White Vespa

Nine



15 June





When he finished in the dark room Myles wanted out; it was close in there and the day had started to heat up. Standing by the refrigerator he filled a saucer with green olives as big as apricots, cut four slices of the black bread he’d bought that morning in Yialós, cut a half-inch thick slice off a block of hard white cheese, and arranged the lot on a sea-blue platter. He felt good. He liked what had turned up in the developing pan. With a paring knife he sliced up two thin-skinned tomatoes and set them on the platter next to the cheese. He pulled the cork out of a good bottle of Kourtáke retsina, poured a coffee cup full, put the cup on the platter, looked at it, and approved.

Sitting in the deep olive shade, he started on lunch. He was satisfied. One of the shots he’d taken of the beetle was good beyond all expectation. The sun poured in low and bright, and the gold back of the beetle shone white, like a new-risen moon. It cast a shadow almost to the edge of the frame. The grains of sand in the sun shone like Blake’s grain of sand, those in shadow looked dusky, ominous. He ate an olive, a chunk of cheese, a little bread. He tasted the retsina.

Then he heard his name called and there was Jim, looking hot in khakis and a Madras shirt and walking toward him.

“See you found the place.”

“Not a problem. And some kinda place you got here!” Jim said, looking around. He declined lunch but agreed to retsina. Myles brought out a second cup and the cold bottle, its deep yellow label covered in sweat.

“You left in a bit of a hurry the other night,” Jim said, as he tasted the wine.

“Yeah, that’s so. Have an olive. The salt improves the wine.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened?” Jim asked.

“I saw enough of what happened. Hurt girl.”

“Well, I stuck around. That Paul!”

“Yeah, what a guy.”

“I asked him what the girl was so pissed about,” Jim said.

“Yeah?” Myles said, not encouraging.

“Not very interested in this story, are you?”

“What do you expect? I’m a photographer! Story, that’s for film, maybe, or a novel. Boy meets girl. Girl has a bad time. Even as a story, it’s kind of an old one.”

Jim looked owlishly over the top of his sunglasses.

“But it’s not such an old story, at least not how Paul tells it.”

“Paul. I’m beginning not to like him.”

“Still, you’ve got to admit he’s charming,” Jim said.

“And handsome, way too handsome.”

“But a little old for that girl?” Jim asked.

“No kidding?”

“Well, Paul says he met her a couple of days ago, and they hit it off. Went on a picnic, swimming. They arranged to meet again that night. Paul was wearing just shorts and a T-shirt, no pockets. He’d stuck a condom in his waistband. Hopeful, I guess. But the edge of the thing scratched at him, so he slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans as they walked along the waterfront and then on out of town. Forgot about it. Later, they went to his place, where he was, as he said, supplied. Paul thinks her mother must have found it cleaning out pockets for the hotel laundry. Simple forgetfulness, that’s Paul’s story. Not like he forced himself on her.”

“What’s her name?” Myles asked.

“I don’t know. Paul didn’t say.”

“Why again did you want to tell me this story?”

They went inside, looked at photographs. Jim lingered in front of the man on the white Vespa but made no comment. He looked at the newly developed work and shook his head.

“Too good, Myles.” He was especially taken with the beetle, the great ovoid shadow drawn out of the beetle’s unexpected bulk. “What do you mean calling yourself an amateur?”

“Why not? What’s the advantage of being a professional? Lot of expectations I don’t need . . . I like the images, to make images. And Jim, no story, no one’s going to ask what that beetle did next.” Myles paused. “Paul wasn’t altogether wrong, what he said about the beetle becoming a scarab in my photograph. I want it to. And the very first thing I do to make that happen is kill the story.”

“Wait, wait,” Jim objected, “let’s not forget my profession. Stories are my life, you know, how I make a living!”

“There you have it. You are a professional,” Myles teased, having lost some of his intense seriousness.

“But most people need a story to make meaning, to find meaning,” Jim said. “They do just the opposite of what you do; they make stories out of the fragments of their lives.”

“Yeah, they do, and the meaning they make is story-meaning.”

“What?” For the first time Jim sounded a little puzzled.

“And stories are always sad,” Myles whispered.

“Surely not always?”

“You can only keep a story from getting sad by cutting it off before the end.”





Ten



16 June





Myles took the turns down into Yialós in lazy swoops, the Vespa idling quietly under him. The fire in Turkey was still on, but it had died down or the wind had shifted, because now the sky was only faintly discolored. It was early; Myles was heading for the open bakery to get a loaf of black bread directly off the baker’s wooden paddle. When he broke the loaf for breakfast, back up at his little house, he liked it to steam, then a swipe of butter, then a dab of local jam or peppery pine honey. Almost every morning. Some pleasures had more stamina than others.

The flat streets back of the harbor, so busy later in the day, had that ghostly look busy streets get when the people are gone. At the paraléia he leaned the Vespa to the right, his eyes out over the harbor, looking at the tied-up boats, bright paint reflected in slick water. He never got tired of looking at the small boats, another pleasure with legs.

Yórgos, standing fishing on the deck of a blue boat, a not so bright boat, spotted Myles and waved, spastically, flashing a bright smile, then feigning a loss of balance. Myles liked Yórgos, a good kid apparently impervious to the daily crush of tourists. So he braked.

“Any fish?”

And Paul stood up from behind the cabin, where he’d been sitting out of sight. “I haven’t got any. Yórgos has a bunch. He’s teaching me how to work a hand line, but not the catching-fish part, it seems.”

“Aha.”

Paul looked as if he hadn’t been to bed, not so fresh as the morning. “Stick around, be good for a laugh.”

Yórgos allowed he had twelve in his bucket. “Small ones, but we eat small ones.”

Myles laughed, “I know. Sometimes it looks to me like you’re eating the bait.” Myles could see Yórgos hadn’t got the joke, and he felt relieved. It had been mean.

An awkwardness settled over them. Myles wasn’t happy to see Paul. He didn’t like scenes or people hurt for sport. But now Paul was all charm, mangling a little Greek to put Yórgos at ease. Myles stayed longer than he meant to—the black bread was cooling on a shelf in the window when he got to the bakery.

Standing at the counter, paying for the bread, Myles listened to the music filtering in from a back room. The sound was scratchy, a record maybe. But it was the real thing, Greek music, old time bazouki, the sound of Asia in it. Asia Minor, Myles thought, so close, not even there, really, but here.





Eleven



16 June





Anne looked at the box of salt fish by the door and shuddered. It smelled bad but it smelled, and she liked that, anyway. The air in the little store was thick with the smell of olives and coffee, spices in newspaper cones and braids of garlic hung on nails on both sides of the doorjamb. The simple density of the smells reminded her of the Pike Place Market of her childhood, where she’d gone with her family to buy spiced tea and dates and powdered vanilla by the ounce. This was nothing like shopping at Fred Meyer where she shopped at home, a store that hardly smelled at all.

She carried her basket around the pell-mell aisles, trying to find in the jumble the few things she’d forgotten when she’d bought for her room: something to juice oranges, a serrated knife, stick matches and mosquito coils. The store was busy and she waited with fitful impatience in the checkout line, a line of tourists buying snacks or suntan oil or fruit from the produce baskets that lined the curb outside the store. She listened to the girl at the register, her friendly if broken English punctuated by swift, clacking Greek.

The light shone thick in the store window, but only half-lit the dusky shop. Anne stood there, still, feeling the world rush around her. The couple in front of her, she realized, was upset; the man put down their basket on the counter and mouthed, “Okay!” They were looking out the window at three girls, beautiful gawky girls, who were smiling furiously at an animated man who was laughing, holding out a peach to the oldest of the three. She had taken a bite and a drop of juice had run down to her chin, which he was wiping away with a finger that somehow lingered suggestively near her throat.

“Larry! Do something!”

Larry called out, “Hey!” And, pushed a little, started for the door.

The girls looked startled, caught out, but turned toward their father obediently.

The man with the peach licked his finger and then half-turned to look, too. It was Paul, smiling still, as if he was the only one of them more than half alive. “Ciao,” he called out to the girls’ backs.

Anne stepped behind their mother. Over Larry’s shoulder she could just see the insolence in the look Paul turned on him.

“Daddy?” Paul asked, head cocked, then strode away.

“Miss?” Anne looked around, the family of girls was gone. The cashier took her basket with one hand, gesturing toward where Paul had gone with the other. “That man,” she said, “he is like honey.”

Out in the cobbled alley, Anne’s first impulse was to go now, after Paul, but that impulse was weak, and she turned toward the harbor. “So,” she thought, “he still has it.” She stared at the sack in her hand as if she couldn’t figure out how it had gotten there. She felt impaired, frozen. She needed to sit down in the sun.





Later, curled on her bed in her shaded room, she cried. She remembered deep as her bones that she was grown from a little girl who had often cried alone, nobody to tell.