The Receptionist

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by Janet Groth


  I was jolted awake by the touch of a hand on my thigh. I turned my head and saw Monsieur Caryannis’s spectacles glinting at me in the dim light of the SORTIE sign.

  “I thought you had taken a cabin,” I said in icy German. To my mind this was a stinging rebuke that any right-thinking gentleman would take to mean “Get your hand the hell off my thigh and make yourself scarce.” But it did not have this effect.

  “Madame Caryannis was not feeling well, and as there was a lady who wished to share, I gave up my space to her,” he explained.

  “That was very considerate of you,” I spat out, removing Monsieur Caryannis’s hand to his own thigh.

  He had begun to look very meek, almost stricken.

  “I myself am feeling a slight chill,” I added in a mellower tone. “If you will excuse me, I’ll try to find a chair out of the draft.” I moved to the seat farthest away. When I glanced back, he was still hunched rather forlornly over the chair I had left. I thought, It is so easy to make a man ridiculous. One has only to say no. I suppose that’s why they hate us so. Now, gloomily, I began to feel guilt.

  I must have dozed off, for the next hand on me was shaking me roughly by the shoulder. When I opened my eyes, Mr. Phillip was already vanishing. I ascended to the bridge through the grayness of slumbering bodies billowing over a cold sea.

  A large wheel dominated the windowed enclosure. A hatless man in dark clothes stood behind it, feet wide apart. A steward handed around thick white cups of thick black coffee. I stood beside Mr. Phillip, looking out the window and sipping the sweet Turkish brew. Dark islands hulked all around us. Patras was to the right; Corfu, to the left and almost out of sight behind us. Somewhere up ahead a light was blinking. There was some pink behind the charcoal hump to the left of us. How could the sun come up to the left of us? Mr. Phillip would explain. He gestured to the chart room just behind the man at the helm. New, specific instruments of ancient design gleamed out at me from various points around the walls. A large, sturdy table held an orderly profusion of navigational maps. I bent over them with serious eyes, but the neat lines before me remained a mystery.

  Then there was nothing to look at but the face of Mr. Phillip. It had deep lines, none of which signified anxiety. There were weather lines, squint lines, interrupted-sleep lines. They charted a handsome, seafaring course across straight features, around deep-set eyes. There was a flash of gold tooth in his smile as he brought his face down to mine. But his kiss was not kind. It was not even personal, and its urgency bore the pressure of haste rather than emotion. I broke away, with difficulty, and was propelled by my own momentum back into the other room. I subsided against the wall, breathing heavily.

  The man at the wheel grinned. “Americano?” he asked. How could I make him understand that my flight had been motivated by hedonism, not puritanism? I liked to be kindly kissed.

  “Mr. Phillip,” he said, “is a good man. A very good man. I personally have never known him to be so moved by a beautiful woman as he has today shown himself to be.” Oh, brother, I thought. Mr. Phillip entered the room. No one spoke. I moved out of the enclosure onto the port-side bow. Mr. Phillip followed. His arms encircled the part of the rail against which I was standing, then dropped to his sides as two kerchiefed ladies in mackintoshes popped up from behind the small foghorn.

  “Le soleil est très joli, n’est-ce pas?” the first head-scarfed lady asserted. Mr. Phillip bowed his assent. A mustachioed German bearing a telescope emerged from the wheelhouse, muttered, “Guten Morgen,” and stepped carefully over the sill. There was an exchange of guttural formalities. Suddenly Mr. Phillip herded us all back into the wheelhouse and I had a vision of him stuffing us, mackintoshes, head scarves, telescopes, and all, into his bunk for a whirlwind orgy. But he did not stop until we were all through the wheelhouse and out the other side. A whoosh of sudsy water explained the maneuver. The decks were being washed down. The sun had blazed into brightness, obscuring itself.

  I went to the saloon and fell asleep in a deep red chair under a picture of Delphi. Again I dreamed. I dreamed that Fritz was a potato. I was in the dream, too. And a knight in armor, who announced that he had come to woo me and to ask for my hand. But my potato-love said to him, “You will never win her. I will seduce her with my eyes.” I awoke and, disturbed by the linguistic trick my subconscious had played on me, slept no more but spent the morning at the deep tile-lined tank euphemistically referred to as the swimming pool.

  Lolling in a deck chair under the bright sky, I made the acquaintance of a couple of drab female members of L’Homme Nouveau. Francoise and Claudine were from Amiens and would be spending the rest of the summer at Delphi. I would like to have known more about the religious aspects of their movement, but again language proved a barrier. Would they attempt in Delphi a synthesis of the pagan and the Christian? The Roman and the Byzantine? Or perhaps they were simply taking advantage of group rates. A strikingly well-built youth of eighteen or nineteen came by in electric-blue swim trunks. He greeted Françoise and Claudine and introduced himself as Pierre. He said that he, too, was a member of L’Homme Nouveau. Sitting down beside me, Pierre quizzed me charmingly about America. He was especially curious about New York, and Indians, confiding at one point, “Les Apaches sont pour moi très sympathiques.” When he couldn’t persuade me to join him in the pool, he asked me to please hold his watch. Soon he was cavorting in the liveliest manner with a girl in a bright yellow bikini and bright yellow hair. In between the shrieks and splashing of a water fight, I heard her cry, “Mach meine Haare nicht nass!” So it seemed she was German and was not engaged in any attempted renewal of French Catholicism.

  Twenty minutes later the pair were still happily submerged, and I had tired of watch-sitting duty. I deposited the watch with Françoise and Claudine, reflecting that “L’Homme Nouveau”—the new man—was, to all intents and purposes, not so very different from the old.

  At noon the Carina passed through the Corinth Canal. The delicate maneuver executed, the canal lined out behind us like a perfect punctuation mark—a dash of brilliant green leading to the next, and last, phase of our journey, through Greek waters to Piraeus.

  BY MIDAFTERNOON I WAS jouncing my way into Athens on the seat of an uncertainly sprung city bus. Suddenly, through the grimy window on my left, I glimpsed the Parthenon and it hit me that I was truly in Greece. The bandage around my heart loosened. I got off at Síntagma Square and crossed to the sprawling café outside the American Express. It was siesta time and the plaza was full of young coffee drinkers, scornful of sleep, even in the midday heat. I saw two who smiled at me. I realized that I was smiling already. I was happy to be in Greece and it showed. They offered me a chair and I took it. They told me that their names were Andre and Alex, but I didn’t really care what their names were. I was flattered. I was fought over. Alex moved in. He moved me out, out of the plaza, bag and baggage, into his blue Saab automobile.

  “We must first find you a place to stay,” said Alex. “I know a fine old house here in the Pláka. That is what we call this area around the cathedral, you know. It’s just here.”

  We went in. A large black-haired man with a black mustache came forward from the rear of the house. Introducing himself as Mr. Propopoulous, he showed me a big, squarish room, bright and clean, on the ground floor. In a moment it was settled. My bags were placed in the room and the key was deposited in my palm.

  “Come,” said Alex. ‘’We just have time for a lemonade on Philopappos Hill—and your first good look at Athens.”

  I was guided into the Saab once more and was soon being driven past ancient spots.

  “That is the Temple of Jupiter,” said Alex. “And there is the prison cell where Socrates was kept until his suicide.” We swept past the small grated opening in a crumbling old wall, up to a hill facing the Acropolis. Leaving the car, we walked into an open, vine-shaded terrace and listened for a while to the cicadas.

  “They live only one summer, you know,” said Alex. “When
we hear them begin to sing, we say in Greece, ‘Summer has begun.’ And when they have laid their eggs, they die.”

  “How very sad,” I said, suppressing a smile. I wondered if this was the way Alex really saw things or merely his idea of how to talk to a woman.

  “Now I must go back to my shop. And you must sleep. At nine, I will call for you, and we will go to the most beautiful beach in the world. We will have dinner on the terrace and listen to the waves lapping against the shore.”

  Back in Andria House I discovered that I was very tired. Even so, I was too surprised to sleep. Having spurned overtures all over Europe all summer long, I had not the faintest idea why I had encouraged this one myself.

  If you don’t know, then who’s minding the store? I asked myself. I shuddered at the thought of all that undiscovered territory encased in my skull. How had I become such a stranger? It wasn’t only that I was in a strange country. Being clueless about my own motives and feelings was a prevailing condition with me, thrown into relief by the fact that I was no longer surrounded by people who insisted they knew me. I thought of my uncle Bill, back in Iowa, sitting at supper one Sunday with the people most familiar to him in all the world. He had sat considering us—his wife, brother, sister-in-law, sisters, nephew, and niece—then suddenly asked, “Who are these people sitting here?” He spoke in a normal tone of voice and at first he seemed to be addressing the lamp in the middle of the dining room table. Then his eyes moved slowly over our faces once again. “I don’t know you,” he said. “I don’t know a blamed one of you.” Exhausted by the weight of this recollection—or just exhausted—I did, then, fall asleep.

  That evening, I took more trouble getting myself ready than I had in a long while. Alex was late, but he was pleased by my looks, so I was pleased. We drove under the flood-lit Acropolis, across Athens, then out to a highway along the coast. Greek music flowed from the radio. I felt very well.

  A number of cottages lined a small cove, and we turned in beside one of them, passing a uniformed guard at the gate, who waved us through. Alex brought us each a drink as we sat on the terrace and ordered dinner from a nearby caterer. A radio was playing American music of the forties—the big bands. Alex proposed the Greek toast, “Yasou!”

  After dinner, we had coffee laced with brandy. Alex relaxed and was at his most extravagant then, making love to me. He compared me to Eve and said he was in paradise. The next minute he was spinning a desert fantasy out of The Arabian Nights. Then, as I lay watching in disbelief, he sprang off the couch and began to show off for me. Doing calisthenics and boasting of his athletic trophies and ribbons.

  I was reminded of Fritz and of an evening party on Long Island, during one of the bad times. Fritz’s play had just come back from his publisher in Germany with a rejection, and he was drinking more than was usual for him. He did not hold his liquor well. There were about a dozen people at the party in a beach house that belonged to a photographer named Harry, who specialized in moody shots for fashion magazines. Because someone had mentioned the Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston bout, Fritz and Harry had challenged one another to a boxing match.

  Harry’s girlfriend and I watched from a corner of the room as the two grown men staggered around the living room in swimming trunks, protecting their noses with Harry’s sons’ junior gloves, each bragging loudly that he would very soon knock the other down. One of them actually did get a bloody nose when he tripped over his own foot and, falling, bumped his face against the corner of an easy chair. I had wanted to shout, “Please don’t!” Please don’t show us how like little boys you are. We don’t want to see how vulnerable you are. We come to you for strength and protection. If you show that you are weak, like us, we are confronted in a way that you are not—no, you really are not, having on some level known it all along—that we are alone, that no one is safe, and that men and women can only cling to one another, suspended over the void.

  Alex may have seen that my eyes were wet, for he drew my head down on his shoulder and spoke tenderly to me. To weep, to be consoled, must have been what I wanted. Soon I was lighthearted again. Alex heard me laughing in the bath and came in to ask, “What’s so funny?”

  I waved a sponge at the steep-sided porcelain chair I was sitting in and hooted, “This isn’t a bathtub; it’s a throne!”

  Alex was wounded. “Many tubs in Greece are of that style,” he retorted with dignity. “To me it seems a very pleasing form. I see nothing funny about it.” Later he wanted to comb my hair, or, as he said, “plot” it.

  “Not plot, plait.”

  “Yes, please.” And then, holding up his handiwork: “Plait. What a curious word.”

  “What a curious plait.”

  In the morning, as we drove back to Athens, Alex began worrying out loud that I was not seeing enough.

  “You must go to one of our wonderful islands. You can go to Hydra in a day, simply by taking the tube from Omonoia Square right to the docks in Piraeus. And Hydra is magnificent.”

  I said I’d think about it, adding, “This evening, I want to go to the Sound and Light performance.”

  “An excellent idea,” said Alex. He did not suggest going along.

  We drew up in front of Andria House. Fat, dark, formal Mr. Propopoulous came forward, anxiously tossing his beads and crying, “But where have you been? You did not come in all night.” He looked past me at the street, where Alex was starting the Saab and pulling away from the curb. Mr. Propopoulous drew himself up into a semblance of a shrug and mumbled, “Ah, these young people . . .”

  I DECIDED TO WASH my hair. Mr. Propopoulous was prevailed upon to put in motion a set of operations that eventually yielded hot water. When, hair washed, I expressed a wish to dry it and asked if he had a blow-dryer, Mr. Propopoulous pointed to the top of his house: “No such apparatus, but perhaps the sun?” Stepping out onto the roof, I was rewarded by a spectacular view, not only of the cathedral, but of a corner of the Acropolis as well, together with a vista of coral-tiled roofs and whitewashed buildings against a bowl of blue sky.

  For long minutes I seemed to be in a world without activity. Even the sounds of the street were muted. Then, without warning, a window opened directly opposite me. A black-haired matron of thirty-five or forty appeared. Here, out of context, she seemed almost an apparition. What can she be like? I wondered. Does she sing? What stories does she tell her children? I wished I had learned the Greek word for “hello.” Just as I was about to try out “buongiorno,” the woman withdrew.

  Reluctantly, as if it were something I had long avoided, I tried to think what the other woman had seen. I realized that I myself was more profoundly out of context, not only to this other woman, but to all who encountered me as I traveled about alone, possessed of no other identifiable relationship to the world or to society but a sexual one. Was it possible that I had no other identity?

  That evening, as I walked up the steep path to the roped-off entrance of the Sound and Light show, people all around me were exchanging desultory comments in French. I turned to a buxom woman with a deep tan and sun-bleached auburn hair and ventured a question in French: “Excusez-moi. L’exhibition—ce n’est pas en anglais?”

  The woman smiled at me: “Mais non, c’est en français, mademoiselle. Vous êtes americaine, n’est-ce pas?”

  I admitted that I was and said I had come thinking that this performance was to be in English. Really, I was worried, I said. My French was not equal to the occasion. The woman smiled again and drew a handsome young man, also deeply tanned, into the circle of her arm. “Don’t worry, mademoiselle. I am sure Pedro will be glad to be your interpreter, won’t you, Pedro?”

  Pedro grinned. “But of course, Mademoiselle—?”

  “Groth.”

  “Mademoiselle Groth. I am Pierre LaSalle. These funny friends all call me Pedro. It is because I come from Nice. You must call me Pedro, too, and if I may, I shall call you—?”

  “Janet.”

  “Jeanette, may I present to you our little
group.” He gestured at a group of people who might have stepped straight out of a Buñuel film. “Sylvie, Pepe, BaBa, Monsieur le Président, Monsieur le Docteur, Nikki, and Mr. Jacques. We are all traveling together, you see. We would be most happy if you would join us.”

  The others joined in the invitation: “Yes, by all means.” “Do, please.”

  “Thank you—you are very kind.”

  The rope across the entrance was removed at this point and I followed the others to a row of folding chairs near the crest of the hill. Pedro and his “funny friends” had gone back to their conversation in French, and I was on my own.

  Afterward, Pedro asked me to make myself a member of their party. I felt no great desire to join them, but Sylvie pressed me to come, giving me a strange look of desperation, and I relented. When we arrived, the Bacchus Tavern was very crowded, but after Nikki exchanged a few words with the headwaiter, we were assured the best table would be ours within minutes. So we stood in the roofless hall outside the vine-arbored dining room. Mr. Jacques, who had shown no interest in me before, suddenly struck a match and brought it up to my face. I saw his leering eyes behind the flame. Then he said in English, “First class. Absolutely first class.”

  The headwaiter came and seated us at a table near the front. When the food came, it was consumed without ceremony. More wine was poured. Everyone laughed a great deal. An ass wearing a wreath of vine leaves over his ears ate off the tables and pushed his head into the ladies’ laps. At last, the rest of the party moved to go. Without seeing precisely how it had happened, I found myself alone in one of the cars with Pedro. He drove me to Andria House obediently enough but was less willing to let me leave the car and enter by myself. Caught in his vice-like grip, I laughed, releasing my breath in gasps that sounded almost like sobs. Pedro was passionately committed to possessing me; I, just as passionately to my release. To get his way, Pedro could only use force. To get mine, I resorted to feminine wiles. I seduced him into the idea of tomorrow. Tonight was impossible, I told him, with the perfect semblance of infinite regret. But tomorrow—ah, if he would only just be patient until tomorrow . . .

 

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