Lynne Tillman: Cast in Doubt

Helen does too. She is eccentric in her young way. I suppose she’s been suicidal as she alludes to dark incidents that might make me shudder were she to reveal them. I try to put myself in her frame of mind but I cannot realize or fully imagine the murky deposits of memory to which she refers. Nor can I mentally fit my frame inside her frame. Helen is slender and terribly sweet-looking. It seems to me she should be happy as she is lovely and bright and, most important, has many years in front of her. She says this is why she is unhappy. What is she going to do? she asks. Life is overwhelmingly empty. Sometimes I think we are isomorphs.

Young women oughtn’t be so unhappy. I’ve read Madame Bovary but Helen’s unhappiness is not of that sort. Or maybe it is, in a revamped version. Perhaps she is an Anna Karenina in love with one of those long-haired and unpleasant rock musicians. Tragic love or bourgeois life may be pressing down on the girl. One day, I tell her, you will fall in love and marry, bear a child or find some good work to do. Helen laughs at me and tells me I am way off base; that her distress — angst, I say — is different. It quite escapes me. Much escapes me and I escape some of it. Living here, time just passes, and people come and go; it’s possible to fool oneself about what one is missing or misunderstanding.

When I first arrived, I kept to myself, the way Helen does now. I was suspicious of others like me. That is, those more like me than the natives. I avoided their company and posed as a self-sufficient litterateur who had come for reasons different from anyone else’s. This went on for months. Months and months. Gradually I was drawn in, perhaps first by Alicia, Alicia of the beautiful voice. Yes, I think so. It was Alicia’s inviting me to tea at her plain but sumptuous apartment, where she almost undressed me, figuratively speaking, of course. And once my clothes were off I found I couldn’t quite force them back on again. And then she had me to dinner with Roger and some of the others. Alicia was the queen of the scene then, the Queen Bee. She’d been an opera singer and had abandoned her career for reasons that were never spelled out, and that may have involved a man or men, or not; it may have been that her voice was giving out. Alicia never said. There are photographs of her in costume around her apartment, and occasionally I’ve commented on the beauty of her appearance, but that was years ago, and here she still is, still the Queen Bee. After almost twenty years the scene has become a bit frayed at the edges. Thinner, balder, less bright, more brittle. Like me.

Stephen was at that first dinner, and Roger, and Duncan, I think. Stephen fascinated me, as does Helen now. He and I necked one night; it was pleasant but not passionate and so we immediately became friends, never lovers. It is awful what happened to him. I hope Helen isn’t actually anything like him. He’s a cranky hermit and never bathes, and yet he was such a beautiful young man. His breath smelled of spring onions — is that what Auden wrote? I can’t remember. Helen probably isn’t anything like him, though at my first sight of her, he, Stephen — my Stephen Dedalus — came to mind. Helen might be Molly. She says yes from her bed, but of course leaves it too, which poor Molly never did. This is an argument I’ve had with Roger, about Molly’s ecstasy on the bed, from her small bedroom. He says my point of view is jaundiced by the ghosts of my feminist ancestors. I do practice, as Alicia has succinctly put it, a form of ancestor worship.

Helen doesn’t live abstemiously or like a nun, I’ve discovered. I take care of a young Greek named Yannis; he is my companion and lover, whom I help and will send to college should he want that and if he is bright enough. He has a terrible temper, and we fight when I’ve drunk too much. Before me, but very briefly, he was with Roger, another American. Yannis was considerably calmer then, Roger likes to claim. I do not believe this. Roger is from the South and is a braggart with the temper of a disturbed snake. My temper is not the best, either. My charge Yannis and I forgive each other, though. I never talk about him to Helen but he is with me at meals at the restaurant Christos manages. I don’t need to talk about him.

I have dinner at the same restaurant every night. I adore their lamb and fish, and their salads are always fresh. When I go to the movies I take Yannis, if he wants. Helen and Yannis appear to tolerate each other. She knows a little Greek and they transact whatever is necessary in a simple tongue. The foreign movies have Greek subtitles, are never dubbed, and apart from the noise of the worry beads that are swung wildly during action movies, it is perfectly easy for any English-speaking foreigner to follow them. We go often, Helen and I, at 6 P.M. generally.

It was Yannis who told me that Helen sleeps with sailors from the naval base. So it wasn’t precisely my discovery; it was Yannis’, and he is much more in the position than I to find out such material. When he told me he clasped his hands together and rubbed his palms in what amounts to a lewd gesture. He is a simple boy, after all, and simple peasant boys, even those who sleep with rich foreigners — foreigners here are thought to be rich and are, relatively so — these boys are terribly self-righteous and bigoted. My first thought was, when does she do it? because she seems always to be at home, on her terrace. Of course they may visit her in that decrepit house and leave stealthily in the early morning, when the sun is just nudging up over the harbor. Nectaria as well as Chrissoula must know what is going on, but neither has let on to me. Nectaria is terribly open-minded for one raised in such a seemingly rigid society. But then we are foreigners, and their rules don’t apply to us. No one can be as good as they are. I think I am slightly disappointed in Helen, my vision of Helen, though I hesitate to admit this even to myself and never would to the others.

I rub my hands, the way Yannis did but without the lewdness. Lately there’s been a numbness in my hands and feet. Luckily I’m not a painter like Bliss, wherever he is, with wife number-whatever-it-is, because my hands, when numb, are useless and couldn’t hold a brush or even a rag. They tingle annoyingly. Were my eyes to become numb so that they froze in their sockets, I’d be morbidly worried. I wouldn’t be able to read. And life would be over for me.

As if to forestall such a terrible fate, I vigorously shake my legs and arms. Yannis must think me mad. I leap up and down, stamping my feet and jerking my hands. Then I pull my short white terry around me and recline in my favorite chair. The blood must have shot to the colder points of my body. I’m not in good health, and in the States I’d receive better medical attention or be compelled to by high-minded friends. Still, I’m quite happy to be outside of Massachusetts and out of the reach of my brother and his Puritan wife, who would probably love to place me in a hospital.

Perhaps my eyes are already numb and stuck in their sockets. They are large and protruding, colored a limpid blue, which, after much wine, turns milky and pale, while the whites go pink. My eyes might be a suitable flag for the spanking-new gay republic in the States. Though I believe there may already be one. If I stare into the mirror for any length of time and fix my eyes upon myself, I realize again what I did when I was only seven. I am quite repulsive, like a frog.

Helen doesn’t seem to care or notice how strange-looking I am. My head, for instance, is too big for my body, I always had the largest hat size in any class at school, and when measured, the hatmaker would invariably remark on it. I was called alternately Big Head or Egg Head, and fortunately my other extremities were of normal size so I didn’t suffer much from that, when I was young. Here the boys don’t seem so focused on size as we are in the States. From what I can tell, before puberty they all play with each other’s genitals and at puberty some boys are the girls, and some the boys. There is now a young pretty blond who is much fussed over by the others, even courted by them. When they walk along the harbor, he is positioned in the center. The other boys keep their arms around him, or at times one of the boys might hold the favorite more possessively, to claim his rights in the moment. It swiftly changes, but the blond boy always remains the girl. And if his future is like that of the others I’ve seen, he will probably wind up a homosexual, despised by his present mates and sexual partners, and exiled to Athens where he will find others of his kind.