John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

Hamrah’s wife came with a pitcher to offer more wine. She was small, buxom, with a face like a child’s — pretty mouth, a slightly turned up nose, shy eyes. I held up my cup and she filled it.

“I’m Thalia,” she said. “Remember?”

I grinned. “It’s beginning to come back to me.”

She laughed, holding off. “Wonderful.”

“Come sit,” I said.

She glanced around the room. There were plenty of empty wine cups, but there was nobody there not able to serve himself. She set the pitcher on the carved center table, came back with her cup, and sat down on the floor beside my cushion. When she’d arranged herself, feet tucked under her to one side, chiton flowing smoothly over her knees, she looked up, smiling, as if for some new command. Since I had none to give, she said with pleasantly childlike irony, “You look like you’re having a wonderful time.”

“I’ve been listening and learning,” I said solemnly.

“Wonderful!” She looked over at the group around her husband. A short, thick man like a sawed- off column with a black, short beard and eyes large as hen’s eggs was talking about market- seizure modalities. She looked back at me, serious. “I hear you write poetry.”

“At times. I’m a degenerate.”

She drank and thought about it. “Really?” she asked.

I understood all this, of course. The womanly flirtation, the hostessly flattery, and, alas, the serious child peeking out behind.

“Very, very degenerate,” I said. I glanced at her husband, clean cut, erect as a general. “Now Solon’s poetry is something else. It’s public, rhetorical, designed to sway the community to good. But mine—” I shook my head in mock despair. “Pure anarchy. If I had any character I’d burn it.”

Thalia lifted her head and laughed, self-conscious but also amused, curious. “Are you serious, Agathon?”

I slid off the cushion, pushed it away, and sat beside her on the floor. Tuka and someone I didn’t know drifted past the doorway, dancing. (“Nice enough, yes,” Tuka was saying. “You know the kind. Sex makes her seasick.”) “Never more serious in my life,” I said. “All poetry, good or evil, works by the same process. Solon writes good good poetry, I write good evil poetry.”

“You must let me see it sometime. Is it naughty?”

“Alas, no. Aseptic.”

She smiled and glanced over at her husband. “What’s the process? — What you were talking about.”

“You want the whole lecture?”

She nodded happily. “While we dance.”

“Good idea,” I said, “but unluckily—”

“Oh.” She glanced at my bad leg. “How stupid!”

“How about I lecture while we go for a walk?”

“Wonderful!” she said.

I set down my cup, labored to my feet, and held out my hand. We walked, and I gave her the lecture I used to dazzle students with, about philosophy by exclusion (logic) and philosophy by inclusion (poetry), and poetry for the common good (Solon’s) and poetry for sickly self-congratulation (mine). We ended up sitting in the tall, soft grass by the pond, holding hands. Looking at the wide, unmoving pond, you couldn’t tell whether the water or the shore was more still. I put my arm around her. Her back was softer than Tuka’s, less sharply cleft at the spine. She told me about her father. Once when he was drunk and she was bringing him home, he tried to push her in front of a carriage team. All her life she’d been afraid to go to sleep at night. I moved my hand on her back. It was very unusual for her to talk seriously with anyone, she said. She felt like a prisoner sometimes. Life seemed huge when you were sitting out here by the water, looking up at the stars, and it made her feel cheated not to be able to see everything, know everything there was. I thought fleetingly about my old book — a thing I rarely mentioned to anyone — and moved my hand on the far side of her back, slowly. I was thinking now of Iona. “Will you show me your poetry?” she asked. I said nothing, and when she turned to look at me I kissed her. She didn’t exactly return the kiss, but she didn’t pull away either.

I said, “Let’s swim.”

“Here?” she said, incredulous. But it wasn’t the pond’s stagnation she was thinking of.

Quite casually — because, though ray tongue was glib, I was too drunk for any ghost of inhibition — I stripped and dove in. I hit my head on a stump but hardly noticed. The water was warm as soup. After a moment she too was in the water, laughing, calling out to me about the water’s warmth. She swam beautifully, as graceful as an athlete, and after a time I crawled out on the bank to sit and watch her. Blood ran down into my eyes from where I’d hit myself on the sunken stump. At last she too came out, shyly, her body white in the moonlight — hips and breasts far sweeter, it seemed to me, than those of any casually, habitually naked Spartan girl. She sat down beside me, shook her hair, and laughed. “Marvelous!” she said. I put my arm around her, laid her down, and kissed her. Blood fell on her from my banged-up forehead. She was smiling, and whispered, “Marvelous.” It was, but I could do nothing, my body wine-logged. And perhaps something else. Wine doesn’t usually defeat me at such moments. “We’d better go back,” I said. She nodded. After a while, still not speaking, we got up, dressed, and, holding hands, went back up to the house. Hamrah and Tuka sat on the terrace, in the shadow of the cypresses, talking. (“…is, there’s no such thing as a grown-up,” Tuka was saying. “I imagine it’s especially sad to people who are really, really old.”) Thalia and I went inside, refilled our cups, and drank. Not long after that, I fell asleep. I slept like a boulder.

A week later, Hamrah told me solemnly, his big hands closing and opening around each other, that his marriage was on the rocks because of “what happened the other night.” I was astonished. “Hamrah,” I asked, “do you think I made love to your wife?” He tipped his head down and rolled up his eyes, full of gloomy guilt “No,” he said, “but maybe it would have been better if you had, because I did with yours, and now Thalia hates me.” “But that’s absurd!” I said. His news surprised me, to say the least, partly because it came from such a fine, antiseptic, military-looking man, but I wasn’t shocked, certainly not wounded. I was partly surprised that Tuka had failed to mention it, and partly I was surprised at Thalia, if what he said was true. I could understand well enough why they’d done it. They’d thought we had. It was mere chance that we hadn’t. I remembered what Thalia had said about the hugeness of life and her feeling cheated. I could have laughed, now, but I didn’t. “It’s ridiculous,” I said. I sounded to myself like Solon, filling the air with noises while he thought about his next move. “I could have had her,” I said. “I suppose it was stupid of me not to.” He looked mournfully toward the house, like a warrior surveying the ground of his defeat. Inside, Tuka and Thalia were talking. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. And so that night I went swimming again with Thalia, pristine Athenian girl, and our naked bodies would brush together from time to time and she would raise her arms, reaching for her stroke, so that her breasts moved against my chest, and afterward (goose pimples rising on my skin, my teeth chattering) we made love on the bank where we’d sat looking up at the stars. When we went to the house, Tuka and Hamrah were in bed. Hamrah pretended not to see us at the door. I took Thalia’s hand and led her to the second bedroom. Toward daylight, Tuka came to our bed.

All this happened more than once. I understood, well enough, that it was destructive. Hamrah was a good lover (Tuka told me in great detail), and I, as a matter of fact, was far from spectacular in bed, especially with Thalia. Nearly always, in fact, I was impotent with her, and she would say things like “Agathon, Agathon, what have I done wrong? Why can’t you love me?” and would talk of suicide. Hamrah, meanwhile, would be firm as a rock for hours, mumbling, “Tuka, Tuka, I love you, I love you,” to which Tuka would answer, sensibly, “Don’t be silly, dear, it’s just a friendly fuck.” And they would laugh. But for all his physical superiority, I had him cold: I loved his wife better than he did — or, anyway, I understood her better than he did, cared more about what she thought. I could offer her pieces of this huge life that Hannah had never heard of. What had started, between me and Thalia, as a friendly fuck became something else. Though I liked being in bed with her, even when I was impotent, what I liked best was walking and talking with her, telling her about politics and philosophy and poetry, or listening to her stories about her childhood. I wrote poems for her, degenerate, of course. But whatever of the degenerate there may have been in the poems, it was mine, not hers. She was the gentlest girl I’d ever known. Certainly gentler than Tuka, gentler than Iona. When Tuka was angry she would cut with her tongue, lash out with her fists, at last go rigid with fury. As for Iona, she had the mask of gentleness, but I guessed from the beginning that it was a mask. She almost never raised her voice at her children, but once when she was slightly drunk and her second oldest son was screeching, shivering the night with his pointless, now merry, now cantankerous noise, I watched her smash a cup on his skull (almost without expression). Another time, when I stood behind her and bacon grease spattered on her arm — no fault of mine — she turned and meant to brain me, merely because I was handy, then thought better of it Thalia, when she was offended, withdrew or wept. The best of them all, perhaps. Yet Thalia never possessed me, body and soul. For her, as for them, I felt tenderness, respect admiration. Like theirs, her unexpected appearance in a room gave my heart a sudden leap of pleasure and, needless to say, desire. But she was never inside me like an incubus bent on my destruction. It was like the difference between a reflection in a clean pool and a reflection seized by a water spirit as a mask for her deadly courtship. What it was that made the difference I don’t know. — In any case, Thalia stopped loving her husband. Tuka, for her part, loved me more than ever, it seemed. She had never been awed by Hannah’s intellect or his worldly aplomb, and I was a gentler, though not a more robust, bedfellow. But while her nights with Hamrah intensified her love for me, they also had on her an effect she had never expected, though I could have warned her of it. Sometimes when we were talking happily about this or that, her eyes would move away, and I knew she was thinking of him. I was sorry for her, as I was for Hamrah and Thalia, but I said nothing.