Outline: A Novel

VIII

My friend Elena was very beautiful: Ryan was beside himself. He’d been ambling along the street and spied us sitting at a bar. She’s in a different league, he said, when she excused herself to go and make a phone call. Elena was thirty-six, intelligent, exquisitely dressed. She’s another proposition entirely, he said.

The bar was on a narrow side street so steep that the chairs and tables slanted and wobbled on the uneven pavement. I had just watched a woman, a tourist, fall backwards into a planter, her shopping bags and guidebooks flying out to all sides of her, while her husband sat startled in his chair, apparently more embarrassed than concerned. He wore a pair of binoculars around his neck, and hiking boots on his feet that remained punctiliously tucked beneath the table while his wife flailed in the dry, spiky greenery. Eventually he put out an arm across the table to help her back up, but it was beyond her reach and so she was forced to struggle out on her own.

I asked Ryan what he had done today, and he said that he had gone to a museum or two, and then spent the afternoon wandering around the Agora, though to be honest he was a bit the worse for wear. He’d had a late night with some of the younger students, he said. They’d taken him to a series of bars, each one a good forty minutes’ walk from the next. I was feeling my age, he said. I just wanted a drink — I didn’t much care where I got it or how it came, and I certainly didn’t need to walk to the other side of town to drink it off a lip-shaped sofa. But they’re a nice enough crowd, he said. They’d been teaching him a few words of Greek — he wasn’t sure how much change he’d get for them, his pronunciation being what it was, but all the same it was interesting to get a sense of things on the verbal level. He hadn’t realised how many English meanings came from Greek compounds. For instance the word ellipsis, he’d been told, could literally be translated as ‘to hide behind silence’. It’s fascinating stuff, he said.

Elena came back and sat down again. Her appearance, this evening, was particularly Lorelei-like. She seemed to be composed entirely of curves and waves.

‘My friend will meet us shortly,’ she said, ‘in a place not far from here.’

Ryan lifted an eyebrow.

‘You two off somewhere?’

‘We’re meeting Melete,’ Elena said. ‘You are familiar with the name? She is one of the pre-eminent lesbian poets of Greece.’

Ryan said that actually he was peaked; he might have to leave us to it. He’d had a late night, as he’d said. And then he’d come back to the apartment at three in the morning to find great winged scarab-like creatures flying all around the place and had had to bash them all to death with his shoe. Someone — it wasn’t him — had left a light on and a window open. All the same, it had struck him how little he cared about cheerfully massacring the bastards: when he was younger, he would have been too frightened. You become brave just by being a parent, he said. Or maybe it’s just you become disinhibited. He’d felt this last night, socialising with people in their twenties. He’d forgotten how physically shy they were.

The quick hot dusk was falling, and soon the narrow street had filled up with darkness. The man in the hiking boots and his wife had gone. Ryan’s phone rang and he picked it up, showing us the photograph of a grinning, toothless child that was pulsing on the screen. Must be bedtime, he said; I’ll be seeing you folks. He stood and with a wave of his hand walked away down the hill, talking. Elena paid the bill with her credit card from the office — she was an editor at a publishing house and so strictly speaking, she said, we could consider our meeting to be work — and we walked up towards the light and noise of the main street. She trod beside me with quick, light steps in her high-heeled sandals; her dress was a shift of a knitted material the same dark gold colour as her long waving hair. All the men we passed looked at her, one after the other. We crossed Kolonaki Square, which was empty now except for one or two dark figures lying huddled on the benches. A woman sat on one of the low concrete walls, her legs strangely spattered with dried mud, eating crackers from a packet. A little boy stood near her at the kiosk, looking at the chocolate bars. We walked up an alleyway and came out in a crowded little square filled with the noise of people packed into the restaurant terraces all around its four sides, their faces in the darkness garish with electric light. The heat and the noise and electric light in the darkness produced an atmosphere of unvarying excitement, like a wave continually breaking, and though the restaurants looked indistinguishable from one another, Elena passed several before stopping very decidedly at one. This was the place, she said; Melete had said we should get a table and wait for her here. She wove her way through the tables and spoke to a waiter, who stood there implacable as a policeman and began shaking his head while she talked.

‘He says they are full,’ she said, crestfallen, her arms dropping to her sides.

Her disappointment was so intense that she didn’t move, but stayed standing among the tables and staring at them as though willing them to yield to her. The waiter, observing this performance, appeared to change his mind: there was, he decided, room, if we were happy to sit — Elena translated — over in that corner. He showed us to the table, which Elena scrutinised as though she might not take it after all. It is a bit too close to the wall, she said to me. Do you think we will be all right here? I said I didn’t mind sitting next to the wall: she could sit in the place further out if she preferred.

‘Why do you wear these dark clothes?’ she said to me, once we had sat down. ‘I don’t understand it. I wear light things when it is hot. Also you look a little sunburned,’ she added. ‘Between your shoulders, just there, the skin is burned.’

I told her I had spent the afternoon on a boat, with someone I didn’t know well enough to ask to put sun cream on my back. She asked who this person was. Was it a man?

Yes, I said, a man I had met on the airplane and had got talking to. Elena’s eyes widened with surprise.

‘I would not have thought it likely’, she said, ‘that you would go off on a boat with a complete stranger. What is he like? Do you like him?’

I closed my eyes and tried to summon up my feelings for my neighbour. When I opened them again Elena was still looking at me, waiting. I said that I had become so unused to thinking about things in terms of whether I liked them or whether I didn’t that I couldn’t answer her question. My neighbour was merely a perfectly good example of something about which I could only feel absolute ambivalence.

‘But you still let him take you out on his boat,’ she said.

It was hot, I said. And the terms on which we had left the harbour were strictly — or so I thought — the terms of friendship. I described his attempt to kiss me, when we were anchored far out to sea. I said that he was old, and that though it would be cruel to call him ugly, I had found his physical advances as repellent as they were surprising. It had never occurred to me that he would do such a thing; or more accurately, before she pointed out that I would have to be an imbecile not to have seen it as a possibility, I thought he wouldn’t dare do such a thing. I had thought the differences between us were obvious, but to him they weren’t.

She hoped, Elena said, that I had made that fact clear to him. I said that, on the contrary, I had come up with all manner of excuses to spare his feelings. She was silent for a while.

‘If,’ she said presently, ‘you had told him the truth, if you had said to him, look, you are old and short and fat, and though I like you the only reason I am really here is to get a ride on your boat —’ she began to laugh, fanning her face with the menu ‘— if you had said those things to him, you understand, you would have heard some truths in return. If you had been frank you would have elicited frankness.’

She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next, and it was only, in a sense, when she had reached this place of mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted. What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.

Unseen by Elena, a slender woman with a fox-like face was approaching our table. I took this to be Melete. She came stealthily behind Elena’s chair and rested her hand on her shoulder.

‘Yassas,’ she said sombrely.

She wore a mannish black waistcoat and trousers, and her short straight hair fell in two glossy black wings on either side of her narrow, shy, pointed face.

Elena twisted around in her seat to greet her.

‘You as well!’ she exclaimed. ‘These dark clothes, both of you — why do you always wear dark things?’

Melete took her time replying to this. She sat down in the vacant chair, sat back and crossed her legs, withdrew a packet of cigarettes from her waistcoat pocket and lit one.

‘Elena,’ she said, ‘it is not polite to talk about how people look. It is our own business what we wear.’ She reached across the table and shook my hand. ‘It’s noisy here tonight,’ she said, looking around. ‘I’ve just taken part in a poetry reading where the audience numbered six people. The contrast is quite noticeable.’

She picked up the wine list from the table and began to study it, the cigarette smoking in her fingers, her fine nose twitching slightly, her glossy hair falling forward over her cheeks.

One of the six, she added, glancing up, was a man who came to nearly every public appearance she gave, and would sit in the front row making faces at her. This had been happening for several years now. She would look up from her lectern, not just in Athens but in other cities that are quite far away, and there he would be right in front of her, sticking his tongue out and making rude signs.

‘But do you know him?’ Elena said, astonished. ‘Have you ever spoken to him?’

‘I taught him,’ Melete said. ‘He was an undergraduate student of mine, a long time ago, when I lectured at the university.’

‘And what did you do to him? Why does he torment you in this way?’

‘I have to assume’, Melete said, puffing gravely on her cigarette, ‘that he doesn’t have a reason. I did nothing to him: I barely even remember teaching him. He passed through one of my classes, where there were more than fifty students. I didn’t notice him. I’ve tried, obviously, to remember some particular incident but there isn’t one. You could spend your whole life’, she said, ‘trying to trace events back to your own mistakes. People in legend thought that their misfortunes could be traced back to their failure to offer libations to certain gods. But there is another explanation,’ she said, ‘which is simply that he is mad.’

‘Have you ever tried to talk to him?’ Elena said.

Melete slowly shook her head.

‘As I said, I barely remember him, though I don’t forget people easily. So you could say that this attack has come from the place I least expected. In fact it would almost be true to say that this student was the very last person I had ever considered to pose a threat to me.’

At times, Melete continued, it had almost seemed to her that this fact was what had created his behaviour. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created an attack on itself, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.

‘I prefer to call it madness,’ she said, ‘whether his or my own, and so instead I have tried to become fond of him. I look up and there he always is, waggling his fingers and sticking out his tongue. He is in fact entirely dependable, more faithful to me than any lover I’ve ever had. I try to love him back.’

She closed the wine list and put up her finger to summon the waiter. Elena said something to her in Greek and a brief dispute ensued, which the waiter joined halfway through and in which he appeared conclusively to take Melete’s side, taking the order from her with much brusque nodding of his head despite Elena’s continued petitions.

‘Elena knows nothing about wine,’ Melete said, to me.

Elena seemed to take no offence at this remark. She returned to the subject of Melete’s persecutor.

‘What you have described,’ she said, ‘is complete subjection. The idea that you should love your enemies is patently ridiculous. It is entirely a religious proposition. To say that you love what you hate and what hates you is the same as admitting you have been defeated, that you accept your oppression and are just trying to make yourself feel better about it. And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ‘you would find out.’

I watched the people at the other tables and at the tables on the adjoining terraces, all packed so tightly that the whole square seemed to be aflame with conversation. Here and there beggars moved among the talking people, who often took some time to realise they were there, and then either gave them something or brushed them away. Several times I saw this repeated, the wraith-like figure standing unnoticed behind the chair of the person obliviously eating, talking, absorbed in life. A tiny, desiccated, hooded woman was moving among the tables close to us, and presently she approached ours, murmuring, the little claw of her hand outstretched. I watched Melete place some coins in her palm and say a few words to her, gently stroking her fingers.

‘What he thinks is of no importance,’ she continued. ‘If I found out more about what he thinks, I might start to confuse him with myself. And I don’t compose myself from other people’s ideas, any more than I compose a verse from someone else’s poem.’

‘But to him this is a game, a fantasy,’ Elena said. ‘Men like to play this game. And they actually fear your honesty, because then the game is spoiled. By not being honest with a man you allow him to continue his game, to live in his fantasy.’

As if to prove her point, my phone sounded on the table. It was a text from my neighbour: I miss you, it said.

It was only when you got beyond people’s fantasies, Elena continued, about themselves and one another, that you accessed a level of reality where things assumed their true value and were what they seemed to be. Some of those truths, admittedly enough, were ugly, but others were not. The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight. If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.

Melete laughed. ‘According to that logic,’ she said, ‘there can be no relationship at all. There can only be people stalking one another.’

The waiter brought the wine, a small unlabelled bottle the colour of ink, and Melete began to pour it out.

‘It’s true,’ Elena said, ‘that my own need for provocation is something other people seem to find very difficult to understand. Yet to me it has always made perfect sense. But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also — as you say, by the same logic — something I will feel driven to provoke. If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.’

The person she was involved with now, she said — a man named Konstantin — had given her for the first time in her life a cause to fear these tendencies in herself, for the reason that — unlike, if she was to be honest, any other man of her experience — she judged him to be her equal. He was intelligent, handsome, amusing, an intellectual: she liked being beside him, liked the reflection of herself he gave her. And he was a man in possession of his own morality and attitudes, so that she felt — for the first time, as she had said — a kind of invisible boundary around him, a line it was clear, though no one ever said as much, she ought not to cross. That line, that boundary, was something she had never encountered so palpably in any other man, men whose defences were usually cobbled together out of fantasies and deceptions that no one — themselves least of all — would blame her for wanting to break through. And so not only did she feel a sense of prohibition around Konstantin, a sense that he would regard her raiding him for his truth much as he would have regarded her breaking into his house and stealing his things, she had actually become frightened of the very thing she loved him for, his equality with herself.

It remained, therefore, within his grasp, this weapon of which she had been so quick to disarm every other man: the power to hurt her. At a party recently, where she had taken Konstantin and introduced him to many of her friends, she had been enjoying the feeling of showing him off to her social circle, seeing his handsomeness and his wit and his integrity through their eyes — and vice versa, because this was a house of artists and other interesting people from her world — and she had started to eavesdrop a little on his conversation with a woman she knew but didn’t like very much, a woman called Yanna. It was partly out of spite towards Yanna that she had given into the temptation to eavesdrop: she wanted to hear Konstantin speak, and to imagine Yanna’s jealousy at the intelligence and good looks of Elena’s boyfriend. Yanna was asking about Konstantin’s children, of which he has two from a previous marriage, and then, quite casually, while Elena was listening, Yanna asked him whether he’d like to have any more children. No, he said, while Elena, listening, felt as though knives were being plunged into her from all sides; no, he didn’t think he wanted any more children, he was happy with things as they were.

She raised her glass to her lips, her hand trembling.

‘We had never,’ she continued quietly, ‘discussed the question of children, but it is obvious that for me it remains open, that I may very well want to have children. Suddenly this party I was enjoying, where I had felt so happy, became a torture. I was unable to laugh or smile or speak to anyone properly; I just wanted to go away and be alone, but I had to stay there with him until it was over. And of course he had noticed that I was upset, and kept asking me what was wrong; and for the whole of the rest of that evening and night he kept asking me to tell him what was wrong. In the morning he was due to go away on business for a few days. I had to tell him, he said. It was impossible for him to go to the airport and get on a plane with me in this upset state. But of course it would have been so humiliating to tell him, because I had overheard something not meant for my ears, and also because of the subject itself, which ought to have been approached so differently.

‘It seemed to me that this was a situation it was impossible to get out of, while still thinking as well of one another as we had before. I had this feeling,’ she continued, ‘which I have had since and which gets worse each time we argue, that we were caught in a net of words, tangled up in all these strings and knots, and that each of us thought there was something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were. I find myself thinking of the simplicity of the time before we had said one syllable to one another: that is the time I would like to go back to,’ she said, ‘the time just before we first opened our mouths to speak.’

I looked at the couple at the table next to ours, a man and a woman who had eaten their meal in a more or less unbroken silence. She had kept her handbag on the table in front of her plate, as though she was worried it might be stolen. It sat there between them and both of them glanced at it occasionally.

‘But did you tell Konstantin that you had heard him?’ Melete said. ‘That morning, while you were waiting for the taxi, did you admit it?’

‘Yes,’ Elena said. ‘He was embarrassed, of course, and said it had been a thoughtless comment, that it didn’t mean anything, and in a way I believed him and it was a relief, but in my heart I thought — why bother to speak at all? Why say anything, if you can just take it back the next minute? Yet of course I wanted it to be taken back. And even thinking about it now the whole thing seems slightly unreal, as though by allowing it to be taken back I can no longer be sure that it actually happened. Anyway,’ she continued, ‘the taxi came and he got in it and left, both of us friends again, but afterwards I had the feeling of a stain, something small but permanent, like a little stain that ruins the whole dress — I imagined all the years passing, and us having children, and me never being able to forget the way he had shaken his head and said no when someone had asked him whether he wanted them. And him perhaps remembering that I was a person capable of invading his privacy and judging him on what I had found. This idea made me want to run away from him, from our apartment and the life we have together, to hide myself somewhere, in something unspoiled.’

There was a silence, into which the noise from the surrounding tables steadily flowed. We drank the soft, dark wine, so soft it could barely be felt on the tongue.

‘Last night I had a dream,’ Melete said presently, ‘in which I and several other women, some of whom were friends of mine and some of whom were strangers, were trying to get into the opera. But all of us were bleeding, pouring out menstrual blood: it was a kind of pandemonium, there at the entrance to the opera house. There was blood on our dresses, dripping down into our shoes; every time one woman stopped bleeding another started, and the women were placing their bloodied towels in a neat pile by the door to the building, a pile that got bigger and bigger and that other people had to pass to get in. They looked at us as they passed, men in their dinner jackets and bow ties, in absolute disgust. The opera began; we could hear the music coming from inside, but we couldn’t seem to get ourselves across the threshold. I felt a great anxiety’, Melete said, ‘that all of this was somehow my fault, because I was the one who had first noticed the blood, noticed it on my own clothes, and in my tremendous shame I seemed to have created this much bigger problem. And it strikes me’, she said to Elena, ‘that your story about Konstantin is really a story about disgust, the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness. As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.’

Elena nodded her golden head, and put her hand across the table to touch Melete’s fingers.

When she was a child, Melete continued, she used to suffer from the most terrible attacks of vomiting. It was a quite debilitating condition that persisted for several years. The attacks always occurred at exactly the same time of day and under exactly the same circumstances, the hour when she would return from school to the house she shared with her mother and stepfather. Understandably enough, her mother was very distressed by Melete’s suffering, which had no apparent cause and therefore seemed to be nothing less than a criticism of her own way of life and the man she had introduced into the household, a man her only child refused — as though by a point of principle — to love or even to recognise. Every day at school, Melete would forget about the vomiting, but then as it became time to go home she would feel the first signs of its approach, a feeling of weightlessness, almost as though the ground were giving way under her feet. She would hurry back to the house in a state of anxiety, and there, usually in the kitchen, where her mother was waiting to give her her afternoon snack, an extraordinary nausea would start to grow. She would be taken to the sofa to lie down; a blanket would be put over her, the television switched on, and a bowl left by her side; and while Melete retched, her mother and stepfather would spend their evening together in the kitchen, talking and eating dinner. Her mother had taken her to doctors, therapists, and finally a child psychoanalyst, who suggested — much to the mystification of the adults who were paying his bill — that Melete take up a musical instrument. He asked her whether there was any instrument in particular she had ever thought of playing, and she said, the trumpet. And so, reluctantly, her mother and stepfather had bought her a trumpet. Now, every day after school, instead of the consuming prospect of the vomiting, she had before her the prospect of blowing through the brass instrument to produce its great rude noise. In this way she had made manifest her disgust in flawed humanity, and also managed to interrupt those tête-à-têtes over supper in the kitchen, which could never again be conducted in quite the same way, without her as their victim.

‘Lately,’ she said, ‘I have taken the trumpet out of its case and started practising. I play it in my little apartment.’ She laughed. ‘It feels good to be making that rude noise again.’

On the way back down the hill, Elena said she would have to stop off in Kolonaki Square to get her motorbike. She offered Melete a lift on the back, since they lived close to one another. There was plenty of room for two people, she told me, and it was the quickest way. She had travelled all over Greece like that with her oldest female friend, Hermione, the two of them even taking the bike on the ferries out to the islands with just some money and their swimming costumes, finding beaches down dirt tracks where there wasn’t another person to be seen. Hermione had clung to her down some formidable mountainsides, she said, and they had never yet fallen off. Looking back, those were some of the best times of her life, though at the time they had had the feeling of a prelude, a period of waiting, as though for the real drama of living to begin. Those times had more or less gone, now that she was with Konstantin: she wasn’t sure why, because he would never have stopped her from going off travelling with Hermione, in fact he would have liked it, as modern men always liked it when you proved your independence from them. But it would have felt like a fake somehow, she said, a copy, to try to become those girls again, hurtling down those dirt roads, never knowing what they would find at the end of them.