“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. Fat lot you care.”
He cautiously advances, hesitates, then sits on the bed beside her, leaving the lyre between them. She gives the instrument a bitter side-glance.
“I know it’s out of tune. I
hate
it. How the idea got around that the whole world fell silent when that ridiculous cousin of mine gave one of his endless concerts, God only knows. Tinkle, tinkle, plonk, plonk. Everyone I knew used to go to sleep with the sheer screaming boredom of it all.” She fiddles with the chaplet, as if it is to blame. “And this absurd outfit. Don’t think I don’t know you’re only pretending to like it.”
She flicks him a cold glance out of the corner of her dark eyes.
“Pig.” She tears at a rosebud. “I hate you.” He waits. “And you thought that black girl’s boobs were much nicer, anyway.”
He shakes his head.
“I’m just amazed you didn’t have her as well by the end. Or both of us together.” She pulls another rosebud out of the chaplet, and starts tearing its petals off, one by one. “Properly developed, it could have been a perfectly tasteful and interesting idea. I’m not unreasonable. I wouldn’t have objected to a certain discreet nuance of romantic interest. I’m not totally unaware that you’re male and I’m female.”
He pushes the lyre back and edges a few inches closer.
“And don’t think that’s going to get you anywhere.”
He reaches and takes her hand; she tries to pull it free, but he insists. Their joined hands lie on the white sheet, prisoner and jailer. She gives them a contemptuous look, then away.
“Not if you got down on your knees again and begged me. And another thing. This is all strictly off the record.”
He squeezes the hand; then moves a little closer still, and after a further squeeze, puts his arm around her bare shoulders. She does not respond.
“I know exactly what you’re trying to do. I may not be the musical one in my family, but I can recognize a fugal inversion when I see it.”
He bends and kisses the shoulder.
“I haven’t the least liking or affection for you anymore. It’s just that I’m too tired to care. It was a bloody awful flight. I was airsick.”
He kisses the shoulder again.
“You have absolutely no feeling for my feelings at all.”
He removes the rubber sheet. She throws a quick look down at his lap, then turns her head away.
“How unspeakably vulgar you are sometimes.”
He tries to lead her hand to the unspeakable vulgarity, but she snatches it away and folds her arms across her breasts again, staring at the quilted wall.
“You needn’t think I didn’t see that smirk on your face when I spoke of maidenliness. Just because once or twice in the past I may have allowed myself to relax in your presence. I suppose you think that’s inconsistent and silly as well. That occasionally I have the humanity to contradict my own public image.”
He examines her profile, and then gently begins to ease the white strap of the tunic off her delectably rounded and golden shoulder. But she clamps her arm against her side when the whole top of the garment threatens to fall.
“And before you start thinking you’re doing a marvelous seduction job, I’d better remind you that you’re not the only one by a long chalk. I’ve had my clothes taken off by sensitive geniuses. I’m not going to be impressed by a composer of erotica.”
He takes his hand away. There is a silence. Then, still staring at the wall, she slips the hanging strap under her elbow.
More silence. Still she stares at the wall.
“I didn’t say you had to take your arm away.”
He puts it back.
“Not that I care a damn. Personally.”
He teases, very gingerly, the front of the tunic over what prevents it from falling to her lap.
“You think I know nothing about men. I can tell you my very first lover had more sex in his little toenail than you do in your whole boring body. Or he would have if he’d had a little toenail. You wouldn’t have caught him just looking at the breasts of Miss Greece of nineteen eighty-two.” She adds, “I refer to nineteen eighty-two B.C., of course.”
He raises his hand, and lets his other hand, around the shoulders, slip down to the bare waist and pull her a fraction closer. He leans to kiss her cheek; in vain. She turns her head away.
“But then he didn’t have an infantile transferred fixation from golliwogs.” He clears his throat. “I take that back. But then he didn’t have an absolutely typical male pseudo-intellectual’s sexist belief that making black sisters proves he’s a liberal.”
There is a silence. She looks down at his right hand and its movements.
“I’ve a good mind to tell you about him. Just to put you in your place.” She watches a few moments more. “And that happens to be a purely involuntary reaction. I can produce exactly the same effect using my own hands.” She sniffs. “As I often have to, given how inept and ignorant most of you are.” His hand stops. She lets out an impatient breath. “Oh for God’s sake. Now you’ve started, you may as well go on.” He goes on. “I don’t know why men put such enormous value on it. It’s actually not half as exciting as you all so fondly imagine. It’s only a biological survival mechanism. To facilitate suckling.” A moment or two later, with another sigh, she leans back, propped on her arms. “Honestly. You’re just like laboratory rats. The simplest trigger… off you trot.” She subsides further, on her elbows. “Nibble and bite. Bite and nibble.” There is a silence. But then she sits abruptly and pushes him away. “You can’t do that until you’ve undone my zone. Anyway, you’re only trying to distract me. What you really need is a good bucket of cold water.” His hand is slapped. “And stop that. It’s a very complicated knot. If you want to do something useful for once, you’d better go and close the door. And turn the light out while you’re about it.”
He goes to the door, and closes it on the impenetrable night that stands beyond. She is standing as well, by the bed, her bare back to him, her hands by her side, untying the saffron girdle. But just as she is about to slip the tunic down, she glances back at him over her shoulder.
“If you don’t mind. We’ve already had quite enough voyeurism in this sickening room.”
He presses the switch at the door. The white panel above the bed is extinguished, but another panel above the door, apparently controlled from outside, continues to glow. It is dim, penumbral, like summer moonlight.
He opens his hands apologetically.
“Sod. You’ve just invented that.” He raises his hands in denial. “Oh yes you have. There hasn’t been a single mention of it before this.” She admonishes him with a long moment’s accusing stare, then turns her back and steps out of the tunic. Now she faces him, holding the garment in front of her bosom, like some Victorian artist’s model. “You’re really asking for it again. The only good line you came up with was when that doctor said you ought to be stuffed and put in a museum.”
She looks in the twilight for somewhere to hang her tunic; then walks around the end of the bed to the cuckoo clock in the far corner. There she hangs it from a projecting chamois-head at the corner of one of the eaves. Without looking at him she returns to the bed, plumps up the pillows, and sits back in the center of it with folded arms. He moves to join her.
“Oh no you don’t. You can get the chair and sit there.” She points to a place on the carpet ten feet from the bed. “And listen to someone else for once in your life.”
He fetches the chair and sits where she has indicated; then folds his arms as well. The Grecian-haired girl on the bed stares at him with an unconcealed suspicious resentment, then quickly at something lower down his body, before transferring her disdainful gaze to the light-panel over the door. There is a silence, during which his eyes do not leave her body. It is not a body, now it is revealed in all its beauty, that encourages leaving in any sense. It somehow contrives, all at the same time, to be both demure and provocative, classical and modern, individual and Eve-like, tender and unforgiving, present and past, real and dreamed, soft and…
She gives him a fierce look. “And for God’s sake stop staring at me like a dog waiting for a bone.” He looks down. “Unlike you I try to think before I tell a story.” He bows his head in assent. “You’d better regard it as a tutorial. Not just about sexual arrogance, either. But on how to get simply and quickly to the point, instead of beating endlessly about the bush. Like some people I could mention.”
There is a further silence, then she begins to narrate.
“If you must know, it happened at home. I was only sixteen. There was a place, a sort of alpine meadow surrounded by dense undergrowth, where I used to go sometimes on my own to sunbathe. It was very hot, July, and I’d taken off my tunic. A favorite aunt of mine – actually I’ve always been more like a daughter to her than a niece – has always held strong naturist views. It was she who first taught me not to be ashamed of my body. Some people say I look rather like her. She has a thing about sea-bathing as well – summer and winter. But that wouldn’t mean anything to you.”
She unfolds her arms and puts her hands behind her head, still staring at the light over the door.
“Anyway. There I was in my meadow. A couple of nightingales singing in the bushes nearby. Wild flowers, buzzing bees, all that sort of thing. The sun on my fifteen-year-old back. Then I thought I might get burnt. So I knelt up and rubbed some olive oil I’d brought all over my skin. I can’t imagine why, but as I was smoothing it in, instead of reflecting on naturist principles I began thinking about a young shepherd. By pure chance I’d met him once or twice. His name was Mopsus. Purely by chance, on walks. There was a beech tree he used to loll about under when it was hot. Playing a pipe, and if you think my lute is out of tune… anyway. A month before my mother – you know about my parents?”
He nods.
“She just had this thing about shepherds. After the divorce.”
He nods again.
“Not that you could ever imagine, being a man. I mean twins are bad enough. But nonuplets, and the whole lot daughters. There had to be a limit, even in those days.” She looks at him as if he might disagree; but he puts on his most understanding face. “I had to live with it all my childhood. Constant rows over the alimony. I’m not entirely blaming Daddy, she went through more sets of lawyers than dresses at a sale. And anyway, heaven knows she made enough out of the nine of us once we were old enough. Talk about traveling freak shows. We were hardly ever off the road in the beginning. It was worse than being the Rolling Stones. And we had the most ghastly manager, our so-called musical uncle, he was an absolute pansy – of course that’s why Mummy picked him, he had about as much interest in women as a film-star has in anonymity. We used to call him Aunt Polly, Thalia and me. That’s my only other sister who has a sense of humor. He used to pluck tweely away while we were supposed to prance around in our special costumes looking frightfully soulful and intelligent and all the rest of it. I mean that was the act. You’ve never seen anything so pathetic in all your life.”
He raises his eyebrows in gratitude for this valuable insight into primitive Greek religion.
“Apollo Musagetes, that was his real name. His stage name.”
Now his mouth opens, in some surprise.
“That’s what irritated me so much when you talked of swanning through the olive groves. Some chance. We’d hardly started menstruating before we were pushed off on our first tour. Pindus, Helicon, every wretched little mountain between. Honestly, I knew every temple dressing-room in Greece by the time I was fourteen. We might get booked in as the Glorious Muses. All we really were was the Delphi Dancing Girls. Most of it was about as much fun as playing Pittsburgh on a wet Sunday night.”
He makes an appropriate gesture of prayer, for forgiveness.
“Pig. Anyway, my mother had this boy transferred off the mountain the month before. Two of my sisters had complained about something they’d seen him doing, I was never told quite what. Apparently he was being rather beastly to one of his ewes. That was it, of course. Out he went. I can’t imagine why he should have crossed my mind that particular day.”
She reclines a little farther back, and raises her knees; then extends one leg in the air, turning and inspecting the slim ankle for a moment, before bringing it back to its partner.
“Actually… oh well, there was something, I suppose I’d better tell you. Again, by pure chance, one day before he was given the boot, I was walking on my own and happened to pass near his beech tree. It was terribly hot that day, too. I was rather surprised to notice he wasn’t there, though all his smelly old sheep were. Then I remembered, Olympus knows why, that there was a spring not far away. It came out of a cave and made a little pool. Actually it was our pool, it was supposed to be a kind of combined bath and bidet for my sisters and myself, but never mind. Anyway, I had nothing better to do, all this was in that absolutely marvelous time before the alphabet and writing was invented – my Zeus, if we’d only realized. We should be so lucky.” She throws him a dark look. “So I went to the pool. He was having a bathe. Naturally I didn’t want to disturb his privacy, so I stepped behind some bushes.” She glances at the man on the chair. “Is this boring you?”
He shakes his head.
“You’re quite sure?”
He nods.
“I was only fourteen.”
He nods again. She turns on her side, towards him, and curls up her legs a little. Her right hand smooths the sheet.
“He came out of the Pierian Fountain – that was Aunt Polly’s prissy name for this pool – and sat on a rock beside it to dry. And then – he was only a simple country boy, of course. Actually, to cut a long story short, he began… well, playing with a rather different sort of pipe. Or syrinx, as we called it. He obviously thought he was alone. I was frankly quite shocked. Disgusted. It wasn’t that I hadn’t seen naked men before, at my aunt’s in Cyprus.” She looks up. “Did I tell you she lived in Cyprus?”
He shakes his head. She goes back to smoothing the sheet.
“Anyway. As a matter of fact I’d always thought their little hanging things looked rather silly. All that horrible pelt surrounding them. I couldn’t understand why they shaved their beards every day, but not that. Why they couldn’t see that my aunt and her woman friends and me looked so much prettier.” She looks up again. “I suppose you did notice?”