Everything Beautiful Began After (8 page)

After lunch, they drank Armagnac and George thanked Costas again for his generosity the previous week. Costas shrugged. Then he wrote down the address of a derelict house in Athens, where he’d made a bit of a home for himself with a few others.

“If you get lost, come to this address and ask for me.”

Chapter Twelve

To celebrate his night of passion with Rebecca, George had decided on an all-day drinking session. After leaving Rebecca’s apartment that morning, he spent the afternoon flitting from café to restaurant, nibbling on sandwiches and small pies, reading, and drinking as much as he could without drawing attention to himself.

By the early hours of the morning, however, the only bar open was an Internet café. It served until 5:00 a.m. and generally catered to backpackers from a nearby hostel.

George paid to sit at a computer, where he sat drinking and feeling sleepy in the bright glow of the monitor. If people were watching him, he was certainly not aware of it.

When the Internet café closed, he decided to sleep in a park. Morning was almost upon the city, and despite the inevitable but harmless advances of men who lurked in the bushes, he was comfortable and safe.

He crossed a bridge over the railway lines toward a mass of trees and empty paths. He skirted the edge of the park railing—hoping he would come upon an opening. Then he suddenly realized that he was surrounded by a group of men. Something poked into his stomach and George looked down to see a sort of pipe, which he later realized was a gun. The men went through his pockets quickly. He could feel their hands upon him like mad animals. Despite the violence of what was happening, however, George was quite relaxed. It was an event beyond his control, and so all he had to do was surrender to it and wait for it to be over. Afterward, they muscled him to the floor and ran away. George lay there, unharmed but in shock.

A homeless man under some cardboard boxes witnessed the incident and took pity on George, who, like himself, he judged to be nothing more than a harmless drunk. Costas helped George to his feet, brushed him off, and offered him a place to sit down with some wine and something to smoke.

After a few swigs of liquor and the remains of a cigar that Costas kept for emergencies, George fell asleep on the cardboard. Costas covered him up with one of his blankets and covered himself with another.

The next morning, George thanked Costas for his generosity and begged him to be his guest for lunch in a week after he’d sorted himself out. Costas accepted, and George told him the address of a café on his block that served excellent fish and even more excellent wine. Costas nodded politely and said he would see George then. George also promised a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of ouzo as a return gift for the wine and cigar stub he’d smoked at Costas’s expense.

Chapter Thirteen

As Costas packed up to leave, George had an idea.

“Listen,” he said. “If the police don’t like the look of you, then let’s change the look of you.”

George disappeared into his bedroom and returned with a suit and a pair of loafers.

The suit was a little baggy, but the shoes fit with three pairs of socks.

“It’s very nice,” Costas said, stroking the fabric. “It’s been twenty years since I wore a suit.”

“Splendid,” George said. “Fits you very well, and actually looks good with your T-shirt underneath, like you’re from California.”

“I’ll take these,” George said, pointing to Costas’s old clothes, which lay on the floor in a dark heap. The smell of sweat and urine was quite strong, and for a second, George was reluctant to pick them up.

“No, no,” Costas said reaching, “I’ll take them—you can never have too many clothes.”

George saw Costas to the front door, and they shook hands. There was a dignity in fine clothes that George felt was vital to a person’s sense of self.

Many of George’s heroes—archaeologists and linguists from the 1930s—wrote in their books as much about their tailors as they did about their expeditions. They climbed blazing hot sand dunes in linen suits from Savile Row. They explored Himalayan caves in tweed with full brogues and sock garters—and but for some grave injury or temporary paralysis, they were never unshaven.

The suit George gave Costas was one of several tailored for him in Paris. His button-down shirts had been sewn on Jermyn Street in London, and his shoes were from Alfred Sargent. In George’s opinion, bow ties had never gone out of style, and his shaving accoutrements were from Geo. F. Trumper, as were a few of his more eccentric possessions—such as a narrow silver device meant for making Champagne less fizzy.

Chapter Fourteen

George’s father left Saudi Arabia and returned to his home in the United States when George was in his final year at Exmouth, about three years before he went to Athens. He wrote to George and said he wanted to be his father again.

He said he also wanted to give George money—to make his life more comfortable, to do fatherly things and make sure he was a well-set-up young man for the future.

For the past three years, he visited George when he felt like it, about twice a year. Five months ago, his father had come to Athens.

After a long dinner with several bottles of wine, George had walked him back to his hotel through Syntagma Square—past the Parliament Building and up that long stretch of boulevard to the Athens Hilton. He then helped him upstairs, and waited in the sitting room part of the suite as his father knocked about in the bathroom. After ten minutes, George went to see what he was doing and found him asleep on the floor in his clothes. George unknotted his tie, loosened his shirt collar, unhinged his belt, took off his shoes, and pulled a blanket over him.

On the dresser was a large envelope with George’s name on it. Inside, a wad of bills in U.S. dollars and, as always, a gift certificate for Hermès—his father’s idea of tailoring.

Before leaving, George folded his father’s clothes and tidied up. He also set some empty vodka bottles outside the door for the maid. He straightened up the golf magazines on the desk. He drew the curtains against the city and sat on the bed. For a few minutes he watched his father sleep. Then he got up and left, closing the door quietly behind himself.

George stopped to chat with the desk clerk on his way out, and asked that they check on his father in a few hours, as he hasn’t been feeling well. Then George took a taxi home and put himself to bed.

Homer’s
Odyssey
was George’s favorite poem of all time. He had copied it out and translated it into English. Part of the story is about how a boy’s father goes missing.

Chapter Fifteen

George woke up in the early hours of the morning. It was still dark. The liquor store would not be open for several hours. He read a little of the poetry from the book on his bedside table.

There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces.

Then he got up and ate some cold potatoes with yogurt, lemon juice, and chives.

He had written Rebecca’s name in ancient Greek and taped it on his refrigerator. He had even tried to compose a few lines of poetry for her, which he kept in his pillowcase with an emergency packet of cigarettes and the birthday cards from his father, which went back as far as his seventeenth birthday.

George unwrapped a bar of chocolate. He hoped the sugar would make him feel better. The world was too hard to live in when he was sober, because everything felt precious. Like some devout follower of an obscure religion, he was moved to tears frequently by what he perceived as divine moments—like rain on the window or the smell of apples, or a man reading a book with his daughter in the park; a flock of birds, the flash and clatter of a passing train, and the silent beauty of faces.

Booze washed all that nonsense away. It shallowed his perception. As a drunk, he was free to explore the earth without having to digest every moment as if it were his last.

Outside the window above his bed, a dull blue sky meant dawn was near.

Somewhere across the city, among the thousands of thumping hearts, was the one he wanted.

After thinking about it for a minute, George decided it had been much too long and that he should walk several miles across Athens to her apartment where he would smoke, swig from the bottle of ouzo he would buy when the shops opened, and then soak up the imagined impression of her slumbering body from beneath her balcony.

Perhaps he would even ring her buzzer and then run away (if he wasn’t too drunk to find it). He imagined leaping into a bush as she rushed down to see who was there.

George was in the habit of leaving his apartment with everything on, including lights, the radio, and once even the shower—which he’d drunkenly forgotten to get into in the first place. Without turning around, he found his keys and took from a drawer the gift certificate his father had left him—an orange envelope with a horse and cart engraved upon it. He thought it might be a nice impromptu gift, or serve in place of an excuse should his presence be discovered.

The elevator tapped quickly in its descent, and George remembered the sound of housemasters’ shoes echoing through tall arched corridors of the dormitory.

A year before he graduated from Exmouth, his only real pleasure, aside from translating ancient texts and music, was drinking single malt against an obelisk set in the manicured grounds of the school. He liked to sit there, drink, and hum Bach. The obelisk was known as the Exmouth phallus. Once, drunkenly, George wrapped his body around its base and screamed:

“Thrust me deep inside, O great Exmouth cock, where no mortals dare spread fragile wings.”

If it hadn’t been parents day, nobody would have heard and George wouldn’t have got into any trouble.

Some of the colder mornings brought great joy. Before dawn, after a night of heavy frost, George wandered the white dreaming garden through clouds of breath and the forever nothing of stars. Like a silk puppet, he glided through the grounds, the only living witness to that day’s birth.

George had entered boarding school when he was seven, soon after his family split up.

The flight from Lexington to Boston was uneventful. He was served a bag of animal crackers and the beverage of his choice (Fanta). Someone from the school named Terrence drove to the airport to pick him up.

By the time George reached Rebecca’s apartment building around seven in the morning, his memories of Exmouth lay scattered behind him. He had bought some liquor on the way and was now too drunk to focus on anything above the second floor. He simply stared at her building and tried to make sense of the blurred colors.

When George eventually found the courage to cross the street, he realized he had been staring up at the second floor of the wrong building, and so he gave up and fell asleep in a park nearby.

He slept unceremoniously until early afternoon.

When he woke up, he walked carefully through the bright sunshine to the closest metro station. He felt ragged and nearing sobriety. His lungs ached for the heaviness of smoke. Like the veteran of his own private war, he painfully and crookedly ascended to the platform.

A train pulled in.

He watched people spill from the doors, waiting for an opening so he could board. Suddenly, Rebecca was in front of him, with a bouquet of white flowers.

“Rebecca!”

She seemed surprised. Her eyes were a beautiful shape.

George tried to stand straight. “Sorry if I frightened you,” he stammered.

“What are you doing here, George?”

“Oh, well, I had to collect some official documents from the library up the road.” He motioned one way and then looked in the other direction and motioned that way too.

“Have you ever been there?” he asked, touching the heads of her flowers.

“Where?” she said.

“You live here?” George asked.

“You know I do.”

“Just coming home?”

“Yes—why do you have leaves stuck to your pants?”

“These leaves?” George said and looked down at his soiled suit trousers, laughing. “I took a nap in the grounds of the academy—it really needs a good rake, to be honest.”

“I thought you said it was a library?”

“It’s both, in a way, I suppose—hasn’t it been ages since we saw each other!”

“Looks like you need to sober up.”

“Rebecca,” he said breathlessly. There was so much he wanted to say, but was unable to think past the syllables of her name that filled him like some delicate music.

She looked down the platform, in the direction of her apartment.

“I’ll sober up very soon,” he said. “I have something for you too.”

He reached into his pocket and handed her the orange envelope.

“It looks important,” she said. “Is it a letter?”

“Sort of, open it later.”

She faltered, but George insisted and she put the envelope in the pocket of her dress. Then she looked again in the direction of the steps.

“I have to go, George,” she smiled.

George raised his fingers to his face.

“Is my nose bleeding?”

“I don’t think so,” Rebecca said, standing on her tip toes.

“I’ve been having some trouble with it.”

It was a lie he made up which he instantly regretted.

For a moment George thought she might ask him over for a nap or a cup of tea. She may even have a little wine and some hard Greek biscuits to chew on.

Sensing her departure, he said:

“I’m pretty sober now, as it happens.” But then realized he was carrying a can of freshly opened beer he’d just purchased at the train station kiosk.

His shoes were also covered in dark stains, which he suspected was urine.

Rebecca had on her light blue ballet flats. She sighed heavily. Her arm with the flowers fell.

“George,” she said. “Can we sit down here and chat for a minute?”

She guided him over to a bench seat at the top of the stairs, and they both sat down.

“This is nice, isn’t it?” George said.

Rebecca surveyed him carefully before she spoke. “Can we just be friends from now on?”