He may, I answer, disconcerted. I’m not sure why this question irks me. Perhaps she thinks I pry Yannis too. I won’t ask, though to a girl who has stripped for money this might not mean very much anyway. I change the subject abruptly, but she is unperturbed. I observe that she appeared to be excited earlier, when I saw her on her terrace. Had something happened? I ask. Helen stops eating. It was weird, she begins, which always signals to me some fresh revelation. She was reading and felt happy. She was happy for no reason. Nothing was really different. Yet she seems to have experienced a sudden rush, a release. Everything might be all right, after all. She knew suddenly, she said, that she could be whatever she wanted, because she could simply make it up. She felt freer. The past didn’t matter really. It was just a story, and she could always change the story. She asks if I have ever felt like that. Before I can respond, she says, with relish, that the only other time she ever was as happy was when she was watching a movie whose title she has forgotten, but it was as if she were a movie with a happy ending. Helen laughs quietly, her hand covering her mouth. I tell her she’s had an epiphany. She laughs even more.
Now she looks twelve. Unbearably defenseless. Part of her mask has dropped, and she’s stripped bare or stripping. She may reveal her true self to me. I don’t know what else to say to her. I ought to say something else but the expression on her face reminds me of myself at her age. I remember, even sense, my youthful expectation of life’s limitlessness, my naive belief in possibility. I would not have compared my self or my happiness with a movie’s end, but looking at her, I feel the crush of memory. And, as if memory were physical, it forces me lower in my chair. I drink more wine. I feel queasy, aware of an unspeakable emptiness below my heart. I take her hand and say something to the effect that, yes, Helen, everything will indeed be all right. I shut my eyes so that she won’t see that there are tears in them. But she pats my hand understandingly. It is suddenly darker. She is barely visible.
Impulsively, to pluck us from this dangerous and lugubrious patch, I announce what I meant not to tell her. I tell her almost comically, making light of it, that I visited John in the hospital, with Alicia. I emphasize the accidental nature of the visit, my surprise as to his identity and their connection, and so on. You’re kidding, Helen responds, and then grows pensive. She adds, If you’re not, it’s unbelievable. It stinks.
Stinks? I hadn’t really expected her not to believe me. I don’t see, I answer, why you’re so angry. It’s simply true. I had no idea, and frankly, dear, I don’t like being told that any of my stories stink. Helen withdraws into herself for a while, but she doesn’t leave the table. I question why I care, of course, why I allow her feelings any importance at all. She’s just a young girl who knows nothing; and surely it is I who invests her with power.
I study Helen and recognize a child, hurt, alone, anxiously searching, looking at the sea and the wide world, which I know is smaller and more impenetrable than the object of her gaze suggests. Attempting to dismiss her doesn’t work, as I genuinely like her and am attached to her against my better judgment. In a state, I nervously consume another glass of wine, nearly gagging as it goes down. Helen speaks at last and claims that she doesn’t like liars very much, even though she lies sometimes. “I lie. People lie all the time. But you should admit it.” In this moment she reminds me of Gwen.
I’ve never been able to admit I’ve lied, to anyone. I’d rather die, and, muddled and soft as I have become, I can’t stand her indignant scorn. Oh, Helen, I sputter, I don’t see anything wrong in my being interested in your friends and your life. It is not precisely prying.
I am appalled to hear myself sound like a father or mother. John is no friend of mine, she insists with annoyance, he wasn’t really even a boyfriend. He’s a worse liar than you. Then she pauses and asks if John is trying to move in on Alicia — to move in on rather than in with, I note. Her delivery is flat; it’s a sophisticated voice, with little inflection. It’s a voice I hadn’t yet heard, from her. I am taken aback. I visualize Helen in the city, urbanely testing her young tongue in tandem with similarly dressed girls, who sit in clubs with boys like John. They are clever and wild, the girls Gwen wrote me about. Helen may indeed have been one. When I was her age, I would have been frightened to death by people, young women, like her. It’s especially her psychological astuteness that unnerves me. She taps her cigarette on the table, and I light it for her. She looks me directly in the eye. I try not to flinch.
Helen seems to be weakening. After all, I am her only friend here, I and Chrissoula, who can’t really talk to her. But now Helen falls silent again. Her silence may deepen into a resolve not to speak. So I do, after drinking another glass of wine; I make myself vulnerable to her. Unquestionably I want to appease her.
Ultimately, Helen, I offer, in the end everyone knows everyone. I don’t know why. It must have to do with age, with how the world grows small conceptually as we grow older. We are connected whether we want to be or not. We are all connected. I toss this out, quite off the cuff, but the reasoning will serve, I hope. Then I follow with the connected notion, to my mind, that physicists deem an equation elegant when it’s executed particularly well, when it is beautiful, and that makes science close to art. Do you mean, Horace, she interjects, again in that sophisticated voice, do you mean, to you, John and I make an elegant equation?
It is not like Helen to draw paranoid conclusions. I don’t know what you mean, Helen, I answer. I am not Machiavelli. Helen agrees that I am not but goes on to remind me that I am a writer. She’s known a couple, and even had one in the family, but no one really famous. My mind races through some possibilities, but her last name — Nash — only brings me to Ogden, and I’m sure he’s not in her family. Helen may be traveling under an assumed name, carefully hiding the identity of a famous father or uncle, or grandfather. I don’t know why I need to, again I’m being impetuous, but I ask, Do I remind you of your father, Helen? She stares at me quizzically and then answers that I do, but only when I ask questions like that. He’s a shrink, she says. Helen swallows her retsina in one gulp. A shrink, I repeat after her. A horrible word, I think. A shrink, I say again. Helen adds, Children of shrinks are really fucked up. And, in the definitive way she has said this, it is as if she were bringing to a conclusion my own queries and thoughts.
I nod in agreement. It’s as if we are and are not discussing her. She has already told me that she is, as she puts it, fucked up, but now I think she’s being ironic, at least in this very moment. This is getting heavy, she says, with a half-smile. Yes, I know, Helen, we are not supposed to get heavy with each other. She laughs again — Helen often does when I use her argot.
It dawns on me that she has told me next to nothing about John and her, only that John is a liar, as am I. She is most definitely artful, and I am still curious. John was a sort of boyfriend. They are not friends. I feel more sadness welling inside me. Children leave each other without a second thought. I was; I did. All those wonderful men, those friends, lovers, and I’ll never see them again. Each face is a drop of memory that is diluted by time and dissolves; nothing rests or stays still long enough to form into a clear image. They’ve drifted away, or I did. Helen doesn’t realize how precious all those moments are, and John — how beautiful he is, with those violet eyes and soft lips. I’d hold him to me forever were he mine. I’d love to make love with John. I gaze at Helen vacantly. Perhaps. With her, too. The thought scandalizes me. Am I blanching? Would this idea horrify her? Probably not. I have learned over the years that only one’s own thoughts can ever genuinely shock one.