Nikos and I spent the first week of my trip in Athens. There weren’t that many tourists yet, and whoever had made the journey was serious, middle-aged, or unattractive, and usually a combination. Knee socks were popular. So were maps. I made a call to Steve Kelly and was told by someone at his office that he was out of town. When I asked them where he was, they wouldn’t tell me. I left my number. He never called. I thought of dropping by the hotel to look for him—I was staying with Nikos at his house—but somehow never did.
By myself, I walked up to the Acropolis. I had a sketch pad with me and I saw a little boy pointing at it. Maybe he thought it was funny that a grown man would want to draw. Maybe he was jealous. He had his finger raised and held it, and I looked into his wide face, his blue eyes.
“Stop pointing,” said his mother, or something close in French, and hurried him off.
I continued up the slippery marble walkway, up the steps, trying to imagine someone from the deep past making this same trip in leather sandals, someone whom the heat did not bother: Socrates, pre-hemlock. I felt I was being followed and looked quickly over my shoulder, but the stairs descended in emptiness, until a dog crossed on its way to somewhere else. The shadow of a dove flying, a brief darkness on the yellow stone, crossed after. There was no one in sight. On my right was the Agora, a peaceful dusty meadow, a few pieces from monuments strewn around, but they didn’t suggest greatness, only monumental decay. An Asian man with a camera snapped a picture. He sensed me watching him and turned around. He was wearing sunglasses and I couldn’t see his eyes. If I had been closer, I’d have seen myself reflected and staring back.
It wasn’t that hot, but I was dizzy. I remembered the café where I had sat with Steve. I pictured his red hair and the bougainvillea falling over him, and the ice in the glasses and his beautiful friend. I took an alley to the left which, in my invented map, led to this same place. I wandered on, but here it was deserted and dirty. I stopped to think. An ancient wall was marred by a rotting wooden door. Graffiti in wavering Greek coursed over the rock in a perversion of hieroglyphics. Twitching on the doorstep, a needle still in his vein, a young man groaned in a combination of pleasure and grief. He didn’t notice me, and I walked past quickly.
I was not going to find my café. I headed upward, upward. The path curved to the right. At a distance I saw a man walking with a cane. He was wearing a hat. He was old and walked slowly, but I couldn’t catch up with him. I walked faster, but the distance remained between us. I wondered why I was chasing him, and then I realized I thought he was Michaud, the French archaeologist I had encountered in Delphi. But Michaud was dead. And this man, with his cane, disappeared around a bend in the road, and when I finally rounded it he was gone.
I bought a bottle of water at a shop that sold cigarettes and lottery tickets and drank half.
The Acropolis had many people wandering it, climbing on the rocks, looking up at its curving pillars as if somewhere there, contained in the language of the metopes, was an explanation of the nature of man. Why, despite what we knew of the battle, savagery versus reason, our Centaurs always triumphed over our Lapiths.
I felt very lonely as I walked back down the mountain. Everyone seemed to be a couple or a part of some other gathering of souls. A little boy stood screaming, mouth wide, his hands fisted at his sides as his mother, a beautiful anachronism in black, heeled oxfords, and hat, did her best to wipe the tears. Two priests in front of me, like chess pieces in their matching black, glided down the path. The whole walk down seemed strange as if I’d wandered into a hall of mirrors, able to see yet not be seen—not seen by the couple embracing on the ancient wall, or by the two little boys chasing each other, or by the old man talking to his cat. Ahead there was a young man with his wife, and they had a little boy, and I wondered if that’s what I would look like walking with Olivia and Michael. But we had never walked together.
Suddenly I had to sit down. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be anywhere. And I remembered why Uncle William had sent me to Greece, nearly a year ago. He thought it would heal me. He couldn’t bear to see his “golden sunshine” so extinguished. He’d told me years ago that I had saved him. He had been lost. He had destroyed a string of lovers and felt so alone that he traveled and traveled and traveled, always two steps ahead of that one who was stalking him: himself. This was when I was in college, just accepting that I could love this man and learning to enjoy him. The whiskey had him but his words were sublime and pounded on my eardrums, unlike anything he’d said before.
I stood up from the wall. I was sweating. I had to get something to drink. I took a few cautious steps, conscious of the blood humming in my brain and there were dark purple splotches dancing in my peripheral vision. I placed my feet on the ground in front of me, one after the other. I had a moment of consciousness, where I remembered wondering why people didn’t just sit down when they felt this way. Why they pretended that they could stand and walk and function. But I couldn’t bring myself to sit down. I just wanted to get away from the ancient buildings, the churning eternity of people. I thought of all the bones beneath my feet, all those dead philosophers and ordinary Greeks. I thought of my house on its bald hill with its one tree and wondered if this hill had once looked like that. Once a hill, but now choked with buildings, some falling in disrepair, all rotting window grilles and splintered wood held whole by glossy paint. I stopped to rest and then I saw someone, reflected in a dirty window, looking over my shoulder. I turned quickly, but there was no one there.
It was just a reflection, ungenerous, altered by mood.
Something in the shading of this blackened glass aged me. I looked heavier. My hair was pushed off my forehead with sweat and looked as if it had thinned. It was me, older, less handsome, in a wrinkled suit.
Back at the Nikolaides house, I fell into a deep sleep, and when I woke up it was ten-thirty. Nikos was waiting for me, waiting to eat. We sat on the terrace on the roof. The food smelled of olives and dill. I realized that I was starving. Nikos had spent the day trying to get a form through some ministry, which seemed to be a ministry set up to stymie the progression of forms of its invention.
“I need a break,” said Nikos. “I’m glad we are getting out of Athens.”
A light breeze scattered the paper napkins. On the street, unseen but loud, two young girls gossiped back and forth.
“You’re wrong about the Acropolis,” I said.
“Why? What did I say?”
“You said there was nothing to see there.”
“When did I say that?”
“It was the first time I met you. You said, ‘Every Greek has the Acropolis at his back.’ And then you said something about wanting to know the future.”
“I don’t remember saying that,” said Nikos. He gave me an incredulous look. “How can you walk around with all those things in your head? Memories are for old people.”
After dinner, Nikos asked to see my sketches. At first I resisted, but then I remembered Olivia with her poem, who had read it just to avoid appearing too serious about it, and this seemed a wise course of action. I went upstairs and got the sketchbook.
“Very nice,” he said. “But this is just your hand.” He flipped up the pages, over and over, and there were maybe fifty studies of my left hand at all different angles. I had stayed sketching at the Acropolis for hours.
“It’s the only thing I can draw,” I said. I flipped a few pages later and there was an attempt at one of the caryatids of the Erechtheion. I had imposed some sort of sensibility on her because I hadn’t trusted a nose that big to be beautiful. The eyes were round and bulged out over her other features, and I had flattened the whole. Nikos flipped to the earlier pages, to a sketch of the octopus bowl that we’d excavated from Aspros. I had put all the fragments together on the page in a way that I thought made sense.
“Maybe there’s a part of you that is an artist,” said Nikos.
“No, Nikos,” I said. “There’s a part of me that wants to record. I like to hold on to things. I never think of something and want to draw it. Or want to make something.”
“No imagining of things?” asked Nikos.
“No creative urge. No obsession. No glorious dementia.” I took back my book. “No gift.”
Nikos nodded at me thoughtfully. We had had a few drunken, carousing nights, but both of us were a bit subdued, Nikos because of his impending wedding and me because being in Greece reminded me of the previous summer and Olivia. And Jack, whose death was bothering me.
I asked, “Are the police still investigating Jack’s death?”
Nikos shrugged. “They can investigate all they want, but if they were going to find the killer, they would have already done it.”
“So the killer gets away with it.”
Nikos was surprised at my concern. “Does this upset you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. Because I wasn’t.
Nikos thought my depression would pass. He had decided to get married and was of the opinion that I should get married. What was good for him was good for me. Number three is the charm. He thought I should go back to work. He didn’t seem to think my business in Vermont qualified and, much as I protested, I rather agreed. He kept looking at my sketch of the bowl and saying how very good it was, how I’d impressed him in Aspros, sitting in the violent heat with my basins and bowls, patiently looking at all the fragments. He sounded vaguely parental on this point. I really didn’t need that kind of attention, not from Nikos, but I had a suspicion that later in life I would revisit this annoying episode in our friendship with a certain amount of affection.
After I’d left Vermont, I’d been nagged by a desire to learn more about Jack. I met Neftali for coffee the day before she was to return to Greece. Neftali and Jack had been close once, long ago. I wondered how she tied in with Jack’s fascination with Greece. They might have been lovers when Neftali was in her twenties, although she said nothing to confirm this. Their involvement, although it had never previously entered my mind, now seemed certain. Despite—or perhaps because—of what they’d been to each other, they remained friends. That’s why she’d had him at the house in Aspros, and it was Neftali who’d helped Jack and Amanda move to Hydra. Yes, his drinking had bothered her, and the young wife sleeping with everyone, but artists were like children. Sometimes you had to look the other way.
Jack was born in 1916, somewhere in Missouri. A sister and a brother had died during the Depression, the sister from pneumonia, the brother from a tractor accident that had left him with one arm for the last two days of his life. Jack had nursed the brother through this, and apparently, although I’d never seen it, Jack’s breakthrough exhibit was a series of male figures all with one arm. Jack’s coming to art was something of a mystery, but he’d had some formal training at the Art Institute in Chicago. He painted for a while and some of the canvases survived.
“But he loved sculpting things,” Neftali told me. “He liked to put something into the space, and see it move out all the air.”
I hadn’t seen anything of his, other than his replicas, but from the way Neftali was shaking her head, it was clear that she’d been impressed.
“You know, Jack was in the war, in France. There was a grenade that landed somewhere close. It killed everyone but him. He stayed in a ditch with his leg broken up, the bone sticking through, for four days, waiting for death. Waiting. And someone came and saved him. And then one day he is killed by a man with a hat.” She was angry. “That’s all we know. But this great artist is dead, dead, and he was only forty-seven.”
Of course I wanted to tell Neftali this “man with a hat” had actually been Amanda, that the hat was Olivia’s missing donkey-driver straw. If I’d shown Neftali Amanda’s ferry ticket to Hydra, she would have come to the same conclusion as I had. After all, Amanda’s only alibi had been Tomas. But I didn’t want to torture Neftali with this information. She was better off without it.
“I don’t hate Jack anymore,” I said. “I don’t know what he meant to accomplish with his little army, but there’s something sincere about it.”
Neftali put her hand on mine and squeezed. “Rupert, you think you’re worse than you are.”
I wondered why Jack had chosen Hydra as his home. Why not be closer to his rebels up in Macedonia or Thrace—or anywhere, for that matter, on the mainland? I sipped my coffee and looked at the harbor. The sunlight hit the surface of the water and was shattered into a million brilliant pieces. Boats came back and forth. Workers leaped onto the hard brick of solid land. Convoys of horses, standing patiently, all strung together, waited for their loads. There were no cars and no bicycles on Hydra. People walked everywhere or rode horses. The place was too quiet, which made it seem as if everyone were shouting. A few elegant yachts were at anchor in the harbor, and I could hear a volley of accents: English, Danish, and American.
Nikos came out of the café and sat down. He fixed his eyes on me in that overly patient way that let me know he was prepared for an argument.
“Tell me we’re not here to see Amanda,” I said.
“We are not here to see Amanda,” he said.
“Why are you even in contact with her?”
“She’s selling the house. She needed someone to help her.”
“And you agreed?”
“She has an agent,” said Nikos. “She just wanted to check with someone she trusted.”
“And why am I here?” I asked.
Nikos shook his head in a patronizing way. “Look,” he said, pointing at some sort of old fort. “Look,” he said, gesturing up the hill at a bank of mansions. “Look,” he said. He grabbed my head and turned it toward an old clock tower that looked vaguely German. “Water,” he said. “Boats.” He looked around. “Horses! Lots of horses.”
“I’m looking,” I said.
“This is Hydra,” said Nikos. “Even the Greeks come to look.”
“Very pretty,” I said.
Nikos put the paper down. “It’s not far away, just up there. Five-minute walk.”
“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll follow in about an hour.”
“You are angry,” he said. “She’s all alone here. She’s helpless. Her husband is dead. Why don’t you like her?”
I thought. “She’s self-serving.”
“And you are Florence Nightingale in Turkey?”
Which, of course, was both valid and funny.
I looked at my watch. Nikos had been gone half an hour. The waitress asked me if I wanted another coffee, and I ordered whiskey. I sipped it slowly, watching the boats come in, expertly lining themselves up. What kind of life had Jack and Amanda shared here in all this quiet? How had they passed the time? When I was done, the waitress came by again. She pointed the way up to Amanda’s house. Apparently, lots of people visited. They left flowers on the path or found the spot where Jack had fallen.
“Did you know him?” I asked.
The woman nodded. “I didn’t like him very much. He was always drunk, and his wife, sleeping with everyone. I don’t know why he stayed with her.”
“Maybe he loved her.”
The woman gave me a concerned look and took my empty glass.
“Can you take me there?” I said.
“The house is just up there. See? Follow the path.”
“Not the house,” I said. “The place where he fell.”
“You are an admirer?” she asked.
I pondered this. “I think I am,” I said.
She walked a way with me up the main path that, if I had continued along it, would take me to the house. But she turned after a restaurant and we started to the right. A cat and her kittens were living beside an overflowing garbage can, and they yowled when they saw me, as if I were likely to feed them. I offered the woman a cigarette and she let me light it. She smoked holding it between her forefinger and thumb.
“Does it take long to get there?” I asked.
“That depends on where you’re coming from,” she said.
I thought and said, “That’s a joke.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “You are too serious.”
She gestured for me to go ahead and I pushed my way under an olive tree. I could see that the grass was trampled here. Someone had put a few bricks together to make a low altar, and on this were some dew-stained cigarettes. The grass beside these bricks was tinged with a red residue.
“Is that…?”
“Wine,” said the woman. She looked at me again. She thought I was out of my mind, and I was beginning to share her opinion. “They pour it into the ground there. Maybe they think he’s going to grow up, like a vine.”
I crouched down and looked at the altar, then up at the dizzying rise of the cliff. The mountain pitched upward like a jagged tooth, but at the top I saw a low wall. Jack must have fallen from there.
“Can we go?” asked the woman.
“I’ll stay here, if it’s all right.”
She nodded, unimpressed. “Should I save you a fish for your dinner?” she asked.
“I hope to join you,” I said politely, “but I have to catch up with my friend.”
I don’t know how long I stood there. This spot was unremarkable, but I felt the same involuntary awe that found me in cathedrals. There was a sense of God. Maybe it was the quiet; I could hear a horse some distance away, the flick and flick of its tail. A cloud passed over, creating an instant of shadow. For a moment it was as if all time had stopped. But then I heard a woman laughing. Amanda laughing. She was sitting on the wall, that same wall Jack had fallen from. She wasn’t scared. She was laughing and laughing; Nikos was delighting her in some way. Then she looked over. I couldn’t see her features because she was backlit by the sun. All I saw was her fuzzy golden halo of hair and her strong arms.
“Rupert,” she called, “is that you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You should come up and have a drink,” she said. “I’m just putting together some mezes.”
Almost a year passed before I saw Amanda again. Of course, she was never convicted of killing Jack. She was never even a suspect. I had no real evidence and was still piecing it all together. But on seeing Amanda at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in her red silk sheath, a narrow cape extending down to the floor—the stunning Amanda, a woman I had never known, except carnally, the murderer of her husband—I felt a cold and unforgiving condescension.
The occasion was Uncle William’s donation of the head. We had fought over this for months. I wanted to protect the head and Uncle William, who believed in it, from too much scrutiny. He thought I was being ungenerous. I sat through many lectures on the need for patronage in public art. All those little Negro children from the Bronx who would never see a head like this if he didn’t provide it. Had I no feelings of responsibility to those less fortunate? Had he failed to teach me the sanctimonious serenity that is noblesse oblige? The only good to come of this, as far as I was concerned, was that I met Dr. Schultz from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Schultz had come to authenticate the head before its acceptance by the museum. He was a pleasant man with an almost religious quietness and humility. His hair was gray and cropped in a neat cube over his ears. His suit must have been nice once but now had shiny worn patches. When he asked the particulars of finding the head, he turned his ear to me in such a way that I was reminded of something, that I only later attributed to recollections of the Victrola. He had large ears and, when he listened, was absolutely still.
Dr. Schultz was heading to northern Iraq, where he’d started an excavation in conjunction with some French archaeologists. I was startled when he invited me to join him. I was moved by this generosity and immediately accepted. I was to join him in a couple of days. I had my bags packed. There were little brushes and a small pick and some other stuff. Uncle William had had my initials burned into the wooden handles.
I supposed there was to be some sort of address by the director of the museum, and then Uncle William would be honored. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I knew he was taking a few moments to pull himself together because he had a tendency to get emotional at things like this. There was a waiter gliding around with a tray of champagne flutes, and I took one. I decided to look for Clive, who was lurking somewhere, listening in on other people’s conversations. I found him standing by the head with a rather handsome-looking man, maybe ten years his senior. I stood at a safe distance with my drink, pretending to be interested in a grave stella that was displayed close by.
I heard Clive say, “Do you really think it’s Antinoüs? Aren’t the eyebrows a bit wonky?”
“I have no doubt in my mind that it is he. Do you know his story?”
“No,” said Clive.
“He was the favorite of Hadrian. He drowned in the Nile under suspicious circumstances. Hadrian was distraught. He made Antinoüs a deity. Gave him his own constellation. He was the last god added to the pantheon.”
This man seemed genuinely saddened by this. Clive said, “But isn’t it funny that we know who it was, but we don’t know the artist. Today it’s different. Everyone knows the artist, but they don’t always know the subject.”
“That’s very true,” said the man.
I, of course, wondered if Clive was being ironic, but he’d probably just gotten carried away and forgotten that he did know the artist. But Clive was right. The subject was no longer the divinity, the artist was. Old Jack. Jack, wherever he was.
And then I saw Amanda walking toward me.
“How are you, Rupert?” she said. “I thought you were going to call me when you got back from Greece.”
“I still might,” I said.
“That was ten months ago,” she said. She had an enormous canary diamond on her left ring finger. She had once worn an unfaceted topaz set in bronze, something Jack had made. I picked up Amanda’s hand and admired the ring.
“Kiplinger,” she said.
“I was going to say Cartier.” I let the hand drop. “Nineteen twenties. Very nice.”
“Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” she said.
I took a moment to think. “I’d rather wait till Kiplinger’s dead for that.”
There was a silence.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Of course you don’t.” I raised my glass and Amanda left me.
I wandered into the next gallery. I was surprised to see Uncle William standing there, completely alone. He seemed to be hiding.
“Uncle William,” I said. I handed him the champagne.
“I hate champagne,” he said.
“I know,” I replied, “but I think you need it.”
Uncle William was looking at a modern piece, some wooden female figure rising upward like a flame, with her hands above her head and the whole thing swirling at an angle. The eyes of the figure were closed and the mouth open, just a little. The breasts were full and the stomach kind of flattened, not rounded as women’s stomachs usually were. The musculature was exceptional for a woman: pronounced, lean, and strong. I looked at the face for a moment and recognized her. I wasn’t surprised at the artist: John Weldon. The title of the piece was The Lovers. Amanda floated out in a whirlwind and I thought I saw an influence, one of churning figures—was it Paulo and Francesca?—from Blake’s illustrations of the Inferno. I looked at the base of the sculpture and it seemed to be rising out of a molten heap of dark bronze, but there were holes in the bronze, and showing through this were goat hair, fragments of bone, a twist of rusted wire, and a piece of marble rubble that under scrutiny revealed the flattened oval of an eye, Jack’s eye.
I must have been quiet for some time, because Uncle William patted my arm.
“It’s amazing what goes for art,” he said.
I laughed. “I’m actually an admirer,” I said. “Weldon had a great capacity for life.”
Uncle William looked at the dates, 1916–1963. “Well, he’s dead now.”
I looked at the writhing figures. Jack was trapped in there, with Amanda. They were caught in marble and the wood, everything, even their pulse. “Take a closer look,” I said.
He did. “Rupert, it’s atrocious.”
“I don’t agree,” I said, placing my hand on his shoulder, “it’s divine.”