White Vespa (3 page)

Outside, the stars faded and it was morning. Anne looked around, a rented room. Nothing in it made any claim; it was just stuff, there. She liked it that way, a bed a bed, a chair a chair. “Heirloom,” she said quietly, finding the word ridiculous and pretentious. The stuff of the fathers, she thought, the manstuff. And the stuff of the mothers wasn't much better.

 

When I unpacked on Sými at the end of May it was different. I set up the dark room before I hung my shirts. I found Sými even more beautiful than I remembered, perhaps because it was the place in the photograph, and I wanted to enter the world I had seen in the photograph of the white Vespa. To be sure. And in landing on Sými I did seem to enter that world. I found the house on the first day. Driving with the owner up to it, when he said,
That's it
, gesturing toward a house half hidden by rocks on the bluff overhead, a low yellow house with rust-red shutters and door, I had known it was the house for me. Walking through the cool rooms, looking through the old, wavy glass down toward Yialós, everything in me said,
Yes, this is the place
. I signed a lease for four months, with an option to renew at a reduced rate for the off-season.

 

Paul slouched in the shade of the clock tower at the jaws of the harbor, a tower he'd first seen in the movie
Pascali's Island.
He'd been surprised to recognize it when he'd come down from Rhodes on the big catamaran, the
Sými II
. He wasn't the type to read the credits at the movies, and the movie had come out years before. But the tower and the haunted look of the town behind it had stayed with him, and he'd remembered it right away.

He was waiting for his
fille du jour,
a girl he'd met in the morning on his way to his regular café. She'd been trying to take a picture of herself with the timer on her camera. First setting it, then sprinting around behind a picturesquely abandoned building, then strolling out all carefree around the corner just as the shutter clicked. That was the idea. But the angle was bad and the timing difficult, and she was on her third try when Paul came up and offered to take the picture. She'd found him hard to resist. They'd agreed on a picnic and a swim.

Paul saw her while she was still inside the lobby of the Alíki. The doorman held the door open wide for her and she walked outside, squinting. How she'd gotten so tan in Norway Paul didn't know, but it wouldn't have been from the sun. Still, the effect was good. He watched her looking for him, looking a little embarrassed, but extremely fetching. He waited a moment more then called to her, waving, and she smiled, relieved. Not, he thought, that she would have had much experience with being stood up.

He started the motorcycle he'd rented for the day and rode over to her in a long arc. The road to Pédhi runs around the harbor at Yialós, up the switchbacks to Chorió, then over the top and down through terraced slopes to the sea. Katya had pressed her head tight to his back when they'd got out on the open road and he'd goosed the throttle. But she liked the speed—he could tell—and he took that for a favorable sign.

At Pédhi the boat taxi was just pulling away from the dock when they
rode up, and the boatman brought it back in so they could board for the short run to Ayios Nikólaos. The sun broke on the water in brilliant, winking pieces. The breeze as the boat chugged out toward the beach near the point felt cool enough, and Paul draped his towel across the girl's shoulders, his fingers grazing the bare skin of her neck and long, loose hair. The boatman cut the engine and nosed the boat into the sand. Paul stood in the water and pushed the boat free, and it backed away from the beach, turned, and started back for Pédhi. Paul liked the old boats, rough with use, but painted bright, this one blue with red gunnels.

There were only a few sunbathers on the beach. But quite a few goats, some down on the sand scrounging and others looking out wild-eyed from the rocks.

They spread their towels and waited to get hot. She slipped out of her shorts and loose shirt and folded them up for a pillow. She paused, just perceptibly, standing in her bikini, then undid the snap on the top and dropped it next to her other clothes. No tan lines. On their backs, side by side, they talked, listening to each other and to the odd goat bell and to the sounds of the man who would make them lunch, now lighting his grill. She said it was the last time she would travel with her parents. He said he could understand that; she seemed too old for that.

“How about you? What are you doing here?” She asked.

“Me? I'm just hanging around. Once a month I cash a check and it's enough.”

She pressed him.

“No. I think the world does quite all right without me.” He laughed. “I like it the way it is. I think most people find it easier to imagine up a better world than to live in this one. Does the world really need fixing?”

He smiled and suggested a swim and was up and wading out before she stirred. But he tired before she did, too, and then he climbed up on the rocks to watch her. Wide shoulders, trim hips, a boyish figure, really, except for the small breasts and yard of yellow hair. He liked to watch her, her flesh in the blue bay, the way the water glazed her, the way, when she lay still, she seemed cast in glass, half in and half out of it.

When she finished swimming he went down the beach and bought lunch. He bought fish off the grill and a large Greek salad out of a cooler, and
they ate with their fingers off a folded newspaper, sitting cross-legged on their towels. He opened the red wine he'd brought from Yialós and they drank it from the bottle. The girl was interested, he could see that. Later, he thought, would be soon enough.

 

The job Anne found was delivering drinks in a swank bar up in Chorió. Finding it had been easier than she expected. There were very few locals to choose from, and the flashier restaurants and bars made liberal use of foreigners to carry the dishes and glassware. EC nationals were favored, as plausibly legal, but plausibility was not always possible. Two Stories occupied a two-story building that stood flush on the main stair from Yialós. When the place was closed it looked like a house except for the hand-painted sign over a fading blue door. Open, Two Stories started in the street, a row of tables and chairs lining the ocher walls. Inside, there was a bar on the left with bottles on shelves reaching toward the ceiling. The ceiling itself was very high and white, with ornate moldings and a raised design in the plaster around the hanging lights and two great fans. The second story wasn't up but down, as the ground broke steeply away from the street, making another room with a view downstairs. Though the windows were small, the view was good, houses on the hills, small, neoclassical places, and in the distance, the blue Aegean. Outside, four tables crowded a stone terrace, and it was there customers interested in the view sat with their drinks, gazing outward.

By the second night Anne recognized some of the regulars and had mastered the system well enough that she hardly needed to think. It was another job in another bar; even on the first night she wouldn't have been picked out as new. Soon, she understood, there would be regulars who came just to sit in her section, men who tipped well and wanted to flirt a little. There would be some camaraderie with the staff, customers looked down on and the owner, probably, despised. That's the way it was, but Anne held herself back a little from all that. The distance in her kept all but the rudest drunk from trying to get too close. In a bar, this made her efficient, and when the tips were counted at night's end she did as well as anybody.

 

Myles wanted a drink. The scene at dinner had left him unsettled, embarrassed at first and then a little angry. Jim had suggested dinner, and they were hardly seated when Paul strolled by. Myles had said,
Join us
, and, to his surprise, Paul had. They'd ordered a lot of food, and a table covered with full serving dishes makes for happy chatter. They'd had that. About the time the yogurt and honey arrived, Jim asked Myles what he'd been working on that day. An innocuous question.

“Close-ups, wildflowers, herbs, bugs.”

“For what?”

“Well, to introduce chapters, something like an initial, illuminated capital in an old manuscript.”

He could see what he meant either wasn't getting across or bored them. He touched his spoon to the honey then filled it with yogurt.

“Maybe I just like close-ups, like using the bellows.”

“The what?”

“The bellows.” Myles explained how the contraption worked, pulling it out of his bag to demonstrate. “Better quality close-ups, though, that's the main thing.”

“But why?” Paul goaded. He knew there would be a reason.

“Well, a close-up isolates a subject, say a beetle. Today I spent a long time trying to shoot a golden beetle, well a beetle and his shadow, and . . .”

“But isn't it changed if you isolate it, not a beetle anymore but something else? Suddenly it's got a mythological feel—it's a scarab
,
” Paul said.

“Maybe. But maybe in a close-up you see the scarab that's always there in the beetle you hardly notice,” Myles replied.

“If you want to see a scarab just give your beetle a ball of dung to push,” Paul laughed.

He was still laughing when a blond girl pushed through the crowded taverna chairs to their table and threw something into Paul's dish of yogurt. Even
before she got to the table she was shouting, though what she was shouting was a mystery since none of them knew whatever language it was she was shouting in. But she was clearly in a rage and ready to cry. Suddenly, she remembered a few English obscenities.

“Asshole! Son of a bitch! Cocksucker!”

“Not often,” Paul sniggered. “But you might be right about my mother.”

With that the girl fell silent, and the taverna was silent, too, except for Paul, who was quietly giggling, shaking his head back and forth in feigned who-me wonderment. Then the girl was gone. Myles watched her disappear down the alley; for a ways her long bright hair shone in the near dark. Then it didn't.

“Kinda young,” Jim observed.

Paul fished the silver packet out of his yogurt and licked it clean—it was a condom—then spooned up some more yogurt and honey and went on eating.

“What a guy,” was all Myles could think to say. He counted out two thousand drachmae, dropped them on the table and pushed back his chair.

 

And he'd found he wanted a drink. He'd walked on by his parked Vespa and took the great stone stairs, the Kalí Stráta, up toward Chorió. In the night glare of the street lamps it all looked like a movie set, depthless, shells of old mansions. Stoned up doorways and blank windows with their neoclassical surrounds fronted the stairs on both sides. They must have been beautiful old places; they still were. A little higher up the houses were occupied, but at night even there the life was all inside; they were closed to the street.