White Vespa (23 page)

 

They walked on, turned left at the corner and sat down under one of Vapori's canvas umbrellas. Michael got back up immediately, adjusting the umbrella to get the sun off Jim's face.

“That fucking Paul.”

“That handsome asshole,” Michael said, remembering how Paul had first looked to him. But he'd had no idea. “I've been thinking about what would have happened if I'd caught him at the ferry dock. And that was before.”

“Before?”

“Before Anne took her little swim.” Michael's voice had a bitter edge that surprised Jim. “I've been wondering.”

“About what?”

“About what Anne thought would happen after she was dead. If she thought about it. I mean, if Myles is right, if we're talking about a suicide.”

“And?”

“Maybe she thought I'd go after him, or Myles.” Michael looked straight into Jim's face. “I know I'm not showing much respect for the dead . . .”

“I doubt she was designating executioners, Michael. I mean, that sounds more like Paul than Anne.” They sat quietly and the rustling sounds of Yialós crowded in.

Michael started to speak and then stopped. Finally, he said, “She
was
his sister.”

“She couldn't help that,” Jim said.

The waiter came and they hadn't thought about it and they sent him away. Jim glanced around, a world at rest under the umbrellas, everything embalmed in honeyed light. It all looked the same, but not so pleasing.

“I miss her,” Jim said. “Mostly I miss her for Myles. They weren't looking, but love found them. For what? For this? Does love always have death up its sleeve?” Jim gazed across the table at Michael. “I don't want that to be so. But I think it is. If we're lucky we're allowed to forget. We get our good years.”

 

Blue came looking for them, hair wet from a shower, face scrubbed clean. She seemed as young as ever, her only make-up a swimmer's tan. She surveyed the two of them critically as she sat down, asking before anything, “Who's buying?”

Jim held up a weary hand. The waiter came back to the table and they ordered iced coffees, Coke for Blue. The sun beat down on the canvas umbrellas. The sound of glassware and silver spoons rustled through the alley. A small red dragonfly touched down on Jim's sleeve, its clear wings veined black. Then it flew away again. The drinks showed up.

Blue asked after Myles, a sudden expression of concern replacing the teasing face she adopted habitually with Michael and Jim. Often they were her fun, and though Anne's drowning had shook her she hadn't dropped her teasing pose. She was young; she didn't have many faces to choose from.

Jim tried to explain. How Myles seemed not to have grasped it, didn't seem to know what he was feeling. “Funny thing is, Myles' body
does
know. He looks stove up and when he moves he moves like a man who hurts.”

Blue shook herself, but said nothing, then got up to look for a magazine.

“You know, Michael, I could see the way his eyes looked for her, settled vacantly on an empty chair or the bed in the alcove, as if he hoped to see the print of her body there in the rumpled sheets. But he wasn't seeing anything, not really.”

“He came up before,” Michael said.

“What?”

“After he lost his kid . . .”

“Oh,” Jim said, “Did he?”

 

Paul smiled, giving his body to the surge of glittering travelers flowing along Bodrum's yacht harbor. By day, the streets had been quiet, uncrowded, but now they teemed, people in waves, expectant, as if walking toward revelry. The Turkish yachts creaked and shifted, their lights bobbing, revealing the clear varnished wood they were made of. Nothing like the bright, painted boats of Greece, Paul thought, and nothing like the antiseptic white yachts of the international rich—though the rich were here, too, on parade. Paul felt his happiness growing; a place, he thought, more anonymous than Sými, and more transient.

Anne could have Sými and all those other smelly little islands for all Paul cared. But he doubted she would want them. He thought she'd probably prefer to sit in the dark and lick her precious wounds. Fine, she could do that anywhere. He hadn't appreciated her tracking him down, that was sure, and part of why he felt good was that he didn't expect to see her again.

Paul stopped to lean against a light pole on Neyzen Tevfik Caddesi. It was hot, and he felt pleasantly wet under his loose, black shirt and soft, khaki shorts. Everything, everybody, himself included, seemed on display, everyone there to see and be seen. He liked it; it wasn't a world that would ask many close questions. He started walking again, listening to the voices, the languages, looking at the summer skin. Over on the left he saw two carts, a man and his competition, selling prickly pears, each in his own bell of lantern light. He strolled over to one of them, asked for four, and watched the man's quick hands and sharp knife peel them. Paul ate the fruit standing at the cart, the rich, orange flesh translucent in the soft, yellow light. He grinned at the vendor as he speared the last of the fruit with a toothpick, then walked on, a little irritated by the slight stickiness on his hands. He sucked at his fingers one by one. Then he lost himself again in the flow of bodies, in the flow of the crowd.

He saw the crusader castle over the water on the right, then the town
square on the left. It, too, fell back as he swept forward, through the bazaar, the crowd dog-legging left down Uzunyol, a pedestrian alley, running between brightly lit storefronts on one side and a row of restaurants on the other. Here, the way was narrow, crowded, the closeness of it only broken by regular views of Bodrum's second harbor out through the restaurants, where tables sat on decks built over the sea.

The crowd murmured as it walked, the bright voices of street vendors and touts ringing in the narrow street. Paul let himself be swept forward, by windows full of seafood and ice cream shops, by shoeshine boys and street magicians. He found himself walking behind a child, a curly-haired boy in a sailor suit, who was having a hard time keeping up. His mother looked irritated, tired of leading the reluctant child through the jostling crowd. Perhaps, because she had a son, she felt encumbered, unfit for the revels, which seemed forever about to break out. The woman looked away, forward, and the boy reached after her. Just as the child began another step, Paul swept his foot under the boy's, cutting left. He was even with the woman when the boy crashed into the cobbles, but he heard her, as he walked by, cursing the child's clumsiness over the boy's low whimper.

“
Whatcha doin'?
” he whispered, his face showing the extraordinary liveliness that rarely failed to draw strangers to him. Then he smiled broadly. He felt good, he had the night before him.

 

Then it was the end of summer. The forgotten cities stirred and called. There were jobs to return to, friends not missed now remembered. Things to do. The excursion boats arrived in Sými harbor less full. Large piles of luggage accumulated on the paving stones for the trip to Rhodes and the big ferries caught there for Athens. Those with less and more expensive luggage would fly from Rhodes, for London or Frankfurt and on from there to the anyplace that might be home.

Suddenly, things began to look provisional. The tourist cafés sat empty even at lunch, slick young waiters with dark hair sitting together at a table or trying to talk a lone stroller into sitting down. These places were leaning already into the shuttered season. The fresh paint of summer was scuffed and chipping, witness to the quick work of salt air in a harbor town. Everything looked a little tattered, like sets at the end of a theater season. Even the small beautiful buildings with their neoclassical facades looked ready to be taken down and stored in boxes for a coming year.

But still the blue of the sky stood stiff over the island, tight as a well-staked tent. The wind was still welcome, brought a cool edge to what otherwise might have been too hot days. The sun rose and set, burnt a track across the sky, cast crisp, black shadows. Away from Sými town and the human retreat, the island shone magical as ever, everlasting. Perhaps the grasses had faded to a lighter gold, clattered rather than soughed in the wind. Perhaps the voices of the insects had grown a little thin, shrill. But Sými was still a place well worth traveling to, for all the people who were going away.

Myles sat on the curb in front of the Alíki, waiting to say his good-byes to Michael and Blue. They'd delayed their departure, after the disaster, but now they were headed back to the States, if in stages. First to Kos to catch the Pátmos ferry. Then, after a day on Pátmos, they planned to ferry on to Sámos, and from there back to Athens and a couple of days in the museums. Myles
wondered why Jim wasn't going with them, and he had his suspicions. Their going would have been difficult for Myles only a few days before, before Anne took his feelings down with her. Now he waited quietly, patient as a beach stone, for the good-byes to get said.

A Mercedes taxi appeared, coming from town, and Myles recognized Blue's animated face through the windshield. He surprised himself with a wry smile, at the relief of not being that young any more. They emerged from the taxi in the middle of a mock argument, Blue upbraiding Michael and Jim for the coolness of their parting. But Myles thought she wasn't looking very closely, that their constraint spoke, and he detected a catch in the usually controlled rhythms of Michael's speech.

“Stop it,” he whispered to Blue, affectionately, “you're terrible.”

“Me?”

Myles led her a little away, over by the Vespa where it teetered on its stand.

“Myles! Look at them! Proper as school teachers. Next they'll be shaking hands . . .” Blue's voice trailed away, and she cocked her head as if in disbelief.

“Yeah, yeah,” Myles said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, it looks like love to me.”

Blue made as if to study them, pressing a thin fist under her chin. “If that's it, there's not much to miss.”

“Maybe.”

Then she hugged him hard. “Oh Myles, I'm so sorry!”

When she looked up Myles saw her eyes had flooded with tears, and though he hadn't expected it, he was moved. “I know, Blue,” he said, but his voice broke on her name. There was a flurry of activity on the ferry. The last of the passengers were getting on. “Hey, I'm going to be fine.”

Myles turned toward Michael but Blue pulled him back, reaching her mouth up close to his ear. “I knew all along Paul was a jerk, maybe not how big a jerk, but a jerk. I just wanted . . . I don't know what I wanted. Excitement, maybe.”

Myles pressed her hand. “It's okay, Blue. You're going to find way better guys.” And then Michael stepped toward him.

Michael reached out a hand but Myles hugged him. While he had him
close, Myles whispered, “You got the best man.”

“I know it,” Michael choked out.

“You're not letting him get away?”

“No, I'm not.”

 

“So you leavin' too?” Paniyótis stood by the table with a bottle of oúzo and three glasses. “We drink together?”

“Yes, please.” Myles watched as Paniyótis filled first his glass and then Jim's and finally his own, his figure flickering in the candlelight.

“I know you don't take no water most times,” he said to Myles, pouring a little in his own and Jim's, turning the oúzo fog-white. He dropped a few ice cubes in the white drinks, then said, “You toast?
Parakaló?
”

“
Sto kaló,
” Myles said, woodenly.

“May you always come back to Greece.” Paniyótis was waving his glass around, but the theater of it rang a little hollow.

“Safe journeys,” Jim added, mechanically.

When they'd drank, Myles stood to hug Paniyótis, in spite of his splattered apron. “'
Phristó polí,
” he added, many thanks.

He sat back down and then remembered he wanted to pay Yórgos to put his house in order. Paniyótis was retreating toward the kitchen but came back when Myles called after him. “Is it okay if I hire Yórgos to clean,” he made scrubbing motions, “after I'm gone?” Paniyótis nodded, looking proud of his son. “Then could you send him over?”

“Mr. Myles?” The boy said, suddenly standing straight and expectant by their table.

“But I'm only going as far as Níssyros!” Myles exclaimed, when he'd had time to digest the toasts.

“Taking my advice at last,” Jim said, feigning satisfaction. “But now I wish you were staying on here.”

“You'll be gone, too, soon enough. Maybe you should go on up to Sámos, catch 'em.”

“We finished so well here I'm scared to!” Jim looked suddenly happy.

“Ah.” Myles looked up, “So that's it.” Then he said, “Let's walk,” and they stood, saluted the kitchen, and strolled away.

They walked on the steep hillside directly west of the harbor. The alleys there are mostly stairs and straight up; only a few run with the hillside. They sat often, looking down on the unfamiliar night views. They were at ease, as they'd so often been together, but it was as if talk had been shaken out of them.

They walked, listening to the sound of their feet in the alleys. When they had walked out the chances west of the harbor they took to the familiar stairs to the east, waiting for the words they both hoped would come. Walking across Chorió, high up, they passed by the notch between houses where Myles had once seen the leaping woman. A family was sitting there in a pool of light, a boy curled in the arms of his mother, the father smoking quietly in his chair. Myles thought he recognized the woman, no longer girlish at all, no longer leaping free of anything, but looking, he thought, content, happy to be a mother in a folding chair.