All That Is (24 page)

“No. Not quite,” Bowman said to finish more interest on the biographer’s part.

He had not been thinking of marriage but of everything that might lead up to it. He had been thinking ceaselessly of Christine. He knew he would have to do something ordinary, asking her up to the apartment for a drink or a nightcap, the word seemed old-fashioned and even preposterous. He was certain she liked him, but at the same time he was nervous about putting it to the test. He hated the idea of being awkward. At the same time he knew it to be unimportant, that once they were past that, anything awkward would be forgotten. But it didn’t matter what he knew, or else he’d forgotten all he knew. The journalist was telling the story of a notorious murder—it wasn’t clear where it had happened—that was solved because of traces of semen, he pronounced it semean, found on a cigarette. He managed to repeat the word several times. No one bothered to correct him.

As they left the table, Christine said in a low voice,

“Semean?”

“It must be the French pronunciation,” Bowman said.

“Seminé,”
she suggested.

“It’s the title of a song.”

“Um. I’ll try some,” she remarked as if they were talking about an odd menu item. She added, “Do you happen to have any?”

Was she still kidding? She was not looking at him.

“Yes,” he said. “Lots.”

“I thought you might say that.”

For a few moments in the cab they rode quietly, as if they were going to the theater. Then he kissed her, fully, on the mouth. The taste was fresh. He smelled her perfume. He held her hand as they rode up in the elevator.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“I’m going to have a little something.”

He poured some bourbon. He felt she was watching him. He drank it rather quickly. He began to kiss her again, holding her by the arms.

In the bedroom, he removed her shoes. Then, in only the light from the other room, they undressed on opposite sides of the bed.

“Lots, you said.”

“Yes.”

She went into the bathroom. She came out and he said,

“No, stand there for a moment.”

He tried to look slowly at her but couldn’t. It was the first time, it was always blinding.

“Come here,” he said.

She lay beside him for a few minutes, the first minutes, as a swimmer lies in the sun. He could see her nakedness, almost all of it, in the near dark. They made love simply, straightforwardly—she saw the ceiling, he the sheets, like schoolchildren. There was no sound but the float of traffic distant and below. There was not even that. The silence was everywhere and he came like a drinking horse. He lay for a long time on top of her, dreaming, exhausted. She had not made love for more than a year, and she lay dreaming, too, and then asleep.

They woke to the fresh light of the world. She was exactly as she had been the night before though her mouth was pale now and her eyes plain. They made love again, he was like a boy of eighteen, invincibly hard. The apartment was beautiful in a way it had never been, the light in it, her presence. They had not been too hasty in going to bed together, nor had they waited too long. These were merely the days of initiation, he knew. So much was still to come.

They drank orange juice and made coffee. He had to go to work.

“Can we have dinner this evening?”

“No, I’m sorry, I can’t this evening … darling—it’s too early to call you darling, isn’t it?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, this once.”

“Go ahead.”

“Darling,” she said.

Tim Wille was a furniture designer, a little nervous and wild-eyed. When he talked to you he looked elsewhere, often at the wall. He no longer drank. He had been arrested while driving with a blood alcohol level that was .17 above the maximum limit. He’d spent the night in jail and thousands of dollars in lawyer’s fees over the following year. It was the best thing that ever happened to him—he gave up drinking, he said. He still had the look of it, though, along the edges.

Someone was singing at his house, it was hard to make out what. It was a party. The sound drifted over in a loose, romantic way. She liked Bowman’s house, Christine said. Although she had lived in New York, she had never been out here.

“It’s like the cane fields or something.”

They could hear the sea, the continuous, low sound of waves that lay beneath the wind.

He took her to a restaurant on the highway, a farmhouse set back from the road and run by a Greek family, a mother and two sons who were both in their fifties. The older one, George, was in the kitchen. Steve, who was less taciturn, handled the front, and the mother was cashier and ran the bar. The restaurant was known for steak, grilled over coals, and various Greek dishes like moussaka. When Steve came to the table, Christine said to him in Greek,

“So, what do you have to eat?”

He looked at her and nodded slightly.

“What do you like?” he said in Greek.

“Skorthalia,”
she said. “Toasted
kesari
. Lamb and rice.
Metrio
afterwards.”

He responded with a smile. She was wearing a silk, apricot-colored shirt. Her teeth were white as calling cards. Later, the older brother came to the door of the kitchen to look.

“I’m very impressed,” Bowman said. “How long did it take you to learn Greek?”

“How long did it take me? One marriage,” she said.

The restaurant was crowded, almost every table was filled. A dwarf girl came in with her mother. She was barely four feet tall and had a stunted leg. She was wearing a kind of sweatshirt and her fingernails were painted blue. It was painful to see her twisting walk, but her face was serene.

“It’s like Greece,” Christine said. “Everyone comes, the whole town.”

There was a rather heavy woman, heavy but confident and definitely attractive in a flowered dress at a table near the door. Her name was Grace Clark. She was with another woman and a man, Gin Lane from the look of them. She had murdered her husband, Bowman said.

“Really?”

“I don’t know if she murdered him, but he was shot five times. She was in the city at the time, she claimed. She’d gone in to see the dentist but had gotten the day wrong. The police couldn’t shake her story. Her husband was a closet homosexual, he used to bring Puerto Rican boys to the house when she was gone. Very few people knew. She must have known. She had three witnesses to the fact that she didn’t kill him, she said. She was one, her husband was one, and God was the third.”

“She could prove she was in the city?”

“I don’t think so. That’s the point. No one was ever charged. The case has never been solved.”

They were drinking a second bottle of retsina.

“She was married two or three times before. I mean, what does it take to shoot your husband five times and claim you were away when it happened? I’ve met her, she’s actually an interesting woman.”

“I’ve never known a murderer, at least I don’t think I have. I do know some thieves.”

He was intensely aware of being there with her, the pleasure of it. He could see himself sitting across from her, the two of them. That was part of the pleasure.

The ocean that night could be heard from some way off. The sound of the waves was even and unending. They went to look. It was after eleven and the beach was completely empty, not even a light in any of the houses near it. The water was black, rising and then with a roar showing its teeth. They stood watching. He was a little drunk. Christine was hugging herself.

“Do you want to go for a swim?” he asked half-seriously.

“No. Not me.”

He felt a sudden desire, a wild recklessness, the image of the sea in Tahiti with the fervent sailors diving from their ships, the sea off Oahu or the California coast with a storm beginning to blow. Leander had swum the Hellespont.

“It would be wonderful,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

“Are you crazy?”

He was elated, also boasting. He had gone swimming at night though not in the breakers. The big waves were rhythmically swelling, peaking, and then crashing down. He stooped to take off his shoes.

“You’re not really going in?”

“Just for a minute.”

He was taking off his shirt and pants. She stood in disbelief.

“I’ll just see how cold it is.”

He was aware of the unreality of it, the bravado, but he was standing in his shorts, at night, at the sea’s edge. Turning back had become impossible.

“Philip,” she said. “Don’t.”

“It’s all right. I’ll be all right.”

“No!”

The first rush of water around his ankles was not as cold as he’d expected. As he moved forward, a surge swept in and the water rose up to his waist. Suddenly there was a wave rising before him and he dove into it, the steep black water, and came up in the face of another one about to break. He dove again, coming up this time farther out. The outer line
of waves was rising here. It was deeper. The bottom was gone, his feet could no longer touch it. He fought against panic. He was rising and falling in the swells, the waves thundering. He tried to sense their rhythm. A swell lifted him and he looked towards shore. He couldn’t see her. The waves were coming in sets of five or six, he couldn’t tell. He had to wait until it was calmer, which he was afraid it would not be. Swimming he tried to control his breath. Suddenly his heart jumped. Something was there in the darkness! It was a swimmer’s head. Christine.

“What are you doing?” he cried.

He was frightened at seeing her. He was having enough difficulty himself.

“Can you touch bottom here?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Do you know how to get back?”

“No.”

“Stay with me! Watch out! Here’s one! Dive!”

They came up together. Her face looked white, fearful.

“When you’re lifted up, when it’s about to break, swim with it hard, stretch out, like a knife.”

They were rising steeply.

“Now!” he called.

They began swimming together but it broke past them. Then came another. They were too late, it collapsed beneath them. They both disappeared in the surf but came up in time to dive beneath a breaking wave. They were closer in.

“Now!” he cried again. “Go!”

She tried to run in the waist-high water but was pulled back and fell in the rush of a wave. She managed to get back on her feet and stumbled out. He followed her.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

She stood with her arms around herself, shaking.

“That was something,” he said.

“Yes.” It was hard for her to speak.

A surge of water came in around their feet. He took her in his arms. He could feel her chest heaving as she breathed. He admired her immensely.

“What made you do it?”

“I don’t know. Love madness.”

“You’ve never done it before?”

“Not in water like that.”

They went back to the house shaken but exultant. She sat with a robe pulled up around her.

“Are you cold?”

“A little.”

“Do you want something to drink?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m getting warmer.”

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw you out there. Weren’t you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I had to.”

He lay in bed while she showered. He had bought two extra pillows and was lying amid them as he waited. The feeling beforehand was like no other. He heard the shower being turned off and finally she came out, her hair hastily dried, and taking off the robe, slipped into bed beside him. No one was ever more desired. He pulled her to him to be able to hold her more fully. Her hand was between his legs.

“Oh, my,” she whispered.

“That’s right.”

He felt like a god. They were only beginning.

He woke in the early light. It was strangely quiet, the waves had stopped breaking. A long vein of green lay in the sea. On the window was a pale moth waiting for morning.

“Christine,” he said softly in her ear. “Don’t wake up. Can you do it while you’re sleeping?”

Afterward, they lay as if dismembered. One leg, clad in a white pajama, was up among the pillows near her head. She stroked the bare foot. The sheets, which had been of an incredible softness, were kicked out of place. Far down the beach, unseen, an American flag flew from a single tall pole like a signal of decency and goodness.

“This is the way you fall in love,” he said.

“Is this the way you did?”

“Oh, God no.”

He was silent then.

“I was stricken,” he said. “I was blinded by it. I didn’t know anything. Of course, neither did she. That was a long time ago. Then we got divorced. We were simply different kinds of people. She had the courage to say it. She wrote me a letter.”

“It was that easy?”

“Oh, not at the time. Things are never that easy at the time.”

“I know,” she said. “I married for sex.”

“I hoped that was what I was marrying for.”

“Women are very weak.”

“That’s funny. I haven’t found that to be so.”

“They’re weak. A bracelet, a trinket, a ring.”

“I notice you’re still wearing one.”

“It’s sentimental,” she said. “I can’t wait to take it off.”

“Let me,” he said but did not move.

“You certainly deserve to.”

He didn’t want to say anything further but to let that remain like a last chord. Then he said,

“I was very impressed when you were speaking Greek. He was impressed, too.”

“I don’t really know that much.”

“You seemed to have no problem.”

“My problem is that I need to find a place to live. I need to earn money, and I need a place to live.”

“I’ll help you.”

“Do you mean that?”

“Absolutely. A woman like you can have anything she wants.”

“A woman like me,” she said.

Yes, like her. The thought of traveling with her, the two of them together in Greece—he ignored the fact of her husband there—the Greece she had told him about. He imagined it, Salonica, Kythira, the women in black, the white boats that linked the islands. He’d never been there. He’d read
The Colossus of Maroussi
, wild and exaggerated, he’d read Homer, he’d seen
Antigone
and
Medea
and listened to the fabulous voice
of Nana Mouskouri filled with life. Not all at once but somehow together he thought of Aleksei Paros who had more or less disappeared, Maria Callas, the shipping magnates, the white wine that tasted of pine sap, the Aegean, white teeth and dark hair. It was all a brilliant dream, Greece was in one’s blood, they wailed at the grave there, they washed the bodies of the dead. But it was not death that drew him, it was the opposite. With Christine it would be unimaginably rich, living in the sunlight, on the water, on terraces hidden by vines, in the bare rooms of hotels. She would shake it flat and read some of the Greek newspaper to him, perhaps she would, he imagined her able to do anything. He wanted the Greek words for morning, night, thank you, love. He wanted some dirty Greek words so he could whisper them. Nude, he remembered, was the same in every language but probably not in Greek. He loved her nude, he loved thinking of it. He was for the moment emptied of desire but not in the broader sense.