“Please fasten your seat belts and follow the demonstration on the use of the life jacket which is located under your seat.”
The huge jet is taxiing on the runway moving on to the principal lane and is about to take off. A letter put me on it. A skeletal letter bulging with fading memories.
A letter that by any measure of probability should not have reached me. I take the envelope out of my pocket. I look at the address of the sender. I knew it so well and yet it had been totally effaced from my memory. My own address in Cairo crossed out by an old neighbor I had not seen in fifteen years and replaced by the Athens one I had given him just before leaving Egypt. It is a miracle letter, an Olympic marathon runner. It went to my mother‟s house in Athens and she in her turn forwarded it to the island.
I ignore the demonstration by the pretty stewardess and open it for the hundredth time. Not because it is momentous but because fate is sometimes unpredictable and inexorable and teases us and alters our life with memories and illegible scribbling.
DeaR NicKy,
My LetteR will suRprise you. So Much Time has gone by since We lasT
coMMunicaTed. I do noT even kNow if you aRe sTill in EgypT. In any case I hope it will Reach you. I puT pLease forward on The enveLope, as you wiLL see if iT
Reaches yoU.
WeLL, I wRiTe to give you ouR news which UnfoRTunaTely is bad. Telly died suddenly of a ceRebRaL sTRoke as he was LectuRing aT college.
ThaT happened abouT Two monThs ago and you can iMagine ouR pain and heLpnessness. We aRe jusT coming Round To accepTing ouR Loss and geTTing back inTo the RouTine of ouR Life. Sam and NichoLas are bacK at their coLLeges on The wesT coasT and I have finaLLy found The Time To seNd you These few woRds.
Please wRite To me youR News. My God, whaT wouLdn‟T I give to see you again.
ALL my Love,
SheRi.
To tell the truth, I was not shaken. Too much time had passed since I saw them last. Something like twenty years and then, even before that, I had lost all sense of friendship and respect I had for Telly. Poor Sheri, I wondered how deep and genuine 40
her sense of pain, her sense of loss was. How sincere her words. I wondered how those twenty years had gone by and if anything had changed in her warped family life.
When I left, things had more or less returned to normal; but for how long? She was pregnant with a second child which tied her all the more to a matrimonial straitjacket.
Twenty years. Perhaps, it did work out. I doubted it. Not if I knew Telly as well as I thought.
I wondered what she looked like now. Had she lost her freshness, her beauty, that pertness that characterized her? Even at thirty, before her marriage, she was the all-American girl next door of glamour magazines. Blond, blue-eyed, well-built and smiling. The sort of ideal that you do not find next door outside the movies. And her letter, which brought a smile to my lips, typically High-School American. A mixture of ordinary and capital letters indiscriminately put down because, after all, when you come to think of it, it doesn‟t really matter.
I answered the letter, of course, with my condolences and insincere grief and a brief account of my own clutter of happiness and unhappiness, minor successes and all too many failures. That I was now living almost permanently on an island in Greece with my fifteen-year-old daughter. Writing. That I was now almost happy and that, after all was said and done, was my main achievement.
She replied within two weeks with the same haphazard insertion of capital letters where they had no business being, with delight that I got her letter after all, with undisguised agitation that I was divorced and lived on an island. She sent me her phone number and said to phone her or else send her a long, long detailed letter. And, of course, now that there was no wife to consent or not, she expected me in the STaTes SooN.
As I could not envisage explaining the causes and intricacies of my divorce over the phone, I wrote to her a passably detailed essay (in a somewhat enhanced literary form to her‟s) on our lost twenty years and invited her, in my turn, to summer vacations on the island as my guest, something that would surely not please young Annie. But I doubted it would ever come to that. Anyway, what was she so excited about? We were getting on in age. I was forty three and she must have been almost ten years older. True, I had come across one or two pretty wonderful women in their middle fifties and Sheri might be in their mold but that remained to be seen. Dreams, sometimes, beget nasty surprises. Though, sometimes not. I had to find out. I asked my mother to come to the island to take care of Annie for a week or two and as I was contemplating these unanswerable questions on the plane, the surge of speed launched us into the ether.
On to a journey as tiresome but not as protracted as the one of two decades earlier, which took thirteen propeller-driven hours just to cross the Atlantic. Though the anticipation, I must admit, quite comparable. Then, a young, new, dream-world unwrapping; now, an old occurrence flickering to life. With strong enough memories and curiosity to urge me to take the trip. In any case, I had just finished a novel and my mind was blank. I needed the break to recharge my batteries. To think of something new to grapple with in my writing. Might not this visit and the recollection of the strange, almost forgotten affair fecundate my inspiration?
I vividly remember my arrival, feeling lost and disorientated after a day and a night on an airplane, with propellers still vibrating in my brain, where I was met by Telly‟s parents, at Logan airport in Boston. Two friendly, affectionate, middle-aged strangers, more Greek than American despite the strong local accent. His mother, my father‟s cousin, sent off for an arranged marriage, a generation ago, to a man she did not know, with the courage or, perhaps, resignation and fatalism of difficult times, 41
made a visible success of her life even if one cannot talk of the non-visible part of it.
On the visible side, however, she had a very prominent son. Prominent, that is, for her class, education and first-generation immigrant status. An assistant professor of mathematics at Boston University. Mathematics was a quirk of mine, much to my father‟s disappointment and disapproval, who could not envisage its practical usefulness. Well neither could I for that matter but at my age that did not hold much weight. Better than nothing, he must have thought and allowed me to apply to that university. I was admitted, and his consolation was the reassurance that Telly would be looking after me.
How can I describe Telly? He hated his Greek name, Aristotelis, and said that at least Onassis had the money to bolster it, to keep people from laughing at it. As for his looks, since they say a picture is worth a thousand words and since a handful of film stars are more widely known than Mao Zedong and Hitler, I shall use such a one to relieve us of a thousand words. Telly was the spitting image of Sylvester Stallone with the qualification that a punch from Rocky would have left Telly smiling while a punch from Telly would have flattened Rocky. An odd aptitude for a mathematician.
And not the only one. Telly was handsome, sociable and charming with that attribute of utter congeniality: the easy smile and ready laugh and, so, effortlessly, embodied the legendary lady killer. Which he was, carelessly, unselfconsciously, unintentionally and mostly succumbing to the temptations that came his way. He did not intimidate by his professional standing because he was totally unpretentious and uncultured. His mathematical brain, that formidable annihilator of infinities, irrational equations, Pythagorean theorems, matrices and differential geometry, could not abide a short story, a lyrical poem, a poignant painting. His favorite TV shows were cowboy westerns and in the Sunday newspapers ignored the politics and tackled the comic strips with boisterous glee.
I stayed at their home for a few days on my arrival in Boston and subsequently visited the family on every occasion I could get away from my studies and the depressing college boarding house. They had become my family in exile. An instant affinity bound me to Telly at once. It was easy to like him and definitely much less so for someone to warm up to me. Though easy-going, I was quiet and withdrawn. But mathematics bound us together. And family. This solidarity being the only Greek trait left in his character from the overwhelming American melting pot. For he could not speak, or would not speak, a word of Greek though he understood most of his parents‟
Greek chatter. In college he took me under his wing. He insisted I go to his office every day and he helped me with any difficulties I might have in the various subdivisions of this vast subject. Advised me on the elective subjects I should choose and even on the sports I should do, which were a compulsory part of the undergraduate curriculum. “God, Nikos, not body building. It‟s so boring. Try squash,” he proposed. “It will keep you fit, agile and develop your reflexes.” Told me about the instructors and professors, their strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies.
What are yours? I asked him for a laugh. He smiled. “Well,” he said, “let me see.
Strength: physical. Weakness: women. Idiosyncrasy: mathematics.” I laughed at this succinct self-appraisal and told him I shared with him just the last one. “That won‟t do,” he said. “Can‟t help you with the first one but life without women, is not worth a shit. I‟ll get you fixed up with a girl pretty soon.” I was dazzled by him. In college he was a personality, almost a celebrity. His reputation in the math department was as high as his popularity. Walking by his side in the college corridors, I witnessed the on-going, continuous greetings of students and staff. Pretty girls giving him the eye and bright alluring smiles. Outside he was 42
just another friendly, likeable fellow. He had ordinary friends because, apart from his extraordinary but specific brilliance, he, himself, was ordinary. Not a single intellectual in his crowd of buddies. Not even another mathematician. Well, just me and I was nothing much; just passionate about it. He frequented coffee bars where he met his friends and flirted with the women he knew and the waitresses and was known as the Prof. The first time I went there, after he promised to fix me up with a girl, he pointed at a pretty waitress and asked me what I thought of her. She was pretty and sexy and although probably my age, was very much an adult. I said she was very nice.
“Okay, I‟ll fix you up with her. When are you free?”
“Oh Telly, give us a break. Where will I take her? I don‟t even have a car,” I protested.
“Don‟t worry. She‟ll take you! And ask her to give you a blow-job.”
“What‟s a blow-job?”
“Never mind,” he answered. “Just tell her.”
I just about managed to postpone the date for another time. I was barely a few weeks in the States and still a little lost, let alone my inexperience in sex and the savoir-faire of American dates with accomplished damsels and mysterious blow jobs.
I was starting to understand Telly and meanwhile I got to know Sheri. I mean even Einstein had a soft spot for the opposite sex. I read about it somewhere. It all comes out eventually, usually after one‟s death, and one is amazed that the brain of such a genius was also preoccupied with the baser instincts. If you can call sex, base, which obviously you can‟t because it is vastly more important than the Theory of Relativity. It is a question of life and death. So is relativity, for that matter, but relativity is the long run. The very, very long run and has to do with light, energy and mass and ultimately, the understanding of the universe. These are the questions that fired my interest in mathematics and physics and caused all those arguments with my father who was more concerned with the here and now. But I am getting off the point.
I don‟t know if Telly was a genius. Einstein reputedly was, despite his soft spot and his clowning. We have this picture of him making a funny face with his tongue sticking out and perhaps he preferred comics to politics, so why not Telly?
Well, Telly was not of the same caliber but his soft spot was very much softer. And he was easygoing and handsome and charming and girls gravitated to him like flies to honey. He was going steady with Sheri for almost two years and they were planning to get married. Did she suspect his gallivanting? I cannot imagine that she did not.
She was a bright, down-to-earth young woman, who besides being very attractive, as I described her above, was firm and bossy in a tender manner and this seemed to suit Telly‟s disposition, which was that of a thirty-something year old adolescent. He was conventional enough to want to settle down and raise a family and it seemed to me that Sheri was a good choice. Settle down was perhaps what she hoped would happen to Telly once they were married. And, mathematics notwithstanding, they were compatible in their intellects and interests. Sheri, after high school, was apprenticed as a hairdresser and beautician and no higher ambitions troubled her after that. When she met Telly they locked on each other like a virus on a cell. This is, perhaps, an unfair metaphor because it implies something bad on something good, which is never a clear-cut case with human beings. I just meant to illustrate their cohesiveness.
My freshman year was pleasant enough with hard work, with Telly‟s help and his family‟s open house where I was always welcome. I spent many weekends there, sleeping on a sofa in the living room, looking at Jack Paar on late night TV and spending the next day with Telly on his rounds of coffee bars and appointments with 43
friends, many of which were in his mold, progeny of Greek immigrants, unable to articulate a simple phrase in the language of their parents. Sometimes, but not often, for I did not want to become a pest, we went for drives and excursions or visits to other friends with Sheri. And the illicit was not missing, either. On a few occasions, he picked me up from college for a drive with young women I had not seen before. If I happened to ask about them, next day at college, he would claim they were just old friends and would I please keep it to myself.
That first Christmas and New Year I spent with my family in exile. Good thing, too, because the dorms were deserted as my fellow boarders dispersed across the US feasting with their families. Many visits were exchanged between the Greeks to keep traditions alive and reminisce about the old country and many more telephone calls went back and forth with good wishes. A lovely young lady called June Rubinski came to see Telly‟s parents. She was an old girlfriend of his from way back and was on particularly friendly terms with his parents. I was introduced to her but we hardly exchanged a word. Telly was not at home and she did not stay long. During the introductions, my aunt gushed effusively to me.
“This beauty,” she said, “is not only an angel of kindness and good manners; she is an assistant professor of literature at Radcliffe. She came to see me often when Telly was in the army and I prayed and prayed that when he would be demobilized he‟d ask her to marry him but my stupid son botched it up.” June smiled.
“Ancient history,” she said.
“Isn‟t she beautiful? Isn‟t she a Madonna?” my aunt insisted.
“My God, how you embarrass me Maria,” June said blushing. “Good bye, Nikos, I have to go. Nikos is for Nicholas, is it not? Such a nice name. Why shorten it?”
I smiled and blushed in turn. I was tongue-tied.
I asked Telly about her.
“Well,” he said and then he smiled. “Good looking broad, isn‟t she?”
“She‟s not a broad, Telly. She‟s a very beautiful woman. She‟s a Madonna.” He laughed.
“Stop parroting my mother. I‟ve had enough of this Madonna business all these years. Well,” he started again and then paused.
“Get on with it.”
“I met June at a college prom at Radcliffe. We had exactly parallel studies. In different subjects, of course. I was in my last year for my PhD at MIT and June in her last year at Radcliffe.”
“You finished at MIT? Wow! Wow!”
“It was close to home.”
I laughed.
“How very convenient!”
“We dated after that and fell in love.”
“Did you make love to this Madonna?”
“You didn‟t think we held hands, did you? At twenty six?”
“Oh my God!”
“After the doctorate I was drafted for my military service and they sent me to Alaska. To an interception and decoding station near Prudhoe Bay where you spit and your spittle becomes ice before it reaches the ground. It was so miserable there. So cold you had to be careful, if you stayed out for a while, not to bump your nose on a hard surface because it might break off like an icicle. So maddening to have twenty-44
four hours of daylight in summer and of darkness in winter. I stayed there for two years with a week‟s break at home every six months. The only thing that kept me going was June‟s letters. Regularly, one a week.”
“Did you write as often?”
“I never answered and she kept on writing.”
“Oh, how could you?”
“I am not much of a letter writer and, anyway, what was there to write about?
The variations in snowfall and temperatures? Or the decoded Soviet messages which were secret and technical?”
“To tell her you love her and miss her.”
“She knew that.”
“How pedestrian you are. How unromantic. What happened then?”
“It‟s funny, when I returned to civilian life, after the first few months our love petered out.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes. More or less. She was by that time teaching at Radcliffe and I was offered tenure at BU. We saw each other often but the magic was gone. We are still good friends, though.”
“Forgive me if I am indiscreet. With Sheri, the magic is still there?”
“Oh Nicky, you‟ll grow up and understand. At our age priorities are different.
We want to settle down and have children. You weigh and balance things differently.” Easter came early in the spring that year yet the weather had already warmed considerably from the icy winter months. The Greek community started organizing the traditional feast which gave it cohesion and a sense of identity separate from the other Americans, for although they were proud to be American and were loyal to the country that gave them the opportunity for a better life, they were also proud of their heritage. So after the forty-day fast, which most of them observed, they attended the midnight mass of the Resurrection and then congregated to a hired hall to eat the traditional maghiritsa, a thick tasty soup made from the entrails of the slaughtered lambs, whose fate landed them on the skewer before their final resting place in the abdomen of the faithful.
I could not very well refuse to join Telly‟s family in their religious duties and I was surprised to find out that Telly was at one with them. Not a single doubt in that mathematically programmed and razor-sharp brain of his. Where the intricacies of mathematics stopped, simple-mindedness and the kissing of icons took over. I was disappointed. Mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, anthropologists, I figured, should be in the avant garde of, if not atheism, at least, agnosticism. My feelings, bad enough then, seem to get more extreme as time goes by. I cannot bear the ecclesiastical ritual and its chief protagonists, the priests. I was very uncomfortable at the hall because the priest who celebrated mass was circulating in our midst and kept me under close scrutiny. Whenever he saw me drinking a highball he harassed me with cups of coffee and unctuous smiles. A girl about my age, Greek of course, for everyone in that hall was Greek even if one would have never deduced it from the patchy smattering of Greek and the few scratchy Greek records, noticed the persecution and smiled at me. Had I been drinking solely coffee, I would have shied away. As it was, the mixture of coffee and alcohol gave me the guts to go up to her.
“May I sit next to you?” I asked.
She smiled and pointed to the empty chair beside her.
“For a little peace and quiet,” I added.
“Well you have been drinking too much,” she said inferring my exasperation.
45
“Am I not allowed?”
“He was being thoughtful.”
“And terribly annoying.”
“But compassionately Christian.”
“Balls. He was pushy and intrusive but I didn‟t want to be offensive to a silly priest just after the Resurrection of our Lord.”
We laughed and looked at each other intently.
“Where have I seen you before?” I asked her.
“In church?”
“No.”
“So you don‟t remember?”
“Do you?”
She smiled.
“Of course I do. A few weeks ago at BU. As you were entering Telly‟s office I was coming out. You smiled at me and I thought that smile was rather sweet.”
“Of course, forgive me. I do remember, after all. Is that why you were following the progression of highballs down my throat with such diligence?”
“Yes. I was wondering how long it would take you to fall flat on your face.
The truth is, by the time that first coffee arrived, you were swaying dangerously. I really don‟t blame the priest. I had the urge to do the same.”
“Oh what a sweet, caring person you are! Moreover, a BU comrade-in-arms.
What is your name?”
“Laura.”
“I‟m happy to have met you, Laura. Mine is …”
“Nicky?”
“Yes. That‟s what Telly calls me. Nicholas officially, Nikos for short. Should I be flattered that you have been making discreet inquiries about my name?”
“I don‟t see the point of your question. I think you already are.”
“My, my, that‟s an evasive answer. Let me rephrase the question. Do we have the highballs and the priest to thank for our meeting or would you have made a move to get to know me?”
“I had an eye on you and a wait-and-see policy.”
“I don‟t blame you. You had to find out if I would end up flat on my face.” She laughed.
“I hoped you wouldn‟t. I did want to meet you.”
“You are very sweet.”
“But you are not. You never even noticed me.”
“You know, Laura, I am new here and a little lost. So many new faces! They are just a blur to me. When I saw you I came right up, didn‟t I?”
“Okay. You‟re tentatively forgiven.”
“Not permanently?”
“No. That will have to wait.”
I smiled.
“This means we shall have to see each other again. You are very cunning.”
“And I must say, you are quite perceptive.”
That was not the end of our conversation. It was the beginning. We talked in a flirty, humorous vein for the next two hours until the eating and drinking ended, with bloated bellies and heavy eyelids round about three past midnight. I called Laura next day and nearly every day after that and we started going out for dates in restaurants and movies and drives in her car to exercise her deficient American-accented Greek 46
and we kissed to perfect my deficient lip-touching technique on her lips and other parts of her soft, inviting body in deserted spots that a cunning girl would know
….and….oh, I close for a moment my eyes, in the subdued din of the jet engines and the discomfort of my laid-back economy seat, to recall her face, her body, her voice, her intelligence and her wild, lascivious streak.
Laura was no beauty. She had a pretty face with large black, intelligent eyes, raven black, shoulder length hair, a milk-white complexion and the best part of her, a lovely, sweet, absolutely delightful smile. She was of normal height; well, perhaps slightly short for standard, well-fed American youth, and on the plump side but pleasantly so rather than unpleasantly. It was a good body, in the main, with full breasts and shapely legs that filled their jeans. That day, in the post Resurrection break-fasting binge, she was dressed formally and a little ludicrously in a black taffeta dress with pleats and frills and a décolletage of Chantilly lace coming right up to her neck and chin. Her plump arms, bare and white were begging to be pinched. Beneath, she wore a black, gossamer body stocking and black pumps. I am sure she felt uncomfortable in her mother‟s authoritarian but hardly authoritative taste. That, as I said, was the beginning. Her simplified, everyday clothing was tasteful and attractive and the only recommendation I ever made was that she should lose two or three kilos.
“How much is that in pounds?”
“I don‟t think in pounds,” I told her, “I only know kilos.”
“And you call yourself a mathematician?”
Laura was a sophomore majoring in Sociology. When I asked her why she had chosen such a dull subject she answered that, perhaps, it was because she was a dullard. It was the kind of reply she would give to silly questions. There was no doubt that Laura was confident of her brains and had the grades to prove it. The only difficulty she encountered in her curriculum was in statistical theory, a branch of mathematics, indispensable in the study of trends and populations, and it was this which led her to Telly, a family friend, and inadvertently to the first smile we exchanged. Her father, a first-generation Greek-American went to his native village in the old country, when it was time to get married, and returned with a wife much in the manner of Telly‟s parents but with the advantage that the future spouses had, at least, a look at each other. So it was from her mother that Laura acquired the modicum of Greek that often brought a smile of amusement to my face and a look of annoyance on hers. For like most American girls, the tendency to be bossy was in the culture and there was always this gentle assertion, the wish to have the last word, to have her way, not to be ridiculed.
“If I don‟t make mistakes, how will I ever learn?” she would say peevishly.
“And if you laugh at me how do you expect me to make the effort?” I would hug her and kiss her and try to choke my laughter.
“No offense meant, my love, I swear it. Can I help it if it‟s funny?” Her father was a plumbing contractor and had about ten people working for him, which meant he made a lot of money. That, at least, is the plumbers‟ income reputation in the US and it must have been true because Laura did not live at home.
She shared a comfortable flat in a downtown apartment building with another girl student and drove her own car. And, of course, she must have had a mind of her own to have split away from a conservative Greek family.
Our romance progressed in a calm, pleasant, compatible manner considering we both had to work on our respective fields of study and though we saw and smiled and kissed fleetingly each other, at college, daily, and talked on the phone at night, we met mainly on the weekends. The cozy dinners were fine, the movies, the whispering 47
in the dark, the furtive kisses and holding hands were very nice but the long drives in out of the way, deserted spots were the best. For a new horizon was opening up for the little bumpkin from Cairo: the panorama, heady and thrilling, of sex. Little by little, the bright, sexy sophomore was teaching her lackluster but avid freshman the elements of physical engagement. All the way from heart-thumping touching of lips to heart-thumping tangling of tongues to heart-thumping touching of body parts, remote and intimate. Teaching intelligently, guessing my inexperience, leading me on as if I was the initiator and she the seduced, reluctant but giving in, hinting the next step, telling me no and acquiescing until I, the little bumpkin, finally understood that she was no virgin. That things were different in the States, that there was more to come. And one day, after a few drinks at a bar, she said her flat-mate was away and she had a hunch I would prefer an empty flat to the back seat of her car and we laughed and went up and kissed and sick with love and passion, undressed and made love. Oh, the magic of that day, I shall never forget. Again and again we coupled and fought and she could not get enough of it and neither could I until I felt my soul about to break out of my throat. When we kissed goodnight, she called me, my darling. It was the first time.
I still saw Telly at BU on most weekdays but ever since I met Laura my weekends were solely for her. He made little jokes about how I finally found my way and had no more use for him and, How was I getting on? Did I hit home