The Names

3

Awake. The pulsing cry of doves. I have to concentrate to form a sense of whereabouts. Up, into the world, crank the shutters open. The beekeeper in the garden of the British School marches in his hooded bonnet to the box hives. I take the coffee mug from the drain basket, set the water boiling. Mount Hymettus is a white shadow, summer mornings, a vaporous reach to the gulf. Today's a market day, a man is chasing peaches down the steep street below the terrace restaurants. A pickup has hit his, knocking a bushel off the end, and the peaches come down the asphalt surface in wobbling rows. The man is trying to head them off, running low to the ground and making sweeping motions with his arm. A boy stands under the mulberry trees, hosing down the floor of the restaurants. Where the pickups have met, a vast gesturing goes on between the driver of one vehicle and a friend of the stooped and running man. An envelope of Nescafe, a leftover donut. The phone is ringing, the first of the day's wrong numbers. Doves lighting on the still tips of cypresses. The men from the café around the corner come into view, watching the peaches roll. They lean into the street with care, evaluating gravely, prepared to extend only so much in effort and gesture. Honeybees rise clustered in the dusty light.I walk to the office, where I make myself another cup of coffee and wait for the telex to address me.

Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense it's improvised, it's almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It's too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.Charles Maitland and I discussed this, sitting on a bench in the National Gardens, where it was fifteen degrees cooler than in the bright city around us. Kids walked by, eating rings of sesame bread."You're talking about modern marriage. Americans.”"Kathryn is Canadian.”"New World then.”"I think you're out of touch.”"Of course I'm out of touch. And a good thing too. Spare me from being in touch. The point is that the thing you describe has nothing to do with wedlock. “He produced the word like a gold coin between his teeth. Handsome battered face. Burst capillaries, streaked blue eyes. He was fifty-eight, a half shambles, broad, ruddy, silver-browed, racked by fits of coughing. Sundays he drove alone to a field outside the city and flew his radio-controlled model plane. It weighed nine pounds and cost two thousand dollars."True," I said. "Wedlock was the last thing Kathryn and I thought we'd entered. We hadn't entered a state at all. If anything, we'd broken out of states and nations and firm designs. She used to say this marriage is a movie. She didn't mean it wasn't real. The whole thing flickered. It was a series of small flickering moments. But at the same time calm and safe. A day-to-day life. Restrained, moderate. I thought if you didn't want anything, your marriage was bound to work. I thought the trouble was that everyone wanted. They wanted in different directions. Tap, coming along, reinforced the feeling that we were making it up day by day, little by little, but sanely, contentedly, with no huge self-seeking visions.”"I'm thirsty," he said."A drink would kill you.”"It flickered. It was a series of flickers. You were calm and safe.”"We had incredible fights.”"When the old girl gets here, we're going for a drink.”"I'm having lunch with Rowser. Come along.”"Christ, no. Christ, not him.”"Be a sport," I said.Shaded paths. Watercourses and stone fountains. A dense green place with towering trees that provided a fan vaulting, a cover against the enlarged-heart panics of central Athens. The landscape had a pleasing randomness. It was an enticement to wander foolishly, to get lost without feeling you were part of a formalist puzzle, a garden of hedge traps and designed escapes. A dozen men talked politics under a pine tree. Intermittently Charles listened, translating for me. He and Ann had been married twenty-nine years (she was seven or eight years younger than he was). In that time he'd held various jobs involving the security of overseas branches of British and American corporations. He now worked on a consulting basis, advising mainly on fire safety, something of a drop in status and income, considering the living to be made in terror.They'd lived in Egypt, Nigeria, Panama, Turkey, Cyprus, East Africa, the Sudan and Lebanon. These stays were anywhere from one year to four. They'd lived elsewhere, including the States, for shorter periods, and they'd been through a number of things, from house arrest and deportation, Cairo '56, to heavy shelling and infectious hepatitis, Beirut '76. Ann talked about these episodes in a tone of remote sadness, as if they were things she'd heard about or read in the newspaper. Maybe she felt unqualified to share the emotions of the native-born. The Lebanese were the victims, Beirut was the tragedy, the world was the loser. She never mentioned what they themselves had lost in any of the places they'd lived. It was Charles, finally, who told me that everything in their small home in Cyprus had been stolen or destroyed when the Turks rolled over the countryside and he implied this was only one of several ruinous events. They'd seemed, the troops, to have a deep need to pull things out of walls, whatever was jutting-pipes, taps, valves, switches. The walls themselves they'd smeared with shit.There was a protocol of coping, of making do, and Ann was expert. I was learning that reticence was fairly common in such matters. There was a sense in which people felt it was self-incriminating to speak out against these violations. I thought I sometimes detected in people who had lost property or fled, most frequently in Americans, some mild surprise that it hadn't happened sooner, that the men with the six-day beards hadn't come much earlier to burn them out, or uproot the plumbing, or walk off with the prayer rugs they'd bargained for in the souk and bought as investments-for the crimes of drinking whiskey, making money, jogging in shiny suits along the boulevards at dusk. Wasn't there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Ann said, was the only real regret. There was sweet crude in the delta, a howling loneliness. Charles was doing security and safety for a refinery built by Shell and British Petroleum. She fled to Beirut and the war in the streets. The marriage lost some of its conviction but made eventual gains in the category of rueful irony when BP's assets were nationalized.They didn't want to go back home. Too many years of elaborate skies, lithe people with plaited hair, red-robed, in bare feet. Or was that England today? They thought they might retire to California, where they had a son in graduate school, some kind of raving savant by the sound of it-a mathematician."The idea is to learn the language," Charles said, "but not to let them know. This is what I do. I don't let people know unless absolutely pressed.”"But then what good is it?”"I listen. I listen all the time. I pick up things, listening. I have an advantage in this regard. I'm not only a foreigner. I don't look as if I speak Greek.”"This is an incredible distinction, Charles. Are you serious?”"You want to pick up whatever you can.”"But don't you do business here occasionally?”"One does business in English. Surely you've come to suspect this.”"If I ever learn the language, I'll speak it as often as possible. I want to talk to them, I want to hear what they're saying. These men arguing, there's something serious, almost loving about it. I want to interrupt, ask questions.”"You won't pick up anything, talking to them.”"I don't want to pick up anything.”"Using my method, you'll learn infinitely more.”"Charles, your method is crazy.”"What about a Heineken then? Is it possible in this country to get beer in green bottles?”"Seriously, do you speak Arabic?”"Of course.”"I envy that. I really do.”"Ann's a brilliant linguist. She's done translation, you know. She's very good.”"My kid speaks Ob. It's a kind of pig Latin. You insert o-b in certain parts of words.”Charles hunched forward, his cigarette burning to the filter."Something almost loving," he mumbled, glancing at the men around the tree."You know what I mean. There's a certain quality in the language.”"You want to interrupt. You want to ask questions.”I watched Ann cross to us, emerging from a ring of poplars. A gait with a pleasing sway. Even at a distance, her mouth showed the small pursed conceit of a remark in the making. We stood, flanking her, and headed down a path toward the nearest gate."At any given time," she said, "half the women in Athens are having their hair done by the other half.”"They've worked wonders, clearly," Charles said."It is such confusion. I'd still be there had it not been for no-shows and dropouts. James, I've never realized. You have khaki hair.”"It's brown.”"If jeeps had hair, it would look like yours. He has khaki hair," she told Charles."Leave him alone. He's having lunch with George Rowser.”"He's having lunch with us. Where are we off to?”"We'll have dinner," I said."Good. Shall I call anyone?”"Call everyone.”"What are all these people doing in the park?" she said. "Greeks hate fresh air.”

I pulled down a book on mythology for Tap. I took it to the cash register. The woman there directed me to a man across the room. I gave him the book and followed him to his little desk. He took a thick pad, wrote out a sales slip and gave it to me, without the book. I took the sales slip to the woman at the cash register. She took my money, stamped the slip and gave it back to me with my change. I put the stamped document in my pocket and went to the little desk. The man had wrapped the book and was sealing the package with transparent tape. He wanted my sales slip. I took it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He gave me a carbon copy. I put it in my pocket and left with the neatly wrapped book.My life was full of routine surprises. One day I was watching runners from Marathon dodge taxis near the Athens Hilton, the next I was turning a corner in Istanbul to see a gypsy leading a bear on a leash. I began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.One day I went out to find the streets full of children wearing costumes. I didn't know what the occasion was, what was being commemorated. In the center of Athens there were hundreds of these children in elaborate masquerade. They walked hand in hand with their parents or ran among the pigeons in front of the war memorial. Children as cowboys, elves, moonwalkers, oil sheiks with black beards, toting briefcases. I didn't ask what it meant. I was happy not knowing. I wanted to preserve the surprise in an opaque medium. This happened many times in large and small ways. Athens was my legal home but I wasn't ready to give up tourism, even here.In the flower market I saw a priest and a deacon come out of the church behind the stalls, leading a group of people who carried crosses and other objects. The priest had wild eyes and a flaring beard, the people may have been mourners. They walked once around the church and went back inside.To be taken constantly by surprise was not the worst thing that could happen to a man living apart.

Rowser traveled under a false name. He had a total of three identities and owned the relevant paper. His office outside Washington was equipped with a letter-bomb detector, a voice scrambler, an elaborate system to prevent break-ins. He was a man who never quite took the final heavy step into foolishness and pathos, despite the indications. His life itself was the chief indication, full of the ornaments of paranoia and deception. Even his hoarse voice, a forced whisper, seemed a comic symptom of the clandestine environment. But Rowser's massive drive, his will to see things through, overpowered everything else.He was a businessman. He sold insurance to other businessmen. The subjects were money, politics and force.I met him in the bar off the lobby of the Grande Bretagne, one of the duskier haunts, plush chairs, soft voices. He was a stocky man with glasses, going bald. He was drinking mineral water and making notes when I walked in."Sit down. I'm back from Kuwait.”"Are they killing Americans?”"Not so you'd notice," he said. "Not openly. What have you got for me?”"George, can I order a drink?”"Order a drink.”"Turkey is an education in how far people will go to make a point. Except no one agrees on what the point is.”"What else is new?”"The weather was good.”"Did you go to the mosques?”"Not this trip," I said."I can't understand how people go to Istanbul and don't do the mosques. I can spend hours in one mosque.”"I was there on business, George.”"Very good. But you can always make time for a mosque.”"Are you religious?”"Get away from me. I like the awe, that's all.”"Impressive architecture. I concede that much.”"No pictures. I have entree to Vatican pictures no one gets in to see without stunning credentials. I want to see the stuff in Naples. The hidden rooms.”"Who do you know?”"I have a cardinal in the States.”The waiter came, head tilted, a faintly mocking look in his eyes. I ordered a beer. Rowser's ultra-secure briefcase sat next to him in the soft chair. It was full of painstaking assessments, I was sure. Data on the stability of the countries he'd been visiting. Facts on the infrastructure. Probabilities, statistics. These were the music of Rowser's life, the only coherence he needed.What connected us was risk.He'd started in this line of work by gathering material for people who wrote scholarly reports on large-scale death and destruction. Rowser had a gift for numbers and a temperament that enabled him to separate mathematical techniques and actuarial science from the terrifying events he culled for his figures. In universities and research centers he attended any number of conferences at which people discussed such choice calamities as reactor meltdowns, runaway viruses and three-day spasm wars.Somebody had to tell us what our chances were. Rowser's problem was that he didn't have the breadth and penetration to succeed as a risk analyst. He knew what he was, a night-school hustler, a man who figured the angles, brusque, enterprising, chained to late nights and caffeine. He was no game theorist or geopolitician. He had no system of assumptions and principles. What he had was a set of interlocking facts he'd drawn from tons of research material on the cost-effectiveness of terror.There had been over five thousand terrorist incidents in the past decade.Kidnappings were routine business.Ransom requests of five million dollars were not unusual.In this decade a quarter of a billion dollars in ransom money had been paid to terrorists.Business executives were prime targets.U.S. executives led the world, being targeted with particular frequency in the Middle East and Latin America.Simple. He convinced a medium-sized insurance company to sell ransom policies to the multinationals. His job was to figure the risk of enrolling applicants for coverage. He read everything in the public record on terror and traveled widely to set up lines of data-gathering that helped him draw conclusions about overseas operations, the attitudes of host countries, political currents in general. Secrecy was important. If a terrorist group knew that a certain corporation insured its executives against kidnap and ransom, they'd clearly want to consider an action.The man of narrow outlook becomes immersed. Rowser occupied himself profoundly in the customs and attitudes of the secret life. His thoroughness was compulsive and regenerative, a pathological condition. He stopped carrying company ID, he committed phone numbers and addresses to memory, he spent small fortunes on electronic devices. I don't think he became involved in these things as some men do, because they verge on something deep and unseen, a dream life or alternate self. He wasn't the kind of man who plays at danger. I think he was simply scared. Risk had become a physical thing."What's that?”"A book I bought my kid.”"I'm a two-time loser," he said."We're only separated, George.”"Get divorced.”"Why?”"Absolutely. I don't even remember them. If they walked down the street together, I'd go right by.”"I don't want to discuss marriage. I did that an hour ago.”"Drink your beer, we'll go.”"Where are we having lunch?”"I don't eat lunch. My doctor told me to drop one meal. We'll walk around the block. I want an overview on Turkey.”"It's damn hot out there.”"I don't like talking where it may not be secure. Drink down your beer, we'll go.”"It's insurance. That's all it is, George. Nobody's listening.”"I'm the kind of person he doesn't like to break a habit. I started doing things this way and maybe it's not necessary anymore. Maybe it was never necessary, looking objectively. But a habit is the toughest thing to break for this type person. There is no logic in most habits. This is exactly why they take such hold. A habit is a death grip to somebody like me.”The harsh dry scrape in his voice was halfway poignant. I first met Rowser at a seminar on foreign investments. Many voices besides his own at the Hay-Adams that day. Curious, I thought, how all these regional accents converged on the same sets of words. The language of business is hard-edged and aggressive, drawing some of its technical cant from the weapons pools of the south and southwest, a rural nurturing in a way, a blooding of the gray-suited, the pale, the corporate man. It's all the same game, these cross-argots suggest.By this time Rowser was head of development for the Northeast Group, a subsidiary of a two-billion-dollar conglomerate he referred to as "the parent." No more edgy executives. The Northeast Group specialized in political risk insurance for corporations with foreign holdings. In recent years U.S. assets had been seized in two dozen countries and businessmen were looking for financial protection. All those grave Zaireans, those Pakistanis with their sensual lips and bright smiles, voices in melodic ascent, what sweet-natured technocrats they made, running the plants we'd designed and financed, using our very jargon.Rowser and his group were writing political risk insurance in impressive amounts. They sold portions of the original policies to syndicates in order to spread risk and generate whatever cash flow the parent did not supply. He broadened his data collection network and installed a few key people called risk analysts, the title he'd felt unworthy of in the days when he gathered facts for the end of the world. This was the job he offered me. Associate director of risk analysis, Middle East.I was a freelance writer, something of a Renaissance hack. Booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, all kinds of institutional litter for government and industry. Newsletters for a computer firm. Scripts for industrial films. Tax-planning strategies, investment strategies. We had three meetings. At the time I was ghosting a book on global conflict for an Air Force general associated with one of Rowser's old encampments, the Institute of Risk Analysis at American University. Rowser had seen early pages of the manuscript and it was possible he'd been impressed by the way I'd reshaped the general's muddled thinking. The general was a living wilderness. Everyone in the risk community knew this.Rowser told me that material flowed into Athens from various control points around the Mediterranean, the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. It needed structuring, it needed perusal by someone with intellectual range. He wanted a view that was broader than the underwriter's or statistician's.A tallish fellow with an educated face and khaki hair might be just what he needed for the region.I turned him down. Kathryn, Tap and I were living in an old gabled house in the Champlain Islands, a place her father had owned, and we liked it there, among farms and apple orchards, a lake culture lying between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. My grubstreet ways suited us. We had a picture of ourselves as people who needed little. Kathryn was managing a crafts school on North Hero, one island up from us, and the occasional presence in our home of laconic young potters and quilt-makers gave the place a dusting of old-fashioned virtue. We wanted Tap to grow up in North America.A year later we were in Toronto, dividing our books, and Kathryn was speaking Greek to a tape machine. So much for North America. I got in touch with Rowser. He had a man for the region but said he was interested in talking to me. I said it had to be Athens. He'd try to work it out, he told me. It took three months.I'd have a steady job, an office, a secretary, a schedule and clear-cut responsibilities while my wife worked in a trench and my son wrote a novel. A happy pair. They were the freelancers now but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was the one taking the major risk. There was nothing to come back to if I failed, no place in particular I belonged. They were my place, the only true boundaries I had. I went, I set out, as a man on a dangerous journey, feeling a grimness and will I'd never felt before.Self-satisfied, willing to settle.What are my qualities? This was a question that nagged at the whole affair. Passion, character, fortitude and wit. Cunning and dumb luck. I'd have to command something of all of these. Is this why people try to force events, to find out how complete they are and what they've managed to accumulate of drifting fortune? Some kinds of loneliness are an accusation. Do we feel this is what we are, broken down to entity, unpigmented?The rocky brown island, the chalk village, the men spreading their yellow nets, all these forms of emitted light. The layered Minoan soil, ochre and rust and soot, and the shards of painted pottery, these are the passions that saturate the world. And it was Rowser, walking uphill past the jewelry shops along the pedestrian mall, half panting, who was the middleman of all this hazardous love. Rowser in his insurance man's gray suit."Lloyd's wants to declare the Gulf a war zone," he said. "That could double the tanker premium.”"How do you know?”"I got some playback from a Kuwaiti defense meeting. They're figuring a worst-case scenario. Lloyd's is. Tanker hulks littering the strait. The robed ones are muttering in their beards. Even the parent is nervous about the prospect. It impacts on almost everything they're involved in.”"A war zone.”"It has a ring, doesn't it.”He wanted to know about Turkey. I had precise figures for nonperforming loans. I had classified telex traffic between bank branches in the region. I had foreign exchange factors, inflation rates, election possibilities, exports and imports. I had cars lined up for gasoline, daily power cuts, no water coming out of household taps, crowds of unemployed young men standing on corners, fifteen-year-old girls shot to death for politics. No coffee, no heating oil, no spare parts for combat aircraft. I had martial law, black markets, the International Monetary Fund, God is great.I'd been given the scrambled telexes by my friend David Keller, a credit head at the Mainland Bank. Much of the other material I'd been given by our control for Turkey. The streets of Istanbul were data in their own right, the raw force, the unraveling. The rest came from our contacts at the World Bank and various research institutes.We'd circled back and were heading downhill, single file, along a narrow sidewalk. He talked to me over his shoulder."Where are you from? Did I ever ask?”"Medium-sized town. Pennsylvania.”"I'm from Jersey City.”"What do you want me to say, George? We're a long way from home?”We crossed the street to avoid a deposit of soap suds."Do I want to go to the Acropolis?”"Everybody goes," I told him."Is there climbing?”"They all do it. The lame, the halt.”"What's up there exactly that I have to see it?”"You go to Naples to look at dirty pictures.”"I have to finagle that. This is nothing," he said.Five minutes later we were in the office, two modest rooms connected by an arched opening. My secretary, a middle-aged woman who liked to be called Mrs. Helen, was at a funeral in the north somewhere.Rowser took off his shoes and asked to see telexes, notes, memoranda, whatever I could give him. Stamped documents, rows of figures. As he settled into his reading I felt myself beginning to perceive the silence, the eerie calm that closed in gradually every time I came in here from the street. The building was in a cul-de-sac, a preciously quiet spot in a city hardened to noise. Noise is a kind of rain to Athenians, an environment shaped by nature. Nothing can prevent it."When do you leave, George?”"Tomorrow.”"TW?”"Right.”"Expect a stop.”"It's nonstop.”"Expect a stop. Shannon or Goose Bay.”"Why?" he said."They take off without full tanks. They tell you it's too hot here and the fuel expands. Or the runway's too short and the fuel is heavy. It's the fuel all right. More expensive here. They like to fill up elsewhere.”"It comes back to that.”"No escape," I said.He went back to his reading. I sat at my desk with a lemon drink, watching him. He had a dozen nervous gestures. He touched his face, his clothes, blinking almost constantly. I imagined him stranded in Goose Bay. Big empty remote innocent Labrador. Scraped-clean-by-the-wind Labrador. No politics, no risk. The place would be an offense to him, a white space he could not know through numbers. He would die there, gesturing.

Summer nights belong to people in the streets. Everyone is outdoors, massed against the stonescape. We reconceive the city as a collection of unit spaces that people occupy in a fixed order of succession. Park benches, café tables, the swinging seats on ferris wheels in the carnival lots. Pleasure is not diversion but urgent life, a social order perceived as temporary. People go to movies set up in vacant lots and eat in tavernas that are improvised according to topography. Chairs and tables appear on sidewalks, rooftops and patios, on stepped streets and in alleys, and amplified music comes gusting across the soft night. The cars are out, the motorcycles and scooters and jeeps, and there are arguments, radios playing, the sound of auto horns. Horns that chime, that beep, that squeal, that blast a fanfare, horns that play popular tunes. Young men on the summer hunt. Horns, tires, crackling exhausts. This noise is annunciatory, we feel. They are saying they are on the way, they are close, they are here.Only the men in their local cafes keep indoors, where the light is good and they can play pinochle and backgammon and read newspapers with enormous headlines, a noise of its own. They are always there behind the floor-to-ceiling windows, skeptics before the cadences of life, and in winter they will still be there, in place, wearing hats and coats indoors on the coldest nights, tossing cards through the dense smoke.People everywhere are absorbed in conversation. Seated under trees, under striped canopies in the squares, they bend together over food and drink, their voices darkly raveled in Oriental laments that flow from radios in basements and back kitchens. Conversation is life, language is the deepest being. We see the patterns repeat, the gestures drive the words. It is the sound and picture of humans communicating. It is talk as a definition of itself. Talk. Voices out of doorways and open windows, voices on the stuccoed-brick balconies, a driver taking both hands off the wheel to gesture as he speaks. Every conversation is a shared narrative, a thing that surges forward, too dense to allow space for the unspoken, the sterile. The talk is unconditional, the participants drawn in completely.This is a way of speaking that takes such pure joy in its own openness and ardor that we begin to feel these people are discussing language itself. What pleasure in the simplest greeting. It's as though one friend says to another, "How good it is to say 'How are you?' " The other replying, "When I answer 'I am well and how are you,' what I really mean is that I'm delighted to have a chance to say these familiar things-they bridge the lonely distances.”The seller of lottery tickets comes dragging along, his curious stave all blazoned with flapping papers, and he calls a word or two into the dimness, then walks some more.The motion is toward the sea, the roads lead to the sea, the cars come down as though to spawn among the warships and trawlers. In a taverna along the coast we were nine for dinner, lingering well past midnight over wine and fruit. The Kellers, David and Lindsay. The Bordens, Richard and Dorothy (Dick and Dot). Axton, James. A Greek named Eliades, black-bearded, deeply attentive. The Maitlands, Ann and Charles. A German doing business.For most of its duration the dinner progressed like any other.The Bordens told a story in alternating voices about having car trouble on a mountain road. They walked to a village and drew a picture of a car for a man sitting under a tree. Dick traveled a lot and drew pictures wherever he went. He was friendly, cheerful, prematurely bald and told the same stories repeatedly, using identical gestures and intonations. He was an engineer who spent most of his time in the Gulf. Dot was a mother of twin girls, talkative, cheerful, weight-conscious (they both were), an energetic shopper, ready to lead expeditions to American brand names. Dick and Dot were our comic book couple. Once their stories were told, they were content to make background noises, to laugh easily and pleasantly, rewarding us for the allowances we made."I'm good at faces, bad at names," she said to the Greek.I watched Lindsay talk with Charles Maitland. Other voices at my ear, an old man strumming a guitar near the wine casks. She was the youngest of us by a wide margin. Light hair worn long, light blue eyes, hands crossed on the table. A mood of calm, a sun-bather's marginal apartness. She had a broad face, conspicuously American, and of a type, the still hopeful outer suburbs, the face in the train window, unadorned, flushed by some outdoor task.Charles said something that made her laugh.This clear sound in the music and dense talk called up the voices of women passing below my terrace at night. How is it possible that one syllable of laughter, a spray in the dark, could tell me a woman was American? This sound is exact, minutely clear and telling, and I'd hear it rise through the cypresses across the street, Americans, walking, single file along the high wall, lost tourists, students, expatriates."Travel is a kind of fatalism," Charles was telling her. "At my age, I'm beginning to sense the menace ahead. I'm going to die soon, goes the refrain, so I'd better see the bloody sights. This is why I don't travel except on business.”"You've lived everywhere.”"Living is different. One doesn't gather up sights in quite the same way. There's no compiling of sights. I think it's when people get old they begin to compile. They not only visit pyramids, they try to build a pyramid out of the sights of the world.”"Travel as tomb-building," I said."He listens in. The worst kind of dinner companion. Chooses his moments." He made a fist around his cigarette. "Living is different, you see. We were saving the sights for our old age. But now the whole idea of travel begins to reek of death. I have nightmares about busloads of rotting corpses.”"Stop," she said."Guidebooks and sturdy shoes. I don't want to give in.”"But you're not old.”"My lungs are shot. More wine," he said."I wish I could see a merry twinkle in your eyes. Then I'd know you were kidding.”"My eyes are shot too.”Lindsay was in some ways the stabilizing center of our lives together, our lives as dinner companions, people forced by circumstance to get along. In a way, despite her age, it was logical.She was the one most recently removed from a fixed life. It said something about the world of corporate transients that we saw her as a force for equilibrium. No doubt she gave David the latitude he needed. She would enjoy his moments of dangerous fun and be uncritical of the corollary broodings.Second wives. I wondered if there was a sense in which they felt they'd been preparing for this all along. Waiting to put the gift to use, the knack for solving difficult men. And I wondered if some men tore through first marriages believing this was the only way to arrive at the settled peace that a younger woman held in her flawless hands, knowing he'd appear one day, a slurry of blood and axle grease. To women, these men must have the glamour of a wrecked Ferrari. I could see how David would be one of these. I envied him this reassuring woman, at the same time not forgetting how much I valued the depth of Kathryn's resolve, her rigorous choices and fixed beliefs. This is the natural state.The German, named Stahl, was talking to me about refrigeration systems. Below us a slack tide washed against the narrow beach. A waiter brought melon, whitish green with spotted yellow rind. These mass dinners had shifting patterns, directional changes of conversation, and I found myself involved in an intricate cross-cut talk with the German, to my right, on air cooling, and with David Keller and Dick Borden, at the other end and other side of the table, on famous movie cowboys and the names of their horses. David was going to Beirut the next day. Charles was going to Ankara. Ann was going to Nairobi to visit her sister. Stahl was going to Frankfurt. Dick was going to Muscat, Dubai and Riyadh.Two children ran through the room, the guitarist started singing. At the far edge of auditory range, through all the cross-talk, I heard Ann Maitland, in conversation with this man Eliades, switch briefly from English to Greek. A phrase or short sentence, that was all, and she probably had no motive except to clarify or emphasize a point. But it seemed an intimacy, the way her voice softly closed around this fragment, it seemed a contact of some private kind. How strange, that a few words in a foreign language (the local language, spoken at surrounding tables) could float through to me, suggesting the nature of a confidence, making the other dialogue seem so much random noise. Ann was probably a dozen years older than he was. Attractive, bantering, sometimes unsure of things, drawn taut, with a self-mocking imperial way about her and beautiful sorry eyes. Did I begrudge her a sentence in Greek? About Eliades I knew nothing, not even which one of us he was connected to, or in what way. He'd arrived late, making the customary remark about normal time and Greek time."Topper," Dick Borden said. "That was Hopalong Cassidy's horse.”David said, "Hopalong Cassidy? I'm talking about cowboys, man. Guys who got down there in the shit and the muck. Guys with broken-down rummy sidekicks.”"Hoppy had a sidekick. He chewed tobacky.”David got up to find the toilet, taking a handful of black grapes with him. I drew Charles into the colloquy with the German, deftly, and then went around the table to David's chair, sitting across from Ann and Eliades. He had bitten into a peach and was smelling the pit-streaked flesh. I think I smiled, recognizing my own mannerism. These peaches were a baffling delight, certain ones, producing the kind of sense pleasure that's so unexpectedly deep it seems to need another context. Ordinary things aren't supposed to be this gratifying. Nothing about the exterior of the peach tells you it will be so lush, moist and aromatic, juices running along your gums, or so subtly colored inside, a pink-veined golden bloom. I tried to discuss this with the faces across the table."But I think pleasure is not easy to repeat," Eliades said. "Tomorrow you will eat a peach from the same basket and be disappointed. Then you will wonder if you were mistaken. A peach, a cigarette. I enjoy one cigarette out of a thousand. Still I keep smoking. I think pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing. I keep smoking to find this moment. Maybe I will die trying.”Possibly it was his appearance that gave these remarks the importance of a world view. His wild beard covered most of his face. It started just below the eyes. He seemed to be bleeding this coarse black hair. His shoulders curved forward as he spoke and he rocked slightly at the front edge of the chair. He wore a tan suit and pastel tie, an outfit at odds with the large fierce head, the rough surface he carried.I tried to pursue the notion that some pleasures overflow the conditions attending them. Maybe I was a little drunk.Ann said, "Let's not have metaphysics this evening. I'm a plain girl from a mill town.”"There is always politics," Eliades said.He was looking at me with a humorous expression. I thought I read a tactful challenge there. If the subject was too delicate, he seemed to be saying, I might honorably go back to cowboys."A Greek word, of course. Politics.”"Do you know Greek?" he said."I'm having a hard time learning. I've felt at a constant disadvantage since my first day in this part of the world. I've felt stupid in fact. How is it so many people know three, four, five languages?”"That is politics too," he said, and his teeth showed yellowish in the mass of hair. "The politics of occupation, the politics of dispersal, the politics of resettlement, the politics of military bases.”Wind shook the bamboo canopy and blew paper napkins across the floor. Dick Borden, at the head of the table, to my left, talked across me to his wife, who was on my immediate right, about getting on home to relieve the sitter. Lindsay brushed past my chair. Someone joined the old guitarist in his song, a man, dark and serious, turning in his chair to face the musician."For a long time," Dot said to the German, "we didn't know our exact address. Postal code, district, we didn't know these things." She turned to Eliades. "And our telephone number wasn't the number on our telephone. We didn't know how to find out our real number. But I told you this, didn't I, at that thing at the Hilton?”The peach pit sat on Eliades' plate. He leaned forward to extend a cigarette from his pack of Old Navy. When I smiled no, he offered the pack down one side of the table, up the other. Ann was talking to Charles. Was this the point in the evening at which husbands and wives find each other again, suppressing yawns, making eye contact through the smoke? Time to go, time to resume our murky shapes. The public self is weary of its gleam."It is very interesting," Eliades was telling me, "how Americans learn geography and world history as their interests are damaged in one country after another. This is interesting.”Would I leap to my country's defense?"They learn comparative religion, economics of the Third World, the politics of oil, the politics of race and hunger.”"Politics again.”"Yes, always politics. There is no place to hide.”He was smiling politely.Ann said, "Do you need a ride, Andreas? We're about to leave, I think.”"I have my car, thank you.”Charles was trying to signal the waiter."I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves. TV. Look, this is Iran, this is Iraq. Let us pronounce the word correctly. E-ron. E-ronians. This is a Sunni, this is a Shi'ite. Very good. Next year we do the Philippine Islands, okay?”"You know American TV?”"Three years," he said. "All countries where the U.S. has strong interests stand in line to undergo a terrible crisis so that at last the Americans will see them. This is very touching.”"Beware," Ann said. "He is leading up to something.”"I know what he's leading up to. When he says two countries fight, I understand him to mean the Greeks and the Turks. He is leading up to poor little Greece and how we've abused her. Turkey, Cyprus, the CIA, U.S. military bases. He slipped in military bases a while back. I've been wary ever since.”His smile broadened, a little wolfish now."This is interesting, how a U.S. bank based in Athens can lend money to Turkey. I like this very much. Okay, they are the southeast flank and there are U.S. bases there and the Americans want to spy on the Russians, okay. Lift the embargo, give them enormous foreign aid. This is Washington. Then you also lend them enormous sums privately, if it is possible to call a bank the size of yours a private institution. You approve loans from your headquarters in the middle of Athens. But the documentation is done in New York and London. Why is this, because of sensitivity to the feelings of Greeks? No, it is because the Turks will be insulted if the agreements are signed on Greek soil. How much face could a Turk bring to such a meeting? This is considerate, I think. This is very understanding." His shoulders curved forward, head hanging over the table. "You structure the loan and when they can't pay the money, what happens? I will tell you. You have a meeting in Switzerland and you restructure. Athens gives to Ankara. I like this. This is interesting to me.”"Oh dear," Ann said. "I think you have the wrong man, Andreas. This is not David Keller. You want David. He's the banker.”"I am James. The risk analyst.”Eliades sat back in his chair, arms spread wide in a request for pardon. It wasn't much of an offense, the facts being what they were, but the small error had robbed his moral force of its effectiveness. A boy was clearing the table. Charles leaned my way to collect some money."Need a ride?" he said."Came with David.”"That doesn't answer my question.”"Where is the cowboy?”Eliades poured the last of the wine into my glass. His fingers were coppery with nicotine. For the first time all night he stopped his determined observing. Names, faces, strands of conversation. The old man sang alone, a cat walked the rail above the beach."What is a risk analyst?”"Politics," I said. "Very definitely.”"I am glad.”Dick and Dot offered to take the German to his hotel. Charles moved next to me while he waited for the change to come. The man who made change, the most important job in the country judging by the look of such men, sat at a desk full of papers, with a hand calculator and a metal box for money in front of him, and he wore a tie and jacket and knitted V-neck sweater, and had graying hair cropped close and shadowy jowls, and was wide, thick and despotic, the only stationary presence in that part of the room, where waiters and other family members moved back and forth.Eliades walked as far as the parking area with the departing people. I heard the Bordens laughing out there. The waiters wore tight white shirts with the edges of their short sleeves folded back. There were three of us at the table now."Not a bad evening," Ann said. "As these things go.”"What do you mean?”"Not a bad evening.”"How do these things go?" Charles said."They simply go.”"What, they shoot out toward infinity?”"I suppose they do in a sense. James would know.”"No French tonight to tell us how shifty the Lebanese are," he said. "No Lebanese to tell us how the Saudis pick their feet in business meetings. No one to say about Syrians from Aleppo, 'Count your fingers after you shake hands with them.'‘"No one from the Midlands selling smoke alarms.”"Yes, remember Ruddle.”"His name was Wood.”"The fellow with the bad eye. The eye that drifted.”"His name was Wood," she said."Why would I think Ruddle?”"You're tired, I suppose.”"What does fatigue have to do with the name Ruddle?”Charles coughed into the hand that was curled around his cigarette."What about you?" he asked her. "Tired?”"Not very. A little.”"When are you off?”"A seven o'clock flight actually.”"That's mad.”"Isn't it insane? I'll have to be out the door at five.”"But that's mad," he said without conviction."No matter. I sleep on planes.”"Yes, you do, don't you?”"What do you mean?" she said."By what?”"James heard. A note of accusation. Are people who sleep on planes less mentally alert? More in touch with our primitive nature perhaps? How easily we descend. Is this what you're saying?”"Christ, what energy.”There was a long moment in which we seemed to be listening to ourselves breathe. Ann toyed absently with the remaining utensils, a knife and spoon. Then she stopped."Does anyone know why we're sitting here?" she said."That gangster is counting out change.”As Eliades headed back, there was a stir at a far table, people talking in loud voices, laughing, someone getting up to point. Others looked over the rail. I watched Andreas walk over there and look down to the beach. He motioned us over.A woman came out of the sea, tawny hair clinging to her shoulders and face. It was Lindsay in her sea-jade summer dress, twisted slightly at the hips, sticking wet. Her laughter rang among our voices, clear as bell metal, precisely shaped. Using both hands she scooped hair from the sides of her face, head tilted back. Ten yards behind was David, bent over, retching in knee-deep water.Happy babble from the taverna.He emerged now, still in his blazer and Italian pants, his sleek black slip-ons, and Lindsay laughed again, watching him walk sopping in small circles, making those coarse noises. He moved heavily, like a plaster-cast man, arms held out from his body, legs well apart. A waiter aimed a light nearly straight down, helping Lindsay find her shoes, and she stopped laughing long enough to call efbaristó, merci, thank you, and the sound of her voice set her laughing again. She stepped into the shoes, her body glistening a little, beginning to tremble. David was standing nearly upright now, limbs still spread wide. Only his head was lowered, as though he'd decided to study the sandy-wet shoes for an explanation. He was coughing hoarsely and Lindsay turned to point him toward a stone path. People started returning to their tables.David called up, "The water's no good to drink.”"Oceans ordinarily aren't," Charles said."Well I'm just advising people.”"Did you swim or wade?" Ann said."We swam out to the float but there is no float.”"That's a different beach. You want the one just south of here.”"That's what Lindsay said.”We went back to the table as they started climbing the path through the trees. Charles got his change, he and Ann said goodnight. Eliades disappeared into the kitchen, coming back a moment later with four glasses of brandy clustered in his hands."The owner," he said. "Private stock.”I thought of Kathryn, who liked a fingerbreadth of Metaxa on raw nights, sitting up in bed to read and sip, her mouth warm with it, later, in the dark. Prophetic significance. All those northern nights lapped in snow, the world shocked white under Polaris, our hushed love smelling of Greek booze."Tell me, Andreas, what were you doing in the States?”"Refrigeration systems.”"Cheers," I said."Cheers.”Swallowing slowly."You're connected with the German fellow then.”"Yes, Stahl.”"And Stahl is here to do business with Dick Borden?”"No, with Hardeman.”"Who is Hardeman?”"He is the banker's friend. I thought your friend.”"David's friend.”"But he didn't come. We think his flight was delayed. A sandstorm in Cairo.”Lindsay stood ten feet away, shyly, as though we might send her from the room. She'd been wringing out the hem of her dress and the fabric was full of spiral twists. Andreas extended a glass and she came forward, followed by a boy with a mop."This is so nice. Thank you. Cheers.”"Where's David?" I said."He's in the men's room, freshening up.”This set her off again, laughing. She barely got the sentence out before her face went tight with glee. I put my jacket around her shoulders. She sat there rigid with laughter, her face looking synthetic, an object under measured stress."Freshening up," she said again, and sat there shivering, crying with laughter.In time she began to settle down, whispering her thanks for the brandy, drawing the jacket more closely around her, whispering her thanks for the jacket. A mood of soft withdrawal. She was too self-conscious to return the pampering smiles of people at other tables."I don't have to ask if you like to swim," Andreas said."I don't think what we did was really a swim. I don't know what to call it.”"A David Keller," I said."Right, it was a Keller. But I went willingly.”"Have you been to the islands?" he said."Only the one-day tour," she whispered. "I'm waiting for my curtains.”"That's a line she uses," I told Andreas. "No one knows what it means.”"We're still moving in really. This is all new to me. I'm only learning to count. The numbers are fun. Do you know the alphabet, James?”"Yes, and I can tie my own shoes.”"Andreas, is it absolutely necessary to know verbs? Must we know verbs?”"I think it will help," he said. "You seem to be very active.”Both men were singing again. The customer, a man with dark hair and a full mustache, was looking directly at the guitarist, who stood against the wine casks, one foot up on a chair, head slightly tilted toward his bent left hand. The song gathered force, a spirited lament. Its tone evoked inevitable things. Time was passing, love was fading, grief was deep and total. As with people in conversation, these men appeared to go beyond the soulful routine woe of the lyrics. Their subjects were memory and tragic narrative and men who put their voices to song. The dark man was intense, his eyes still fixed on the old musician, never wavering. He was charged with feeling. His eyes were bright with it. The song called up a luminous fervor and he seemed to rise slightly in the chair. The men were twenty feet apart, voices shading into each other. The guitarist looked up then, a spare figure with gray stubble, someone's second cousin, the man we see asleep at corner tables all through the islands. For the rest of the song they looked at each other, strangers, to something beyond. A blood recollection, a shared past. I didn't know.

I sat with David on his terrace above the National Gardens, across from the Olympic Stadium, looking toward the Acropolis. Pentelic marble old and new. The prime minister lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the next building."They pay some heavyish coin.”He was talking about his more difficult postings. He sat in his damp clothes, minus the shoes and blazer, drinking beer. He was a fairly large man, just beginning to flesh out, slow-moving in a vaguely dangerous way.Noise in short bursts issued from motorcycles crossing the dark city. Lindsay was asleep."The gamier the place, or the more ticklish politically, or the more sand dunes per square mile, obviously they sweeten the pot, our New York masters. The dunes in the Empty Quarter reach eight, nine hundred feet. I flew over with a guy from Aramco. Forget it.”In Jeddah the fruit bats swooped out of the night to take water from his pool, drinking in full flight. His wife, the first, came out of the house one day to find three baboons pounding on the hood and roof of their car.In Tehran, between wives, he invented the name Chain Day. This was the tenth day of Muharram, the period of mourning and self-flagellation. As hundreds of thousands of people marched toward the Shahyad monument, some of them wearing funeral shrouds, striking themselves with steel bars and knife blades affixed to chains, David was hosting a Chain Day party at his house in North Tehran, an area sealed off from the marchers by troops and tank barricades. The partygoers could hear the chanting mobs but whether they were chanting "Death to the shah" or "God is great," and whether it mattered, no one knew for sure. The thing he feared in Tehran was traffic. The apocalyptic inching pack-ice growl of four miles of cars. The drivers' free-form ways. Cars kept coming at him in reverse. He was always finding himself driving down a narrow street with a car coming toward him backwards. The driver expected him to move, or ascend, or vanish. Eventually he saw what was so fearful about this, a thing so simple he hadn't been able to isolate it from the larger marvel of a city full of cars going backwards. They did not reduce speed when driving in reverse. To David Keller, between wives, this seemed an interesting thing. There was a cosmology here, a rich structure of some kind, a theorem in particle physics. Reverse and forward were interchangeable. And why not, what was the difference really? A moving vehicle is no different moving backwards than it is moving forwards, especially when the driver regards the whole arrangement as if he were on foot, able to touch, to bump, to brush his way past vague obstacles in the street. This was the second revelation of David's stay in Tehran. People drove as if they were walking. They veered idiosyncratically, these fellows with their army surplus field jackets and their interesting sense of space.In Istanbul, earlier, he used to tell people he wanted to get Mainland New York to approve purchase of a jeep-mounted recoilless rifle, plus jeep, to get him to and from the rep office. More seriously he talked about armoring his car. "Armoring your car," he told me, "is known as a major expenditure proposal. Forty thousand dollars. Allowing your driver to carry a gun is known as a small arms shipment to the Marxist-Leninist Armed Propaganda Squad. Not that the driver would give them the piece. They'd take it after they blew you both away with antitank grenades and AK-47s.”This summer, the summer in which we sat on his broad terrace, was the period after the shah left Iran, before the hostages were taken, before the Grand Mosque and Afghanistan. The price of oil was an index to the Western world's anxiety. It provided a figure, $24 a barrel, say, to measure against the figure of the month before or the year before. It was a handy way to refer to our complex involvements. It told us how bad we felt at a given time."How's Tap doing?”"The kid writes novels, he eats octopus.”"Good. That's great.”"How are yours? Where are they living?”"Michigan. They're doing fine. They love it. They swim. “"What's your first wife's name?”"Grace," he said. "That's a first wife's name, isn't it?”"Does Lindsay talk about having kids?”"Shit, Lindsay'll do anything. She's crazy. Did she tell you she found a job? Great break, she's been getting antsy for something to do. She'll teach English at one of these language schools. It's an escape from the bank wives and their get-togethers.”"I haven't noticed you two hosting any dinner parties for Mainland people here on business. Or evacuees from disturbed areas. You're the credit head, aren't you?”"Disturbed areas. That's what we call them all right. Like snow flurries on a weather map. Dinner parties in this division are famous for eyewitness accounts of very large groups of people marching on embassies and banks. Also famous for unrelenting politeness. All the ethnic groups and religious subgroups. Can you seat a Druze next to a Maronite? They're all more or less multinationalized but who knows what lies underneath? We have a Sikh who carries the mandatory sect knife somewhere on his person. Sometimes I'm careful what I say without knowing precisely why. Grace used to handle things when we were in Beirut and Jeddah and Istanbul. She handled things beautifully in fact. Lindsay I don't think would be all that adept. I think she'd stand there laughing.”"What about the Americans?”"Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends. That swim made me hungry.”David drank slowly but steadily whenever possible. In the course of a long Sunday lunch on the eastern shore or a night almost anywhere, his voice would begin to rumble and drone, grow friendlier, taking on paternal tones, and in his large blond face a ruined child would appear, barely discernible in the slack flesh, a watcher, distant and contrite."Our office in Monrovia has a guy on the payroll whose job is catching snakes. That's all he does. He goes to employees' houses on a regular basis, through the yard, the garden, the hedges, catching snakes.”"What's he called officially?”"The snake catcher.”"That's remarkably direct," I said."They couldn't come up with a buzz word for snake, it seems.”This was the summer before crowds attacked the U.S. embassies in Islamabad and Tripoli, before the assassinations of American technicians in Turkey, before Liberia, the executions on the beach, the stoning of dead bodies, the evacuation of personnel from the Mainland Bank."Does Kathryn ever get to Athens?”"No.”"I meet my kids in New York," he said."That's easier than going to the island.”"We eat banana splits in the hotel room. They cost eight dollars each.”"Did Grace ever attack you physically?”"She's not a physical person, Grace.”"Ever hit her? I'm serious.”"No. Ever hit Kathryn?”"We've scuffled. No clean blows. She took a run at me once with a kitchen thing.”"What for?”"She found out I went to bed with a friend of hers. It led to words.”"The friend made sure she found out?”"She let on, somehow. She sent signals.”"So you nearly got spiked with an ice pick.”"It was just a potato peeler. What annoyed the friend was my perceived indifference. It was one of those situations. You find yourself in a situation. Alone with Antoinette. The two of you have felt the usual secret lustings. The normal healthy subatomic lustful vibrations. These are feelings that get acted on when man and wife split up. Suddenly there's an Antoinette, destiny in her eyes. But Kathryn and I hadn't split up. We hadn't done anything. The situation just arose. The combination of circumstances.”"What situation? Paint a picture.”"Never mind a picture.”"Her apartment?”"Her house. Diagonally across the park from ours.”"Summer, winter?”"Winter.”"The plant-filled parlor room. The glass of wine.”"Something like that.”"The intimate talk," he said."Yes.”"Always the intimate talk. This woman is divorced, right?”"Yes.”"The sadness," he said."There was sadness, yes. But it had nothing to do with her divorce. She'd just lost her job. The CBC. They fired her.”"The sadness.”"All right the sadness.”"The longing.”"Yes, there was longing.”"The need," he said."Yes.”"In the starry night, in the parlor room, sipping dry white wine.”"It was a good job. She was upset.”" 'Comfort me, comfort me.'‘"Anyway I gave the impression of wavering. I must have drawn back. This was inexcusable, of course. I hesitated, I showed uncertainty. We did the thing finally. We couldn't end our friendship, commit our crime, without finishing what we'd started. So we did the thing. We eked out a fuck. What an idiot I was. Antoinette got her sweet revenge.”"She let on.”"She let on. And in letting on she didn't fail to communicate this half-heartedness of mine. I don't know how she did this without being direct, which I gather she wasn't. I suppose in fables and parables, in allegories. The language of women and children. This is what got Kathryn really furious, I think. Not just the sex, the friend. The way I went about it. I committed a crime against the earth. That's what made her want to carve my ribs.”"Did it clear the air? This knife fight?”"Beginning of the end.”"We married young," he said. "We didn't know anything. You know the story. Little or no experience. Grace said I was the first, more or less the first, really the first, the first in any important way.”We laughed."I knew our marriage was shot to hell when we started watching TV in different rooms," he said. "If her sound was up loud enough, I could hear her change channels in there. When she went to the same channel I was watching, I switched channels myself. I couldn't bear watching the same stuff she was watching. I believe this is called estrangement.”"You're not going to become a stereotype, are you?”"What do you mean?”"It's bad enough you have a new young wife. You don't want to be thought of as one of these men with an old wife and old kids back in the States. These are the wives who weren't dynamic enough to keep up with men like you in the great surge of your multinational career. The old wives and old kids are gray and stooped, sitting in front of TV sets in the suburbs. The wives have head colds all the time. The old dogs are listless on the patios.”"At least my new young wife isn't a fantasy wife. A stewardess or model. You know Hardeman? His second wife is a former ball girl for the Atlanta Braves. She used to sit along the left-field line waiting for foul balls. I think she found one in Hardeman.”David was casual about most bank matters. He told me what the bank was doing in Turkey and gave me telexes and other paper that detailed loan proposals. These documents impressed Rowser, particularly the ones marked confidential in block letters. I guess David felt there was little or no danger in giving this particular classified material to a friend. We were serving the same broad ends."Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing in some of these places. I can't get the Empty Quarter out of my mind. We flew right over the dunes, man, nothing but sand, a quarter of a million square miles. A planet of sand. Sand mountains, sand plains and valleys. Sand weather, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty degrees, and I can't imagine what it's like when the wind's blowing. I tried to convince myself it was beautiful. The desert, you know. The vast sweep. But it scared me. This Aramco guy told me he can stand on the airstrip they have out there and he can hear the blood flowing in his body. Is it the silence or the heat that makes this possible? Or both? Hear the blood.”"What were you doing flying over this place?”"Oil, boy. What else? Big field. We're financing some construction.”"You know what Maitland says.”"What does he say?”"Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.”David went in to get me a beer and another for himself. I was wide awake and feeling hungry. A faint light was visible in the sky, the Parthenon emerging, two-dimensional, a soft but structured image. I followed him to the kitchen and we started eating whatever was lying loose, mainly pastry and fruit. Lindsay came in to complain about the noise. She wore a nightgown with a ruffled hem and we smiled when we saw her.

In these early hours the sky seems very near street level. The street extends from eastern sky to western. It's always a surprise, entering the boulevard by first light when there's no traffic, being able to see things as unconnected, the embassy mansions with their period detail, objects coming out of the gloom, mulberry trees and kiosks, and to make out the contours of the street itself, a place of clear limits, we see, with its own form and meaning, appearing in the stillness and marine light to be almost a rolling field, a broad path to the mountains. Traffic must be a stream that binds things to some denser perspective.The boulevard was empty only momentarily. A bus moved past, drowned faces pressed against the windows, and then the little cars. Four abreast they came, out of the concrete hollows to the west, the first anxious wave of the day.The way home was uphill into narrower streets, severely graded toward the pine woods and gray rock of Lycabettus. I stood by the bed in my pajamas, feeling vaguely unstuck, my habits no longer bound to hers. The tides and easements of custom. Our book of days. The canaries on the back balconies were singing, already women were beating rugs, and water fell to the courtyard from rows of potted plants, ringing on the bright stone.That was my day.