The Names

9

I made my way through the mud streets, the same complicated solitude. I could almost see myself, glowing in borrowed light. A voice, my own but outside me, speaking something other than words, commented somehow on the action.I was made of denim and sheepskin. My shoes were waterproof, my gloves lined with wool.This is the way things happen. I walk into a café in a wind-beaten town and they are right there even if I don't know it at the time. And now I duck under a stone beam on a cold smoky morning in the towered hamlet where no one (almost no one) lives and he is sitting on a blue crate, a crate for soda bottles, and there is one for me as well, upended. A fire is going, twigs mostly, and he lifts his feet off the dirt floor, putting them close to the flames, and it is nothing, a talk in a basement room with a medium-sized man who has a cold. But how else would it be? What did I expect? The only true surprise is that I am in the scene. It ought to be someone else sitting here, a man who has seen himself plain."What do we have?" he said. "First we have a film director and now we have a writer. This is not so strange really.”"Frank thinks I want to write about him.”"About him or about us?”"I'm a friend of Owen Brademas. That's all. I know Owen. We've talked many times.”"A man who knows languages. A calm man, very humane, I think. He has a wide and tolerant understanding, a capacity for civilized thought. He is not hurried, he is not grasping for satisfactions. This is what it means to know languages.”He had a long face, a receding hairline, pale freckles high on his forehead. Small hands. This reassured me in some mysterious way, the size of his hands. His face was impassive. He wore a black tunic unraveling at the right shoulder. I studied, I took mental notes."I thought you would want to speak Greek," I said. "Or whatever the language of a particular place.”"We are no longer in a place. We are a little disorganized. Soon it will be all right again. Also this business with Frank Volterra is unique. What do we have? A situation we have not had before. So we are attempting to adjust.”"Are the others interested? Will they agree to be part of a film?”"There are problems. It is a question of our larger purpose. We must consider many things. One thing is whether we are such filmic material as Frank Volterra believes. Maybe we are not. He lacks a complete understanding.”"Owen Brademas had this understanding.”"Have you?" he said."If we are talking about a solvable thing, a riddle or puzzle, then I have solved it, yes.”"What is your solution?”"The letters match," I said. "Name, place-name.”He was leaning back, balanced, hands clasped on his knees, his feet still dangling over the flames. I crouched forward, wanting to feel the heat on my face. He didn't change expression, although it's possible to say that my remark, my reply, prompted him to renew his stoic mien, to inhabit it more fully. I'd made him aware of the look on his face."Do we seem improbable to you?”"No," I said."I wonder why this is.”"I don't know.”"We ought to seem improbable. What do you think?”"I'm not sure. I don't know.”"Something in our method finds a home in your unconscious mind. A recognition. This curious recognition is not subject to conscious scrutiny. Our program evokes something that you seem to understand and find familiar, something you cannot analyze. We are working at a preverbal level, although we use words, of course, we use them all the time. This is a mystery.”His eyes were dim, blood-flecked. He had a two-day stubble, reddish blond, darker than the hair on his head. His fingernails were yellowish and thick."In one sense we barely exist," he said. "It is a difficult life. There are many setbacks. The cells lose touch with each other. Differences arise of theory and of practice. For months nothing happens. We lose purpose, get sick. Some have died, some have wandered off. Who are we, what are we doing here? There is not even a threat of the police to give us a criminal identity. No one knows we exist. No one is looking for us.”He stopped briefly in order to cough."But in another sense we have a permanent bond. How could it be otherwise? We have in common that first experience, among others, that experience of recognition, of knowing this program reaches something in us, of knowing we all wanted at once to be part of it. When I first heard of this, before I became a member, it was in Tabriz, eight years ago. People in a hotel talked of a cult murder somewhere in the area. Much later, I cannot tell you how, I learned what the elements were. Immediately it reached me, something about the nature of the final act. It seemed right to me. Extreme, insane, whatever you wish to call it in words. Numbers behave, words do not. I knew it was right. Inevitable and perfect and right.”"But why?”"The letters matched.”"But to kill?”"Nothing less," he said. "It had to be that. I knew at once it was right. I cannot describe how fully and deeply it reached me. Not as an answer, not as a question. Something else totally. Some terrible and definitive thing. I knew it was right. It had to be. Shatter his skull, kill him, smash his brains.”"Because the letters matched.”"I believe you see it, how nothing else would suffice. It had to be this one thing, done with our hands, in direct contact. Nothing else, nothing less. You do see that it's correct. You see the rightness of it. You know it intuitively. The whole program leads up to this. Only a death.”He put his feet on the ground in order to cough, head down, hands covering his face. When he was finished he leaned back again, balancing, his feet in the air once more. I reached to the side for more twigs, dropped them on the fire. We sat that way in silence for a while. Andahl leaning well back, his feet raised. Axton crouched forward, looking into the fire."We walked through these mountains from north to south. When we came into the Mani we knew we would stay. We are set back but only for a time. What is here. This is the strength of the Mani. It does not suggest things to us. No gods, no history. The rest of the Peloponnese is full of associations. The Deep Mani, no. Only what is here. The rocks, the towers. A dead silence. A place where it is possible for men to stop making history. We are inventing a way out.”He lowered himself again, coughed into his armpit. He was wearing a strange pair of suede boots trimmed on the outside with some fleecy synthetic-women's boots, I thought. His pants were loose and brown, drawn in at the ankles."The large stone outside this village," I said. "Why were those words painted there?”"Someone, leaving, painted the words.”"When you found them, you painted them over, made them illegible.”"We are not painters. It was not a good painting.”"Why did he do it?”"There are many setbacks. We lose purpose, get sick. Some people die, some wander off. There are differences in meaning, differences in words. But know this. Madness has a structure. We might say madness is all structure. We might say structure is inherent in madness. There is not the one without the other.”He coughed into his armpit."No one has to stay. There are no chains or gates. More die than leave. We are here to carry out the pattern. A small patient task. You have the word in English. Abecedarian. This is what we are.”"I don't know the word.”"Learners of the alphabet. Beginners.”"And how did you begin, how did the cult begin?”"This can wait for another time. We will talk again if the occasion permits.”Through the rest of the conversation I found myself eliminating contractions from my speech. Not to ridicule or mimic Andahl. It was something of a surrender to the dominance these complete words seemed to possess, their stronger formulation, spoken aloud."Does the cult have a name?”"Yes.”"Can you tell me what it is?”"No, impossible. Nameforms are an important element in our program, as you know. What do we have? Names, letters, sounds, derivations, transliterations. We approach nameforms warily. Such secret power. When the name is itself secret, the power and influence are magnified. A secret name is a way of escaping the world. It is an opening into the self.”From somewhere under his tunic he took a maroon scarf and wrapped it around his head. I took this to mean we were coming to an end."What we have not talked about is the experience of killing," he said. "How it confirms the early sense of recognition, the perception that the program must end this way. It confirms everything. It tells us how deep we are in." He was watching me through this. "We have not talked about the sound, the hammers, a damp noise, the way she crumpled, how soft it was. We have not talked about the way she crumpled or how we kept hitting, Emmerich sobbing, the word-building German, he could only groan and sob. Or how long it took, we have not talked about this. Or how we hit harder because we could not stand the sound, the damp sound of the hammers on her face and head. How Emmerich used the cleft end of the hammerhead. Anything to change the sound. He gouged, you know? We were hysterical. It was a frenzy but not of blood. A frenzy of knowing, of terrible confirmation. Yes, we are here, we are actually killing, we are doing it. It was beyond any horror but this was precisely what we had always seen and known. We had our proof. How right we were to tremble when we first learned the program. We have not talked about the way she crumpled or how we knelt over her, having found her weeks before, having determined her condition, having tracked her, having waited in the dust, in the silences, the burning sun, watching her drag her leg, watching her approach the place, the name, the place, all this, having matched the Greek letters, or how she crumpled, only stunned at first, a single blow, or how we knelt over her with the hammers, smashing, beating in her head, or how he gouged with the cleft end, pulling out brains, or the sight of it. We have not talked about the sight of it, how flesh gives up its bloom and vigor, how functions gradually cease, how we could seem to ourselves to be causing functions to end, one after the other, metabolism, response to stimuli, actually sensing these progressive endings in the way she sank. Or how little blood, not at all what we expected, the blood. We looked at each other, amazed at this paucity of blood. It made us feel we had missed a step along the way.”He went outside to cough. He was out there for some time, hawking and spitting. It made me think of the night I'd vomited pigeon swill in that alley in Jerusalem, an episode I now saw as a clear separation, a space between ways of existing. No wonder I'd puked. What haste my system made to reject the whole business, what an eager spew, burbling out like some chemical death. I'd leaned against the wall in a cold sweat, head bent, hearing Volterra laugh."Has this been of help to you?" Andahl said, coming back in, teary-eyed from his exertions."Of help?”"This talk we have had. Has it given you a start? What do you think? Is there an interest, is there something here? If Frank Volterra gains a better understanding, if he learns what the method is, he may decide it is not a thing that adapts well to film. It is not a film. It is a book.”"I see. You are helping me toward the writing of a book.”"You are a writer.”"If you lose one man, you have another in reserve.”"There is no question of losing," he said. "The only question is how we will decide in the end.”"But why are you interested, either way, either form?”"In one sense we barely exist. There are many setbacks. People die, they go out one day and disappear. Differences arise. For months nothing happens. The cells lose touch with each other. No one knows we are here. I talked to the others about a film. I myself argued for a film. Now I see there is more to discuss. We are still talking. There is bitter opposition. I must tell you that. We are talking about the value of an external object. Not a cult document but a thing outside the cult. An interface with the world. What is a book? What is the nature of a book? Why does it have the shape it has? How does the hand interact with the eyes when someone reads a book? A book throws a shadow, a film is a shadow. We are trying to define things.”"You want an external object. I am trying to understand.”"It will outlast us. This is the argument I make to them. Something to outlast us. Something to contain the pattern. We barely exist. No one will know it when we die away. What do you think, Axstone?”I studied him for further details, a mark on the back of the hand, a way of standing, although I had no reason to collect such incidentals beyond an uncertain wish to return a truth to the landscape itself, the name-haunted place.It was warmer now. I followed him out of the village, hurrying to keep up. A woman, the old one, appeared through an archway on the slope below us, motionless among goats browsing in the thistle-heads, a thousand feet above the sea.Frank's car was parked behind mine. He had a black Mazda bearing on its windshield the checkered decal that showed it was rented. Andahl got in and they drove away.

By noon I was checked out, sitting in my car outside the hotel. A merchant ship lay at anchor. Del sat next to me, cleaning the lens of a still camera with a blow-brush. Pieces of equipment were on the floor, above the dashboard, in the open glove compartment. We were talking about Frank's movies, the two features. A man's hat came sailing across the street."I missed the second one," I said. "I saw the first when we were living on an island in Lake Champlain. You cross the lake on a little ferry, a canal barge, that runs by a cable strung from one bank to the other.”"Don't let him know.”"What do you mean?”"He'll get upset," she said."That I missed one of his movies? He wouldn't care. Why would he care?”"He'll get upset. He's serious about things like that. He expects things from friends and he can't understand, it's beyond belief to him that a friend would not do anything, go anywhere, rob and steal, to see one of his films. He'd do it for them, he expects them to do it for him. He may be hard to get along with at times, especially when his brain is raging, like right now, he's the incredible deadly manta ray, the killer of the deep, but you know he'd do anything for you, without exception. It's all part of the same thing.”"I watched TV, Kathryn went to the movies. That was our private metaphor.”"Frank is loyal," she said. "He's serious about that. He's got a side people don't know. He more or less literally saved my life. He has that side. I wouldn't call it protective exactly. It's a little deeper. He wanted to show me I could be better than I was. It's partly because he thought the way I was living was a form of self-indulgence, which is something he hates. But he also wanted to get me out of there. I was hanging around with people on the fringes. They were people with borrowed vans. Everybody had a borrowed van or knew where to get one. I was always crossing a bridge in someone's borrowed van. I lived with a van painter for a while. We lived in his van. He painted mystical designs on vans and campers. He was after a total design environment, he used to say. Your house, your van, your garage. That was his vision. I was working in television then, a fringe job. TV is the coke medium. The pace is the same. Frank helped me with that. I always half-disgusted him. How I could think so little of myself that I would just go to waste.”She used lens tissue moistened with alcohol."When are you going home?”"When he's ready," she said."Where do you live?”"Oakland.”"Where does Frank live?”"He wouldn't want me to say.”"He was always like that. Funny. We never knew where he lived. At least I didn't.”"He took me to the hospital to see my father dying. I had to be dragged if you can picture how pathetic. Do the hard things. That's a skill I don't ever want to learn.”I saw Volterra's car in the rearview mirror. He parked behind us, got out, opened the back door of my car, got in without looking at either one of us."What did he want?”"He wanted to talk about books," I said."He wouldn't tell me why he wanted to see you.”"It's just an intuition, Frank, but I think he's doing all this on his own. I don't think they know about it. I think he may be a deserter. Or maybe they threw him out. I don't think people who believe what they believe and do what they do would even remotely consider the idea of being put on film, put in a book.”"We find out tomorrow," he said."Has he arranged a meeting?”"I talk to them in the morning.”"I don't think they'll be there.”"They'll be there. And they'll listen to me. They'll see at once what I want to do and why they ought to be part of it.”"Maybe. But he was alone when you found him. He's still alone. Anything outside the cult is meaningless to them. They're locked in. They've invented their own meaning, their own perfection. The last thing they want is an account of their lives.”"What's your stake in all this?”"I'm going home," I told him. "I saw Andahl in his pixie boots. I can go home now. If you're confused by my presence here, so am I. But I'm leaving and I'm not coming back.”"What do you do in Athens? What's your job?”"You still think I'm here to write about you.”"What's your job?" he said."I'm called a risk analyst.”Del said, "A likely story." Sighting through the viewfinder."It's a mass of organized guesswork. Political risk insurance. Companies don't want to be caught short.”I was talking with my head turned toward Del."It sounds vague," she said. "It sounds vague, Frank. What do you think?”He sat in the middle of the back seat. The play in her voice got him off course. The urgency he'd brought with him, the sense of imperative purpose, began slowly to dissolve, and with it his suspicion. He sat back, thinking. A day's wait."How will you do it?" she said.She'd joined him at precisely the right moment in his meditations. He answered immediately."Two people from Rome. That's all I need. Kids I know. They bring the equipment on the car ferry from Brindisi. Drive down here from Patras. We go to work. I don't necessarily want to shoot twenty-two hours of film, then work it back on the editing table. We shoot whatever's here. I don't care if I end up with half an hour. Whatever the yield. It won't matter anyway. The coterie toads are all lined up. They're ready to turn. My time has come. I've sensed it the last eighteen months. People give off a musty smell. Whole projects reek. You can't believe how much pleasure it'll give them. A few seconds of pure pleasure. A platonic orgasm. Then they'll forget it completely. Once you fail, you're okay again. And this is the time. It's possible to sense these things. I sense these things across fucking oceans.”"You'll give them something to bury you for," I said."I'll go beyond the bounds. They can bury me or not. Some people will see it right away. They'll know exactly what I'm doing, frame by frame. The rest don't matter.”Maybe it would happen the way he believed it would. He'd meet them in a ruined tower near the sea. Strange faces in a ring. There is time and there is film time. It was a natural extension, the barest of transferals, to make the crossing, to leap into the frame. Film was implied in everything they did.But there was Andahl. He'd introduced an element of motivation, of attitudes and needs. The cult's power, its psychic grip, was based on an absence of such things. No sense, no content, no historic bond, no ritual significance. Owen and I had spent several hours building theories, surrounding the bare act with desperate speculations, mainly to comfort ourselves. We knew in the end we'd be left with nothing. Nothing signified, nothing meant.Andahl etched an almost human face on this hard blank surface. How could he still be one of them? He wanted something. He'd attempted to draw me in, slipping bits of information to me, withholding others temporarily. He was maneuvering toward some further contact.He'd told me those words on the rock were put there by someone leaving. The apostate manages his own escape by revealing a secret of the organization, breaking its hold on him. He was the one who'd painted the words-the words that may have been more than a reference to what they did, that may have been their name. Someone else blotted them out. It was possible they were looking for him.All he wanted from us was a chance to explain. These meetings were a way of turning himself toward the air of worldly reason, of conventional sense and its manipulations. He was raising a call for human pity and forgiveness."I've been getting to know this mountain," Frank said. "The other day I was going on foot up a narrow trail above one of the villages. There was a house up there, looked uninhabited. I peer into every structure that looks uninhabited. In my uniquely dumbfuck way I figure sooner or later I'll come across them. This was before Andahl had set up the meeting. I was scouring the hills, scouring the valleys. Now I'm on this trail when suddenly I hear behind me the sound of goat-bells. Here they come, without exaggeration, eighty-five goats, scrambling up the trail behind me, coming fast, for goats. On either side of the trail we find orchards of prickly pear. Whole fields of the stuff. I pick up the pace. I'm not running yet. I don't want to embarrass myself by running. The idea is to make it over the rise where the terrain opens up and there is plenty of room for the goats to graze without trampling me. But what happens? Fifty yards from the end of the trail I hear a pounding driving hellbent noise. Donkeys and mules, a whole train of them, galloping down the trail at me. A guy is sitting on the lead mule. He's the muleteer, a reckless-looking bastard, a real Maniot, sitting side-saddle, reaching back to swat his mule on the rump with a long switch. And he's uttering what I took to be the muleteer's traditional cry, it sounds like the cry of a Venetian boatman poling around a sharp bend. A barbaric vowel sound. A thousand-year-old cry. I had the definite impression it was meant to urge the mules on. The goats meanwhile are jumping up my ass. They're in a frenzy of hoofs and curved horns, piling up on top of each other. Like some massive rut, the peak of the rutting cycle. And the donkeys and mules are bearing down. It's their only run of the week. All week they've plodded under heavy loads. Now they finally have a chance to run, to get loose, feel free, the wind in their manes, if they had manes, and there I was, in their path, the goats piling up behind me." He paused thoughtfully. "I didn't know whether to shit or go blind.”He would never finish the story. Del started laughing and couldn't stop. I hadn't imagined she could laugh at all but his last remark sent a light to her face, almost broke it apart in a kind of whimpering mirth. Soon Frank was laughing too. They seemed to take their good feeling beyond the story he'd been telling. She sat facing the windshield, making that helpless sound. Their laughter had points of contact, found each other like instruments in a brass quintet, communicating subtle and lovely things. Frank reached over the seat and put his hands on her breasts, awkwardly, clutching tight. His delight had to find something to grasp, to adhere to, some part of her. He narrowed his eyes, showed clenched teeth. It was his old hungry look, hungry for the limit of things. Eventually he settled back in his seat, hands clasped behind his neck. I needed Kathryn to help me see him complete, feel what we'd all felt together, years ago.The water beyond the jetty was blowing white. They got out of the car, camera equipment slung over Del's shoulders. Frank nodded to me. They said goodbye, standing on the sidewalk, and I drove north, out of town, seeing at once the summit of Taygetus, well ahead, as I'd seen it with Tap from the other side when I first came down to the Mani, a wide reach above the hills and orchards, snow-gold in the climbing sun.

Dick and Dot, the Bordens, greeted me at the door. In the living room a few people stood holding drinks. Before the others arrived, Dick said, he wanted to show me something, and led me down a long hall to the study. The floor was layered with rugs. There were rugs hanging on the walls and rugs draped across the sofa and chairs. He showed me rugs rolled up in closets and rugs wedged under the desk. He walked me around the room, talking about the acquisition of particular rugs. Visits to dealers in Dubai, to warehouses in Lahore, to Turkish weaving areas. The color in this prayer kilim comes from the roots of certain grasses. You can tell children worked on this Bokhara because the knots aren't banged down tightly. Dot came in to ask what I wanted to drink, then joined us briefly, happy to trade voices with her husband, to recite stories about bargaining for rugs over jasmine tea, getting rugs through customs, photographing rugs for insurance purposes. Investments, she said. Supply was getting scarce, value was bound to increase, they were buying all they could. War, revolution, ethnic uprisings. Future value, future gain. And in the meantime look how lovely. When she left, Dick got down on his knees to lift the edges of rugs arranged in layers on the floor. Hexagons. Stylized flying birds. Palmette stars. He threw back the edges to show more, the mellow colors of an old kilim made by nomadic weavers, a double prayer-niche that allowed both young and old to pray. He threw back entire rugs to show the full surfaces of what lay beneath, the patterns multiplying inward. He was not thinking of investments now. There were grids and arabesques, gardens in silk and wool. He pointed out multiple backgrounds, borders with formal Kufic lettering, things drawn together in crowded surfaces, a contained and intricate rapture, the desert universe made shapely and complete. He bobbed his smallish, round and almost hairless head, speaking in a soft hypnotic singsong. Geometry, nature and God.The living room was crowded when we got back. I was drinking raki for no good reason. David introduced me to a man named Roy Hardeman. I looked at the wall-hangings, the silk calligraphy. They have a tendency to crowd together in doorways, leaving the cinema for instance. A woman's voice. One thing I will say for the English, we don't block exits. Lindsay stood across the room, laughing. What was it about our lives that year we were together that made us so ready to laugh? We were always laughing, it seemed, as if impelled by some quality of the sky on clear nights, the mountains around us, the sea at the foot of Syngrou Street. Hardeman said something. He was a small correct American who stood with his legs together, feet slightly parted. Based in Tunis, David said. Travels widely in North Africa, Western Europe. The pinched face of a killer executive. Dot moved toward me with a bottle three-quarters full. I realized why the name seemed familiar. Refrigeration systems. He was the man who hadn't showed up the night David and Lindsay went swimming in their clothes. A sandstorm in Cairo, someone had said. But who? Dick went down the hall with three Armenians from Tehran, here to get Canadian visas. I asked David if he'd gone to Frankfurt. He paused to wonder. Charles Maitland entered, full of chummy belligerence. Ann, behind him, looked nervous, over-alert. We were all standing, a stylized fatigue, a form of waking collapse that we agreed to undergo together.Drink and banter made us hungry and someone got together a group of seven or eight for dinner. Sometime later we were down to four, sitting in a club in the Plaka watching a belly dancer named Janet Ruffing, the wife of the operations head at the Mainland Bank. David was astonished. He leaned over to confer with Lindsay. Roy Hardeman had gone across the room to make a phone call, wincing in the noise of drums, flute, amplified guitar and bouzouki. That curious bird-footed stance."I heard some of them were taking lessons," Lindsay said, "but I didn't think it would get this far. This is quite far.”"Does Jack Ruffing know?”"Of course he knows.”"I don't think he knows," David said.Hardeman came back to the table and David explained who the dancer was. Everybody seemed to know Jack Ruffing."Does Jack know?" Hardeman said."I don't think he knows.”"Hadn't someone better tell him? Look, I asked an associate to join us for a little last-minute give-and-take. I'm leaving a day sooner than I'd planned.”"I wonder if she gets paid," Lindsay said.Polychrome sateen. Finger cymbals and scarlet lips. We studied her wandering pelvis, watched her lean and toss and vibrate. She was all wrong, long and slender, a white-bodied bending reed, but the cheerfulness of her effort, the shy pleasure she found, made us, made me, instantly willing to overlook the flat belly and slim hips, the earnest mechanics in her movements. What innocence and pluck, a bank wife, to dance in public, her navel fluttering above a turquoise sash. I ordered another drink and tried to recall the word for well-proportioned buttocks.When the dance ended Lindsay went looking for her in a room at the top of the stairs. The musicians took a break, the three men at the table listened to the noise in the street, the motorcycles, the music from discos and nightclubs."Like to dedicate this medley of tunes to the deposed shah of Iran," David said, looking into his glass. "I run in the woods every day.”"Good country hardball," Hardeman said."How is Karen?”"She likes it there. She really likes it.”"Lindsay likes it here.”"She rides," Hardeman said."Only keep her out of the desert.”"I have a romance with the desert. That's right, of all people. The desert winds have stirring names.”"Lindsay thinks a lot of Karen.”"I'll tell her. That's good to know. She'll be pleased.”"We may be there in March.”"Our whole division moves to London in March.”"Sudden.”"Hostile oil, both sides.”"Not that many options.”"We had to facilitate," Hardeman said.Janet wore a skirt, blouse and cardigan but her makeup was intact, shadows, penciled outlines, arcs and bands of color, a little eerie in the muted light, on a face that was a clear work of household prose. She was happy in a certain way, as someone is happy who learns that her motives are not complicated after all."It was unexpected," Lindsay said. "I never thought it would get this far.”"I know, it's crazy. I saw an opening and just went for it.”"You were good.”"My bellywork isn't very advanced. I have a lot of work to do on what we call hip isolation. I'm way too conscious of what I'm doing.”"What a surprise," Lindsay said, "to walk in like that and look who's up there dancing.”"People are kind," Janet said. "It's sort of an extended tryout.”"Haven't seen Jack," David said, looking at the woman with carefully measured concern."Jack's in the Emirates.”"The budget problem. Right, correct.”"I do things by rote," she said to Lindsay. "That's the only way I can do things. People seem to understand.”"Well you were good. I thought you were good.”Lindsay and I listened to her analyze her body in objective terms. I tried to work up a salacious interest, I schemed at it in fact, but she was artless, open and bland, so detached from the murmurous subcurrents, the system of images, that I gave it up. In the end this would become her appeal, her arousing power, this very deadness of intent.A waiter brought drinks, the musicians returned. I liked the noise, the need to talk loud, to lean into people's faces and enunciate. This was the true party, just beginning, a shouted dialogue lacking sense and purpose. I huddled next to Janet, asking questions about her life, easing my way into her consciousness. Slowly we evolved a mood of curious intimacy, a sympathetic exchange made of misunderstood remarks, our heads nodding in the painted smoke.I was aware of Lindsay's amused disapproval. It spurred me on, it was sexy, the Mainland wives protecting each other from public shame. The two men played a game with Tunisian coins."I have to get to know you, Janet.”"I'm not even sure who you are. I don't think I have it quite straight, who belongs to what at this table.”"I like it when women call me James.”"I don't do this," she said."You don't do what? I love the way you move.”"You know what I mean.”"We're only talking." Moving my lips, soundlessly."Only talking?”"It's those wavelike ripples across your belly when you dance. Say belly. I want to watch your lips.”"No, honest, I don't do this.”"I know you don't, I know you don't.”"Do you really because it's important to me. And with people here I don't want to give the wrong impression.”"Lindsay is special. She's good people.”"I like Lindsay, I really do.”"They'll leave soon. Then you and I can really talk.”"I don't want to really talk. It's the last thing I want to do.”Folk dancers linking hands across their bodies moved sideways on the small stage."Your lipstick is cracked in places, which only heightens the effect. I could hardly breathe while you were up there. You were imperfect, even deeply flawed, but what a heartrending American body, how acutely moving. Say thighs. I want to watch your tongue curl up in your painted mouth.”"I don't do this, James.”"When women call me James, it gives me an image of myself. It affords me an image. Grownup. At last, I think, I am grown up. She is calling me James. You have gorgeous long legs, Janet. That's rare today. The way your legs emerged from that silky garment, one at a time, bent ever so slightly. Sheer. A sheer garment.”"I really have to leave.”"Because at heart, down deep, I'm still twenty-two years old.”"Honest, I can't stay.”"How old are you, down deep?”"Lindsay's going to think whatever.”"One more drink. We'll talk about your body. It's supple, for starters. It has a married poignancy that single carefree bodies can't even begin to suggest. The suppleness is hard-won. I love your ass.”"This means nothing to me.”"I know.”"If I thought you were serious I'd probably laugh in your face.”"You're shielding yourself from the truth. Because you know I'm serious. And I know you know it. I have to have you, Janet. Don't you see how you affect me?”"No. I totally do not.”"Say breasts. Say tongue.”"We were two years in Brussels, three and a half years in Rome, a year back in New York and now a year and a half so far in Greece and no one has ever talked to me this way.”"I want you. It's no longer a question of choice, a question of actual wanting. We've gone beyond that. You know it, I know it. I want what's inside that cardigan, that skirt. What kind of panties are you wearing? If you don't tell me, I'll reach right under there and pull them off your legs. Then I'll put them in my pocket. They'll be mine. That vivid and intimate thing, that object.”Lindsay, turned away from us toward the stage, was still our listener, our auditor, and in everything we said there was acknowledgment of this, although she couldn't hear a word, of course, through the flutes and bouzoukis. A dancer leaped, struck his black boot with the palm of his hand, in midair, slapped it hard."Here's what I want to say about your makeup.”"No, please.”"It's compelling without being sexy or lurid. That's the odd thing. It's a statement of some sort, isn't it? The body is supple, open, airy and free. The face is masked, almost bitterly masked. I'm not the kind of man who tells women who they are or what they mean, so we'll just let it lay, we'll let it rest, the face, the mask, the cracked scarlet.”"I don't do this. What am I doing listening to this? Not to mention I have to go to the ladies room.”"Let me go with you. I want to. Please.”"I'm not so indecisive I can't get up and go home. It's just a sleepiness that keeps me here.”"I know. I know exactly.”"Are you sleepy too?”"That's it exactly. A sleepiness.”She put a hand to my face, briefly, and looked at me with a strange sympathy, an understanding of something that applied to us both. Then she went downstairs, where the toilets were.I looked diagonally across the table to see the great Balkan head of Andreas Eliades. He sat talking to Hardeman. Remember. We'd sat with four glasses of brandy in that seaside taverna, waiting for David and Lindsay to come up from the beach. Hardeman's name, Hardeman's plane, a sandstorm in Cairo. In the passing of time, that night seemed to deepen its weave. It was like a mingled reminiscence I carried with me, the selective memories of those who were there. Moments kept coming back to me, precise textures, the brand names of cigarettes, the old guitarist's eyes, his seamed brown hand, and what the Bordens said, and who plucked a grape from the wet bunch, and where people sat, how we rearranged ourselves around the table as the evening passed through its own solid objects to become what it is now. Eliades seemed more and more the means of some connection.We nodded to each other and I made a scattered gesture to indicate I didn't know what I was doing in a place like this. I realized Lindsay was looking at me. She sat straight across from me, an empty chair on either side of her. Andreas was at the far end, facing Hardeman, who had moved.I said to Andreas, "We keep running into each other.”He shrugged, I shrugged.David was between Hardeman and me. Janet's chair was to my left. Where people sat seemed important to me, although I didn't know why."Don't stare," I said to Lindsay. "It makes me feel you're making up your mind about something.”"About going home," she said. "Whose idea was this anyway?”"Somebody wanted to see Greek dancing.”Andreas asked her whether she was learning verbs. Another memory, a fragment of that summer night. They tried to chat politely through the amplified sound. David leaned my way to fix me with a sad-eyed look."We haven't talked," he said."I know.”"I wanted to talk. We never get to talk.”"We'll talk soon. We'll talk tomorrow. We'll have lunch.”When he and Lindsay were gone I didn't move closer to the two men and when Janet Ruffing came back to the table she sat in Lindsay's chair. It was like a board game. Two sets of people facing each other, two sets of empty chairs. Hardeman ordered another round."They're talking business," I said to her. "Shipments, tonnage.”"Who is the bearded man?”"Business. A businessman.”"He looks like one of those priests.”"He's having an affair with Ann Maitland, probably. Do you know her?”"Why would you tell me something like that?”"I'd tell you anything tonight. There are no strategies. I mean it. I'd tell you anything, I'd do anything for you.”"But why?”"The way you danced.”"But you said I wasn't very good.”"The way you moved, your legs, your breasts, what you are. Never mind technique. What you are, how pleased you were with yourself.”"But I don't think that's true.”"How pleased you were. I insist on that.”"I almost think in a roundabout way you're trying to bring out my vanity.”"You're not vain, you're hopeful. Vanity is a defensive quality. It contains an element of fear. It's a look into the future, into wasting away and death." Another dancer leaped. "I'm at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space. I know things. I know what we're going to say before we say it.”"What did Lindsay say?”"She only looked at me.”"Are these bank people?”"Refrigerators.”"They're going to wonder what we're saying.”"I'd like to walk out of here with your panties in my back pocket. You'd have to follow me, wouldn't you? I'd like to slip my hand under your blouse and detach your bra. I want to sit here and talk to you knowing I've got your bra and panties in my pocket. That's all I ask. The knowledge of a bareness under your clothes. Knowing that, sitting here talking to you and knowing you were naked under your clothes, this would enable me to live another ten years, this knowledge alone, independent of food and drink. Are you wearing a bra in fact? I'm not one of those men who can tell at a glance. I've never had the self-assured powers of observation that would allow me to say that this or that woman was or was not wearing a bra. As a kid I never stood on street corners and estimated cup measurements. There goes a C cup, like that, with total self-assurance.”"Please. I think I ought to go.”"Only to put my hands under your clothes. No more than that. What we did as kids, adolescent sex, how happy that would make me. A back room in your family's summer bungalow. A mildewed room, a darkening, a sudden rain. Move against me, push me off, pull me onto you again. Worried about someone coming back, back from the lake, the yard sale. Worried about everything we're doing. The rain loosens every fresh smell in the countryside. It comes in on us from outdoors, rain-fresh, rain-washed, lovely, sweet-smelling, a chill in the summer air. It's nature, it's sex. And you pull me onto you and worry and tell me not to, not to. See how sentimental I am. How cheap and indecent. They're coming back from the lakeside bar, the one on stilts called Mickey's Landing, where you wait on tables when you're feeling bored.”"But the dancing isn't sexy to me. It's not that at all.”"I know that, I know, it's part of the point, part of the reason I want you so badly, your long, white and well-meaning body.”"Oh thanks.”"Your body has won out over marriage. It's better for the experience. It's wildly beautiful. How old are you, thirty-five?”"Thirty-four.”"Wearing a cardigan. Is a cardigan what women wear when they don't want to talk about themselves?”"How can I talk? This isn't real to me.”"You danced. That was real.”"I don't do this.”"You danced. This talk we're having means nothing to you and everything to me. You danced, I didn't. I'm trying to return to you some idea of how deeply you affected me, dancing, barefoot, in arm-length gloves, in filmy things, and of how you affect me right now, sitting here, so hard to find under the eyeshadow, the mascara, the lip gloss, the lipstick. The way you sit here unmoved by our talking excites hell out of me.”"I'm not unmoved.”"I want to reach you in the most direct of ways. I want you to say to yourself, 'He is going to do something and I don't know what it is but I want him to do it.' Janet.”We were all drinking Scotch. Andreas still in his raincoat."Your voice, when you were telling us about your body, about the lessons, the practices, the hips do this, the belly does that, your voice was four inches outside your body, it began at a point about four inches beyond your lips.”"I don't know what you mean.”"There's a lack of connection between your words and the physical action they describe, the parts of the body they describe. This is what draws me to you so intensely. I want to put your voice back inside your body, where it belongs.”"How do you do that?" A half smile, skeptical and tired."By making you see yourself in a different way, I guess. By making you see me, making you feel the heat of my wanting. Do you feel it? Tell me if you do. I want to hear you say it. Say heat. Say wet between my legs. Say legs. Seriously, I want you to. Stockings. Whisper it. The word is meant to be whispered.”"I can sit and listen to you and I can tell myself this is real and I can tell myself he means it. But it's just so foreign to me. I don't know the responses.”"James. Call me James.”"Oh shit please.”"Use names, " I said."No more drinks. I don't do this.”"Neither one of us wants to go home. We want to put off going home. We want to stay here awhile longer. I'd forgotten what it was like, not wanting to go home. Of course I don't have to go home. That worrisome small force isn't pulling at me, as it pulls at you. What is waiting there that you don't want to face?" We sat awhile, thinking about this. "I'm trying to express what you're feeling, what we're both feeling. If I can do that, you may begin to trust me in the deepest way. The way that complicates, that envelops. So that when you want to stop what we're doing, the shove and force and direction of the whole night, you won't be able to.”"I wonder if you would recognize me on the street, tomorrow, without this makeup I'm wearing. Even stranger, I wonder if I would recognize you.”"The glare would be immense, the broad sunlight. We'd want to run from each other.”Greeks from the audience were on stage now, dancing, and soon tourists began approaching the edges of the platform, carrying purses with them and shoulder bags and wearing sea captain's hats, looking back at friends-looks that begged encouragement for some stupidity they thought they were about to invent."They'll be closing soon," she said. "I think it's really time.”She went upstairs to get her coat. I stood listening to Hardeman talk about maintenance feasibility. Andreas, attending to these remarks, took a card out of some inner pocket and extended it to me without looking up. A simple business card. I offered Hardeman some money, which he waved off, and then Janet and I went into the street.There wasn't space to hold the sound. It crowded the night, dense waves of it, heavy with electrified force. It came out of the walls and pavement and wooden doors, the pulse of some undefined event, and we walked up the stepped street, into it, her arm linked with mine.A man with cowhide bagpipes stood playing in the window of a small taverna. This music was a condition of the air, the weather of these old streets at half past one in the morning, and I edged her into a wall and kissed her. She looked away, her mouth smeared, saying we had to go down the other way, to the bottom of the steps, where the taxis were, if there were any. I pulled her up higher past the cabarets, the last of the Cretan dancers, the last of the singers in open shirts, and held her against the second of the old walls of falling buildings. She looked at me in a near grimace of wondering, a speculation that had the shock of waking about it, of trying to recall a somber dream. Who was he, what were we doing there? I pressed her against the wall, trying to open her coat. She said we had to get a taxi, she had to get home. I put my hand between her legs, over the skirt, and she seemed to sink a little, her head turned against the wall. I tried to get her to hold the edges of my coat to keep us covered, keep us out of the cold, while I worked at my pants. She broke away, running down some steps past a scaffold set against an old building. She ran holding her handbag by the strap and well away from her body as if it held something she thought might spill on her. She turned a corner and went uphill now, into an empty street. When I reached her and put my arms around her from behind she stood motionless. I moved my hands down her belly over the skirt and placed my knees behind hers, making her bend slightly, dip into me. She said something, then shook away and walked out of the dim light toward the wall. I pressed her against the wall. The music was far away and fading by degrees as places closed. I kissed her, lifted her skirt. Voices below us, a laughing man.She said to me, she whispered with uncanny clarity, "People just want to be held. It's enough to be held, isn't it?”I paused, then used my knees to move her legs apart. I worked in stages, trying to reason it, to maneuver things correctly. We took short breaths, our mouths together, as we urged each other into a rhythm and a need. I worked at her clothes, my mind racing blankly. I felt the warmth in her buttocks and thighs and I moved her toward me. She seemed to be thinking past this moment, finished with it, watching herself in a taxi heading home."Janet Ruffing.”"I don't do this. I don't.”We stood under an iron balcony, in the upper sector of the old town, beneath the rock mass of the north slope of the Acropolis.