Don't I Know You? (7 page)

*   *   *

So began my enchantment, my inability to break free of the damaging spell that Nick's betrayal would cast. Not that we used words like betrayal, or jealousy. This was 1970, the height of the so-called sexual revolution, when possessiveness and jealousy were nothing but bad ideas, “bourgeois constructs.” I felt wrong just being in their grip.

The next morning Nick came back as if from brushing his teeth, unrepentant and casual. No apologies, no explanations. “Where were you?” I must have yelped. I was next door with Sally, he answered with a touch of exasperation. I didn't know where you were, I said, I was worried. But Beano told you, he replied mildly; we could hear the two of you talking outside.

We.

He changed his clothes and took our soap, water bottle, and towel to head down to the faucet. I'll get the water, he said, and that was that. Even though he couldn't disguise a certain just-laid friskiness, his behavior made it impossible for me to cry or fight. And I was too off balance, too dismantled, to even locate my feelings, let alone act on them. When he came back I was back in bed, pretending to read. (
The Bell Jar
, of course.) He opened his notebook and began to write.

Later in the day I went down to the Mermaid, ordered a bottle of red wine, and slowly, methodically drank it. Joni was sitting at another table with the red-haired guy, playing backgammon and drinking beer. They smiled at me and left me alone. At dusk, when I finally made my way back up the cliff to our cave, Nick was gone. I slept in my clothes. In the middle of the night, he came in, sliding into his bag and leaving it unzipped so as not to wake me. But I was awake anyway.

After that we settled into a routine. On most mornings he would head off with Sally, to spend the day in another cove. Tactful! I would sit in the door of the cave underlining
The Bell Jar
or head down to the Mermaid. By sunset, he'd be back, sunburnt all over. I would then fuzzily cook dinner, usually some version of an omelet, in our new frying pan. I was like any other wife in a bad grown-up marriage. He never talked about Sally—and I never asked. Some nights he slipped out, some nights he stayed with me. I wasn't able to question this, and therefore I began to fall apart, slowly and erratically, like a building gutted by fire but still standing.

I assumed a late-stage Simone de Beauvoir stance down at the Mermaid, starting on red wine at eleven a.m. and drinking with anybody who cared to join me. I knew I should take a stab at revenge sex, but I didn't have the heart for it. I was too busy trying to breathe in a whole new element, the thin atmosphere that exists outside the boundaries of unbroken love.

The worst part was Nick's journal. I didn't go looking for it; that would have required too much initiative and spunk. But he tended to leave it conspicuously available. In my path, as it were. And there aren't many spots to hide a journal in a cave.

One day I found it lying open on the ledge near the entrance where we kept the matches and loose change. I picked up the familiar notebook, each page pebbled blue with ink, and read his patient, writerly descriptions of their lovemaking. The feel of her skin, the grip of her thighs, the oystery pliancy of her clitoris. Nick was a bit of an aficionado when it came to women's bodies. He seemed fascinated by the rest of Sally too, her untalkative aplomb, the mystery of an American woman from the South. She had olive skin and those broody, deep bangs—the opposite of me. I read in his notes that she had dropped out of Juilliard, disillusioned by the classical music world and unsure of her own talents. She'd been living in Matala with Beano for two months now—an old hand.

Nick was the first man she'd slept with in a year, he noted. Imagine writing that down, I thought with a flare of hatred. Scuzzy little journalist. I was still reeling from this fresh knowledge that I had been living and traveling and making love with a stranger. My whole understanding of the world had been recalled, like a car in which a fatal engineering flaw has been discovered.

I knew I should leave Matala and Nick. Instead I settled into my lugubrious role as Cuckolded Hippie. Hoot from San Antonio was sympathetic and sat with me a lot at the Mermaid. He said I should move to Texas, where the ratio of men to women was better. Joni's smile when I passed her on the way to the faucet seemed knowing.

Then I got sick, my default strategy, with a cough that wouldn't go away. The caves were dusty, needless to say. I stayed awake at night when Nick wasn't there, coughing hard, hoping they would both hear me next door. But caves have thick walls, and in any case Nick was immune to guilt. I remembered him telling me that when he was little, cartoons upset him because they seemed so violent, and the animals in them were always hurting each other. So this new ability to administer homeopathic dosages of rejection day after day surprised me.

Why didn't I leave? It's the first question that women in unhappy situations are always asked, and can't answer.

A week or so went by like that. One afternoon I went down to the tap to wash my hair, to try to get a grip on myself in some small way. It was a humid day and the gush of cold water felt good on my scalp. Maybe now I can get it together to leave, I thought. I had a towel wrapped around my wet hair and was heading back toward the cliffs when I saw that a new couple had just arrived, with guitars. A welcome party was already under way around a bonfire on the beach. Carey had brought a bucket of beer from Delfini's, the joints were going round. Joni was there too, with a stack of silver bracelets up one arm and her dulcimer in her lap. Hoot hailed me over. Then I saw Nick and Sally in the circle too, sitting together. Okay, I thought, I'll do this anyway. They can't make an exile out of me. I took a sip of Hoot's joint and unwrapped my wet hair so the sun and the fire could dry it.

The new guy on the guitar was good, and knew all the words to “Masters of War.” I got into it, or maybe it was the dope; everyone was singing, the fishing boats rocked on the horizon, the sky was cloudless. Here I was on a Greek island, with Joni Mitchell. Then I looked across the fire and saw Nick leaning over, kissing Sally, as if I wasn't there. I was smoking a cigarette—Kents or Marlboros, I smoked anything now—and I flicked my lit cigarette at them and stalked away from the circle. But I didn't feel justified in my anger and hurt. I just felt foolish, swathed in jealousy like ugly clothes that didn't fit.

Maybe it was that night that I took to my pallet, with some cheap grappa to quell my cough. I fumbled in my pack for the razor blades I had furtively packed—an uncommitted hippie, I still shaved my legs. I'm not suicidal, I lectured myself, I just need to see my own blood, evidence that I exist. So I used a razor to nick a dotted line across one wrist. Nothing more than a bracelet of blood beads. It stung, like the nightmare bee.

And that did help.

Nick had left earlier that night to go down to the cafés, but I guess he had forgotten something—matches, or money. As I was busy with my handiwork, he came back and interrupted me. He made an exasperated sound, then took away the razor blades and my Swiss Army knife too. And then he left. No doubt he thought it was cheesy and manipulative of me, and he wasn't going to rise to the bait.

Free love meant that you could be attracted to other people, you could sleep with them, and it didn't necessarily change anything. The birth control pill also took away consequence. But every molecule in my body seemed to have been reorganized by his faithlessness and I didn't know how to proceed.

Eventually, I got to sleep. Nick was there in the morning when I woke up. I never did it again, but for me the cutting had broken the silence.

*   *   *

The next day Sally and Nick and most of the other cave people took the bus to some religious festival in a town near Mires. Sally set off in a straw fedora with a black feather in the brim. Nick took his notebook with him, which was too bad because I had now surrendered to reading it whenever possible. It kept me looped into their story. Turns out that Sally had been briefly addicted to codeine when she was at Juilliard; this would increase her appeal for Nick, I knew. I always felt a bit suburban in this regard, even though I was broken in other, less glamorous ways.

When they got back later in the day, the “wolf-women” announced that they were throwing a mythology-themed “Europa party” in their big cave on the third tier. These were two new arrivals who had brought a new vibe to Matala. They'd been on the road for more than a year, and were tough, brown, and fearless women. The previous winter they'd lived up in the hills of Jamaica, near Negril. I got talking to one of them—Carolina, with her knotted hair bundled up in an African sort of turban—and she let slip that they weren't just wolf-
like
. At night, when they were in the mood, they turned
into
wolves.

You mean, metaphorically. No, she said, I mean biting and growling and having a tail. Her washed-out blue eyes for a moment looked like husky-dog eyes, and I believed her.

The two of them moved into a cave that everyone thought was too big and rough to inhabit. Magically, they scrounged up a broken-down couch from the village and fashioned a rusted lamp into a kerosene torch. They organized moon-howling parties with candlelit headdresses. They were edgier than the hippie girls, adding some drama to Matala's laid-back scene. They also liked to throw theme parties like this one, making special raki cocktails with fresh pineapple.

So I put on some kohl eyeliner and showed up at their cave. Everyone else was back from the festival, in a party mood. Nick and Sally were there too, but it was so crowded it was easy to ignore them. Hoot made me dance with him, in his whirly-armed way. The new guy, Ferrous, was playing guitar; things felt good. Then the two wolf-girls started dirty dancing with a local soldier who had somehow been included. He got an erection and was horribly embarrassed, until the girls tugged off his pants. Everybody started clapping as he stood there with a stiff cock, grinning and red-faced. Carolina danced around his erection as if his penis were a little god in a shrine. Then he pulled up his pants and fled the party. But that was when things turned; other couples started making out, and more clothes came off. One guy I didn't recognize was standing in one corner, holding a glass with nothing on but a T-shirt, his cock at half mast, kind of hopeful-looking.

Not eager to be a wallflower at the orgy, I was about to leave when I saw Nick and Sally embrace and then slide onto the ground, until he was on top of her. Wow, this I can't handle, I thought, and headed for the door. I had to detour around them but they didn't seem to see or notice me. It was dark outside. I stumbled on the path and then, voluptuously, I let myself fall, and roll down, down the side of the cliff, scraping myself a little until I came to rest at the base of the cliffs on the cool sand. I lay there, fully abject, hoping someone would see me and assume that I was dead.

Soon enough, the wild dogs came sniffing around, poking their wet noses into my face until they got bored and moved on. I lay there for a long time until I was shivering. I heard a group of kids leaving the party cave, still noisy, but they took another path. My efforts to be conspicuously shattered and derelict were not having an impact. So I got up, brushed off the sand, and went back to our empty cave.

The next day I went down early to the Mermaid to begin my solo drinking. I had moved on from
The Bell Jar
to
The Autobiography of a Yogi
, by Paramahansa Yogananda, a book about spiritual enlightenment and not in any superficial self-help way. It was harrowing, in fact. I dearly wanted to be razed like that, obliterated, suffused with a shower of white light across the top of my brain. The thirst for transcendence was keen.

On Sundays Delfini's offered pancakes, for the homesick Americans. I was wondering how raki would go with pancakes when the door opened and Joni Mitchell came in. She was wearing a sort of patchwork jacket with nice ivory linen pants, and bare feet. She had her leather sandals in one hand and a notebook—a six-ring one just like Nick's—in the other. No doubt she'd heard about my predicament.

“Hey,” she said. “Want some company?”

She sat down and lit a cigarette. One of my few remaining rules was not to smoke before noon. But I inhaled her smoke happily. Gauloises, thick and strong.

“Is Nick off somewhere with Sally?” she asked, getting right down to it.

“Yes,” I said.

“I think it's bullshit.”

“What is?”

“This free-love thing. It's bullshit. It's only free for the guys.”

“I don't know,” I said. “It's not like monogamy has a great track record.”

“But don't you find,” she said, drawing hungrily on her cigarette, “that if you love someone, you don't want them to sleep with anyone else?” She squinted against the blue smoke. Her cheekbones were amazing. “You just don't. Whenever I do it myself, at least I know it's hurting someone.”

Carey came out of the kitchen with a plate of pancakes and a pitcher of honey. He put a black coffee down in front of Joni. The two of them kissed and she wiped a fleck of something off his cheek.

“What time are you off?” she asked.

“Another hour. It's market day in Mires, so we're closing early.”

“We can go to the red cove this afternoon.”

“Cool.” Carey went back to the kitchen.

“How long are you staying?” I asked Joni. I decided that I liked her company. There was something about her that reminded me of home, of Canada. Her complicated, aggressive shyness. I poured a little red wine in her water glass.

“I don't know. Every day I keep meaning to leave.” She laughed quite boisterously. “I'm supposed to be back in L.A. working right now. There are people there waiting for me to cough up more songs, put out another album. But I don't like the way music works when it turns into a business.”