Not like her sister, John said. He delivered a mixed message, and an extremely provocative one. Her sister, not like her sister. Helen has never mentioned a sister. And he is not like her, not like that. Does this mean that Helen’s sister tried to kill herself? Or did she succeed?
Helen’s sister may have been or was a suicide. Perhaps Helen’s twin sister was a suicide. Helen doubled. There may have been two just like her, sharing a psyche. Two Helens and one John. How differently I am drawn to these young people, these children. They are children but children are not innocent. John, I could mother and father, could imagine stroking and petting, even kissing — yes, that soft mouth, Gwen’s perfect boring white boy. But Helen — I love her at a distance, love her platonically. I dare not fondle even her abstraction. My interest is, how shall I put it, more scientific, perhaps. She is of a different tribe and immensely attractive, and it’s true that once or twice I imagined kissing her, but only on her forehead. I am avuncular with her. Or try to be. She is like me, I suspect or want to believe, somewhere deep inside her, but her resemblance to me exists below the level of my consciousness and hers. Thoughts like these are why Roger thinks I’m getting senile.
How shall I tell Helen about John’s ax? I don’t see that I can even mention visiting John, unless I lay the blame entirely upon Alicia. It’s always wonderful that what first appears to be a liability — such as Alicia’s presence in the hospital — can be turned, in a nonce, to an advantage. It’s the obvious course. I’ll mention to Helen that Alicia and I went for a walk, and she invited me with her to see a friend in the hospital. John. I had no idea what she was up to, or who he was, and then, when I found myself in his hospital room, in the natural course of things it came out that I was Helen’s friend, and so on. It all just came out — and John said what he did about the ax, and her sister; but ought I venture to bring her sister into the first conversation I hold with Helen about John? Tricky. It’s Alicia’s fault, I’ll insist to her like a schoolboy. Helen must know Alicia dislikes her. She doesn’t care a jot for Alicia, I’m certain of that, and Helen knows she can depend upon me. I care about her.
Frankly, I don’t want to tell Helen any of this, as I am vulnerable to the worst sort of silly charge — being a busybody and a snoop, as well as disregarding the terms of our relationship which I tacitly agreed to that day in my car. In my defense I don’t know why I felt compelled to visit John, except that I am often a trifle bored, and I try, in my own way, to make life a bit more interesting, more inventive, more like fiction than it might otherwise be — that is, I consciously do something that a character in one of my stories might, to entertain myself and my readers. It is, one might respond, my rationale. With age I do this rather more frequently.
I’d like to think this is what makes me a storyteller. My mother was a wonderful fabulist and even today I miss the sound of her voice as she turned one of Aunt Grace’s visits with her into an intriguing and fantastic event, one full of danger and diversion. As when she told the story of one of her sisters visiting Boston when automobiles were still new to the metropolis. I ought not to have turned against my mother, especially when I remember those bedtime tales that were, in a way, our secret bond. I’m sure my father remained unaware of his wife’s late-night confabulations. Sometimes I could barely fall asleep, thinking about all the many exciting events my mother had related. It was she who told me the stories of our family’s history, which I know now were part fact, part imagination or desire. She ought to have been a writer. But unlike Jane Austen she didn’t put pen to paper after her father and sisters left the room or after she finished her housework, when then, and then only, she had a moment of solitude, a moment to herself.
Instead of being a secret writer, Mother spoke in private to me, and only with me did she abandon her daily life and duties to enter into a world of her own making, an intriguing world. This must have been what impelled me to become a writer, to enter into a world of my own making, a world of literature. I ought not to have turned against her, but then I was a teenager, not much younger than Helen is now. I’m sure Helen has turned against her mother too, though mothers are different for boys and girls, I should think.
I am utterly susceptible to intrigue, my own and others. It relieves my boredom and fills my mind with puzzles and problems that I must solve. I play games, one would say in the current lingo that Helen uses, but I do not want ever to hurt anyone. When I am drunk, it is a different matter. Drinking releases both the worst and the best in me. It heightens ordinary perceptions, dulls my sense of existence as sheer repetition, and alleviates a growing and gnawing ennui, though only temporarily. Sometimes, and it’s a feeling I can barely describe, sometimes I am at a table and someone begins to speak and I feel, oh no, not this, oh, not this, not again; and inside me, in the pit of my stomach, I sense I am dying, that the words being spoken by the other are in fact drawing my life from me, bleeding me. At other times I feel I cannot breathe, that I am being suffocated, that the breath of life itself is being stolen from me and I am being buried alive.
Normal boredom is not so dramatic, of course. I became bored with life when I was about thirty-five. It was then that I recognized that there wasn’t more to it than there’d already been, and that it would go on and on in a similar manner. I took to my bed for a year and then, years later, moved to Greece. I move slowly along the dusty streets, watching my shadow, which is more nimble than I. The sun still holds itself firmly overhead, glaring at us mortals, at me and my shadow. Me and my shadow…Me and my shadow. Fred Astaire, da-da, and my shadow, strolling down the avenue. In my mind’s eye, I wrest the pearl-handled cane from my arthritic fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wheeler, and stride across the unpaved avenue. No one notices my dashing movements, for this dance is internal, not of this world, and in slow motion. Time moves so slowly here. Time is a tortoise, not a frog. Take my hand, I’m a frog in paradise, just a frog in paradise. Da-da.
The stores close for several hours during the heat of the day. Shopkeepers dawdle as they pull down the shutters. Salespeople dally among themselves, talking in groups. Their bodies are relaxed, planted in the moment; they are not rushing to the next appointment. In cafés the old men — dare I say that, they may be my age — sit at plain wooden card tables, wearing frayed jackets, and play tavoli, their white heads bent in concentration over the board, their fingers jiggling their worry beads. Small glasses of ouzo may be gulped down between moves, yet none of them ever seems to become drunk. It is a marvel to me. Their wives are at home, attending to their small houses or carrying roasts to the baker’s oven. The men have their cafés. The women meet in the tangled alleyways between their houses, and they exchange news. Do they complain about their husbands? Nectaria, who takes care of me and the hotel, Nectaria knows all the town gossip. She is the queen of this part of town as Alicia is the queen of our community.
The covered market is open. It is so grand and plain, so complex and simple, such a home of opposites, of everything and nothing. I could become dizzy merely from the pungent scents and mellifluous rumble of voices. So much life exists here, it bubbles forth from the stalls. Today it excites me, satisfies me, whereas on other days the very same scenes, sounds and smells might bring me to an exhaustion I despair of, to an aggrieved alienation. I love the displays of fruit and vegetables, the range and array of colors any nineteenth-century artist would have envied. Green and purple figs, brown and black olives, ocher nuts, golden raisins, thick white yogurt — some feel it is the best in the world — gray and pink fish. I dislike looking at the various fish, but not as much as looking at octopuses. A cornucopia of delights with none of the razzmatazz of modern life, just a marketplace, just a meeting place, something ordinary to all who live here. Why trade this ordinary beauty, this everyday luxury, for supermarkets. Yet this is how life has gone in the West, and though I am in the West, even in the birthplace of its civilization, as the Greeks love to boast, I am far from its most avid practitioners, far from total modernity, from the city, the sophisticated city I know, love and hare, the city that thrills and repels me. I miss it sometimes but as I grow less agile, I am aware that merely walking down Fifth Avenue would afford so much less of the pleasure it once did. I couldn’t walk it as I did in my youth. Why has life gone as it has?