White Vespa (15 page)

“Okay, it was worth the walk out,” he said, “but maybe not the walk back.”

“I'll buy you dinner when we get back, if you'll stop mewling,” Myles said, and then he plunged forward, the light all mercury on the surface as he frog-kicked underwater, holding his breath, reaching forward into the cool, liquid light, and then pulling himself through. He wasn't a swimmer, wouldn't even get into a pool, but in the Aegean he swam often. He pushed his head through the surface and rolled onto his back, blind because his glasses were with his pack and because the sun dazzled him. But he liked that glittering blindness, and he splashed around for a few minutes before joining Jim in the shade.

“So, how's it going with Anne?”

“Well, I think,” Myles said.

“You think?”

“There's a darkness in her, something big and untouchable. It gets in the way.”

“You knew that going in,” Jim said.

“Not that it was untouchable.”

“Come on, Myles, that kind of darkness is always untouchable, beyond help, you
knew
that. If you were drawn to her, you were drawn to that. Face it.”

“She's almost told me what it's made of a couple of times. It was right there. I could feel it pressing on the air between us.”

“What if she did?” Jim said. “What can really be told? She could tell you everything she could tell, and it would still be there, untouchable.”

“Maybe,” Myles said.

“Maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe. Sometimes it seems that the darkness is just there, that our disasters are only occasions, and there are always occasions, that the darkness
will
find a way in. But sometimes it seems that the darkness is made. That it's people who make it. And I'd prefer it that way, because that would mean there might be something to do about it. I want there to be something to do.” Myles' voice had deepened, gotten sad. “If you say the hurt in Anne is untouchable, and I know I said it myself, that means there is nothing to do but take the darkness or let her go.”

They sat in the blue shade of a boulder, suddenly quiet. Myles' head inclined toward Jim's, as if he was listening or waiting to listen. The rippling reflections off the restless sea played over them like stage fire.

In the unstill light, Jim looked forlorn. “Probably,” he said, “probably those are your choices.”

 

Blue felt the last of her awkwardness ease as her body got fluid, her limbs finding their stride on the treadmill. A half-smile played on her pursed lips. She sank into her body, her fleetness; this must be, she thought, something like yoga or meditation, but moving. Her eyes half-closed, the open door across from her no more than a rectangle of spilled light.

Michael worked quickly, mostly with free weights; he knew gyms and Sými's gym wasn't much, but he could do enough here to stay fit. He looked over at Blue between sets. He didn't know her very well; she was so much younger, the daughter of his father's second marriage. That she was here, that he was more or less her chaperone for a big chunk of summer, struck him as unlikely. His father's suggestion that he should look after her had come as a surprise, and he wondered what it meant, if it portended another divorce or if perhaps his father was sick. He hadn't asked, just said,
Sure
, and here she was, showing an effortless stride on the treadmill, seemingly carefree.

There weren't many teenagers on Sými, but she didn't seem to mind. She liked adults, talking to Michael and to Jim. And reading. She was forever trading in one book for another at the lending library run out of See You Travel, near Vapori
,
reading on the beach, in bed, probably, Michael thought, even in the shower. And if she wasn't reading she was writing, pages every day in a journal she guarded carefully. Perhaps she was painfully intelligent, as teenagers can be. She was certainly observant, had already collected quite a hoard of potshards, Byzantine and classical clay. She said quite confidently that before the summer was over she'd make a big find. Michael found Blue no trouble at all, or wouldn't have, if it hadn't been for Jim. Sometimes he wanted to be alone with Jim.

The doorway darkened, and Paul stepped in. He glanced at Blue, swung his head around and saw Michael. He nodded. Michael was doing sit-ups, a five kilo plate tucked behind his head. Every time he came up he saw Paul, fussing with a weight machine, for pull downs, but not doing many.

“Need some help?”

“Thanks, no,” Paul said, “just looking for a weight that feels right.” He watched Michael, Michael's easy way with the weights. “Spend a lot of time in the gym?” he asked.

“What it takes. I enjoy it, no bullshit. Especially after a day that's had more bullshit in it than I can stand.”

Blue's eyes, Michael noticed, had come into focus. She was watching Paul.

“Have a lot of days like that?” Paul asked.

“Not so many, but enough.”

“What do you mean,
No bullshit
?”

“You can't charm the weights. Know what I mean?” Michael said. “You got to actually lift them or they stay put. Winking don't help.”

“No wonder I'm having a problem,” Paul said. “Must be why they call them dumbbells,” he added, smiling his best smile.

“Must be.”

 

“You don't like him?” Blue said, as they walked back toward their rooms.

“Well, no.”

“Why not?”

“He's a user. Nobody gets to know him without paying a price,” Michael answered, speaking slowly.

“I like him,” Blue announced.

“You don't know him.”

“But I want to,” she said.

“I think he's all tied up just now with Katerina and Alexandra.”

“You think they tie him up?” she teased.

Michael smiled wearily. “Yeah, I think they probably do.”

 

Anne woke from a dream, another girlhood dream. She was out by herself in the little outboard, the Puget Sound running against her, trying to bring the boat to shore. She could see the red-barked madroñas on the hillside and a house, the house she'd grown up in, big but getting smaller as the boat was sucked out on the tide. Anne groaned. She felt tired, exhausted by her memories and the way they came back at her uncalled, as dreams. Always the tide too strong, taking her out, away. The familiar world sinking into the horizon beyond the boat's blue bow.

She rolled onto her side, crossing her arms across her chest. She was awake now and the fear was gone. She let the dream come back, seeing again the house where she and Paul had been children. She remembered her parents coming home late in long, smooth Cadillacs. Two of them, in the double garage, like monstrous twins. Five days a week, sometimes six, they drove to the dock on Bainbridge to take the ferry into Seattle and the offices where they were lawyers, partners. Their world over there in the city had only the palest reality for Anne growing up on the island, where the smell of the Sound was so real, the green woods threaded with trails. Seattle shone by day like a mirage over the water, on days when it was visible at all, and at night it was no more than a lower heaven, a dense cluster of stars dropped into the small hills of the mainland. Sometime after dark her parents would return, the big cars whispering into the drive and the garage doors scrolling up to let them in. They came home half drunk, drank on the ferry over, and drank some more after they arrived home. When they were there, she and Paul were expected to snap to. But the children were very loosely supervised, left to fend for themselves at an age when other families would have employed a sitter. Anne strayed, on horseback or in the boat, her attention going everywhere, to the deer she surprised in pocket meadows, to the jays in the trees. The world, its animals and fishes, its trees and wild orchids, these things spoke to her louder
than her parents or her brother. She knew where to find oysters on the flats at low tide, where to dig razor clams or rake steamers. She had knelt at the gunnels to watch the pulsing jellyfish, so luminescent in the green sea water. She'd been the one brave enough to follow the rain-soaked man who occasionally dug an obscene gooey duck.

She hadn't known to ask if she was happy. She'd been interested, involved in living, and more than anything she felt nostalgia for that, for that previous and intenser life.

Anne touched her feet to the still cool floor. Made contact. Maybe, she thought, it was just childhood she missed, the greater awareness of someone new to the world. No matter who you were, you lost that.

Together, they entered. Not knowing it, they accommodated themselves to the way life was lived on Sými, an island life, a summer world. It was a world that didn't exist in winter, when Sými closed like a great clamshell. That was a shuttered world, when only Sýmiots walked the cold alleys. In summer, the winter residents were submerged in a tide of visitors. Then Sými seemed a world without history and the things that were old no more than a stage set for the hordes just born as they stepped off the boat. And every new world smells a little like paradise.

But at best the summer crowd was reborn, for they'd been born before and lived elsewhere and arrived on Sými each carrying their own load of history. First in that load was a sense of order, and it was this as much as anything that made the new world take shape. People paired up. Friends were made, gatherings arranged. Newcomers were welcomed and welcomed until, quite suddenly, they were no longer welcomed. Then it was not such a new world, but too much like the old one left behind.

Anne would waken in her bed or in Myles', hearing the rough purr of his scooter returning from the bakery. She began to eat. Something like happiness flickered at the edge of her consciousness, something she didn't have faith enough to believe in. A softness stole over her. Myles, with, as he said, heart enough left to break, seemed radiant as morning. He wanted to be forever bearing gifts, simple things, that flesh-hot bread and pats of yellow butter, a spoon of berry jam, a painted pottery shard, a sea-washed pebble, a fist full of spices plucked wild from the rough hills of Sými. And his body, which he wanted to give.

So he, too, turned up at the gym, joined Michael and Jim and fleet Blue and Paul. By the middle of summer sometimes it seemed like the place was theirs. Michael, by then, was not only working out but working as a trainer for all of them, even for Paul. The owner greeted them as regulars and asked their opinions about possible improvements. After the gym, there was often
an hour at Vapori
,
where Kat and Alexandra and sometimes Anne might be waiting for them, ready to praise them if not to join them. They laughed together, they laughed alone.

Picnics were arranged, money pooled and a boat hired to take them to a secluded inlet with just sand enough for a few beach towels. Often Myles took his camera and hiked up a goat trail, looking for photographs. Sometimes Anne went along, but often Myles hired Yórgos to carry his pack or his tripod and hiked a long ways otherwise alone. He talked to the wild-eyed goats while the goatherds eyed him suspiciously from a patch of blue shade. Anne stayed behind, snorkeling, her body casting a slim shadow on the bottom.

Blue slowly warmed to Alexandra; the more they talked the more they talked alike. Blue still sought the company of Michael and Jim or Anne and Myles, or Paul, but sometimes she liked to go off with Alex, and then they spread their towels on a sand spit of their own, whispering a little, side by side, those things they liked to say that would embarrass them if they weren't alone. They liked to talk about Paul.

Or Jim would reserve a row of tables at To Stenáki
,
and they would push them all together, order a great feast, eating off the common plates and drinking too much retsina. A little too much made a festival. Then Váso would run back and forth to their table, carrying a plate of fish or squid or Greek salads in big bowls sitting there under a bright slab of féta cheese. Now that the restaurant was busy every night, Váso helped her father often, smiling sweetly as she ran up the aisles back into the kitchen. She was a great favorite. Paniyótis might come out at meal's end with a bottle of Metaxa and pour a round for free or send slices of watermelon and wave when they looked surprised at the arrival of yet more food.

Sometime before the eating was done Anne would get up quietly, lean over Myles' shoulder and kiss his cheek, and they would decide if he would meet her later at Two Stories or wait for her at home. Then she would say goodnight and slip into the alleyway, off to work, leaving Myles a little subdued. But often the whole crowd of them, or half of them, would end the evening at Two Stories, where they were familiars of the place and treated well, not only by Anne. The owner would shout his greetings from his stool behind the upstairs bar and wave them down the stairway to the terrace, where Anne or the Aussi bartender would bring them their regular drinks without being asked. And breezes broke over the terrace until the heat of the day was
washed away. Sometime, very late, they climbed the stairs up, said
kaliníchte,
and stepped out onto the green paving stones of the Kalí Stráta
.

 

They sank deeply. The summer world seemed for a time unending, but they carried the end within them, each with their own calendar with a day marked on it
The End
. Only Myles suffered from the illusion that he was staying, imagined his calendar carried no day marked with an
X
.

 

“I . . . I spent a lot of time on the water as a kid.” Anne said from where she'd stretched out in the bow, her voice throaty and all mixed with the throb of the inboard.