Collected Novels and Plays (50 page)

“What are you saying?” a little boy must have asked. He listened soberly to whatever O. replied. A last phrase sent them all laughing & scrambling away.

Orestes: Greek children love me because I treat them like adults.

Their fathers, meanwhile, had sent many cans of wine to the table
cleared for (Dora)’s party. It was the work of the next hour to consume these, toasting the givers or whoever happened by. To eat: a cube of cheese, crust of bread, 2 olives, a segment of grilled octopus. Small plates piled up empty. They could be used later, said O., to throw at Kosta’s feet, if he danced well. Kosta blushed.

They had all danced, Sandy included—connected by handkerchiefs to Maritsa & Dora, to numberless others forming a great swaying crescent. Then this simple dance would end, another kind of tune begin, a single young fisherman spin, dip, snap, leap his way through it, eyes always on the earth; or an older dancer, closer to earth in another sense, allude

execute slow allusions to the passion & agility he no longer commanded.

Presently Sandy was able to watch with—and Dora without—astonishment his brother & Kosta alone in the dancing place.
Circling one another
H
h
issing like serpents, Kosta wriggling his powerful shoulders rapidly, seductively in parody of a belly dancer (fat, clown-white, a dream of beauty to any man present), they circled one another until, suddenly, on an emphatic beat

The very hissing is sexual—ssss! It’s of course the consonant missing from a married woman’s name (put in the genitive: Mr Pappas, Mrs Pappa, etc.) and so commends itself to the dancer as a tiny linguistic feature related to moustache & phallus, one more fine feather of virility—

beat, Kosta jumped & landed not on the ground but in midair, with legs wrapped about O.’s waist, head fallen back, shoulders still undulating. The two pairs of arms outstretched, the 2 moustached heads oppositely inclined—something was there of Narcissus & his image, something of the Jack of Clubs. Then they sprang apart, to revolve separately, barely smiling, until the piece ended.

“Come now,” said Orestes to his brother, later, after a fresh can of wine had been drunk. “You and I this time.”

The state of high spirits known as kéfi had descended upon their
table. (Dora) at whom Sandy had looked questioningly, merely laughed & said, “Of course!”

Already the instruments were wrangling happily together. Sandy contented himself with repeating, most gracefully, he thought, the basic steps Orestes indicated—forward, sideways, snap your fingers—while the latter went on to dip, whirl, touch earth, strike shoe with palm, resoundingly, rise, dip again, & abruptly, facing Sandy, whisper
Now
.

“I’m too heavy, I’ll knock you over.”

“Don’t worry, come on, boy!”

He places his hands on O.’s shoulders. “Hup!” cries Orestes, and S., with a last desparing look at the world, springs upwards & backwards to lock his thighs around his partner’s waist. The rest of him has fallen free, head inches from the ground, arms trailing. Upside down, trees, tables, (Dora), the colored wool embroidery of her bag, everything exuberantly revolves. O.’s face grins down: the look of the initiator. Now Sandy
remembers to snap his fingers. O. hisses lightly, provocatively. It ends all too soon. “Up!” cried Orestes & their uncouplement is effected to applause. S. lurches backwards, sustained by the music’s beat, by nothing else. His dizziness has hardly passed before O. confronts him—“Ready? Now brace yourself. Hup!”—and in a flash the whole staggering weight of another body has become
his
. But he’s mad, S. thinks, I
can’t hold him up! as they go reeling towards a group of tables and Orestes, blissful & trusting, smiles up at him. I cannot. Sandy has opened his mouth to cry—the blood pounding beneath his sunburn—he cannot—yet within seconds it appears that he can; he can, he can. Power & joy fill him. His eyes fill. He can dance under his brother’s weight. Then it is over, & the music, too.

“Bravo,” said Dora, welcoming them back. “You’re going to make an excellent Greek, Sandy.”

It had earned them
lots
more wine.

An hour later (Dora) looked at Sandy more closely. “I think we shall have to take you home.”

“Ah, no!” from Orestes. It was a
good
panegyri; Sandy must be allowed to see it all—look, they were carving the lamb at last!

S. (earnestly): I’m not drunk, you know.

Dora: No, but you are bright red. Look at him, Orestes, he’s badly burned.

O.: Ah, it’s too bad, etc. The upshot (to be written?) is that Kosta takes his family, Dora & Sandy back to the House, then returns to bring Orestes home when the panegyri has run its course.

Sandy feels nothing, notices nothing. The wine has numbed him. He is put to bed.

(Make the dancing less euphoric?)

Just before dawn something woke him. The gray light barely tinged his sheets. Burning all over, head throbbing, Sandy got up to peer into the front room. Orestes’ bed had not been slept in. Nor was he to be found lying facedown among the cactuses outside his door. No one was anywhere. Had there been a sound? A voice? It came to S. that if he were to walk down those steps, under those eucalyptuses at every moment more visible, & reach that last tree
at its point parallel to the façade of the House, he would see—What? He hardly knows; he would simply
see
.

He walks there. He does see.

First he has met, on his way, Kosta in great good humor, making for his quarters—“Ah, Kyrie Sandy,” and touches the sunburn inquiringly, laughing, nodding.

Then the dog Kanella, tail not wagging, puzzled at the edge of the terrace.

20 yards distant stands Orestes. He has been out all night. Sober as stone, he is nonetheless hesitant, blinking, off guard, as if having just gained this level & found it unfamiliar. Between him & the House (Dora) has appeared, in her nightgown and dark blue flannel robe. At the sight of it, Sandy’s teeth begin to chatter. Neither sees
him
. Her feet are bare, her hair unkempt. O. breaks the silence, but in Greek.

“The servants,” she whispers, warning him.

The air grows a shade paler. It dawns on the audience that she has had no sleep. Her whole body shakes once. She asks where Orestes has been.

He replies. It sounds harmless, plausible. A night of drink, of talk——anything. A few hours sleep at———’s house.
Kosta
hadn’t felt like leaving.

“My dear,” she said with a light, hysterical laugh. “You’re lying to me. Don’t.”

A very long pause. She turned her clenched face from him, savagely.

“Dora, I never dreamed,” said Orestes.

“Nor I,” she sobbed. “Help me. Oh my friend. It came too suddenly. I couldn’t control. Do you understand. It’s not what I.”

He goes to her now, draws her hands down from her face, saying her name. She stares: half panic, half outrage. “Go to bed, Orestes.”

He will not. She has asked for his help.

She throws herself into his arms
.

She gave him a look from which reasonableness had been scrupulously withdrawn and threw herself

“Go, go,” she sighed. “I’m all right. Go to bed.”

Sandy, from behind his tree, obeyed her. Back to the cottage he sped, unseen, bone-cold, with clacking teeth.

In 5 minutes he hears O. come in, say his name &, when he doesn’t answer, fall on the bed in the front room.

The day was brighter when Orestes spoke again. “Are you awake, Sandy? Do you feel better? Shall I fetch you a glass of water?”

Now S. lets O. tell what has happened. Orestes is, as usual “amazed,” “profoundly disturbed,” wonders if he will be able to “cope” with (Dora)—it will be for
him
, naturally, to take charge of the situation.

“Shall I pretend it never happened? Or try to help Dora accept & overcome her feelings?”

Orestes often borrowed this rhetorical device from Greek tragedy. Never “How did you come here?” but “Did you walk today? Or take your bicycle?” So that to answer him (unless one can say
I swam
or
I flew
) one must admit that he has foreseen, in his wisdom, every alternative.

The alternative here—the unforeseen one—would be to return the love.

(Dora’s more “Byzantine” device: “I suppose, in this heat, you came by boat …?”)

Anyhow, he talks & talks. The prison of words. S. may fall back to sleep in the midst of it—as I am about to do, myself, this hot, hot afternoon.

It
is
a crucial scene. How it was actually resolved I must try to remember.
From then on

Outdoors, alone.

The setting sun. A clear golden

From the horizon a golden-pink light flows. When I lower my eyes it is to see water breaking on a rock a yard or two below my bare feet. The waves are small, their bravura limitless. One could name

(Sandy, feverish) tried to name their different movements: the
swirl
pirouette, the recoil, the beat missed on purpose, the upward hurl of white nets, the pounce, the pause for reflection; but no two were ever accomplished with quite the same motive or, for that matter, success. Again & again an ornate sequence would inexplicably break down; the sea would shrug, collapse, retire into a slot, a coulisse prudently hollowed out of rock
before-hand. For an instant the stage would be empty; one felt a sad kinship with the effaced gesture. Then a new star

a crash of harps! A new, staggeringly assured star, all mist & fretted crystal, had leapt and “frozen”—like only the greatest dancers, a second longer than anyone would have thought possible, in the tense, vivid air.

His feet alone gave scale to the spectacle. He tried to keep them in sight.

The play of water: a fou rire that goes on & on. Successions of rapid,
fluid shocks, unending variations, each as simple, each as elaborate, as the last. It bears no message.

It wrote a message in invisible ink, not to be read for 1000’s of years, upon the worn, slotted surface of the rock.

12.vii.61

He felt (Dora)’s hand on his forehead. “I came out to see how you were. You looked feverish at lunch.”

She sat down beside him. He gazed avidly into her face for signs of
unhappiness
her own fever. None showed.

“Kosta is bringing some bismuth from town. If you’re no better tomorrow we’ll have the doctor.”

“I’ll be all right. I’m all right now,” said Sandy. It was what he said & said during the fortnight that followed. There were days, furthermore, when D. & O., occupied by their own dilemma, gave every appearance of believing him. They never told him to stay in bed. He was free to wander about, thinner & weaker daily, as if he were not a child. The doctor materialized. When the bottle of medicine had been emptied, no one
suggested that it be refilled. Sandy would rise from lunch, having eaten some soup &
2
spoonfuls of Dora’s cornstarch confection which reappeared, larger & sturdier it seemed, from meal to meal. He would totter down to the water’s edge with his book & his blanket, there to remain until one of them came for him.

Orestes, he supposed, kept him informed of the unfolding drama. What (Dora) had said, what he in turn had replied. Somehow, by the time Sandy left the hospital—they have stayed on in Athens to be near him—it was all resolved. Her great wave of feeling had spent itself.

Psychologically (O. explains) it was to have been expected. A final sexual upsurge that had little to do with him personally. As he, rather than another, happened to be her guest, he had borne the brunt of it. Patiently, reasonably, he now faced with her all the contributing
motives—the delayed shock of widowhood, the sense that this had not brought Byron closer to her. She ended by seeming to accept his interpretations gratefully. She would
keep Orestes as her dearest friend.

(In fact she is going to America with him.)

“You see,” said O. gravely, “Dora means too much to me now, for me to risk the ambiguities, the tensions of a sexual relationship. She sees it, she agrees with me. We’re more than ever in perfect accord, having lived through those anxious weeks together.”

Something of the sort, put into talk or not, gets through to Sandy. In his mind Orestes & Dora perform a final somersault: they have chosen imagination, withstood the coarse quicksand of the senses. Platonic love! S. lies back on his pillow, impressed.

(Dora, 5 years later, in her narrow N. Y. flat, studying Chinese. She has aged, seems paler & softer, from spending less time out of doors, perhaps. Her brush, her inkstone. “This is the ideogram of power, this of language, this of island.” She & Sandy spend a sweet, elegiac hour together; he is going abroad, who knows if they will meet again? Is he going to Greece? She would like to give him some letters. Speaking of Orestes, as of a
character in a novel, she says, “He was Greek, yes, but with the glaze of a Turk.”) (It’s after hearing—from me—of this visit that O. writes his letter full of hurt withdrawal: Dora’s charm had “blinded” me; I was no longer the serious, childlike, brother-loving etc …. It strikes me now that behind these words lay his dismay over my not having sought to bring him & Dora together again. “Love is not merely
feeling, but action,” he wrote. A dreamer to the last.)

Wait—

One conversation he did remember, from his 1st week in the hospital. The doctors had yet to determine what the matter was. Orestes stuck his daily bouquet in water & seated himself. To cheer S. up, he remarked
what a lucky guy he was to be able to afford a private room—all O.’s experiences of hospitals had been wards full of moaning & dying. Well, Sandy was just a gilded youth.

S.: I still don’t feel I’m really sick. It doesn’t seem possible to
be
sick in Europe.

O.: Oh? Were you often sick at home?

S.: Oh, you know—measles, colds, a sprained ankle. I’d stay in bed and let Mother bring me soup & orangeade.

O.: You enjoyed being sick at home, is that what you mean?

S.: Well, I guess so—compared to
this
place. Did I say something wrong?