—
The sea had gone dark; the cannons inset into the plastered wall of the restaurant pointed out toward a void that the fishing boats and their lights didn’t humanize. Waves dissolved violently on the rocks below. The Aegean was a dangerous and untrustworthy sea, swept by sudden malevolent moods. It was nothing like the sea of tourist legend. Hundreds of people drowned here every decade, and the sand at its bottom was nothing more than a graveyard of bones and ships. Naomi thought back to nights she had spent here over the years. The bitter lonely nights, but also more tender ones filled with narcotic parties and beautiful faces. Evenings spent sitting in this very spot during holidays when she was still at school in England, troubled and failed in all things academic until she had decided to turn it around and get a degree. The Sunset had been a crucial refuge. But the people she had once hung out with there had all dispersed to the four corners of the world. “There is only sea, there is only weather.” A quote from somewhere came back into her mind, lingering there unwanted, and she wondered what it would be like to be alone in the world with all the money she needed, free of the need to work or endure a boss. Since her father had packed her off to an expensive school early on she had grown used to being separated from the rest of the human race and, she might have added, she had grown used to being without him. But being separated from the father was not the same as being fatherless. Yet she could imagine living in the house on the mountainside alone, living in the house in London alone, passing months alone in the villa in Sorano. Who would notice that she was now solitary and not encumbered with a father and a stepmother? People could not disappear from the face of the earth, naturally, but that was a different problem altogether.
“I used to have that fantasy all the time—that I was solitary and I could choose a different name every day. But the downside—well, your parents would have to die in a nuclear war or the plague. The cons would outweigh the pros.”
“Surely they would.”
They ordered another bottle, but neither of them felt drunk.
“I wonder if Faoud has any family left,” Sam said. “They’re probably dead, if things are as bad as they say.”
Another two hours, lost in rambling conversations. Above them bats swooped in parabolas above the restaurant lights, maddened by something the women couldn’t understand. Yet Naomi talked on. She said she had realized that day what the problem with her life was. A person who has nothing, she said, who is living like an animal surrounded by men with shotguns—she had thought to herself, what does it have to do with me? An observer could say that everything about herself was frivolous, that she was truly born of frivolity. Frivolity had raised her and made her. All of it was worthless, or nearly worthless. You could not at first believe that your whole upbringing, the way that you lived and thought and felt, was worthless from top to bottom. It’s impossible to think like that. But suddenly that afternoon she had, and there was no coming back from it. She knew it was true and it came from the way Faoud had looked at her. He saw right through her effortlessly. It was like being stabbed cleanly with a knife. No one ever looks at you like that. No one ever dares. It was as if he was looking at shit and marvelling at its complexity. Marveling that it even existed and was so unaware of itself. So she had been thinking—why was that so, and what made it so? Was it something she could change?
“I wouldn’t say you were shit,” Sam said.
“Nor would he, but it’s not the point. It’s a perception—a moment of revelation. No one has an agenda for having it. It just happens and then you can’t go back. You’re undone.”
“Then you go forward,” Sam muttered.
“Sure, forward. Whatever that means. Forward to what? If your past is shit, what do you go forward to?”
When they finished the second bottle they looked up to find the restaurant deserted. Naomi picked up the bill. They walked a little unsteadily up to the path and the tower that loomed over it and agreed to part ways for the night. They kissed and hugged, and the helter-skelter laughter of the earlier part of the evening was still inside them. They were now officially a secret society of two, with a third honorable member who didn’t yet know that he belonged to it. Naomi ran a hand through the other girl’s thick and tangled hair and there was a sensual agreement between them that was too reticent to break the surface of gestures. They felt superior to their surroundings when they were together, no matter who was present.
“Sleep in tomorrow,” Naomi said. “Maybe we’ll go for a boat ride with the savage in the afternoon.”
Naomi walked slowly by herself back down to the port and looked in at the Pirate Cove to see if any pleasant scoundrels were there to buy her a drink. Finding none, she went to the ATM instead and took out three hundred euros. With a foreign card she could surpass the withdrawal limits imposed on Greeks by their own government. She ascended to the villa in the silence of the late night, the cats scattering around her as she crossed the squares. At the villa everyone was asleep, and she let herself in with a feeling of relief. She made herself tea in the kitchen and then sat on the terrace, watching clouds race across a star-rich sky, and in her head she made an inventory of everything that was in the house. There was a considerable haul of jewelry accumulated by her vain and possessive stepmother. There were the credit cards in Jimmie’s single, voluminous wallet. There was cash in their bedroom that Carissa had once told her about—they kept it in the wardrobe in an unlocked box, a strikingly fearless gesture on their part. There were the paintings and the artworks, which were difficult to remove but which represented a considerable asset. There were expensive clothes, a few shirts worth thousands of euros, the wine collection, and the cigars. All of it, she thought, belonged to her anyway.
It was her inheritance, but if Jimmie ever had a sudden accident it would be taken away from her by the salope. There was a way to prevent that from happening. She did the math and sipped her tea until everything was clearer. It wasn’t that complicated when seen from above. She was beginning to form an idea so extreme that it had nowhere to go but forward. But in the larger scheme of human suffering, it was not as extreme as she had first imagined. In the moral sense, it was simple and straightforward.
EIGHT