White Vespa

Twenty-five



23 June





Anne arrived early, and early enough so that she had a choice of tables at Vapori. Soon, she knew, it would be crowded; the place did a big trade every day. She tried one chair, then another, finally settling on one where she could sit with her back to the wall. She put on her sunglasses then took them off again; she pulled her hair back and clipped it behind her ears. No hiding. She was determined to keep things under control. She thought she could.

Paul’s invitation to meet for coffee had caught her off guard. She’d still been trying to register the invitation in a general way when Paul suggested a time and place. “Yes?” He said, but it wasn’t a question; he’d already assumed she’d be there and moved on. He made everything seem easy. It was one of his gifts.

Anne already had an iced coffee, a frappé, on the table in front of her when Paul turned into the alley where she was sitting under one of the canvas umbrellas in thick, yellow light. When Anne saw him, sidling through the chairs to her table, she glanced at her watch, in mock irritation, but also just to look away.

When the waitress came to the table Paul ordered a frappé too, but me gála, and métrio.

“So you drink that stuff black?” he said.

“Skéto.”

“That’s tough. I’m being impressed right now.”

“Very funny,” Anne smiled, and it was a winning smile, something not habitual to her face. She couldn’t help herself.

They talked. The waitress brought Paul’s coffee. All hostility seemed to have been tucked away. In answer to Anne’s question, Paul ticked off the places he’d lived, mostly warm and cheap places, Portugal, Morocco, Mexico, Thailand, Bali, Sri Lanka and Goa.

“It’s been eight years of vacation,” he summed up. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “If you stay away long enough there’s no place to go back to, and I’ve been away longer than that.”

Anne said nothing.

“How’d you find me, anyway?”

“I didn’t find you. Just chance.” Anne lied badly. It wasn’t one of her gifts.

“But you didn’t seem very surprised to see me,” Paul said.

“I wasn’t. I’d already seen you a couple of times.”

Paul laughed easily. “I confess, I’d already seen you, too, but I was thinking you had found me. So I was just waiting to see what for. I’m still waiting, you know. If you came here looking for me, hey, I’m honored. It’s a long trip out here from—”

“Portland.”

“—from Portland.” Paul looked at her knowingly and nodded, as if he was encouraging her to tell all.

The waitress picked up the empties and Paul ordered a second frappé, Anne a gin straight up. It was Paul’s turn to consult his watch.

“11:00 a.m.,” he pronounced, “dangerous.”

“Got to keep myself inoculated. You know? I come in contact with heavy doses of the stuff every night.”

“Me too,” Paul responded brightly.

They talked. It had been a long time, so there was plenty to tell. Anne had to admit to Paul’s charms. He was more than handsome, supernaturally vivacious. He just seemed to be more alive than other people, life shown in his eyes, his lips, his very skin. Everything about him was mobile, animated.

“So where,” Paul asked at last, “is Mr. Powell?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know?”

“It didn’t last at all.” Anne said. “When I told him I’d been disinherited, he began to doubt the wisdom of having run off to Reno. Of course, the old man had told me I was disinherited way before that, but I hadn’t mentioned it. Eloping got me away from Bainbridge Island, from home, from the old bastard. I don’t regret it.”

“Glad to hear it.”





Sometime after noon Paul reminded Anne she’d tried to drown him when they were kids.

“Hardly.”

“No? Hey, I’m not holding a grudge. We were just kids back then, right?” Paul said. “Kids do some crazy shit.”

“Well, I don’t see how you could have drowned so close to shore. I wanted to humble you, maybe,” Anne conceded.

“Humble me? This is how I remember it. You convinced me to get out of our little outboard onto a sandy shoal—at low tide—saying you’d take a picture of me when the tide came up just enough so it looked like I was walking on water.”

“I took the picture, you saw it. It was a good one. You had a big golden grin on your face, pleased as punch to perform a miracle. You walked on water, just like Christ! And you got the proof. What’s to complain about?” Anne asked, a mocking edge on her voice.

“Yeah. Then you and your girlfriend . . . What was her name?”

“Rose. Actually Sea Rose, I think. That was some family . . .”

“Then you and Sea Rose just laughed as the tide came up fast, a real Puget Sound tide,” Paul said. “Kept asking me about those monster jellyfish. Then, then when it was up to my waist, you cut in close with the boat, setting up a big wake, laughing like you’d gone crazy.”

“Maybe I had. Dad thought so.”

“And then, in your sweetest voice . . .”

“Which was never that sweet.”

“You said, Bye, bye-bye, waved and just took off, left me there. I shouted myself hoarse, and the boat just kept getting smaller and smaller, and then it disappeared behind the point.” Paul pretended to pout.

“It must have been fifty yards to shore.”

“I couldn’t swim.”

“You didn’t have to,” Anne said, trying to sound exasperated.

“Thanks to Tea Rose, or whatever her name was, telling her mother.”

Anne had tears in her eyes from silent laughter. “That traitor. I never spoke to her again.”

“See!”

“It’s the happiest memory of my life, really.” Anne was laughing hysterically.

“You caught hell,” Paul said. “Your lie was so lame.”

“Yeah, yeah. But it was worth it, believe me. The look on your face when I said bye-bye was really too much. I laughed so hard I peed my pants.”

“There were jellyfish, those big ones that look like a raw egg, yellow yolk, and tentacles six feet long.”

“Poor Paul! Big bad tentacles.”

“Well, poor Paul has gotta go.” He was suddenly standing. “On me,” he added, leaving money enough and more tucked under his glass. “You’ll be seeing me around, Sis, can’t be helped.”

Anne looked at her hands, folded quietly in her lap. “We all remember a different story,” Paul had said, his manner just totally disarming, as if he was granting the differences to excuse her, because in his story, he was the victim. She shook her head. She hadn’t even challenged that. “Bullshit,” she said, and the waitress came over to her table, having heard something, and Anne ordered another gin.





Twenty-six



24 June





Myles fed the taverna cats the remains of the kalamária and a few chips while Jim finished the mezédhes. The food wasn’t wonderful, but the great plane trees over the tables in front of the taverna made it a pleasant place for lunch, easily the best in Livádhia, Tílos’ port town. Jim had said the town was nondescript and it was, nondescript but not objectionable either. A few small hotels and pensions suggested the island enjoyed a very modest tourist trade. The harbor opened wide and clear and clean, with a long expanse of sandy beach populated only by small boats, some pulled up on the sand, some riding at anchor. Livádhia had all the elements that made Greek island towns so pleasant, but here the mix felt flat. Myles hadn’t touched his cameras yet.

Jim gestured across the bay to a red track that ran along the hillside well above the water.

“That trail,” he said, “is worth walking. Goes to hell and gone and you can pick your way down to some absolutely private beaches, just small half moons of golden sand. How about it? A walk and a swim?”





The track ran wide as a road at first. Myles picked a carob pod from a tree and broke it, remembering, when he smelled it, how Anne had put her face into his hands to smell the carob that first night at Two Stories.

Soon enough the trail got narrow, and they went single file, Jim in front. The shrubs, it seemed, were beautiful but thorny, and Myles had many occasions to regret he’d worn sandals. But he was carrying his camera now, stopping often to take pictures of the shrubs and small trees, which, curiously, did not crowd one another, but kept their distance. Because of this they seemed somehow fully expressed, as if what was in the seed had had its say. Elegant organic forms.

Further on they stopped to look down on a small cove where two men floated in the water, face up.

“Some folks should wear suits,” Myles observed. The women, he saw, had pulled out like seals on the beach and looked to have been toasted more or less the same color as the sand.

“Well, maybe not that private.” Jim laughed. “Germans, most likely. Anyway, some folks ain’t happy missing any chance for a cancer.”

“Now, don’t go getting dyspeptic on me, Jim. Or prudish. That would be too American. Besides, that’s my job.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“I hide it well,” Myles said.





They were walking again. At the next cove there was something black rolling in the light surf. Sitting on a high rock, Myles snapped on his longest lens and brought it into focus. It was a body, a goat, its four legs splayed wide.

“Want to see?”

Jim took the camera. “You think it was a fall? Or death by drowning?”

A wave washed in and the legs, which had been pointing out to sea, turned as the body rolled in the surf. For a moment they pointed up the hill, then the wave ebbed away and the body rolled back.

“Well, I’d think a fall,” Myles said. “Nature isn’t quite as sure-footed as these crazy-ass goats seem to think. Surprised they’re not all dead. Have you watched them? They jump and then look for a place to land.”

They walked on, the path following the contours of the hillsides, a lazy meander through rough country. Far out from town the trail turned sharply left and standing on the turn they gazed down on a thin peninsula that ran on out into the Aegean. Down below it narrowed to a scant few yards before widening out and going on. At the neck, two sandy beaches were situated back to back, only a low bushy ridge between them. Waves were breaking on both beaches, rolling in from right and left. Myles got out his camera and maneuvered a particularly well-expressed bush into the left of frame.

“For The Lesser Dodecanese,” he said shyly, “just the kind of postcard shot my publisher’s going to want lots of. And look, the sands are trackless, wave-swept !” He laughed, but he took the picture.

“When you’re done,” Jim asked archly, “will I be allowed to swim there? Make tracks and all?”

“If you’re good. God, it does look like a wonderful place to swim. A beach apiece.”

Myles started down the faint path, but Jim was soon ahead of him. Cairns marked the path down, some quite large, others just a few small stacked stones. Myles took close-ups of several. Through the camera they looked monumental, and though the stones had probably been put up haphazardly, like all standing stones they now had an inevitable look. Jim watched Myles indulgently, liked to see the sure way he moved when he was immersed in his work.

“Not,” Jim said coyly, “for The Lesser Dodecanese?”

“Ah, no, probably not.”





Twenty-seven



24 June





“Been hiding, love?” Pru said, smiling to see Paul start at her voice.

He turned in the door to his rooms, which he’d just pushed open. He peered at her, at her face a little blue where she stood in the shadow across the alley. Then he made a show of looking around. “What, no Mary?” He whispered, smiling. “You,” he said, “can come in.”

“What makes you think I want to?” Pru asked.

“Not want a little more?” Paul stepped into the dark of his doorway, then put his hand out into the alley where it caught the light and waved Pru through the door, whispering still, “Shh . . . shh . . . what if Mary should hear you?”

Pru wobbled walking in, saying, “She won’t. She’s out cold.”

“Put her down, did you?” Paul laughed. He ran his fingers up her thin dress between her legs and she jumped a little. “Easy,” he said, guiding her hand to his loose slacks. “Paul has what you want.”

She leaned into him, humming, lifted her hands to tug at his belt.

“Think about Mary,” Paul said. “Fat Mary. Squirming on her bed, all alone.”

“What?” Pru looked up.

“Doesn’t it make you hot, betraying her?” Paul licked his lips. “I think it does.”

“You’re mean,” Pru said, a little put off, a little amused.

“I think fat Mary’s been getting her kicks knowing she’s been keeping you from getting yours.” Paul leaned back in, his tongue rippling over Pru’s ear, one hand brushing across her taut breasts while the other again glided up between her thighs. “Don’t you?”

“Maybe,” Pru gasped, as Paul pressed her back against the door. “Oh,” she said, “oh, oh, oh.”

“My sister was a Mary. Always clopping in on her horse just when I got a girl’s pants down. She had a genius for turning up at the wrong time.” Paul spoke quietly in Pru’s ear, conversationally, his hands slippery now.

Pru panted, “What?”

“I called her Annie-interrupt-us. She liked butting in. Like Mary likes it.”

“But they’re not here now,” Pru said, pulling Paul toward the bed that shone white in the unlit room.

“Let’s pretend they are,” Paul said, “Let’s pretend we’re forcing them to watch.”





Pru stared at the dark ceiling, a little embarrassed now that she had sobered up. She considered getting dressed. Paul was sitting at the table, peeling an orange. He’d turned a lamp on. She had a feeling that if she didn’t get dressed soon he would ask her to, and she didn’t want that, but she didn’t feel quite ready to stand up yet.

“I saw you with your sister yesterday,” Pru said. “Looked like you were chatting her up.”

“Oh, I was. She is my sister.”

“I know, Annie-interrupt-us. Very funny.”

“But true. My bitch of a mom wouldn’t hire a babysitter. She said I should do it, that I would do it. And my parents, they were never home. So I was stuck there while little Annie did whatever she damn well pleased. And if I could talk a girl into dropping by, Anne just followed us around like a puppy. Whatcha doin? Or she’d be gone for hours and then bingo, Whatcha doin?”

Pru thought she could hear the boy Paul in his voice now, petulant, a whiner, which surprised her. She pulled a sheet around her and started looking for her clothes.

Paul lifted a segment of orange to his mouth, watching Pru. “I guess it’s never too late for modesty,” he said. Pru glanced up, suddenly scared what Paul might say next. “Don’t forget to wake Mary up. Accidentally, you know,” Paul had noticed Pru’s sudden haste. “Just let her get a whiff of you. You won’t have to say a word,” Paul added, as if what he was saying was sage advice.





Paul gave Pru his best friendly wave when she let herself out, but he didn’t get up, not even when she said she’d be leaving Sými in the morning. He peeled a second orange, thinking. Not about Pru, but about Anne. He didn’t think she was here to make his life on Sými better. She hadn’t made his life on Bainbridge better, that was sure. His mother. Her face pasty with anger. Red-faced anger was for people with blood in their veins. And Anne was always telling tales. Sometimes they were true, but why tell them? And they weren’t always true. Anne’d had a way of getting even, by getting Paul switched.

One time she’d called their mother to his door in the middle of the night by acting scared, Something’s wrong with Paul, come quick, when the thing that was wrong with him was that he was frustrated. Their mother had sent Anne back to bed but marched Paul into the kitchen, where, when he denied what he’d been doing, she’d slashed at his ass with a thin, metal spatula. For lying. What had she expected him to say? But their parents were crazy on the subject of lying. And his mother wasn’t the kind to delegate a paddling to their father. Paul still remembered the white flashes of pain, and his mother’s spiteful determination to make it hurt. Anne, he thought, had no doubt heard his screaming.





Twenty-eight



25 June





“Guidebook says it was abandoned in the 1950s.”

“Just like that, agreed and left?” Myles asked.

They had stopped in the shade on the road up to Mikró Horió. Myles was setting up for a long shot. The town was across from them, impressive and empty. One building, plastered and whitewashed and trimmed out in green, had been restored as a taverna or ouzerí and recalled what the town must have been. Another small building above it was under renovation and the church had been maintained, but except for that the town was coming down, slowly turning to rubble. Nothing moved.

“Still life,” Jim observed wryly, when he heard the shutter click.

“People are always leaving,” Myles said somberly. “But we don’t remark their absence. They get replaced. The bustle distracts us.”

Myles fell silent, thinking about Max. He twisted off the long lens and snapped the wide angle into place.

“And?” Jim asked.

“And we know it anyway and want it acknowledged,” Myles said. “So we like places like this, beautiful abandoned places. Doesn’t have to be our abandoned place to stand for the lost homeland or just the lost home.”

“Nóstos. Nostalgia.”

“Old photographs get us to the same place.” Myles glanced at Jim, nodding. “The world in the photograph is always a lost world. The place might be the same but the people are always gone or changed. Doesn’t have to be a very old photograph if the people in it are people we knew. But if it is an old photograph, a very old photograph, it doesn’t matter who the people are, because we know they’re all dead.”

They walked on up the dirt track, talking. The ghost town, which had looked small on the hillside, seemed to get bigger as they walked into it. By the time they got to the swept terrace of the padlocked white taverna, what had been Mikró Horió was all around them. A few of the alleys were clear but most were deep in rubble, in plaster and stone that had fallen from the walls. As they walked they occasionally heard a clatter; the town was not uninhabited, after all, but home to a herd of ravening goats, there to help the elements in bringing the place down.

Myles worked. A fig tree growing straight from the heart of a small cottage. The open mouths of terrace ovens. Along one arcing alley he shot a whole row of ovens, one over the shoulder of the next, a long, curving tribute to bread making.

Some of the houses still had roofs, or a part of a roof, and the interiors swam in blue, dust-laden light. There were carved cupboards and divans, hearths over free-form fireplaces, and small niches carved from the walls. Some of these places had once looked a great deal like Myles’ house on Sými, but they’d been let go and found beautiful ruin. Myles took his photographs.

“Just this much loss,” he said, “and no more.”

Jim looked at him quizzically from where he leaned against a wall, watching.

“Until we turn our backs and go,” Myles whispered.

When the light started to fade they walked on, away from Livádhia, toward Megálo Horió on the other side of the island, where the human distraction was in full swing. Walking into town they watched bright green bee catchers flash over the orchards in the last of the sun and then the owls and bats come out for night hunting.

Megálo Horió crouched under the ancient citadel and seemed alive enough. Why this town to live and Mikró Horió to die? They didn’t know. At the recommended taverna they ate well, grilled eggplant and stuffed cuttlefish, a plate of red peppers, a slab of féta, two cans of retsina from the barrel. Jim pointed three times, each time in the direction of a not too distant beach.

“The place is surrounded,” Myles said.

“It is an island.”

“Aha.”

“Says here,” Jim was looking down at a guidebook, “that over at that beach,” he pointed over his shoulder, “at Ayios Andónios, you can see the bones of some very dead Greeks,” Myles raised his eyebrows, “buried Pompeii-style in the last eruption of the volcano on Níssyros.”

“Hmm,” Myles said, occupied with the cuttlefish.

“Doesn’t actually say the last eruption,” Jim said, looking up from the book.

“But some eruption?”

“Yes, and buried alive.”

“So,” Myles said, “the trouble that started over there landed here?”

“Exactly.”

“As trouble often does?”

“Yes,” Jim laughed, “sort of.”





Twenty-nine



June 25





Anne sat on her barstool like she’d done it too much and she had. Even drunk she perched there sure as a bird, a cormorant, she thought, with disgust. It was after hours and the doors were locked, but the help who still wanted to drink were doing so in the upstairs bar. There was a bottle of gin open in front of Anne and she’d had a few. Everybody’d had a few and a false hilarity rippled through them and a little malice, too. Anne wanted to get away from all their sticky chumminess, but she leaned forward and bent the bottle over her small glass and poured another.

Lisa pressed close to her and was muttering something about men, what bastards they were, and Anne said, “Yeah,” the way she did when she didn’t want to talk all that much.

“All of’em. Oughta get—”

“Get?” Anne prompted.

“—what’s comin’ to ’em.”

Anne turned her head toward Lisa, and it was like turning her face to an over-heated stove. “They don’t often,” she said.

“But they oughta.”

“I know one really oughta,” Anne said.

“I know way more’n one,” Lisa slurred, wagging her raw face side to side, as if she was contemplating big numbers.

Anne stood up and her body waved unnaturally over her feet. Lisa reached over to steady her and Anne grinned.

“Tell you what. I’ll let you know,” she blurted out, “when the slaughter begins.”

Lisa considered, then said, “Do that.”

The bathroom reeked but Anne went in anyway. The sallow light ran on the walls. Anne splashed her eyes with water and pulled her sleeve across her face to dry it off. She didn’t much like the person she saw looking back in the mirror. The glittering hardness. She looked untouchable even to herself, though she knew she’d been touched too much before she’d ever had any say in the matter. But maybe it wasn’t true she couldn’t be touched. Maybe she could. Maybe she was scared she could.

“F*ck it,” she muttered, looking down at her shaking hands. When she looked up again she just looked tired, and she stared hard at her face in the mirror and said low but fervently, “What am I here for?”





Out in the bar nothing had changed, but she left her stool empty, lifted her hand by way of good-bye, and slipped out the door.

A couple of clouds, bright in the moonlight, sailed over Sými town, and she walked down, under their prows, down the great steps, wanting nothing now but her bed and dreamless sleep.





Thirty



26 June





The ferry from Tílos put in at Níssyros on the return to Sými. Jim said the main town, Mandhráki, was worth seeing, built around a shared garden, the alleys serpentine and houses impassive as poker players.

“But you can’t see it from the harbor?” Myles asked.

“No.”

“Well, what you can see from here looks dismal enough.”

“Yes,” Jim said.

The ferry pulled away from the pier and ran close-in to shore as far as Páli, a safe harbor, mostly for yachts, they thought, as standing by the rail all they could see was a thicket of shining masts over the breakwater.

The shore itself had been scarred by a road and worse, a plague of dumping.

“Worth a visit?”

“It is, Myles. Not this bit, but the rest of the island.”

“All the parts you can’t see?” Myles smiled.

“That’s right! Maybe they should put up a sign, All Charms Hidden.” Jim held up an imaginary sign. “But there’s a very impressive crater at the heart of the island and two wonderful hill towns strung out along the lip of the caldera.”

The ferry ran alongside an outsize hotel development, seemingly abandoned before it had even been finished. Myles teased Jim, enjoying it. “Mmm. Also charming.”

“For the best, really. That place would have ruined the island,” Jim said defensively.

“How hard would that have been, what with the job so well begun?” Myles snickered. “Just kidding. I believe you; I’ll come back, take my camera for a walk all over the island.”

“Walking your camera?”

“That’s right. So much less bother than a dog,” Myles said. “Never wants to go the other way or stop to piss on a bush.”





They dozed. Myles woke first and from the rail he could see Sými in the distance. The sea was glossy smooth. The ferry split the water and left a great white wake where it had been. Myles neatly peeled two apples with the long blade of his traveling knife and then nudged Jim awake. He sliced up the small smoked gouda he’d found in a market on Tílos and opened a packet of dense digestive biscuits. He bought two bottles of mineral water at the bar. They ate off a sheet of newspaper, reflectively, watching the gulls working the wake for a snack of their own.

“Were you ever married, Myles?”

“Yes. Once. It was years ago. How about you?”

“Well, no. I’m gay. I thought you knew,” Jim said carefully.

“Ah, no. Hadn’t thought about it.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Of course not. Committed relationship?” Myles asked.

“Several!” Jim smiled brightly.

“Not now?”

“No.”

“Haven’t given up?”

“No.” Jim let the moment elongate. “What happened?”

“When?”

“When you were married.”

“We ended farther apart than we started,” Myles said.

Jim said nothing.

Myles shuddered. “There was a child. A boy. Max. We lost him,” he said, and when he spoke again his voice was shaky. “He was only fifteen. Just disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Jim asked. “As in kidnapped?”

“I don’t know. Ran away, more likely. He didn’t seem such an unhappy kid, but distant, very distant, right from the beginning.”

“Myles, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. But my wife and I, well, we never recovered from that. We didn’t fight. We hadn’t fought with Max, either. But all the glue came unstuck,” Myles concluded.

“That’s very hard. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s a grief, but it’s my grief. Everybody’s got one or more of his own. Plenty to carry without carrying anybody else’s load.”

They were silent for a long time. Jim was looking for words.

“I know you don’t want to burden me,” Jim said, “I appreciate that. But it’d be a hard world if we didn’t shoulder our griefs together.” He paused. “Somehow the burdens are common. We lift as much as we can, everyone as much as his heart can carry and no more. Whose burden it is almost doesn’t matter.”

Standing there, Myles felt his losses again, felt Max and Bryn, Bryn as gone as the boy, in the end, leaving and not looking back. Because for Bryn he recalled the lost world, he knew that. His face, his voice, too painful to see, to hear. Myles felt the exhaustion of grief creeping back, and he pushed it away. “Maybe,” he said at last, “maybe I’m less concerned about burdening you than about burdening me. Forgive me. Telling the tale hurts. Sometimes I don’t want to.”