White Vespa

Nineteen



21 June





They sat face to face over a small table, a half-eaten lunch between them. Myles had eaten his half; Anne had watched him eat it. They were drinking red wine, a dark red wine called mávro, “black,” by the Greeks. Myles kept remembering Anne on the divan, and even with the live woman sitting at the table across from him, he was distracted by the image of the woman he expected to appear in the developing tray. He wanted to be alone, to study that woman alone. When they’d finished with the camera they’d almost run from it, uneasy, as if they’d found themselves suddenly standing too close together. The ride down on the Vespa, Anne with her arms around his waist, her head turned sideways and pressed to his back, hadn’t helped any.

So they sat quietly under the arbor at the point, Myles looking out toward Nímos, Anne toward Sými town. The light dappled the green table top, but the light on the water was all glare. There was too much of it. Myles was fighting down the impulse to confess, to disclose too much too soon. He wanted to see those photographs. Anne’s eyes were down; she was toying with the food on her plate.

“When do I get to see the photos?”

“Soon,” Myles said. “Whenever you want; I’ll develop them tonight or maybe tomorrow morning.”

Paul came into view, strolling, gesturing elegantly as he talked. He was talking to a woman Myles didn’t think he’d seen around town. They were both in swimsuits and must have come from one of the inlets beyond the point favored by those who liked to sunbathe nude. Myles raised one hand, and Paul saw him and smiled broadly, heading for their table, but he could hardly have avoided them, as the track ran right under the taverna’s shady arbor.

“Eh, Paul, working on that tan?”

“Myles! This is Pru, a new friend.”

They nodded. Myles turned to introduce Anne, but before he could say anything he saw that they’d met.

“Anne, been a long time,” Paul said.

“I guess so.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Working at a bar,” Anne said.

“I mean, what are you doing on Sými?”

“Working at a bar.”

“Yeah, and? I see you’ve met Myles,” Paul observed.

“Yeah, I met him at the bar.”

“Which bar?”

“Two Stories,” Anne said.

Another woman straggled up to the table, looking thirsty.

Paul said, “Pru’s friend; she’s a Mary. This is Myles Twomey and Anne Powell.”

“Could I get a drink?” Mary asked.

“Sure!”

“So you two know each other from before, from before Sými?” Myles asked.

“Oh yeah, way before,” Paul said.

Anne turned woodenly to Myles. “He’s my brother, my big brother.”

“Aha.”

“How about that?” Mary said, sitting down sullenly at the adjoining table and looking away. Pru sat down with her, and they started waving, hoping to get the waiter’s attention.

It was cool in the shade of the arbor, but even in the shade the light was intense. Myles was looking at Paul’s face; he didn’t look very surprised. He looked over at Anne; she didn’t look very surprised, either. He wondered about that. And no sibling hugs.

So then they were five people, sitting in the dappled light of a grape arbor.

“You gonna eat that?” Paul asked, gesturing toward Anne’s half of the lunch. Seeing the shook heads he started in on the leftover mezédhes, dabbing at the tzadzíki and the garlic sauce with rough-cut bread.

“What’s this called?” he asked, pointing to the garlic.

“Skordhaliá,” Myles said.

“It’s good. And this?” he said, twirling a fork in the wild greens.

“Hórta.”

“Not so good.”

“One of those things you learn to like,” Myles said.

“I’ll work on it.”

“Good to have some kind of work to do,” Anne put in.

“Hmm. I’m good at this; it’s tasting better already. Good bitter edge,” he smiled.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying my lunch,” Anne said.

“What are you doing here again?” Paul asked.

“Working. Some of us have to work.”

“And some of us don’t,” Paul said gleefully.

Myles raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t say anything.





Twenty



21 June





Myles wondered if she’d consider the photos a success. From the contact sheets he’d picked eighteen to print, and of those he’d blown-up seven. He’d taped the seven to the wall and was looking at them, one at a time. Myles couldn’t even be sure what he thought of them. It was late, and the light shone starkly from the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling.

He poured a half glass of oúzo from the bottle he kept cold in the freezer. From Lésvos, a very acrid oúzo. He poured a little bottled water from the fridge into the oúzo and watched it turn milky, a smoky blue. Then he crossed back to the photos. If she wanted to be flattered, she wasn’t going to like them. But maybe she didn’t want that. The photographs were beautiful, but she wasn’t beautiful in them. The beauty was austere and a little terrible, and it had more to do with composition than with her face or the suave lines of her body in motion. But the beauty, such as it was, was hers, she’d made it, composed herself in the cramped space of the divan at only the slightest of suggestions from him.

It was very late and Myles was tired. Looking at the photos, he thought he smelled her, Anne, and he looked around, but he was alone. He hadn’t noticed that she had any particular scent but looking at the photographs now he smelled something, or remembered something, her scent. Sweet but also bitter, burnt vanilla, maybe. Myles thought it must be time to put out the light, but he looked a last time at the most haunted of the photos. He’d stood on top of a chair and shot straight down on her, the walls over the built-in divan provided the perspective, a sense of depth, as if, looking at the photo, you were looking into a hole. Anne was curled into the too-small rectangle of the divan, all in profile, eyes closed. Everywhere you could see her bones, the shape of the skeleton beneath her fine skin. More than anything it reminded Myles of other photographs he had seen, photographs of prehistoric pit burials.

He turned off the light, finding his way to the narrow bed where he slept in the dark. He set his drink on the floor, slipped out of his jeans, and lay down on his back. Propping his head up on a pillow, he retrieved the oúzo. After awhile, he found he didn’t need the light to see the photos. In the dark he read Anne’s face, her body. Everything about her image said, Reach me, I am here. But it also said, You can’t reach me, I can’t be reached. What the images unveiled was the veil itself.

Myles knew he would try to reach behind it. He hadn’t resisted, and now he couldn’t resist. He went on drinking in the dark until he could feel the world rushing round him.





In the morning, Myles pulled another set of prints, for Anne. In the red light of his makeshift darkroom he looked at the photographs again, picking them one at a time out of the developing trays and hanging them to dry.

The darkroom was silent, but outside, it seemed a long way off, he could hear the insects tuning up, an occasional birdcall. For a moment, he was frightened of showing Anne the photographs, and frightened by the images themselves, by his attraction to them.

He lifted the green apron over his head and hung it on a square nail someone had hammered into the back of the door a long time ago. He didn’t go out, but sat down on a rush chair, thinking. His pulse pounded in his ears. It struck him as suspicious that he’d been the one to suggest the cramped quarters of the divan, that the contortion of the photos sprang directly from that choice. Push yourself into the angles of the couch, he’d said. And she had. The power of the images started there, in the contortion of Anne’s body pressed into the walls, the containment. But he’d also said, Show me, and she had. Were the images hers or his, or was there already a kind of union there, both of them on view in the captured light?





He heard the door clatter in the other room and called out, “Anne, I’m in here,” but when he opened the door of the darkroom it wasn’t Anne. Jim, standing in front of the photos where they were taped to the wall, cast Myles a quizzical glance.

“Doing portraits now?”

“Just these.”

“Special order?” Jim asked.

Myles didn’t respond, but he could see that Jim wasn’t mocking, was just curious.

“And this,” Jim gestured toward the photos, “is Anne?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like she might be long if you ever let her stretch out.”

Myles laughed.

Jim looked at the photos again. “And I think maybe you should buy her lunch sometime. Kinda thin.”

“Yes, very thin, too thin to be healthy,” Myles said, “and I already bought her lunch, yesterday. Problem is, she didn’t eat it.”

“Sometimes force-feeding is required.”

“Aha.”





They sat outside, in the deep shade, light bounding around them, a large round of figs on a plate between them. Occasionally, while they talked, one of them bent forward and tore a fig from the vine they were threaded on. When they got thirsty, they poured mineral water from a green bottle into Myles’ crazed mugs. At some point, they’d become friends. They talked without constraint. The silences were easy.

“Look, Myles, I’m thinking of going over to Tílos.”

Myles considered the news.

“Have you been?” Jim asked.

“To Tílos?” He looked over at Jim. “No.”

“Well, want to go? It’s a lesser Dodecanese. Some very beautiful places on the island, just made for a camera,” Jim said.

“When are you going?”

“The best connections are tomorrow.”





Twenty-one



22 June





Anne slept late and then stayed in bed a long time after she was awake. She ran her hands over her torso, feeling her ribs. She liked the way her narrow fingers fit in the grooves between them. She felt light inside, a glow under the skin of her taut abdomen. That would be hunger. When she got up, she told herself, she’d eat, oranges maybe.

She rolled over and pressed herself into the bed, writhing quietly. She wondered about her face, how it looked now, how it would look in the photographs Myles had taken the day before. The thought made her feel uneasy, exposed. The whole session had gone out of control from the very beginning. She hadn’t been what she’d intended, hadn’t shown what she’d intended, had no idea what she had shown.

She rolled over again; her feet slapped the floor and she sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, hands in her hair, kneading her scalp with her long fingers. Then she remembered Paul.

“Shit,” she said softly.





She twisted the juice from four oranges into a glass, filling it to the rim. She drank off an inch and then refilled it from a bottle of vodka she kept in the refrigerator. She stirred it with her finger and then washed her hands.

She wanted to be alone. Outside, the sun was hot, very hot. She put on her bathing suit, a serious, one-piece black suit made for actual swimming. She’d decided she’d swim first, think things over after. Think about Myles and about Paul. But as she walked by the boatworks and on around the point where they’d met Paul yesterday, she found she couldn’t help but think about him now. Sými was small. You were going to bump into people; then you’d remember them where you had seen them, and they would rattle in your head when you didn’t want them to. As long as you stayed out of things, you could keep clear, but then, that’s all you could do. And it wouldn’t be possible to live that way on Sými. Here, you would have to act, or be acted on, and she’d come to act.





The first cove was crowded with day-trippers but Anne had had enough of walking. She picked her way through their pink flesh to the water’s edge, kicked off her sandals, and waded right in. She despised people who waded in slowly, who refused to take a plunge. As soon as the water was deep enough, she dove, swimming strongly under the surface of the water for a long time. The surface shone like the broken shards of a bright mirror, and she swam under it, out of sight, until she was well beyond the farthest swimmer. By then, her chest was tight, but she forced herself to glide up through the surface, no commotion. She rolled onto her back and took deep, even breaths, her eyes cast up into the simple blue of a clear sky.

She watched the seabirds riding the wind, now close and low, now drowning in deep sky. Anne let herself go, just floating, felt the small waves rippling through her. The birds, she thought, were in flight but not fleeing. For all their ease and poise, they were hunting.

She held her arms out like pale, thin wings. She tried on a hunting expression, severe eyes under drawn brow, head cocked a little. Then she began to swim, her legs scissoring through the sheer sea water. She lifted an arm up out of the sea then plunged it back in again and she was gone, diving deep.





Twenty-two



22 June





Paul had been surprised by Anne’s open hostility. That wasn’t fun. He didn’t like other people’s hostility unless he was trying to provoke it. He lay flat on his back, doing sit-ups in sets of ten. He was between sets and breathing hard. The dust stuck to him. He started in, ten more. The hard floor hurt and he resented the dust, and he thought again about the gym on the paraléia. Paul hated gyms; the smell reminded him of grade school locker rooms and the rough kids he hadn’t always been able to charm. They’d been too stupid to charm, the kind of kids who burnt circles on the inside of their arms with cigarettes just to show how tough, how insensitive they could be. As if he’d doubted it. But he thought maybe he’d have to put up with the smell if he wanted to stay the slow decline of his body. Life was going to be less fun when he wasn’t so handsome, he knew it. At least, he thought, he’d still have the money.

He heard a rap at the door and called out, “It’s open.”

Yórgos pushed through the door but hesitated on the threshold.

“It’s all right, okay, we’re all boys here.”

Yórgos stumbled coming in and red-faced set the two plastic bags on the table. He waited while Paul searched the shorts he’d dropped at the foot of the bed when he’d gotten in. Without Pru. He’d ditched Pru and “a Mary” when it became obvious they were going to want to talk. They shouldn’t have wanted that; they weren’t good at it.

He found the money and gave Yórgos too much, not asking how much the watermelon and half dozen oranges had actually cost.

“’Phristó,” Yórgos said, backing toward the door.

“Wait a minute.” Paul shook a few cigarettes from an open pack and dropped them in Yórgos’s outstretched hand.

“Careful,” he said, “they’re habit forming.” Paul didn’t think Yórgos understood, but it amused him to deliver the warning.

Still, Yórgos nodded as if he did understand and said, See you, as he sprinted through the door, leaving it open behind him.

Paul shut the door and started in on push-ups. Even in sets of ten he did them badly, too quickly and reaching for the floor with his chin. He thought he’d try to win Anne over, as a little experiment, a test. He could understand her resentment. When their father had died, he’d got all the money. She’d got none. She hadn’t come to the funeral; she hadn’t even inquired about the terms of the will. But he knew their father had left her nothing but an old dictionary with a bookmark tucked into the pages, to show where he’d underlined one word, liar. When his father’s dismayed lawyer had disclosed the bequest, Paul laughed. Thinking about it now, he shook his head. Such are the ironies, he thought, snorting. What had their parents expected? That they wouldn’t lie to avoid the switch? As far as he could see, they had run the house as a virtual school for liars. He’d graduated. Anne had flunked out.





Twenty-three



16 Sept.





Walking the road from Nikiá, walking alone as I’ve grown used to, I was thinking about silence, not the silence of landscape but the silence of the human mouth kept shut. I was thinking about the religious, how some take vows of silence, and what it might get them. I thought of the wonderful expressiveness of a mute girl, a girl Max befriended when he was only eight or nine, how her lips seemed always about to speak or seemed as if they had just spoken and what she was going to say or had just said was all illuminated by her lips, how they would have shaped the words if there had been words to shape.

But maybe that was an adult’s response; I saw it in other adults, other parents come to collect their kids at school, the way they hung on that girl’s lips. Max, I think, did not, nor the other kids who called her friend; they looked in her eyes, and something implicit passed back and forth between them. Maybe silence was still a familiar to them, and all that could be said with the eyes was quite enough.

Now, back, pencil scratching on these white sheets, I know it is Max’s own silence that haunts me, that my mind ran to the girl to keep free of Max. It was Max who took a vow of silence, a provisional vow in the withdrawn distance of his childhood, and final vows when he left, disappeared, and slowly all hope of his silence ever being broken drained away.

I imagine him fallen under a sea of glass, a face I can see there, still a boy’s face, fifteen or younger, but a face grown inward, away, still sinking away. When he was there, he was there every day, his slow retreat from us hardly remarked. Now it seems I failed to look, that I was reading the newspaper or worrying about work or what needed doing in the yard. Still, I don’t think I was abnormally disengaged, not more disengaged than the neighbors with their kids. I think we’re all of us turning away from other people, even our sons, even our lovers, because we just can’t stand it, because if we do more than peek we are simply overwhelmed. I almost wrote, by the tragedy of it, but maybe just by the simple marvel of it, the unseen marvel of another life. Maybe the inability to look is itself the tragedy of it.





Twenty-four



22 June





Myles expected Anne all day, but when it started to get dark he stopped expecting her. She’d be at Two Stories. It had been very hot and dry and during the day he’d carried water to the plants in the yard, starting with the pots of jasmine. Now that it was dark the smell of the jasmine was everywhere in the house, loud. He’d packed a canvas satchel and the Nikon in his leather pack; he’d agreed to join Jim on an excursion to Tílos. It would help him maintain his cover, he’d joked, and, he hadn’t said, give him a few days away from Sými, away from Anne. Maybe, he thought, he could keep clear of her after all.





He sat alone in the dark, with only the light of a small candle in a storm chimney on the table in front of him. It was pleasant, after the heat of the day, to sit in the dark with a breeze passing through the black windows and doors. He ate the cheese and the fruit, things that wouldn’t keep, and a few hard rusks from the bakery. There were two half bottles of wine and he drank both, the retsina with the food and then the red, slowly, after. It was a very practical meal, very simple, satisfying. When the wine was gone he measured out the powdered coffee and sugar and standing in front of the blue flame of the gas ring he made Greek coffee, all by candlelight, and he got it just right again. He thought it was time they made an honorary Greek of him. After he drank it he wished he had someone to read the grounds, an old Greek witch, or a young one, but he was alone in the house.

He turned on the light. The manila envelope he’d prepared for Anne was on the table, and he opened it. He pushed the coffee cup away and spread the seven photos out on the table in front of him. He’d been sure Anne would come to get them, but now he’d have to take them to her at Two Stories, to get them to her before he left in the morning.

Looking at the images he noticed there was a little too much of Anne’s upper lip; it seemed the lip of a somewhat wider mouth, and in every one of the photographs it made her mouth look soft and hungry. The wide-set eyes had an inward look, pooled the light deep down, and were set under ferocious, arched eyebrows. The face was Anne’s all right, but it wasn’t the face she showed the world. It was as if her features had been imperceptibly rearranged, and the aggregate of small changes made all the difference. Again, Myles thought he smelled something sweet but burnt, acrid, too.

He put his hands in his hair and took a deep breath, and the room smelled of jasmine again. But he was spooked; he gathered up the prints and put them in the envelope and bent the clasp shut. He stood up, stiffly, retrieved the key to the Vespa out of a bowl on the counter and walked out the door.

The Vespa had yellow-tinted glass in the headlight and cast a golden cone into the thick blue night as he coasted through the curves into town. Around the harbor, he rode quietly under the streetlights, and then throttled up for the sweeping turns out of Yialós, up to Chorió. He parked as close as he could get to the Kalí Stráta and walked the last bit to Two Stories, envelope in hand. The thin envelope felt unaccountably heavy.

Nothing can ever be undone, Myles knew that, but he also knew most of the time we act forgetful of that fact. Handing over the envelope, he felt, would be irrevocable. When Anne looked at the photographs, things would be different. But he knew he was going to give them to her; there never had been any doubt about that.

He walked through the open door under the hand-painted Two Stories sign and took the stairs down. Anne was serving drinks to a table of drunks near the wall. Myles couldn’t hear what was being said but he could tell it wasn’t pretty, that masculine leer swept around the table from face to face. Anne put the drinks down on the table one by one, as if from a great distance. She treated the drinkers with a weary scorn, saying nothing, as if whatever had been said was comment enough on the lot of them. Myles felt a sudden and unreasonable pride in her.

“Got some unpleasant customers, I see.”

“Hi Myles.” She smiled an easy smile. Myles held out the envelope and Anne took it, holding it out in front of her, judging its weight. “A lot of them must have been out of focus!”

“I only printed seven. The most expressive seven,” Myles said.

“Only seven?”

“You’ll find contact sheets in there, too. I’ll print up any shot you want to see.”

“Okay. Hey, thanks,” Anne said. “Should I look now? Maybe not? Probably better to look when there’s more light and quiet.”

“Probably.”

“I gotta work,” she said, leaning close and kissing him lightly, but slowly, on the lips. “Okay?”

“More than okay,” Myles whispered. As she pulled away, he caught her scent; it had been memory, not hallucination, that had overtaken his senses before.

Myles watched her going away, a walk so confident he could hardly believe she was the woman in the photographs. Then she was outside, on the terrace, picking up empty glasses and taking orders. Belatedly, Myles recognized the face turned toward him at the table by the door as Paul’s, a knowing but tolerant smile flickering over it.

Myles nodded but he didn’t go over, and Paul turned his head back toward the terrace and the town lights beyond. Myles was surprised to see Paul at Two Stories, but not so interested that he wanted an explanation.

When Anne came back to the bar he told her about the trip to Tílos. He’d be up to see her, he said, as soon as he was back on the island. But for now, he needed to sleep.

“Wait a minute. I’ll walk you out.”

Myles watched her deliver a tray of drinks then swing back to the bar. She said something to the bartender and gestured toward the stairs.





“Are you on foot?”

“Not tonight. The Vespa’s in an alley down there,” he said, pointing.

They walked down, the shining flagstones under their feet. In the dark of the alley Myles kissed her, pulling a little on her soft upper lip with his. Anne peered into his eyes, touched his beard with the fingers of her right hand, and whispered goodnight. Then she was gone. For a minute, at least, Myles felt young.

Straddling the Vespa he backed it away from the wall and turned it around. Still warm, it came to life on the first kick, echoing in the alley. Then Myles was gone, too.