Don't I Know You? (5 page)

And that was how the week ended, really, although two more days remained. We still had 180 pages of Axel's novel to read. The schoolteacher's memoir had veered away from her husband's experience in the war to her rage at being abandoned at home with a small baby. She was going gangbusters, she said, and wanted to finish it before we all dispersed. As for me, I was still working on my event-free play, which L'Orren had read. She urged me to read Lorca and said she thought absurdist drama was “a bit masculinist.”

On my last night, I stayed away from John's cottage and wrote a long, newsy note to Larry. It was too late to mail it, but I could give it to him when I got back. I called my parents to find out when they were picking me up. Then I put on my yellow rain jacket and walked down to the bridge, alone. The Grand was milky-brown and swollen but subdued, coursing along.

I crossed the back lawn on my way to the dorm. John's cottage was dark. I wanted to retrieve my red-stairway painting, which I had left to dry in Emilio's studio. That too was dark, except for what looked like a throb of candlelight in one corner. I knocked; no answer. As I opened the door I glimpsed L'Orren's massive hair all but covering Emilio as she lay naked on top of him, on paint-splattered drop sheets. She was making a sound that didn't seem to belong to her, almost a coo. I closed the door as softly as I could. Was this sort of thing going on everywhere? Was the whole world awash in lust, and I hadn't noticed?

On the last day, from my window seat in the dorm, I saw the school director walk across the back lawn to John's cottage. He knocked on the door, John answered, and he stepped in. Maybe he's just thanking him, I thought, and saying goodbye. About twenty minutes later the door opened and the director emerged, unsmiling. I wanted to run across the lawn and throw myself in John's arms. Instead, I wrote a new scene in my play, in which the woman lies down and embraces her bench.

“John's been fired,” L'Orren said when we were packing up. She was going home that afternoon. “Apparently one of the waitresses complained about him being out of line.” She carefully folded her white Indian shirts. “Or something like that.”

“But he's leaving tomorrow, so what's the point of firing him?”

She gave me a long-suffering look. “What it means is that he won't be back. I was going to sign up for next year. Now I'm not so sure.”

“Then they should fire Emilio too,” I said. “He'll screw anything that walks.”

L'Orren said nothing, just slid her copy of
Bonjour Tristesse
into the side pocket of her suitcase.

Her mother was downstairs waiting to drive her home, which cast L'Orren in a slightly different light. She looked small and pale, maybe hungover.

“Don't forget what I said about Lorca,” she said as she left the room. “Reading him truly changed my life.”

“What if I like mine the way it is?”

*   *   *

At dinner that night, John didn't seem upset. He stayed on after dessert, playing Ping-Pong with the others. I went into the gallery and sat at the piano. But I didn't want to play Satie or Bach, because now I knew what I was feeling, and why. If I played that music, it would be like broadcasting our secret through the house.

Everything I wrote, or did, was now about my secret life with John Updike.

On Saturday morning my parents arrived looking heartbreakingly trim, jovial, and innocent. I showed them my pine-tree canvas and my mother was so pleased. “Emilio said it was painterly,” I reported. I added that I was still working on my play about feminine identity. It wasn't done yet, but Mr. Updike had been encouraging.

“Can we meet him?” asked my mother, peering around the gallery.

“I think he's already left,” I said. Then John walked in with some books under his arm. I introduced him to my parents. I could tell my mother was surprised by how young he was. She had probably imagined someone more professorial. My father beamed at John, this bright mentor for my untapped talents.

I was dying inside.

“Your daughter's very talented,” John said to them. “But I want her to keep reading.” He handed me several books, including Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du Mal
, and his novel. Then he looked at me fearlessly, as if to say, Give me your gaze, it's all right, we've done nothing wrong.

“I keep telling her to send something in to
Reader's Digest
,” said my dear, irrepressible father. This remark sent my mother skittering off to study one of Horatio Walker's paintings on the wall.

“Look at that sky,” she said approvingly.

“Well, I think I'm on my way now,” John said. He shook my hand. “Miss McEwan.”

“Thank you for everything, Mr. Updike,” I managed. I was wearing the green-and-white dress.

My parents drove me down the road, under the willows, past the Shell sign and the field with Walker's crypt, back home to our split-level bungalow in Burlington, to our own Ping-Pong table, to my job at Rico's House of Beauty, and Larry.

Our first night together, in the new LeSabre, Larry and I went all the way. I love you, we solemnly told each other.

A week later, I broke it off. He took it badly. I didn't tell him, or anyone, about John Updike for a long time. Until now.

Every day for the rest of that summer I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, stared at the warts on my right hand, and said, out loud, “Begone!”

By the end of August, they had vanished.

 

Free Love

As soon as the locals saw our backpacks they knew where we were headed, and waved us to an empty bus parked by the curb. We were in Mires, a small market town not far from the south coast. All day long on the ride across Crete the sky had been perfectly blue and empty, as if clouds were some British invention that didn't work here. A voltage problem.

The driver stood outside, smoking. “Matala?” I asked, with my grateful-to-be-a-guest-in-your-country smile. He said nothing, just cranked open the door. Nick and I took the front seats, sitting with our packs against our knees. Then we waited. The irony of traveling, of being on the road, is how much time you spend not going anywhere.

The flat white light, the strangeness of the language, and the long deck-class night on the ferry to Iraklion had put us in a stupor. The driver clacked a row of beads through his fingers, obeying some mysterious inner timetable. The roof of the bus radiated heat.

Across the street a woman in rolled-down stockings used a twig broom to sweep the patio of her house, a white cube. Through the open door the dark interior looked cool and inviting.

I dug a halter top out of my pack and went down a laneway to change out of my sweater. Nick stayed on the bus writing in his six-ring loose-leaf notebook. When it was full he didn't start a new one, he just kept adding more pages to it. After four months on the road, the pocket of his suede jacket had stretched from the weight of it.

Back on the bus, I slid open our window. What was the holdup? We were the only passengers.

Then the driver abruptly swung up into his seat and the engine started with a noise as guttural as a tractor engine. At the sound a hippie couple carrying string bags full of vegetables emerged from the market. The girl wore a black fisherman's cap, sandals made out of car tires, an Indian skirt covered in round mirrors, and a T-shirt with a telltale constellation of tiny holes from falling hash embers. Her shirtless boyfriend had dark hair to his shoulders and an army dog tag around his neck. Their skin had the grayish tinge of having passed through sunburn to something else. Not newcomers.

“Hey,” he said, flashing us two fingers in a V as they got on the bus. Nick and I were right behind the driver, hugging our packs like eager tourists. They made their way to the backseat, where the girl stretched out with her head in her boyfriend's lap. He peeled a banana and the smell filled the air as the bus pulled out of town.

“We should have bought more food,” I said to Nick. “Everything will probably be shut when we get there.” He nodded. He could go all day on nothing but an apple, but I got shaky if I didn't eat. I rummaged in my pack. “Don't we still have those peanuts from the ferry?” He nodded again, looking out the window at fields of dun-colored sheep, like rocks on the move. We had fallen into the habit of connubial silence on the road.

After an hour the bus left the pavement and began jolting down a dirt road. A fisherman carrying a long pole walked toward us with his catch; the driver lifted his finger off the wheel as he passed. We opened the windows as wide as they would go. I thought I could smell the sea. There were no more houses and the trees dwindled as the landscape surrendered to another element.

The driver looked over at Nick.

“First time Matala?”

“Yes, first time.”

“Deutschland?”

“Canada.”

“Ah, Canada!”

The driver pretended to sip on a joint. “You smoke?”

“Oh no.” We knew about the police in Greece.

“I find for you, very good.”

“No, that's fine, but thank you.”

The driver pointed to me. “Your wife?”

“Yes, my wife.”

I displayed my dime-store ring.

The driver grinned.

“No wives in Matala,” he said, holding up the gold band on his wedding finger. “Everybody married to everybody.” He laughed at his joke.

“Huh,” said Nick.

“We're just visiting for a few days,” I piped up. “To swim.” I swam with my arms.

“Yes, yes,” said the driver, already dismissive. “Good for swimming, Matala. But Komos better.”

*   *   *

I dug out my journal, a school exercise book that I'd bought in Portugal. I had started it with the intention of writing about our trip, and maybe selling a story to a newspaper back home. Instead, I kept lists of Spanish and French words, useful phrases for “third-class” or “does that include breakfast?” At the back I kept track of what we spent, with long wavering columns of numbers under two headings, R and N. We split the cost of everything—every cup of tea and ten-cent bun. Nick was especially frugal. Once, when I was pining for a real lunch in a restaurant he patiently waited outside, reading a book while I sat at a table eating my
salade composée.

Nick never complained about the discomforts of life on the road—the endless walks to reach the outskirts of a city to start hitchhiking, or the hours of standing on the side of a road as cars sped by. I was less stoic. And more anxious. There was always a little current of panic in me ready to spark if we arrived someplace after dusk and couldn't find the hostel or a place to eat. At a certain point in the day, I needed to be inside and safe.

So on the bus to Matala, with my face out the window, I was determined to be okay, to not repeat our time in Morocco. That was when things had started to unravel.

I got sick in Tangiers. It was just a stomach thing but it amplified the culture shock. Fresh out of college, I was overwhelmed by Morocco—the beggars in their backward rubber boots, the rheumy-eyed expats in cafés, the street kids a hundred times savvier than us, leading us to silver teapots and carpets and hashish. At first, after the macho advances of Spanish and Italian men, I was relieved to be ignored by the men in the soukh, whose gazes slid over me and lingered on Nick instead. But after basking in this invisibility for a few days, I began to feel myself vanishing limb by limb, like the Cheshire cat.

We lay under the ceiling fan in our cheap hotel (an incredible 31 cents a night according to my journal), with the clamor of the soukh a few lanes over drifting through the shutters. Who was I? Tangiers demands a sturdy sense of self, and I didn't have one.

After a few days of scurrying down the hall to the hotel's single bathroom, a dark, damp booth with water sluicing around the two stone footprints (a welcome arrangement when you are already doubled over), I told Nick we had to find a doctor. We went out into the streets but it was some religious holiday and everything was closed. As we searched through the streets I shat myself a little, a harmless but soul-forfeiting experience. We came to a gated compound with a doctor's name on it and knocked on the wooden door. Minutes passed. A peephole slid open and a pair of eyes regarded us.

“My wife is sick,” Nick said as I stood beside him, mute, well fed, and clearly not bedridden. “We're looking for a doctor.”

“Not here,” the eye-person murmured, and slid the peephole shut. I began to weep. This was not “touring Europe.” It was not even bohemia. I just wanted to go home.

Our plan was to make it to Fez and spend some time in the desert. But when we got to Marrakesh I got sick again. The hostel was coed, and the man in the bunk above me slept with a long knife. We were sitting in a café staring at chunks of lamb that I couldn't bring myself to eat when I told Nick that I wanted to turn back—back to the thirty-one-cent hotel in Tangiers, and back to Spain, where at least I knew how to read a menu. Morocco had shown me just how little weight this independent-modern-woman thing had in the wider, older world.

If we left now, I argued, we would have more time in Greece. We could stay on some island for a few weeks. He could get more writing done.

Nick agreed.

On the ferry to Gibraltar, we watched the immaculate blue-and-white coast recede like a sailboat. I felt bad that Morocco had unmoored me. Nick would have pushed on to the mountains and the desert if he'd been on his own.

We stood at the railing of the ferry, the wind whipping our hair. I leaned into him, trying to amuse. “We'll always not have Fez.”

Nick smiled. He didn't seem to hold it against me. He just wrote a little more in his notebook each day.

So on the bus to Matala, I decided that whatever was going to happen on Crete, I would put up with it. I was in love with him. And he was the first.