The Names

I met her in a café 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 café 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 cafés. 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 wine. I smiled at Ann, turning my head, making it a look of measurement, evaluation. A look of the left eye."Is it possible, love affairs as functions of geography?”She looked back, showing amused interest."Possibly you want to deepen the experience of a place. A place you know you will have to leave some day, most likely not by choice.”"That hadn't occurred to me," she said. "Adulterous sex as a function of geography. Do I have such obscure motives?”"The loss of Kenya, the loss of Cyprus. You want to keep something for yourself that isn't a tribal mask or figurine. A private Cyprus, a meditation. How does a woman make these places hers as well as her husband's when after all it's his job that determines where they go, and when they go, and when they leave.”"A function of memory. I might buy that. Some women have a way of planning their memories.”"Isn't there a connection? Geography and memory?”"You're drifting away from me.”"You're a plain girl from a mill town. I know.”"Of course there is sheer sense pleasure. Are we allowed to take that into account? Excitement.”"That's another subject. I don't find that subject agreeable.”"You want to maintain a certain decorum.”"A certain level. I don't want to succumb to jealousy. A man has jealous thoughts about a woman he's never loved, a woman who's simply a friend. He doesn't want to hear about sense pleasures. He's interested in her affairs as themes, motifs in her life.”"Just the conversation," she said, "for Kolonaki Square.”"You don't have to hate a man to enjoy his bad luck. True? And you don't have to love a woman to feel possessive toward her or resentful of her affairs.”"I don't know how serious you are. Are you serious?”"Of course I'm serious.”"Well how nice. I think.”"I hadn't thought of it as nice or not nice.”"Or do I make a mistake in regarding myself as specially favored?”"Probably you make a mistake. I have a history of pathological envy.”She laughed."You have too much time to think, James. You're alone too much, aren't you?”"And you?”"Wherever we've been I've managed to find things to do. Not much but enough. English lessons in the beginning. Of course I was a full-time mother and housekeeper for quite a few years. I do occasional work for the British Council here. Translation mainly. It does make a difference. I need to feel that I'm building little blocks of time. That's why the café life will never claim me.”"Have you ever thought being alone might be in some way a fullness, a completion?”"No, absolutely.”"I believe deeply in the idea of two. Two people. It's the only sanity. The only richness.”"Of course.”"Yesterday I was in Amman, sitting in the Roman theater, and I had an odd sensation. I don't know if I can describe it but I think I perceived solitude as a collection of things rather than an absence of things. Being alone has components. I felt I was being put together out of these nameless things. This was new to me. Of course I'd been traveling, running around. This was the first quiet moment I'd had. Maybe that's all it was. But I felt I was being put together. I was alone and absolutely myself.”"Terrifying. Not that I know what you're talking about," she said.A young man fell into the chair next to Ann's, crossed his legs, folded his arms and eased into the slouch of a ten-hour wait, the slouch of cancelled flights, half-sleep in vast rooms.This was Peter, her son, a pointed face, curly reddish hair, wireframe specs. He wore a checked sport coat that was a couple of sizes too large, a country gentleman's outfit with pockets for shotgun shells or corn cobs to toss to the pigs. He wanted to see a menu."In modern travel there are no artists-only critics," he told me."You're tired," Ann said."On the one hand there's nothing new to make of all this. On the other there's so much to dismiss as overrated or plain rotten. My critical sense has been given a confident charge these past weeks. It does something for a person's self-esteem when he is able to judge entire land masses as second-rate.”The Far East, from which direction Peter had come, put him in a particular mood of censure. There was a great deal of energy in his observations and it seemed to hang above the fallen body like a posthumous glow."Incidentally the phone rang as I was walking out the door. Athens is evidently a place where you pick up a ringing phone and it keeps ringing.”I asked him what kind of mathematics he did. He couldn't decide whether or not to tell me. He did mention that at Berkeley he was in a favorable position to study two of the esoteric wonders of our time, subjects only an adept might begin to penetrate. Pure mathematics and the state of California. There were no analogies from the real world that might help him explain either of these. He began to disappear beneath the table."Who was it?" she said."What.”"Who was on the telephone?”"Well when I realized it wouldn't stop ringing I put it down. But he rang back. Greek fellow. Wrong number.”She tilted the wine bottle to read the label."It's a way of life, wrong numbers," I said. "Telephones constantly change hands. People buy them, inherit them. I learn more Greek talking to people who've dialed the wrong number-”Finally Charles showed up, returning us briefly to our careless pace. He talked about recent arrivals and departures, local politics, Swahili curses and obscenities, growling these last into the hand that clutched his cigarette. The single oddness he conveyed, a man staying strong as he wears away, an appearance of robust corrosion, was always more apparent when I hadn't seen him for a time."Your son won't tell me what sort of mathematics he does. If you explain that I used to do technical writing now and then, he may consider speaking to me.”"Technical writing. He deals in truth and beauty. That's the wrong thing to say, James. Technical writing.”"I only mean I'm familiar with some of the nomenclature. I may be able to distinguish one discipline from another.”"He's not impressed," Charles said. "Look at him.”"Unimpressed. What can I do to prove myself? Give me a test.”Ann was in conversation with someone at the next table. We were all passing time."There is no test," Charles said. "The only test is mathematics. You've got to know the secrets. Look at him. He speaks to no one. He says he's not able to talk about it. There are certain things he can't discuss with his professors. It's too bloody rarefied. It makes no sense if you don't know the secrets, the codes. It means nothing, says nothing, refers to nothing, is in fact absolutely useless.”Peter Maitland ate his lunch."It doesn't bear on human experience, human progress, ordinary human language," Charles said. "It must be a form of zoology. It's a branch of zoology. The great ape branch. That's why men are teaching apes to communicate. So we can discuss mathematics with them." They'd been through this before. "It's interesting in itself, you see. It refers to itself and only itself. It's the pure exercise of the mind. It's Rosicrucianism, druids in hoods. The formal balances, that's what counts. The patterns, the structures. It's the inner consistencies we have to search for. The symmetries, the harmonies, the mysteries, the whisperies. Good Christ, Axton, you can't expect the man to talk about these things.”Peter said to his mother across a forkful of spinach pie, "Is he doing one of his comic bits, do you think? Will he juggle oranges next?”She wasn't listening."How happy he is to be wrong," Peter said. "It's his special provenance. He loves to return to it. Of course he knows how deeply he misconstrues. This is part of the joy of the thing. The whole point is to pretend not to know. As some people protect their inexperience or fear, this man protects his knowledge of the true situation. It's a way of spreading guilt. His innocence, other people's guilt. There's a proportional relation. This is the theme of his life, pretending not to know. Keeps him going, absolutely.”He was addressing himself to me. Charles gazed past the traffic as though none of this had anything to do with him or was at worst an extension of the discourse on mathematics."I look forward to their retirement. They want to live in California, you know. We'll see each other on American holidays. Charlie will drink Miller Lite and watch the Super Bowl. We'll have cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. My dear mother will finally get her tour of movie stars' homes. All the stars she's ever heard of are long dead, of course, whether she knows it or not. While she was in the jungles, the marshes and the hill stations, all the neon lights went out, one by one.”They were feeling happy again. Peter took a sip of his mother's wine, then directed another look my way, a different one, quizzical, mock angry."Who are you anyway," he said, "that I should tell you our secrets?”While we laughed I wondered if I would ever see these two people in quite the same way. Peter had altered them not only by what he'd said but by a simple physical extension of the local figure they made. He was the apex, the revelation of full effect. He knew his mother's affairs, his father's weaknesses, and I felt in a sense he'd stolen these things from me. I wanted to forget him, the jut of his face, its curious outdatedness, the voice with its self-referring note of complaint. I was afraid my romance with Ann Maitland would end, my word-romance, the pleasant distant speculative longing.Ann and Peter decided to go for a walk. We watched them cross to the small park, where they waited for a break in traffic."There they go," Charles said. "The twenty-four hours of my life. A.M. and P.M.”"Has he ever told you what he's doing?”"In mathematics? Something awesome, I gather. He expects to be burnt out by the time he's twenty-five. We'll see how he adapts to that.”There was an antique air of celibacy about Peter. It had the stubborn force of some vow a boy might make when he is fourteen, high-minded, his life suddenly come to a powerful hesitancy -a pledge which the man in his scrupulous carved space might well decide to honor. I had one of my sentimental thoughts. He would meet a woman one day soon and be immediately transformed. The apparatus of complaint would fall away. His cleverness would be shamed by the power of love.