White Vespa (17 page)

“Oh no, Jesus no,” Myles whispered.

Anne's eyes swept across him, a quick glance that said,
You asked
. Then she started to speak again. “I don't think I understood that Paul was yelling right in my face,
Pull, bitch, pull
. But then I did, and I pulled and pulled just wanting an end to it. And then it was quiet and Paul dragged us around the post, kicked me loose, and went on around the post again and tied the rope off.

“Standing over me, hissing, he said,
There's your fuckin' horse
. My hands were over my eyes and he yanked them away, hissing,
Look at your precious little pony now, bitch. We killed her, just you and me.
And I did look. She was hanging over me, slowly twisting in the air. Drooling, bug-eyed, piss running down between her legs.

“
We did it!
He crowed, and then he brought his grinning face close to mine and whispered,
And if you ever tell anybody I'm gonna kill you, too. Believe me?
I believed him.
Now get out of here,
he said, and he kicked me, jerked me to my feet and kicked me again.
Get!
I ran through the barn door out into the snow. What I couldn't believe was that it was still morning.

“Myles?”

“I'm right here.”

“You know? I ran across the yard in my cowgirl boots, across the road and plunged into the woods. I kept falling down in those hopeless boots. Finally, I just stayed there, face down in the snow. And then it came to me, if I'd only opened the barn door while Pie still had her feet she could have run, and running, Paul would have flown on up, that fucking evil little wizard, up and up until his hands and arms were all twisted in the pulleys of the block and tackle. God, it would have been so easy to push the door open, and I just stood there, screaming helplessly.”

“Anne, Anne, no kid . . .”

“
And then,
then I got cold, and I just got up, trudged into the house
and took a hot shower. Couldn't stand the cold. Just as if we hadn't hung Pie.”

“Anne, Anne,
Paul
hung Pie.”

“No. We did. Paul didn't weigh enough to hoist her up. It took my sixty pounds to kill her.”

“Paul somehow convinced Dad Pie had just collapsed in the barn. He must have cut her down and cleaned her up and told some pretty convincing lies. Or maybe Dad just had to believe Paul's story was true. I was too stunned to wonder. The next day they buried Pie in the pasture with a god damn backhoe. I didn't say a thing. Not until years later. Then I told my therapist. And after that, my dad, I shouted at him,
Your son is a fucking killer!
What that got me was thrown out of the house for good and all. Old Dad never believed a word of it; he blamed the therapist for encouraging me in
false memories
. He threatened to sue her!” Myles expected Anne to cry then but she didn't. “Been fucked up ever since,” she said, her lips stiff in a brittle smile. “You wanted to know.”

 

Soon Yialí came into view across the water, a low lying, two-humped, camel-colored islet despoiled by gypsum mines, indeed not much more than one big gypsum mine, and I wondered what god had once lived there traded in now for a big shovel, and I didn't care! I powered down at the ferry dock and slipped slowly into town, the Vespa's low mutter resounding off the narrow alleys of Mandhráki,
off the white walls of the two story stucco houses. Then the kambá
,
the communal orchard the town is built around, opened on the left, and then closed again, and I was threading my way into the town square. I left the scooter there.

 

Paul thought Katerina must have spent too much time in the sun before she took to big hats. She certainly had a serious collection of big ones now, which Paul was sorting through in front of the mirror in her room in the Alíki. He tried on two or three, grinning foxily into the mirror at Katerina, who lay behind him naked on the bed. She was lying on her side, her head on a pillow.

“You look better in that one,” she said.

“Next, I'll model swimwear.”

“You could, you know, you'd make a beautiful woman,
eine schöne Frau.
”

Paul feigned indignation but then selected a lipstick from the rows on the dressing table.

Katerina swung her legs off the bed and walked—in a loose-gaited way she never walked in clothes—over to the dressing table.

“Stand up,” and she turned the bench lengthwise and pressed him down onto it, her palms on his shoulders. She sat down behind him, straddling the bench, the inside of her smooth thighs pressing the outside of his.

“Now,” she said, “this way,” and she smiled broadly over his shoulder, reaching around to neatly color his lips.

“Hold still!” She applied an appalling silver eye shadow, black eye liner, and touched at his already thick lashes with mascara. His eyes looked ready to leap from their sockets.

“Baby, baby,” Paul whispered, “you know what I like.”

“
Liebschön,
you know what I like, how I like,” she said, leading him back to the bed.

 

Paul sprawled on the sheets, watching Katerina's elaborate preparations to face the world. Or to face Alexandra, who would soon be returning from her afternoon swim. Paul knew Katerina would prefer he was gone when Alexandra got back, but he preferred to be there still and a little disheveled. Alex knew, of course, but he liked reminding her, watching her burn. It was one of the
little things that had kept him interested so long. His affairs, he admitted quite genially, tended to be fleeting at best. Boredom sometimes set in immediately after introductions.

Katerina rubbed at his face with make-up remover and then a warm, wet towel, “You got a little smudged.”

“In the heat of the moment,” he said, making as if to bite at one of her breasts through her slip, growling.

“Now get dressed, please?”

 

He left before Alexandra turned up, but she was in the lobby, drinking a Coke.

“Just get back?” Paul asked her.

“No. I've been back an hour, waiting for you to get out. Blue was off with her brother and Jim so I had to swim alone.”

“You should've knocked or come right in. You have a key,” Paul said.

“Sure, right. What do you see in her, anyway?” Alexandra said.

“In Kat? Well, there's a lot of you in your mother, Alex, and she knows what to do with it. Some women get jaded when they get older, some get dedicated. Your mom's one of the dedicated kind.”

Alexandra flushed, somewhere between jealous and angry. “Gee, thanks for telling me that!”

“But you asked what I see in her!” Paul said.

“Yeah, thanks, thanks again for telling me.
Dedicated!”
She turned on her heel, swearing in German, heading for her room. “
Mach es dir selber!”

Paul had liked the
lot of you in your mother
better than the
dedicated
. Sometimes, he had to admit it, he really had a way with words. He laughed, walking toward the sun shining in the glass doors on the seaside of the lobby.

 

“What do you think he meant by
dedicated?
” Blue wondered out loud. “It's bad enough he's making it with your mom without his talking about it,” she added, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible.

Alexandra wasn't responding.

“Maybe he has a hard time getting it up, you know, so your mom's got to be
dedicated.
”

“Could you please just shut up?”

“Probably that's not it,” Blue said.

“Please?”

“Maybe he just meant like
really
experienced.”

“Enough already!” Alex pushed herself up off the beach, looked at her breasts caked in sand, and groaned. “I'm going in.”

“Me too!” Blue leapt up, an athlete in a swimmer's suit. She was in the water before Alexandra and swam like a dolphin. Back home she'd starred on the swim team and it showed. Alex waded in, cursing. What Alexandra did in the water could hardly be called swimming. But it was something other than talking about Paul. Alex
could
float; once in she rolled over and lay there, letting the waves run through her on their way to the beach. She liked that, how it felt.

She decided not to be angry with Blue. Who else was there to spend the long afternoons with, after all, while her mom and Paul, and Michael and Jim, disappeared from public view? She smiled blithely into the sun: she'd suggest they shop Sými's boutiques. She was flush with guilt money and Blue never seemed to have any money to spare. She'd buy her something. But Alexandra had to admit that by the second day there hadn't been much to shop for on Sými. At times like these she remembered the smart shops of Tübingen with a feeling close to grief.

 

“
Dedicated?
” Michael asked.

Blue shrugged, “That's what she said.”

“Why does she care?”

“Come on! It's her mother!” Blue exclaimed.

“Yeah, but somehow I don't think Paul would be the first lover her mom's carted home.”

“I wouldn't think so,” Jim put in.

They were happily launched on lunch; Jim had insisted on taking them out when Blue let on it was Michael's thirty-sixth birthday.

“I'd think a man at the elbow pretty much goes with the outfits,” Jim added.

Blue looked back and forth between them, at their happy eating. “You two are getting older every day.”

“Well, it
is
my birthday,” Michael said. “But why are you complaining? For you it's a free lunch.”

“I meant conservative,” Blue said firmly.

“Ouch!” Jim laughed, “Hope that zinger was for you, Michael.” He was cutting up a large red pepper, eating it with the hórta and the melitzanosaláta that Paniyótis had recommended as especially good.

“I meant you, too,” Blue said.

“Thanks,” Jim responded, wondering why Paul's very name was so often the occasion for trouble.

“I mean, you two seem like you've been married for a long time.”

Jim and Michael exchanged fawning looks, and then Michael picked up his Coke bottle and said, “I'll toast to that!”

Jim clicked his glass against Michael's bottle, “To growing old together!”

“I don't see why you'd want to rush into that,” Blue said, giggling.

 

Jim called Váso over to the table and asked for sheep's milk yogurt with honey, three servings.

“Okay,” she said, “in a minute.”

Jim watched her carry the dishes she'd cleared off their table into the kitchen, bending under the load, then re-emerge at a run, heading down the alley. For the sheep's milk yogurt, he realized, feeling a twinge of guilt that he'd been so particular.

Michael couldn't help bringing up Paul again. “You watch, Katerina's going to repent getting so thick with Paul.”