Collected Novels and Plays (43 page)

The game had broken like a bubble—or had not, had rather, by ending on terms so incongruous, left him still inside it, sustaining it all by himself. He thought of some old stage uncle, living on in a boarding-house, friendless, wedded to the mannerism of a once famous role. He felt ridiculously lonely.

At last he started back towards the house, regaining first the higher level of green, then the shady terrace. The cardplayers, intent on
their
game, scarcely looked up as Francis slipped into the great, red, scented room. He paused behind his mother while she fingered a face card. “Do you know what I’d love?” she murmured, feeling his presence. “A glass of cold, cold water.”

“So would I, Francis,” said Mrs. Gresham.

“Make it three,” whispered Bertha Durdee, and played a heart.

Francis hurried to the pantry, positively afraid lest now, too late, he should hear from somewhere a chorus of mocking voices sing out the start of a fresh game, in which he, once again, would be It.

On his return Natalie Bigelow asked for water. The grown-ups did not otherwise detain him.

But only after coming upon the children building castles at the sea’s edge, oblivious to him, did Francis stare out over the lulled water and understand. He
was
It. He tentatively said so the first time, then once more with an exquisite tremor of conviction: “I am It.”

The words carried with them wondrous notions of selflessness, of permanence. His father coughed behind him in the house. The children trembled against the sea. He knew the expression on his own face. The entire world was real.

(1965)

Orestes

The islands of Greece

Across vivid water the islands of Greece lie. They have been cut out of cardboard and set on bases of

at subtle odds with one another, upon bases of pale haze. Their colors are mauve, exhausted blue, tanned rose, here & there crinkled to catch the light. They do not seem

It is inconceivable that they are of one substance with the warm red rock underfoot

rock of one’s own vantage point (?)

One early evening

(Name) had grown used to this contradiction. She

Late one
spring
afternoon a woman no longer
puzzled
troubled by this illusion left her house, the largest on the island of (Name), and set out on foot in the direction of town.

At the top of a hill she met Orestes. He

Her body was strong and graceful, her features first darkened, then silvered by the dry summer. White strands in her iron-colored hair shot backward into an elaborate plaited bun. Her
large, Byzantine
eyes, immense & shining, though set in webs of age, attended without curiosity to the path which rose and fell never far from the water’s edge. She wore sandals, a gray skirt, not embroidered, & a
night-blue shawl

and had wound a thin night-blue shawl around the upper part of her body, to produce an impression of deliberate, coquettish antiquity. Drawstring looped over her wrist, an old-fashioned beaded purse sparkled mustily as she walked, making light of the mission she did not have. She had told them she was going to the pharmacy. They had

She had said she was going to the pharmacy, not that there was anything to do, now, but wait. The others had appeared to understand.

So did the few people she passed; they greeted her courteously, without lingering.

On a small promontory she met Orestes. He was walking away from the town. It stretched on either side of him like a robe, its hues of white & stone hanging down into the still harbor.

“Pardon me,” he said. “Do you live here? I am looking for the Sleeping Woman.”

His Greek, fluent but incorrect, made her examine him carefully.

“Ah,” she said at length, “but the best view is from the town. Did no one point it out? You must turn back.”

Whereupon they fell into step together and Orestes set about

O., who found all his own traits extraordinary, set about marveling at his
stupidity
imperception. Did she mean those slopes directly facing the port?
Their
silhouette made up the Sleeping Woman? He laughed out loud, swinging his zippered notebook from his little finger.

At this juncture, I think, no serious evocation of landscape. What else will serve?

Let me see. Orestes can give her ice cream at the café. (It must be Summer. O.’s sabbatical year will just have begun.) A mild dusk. The awnings that close me in won’t be needed. It will divert her to sit in full view of the populace—the grande dame of the island, already on such jolly terms with the newcomer.

He will talk.

“I was born 35 years ago in Asia Minor of Greek parents. My father, a goatherd, fell in love with a beautiful etc. Dead of cancer. Poverty. New York. Mother remarried, lives in Texas. A stepfather,
a half-brother

No. Avoid plunging stupidly into exposition. Let him be felt a bit. Let
her
be felt.

Orestes

Little stream, have you petered out so soon?

This is my first prolonged exposure to the
town
of Diblos (1800 souls). It has, I can report so far, a hotel & a café. In the hotel are 12 rooms, 2 baths, a manager in pyjamas morning and night, an energetic Italian-speaking maid named Chryssoula whose children—Yannis, Theodoros, Aphrodite, six all told—run errands & whose big black cat does not. Here at the café, the canvas, still rolled down, is flapping
furiously. An umber heat pulses through it. My table lurches from side to side as I write, at one with the incomprehensible voices, rattle of beads,
the click & screech of crockery. It is 4:00 of my 2nd day here, and of my 7th in Greece for as many years. I’d thought one of the first things to do would be to walk out to the House, but I haven’t. Nor have I wanted in any way to “use” my previous visit, or my connection with O.
& Dora. The natives have shown, up to now, no glimmer of recognition.

5:30. The boat from Athens has come & gone. The awnings are rolled up. Nobody in sight. I could be giving thought to

5:45. The American girl, Lucy, from the N.’s lunch last week, was on the boat. I hadn’t noticed her getting off. She seemed ominously glad to see a familiar face. Then: “But you’re
working
, excuse me!”—leaving me with the choice of being amused by her view of the Writer as finer & nobler than the rest of us or being undone by the whole sorry banality of writing so much as a postcard in a public place. Anyhow, she
couldn’t join me. A luggage-bearing child led her off to a room taken, sight unseen. Will she be here long? I didn’t ask. I am so cold to people. And keep forgetting that it’s that, the coldness, the remoteness, that attracts them. If I were warmer, talked more, showed more interest,
felt
more interest—

To fit in somewhere:

(Dora) was constantly polite and respected, but Orestes had
time
for people, time to talk and show interest, to make his listeners feel that their minds were rare & flexible, time to welcome a stranger into the circle with some deft bit of nonsense from the speaker’s well of inexhaustible friendliness. This kind of conversation finds its happiest expression in the dialogues of Plato, where for all Socrates’ avowed humility it is certainly
he who does the talking & remains the center of attention. The system worked like a charm at the waterfront café where a half dozen idle citizens would be held spellbound, hours on end, while (Dora) knitted. “How do you do it?” she asked one day.

“What do you mean? I like doing it,” he said.

“How can you?” was on the tip of her tongue. Instead she returned to her
knitting
handiwork, head bowed in acknowledgment of her friend’s superior humanity.

(The Greek restaurant in New York: a contrasting scene.)

17.vi.61

From the post-office (no letters yet) a strange view of the Sleeping Woman, seen only by afternoon light until today. Barely recognizable, a collapsing tent of whitish bluffs & uncertain distances; let Orestes see her that way just before (after?) the confrontation on the terrace.

Seen from the café, now, the Woman is more distinct: knee, belly, ribcage, breast (a shallow hemisphere) slung backwards to the long throat; a firm jutting chin, nose ditto; mouth shut, refusal of a kiss.

She gives the landscape an intense dreamlike quality. In the foreground, set low, an Italianate composition of peeling villa, cypress, palm, lemon trees, all green-black between the sky-colored water & the hills pale as clouds.

Even the narrow channel between island and mainland struck Orestes as emblematic. He thought of the “tight straits” of his early life.

18.vi.61

Along the quai are moored the little water taxis, each shaded by a canopy of white cloth. This, on Dora’s more stylish boat, had a border of scarlet fringe.

She sent the boat for Orestes the following afternoon. The young boatman

“Well, this has been very nice,” said (Dora)—they were now speaking English. She gave him her hand, adding as if it meant nothing, “You wouldn’t be a bridge fan?

He stared at her, thinking of
Hart Crane
water to be spanned.

“Or any card game. It helps to pass the time.”

“Oh you know,” cried Orestes joyously, understanding & savoring his conquest, “I have no talent for such things. I would play a diamond instead of a heart—is that what the suits are called?” He ended by noticing her smile. “Would you like me to play cards with you?” he said meekly.

She sent the boat for him the following afternoon. The young boatman, Kosta, knew him by sight. In those days before the tourists discovered (Diblos) every stranger was known, through someone’s hospitable interrogation, within an hour of arrival.

(It’s moving too quickly.)

(That same night) Orestes strolled the length of the waterfront to a taverna above the beach—from afar, a diamond blaze, a faint blare of song; once there, 8 tables, a central rectangle of earth, unshaded bulbs strung on wires. A whitewashed cube, windowless, in whose forehead burned the strongest bulb, completed the setting. Two couples sat at one table, two sailors at another.
Orestes
The music had stopped. O. nodded about politely,
seated himself and ordered wine & cheese from the child who came stumbling out over an apron that covered him from chest to ankles.

Ah wait. Insert:

At a 3rd table sat a small, plump infant of a man, dashingly dressed, an Athenian on holiday, O. supposed in the moment it took to nod about & choose a table removed from the outsider. He seated himself, etc. HA rhythmical grating, ominous & blurred, the needle in its groove, heralded the next selection. From the loudspeaker issued a splatter of
twanging sounds, a melody any fragment of which seemed feverish but whose final effect was
one of tragic lassitude. A voice put words to it:

(Or find other words. Love & Betrayal. Make them up?)

One of the sailors rose to dance. He snapped fingers, leapt, dipped, never looked up. Above him, counterwise to his movements, a lightbulb slowly revolved. When the dance ended, the small plump man, who had come unnoticed to Orestes’ table, asked permission to sit down.

The Enfant Chic.

He is forever pursing his pale mouth and rolling his pale eyes. A silken swag of hair, a lightly pitted face like the moon’s. The rest of him vanishes into his new clothes; the white collar stands out from his ears, only his knuckles show below the pink cuffs. In talking, he spreads out his hands & the two middle fingers stay glued together as on fashion dummies. He would be, oh, 40. One thinks at first he is a photographer; he leers at one, mimes the
snapping of a picture. Is he mad? His manner changes. He asks if one knows an Athens shop called l’Enfant Chic. No, no, no, he does not own it. No, no, he doesn’t buy his clothes there, hahaha. The outspread hand flattens upon his heart. Ze suis, moi, l’Enfant Seek. Actually his name is Yannis, as whose isn’t, and he runs a shop of his own here called Tout pour le Sport.

That’s not going to work. There’s no place for the Enfant Chic in this story. Yet he lives here.
Orson
Orestes could have to reckon with him, & for O. he’d be a rather different person, able to speak his own language, dispense with those airs of complicity, of knowing more than he tells, put on by his utter ignorance—of me, of English, even of French—like one more piece of smart clothing.