Roman did not come to stay or even to visit me. I kept expecting him and then one day I no longer expected him. Who knows what happened to him after I left the encampment? Perhaps the old woman warned him against trailing after a gadjo like me. Yannis lived with Roger for a time. Their fights were monumental; sometimes both stayed home and out of sight because of the shiners they’d given each other. Yannis drifted away from him as well. Roger continued to work on his second novel, which still has not appeared. Wallace had another nervous breakdown. Stephen the Hermit returned but said not a word to me about our morning on the beach. I worried he would and fantasized that he’d accuse me of the theft. But he never did. John left the Greek widow Ariadne two years ago and disappeared; she abandoned Crete for Athens, seeking a better life, one not sullied by rumor and insinuation.
Alicia is still in her lovely home, surrounded by beauty, as nimble and unflappable as ever. She maintains it is the yoga. I continue to refuse to do it, though. Recently she met a Danish woman, a retired biologist, and they are now living together. I am happy for Alicia. As usual, Roger has nothing good to say on the subject.
Over the years, and with greater and greater infrequency, I remembered Helen. Once, carefully tracing the trajectory of my feelings, I discovered that my initial reaction to her diary was similar to my reaction to an attenuated affair of the heart in my sophomore year in college. I had had a crush on an upperclassman named Allan, who was to me rapture itself — he was the perfect man. In my eyes he was everything I wasn’t. I joined his club, I signed up for his classes and then finally I conquered my fears and spoke to him, my hero. Boldly I proposed a date with him, for lunch at a lovely French restaurant, which he accepted. I dressed with such care and eagerness one would have thought I had an audience with the Pope. But the truth was, he was insipid — beautiful, but insipid. He had nothing to offer except his good looks, which taught me rather early that sometimes beauty is wasted on the beautiful. Yet I have never deserted the pursuit of, and fascination with, beauty.
I decided that Helen too was insipid and uninspired. That I had drawn inspiration from her became a disturbance to me, not unlike the occasional static on my shortwave radio. On Sundays it is my habit to listen to the BBC World Service.
Chapter 19
Not long ago, a letter arrived from Gwen. I awoke to see it sticking out from under the door, its airmail envelope beckoning to me. Nectaria had brought it upstairs and pushed it beneath my door, which she does from time to time when she thinks something’s important. By now, she recognized Gwen’s handwriting; and too, Nectaria liked Gwen. Gwen made her laugh. I hoped for one of Gwen’s long, newsy, gossipy epistles.
25 November 1980
Dear Lulu,
Owing to a series of disasters, details of which I will not bore you with at this time, I have had to change my address and telephone number.
She then provided both. Next to the telephone number was the word UNLISTED.
I beseech you not to give these out to anybody — anybody at all — no matter how innocent — sounding the request (and this goes for the likes of…)
Here she enumerated the names of people we both knew and to whom I thought her very close and attached.
Everybody, in fact. I will tell you more when next we speak or see each other.
Love to you,
G
The letter, its brevity, its absoluteness, the disasters she alluded to — all were greatly troubling. The letter was paranoid enough that I became thoroughly and irrevocably alarmed. I had been, for many years, expecting that Gwen would meet with doom — an accident or fatal trouble. Immediately I telephoned my travel agent, closed up my apartment, and gave instructions to Nectaria. The next day I was on a plane to Athens. From there I flew to New York City, where I stayed for two months.
Gwen was not at all surprised to see me and acted as if it was quite in keeping with me to show up unannounced on her doorstep, so to speak. This was of a piece with Gwen, not to be surprised. We caught up. We covered our lives and gossiped about everything that had happened since we had last seen each other, five years ago. For it had been that long — or short. I hadn’t had Chinese food in many years and she invited me to dine at her favorite restaurant. This is where Gwen sagaciously announced, Sometimes history chooses for us and we are at its mercy.
In the course of that evening I explained to Gwen that I had reached the point in my life — I am nearly seventy — when I ask myself, How could I have done things differently? Could I have? I am not without regret though I am not filled with remorse either. It would be impossible to imagine a life that did not contain some regrets. My concern was: Was there a task with which I had been entrusted that I had not fulfilled? I felt relieved that Gwen was present to listen to me and to hear my plaints.
Ultimately — and I had determined never to bring it up — I expressed my disappointment in reading Helen’s diary; I said I had not found what I was looking for. At some point in the years since I’d seen Gwen, I had been startled to recall the Gypsy’s premonitory dictum, or curse: You only look for the right things. I now related to Gwen the specifics of the Gypsy’s reading of my palm. Gwen dismissed it, actually she went “Pooh-pooh, Lulu.” with much droll humor, her conclusion was that it was just like me to suffer from a fate neurosis when that particular neurosis had largely been discredited in psychoanalytic circles. Even your psyche’s out of date, she laughed. I laughed along with her.
Almost without thinking I returned to Helen and found these words issuing from myself: Isn’t it strange that Helen never mentioned me in her diary? Isn’t that very peculiar? There was a deliberate and mischievous air to Gwen that night. With a grin that was both insouciant and solemn, she answered, “I know what you were looking for, Lulu.” “What?” I asked sharply. “Your name.”
I was immediately and intensely annoyed. If that is true, I went on excitedly and with exasperation, then everything I thought about Helen was about me, and if that is so, it is the most typical kind of story — I was looking for myself — the most trite. How tiresome, how conventional. I excoriated myself over and again, on and on. I insisted that we drink to my stupidity. For when I believed myself to be most special, most inventive, most filled with imagination, experiencing life anew, and behaving most uncharacteristically, I was perhaps more than ever like everyone else and, what is more, most like myself, a self of which I was unaware. With sly glee, Gwen retorted: Quel unique.
To myself I said that I would rather believe I was under some kind of spell, an enchantment. My experience of Helen was, after all, mine. Yet experience itself — and this I had never thought before — is not pure and indifferent. I did not truly understand the Gypsies, nor did I understand Helen, I suppose, nor, more difficult to admit, even Gwen. Who was I to judge my own, let alone another’s, experience? I thought this rather idiotically, for who else would want to stand in my shoes to judge my experience but me? Still, and after all, along with, part and parcel of, having an experience, one has many other things — the circumstances of one’s birth, one’s class, sex, race and so forth. Was I a Dickens? Could I see outside myself? Am I myself?