Collected Novels and Plays (54 page)

She tried not to feel it as an obligation, those Friday evenings, re-entering the apartment. She was paying her share, true; but more and more it seemed, as she gave him the money each month, that she was buying her own privacy from Orestes. For two nights he would move onto the sofa bed, giving up the bedroom to her. On one night they would go to the theatre; on the other, receive friends. It soon appeared that these sleeping arrangements were unsatisfactory. The
weekend found Dora refreshed, ready for the diversions it was thought better to have earned,
in America, than mere money; while Orestes, exhausted by work, face green and long as the face in an ikon, might have been happy to slip into his relinquished bedroom somewhat before the last guests had left.

To his regular lectures had been added a weekly TV program, “The World of Poetry.” Produced with a minimum of fuss over an educational channel, at the wrong hour of the wrong evening, it nevertheless by spring had gathered a faithful public who wrote letters, telephoned the station, sent Orestes their photographs and sonnets. He took it all very seriously. Wearing a new pale blue shirt, he had arrived for his debut an hour early, ready to put himself in
the hands of the cosmeticians. There were none. His disappointment, though concealed, was justified; on the screen he looked unwell and weird. His programs tended to fall into two halves: the classic, the contemporary. After an initial talk on, say, Shelley, with resonant quotation prefaced by sips of water, he would try to wind up with “a Shelley of today”—some odd young man he would have met, who was meant to give the viewers an absolutely authentic image of
genius struggling from the chrysalis of society. Orestes relied perhaps too heavily upon his friends to perform, rather than poets whose names were better known. But the public seemed ill-equipped to tell the difference. So much so that, today in New York, these discoveries of Orestes, published by now and with their own disciples, make up a clearly defined battalion in the endless literary wars of our time.

There was the film, too. In these months Orestes was writing the first of six complete scripts. A week in Hollywood, the frequent telephone conferences thereafter, had not helped him form a notion of how to proceed. Each month, when the producer came to town, a big black car would call for Orestes and sweep him, in evening clothes at first rented, eventually his very own, into the countryside for a party with starlets and bigwigs. From one such dinner, near Christmas,
he returned with a pair of gold and sapphire cufflinks. It was hard to resist, for Orestes, a little gentle namedropping; and, for others, a little gentle irony at his expense. Certain young poets—infants in Dora’s eyes—so devoted
to their calling as never to have heard of selling one’s talents, dipped into the punchbowl and came up with a hesitant question. Wasn’t that what Orestes was doing? Wasn’t his time too precious
for this kind of drudgery?

He would admit it himself some days. He rose at seven, never retired before midnight.

Only once, one miserable midweek night before Dora had found work, did she and Orestes try a Greek restaurant. A new one had opened near Times Square, and the idea had been to go forth, a company of poets, to taste the richly restorative food and society of Greeks.

The place seemed large and crowded. They were put at a recently vacated table.

“This is strange,” said Orestes, moving his face about. “Can you
see
, Dora?”

The lighting was dim but might not have existed, to hear him talk. “I’ve never seen a Greek restaurant,” he went on, “that wasn’t a blaze of electric light. The Greeks love light. In Athens, in broad daylight, the butcher stalls are outlined and festooned with lighted bulbs. They are theatres in which brains and hearts have literally been laid bare, all buzzing with flies. And the crowds!” He asked their waiter in Greek,
good-naturedly, why it was so dark in the restaurant.

“How’s everybody tonight?” said the waiter, removing soiled napkins and glasses. “A cocktail before your meal, folks?”

Dora wanted a Manhattan. Orestes told the young poets to try ouzo, then repeated his question in English.

“You got me,” came the answer. “Unless it’s the ladies. They often like not too bright a room.” He handed round red and gold menus.

“It’s true,” said Dora, “you see very few women eating out in Athens, except in summer. Here, everyone’s brought his wife along.”

“Wait,” said Orestes to the waiter. “What part of Greece are you from?”

Eager to leave, the waiter admitted Sparta.

“But you don’t speak Greek? I’m amazed!”

“Oh, I’m Greek, I speak Greek!” and with a smile of reassurance he escaped.

“That was childish of me,” Orestes laughed. “But he should be prouder of his heritage.”

As he peered into the dim hubbub, Orestes said goodbye to any hopes of reliving those brilliant evenings in taverns across the water. The crossing itself had wrought a sea change upon the other Greek customers. Young men who, on native ground a few years earlier, would have listened to Orestes with dreaming eyes had already watched dream after dream sinking into a parody of its fulfillment: fortune, family, the wife to dress (or overdress), the child to educate (or
worse, since this was America, to be educated
by
)—and all these lives at once insured, reflected, and corroded by conveniences bought on time, in time,
with
time, payments the receipts for which could be examined even here, through smoke, in the form of sallow, untended flesh and the delusive mannerisms of the insider. Dante might have spoken to these diners, gone over the receipts, shown them where they had paid too much; not Orestes. With a shudder of
horror and identification he turned back to his party.

“No, but really,” Dora remarked when he had said his piece, “you’ll see the same class of people in Athens, if you know where to look.”

“I give you the light of Greece, then,” smiled Orestes, lifting his glass. “Once you have had your vision, no lesser world is altogether tolerable. I used to enjoy places like this. But I’ve been
there
, I’ve felt the sun licking at my wings. If I were Icarus, I would set out tomorrow—to melt in that sun, to drown in that sea!”

At least they would have a good meal. Turning to the menu, Orestes ordered portions of souvlakia, moussaka, stuffed vine leaves—ah, and there were calamarákia! Nothing was more delicious (he told the poets) than these little squid, crisp with golden batter. Did they come from
Florida? The waiter couldn’t say. “Well, two portions of those,” said Orestes. “And of course, wine.”

“I’ll bring the wine list,” said the waiter, by now speaking Greek to oblige him.

“Don’t bother. Just two large cans of retsina.”

“We have only bottled wine.”

“Bottles then,” said Orestes with an indifferent wave of his hand.

The bouzoukia orchestra, which had been resting when their party arrived, began to play. Eight men sat in a row, gazing nowhere and deftly worrying their instruments. A soloist advanced to the edge of the platform. Her body, barely contained by a white and silver dress, might have been artificially matured so as to be recognizable as female at immense distances. Black, platinum-streaked curls spilled onto fat shoulders and quivering arms. She held a cloth orchid
concealing a microphone. By turns sweet, hoarse, piercing, dripping with ornaments and imperfections, her voice reached them as an aural equivalent of the many-layered, honey-soaked baklava Orestes intended ordering for dessert. This much, surely, was authentic—or was it? One poet thought he recognized an Italian hit of the year before.

Nobody got up to dance. “But nobody’s dancing—why?” asked Orestes when the waiter brought their orders.

“It is not permitted.”

A plate set before Orestes seemed to contain five or six fingers, swollen purplish pink and trailing oil black roots. What was this? His calamarákia.

“Ah no. I wanted them fried. I’ve never seen squid served this way. They’re not even hot. Take them away, ask the cook to fry them properly.”

The waiter removed the two portions.

A second song ended to loud applause. The singer blew one kiss and ambled pouting from the stage. “One likes her,” Orestes explained, “because she is the essence of voluptuous femininity.” Then he noticed
that the vine leaves had come out of a can. He could tell by a certain green dye mixed with the oil. “As a rule I don’t let trivial details upset me,” he said. “It’s not like me to lodge
complaints—is it, Dora?”

It was not, and she said so.

“Forgive me, then, if I do this once. It will be for the glory that was Greece.”

So the drama moved inexorably to its close. The wine was wrong. The same calamarákia returned, perhaps hotter. Meanwhile, a child-faced poet had been made unwell by a single glass of ouzo. The waiter offered to show Orestes the brine vat in the kitchen, out of which the vine leaves had been taken. Orestes waved him away, calling for the manager.

“Oríste!” cried this person when he appeared.

“He knows you …?” the sick poet moaned, mistaking for Orestes’ name the conventional Greek reply to a summons.

“I ordered fresh calamarákia, fried,” began Orestes. The manager regretted; there was no fresh squid at this time of year. Then why had it been on the menu? Ah, the menu did not say
fresh
squid. Here as in any Greek restaurant, one basic menu did for all seasons. And some people preferred their squid canned, yes indeed! The two portions in question, however, would not appear on their check.

This concession failed to satisfy Orestes.

“Another thing,” he said, shifting to English. “This wine tastes funny, and the ouzo can’t have been good. It has made my friend ill.”

The manager took a sip of wine, then looked closely at the poet. “He’s under age, isn’t he? Did he show any identification?”

“I’m surprised you can see him at all in this light!”

“Look, Sir, don’t blame me for the New York State Law. I’m just the guy who gets his permit taken away.”

“This is ridiculous,” said Orestes. “No Greek has ever come within five years of guessing an American’s age.”

Dream—Venice, a Hospital. O. is to undergo surgery. Reception desk very crowded. Old woman edges in front of him. I make her yield her place & try to tell the nurse O.’s name. We are separated at the elevators. Mine: a moving wooden room like a rustic privy. Hot sun through a knothole burns my wrist (redder & hairier than mine) & I think, Summer at last! Now we move sideways like a train. At the end of a vast
streaked palazzo (the Hosp.) I get off. I wear black trousers, black turtleneck, am barefoot. While I wait for O., an attendant—older, heavy accent—talks to me. He cannot belive I’m born in Taxas, says there’s something “Italian” about the back of my head. I say, conscious of speaking a highly artifical language, “Perhaps I have foreign blood.” He: Beg pardon—what? I: Foreign blood. He: Foreign
what
?
“BLOOD!!” I shout. And O. comes limping into view.

“I am nineteen,” declared the poet haughtily.

“I’m not asking for the gentleman’s word,” said the manager. “I’m asking to see his driver’s license.”

“I don’t drive.”

“It’s a matter of principle,” said a second poet, beginning to laugh.

Orestes struck the table lightly with his palm. Until now, only his Greek pride had been offended. But the appeal to local ordinances aroused an American dander he hadn’t known he had. “Ask the waiter to bring our check.”

The manager hesitated. Suppose these were well-connected people? In that brief interval Dora spoke up.

She
didn’t
feel like leaving, did they mind? She put her hand on Orestes’ and smiled up at the manager. If they could just have some bicarbonate of soda? She said in her plainest, most motherly Greek. It was wet out, the rest of the dinner was so good! “Orestes, you must try my moussaka, they’ve given me far too much.”

It worked. The manager melted away. Orestes let himself be calmed.

The worst, from her point of view, was simply to have lost control in front of the young. Luckily they were poets. Abstractor topics presented themselves, the music continued to please, the baklava was a success. So, perhaps, was the evening as a whole, in every mind but Orestes’. Into him the half averted scene kept biting deeply. What had he expected? Greece in America? He was not used to this grinding confusion of loyalties. Either, it
seemed, one was Greek and unfortified against the virus endemic here, or American and a carrier. The two natures absolutely did not mix. To emerge at last, twenty dollars poorer, onto the neon-streaked, puddle-paved streets came as no relief. People of every description jostled them. It was the melting pot with a vengeance. Dora took his arm and led him, the poets following, calmly through the flashing, shrieking labyrinth. She seemed actually to know where they were.

More and more she was coming to baffle a possessiveness he felt for her. From the start it had been of absurd yet paramount importance that she
see
and
feel
New York. After her maiden trip on the subway, he had turned to her, ready for superlatives. But what was Dora to say who had ridden the Métro a month before, who had gone by train under the Alps, for that matter? This was no typically “New York” experience. Orestes
looked away in frustration. The contest recurred daily. She had
been
in department stores, she had already tasted doughnuts. She had seen crowds almost as huge crawling at the bottom of chasms less deep, perhaps, than these—but she was no judge of depth. The Louvre allowed her to be critical of the Metropolitan, the Comédie of Broadway. Orestes could teach her nothing. It was as if his very virility were being challenged. Wasn’t there something, he asked
one day with desperate lightness, something singular about his home-town that had struck her, that she hadn’t foreseen? “Ah yes!” she exclaimed, then had to think. “Well, there are many more Negroes than I’d imagined. And many more antique shops.”

Reluctantly he evolved the theory that it was too much for her. No woman her age could cope with a world so drastically at odds with all she had known. Her serenity was a defense, a symptom of shock. Neither then nor later when events bore it out did this view of Dora comfort him.