I PLEASED MY GREEK housekeeper enormously by telling her she didn’t have to cook dinner for me. I ate a plate of lamb-stew guk at the lighted taverna across the vacant lot. I was again standing on my cavey porch with a glass of Scotch in my hand looking at the moonlit harbor, when Georgina Taylor called up to me from below.
“Are you up there all alone?”
Politely I invited her up for a drink. It was a definite mistake and I knew it. Inviting people in for a nightcap is one of the slower forms of suicide.
She was already a little drunk. And once she was there, inside, she began to put away the Scotch like an NFL linebacker on the night after a losing season. It was Scotch they had thoughtfully provided for me, along with the bill. She got quite drunk on it, quite soon.
It was as if she could hardly wait till the amenities were over before plunging in and pouring out her story.
“It’s a shame you should be here all alone like this on your first night here.”
“I don’t mind it,” I said.
“How are you finding the house?”
“It’s a little big for one man.”
“I told them that. You must have done something quite remarkable for Freddy Tarkoff.”
“We’re old friends.”
On the second large whisky she dispensed with the subterfuge of soda altogether, but did accept ice.
“Are you really a private detective?”
I gestured.
“I ought to hire you to get the goods on Con for me.”
“I don’t take divorce cases. They get too messy.”
“No? Doesn’t matter. I’ve got the goods on him myself, anyway. He’s never bothered to try and hide them.”
“What you need is a lawyer, then.”
“Oh,” she said inconclusively. Then, “I suppose I shall never do anything about it. It really is a lovely night, out.”
“Lovely.”
“You don’t talk a great hell of a lot, do you?”
I didn’t answer that.
She thrust out her glass. She accepted a third large one, with ice, before launching herself.
“Con is having an affair with Sonny Duval’s ‘wife,’” she said. She twisted the word Wife savagely, to make sure I understood Jane Duval wasn’t one.
“And I’m supposed to say I’m sorry about that, is that it?” I said. I made it blunt.
She ignored it completely. “They aren’t really married, ‘the Duvals,’” Georgina Taylor said. “They don’t believe in getting married.” She looked at me, evidently for some comment. I didn’t make any. At this point it wasn’t going to make any difference whether I did or not.
“This is not the first affair Jane Duval has had on the island. But this time she seems to have flipped. I suppose that’s my Con. He could honey-talk the devil himself. Anyway, she claims Con promised to take her away. Away from ‘all this.’ Con, who has no intention of doing any such thing, has had to flee to Athens. And now Jane is threatening to follow him. And, as usual, it’s being left to me to get him out of it.”
She looked at me again. I didn’t say anything. Her voice took on a plaintive wail.
“I think this is all very un-chic of Sonny and Jane, who are millionaires incidentally. American millionaires. And who claim to believe in free love and free sex all over the place.”
This time she didn’t hold out her glass but reached for the bottle herself, on the little tray. “Don’t bother with the cubes,” she said hoarsely.
I got up, hoping she would get up too. She did. But then she took a step toward me, still holding tight to her glass, and leaned against me.
Where I come from women don’t lean against you indiscriminately. If they do, they live to think about it, if they don’t regret it.
Her unbound breasts in her faded shirt jiggled against my lower chest. “I guess you must know there’s not anything at all I can do about it,” I said, and pushed her gently away from me.
She was wiping her eyes with one hand, and sipping Scotch with the other. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I really do. I shouldn’t come up here and lay all this on your back. Please believe it won’t happen again.”
“I do. I believe it. After all, all I did was to come here and rent your house,” I said.
She laughed.
“I’ll be going.”
But it took a while to get her out. She was required now by something or other to maintain a pretense that she came up only to see how I was making out and not to confess her current misery and she would not stop talking.
I learned several things. I learned that Con was short for Constantine, and not for Conrad. I learned that Georgina Taylor was indeed English and had met Constantine Taylor in Alexandria during the war, where he was a naval officer. I learned they had a 22-year-old son, now living in London.
When she finally went out the door, she staggered a little as she handed me the slim remains of her fifth large whisky.
I shut the door. I thought I could see now why the cabman made his malicious laugh.
I turned off all the lights and took the whisky bottle upstairs with me and went down the bare hall hung with bad paintings to my bedroom. I was sleeping in the bedroom over the living room, overlooking the harbor. I did not turn the lights on and stood looking out over the still-moonlit harbor and tried to calm my ears. I was wide awake. I poured myself a stiff drink, while listening to my insides complain to me that I had poured too much whisky in them already today.
From down below, I could hear music playing on Georgina’s record player. Then a bottle clinking. I stepped out on the flat porch roof with my drink and stood a long time, brooding. The yacht harbor was still beautiful in the moonlight.
Some vacation. I could boot Freddy Tarkoff right in the butt. All the unpleasant things were clamoring in my head again. My life. My job for Tarkoff. My divorce. All jostling each other to be the first one out.
I still wasn’t ready to think about any of it yet.
Among the yachts and boats in the harbor was one big one, a beauty. A ketch. It was all dark, and looked all locked up. It must have had a 90-foot mast, and had the long lines of an ocean sailer. You could go anywhere on that. As it rocked, its huge mast made an enormous arc across the bright star-marked sky.
I tried to imagine what it must be like to have enough money to own a boat like that, and failed. Enough money to live on it, and go where you wanted, and leave when you felt like it. I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine having that much money.
After a while I went back inside and got into the rather lumpy bed.
All I did was toss among the lumps. So I made myself think about the yacht again. It was either that, or the other stuff. I went over every line of her, and every cable, and every stay. I went over every furled sail on her, and over all their lashings.
Then I went over every extra sail that must be in her sail locker. I went over every cabin in detail. I had never seen the cabins. It didn’t matter. I made them up as I would have had them and went over them.
It was a trick I had learned during the war. My war. When you did not want to think about something, think about something you wanted. But it had to be something you wanted badly. Back then it had been a cabin I had once seen up in the Wind River Range. I had never seen the inside of that, either. But I had made it up a thousand times. And it had worked back then.
Now I did the same thing with the yacht. It worked again.
It took a long time. But my head stopped, and I got to sleep.