Two days later I saw Ann at the street market near my building, the Friday market. She was hefting a melon, turning it, poking with her thumb."You have to press right here, at the underside. This man is angry with me. He likes to do the pressing himself. Listen to him mutter. I am touching his tiny plump early-season melon.”She handed him the fruit, which he placed on one of the weighing pans of an antique balance. There was a beggar with a Panasonic, playing loud music. We walked slowly down the middle of the street, between the stalls, the men shouting out prices."I've been wondering something. This is awkward.”"What have you been wondering?”"Andreas. Have you seen him?”"I thought you understood it was over.”"There's something I would like to have explained to him.”"Can't you do it yourself?”"This is silly. I don't know how to get in touch with him. I can't find him in the phone book.”"Do you have a phone book? Lucky fellow.”"I went down to the Hilton. There's a phone book at the Hilton.”"I don't know, James. Maybe the phone isn't in his name. I'm sure I can remember the number if you'd like to have it.”"You're annoyed.”"You want to talk to Andreas. Why shouldn't you? But isn't he in London?”"I was hoping you could tell me where he is.”"I thought you understood.”"People are always saying things are over.”"But they're not to be believed. Is that it?”"Where does he live? Where was he living in Athens when you were seeing him?”"Can't you contact him through his firm? That's the obvious solution. Call London, call Bremen.”"Where was he living?”"Not far from the airport. Terrible place. Two concrete slabs on four concrete stilts. A street that disappears into scrub below Hymettus. In summer it's bleached white. Dust hangs in the air. Two inches of dust on the furniture and floors. I tried once to ask him why he lived there. He went into a Greek male frenzy. Not for me to inquire, plainly.”"It wouldn't matter to Andreas where he lived. I don't think he notices things like that.”"No, I don't think he does. What do you know that you're not telling me?”The peddler of lottery tickets stood at the end of the street, between the flower sellers and the vendors of clay pots, calling the same urgent word over and over. A summons to buy, to act, to live. The risk was small, the price was low. Times wouldn't always be this good.Today, today.I called the number many times over a two-day period. Four of those times I got an old man whose number contained six digits, or one less than I was dialing. It was the right number as far as it went but it didn't go far enough. It needed a nine on the end. The other times there was only line noise, a frozen hum.I didn't want to be the victim of a misunderstanding.I took a taxi to the address Ann had given me. I climbed an exterior staircase to the second floor of the building, looked through the dusty windows. Abandoned. On the first floor a woman with a small child in her arms listened to my fragmentary questions about the man who used to live upstairs. When I was finished, she gave me the classic look, the raised brows, tutting lips. Who knows, who cares?So I sat on my terrace, watching the light change, hearing remotely the ram's horn lament of the day's fourth and final rush hour. I had no plans. I would not be leaving the country for three weeks. I wanted to get up early, run in the woods, study my Greek (now that I had the time), sleep through the empty afternoons, fade into the spaces. I would avoid people, stop drinking, write letters to old friends. These were not plans but only private forms, outlines for a human figure. I would sit and watch.Was it clear to him that any data passed on to the CIA, to their Foreign Assessment Center, to the Iraq or Turkey or Pakistan desk, was not related in any way to affairs in Greece? Did he understand that we were simply based here and did not gather local information? Of course he understood. The questions had to take a different form. Who was he? How far would he go to make his point? What was his point?A silence seemed to fall. I watched a glow appear behind the mountain, a shower of light, brick orange, climbing. Then the topmost arc of the moon showed over the ridge-line. It rose in degrees, fully illuminated, a calculus-driven model of pure ascent. Soon it was free of the mountain's dark mass, beginning to vault toward the west, to silver and glint, a cold object now, away from the earth-blood, the earth-burn, but beautiful, hard, bright.The phone rang twice, then stopped.
She had the kind of fair skin that seemed to admit light, almost to provide a passage for light. Maybe it was her guileless manner that heightened the impression of such open texture-that and her stillness, the way she collected whatever was in the air, gathered objectively, our conversation, our world complaints. I remember how she turned her head once, moving into a patch of sun, her left ear going incandescent, the edge and outer whorls, light penetrating finely, and how I thought this moment was the one that would come back to me when I wanted to think of Lindsay years from now, the haze that rimmed her downy lobe.I told her I'd be seeing Tap soon. We climbed the street named after Plutarch, slowly, bending to the effort. The sky above Lycabettus resembled an island sky today, saturated with color, blue deeps and soundings. This island sense was enhanced by the whitewashed chapel at the top of the hill, the tending presence, not so much surrounded by the sky as adhering to it, belonging to it."Will you be seeing Kathryn too?”"If she's not living in a hole somewhere up the coast.”"Does she write to you?”"Occasionally. Usually in a rush of some kind. The last lines are always scrawled. Even in Tap's letters I don't feel her presence. Shouldn't there be a feeling of her presence behind them? It occurred to me just recently that she doesn't read his letters anymore. In a way his letters told me more about things, essential things, than hers did. We exchanged some sense of ourselves through him. A mysterious sense, an intuition. But I don't feel her presence anymore. It's another connection closed down.”"You don't feel her presence but you still love her.”"I make too much of love. This is because I've never been massively seized by it. It was never an obsessive thing for me, an obsessive tracking of someone or something. You can break clear of obsessions. Or they just dissolve. But this happened slowly. It grew around me. It covered everything, it became everything. I'll tell you what the shock is. To live apart is the shock, the seizure. This is what I register daily and obsessively.”"In novels lately the only real love, the only unconditional love I ever come across is what people feel for animals. Dolphins, bears, wolves, canaries.”We both laughed. We wondered if this was a sign of some modern collapse. Love deflected, love that could not work when it was given to a man or a woman. Things had to work. Only small children and animals in the wild could provide the conditions in which a person's love might find a means to perfect itself, might not be thwarted, dismissed, defeated. Love was turning mystical, we thought."When are you two going to have children?”"We're our own children.”She smiled in the private way she had, the slowly deepening way, amused perhaps to have hit upon a truth. She'd only meant to make a small joke but had found something in the sentence that made her want to think about it."Seriously. You ought to have children.”"We will. We want to.”"When does he get back?”"Tomorrow afternoon.”"Where is he?”"It's written down somewhere. Cities, hotels, airlines, flight numbers, times of arrival and departure.”We walked under the locust trees, fifty yards away from the place where the street becomes stepped, climbing in four or five levels toward the pale crags."This is the conversation we were supposed to have on Rhodes," I said."When he went swimming?”"He left us on the beach. There was a deep pause. We were meant to talk importantly about things.”"I couldn't think of anything. Could you?”"No.”"That was the one day it didn't rain," she said."When we all squeezed together on my balcony, passing David's flask.”"Oh that plummy sunset.”We decided we'd walked far enough. There was a small narrow shop, a grocery store that offered little more than yogurt, butter, pyramid cartons of processed German milk. Two chairs and a small metal table stood on the sidewalk, waiting for us."You ought to make the visit a permanent one," she said. "Stay there, see what happens.”"It rains.”"Not that we don't want you back.”"She purposely chose a rainy place.”"How big the world is. They keep telling us it's getting smaller all the time. But it's not, is it? Whatever we learn about it makes it bigger. Whatever we do to complicate things makes it bigger. It's all a complication. It's one big tangled thing." She began to laugh. "Modern communications don't shrink the world, they make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, they connect more things. The world isn't shrinking at all. People who say it's shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm." I didn't know what she meant by this but it sounded funny. It sounded funny to her too. She had to talk through her laughter. "No wonder people go to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don't trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books that tell them how to run, walk and sit. We're trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications.”I sat there and watched her laugh. She wore the same jade dress she'd gone swimming in, that summer night by the sea.