John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

But this is clear: I loved my wife — loved her second only to adventures and ideas. We were children together. My father was an oil merchant, well off but by no means nobly born. A kindly, gentle, reflective man. His chief hope of rising in the world, after the death of my beaming, extrovert younger brother, was my cleverness. (No one could have guessed in those days that within a generation Solon’s middle class would be governing Athens.) I was sent to a teacher by the name of Klinias, attached to the house of Philombrotos, Tuka’s father. He was an arkhon, her father; a member of the all-powerful landed aristocracy, and one of the most powerful men in the ruling oligarchy. I did well. Klinias was no fool (he had studied with Thales in Miletus), and I was, in my lugubrious, angry way, ambitious. I lived, along with another boy, Konon, in Klinias’s stone hut at the edge of Philombrotos’s grounds, and when I wasn’t studying or rabbit-hunting or trying to ride some horse to death (punishing all horses for my brother’s demise), I did chores, sometimes for Klinias, sometimes for Philombrotos. I first saw Tuka when I was working in the vineyard behind Philombrotos’s house — a small, private vineyard that served his kitchen. She was standing with her slave in a window high above me, looking down at me with a bold, steady gaze that unnerved me. I couldn’t guess how long she’d been watching or what stupid thing I might have done in front of her. I was — what? Nine or ten? In any case, I was observed, like something in a cage, like something owned, and I could do nothing about it. I was very conscious, of course, of my social class — and hers. My father was a democrat who liked to talk about the grand contribution of the merchant class, but I wasn’t fooled. I didn’t miss the exaggerated politeness with which he greeted the rich, and I didn’t miss the eagerness with which he encouraged my study. The girl went on staring, and I worked faster, fuming. Someday I was going to be avenged.

She was there again the following day. It must have been more than an hour she stood there (her slave two steps behind her) watching, smiling now and then, pretty much as you’d smile at a turtle in a jug. I decided to ignore her, and I did, for perhaps three minutes. When I looked up again, she was gone. That was worse. I stood with my fists clenched, baffled, furious, staring into my half-filled basket. Then suddenly, as if dropped like apples from a limb or like gods shot down in the lightning from Olympos, she was there — she and her two friends, girls, their slaves not far off, behind them. The three girls stood ten feet from me, their hands folded, their clothes clean and elegant, startling next to the homespun of ordinary workers.

She said, “What’s your name?”

“Agathon,” I said.

They laughed, and I knew I was blushing.

“I’m Tuka,” she said. Her voice was softer, gentler than wind in leaves. It filled me with alarm.

I laughed scornfully, and she looked puzzled. I mumbled, “I have to work.”

“We’ll help,” she said.

I shook my head. “You can’t. It has to be done right. A person like you—”

She tipped her head far over to one side and looked at me. “How silly!” she said. The half whisper resounded through me like a judgment. They laughed again, like birds, and fluttered away.

She came alone the next time, or alone except for her slave, and said, “I want you for my friend.”

I said I couldn’t be. I had to study.

She thought about it. “I bet there are things I know that you don’t, Agathon.”

I laughed. I knew where I was strong. Who but Konon and I could read Klinias’s book? I said, “Like what?”

She thought again, then came to me and took my hand. A sensation stranger than touching a fledgling in its nest. After a moment she kissed my cheek.

I was doomed.

We played together throughout our childhood. She was a tomboy, a good head taller than I was. I liked her looks because she was my friend, but I knew in gloomy secret that, except for her dimples, her soft voice, she was ugly. Her head was enormous, and her nose, though handsomely shaped, was a size too large. She couldn’t compete with prettier girls in looks, so she did it by wit. She had the slyest tongue in Athens — a mind like lightning and that soft, near-whisper of a voice that kept her victim from knowing what had happened to him until he came to, days later, in his bath. Her father, who was elderly, in fact decrepit, neither approved nor disapproved, exactly, of our friendship. He was the busiest man in Greece: he knew only instants of his daughter’s life, and even those instants, when he gazed fondly out to where she played on the lawn, or when he watched her at her harp, were befogged by his official concerns. Or by his dearer love, to be exact. He had no time, no room in his heart, for any love but Athens — beautiful, albescent as an aging virgin, irrational, tyrannical, deep-dreamed as a wife inexplicably wronged. The city was his goddess. When he spoke to the assembly he pleaded like a lover or a supplicant, scolded like a husband or a priest divinely shunned. The clouds above the Acropolis, the pillared, honeycombed white buildings, chamber rising out of chamber, the rolling-gaited crumple-horned cows of the valleys below were in every syllable he spoke. For all the studied, peculiarly statuesque dignity of his bearing, he seemed, like any lover, a man perpetually at his wit’s end. It was the time of the war with the Megarians, and Athenian politics were in chaos. As I grew older I became involved in all that, as Klinias’s student. Tuka’s father knew me as a record keeper before he recognized me as Tuka’s beloved old playmate.

I have no idea what games we played, through all those childhood years. I know that we sometimes had long talks, the slave girl observing in silence from her place, and sometimes I tried to dazzle Tuka with a grim, disturbing theory I had about the prima materia. She was a master of pretending to listen, and sometimes she made me think of what I thought were brilliant things. They were wasted on her. She was un- if not anti-philosophical; a musician.

Sometimes I would listen for hours while she played the harp. It was a big concert instrument, studded with jewels, imported walnut braced with gold, a gift from her father on her twelfth birthday. He meant to make her the finest musician in Greece, and he nearly did it. When she performed for me (or for anyone else) she treated her playing lightly, casually, as though it had come with ease and had no great importance for her. If the fingers moving too fast for sight made some slight mistake, she would cavalierly repeat the mistake when the phrase returned and would build it into her variations, cunningly flaunting her pretended indifference to precision. But I knew — better than her teacher, perhaps — how far she was from indifferent. Early in the morning, when the birds first began, singing in earnest and all the herbs in Klinias’s garden and all the grass and shrubbery rising toward Philombrotos’s house were newgreen and bathed in dew, I would hear Tuka at her practice. It was a lovely sound, those rich low notes like far-off herders’ bells, the tinkling high notes like leaves rustled by a breeze on a tree made of silver, but it did not seem for beauty’s sake she played. She would work one phrase again and again, doggedly, her mind calcinating by patient violence the stubbornness of fingers and wires. Hunched in the coolness of the morning, concentrating on Tuka from my patch of sunlight on the swept-stone steps of Klinias’s hut, I could feel her whole spirit contracting to that phrase, excluding all reality except for the ten or fifteen notes that refused to submit to her will. The phrase would come more and more quickly and lightly, and as her will gained ground she would begin to lead up to the troublesome phrase from farther back and from farther back still until suddenly — and I too could feel it — the recalcitrant phrase could no longer resist her but would fly by under her fingers as if by choice, like a storm in the wind god’s hand. Then suddenly, as if without a trace of pleasure in her mastery of the problem, she would move directly to her next problem — not even playing up to it, simply turning to it, single-minded as a spider — and the battle of music against wires and stubborn flesh would begin again. I would sit fascinated by Tuka’s mind — her compulsive need to appear casual and offhand in public, and the cold-bloodedness of her assault on beauty — until the first excitement of the songbirds waned, the dogs, roosters, and donkeys of Athens lost interest in announcing morning, and the brume on the Akropolis had lifted. Klinias would nudge me with his foot, and I would look up as if surprised, though I’d been waiting for him to come drive me like a goose to my morning chores. I’d jump up, clowning obsequiously, to go for water at the well beside the vineyard.