I saw a black form that I knew was my sister race away from me down the breakwater and strike the rocks and then a second time toward the very end of the jetty and once, just once, the sealed plastic envelope riding high atop the waves, a chalky message in a plastic bottle. Then another wave broke hard right in front of me and the rain began and I backed away.
I backed away from all of it.
I turned and walked toward the dunes and toward the telephones at a retreat for an order of nuns.
When the police were through and the report was duly filed I drove myself home declining their kind offer and drank the way my father had, scotch neat in a tumbler, and wept for us all and then in the small hours of the morning I got up and uncovered all the mirrors.
When the Penny Drops
for Mort Levin
Bear with me.
I have a story to tell but first, bear with me. It’ll take just a moment.
Here’s the thesis.
It’s from the mysterious that we make the leap to godly grace or evil.
And only from there.
A little knowlege, which is all we’ll ever have, is a dangerous thing.
My wife and I were having dinner with friends one evening some years ago at an outdoor cafe on Columbus Avenue and as sometimes happens even when you don’t particularly want it to happen the conversation got around to religion, organized and otherwise—and I recalled the story about the Eskimo and the Missionary. The Eskimo asks the Missionary, if I knew nothing at all about this God of yours and nothing about sin, would I go to hell? and the Missionary says no, of course not.
Then why on earth, asks the Eskimo, did you tell me?
My wife laughed. My friends, both of whom would go on to be critics for the New York Times Book Review, smiled thinly.
But the point of the story I think is not that innocence is grace or even good. The Eskimo is not the Noble Savage. It is that knowlege is never complete, it brings with it a core of mystery, of the seemingly impenetrable—and with that a dangerous complexity of light and dark, brightness and shadow which must be penetrated at least to some degree even to make out everyday objects against the looming sky or teeming earth and, lest we stumble, begin to see.
But there I go, talking like a cameraman again. Sorry.
At the time of our conversation on Columbus Avenue I’d been working for ABC News for roughly five years. I’d photographed the Super Bowl and the Rangers, crime scenes and celebrity galas, floods in Iowa and fires in California, mayoral and presidential campaigns and other natural disasters. I liked the work almost as much as I’d loved my Brownie box camera as a boy, roaming the deep Maine woods. I liked the business of watching, the keen eye, the quick fine moment of reaction when the picture either works or doesn’t, I liked the frame of things and the roiling images.
My wife Laura was a journalist for the airline industry. This meant that we were hardly ever home at the same time. The two of us were always flying off somewhere, Laura to cover a convention or a scandal or a merger, myself to God knows where and to God knows what purpose, at the service of some breaking story. It was the major reason we had no children. I think it was also the major reason we were so happy, at least initially. As newlyweds we had no time to doubt one another or question each other’s decisions, to deal with the small personal peeves and grievances that can separate two people starting off together. Time was flowing fast and our business was mostly to hang on—and to hang onto one another in the process.
And over time it deepened. There’s a sheer simple joy in cooperating with another living soul under difficult circumstances that’s highly underrated. For two people who are mostly apart and provided that there’s love to begin with, every meeting is glue. It is a soft glue which allows for great elastic pullings apart, thin fibrous stretchings over cities and continents, space and time. But each strand is of exactly the same composition. It wants to come together. Its chemical goal is to return to the unity from which it sprang in the first place. And it does.
It did for us.
But in the summer of 1969 we’d been married over a year and we’d yet to have a honeymoon of any real duration. We’d snatch a long summer weekend at Sag Harbor between assignments and say, okay, this is our honeymoon or else schedule a couple of days to rent a car and drive upstate for Thanksgiving turkey dinner at some country inn and that was our honeymoon too. Our honeymoons were like bright Fall leaves in a swirling wind, hard to catch but lovely when you did.
It was August and so hot in Manhattan that most of the cabbies smelled like old salami sandwiches left out to bake in the sun. I’d just finished covering Woodstock, four hundred thousand kids intent on grabbing peace and love and drugs and music with both hands, a three-day sweet-minded nightmare of traffic, rain, mud and awful sanitation. The week before I’d been in Los Angeles covering the Tate murders. I was burnt out and exhausted. I begged a break in the great unending chain of stories and miraculously I got one—five days off. Nine when you counted the weekends.
And where was Laura? Laura was in Athens, working on an article about Olympic Airlines. It turned out she was nearly finished. I hopped a plane.
We didn’t stay there. Only the most weak-kneed tourists do. Athens was bombed heavily during the Second World War and then jerrybuilt thereafter. Other than Plaka—the Old Town near the Parthenon—and Lycabettus Hill across the valley, Athens is not a fine city. It’s grey and homely to the eye. We spent one night with me recuperating from the flight and the first thing next morning, headed by cab for the port of Pireaus and then by ferry to Mykonos in the Cyclades.
In August inland Mykonos is sere as a desert. You half expect to see a barefoot prophet, staff in hand, walk over the next rise. You’re lucky to see a green thing anywhere unless it’s a tourist’s crumpled pack of Salems. On the shore, though, there’s always a breeze and you can be comfortable sitting in ninety degree weather all day long. Laura and I stayed by the shore, in a small eight-room hotel which overlooked the harbor.
We had a wonderful time. We spent days basking under clear skies and swimming the turquoise sea at a nude beach which could only be reached by ferry, Laura careful of the pale tender breastflesh which prior to then had never seen the sun. We spent warm breezy evenings sitting in the outdoor tavernas over wine and mezes, seaweed-green dolmadakia, grilled shrimp and calamari, fish-roe taramasalata and spicy keftedes. Nights we went back to each other’s bodies laughing like street kids with a secret. Or like swimmers adrift in the Aegean, buoyed by ageless waters.
We met French tourists and English tourists and Dutch tourists and many of the locals—those who still retained the fortitude and amiability to deal with all these outsiders three months into the season. We struggled with language. There was a lot of laughing and dancing in the clubs and a lot of drinking and no headaches in the morning whatsoever for either of us.
The night before we were set to leave we had dinner at the Sunset Bar on the side of the island opposite the harbor and watched a magnificent red ball descend into slowly darkening waters, bluegreen to purple to black. We waved to an Australian couple we knew sitting at a nearby table but didn’t invite them over. We were saying goodbye to the island. The honeymoon—our first real honeymoon—was almost over. We took our time over wine and dinner and creme caramel afterwards and rich dark coffee. We took a couple glasses of Metaxa brandy after that.
I paid the bill and we got up and hand in hand roamed the island in the style to which we’d become accustomed, getting ourselves purposely, happily lost in the narrow whitewashed streets which wound uphill and down and then up again past windmills stark against the seascape and shops and small whitewashed houses with blue milkpaint shutters. Every now and then we could hear music from the clubs spill through the warm windless night, distant echos of Dionysus. Finally our hotel was near. We decided on one last brandy at a harborside taverna.
We sat at an outdoor table. And that was when I realized my pocket was empty.
Th
at my wallet was missing.
To retrace our steps was impossible. Too much meandering down too many streets in a town designed specifically as a labyrinth to foil ancient pirates. There was only one hope of finding the damn thing and that was that I’d dropped it back at the restaurant after paying our bill. We searched the ground anyway. And now there was nothing happy about getting lost along the way. We made wrong turns, bad decisions, we had to retrace our steps. I began to feel the way those pirates must have felt, frustrated and bewildered and angry. Those goddamn Mykonians! Couldn’t they draw a single straight line to anywhere?
Finally we found our way to the restaurant and hailed our waiter. He was grinning, happy to see us again. He had just enough English to understand what we were saying. His grin vanished into a grimace like a sudden squall at sea. He was instantly all business, a tall thin aproned squall himself, peering under tables, collaring every waiter, every busboy, going from table to table asking the patrons and into the kitchen to question the cooks. It took maybe all of ten minutes, that’s how fast he was and when he returned to us he looked so dejected you’d have thought it was his wallet, not mine. Or that it was some close relative I’d lost and not a wallet at all.
We thanked him and started home. He’d refused Laura’s offer of a tip. We didn’t push it. He was a good man and he had pride.
I tried not to be sullen.
Losing the wallet was a major annoyance, especially in a foreign country but that was all it was—that was what I kept telling myself. Don’t spoil five terrific days over one curdled night. I still had my passport and Laura had plenty of cash. No problem. But it hung there in the air ahead of us with each step we took, something dark and empty-feeling pressing my head down to scan and search the street in front of me.
We climbed the steps to the hotel. In the lobby Theodoro, the night man, was grinning at us from behind the desk and I remember having the small-minded thought that inappropriate grinning was perhaps a Greek trait.
“Paracalo,” he said. Please. He held up his hand like a traffic cop.
He reached into the desk drawer and pulled out my wallet.
“A gentleman returns this to you,” he said.
He handed it to me. License, credit cards, drachmas, U.S. money. Not a thing was missing.
I was used to New York. I was used to London or Rome or Paris. Amazing.
Of course, I thought. The address was printed on the hotel’s card and the card was in the wallet. Still amazing.
“Who was he? Did he leave a name?”
I figured he deserved a reward.
He shook his head. “I do not know him. He ask me for an envelope and piece of paper. For you.”
He handed me the envelope and I opened it. In a neat blue felt-tip scrawl the man had written Do the same for someone else someday.
That was all.
I remember that I did feel touched. It was such a generous thing to do, such a delightful thing to say to me. But I did not immediately feel touched by mystery.
It brushed by me all the same.
I have almost nothing left of my father. My mother and he divorced bitterly when I was only sixteen. He moved from our home in New Jersey to Florida and took up with a woman he met on the plane en route to Fort Meyers. I never visited. One night about eighteen months later he was coming home drunk from a party and wrapped his car around a tree. He lingered a few days, she died instantly. I didn’t go to his funeral either though I regret that now. But at the time I was still too angry.
I have a few old photos, those few my mother didn’t burn after he left and I have his ring. He left it on my night table the day he moved his things. The ring is gold with a large ruby inset, squarish and heavy. For a long time I wouldn’t wear it, not even after he died. It sat in my drawer straight through college and for years thereafter. I don’t know exactly what made me change my mind about the ring except that I’ve heard it said that we never renounce the ones we love, we replace them. And perhaps by then I’d replaced my hurt angry love for my father with a far gentler love for Laura.
But once I began I wore it every day. I took it off only to go to bed at night and to wash my hands. Putting the ring on again every morning was as much unconscious ritual as shaving or brushing my teeth.
One night in October of 1989 I was in a bar in Greenwich Village called the Lion’s Head drinking with some friends. I wasn’t known there, my friends were. It was their local bar. Laura was out of town again. I was restless.
At some point I got up and went to the john to relieve my bladder and afterwards I washed my hands and then I continued drinking. When it became clear that one more Dewar’s rocks was going to send me well over the top I quit and paid the tab and said goodnight and hailed a cab uptown. It was almost midnight.
The cab was at 10th Avenue and 57th Street before I missed the ring.
I knew what I’d done right away. I’d left it on the sink when I washed my hands.
I felt a kind of panic. Cabbies as a rule are not terribly flexible and this one must have thought I was crazy. I told him to turn around now and head back to the Lion’s Head as fast as he could and that if he got there in less than twenty minutes he’d get twenty dollars tip. We were there in twenty-five. I gave him the twenty anyhow.
My friends were gone. In the bathroom the ring was gone too. I went to the bartender. He smiled and put my ring on the bar and turned a cocktail napkin face-up in front of me. At first I thought he was going to pour me a drink. And then I read the napkin.
Do the same for someone else someday, it read.
The hand was barely legible. The bartender didn’t know the guy, said he’d never seen him before. Said he had a few beers and left. Good tipper. Average height, average build. Joe Average.
I remembered Mykonos. I entered mystery.
Mystery seethes with promise and promiscuity. Most of the creatures of the earth are born in huge numbers, an almost unimaginable promise of life each Spring, the vast majority of them only in order to die ugly and die young before they are fully formed. Billions upon billions of insect larva—maggot, grub, caterpillar, lacewing, mosquito. Their entire business is in the jaws, in the eating. That and the business of transformation. Killing cabbage leaf and cotton leaf, oak and elm, only to be hunted down by other larger creatures who’ve developed a taste for them as specifically as theirs for cabbage—or to be eaten alive from within by the swarming hatchlings of some parasite. A specific taste of the parasite’s too. And again like the larva, also measured in the billions born and billions dying, because these same parasites are themselves very tasty to other critters. Promise and promiscuity. That’s the business of living and the entire mystery is why. To what end? To perpetuate exactly what?
That and transformation. Take a stumpy furry crawling earth-bound body and turn it light as a feather, give it delicate lacy wings. Turn rending jaws to sipping proboscis.
The word larva means ghost or mask.
I was, I suppose, in my larval stage.
I’m past it now.
I know what I fed upon, my own personal version of the cabbage leaf. I fed upon my work, on the world I saw through the viewfinder. A limited world and in no sense a true world but my own, one I was capable of and even adept at seeing.
That and Laura.
That very first night many years ago we met awkwardly, Laura and I, over dinner with mutual friends at their East Side apartment. Neither of us knew the other was supposed to be there. It was an ambush for us both and it didn’t work out one bit. My excuse leaving was her leaving. I was going to be a gentleman and see her to a cab and anyway, I had to work next morning. Good night, folks. And don’t try this again.
Then on the street a strange thing happened. We started talking about how awful and awkward it was up there and we both started laughing—genuinely laughing for the first time that night. We made fun of our friends all the way to the corner. When the cab pulled up on an impulse I asked her if she had a good memory for numbers an
d she said yes, as a matter of fact she did. I rattled off my telephone number and she smiled and nodded and the cab pulled away.
It was a month before she called me. I’d almost forgotten all about her. Wasn’t even certain I’d recognize her. But when she stepped into the bar and we started talking it didn’t take more than an hour before I knew I’d never forget her. Not this woman. This one was a keeper. Funny and smart and once you started really looking, lovely. And we couldn’t stop talking and after a while we couldn’t stop touching each other either—it was like kind of horizontal gravity. Hand upon hand, hand reaching up to touch arm or shoulder and finally in the wee dazed hours of the morning in this Midtown upscale bar new to both of us and almost empty, almost closing and in full view of the bartender, hand to cheek and lips to lips, yes, Laura and I necking in front of strangers, necking gently like a pair of teenagers, like people we might view with amusement or disapproval had it not been us doing the kissing. Intoxicated and not with drink. And that was the way it stayed.