The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  That night the children lay wide-eyed, shivering. Two servants carried in the harp for us, and Tuka played.

  Lightly, at a Helot party later, I mentioned the incident to Iona.

  “Horrible!” she said, then whispered, “but what do you expect?”

  24 Agathon:

  Also this:

  One night at a party at Dorkis’s—a dark, ugly party, cloying funereal roses and ferns, because the revolution was on now, the laughter and chatter rang hollow and thick as the jokes of trapped miners—Tuka told Iona’s oldest boy that Iona was in love with me, that she was leaving Dorkis, and that Iona’s basic problem—the reason for her drunks, her indifference to her family, her bold activity in the senseless rebellion—was that Iona was insane. All this came out very casually, I understand. Casual as the blue-black welt, the fire- scarred fingers of the testy little man who sat in the corner of the room, never speaking, starting wildly whenever a new guest knocked at the door or a cup fell to the polished stone floor and shattered. The boy, Miletos, was fifteen: a beautiful, curly-headed innocent. It was his first adult party, the first time he’d drunk wine with his parents’ strange friends. (There were no Spartans there that night, and no Athenians but ourselves.) He was in the kitchen cutting cheese to take in to the others, and Tuka was helping him. She’d always been fonder of him than of all the rest of Dorkis’s family put together, because he was the gentlest and, she thought, the wisest of them all, and handsome besides: he made her remember her own youth, her own ideals. She wanted to protect him, save him from pain and disillusionment like her own. He must have understood that as plainly as I did. He must have understood everything, in a way. If he was baffled by what he felt around him—the emptied, silent streets outside, and here in the charged dimness of the room, the hothouse closeness of his mother’s feeling for me and mine for her, his father’s wise preference for noninterference (watching the party with an absentminded smile and thoughtful eyes), and Tuka’s jealousy—baffled or not he nevertheless understood it all, and if he were older he would have accepted the bafflement, as the rest of us did, as one of life’s conditions. But he was young and did not know about that, and he knew Tuka’s feeling for him, which he could not help but return because she, too, was beautiful, and he knew that she was, besides that, brilliant: she spoke, always, with keen wit and absolute authority, and everyone listened to her. He knew by her every gesture now—her sailing over to help him with the cheese, her flashing of the special dimpled smile reserved for the few she really loved, and her teasing (“Miletos, hand over that weapon before you saw your arm off”)—that he could ask in safety about the thing that was troubling him more than anything out in the larger, more dangerous world of stealth and war. Perhaps he was troubled more than usual that moment, and less inhibited; he wasn’t used to wine in such doses.

  He said, looking at the plate and smiling as if the question were possibly silly, “Tuka, what’s going on between Mom and Dad?”

  “Nothing,” she said, too quick-witted. “That’s the problem.” The knife slipped through the cheese as if through butter.

  He smiled, not showing he was weighing the answer. “Mom’s acting really strange,” he said. “Sometimes she leaves me with the kids and she doesn’t come home all night. I wonder where she goes.”

  Did Tuka suffer a twinge of alarm? We hadn’t known, Tuka and I, that Iona sometimes slept away from home. I don’t know yet where she went, or why—assuming Miletos was right about her absences. Revolution, no doubt. The news worried me when I heard it later. But Tuka was not thinking about the rebellion. Did she quickly search her mind for times I too had been missing? I don’t know, of course. I know only that Miletos asked it, or anyway that Tuka said later that he asked it, and that Tuka told him that Dorkis and Iona were breaking up, that Iona had, oh, a “crush” on me. “Lots of women do, from time to time,” she said. “You get used to it.” (I can imagine the lightness with which she must have said it, the false bravado of securely loved wife forever having to pick up the pieces for heartbroken women, and I can imagine the pain she did not see in the boy whose mother had been reduced to another poor helpless infatuate whore.) Did she go on to talk about middle age, the feeling Thalia talked about, that life is huge and everyone is cheated? I know why, if she did. Because she loved Miletos and confused her own troubled nature with his, and wanted to ease with her brittle quick tongue the pain he too must sooner or later come to, like all who live.

  But whatever they said, the boy did not show that he was hurt. I talked with him briefly as we left the house, and he was cheerful, eagerly looking forward to a job he was starting in the moruini, out at the stables on one of the farms.

  Two nights later I received a message from Iona, saying she was staying at an inn and wanted me away tomorrow so that she could talk with Tuka. I could hear the exact tone of her voice in the flatly recited message: it was husky; sorrowing and drunk. She mentioned, in a single obscure sentence, that Tuka had said terrible things about us, and about Iona and Dorkis, to Miletos. I was frightened, frustrated by the span of time and space between the human voice that had dictated the message and the mechanical echo on my stoop. It was late—near miduight—and the message, delivered by a dark-faced boy who spoke the words twice over, then vanished in the darkness, had, it seemed to me, the character of a summons. She named the inn, and all her phrases had a checked violence in them, like tornado weather, that I couldn’t shrug off until morning. I knew for sure that she’d been drinking. The tremor of anger is always there, just edging the surface like a crocodile snout, when Iona’s had too much wine. And I guessed that it was not entirely her son’s pain that enraged her. She could have defended herself (and wouldn’t have needed to) against a direct attack from Tuka. But she had no defense against Miletos’s innocent grief, in which, whether she admitted it or not, her own guilt—not as he saw it but as she saw it, looking at herself through her son’s eyes—shone clear. I was afraid, in a word, that, hurled back into a childhood vision of goodness that even children know for a half-truth—thrown back into memories of family happiness that she seemed to have destroyed by selfish, however unconsummated lust—she would kill herself. I knew well enough that I was probably exaggerating. People rarely commit suicide except to punish loved ones, and though Iona was fond of Tuka, in a way, or had been once, Tuka and she weren’t close enough for that. But whatever sense might argue, I was afraid. Fear was in the air, in those days. Worse even than now. There’s a kind of healthiness in open violence—scattered fires against the skyline, roars of rioting and looting: the healthiness of a good gust of wind in an electric storm, or an honest heart attack after riddling weeks of mysterious malaise. In those days you were forever waiting, watching for signs that the trouble was over, or else not. Someone had to go to her, I thought, and it obviously couldn’t be me. I would sleep with her, and if ever I slept with Dorkis’s wife, it was not going to be by chance. And so, incredibly, I sent Tuka.

  From the point of view of the omniscient, indifferent gods, it must have been amusing. As Poseidon’s lightning bursts forth between thunderheads, shattering the darkness and sending down rain like a thousand swords, driving small animals into their burrows and birds to the silent depths of trees, so Tuka burst in in her terrible splendor on the darkness of Iona’s room.

  “You bitch!” she said.

  But as the earth spreads wide in the lightning glow and opens its furrows and seams to the rain, so Iona rose sweetly wide-eyed from her pillow and stretched out an arm to her adversary.

  “Why, Tuka!” she said.

  In short, they were both as reasonable as possible, given the circumstances. Tuka adopted the point of view that she’d told Miletos all in a last-ditch effort to save the two marriages, that she’d warned Iona that she’d tattle to Miletos if Iona continued to see me (which may have been true. Who knows?), and that she’d done it all, to tell the real truth, for Iona’s good and Dorkis’s. Iona adopted the point of view that she couldn’
t understand what on earth made Tuka believe she had cause for jealousy, that she and Dorkis shared a love more profound than words could express, there had never been the slightest question of that! and that her sole concern in this squalid affair was that Miletos might now respect Tuka less, Tuka whom he loved as a sister. They were both, I know without having been there, simply brilliant, though one couldn’t exactly call what they had together a conversation. Iona wept, clutching her covers to her bosom, and said, “Tuka, dearest, dearest Tuka, you’re sick.” Tuka said (a parting shot), “Lie there and masturbate!”

  And so they both won hands down. Iona talked to me later, briefly, distantly (because Tuka had won). She was worried about Tuka. There was no problem now with Miletos or Dorkis: they had talked, she said. Miletos, when he came home from his first day of work at the stables, had eaten supper apart from the others and had gone to his room. She’d pursued him there, and when she’d asked what was wrong he’d come out at last, weeping, with “Mother, why are you leaving us?” She’d answered that she wasn’t—an honest answer. (All of us are honest second by second, and she was talking with the son she loved. How could she dream, that instant, that she had ever dreamed of leaving—if she had?) She’d probed further, and he’d told her the rest of what distressed him, and she answered all that honestly too. Considering. They talked about love, and she told him, honestly, of her feelings about me, her feelings about Dorkis, about Tuka. And so it was true, there was no problem with Miletos. He remained our friend. The problem was Tuka. She’d gone again past all human limits, and Iona, who had never seen it before, believed Tuka incapable of love for anyone, certainly indifferent if not hostile to Iona’s whole family. Even if that were false, as Iona hoped it might be, Tuka’s anger was not a thing you walked into twice. Iona told herself two stories, both half-truths and mutually exclusive but nevertheless as real for her as two large owls in a tree. That Tuka was insane, a physical threat to me and to our children. And that Tuka had acted at my instigation, breaking off a “relationship” that I was too gentle, that is, cowardly, to bring to an end myself. She could be, supported by these theories, fond of me as an aunt is of a nephew who has some terminal disease, but her “crush” on me, as Tuka put it, was done with. Also, ironically, she no longer needed me. Thanks to Tuka (though this was hardly what Tuka had in mind), or thanks directly to Miletos’s grief, which first found words that night in the kitchen when Miletos and Tuka were cutting cheese—but sooner or later would have had to find words, with Tuka or without—Iona had fallen in love, once more, with her family.

  Tuka also won and lost. The pain of jealousy was over, for the moment anyway, and now, clear-minded, she could see the jealousy and the attack on Iona as they were, and she was depressed. It was true that she had hurt Miletos, and though she wasn’t the cause of his grief, she was to blame. And it was true, she knew, that Iona had been fond of her, that they really might have been like sisters, whatever that meant, if it weren’t for Dorkis and me. It could have been very good for all of us. But Dorkis was a lover, not only a man with busy hands but a man who did in fact fall in love, though he did nothing about it—and so, alas, was I. So that whenever we came together, the four of us, there was no escape from the heart-swapping game, tiresome and futile, doomed to frustration and anger because of our natures. She understood, now that her attack on Iona had ended it, that we’d had nothing from the start, only a grand potential that was, like all grand potentials, illusion. She walked abstractedly through her days, carrying with her, in everything she did, a dreary sense of loss, the loss of a thing that had never existed. She missed them and wished she had never known them. Secure at last in her possession of me, she wondered what it was that she’d fought so fiercely to possess. We began to have long talks about our childhoods, saying everything that came to mind, talking quietly, almost wearily, as if turning old happiness over and over, hunting for what had seemed so good in it.

  “Do you love me?” she would say sometimes. “I mean, if you were free to sleep with someone else, would you?”

  I would laugh.

  I heard, during this period, of Klinias’s death’ (My first news was the arrival of the book.) I took the whole thing as though I’d been expecting it, and I wondered idly how old Solon was now. I could recall very clearly how happy I had been with Klinias, and how alive he made me feel. Tuka mentioned that she had slept one night with Konon. It was like something I had read somewhere; interesting, nothing more. Poor Klinias, I said absently. She nodded.

  But my lethargy, at least, did not last much longer. I woke up a few mornings later with the thought of Klinias’s book. It was mine, it came to me. I owned it. I got up, dressed, and began to read through it, and as I read my fingertips began to tremble. I read faster and faster, excitedly, wildly. What a book it was! I’d forgotten! When, toward noon, Tuka said, “Good morning,” interrupting me, I looked up at her in rage.

  25 Peeker:

  I think something’s wrong with Agathon. When he shits the smell is too horrible to believe—it’s like after asparagus or something. And this morning he fell down. It scared him; I know because when I went over to help him he hit my hand away. “Let me be!” he yelled. “Boys should respect their elders!”

  “Are you all right?” I said. “Is your hip broken?”

  “I’ll dance on your grave,” he said.

  But it wasn’t natural, his simply toppling over like that. It made me think. He’s been sleeping late, and taking naps all the time. He never used to do that. He has this thing about using every moment. And the rat bites on his toes and fingers don’t heal the way they should. That may be just his age, I suppose—like the rat bites themselves. Rats never bite me. I feel their noses the minute they touch me, and I slap them away, even in my sleep. But old people’s nerves aren’t sensitive, and their reactions are slow. His hands and feet look like something that’s been fed to the chickens.

  This afternoon when he was at the table writing he fell asleep without even knowing it was coming on: just bent his head down and drifted off, sleeping on his nose. He still had the pen in his hand. I called the jailer, and after a while he came.

  “I think my master’s sick,” I said.

  He looked in, making a face at the smell.

  “Dead?” he said.

  I shook my head. “He’s just asleep. But he never sleeps in the afternoon, or anyway he never used to. He fell down for no reason this morning.”

  The jailer looked at me, doubtful. I suppose they tell him a lot of crazy things.

  “Listen,” I said. “I really think he’s sick. Honest. I’ve got to get him out of here. He’ll die or something.”

  The jailer thought about it, scowling, and at last he shook his head slowly, as if saying it was hopeless. I looked back at Agathon, sleeping on his nose, with his long hair going out on the table in all directions, like ropes from a tent. “Please,” I said—because it panicked me: he really did look dead—“you’ve got to help me. Get a doctor. Make the ephors come.” He was shaking his head, slow, hopeless, and, it seemed to me, not quite indifferent “This then,” I said, and glanced at him, wondering if I was right. “Pass the word to the Helots. They know him. They’ve got doctors.”

  The jailer turned his face away, looking at the mountains.

  “He’s sick,” I hissed. “He may stink like a sewer, but he’s human. And he’s sick.”

  26 Agathon:

  Life is full of mysteries. I found two more of my rats dead this morning. That’s not one of the mysteries, of course. Some simple sickness that terminates in death. The usual business—summer, winter, day and night. The mystery lies in my jailer’s reaction. I’ve underestimated the man. When he came with my breakfast I held up my three dead rats by their tails, putting on, for his benefit, the saddest face possible and granting him the glimpse of a tear. He frowned, at first, disgusted by my feeling for a fellow creature. But when I placed the three corpses beside my plate (it was a means of taking my mind off the foo
d), his frown changed to a thoughtful look. (Coming of spring.) It had no doubt come even to his attention that too many dying rats can be a bad omen. If the disease they have is communicable to man, my situation is not exactly enviable.

  “Poor devils,” I said. Peeker rolled his eyes up and covered his face. He knows when a speech is coming.

  “Alas,” I said, “riding the golden chariot of our prosperity, we neglect to give proper attention to the humble rat. Only in miserable circumstances—this cell, for example—do we pause to reflect on their lot. Like us, the poor rat is born into a world he never willed and can only in minimal ways control. He suffers the agonies of youth—the squalling indignity of his first nakedness, the inexplicable rules of harsh parents—he matures into the age of love and saddles himself with some whimpering, nagging, winsome female—he declines into middle-aged sickness and mournful confusion—and at last, bewildered and shivering, he dies, to be forgotten.” I clasped my hands and lifted them to my forehead. “Ah, Zeus, what’s it all for?”