“I’m Rupert,” I responded, shaking his hand. “I’m a fork expert.” I let the moment hang for a moment and then smiled.
Jack squeezed my hand a little too tightly.
Jack Weldon was a man of convictions, mostly political, and he liked to hear himself talk. He hated the Greek king and hated the current government for being controlled by the Americans. He believed that the common man in Greece lived in a state of complete oppression. As he held forth, we passed the platters of food up and down the table. I had just remembered where I’d heard him mentioned when he slammed his hand down on the table and yelled, “We’re all complicit!”
I knew Jack Weldon not from conversations about art in New York but from Steve Kelly. It was Jack that Steve and Adonis had been so interested in—he was the focus of their conversation—on that day when we had stopped near Livadiá on the way to Delphi. I made a mental note to tell Steve, next time I saw him, that Jack was nothing but hot air and ego, a waste of time. I looked over at Nikos. He was sitting across from me, as was Jack, with Amanda between them. Nikos gave me a knowing, slightly terrified look.
I turned to Jack and said, “You’re a bit like a modern-day Byron.”
“That old fag? He was carried off by his own shit.”
I looked over to Neftali, who put her forkful of veal back down on the plate and shook her head.
“Well,” said Nathan. “That’s quite an epitaph.”
“Can we please talk about something that doesn’t make us fight?” asked Amanda.
“Something less contentious,” added Nathan.
“Than Byron?” Clive laughed. “How can we be fighting about Byron? Are we even fighting? And I thought he was sleeping with his sister.”
“Someone should tell a story,” said Amanda.
“Or a joke. Rupert, do you have a joke?”
“I don’t tell jokes,” I said earnestly. “Honestly, even when people tell jokes that I know are funny, I have to make myself laugh. I don’t really understand the process.”
Nikos waved at me with his knife. “Tell them about you and Steve Kelly in Delphi.”
“Steve Kelly the journalist?” asked Neftali.
“Yes,” I said, “the same. And I will tell this story, but Nikos, you have to promise me that when I leave bits out, you’re not going to say, ‘You left something out.’”
“There are,” said Nikos, “women present.”
“I don’t know if I should tell it,” I said.
“Tell the damn story,” said Jack.
I looked over at Olivia. I knew there was no point in telling it unless I included the part about me naked in the hallway while Steve wrestled the girl for my wallet. I drained my martini and the glass of wine that was next to it and jumped in, leaving out only the fact that I had been in a dark mood at the time, skirting an even darker depression.
Lunch lasted nearly two hours, and by the end I was fiercely tipsy and bold. Most people seemed to be retiring to their rooms—I was sharing a room in front with Nikos—but he’d made a point of asking me if I was going to nap and I’d intuited that this meant he’d rather I didn’t. He wanted the room to himself. Jack was going to the beach for a swim, but he didn’t ask for company and no one, me included, had felt like accompanying him. Clive and I were the last people at the table.
“Where is the beach?” I asked.
“It’s not walking distance. I usually hitch a ride, but if a few people want to go, we get a taxi.” Clive rolled a cigarette and offered it to me. I took it. “If you want to go for a swim, I’ll go with you. There’s a little beach by the fishing village I’ve wanted to try out. You might be good company for that.”
“Do you think Nathan will want to go?” I asked.
“No,” said Clive. “He naps religiously. That’s why he still looks like that. And he doesn’t smoke. But most of all,” said Clive, “he only goes to the one beach where the ferry came in, because that’s the only one with restaurants and therefore bathrooms.”
I went to get my trunks and a towel. I didn’t have the right kind of bag to put them in, but Nikos had a canvas knapsack that he loaned to me. He had his shoes off and was lying on the bed.
“Neftali knows what you’re doing,” I said. I found my sunglasses and put them on.
“She disapproves,” said Nikos.
“She’s scared that Jack will find out.”
“So am I,” said Nikos. But he made it seem as if the whole situation was beyond his control.
Amanda was coming up the stairs as I went down. “Jack took the Vespa, so you’re going to have to hitch.” She smiled her gorgeous, large-toothed, all natural smile. “Clive started ahead. He said he’d walk slowly so you could catch up. Okay?”
I forced a smile back. I didn’t like Amanda and I wondered why.
When I caught up with Clive, he was sitting on the wall of a small chapel conversing with a young Greek in jeans and a T-shirt. The Greek, who was close in age to Clive, was clearly interested in whatever Clive was offering. They had an ease with each other that let me know that they were not meeting for the first time. I announced myself with a loud hello when I was still quite a distance away. I waved my arms. I hadn’t been on Aspros long, but I knew I didn’t want to be sneaking up on people.
“I’m Rupert,” I said. I extended my hand.
“This is Tomas,” said Clive. “He has to make a delivery in Faros, and he said he’d drop us off.”
“That’s very kind,” I said.
“Yes,” said Tomas. “Very kind.”
Tomas didn’t know much English, but I could see he was a fast learner. He had a small pickup truck and I volunteered to ride in back. The truck was carrying nets and although there was a faint fishy odor, I didn’t mind sitting on them.
The sun was shining brightly but I had my sunglasses, and we sped around the curves, past the olive terraces and herds of goats.
But there was something nagging at me, some residual guilt. And then I remembered the date. It was July 14. I had bought a ferry ticket that morning, so the date should have been in the forefront of my mind. July 14 was my wife’s birthday.
One year ago I had been at Saks, choosing the evening purse that I bought for the occasion. It was black, elegant, with all kinds of fancy whorls of jet embroidered onto it. I liked it because it seemed almost flapperlike, not that there was anything flapperlike about Hester, but she was hard to buy for. Rather than trying for something she might actually like—that might be an outright failure for having been a borderline success—I bought something I would find attractive on a woman. And this was doubly ridiculous, since Hester and I had been separated for a year.
The woman who assisted me in the purchase was young, attractive, and flirtatious. Usually, this didn’t bother me, but I was reliving my failures of the last few years, starting with the wreck of my marriage, the loss of my son, and all the women whose lives I had lately tried to destroy in a desperate attempt to keep myself afloat.
“I like the metallic ribbon with the blue paper,” she said.
“That’s very nice,” I replied.
“Is it for someone special?”
“Yes,” I said. “My mother.”
I offered to take the woman for a cup of coffee, and she went to find someone to cover for her. I could see them assessing my virtues in one of the mirrored pillars. Then, to save time, I’d headed for the Plaza, where I was meeting Hester for dinner. It wasn’t hard to convince the girl to come upstairs with me. And she wanted to be seduced, which made it almost boring. I promised I’d call her, wrote her number down on a pad by the hotel phone, and left it there for the cleaning lady. The girl went off in a state of confusion and I showered, then had to put the same clothes on, which is always unpleasant. Hester was in the lobby heading for the restaurant when the elevator doors opened, and I annoyed the woman who was riding with me when I hit the button for the basement without letting her get off.
I turned to look at Clive and Tomas. Clive wa
s talking and talking, and Tomas, who had enormous black eyes and the eyelashes of a camel, was smiling at him in a calm way that, to me, meant he only understood every third word out of Clive’s mouth. I shifted on the nets. The sun felt good. I knew I was getting grilled, but here in the open air, the Plaza and that terrible salesgirl with her expensive matching underwear and powdered skin, my own sweat, the impossible luxury of the feather pillows, the sounds of doors closing up and down the hall, and my Hester—that cold vessel of grief—striding into the lobby. … I could almost forget it all.
Clive stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Is everything all right?”
And I said, “I think my feet are burning.”
“What?”
“I think I’m burning.”
“I can’t hear you.”
“I’m burning.” I’m burning. I’m burning. I’m burning. I’m burning. I’m burning.
Nothing seemed to be happening in Faros. There were a couple of men by some colorful boats mending nets. People seemed to do an awful lot of net mending but not much fishing. A woman in black in active conversation with herself was picking capers from the flowering vines that clung to the wall.
“Yásas,” said Clive as we passed.
“Yásas,” said the woman, and smiled very wide. I supposed we were entertaining in the same way that encountering rare fauna was entertaining.
The path was narrow and somehow I was leading.
“Where am I going?” I asked Clive. It sounded like a larger question.
“Just follow the path. We’re going over this rise here, and then the path leads down to a pebble beach. And there’s a charming little church.” Clive kept talking, but I was thinking about Hester and I wondered what was happening, if she was thinking about me.
I hadn’t wanted to take her out for dinner that night or buy her a gift, but my Uncle William had insisted.
“Rupert, she’s suffering too. When we don’t know what to do, we do what’s polite. That’s all the guidance we need.”
Uncle William didn’t believe in psychotherapy. I wondered if he’d even heard of it, apart from Freud jokes. Instead, he maintained that if we followed protocol and observed good manners, our lives would achieve the tidiness that some people sought in therapy. Mostly he was right about the importance of good manners. However, in this particular application—Hester’s birthday—there was the biting of presence hypocrisy.
Clive and I reached the top of the hill and stopped to enjoy the view. A natural rock promontory extended like a tongue into the bay, and built on this was a small white chapel with a blue dome. There was also a complex of low concrete buildings leading out to the chapel, all whitewashed.
“That’s a little monastery,” said Clive. “You can get a room there and some travelers do.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“Well, it might be in a Chaucer sort of way, but then again there is the hair thing.”
“What hair thing?”
“They’re all Orthodox. That’s a lot of hair.”
I said, “Did you bring anything to drink?”
“I did,” said Clive. He pulled out a bottle of white wine. “And I remembered the corkscrew.”
I’d really meant water but was pleased to see the wine. We sat down on my towel—Clive had forgotten his—underneath an olive tree and began passing the bottle back and forth.
“Nikos says you’re here to look for works of art,” said Clive.
“He said that?”
“Yes.”
“He must be drinking too much.”
“Does that mean you’re not?”
“Do you mean looking for art, or drinking?” I gestured for the wine. “What does it look like to you?”
“You make a convincing bon vivant,” said Clive.
“As you know,” I said, nodding, “we the few, the privileged, need a sense of purpose. It’s all that Protestant vigor and distrust of sloth, so whatever we do we have to pretend it’s in pursuit of something worthwhile. And the only thing so profoundly abstract that we can bend it to our will and make it fulfill all our needs, including those of productivity and civic duty, is art.”
“You’re very cynical, Rupert.”
“Only when I’m talking about myself.” I took a gulp of wine and it went down easily. “And what about you? Are you a cynic?”
Clive shook his head. “I wish I was.” He looked at me for a moment and grew serious. “I’m a romantic.” He stood up and grabbed the hair on the sides of his head. “What am I doing?” he asked the sky. He then turned to me and repeated the question.
I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I took a guess. “How long have you and Nathan been together?”
“Are we together?” asked Clive. “Am I being funny, or am I being tedious? Am I young and full of life, or am I uncultured and immature? Nathan invited me to come and I would have been an idiot not to, but it doesn’t mean anything, not to him.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because Nathan has someone else, who is mature and cultured and almost as exquisite to look at as Nathan. But not quite. No one is.”
“But Nathan invited you,” I said. I wasn’t exactly sure what to say. I didn’t like giving anyone advice and found my role as Clive’s confidant a bit premature.
“I’m boring you,” said Clive apologetically.
“No, no,” I protested.
“Yes, I am, and I don’t take it personally. I bore everyone after a while.”
I did feel bad for Clive. He was young and emotional, and I wanted to have him back where he’d been that afternoon, singing off-key imitations of Al Jolson. Or maybe I was being just like Nathan. I didn’t know.
“Who is Nathan’s other … friend?”
“I’m not supposed to mention his name,” said Clive. “He’s a writer.” Clive set about rolling himself a cigarette. “If you think I’m boring you, you can’t imagine what I’m doing to myself.”
“It’s a beautiful day,” I said. “Enjoy yourself.”
We’d been sitting under the tree for a little over half an hour when Clive got up to take a leak. The wine seemed to have hit him hard. He must have drunk a lot at lunch and this last bottle had been all he needed to cross into a rather sloppy state.
“Rupert, you’ve got to come here,” he said, from behind the rock.
“No, Clive, I don’t,” I responded.
“I think you should. Jack’s down there in a boat, and he’s doing something suspicious.”
I got up and walked around the rock. Clive was now crouched behind a bush and I followed his lead and crouched beside him. Clive was right. Jack was in a rowboat with a man who looked like a fisherman, and they were paddling up to some caves in the rock face, caves filled with water and inaccessible by land.
“Who’s he with?” I asked.
“I’d say that’s Thanasi,” said Clive.
“The real man?”
“The same.”
The sea was a bit rough and a few times I thought the boat was going to smash against the rocks, but Thanasi managed to jump out, holding the rope. He looked around then helped Jack out. They went into the cave together, stepping and climbing from rock to rock. The whole thing looked dangerous.
“Do you think there’s any dry space in there?” I asked Clive.
“I wouldn’t think so,” he said.
“Any fish?”
“You’re asking the wrong person. But the locals don’t fish in the caves.”
Ten minutes passed with nothing happening. Clive was still rather drunk, and said that we were like the Hardy Boys. I’d never read the Hardy Boys, but he was insisting passionately that this was very similar to one of the books and was about to launch into a detailed description of the book’s plot when Jack left the cave. He was empty-handed and seemed to have a hard time getting out among the rocks. He was almost crawling.
“I wish we weren’t hiding,” said Clive.
“W
hy?” I asked.
“Because I’d like to yell down and tell him what a sissy he is.”
Jack was followed by Thanasi, who was picking his way across the rocks with considerably more skill, despite the fact that he was carrying a net on his back that appeared to be very heavy.
“What’s that?” asked Clive.
It was impossible to see, but Thanasi was struggling with it. Thanasi set the net down in the boat very carefully and the two men began to row off.
When they were gone, we went down to the beach. I wanted to swim out to the caves to get a better look, but they were much farther out than they’d looked from a distance, and the tide was in. Clive had a snorkel and mask back at the house, and he said it might be better if we came back on another day. For one thing, we didn’t want to be in the cave if Jack returned. And all the wine we’d consumed did introduce the possibility of drowning.
After soaking awhile in the water, we got out and followed the path back to town. Clive was a bit more sensible after the swim and surprisingly quiet. Tomas’s truck was still parked by the harbor. Clive went into a store and bought a couple of bottles of beer and we sat on the pier with our feet in the water waiting for Tomas to show up, watching the fishing boats come in and a few young people strolling about, arm in arm. Everyone greeted us and I felt lucky to be there. About a half hour later, Tomas returned and we got back into the truck. I lay on the nets contemplating the cloudless sky. By the time we reached the house, most people were stirring to life.
8
p
The next day I was very sunburned, especially on the tops of my feet, and could not wear shoes. I, therefore, could not leave the house. I spent the majority of the day padding after Olivia in my bare feet. Later, we sat on opposite ends of the couch, reading books. She was in the middle of Moby-Dick, and I had found some paperbacks of Neftali’s from her high school days, stashed in a box in the closet with the croquet set. One was The Girls of Delta Delta Delta, which was wonderfully lurid. I read to Olivia the account of the mayhem following a panty raid by Sigma Chi. The book took me about three hours to read, and after that there was a horror tale—The Cave of Count Carlos—that involved sex slaves and human sacrifice. As Neftali passed by on the way to the kitchen, she told me it had been one of her favorites. Olivia tried to make it seem that I was driving her nuts—I insisted on reading all the really good parts out loud—but I knew she was captivated and her progress on old Moby was extremely slow.
Forgery Page 12