25
“OH, THERE YOU ARE.”
I heard her sigh as I opened my eyes. I stared up at that aqueous ceiling and the light all around us, feeling as if we were floating on that great blue bay beyond our balcony.
“So, do you think I was crazy to come, then?” she asked.
She seemed to be prompting me back to earth out of an oceanic vastness.
“As you said,” I replied, “you don’t seem to have had much of a choice.”
“I would have gone crazy—that’s what. I’ve been a little lost recently, a little scared. My doctor said I needed to get away from New York.”
“It was a good idea.”
“Mother used to tell me when I complained that the choices we make were made for us long before we even knew they were choices.”
I looked over to where she lay on her bed, her profile a lovely composition against the sheer white of the wall behind, head propped on a pillow to better see the colors of the bay. Her hands were crossed over her breasts as in one of those Gothic tomb sculptures. Except her feet were bare, her toes rhythmically pointing and unpointing, arching those ugly yet beautiful feet that I recalled so well from the night of our sixth-form dance.
“It’s a little strange finding out your father’s not your father,” she said. “Even if Bobby—do you mind if I call him Bobby?—wasn’t quite the monster everyone thought he was.”
“Like Max—or was it Telemachus?—always said, We can’t pick the guy who knocked up our mother. And as much as he complained about his dad, I actually took quite a shine to Jack. Did you ever meet Jack, the big bad banker?”
On the subject of Max, it was as if she hadn’t heard or didn’t care. “Bobby doted on me,” she told me. “He loved me. Deep down he yearned for a kind of perfect world, free of injustice, where music and art mattered more than anything because they were an expression of man’s highest calling. He just hated a world he couldn’t change.”
“Well, I guess that explains how he and Max got on so famously,” I replied.
“You like rubbing it in, don’t you?”
“Sorry—but someone in bed, so to speak, with the likes of Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Kim Philby—traitors responsible for the deaths of thousands . . . you’re well out of it.”
I thought I’d nicely laid to rest any lingering misbegotten loyalties or affections.
“Bobby gave me piano lessons even though he could barely play anymore. Even his voice was musical. He could explain music with a sensitivity that actually brought tears to my mother’s eyes. Even now I’ll dance a passage and think how he’d work the phrasing. When I was a little girl, he’d have me sit in his lap, and comb my hair, and read to me, and he’d call me ‘his little miracle.’ For years when I was a kid, he called me that, ‘my little miracle.’ God knows how Mother managed that neat illusion—but then she was the Houdini of sex.”
“So he was . . .”
“Capable of producing a child? At least he thought so—she could convince him of anything. But nothing was quite the same again after that night when you and Max visited Hermitage.”
“Max and I?”
“He asked you to read a prayer from Samuel Williams’s Essays and Prayers.”
“Yes, just a little awkward.”
“We’d never said prayers at a meal, never. And just like that, it began, first with his grandfather and Essays and Prayers, and then this religious thing began to take him over. It drove my mother insane. First, she came to live with me in New York, until she got her own place— thank God. After he was kicked off the Winsted board, he converted to Catholicism. He became like a monk with his keepers, railing at a fallen world, of which I was one of the truly fallen. I couldn’t go back, for years.”
“Angels,” I murmured to myself a little wistfully. “So, Colonel Fairburn—he really believes you’re his daughter?”
“My mother has her first cousin wrapped in so many knots, he doesn’t know which way his dick is pointing.”
“Well—”
“They just headed for the hills, you see, back to his Sussex mansion, living in the past like two antiquarians: when they were kids growing up there, when she was a star with Sadler’s Wells, when he was a famous archaeologist at Cambridge. My lawyer got me to agree to go to their wedding this November . . . and make peace.”
She turned to me to get my reaction. Her pale blue eyes sparked as she tried to smile and make light of her dilemma. That sounding board of a blue bay produced more soft hoots, the cough of an old diesel engine, the splash of a mooring rope: vesperal hymns of a harbor at day’s end.
“The old do that, escape into the past.”
“Forget it.” She turned from my note of vague sympathy, sighting along her upraised right leg to where it ended in a perfect arch. “The past . . . well, did you ever go snorkeling? I did once in Key West. We did two weeks of performances down in Miami and then we had a week off. It’s like that, you see, like you’re floating on this great inland sea and all that has ever gone before you forms the ocean floor, those deep caverns and ridges, some of them reaching up as reefs and shoals, even islands. And as you float above you can feel the warm currents— sometimes they kinda catch you unaware, so that you are buoyed up, warmed through and through with the hidden life there below, which you can never quite touch. Because even staring down, even when you try to dive down and touch bottom, it’s always falling away from you— the past, I mean. It’s just what you feel in your bones . . . there in the music, in the steps, where those feelings come from. Sorry, I know you think it’s flaky, but that’s how it feels to me. It’s as lost as you and I will be to our great-great-grandchildren.”
My heart fell at her elegiac, brave words: a disciple of Max, womanly wisdom from my fair Athena.
Later, after dinner, we strolled the waterfront of Nafplio with the other tourists and a few locals, teenagers wheeling on one another’s arms. The stars and a half-moon drifted on the bay amidst the lights of returning fishing boats. Bouzouki music or revolting Euro pop played in the harbor-front tavernas. My back—we had shared three bottles of a superb Allagiannis Savatiano, with hints of mango and lemon around the edges—was behaving itself. We were feeling no pain. She wore a white blouse, barely buttoned, showing her pale, long-tendoned neck merging into the upper curve of her breasts. Her hair was tight in a chignon, so that the handsome oval of her face and the looping ringlets of her hair showed her features to best advantage. We walked in silence along the quay, touching hands, staring out over the water and the star-reflected night. I could not help noticing how she instinctively turned and smiled at the garish strobe lights and disco beat coming from the tourist joints along the harbor. Everything about her body language—the way she swayed her hips or twirled her skirt—yearned for that music, to discard the elastic brace that sheathed her knee, to be healed, to be free again. How many wild New York parties and dance clubs were encompassed in her longing smiles, when she and Max had danced the night away at Studio 54? I tried not to think about it. Especially the famous censored photograph in People magazine, when she’d danced topless with a coterie of nude male dancers from the Joffrey Ballet.
We stood gazing out at the fortress of Bourtzi in the middle of the harbor, like a slightly dented hat floating on a glassy sea. Above us, long walls snaked the hillsides, and the Venetian castle of Palamidi loomed on the edge of darkness, plucking out starlight as we continued our stroll.
“Lots of walls,” she said.
“The Venetians built them and the castle.”
“Venice . . .” There was a kind of ache in her voice. “Venetians seem to be everywhere around these parts.”
“Venice,” I echoed, wondering if I might elicit something of Max’s mocking refrain that often edged her tone of voice.
She took my hand and turned and kissed me, lingering for a moment, and then hugged me. I hugged her back.
“You taste like wine.” “So do you.”
“I know I’m a little drunk, but that was nice.” She attempted a childish giggle.
“From Patras, a vineyard on the west coast, the Allagiannis Savatiano.”
“I meant you. It’s nice to know . . . more about you.”
“Today me, tomorrow my father.” I shrugged. “It’s strange, you know, twenty years ago—no, twenty-four, when I spent a spring break at Princeton, I thought I detected irritation in his older colleagues in the Archaeology Department, a hint of controversy about his free spending habits and what one guy described as his ‘cowboy gallivanting,’ whatever that was about. Before my senior year at Winsted, in Crete, I rarely heard anything about it, just reverence for his scholarship, his intrepid work in OSS: first American into occupied Greece. But these days, even his reputation as an archaeologist has evaporated among the younger people in the profession. He’s become a vaguely mythic figure, a name attached to a professorship, a gallery in the museum. Nobody in the field even mentions his articles and books. You see, without a major find, a major discovery—nobody, in the end, remembers.”
“And Winsted?”
“A name on a wall. Nobody left who knew him.”
“Not for Elliot, not for my mother, not for me. This is our chance, before they’re all gone.”
“Like you said . . . lost as you and I will be.”
“At least you and Max and Vlada have your books.”
I turned on the quay to her down-turned face, highlighted in the play of garish lights from a nearby disco, and touched her quivering chin, until her eyes again found mine.
“Ah, but you lived—you really did,” I told her, and I meant every word. “You brought joy to how many thousands.”
She smiled and seemed to breathe deeply of some fragrance; lifting her face to the sky, she pointed.
“Orion.”
I followed her gaze to where Orion’s belt teetered above the obsidian mirror of the bay, as if yearning to merge with its triplicate echo, blue giants ballasted by the pinkish plume of an expanding nebula.
“Don’t tell me you’re a stargazer like Max.”
“He had a thing about stars—he did, that boy.”
It was the first real flicker of affection for Max I’d detected in her voice. And it seemed to produce a response, as if to some veiled desire writ large in the heavens, for she suddenly reached up and began pulling out bobby pins, letting down her hair and shaking it loose.
“Perhaps he should have been a medievalist,” I offered, wanting to put the brakes on her transformation. “Funny, how someone who so loved to find order in chaos could have lived such a disorderly life.”
She glanced at me in the half-light, her long hair flaring, as if caught by a stray current of solar wind, as if glad she’d succeeded in drawing that bit of bile from my soul: what, I realized the moment I spat it out, could just as easily have been construed as a criticism of her life, as well.
She turned her face again to the night sky. “It was my mother who taught me the stars; she liked to say the stars were a kind of first language, like the invisible notes of birdsong, and how the succession of wildflowers is the only measure of time that really matters.”
In this, I sensed less a defensive tone than a cry of abandonment . . . or was it a yearning to belong? And I was put in mind of all the books on botany and astronomy on my father’s shelves, and how many times, opening the pages of one of his books, a dried flower would slip free.
“You mentioned the Philby autobiography you found with the letters: What did the inscription say?”
Without hesitation she recited: “‘For Suzanne, a love never betrayed. And you, my darling, the best of all. Kim.’”
I nodded, not a little bewildered, struggling, and—following her gaze skyward, as I had followed Max’s stellar gaze from our boathouse all those years before—tried to put it aside.
“For me, the stars always seemed a little unnerving. I mean, you spend your career puttering in the earth for scraps of lost lives, the glimmering fragment that will add another syllable to a lost history; while out there, murmuring away every night, are billions of notes of data, infinitely old, from various eras separated by millions of years—and all of it flooding away from you, as tempting as they are unintelligible, of worlds that have flickered out a billion years before Paleolithic men painted their bison in the flame-lit caves of Lascaux.”
From a disco along the quay, the incongruent strains of a Jerome Kern standard, “I’m Old Fashioned.” She laughed incredulously, as if she’d been found out, and turned to me and took my hands in a slow two-step, slipping a hand to my shoulder as she had on the night of the senior dance. Her parted liquid lips seemed poised on a memory as she kept her eyes firmly turned to the heavens.
“Jerry Robbins . . . I did the second performance.”
“Who?”
“You don’t find it some comfort to be part of them—the stars, I mean, to know their names, to wonder about their journey?”
“With so many lost stories of our own . . . just a drop in the ocean—pretty small potatoes.”
“I kinda feel like they’re my friends, that I’m at the heart of their journey, the midpoint of all things—but what the fuck: I’m old-fashioned.” She squeezed my hand as if to put a stop to any hint of self-pity and expertly led me in a few turns, then, breaking away a moment to dance a few steps, arms extended to an invisible partner, she closed her eyes as she hummed along with the music.
“Well,” I said to her, “I feel a little bit less insignificant here with you and—who did you say—Mr. Robbins?”
“And Mr. Kern—two Jeromes.”
She returned to me and nestled her head against my ear as if better to whisper.
“I don’t think it’s about being bigger or smaller; it’s only how alive you are. Even when I’m on the stage at the Met—and it’s a huge, scary space, especially in a solo—I feel like I’m just about where I need to be, that I can project enough feeling—when I’m perfectly on the music— to fill the thing, as fully alive as God or nature ever meant us to be. There were moments when I knew I could be anything. . . . Well, maybe not Astaire.”
With all the wine and Demerol, I ended up being good for nothing. I fell asleep as soon as I lay down on my bed. Sometime later, I awoke from the most violent nightmare, the kind of nightmare that I had pretty much banished toward the end of my freshman year at Princeton. I’d been proud of how, by forcing myself to focus intensely on my studies, steeping myself in the ancient past, I’d strangled my own past. Keeping my mouth shut and my mind engaged on work seemed to banish bad feelings; as Maureen put it, “Listen, soldier—live in the present and find yourself a sweet girl and the past will take care of itself.” The Demerol helped, my students helped, even if they thought anyone who’d served in Vietnam was an idiot or a loser. But there I was on the floor, awash in sweat, the bedclothes kicked the hell all over the place, and Laura beside me, cringing in her T-shirt and panties as she held one of my arms and shied away from the other. I was mortified and shivering with fear because I had been trying to save myself from drowning, from being pulled under, as if the Vam Co Dong River had come alive, as if all the floating bodies had risen up as one.
“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” “Peter, are you okay?”
“Of course I’m okay.”
I was indignant, furious at myself. She let go of my arm and reached to rub her shoulder, where I must have hit her pretty hard; she had a big purple bruise there the next morning.
“You scared me to death.” “Scared you—shit.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Well . . . I was, I was just fine until you came along.”
She reminded me of that all the way to Pylos by giving me the silent treatment.