"I saw," she said, grasping his hand more tightly.
She looked right again and made out what looked like the ruins of an old English mill, one arched window stacked upon another, and the lighted city behind them. She glanced left, and the mountain crag had become the black rectangular outline of a building with what might have been a chimney poking from one end. Then they were in the trees again, with the deafening clatter of the cicadas and a smell of pine strong enough to make her eyes tingle.
"It's a tent," she whispered, momentarily drawing him to a halt. "Right? Sex on the South Col. How did you guess my secret appetites?"
But he was striding strongly ahead of her. She was breathless but she could go all day when she felt like it, so her breathlessness came from something else. They had joined a wide path. Before them two grey figures in uniform were standing guard over a small stone hut on which a light-bulb burned inside a wire cage. Joseph went forward to them and she heard the responsive murmur of their greeting. The hut stood between two iron gates. Behind one lay the city again, now a distant blaze of busy lights; but behind the other lay only pitch darkness and it was to the darkness that they were about to be admitted, for she heard the clank of keys and the creak of iron as the gate swung slowly on its hinges. For a moment, the panic got her. What am I doing here? Where am I? Bolt, nitwit, bolt. The men were officials or policemen and she guessed by their sheepishness that Joseph had bribed them. They all looked at their watches, and as he raised his wrist she saw the glint of his flashy cream shirt and cuff-links. Now Joseph was beckoning her forward. She pressed back and saw two girls standing below her on the path, looking up. He was calling to her. She started for the open gate. She felt the policemen's eyes undress her and it occurred to her that Joseph had not yet looked at her that way; he had not supplied the crude evidence of wanting her. In her uncertainty she wished urgently that he would.
The gate shut behind her. There were steps, and after the steps a path of slippery rock. She heard him warning her to take care. She would have put her arm around him, but he manoeuvred her ahead of him saying her view must not be hampered by his own bulk. So it's a view, she thought. The second-best view in the world. The rock must have been marble, for it shone even in the darkness and her leather soles slipped on it perilously. Once she almost fell, but his hand caught her with a speed and strength that made Al's puny. Once she squeezed her arm to her side, making his knuckles press against her breast. Feel, she told him desperately in her mind. It's mine, the first of two; the left one is marginally more erogenous than the right, but who's counting? The path zigzagged, the darkness grew thinner and felt hot to her, as if it had retained the day's sun. Below her, through the trees, the city fell away like a departing planet; above her she was aware only of a jagged blackness of towers and scaffolding. The rumbling of the traffic died, leaving the night to the cicadas.
"Walk slowly now, please."
She knew by his tone that whatever it was, it was near. The path zigzagged again; they came to a wooden staircase. Steps, a flat stretch, then steps again. Joseph walked lightly here, and she copied his example, so that once again their stealth united them. Side by side they passed through a vast gateway, of which the sheer scale made her lift her head. As she did so, she saw a red half moon slip down from among the stars and take its place among the pillars of the Parthenon.
She whispered, "God." She felt inadequate and, for a second, utterly lonely. She walked forward slowly, like someone advancing on a mirage, waiting for it to turn to nothing, but it didn't. She walked the length of it, looking for a place to climb aboard, but at the first staircase a prim notice said"ascent is not allowed." Suddenly, for no clear reason, she was running. She was running heaven-bent between the boulders, making for the dark edge of this unearthly city, only half aware that Joseph in his silk shirt was jogging effortlessly at her side. She was laughing and talking at the same time; she was saying the things that she was told she said in bed--whatever came into her mind. She had the feeling she could escape her body and run into the sky without falling. Slowing to a walk, she reached the parapet and flopped over it, gazing downward into the lighted island ringed with the black ocean of the Attic plain. She looked back and saw him watching her from a few paces off.
"Thank you," she said at last.
Going over to him, she grasped his head in both hands and kissed him on the mouth, a five-year kiss, first without the tongue, then with it, tilting his head this way and that and inspecting his face between whiles, as if to measure the effect of her work, and this time they held each other long enough for her to know: absolutely yes, it works.
"Thanks, Jose," she repeated, only to feel him pulling back. His head slipped from her grasp, his hands unlocked her arms and returned them to her sides. He had left her, amazingly, with nothing.
Mystified and nearly angry, she stared at his motionless sentinel's face in the moonlight. In her time, she reckoned she had known them all. The closet gays who bluffed until they wept. The too-old virgins haunted by imagined clouds of impotence. The would-be Don Juans and fabled studs who withdrew from the brink in a fit of timidity or conscience. And there had been enough honest tenderness in her, as a rule, to turn mother or sister or the other thing and make a bond with any one of them. But in Joseph, as she gazed into the shadowed sockets of his eyes, she sensed a reluctance she had never met before. It was not that he lacked desire, not that he lacked capacity. She was too old a trouper to mistake the tension and confidence of his embrace. Rather it was as though his aim lay out beyond her somewhere, and by withholding himself he were trying to tell her so.
"Shall I thank you again?" she asked.
For a moment longer he remained gazing at her in the silence. Then he lifted his wrist and looked at his gold watch by the moonlight.
"I think actually, since we have too little time already, I should show you some of the temples here. You allow me to bore you?"
In the extraordinary hiatus that had risen between them, he was counting on her to support his view of abstinence.
"Jose, I want the lot," she declared, flinging an arm through his and bearing him off as if he were a trophy. "Who built it, how much did it cost, what did they worship, and did it work? You can bore me till life us do part."
It never occurred to her he wouldn't have the answers, and she was right. He lectured her, she listened; he walked her sedately from temple to temple, she followed, holding his arm, thinking: I'll be your sister, your pupil, your anything. I'll hold you up and say it was all you, I'll lay you down and say it was all me, I'll get that smile out of you if it kills me.
"No, Charlie," he replied gravely, "Propylaea was not a goddess, but the gateway to a sanctuary. The word came from propylon; the Greeks used the plural form to give distinction to the holy places."
"Learn it up specially for us, Jose, did you?"
"Of course. All for you. Why not?"
"I could do that. Mind like a sponge, me. You'd be amazed. One peek at the books, I'd be your instant expert."
He stopped; she stopped with him.
"Then repeat it to me," he said.
She didn't believe him at first, she suspected he was teasing her. Then, grasping him by the arms, she turned him sharply round and marched him back over the course while she repeated to him everything he had told her.
"Will I do?" They were at the end again. "Do I get second-best prize?"