said. 'I'd better hurry and take my bath so we can feed him.”'If we don't feed him, he'll blow away in this wind.”'That's right. He needs ballast. Do you think he knows what ballast is?”'He's writing a prairie epic, not a sea epic, but I think he knows anyway. Five drachmas says he knows.”He turned on a light. I'd arrived expecting him to be changed in appearance. He'd always seemed vaguely delicate to me, small-boned. I thought the open life would transform him physically. There might be something of the wild boy about him. The sun and wind would crack his skin a little, mark up the tidy surface. This unpremeditated life of theirs would break him out of his containment, I thought. But he looked about the same. A little darker, that was all.The essential Thomas Axton now stood before me. Arms crossed on his chest, left foot forward, he spoke in his uninflected manner about ballast in ships. He seemed to be speaking through a hollow stalk. It was the perfect voice for Ob.When Kathryn was ready we walked down to the harborfront. This wasn't an island abandoned to tourism. It was hard to get to, had one shabby hotel and a few rocky beaches, the best of them inaccessible except by boat. Even in midsummer there were only a couple of orange backpacks propped against the fountain, no wandering shoppers or places to shop. We would eat in one of the two identical restaurants. The waiter would spread the paper covering and drop utensils and bread onto the table. He would bring out grilled meat or fish and a country salad and some wine and a soft drink. Cats would appear under the chairs. The wind would shake the canopy and we would tuck the paper covering under the elastic band beneath the table top. A plastic ashtray, toothpicks in a glass.She preferred satisfactions that were basic. This was Greece to her, the burning wind, and she was loyal to the place and the idea. At the site she worked with trowels, root clippers, dental picks, tweezers, whatever else they used to move dirt and extract objects. Inches a day. Days the same. Stooped in her five-foot trench. At night she wrote reports, made charts, mapped out the soil changes and heated water for her bath and Tap's.She'd started out washing clothes for the dig director and fieldworkers. She also prepared lunch from time to time and helped clean the house where most of the staff lived. After budget cuts and defections, the director, Owen Brademas, gave her a trench. That's the kind of operation it was. The director wore bathing trunks and played the recorder.This was her first dig. She had no experience and no degree and was paid nothing. After we split up she'd read the details of this excavation in something called a fieldwork opportunities bulletin. Volunteers accepted. Travel and lodging paid by individual. Field gear provided.It was interesting to see, back then, how progressively certain she became that this was the future. Other jobs she'd had, good ones, jobs she liked, never took hold so powerfully, the way this mere prospect took hold. The event gathered force. I began to understand it wasn't just a reaction to our separating and I didn't know how to take this. It's almost comic, the number of ways in which people can find themselves diminished.Against my lassitude she operated at peak levels. Sold things, gave things away, stored things in people's garages. It had struck her with the pure light of a major saint's vision. She would sift dirt on an island in the Aegean.She started learning Greek. She ordered tapes, bought dictionaries, found a teacher. She went through a couple of dozen books on archaeology. Her study and planning were carried on in a fusion of anticipation and controlled rage. The latter had its source in my own living person. Every day made her more certain of my various failings. I compiled a mental list, which I often recited aloud to her, asking how accurate it was in reflecting her grievances. This was my chief weapon of the period. She hated the feeling that someone knew her mind.1.
We came to refer to these as the 27 Depravities, like some reckoning of hollow-cheeked church theologians. Since then I've sometimes had to remind myself it was my list, not hers. I think it was a fair analysis of her complaints and I took a self-destructive pleasure in calling out the accusations as if from her own unforgiving heart. Such was my mood those days. I was trying to involve her in my failings, make her see how she exaggerated routine lapses, make her appear shrewish to herself, the bitch of legend.Every day I'd recite a few entries, go into deep meditation, working up new ones, polishing old, and then come back at her with the results. For aggravating effect I'd sometimes use a female voice. It was a week-long operation. Most of the items brought silence. Some made her laugh sarcastically. I had to learn that people who try to be perceptive about themselves are taken for self-hectoring fools, although it's more accurate to say I was trying to be perceptive about her. The oral delivery was a devotional exercise, an attempt to understand through repetition. I wanted to get inside her, see myself through her, learn the things she knew. Thus Kathryn's cutting laughter. 'Is this what I'm supposed to think of you? Is this the picture I have in my mind? A masterpiece of evasion. This is what you've compiled.”What a funhouse mirror is love.By the end of the week I was using a vibrant liturgical voice, sending it toward the distant ceiling of our renovated Victorian house in Toronto's east end. I sat on the striped sofa in the living room, watching her separate her books from mine (bound for different garages), and I stopped reciting long enough to ask casually, by the way, 'What would happen if I followed?”Now, six thousand miles from that cobblestone street, the family sits down to dinner. Ten octopus carcasses hang over a clothesline near our table. Kathryn goes into the kitchen to exchange greetings with the owner and his wife and to look at the heated trays, the meat and vegetables lurking beneath oil slicks.A man standing near the edge of the quay lifts his cane to waggle a warning at some children playing nearby. Tap would use this detail in his novel.
2
Owen Brademas used to say that even random things take ideal shapes and come to us in painterly forms. It's a matter of seeing what is there. He saw patterns there, moments in the flow.His pain was radiant, almost otherworldly. He seemed to be in touch with grief, as if it were a layer of being he'd learned how to tap. He expressed things out of it and through it. Even his laughter had a desolate edge. If it was all sometimes too impressive, I never doubted the unsparing nature of whatever it was that haunted his life. Many hours we spent in conversation, the three of us. I used to study Owen, trying to figure him out. He had an unsettling mental force. Everyone was affected by it to one degree or another. I think he made us feel we were among the fortunate ordinary objects of the world. Maybe we thought his ruinous inner life was a form of devastating honesty, something unique and brave, a condition we were lucky to have avoided.Owen was a naturally friendly man, lank, with a long- striding walk. My son enjoyed spending time with him and I was a little surprised at how quickly Kathryn developed a fondness, a warm regard, whatever a woman in her mid-thirties feels toward a sixty-year-old man with a western voice and a long stride.Her eagerness to work amazed and confounded him. She went at it like someone half her age. This was inconsistent with the style of a fading operation. It was a dig that would never be published. From forty people, the first time I visited, they were down to nine. Still, she worked and learned and helped keep things going. I think Owen enjoyed being shamed. He'd emerge from one of his midday swims to find her at the bottom of
