John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“That’s all dumb.” I’d made her uneasy, missed the point.

“So you say. Maybe so. All I know is, I gave the warning by impulse, and instantly regretted it though for two whole days I didn’t tell him I’d warned them. When the time he’d decided on came, the guards appeared out of nowhere and disarmed him. Konon looked at me and his face twisted like a monkey’s, trying to smile.”

The room became still. She looked at me, full of some feeling I couldn’t read. I tried to think what I really felt about my betrayal of Konon and found I felt nothing. She seemed to love me: love, or else the joy of conquest, shone on her clear as an aureole. If she loved me, was it as an amused mother, or as my own soul’s image, or as an infinitely tolerant, weary goddess? A queer image passed through my mind, of locking her up in a room someplace as Sardinians lock up their gold.

“What are you thinking?” I said.

She laughed, an explosion of the churning thought I couldn’t guess. She swung her legs off the couch and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “I think we’re incredibly different people,” she said, “and incredibly similar.”

“How?” I said.

“Have you got about nine million years?”

I, too, laughed. But what I wanted was an answer, final and sure as a thunderbolt. “How are we different?”

Iona retreated to the ironic mask she knew how to work so well. “All ways,” she said, turning the corners of her mouth down. “Do you collect chickens’ feet?”

“Do you?” I said.

She laughed, turning down her mouth again, then relenting, smiling and frowning. “We’d better not talk about it,” she said. She came down to the floor beside me and kissed my cheek.

But I was thinking about the brothers she rarely talked about, and the father. She knew all the tricks. I was jelly. She knew how men long to be superior, masculine; knew how timid they are about advances, how shattered by a No. She could tease me to the limit she wanted to go and could ease me away so that I felt not rejected but mighty as a god. It was too perfect. I wasn’t worth it I was her toy. But my God how I loved her and wished it were real! But what if it was?

“What was your father like?” I said.

She sat on her feet and thought, then began talking softly. In the mountain village where they lived there was a river with a strong current. There were large, sharp rocks. They swam there, and he looked on with stern approval. He was fierce as a lion all his life, but he wasn’t bitter until after Iona’s mother had left him, when the children were grown, to go off with some prophet from the far northern hills. Iona’s father had become, then, an angry, misanthropic old man.

I put my hand on hers. “Are you like him?” I asked.

“Ridiculous!” she said, laughing.

Perhaps she wasn’t, I couldn’t be sure, but she carried his image like a carved stone in her heart.

“I have to go,” I said.

After a moment she nodded, a little stiffly.

I climbed up my crutch into the room. “I’ve stayed too long,” I said. “Forgive me.” I offered her my hand to help her up and, after a second’s hesitation, she accepted it. She walked with me to the door, saying nothing. Was she angry? I leaned on the doorframe as I always did when leaving her, my hand on the door but my chest undecided, and I watched her face, wondering if I would kiss her. She did the same, though perhaps thinking about something different, leaning on the other doorframe. She watched my face as I watched hers. It would have been better if we’d worked out some ritual, I thought, or settled the matter by going to bed. But our metaphysics or something was against it. At last she came to me and put her arms around me. “You are a good man, Agathon.”

“Who knows?” I kissed her. As usual, it wasn’t enough. I held her close, moving my hands on her smooth small back and then her hips. Then, as usual, I paused and we waited for the sign that neither of us would give alone, true democrats, and it was over for another day. As always when I left her, the streets were beautiful. The flowers, the birds, the sunlight were out of their minds.

It was a terrible time, for Tuka. I never told her of my visits to Iona, not so much from cowardice, I think, though I never deny my cowardice, as from a wish to spare her unnecessary grief. But she knew about them, or some of them. When our families were together Iona would sometimes show knowledge of things she ought not to have known, and Tuka would ask questions, casually, lightly, and Iona, as casually as possible, looking guilty as hell, would mention that I had dropped by. It made Tuka furious and a little frightened, though she wouldn’t show that to Dorkis or Iona. “Agathon, they’re practically slaves,” she said. It was the worst she could say, and my total indifference to their accidental and irrelevant condition frustrated Tuka to the edge of violence. “What do you think people are saying about you?” she said. “You must be insane!” But she knew, too, my indifference to the nonsense people say. She loved society, the conversation of her own kind, as the saying goes; as for me, Sparta was my hermitage from all that. There were none of her own kind here, or mine. The Spartans, whom I thought less than human, were our supposed superiors. The few Athenians in town were black-market pigs. She blinked all that, playing aristocratic lady in a dung heap she changed by her imagination to elegant old Athens. Why she’d come with me in the first place I couldn’t say. She almost didn’t. When the carriage arrived to take us away from Athens, she sat in her room and refused to move. I gave her ten minutes and went out to the carriage to wait. At last she came, still furious, weeping. But in time she accepted her life in Sparta. She made our three rooms in the palace a fair imitation of Athens, and she created, in them, with the help of her culinary skill and her harp, an imitation of Athenian society. It was temporary, she understood. What stories we’d have to tell when we went home! Even my consort with Helots was acceptable in those terms. And she did not actively dislike the friends I made among the Helots. In her generous moments — that is, when she felt secure in her total possession of me — she could understand that they were merely victims: she herself might be a slave, if Sparta were ever to capture Athens. And she, as an Athenian, had known Korinthian slaves who had once been aristocratic masters. In fact, she had very much liked Iona and Dorkis, at first. Iona might have been her closest friend, if I hadn’t gotten involved. Now she was afraid to leave the house, for fear Iona might appear; afraid to let me go off by myself in the morning, for fear I might go visit her.

It was a strange, irrational hatred, and she knew it. I did not love Tuka less than I had before. When I woke up in the morning and looked at her, with sunlight falling over her shoulders and glittering in her blue-black hair, she seemed the most valuable thing in the world to me. I’d press closer to her warmth, nestling up to her firm, broad-beamed buttocks and sliding my hand around her waist to her breast. Then for a long time I’d lie half awake and half asleep, all our lives since childhood closed together, secure and safe, as if the room we lay in were not mere physical space but a bubble of time. We would hear the children’s voices in the next room, and the bubble of time stretched outward to include them: my son, absent- minded and quiet and gentle as myself (or gentle as I liked to imagine myself), kneeling by the seashore shaping huge figures out of sand and stone; our daughter, clever and sly and as beautiful as Tuka, hoarding her treasures in Tuka’s cast-off woolen purse, or climbing some tree to branches higher than any of the boys had nerve for. It was absurd that Tuka should doubt that I loved her — loved all of them.