Drowning Lessons (6 page)

He shivered, pulled out his blue and gray cardigan, which, back in New York, he'd thought would go well with the Aegean. He put it on and, taking his sketchbook, made his way up the brass-railed stairway to the smoking lounge, where he sketched a mother knitting, a crew member filling his pipe, a fat man asleep in a chair with his mouth wide open. He did a dozen portraits. He titled them “The Dormant Ferry Series.”

On deck, he sketched a lifeboat silhouetted against the black sky. Not bad, he thought, lighting a cigarette. He noticed a scattering of lights on the horizon, as if a cluster of stars had fallen there. Being the only one outdoors, he felt proprietary toward the night. As he sketched, he reflected on what, if anything, he knew about loneliness. The fact that he had spent so much of his own life alone didn't qualify him. Or did it?

As she opened her eyes, Karina looked dazed and frightened; then she presumably identified the grumble of the ferry's engines, smiled, stretched, and said, “I am so happy!” Andrew believed her.

It was still dark when the ferry docked at Iráklion (Heracleum,
home of Hercules), Crete's capital city, though Andrew didn't feel the least bit heroic, crammed into the crowd behind the lowering stern hatch. Amid shouted commands, squawking pelicans, pressing bodies, and thickening diesel fumes, he and Karina held hands again as the hatch crashed down on cracked cement, and they rode the surge of passengers shoving their way toward the taxi lights on shore. When all the taxis had departed, three people stood on the dock in the dim light of dawn: Andrew, Karina, and an overweight middle-aged woman, a pharmacist from Anchorage, Alaska.

“Do you guys know where the youth hostel is?” the pharmacist asked.

Past the ruins of a Venetian fort, down a median strip of coastal highway clogged with morning traffic, they bore their packs, asking directions to the hostel, which they found on a side street. When no one answered their calls at the reception desk, they climbed rickety stairs past rooms littered with strewn luggage and sleeping bodies. They found a room with two empty bunks, but no pillows or sheets. The pharmacist went straight to sleep.

“I don't want to stay here,” said Karina. “I want to rent a car.”

Back on the street, Karina said, “You still haven't told me about loneliness.”

“I will,” said Andrew. “I promise.” But what could he say of years spent wandering the streets of New York, of insomniac nights writing beneath his own reflection in greasy diner windows, or sitting in dark movie theaters among smells of butter and bubble gum, or watching subway crews pick garbage from between the tracks at Canal Street? What did it all add up to
except more of the same wretched solitude? What had it taught him?

The Cretan landscape depressed Andrew, who'd looked forward to pine forests and rugged peaks. Instead he found low shrubs and scruffy dunes, an injured landscape to which insult had been added in the form of poured-concrete architecture, cement-mixer Bauhaus. The whole coast had been razed to erect tourist traps. This feisty little country, thought Andrew, which stood off the Trojans, survived Alexander, defied the Romans and the Turks, and outlasted the Nazis, has failed to fend off the worst barbarians of all: tourists like me. Still, out of the concrete nothingness, if he squinted hard Andrew could see beauty in the parched dunes, in the unbroken reaches of sea and sky.

He sat behind the wheel; Karina had told him she had trouble driving a standard. As he drove, Andrew watched her out of the corner of his eye and sketched her in his mind. Who was she? Was she an artist, a poet? Probably not; she seemed too well adjusted, too childishly happy. For sure she was the type with many friends, though perhaps no intimate ones. He imagined that she scored high on tests and could recite the first stanzas of her country's most famous poems. She was lazy, a quality he knew he could grow to love, especially after the competitive furor of American women. She would spoil her children rotten, but they'd worship her anyway. That smile would always win out. Men would fall for her simply because she'd do nothing to encourage them. Jewish, apparently. Not Orthodox, clearly. No doubt she believed in hell and therefore would never go there.
God would exist and look out for her. No wonder she wondered about loneliness, having never experienced it.

At his last thought, Karina turned and faced Andrew, twirling a finger through her dark hair and smiling as if reading his mind. The little green Fiat shuddered at eighty kilometers per hour along the pockmarked macadam. Every few miles she insisted that Andrew pull over, that they walk hand in hand to the edge of the sea, so she could touch it, taste it, cup it in her hands to see if the water was really yellow blue.

“In Niterói, where I am from, the sea is different,” she said. “It is both more beautiful and more sad.”

“Why is it more sad?” said Andrew.

“Because it is more beautiful.”

With her camera, Andrew photographed Karina facing away from the yellow blue water. She lived in Zurich now, she said, worked at a bank, rarely saw her family, though they spoke constantly, and hadn't been to the sea in over ten years. “I want to hug it,” she said, looking out to sea. “I want to kiss it.” She closed her eyes and gave the salty air a gentle kiss.

Her father, Andrew learned as they drove on, imported chemical compounds, and her mother was a celebrated literary agent, numbering García Márquez among her clients. The more he learned about her, the more Andrew questioned his musings. Perhaps Karina was more worldly and sophisticated than he suspected. With that thought came another: that he'd been looking for just such a woman, childlike, beautiful, independent, curious, foreign, willing. Andrew had grown heartsick over the hypocritical bearing of many American women, who lulled men by assuring them that they weren't necessary, until the trap was sprung
and the burlesque of independence ended. Or maybe he'd just chosen badly.

As they wound up the coastal highway, Andrew heard about George, the lover left behind, the investment banker who'd brought Karina to Zurich and set her up in a high-paying job and a cushy apartment; and Peter, the British lawyer who'd courted her with a box of roses — not six roses, or ten, but a full dozen (“And you know how expensive roses can be!”) — and awaited her now in London. The problem with George was that he wasn't Jewish. The problem with Peter — and it was a big problem, a potentially insurmountable problem, a problem that Karina, the paragon of a noninsomniac, had apparently been losing sleep over — was that Peter was
old
. Karina was twenty-nine, and Peter had recently turned forty. Two weeks shy of his thirty-ninth birthday, Andrew had a hard time appreciating the gulf between these two numbers, each of which seemed to him safely removed from death. “Eleven years — that doesn't exactly make him old enough to be your father.”

“That is not the problem.”

“What's the problem, then?”

“Sex. With someone so old there will be difficulties, no?”

“I beg to differ,” said Andrew.

“Well, let me ask you then,” said Karina. “Are you as enthusiastic a lover as you were when you were young?”

“I
am
young.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don't. And I'm not sure I want to.” He floored the gas and shoved the little Fiat into second up the first in a series of steep, green-carpeted hills. Finally, he said, “I'm a much better
lover now than I was at thirty, let alone at twenty or twenty-five.”

“Really?” This interested her. It interested her greatly.

“I'm a lot more patient. I know what a woman's needs are, and how to satisfy them.”

“But what about you?” said Karina. “Are you as … you know.”

“As
virile
? As
horny
? Can I still
get it up
? I'm thirty-nine; I'm not dead!” But the fact was that even now, alone on a Greek island with this sexy Brazilian, he wanted sex less than he would have at twenty or even at twenty-five. Then he would have wanted it desperately; it would have filled the pit of his thoughts. Now he considered it an interesting possibility among possibilities. He certainly wouldn't push the issue.

“Peter is not like you,” Karina concluded. “But I trust him. And he takes care of me.”

Andrew began to not like her so much. He turned his attention to the increasingly rugged landscape as they climbed into the clouds and he white-knuckled the steering wheel. Finally, he couldn't resist asking, “Why should some man have to take care of you?”

“He doesn't
have
to. I like to know that he can.”

“You fascinate me,” said Andrew, lighting a cigarette.

“You don't approve?”

“Approve? No. No, I don't.”

“Well, that's your problem, isn't it?” said Karina.

They rode on in silence; Andrew tried to screw up some enthusiasm for sightseeing and considered using an excursion to the palace of Malia — in the town of their destination — as an excuse to dump Karina. But just as he thought so, she pointed to a
scruffy side road banking into a field of poppies. “Oh, please, take that road!” she exclaimed with such dire enthusiasm Andrew hit the brakes and fishtailed onto it through a patch of sand. Soon the Fiat, which they had already dubbed “the green frog,” twisted up one hairpin turn after another, past Moho and Krassi, towns clustered around Byzantine churches with red-tiled domes like pigeons clustered around a hag with breadcrumbs. They drove through Tzermiado, where women wrapped in shawls ran from their shops, squawking, “Come! Look! Stop! Stay a while! Buy a tablecloth!” waving bottles of homemade wine and baskets of lemons and other fruit. “For your wife!” one woman shouted. “For your daughter!” shouted another. Karina looked at him as if to say,
there, you see?

From Tzermiado they coasted down through a river valley, between wall-like rows of towering eucalyptus, along hillsides bristling with daisies and arthritic-looking olive trees. Every few kilometers they passed the same old farmer side-mounted on his burro, his mustache as big as his face. Sometimes they pulled over, and Karina took photographs while Andrew sketched. She peered over his shoulder, holding her breath, watching him crosshatch.

“I love watching you draw,” she said. “It is like watching a bird build its nest.” And suddenly Andrew liked her all over again.

They decided to spend two more days together. “But that is all,” said Karina. “No matter what. Even if I like you.”

A moment later she said, “Since we are going to know each other for only two more days, and since we are not going to be lovers and will probably never see each other again, we can be totally honest, no?”

“Totally honest,” said Andrew. Except for the part about them
not becoming lovers, he liked the plan. If good for nothing else, honesty could be diverting. As they rolled from town to town, Andrew did his best to answer her questions sincerely.

“So you are saying,” said Karina, “that there is no limit to how many women you would make love to, if you could?”

“Physically?”

“Emotionally. No limits?”

“There are always limits.”

“Have you never wanted to be faithful?”

“I don't define faithfulness in terms of monogamy.”

“How do you define it?”

“As how you feel about someone. If my love for a woman reduces my desire to make love to others, that's wonderful. But the idea that one's love for another is enhanced by suppressing or, worse, denying the desire to be with others, that's just plain foolish.”

“Many of my friends say this, too,” said Karina. “You would be happy in Brazil. Especially because you are a man.”

Andrew told her of his uncontrollable lusts, of the attacks of desire that had driven him to distraction in his twenties and even later, into his thirties.

“So you have been unfaithful?” she said.

“By your definition, yes.”

“And you did not feel guilty?”

“I would have felt just as guilty harboring the desires, even if I didn't act on them. What about you?”

“Never.”

“Don't you think about sex?”

“Of course. I think about it with Peter.”

“The Rose Giver.”

“Do not make fun of him!”

“I wasn't making fun of him. I'm making fun of you. A guy hands you a dozen roses, and you fall in love. If I were to run out and pick a dozen poppies —” the hillside was still covered with them “— would you fall in love with me, then?”

“It's not the same thing.”

“True, a poppy's not a rose.”

“Do not be presumptuous. You are not my type.”

“You're right. I'm not respectable. And I'm not Jewish.”

Karina said nothing. She shifted in the passenger seat, offering him as much of her back as possible, while he considered what his “type” might be. Age: between thirty-five and “middle.” Lineage: Italian (though he could pass for Greek, he thought). Face: belonging to a country by the sea where thick coffee is sipped from skimpy cups. Profession: drawing storyboards for tv commercials. A Renaissance man. Ads for sneakers and soft drinks. A hack.

“Since you've been here, you haven't wanted a man?” asked Andrew.

“Naturally.” She kept looking out the window. “But only to look at. I like to look at men. For me they are part of the scenery.”

In Ano Viánnos, a market town high up in the mountains untouched by tourism, they strolled. In a hundred kilometers they'd revealed too much too quickly, and now they were road weary, sick of each other and themselves.

Ice-cream bars in hand, they roamed past battered shops selling fruit and bread, unlit hardware stores where the hardware looked used, cafes with birdlike old men in dark shirts picking at worry beads. Here, at last, was the real Greece: no signs in
English, no discos, no loudspeakers, no mopeds. No cement. No young people either, Andrew noticed, only middle aged and old, all dressed in dark clothes, seeking refuge from the sun. The only signs of activity were the women selling pistachios, baskets of lemons, serving coffee and ouzo to men who seemed neither happy nor sad as they chewed their mustaches, worried their beads, and watched the earth spin. For the first time in Greece, Andrew felt as if he'd arrived somewhere authentic. Karina went for a stroll as he took a seat. Unlike his world, where everything was measured in dollars and convenience, here was a poor, gentle, inconvenient world. He could grow old in a place like this. Everyone else had.