John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

She said, “Did Dorkis tell you what he’s considering?” Her voice was so quiet it might have come from inside me.

“Which?”

“You know.” Then: “The assassination.”

“It’s a bad idea.” My voice, in my own ears, was donkeyish. It had a quaver and my body felt callow.

“He told you, then?”

I nodded.

“Why is it a bad idea?”

“It just is.” Because I’m a coward, I should have said. “Some ideas are just bad. There’s no explanation, they just are.”

“Ridiculous!” She laughed, her amusement breaking over the frown, not quite ending the frown but transforming it, deepening the dimple.

“Maybe so,” I said.

She went on smiling, thinking, then lay back in the grass, put her hands behind her head, and pursed her lips. “I know why you say it’s a bad idea.” Her flat voice again, businesslike. “The truth is, you don’t want him dead. He interests you.”

“That’s irrelevant. Of course he does.” It was a lie, in fact. Nothing was of interest but her mouth and the line of her hip, the shattering sweetness of her voice. I listened to the crickets, my heart tripping rapidly and lightly, as if I were standing looking down from the roof of a tower. The water lapped at the shore, very quietly.

“You’d give up anything, anybody, for an interesting idea, even a monstrous one like his.” Her voice was half serious, half mocking. Coming straight at you (except with questions) was Iona’s last resort.

“An idea or an adventure,” I said.

She lay still, looking at the stars. I could feel her baffled annoyance, and it pleased me. At last, with a brief, ironic smile, she said, “All right, smart one, explain.”

“It’s nothing,” I said, still mysteriously uneasy but also tingling with some more than sexual pleasure. “It’s a cliché I have. Ghost of my youthful metaphysics. What is the ultimate reality? Adventures and ideas. An adventure is when someone pokes you in the mouth. An idea is when you think pokedness.”

“You can’t believe that’s what life’s like!” She was indignant, smiling and scoffing at once, and probably aware that her indignation was sexy.

“I do believe it. So does Dorkis. That’s what he means when he talks about riding reality like a bird.”

She turned her head to look at me. “Only part of him believes that.” Her eyes were dead serious now, though the look was still gentle. “What’s best in him makes adventures out of ideas. Such as killing Lykourgos.”

That was sharp, I thought. Foolishly, I hadn’t expected it. I should have guessed that her half jokes, her dimple-flashing ironies weren’t all she had, were the ambiance, say, around something she knew for sure. I felt a little flicker of excitement, sexual, and wished I’d brought the wine. “So people can change reality,” I said

“Of course they can,” she snapped, then knew she’d been made fun of. She turned her face away. After a while she said, like a sigh, “You really are serious, somewhere behind all those masks. It would be interesting to know sometime what you really think.”

“So I’ll tell you,” I said, and smiled, boyishly world- weary, wondering what I’d make up.

She slid her eyes at me. She was thinking about it too. The new beginning. Peace like the night around us.

I looked at the stars. “All talk between men and women is a prelude to sex,” I said. “You’re aware of that?”

“That’s really dumb,” she said. Smile with dimple.

“Right.” But I said, “Because adventures don’t begin in ideas, they begin in emotional impulses. For instance, Dorkis and Tuka don’t think of making love, they merely think as far as clearing the table, separating themselves from you and me, setting up the potential for a new reality — a new adventure. When it’s happened they’ll realize what’s happened, that is, they’ll crystallize the event to an idea, which will signal that it’s over. An idea is the conceptualization of a reality which no longer exists.”

“Boy,” she said. But smiled.

After a long time, which I foolishly imagined she’d been using to brood on my theory, she asked, “Do you think they’re making love?” It was one of those straight- at-you questions that made a lie, a joke, impossible, made all my normally devious ways seem shameful.

“Would it bother you?”

“I’m not sure.” The tone was so straight, so nakedly trusting, it unnerved me like the whisper of a god. Also, it filled me with lust.

“Strange how I love you,” I said. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. I leaned on my arm beside her and, after I’d thought about it, closed my hand on her breast. The effect shook me to my roots, hurled me back into the innocence of childhood. The softness of her flesh was like a sudden bursting of wells in a desert, like sympathy, kindness, and understanding I’d forgotten I deserved. It was as if all I’d been when I was good, when I was young, had lain in moldering disuse until that instant. All the tension I’d hardly known I felt came unwound. I was clean. She searched my face, knew everything in it.

“Don’t,” she said gently.

I kissed her and she put her arm around me, kissing me back. It was all overpowering — her very breathing slaughtered my ears — yet with a piece of my mind I didn’t believe it, quite; no more than I really believed in the gods, or believed there were Helots being murdered somewhere in these hills. She was a good lover, a woman who knew how to play to men. The suspicion made the night terrible.

“I love you,” I said. It sounded to me more convincing, and far more dangerous, than most of the things I said in those days. Other girls I’d made love to I hadn’t lied to. Then what made me say it? Panic seized me. Did I not love Tuka, then? I couldn’t remember. I drew away from her abruptly to look at the water and think. I ached. My groin was as charged as the bottom of the sea and my chest was like wind in a cave. I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, I could abandon everything I had in one moment, without remorse, for the taste of Iona’s mouth, for her walk, her voice, her breast in my cupped hand. Presumably in six months I could drop Iona for somebody else’s mouth, or perhaps for a camel trip. I was outraged. — Did she love me at all? I wondered then, in fresh panic. The whole world was dead and putrefact.

Seeing that I remained still as a rock, Iona sat up and touched her face to her drawn-up knees and slightly shook her head. “I can’t believe this is me,” she said. It sounded honest.

I looked at her as coldly and objectively as possible. She was lovely and gentle, and I was swayed again. The night was as vast and deep as the cavern of childhood. The fact, sure as the huge rocks that waited below the unrippled lake, was that I was going to make love to her, that she too was hollow with desire. Just the same, I tried to think. It was true that she was beautiful, and it was true that “by a certain system of morality,” as Lykourgos would say, she was good. She’d been a loving and faithful wife to Dorkis all the years of their marriage. I knew that, without her telling me, without any evidence whatever, or none of the kind mere scientists understand. Yet like me, perhaps, she was toying in the back of her mind with throwing all she had been away. It was a thought that, once entertained for an instant, could never be dismissed. She would live the rest of her life knowing that loyalties are moment-to-moment things, even those one clings to till one dies.

Or was she toying with me?

I was horrified anew at the violence of my feeling for her. It shook my world like the wrath of Poseidon and left nothing familiar, nothing even recognizable. Why should I be in Sparta? My whole life was meaningless. I was free. Also caught. It wasn’t her body I wanted, or not just that. I wanted her.