“I’m waiting for my friend to arrive,” she said. “I presume he’ll be in a taxi. You can have the taxi.”
“Thank you,” he said humbly. “I should be extremely grateful. Do you mind if I wait here? It’s very hot out there.”
She picked up the wide flowered sun hat lying beside the lounger and spun it across to him. “You’re going pink,” she said.
He looked at the hat, and reluctantly put it on. She laughed. He took it off.
“Come on,” she said. “You’re going to look a lot sillier if you stand there giving your lecture and you’re bright red.”
He put it on again, and she threw him the tube of sunblock. He obediently anointed himself, and they went on waiting.
“So when are you expecting your friend?” he asked.
“Yesterday,” she said.
24
Mrs. Fred Toppler and Dr. Norman Wilfred were getting on like a house on fire. They were sipping champagne cocktails in the loggia high up on the corner of Democritus, where it caught every slight breath of air from the sea. His nocturnal expedition into her bed in search of the wire cutters seemed to have been forgotten.
“It’s such a tonic,” she said, “to have someone here who is not only so distinguished but so young! It sometimes makes me just a little bit sad that the people who share our passion for promoting civilized values are almost all past retiring age. I feel so young in heart myself! This is what brought the late Mr. Fred Toppler and me together. He was eighty-one years old when we first met. ‘Baby,’ he said — he always called me Baby—‘you make me feel young again.’ I was a dancer. A serious dancer. Nothing cheap. I had a beautiful body. I was happy to express myself with it. I was in a show in Vegas. I’m in my dressing room afterwards and the girl comes in and says, ‘Miss LeStarr’—I was Bahama LeStarr, second billing—‘there’s a gentleman to see you, and he’s in a white tux!’ A white tux, would you believe! Like something in an old movie!
“So he takes me out to dinner. Champagne, caviar, all the baloola. He was a gentleman. This was twenty years ago. There were gentlemen then. ‘Baby,’ he says, ‘you make me feel like I’ve never grown up. Will you marry me?’
“I say, ‘Mr. Toppler, that is so sweet, I am so touched, but I have my career!’
“And he says, ‘You go right on with your career, Baby, because that’s what I love, to watch you dance.’
“So, OK, I’m on tour, I have a contract. Palm Springs, Houston, Honolulu. And, Dr. Wilfred, Mr. Toppler follows me! Everywhere! Ten cities in ten weeks! Eighty-one! And he’s on the road!
“I say, ‘OK, honey, you win.’ We fly to LA, because I’m his fourth, and LA is where he always likes to get divorced. Sweet! We get married in New Orleans — it’s Carnival — we dance in the streets! Then straight back to Lake Tahoe to start the next tour. And for the next six weeks I’m dancing all night and we’re honeymooning all day. Never out of our suite from dawn to dusk! ‘Baby,’ he says, ‘you make me feel like I can touch the stars!’
“Six weeks of true love. And then — oh, Dr. Wilfred, this is so sad! — in Fort Lauderdale I lost him.
“Heart. Just like that. He didn’t suffer. You wouldn’t believe the unkind things some people said. I took no notice. I knew I’d given him those six wonderful weeks.
“So there I am, a widow already. And the major stockholder in TipToppler Beauty Products, plus a string of TV stations and industrial-refuse facilities. Plus also — and this Mr. Toppler had never even mentioned when he told me about his will — a plot of ground someplace in Greece where he was building a vacation home for his second wife — she was Greek — singer — bouzouki — only then he moved on to number three and he forgot about it.
“So I cry my eyes out for a bit, and then I think, How best can I honor the memory of that wonderful man? And I think to myself, When I was Bahama LeStarr I worked my butt off to give something back to humanity, and I did it by the only means I had to offer, which was my dancing. But how many cities can you dance in before your knees go and your boobs need some work on them and agents won’t return your calls? And I see I have to stop thinking like Bahama LeStarr now and start thinking like Mrs. Fred Toppler, because Mrs. Fred Toppler is what I am, and as Mrs. Fred Toppler I can do so much more to make the world a better place than I ever could as Bahama LeStarr.
“And it’s a funny thing — if you’re Mrs. Fred Toppler you suddenly find there are a lot of other people out there who also want to make the world a better place, and all they need to do it is for you to come in with them, and maybe help them out with a dime or two. So this German guy comes to see me. Dieter. Pointy ears, no hair, looks like some creature on Planet Zog. Two minutes with him and I know he’s the cat’s meow. Architect — thinker — everything. A true visionary — and don’t worry, he’s gay.
“He comes here, he looks at the site, he reads stuff in the library, and what do you think? This place was sacred to the goddess Athena! And what was Athena in charge of? Wisdom and civilization! ‘Mrs. Toppler,’ says Dieter, ‘together you and I will dedicate this beautiful property of yours to Athena again! We will turn it into a center of wisdom and civilization, a place of beauty where the finest minds in the English-speaking world can mix with the leaders of English-speaking society.’”
She indicated the view out of the window.
“Every stick and stone that you can see, we had to bring here. Where was the Temple of Athena? Gone. Vanished. We had experts out here from Athens, holes in the ground all over. Nothing. We had to fetch our own temple from Zakynthos. It was dedicated to Aphrodite. We changed her name, the way I changed mine. Now she’s Athena. The agora came from Pelion. The church from Samos. We built this place from the ground up. You know what was on this site when Mr. Fred Toppler first set eyes on it? Two rusty iron sheds where they gutted fish.”
Dr. Wilfred looked at the perfection that had grown out of those two iron sheds. Several more large yachts had backed up to the waterfront, he saw. Their crews were coiling lines and running out hoses, reefing and brailing.
“And all this because you stopped being Bahama LeStarr and became Mrs. Fred Toppler.”
“All this,” she said, “because I became Bahama LeStarr in the first place. And we’re not finished yet. Up there on the hillside — behind the fences — they’re still working. A new fifty-meter pool. Olympic standard. Mr. Papadopoulou’s pride and joy. He’s taken the work over personally! He’s crazy about that pool of his!
“Hey, it’s so nice talking to you, Dr. Wilfred, because you don’t keep saying things yourself, like some of our other guest speakers. You know how to listen! What are you a doctor of, by the way?”
“Oh, you know … this and that.”
“I love it! You Brits! So, not medicine?”
“Aren’t I?”
“You are? You’re a doctor of medicine?”
“Why not?”
“In that case…”
She pulled her shirt out of her trousers, turned her back towards him, and touched a spot on the brown bulge that was struggling to be free of the waistband.
“Just … there. Like a drill was boring into me. I’ve been to specialists, I’ve been to chiropractors and faith healers … Maybe you can feel something … No…? Press it … Lower, lower … Wait…”
She undid her trousers, pulled them down an inch or two, and leaned over the back of a chair.
“There, yes … Harder … Harder! It doesn’t hurt … Well, OK, it hurts, but it hurts in a way that feels kind of good…”