Everything Beautiful Began After (3 page)

One night, he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

She bowed her head slightly, as if in prayer. When he dragged his lips toward her mouth, she drew back. He pulled back too with a jerk, as though his body had been acting independently of what he wanted. He fixed his gaze on some low steps, upon a tangle of plants that climbed the outer walls of her building—absorbing all they could from the dry soil below.

“Sorry,” he said. “It was too forward.”

“No, no,” she said. “It’s fine.”

Rebecca lost her virginity in Moscow, at the hotel where the Air France team is kept overnight. It wasn’t far from the Kremlin. She was twenty-two.

They drank vodka on the bed and laughed. He had white socks. It was very cold outside. They started talking on the bus that ferries staff between the airport and the hotel. He was from Holland. Afterward, he kissed her forehead and then rose to open a window. Freezing air poured in. He smoked and nodded at everything she said. Then they took showers and dressed. He watched as she waved the hairdryer around. His wife was Dutch too. They had no children. He was the sort of man she could never love, but she allowed her body to want him.

Her body did not change when George was close. She did not feel the calm violence of attraction she had felt with the Dutch pilot in Moscow.
That
was something outside of themselves, something to which they had mutually conceded—like a particular hunger, brought on and satisfied only by one another. Rebecca did not feel that sort of visceral intensity with George, but his arms on her shoulders made her feel safe. And his torso was soft. George was a calm sea upon which she could have floated forever without ever going anywhere. And she would have to tell him sooner or later so that his feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

“Do you always wear a tie?” she said.

The city around them disappearing under nets of evening.

The streetlights had not yet come on.

People carried out garbage in small bags tied at the top.

He was more drunk than usual and had trouble standing still. “Oh, I just like to, that’s all.”

“Actually, it suits you.”

George looked down at his pale orange tie—raising the bottom of it with his hand. Printed on the fabric were little hands clapping.

“They’re applauding.” He smirked. Then he turned away. Rebecca wondered if he might cry. She tried to imagine it.

That evening in Athens was very quiet. Only the hollow clunk of backgammon pieces thrown across a board from a nearby balcony.

A barking dog somewhere else.

A scooter, then footfall.

“Hug me, George.”

Stiff arms wrapped about her waist, then rested lightly on the climb of her hips. He was barely touching her.

“Don’t hate me,” she whispered.

“I hate myself,” he said. She could tell he was very drunk.

“For wanting me?”

“Yes,” he said.

Then he withdrew his arms as if untying something from around her waist. His shoes made noises on the stone, rearranging themselves, anxious to leave and begin walking away.

“I’ve spent my childhood learning to be alone,” she said.

“Me too.”

“Then you can’t hate either of us,” she countered with sudden grace.

Rebecca continued chatting as a way to dispel the awkwardness that threatened to linger until their next meeting. Then she kissed George on the cheek, again and again, until her kisses, like empty words, carried only the weight of consolation.

She could feel the heat on his forehead, the faint aroma of salt.

A car slowed as it approached them. When they didn’t turn around, it sped up again. The heat of an approaching summer was something they would have to endure, for better or worse.

Rebecca stared past George at a kitten sleeping under the wheel of a parked car.

“If you need a can opened or something stirred, or to borrow a hairdryer, I’m not too far away.”

“Thank you, George.”

“Actually, I don’t have a hairdryer, but I have some sublime recordings of the Bach partitas.”

Rebecca shrugged.

She did not know when she would wish to see him again. In some ways he was an easy escape from her old life: he knew her simply as a French painter in Athens. She had come to Greece to paint enough work for an exhibition, which she hoped to have in Paris, to great acclaim.

Maybe her mother would stumble into the gallery by accident, unaware of her unofficial biography on the walls—the narrative of absence.

Before climbing the steps to her crumbling apartment, Rebecca turned in time to see George scoop out the kitten she had forgotten about. He set it down beside a bush and turned to walk away.

Then suddenly she felt the weight of emptiness upstairs. Her things still and heavy, as if underwater. She was in a city where she knew only one person.

“George!” she shouted. He turned to face her.

“Why don’t you come and see my place?” she said, then smiled weakly and motioned with her hand. He followed her up the stairs to her apartment.

Her shoes made gentle claps on the marble steps.

They drank coffee on the balcony. Rebecca’s limbs were already half-asleep. George reached over and began to massage her neck and shoulders. She closed her eyes and sighed deeply.

George got up and stood behind her. She could feel his breath on the back of her head, and the city was suddenly quiet then, somehow emptier than it had ever been.

“Stay,” she said.

The hands on her shoulders stopped.

“Tonight?”

Later it was very hot.

George caressed her bare back with his fingertips.

“That’s nice,” she said. Streetlight fell across the bedsheets.

He moved closer. She felt him press against her. Half asleep, she shifted her body to accommodate his intent. Then she closed her eyes for a few minutes. He kissed her back with deliberate slowness. It was sweltering, despite the open shutters.

She saw that his eyes were wide open, drawing what little light there was in the room. The weight of his body drew forth her physical desire, and she opened her legs. Then, barely inside, George fell back with a gasp.

For a few minutes he didn’t move. Then he pulled the sheet over her slowly, as if covering something delicate he wouldn’t see for a long time. He kissed her once on the lips and lay down without saying anything.

She was very thirsty, but too tired to reach for anything. Morning was only a few hours away.

Chapter Three

Whilst vacuuming, Rebecca once found a shoebox under her grandfather’s bed. Inside were photographs from 1957 of a vacation in Cannes. His handsomeness startled her.

It was amazing to think that once, her grandfather had been young. In many of the pictures he was wearing a black tie and dinner jacket. In another picture he was putting the top down on an old Porsche with a cigarette in his mouth. The Porsche was matte silver. It had a Swiss license plate and thin wheels.

Each photo caught him in the middle of something: unfurling a sail, uncorking champagne, changing a wheel on the car, taking suitcases from the trunk, petting a dog.

Some photographs featured the woman who would become his wife, Rebecca’s grandmother. Rebecca’s life was the history of missing people. She didn’t even know her own father’s name. The one her mother had written on the birth certificate was made up, named after a French pop star killed in a crash.

Inside the shoebox, she found all that remained of her grandparents’ happiness.

Her grandmother had been very beautiful, but her eyes carried the haunted look Rebecca had seen in her sister. In one photograph, she descended the steps of a small airplane. A man behind with black spectacles carried two suitcases. It was the only photograph Rebecca took from the box. A year later, she wrote away to Air France. It was the closest she could get to her grandparents’ early life without money or education.

She wondered who would discover
her
shoebox. In the village of Linières-Bouton, the only glamorous men were the ones who sometimes appeared in summer from Paris on vacation with their wives and children—or visiting elderly relatives who otherwise annoyed them.

Rebecca dwelled on how everything had changed for her grandfather after her grandmother drowned and left him with a single daughter to raise that was her mother.

Did he consider the second half of his life a failure? He was unable to travel because of the burden of child care, and so worked with local businesses, rather than the bigger sales contracts in Paris, Tours, and Nantes that he’d been so successful with. He had also lost the woman he loved to a freak accident.

Rebecca felt it was too harsh to think about. Did he remember the moment that everything changed, like a subtle shift in light? Morning, and then a long afternoon of darkness.

She wondered how much of it was still with him. Was
that
man trapped inside the slow, sighing grandfather with unsteady hands?

Rebecca was too young to understand the conditions and the feelings that come with age. “The Quiet Story of a Sleeping Man” was the title of a sketch Rebecca had made of her grandfather one afternoon. When she showed it to him, he nodded and patted her head gently. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door. The hollow clank of his belt hit the floor. Then a long sigh. A newspaper rustling.

Later that afternoon, during a game show on the television, he mentioned that Rebecca might like to hang her sketch in the hallway.

“Use nails from a jar in the shed,” he said. “There are plenty, and they’re all the same.”

Chapter Four

Bands of wasteland skirt the city of Athens. Sometimes people wander there, looking for things of value to sell in the flea markets of Monastiraki. Bend down and brush away dry soil to reveal a single tile, laid two thousand years ago.

About four hundred years later as the Roman Empire crumbles—cheering as a baby takes his first steps across the very old tiled floor. Centuries on, stories of a new world fill the house, as honey spills from a jug and is lapped up by a hungry dog.

There were more trees then.

The air heavy with dry grass.

Birds came and went.

Now, just yellow rocks, a couch, and a mattress abandoned in the dead of night. Broken glass blinks in the sun. The only shade is from a low crumbling wall—pieces spat out like rotten teeth. The wall was once smooth. An architect fingered the seams then blew the dust from his hands. His horse was outside, drinking loudly from a deep bucket.

Athens is a world of despair and sudden beauty.

And it was from these two conflicting moods that Rebecca found her way as a woman.

It wasn’t long before she loved the city.

And the ability to love Athens, like all love, lies not in the city but in the visitor.

The city matched Rebecca at every turn. Her moods reflected in the things that took place around her—things that she noticed: a cigarette vendor giving bits of fish to cats, a sudden shower of rain, deformed children sitting calmly on the steps of churches as their mothers shook their fists at God and then opened them to passing tourists.

Rebecca felt a physical part of the city, and sensing such blind devotion, it embraced her as its own.

When she opened her eyes, George was already awake. He turned and smiled at her, then offered another massage.

“I must start drawing soon,” she said. “But let’s have some coffee.”

George offered to go out for fresh bread, but Rebecca said it would take too long.

He seemed dreamy and light. She even heard him laughing in the shower.

George stared at things in her kitchen, drinking his coffee slowly.

Rebecca held the front door open and wished him luck with his day. He waved again and stepped out backward. Then she took a long shower.

She spent the day making sketches and drinking chamomile tea. In the afternoon, she slipped from her clothes and worked in her underwear. When it became too hot, she turned the squeaking taps of the shower and waited a few moments before stepping in. There were cracks in the yellow wall, and water found and filled each one quickly—soaking the exposed cement that had dried in the darkness.

She slowly made everything cold.

Pellets of water broke the film of sweat on her body.

She let her mouth fill.

Rebecca’s grandmother had drowned one afternoon at the end of summer.

The lake wasn’t far from their house.

Rebecca’s mother had watched. She was only a child herself. She ran home and told her father. The back door swung open. His daughter couldn’t keep up and soon found herself all alone in the forest. She slowed to a walk. She was afraid. She started crying and then peed. Her legs stung. When she arrived at the lake, all she could see was a cool expanse of water. Then on the other side of the lake, perched on the grass—two bodies, one moving frantically—the other very still.

It was 1964. Rebecca’s mother was almost six years old.

A policeman sat with them at the kitchen table. He kept touching his belt. They drank tea.

His hat was on the table next to a currant cake.

“What will you do with her clothes?” the young gendarme asked. The clock in the hall ticked loudly as if trying to answer.

Then the policeman nodded at the little girl on the couch with her doll. “What are you going to do with her?”

Her father looked at his empty cup without saying anything. He hardly said anything ever again.

The policeman finished his tea and went home.

Rebecca’s hair was wet and heavy from the shower. Evening was falling over Athens.

Her drawings came to life in the dusk.

The city was cooling and traffic had thinned along the main avenue. Her neighbors hit spoons against pots. Someone was setting out plates. Children called in by a voice on the verge of anger.

She thought of George and their single night together.

She tried to imagine what he was thinking. The love of a man is like a drop of color into something clear.

When Rebecca worked for Air France, an old man once died in his seat.