White Vespa

Fifty



22 Aug.





Blue breezed by the reception desk at the Alíki. She was wearing her swimsuit with a white T-shirt pulled over it, bearing the legend, i WAS OUTTA THERE BEFORE YOU EVEN TURNED UP, silk-screened on the back—a training T-shirt from the best swimmer’s pool back home, The Deep End. And she was the kind of girl who liked to plunge in first and not linger in the pool when she was done. She would have preferred to go to the beach with Alexandra early and to swim more and sunbathe less, but she’d accepted it wasn’t going to happen that way. She hadn’t liked Kos much, an island overrun with package tours, and in Bodrum she’d felt uneasy, a little frightened, at the streets teeming and the beginning of something unfamiliar, Asia. Now she wanted to share some secrets with Alex, to find out what was new with Paul.

She rapped sharply on the door and waited. She tried again, and then drifted down the hall to the reception desk. She noticed before she said anything that the man behind the counter in his comic little uniform was surveying her beach clothes disdainfully.

“Sávvas?” She asked, “Don’t you recognize me?”

Sávvas raised an eyebrow quizzically, but said nothing.

“Is Alex here? Room 102?”

“The Knoops checked out yesterday, in the afternoon.”

“Checked out?” Blue sounded dismayed, and she wasn’t feigning it. “Why?”

“It’s not a question we ask.”

“Is there a note for me? Anything at all?” Blue stood still, as if thinking but not thinking. “Just gone?”

Paul pushed through the glass doors as Blue turned away from the counter, toward the door. He grinned at her. He liked Blue.

“They’re gone,” Blue said stonily. “Alex and Kat are gone, left yesterday, left no word.”

“No kidding?”

“Aren’t you surprised? You don’t sound surprised . . . or upset.”

“You think I should be?” Paul said, somehow giving an insistence to the you that suggested Blue’s tone more than any unexpected departure pained him. “Blue, listen to me, people move on. It’s what they do. If you try to stop them or if you miss them when they’re gone, you’re letting them control you. I wouldn’t. I don’t.”

“You’re not going to miss them?” Blue asked, bewildered.

“I hope not!”

Blue shifted uneasily on her feet. She was going to miss them, but Blue felt suddenly alone with Paul and glad of it and a little scared. “I’m going swimming.”

“Where?”

“Around the point, toward Nos,” Blue said.

“I could buy a cheap suit and come along, what do you say?

“Why not?”

“But over toward Nos, I guess I could skip the suit,” Paul said.

“I guess if you wanted to. A lot of people do.”





Fifty-one



22 Aug.





“Blue?”

“In a minute!”

Michael looked across the coffee table to Jim, who was reflectively stirring the ice in a glass of Rebel Yell. Jim was thinking the situation had a family feel. He was also thinking he was hungry, “And Bodrum?”

“Well, better than Kos,” Michael said. “But crowds of people in the streets in the evening. Guess I hadn’t really quite credited the warnings. But I don’t think a stroll is improved by so many other folks strolling, too.”

Blue was trying to get her lipstick on straight. She couldn’t understand why whenever she decided to wear lipstick it always looked like she’d put it on in a bus on a bad road. She sighed and dropped the tube into the clutch purse she sometimes carried in lieu of her everyday pack. She stood up, straightened her blouse, and opened the door into the big room where Michael and Jim sat sipping at whiskies.

“Do I get one?” she asked.

“Have a Coke.”

Blue got a canned Coke out of the fridge. “Guess what?”

“Guess what?” Michael asked, shaking his head.

“Katerina and Alex are gone,” Blue said.

Michael glanced over at Jim, sternly.

“Don’t look at me. It’s news to me.”

Michael’s gaze swung back to Blue.

“I just found out this morning! I went to find Alex for a swim and they were gone, just checked out, no message, no nothing. Weird, huh?”

“When did they go?” Michael asked.

“Yesterday.”

“I bet they were singing as they left,” Michael observed grimly.

“What do you mean by that?” Blue said.

“Maybe Paul will know why they left,” Jim suggested.

“No doubt he is why they left,” Michael snapped.

“He doesn’t know,” Blue stammered out.

Michael stood up.

“I bumped into him at the Alíki. Don’t act like it’s some big deal.”

“What did he say?” Jim asked quietly, thinking the whole comedy was feeling more like family all the time.

Blue looked trapped and a little stubborn. “He said we shouldn’t miss them too much or they’d be controlling us.”

Jim began to laugh, shaking his head. “Now there’s a bit of wisdom for you!”

“Then what happened?” Michael insisted.

“When?”

“After Paul shared the wisdom of his years with you.”

“Nothing happened,” Blue said. “I mean not much. We went swimming.”

Michael sat down next to Jim on the couch, his face dark.

“What’s this, a united front?”

“Blue, look,” Michael began and then faltered. “Dad,” he said carefully, “Dad sent you out here so I’d watch out for you.” Blue started to object, but Michael raised his hand and she fell silent. “I don’t think you need much watching.”

“You’re not my guardian.”

“No. But Blue, you’ve got to stay away from Paul, you’ve just got to. The guy is poison. I’ve got no idea what happened with Katerina and Alex, but I’d bet it was ugly.”

Jim was fidgeting with his drink. “Look,” he said, “enough. Let’s go eat. Michael, Blue knows what you think of Paul, and you’re right, but haranguing ain’t going to make her know it more. Okay? Let’s eat, really.”

Michael wasn’t moving; Jim appealed to Blue with a long glance.

“Okay, okay, I hear you,” she was talking to Michael. “You’re probably right. Okay, you are right.”

Blue had the cowed look of a child forced, a look that Michael couldn’t stand. “Oh Blue! I’m sorry. Damn it! You’re going to choose. I know it doesn’t matter what I say. But I’m frightened for you, because I love you. I hate thinking you might leave here hurt. Keep your heart whole, Blue. Just forget him.”





Fifty-two



23 Aug.





Paul locked the door and looked up between the buildings at the sky. Another blue-sky day, a sonic boom of blue over the Eastern Aegean. Good. He started down the alley but paused at the window, looking at his mussed bed in the mirror that stood near the wardrobe across the room. He liked mirrors; he always had. He liked what he saw when he looked there. The handsomest man.

He was dressed for the gym, and he walked easily over the cobbled alleys his feet had now memorized. At the Kalí Stráta he turned right, down. The gym had grown on him. He was a regular, and his body had begun to respond. It felt different, lighter and more alive. He could feel the difference in every step. Today, he thought whimsically, he’d tell Anne he was ready to pose for the after photo. After the gym, after Kat, after Alex.

He was even with Michael before he saw him. Michael stepped out of the doorway of an abandoned courtyard, the trashy remains of a walled garden that had once separated a great mansion from the bustle of the Kalí Stráta.

“You mind?” he said, taking Paul by the arm and leading him back through the doorway and on into the courtyard.

“Kinda! What’s up?”

“Look, think of this as a friendly warning,” Michael said.

“About what?”

“About Blue.”

Paul put on his bored face. “What about her?”

“I don’t want her wrecking her life with the likes of you.” Michael had backed Paul up against the wall and was leaning in on him. “You understand?”

“Wrecking your life is what life’s all about,” Paul said.

“And somebody else’s?”

“What do you think, a*shole? That’s the fun of it.”

Michael jammed his forearm into Paul’s neck, and Paul’s head slammed against the wall. “You better be having your fun somewhere else. If you lay a hand on Blue, I’ll be breaking you into tiny pieces. That’ll be my fun. Got it?”

Michael took a half step back, his forearm coming down off Paul’s neck. He was half hoping Paul would give him a reason. He glowered.

“What makes you think Blue’s so damn sweet, anyway? ” Paul snarled. “You’re the last one she’d show . . .”

The flat of Michael’s fist hit Paul’s solar plexus hard. Paul crumpled up like a squashed beer can. “This is my advice, you slimy bastard. Don’t let me see you on Sými again, not even once. We’re staying, you’re going.”

Out on the stairs Michael tried to walk normally. He felt a little disoriented by the adrenaline: everything looked too bright and reeled like a stage set in a dream. He shook his head and it hurt. But he didn’t debate with himself about whether he’d done the right thing. He’d work out, work the rush out, then see if Blue would let him take her swimming. He’d keep it simple.

Paul straightened up, eyes shining with tears and with a grimace something like a smile smeared across his lips. He willed himself erect, controlled his breathing, fighting off the panic desire to gulp at the air. “Not a hand on her,” he muttered. He could hear people clicking by on the flagstones on the other side of the wall. A family. Children prattling. He breathed a little deeper, and the color in his face began to subside toward normal. “Right,” he said, “not a hand.” He walked through the door back onto the Kalí Stráta and turned left, back up.





Fifty-three



24 Aug.





Anne looked down into the viewfinder of the Hasselblad, a bright square of the world as the camera saw it. She stood in an abandoned courtyard, just a few steps off the Kalí Stráta. Myles was examining the construction of a dilapidated rubble wall, a painted layer of plaster, stones in courses, and then just anything tossed into the core of the wall, which had once served to cloister off the inner courtyard, close to the house, from an outer courtyard, which itself had stood behind a massive door.

“Layer upon layer of privacy in these old places,” Myles remarked.

Anne said, “Hmm.” She was looking at the shell of the building itself, the windows that opened on blue air, nothing but air behind them. “Not much privacy in those rooms now,” she observed. But she thought they were beautiful just as they were, broken open, all secrets out.

“You can take a picture, you know. That’s what that thing’s for.”

There were several old abandoned mansions along the last stretch of the great stairs, just above the commercial quarter of Yialós. Though entry was barred at most, by stacked rocks or loosely strung wire, there always seemed to be a way around the barriers. This was their third trespass of the day.

“How about a picture of you?” Anne said.

“You think I’m square enough for the format?”

“Not at all, Myles, you’re round. Really, I’d need a fish-eye lens to do you justice.”

“You can be so cruel,” he said, but he was laughing. The day had been good, full of the comfortable quiet Myles thought of as the very ground of happiness.

They walked on down, turning right at the bottom of the stairs. Myles pulled a couple of paperback books from his pack, hoping to exchange them at See You Travel, which kept a rack of books for that purpose just inside the door. Through the square panes of the mullioned shop windows Myles caught sight of Paul, sitting, leaning forward, probably smiling at the dark-haired agent just across the desk. Then Anne saw Paul, too, and she stepped around Myles into the open door of the shop.

“What are you doing?” she exclaimed, and Myles was surprised at the note of alarm in her voice.

Paul’s head came around. “Annie’s so concerned?” he mocked, without missing a beat. Then he performed the introductions, and Myles was struck again by Paul’s flawless easy manner. The agent’s name was Anastasia, he said, “A beautiful name.”

Anne shuffled through the loose pile of brochures spread on the desk at Paul’s elbow. Cypress, Turkey (a panoramic view of the strange landforms of Cappadocia), the Czech Republic (a cityscape of Prague), Hungary.

“More cheap places?” she said. “More running away?”

Paul glanced knowingly at Anastasia. “Sistah! Who would I be running from? But my Kat’s gone and left me,” his voice went low, as if it was jazz and he was singing, “and when my Kat’s away . . .”

“Do you ever stop playing?” Myles interposed, he couldn’t help it.

“But I like to play! And now I’m thinking it might be more fun to play somewhere else. What do you think? Cappadocia? Not sure I’d go for all that monastic stuff . . . But Budapest? I hear you can buy just about anything there, and cheap. A regular Sodom.”

“Why not stay awhile?” Anne stuttered.

Myles wanted to say, Let him go, but he didn’t.

Paul’s eyes swept her urgent face. “I am staying awhile, a little while.” Then he turned his back on them, turned back to the clear face of the travel agent. “Anastasia hasn’t finished giving me her good advice, and I’m listening, I really am.”





Fifty-four



21 Sept.





The fogged, purple skins of the overripe figs split when they hit the ground. Every day I pick a few of them up in the yard and fling them into the caldera. They don’t get quite sweet enough to eat before they fall, I don’t know why, but the wasps like them, and I don’t like the wasps, not much. I don’t want to encourage them. I’m not inviting them for lunch.

Still, the figs settle dramatically when they hit the ground, which gives the skins a baggy look, like a sport jacket somewhere between comfortable and worn out. Interesting, the exposed edge along the tears, white, and the wet fleshiness within, a deep wine color. The broken figs speak to me.

Even if I can’t eat them, I like to look at them. Today, out picking them up, I saw a wasp hovering over the rip in a fig’s skin, then it landed, its thrumming wings suddenly still, glossy and veined, as long as it was feeding on the wound. Wasp, vèspa in Italian. I could see the formal similarities, the wasp-thin waist of the motorbike in profile. I was just looking. But when another wasp dropped out of the sky to hover over the torn fig, I picked the fig up and flipped it over the low wall. The bees buzzed me, as if to complain about my inhospitable manners. And, oddly, standing there I remembered a line of poetry Jim recited for me one day, while I was slicing lemons on a plate, the smell of them thick enough to see in the air over my little table: What smell is this that cuts the air like a bee? When I said, Lemon? He laughed, explaining he’d been quoting the poet Sikelianos.

But most of the time a scent isn’t as definite as a bee. At least not at my age. To smell most anything distinctly I have to lean in, put my nose right on it. Or it’s just a suggestion, a faint trace of something that’s slipping away.





Fifty-five



26 Aug.





Anne stood in the shower, washing the smoke out of her hair with the last of Myles’ shampoo, coconut. When she put her lathered head back under the nozzle the smell of the shampoo filled the small bathroom. She breathed deeply, running her long fingers through her wet hair, to rinse. That was it. Enough of Two Stories.

She looked at herself in the small mirror as she toweled her body dry, surprised to see she looked less hard. There was the beginning of a softness, a roundness. She’d been eating. All of her appetites had come back together. Wanting Myles had come first, the rest after. And he encouraged her to eat, ordering too much in the island tavernas and then calling for help. At first she’d resisted, but then she hadn’t, eating felt good, right. But she was drinking more, too. All of her appetites had come alive together, including her appetite for revenge. And now . . .

Myles called from the next room, his voice muffled. “Just a minute,” she said in return, running a spiky comb through her hair. The dreams had claimed her. She no longer pushed them away when she woke up thrashing, and she’d let the memories come. And they had come, like over-large furniture pushed into a small, neatly furnished room, overwhelming it. She looked at them every day, sometimes just bewildered, sometimes angry that they should be hers. Anger was the main thing, the throbbing at the heart that kept her going. She was attending to it now, and listening for its buzz. It had grown loud.

She pulled a T-shirt and panties off the hook by the mirror and tugged them on. Myles had pared candles to fit the old tin sconces on the walls and the room was lit by just the four candles. “Getting romantic?” she said.

“It’s a good light. The sconces work, even tarnished. Not a good light to read by,” Myles admitted, “but for looking it’s good. Vagrant, yellow. Moving all the time. It’s a light that allows for the depth of things.”

“Things!” Anne exclaimed, teasing.

“And for you, for your depth in the world of things. The body needs depth, and shadows, to really be there. And I think we’ve got to be there in our bodies. Well, maybe not for romance, but for Eros, for the real god, creator, destroyer.”

“Want me to destroy you?” Anne asked, coming closer.

“I want to be destroyed. Not by you, with you. I want you to be destroyed, too. That we should get up from the bed different people. It’s what I always want.”

“You want a lot,” she said.

“I do,” he whispered, “give it to me.”

“Don’t I try?”

She had covered him with her wet hair. Then she had his head in her hands, and she was kissing him. “Come on,” she said, “the shadows are deeper in there.” She nodded toward the alcove then led him toward the narrow bed still rumpled from another night’s sleep. “You used to be such a neat man,” she whispered, her eyes mischievous as she lay curled on the bed next to him, looking into his eyes. “Then one day you got up a different man, a not-so-neat man.”

“That’s true.”

“And tomorrow?” she asked, suddenly serious.

“A different man again.”

“So who do I love?”

“I don’t know,” Myles said.

“I don’t want to destroy you,” Anne suddenly sobbed.

“Oh Anne! But you have, and I want you to.” Then he said, “Come to me,” and she rolled over against him, her hips warm against his thighs. He pushed her hair away and ran his teeth over the nape of her neck, and she shivered, and they were through with talking.





“Myles?”

Myles propped open one eye and looked into Anne’s face.

“Could you take me back to my place?”

“You sure you want to?” Myles asked.

“I don’t want to but I can’t get to sleep. Will you take me?”





Myles kicked the Vespa to life. He switched on the light and the yellow beam cast a garish glow on the great boulders that littered the landscape. As he swung the white Vespa out from under the olive tree the light washed over the yard and settled on his small house, on Anne just coming out the rust-red door, tall and dark and suddenly looking gaunt again. Myles rode slowly to her, stopping in front of the door then wheeling the bike around to face the track out to the road. Anne got on, slipping between Myles and the upright spare tire.

The air chilled them as they swam through the curves into Yialós; it was late, very late, and the heat of the day had given way long since to a sea-cooled night. They sank into it, into a town submerged in sleep and spectral in the Vespa’s lamp and the shimmering cones under the streetlights. Everything shut up. The streets empty and the alleys empty. The low puttering of the Vespa came back to them as a muted echo as they rode past the still walls. At the harbor Myles turned left and they ran along the water where small fishing boats were riding out the night and then by the yachts, now dark, too. The lit clock tower hung in the sky in front of them and then they were to it, again bearing left. Myles pulled to a stop at the foot of the stairs that led to Anne’s rooms and she got off, leaning on him heavily, her arms around his neck and her mouth at his ear.

“Will you come for me tomorrow?” she said, the sound of her voice mixing with the sound of the idling Vespa. “For a picnic. Just you and me. And a grill.”

“Grilled what?”

“Fish.” Anne said. “I’ll buy something good in the morning.”

“What should I bring?”

“The rest! Surprise me.”

Myles was backing the Vespa in a tight arc, ready to go, when Anne came back down the stairs. “About two?”

Myles nodded and yawned, though he tried to suppress it. Anne grinned at him, looking indulgent, tender.