Hoot ducked out of the entrance, momentarily blocking the sunlight’s blare. “So I’m down the way, if you need me. It’s the one with the cowbell nailed outside. And you’ll meet everybody tonight at the Mermaid.”

  He put his hands in a prayer position and gave a slight bow.

  “Welcome to Matala.”

  While I unpacked Nick knelt in the entrance and looked out at the ocean. A few kids in cutoff jeans were in the water, standing in swells that raced far up onto the beach before the waves broke into a bluish-white ruffle of foam, and then shrank back into the sea. A steady soft breeze blew. The only sound was when the tide sometimes surged into the sea-level caves with a booming clap.

  I unrolled my sleeping bag on the gravel bed, then took Nick’s bag and smoothed it out alongside mine. They were different makes but with some patience the two could be zipped together into one cocoon. The bed side of the cave was tucked away from the door and quite private.

  Nick changed into his bathing suit, opened his notebook, and uncapped his pen. I lay down in our new bedroom where the walls radiated a stony coolness. I turned to a fresh page in my journal and wrote the word “Matala.” If it took living in a cave to play house, I was game.

  Feb. 10th, 1970

  Yesterday we took a trip into Pitsidia and bought ourselves the local version of a BBQ—a little brazier that holds charcoal—and an iron frying pan. A kerosene lamp, extra wick, and candles. Some of the coarse salt they use here, twisted up in brown paper, fresh oregano, eggs in a cloth. Plus a bottle of olive oil the color of baby snakes.

  We spent seventy cents on a fish in a plastic bag with ice that melted on the 4 k. walk back to Matala. Found the old guy in the village who sells bundles of firewood. He wraps each one tenderly in grapevines. So we’re all set up now.

  The caves are better than a hotel in some ways. They’re soundproof, for one thing. No thunder from your neighbor’s shower (I wish). And they never lose their coolness even in the heat of the day. The shit cave is not great, you have to watch your step, but it does get “flushed” twice a day. Garbage is burnt in the beach bonfires, and we don’t generate much. Anything perishable the local dogs take care of.

  There’s only one tap for all of us and lugging cans of water up the cliff is a chore. On Sundays the tour buses arrive and people with cameras roam around the cliffs for an hour or so, apologetically poking their heads into our homes as if we were Maasai warriors living in mud huts. Well, they are caves.

  Nick’s writing a lot, and has finished some really good poems. I like it when we’re both in the cave at dusk, waiting for the charcoal embers to get perfectly white, and he’s scribbling away—it’s pathetic, this playing-house thing, I know. But I’m tired of always being on the move and out of my element (whatever that is). So far everyone here is friendly and nice except for a few weirdos who live on the opposite cliff and don’t hang out much. I like the way the weather rules everything here. A full moon means late parties on the beach, and on windy days with high surf, everyone holes up (literally).

  In the cave next door to us are a brother and sister from South Carolina—I think he just went AWOL from the marines. She’s some sort of musician, a classical pianist I think. Shy.

  The other day Nick and I ventured farther down the shoreline. There are coves like this, one after another, all down the coast, with great dinosaur humps of rock in between. One cove has dark-red sand. The rock is scoured with trenches and furrows, or in other places it’s pockmarked and lacy, like bone marrow. A twenty-minute walk in either direction and there’s not another soul around.

  Ran into Joni Mitchell at the bakery lady’s today! She was wearing turquoise and silver rings on her fingers and had a bad sunburn on her chest. Long straight blond hair and a long upper lip, with a cute overbite. There was only one loaf of bread left and she really seemed to want it, so I let her buy it. Then the red-haired guy with the turban, his name is Carey I think, came in and scared her, grabbing her from behind and lifting her up. She has a nice big laugh. I was relieved when they ignored me. I can never bring myself to say fan stuff to musicians or actors. It feels so intrusive.

  I told Nick about Joni, but he doesn’t like her songs that much. “Her lines have too many words,” he said. I felt like holding up his notebook, but refrained.

  * * *

  Something has happened that I don’t understand. The moon was full, it was the middle of the night and I was having a nightmare. I only remember the end of it, when there was a huge bee circling my head, dive-bombing me, trying to fly into my eyes. It wasn’t a regular bee, it was a killer bee and I was very scared. I had a little paddle in one hand that I was using to fend off this attacker. I woke up with that incredible sense of relief you have when you realize it was only a dream, and now you’re safe in bed. Then I noticed that Nick wasn’t beside me.

  He’s gone out to pee, I thought, and lay in my warm sleeping bag, grateful to have surfaced and escaped the killer bee. The light of the moon shone through the door of the cave, through my pretty batik curtain. Some of the wild dogs that roam the beach were barking, and from the sound of the surf, the wind was coming up. I remembered that we’d left the charcoal brazier outside and hoped the wind hadn’t scattered any leftover embers.

  Nick’s side felt cool. He must have been gone for some time. I unzipped my bag to go looking for him.

  When I stepped out of our cave the moon was so bright it was as if a big television were casting a blue pall on everything. It threw my shadow on the cliff wall. I smelled cigarette smoke and saw that the marine next door was sitting on the ledge, in boxer shorts. He had a brush cut; he was the only cave guy with short hair. Beano, they called him, because that’s all he cooked, beans and rice. That’s what he brought to the parties.

  Hey Beano, I said, what’re you doing up?

  He lifted his cigarette.

  Want one?

  I did smoke, but I rolled my own and didn’t like filtered American cigarettes.

  Have you seen Nick?

  Yeah, he said with his eyes fixed on the surf below.

  Is there a party somewhere? I asked. But the night was perfectly quiet, except for the dogs.

  He pointed behind him with his cigarette, toward the cave he shared with his sister.

  Nick’s in there?

  He nodded and gave me a kindly look with lustrous eyes. Whatever he had been through in the marines, it seemed to have made him gentler than the others here, so intent on being pacifists.

  I was slow to put it together. So, Nick had slipped out of our zippered bed and had gone next door, to sleep with … Sally, that was her name. Beano and Sally, brother and sister, the model family next door. What nerve, among other things.

  This time Beano passed me his cigarette and I took it. I didn’t know what to do—storm into the cave and drag him “home”? I was confused. Nick and I had sex, lots of sex. I thought he loved me, and my body, at least he said he did. A deep sense of disorientation came over me. Everything was turned upside down, and I doubted it all, one hundred percent of it. Nick was not who I had thought he was, and so neither was I.

  He could have at least warned me that he wanted to sleep with someone else. Was restless. It might have been negotiable. In theory.

  Luckily there was a canvas tarp nailed over the entrance to their cave, thick enough to muffle any sounds. The dogs barked on, as if scolding the moon for being so bright. Beano and I didn’t say anything, we just sat there smoking and watching the phosphorescent white foam of the waves as they broke down below. The breeze, all the way from Africa, was not as warm as usual; I began to shiver, so I left Beano and went back inside. I curled up in bed, pulling the toggle on my sleeping bag to cover everything but my face. Maybe they were just talking, I thought. She was quiet, but she seemed smart, knowing.
Dark bangs cut straight, like Veronica in the cartoon strip. I decided I would give him the benefit of the doubt.

  * * *

  So began my enchantment, my inability to break free of the damaging spell that Nick’s betrayal would cast. Not that we used words like betrayal, or jealousy. This was 1970, the height of the so-called sexual revolution, when possessiveness and jealousy were nothing but bad ideas, “bourgeois constructs.” I felt wrong just being in their grip.

  The next morning Nick came back as if from brushing his teeth, unrepentant and casual. No apologies, no explanations. “Where were you?” I must have yelped. I was next door with Sally, he answered with a touch of exasperation. I didn’t know where you were, I said, I was worried. But Beano told you, he replied mildly; we could hear the two of you talking outside.

  We.

  He changed his clothes and took our soap, water bottle, and towel to head down to the faucet. I’ll get the water, he said, and that was that. Even though he couldn’t disguise a certain just-laid friskiness, his behavior made it impossible for me to cry or fight. And I was too off balance, too dismantled, to even locate my feelings, let alone act on them. When he came back I was back in bed, pretending to read. (The Bell Jar, of course.) He opened his notebook and began to write.

  Later in the day I went down to the Mermaid, ordered a bottle of red wine, and slowly, methodically drank it. Joni was sitting at another table with the red-haired guy, playing backgammon and drinking beer. They smiled at me and left me alone. At dusk, when I finally made my way back up the cliff to our cave, Nick was gone. I slept in my clothes. In the middle of the night, he came in, sliding into his bag and leaving it unzipped so as not to wake me. But I was awake anyway.

  After that we settled into a routine. On most mornings he would head off with Sally, to spend the day in another cove. Tactful! I would sit in the door of the cave underlining The Bell Jar or head down to the Mermaid. By sunset, he’d be back, sunburnt all over. I would then fuzzily cook dinner, usually some version of an omelet, in our new frying pan. I was like any other wife in a bad grown-up marriage. He never talked about Sally—and I never asked. Some nights he slipped out, some nights he stayed with me. I wasn’t able to question this, and therefore I began to fall apart, slowly and erratically, like a building gutted by fire but still standing.

  I assumed a late-stage Simone de Beauvoir stance down at the Mermaid, starting on red wine at eleven a.m. and drinking with anybody who cared to join me. I knew I should take a stab at revenge sex, but I didn’t have the heart for it. I was too busy trying to breathe in a whole new element, the thin atmosphere that exists outside the boundaries of unbroken love.

  The worst part was Nick’s journal. I didn’t go looking for it; that would have required too much initiative and spunk. But he tended to leave it conspicuously available. In my path, as it were. And there aren’t many spots to hide a journal in a cave.

  One day I found it lying open on the ledge near the entrance where we kept the matches and loose change. I picked up the familiar notebook, each page pebbled blue with ink, and read his patient, writerly descriptions of their lovemaking. The feel of her skin, the grip of her thighs, the oystery pliancy of her clitoris. Nick was a bit of an aficionado when it came to women’s bodies. He seemed fascinated by the rest of Sally too, her untalkative aplomb, the mystery of an American woman from the South. She had olive skin and those broody, deep bangs—the opposite of me. I read in his notes that she had dropped out of Juilliard, disillusioned by the classical music world and unsure of her own talents. She’d been living in Matala with Beano for two months now—an old hand.

  Nick was the first man she’d slept with in a year, he noted. Imagine writing that down, I thought with a flare of hatred. Scuzzy little journalist. I was still reeling from this fresh knowledge that I had been living and traveling and making love with a stranger. My whole understanding of the world had been recalled, like a car in which a fatal engineering flaw has been discovered.

  I knew I should leave Matala and Nick. Instead I settled into my lugubrious role as Cuckolded Hippie. Hoot from San Antonio was sympathetic and sat with me a lot at the Mermaid. He said I should move to Texas, where the ratio of men to women was better. Joni’s smile when I passed her on the way to the faucet seemed knowing.

  Then I got sick, my default strategy, with a cough that wouldn’t go away. The caves were dusty, needless to say. I stayed awake at night when Nick wasn’t there, coughing hard, hoping they would both hear me next door. But caves have thick walls, and in any case Nick was immune to guilt. I remembered him telling me that when he was little, cartoons upset him because they seemed so violent, and the animals in them were always hurting each other. So this new ability to administer homeopathic dosages of rejection day after day surprised me.

  Why didn’t I leave? It’s the first question that women in unhappy situations are always asked, and can’t answer.

  A week or so went by like that. One afternoon I went down to the tap to wash my hair, to try to get a grip on myself in some small way. It was a humid day and the gush of cold water felt good on my scalp. Maybe now I can get it together to leave, I thought. I had a towel wrapped around my wet hair and was heading back toward the cliffs when I saw that a new couple had just arrived, with guitars. A welcome party was already under way around a bonfire on the beach. Carey had brought a bucket of beer from Delfini’s, the joints were going round. Joni was there too, with a stack of silver bracelets up one arm and her dulcimer in her lap. Hoot hailed me over. Then I saw Nick and Sally in the circle too, sitting together. Okay, I thought, I’ll do this anyway. They can’t make an exile out of me. I took a sip of Hoot’s joint and unwrapped my wet hair so the sun and the fire could dry it.

  The new guy on the guitar was good, and knew all the words to “Masters of War.” I got into it, or maybe it was the dope; everyone was singing, the fishing boats rocked on the horizon, the sky was cloudless. Here I was on a Greek island, with Joni Mitchell. Then I looked across the fire and saw Nick leaning over, kissing Sally, as if I wasn’t there. I was smoking a cigarette—Kents or Marlboros, I smoked anything now—and I flicked my lit cigarette at them and stalked away from the circle. But I didn’t feel justified in my anger and hurt. I just felt foolish, swathed in jealousy like ugly clothes that didn’t fit.

  Maybe it was that night that I took to my pallet, with some cheap grappa to quell my cough. I fumbled in my pack for the razor blades I had furtively packed—an uncommitted hippie, I still shaved my legs. I’m not suicidal, I lectured myself, I just need to see my own blood, evidence that I exist. So I used a razor to nick a dotted line across one wrist. Nothing more than a bracelet of blood beads. It stung, like the nightmare bee.

  And that did help.

  Nick had left earlier that night to go down to the cafés, but I guess he had forgotten something—matches, or money. As I was busy with my handiwork, he came back and interrupted me. He made an exasperated sound, then took away the razor blades and my Swiss Army knife too. And then he left. No doubt he thought it was cheesy and manipulative of me, and he wasn’t going to rise to the bait.

  Free love meant that you could be attracted to other people, you could sleep with them, and it didn’t necessarily change anything. The birth control pill also took away consequence. But every molecule in my body seemed to have been reorganized by his faithlessness and I didn’t know how to proceed.

  Eventually, I got to sleep. Nick was there in the morning when I woke up. I never did it again, but for me the cutting had broken the silence.

  * * *

  The next day Sally and Nick and most of the other cave people took the bus to some religious festival in a town near Mires. Sally set off in a straw fedora with a black feather in the brim. Nick took his notebook with him, which was too bad because I had now surrendered to reading it whenever possible. It kept me looped into their story. Turns out that Sally had been briefly addicted to codeine when she was at Juilliard; this would increase her appeal for N
ick, I knew. I always felt a bit suburban in this regard, even though I was broken in other, less glamorous ways.

  When they got back later in the day, the “wolf-women” announced that they were throwing a mythology-themed “Europa party” in their big cave on the third tier. These were two new arrivals who had brought a new vibe to Matala. They’d been on the road for more than a year, and were tough, brown, and fearless women. The previous winter they’d lived up in the hills of Jamaica, near Negril. I got talking to one of them—Carolina, with her knotted hair bundled up in an African sort of turban—and she let slip that they weren’t just wolf-like. At night, when they were in the mood, they turned into wolves.

  You mean, metaphorically. No, she said, I mean biting and growling and having a tail. Her washed-out blue eyes for a moment looked like husky-dog eyes, and I believed her.

  The two of them moved into a cave that everyone thought was too big and rough to inhabit. Magically, they scrounged up a broken-down couch from the village and fashioned a rusted lamp into a kerosene torch. They organized moon-howling parties with candlelit headdresses. They were edgier than the hippie girls, adding some drama to Matala’s laid-back scene. They also liked to throw theme parties like this one, making special raki cocktails with fresh pineapple.

  So I put on some kohl eyeliner and showed up at their cave. Everyone else was back from the festival, in a party mood. Nick and Sally were there too, but it was so crowded it was easy to ignore them. Hoot made me dance with him, in his whirly-armed way. The new guy, Ferrous, was playing guitar; things felt good. Then the two wolf-girls started dirty dancing with a local soldier who had somehow been included. He got an erection and was horribly embarrassed, until the girls tugged off his pants. Everybody started clapping as he stood there with a stiff cock, grinning and red-faced. Carolina danced around his erection as if his penis were a little god in a shrine. Then he pulled up his pants and fled the party. But that was when things turned; other couples started making out, and more clothes came off. One guy I didn’t recognize was standing in one corner, holding a glass with nothing on but a T-shirt, his cock at half mast, kind of hopeful-looking.