White Vespa (11 page)

Myles worked. A fig tree growing straight from the heart of a small cottage. The open mouths of terrace ovens. Along one arcing alley he shot a whole row of ovens, one over the shoulder of the next, a long, curving tribute to bread making.

Some of the houses still had roofs, or a part of a roof, and the interiors swam in blue, dust-laden light. There were carved cupboards and divans, hearths over free-form fireplaces, and small niches carved from the walls. Some of these places had once looked a great deal like Myles' house on Sými, but they'd been let go and found beautiful ruin. Myles took his photographs.

“Just this much loss,” he said, “and no more.”

Jim looked at him quizzically from where he leaned against a wall, watching.

“Until we turn our backs and go,” Myles whispered.

When the light started to fade they walked on, away from Livádhia, toward Megálo Horió on the other side of the island, where the human distraction was in full swing. Walking into town they watched bright green bee catchers flash over the orchards in the last of the sun and then the owls and bats come out for night hunting.

Megálo Horió crouched under the ancient citadel and seemed alive enough. Why this town to live and Mikró Horió to die? They didn't know. At the recommended taverna they ate well, grilled eggplant and stuffed cuttlefish, a plate of red peppers, a slab of féta, two cans of retsina from the barrel. Jim pointed three times, each time in the direction of a not too distant beach.

“The place is surrounded,” Myles said.

“It
is
an island.”

“Aha.”

“Says here,” Jim was looking down at a guidebook, “that over at that beach,” he pointed over his shoulder, “at Ayios Andónios, you can see the bones of some very dead Greeks,” Myles raised his eyebrows, “buried Pompeii-style in the last eruption of the volcano on Níssyros.”

“Hmm,” Myles said, occupied with the cuttlefish.

“Doesn't actually say the last eruption,” Jim said, looking up from the book.

“But some eruption?”

“Yes, and buried alive.”

“So,” Myles said, “the trouble that started over there landed here?”

“Exactly.”

“As trouble often does?”

“Yes,” Jim laughed, “sort of.”

 

Anne sat on her barstool like she'd done it too much and she had. Even drunk she perched there sure as a bird, a cormorant, she thought, with disgust. It was after hours and the doors were locked, but the help who still wanted to drink were doing so in the upstairs bar. There was a bottle of gin open in front of Anne and she'd had a few. Everybody'd had a few and a false hilarity rippled through them and a little malice, too. Anne wanted to get away from all their sticky chumminess, but she leaned forward and bent the bottle over her small glass and poured another.

Lisa pressed close to her and was muttering something about men, what bastards they were, and Anne said, “Yeah,” the way she did when she didn't want to talk all that much.

“All of'em. Oughta get—”

“Get?” Anne prompted.

“—what's comin' to 'em.”

Anne turned her head toward Lisa, and it was like turning her face to an over-heated stove. “They don't often,” she said.

“But they oughta.”

“I know one really oughta,” Anne said.

“I know way more'n one,” Lisa slurred, wagging her raw face side to side, as if she was contemplating big numbers.

Anne stood up and her body waved unnaturally over her feet. Lisa reached over to steady her and Anne grinned.

“Tell you what. I'll let you know,” she blurted out, “when the slaughter begins.”

Lisa considered, then said, “Do that.”

The bathroom reeked but Anne went in anyway. The sallow light ran on the walls. Anne splashed her eyes with water and pulled her sleeve across her face to dry it off. She didn't much like the person she saw looking back in the mirror. The glittering hardness. She looked untouchable even to herself,
though she knew she'd been touched too much before she'd ever had any say in the matter. But maybe it wasn't true she couldn't be touched. Maybe she could. Maybe she was scared she could.

“Fuck it,” she muttered, looking down at her shaking hands. When she looked up again she just looked tired, and she stared hard at her face in the mirror and said low but fervently, “What am I here for?”

 

Out in the bar nothing had changed, but she left her stool empty, lifted her hand by way of good-bye, and slipped out the door.

A couple of clouds, bright in the moonlight, sailed over Sými town, and she walked down, under their prows, down the great steps, wanting nothing now but her bed and dreamless sleep.

 

The ferry from Tílos put in at Níssyros on the return to Sými. Jim said the main town, Mandhráki, was worth seeing, built around a shared garden, the alleys serpentine and houses impassive as poker players.

“But you can't see it from the harbor?” Myles asked.

“No.”

“Well, what you
can
see from here looks dismal enough.”

“Yes,” Jim said.

The ferry pulled away from the pier and ran close-in to shore as far as Páli, a safe harbor, mostly for yachts, they thought, as standing by the rail all they could see was a thicket of shining masts over the breakwater.

The shore itself had been scarred by a road and worse, a plague of dumping.

“Worth a visit?”

“It is, Myles. Not this bit, but the rest of the island.”

“All the parts you can't see?” Myles smiled.

“That's right! Maybe they should put up a sign,
All Charms Hidden
.” Jim held up an imaginary sign. “But there's a very impressive crater at the heart of the island and two wonderful hill towns strung out along the lip of the caldera.”

The ferry ran alongside an outsize hotel development, seemingly abandoned before it had even been finished. Myles teased Jim, enjoying it. “Mmm. Also charming.”

“For the best, really. That place would have ruined the island,” Jim said defensively.

“How hard would that have been, what with the job so well begun?” Myles snickered. “Just kidding. I believe you; I'll come back, take my camera for a walk all over the island.”

“Walking your camera?”

“That's right. So much less bother than a dog,” Myles said. “Never wants
to go the other way or stop to piss on a bush.”

 

They dozed. Myles woke first and from the rail he could see Sými in the distance. The sea was glossy smooth. The ferry split the water and left a great white wake where it had been. Myles neatly peeled two apples with the long blade of his traveling knife and then nudged Jim awake. He sliced up the small smoked gouda he'd found in a market on Tílos and opened a packet of dense digestive biscuits. He bought two bottles of mineral water at the bar. They ate off a sheet of newspaper, reflectively, watching the gulls working the wake for a snack of their own.

“Were you ever married, Myles?”

“Yes. Once. It was years ago. How about you?”

“Well, no. I'm gay. I thought you knew,” Jim said carefully.

“Ah, no. Hadn't thought about it.”

“You don't mind?”

“Of course not. Committed relationship?” Myles asked.

“Several!” Jim smiled brightly.

“Not now?”

“No.”

“Haven't given up?”

“No.” Jim let the moment elongate. “What happened?”

“When?”

“When you were married.”

“We ended farther apart than we started,” Myles said.

Jim said nothing.

Myles shuddered. “There was a child. A boy. Max. We lost him,” he said, and when he spoke again his voice was shaky. “He was only fifteen. Just disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Jim asked. “As in kidnapped?”

“I don't know. Ran away, more likely. He didn't seem such an unhappy kid, but distant, very distant, right from the beginning.”

“Myles, I'm sorry.”

“It's okay. It was a long time ago. But my wife and I, well, we never recovered from that. We didn't fight. We hadn't fought with Max, either. But all the glue came unstuck,” Myles concluded.

“That's very hard. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. It's a grief, but it's my grief. Everybody's got one or more of his own. Plenty to carry without carrying anybody else's load.”

They were silent for a long time. Jim was looking for words.

“I know you don't want to burden me,” Jim said, “I appreciate that. But it'd be a hard world if we didn't shoulder our griefs together.” He paused. “Somehow the burdens are common. We lift as much as we can, everyone as much as his heart can carry and no more. Whose burden it is almost doesn't matter.”

Standing there, Myles felt his losses again, felt Max and Bryn, Bryn as gone as the boy, in the end, leaving and not looking back. Because for Bryn
he
recalled the lost world, he knew that. His face, his voice, too painful to see, to hear. Myles felt the exhaustion of grief creeping back, and he pushed it away. “Maybe,” he said at last, “maybe I'm less concerned about burdening you than about burdening me. Forgive me. Telling the tale hurts. Sometimes I don't want to.”

 

Myles unlocked the door and stepped in. He saw immediately that a couple of the photos of Anne he'd left taped to the wall had dropped to the floor. He picked them up, took the others off the wall, and set the short stack on the mantle. He didn't look at them. He didn't need to. He'd been seeing them clearly enough while he'd been away, pinned on the inside of his eyelids when he put the lights out and lay waiting for sleep. Most nights he'd waited a long time.

He stood looking at the man in white on the white Vespa. It occurred to him that if he tried he might be able to find out something about the man in the picture. He must have lived on Sými last summer. He'd owned the Vespa; it hadn't been a rental. The island was very small, someone would recognize him, someone would know him; he, too, could be found out and captured in a story. He must have ridden off somewhere to eat those two baguettes, with somebody, maybe, and sometime after that he must have gotten on a ferry or a flying dolphin and left. Gone back somewhere or on, forward. Myles turned away and started to unpack. He knew he would ask no questions, knew he wanted no answers, which made him uneasy. What did it say about him that he preferred the certainties of the stilled image to the waywardness of actual living? Nothing had stopped when he took the photo but the light on the film.

The photos of Anne were another matter. Even as illusions they had the feel of beginnings.

 

It was afternoon and hot, the air overheated and dry, full of electricity. In the yard, the insects were tuning up. Myles washed his laundry at the sink, then took it outside. He'd run a makeshift clothesline, and he hung the clothes there to dry, a line of somber clothes beginning already to look a little shabby, the colors dulled, his socks getting longer, every wash, from having their necks wrung. Myles carried a cushion from the house for his head and lay down in the swept sand under a large olive tree. He listened, the insects, the muffled
bird calls, the light clacking of the olive leaves. Far off, he could hear the muted city noise of Yialós and the drum of a large engine, a ferry, perhaps. The Aegean, all around him, he could not hear, so he imagined it, the groan of it on Sými's shingled beaches, the deep pull of its ebb tide.

He did not notice the light going. But when he opened his eyes it was to darkness. He looked at his watch, but it was too dark in the night shade of the olive to read the dial. He rolled onto his back and sat up. He was stiff from the hard, sandy ground and his head hurt. A sallow light still shone in the west.

Myles got up slowly, feeling old and crooked. He picked the dry, stiff clothes off the line and crossed to the house. It felt unoccupied, as if it had sat empty for far more than the few days he'd been gone. He thought again about the fallen houses in Mikró Horió on Tílos, about how much his house here was like one of them. Dropping the clothes on the narrow bed where he slept, he sat down next to them. He checked the impulse to make some noise; he let the house be quiet. He tried to decide if he should go over to Two Stories tonight or wait until tomorrow to see Anne. Then he tried to ignore the
should
in that, to sift through what he was feeling, to find if at bottom he wanted to go. He thought, ruefully, that it shouldn't be so hard to tell, but he was going, he realized, that much was certain.

 

Getting the salt off, standing under the showerhead in a corner of the bathroom, Myles came back to life. He realized he'd been dulled by the hours of heavy thudding of the big engine onboard the ferry, that his nap hadn't helped. Sleeping in the shade like a dog or an old goat, he thought sardonically. More like an old goat, he decided.

These guys, Paul thought, must live here. He'd been at it, working the abdominal machine for all he was worth, which wasn't much. The torsos on the serious lifters seemed impossible to him, even repellent, and at the same time a kind of rebuke for the poor shape he found himself in. It wasn't that he looked bad, he didn't; he was as sleek as a man of thirty-five could reasonably hope to be, but he was weak, and he knew it, and it had begun to bother him. Sooner or later, he could see it coming, it
would
begin to affect how he looked. So he'd bought a summer membership at the gym on the paraléia, and there he was, looking at the pumped boys with a mixture of envy and malice.