Everything Beautiful Began After (10 page)

“I’m all dusty,” Henry said.

Rebecca held the door.

“I really don’t want anything,” Henry insisted, “but we can look for you.”

“No, I can’t buy myself anything with this—let’s just use it for you.”

The shop had several display cabinets of scarves and a long table set out for a full dinner with plates, cutlery, and napkins.

In the middle of the shop were two saddles and a selection of equestrian accessories.

“This place is amazing,” Henry said, picking up a riding crop.

“It’s French,” Rebecca said, “like me.”

The saleswoman glided toward them. She was in her late fifties and had short hair. She smiled at Rebecca and said in a deep voice, “Hello, mademoiselle.”

Rebecca smiled. “I’m here to find something beautiful for this strange man.”

“I really don’t need anything,” Henry said to the woman.

“We’re not about need in here,” the saleswoman laughed, “we’re about want, and everybody wants something beautiful—if only to remind them of someone beautiful.”

Henry shrugged. “That’s the best sales pitch I’ve ever heard.”

“How about a man’s shirt?” Rebecca said.

The saleswoman led Henry and Rebecca to a wall of dress shirts.

“Pure mother-of-pearl buttons, and barrel cuffs,” she said, taking one down.

“Interesting,” Henry said, taking it from her. “It’s so simple.”

“If you understand that,” the saleswoman said, “then you understand the most important element of style—which would explain why this young lady has taken a keen interest in you.”

“I’m not keen,” Rebecca said. “But I’m certainly interested.”

The saleswoman laughed and walked back to answer a ringing phone.

Henry chose a white, cotton poplin shirt with an Italian collar. The saleswoman shut the lid of the orange box and tied brown ribbon around it.

“Very pretty,” Henry said.

“And practical,” Rebecca added.

“Like the two of you,” the saleswoman said, handing them the box. “Put it to good use, please.”

Chapter Eighteen

Henry decided to pick dinner up from the restaurant on the corner. He suggested eating on the balcony again.

Once in the street, he stopped and looked up at his own apartment. Rebecca was inside.

A couple of lights were on.

He wondered if he could ever confess how his brother had really died. It wasn’t his fault. Everyone had said so. And when he woke up screaming, Dad always came in and held him.

Rebecca was upstairs. He wanted to love her, and almost could—but something restrained him. He’d felt it all his life, like arms holding him back from the happiness that would destroy him.

Soon, Henry thought, we’ll be eating on that balcony. And even though they would spend the night in each other’s arms, he would yearn for her.

Walking slowly back from the café, he recognized the moment he felt something other than lust. It was in the museum, when she lingered over the remains of the child. He could see that it upset her, and it was when he felt closest to her—when he knew she was capable of understanding him. She had anticipated the event that rooted him to loneliness. She could feel the winter that defined him.

Chapter Nineteen

After Rebecca left the station, George sat back down and lit a cigarette. Then he sobbed a little more. The scent of her perfume lingered, deepening his sense of loss.

A train pulled in. George stood up and stepped forward.

People rushed from the carriages and pushed past him. He felt the urge to fall over and be trampled, but instead moved to the side of the platform and sat down again.

He listened to the sound of footsteps fading.

A man stopped walking to look for something in his pocket.

Another train in the distance. No one on the platform in front of him. An easy lunge. But deep down, he knew it was the impulsiveness of being drunk. For like the Russian petruska dolls that fit one another in varying degrees, the real, sober George lay still, at the core of his life—the true self from which all the other likenesses had been fashioned.

When it got dark, and he felt cold, he decided to walk to an area north of the city center, a dangerous place of broken-down houses and drug addicts. The sort of place where only the boundaries are patrolled by city police.

It took George about two hours to get there. Once he had entered the narrow labyrinth of streets, he stopped walking and lay down on the ground. The small bottle of vodka he had bought was empty, and he could barely walk anymore.

There were people in the shadows. They seemed to move very slowly, until he was completely surrounded. He withdrew his wallet and threw it at them. Shadows moved quickly to pick it up, while others pulled and dragged George over to a wall.

The shadow holding him said something in Greek. Someone in the background laughed. And then he felt a crushing blow above his eye. He looked into the darkness, dumbly aware of a distant silvery thread that flashed with every blow. Something smashed against the top of his head and then a force to his back. And then, as he lost consciousness, a familiar voice.

When George awoke, he was on a mattress in a very dark room. Someone was sitting beside him. When he turned his head, a glass of water appeared, and he took it shakily.

“It’s me, George,” Costas said.

“What happened?”

“You got beaten up on your way to my house.”

“Beaten up?”

“Yes, quite badly.”

“How did I know where you lived?” George said.

“Because I gave you my address.”

“But I don’t have it.”

“Don’t worry about it, I had to give you some stitches.”

“Stitches!” George said. “Did I go to hospital?”

“No, no, I used to be a doctor in another life,” Costas said.

“You were a doctor?”

“That’s why they didn’t kill you, because without me they would have no one to help when they overdose or get stabbed over squabbles. So I have a little pull here, but not much—if they were sane they wouldn’t be here, remember.”

“Where am I?”

“In the house I share with a few harmless junkies.”

George opened his eyes. “Why aren’t you wearing the suit I gave you?”

“Because I sold it,” Costas said. “To buy alcohol. You of all people should understand that. But I was touched, George, by your generosity.”

George lay back down. They talked for a bit longer, and then he went to sleep. He wondered what Rebecca was doing and remembered their night together. Her slow breath and silent eyes. Morning not quite sketched against the window. The happiness of breakfast and the unfolding of a day.

All things, George suspected, that he would never have again.

In the morning he saw that he was in a room with about twelve other people, but Costas was not one of them. He quietly stepped between the sleeping bodies, each on their mattress. Then he climbed through the ground-floor window that functioned as a front door, ripping the lining of his jacket in the process. On the way home, he inspected his injuries in the reflection of car windows. He fingered the stitches on his cheek that Costas said would dissolve and wouldn’t need taking out. One of his eyes was badly swollen. With each step, he tried to retrace his final conversation with Rebecca on the platform, still utterly perplexed as to why she was committed to never being his girlfriend. He thought about her all the way home to his chic but empty apartment in Kolonaki Square.

Then he put himself to bed and hoped never to wake up for a very long time.

Chapter Twenty

Over the next several days, Rebecca made sketches she thought were getting close to what she wanted. Her pencil scratched the canvas paper softly while her mind wandered over moments shared with Henry on his balcony.

After each drawing, Rebecca took a cold shower to wash away sweat that had formed on her body. Then she started to feel lonely.

She sat on her balcony thinking about her mother.

In the evening when the heat broke, Rebecca smoked cigarettes and imagined her mother getting home from the office. The clack of glamorous shoes on a tile floor. Something cooking. Voices from the television. Her boyfriend not home yet. He rides a scooter with fairing. She takes her shoes off and stands beside the microwave in her tights. An expensive cheap pocket-book with loose coins and gum inside. Rebecca wondered if they even looked alike.

The last Christmas card she received from her mother was six years ago. She had brought it with her to Athens. There was a letter missing from her name, but it sounded like “Rebecca” if you said it aloud. Her sister had received one too, but recognized the handwriting on the envelope and threw it away without opening it.

The next day, Rebecca was on her final sketch of the laturna man from the marketplace when something strange happened. Instead of drawing his shabby overcoat and weathered face, her pencil began to move with its own intelligence. Like a newborn animal learning to take a few steps outside its cage, she let her hand carefully and slowly impress upon the canvas paper its own vision. She lost herself, and after several minutes she realized she was no longer drawing the organ grinder, but the topless man who lived opposite Henry’s apartment. From what she could remember, her sketch was the keen likeness of someone from a distance—but it lacked the intimacy she prided herself on with other subjects.

As the pink flesh of dusk swallowed Athens, Rebecca cooked several small fish in a frying pan, and then ate them with hummus she’d made from grinding chickpeas in a bowl with a squeeze of lemon, salt, oil, and tahini. There was half a bottle of wine left in the refrigerator, and so Rebecca (wearing nothing but Henry’s white shirt) took the cold bottle into her studio and drank it down like water, looking at her sketches.

She thought how perfect it would be if Henry were to show up at that moment with more wine and cigarettes. Then she took off all her clothes and went to bed.

The next morning, Rebecca drank milk on her balcony and sketched from memory the topless man standing over his steaming pots. When she stopped to make coffee, she decided that her exhibition would consist of a series based on modern Greek tragedy.

The topless man would be her first subject.

She quickly dressed, packed her pencils into a box that she strapped to an easel—then slipped several sheets of paper between the straps. It was a sweltering noon, but she hoisted the gear onto her back and set out across the city.

On the metro, her mind cast back to one of her first memories, and one of the only moments with her mother.

They were at home. Her mother had come down from Paris for a few days.

One night, unable to sleep, Rebecca crept out of her room and saw a light on downstairs. She was six or seven years old. Her mother was on the couch smoking. When Rebecca peeped her head around the door, her mother smiled.

“Come,” she said.

Rebecca remembered walking slowly toward her, anticipating at any moment, that her mother might just as easily dismiss her back upstairs.

She was leafing through a book of paintings.

They read the book together. It was very quiet. Rebecca hoped her sister wouldn’t wake up.

“Look at this one,” her mother said. “Aren’t the colors pretty?”

Rebecca nodded. Her mother turned the page.

“I used to paint, Rebecca.”

“I can paint too!”

She dragged slowly on her cigarette.

“This one is nice,” Rebecca said.

“That was one of my mother’s favorites,” her mother said. “She died long before you were born. I can barely remember her myself.”

Rebecca nodded. “But you’re not going to die?”

Her mother stubbed out her cigarette.

“You never know.”

Their eyes went back to the book of paintings.

“I love this one,” her mother said. “I really, really love it.”

Rebecca stared at the painting. A girl in a pretty pink dress lying in a meadow. A farmhouse in the distance.

“Is she trying to run away or trying to go home?” Rebecca asked.

“Both,” her mother said softly. “She’s trying to do both.”

She drew on the cigarette, tapped her ash directly onto the picture, and closed the book.

Sometimes children, not long exiled from that silent world of softness and gesture, can feel in their tiny hearts the nuances of what adults say; and though powerless to act, they sense fully those feelings that creep like figures behind the veil of language.

And though Rebecca would never admit, even to her sister, the feeling that passed over her at that moment, she knew with certainty that something was terribly wrong. And though in the coming years she would yearn for her mother, in truth, it was not
this
woman she yearned for, but the idea of her—without the terror she was too young to recognize as madness.

It was easy getting into the topless man’s building, as the door had been propped open. People were making their way home for siesta. Small children peddled their bicycles barefoot on the street outside.

Rebecca ascended the stairs that led to his front door.

The echo of children’s voices lessened.

Then, by the time she reached his floor, she could no longer hear the children, nor the low hum of distant traffic, nor other voices—just her own breathing and the tapping of her easel as she conquered each step.

The hallway was heavy with steam. There were two names scrawled on his door in blue pen. Rebecca listened. She could hear him inside walking around.

She knocked.

The walking stopped. But nothing happened.

She wondered if he would answer at all, then a voice.

“
Neh?
”

“Hello,” she said. “Hello, monsieur.”

The door opened.

He was topless, and hot steam poured into the hallway.

“
Neh?
” he said, but with more gentleness.

Rebecca smiled broadly and motioned with her hand that she wanted to come in. For a moment he didn’t move. Then he turned slowly so that she might enter his apartment, but she froze and felt suddenly faint.