Drowning Lessons (7 page)

He pulled out his pad and began sketching. The man nearest him, with an oxlike face and missing tooth, turned red, then hauled himself out of his chair, shook his head, and walked away — but only a few steps. Then he stopped and watched as Andrew kept drawing.

The two men at the same table gazed past Andrew as he sketched their contours, outlined long, hairy ears, bristling mustaches, knobby fists gripping cups and canes. Eventually the ox-faced man made his way to where Andrew sat working and sidled up behind him, watching over his shoulder, rubbing his chin, nodding, snorting. After a while he walked past Andrew and retook his seat, where he resumed his former pose.

Finished, Andrew held up the sketch for them to see. The three men nodded solemnly, then, little by little, they smiled and looked at each other. One pointed to the pad, then to his friend, and laughed and slapped the other's back. Soon they were shaking Andrew's hand, slapping
his
back, calling for raki. All three men turned out to be named Yanni, and so Andrew titled his sketch
The Three Yannis of Ano Viánnos
.

“For you,” he said, tearing the page from his sketchbook and handing it to them. One of the Yannis hurried across the cobblestones to a small shop from which he emerged with a big jar of honey that he presented to Andrew. More laughter, more back-slaps, more toasts.
To the Virgin Mother. To Crete. To the Great Hereafter. To Zeus.
Karina returned, saw them all laughing, and clasped her hands in delight. “To your wife!” one of the Yannis shouted. “Yes,” said Andrew, hugging her. “To my wife. We're on our honeymoon.”

“He is lying,” said Karina, laughing.

“We are going to make many babies.”

To procreation! And to your children's children! Stinyássas!

A half hour later, as the Yannis slipped into the advanced philosophical stages of drunkenness, Andrew and Karina got up to leave. They had to fight their way through the shaking of hands and patting of backs and gestures indicating to Andrew that he should sketch them all over again.

“Hold me,” said Karina as they stumbled toward the green frog. “I am so drunk.”

Andrew drove over washed-out roads, scaring up starlings and seagulls, up sheer cliffs, down windmill-studded valleys, through brown towns huddled like grazing goats around red stone churches. Twice they took wrong turns and had to double back to their junction. By late afternoon they reached the windswept coast town of Áyios Nikólaos, built around one of Crete's two freshwater lakes and linked by canal to the Aegean.

On a small public beach, Andrew dove into the brackish water. But his limbs felt too heavy to swim, so he got back out and lay on a long chair next to Karina, whose purple bathing suit set off the
pale contours of her flesh and kept Andrew from concentrating on the scenery or sleeping. After only twenty-four hours, they had reached that stage of a relationship where talk is unnecessary. While she dozed under a shade umbrella, Andrew stared at her full lips and at the gentle dip and curve of her belly. He realized then that he wanted to make love to her and had wanted to all along.

“Loneliness is an adventure,” he said, lying there with his eyes closed, the world a vermilion blur behind his eyelids. “Possibly the greatest adventure of all.”

It was nearly dark. The sky had turned violet; the waves curled iridescently on the shore. They had driven another fifty kilometers, across the narrowest part of Crete to its opposite coast, to Ierápetra, with its greenhouses and pickling factories, then east along the coast road to Makrigialos, where, as the sun set, they found two rooms in a green wooden house set back from the beach. As the last drop of molten sun dissolved into the sea, they lay dripping like a pair of spent lovers, but (Andrew reflected) instead of making love to each other, they'd been making love to Crete and to the sea.

Andrew asked, “Do you know who Ambrose Bierce was?”

Karina shook her head.

“Ambrose Bierce was an American journalist, a contemporary of Mark Twain, but even more cynical. One day he went to Mexico and was never heard from again. Some say he was kidnapped by Pancho Villa's troops, but no one really knows. Anyway, Bierce wrote a book called
The Devil's Dictionary
, in which he defines ‘alone' as meaning ‘in bad company.' That's what loneliness is. No
longer being able to enjoy being alone with yourself. When you're lonely, the person you really want to be with is yourself.”

“That is an interesting theory. And how does one learn to do that?”

Andrew shrugged. “Go for a walk, eat a nice meal by candlelight; romance yourself. Ask yourself, ‘What do I feel like doing today?' It sounds strange, but why should it? Why should it be so strange to do with ourselves what we think nothing of doing with others? Why — for example — should I be more courteous to you, whom I barely know, than to myself, whom I'll know for the rest of my life? It doesn't make sense.”

“You're right,” said Karina. “It doesn't.”

“The fact is, most of us are our own worst enemies. Instead of being kind to ourselves, we go out of our way to be cruel, and that leads some to think of suicide.”

Karina asked, “Do you ever think of suicide?”

Surprised, Andrew nodded. “Sometimes I think it's why I took this trip.” The surf hissed. “I guess I've thought about it at times in my life. Maybe a little too many times, lately.” He was going to leave it at that, but then he remembered their vow. “But for no reason in particular, which is the worst of all reasons, since you can't get around it.” Now he'd said both too little and too much, and regretted it.

“I, too, have thought of suicide,” said Karina. “I don't know why. When I was four, my father was run out of town by the Mafia. They made him take his pants off and run through the village. Respectability is everything in Brazil. That is why we moved to Niterói.” She leaned up, drank her water. “Why do you think of suicide?”

“Because no one has ever bought me roses.”

“I wish you would forget about roses. You are an angry man, I think. What has made you so angry?”

“I used to take myself to a barber and get a shave,” said Andrew. “I loved the feel of warm shaving cream, the stropping of the blade on leather, the clean, efficient rasps of the razor as the barber stretched my skin, the touch of efficient but caring fingers. Unfortunately, barbers no longer shave people. Matters of insurance. Maybe that's why I'm suicidal.” He yawned.

“I'm not ready to sleep,” said Karina. “Come, let's go to town.”

In the dark, they picked up their towels, rinsed the sand off their feet, and made their way to the green frog. They drove to the center of Makrigialos, a kind of Ocean City, New Jersey, but with pine trees and mountains, where they dined at a seaside taverna to throbbing disco music and Karina looked at Andrew's sketches. Meanwhile, he watched the dark sea lap at the pilings and realized he hadn't felt lonely once since meeting Karina on the dock. Her sparkling, yellow blue openness balanced his brooding, wine-dark depths. He felt as if he'd known her forever.

Back at the house, on a terrace draped with bougainvillea, they shared a bottle of retsina and cookies from the taverna. Andrew sniffled: he was catching a cold. Karina proclaimed that with his sniffles Andrew had eliminated any possibility of their being lovers. “So now we shall never know if what you say is true,” she said, smiling.

Just after the moon set, Andrew woke. His cold had gotten worse, and his stomach growled: wine and cookies. He blew his nose, gulped down two aspirin and half a Valium with some water,
and tried to go back to sleep. When he couldn't, he pulled on his slacks and walked along the beach. Pelicans and seagulls glided down the cliffs; the shore smeared itself with fog. He walked a long way, past the lighthouse and tied-up fishing skiffs, until dawn stained the eastern sky. Bierce had it right: it was easier to look elsewhere for comfort, even to inanimate things, like paintings or the sea. He walked, sandals in hand, kicking at stones. Now he
was
lonely. And what did loneliness consist of? Dashed hopes? Disappointment? The total absence of passion or pain? The loss of something one never had to begin with?
She thinks I'm angry
. Even in sketching, Andrew looked outside himself, to other objects, other people, as if they were mirrors, showing him who he was, giving him back to himself. The sea is a big mirror, he thought. A vast, nauseating mirror that gives us back to ourselves clean and refreshed, like a box of shirts from the Chinese laundry.

When he returned, he found Karina drinking orange juice on her balcony. She smiled and waved, the morning breeze fluttering her hair. “Where are we going today?” she called.

“We could keep going east,” he shouted up at her, “to the tip of the island, or head back through the mountains.”

“Let us head back,” said Karina. “I am sick of the sea.”

Soon the little green frog wrestled the hairpin curves, averaging twenty kilometers an hour through steep bluffs clad in wild oregano, sage, and thyme. The bluffs were home to the horned Cretan ibex, the
kri-kri
so often depicted in Minoan art, a creature so shy and elusive it's been labeled extinct. They saw goats, cows, gulls, swallows, geckos, chameleons. As they rounded a sharp turn, a vulture hung in front of them, motionless, a stuffed trophy suspended in midair, its tail feathers ruffling so close to the
driver's window Andrew felt he could reach out and touch them. Then it swooped out of their sight, down toward the distant sea. Karina turned to Andrew with a wild, astonished look. It would have been the perfect time to kiss her, had he not been driving.

They drove past cypress, evergreen oak, sweet chestnut, and Calabrian pine. The old forests (Andrew read in his
Rough Guide
) were gone, consumed to build houses and ships themselves consumed by earthquakes and wars. They drove through a series of dry, dusty villages, places to get gas or food that earned no mention in their guidebooks. They invented a little game. As Andrew drove, Karina would ask him to describe something: an object, a vista, a feeling. Andrew would venture a sentence, which Karina would transcribe into his sketchbook, and which they would each improve upon, with Karina crossing out words and adding new ones. Then she would read the finished product out loud.

“Bravo!” Karina would say. Or, “Not so good.”

In Áyios Galinas they found a vacant hotel, with rooms across the hall from each other. On their way to dinner, a blackout extinguished the entire village. They groped down the dark, winding road to the harbor, where they found an open restaurant on the water, sustained by candles and generators. The silence delighted Andrew, no loudspeakers, no disco, only their voices and the tinkling of forks and spoons and the ocean waves lapping against the harbor wall, going
shush, shush
, demanding more silence. Andrew ordered an omelet and wine, and Karina did the same.

Then the power came back; the music blared; the sky broke with light and noise. Andrew laughed — ancient Greece was gone, and so was his trip, almost, and any chance to be with this woman as more than a chauffeur. After dessert, in the dimly lit doorway of a house they happened to walk by, a serious-faced
young man tuned his guitar while his girlfriend rolled a cigarette and placed it gingerly between his lips, and this simple gesture made Andrew want to throw Karina on the beach and make furious love to her. Instead, back at the hotel, between both of their opened doors, he said good night.

“Good night, Andrew.” She kissed him on the cheek.

“Describe to me the color of the sea.”

Andrew tapped his pen against his sketchbook. It wasn't really yellow blue, or aquamarine, or azure, or any color you'd find in a watercolor box.

“Well?” said Karina.

“I'm thinking.”

Nor was it the blue of the sky, or robin's eggs, or sapphire, or tourmaline. For too long, poets had been getting away with saying that things were like other things. Andrew would put a stop to it. Here; now.

“I am still waiting,” said Karina, combing her fingers through her hair.

Nor should they be allowed to get away with such expedients as “the blue of dreams.” The sea is no dream, no sigh, no murmur, no memory. Andrew set his descriptive sights on the far shores of verisimilitude, where, he thought, poetic rendition might meet scientific accuracy. “Impossibly blue” was ridiculous. Homer called it the “wine-dark sea,” but that was because the Greeks had no word for the color blue. Then again Homer was blind.

“You have given up?” said Karina.

“I have not! Patience!”

And when you scoop up a handful, what do you get? Clear brine that slips through your fingers, the home of spiny urchins.
What looks so dreamy from a distance turns to salt water. From a great enough distance the whole world turns dreamy blue, absorbing, seducing us. Hence, the Blue of Absorption. The Blue of Arousal. Of Seduction … Andrew scribbled frantically.

“I am still waiting,” said Karina.

“Got it,” he said at last, clearing his throat. “The sea is the color of flirtation, the promise of ecstasy with no guarantee.”

Karina rose in disgust to her feet. “I'm going swimming,” she said, and ran, dove, and splashed into the sea that Andrew had so eloquently failed to describe.

Rethymnon, a former Venetian port, town of minarets pointed phallically skyward, balconies of hand-hewn oak, intricately carved doorways of cramped shops. The multicolored clay-tiled roofs and ochre walls relieved the parade of sugar-lump and concrete architecture. Rust reds, nut browns, mint greens, and butter yellows melted and shimmered in the oily bay.

They had agreed to part ways here and so spent their last hour in search of a gift for Peter, Karina's lawyer lover awaiting her in London. They passed clear and yellow bottles of raki and ouzo, strings of bright worry beads, finely embroidered linens, glistening olives of all colors and sizes, anchovies, pistachios, stuffed grape leaves … Too strong, too small, too homely, too salty.