The ferry arrived and there was the usual bustle. Someone was reversing in a small pickup truck, either trying to get on the ferry or kill the elderly woman who refused to move. Cameras were out and pointing. People were hugging. I saw Hester waiting on the pier. Even if she had been wearing other clothes, I would have recognized her stiff spine, her thrown-back shoulders. Goodbye. Goodbye, I thought, but a part of me was sad because she was taking some of my old life with her, something I would not get back. I watched her climb down into the boat, out of sight. Then I saw Clive and, after him, Nikos. I wondered what they were doing at the ferry.
There were a few sheep, causing problems, and a donkey. The donkey, not in the mood for seafaring, was pulling anxiously at its rope. At the rope’s other end, a man was struggling, and then the donkey—defiant swing of the head, monster teeth gleaming—escaped. I watched its mad dash, the men waving their arms; the women, mouths all Os of shock and wonder—then it reached the edge of the land. I saw the donkey’s lowered head, the moment of indecision, then decision, and it jumped off the pier. For a timeless second the donkey was flying; then it hit the water with a tremendous splash. I held my breath, worried that it had broken its legs. But the donkey resurfaced, swimming, and then—as if dropped from the heavens—was wading through the children on the beach, and they were hugging it and slapping its sides, and a little girl ran over with a sprig of jasmine and tucked it into the bridle. And another little girl ran down from the restaurant and gave it something to eat—maybe a carrot? a cake?—and the donkey liked it.
I felt happy then—an awkward joy—and realized that the gravel was poking through the seat of my pants. I walked down the hill, back into town. Nikos and Clive were by the newsstand, and Clive was reading the paper. I could see by the way Nikos lowered his glasses and then put them back that he had been looking for me.
“Rupert,” called Nikos, “did you see the donkey?”
“Yes, yes. Quite a jump.”
Clive looked me up and down. “You look terrible. Are you hung over?”
“No,” I said. “I’m hung under.”
“What does this mean?” asked Nikos.
Clive wondered. “It means either he has a large penis or he wants a drink.”
I smiled. “I’ll take the drink.”
Clive and Nikos were actually at the port to see off Amanda, who, in response to the latest phone call from Jack, had decided to leave immediately. She’d packed in a hurry and only just made the ferry. Nikos, although he’d been insisting that she go to Hydra for the last two weeks, had suddenly felt compelled to try and convince her to stay.
“She didn’t say why?” I asked.
Nikos shook his head. “There was something wrong.”
“No one knows much about Amanda.” I waited for Nikos to disagree, but he didn’t.
“She’s up to something,” said Clive.
I spent the next few days dividing my time between the site and Olivia’s side, which seemed the safest places to be. Although Amanda had not been a regular drinking companion, her absence somehow disturbed the balance, and I found myself going to bed at the reasonable hour of 2 A.M. and often waking because I was done with sleeping. I hadn’t asked Olivia to marry me, because it seemed ridiculous—I seemed ridiculous—in Hester’s wake.
The site had not yielded anything exceptional, or even whole, and the little chips and shards of dirty pottery were no longer that compelling. The promise of a great find had dimmed. When Nikos and I referred to the “site” it now included the café across the valley, where we could supervise, although the workers at this distance were as small as ants. Nikos thought the whole thing was under control. He had decided that Tomas was a good supervisor and, to keep him in line, had dangled the prospect of a job in Athens and maybe even New York as incentive to find something. I agreed that this was the best way of having the dig yield something real.
Nikos was going to have to return to Athens to see Kostas, who probably just missed him but had sent a number of messages citing all Nikos’s neglected duties, his spending too much money, his mother, his fiancée, all wondering what he was up to. He decided to go home for a week but kept not leaving, until one Thursday he packed a small bag and sneaked off without saying goodbye to anyone. Nathan and Clive were returning to New York in another ten days, and although it had seemed that the summer would go on forever, what was left was passing too fast. We made jokes about all getting a house together, a commune of sybarites, or meeting up again next year. No one believed it, though. And it covered up a sadness—an anticipation of nostalgia—made all the stronger by a few things: the ghost of angry Jack hovering over Amanda, Nathan’s recent post-office phone calls to his lover in New York, Olivia’s declining health.
Nikos was in Athens when Amanda returned. The rest of us were in the garden with the Victrola cranked and coughing up a Viennese waltz, and Olivia was killing me at backgammon. Neftali had Clive helping her with some potted geraniums that needed to be moved. Nathan was writing postcards, the sure sign of someone about to return home. There wasn’t much light in the garden, and when the gate creaked open I couldn’t make out who was standing there.
Then I heard Amanda’s voice—“Don’t make a fuss”—and before I could decide what she was talking about, she stepped into the light shining off the front of the house, and we saw what a mess Jack had made of her face.
Nathan stood up, and all his postcards slid to the ground. I didn’t move, because I didn’t know what to do other than make a fuss. Neftali was holding her breath, but Olivia got up right away. She ran over to her and put her arms around Amanda and walked her up the stairs of the house. She paused at the door and said, “Rupert, please bring in Amanda’s bag,” and then they disappeared inside.
Later that night I heard Amanda sobbing in the room across the hall, but it sounded almost staged to me. I could never be generous to Amanda. Too much of this, again, seemed within her capacity to control.
The next morning I had to walk into town to get another notebook. I’d filled mine with little sketches of the larger shards and guesses as to their provenance. I’d been looking forward to the walk, but after rounding the first corner I saw that I was behind Amanda. I could have waited to let her get ahead, but, as if sensing me, she turned. Her face was blue on one side and she had a cut above her left eyebrow. It looked as if she’d been in a barroom brawl. When I got closer—she was waiting for me—I saw that her lip had also been cut but was almost healed.
“Cigarette?” I offered.
She took it.
“Did Jack do that to you?”
“God, Rupert, how do you do it?”
“What?”
“You just asked me about Jack in the same tone of voice that you offered me a cigarette.”
I thought, “Years of practiced patrician denial.”
“You really think you’ve got my number, don’t you?” said Amanda.
I regarded her. She looked more angry than wounded, more aggressive than needy. “If you want to be alone,” I said, “I understand.” I began to walk ahead.
Amanda watched my back for a minute, then said, “Yes.”
I turned around.
She began to shake her head in an appealingly self-deprecating way, a predictable way. “Yes, Jack did this to me.”
I waited for Amanda to catch up.
“He was drunk when I spoke to him on the phone, not darling-I-miss-you drunk, more why-do-I-even-bother? drunk. But when I got to Hydra, he was so deep into it that, I don’t know, he didn’t even recognize me.”
“He’s got a problem,” I said, “and it sounds like you have some decisions to make.”
“His problem is my problem,” said Amanda. “He’s my husband and I love him.”
“Well, I can’t argue with that,” I said. I tried to make it sound clipped and proper, but Amanda saw the sarcasm.
“I won’t argue with you,” she said. “I know you don’t like Jack.”
“And right now,” I held her chin, which was level with mine, “you’re not in a very good position to defend him.”
Amanda seemed inclined to be honest with me, but I didn’t want to look into the depths of her relationship with Jack. Everyone hated Jack. Everyone said he was pompous, a poseur, and that the tiresome tough-guy routine, complete with macho dialogue, was contrived and offensive, but they always added the disclaimer, “He’s a great artist.” Clive and I, however, had decided that even his art was crap. This was a deep-felt conviction, although neither of us had ever seen any of his sculptures. And the fact that he was a wife-beater didn’t surprise me at all. Clive had called him that one night—“wife beater!”—as Jack stumbled his way to a restaurant bathroom, but this was just Clive’s sense of humor, not based on anything. Then again, no one was surprised that Jack had hit Amanda, and no one was surprised that she’d shown up again on Aspros. Amanda considered us family—we were safe—but I thought it was something more. I thought she needed people to witness her pulpy face as a sort of vanity. A true drama queen needs everything noticed, cooed over, regardless of the pathetic light she is thrown into.
That night Amanda, Clive, and I stayed in town after dinner for a few drinks. Olivia needed her space and didn’t want me walking around the house, pretending not to be bored.
“I need a night of sitting on the couch reading one of Neftali’s lurid books,” she said. “Go on then.” She waved me off. “Go make some mischief.”
We went to the small fancy bar that served cocktails and ordered martinis. Actually, we ordered glasses of vodka, and then asked for them to bring a bottle of “martini” out so we could add a little. We’d learned the local martini was a glass of vermouth with an olive, but sometimes a caper, floating in it. We also dropped ice into it. I took a certain amount of pride in this, my very bad martini, as all those girls I’d known growing up had taken pride in their very good martinis. I thought that Amanda was drinking rather fast, but then I’d finished my drink before she had. Clive ordered another round and we made our drinks.
“I miss Nikos,” said Clive.
“He’ll be back soon,” I said.
“But I might be gone,” said Clive, “and he didn’t even say goodbye.”
“I’ll give you his number in Athens,” I said. I looked over at Amanda. “Do you miss Nikos?”
Amanda smiled. “What’s it to you?”
I looked over at Clive, then back at Amanda, raising my eyebrows.
“You’re very fond of him, aren’t you, Rupert?” said Amanda. “A little too fond. And jealous of me?”
“What are you suggesting?” said Clive. He feigned shock.
I was amused. “I know what this is about, Amanda,” I said, because I did. There had to be something wrong with me because I had never pursued her, hadn’t even flirted passively, which I did with nearly all women.
“What is it about?” asked Clive, but Amanda and I just kept looking at each other.
Two martinis later, Tomas walked by with a few of his friends. He was clutching a paper bag with a bottle in it. After a quick exchange, Clive decided to join him. At this point, Amanda and I should have gone home, but we were talking about people from college, and we, predictably, had a few people we knew in common. One of them was Kiplinger Sand. I didn’t know much about Kiplinger other than he was now in the movies, wore offensive jackets, and drank toxic South American liquors that he bought at Irish bars in Chelsea, but I found the conversation pleasantly shallow and thought, I suppose, that I should stay for another drink.
“A friend of mine went out with him a couple of times,” Amanda said.
“Just a couple of times?”
“Well,” said Amanda, “they had an encounter in the back of his car.”
“You can’t stop there,” I said. “Amanda, subtlety is completely lost on me.”
“I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t very good.” She laughed, and I saw her big clean teeth. “Let’s have another one,” she said. The bartender had left the vodka, “martini,” and ice on the bar, so we could make our own.
Sometime shortly after, we crossed the border. At one point I was still witty and neat, and the next I was slipping a bit off the bar stool, the room was spinning in the corners, and when I went to the bathroom I saw my face had taken on a vulgarity. I took a slightly longer way back to the bar stools. Amanda seemed a little slumped but pulled herself straight when she saw me. The bottle of vodka was empty.
“I think we’re done here,” I said. I paid up and we walked out. “We’ll have a nightcap back at the house.”
We turned off the town square and began walking up the path, up the steps. Amanda had my arm and was clinging to me. She was almost my height and her hands felt very big, especially compared to Olivia’s. At one point, one of us, probably me, said, “Look at the moon.” And the moon seemed very full and I wondered if it had actually been a month since I’d arrived, and then Amanda had lifted up my shirt and put her bare hands on my stomach, had worked them around to the base of my back, and we were kissing. And I was sitting on the low wall in front of the chapel, and it occurred to me that it would be better to be inside the courtyard, out of the moonlight. And then we were inside, and then Amanda unbuttoned her shirt.
“No,” I said. “I can’t do this right now.” I don’t know why nudity all of a sudden bothered me. Possibly discovery. Possibly Olivia. Some clear-minded guilt had exerted itself, but Amanda wasn’t listening. She began to unbuckle my belt. “No, we are not doing this.” I pushed her away and rebuckled my belt.
“Why not, Rupert?”
“Because we can’t. It’s not going to work.”
Amanda stood looking at me, her shirt open. “Who wants anything to work?” she said. “Is it Olivia?” she added, with great condescension.
I was so drunk I remember being impressed with Amanda’s ability to come up with that. She took my silence as acquiescence, and I must have done the same, at least for a couple of minutes. Amanda was strong and warm and she smelled wonderful. But then I wanted another drink. And then I remembered Hester, and Hester’s face at the restaurant and what I’d said to her, and all of this wouldn’t go away and I didn’t feel like fucking Amanda just then. I pushed her away and said, “I can’t do this.”
And Amanda looked angry and said, “Mister Morals.”
Which was something I’d never been accused of. I shook my head and said, “Not even you and I can fuck our way straight this time.”
I realized I was sobering up ever so slightly, but the last of the vodka was only hitting Amanda now. I remembered the bottle of vodka, empty on the bar, and that it hadn’t been that way when I’d gone to the bathroom, and that Amanda must have drunk it all, a lot, as if it were water. I was walking up the path again, buttoning my shirt, but Amanda caught up with me and I think I must have hated her because when she tried to kiss me again, I pushed her, and she fell off the path and against an olive tree. I didn’t help her up. I started walking away as quickly as I could.
Then I went and woke up Olivia and said many things to her, some of which I actually remembered the next morning.
I woke up because the sun was shining strongly. I opened my eyes just a crack. I wasn’t sure where I was and my first feeling, before recognition, was dread. Then I saw the little desk and all of Olivia’s lotions and her pills on it, and then the bed creaked gently and I saw Olivia sitting on the bed at my side. I put my arm around her as she sat there.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “What time is it?”
“It’s two.”
There was a moment of silence that I wanted to last forever, and then Olivia said, “I’m going to go down for lunch. I’ll be back in an hour. Do you want anything?”
“No,” I said. I wanted to make conversation right then, as if to prove to Olivia that I hadn’t been badly drunk, only extremely jovially drunk, which was why I could make light conversation now and didn’t really have a hangover, but this was impossible. I let her go and then remembered Amanda. I wondered if she’d ever made it out of the branches of the olive tree, whether she’d made it home. Then Clive came in and sat just where Olivia had been sitting, and for a moment I was inclined to put my arm around him.
“What were you and Amanda up to last night?” he asked in a loud whisper.
I was still trying to reconstruct the events of the previous evening and was momentarily concerned that Amanda and I had indeed been fucking each other in the light of the moon.
“Why?” I ventured.
“Well, she’s still not home yet. I was hoping she’d somehow come back and found you. But your room’s empty. I really ought to go find Tomas.”
“What does Tomas have to do with this?”
“Tomas and I were walking up the path and we saw Amanda. She seemed to have fallen into a tree. And then she and Tomas were talking, and all of a sudden I was going home to bed, and Tomas and Amanda were …”
“Were what?” I asked.
“I don’t really know. Tomas had a bottle of wine. He and I were going to drink it together, then, all of a sudden, I was going home.” Clive thought for a minute. “We really shouldn’t drink so much.”
Clive disappeared and I closed my eyes again. When I opened them, Olivia was back on the side of the bed. She was holding a glass of water. She was looking into it as if the glass possessed a divining ability.
“How do you feel now?” she asked.
“I’m all right,” I said, but I wasn’t sure yet. Olivia looked serious and it made me nervous.
“I have to ask you, Rupert. Is it true, about your little boy?”
I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, she had put the water on the side table and was crouching with her face very close to mine. “What if I made it up?”
“Why would you do that?” she asked.
“Handsome and damaged, Livvy. It’s supposed to be irresistible.”
“I don’t know about irresistible,” she said. She smiled and handed me the water. “It is dangerously attractive.”
“I’ll take what I can get,” I said. I sat up.
Clive stuck his head in the door and said, “Is he up?”
“He is,” I answered.
“Well, you better get dressed. Amanda still hasn’t shown up yet. I think we should go to the site and ask Tomas what happened to her.”
By the time I got on the bike it was almost five. Clive drove as fast as the thing would take us, which was at a dizzying speed down the hills and then excruciatingly slowly as we crested them. The workers were finishing up for the day, laying out the canvas tarps over the site, but I got a quick look at the pit, before it was completely covered; I saw that in some places they had struck rock, and this wasn’t a good sign. Clive immediately began questioning Tomas, who was his friend after all. I would have been happy to avoid Tomas altogether at that point—it was some variety of guilt at having delivered Amanda to him—but I needed to ask about the dig. I walked over slowly.
“Amanda’s all right,” said Clive. “She’s still at Tomas’s.”
To me these seemed to be mutually exclusive facts, but Clive seemed satisfied. Tomas looked positively smug. “How is she?” I asked.
“She is sleeping today a lot,” said Tomas.
“Is she coming back to the villa?” I asked.
“No, boss,” he said. “She does not like you very much.” And he laughed.
Clive guffawed, but I was in no mood for this. “Tomas, are you striking rock?”
“In some places, there’s the rock,” he said, suddenly serious.
“Well, you better find something soon. You know, the dig’s almost over.”
“I don’t understand,” said Tomas.
“No dirt, no dig.” I got on the back of the bike and Clive took off. I saw Tomas looking back at the pit. He knew he had to find something if he was to get the job in Athens, or even New York, where women like Amanda populated the streets. All those Amazonian blondes and all that money, but our little sandpit hadn’t yielded anything marvelous. Although—and here I was cautiously pleased—we had a number of fragments that could be restored into a rather large bowl with nautical figures on it, a starfish, a squid, a dolphin; it was lovely and justified the whole process for me. But I wasn’t feeling particularly generous to Tomas. I wondered first what Amanda had said, and then what she thought, and then—because I still wasn’t sure—what had really happened between us.
Amanda did not come back the next day either. Clive said something about Tomas having tied her up in his shed, and I said she probably liked it. Clive wasn’t any happier with Amanda than I was. He had been cultivating this friendship with Tomas for a long time and wanted something to show for it, but, since he and Nathan were leaving in a week, it seemed that all that cultivation might not yield the specific results that Clive had hoped for. Amanda’s sleeping with Tomas annoyed me, although I’m not sure why. As far as I was concerned, she had wasted whatever limited goodwill she’d managed to accrue. When Neftali came in at lunch—I usually ate back at the house to be with Olivia—and said that Nikos was going to be on the seven o’clock ferry, I felt a little thrill of pleasure. Amanda’s defecting to the working classes would disturb him profoundly. I took Clive back to the site with me, because he was bored, and we stopped off at the café in the old town for a drink first. I showed him my notebooks.
“You know, Rupert, you’re an excellent draftsman,” he said.
“I have no sense of depth,” I responded.
“But the detail.” He nodded at me encouragingly.
“Where were you when I was in the third grade?” I asked.
“Preschool probably. No, I was still at home.”
We sat for a little while enjoying a drink, the quiet of it all, anticipating Nikos’s return and gossiping in an enjoyable, unkind way. And then Clive jumped up and said, “I think something’s happening over there.”
“Where?”
“At the dig.”
I looked over and it seemed, I couldn’t see very well, that someone was swinging his shirt as a signal. There was a German couple at the next table and Clive asked to borrow their binoculars.
“They’re waving at us,” said Clive. “They’re looking right over here and waving, and someone’s holding something.”
I grabbed the binoculars from Clive. I could see it, something round, something white. “I think,” I said, the blood pounding in my ears, “I think they’ve found a head.”