White Vespa

Three



8 June





Paul folded the newspaper he’d been reading and tossed it into a basket of magazines and books that served as a lending library for regulars at Vapori. He was a regular. He swirled the ice in his coffee and smiled at the waitress, but he was just flirting for service. He wouldn’t ruin his regular café by taking up with a waitress.

He was sitting across the alley from the café proper; there were tables on both sides of the narrow street, under raw canvas umbrellas. The light in the street bounced in sheets off the foot-worn slates, but under the umbrellas it was soft, yellow. It made a good light for reading, and the waitresses were friendly. He’d made a point of charming them. Charm made the world more agreeable, more amenable to his desires.

A minivan inched down the alley toward the waterfront, turning the umbrellas on their poles as it brushed them on both sides. The tour boats were in from Rhodes and the gawkers were thick. Soon the tavernas and ouzerís would be doing a big business; there was always a big business at lunch. So lunch time was a good time to find a girl and picnic at the beach, swim a little, get brown. Paul was already very brown. But it wasn’t quite time for that yet. He ordered another frappé.

While he was waiting for the coffee, Myles Twomey sauntered into the alley. He looked hot and had probably just come down from Chorió on the city steps. He had a Nikon around his neck and wore a black leather backpack that Paul knew was heavy with lenses. Paul thought Myles a bit of a character, and sometimes he found it amusing to draw him out.

“Eh, Myles, what’s up?”

Myles turned his head toward Paul, blinking.

“Sit down. Want a Tribbie?” Paul asked, fishing the newspaper back out of the basket.

After Myles had ordered, he glanced at the headlines, then dropped the paper back where it had come from.

“No?”

“I’ve had enough of news. Another day of suffering. I don’t need reminding. It takes a sadist to really enjoy the news.”

“But I love the news!”

“Well?”

“It makes the world seem so dramatic. Something big always happening.”

“But not here?” Myles said.

“Not anywhere I’ve ever been. How many things have I seen with my own eyes that would make the International Herald Tribune?”

“That might be a lucky thing,” Myles said, “considering.”

“But you’ve got to admit life mostly happens on the small side.” Paul gave Myles an encouraging look.

“Maybe life mostly happens life-size. Maybe it’s the outsize world of the news that makes real life seem small.”

“Well, maybe,” Paul said, genially. “But the news is kind of like the movies, isn’t it? People like their actors on the big screen. People like their news big.”

“They do,” Myles said.

“And?”

“And I’m not sure we should take that as a recommendation.”

Paul’s frappé arrived. And soon after a bottle of water for Myles. The waitress struck a pose when she saw his Nikon on the table, but Myles was pretty sure she was hamming it up for Paul. Which seemed only right, because Myles thought there was something of a pose in Paul’s easy ways, too.

“I’m walking,” Paul said, standing up as soon as the waitress left.

Myles lifted his eyebrows in a question.

“And I’m buying.”

“Perfectly acceptable,” Myles said, smiling.

“It’ll be yours next time!”

“Aha, that would be the catch.”





Myles watched Paul stroll down the alley toward the harbor, weaving his way through the milling pedestrians, angling close to the fruit-and-vegetable vendor at the corner before swinging left. There was a visible ripple as he passed, people stared after him. Myles shook his head, then turned his attention to the photo log he kept whenever he was working. He’d had a good morning, so there were entries to work up. He jotted down the basics while he was shooting, but he liked to elaborate on them before he developed the film, then again, after. It was as much a daybook as a log. Today’s pages were full of notations about the light, which had been very thick and yellow early in the day, almost oily: A wildfire is burning on the Turkish mainland, near Mar-maris, he wrote, and a high, thin sheet of smoke has stained the sky. The shots he’d taken that morning would brood, he was sure of it. It’s surprising how an open doorway seen at a distance here makes even a kept-up house look absolutely abandoned. The interior so black. You just can’t imagine anyone walking out of a door like that. Then a girl suddenly shows in the doorway, limbs flashing. Not walking, she’s running. But the photo I took with the long lens, before the girl appeared, it won’t know a thing about her. In the photo, she won’t be about to dash out, not ever. Myles capped his pen and stowed it in his pack. Then he looked at his watch, which said it was time for lunch.





To Stenáki was packed. The tables, set in the street in front of the taverna, looked full, and Myles was ready to consider second choices when Panyiótis called to him from the door, insisting that a chair would be found, and one was, at a table already occupied. Myles tried to beg off but the other fellow looked glad for company so Myles sat down. Another American.

“Jim,” he said, reaching across the table.

Myles introduced himself and accepted a glass of retsina from the large tin pitcher on the table. It tasted a little harsh, piney, like cheap retsina from the barrel, which is exactly what it was, but Myles had a taste for it, and cold it collaborated well with taverna food. As always, the second swallow tasted a little less harsh and after that it was good.

Jim eyed him curiously.

“So you just sold everything?”

“Why not? It no longer felt like it was mine. Just a bunch of stuff, a weight, so I put it down.”

Myles had ordered mezédhes, which were good. The melitzanosaláta had his attention; the aubergines had been seared on the grill and had that strong, smoky flavor he loved. He didn’t mind the blunt questions; he didn’t care. He tipped his chair back.

“And you, in the States, what do you do?” Myles asked.

“English professor.”

“Aha.”

“Sými is thick with professors in summer. Most from the States, Greek Americans, most of them in the sciences. They own places here, can afford it. I come every summer, but I just take a small room. It’s enough. Here you live outside.”

“Sounds good, except for the going back part,” Myles observed, teasing a little.

“This summer I’m staying on longer than usual. My sabbatical year has come round again, at last. But Sými is dead out of season.”

“Some like it dead.”

Jim laughed at this, thinking it a witticism. Myles laughed, too, cleaning up the last of the tzatzíki with a rough slice of bread. He admired the big red pepper bathed in olive oil on another saucer and felt good.

“Well,” he explained, “I’m masquerading as a photographer.”

“You’ve got the props.”

Myles fingered the long lens on the Nikon on the table in front of him. “I have a contract, actually,” he smiled shyly, “for a coffee-table book: The Lesser Dodecanese. But I’m just faking it. It makes a good cover, and it’s a hell of an excuse for long walks. Who knows, maybe someday there will be a book, but it doesn’t much matter one way or the other.”

A girl came to the table to collect the plates. Her name was Váso, she said, and she was eight. Panyiótis was her father. Myles had seen her playing in the alleys up in Chorió, near the square; he remembered her clearly, wilder then than now.

“See you around,” he said, standing up abruptly.

Jim stretched out his hand, said, “Wait,” scribbled the phone number of his pension on a piece of paper he tore from the tablecloth and handed it over. Myles found the white Vespa in the shade of a yellow building, where he’d left it, and kicked the engine to life. He eased his way around the harbor and then took the back road out of town, up a dry gulch, to his house in the hills. Standing out back, he could see the harbor framed by dry cliffs, and from out front, the road winding between olive trees, going overland. Not that it went far, but he liked a house that looked two ways.





Four



9 June





Anne came awake all at once, breathless. The darkness pulsed around her. A dream, frightening. She couldn’t remember it, and she didn’t try. She took deep, controlled breaths, calming herself. There was starlight in the window, no sign of dawn, but she got up anyway, dressing in the dark. She’d been lucky with the room; she knew that already. It had quieted down early and stayed quiet, though it was only three houses above the paraléia where it turned from the island’s best hotels to a rougher neighborhood where the boatworks had once been big business. She’d been told a few boats were still built there every year.

Anne liked the location, close to the bustle of Yialós but out of it. She’d rented the place for the summer, though she had, really, only money enough for half of that. She’d get a job, manage. And maybe she wouldn’t stay. Hard to tell what would happen, once she found Paul. Finding him won’t be hard, she thought, he’ll be wherever the loafers congregate.

A little cold, she wrapped herself in a blanket off her mussed bed and sat in front of a window in a straight chair. She put her feet up on the sill and tilted back, easing into the darkness. In the quiet, sounds carried, and she listened to footsteps on the stairs, going down. She wondered if she was hearing the sound of a fisherman, or a man, maybe a woman, up early to bake the day’s bread. She didn’t know; she imagined. She imagined anyone up this early would be walking with a purpose, headed for a boat or a bakery and knowing what they meant to do when they got there. She envied them their purpose, their small certainties. She had no idea what she was going to do, but something. She felt she had to do something, anything.

Outside, the stars faded and it was morning. Anne looked around, a rented room. Nothing in it made any claim; it was just stuff, there. She liked it that way, a bed a bed, a chair a chair. “Heirloom,” she said quietly, finding the word ridiculous and pretentious. The stuff of the fathers, she thought, the manstuff. And the stuff of the mothers wasn’t much better.





Five



11 Sept.





When I unpacked I set up the two tripods in the corner of the living room, one with the Nikon on it and the other with the Hasselblad. They’re still standing there, untouched. I’ve draped a blue bandanna over one and a red over the other, hooded them. Dust covers. The portable darkroom is still in its canvas bag, the last rolls of film are in the refrigerator, undeveloped. It will take more nerve than I’ve got to look at them now.

When I unpacked on Sými at the end of May it was different. I set up the dark room before I hung my shirts. I found Sými even more beautiful than I remembered, perhaps because it was the place in the photograph, and I wanted to enter the world I had seen in the photograph of the white Vespa. To be sure. And in landing on Sými I did seem to enter that world. I found the house on the first day. Driving with the owner up to it, when he said, That’s it, gesturing toward a house half hidden by rocks on the bluff overhead, a low yellow house with rust-red shutters and door, I had known it was the house for me. Walking through the cool rooms, looking through the old, wavy glass down toward Yialós, everything in me said, Yes, this is the place. I signed a lease for four months, with an option to renew at a reduced rate for the off-season.

The next day I hired a taxi and moved in. The house was small, but the design was strong; it held its own with the landscape, with the cliffs out back and the yard of exposed boulders, with the few gnarled olives and large agaves. There were two big pots of jasmine on either side of the front door, and a weathered table and chairs under the largest of the olives, where the shade was deep. The view rolled over a tumbled landscape, all dry, beautiful in sandy stone and yellowed grasses, and that smoky green of trees and shrubs in arid countries.

There was a small bedroom, hardly bigger than a closet, where I set up the dark room, and a small, hard, island bed in an alcove in the main room, where I planned to sleep. The house had escaped serious remodeling; it still had hand-carved wooden cupboards, built-in Turkish-style low couches, and a saw-edged mantle over the hearth. Very rough wooden floors, the grain standing ribbed above the worn away spaces in between. I loved the place all at once.

I walked into town, down a road that followed the bends of a dry wash. In the quiet, the insects hummed. And then I was in town and making inquiries about a motorbike. I was directed to a shop and in a row of mostly new and newish motorbikes saw a couple of old Vespas, one blue and one white. I only took one out for a test ride, the white Vespa, and only haggled a little over the price. It ran well, puttering up the steep road to my new house without undue difficulty.

That evening, I finished unpacking, putting the photograph of the man in white on the mantle. If anything, I was drawn to the photo more than ever, and I looked at it several times in the edgy light of the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. Finally, I began to entertain the suspicion that the Vespa in the photograph might be the same one that was parked in the yard under a tree. I noted the pattern of dents and creases then took my flashlight out into the night to check. I felt very odd out there, bending over the bike in the dark, discovering that it was indeed the same one that was in the photograph. Just for a second, I felt I had become someone else. I clicked off the light. I had thought I wanted to be someone else, but it felt wrong, more like possession than getting free. But it was only a feeling, and by the time I’d picked my way back to the house by starlight, I felt fine, felt that things were going my way.