Cast in Doubt (12 page)

I explain to Helen that art makes virtue out of necessity—the artist must do what he does; he can see no way other than the way he sees. That is vision. Science, on the other hand, makes necessity itself a virtue—that is, it says that nature is beautiful, even though it is cruel. Niels Bohr once told his colleagues, I heard, that the task of physics was “not to find out how nature is, but what we can say about nature.” This is much like writing, I go on. Physicists designate equations elegant when they serve many functions, which is part of that beauty. That is what elegance is. I’m defending my earlier assertion, and some other position, my position vis-à-vis hers, but I’m not sure what hers is, except one of disbelief. And she must never guess that I have had, even for the most minute second, a nanosecond, the slightest trace of desire for her. I would never act on it. Am I an old fool like Lear? “O heavens, if you do love old men…”

Drunk, teetering on the maudlin, I pursue an ambiguous line, but I cannot stop myself. I cannot go home now. I know I should. The white wine is gone, much of it swirling around my brain. Helen is most certainly by my side. I am close to her, but what does that mean? Am I really close to anyone? It must be the alcohol that has produced this phantasm—that I could bed her, could desire her. I feel not a trace of lust for her. It is all a product of my imagination, mental activity—an inventive kind of willfulness, in a sense.

I focus as best I can. She’s probably not concerned yet with elegance, and may never be. It’s odd how quickly one becomes or feels drunk. It’s true—to me, her father’s being a psychiatrist serves a function; Roger over there with Adonis serves another; even Alicia, who is not here, annoying, marvelous Alicia, serves a function—she appears at the wrong times, as she did in the hospital. But what function do I serve? Am I content with thinking of myself as a storyteller? Isn’t that too easy?

Wallace, who has just arrived—this I observe with a start—he serves no function whatsoever. He is inelegant. A clod. No, a succubus. The Dutchwoman is with him, propping him up, and with them an aged stooped creature whose face is covered by a beard. I squint and squint. It’s Stephen the Hermit. This is quite extraordinary, I exclaim to Helen, that man hasn’t been out in years—not in company. He was once exquisitely beautiful, so beautiful. A great beauty. How did they manage to capture him?

Helen turns to look at him and giggles, as she should. It’s as if I were describing Tarzan. Tarzan was English, wasn’t he? Stephen is English, a scion of colonialists; I would bet on that, were I a gambling man like Rhett Butler. She probably hasn’t read
Gone with the Wind
. She must have seen the movie. I am effervescent, giddy, and at the sight of Stephen, light-headed if not light-hearted. Words almost dance off one’s tongue when one’s mind is addled by drink.

They’re coming our way. It’s been ages since I’ve seen Stephen. Roger is coming over too. It’s a feast. I feel festive, ebullient. More drink. I call out, Wine for everyone, Christos.

Stephen sits down beside Helen. It is hard to believe that he was once a child movie star. His mother was Hungarian, I believe, his father terribly English and rich, but for some reason or other, Stephen was raised primarily in Rome. There a director cast him in a role and he quickly became a child actor, whose adorable looks were beloved by a nation that worships its bambini. The early attention did little good for Stephen, as he grew up surrounded either by doting nannies, a narcissistic mother, or film crews paid to pander to him. And what does a child know, father to the man.

My word, Stephen now—a sight to behold, a sorry sight. I can’t quite believe my eyes. How low a man can sink. Roger and Wallace are arguing about politics, so I needn’t join in. I can observe the scene.

Helen is rapt. Weird Stephen, in good form, is talking to her in a respectable way. He flails his arms every now and again, but is in most ways well behaved. English eccentrics are wonderfully odd. Even though he is completely mad, he still retains some of the manners of a gentleman. I hear bits of his monologue; it follows in a seemingly logical order. Perhaps he does make sense much of the time, but as I never see him, how would I know. He makes sense in the forest, with no one to hear him out, and we all judge him so harshly. I am ashamed of myself and turn to face Helen and him. They are blurry shapes. They are good people, I know this in my heart.

I listen wholeheartedly to Stephen, moving my chair closer to his to catch his every word. He has no money, as he has been cut off by his family, almost entirely; naturally they disapprove of the way he lives. He pushes his hair back—long, unruly hair—which exposes more of his face, though there’s nothing to be done with his beard. Helen takes my hand, she must know I’m drifting in and out of this world, and squeezes it every once in a while. Sweet Helen. Sad Stephen. The authorities cut off his electricity some months ago, and he lives in a house without light except from that of candles which he’s set about his place in tin cans. He’ll die by fire. I know it. I feel it. The house will go up in a second, and he will be destroyed, burned to death. No, asphyxiated. It seems inevitable.

An impish smile plays on Stephen’s lips. He is exuberant. He declares to Helen, as if exposing a great truth, his great truth, that he has discovered electricity, how important it is, how electricity is magic. He ecstatically enthuses on the power of Light and God, that electricity running through thin wires and cables is the lifeblood of our society. He’d never realized before the way that God was a part of everything, but seeing dots of electric light in houses around the world was proof of God’s power. His mother and father had tried to control him through the telephone, but that was not the fault of God or electricity. His daily life was once absorbed in switching lights on and off, and he rues the day he complained of that activity as simple repetition when in fact it was central to his life and all life. Now, without this routine, it’s as if he were doing penance. Lighting candles makes him wish he were Catholic but still he misses the radio, the voices that spoke to him and the world. The BBC, the BBC World Service, he can’t live without it. He bellows: I love electricity. I love electricity.

Roger, Wallace and the Dutchwoman laugh, first in horror, and then raucously, in morbid delight. Stephen looks about only to discover them laughing at him, staring at him, as at a comedian or worse. He grabs his book bag and shuffles off from the restaurant, walking in long angry strides around the harbor until he is well out of sight. The mirth dies a self-conscious death. Wallace explains that he wooed Stephen out of his ramshackle debacle of a house with the promise of a good dinner. Roger, ever the one to know more than anyone else, Roger insists that Stephen cribbed all of that from Nijinsky, and that he’s not mad at all. Just playing possum. Like Pound? Wallace goes on again. Roger notes sarcastically that even madness is unoriginal. I simply won’t hear any more of this, I think.

Wallace says that Stephen eats scraps these days. Roger harrumphs caustically. Poor Stephen, I declaim, and, in Roger’s direction, ask, have you no pity? I reach for my glass but can barely lift the drink to my mouth. And to think that, by comparison with Stephen, Wallace now seems sane. Roger bothers to respond only with, You’re drunk, Horace. Then he turns his chair around so that his back is to me. But where is Helen? She has disappeared. Has she run after our Nijinsky, our Stephen?

Yannis as usual has managed to appear from nowhere, like one of the Furies. He is begrudgingly at my side, but where has everyone else gone. Have I been talking aloud again or thinking to myself? Where is Helen? Yannis grabs my hand and pulls me out of the chair. He walks ahead of me, leaving me to putter along after him. A great rage wells in me. I want to strike him, to hurt him. I mutter something. He looks at me as a wounded animal might, but what have I done? I am infuriated by his reproach. I throw down some money, I throw it down on the ground in front of him. He turns again. There is on his face an expression of disgust so great that I must avert my gaze. Surely he cannot hate me that much. This is a dream, a poisoned vision.

A yacht named
Viridiana
docked in the harbor the other day, a sleek white sailing vessel off of which my friend Gwen alighted, sleepily. She met the owner in Iráklion and took up his offer to sail here with him—a French-Greek millionaire—and his wife, who’s just French, and assorted guests. Gwen tells me the vessel sleeps twelve, all in one bed, and I can’t decide whether or not she is joking. She remarks that I’ve been away from the States too long if I don’t know.

Gwen is in fine shape, thin and energetic, yet she somehow exudes, at the same time, a soigné world-weariness. while here, she announces, she will work only on her tan, and me. Then she laughs. Gwen hugs me, not too tightly, and mentions being beat but not a Beat, not ever, and later, something about missing the beat or the boat. I’m not sure. She talks very fast, she always, has. I’d almost forgotten that.

It’s a tonic to see her, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, running her tongue over her lips, patting her knee impatiently. Lulu—she calls me Lulu—you’re looking well for a beaten man. She is capable of using one word or metaphor all day long, in as many different ways as one could. Gwen views Yannis through her jaded eyes, and it is as if I can see him through them. I know she is suspicious of him and our arrangement, as she is naturally suspicious about everything, and certainly exaggeratedly so about affairs of the heart. Gwen has often remarked she has no heart for the heart, that hers just ticked over and died, stopped beating ages ago, that she goes through the motions. Her heart’s wound up, ready to spring, like a dog on a bone, but really it’s only the motions, the emotions. Statements of this kind often issue from her, but in fact she continues to fall in love over and over again, even if heartlessly. She has carried on an affair with a friend’s husband for years. I’ve nearly given up men, she confesses. But I’ll never quit smoking.

I lead her to her room, which is one floor below mine. A bouquet of flowers carefully arranged and placed in a locally made ceramic vase has been set on the white dresser. Nectaria put the flowers there, to welcome Gwen. I think Gwen is surprised and pleased. People who expect bad or poor treatment are usually overcome by kindness. I would never allow anyone but Gwen to call me Lulu.

It’s so nourishing to talk with Gwen. We talk and talk. I embellish the stories about Alicia and Roger, and then offer my tale of Helen. Gwen listens, scrutinizing me, getting the story. Her lips caress and hold tight a Greek nonfiltered cigarette. Her dark eyes, which slant upward, are narrowed. When I’ve finished, she repeats, You’ve been out of the States too long, Lulu, you’re becoming one of those expatriates. She waves her hands in the air, indicating, I suppose, a dizzy expatriate, a confused one. A predictable expatriate, she explains. Then she adds, Horace, girls like Helen are a dime a dozen. Pish-posh! I exclaim, like a character out of Dickens.

It’s been some time since I’ve seen Helen on her terrace, and she hasn’t come for dinner at Christos’ restaurant. One of the beauties of this place is that one can make oneself scarce, it’s true. One can disappear at will, for a time. Yet Helen may be angry with me. It is no fault of mine that John is living at Alicia’s house, surrounded by bougainvillea, and that he is cared for by such a lovely older woman, though to me she is a younger woman. Isn’t everyone younger than I? Helen may need to blame me, but I am blameless. Of this event, anyway. The last time we dined, in the condition I was, I may have blurted out something about suicide, about her having had a twin who died. Too much time has passed since then. A few days’ absence is normal. And though, prior to Gwen’s arrival, I was furiously at work on my crime book, I was unsettled and concerned about Helen. I thought about her and that evening, and then repressed it. I said to myself it is nothing; but then I dwelled on her and it again, and yet I did and have done nothing. Actually I have been waiting to hear from her. But now I think I will send her a note. I will also ask Yannis to go to the market and buy her some flowers to accompany the note. I don’t think this can be viewed by Helen as another one of Horace’s impositions.

With Gwen here, my absence from home seems poignant. I’ve been here nearly as long as Helen’s been alive. I might become annoyed at Gwen’s harping on my being out of touch. No doubt I am, whatever that means. With the zeitgeist, with American life and day-to-day reality, whatever that may be, with the city, the polis. Politics were not why I left America. I’d lost my lover of many years. I had a publisher, a contract, books to do. I was tired of everyone and everything, just as I am now, come to think of it. I had a little money to play with, as I was and am privileged. I loathe people who hide their means of support, though I am no Marxist. I identified during the sixties with James Baldwin, especially when he fled to France, and though I’m not black, and he’s years younger, and I didn’t suffer the poverty and discrimination he did, I felt close to him. I still feel close to him because of these things and certain details like our bulging eyes and predilection for men. I always thought I’d meet him, but fate has not been kind to me in that respect. He’s a marvelous writer and much misunderstood. Gwen knew of my feelings for him, and she’s the only person I ever told. She’s met him. Gwen knows everyone. She is more than twenty years younger than I. I must ask her how Baldwin is these days. If anyone would know, she would.

The sea is remarkably calm now and the only sounds one hears are small waves slapping gently against the harbor walls. It is quiet, peaceful. The States is a maelstrom. All those products, and people and clubs, and TV shows. I watched television once only. It gave me a headache. There is some noise here of course. On Sundays the army marches around the harbor. Gwen will watch the parade, laugh her sharp little laugh, and flick the ashes of her cigarette. I never would have marched in protest marches. I couldn’t, carrying a banner proclaiming, “U.S. Out Of Vietnam,” or “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” and not because I don’t believe in the truth of both, but because I abhor the idea of wearing a placard or button. I hate to think that a phrase could in any way even for an instant define me. That I could be summed up that way is appalling, absolutely terrifying. I immediately conjure a tombstone upon which my life is reduced to an engraved epitaph.