Five Stories That Are Almost True, But Not Quite by George Loukas - HTML preview

THE SPACESHIP

It was always to the ocean that I gravitated in my moments of introspection

and loneliness. It seemed to be my life's only true and long lasting love affair. An

overwhelming, fateful attraction. I did not offer my love to that infinitely large and

heaving mass of water as I did to the few women of my life. I just loved it inertly with

no demands and in return received the inexplicable comfort of its perpetual movement

and sound of the surf. I could sit and stare at it for many hours. Hours of thought and

temporary well-being. Temporary optimism. Even its indifference was acceptable,

unlike that of a woman. Sometimes in my despair, I hoped it would send me a

beautiful mermaid to lure me in and drown me painlessly, beautifully, releasing me

from life with a long passionate, breathless, choking kiss. Sometimes, I longed for this

kiss of death without being brave enough to initiate it, to taste it.

I loved southern California's coastline. Both the wide sandy beaches and the

wild rocky seafronts. Both its life giving dawns and its stunning, multi-coloured,

cloudy, winter sunsets. After I settled in San Diego I invariably drove there after work

to walk and swim until dark. It was a lonely time of my life but I did not seek

company. I had to find myself after the few devastating emotional and professional

failures I had been through. I had lived too fast, too superficially until then. I had

entered the American mold where time was money and there was never enough of

either. Now that there were even less of both, I was searching for a reason to continue.

Searching my soul, asking the most vital question of my existence: Is it worth it? Do I

go on? For it was not only the shambles of business and marriage. It was a crisis of

age. A crisis of health. I was in my early fifties, a time of stock taking and I could not

help having my doubts. Especially since an unexpected, unbelievable chance

encounter.

I cannot imagine what I would have done without the ocean. What would have

happened if I lived in an inland city? Perhaps, nothing much. I kept on thinking of

Kazantzakis's aphorism, that one is only truly liberated when one realizes that there is

no salvation. Perhaps, I would be at peace when the message finally sank in. As it

was, the ocean was there and it provided me with small, daily doses of salvation

denying me a true, deep sense of liberation. After work, I would drive endlessly up

and down the coast in my small car and would stop to spend the afternoon and

evening swimming and sleeping on the beach. I could not bear my empty home.

On weekends, I would spend the whole day on the go. I would drive for hours,

north, along the coast towards L.A. past La Jolla, Del Mar and Encinitas past all the

state beaches with the lovely Spanish names to end on an out of the way bay or a

deserted beach. I would swim for hours wading in the deep, not thinking of cramps,

currents or sharks for I did not fear the kiss of the mermaid. In colder days, in warm

clothing, I would walk along the sea shore and huddle in blankets at a sheltered spot

when I exhausted myself, to sleep with the unceasing movement and sound of the

waves providing constant and comforting company.

My life was not altogether empty. I had Zoë. I hardly saw her anymore. I

would almost forget my love for her in the two-month intervals between her visits.

Her name means life in Greek. She was what was left of my life. And yet for days I

would not think of her. When I did, I would lose my breath and break into a sweat. I

was afraid time and distance would make two strangers out of us just as it made total

strangers of her mother and me but it was never so. Every time I saw her, I was

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moved by her beauty, by the love I saw in her eyes. Had my seed produced this

fragile, blond angel? My seed and the womb of her mother who met me with a frigid

face and a tight smile whenever I called to pick up Zoë. At twelve, she was far more

beautiful than either of us. And she melted in my arms. She needed me. She needed a

father and this fact went a long way to alleviate my disappointments, my health

problems and my despondent self-centeredness.

I certainly do not blame my wife for our separation, much as I came to despise

her. For it was the same old story. The same mistake too oft repeated. So

commonplace, in fact, one would have thought a sensible person would beware. But

the lure of money is insidiously seductive and success makes one vain. One never

imagines such pitfalls are as much for oneself as for everyone else. So, ever since our

arrival in the States I went about trying to make our fortune with a single-mindedness

that, now, in my saner, if somewhat more desolate moments, I consider utterly insane.

I married Emily in the last month of my final year for my Master's degree in

architectural studies in London. I cannot bring myself to give a description of Emily

for not only might it be unfair but also because she no longer means anything to me. I

cannot bear to think of her. How strange love is. How quickly and easily it can turn to

hate. She was from a rich, English upper-class family and my Greek origins were

rather distasteful to them. But we were in love and Emily was strong willed and

would not listen to their entreaties to sever our relationship. She fell pregnant a few

months before my graduation and though we did not want to have a child so soon, it

solved our confrontation with her family. A marriage was quickly arranged to avoid a

scandal although pregnancies outside marriage had ceased to be items of low-voiced

gossip in the England of the late seventies.

We were married in a morning ceremony of the Anglican Church, followed by

a midday reception of champagne and caviar, of loud upper class accents, of my dear

fellow's and ha-ha's, of top hats and tails for the gentlemen and extravagant, tasteless

dresses with insipid morning hats for the ladies. It was the first and last time I met the

whole of Emily's family and friends. That whole period of preparation for the

marriage was something of a nightmare. Not least because I had very little money to

contribute to the expenses and felt very much manipulated and ignored by the family

who made all of the decisions. I pleaded with Emily to come with me for a week in

Greece so that we would be married in a small forgotten church on a hill or a

forgotten village with just a single priest but she would not hear of it. She could not

do that to her family. As for mine, they did not attend the wedding. They did not think

they would be able to cope with the Lords and the Sirs. My family was poor and knew

not a word of English. I was studying on scholarship.

Our honeymoon was quite unorthodox. If you could call it a honeymoon. In

any case, the family thought it was inadmissible. I had my finals coming up in less

than a month and immediately after the wedding, I returned to my room in London

and started studying eighteen hours a day while Emily stayed at the family's estate in

the country. She would come and spend a few nights a week with me and leave in the

morning. Finally, I was quite happy a baby was on the way even though I never

imagined it would be as wonderful as Zoë.

A month or so after my graduation we left for the United States. It was my big

dream. Emily covered all our travel expenses and our first months in Los Angeles. I

found a job soon enough at a large architectural enterprise and, a year later, I started

my own little business of building and selling small single-family houses. Meanwhile,

little Zoë came to brighten our lives.

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A decade flew by. A decade of business success and the steady erosion of our

marriage. I realize now, how totally selfish I was and how I pushed aside and ignored

my wife's dissatisfaction. I hardly had any time for her. I caused her much distress

and, I am afraid, the distortion of her character from a happy girl to a complaining

shrew. Only Zoë kept us together. I had become a workaholic and the more I earned,

the more money I seemed to crave. I was working with banks, buying plots of land for

housing development and was well on the way to becoming a millionaire a few times

over when an economic recession struck causing a drastic drop in the demand for

housing, a consequent drop in their prices and the price of land. I was caught out

holding large bank loans, large plots of land whose prices tumbled to a fraction of

their original value and ready housing for sale with no buyers in sight. I was

bankrupted so fast I could not believe what had happened.

That was the last straw for Emily. She had not put up with me, so long, for

this. She filed for divorce and I left our house because I could not bear to stay where I

was not wanted. Zoë was eleven at the time and she understood we were separating

without quite understanding why. It helped that we were not loudly quarrelsome. We

exchanged our grievances in reasoned, upper-class English tones. Reasoned but bitter

and implacable. I was shocked to find out the depth of Emily's aversion for me and

the contempt she felt for my business failure and was shocked to realize, once the

masks were down, the distaste I felt for her. How many years did we live in this state

without knowing it? I tried to explain to Zoë that we were separating because we no

longer loved each other but she could not understand it.

“But daddy,” she said, “I love you both. What am I going to do?”

I lived the first few months of the divorce proceedings in a tiny run-down

apartment in downtown L.A. and did some part-time work at my old firm. I visited

Zoë on the weekends and, sometimes, when I had the time, went to her school to kiss

her and say hello just before she took the school bus home. In those days of extreme

depression Zoë was my umbilical cord to life. Emily started working at an

Architectural designer's office even though she did not need the salary. In London she

had earned a diploma in Interior Decoration. She had plenty of money of her own but

the job was part of the divorce. The assertion of independence and freedom of her

new life. Again and again, in my more clement and thoughtful moments I recognized

how unfairly I had confined her life and would allow her in no way to let her needs

take precedence to mine. Two years in London and a decade in the U.S. had not

altered my Middle Eastern mentality. Always too late, it seems, one regrets one's

unfair treatment and selfish behaviour towards others.

Some months later, I was offered a full-time job in San Diego and moved to

that city, which seemed so pleasant and was so much less vast and chaotic than L.A.

There, with a steady job and a reasonable salary I recovered some of my self-respect

though not altogether my peace of mind. I missed my Zoë terribly at the beginning. I

was grateful to Emily for not putting any obstacles to my visits to Zoë and for having

waived her right to alimony and child support. She also agreed to let the child spend a

week with me every two months instead of seeing her once a week which was not

always feasible now that I lived in another city. She also managed to get permission

for this absence from the private school that Zoë was attending on condition that she

would do the homework that would be assigned.

It was in San Diego that I resumed my full-time love affair with the ocean. I

say resumed because, one way or another, my life was always connected to the sea. I

was born and lived on the island of Kos until my family moved to Athens when I was

fifteen. We invariably returned to it, to out house on the island, for our summer

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holidays and I have loved the sea for as far back as I can remember. In San Diego it

became my refuge from loneliness. I was so terribly happy and gratified to see that

Zoë had inherited this love of mine. We spent lovely weeks in the spring and summer

together at the seaside and our recreations were always associated with the ocean and

with excursions up and down the coast. She was developing into an extraordinary

swimmer and could keep up with me and with the long hours I spent in the water. She

was growing strong and tall and promised to be a fine athlete. I also talked to her at

length about my origins and I promised her a trip to Greece to meet her grandparents

and also to Kos as soon as my finances allowed it. I warned her that her Greek

grandparents would not be as grand as the English ones she had visited with her

mother two years earlier but that they would love her very much. And in any case she

ought to be acquainted as much with relative poverty as with wealth. I had,

unfortunately, missed my chance to teach her Greek in my hectic past and now I

confined my mother tongue to expressions of tenderness. I called her Zoëoula mou

(my small Zoë, my little life), aghapi mou (my love), and koritsi mou (my girl). She

responded as well as she could. She called me, daddy mou.

In San Diego I contacted a Greek fellow student from my London days and a

distant girl cousin who had also immigrated to the States with her husband. Both

ended up in San Diego and so I did not feel totally alone. Though I did not see them

often, we kept in touch. Roughly speaking, I saw Michael once a month and phoned

Cathy every few weeks. She was a lovely girl. Simple, sociable, beautiful, with a

smile so devastatingly sweet, I often wondered what would have happened had we

met in Greece, long, long ago, before either of us was married. Idle speculations of a

lonely and depressed person. In any case, Cathy was married to an engineer and had

two grown children. A boy had just entered a university on the East coast and a young

girl was still living at home, attending high school. Her husband was typically Greek.

Macho and a bit of a boor. I had the impression, which might have been tinged by a

bit of wishful thinking, that she was not particularly happy in her marriage. But then

this is hardly unusual. It seems to be the general rule. How many truly happy and

well-matched couples does one know?

Michael and Cathy's husband, Yannis, were friends. They were part of a

handful of Greeks in San Diego who kept in touch, tried to keep the Greek traditions

and resist the American melting pot. From Michael I learnt that Cathy was very

seriously ill. He was not certain of the illness but there were rumors circulating in the

small Greek circle that she was diagnosed HIV positive. I was absolutely stunned. I

called her home immediately and Yannis answered the phone. I could not question

him point blank and in the generalities we exchanged he told me that Katerina was

fine. He always called his wife by her proper name, Katerina, and never failed to get

annoyed by the pet name I had adopted. He would scowl like a Greek peasant every

time. I called their home in the morning, several times after that, hoping Cathy would

answer the phone but there was no reply. About two weeks later I called and was

again confronted by Yannis and, again, everything was just dandy. I could not get any

information and I let it go for a while.

Autumn came around and then winter started showing its teeth. Well, in San

Diego it is never severe but I could no longer swim. I did not stop haunting the

beaches that were now mostly deserted. Some beach parties would take place around

campfires at night and I always enjoyed observing them discreetly from a distance,

lying down somewhere comfortably on a blanket I had with me. They were usually

college-age youngsters having fun with loud music and liquor and boisterous shouting

and laughing. Now and then, a couple would drift off for a little privacy in the

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darkness and would drift back later to be greeted with jeers and laughs by the rest of

the crowd. I enjoyed observing the antics of the youngsters.

I felt like a scientist scrutinizing an unknown tribe in the jungle. These would

be, I thought, the last carefree years of their lives before they entered the jungle of

careers, businesses and family life. Well, perhaps not jungle. It would not be as bad as

that but it would not be easy. It is never easy to be satisfied with what you have. It is

often not easy to accept your fate. It is not easy to spend a lifetime with a person you

loved so dearly and passionately at the start. Perhaps life has become too long, too

rich, too loose and free, with too many opportunities for change. The increasingly

volatile and bizarre permutations and combinations of a restless humanity are the

results of their evolution. Of their advancement and flaws.

On and on my mind would wonder trying to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, the

riddle of life. Trying to justify my sudden fall from grace. Sometimes, pessimism

drowning me in the sound of the surf and, sometimes, hope reviving me like the fresh

breeze that blew in from the ocean. I could not stay at home. I could no longer read

newspapers or books. All I could do was sit and think and walk and think and,

sometimes, exchange a few words with another ocean loner though I preferred to be

alone.

That day a party was on and a large gay campfire was lit and the usual music

and laughs and shouts intermingled with the incessant sound of the wind and the

waves tumbling on the shore. I was just about starting to identify the noisier members

of the party when a woman sat on the sand a few paces away to my left. I assumed she

was from the party though she looked much older than the others. Moreover, her

clothes were different. She wore a sort of cape under which I could just make out in

the darkness, a pair of jeans and light brown suede shoes. When I looked at her face,

she smiled and said, “Hi”. I answered, “Hi”, and saw that she had a woollen head

cover and a thick blond pigtail emerging behind, reaching her waist. I did not talk to

her but kept observing the lively tribe at the campfire. Wondering if the mood would

have been as merry and the noise as animated around a campfire in the Stone Age. Or

if our world would survive and youngsters would have the same fun around campfires

a thousand years from now. I was engrossed in idle thoughts when she asked me the

time.

“It's nine thirty,” I said.

“Thank you,” she answered. “I guess the spaceship will not be coming tonight

with all these people around.”

“The spaceship?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered simply.

We did not talk after that for some time. I felt a little uncomfortable at the

beginning but she was silent and I undid the package of sandwiches I had with me and

I offered her one while I consumed the other. She took it and thanked me. When a

couple separated from the party and started walking along the beach, in the darkness,

she asked,

“Do you think they are looking for the spaceship?”

“No,” I said, “they are probably going for a smooch.”

“Oh,” she said and laughed. “I did not think of it.”

The third sandwich I split in two and gave her one half. She took it with a

smile of complicity.

“Are you, too, waiting for the spaceship?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I did not know it existed.”

“Oh, well,” she said nodding her head with understanding.

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A long silence followed. The less we talk, the better, I thought but I did not

move away. Somehow, I felt the move would be insulting to her even if she did not

understand it. An hour or so later, I decided to leave. It was nearing eleven and I had

work the next day. The party too was about to end. Some of the young people had

already left.

“Well, I have to leave,” I told the woman. “We might meet again. Do you

often come here for the spaceship?”

“Not always. The spaceship will always find me. But I must be at a deserted

spot.”

“Well, good-bye,” I said getting up, collecting and folding the blanket I was

sitting on.

“Good-bye,” she answered. “Thanks for the sandwiches.”

I moved away a few paces and as an afterthought I turned and asked her,

“Do you want me to drive you home? The spaceship will almost certainly not

be coming tonight.”

“I know,” she answered. “But I shall be staying here tonight. I have nowhere

to go. There's this nice fire to keep me warm when the kids leave.”

Damn it, I thought, why the hell did I have to ask her that question? Being nice

and polite always lands you in trouble in this country and it is only in the U.S. that

one finds nice looking women totally mad and totally alone and homeless. But I could

not let it go at that. I just couldn't.

“Don't you have a home?” I asked her. “Where do you live?”

“I have some friends that put me up but they were not at home this evening.”

“Would you like to come with me?”

“If I shall not put you out. Don't you have a family?”

“I do, but they live in L.A.,” I said. “Here in San Diego I live alone.”

“OK then, thanks,” she said smiling and got up on her feet and we walked

across the sand to the road where my car was parked. We got into my tiny

Volkswagen and a faint stench of a person whose body and clothes had not had a

recent wash reached my nostrils. It was not revolting, just barely evident, just barely

disagreeable.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

She smiled. “We've just had your sandwiches,” she said.

“Yes, but are you hungry?”

“Well, just a little.” And then she changed her mind and said, “No, not really.”

But we stopped at a McDonald's for a hamburger and she ate it with gusto and

polished off an ice cream as well. She took off her woollen head cover and I noticed

that her thick blond hair was just starting to turn gray. She must have been my age,

just about fifty and she was handsome in the sense of an older woman who must have

been beautiful in her youth. She still had a good complexion, a sensual mouth and

white strong teeth. My God, what a strange situation! I had a thousand questions to

ask but I was silent. I did not utter a word. I did not want to get involved.

“What's your name?” she asked.

“Paul,” I said. “I am Greek. In my language it is Pavlos. What's yours?”

“Pavlos, Pavlos, Pavlos. How nice it sounds. It suits you. Mine is Janet. Rather

ordinary, isn't it?”

“It's OK. Shall we get moving Janet?”

We drove silently to my two-bedroom flat and when we entered she took off

her hat and cape. She wore a thick woollen brownish-yellow pullover underneath,

over a white shirt which was buttoned at the throat as if waiting for a tie. She was slim

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and well preserved for her age. For the age I surmised. She sat down on an armchair

in the hall and waited. I switched on the TV for her but she got up and switched it off.

“I don't watch television,” she said, “People talk too fast in it and I cannot

follow them. Well, I can if I try but it is mostly a lot of baloney. A lot of noise. In the

spaceship it is very quiet. It is a different world.”

I went about my business while she sat there quietly, absorbed in her thoughts.

I washed in the bathroom and put on my pajamas. I got out an extra pair for Janet. I

gave it to her and told her she could have a bath or a shower and then she could sleep

in the second bedroom which was where Zoë slept when she visited me. She asked if

she could wash her underclothes and socks and I said, of course, and that next day I

would leave for work early. She could either leave or else wait for me if she wanted

me to drive her somewhere. I, then, wished her good night and she said,

“Good night, Pavlos. Many thanks.”

I slept immediately but sometime later I woke up as a naked Janet was

slipping under my bedcovers. Her hair was loose and sweet smelling and so was the

rest of her body, she was firm and soft at the same time and her breasts were the right

size. She snuggled up to me and for a long while we just remained in a silent embrace.

And then she turned her head and kissed me and said, “Pavlos, I love you.” She said it

over and over again, after every kiss and I who had not been with a woman for over a

year found her kisses and caresses too sweet to resist.

She unbuttoned my pajamas and I told her I did not have any condoms and

she said not to worry, she was clean and I said I was not thinking of that but of

pregnancy and she said she was past that. We made love until dawn, and she was so

tender, that when she told me, I love you, I told her I loved her too. I felt I owed it to

her. I felt I loved her.

I slept f