Part 4. The Interrupted Life
Chapter 18
Some years have passed, long years and short ones too, since I began recording my impressions and experiences during this particularly intense and revelatory time in my life. It has taken me a while to return to this journal, but with the munificence of hindsight — which Gwen refers to as “thinking with the behind or through one’s ass”—I decided to plunge into it once more. I have tinkered here and there with the material, but it is basically the story as I lived it. I did go south, I did meet some Gypsies, and Roman, it was Stephen I found, and so on. It is in most respects revealing, to me at the very least.
For less than a year, much energy and thought centered on Helen. Was it an obsession akin to Humbert’s for his nymphet Lolita? Did Helen represent my last chance for freedom, my lost youth? Gwen humored me and humorously observed that my rabid voyeurism was much akin to her raging hormones. Then, from rabid voyeurism she pulled out of a hat the original concept of rabbit voyeurism. This, she contended, was the most difficult voyeurism to deal with, for every time one saw a rabbit one stood still, mouth agape, and because rabbits multiply so rapidly, there were so many, and soon the world would stand still, and so on. How she made me laugh! Especially at myself.
In the past and over the years, my voyeurism was something Gwen never failed to remark upon. But then we writers have generally acknowledged that in ourselves. She contested, rather too directly I thought at the time, for I myself had not thought of it, if you had wanted to see Helen, why didn’t you casually ask Stephen if he knew where she was? She might have still been with him. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, on the beach, but I recognized instantly, and not without embarrassment, when Gwen confronted me with it, that my not asking it demonstrated some error in my approach. It struck me — though I dismissed it quickly and buried the thought — that I did not want to find Helen at all.
This discussion took place the afternoon of the day after I read Helen’s diary. Gwen was as full as ever, full of news and noise, and wit and all the stuff of Gwen that made her so inimitably her. I was terribly happy to be in her presence once more. How important a true friend is! I provided her with an abbreviated account of my night with the Gypsies. Had I related too many details — I did not give the specifics of my fortune, for example — she would have known about my infatuation with Roman. I was rather humiliated, at my age, for having fallen in love like a schoolboy. It was my belief then that that ought not happen. I was in no mood for her teasing me about him.
Gwen was not as shocked as I thought she’d be by my theft of the diary. Rather she seemed to have expected it of me. Perhaps I ought to have been insulted but I was too surprised. I do not know how she knew me capable of this to this day. She contrived some linguistic play about criminal and critical that I thought clever.
Without much elaboration and in as cursory a manner as possible, I described the diary’s contents. She didn’t seem much interested — Gwen thought Helen typical — but I didn’t want Gwen to be too interested. It was incumbent upon me not to show her the diary; I told myself that more eyes would only double the crime and doubly incriminate me. Inchoately I sensed that it would in some odd way expose me as well. While I sensed that, I didn’t actually know it. It was not a coherent thought. In any case I knew I didn’t want Gwen to see the diary.
I did not tell her that I was disappointed in it and in Helen. I could not admit that to her, then. Instead, I complained only of its lack of precision and that Helen was no precisian. Gwen laughed and renamed me Granddad the Grammarian.
What pleasure Gwen derived in annotating the torrid and tawdry details of her short-lived affair with John. They had had another night of pain and pleasure, as she put it, culminating in a shouting match. But things took a much more extreme turn the day after their ultimate and “second” last night together (a night which she had insisted she would never have again!). The change affected all — Alicia, John, Gwen, the town. Unbeknownst to anyone, John had met, when he first arrived, a young Greek woman, a widow, and had fallen in love with her; it had been a secret from all of us. Within a day of my departure, John had vanished. Soon it was determined that he had moved in with the young widow. It was of course a scandal in the town — Nectaria and Chrissoula were enflamed — one that heaped instant infamy upon the two lovers. This episode brought Gwen and Alicia together, somewhat, and they had, in my short absence, many drinks and some laughs over it or him. As is her wont, Gwen laughed about it more than Alicia, and to me had fun with the idea that Homo erectus, the one who stands, preceded Homo sapiens, the one who knows. Alicia rued the day she ever let John into her house. Gwen jettisoned the affair and him with, C’est la vie, I’amour toufours, c’est la guerre, all delivered in one great rush of breath.
For Gwen’s sake, though she protested she didn’t want one, unless she could cry at it, I held a party in her honor. Everyone attended. Yannis returned home, to me, a night or two before the grand event, but with a difference that I could not fathom. As I was any minute expecting Roman to appear, I took Yannis’ alienation in stride. He helped me shop and cook, and just to spite Gwen I served more food than anyone could eat. I hasten to add, there were leftovers.
On the night of the party, at eight, the entire cast of characters began arriving, with the exception of Stephen the Hermit, whom I had not invited, and knew to be, though the others didn’t, on the other side of Crete. Alicia was resplendent in a pea-green sari. Wallace and his Dutch lover, Brechje, brought fruit and bread; I assumed they thought they would not be fed. Several uninvited but nonetheless welcome visitors — friends of Wallace’s — were in tow. Roger entered wearing a tuxedo, which he might have rented. My banker Nicos and his wife, Sultana, came; Lefteris, the electrician, and his wife, whose name I cannot for the life of me recall; an intellectual German couple who had moved into the hotel, and Necaria, Chrissoula and Christos. Later, even John and the young Greek widow, Ariadne, made an entry, shocking the Greeks in the room, annoying Alicia and amusing Gwen. There was Yannis, of course, as well as a few of the young boys who hung about town and turned up like stray dogs, decorating the walls against which they stood rather like ornaments. They spoke to no one but each other. There were assorted others. It was my estimate that, over the course of the evening, at least forty people stopped by.
They all wanted to meet Gwen if they hadn’t already. I wanted it to be a marvelous night for her, as it was to be her send-off. Soon she would return to Manhattan, to what I did not know. The wine and ouzo were flowing freely, and the party, I believed, was immediately off to a great start. I knew it would be a hit, for it had to be — it had to be a howling success for Gwen. It was just what the doctor ordered, for me as well. I wished to forget the events of the last days, even months, and to forget especially my theft and reading of Helen’s diary.