White Vespa (8 page)

“Myles! This is Pru, a new friend.”

They nodded. Myles turned to introduce Anne, but before he could say anything he saw that they'd met.

“Anne, been a long time,” Paul said.

“I guess so.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Working at a bar,” Anne said.

“I mean, what are you doing on Sými?”

“Working at a bar.”

“Yeah, and? I see you've met Myles,” Paul observed.

“Yeah, I met him at the bar.”

“Which bar?”

“Two Stories,” Anne said.

Another woman straggled up to the table, looking thirsty.

Paul said, “Pru's friend; she's a Mary. This is Myles Twomey and Anne Powell.”

“Could I get a drink?” Mary asked.

“Sure!”

“So you two know each other from before, from before Sými?” Myles asked.

“Oh yeah, way before,” Paul said.

Anne turned woodenly to Myles. “He's my brother, my big brother.”

“Aha.”

“How about that?” Mary said, sitting down sullenly at the adjoining table and looking away. Pru sat down with her, and they started waving, hoping to get the waiter's attention.

It was cool in the shade of the arbor, but even in the shade the light was intense. Myles was looking at Paul's face; he didn't look very surprised. He looked over at Anne; she didn't look very surprised, either. He wondered about that. And no sibling hugs.

So then they were five people, sitting in the dappled light of a grape arbor.

“You gonna eat that?” Paul asked, gesturing toward Anne's half of the lunch. Seeing the shook heads he started in on the leftover mezédhes
,
dabbing at the tzadzíki and the garlic sauce with rough-cut bread.

“What's this called?” he asked, pointing to the garlic.

“Skordhaliá
,
” Myles said.

“It's good. And this?” he said, twirling a fork in the wild greens.

“Hórta
.
”

“Not so good.”

“One of those things you learn to like,” Myles said.

“I'll work on it.”

“Good to have some kind of work to do,” Anne put in.

“Hmm. I'm good at this; it's tasting better already. Good bitter edge,” he smiled.

“I'm glad you're enjoying my lunch,” Anne said.

“What are you doing here again?” Paul asked.

“Working. Some of us have to work.”

“And some of us don't,” Paul said gleefully.

Myles raised his eyebrows, but he didn't say anything.

 

Myles wondered if she'd consider the photos a success. From the contact sheets he'd picked eighteen to print, and of those he'd blown-up seven. He'd taped the seven to the wall and was looking at them, one at a time. Myles couldn't even be sure what
he
thought of them. It was late, and the light shone starkly from the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling.

He poured a half glass of oúzo from the bottle he kept cold in the freezer. From Lésvos, a very acrid oúzo. He poured a little bottled water from the fridge into the oúzo and watched it turn milky, a smoky blue. Then he crossed back to the photos. If she wanted to be flattered, she wasn't going to like them. But maybe she didn't want that. The photographs were beautiful, but she wasn't beautiful in them. The beauty was austere and a little terrible, and it had more to do with composition than with her face or the suave lines of her body in motion. But the beauty, such as it was, was hers, she'd made it, composed herself in the cramped space of the divan at only the slightest of suggestions from him.

It was very late and Myles was tired. Looking at the photos, he thought he smelled her, Anne, and he looked around, but he was alone. He hadn't noticed that she had any particular scent but looking at the photographs now he smelled something, or remembered something, her scent. Sweet but also bitter, burnt vanilla, maybe. Myles thought it must be time to put out the light, but he looked a last time at the most haunted of the photos. He'd stood on top of a chair and shot straight down on her, the walls over the built-in divan provided the perspective, a sense of depth, as if, looking at the photo, you were looking into a hole. Anne was curled into the too-small rectangle of the divan, all in profile, eyes closed. Everywhere you could see her bones, the shape of the skeleton beneath her fine skin. More than anything it reminded Myles of other photographs he had seen, photographs of prehistoric pit burials.

He turned off the light, finding his way to the narrow bed where he slept in the dark. He set his drink on the floor, slipped out of his jeans, and lay
down on his back. Propping his head up on a pillow, he retrieved the oúzo. After awhile, he found he didn't need the light to see the photos. In the dark he read Anne's face, her body. Everything about her image said,
Reach me, I am here
. But it also said,
You can't reach me, I can't be reached
. What the images unveiled was the veil itself.

Myles knew he would try to reach behind it. He hadn't resisted, and now he couldn't resist. He went on drinking in the dark until he could feel the world rushing round him.

 

In the morning, Myles pulled another set of prints, for Anne. In the red light of his makeshift darkroom he looked at the photographs again, picking them one at a time out of the developing trays and hanging them to dry.

The darkroom was silent, but outside, it seemed a long way off, he could hear the insects tuning up, an occasional birdcall. For a moment, he was frightened of showing Anne the photographs, and frightened by the images themselves, by his attraction to them.

He lifted the green apron over his head and hung it on a square nail someone had hammered into the back of the door a long time ago. He didn't go out, but sat down on a rush chair, thinking. His pulse pounded in his ears. It struck him as suspicious that he'd been the one to suggest the cramped quarters of the divan, that the contortion of the photos sprang directly from that choice.
Push yourself into the angles of the couch
, he'd said. And she had. The power of the images started there, in the contortion of Anne's body pressed into the walls, the containment. But he'd also said,
Show me,
and she had. Were the images hers or his, or was there already a kind of union there, both of them on view in the captured light?

 

He heard the door clatter in the other room and called out, “Anne, I'm in here,” but when he opened the door of the darkroom it wasn't Anne. Jim, standing in front of the photos where they were taped to the wall, cast Myles a quizzical glance.

“Doing portraits now?”

“Just these.”

“Special order?” Jim asked.

Myles didn't respond, but he could see that Jim wasn't mocking, was just curious.

“And this,” Jim gestured toward the photos, “is Anne?”

“Yes.”

“Looks like she might be long if you ever let her stretch out.”

Myles laughed.

Jim looked at the photos again. “And I think maybe you should buy her lunch sometime. Kinda thin.”

“Yes, very thin, too thin to be healthy,” Myles said, “and I already bought her lunch, yesterday. Problem is, she didn't eat it.”

“Sometimes force-feeding is required.”

“Aha.”

 

They sat outside, in the deep shade, light bounding around them, a large round of figs on a plate between them. Occasionally, while they talked, one of them bent forward and tore a fig from the vine they were threaded on. When they got thirsty, they poured mineral water from a green bottle into Myles' crazed mugs. At some point, they'd become friends. They talked without constraint. The silences were easy.

“Look, Myles, I'm thinking of going over to Tílos.”

Myles considered the news.

“Have you been?” Jim asked.

“To Tílos?” He looked over at Jim. “No.”

“Well, want to go? It's a lesser Dodecanese. Some very beautiful places on the island, just made for a camera,” Jim said.

“When are you going?”

“The best connections are tomorrow.”

 

Anne slept late and then stayed in bed a long time after she was awake. She ran her hands over her torso, feeling her ribs. She liked the way her narrow fingers fit in the grooves between them. She felt light inside, a glow under the skin of her taut abdomen. That would be hunger. When she got up, she told herself, she'd eat, oranges maybe.

She rolled over and pressed herself into the bed, writhing quietly. She wondered about her face, how it looked now, how it would look in the photographs Myles had taken the day before. The thought made her feel uneasy, exposed. The whole session had gone out of control from the very beginning. She hadn't been what she'd intended, hadn't shown what she'd intended, had no idea what she had shown.

She rolled over again; her feet slapped the floor and she sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, hands in her hair, kneading her scalp with her long fingers. Then she remembered Paul.

“Shit,” she said softly.

 

She twisted the juice from four oranges into a glass, filling it to the rim. She drank off an inch and then refilled it from a bottle of vodka she kept in the refrigerator. She stirred it with her finger and then washed her hands.

She wanted to be alone. Outside, the sun was hot, very hot. She put on her bathing suit, a serious, one-piece black suit made for actual swimming. She'd decided she'd swim first, think things over after. Think about Myles and about Paul. But as she walked by the boatworks and on around the point where they'd met Paul yesterday, she found she couldn't help but think about him now. Sými was small. You were going to bump into people; then you'd remember them where you had seen them, and they would rattle in your head when you didn't want them to. As long as you stayed out of things, you could keep clear, but then, that's all you could do. And it wouldn't be possible to
live that way on Sými. Here, you would have to act, or be acted on, and she'd come to act.

 

The first cove was crowded with day-trippers but Anne had had enough of walking. She picked her way through their pink flesh to the water's edge, kicked off her sandals, and waded right in. She despised people who waded in slowly, who refused to take a plunge. As soon as the water was deep enough, she dove, swimming strongly under the surface of the water for a long time. The surface shone like the broken shards of a bright mirror, and she swam under it, out of sight, until she was well beyond the farthest swimmer. By then, her chest was tight, but she forced herself to glide up through the surface, no commotion. She rolled onto her back and took deep, even breaths, her eyes cast up into the simple blue of a clear sky.

She watched the seabirds riding the wind, now close and low, now drowning in deep sky. Anne let herself go, just floating, felt the small waves rippling through her. The birds, she thought, were in flight but not fleeing. For all their ease and poise, they were hunting.

She held her arms out like pale, thin wings. She tried on a hunting expression, severe eyes under drawn brow, head cocked a little. Then she began to swim, her legs scissoring through the sheer sea water. She lifted an arm up out of the sea then plunged it back in again and she was gone, diving deep.

 

Paul had been surprised by Anne's open hostility. That wasn't fun. He didn't like other people's hostility unless he was trying to provoke it. He lay flat on his back, doing sit-ups in sets of ten. He was between sets and breathing hard. The dust stuck to him. He started in, ten more. The hard floor hurt and he resented the dust, and he thought again about the gym on the paraléia. Paul hated gyms; the smell reminded him of grade school locker rooms and the rough kids he hadn't always been able to charm. They'd been too stupid to charm, the kind of kids who burnt circles on the inside of their arms with cigarettes just to show how tough, how insensitive they could be. As if he'd doubted it. But he thought maybe he'd have to put up with the smell if he wanted to stay the slow decline of his body. Life was going to be less fun when he wasn't so handsome, he knew it. At least, he thought, he'd still have the money.

He heard a rap at the door and called out, “It's open.”

Yórgos pushed through the door but hesitated on the threshold.

“It's all right, okay, we're all boys here.”

Yórgos stumbled coming in and red-faced set the two plastic bags on the table. He waited while Paul searched the shorts he'd dropped at the foot of the bed when he'd gotten in. Without Pru. He'd ditched Pru and “a Mary” when it became obvious they were going to want to talk. They shouldn't have wanted that; they weren't good at it.

He found the money and gave Yórgos too much, not asking how much the watermelon and half dozen oranges had actually cost.

“'
Phristó,
” Yórgos said, backing toward the door.

“Wait a minute.” Paul shook a few cigarettes from an open pack and dropped them in Yórgos's outstretched hand.

“Careful,” he said, “they're habit forming.” Paul didn't think Yórgos understood, but it amused him to deliver the warning.

Still, Yórgos nodded as if he did understand and said,
See you,
as he sprinted through the door, leaving it open behind him.

Paul shut the door and started in on push-ups. Even in sets of ten he did them badly, too quickly and reaching for the floor with his chin. He thought he'd try to win Anne over, as a little experiment, a test. He could understand her resentment. When their father had died, he'd got all the money. She'd got none. She hadn't come to the funeral; she hadn't even inquired about the terms of the will. But he knew their father had left her nothing but an old dictionary with a bookmark tucked into the pages, to show where he'd underlined one word,
liar
. When his father's dismayed lawyer had disclosed the bequest, Paul laughed. Thinking about it now, he shook his head. Such are the ironies, he thought, snorting. What had their parents expected? That they wouldn't lie to avoid the switch? As far as he could see, they had run the house as a virtual school for liars. He'd graduated. Anne had flunked out.