‘So what do you want, Case?’ one of his tutors at the Binger had asked irritably a few months before in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, halfway through a three-month grant stay where he had been trying yet again to resolve the end of a script. ‘You want to just go on and on and what? Bore the audience to death?’ One woman in a session had said outright that maybe his inability to finish – to close – was tied up with his unresolved sexuality. He grimaced at the obvious circumlocution for ‘his repressed homosexuality’. Well, it was Amsterdam where window-peeping was a tourist industry and you ordered grass off a menu after discussing it with the waiter. There had been a lot of talk about performance as exhibitionism and audience voyeurism. He had kept silent because, for him, any audience that would see the movie arising from his script was irrelevant. He did not think about other people when he wrote. For him writing was an articulation of his observations, and an attempt to lay them out in a way that would make some sense of the world. The reason he had never produced a play that satisfied him, despite the credits to his name, might be the same reason he had never found an ending that felt right.
There was an announcement and he freeze-framed to listen, but could not tell whether the disembodied announcement was in English or Greek or Esperanto, much less whether the speaker was male or female. Fortunately, he could see the departure boards from where he was sitting, and make out the destinations and gate numbers if he squinted. He was searching for the Aegean Airlines flight when a tall woman stopped in front of him, blocking his view.
She was wearing a perfectly fitted, perfectly pressed, parchment-coloured sleeveless suit and a panama hat of the sort that he associated with Casablanca, tilted very slightly over one eye. Her long, thin, bare arms hung loosely by her side, the slender fingers slightly furled. She wore no varnish on her short, square-cut nails, and she was carrying nothing. That struck him as unusual, because you never saw a woman without a bag of some kind, especially now bags were as big a status symbol as cars, some of them costing almost as much. The fabric of the woman’s suit was so fine and smooth you could tell she did not have so much as a coin in a pocket. Was it possible she was carrying no more than her boarding pass and passport? She didn’t even have a book. Could anyone travel that light?
He was interested in how, by simply standing so long with her back to him, she was building dramatic tension in him. It was not so much that he felt curiosity about her face, but the relaxed fluidity of her waiting roused his interest, for she would not stand so long merely to read something that was already there. Like him, she must be waiting for her gate number to be announced. But people did not normally wait without any sign of impatience. She did not fidget or adjust her clothes or shift her weight from one slender, booted foot to the other, nor did she look away from the board. Case had never seen anyone wait so compellingly. How could anyone surrender with such grace to the necessity of waiting?
Woman in perfectly white silk suit and panama hat stands relaxed with her back to the camera as she studies departure boards. Camera watches her from point of view of man seated. She stands unmoving.
Adequate lines, but how to recast them so that they would express the profound patience evoked by her stillness? Directions should evoke mood without wasting a word in explaining it. No adjectives. A film script like Taxi Driver was the perfect example of dynamic poetry – how a violent, dark, gritty movie could be expressed so lyrically as a script! He had no desire to write that sort of film, but he would have liked his scripts to have the spare beauty that arose from real precision.
Of course, most film moguls and agents would not even notice beauty in a script. Spectacular action and an accelerated plot were the qualities that sold a movie into the cinema chains. It was all about formula and box-office take during the first week. That’s why the films being churned out were so bad. They were made to make money and that was the whole reason for their existence. No one making the movie pretended anything else. The incredible thing was that people kept going to see them.
He sighed, realising he was on the verge of an irritable inner diatribe of the sort that had irked him in his father when he was young. He had seen that edgy, impatient crabbiness settle into the lines in the faces of older people. It seemed to him that intolerance, rigidity and irritability were all signs of decay, and when he noticed the tendency in himself, first with wry amusement and then with distaste, he had vowed to guard against such rants because, aside from being a surrender to ageing, they formed a metaphorical cataract that clouded your vision. He had the feeling that ageing was not a matter of getting old physically, so much as accepting the habits of ageing.
‘Maybe if we could be distracted from going through the motions of ageing we’d be immortal,’ he muttered aloud.
The woman in the pale silk turned and looked at him.
Her eyes were pale blue diamonds and her hair was black and blunt-cut to jaw length with sharp wings that brushed her cheeks. Were there such things as blue diamonds, he wondered dazedly, unable to turn his eyes politely away. Common sense told him that she was too far away to have heard his soft words. But why would she look at him like that if she had not heard him? And even if she had heard, what had he said that had so caught her attention? Or was it merely that he had spoken in English or with an Australian accent? She was looking at him with an expression that might, in a face that lacked the strange blandness of extreme beauty, have been surprise. Her stare had the same quality of intensity as her waiting. That polar gaze was so compellingly focused that it was as if she reached across the distance separating them and touched one finger to his lips. Yet there was no intimacy in her look. She might have been studying a fascinating bug under a microscope.
She turned and walked away without haste, but she was gone from his sight in an instant. It was as if several frames had been cut from a reel of film. One minute she was walking away from him – gliding away, his mind insisted – then she was gone.
People do not vanish, he told himself, groping for balance, for her glance had been so heavy that its withdrawal had made him feel less substantial. He licked his lips and found them dry. You are half out of your head from lack of sleep, he told himself sternly. He was. He had flown non-stop from Australia to Athens, and right now it was about two in the afternoon in his head, even though it was only five in the morning in Greece. He would have got a later flight except there were only two airlines that went to Santorini, and the Olympic Airlines flight was in the evening, which would have meant hanging around all day. So he had opted for the Aegean flight, which had meant waiting four hours in transit.
He got up, slung his bag over his shoulder and strolled across to the duty-free shop, letting his eyes run over the displays: gleaming bottles of Chanel, of Glenfiddich whisky with black and gold labels, of dark red French wines, and then the stuffed children’s toys, chocolates, books and more books – three for the price of two, two for the price of one. There were long lines of bestsellers from number ten to number one, with a disproportionate number about vampires. Ostensibly he was passing time but in fact he was looking for the woman. He wanted to see her again. Or, to be more exact, he wanted to feel the weight of her gaze. There was something about how it had made him feel that he needed to experience once more, in order to understand it. It was absurd, but the desire to find her kept pulsing though his mind so that even when his legs were tired he could not bring himself to sit down.
He forced himself to stop at last, only after he had twice all but accosted tall slender women. Somehow he had failed to notice that one had been close to sixty, with white hair, and the other a redhead in a grey trouser suit. All he had noticed was that both had exhibited an echo of the remoteness and stillness that he had sensed in the woman in the white suit.
Striving for humour, he reminded himself that obsession was when everyone started looking like the person you were searching for. But he was astonished by the strength of his desire to find the woman. He was struggling against the impulse to get up a
nd go hunting again when he heard his name announced.
‘Will passenger Casey Heath please come immediately to boarding gate six. This is a final call for Mr Casey Heath for A3 flight 54 to Santorini.’
He was shocked, because he had never heard his name announced at an airport before. He looked at his watch and saw he had fifteen minutes before the gate closed, but by the time he reached the final length of concourse, he was moving too fast and sweating heavily, his heart racing unpleasantly. He told himself to cool it. He did not normally get flustered. It was the woman.
Stepping onto one of the moving walkways, he imagined a tracking shot following him from one walkway to another until he reached his gate. He calmed down when he saw there were still people lined up. He concentrated on sliding his laptop out of his backpack before the security checkpoint, removing coat, belt and shoes in the prescribed order. Then he waited until the airport official waved him through the metal detector. It beeped as he passed through, and the official ran a portable detector over him before waving him on. He repacked his stuff, put on his shoes and passed into the waiting room where there were a few people still waiting to board.
It was only as he joined the queue that he noticed the woman in the white suit was standing at the front.
Seated on the plane as it taxied to the runway, he wondered what was the matter with him. It was not as if he had not seen his share of glowing people. The film industry was full of them. The truth was that what most people called beauty was so often really just youth and the health that naturally went with it, combined with regular features. That was why all gorgeous people looked more alike than ordinary people. On screen you had to find a way to contrast beauty, to surround it with ugliness and irregularity so that it would stand out. That was probably why, he suspected, beautiful people often chose plain or even ugly partners.
The woman had been beautiful in that same way, and yet her face had burned into his memory. It seemed to him that he could still see her when he blinked, like the afterimage of a firework. The detail of the memory was amazing. He could summon up the startling pallor of her skin, the slightly heavy, crow-black brows and lashes and the sharp angles of the framing hair. She had worn a maroon lipstick that was nearly black. His ex-wife had used a Chanel nail polish called rouge noir, the colour of this woman’s lips. The eyes in a face like that ought to have been dark and lustrous, but instead they had been twin skylights.
He wondered, bewildered, if this was l’amour à première vue. Certainly he had never experienced such intense feelings before for a woman, not even for his ex-wife. But if this was love at first sight, it was not as he had imagined. His heart did not seize with a longing to possess her or even to know her. Indeed, his desire was not so much to see the woman, but to be seen by her.
Once the plane was in the air, he strolled up the aisle, ostensibly to stretch his legs, but he was looking for her. She must have been in the washroom, he thought, disappointed after having lapped the whole plane. Returning to his seat he told himself that he was acting like a schoolboy. He lay back and closed his eyes, but the noise of the plane seemed too loud and the vibrating of the armrest too insistent to allow him to sleep. Even the soft snore of the old Greek woman next to him was too loud. He was not usually so over-sensitive, and he pushed his thumbs against the bony roof of his eye sockets and then pressed the heels of his hands hard against his forehead to ease the stiffness in his neck and shoulders. To stop himself from getting up and searching the plane again, he tried scripting a meeting with the woman on Santorini. He sited the accidental meeting on a walkway so narrow that one of them had to back up.
Man: ‘I am a stranger here.’
In his imagination, she did not answer. She only looked at him enigmatically. Maybe she was Greek? He didn’t speak the language but surely he could find what he needed in a phrase-book. He thought of her face again and it struck him suddenly that she looked more Slavic than Greek. That white skin, the high almost prominent cheekbones and heavy brows, and the way her eyes narrowed at the outer corners. They were the sort of eyes his grandmother had called sideways tears. ‘Never love a woman with eyes like that, for she will steal your soul,’ she had once told him. He smiled, but a queer shiver went down his spine.
He thought of something one of the lecturers at the Binger had once said. There was only one basic dramatic circumstance. Someone wanted something very badly and was having trouble getting it. Before this moment, he had never wanted anything much, save to understand why he was the way he was. But now his desire to meet the woman filled his thoughts. He wanted to hear her voice and feel the chilly potency of her eyes on him.
He lapped the plane twice more before the seatbelt sign came on and the flight attendant shooed him back to his seat. Fastening his seatbelt, he wondered how it was possible that he had not set eyes on the woman. He had even, in some desperation, described her to a flight attendant, explaining that he thought he knew her and wished to say hello.
He made up his mind to get off the plane quickly so he could watch the other passengers disembark, but in the end he was trapped in his seat by the old woman sitting beside him, orthodox cross hanging golden on her chest, in no hurry to get up. As passenger after passenger filed past, she conducted a rapid and voluble conversation in Greek with the woman across the aisle. By the time Case managed to get out, most of the other passengers had already disembarked. Just the same, he waited, pretending to be adjusting the strap on his laptop bag, certain that the woman had not passed him, even though she was not among the remaining passengers. She must have been seated in first class.
He headed determinedly for the baggage carousel, passing smoothly through the passport checkpoint, but the woman was not among those collecting luggage. Taking his own bag, he headed out, imagining a scene in which she was being met by the blond guy who played Jason Bourne. What was his name? He frowned, hating not being able to remember an actor’s name, but he had been having trouble with names lately. It was absurd, because he could remember that the guy had played in Good Will Hunting, and the two Bourne follow-ups, but not his name.
‘Damn,’ he muttered under his breath, because she was not in the arrivals hall.
He was met outside by the taxi driver he had booked, holding up a piece of paper with his name, and on the way up to the village of Firostefano, he had offered an extravagant but mostly incomprehensible travelogue in a combination of Greek and contorted but enthusiastic English. Case only half listened. He knew from his research that the village was on a steeper part of the island where dazzling white buildings capped rocky cliffs. The slope on one side was so steep that the roofs and terraces of one row of villas were level with the path leading to the doors and gates of the row of villas behind them. His villa had two terraces, one the roof of the outside bathroom and the other the roof of the second and detached bedroom, both offering stunning panoramic views of the caldera. It was this view that he saw from the side window as the taxi pulled up on the stony stretch of ground running from the front of a whitewashed church to the edge of a precipitous drop to the sea.
For a long moment, Case stared out across the satin sea to the distant horizon, seeing several small islands which, along with Santorini, were part of the rim of what had once been a huge volcano, while the caldera in their midst had once been the fiery cauldron atop the volcano. Now the sea filled the caldera, save for two small volcanic islands that rose up like jagged teeth.
‘Caldera!’ the taxi driver shouted, then tapped the front window of the taxi. Case looked obediently ahead and saw a line of whitewashed buildings on level ground broken by a narrow path. Gesticulating and talking in swift Greek and picturesque, fragmented English, the taxi driver went on until Case understood that the villa he had rented was to be found along this path, but that the taxi was too wide to take him further. He paid the driver and received a set of keys with the name of the villa on the tag, before the yellow Mercedes rattled away. Turning to face the view, he picked up his bag and
walked towards the low stone wall that ran along the edge of the drop. The view from it was impressive, and yet it was so exactly the same view as he had seen on hundreds of postcards and coffee-table books that it was impossible to be properly impressed. What drew him to the edge was not the view, but the tall, ragged gumtrees flanking it.
The smell of eucalyptus was sharply – almost unbearably – familiar as he came to the wall, and he was filled with a fierce nostalgia that bewildered him with its intensity, for how could he experience such longing for a place to which he had only ever felt himself mildly attached? Sitting on the top of the wall, he felt as if he had never truly smelled gumtrees before, and he sat half dumbfounded until the sun had risen well above the horizon, stealing the last soft trace of dampness from the air.
Simple thirst made him stir, and as he picked up his bag and turned his back on the view, he saw the church. He had noticed it vaguely when the taxi pulled up from the steep street leading into the square, but now he saw that it was a small, whitewashed building with stained-glass windows set either side of an unusually wide timber door protected by a gilt metal security gate. The gate was locked, but the door was very slightly ajar. The ambiguity of a church that was both shut and open drew him closer, and he put his bag down and reached through the gap between the bars to push his fingertips against the door. It was very heavy and pitted with age. Indeed the door seemed older by far than the church, but beyond it he saw nothing but impenetrable darkness. Turning back to the path, he wondered what he had expected to see, and then his mind swerved convulsively back to the woman in the white suit, as he wondered where she was staying.
Metro Winds Page 16