The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  Her eyes were still intense, tearing at me. “But why did he insist on telling you?”

  “Because,” I said. And then understood with a jolt “Because he wanted me to love him no matter what, love him absolutely, like a one-man dog, and prove it.”

  “And yet you told.”

  I nodded.

  She closed her eyes. “Poor Agathon.” After a long time she smiled and met my eyes steadily, as if to say more than her words could tell me. “You were right.”

  I shook my head, looking away, panicky. I’d seen how she talked to men at parties, as if each man she talked to was the finest man in the world. I’d seen how she could fall in with strangers, make them open up their lives to her in minutes. I’d seen her dance with men at parties. (“I only let other men kiss me on the cheek,” she said once. “You know that.” But how could I? I wasn’t at all the parties.) She’d had brothers. She knew a man’s pulse from across the room.

  “I was ’right,’” I said. “It would be pleasant to think so. But I did it by impulse. Who knows what the reasons were? It may easily have been jealousy—of Tuka, even Klinias. It may have been resentment: I could never beat his damned arguments about substance, but here I could beat him once and for all, making Patriotism or loyalty to Solon or God knows what the answer to all his materialism. Or maybe it was ego. I could make my character into something by behaving as if I were it. Or the will to power. I would strike down the traitor and win the applause of Athens.”

  “That’s all dumb.” I’d made her uneasy, missed the point.

  “So you say. Maybe so. All I know is, I gave the warning by impulse, and instantly regretted it though for two whole days I didn’t tell him I’d warned them. When the time he’d decided on came, the guards appeared out of nowhere and disarmed him. Konon looked at me and his face twisted like a monkey’s, trying to smile.”

  The room became still. She looked at me, full of some feeling I couldn’t read. I tried to think what I really felt about my betrayal of Konon and found I felt nothing. She seemed to love me: love, or else the joy of conquest, shone on her clear as an aureole. If she loved me, was it as an amused mother, or as my own soul’s image, or as an infinitely tolerant, weary goddess? A queer image passed through my mind, of locking her up in a room someplace as Sardinians lock up their gold.

  “What are you thinking?” I said.

  She laughed, an explosion of the churning thought I couldn’t guess. She swung her legs off the couch and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “I think we’re incredibly different people,” she said, “and incredibly similar.”

  “How?” I said.

  “Have you got about nine million years?”

  I, too, laughed. But what I wanted was an answer, final and sure as a thunderbolt. “How are we different?”

  Iona retreated to the ironic mask she knew how to work so well. “All ways,” she said, turning the corners of her mouth down. “Do you collect chickens’ feet?”

  “Do you?” I said.

  She laughed, turning down her mouth again, then relenting, smiling and frowning. “We’d better not talk about it,” she said. She came down to the floor beside me and kissed my cheek.

  But I was thinking about the brothers she rarely talked about, and the father. She knew all the tricks. I was jelly. She knew how men long to be superior, masculine; knew how timid they are about advances, how shattered by a No. She could tease me to the limit she wanted to go and could ease me away so that I felt not rejected but mighty as a god. It was too perfect. I wasn’t worth it I was her toy. But my God how I loved her and wished it were real! But what if it was?

  “What was your father like?” I said.

  She sat on her feet and thought, then began talking softly. In the mountain village where they lived there was a river with a strong current. There were large, sharp rocks. They swam there, and he looked on with stern approval. He was fierce as a lion all his life, but he wasn’t bitter until after Iona’s mother had left him, when the children were grown, to go off with some prophet from the far northern hills. Iona’s father had become, then, an angry, misanthropic old man.

  I put my hand on hers. “Are you like him?” I asked.

  “Ridiculous!” she said, laughing.

  Perhaps she wasn’t, I couldn’t be sure, but she carried his image like a carved stone in her heart.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  After a moment she nodded, a little stiffly.

  I climbed up my crutch into the room. “I’ve stayed too long,” I said. “Forgive me.” I offered her my hand to help her up and, after a second’s hesitation, she accepted it. She walked with me to the door, saying nothing. Was she angry? I leaned on the doorframe as I always did when leaving her, my hand on the door but my chest undecided, and I watched her face, wondering if I would kiss her. She did the same, though perhaps thinking about something different, leaning on the other doorframe. She watched my face as I watched hers. It would have been better if we’d worked out some ritual, I thought, or settled the matter by going to bed. But our metaphysics or something was against it. At last she came to me and put her arms around me. “You are a good man, Agathon.”

  “Who knows?” I kissed her. As usual, it wasn’t enough. I held her close, moving my hands on her smooth small back and then her hips. Then, as usual, I paused and we waited for the sign that neither of us would give alone, true democrats, and it was over for another day. As always when I left her, the streets were beautiful. The flowers, the birds, the sunlight were out of their minds.

  It was a terrible time, for Tuka. I never told her of my visits to Iona, not so much from cowardice, I think, though I never deny my cowardice, as from a wish to spare her unnecessary grief. But she knew about them, or some of them. When our families were together Iona would sometimes show knowledge of things she ought not to have known, and Tuka would ask questions, casually, lightly, and Iona, as casually as possible, looking guilty as hell, would mention that I had dropped by. It made Tuka furious and a little frightened, though she wouldn’t show that to Dorkis or Iona. “Agathon, they’re practically slaves,” she said. It was the worst she could say, and my total indifference to their accidental and irrelevant condition frustrated Tuka to the edge of violence. “What do you think people are saying about you?” she said. “You must be insane!” But she knew, too, my indifference to the nonsense people say. She loved society, the conversation of her own kind, as the saying goes; as for me, Sparta was my hermitage from all that. There were none of her own kind here, or mine. The Spartans, whom I thought less than human, were our supposed superiors. The few Athenians in town were black-market pigs. She blinked all that, playing aristocratic lady in a dung heap she changed by her imagination to elegant old Athens. Why she’d come with me in the first place I couldn’t say. She almost didn’t. When the carriage arrived to take us away from Athens, she sat in her room and refused to move. I gave her ten minutes and went out to the carriage to wait. At last she came, still furious, weeping. But in time she accepted her life in Sparta. She made our three rooms in the palace a fair imitation of Athens, and she created, in them, with the help of her culinary skill and her harp, an imitation of Athenian society. It was temporary, she understood. What stories we’d have to tell when we went home! Even my consort with Helots was acceptable in those terms. And she did not actively dislike the friends I made among the Helots. In her generous moments—that is, when she felt secure in her total possession of me—she could understand that they were merely victims: she herself might be a slave, if Sparta were ever to capture Athens. And she, as an Athenian, had known Korinthian slaves who had once been aristocratic masters. In fact, she had very much liked Iona and Dorkis, at first. Iona might have been her closest friend, if I hadn’t gotten involved. Now she was afraid to leave the house, for fear Iona might appear; afraid to let me go off by myself in the morning, for fear I might go visit her.

  It was a strange, irrational hatred, and she knew it. I did not love Tuka less
than I had before. When I woke up in the morning and looked at her, with sunlight falling over her shoulders and glittering in her blue-black hair, she seemed the most valuable thing in the world to me. I’d press closer to her warmth, nestling up to her firm, broad-beamed buttocks and sliding my hand around her waist to her breast. Then for a long time I’d lie half awake and half asleep, all our lives since childhood closed together, secure and safe, as if the room we lay in were not mere physical space but a bubble of time. We would hear the children’s voices in the next room, and the bubble of time stretched outward to include them: my son, absent- minded and quiet and gentle as myself (or gentle as I liked to imagine myself), kneeling by the seashore shaping huge figures out of sand and stone; our daughter, clever and sly and as beautiful as Tuka, hoarding her treasures in Tuka’s cast-off woolen purse, or climbing some tree to branches higher than any of the boys had nerve for. It was absurd that Tuka should doubt that I loved her—loved all of them.

  Sometimes we’d ride to the hills north of Sparta and would sit on some cliff looking down while the horses grazed behind us. On a clear day you could see for a hundred miles.

  She said, once, “Do you ever think of Thaletes?”

  I smiled to keep her from seriousness. “Never.”

  “He was never happy except when he was facing death. That was existence, he thought.”

  “This is existence,” I said. I nodded toward the city far below us, miles away.

  “I know. Standing back from things. Seeing where you are.”

  I glanced at her strong, fine legs. “I meant beauty,” I said.

  “That too, I suppose.” She put her hand on mine. “But you can’t see that either unless you’re back from it.” She looked at me sideways for a moment. “You, for instance. I forget I love you until someone starts stealing you from me.”

  “Nobody’s stealing me,” I said.

  She squeezed my hand. “Damn right.”

  After a while she said, “Poor old horse.” It was our word for Lykourgos. “What does he do for pleasure?”

  “Bites himself, I guess.”

  She laughed. “And other people, yes. And yet I admire him. He knows what he wants.”

  “Like you,” I said.

  Her fingers drew away from my hand to pull some grass. “Little good it does me.”

  Him either, I could have said. I tried to imagine Lykourgos in love, mournfully, hopelessly in love with his brother’s wife and convinced that she was merely toying with him, a woman everybody knew was loose, and as beautiful, people say, as he was ugly. Was Kharilaus his son? No matter, of course. It was all a long long time ago, irrelevant.

  Her face was drawn, as if someone had stolen her earring. She continued pulling grass, casually, grimly, as though it were the dead Iona’s hair.

  I sighed, faintly grieved and weary of broodings. “One must try to want what’s possible, Tuka.”

  “I know.” She wouldn’t look up. “Is she better than me in bed?”

  “Tuka, Tuka,” I said, growing wearier and wearier. “Whatever people may say in Athens, the world is not made exclusively of beds.”

  “But tell me. I have a right to know. Is she better?”

  “I haven’t slept with her.”

  “You’re a liar.” She glanced at me, and I shook my head. She closed her fist hard on a pebble beside her knee, as if to hurl it at me, but she didn’t. “All the worse, then. How can mere human flesh compete with some glorious airy vision?”

  “Tuka, I swear by all the gods—”

  “Don’t bother, boy.” She stood up abruptly and started for her horse. She walked like a Spartan soldier girl, her whole body hard as nails except for her lips, her belly, her breasts. I loved her. Why was she blind to it?

  “Do you want the truth or don’t you?” I yelled.

  She stopped, turned, put her hands on her hips. “If you sleep with her, I’ll kill you.”

  I raised my hand slowly and kissed the fingertips, Solon’s gesture, saying good-bye to life. She sank to her knees suddenly, as if the strength had gone out of her legs, and covered her face, crying. I only half believed it. “Why can’t you ever talk to me?” she screamed. “Why can’t you see when I need you?”

  “So I see it. You need me. Everybody needs me, even Lykourgos. It’s absurd.”

  But she was crying, her muscles growing tight, and I was worried: it was a thing I’d seen before. I went to her and put my arms around her, but her muscles stayed tight. Her face was as stiff as a mask.

  “Tuka, listen. I love you. Listen!” It was Konon’s word: Listen. The recognition checked me for a second. Everything I said, everything I ever did was somebody else’s, not mine. An empty ritual, nothingness. But I said, “Listen, Tuka, please. I love you.” It was true, probably, yet I knew I could have said it as easily, and as honestly—and would say it, if the need arose—to Iona, or Dorkis, or my children, or Konon. And I could have said it as convincingly to Lykourgos’s stooge Alkander if ever some still-warm ember of humanness in him cried out in need of me. And yet I did love her, so far as I could see. Was I unfit, or was it the world that was? But she was rigid as stone, and all the time my mind played games I was rubbing her back and arms, kissing her temples, whispering to her, like an actor. I summoned up tears. At last, all at once, as if something had broken, she relaxed, crying again. I went on whispering a while longer, wondering how I was going to get both her and the horses home, since Tuka was in no shape to ride. “I love you, love you, love you,” I said. I would stake the horses, I decided, and send someone back for them.

  I told Iona I could see no more of her, it was unhealthy. Luckily, I had work to occupy me. Lykourgos had a stack of documents for me to copy, his new labor and reprisals code. He used me, I suppose, not because he lacked scribes of his own but because, as always when the thing he proposed lacked humanness, he wanted my flaccid Ionian reaction. (In those days he still put his laws on parchment.) Not that I would be likely to change his mind; I knew that by now. I played out my role of righteous indignation not for righteousness’ sake anymore, but for art’s. To tell the grim truth, I could see no dignified alternative. I might stomp and bray and disembogue for Athens in a great show of outrage, but it would be an empty gesture: I would change nothing in Sparta that way either, and I knew I couldn’t face without a sneer or an obscene giggle the people at home who praised my righteous noise. I might strike out at Lykourgos—kill him, say, or make seditious speeches in the marketplace—but who but a fool would believe me if I struck out now, after years of silence, even bootlicking? I wouldn’t believe myself. I could do it, I was sure. I could as easily shuck off my dignity as Solon does his, but I would know all the while that I was acting not from noble principle but to appear a man of principle, or to please my old mother, or to break the dull routine of life, or for some other silly reason. There was, it seemed to me, a certain moronic virtue in giving Lykourgos my honest reactions to his monstrous ideas. Until one thinks of something better to do, one should do what one is doing. “Carry on!” as Solon would say. “Love, carry on!”

  Two weeks later, I met Iona by accident on the street. She looked shocked, horrified, when she saw me, and she instantly turned away with a squeezed-shut, wounded, stubborn look, as though my face were a wolfish attack on her. I had known that my breaking off with her would hurt her, but I hadn’t guessed that the pain would last so long. Her look filled me with confusion. I did love her; she knew that. And not seeing her was right; she knew that too. I was not to blame for her misery: life itself was. Apollo’s seduction. Poseidon’s stupid restlessness. Yet she was miserable, so that I, too, was miserable. To continue the separation was empty righteousness—love reduced to arithmetic: Tuka’s love minus Iona’s love equals Virtue, three dead crows wired to a fence. But to end the separation was nonsense too. Tuka would be hurt and eventually, no doubt, Dorkis. I walked half the day, trying to make up some kind of reason for action. Around midafternoon I saw a donkey beaten by a screaming
slave. A troop of Spartan soldiers walked past, eyes steadily front. Were such things omens? I concluded that the world was insane.

  I went to her house that night. The door was unbolted. I went in. She was sitting on the floor, laboriously copying from a scroll, a page of Solon’s opinions that I’d given her weeks ago. She looked up in alarm, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. I tried to think of something I might say I’d left at her house and had come for, but nothing came to me. I stood.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” she said.

  “Not possible,” I said. I realized for the first time that my bad leg was on fire from all that walking.

  “Is Dorkis home?” I asked absurdly, maybe pretending I’d come to see him.

  “He’s in there, working.” She moved her head in the direction of his workroom, prepared to lead me there.

  “He works too hard,” I said.

  There was a silence. I went over to her and, with difficulty, got down on the floor beside her and studied the scroll. I made no comment. She expected none. At last, after a deep breath, she said, “Well!”

  I smiled.

  “How’s Tuka?”

  “Fine.”

  “You still get along with Lykourgos?”