Mortals

“Here’s an example why. I feel like a parasite on your knowledge sometimes, which doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. But as an example. Your knowledge of Greek. In Crete. Remember?”

She had no idea how marginal his command of Greek was, at least at this stage, after years of disuse.

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, is that possible?”

“No, say more.”

“This goes back to our Crete vacation in ’83, the incident… When we went to see the pornographic movies in Heraklion?”

He concentrated. He did remember generally, and elements of the evening came back to him, but only in step with her retelling. He remembered the torso of the event, so to speak. They had gone, purely on impulse, as a lark, to see what a pornographic movie would be like in Greece, in Crete. Pornography had been legalized fairly recently, they had gathered. They had walked in on the last tenth of a movie about a licentious Orthodox priest, which the audience was watching in total, fixated silence. Apparently it was a genre. He remembered the priest hanging himself at the end. And then he remembered clearly the suddenly different, rowdy, raucous response to the second feature, a piece of French pornography. The premise of the French film, beautifully photographed, as he recalled, had been odd. It was about a superbly beautiful matron, possibly a widow, who would only allow her lovers and suitors to perform cunnilingus on her. All of them were willing to do it, but they also, naturally, wanted to have follow-up regular intercourse. But all she would permit was the other, and there was no reciprocation from her, oddly enough for a pornographic movie. She rejects all the penises aimed her way. That was his recollection. He was remembering more. The woman was not a widow. Her husband was a society dentist who relieved his frustrations via other female characters who had more reasonable attitudes toward the penis. The dentist was getting it from the other sluts but not from his maddeningly spectacular creamy blond wife. He remembered thinking it was a slightly off-center premise for a pornographic movie. But the main thing she was reminding him had happened was that there had been a claque of young guys in the audience shouting out, at each instance of cunnilingus, Mathe, Vassilios! Mathe, Vassilios! Now he remembered that. And each bout of yelling had been followed by roars of laughter. And he remembered translating what they were saying, for Iris, when she asked. That he remembered. And the next thing he could remember was being back at the Cretan Sun and having memorable sex with Iris, in their freezing room.

“And you don’t remember my begging you to wait a second and wanting to wait around in the lobby?”

“No. But I remember it was freezing.”

“And you don’t remember being with me in the lobby, unwillingly, but waiting there with me, anything about that?”

“No.”

“And you don’t remember when finally after everybody else had left, after they were turning out the lights, dragging himself out was a poor physically fucked-up person, one leg dragging, this pitiful man with very white skin, an obvious sort of outcast, dragging himself out past us?”

“No, what I remember is the next act, same night.”

“Which was?”

“Well, back at the Cretan Sun. Making love there. Our room overlooked the market and we were right above the spice vendors.”

“And you don’t remember we exchanged looks when we saw this poor devil, this physically unfortunate man, or neighborhood idiot, or whatever he was? And we were sure he was Vassilios?”

What he remembered was hating the Cretan Sun, the cheapest hotel they had ever stayed in, the poster of Delphi above the bed with the line Il y a des poux dans cette chambre penciled neatly along the bottom margin, the miserable shower that gave two minutes of warm water.

“And you don’t remember we exchanged glances… And by the way, when you tell people about our adventures in Crete I would appreciate it if you’d leave out the note on the poster about lice being in our room.”

He was obviously blocking out what should have been cognized as the main event, apparently, of that night. Sex was the reason. Somehow getting aroused, which he had, at the movies, had arced over to the sexual event, events, back at the Cretan Sun, and obliterated the interim for him. It had been that night at the Cretan Sun when he had come up with the affectionate term nethers for her pudenda, which had come from Netherlands, and which he still used from time to time.

He said, “We didn’t discuss this at the time, that night?” She shook her head.

“And we didn’t discuss it the next day, either, did we? That is, we never got into a discourse about it.”

“No, we were too stunned, I thought.”

“I remember noticing an oddlooking guy. But that’s all.”

He thought, Here it is, a thing that has never been an issue: But here it is courtesy of the female mind for which there is nothing dead that can’t be made to live again. He had failed to recognize the situation at the theater as the burning emblem of man’s inhumanity to man it obviously was for her. Then it hadn’t come up the next day due to their katastrofi, when she stepped into a hole in the pavement and cracked her ankle and then the nightmare come true of trying to get medical help in Crete had begun. He remembered every detail of that. He loved her, that was why. But here it was again, the past that lives forever, in detail, with women, like the women in Joyce, “The Dead,” ruining everything. Then at the museum in Heraklion they had been unable to see the murals because the galleries were closed due to a recent katastrofi. And then there had been the katastrofi of the side trip to Anoja in the White Mountains where the insane monster winds had blown his pitiful, hobbling wife flat into the sides of buildings and walls time after time.

She pushed herself to a standing position and got slowly out of the tub, distractedly, not punitively abandoning him, apparently. She was through. She was keeping her back to him, which could be just accidental.

He got out of the tub and dried himself off very thoroughly. He followed her damp footmarks into the bedroom. Once there, he malingered, dragging out finding the right pajamas and selecting a bathrobe from his oversupply. He had four, all gifts from Iris and all too expensive and all more appropriate for some rich parasite than for him. Why she kept buying him bathrobes that lacked pockets was a mystery. He settled on a black silk robe he thought he looked pretty good in. He combed his hair. Iris was in bed. Still naked, looking at a copy of the International Herald Tribune he knew was at least a week old.

It was so clear and so dumb, what was happening. He was being cast as the incarnation of Secrecy. It was inevitable because he worked for the agency and the agency was what, Secrecy Itself. And at the same time she was casting Morel as the dry light of the mind that goes everywhere, anywhere, as Truth with the bit between its teeth, the maypole of Truth she was traipsing around like a berserk Isadora Duncan, flinging her arms around like a jerk, naked, flutes and ribbons all over. That was the scene he was trapped in.

But at least his costume was perfect. He was uncomfortably warm, a natural consequence of dressing himself in a daze, putting pajamas on without reference to what season it was. Black matched his mood. It was his fault that she kept giving him pocketless robes. The first robe she’d given him had been pocketless and he’d praised it. The absence of pockets had seemed to him like a fairly central objection, especially considering the effort she’d gone to, delegating her sister, transatlantic phone consultations. And it had been when they were starting out, when she was insecure about buying things for him. So now all he needed was a cocktail shaker and a Santos Dumont in a cigarette holder and it would be clear he had wandered in from an adjoining farce, a Noel Coward farce. In fact they were both costumed perfectly for the scene, layers and blackness for him, and for her… nudity, symbolizing fearless disclosure.

Now she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her back three-quarters to him, examining the sole of her foot. The great aesthetic absolute, he thought.

She caught him looking too raptly at her. “Why are you looking at me that way?” she asked.

“I’m not looking at you, I’m beholding you.”

“Well this is the wrong moment for it. By the way, I think you have mild priapism.”

“That’s the best kind.”

“Well don’t,” she said, smiling a little.

She was going to sum up. He could tell. She held her mouth in a certain way.