Jewish somewhere back on my mother's side and he expects me to think I'm coming home. I'm an idiot because I don't explore my background, I don't pay more attention to the Jewish ruins. I come mostly from the Midwest. We moved a lot. We lived in a trailer court when I was little. I got into trouble a lot, I ran away two or three times, I went sort of crazy in the Haight. I was way too young to know what was going on. Frank says if it wasn't for the Jewish underpinning I'd be a total Oklahoma drifter. He's stupid about that. I'd be a motorcycle moll, a dancer in a lounge. Everything between the coasts is Oklahoma to him. Big, dusty, lonesome.”'He makes movies there.”'He makes movies. I love his movies. See, on one level he's fascinated by the pure American thing. The aimlessness, the drifting. That's fascinating to him, it lends itself somehow. Motels, mobile homes, whatever. But he'd dump me in a minute if I'd never mentioned being part Jewish. Now that's worthwhile. That's something to respect yourself for. A Jew.”Frank had nothing to say until we were across the river, sitting under the corrugated roof in the Jordanian area, past the gun emplacements, waiting for our original driver to show up.'Do we have to go to Amman?”The question was addressed to himself, if anyone. He wore dark glasses and kept biting skin from the edge of his thumb. The driver appeared, in jeans and elevated heels, extending his pack of cigarettes.Amman is set on seven hills. In Arabic the word for hill or mountain is jebel. When we were fifteen minutes outside the city I told the driver to take us to Jebel Amman, where the Inter-Continental is located. I would pick up the suitcase I'd left there and then go with Frank and Del to the airport, where I'd catch my plane to Athens, they'd catch theirs to Aqaba, a thirty-minute flight.'Do we have to go to Aqaba?' Del said.Most of their clothes were there, two cameras were there, a tape recorder and other equipment in two suitcases and a canvas bag.Five minutes later Volterra spoke for the second time.'I have it all figured out. Once this collapses. Once the entire career goes down the tubes. I know exactly what I'll do for the rest of my life. I've been planning it since the very beginning. Because I've always known. I've known since the beginning, I've been planning since the beginning. Once the dust clears from the last failure. Once they've stopped talking about me in the tones they reserve for the once promising beginners who overextended, who burned out, who miscalculated, who didn't deliver, who ran out of luck. The tone of tepid regret, you know? The knowing tone that says those early successes were obviously accidents anyway. I know where I'll go when this happens, what I'll do.' He dropped his hand from the side of his mouth. 'I'll open a same-day dry-cleaning service. With the money I haven't pissed away on exploring the world for subjects, I'll go to a quiet place somewhere, one of those well-planned communities with crescent streets and picturesque lampposts, a series of town-house developments although there's no town, they've forgotten the town. A modest place. Elderly couples. Divorced women with anxious kids. Unassuming. My same-day dry-cleaning store will be in the shopping mall along with the boutique, the supermarket, the radio and TV repair, the three-in-one movie theater, the fast-food places, the travel agent, all of it. It's a community where no one knows the names of film directors. People just go to the movies, you know? That's where I'll hide out for the rest of my life. Frank's Same Day Dry Cleaning. The fucking clothes'll come whipping along on these huge fucking conveyors, a thousand pairs of tartan slacks, a thousand tennis dresses, all wrapped in shimmering plastic. You want your tartan slacks, all I do is press a button behind the counter and these serpentine conveyors go into motion, shooting the garment toward the desk in twisty looping figures. Pink sales slips flutter from the moving garments. The plastic rustles, it clings. It clings to everything-clothes, car seats, metal, human flesh. I'm behind the counter, happy to be there. People call me Frank, I call them Mr. Mitchell, Mrs. Green. 'Hi, Mr. Mitchell, think we got that pina colada stain off your tartan slacks.' I live in the back of the shop. I have a hotplate, a little Sony TV, my pornographic magazines, my wheat germ and honey shampoo, the one luxury in my life, because I fear baldness more than death. But there is one person who knows my identity, who has managed to find out. An ex-New Yorker, what else? A film society pervert who recognizes me from old photos in his collection of film journals. Word gets around. People start saying, 'He was famous for ten minutes in the seventies.' 'Who was he?' 'An actor, a gangster, I forget.' They forget. In the end they forget even the erroneous things they've been told about me. How beautiful. It's why I'm there, after all.”At the Inter-Con I found out my flight had been delayed for five or six hours. I went out to the car and stuck my head in the window. He sat with one arm around her, still in kis dark glasses, his army surplus jacket, unshaven. Del seemed to be asleep.'Come to Athens,' I said.'I don't know.”'What other possibilities?”'I have to think about it. California maybe. Do nothing for a while.”'They know you in California. Come to Athens. I have a spare bedroom.”'I don't know, Jim.”'What about the cult?”'I have to think about it.”'You're crazy,' I said. 'Forget it.”He looked straight ahead, his hand curled over her shoulder, and he spoke quietly in a tone that found fault with me for dealing in self-evident things.'Don't tell me I'm crazy. I fucking know I'm crazy. Tell me I'm a little brave, a little determined. I want to hear someone say I follow things to the end.”When they were gone I went back to the desk, got the map out of my overnight bag and headed out into the city. From the spaces and heights of Jebel Amman it was a long walk down to the crowds around the taxi ranks near the Roman theater. The sun was warm. Men folded their robes under them, climbing into the shared cabs. I went past the columns and walked slowly up to the top of the theater. On the far side two men sat several rows apart, reading newspapers. No one else was here. The stone ran sandy white, curves lengthening in the climb. I sat one row down from the top. Traffic was a remote noise, another city. I felt solitude begin to return, a sense of elements gathering, first things. A long time passed. This theater, open to the city, was at the same time detached from it, a mental space, a park made of nothing but steps. Perfect. My mind was clear. I felt empty, alert. I took out the map and unfolded it. One of the men on the second tier unfolded his newspaper to turn a page. On the reverse side of the map of Jordan was a detailed map of Amman. I looked for a way back to the hotel that would not involve retracing my route. But I found something else. Something came to me. I didn't have to concentrate or direct my thoughts. As if I'd known all along. As if my interrupted sleep of the night before had been a mechanism of clarifying thought. Initials, names, places. In the emptiness of these moments, in the reason and ease of these sweeping curves, I realized I'd been approaching this point all morning long. I folded the map and put it back in my jacket pocket. One of the men, the higher of the two, got to his feet and walked slowly down the steps. Soft noise from the distant city. Jebel Amman / James Axton.
I met her in a cafe in Kolonaki Square, a place where all Athenians who feel they are worth seeing eventually show up to be seen, where the women have pouty ultraviolet mouths, the uniform is leather, the chains are gold, the futuristic object parked at the corner is a De Tomaso Pantera, the command car of idle fantasy, and the slender bearded men shift in their chairs, behind dark glasses, wearing sweaters draped over their shoulders.Ann, approaching, tilted her head to catch my eye. The warm smile held an edge of reproof.'Where have you been? Said she accusingly.”'Making the rounds. The Gulf and points north. Many wonders.”'You might have mentioned it, you beast.”'It was chaos, honest. I had barely enough time to arrange visas.”'You wanted us to worry,' she said.'Ridiculous.”'You wanted us to think you'd simply run off, run away, given it all up, given us up.”'Did you call my secretary?”'Charlie did.”'Then you knew.”'Eventually,' she said, using the word to indicate I was taking this more seriously than I was supposed to.The main cafes and their auxiliaries were crowded into a noisy slanted space that included a small park, traffic melees, three or four kiosks layered and seamed in bright magazines. The first mild day after a grim spell. The canopies were furled to let in light, the tables extended across the sidewalks. Celebration and release. An old woman turned the crank of a barrel organ while her husband moved among the tables collecting coins. People had the happy air of survivors eager to talk of their common ordeal. Waiters moved sideways. The lottery man stood at the edge of things, bearing his notched stave.'How nice to be back,' I said. 'I want to do nothing, go nowhere. A sunny winter. That's what I want. Orange trees on every street. Women in self- important boots.”'Wait until the wind starts blowing. You're high enough on Lycabettus to get the full effect.”'I want to pass time. Sit in places like this, talk about nothing.”'I have to confess I find it hard to pass time in the heart of the city. I need a seascape or vista.”'I could easily fall into this,' I said. 'Laze my way through life. Coffee here, wine there. You can channel significant things into the commonplace. Or you can avoid them completely.”'I wouldn't have thought you were a cafe wastrel.”'We all are. It's just a matter of realizing it. I'm preparing myself for the bleak years ahead. A lonely sad expatriate. Wifeless. Stumbling through seedy cafes. A friend of mine imagined a similar fate only yesterday. It involved dry cleaning. What does it all mean?”'I don't know. Self-depreciation is a language I don't think I understand. It's so often a form of ego, isn't it, a form of aggression, a wanting to be noticed even for one's flaws. I don't know these modern languages. In fact I may be the person in your fantasy. The sad expatriate. The real one.”Men stood before the kiosks reading displays of the day's papers. The waiter opened a half bottle of
