theorem in particle physics. Reverse and forward were interchangeable. And why not, what was the difference really? A moving vehicle is no different moving backwards than it is moving forwards, especially when the driver regards the whole arrangement as if he were on foot, able to touch, to bump, to brush his way past vague obstacles in the street. This was the second revelation of David's stay in Tehran. People drove as if they were walking. They veered idiosyncratically, these fellows with their army surplus field jackets and their interesting sense of space.In Istanbul, earlier, he used to tell people he wanted to get Mainland New York to approve purchase of a jeep-mounted recoilless rifle, plus jeep, to get him to and from the rep office. More seriously he talked about armoring his car. 'Armoring your car,' he told me, 'is known as a major expenditure proposal. Forty thousand dollars. Allowing your driver to carry a gun is known as a small arms shipment to the Marxist-Leninist Armed Propaganda Squad. Not that the driver would give them the piece. They'd take it after they blew you both away with antitank grenades and AK-47s.”This summer, the summer in which we sat on his broad terrace, was the period after the shah left Iran, before the hostages were taken, before the Grand Mosque and Afghanistan. The price of oil was an index to the Western world's anxiety. It provided a figure, $24 a barrel, say, to measure against the figure of the month before or the year before. It was a handy way to refer to our complex involvements. It told us how bad we felt at a given time.'How's Tap doing?”'The kid writes novels, he eats octopus.”'Good. That's great.”'How are yours? Where are they living?”'Michigan. They're doing fine. They love it. They swim. “'What's your first wife's name?”'Grace,' he said. 'That's a first wife's name, isn't it?”'Does Lindsay talk about having kids?”'Shit, Lindsay'll do anything. She's crazy. Did she tell you she found a job? Great break, she's been getting antsy for something to do. She'll teach English at one of these language schools. It's an escape from the bank wives and their get-togethers.”'I haven't noticed you two hosting any dinner parties for Mainland people here on business. Or evacuees from disturbed areas. You're the credit head, aren't you?”'Disturbed areas. That's what we call them all right. Like snow flurries on a weather map. Dinner parties in this division are famous for eyewitness accounts of very large groups of people marching on embassies and banks. Also famous for unrelenting politeness. All the ethnic groups and religious subgroups. Can you seat a Druze next to a Maronite? They're all more or less multinationalized but who knows what lies underneath? We have a Sikh who carries the mandatory sect knife somewhere on his person. Sometimes I'm careful what I say without knowing precisely why. Grace used to handle things when we were in Beirut and Jeddah and Istanbul. She handled things beautifully in fact. Lindsay I don't think would be all that adept. I think she'd stand there laughing.”'What about the Americans?”'Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends. That swim made me hungry.”David drank slowly but steadily whenever possible. In the course of a long Sunday lunch on the eastern shore or a night almost anywhere, his voice would begin to rumble and drone, grow friendlier, taking on paternal tones, and in his large blond face a ruined child would appear, barely discernible in the slack flesh, a watcher, distant and contrite.'Our office in Monrovia has a guy on the payroll whose job is catching snakes. That's all he does. He goes to employees' houses on a regular basis, through the yard, the garden, the hedges, catching snakes.”'What's he called officially?”'The snake catcher.”'That's remarkably direct,' I said.'They couldn't come up with a buzz word for snake, it seems.”This was the summer before crowds attacked the U.S. embassies in Islamabad and Tripoli, before the assassinations of American technicians in Turkey, before Liberia, the executions on the beach, the stoning of dead bodies, the evacuation of personnel from the Mainland Bank.'Does Kathryn ever get to Athens?”'No.”'I meet my kids in New York,' he said.'That's easier than going to the island.”'We eat banana splits in the hotel room. They cost eight dollars each.”'Did Grace ever attack you physically?”'She's not a physical person, Grace.”'Ever hit her? I'm serious.”'No. Ever hit Kathryn?”'We've scuffled. No clean blows. She took a run at me once with a kitchen thing.”'What for?”'She found out I went to bed with a friend of hers. It led to words.”'The friend made sure she found out?”'She let on, somehow. She sent signals.”'So you nearly got spiked with an ice pick.”'It was just a potato peeler. What annoyed the friend was my perceived indifference. It was one of those situations. You find yourself in a situation. Alone with Antoinette. The two of you have felt the usual secret lustings. The normal healthy subatomic lustful vibrations. These are feelings that get acted on when man and wife split up. Suddenly there's an Antoinette, destiny in her eyes. But Kathryn and I hadn't split up. We hadn't done anything. The situation just arose. The combination of circumstances.”'What situation? Paint a picture.”'Never mind a picture.”'Her apartment?”'Her house. Diagonally across the park from ours.”'Summer, winter?”'Winter.”'The plant-filled parlor room. The glass of wine.”'Something like that.”'The intimate talk,' he said.'Yes.”'Always the intimate talk. This woman is divorced, right?”'Yes.”'The sadness,' he said.'There was sadness, yes. But it had nothing to do with her divorce. She'd just lost her job. The CBC. They fired her.”'The sadness.”'All right the sadness.”'The longing.”'Yes, there was longing.”'The need,' he said.'Yes.”'In the starry night, in the parlor room, sipping dry white wine.”'It was a good job. She was upset.”' 'Comfort me, comfort me.'‘'Anyway I gave the impression of wavering. I must have drawn back. This was inexcusable, of course. I hesitated, I showed uncertainty. We did the thing finally. We couldn't end our friendship, commit our crime, without finishing what we'd started. So we did the thing. We eked out a fuck. What an idiot I was. Antoinette got her sweet revenge.”'She let on.”'She let on. And in letting on she didn't fail to communicate this half-heartedness of mine. I don't know how she did this without being direct, which I gather she wasn't. I suppose in fables and parables, in allegories. The language of women and children. This is what got Kathryn really furious, I think. Not just the sex, the friend. The way I went about it. I committed a crime against the earth. That's what made her want to carve my ribs.”'Did it clear the air? This knife fight?”'Beginning of the end.”'We married young,' he said. 'We didn't know anything. You know the story. Little or no experience. Grace said I was the first, more or less the first, really the first, the first in any important way.”We laughed.'I knew our marriage was shot to hell when we started watching TV in different rooms,' he said. 'If her sound was up loud enough, I could hear her change channels in there. When she went to the same channel I was watching, I switched channels myself. I couldn't bear watching the same stuff she was watching. I believe this is called estrangement.”'You're not going to become a stereotype, are you?”'What do you mean?”'It's bad enough you have a new young wife. You don't want to be thought of as one of these men with an old wife and old kids back in the States. These are the wives who weren't dynamic enough to keep up with men like you in the great surge of your multinational career. The old wives and old kids are gray and stooped, sitting in front of TV sets in the suburbs. The wives have head colds all the time. The old dogs are listless on the patios.”'At least my new young wife isn't a fantasy wife. A stewardess or model. You know Hardeman? His second wife is a former ball girl for the Atlanta Braves. She used to sit along the left-field line waiting for foul balls. I think she found one in Hardeman.”David was casual about most bank matters. He told me what the bank was doing in Turkey and gave me telexes and other paper that detailed loan proposals. These documents impressed Rowser, particularly the ones marked confidential in block letters. I guess David felt there was little or no danger in giving this particular classified material to a friend. We were serving the same broad ends.'Sometimes I wonder what I'm doing in some of these places. I can't get the Empty Quarter out of my mind. We flew right over the dunes, man, nothing but sand, a quarter of a million square miles. A planet of sand. Sand mountains, sand plains and valleys. Sand weather, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty degrees, and I can't imagine what it's like when the wind's blowing. I tried to convince myself it was beautiful. The desert, you know. The vast sweep. But it scared me. This Aramco guy told me he can stand on the airstrip they have out there and he can hear the blood flowing in his body. Is it the silence or the heat that makes this possible? Or both? Hear the blood.”'What were you doing flying over this place?”'Oil, boy. What else? Big field. We're financing some construction.”'You know what Maitland says.”'What does he say?”'Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.”David went in to get me a beer and another for himself. I was wide awake and feeling hungry. A faint light was visible in the sky, the Parthenon emerging, two-dimensional, a soft but structured image. I followed him to the kitchen and we started eating whatever was lying loose, mainly pastry and fruit. Lindsay came in to complain about the noise. She wore a nightgown with a ruffled hem and we smiled when we saw her.
In these early hours the sky seems very near street level. The street extends from eastern sky to western. It's always a surprise, entering the boulevard by first light when there's no traffic, being able to see things as unconnected, the embassy mansions with their period detail, objects coming out of the gloom, mulberry trees and kiosks, and to make out the contours of the street itself, a place of clear limits, we see, with its own form and meaning, appearing in the stillness and marine light to be almost a rolling field, a broad path to the mountains. Traffic must be a stream that binds things to some denser perspective.The boulevard was empty only momentarily. A bus moved past, drowned faces pressed against the windows, and then the little cars. Four abreast they came, out of the concrete hollows to the west, the first anxious wave of the day.The way home was uphill into narrower streets, severely graded toward the pine woods and gray rock of Lycabettus. I stood by the bed in my pajamas, feeling vaguely unstuck, my habits no longer bound to hers. The tides and easements of custom. Our book of days.
