She said this with such tenderness that he felt the last vestiges of his anger melt away. He gave her a chipper smile to let her know. “So what’s he offering?”
“Just a show.”
“Just? Syndicated, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Out of New York?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You don’t seem very excited,” he said.
“I am. There’s just…a lot to think about.”
“What have you told him?”
She shrugged. “That I’d have to talk to you.”
This was suddenly making sense to him. “Is that why you brought him here for dinner? So I could see how unthreatening he was before you told me about it?”
She made a sheepish face.
“I don’t have a problem with it. Really.” He saw that doubts still lingered. “Your ship has come in, sweetheart. We should be celebrating.” He gazed at her for a while, then patted the sofa cushion next to him. She left her chair and joined him, leaning her head against his shoulder.
“Call Burke,” he said. “Tell him we’ll do it.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He’s in L.A. I don’t know how to reach him. He’s gonna call me.”
“Oh.” He thought for a moment. “Did you tell Michael about this?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Should I tell him?”
“No,” she replied, almost fiercely. “Just leave it alone for a while.”
“He’s gonna ask. He must’ve seen the item.”
“Oh, yeah.” She frowned, deep in thought, obviously concerned about hurting her old friend.
“He’ll understand,” he told her, squeezing her shoulder. “It’s not like he didn’t run the place on his own before I came along.”
When he got back to the nursery, Michael sauntered toward him in the slanting afternoon light.
“How did it go?” asked Brian, remembering the call from the cop.
“O.K. They didn’t book him or anything.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. Waved a dildo at some Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
Brian laughed. “You sure he’s sick?”
Michael’s smile was forced. He seemed unusually subdued.
“I’m sorry,” said Brian. “It’s not funny, I know.”
“No. It is. You’re right.”
“Are you O.K., man?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“We were worried when we didn’t hear from you.”
“Oh, well…”
“I guess it took a while with the cops.”
“Not really,” said Michael. “I drove out to the beach. I needed some air.”
“Don’t blame you a bit.”
“I should’ve called, I guess.”
“No. Not at all.” Poor guy, thought Brian. It must’ve really gotten to him.
“Polly said you had to leave. I hope it didn’t make things tight.”
“Nah.” He wondered if Michael was hinting around about the blind item. At any rate, there was no point in avoiding the subject. “Did you see Herb Caen’s column this morning.”
Michael nodded. “Polly showed me.”
“It’s Mary Ann.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“She’s gonna do it, I think.”
Michael seemed to avoid his gaze. “Well, it’s…definitely an opportunity.”
“Yeah, it is.” He hesitated a moment “We may have to work something out, Michael.”
“What do you mean?”
“About the partnership.”
Michael blinked at him, uncomprehending.
“If I leave,” he explained.
“Oh.”
He hoped a smile would soften the blow a little. “If it helps any, this is pretty much of a surprise to me too.”
“Well…that’s O.K.”
“I’ll work it out so you aren’t strapped for help. I promise you that. If you want me to remain an absentee owner, fine…or whatever you want.”
Michael nodded, looking faintly distracted.
“I know this is sudden. I’m really sorry.”
“Hey.”
“It’s not like I love New York, you know.”
“No.”
“But I’d be a real shit to oppose her on this. It’s really a great…”
“Maybe we should talk about this later, huh?”
It was obvious that Michael was hurt. “Well…O.K.”
“It seems a little premature at the moment.”
“O.K…Sure. I just didn’t wanna hide anything. I wanted you to be in on it.”
“I appreciate that,” said Michael as he headed off toward the office.
Mary Ann was already in bed when Brian got out of the shower that night. As he came into the bedroom she was hanging up the phone.
“Who was that.” he asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Michael.”
“What did he want?”
“He says to bring the lap-top with you when you come in tomorrow.”
“Oh…O.K.” He turned and looked at his wife. “Did he say anything about New York?”
She shrugged. “He congratulated me. Not much else.”
“I think he’s kind of freaked out about it.”
“Why?”
“You know. Busting up the partnership.”
“Oh.”
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was too.”
“Was what?”
“Freaked out.”
“Oh.”
“I’m over it.” He reached across and stroked her thigh beneath the bedcovers. “We’ve got a real adventure ahead of us. It was all I could do to keep from telling Shawna.”
She seemed to stiffen. “You didn’t, did you?”
“No. But I don’t see what harm…”
“It’s completely premature, Brian.”
“Why?”
“Well…it’s not a deal yet. She’ll blab it all over school.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I’m having a hard enough time as it is. Kenan called me into his office today over that fucking item.”
“Oh, Christ.” He pictured the indignation of the station manager, his piggish panic at losing this lone jewel in his crown. “Is he onto you?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You denied it, though?”
“Of course.”
“Attagirl.” He turned off the light and climbed into bed, snuggling up to her.
“He’s such an asshole,” she said.
“Absolutely.”
“I can’t wait to watch him twisting in the wind.”
For a moment, for the hell of it, he imagined them lying like this in another city, another season. There was fresh snow on the windowsill, and a streetlight outside, and Shawna was asleep in a wallpapered bedroom down the hall. “You know what?” he said.
“What?” she answered drowsily.
“If we got a place on the ground this time…with a garden, I mean…”
“Go to sleep,” she said sweetly.
She beat him to it several seconds later, purring rhythmically against his back. She was dreaming of the future, no doubt, a land of riches and proper recognition and assholes twisting in the wind.
The Third Whale
THEIR VILLA, LIKE MOST OF THE HOUSES AROUND IT, was a two-story stone building with a red-tile roof and big pine shutters that could be battened against the noonday sun. There was a kitchen (which they never used), a terrace dripping with dusty wisteria, and a pair of huge, high-ceilinged bedrooms overlooking the Aegean. When Mona awoke in hers, it usually took her a while to determine whether it was morning or late afternoon, since she hardly ever missed a siesta.
At the moment, it was morning. She knew because she could hear roosters and the tinny radio in the taverna on the hillside below. (There were entirely different sounds in the afternoon—church bells and asthmatic donkeys and the piratical shouts of children as t
hey clattered down the streets to freedom.)
A frisky zephyr had found its way through the crack in her shutters and was teasing the long, filmy curtains. Out on the landing between the bedrooms she heard her parent’s graceful footfall and the unmistakable piglet squeal of the refrigerator door.
The double doors creaked open, and Anna stood there in her caftan, backlit by the morning, holding a bottle of mineral water.
“Are you awake, dear?”
Errant beams bounced off the shimmering blue plastic like rays from a holy scepter. Our Lady of the Liter, Mona thought, rubbing her eyes. “Yeah, I guess so. What time is it?”
“Eight o’clock. I thought you might like an early start, so you don’t have to travel in the heat of the day.”
Oh, yes. Her long-awaited pilgrimage to Sappho’s birth-place. That was today, wasn’t it?
“I bought some lovely raisin buns at the bakery. Shall I bring you one with some tea?”
Mona swung her legs off the bed. “No, thanks. I’ll come down.”
“Stratos says he can find a driver for you, if you like.”
“That’s O.K. I’ll just get one on the esplanade.”
“Oh…” Anna reached into the pocket of her caftan. “I thought perhaps you could do with these.” She dropped a handful of joints on Mona’s dresser and smiled beatifically. “I’d hate for you to miss anything.”
Mona smiled back at her. “Thanks.”
“Its name is Sigourney.”
The grass, which Mona had already sampled, was from the garden at Barbary Lane. Anna—who named all her dope after her favorite people—had mailed it to herself before leaving home. Despite the buffer of several boxes and four or five layers of shrink wrap, the package had reeked to high heaven when they picked it up in the tiny post office next to the Molivos police station.
No one had said a word, however. Anna could get away with anything.
An hour later Anna and Stratos left for the Dukakis natal site in a beat-up Impala convertible that, to hear Stratos tell it, was all but legendary in Lesbos. Trim and tanned, gold tooth glinting in the sun, the old guy looked almost rakish behind the wheel. Arranging herself next to him, Anna set about doing picturesque things with scarves. “If you can,” she told Mona as the car bumped away down the cobblestones, “find something Sapphic for Michael.”
“O.K.” She trotted alongside the car. “If you don’t like Pelopi,” she said, “feel free to come back and use the house.”
Anna gave her an enigmatic smile.
“I’ll be gone for a few days…is what I mean.”
“Yes, dear. Thank you.”
As the car pulled away from her, Stratos yelled: “Sappho the Russian.” It sounded like that, anyway.
“What?”
“It’s a hotel. Remember.”
She yelled after the Impala. “Sappho the what?”
His answer was drowned out by a chorus of barking dogs.
She finished up the breakfast dishes, then packed a change of clothes, locked up the villa, and hired a cab on the esplanade. The cabs here were all Mercedeses, beige and battered, with lurid and elaborate shrines to the virgin obstructing every dashboard. This was Mary’s island, really, not Sappho’s, and they never let you forget it.
The trip across the island took several hours along winding mountain roads. For most of the journey her driver plied her with cassettes of bouzouki music, so there was blessedly little call for conversation. Beyond the olive groves the landscape became barren and blasted, made vivid here and there by roadside memorials to people who’d gazed too devoutly at the virgin and missed a hairpin turn. She was thoroughly nauseated by the time they descended into the green farming outskirts of Skala Eressou.
It was a beach town, basically: two-story concrete buildings with tile roofs, a row of thatched tavernas forming a sort of boardwalk along the littered gray sand. At the edge of town, where she got out, a jumble of homemade signs offered various services for tourists. Among them, almost as crudely lettered, was one that purported to be official:
WELCOME TO SKALA ERESSOU
Please respect our customs and traditions.
Be discreet in manner and dress.
Happy holidays.
How fucking dare they? How many odes to discretion had Sappho ever written? She wondered if busloads of visiting dykes had become too demonstrative in the lap of the motherland and somehow horrified the Mary-worshipers. It made her want to rip off her shirt and grab the nearest woman.
She walked along the seafront tavernas to get the lay of the land. Most of the other tourists were Greek or German. The British voices were North of England, people on package tours, pale as larvae, buying sunshine on a budget. She spotted several pairs of lowercase lesbians along the way, but hardly enough to qualify the town for mecca status.
Thirsty and still a little queasy, she stopped at the nearest taverna and ordered a Sprite-and-ouzo, the drink she’d learned to tolerate in Molivos. She sipped it slowly, watching the beach. A bare-breasted fräulein with huge mahogany thighs was sprawled towelless on the coarse sand, reading a German tabloid. Her hair was bleached so white that she looked like a negative of herself. Mona made a mental note to pick up some sun block.
The beach curved down to a big gray mountain crumbling into the sea. There were wind surfers in the sparkling water and, just beyond the next taverna, a queue of bathers waiting for an outdoor shower. Despite obvious civic efforts at making the place look like a resort, there was an irrepressible seediness to Skala Eressou, which she found completely endearing.
But what of Sappho? Was there a marker somewhere commemorating her birth? Something noble and weatherworn, bearing a fragment of her work? Maybe she could buy a volume of the verses and read it while she strolled on the beach.
She tried three different gift shops and found not so much as a pamphlet on the poet’s life. The guidebooks she checked devoted a paragraph or two to the subject, but the details, at best, were sketchy and embarrassed: The poet had been born in 612 B.C. in Skala Eressou. She had run a “school for young girls.” Her passionate odes to the beauty of women had often been “misinterpreted.”
Fuming, Mona stalked a statuary shop, where she passed row after row of plaster penises before pouncing on the only female figurine in sight. “Sappho?” she asked the clerk, pronouncing it “Sappo,” the way the Lesbians did.
The clerk frowned at her, uncomprehending.
“Is this Sappho? The poet?”
“Yes,” he replied, though it sounded suspiciously like a question.
“Forget it,” said an American voice behind her. “It’s Aphrodite.”
Mona turned to see a woman her own age, handsome and lanky, with a big Carly Simon mouth. “They don’t do Sappho. Not as a statue, anyway. Somebody told me there’s an ouzo bottle shaped like her, but I haven’t been able to find it.”
Mona returned the figurine to the shelf. “Thanks,” she told the American.
“You’d do better in Mitilíni. They’ve got a statue of her down by the harbor.” The wide mouth flickered. “It’s ugly as shit, but what can you do?”
Mona chuckled. “I can’t even find a book of her poetry.”
“Well, there’s not much left, you know.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“The church burned it.”
Mona grunted. “Figures.”
“You might try the gift shop on the square. They’ve got some fairly decent Sappho key rings.”
“Thanks,” said Mona. “I’ll do that.”
The woman went back to her browsing.
In the shop on the square Mona found the key rings—a crude profile on an enameled chrome medallion. They weren’t much, but they did say SAPPHO, so she bought a green one for Michael, thinking that it looked vaguely horticultural. Then she set off in search of a hotel that sounded like Sappho the Russian.
She found it on the boardwalk after a five-minute search. Sappho the Eressian. The room she rented there was spare
and clean—blond wood, a single bed with white sheets, a lone lamp. She showered off the grit of the road, then anointed herself with sun block and changed into a crinkly cotton caftan she’d bought in Athens. She was much more comfortable when she returned to the beach and felt her wet hair kinking in the warm breeze.
She headed toward the big gray bluff, since the beach seemed less crowded at that end. The bathers grew sparser—and nuder—the longer she walked. When everyone in sight was naked, she skinned off her caftan and rolled it into a tight little ball, stuffing it in her tote bag. She spread a towel on the sand and lay on it, stomach down, feeling a warmth that seemed to rise from the earth’s core.
The nearest sunbathers were a dozen yards away on either side. She raked her fingers through the coarse sand and felt it roll away magically, like tiny gray ball bearings. There was a breeze off the water, and the sun lay on her big white bottom like a friendly hand.
This was all right.
The last time she’d done this had been in San Francisco in the mid-seventies. She and Michael had gone to the nude beach at Devil’s Slide. She had shed her clothes with great reluctance, feeling white and blobby even then. Michael, of course, had wussed out at the last minute, supposedly to preserve his tan line.
She missed him a lot.
She had wanted him to explore Lesbos with her, but the little fool had fallen in love on her and never found the time.
He wasn’t sick, Anna had insisted. He might have the virus, but he wasn’t sick.
But he could be. No, he would be. That was what they said now, wasn’t it?
Unless they discovered a drug or something. Unless some scientist wanted the Nobel Prize bad enough to make it happen. Unless one of the Bush kids, or Marilyn Quayle, maybe, came down with the goddamned thing…
She laid her cheek against the warm sand and closed her eyes.
Later, in the heat of the day, she strode out into the sea. When she was thigh-deep, she turned and surveyed the broad beach, the prosaic little town and distant dung-colored hills. She didn’t know a soul for miles. Anna and Stratos were on the other side of the island, napping by now, no doubt, or making love behind closed shutters, stoned to the tits.