White Vespa (14 page)

“A lot?”

“Enough. And here you are, dressed up like someone in a photograph.”

“Someone?” Anne teased.

“You. You.”

“They look like queens on parade, all of them, except the girl; she looks like she's hoping to make it as a hooker.” Michael turned back to Jim, then glanced over his shoulder one more time. “But maybe I'm being unfair to queens.”

“So severe. I wouldn't have thought you would be quite so severe,” Jim said.

“Why not? Judgment is my middle name.”

 

“Can you get off?” Myles asked.

“Sorry,” Anne shook her head.

“I hoped, coming so late, we'd be nearer alone.”

“Yeah?”

“Should I wait?”

“Wait,” Anne said, and she picked up her tray to make the rounds. Myles watched her go, thinking maybe she was looking light on her feet, hoping he was seeing the happiness in him in her.

 

Jim was telling Michael about the islands, the other islands, about what he and Myles had seen on Tílos. Myles was half listening, and only half recognizing their trip in the telling. He was drinking, into a second glass of bourbon and getting lightheaded. One time he thought he surprised Anne in a look, a look of hatred, just as she turned from talking to Paul to bring an order back to the bar. She hadn't looked angry, but beyond that, where dispassion verges into cruelty. There was almost a smile in it. He wanted to ask her what that look meant but didn't, preferring to enjoy the warmer face she brought back to him at the bar.

 

Sometime late Two Stories got quiet. Even Jim and Michael seemed to have wound down, finished with talking. They were counting their money. Paul came inside and ordered a bottle of champagne, inviting all of them out onto the terrace for a last drink to close the place down. Myles helped Anne carry out the glasses, and Paul covered the neck of the bottle with a napkin and eased the cork out. Alexandra appropriated a glass for herself and it was hers Paul filled first, but then he filled them all, beaming as he did it.

“A toast?” Jim asked.

Paul looked around, that smile, that ever ready smile and the lively eyes. “Of course. Everyone got a glass?”

Michael was looking like he wished he didn't but he half-raised it to acknowledge it was in his hand.

“To the islands,” Paul said, “every one different, to cooling breezes and light-hearted revelry, to women,” he smiled at Katerina, and seeing Alexandra pout, added, “and girls, Sirens all.”

“And Prospero's cell,” Jim called out for no apparent reason. Then he sat down all at once, mumbling.

Paul drank with a flourish then leaned across to kiss Katerina's neck.

Michael set his glass down untouched, bent close to Jim's ear, and whispered rather too loudly, “What a
performance
.”

The night was over. Michael and Jim went up the stairs together and were gone. Paul fished out his wallet, and Katerina pulled on her shawl, while Alexandra downed the half-full glasses left on the table one after another, a twisted grin on her lips.

Then it was just Anne and Myles and the bartender and the bartender said he'd close up and Anne came back to him from wherever she had gone.

They went out under a sickle moon, stars standing bright over the now darkened town. The stairs down shone under the occasional streetlight and were streaked with long shadows. Island cats, out on night maneuvers, shied from them, wild, running low and quickly to safety. The air, occasionally, pulsed overhead with the wing beat of a bat or a night bird. And they walked down, the great stairs swinging first left, then, near the bottom, back to the right. They were holding hands. They didn't talk.

The grave theatricality of the massive ruins, shells of what once had been mansions, stilled their tongues. Then they were in the town, Vapori all folded up, umbrellas leaning against a wall inside, tables and chairs taken in. They walked along the harbor, the small waves rhythmically beating the stone breakwater, the anchored fishing boats groaning at their ropes as they rose and fell.

“Most nights you make this walk alone?” Myles said.

“Mmm.”

“And does it spook you?”

“No. It's a safe place. Greece is a safe place.” After a moment, Anne said, “Do you like the smell?”

“Very much.”

“Me too. It smells like living.”

And after another pause, Myles asked, trembling, “Where are we going?”

“Home,” she said, “my place.”

 

Myles couldn't see the woman in the photographs in the woman on the bed. He looked for her, but he couldn't find her. This woman, wet from a shower, in a loose and long black nightshirt, this woman knew how she looked, knew her looks were in her favor. Myles crossed from the table and sat down quietly beside her. He wanted to talk, but Anne shook her head and said, “After,” and he knew again that he was a fool for talk. She rolled over, away from him, and her head lolled a little but her eyes—so wide set—were on him, calling him out of his sadness to follow her. He leaned across the distance between them, leaned so far to reach her that he found he was lying beside her and kissing her quietly on her cheekbone. Then he took half her wide upper lip in his mouth and shuddered.

She showed him her body, long and angular and hard at the edges, but now welcoming. And she touched him with knowing hands, without any fumble, or embarrassment, or inhibition. She was more beautiful than he had thought, and hungrier. The veiled quality in her eyes, which was the huskiness in her voice, he heard it now in her very breathing. It called to him, and in his own heart there was nothing left but the desire to answer. At the very moment he gave his heart, his heart was broken, and he knew it, submitted to it, stripped away his clothes knowing every caress would leave a scar, every kiss a scar, had to.

 

Woke this morning in a panic, eyes up, on a ceiling I could hardly see, white, nothing to distinguish there. As if all my losses had run together. I couldn't find my old glasses, and even my hands in front of my face looked blurred. In my distress, I actually cried out,
“
Again?
”

With my glasses on, I settled down; a clear view of things is almost as good as actual clarity for settling anxieties. I saw it was another sunny day, the sky poured-in blue clear down to the sea. I used a Turkish coffee pot, a big one, and made myself more coffee than I ever ought to drink, and I made it sweet,
glikó
, something I never do. I wanted to wake up, wide awake.

 

Michael composed the note while Jim slept. He explained very carefully where he was staying, how to get in touch, and that he'd gone to get cleaned up before meeting his young sister's ferry. He looked at the note a last time, set a coffee cup on it as a paperweight and slipped quietly into the coming dawn. He hadn't been looking, he thought, but maybe a man alone never really stops looking. And looking or not, the thing now was to accept. He walked quickly, a little cold in the morning cool in only a T-shirt and jeans. But he stopped when he smelled baking bread, at an open door in a green storefront. He stood still a moment, listening to the music filtering out from somewhere deep in the shop, almost inaudible, but strange with the East. Then he went in, bought a small white loaf right off the baker's great wooden paddle. It was too hot to hold so he had it wrapped in a sheet of paper and carried it away, hot and wholesome and satisfying, just the feel and the smell of it. He ate it as he walked, exclaiming happily,
Deeply significant
, smiling, remembering Jim's phrase.

 

Myles gingerly arranged his leather pack for a headrest and leaned back in the black, juniper shade. He closed his eyes. “I could sleep,” he said.

Jim sat on a rock nearby, looking uncomfortable. “Weren't you the one suggested this little hike?
Stroll
, I think you said.
Stroll overland to the sea at Ayios Vassílios.
That was a stroll?”

“Bit more strenuous than that, as it turns out,” Myles allowed.

“As it turns out.”

“I could sleep.”

“You said that.”

Myles opened his eyes. “Okay, I'm awake. So entertain me.”

A grey-vested crow, a chough, flew into the next juniper and started in, lowering its head, cawing what sounded like disapproval.

“Pretty good trick,” Myles said. “Can you do it again?”

Two more choughs settled in and soon they were making a real racket.

“Very good!” Myles said approvingly.

Jim twisted up his face and spoke in his professor's voice:

“And you quote! But Wallace Stevens, you surprise me. And those choughs are black birds, sure enough, but they're not blackbirds.”

“Careful,” Jim said, “or I'll quote the other twelve ways.”

“When's Michael getting back?” Myles asked.

“Couple of days. He's showing Blue around Rhodes.”

“
Ródhos
.”

“Are we getting snobby about Greek place names?” Jim said.

Myles didn't answer; he was peering into his pack. “Shouldn't really carry lunch in with the cameras,” he observed, shaking bread crumbs off his battered
Nikon. “So what are they looking at?”

“On Rhodes?”

Myles nodded.

“The regular,” Jim said, “the castle, Valley of the Butterflies, Líndos.”

“God, Líndos, white Líndos, that is a beautiful place in spite of the tourists, all them English!”

“But not a
lesser
Dodecanese?” Jim asked.

“No,” Myles said. “Where'd Michael's sister get that name, Blue?”

“Parents big Joni Mitchell fans . . .”

“But Blue Darling?” Myles laughed, “She won't be needing a stage name.”

“Sweet kid, though, and a stunner.”

“Yup. And
real
young.”

“Sixteen, just,” Jim said.

“Bit of a problem for you and Michael, I'd say.”

“Big problem.”

They stood, shoes off, with their feet in the water. Myles had left his pack in the shade of a large rock and waded out, slowly, trying to stay clear of the purple urchins until it was deep enough to swim. The water was cold but clear as gin, and he was hot and wanted it. Jim had on a broad straw hat and did not intend to swim, but even wading found the sea wonderfully cool.