A House Like a Lotus Page 4

  ‘Max won’t come,’ Sandy said.

  But she called and accepted the invitation. ‘So Urs will have someone to talk neurosurgery with.’

  ‘Granted,’ my Uncle Dennys said, ‘Ursula Heschel has overworked ever since I’ve known her, but it still seems atypical of her and Max to come here in the dead of winter. In the spring when the azaleas are out, yes, but not in December.’

  ‘It’s quiet,’ Mother said.

  ‘True, it’s quiet. But I’m the one who’s the researcher. Ursula’s a superb surgeon.’

  ‘You’re right, Dennys,’ Sandy said. ‘There’s something odd about it.’

  Christmas was cold and clear and perfect. The sun glinted off the Atlantic. We had fires going in both the living and dining rooms. The little kids played outside with their new toys, so the rest of us could have some reasonable conversation indoors. Dennys, Urs, and Daddy talked about the mysteries of the brain, and Daddy took them off to the lab. It does seem weird to me that the octopus and the human being share so much of the neurological system.

  Max, Mother, Rhea, and Lucy talked about the state of the world, which as usual was precarious, and about the state of American education, which was deplorable.

  ‘Kate is getting an education just living in this zoo,’ Aunt Lucy said while we were gathered in the kitchen basting the turkey and doing various last-minute things.

  Kate was nibbling the candied grapefruit peel we’d made a few days before. ‘Cowpertown High’s okay. I’m learning plenty.’

  ‘And going to all the dances?’ Aunt Lucy asked.

  ‘Enough,’ Kate said. She could have said ‘all.’ Kate always had half a dozen boys after her whenever there was a dance, and I knew that Mother and Daddy felt responsible for her and worried about whichever boy was driving and whether or not booze or joints had been sneaked in. But Kate had sense enough not to drive home with anyone who was stoned, and she had already called twice to ask someone to come for her. Though we didn’t tell Lucy and Dennys.

  If Mother and Daddy worried about Kate being popular and successful, they worried about me being alone too much. It was okay. I didn’t want to go. Kate loves parties and dances and barbecues, and she gets bored if she doesn’t have a lot to do. Not me.

  We’d put all the extensions in the table. Max had brought over an enormous damask banquet cloth, and with candles and oil lamps lit and the Christmas tree lights sparkling, it looked beautiful. The little kids all behaved reasonably well, and no one threw up. It was a good Christmas.

  And then Max and Ursula asked us for New Year’s Eve—the grownups, plus Charles and me.

  Charles had grown taller, though he wasn’t quite as tall as Xan, but he was still my special brother Charles who understood me better than anyone else. We spent hours up in our favorite old live-oak tree, talking, catching up. I was going to miss him abysmally when he went back to Boston; in my eyes, Kate was not at all a fair exchange for Charles. But at least Charles was still here for New Year’s Eve, and Beau Allaire was a perfect place for a party.

  All the verandahs were full of light as we drove up, and the great columns gleamed. Nettie and Ovid passed hot hors d’oeuvres, and there was lots of conversation and laughter. We played charades. Sandy and I were the best at pantomime, and Mother and Max were best at guessing, but we all threw ourselves into the game and had a lot of fun.

  As all the clocks began to chime midnight, Ovid opened a magnum of champagne, and after a toast we all put our arms about each other’s waist, standing in a circle, and sang Auld Lang Syne. When we were through, Ursula put an arm around Max, tenderly, protectively. And I thought I would like to be protected like that.

  Sitting in Constitution Square, being warmed by the sun, I did not want to think about Max. But that was not very intelligent of me. What I needed to do was to think about Max objectively, not subjectively. I’m enough of a scientist’s daughter to know that nothing can be thought about completely objectively. We all bring our own subjective bias to whatever we think about, but we have to recognize what our bias is, so that we will be able to think as objectively as possible.

  Daddy had said that he could not even study his lab creatures totally objectively, because to observe something is to change it.

  That was certainly true. Max had observed me. And changed me.

  I had finished two cups of the thick, sweet coffee, and that was more than enough. I put my pen and journal back in the shoulder bag, crossed the street to the hotel, went up to my room, and napped. It seemed that all I wanted was sleep, and not just because of jet lag. Sleep is healing, Sandy said, and when I woke up, I did feel better. I had one foot in Athens and the present, and although the other foot was still across the Atlantic and dragging in the past, at least Max had made me aware of how complex we can be, so it did not surprise me to be in both worlds simultaneously.

  The problem was that I could not comprehend the vast span of Max’s complexity. My parents are, as human beings go, complex, but also moderately consistent. I can count on them. And the bad people I’ve met have been so bad that I could count on them being bad, which does simplify things. But shouldn’t I have learned that life is neither consistent nor simple? Why did it surprise me?

  I looked at the travel alarm I’d put on the bed table. Nearly eight. Just time to dress and go up to the roof for dinner. I took a book so I wouldn’t be lonely. I love to eat and read, but in a family like ours I don’t often have the opportunity—only if I’m sick enough to stay in bed, which doesn’t happen often, and when it does, I’m usually too miserable to read.

  Sometimes, when I went over to Beau Allaire, Max and I ate together, with books open beside us on the table, and didn’t talk, unless one of us wanted to read something to the other. We usually ate in the screened part of the back verandah, rather than in the formal, oval dining room. A breezeway went from the screened porch to the kitchen, which was slightly separated from the rest of the house, in the old Southern manner.

  ‘Pol, listen to this,’ Max said. ‘It’s by a physicist, A. J. Wheeler. He says: “Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this, that it destroys the concept of the world as ‘sitting out there,’ with the observer safely separated from it by a 20-centimeter slab of plate glass. Even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, we must shatter the glass.” ’ She made a movement with her hand as though breaking through glass, and her face was bright with interest as she looked up from the book, blinking silver eyes against the light of the candles in the hurricane globes. ‘We cannot separate ourselves from anything in the universe. Not from other creatures. Not from each other.’

  But I had put the glass up between Max and me, erected a barrier, so that we could no longer touch each other.

  I got up to the restaurant at two minutes before eight, and the doors were just opening. I was the only person there, though people did begin to trickle in after a few minutes. It was a beautiful, open-air restaurant, with lots of plants, and candles on all the tables. I had a waiter who spoke good English, so I didn’t try to practice my Greek. He was concerned that I was all alone, so I told him about Uncle Sandy and Aunt Rhea and that they would be with me on Tuesday.

  This seemed to reassure him, and he began explaining the menu to me, and I didn’t think it would be polite for me to tell him that I had a Greek aunt and was used to Greek food. Anyhow, I liked his taking care of me, and he was a kind of surrogate uncle for an hour or so.

  Two couples came in and were seated at tables between me and the view of the Acropolis, and I think one man thought I was staring at him when all I was trying to do was see the Parthenon.

  Dinner tasted good, really good. And that in itself was a big improvement. I ordered fruit and cheese, and my waiter told me that if I lingered over dessert and coffee I’d see, if not hear, the son et lumière show at the Acropolis.

  I ate slices of pear with Brie, a French rather than a Greek dessert. I don’t have a sweet tooth and I’m not fond of baklav
a or any of the other pastries dripping with syrup. Spreading the soft Brie on a crisp slice of pear, I felt a presence behind me, thought it was the waiter, and turned.

  It was the black-haired kid who’d raised his eyebrow at me while we were sitting in Constitution Square. And he was tall. Taller than I.

  “Hi, Red,” he said.

  If Sandy and Rhea had been with me as planned, I’d have ignored him. Though likely if I’d been with Sandy and Rhea he wouldn’t have spoken. I intensely dislike being called Red.

  “Saw you walk over to the King George from the Square this afternoon,” he said. “I’m Zachary Gray, from California. You are American, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Did I really want to talk to this guy?

  “May I sit down?”

  “Feel free.” I still wasn’t sure.

  “What’s your name, and where’re you from?” he asked. He was really spectacular-looking, with black eyes and long black lashes. I envied him those lashes, though I’m happy with my own eyes. Kate would have fallen all over him.

  I didn’t exactly want to fall over him, but I decided I did want him to sit down. “I’m Polly O’Keefe, and I’ve come from an island partway between Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina.”

  “You don’t have a Southern accent. Almost English.”

  “Middle Atlantic,” I corrected him. “I spent a lot of my childhood in Portugal.” Max’s accent was softly Southern, not jarringly, just a gentle, musical rhythm.

  “So, what’re you doing all by your lonesome in Athens? Are your parents with you?”

  “My parents are home on Benne Seed Island. I’m here for a week, and then I’m going to Cyprus. What’re you doing here?”

  “Just bumming around. I’m taking a year off from college to wander around Europe and get some culture.”

  He didn’t look like the typical American backpacker. He looked like money, lots of money.

  The waiter came over and Zachary greeted him. “Hello, Aristeides. This young lady’s a friend of mine.”

  “Yes?”

  I almost told Aristeides I’d never seen him before in my life, but I shut my mouth on the words. I was lonely. And being picked up by a desirable young man was a new experience.

  Zachary ordered a bottle of retsina. “It’s a white wine, soaked over resin. It tastes like the Delphic Oracle.”

  Rhea looks down her nose at retsina.

  But Zachary went on: “There are other Greek wines which are much better; I just happen to like it. Aristeides, by the way, means someone who is inflexibly just.”

  “You speak Greek?” I asked.

  “A few words and phrases. You pick it up.”

  A waiter’s name which means ‘inflexibly just’ would be fine to set down in that journal I was supposed to be keeping for school. “How do you happen to know Aristeides?”

  “I like good food and pleasant places to eat it in. And Athens is my favorite city. I infinitely prefer it to Paris or London or Rome. How come you’re going off to Cyprus right at the beginning of the school year? You don’t look like a dropout.”

  “I’m not. It’s an educational trip. I’m going to be a gofer at a conference in Osia Theola.”

  “How’d you get chosen for the job?”

  “I’m not afraid of hard work.”

  Zachary said, “Your parents must trust you, to let you come this way all alone and stay all by yourself at a hotel in Athens.”

  “They do trust me,” I said. I didn’t think it necessary to say they had no idea I was all alone in Athens.

  “So where’s this place on Cyprus?” he asked.

  “Osia Theola. It’s a small village with a conference center in what used to be a monastery.”

  “Maybe we’ll have a chance to get better acquainted before you go. I decided when I spotted you this afternoon that you were someone I wanted to know.”

  How to respond to this? Kate would have known exactly the right thing to say. I didn’t.

  “I’m glad your parents put you in the King George. You’ll be safe here.” His tone was condescending. “What’s on your agenda for tomorrow?”

  I replied firmly, “I’m going on a bus tour.” I didn’t want this Zachary taking too much for granted.

  “No, no, not a bus tour,” Zachary said. “They’re the pits. You’re coming with me.” He sounded very sure of himself. “I just happen to be free for the next couple of days, and I’ll give you the million-dollar tour.”

  Aristeides brought the wine and two glasses and looked at me questioningly.

  “No, thank you,” I said to him. “Not after I spent all last night on a plane and my internal clock is all mixed up.”

  Zachary started to protest, so I added, “I’m underage, anyhow,” and Aristeides nodded at me and took my glass away, then poured some for Zachary, who held the glass out to me. “Take a sip at least.”

  Because of Rhea’s taste in wines, I’d never had retsina. Maybe my tastes are low, but I liked it; it made me think of pine forests, and Diana walking through fallen needles, her bow slung over her shoulder.

  Aristeides moved away to serve another table, and Zachary looked at me over the rim of his glass. Zachary really was in Athens on his own, while my being by myself was because of some kind of crisis in Sandy and Rhea’s work. And I was suddenly grateful that my parents cared enough about me so that I was not like this Zachary, or the other kids checking in at American Express for their money while their parents did whatever parents do who just want their kids out of their hair.

  “How old are you?” Zachary asked.

  “Nearly seventeen.”

  He leaned toward me. “It’s hard to tell by looking at you. I’d have thought you were older, except that your blue eyes are a child’s.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “Thank God. Tell me about this Benne Seed Island where you live. It sounds as though it’s out in the boonies.”

  “Beene Seed makes the boonies look metropolitan,” I said. “But isolation is good for Daddy’s work.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a marine biologist,” I said briefly. We’ve learned never to talk about Daddy’s experiments, because they’re in an incredibly sensitive area and in the wrong hands could be disastrous. But Zachary seemed to expect me to say something more, so I added, “My father needs a lot of solitude for experiments that take a long time to show any definitive results.”

  “Isn’t that hard on you? How do you feel about all that solitude?”

  I shrugged. “I have six younger brothers and sisters, so it isn’t all that solitary.”

  He nearly swooned. “Seven kids! What got into your parents? You Catholic or something?”

  I shook my head. Sometimes I wondered myself what had got into my parents. It seemed to me that when we were living on Gaea they felt they had to repopulate the island all by themselves so we’d have people to play with.

  Who, of all of us, would I send back? Not even Xan, who’s the one who rubs me like sandpaper.

  From my seat I still had a good view, despite the middle-aged man who thought I was looking at him, and suddenly the walls of the Acropolis were lit by soft, moving lights, shifting from pale rose to green to blue. “Look,” I said.

  Zachary turned around in his chair, and back. “It’s pretty vulgar.” (Rhea would have agreed with him there.) “But I’ll take you tomorrow night if you like.”

  Again, I didn’t know what to say. Yes? Kate says boys don’t like it if you’re too eager. The only person I’d ever dated was Renny, and I’m not sure having pizza with Renny even qualified as a date. He was an intern, and I was a kid who listened to him talk.

  I pushed the thought of Renny away. If I was going to go out with Zachary the next day, I ought to know something more about him. “When you finish getting culture and go back to college, where are you going? What are you planning to be?”

  “One at a time,” he said. “I’m going back to UCLA, and I’ll
be studying law. My pa’s a corporate lawyer, and I mean a multinational corporate lawyer, with his finger in pies on every continent.”

  As I thought: money. I watched the lights shimmer on the hillside and then blink off.

  “I’m taking this year off to find out what I really want. I’ll tell you what I want right now. I want to spend tomorrow with you.”

  With me. This extremely gorgeous-looking young man wanted to spend the day with me. It sounded a lot better than going on a bus tour with a lot of people I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I trusted Zachary. But I didn’t have any reason to trust a lot of strangers on a bus, either.

  “Here we are, both on our own”—Zachary reached across the table and lightly touched the tips of his fingers to mine—“and I think we can have a good time together.”

  Not only had I not mentioned to Zachary that my parents had no idea I was on my own, I also did not tell him about Sandy and Rhea.

  He went on. “When I saw you in the Square this afternoon you reminded me of a wild pony, ready to shy off if anybody frightened you. You still have that look, as though you might suddenly leap up from your chair and vanish. You’re sophisticated enough to be eating alone on the roof of the King George and yet you have an innocence I haven’t seen in anyone your age in I don’t know how long.”

  For want of anything better to say, I murmured, “I’ve lived on islands most of my life.”

  “I was expecting to take off for Corfu tomorrow, but I’d much rather stay here and show you around. I’ll rent a car so we can go off into the countryside.”

  I was flattered. I suspected my cheeks were pink. Kate collects male animals as I collect specimens for Daddy, going out in the boat to get squid or whatever he needs. Nobody anywhere near my age had ever wanted to spend a day with me before. “That sounds like fun. But I think right now I’d better go to bed and get a good night’s sleep if I’m to be awake for you tomorrow.”