White Vespa (13 page)

 

It was still dusk when Jim locked the door of the room he kept in a house behind the old town in Yialós, a small grid of narrow lanes and tiny shops. He enjoyed the short walk down to the harbor and had explored every alley more than once. It was evening. He walked slowly, turning right into a churchyard paved with smooth beach stones, something like a carpet design made from small black and white stones. He wasn't in a hurry, had no one to meet and planned to eat alone, so he took time to enjoy the courtyard, sitting down on the bench that ran all along the whitewashed wall across from the church. The churchyard felt deeply still, and yet he noticed, sitting there, that there was far more traffic than he'd at first thought. Lovers standing in the shade, heads pressed together. An old woman in a headscarf come to light a candle. Tourists exclaiming quietly about the pebble courtyard. A teenager taking the short way, heading for a rendezvous. In summer, he thought, it's always Saturday night.

He stood up and walked on. He found his way into the lit alleys of the old town and arrived at To Stenáki just as a table was being cleared, by Yórgos, as it turned out. It was early for dinner, at least for Greeks, and the taverna, though full, was mostly full of foreigners. He ordered retsina from the barrel and mezédhes. Paniyótis, Yórgos's father, brought them to the table. He seemed harried, as always, but he greeted Jim warmly, if gruffly. While he was considering the menu another lone diner turned up, and Jim asked the newcomer if he'd like to join him rather than wait for a free table. He thought he recognized one of his own kind.

His name was Michael. Another American. When the mezédhes came, skordhaliá and melitzanosaláta, Jim insisted that Michael share them.

“It's just done,” he said, and broke off a slice of rough bread and passed it across the table. “Enjoy it. And try the retsina.”

They fell to talking. When Paniyótis next swept by the table, Jim ordered
a couple more appetizers, tarmosaláta
,
a salty pink dip whipped out of fish eggs, and a plate of flaming red peppers.

“God, what food,” Jim sighed, “the melitzanosaláta is so fine, that burnt taste, I can't get enough of it. Deeply significant,” he concluded.

Michael laughed. “What appetites you have,” he said, smiling.

Later, Jim bought them drinks at Vapori
,
and they sat outside, the light flaring around them off the shining flagstones. Michael had arrived recently but meant to stay a long vacation. He wore a tight white T-shirt and jeans and was tanned and looked strong. A gym type. Later yet they wandered up into the alleys and stairs on the hillside above Yialós, into Horió, stopping here and there to look down at the harbor through the quick apertures between buildings, looking at the boats rocking at anchor and at the play of lights.

Michael did advertising for a small firm in Atlanta, and when he talked about it, it was interesting. He liked the work and that made it sound worth doing. Probably, otherwise Jim wouldn't have listened, and dimly he knew that, but he was free, and he found that the subject held him as it was told.

“It's the pace of the work that's best, the way no matter how well scheduled things look when the project begins, in the end there is a great rush, everybody on the team hyped and irritable and warm and open at the same time, and out of that the work gets done. Out of actually working together. The together part is what finally gets the work done. That's where the ideas come from, and the execution, too.”

“Sounds nothing at all like what I do,” Jim said. “A lot of work alone and then hours in front of classes that try as you might you can't join. The students insist you be the teacher, not one of them, and there is a distance in that . . .”

“But summers on Sými!” Michael interjected.

“Yes, but to exercise the option you've got to give up on the idea of doing much in the way of writing. And it's scholarship that gets rewarded.”

“And?”

“And I decided I didn't care! Found I didn't care to write another article or another book hardly anybody would ever read.”

“And here you are,” Michael said with an approving nod.

“So it seems.”

 

Myles tried to kick-start the Vespa one last time and again it wouldn't start. He swore quietly but thoroughly. He pulled the machine up on its stand and looked at his watch. It was a long walk to Two Stories, and it was already late. He swore again, savoring the way obscenities fell so easily into strings. Then he started to walk, out the drive in the dark where the stars pressed hotly, and then onto the blacktop and the winding road down into Yialós. The road was narrow and the few cars snaking up out of town passed him at a roar and left him blind. Then the cars quit coming, and it was quiet and the blackness thickened around him. Suddenly Myles knew he was happy; how lucky he was to be alive and walking down a twisting road in the night, between the stars overhead and the horseshoe of town lights down below.

 

Paul stopped, and Katerina stopped beside him. She'd taken his arm as soon as they'd pushed through the glazed doors of the Alíki, just like he was a gentleman. Then they strolled down the paraléia arm in arm, Alexandra behind them, looking a little put out. Paul enjoyed the way they swept along, but thought for full effect he really should have had Alexandra on his off arm, though walking three abreast on the busy paraléia would have been impractical at best. And now they had stopped. In front of a restaurant. The host was away from his station so they stood between the lectern where the menus were kept and a hot grill, where blue and yellow flames played over a bed of orange coals. Paul looked at the display of fish, both an advertisement and dinner itself. The smell of grilling mullet swirled in the street.

He smiled at Alexandra, who did not smile back. The girl looked furious, now. So he winked at her, then turned back to Katerina, who was inspecting the fish. She was not dressed for inspecting fish, but not squeamish about it either. When the host came back, she had him hold one up to the light and insisted on seeing the flesh inside, which she seemed to whiff.

“It will do,” she said. So Paul ordered the fish before they sat down.

The host led them to a table under an awning and they trailed to it single file. Katerina carried herself like no woman Paul had ever known, but perhaps the carriage derived from the clothes. Again Victorian, but not frumpy, not the Victorian look of the old, but how the young must have found themselves beautiful a hundred years before. Paul had seen something like it in the movies. He asked to have the awning scrolled back so they could see the stars. Paul admired the two strings of heavy, amber beads Katerina wore over a finely worked, ivory vest. He admired her shimmering black shawl and the tea-colored dress.

“You must have a large suitcase,” Paul said.

“Two big trunks.”

“And you?” Paul turned to Alex.

She grinned wickedly. “Oh, I have a whole valise just for lipstick.”

Paul looked at her brightly painted nails. “And for nail polish?”

“Another one.”

“So you never actually carry your luggage?” He looked back and forth between the shining youth of Alexandra's face and the art of the other.

“Never,” they said together.

Alexandra was wearing a light white sweater, which must have looked very small on the hanger, and a long skirt so fine that when she walked it clung to her like Saran Wrap. And Paul had done fairly well in his closet: he wore tight white jeans with a wide belt, a shining black shirt very open at the neck, and black boots.
He
thought of it as a costume, at least.

Paul ordered a bottle of Gravès off the wine list to go with the fish, and together the three of them built a small dinner off the menu. Alexandra had noticed that even when he was teasing, Paul was cute, just impossibly cute, and she began to take an interest. The woman spoke in her. The girl had never stopped speaking in Katerina, who was as coquettish as any schoolgirl of fifteen.

 

Paul picked at his burnt cream. They had arrived at that difficult moment when they wanted to pay the bill. Greek waiters, whether in a cheap ouzerí or an expensive restaurant, are all shy of the check, as if delivering it is a lapse of hospitality they don't want to commit.

Paul raised his hand to call for the bill. No response. He put down his spoon, and when the waiter passed by the table, his head locked on some other destination, Paul said, “Check, please!” Blind and deaf, the waiter raced by. “
Logariasmó,
” he tried out the word that seemed to trip so neatly off of Anne's tongue, but off his it trudged out, awkward and ineffective.

He settled into his chair, smiled at his double date, and shrugged. “After dinner drinks?”

“Why not?” Katerina said.

“Me too?” Alexandra pleaded.

And the waiter was there. He took the order and prepared to leave. Before he got away, Paul added, “And the bill, please.”

 

“Shall we find a taxi? There are two or three. Or walk?”

They settled on a taxi and the long serpentine ascent of the hills up to Horió. They got out near the windmills, a row of which hung inconspicuously enough on the skyline to the north of town. They scrabbled up a short slope covered in rubble and sat on the fieldstone bench that ran around the base of one of them, looking down at the harbor all spangled in lights. They could see a line of yachts nosing the paraléia across the way, money rubbing up against money. Further right, the illuminated clock tower stood sentry over the inner harbor, and behind it, somewhere, the boatyards had sunk in a flood of darkness.

Paul suggested they continue the night at Two Stories and walked behind the woman and the girl through the lanes of Horió, eyeing speculatively the family resemblance in the twitch of their hips.

 

Váso bit at her dirty fist to keep from snorting. Yórgos heard the quiet gasp that escaped her and turned his black eyes on hers. She looked away, up at the stars, away from the couple in the shadows down below, hiding in the ruined shell of a building, but not hiding well enough. The kids were hiding out in the ruins, too, for fun, and the couple down below was the fun they'd found. They were having a go at it standing up, the woman with her skirt pulled up and the man with his pants down around his ankles. It was the pants falling and the white moons coming into view that had set Váso off, and her body was still shuddering, laughter welling up in her. Yórgos watched, seriously, hearing the woman say “oh” and “oh my” as the man poked awkwardly at her.

Then Yórgos threw a small stone and all motion stopped. He turned his head to Váso and grinned, and then they were both laughing uncontrollably as they scrambled across a pile of rubble for the nearest stairs. In a second, they were on the Kalí Stráta
,
howling to hear their voices ring. They ran by Myles without even recognizing him, but he saw them, and amusement flickered across his lips. “Kids,” he murmured, but he didn't give them much thought. Still, it seemed late for Yórgos, not to mention Váso, to be out and running wild, but it was common, too. Greeks are not a people who sleep early.

Myles thought he heard an owl and looked up, but it was Yórgos again, standing with a bright light behind him, on a wall higher up, hooting. He did recognize Myles now and waved and shouted something down or maybe just shouted, and then he was gone, the beat of children's feet on stone, softly, and then nothing.

 

The upstairs bar at Two Stories was so jammed with the summer crowd that Myles had to thread his way to the top of the stairs. He had imagined something quieter. He put his hand on the banister and started down, looking for Anne as he descended the stairs. He spotted her through the door, serving
drinks on the terrace to a woman in an outrageous get-up. He smiled; he had a soft spot for pretenders.

Jim sat at the bar chatting away but when he saw Myles he waved him over to introduce his new friend Michael.

“Did you see Paul outside?”

“Paul? No, where?”

Following Jim's pointing finger he recognized Paul sitting with the woman in the get-up and a flushed girl. Anne was talking to them, familiarly, he noticed.

“I was just telling Michael about Paul's getting his condom back at To Stenáki.”

“Sounds like a real character,” Michael said, not amused.

“Quite a guy,” Myles agreed.

“An asshole?” Michael asked.

“Yes, but a handsome asshole,” Myles said.

“Very handsome,” Jim put in.

“Paul the handsome asshole,” Michael said, as if he was bestowing a title.

“But,” Myles added, “Anne's brother,” as he watched her coming now toward the bar, her face lighting up when she saw him.

“Anne?” Michael said.

Then she was there, leaning in close to Myles for a kiss.

 

“She's your sister?” Alexandra sounded querulous.

“Don't you think I should have one?”

“Not really. She doesn't act like your sister. Are you sure?”

“Alexandra!” Katerina scolded.

“All right. But it's not fair.”

Paul laughed, “She doesn't think it's fair, either, if you want to know.”

 

“On me,” Anne said, putting half a glass of Wild Turkey down close to Myles' hand.

“I missed you,” Myles whispered.