The Names

of landscape, of possibility. It's bizarre, how opened up my life has become. 'Think about it,' they'll say. But there's nothing to think about. That's what's odd.”We walked through one of the archways and stood above the sea steps. A small girl followed with a baby in her arms. The crowd slowly grew.'You should spend more time in India.”'No. Four days. That's enough.”'Tomorrow you'll come to dinner. Rajiv will want to hear about Tap. He received a letter, you know. Written in Ob.”The soft air made me sad.'And we'll talk, you and I, about Owen.”Soft and moist, a hanging heat. People still came, talking, looking out to sea. They stood around the horn player, the man with the hand drums. There were sellers of invisible commodities, names whispered in the dark. Children kept appearing from the edges, silently crossing some margin or dividing line, cradling the shriveled infants. People drifted toward the Gateway from the street along the sea wall, from the inner streets, the edges, to stand in the warm night together and wait for a breeze. The sound of bicycle bells stuck briefly to the air.Everything clings.

She came at me with the potato peeler, wearing my L.L. Bean chamois cloth shirt, forest green, with long tuck- in tails. I stood there half embarrassed. It was in her face, absolutely, that she would kill me. A rage that will astonish me forever. I evaded the lunge, then stood thoughtfully against the cabinet, my hands tucked into my pants, thumbs showing, like a quarterback on a cold day, waiting to rehuddle.

Ann and Lindsay came down the steps of the British Council, carrying sacks of apples and books. I hailed them from a parkside table in the square. We ordered coffee and watched stooped-over people call their destinations into the windows of passing cabs.Lindsay carried fiction, Ann biography. I lifted an apple from one of the bags and took a lusty bite. It made them smile and I wondered if they interpreted the act as I'd instinctively meant it, meant it in a totally unformed way. To be back again among familiar things and people, alive to the levels of friendship a man enjoys with married women of a certain kind, the wives he is half in love with. Somewhere in the theft and biting of an apple there are elements of innocent erotic wishfulness and other things hard to name.'There's a new wall slogan I've been seeing,' Lindsay said. 'With a date attached?”'Greece is risen,' Ann said. 'And the date is the date the colonels took power. Sometime in sixty-seven.”'Four twenty-one. Or twenty-one four, as they do it here.”'Then there's the other side of the argument. Was it three weeks ago? Someone killed the head of the riot police.”'I must have missed that,' I said.'They killed his driver too. Another date. Charles said the assassins left a calling card. November seventeen. Students against the dictatorship. That was seventy-three, I think.”'David's in Turkey again.”This distracted remark, a remark that seemed to drift away from us, so softly spoken and bare, a remark that Lindsay made as an automatic response to talk of violence, prompted us to change the subject. I told them about a letter I'd received from Tap. He liked the sound the water made in the shower when it hit the plastic lining of the shower curtain. That was the letter.Lindsay said David's kids sent videotapes. She also said she had a class to teach and hurried off after the first cup of coffee.We knew what we wanted to discuss but waited a long moment, allowing Lindsay's departure to become complete. A crouched man jogged alongside a taxi, answering the driver's hand-twisting gesture with the name of some district to the north.'I saw him yesterday,' Ann said. 'He called and we had a drink.”'I knew he'd get in touch.”'He's been away. Tried to call me apparently. He was in London.”'See? Business. That's all.”'Yes. They're moving there. The whole region apparently.”'I thought it might be that.”'So I suppose that will be the end of that. A relief actually. Doubly so.”'Also a reversal.”'Yes, I'm the one who's supposed to be dragged off to yet another distant posting. Torn from the arms of love. I'm almost overwhelmed by relief. Go to London, go to Sydney. What a surprise it is, to feel this way. Why is it I have to discover these things as I go along? As events wheel about me like buzzards? Why don't I know, in advance, just once, how I'll feel about a certain thing? I hate surprises. I'm too old. I want to wear a housecoat for the rest of my life.”'It'll take more than that.”'Shut up.”'You'll need to thicken your ankles and wear slippers without backs or sides. You'll need to be blowzy. Thirty pounds heavier. A little bloated, a little unkempt.”'My inner nature,' she said. 'Wearing flip-flops. It's perfect.”'Standing around ruddy-faced, all your weight on one leg, your hip jutting out.”'Don't look at my hands. I have old fingers.”'It was all conversation. That's all. He's a decent man. His flaws are part of a moral seriousness. Even when he was being completely unreasonable, I had to admire him for it and like him for it. Maybe he had some private suspicions he wanted cleared up. That's all. Talk. His true mission in life.”'Did you tell Charles about us?”'Yes.”'I thought you might have.”'It wasn't an easy position I was in. It never has been. I wanted to shock him a little. Make it real to him, dispel the fog he was disappearing into. I didn't like knowing something he didn't know about his own wife.”'Anyway, that's that.”'We need Lindsay to help us understand all this. She wouldn't have to comment. Only sit and gaze.”'Already I begin to see what an odd match we were.”'Happens all the time.”' 'What do they see in each other?' “'But isn't there something rich and living in all these entanglements, the way we've mingled our lives, all of us, chaotically or not?”'Thank God for books,' she said.Biography. It was time I was getting to the office. We said goodbye at the corner, taking each other's hands in the way people do who want to press gladness into the flesh at the end of an uncertain time. Then I crossed the street and headed west.Silent. The rotor wash. The rippling trees. Dust spinning around them. Their hair and clothes blowing. The frenzy.

The room with its stone hearth, marble font, its ferns and fan palms and village rugs was devised by Lindsay to make her husband feel he had put behind him, at least for a time, all airports and travel. At regular intervals she apologized for the size of the place. The marble balustrade on the terrace, the glass wall producing a sunset, the ship painting from Hydra still unhung in a corner. Too large, she'd say, letting her hands swing out. Too long, too tall, too grand. Not one of life's pressing dilemmas, we reply. But we have to remember that queasiness of this kind has always been a form of middle-class grace, especially when it arises from a feeling of privilege that is binding, privilege that does not allow easy denial, and Lindsay had arrived here, the new young wife, some weeks after David found the apartment. The place made her uneasy. It made her feel, among other things, that whatever risks David ran in places like Lebanon and Turkey were connected to the size of this room.He was playing his collection of Pacific Jazz records, a nice relic of the fifties with their original cover paintings, the odd cello and flute. Roy Hardeman showed up, here for two days of meetings and wearing new glasses, oversized and squarish. We decided we'd have one more drink and go to dinner. An early night, Lindsay said. We needed an early night.Hardeman's attitude, as uninvited guest, was one of temporary deference, a studious waiting for the host, the hostess, the good friend to approach some topic that might give him a chance to reason and speak competitively. He didn't have to wait long.David said, 'I keep reading about tribes or hordes or peoples who came sweeping out of Central Asia. What is it about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it?”'I don't know,' I said.'Why don't we say the Macedonians came sweeping out of Europe? They did. Alexander in particular. But we don't say that. Or the Romans or the Crusaders.”'Do you think it's a racist term?' Hardeman said.'White people established empires. Dark people came sweeping out of Central Asia.”'What about the Aryans?' Hardeman said. 'We don't say the Aryans came sweeping out of Central Asia. They filtered down, they migrated or they simply arrived.”'Exactly. This is because the Aryans were light-skinned. Light-skinned people filter down. Dark people come sweeping out. The Turks came sweeping out. The Mongols. The Bactrians. They came in waves. Wave after wave.”'All right. But your original premise is that Central Asia is a place out of which people come sweeping. Now is it only dark people who come sweeping out of Central Asia or is it simply that Central Asia is a place out of which people of any color might come sweeping, with the exception of the Aryans? Are we talking about race, language or geography?”'I think there's something about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it but there is also the fact that these people tend to be dark-skinned. You can't separate the two things.”'We've separated the Aryans,' Hardeman said. 'And what about the Huns? Certainly the Huns came sweeping out of Central Asia.”'What color were the Huns?' David said.'They weren't light, they weren't dark.”'I should have had this conversation with someone else.”'Sorry.”'I felt I'd perceived something important and interesting, all on my own, you son of a bitch.”'Well you probably did. I'm not sure of my facts really.”'Yes you are.”'Actually I am.”'Of course you are.”'But it's an interesting premise,' Hardeman said.'Fuck you.”We went to dinner in an old mansion near the U.S. embassy. Hardeman was inhaling short Scotches. The perfect part in his hair, the geometric glasses and three-piece suit seemed the achievements of a systematic self-knowledge. This was the finished thing. He was physically compact, worked neatly into well-cut clothes, and nothing attached to him that had not been the subject of meticulous inner testing.'Karen was saying-listen to this, Lindsay-that you both have to come and stay with us in London, soon as we're settled.”'Good. In the spring.”'In the fall would be better. We have to find a nanny.”'But you don't have children,' she said.'My original kids.”'I didn't know you had original kids.”'My first marriage.”'I didn't know,' she said.'They'll spend the summer. Karen's looking forward to finding a nanny.”David sat quietly, surrounding a beer, still unhappy over the earlier conversation.'I saw Andreas not too long ago,' I said. 'We had a dinner of brains and lower organs.”'A good man,' Hardeman said. 'Bright, analytical.”'What does he do for the firm?”'Sales rep. A hard worker. They love him in Bremen. Speaks German well. They tried very hard to talk him