White Vespa

Eight



13 June





Myles wanted a drink. The scene at dinner had left him unsettled, embarrassed at first and then a little angry. Jim had suggested dinner, and they were hardly seated when Paul strolled by. Myles had said, Join us, and, to his surprise, Paul had. They’d ordered a lot of food, and a table covered with full serving dishes makes for happy chatter. They’d had that. About the time the yogurt and honey arrived, Jim asked Myles what he’d been working on that day. An innocuous question.

“Close-ups, wildflowers, herbs, bugs.”

“For what?”

“Well, to introduce chapters, something like an initial, illuminated capital in an old manuscript.”

He could see what he meant either wasn’t getting across or bored them. He touched his spoon to the honey then filled it with yogurt.

“Maybe I just like close-ups, like using the bellows.”

“The what?”

“The bellows.” Myles explained how the contraption worked, pulling it out of his bag to demonstrate. “Better quality close-ups, though, that’s the main thing.”

“But why?” Paul goaded. He knew there would be a reason.

“Well, a close-up isolates a subject, say a beetle. Today I spent a long time trying to shoot a golden beetle, well a beetle and his shadow, and . . .”

“But isn’t it changed if you isolate it, not a beetle anymore but something else? Suddenly it’s got a mythological feel—it’s a scarab,” Paul said.

“Maybe. But maybe in a close-up you see the scarab that’s always there in the beetle you hardly notice,” Myles replied.

“If you want to see a scarab just give your beetle a ball of dung to push,” Paul laughed.

He was still laughing when a blond girl pushed through the crowded taverna chairs to their table and threw something into Paul’s dish of yogurt. Even before she got to the table she was shouting, though what she was shouting was a mystery since none of them knew whatever language it was she was shouting in. But she was clearly in a rage and ready to cry. Suddenly, she remembered a few English obscenities.

“A*shole! Son of a bitch! Cocksucker!”

“Not often,” Paul sniggered. “But you might be right about my mother.”

With that the girl fell silent, and the taverna was silent, too, except for Paul, who was quietly giggling, shaking his head back and forth in feigned who-me wonderment. Then the girl was gone. Myles watched her disappear down the alley; for a ways her long bright hair shone in the near dark. Then it didn’t.

“Kinda young,” Jim observed.

Paul fished the silver packet out of his yogurt and licked it clean—it was a condom—then spooned up some more yogurt and honey and went on eating.

“What a guy,” was all Myles could think to say. He counted out two thousand drachmae, dropped them on the table and pushed back his chair.





And he’d found he wanted a drink. He’d walked on by his parked Vespa and took the great stone stairs, the Kalí Stráta, up toward Chorió. In the night glare of the street lamps it all looked like a movie set, depthless, shells of old mansions. Stoned up doorways and blank windows with their neoclassical surrounds fronted the stairs on both sides. They must have been beautiful old places; they still were. A little higher up the houses were occupied, but at night even there the life was all inside; they were closed to the street.

Myles wished he wasn’t carrying his pack. He shambled a little, tired, he thought ruefully, from stalking a beetle. He passed by Jean and Tonics on the left before turning in at Two Stories. He took the stairs down and crossed to the terrace, sitting down at an empty table. A waitress came up behind him and, speaking over his shoulder, asked what he wanted to drink.

When she brought the whiskey, he asked after Jill, who usually worked the terrace after dark.

“She quit. Gone back to England.”

“Aha.”

“I’m Anne.”

Myles looked up at her, watched as she walked away. A boy’s walk, he decided. And serious eyes.

The place wasn’t busy. Anne watched Myles, too, toying with his camera and taking notes. When he pulled a pair of dusty brown beans out of his pack she swung by his table and asked what they were.

“Carob. I picked them today. They grow on trees, like money,” he added, paying for the drink. “Smell,” he said, breaking one of the pods in his hands.

Anne bent over his cupped hands. “Carob, all right.”

“It’s odd. It’s the pod, not the seeds, that we mean by carob. The seeds are hard, tasteless.”

Myles corralled a couple in his palm and held them out to her. Anne took them, tasted them; they might as well have been glass.

“So you’re a photographer?”

“Sort of. And you, what brings you to Sými?”

“Revenge,” she said, and laughed. “I’m just bumming around, really. One day I stepped off the ferry and found myself here. It’s a beautiful place.”

“It is that.”

“Would you take some pictures of me,” she paused, “sometime?”

Myles twisted the lens of his Nikon with his left hand, looking at her. He was surprised and a little drunk.

“I usually don’t take pictures of people,” he said finally.

“Couldn’t you make an exception?”

There were candles on the tables and a little breeze and the yellow flickering light played over her face, her wide eyes turned on Myles. They had a hooded look, a something-hidden look. Myles knew it was a look that got him involved with women he was better off avoiding.

“Why? Anybody could take a beautiful picture of you,” Myles said.

“I want to see what I look like, to really see myself. I don’t think just anybody could take that picture. Maybe you could.”