John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

Sometimes we’d ride to the hills north of Sparta and would sit on some cliff looking down while the horses grazed behind us. On a clear day you could see for a hundred miles.

She said, once, “Do you ever think of Thaletes?”

I smiled to keep her from seriousness. “Never.”

“He was never happy except when he was facing death. That was existence, he thought.”

“This is existence,” I said. I nodded toward the city far below us, miles away.

“I know. Standing back from things. Seeing where you are.”

I glanced at her strong, fine legs. “I meant beauty,” I said.

“That too, I suppose.” She put her hand on mine. “But you can’t see that either unless you’re back from it.” She looked at me sideways for a moment. “You, for instance. I forget I love you until someone starts stealing you from me.”

“Nobody’s stealing me,” I said.

She squeezed my hand. “Damn right.”

After a while she said, “Poor old horse.” It was our word for Lykourgos. “What does he do for pleasure?”

“Bites himself, I guess.”

She laughed. “And other people, yes. And yet I admire him. He knows what he wants.”

“Like you,” I said.

Her fingers drew away from my hand to pull some grass. “Little good it does me.”

Him either, I could have said. I tried to imagine Lykourgos in love, mournfully, hopelessly in love with his brother’s wife and convinced that she was merely toying with him, a woman everybody knew was loose, and as beautiful, people say, as he was ugly. Was Kharilaus his son? No matter, of course. It was all a long long time ago, irrelevant.

Her face was drawn, as if someone had stolen her earring. She continued pulling grass, casually, grimly, as though it were the dead Iona’s hair.

I sighed, faintly grieved and weary of broodings. “One must try to want what’s possible, Tuka.”

“I know.” She wouldn’t look up. “Is she better than me in bed?”

“Tuka, Tuka,” I said, growing wearier and wearier. “Whatever people may say in Athens, the world is not made exclusively of beds.”

“But tell me. I have a right to know. Is she better?”

“I haven’t slept with her.”

“You’re a liar.” She glanced at me, and I shook my head. She closed her fist hard on a pebble beside her knee, as if to hurl it at me, but she didn’t. “All the worse, then. How can mere human flesh compete with some glorious airy vision?”

“Tuka, I swear by all the gods—”

“Don’t bother, boy.” She stood up abruptly and started for her horse. She walked like a Spartan soldier girl, her whole body hard as nails except for her lips, her belly, her breasts. I loved her. Why was she blind to it?

“Do you want the truth or don’t you?” I yelled.

She stopped, turned, put her hands on her hips. “If you sleep with her, I’ll kill you.”

I raised my hand slowly and kissed the fingertips, Solon’s gesture, saying good-bye to life. She sank to her knees suddenly, as if the strength had gone out of her legs, and covered her face, crying. I only half believed it. “Why can’t you ever talk to me?” she screamed. “Why can’t you see when I need you?”

“So I see it. You need me. Everybody needs me, even Lykourgos. It’s absurd.”

But she was crying, her muscles growing tight, and I was worried: it was a thing I’d seen before. I went to her and put my arms around her, but her muscles stayed tight. Her face was as stiff as a mask.

“Tuka, listen. I love you. Listen!” It was Konon’s word: Listen. The recognition checked me for a second. Everything I said, everything I ever did was somebody else’s, not mine. An empty ritual, nothingness. But I said, “Listen, Tuka, please. I love you.” It was true, probably, yet I knew I could have said it as easily, and as honestly — and would say it, if the need arose — to Iona, or Dorkis, or my children, or Konon. And I could have said it as convincingly to Lykourgos’s stooge Alkander if ever some still-warm ember of humanness in him cried out in need of me. And yet I did love her, so far as I could see. Was I unfit, or was it the world that was? But she was rigid as stone, and all the time my mind played games I was rubbing her back and arms, kissing her temples, whispering to her, like an actor. I summoned up tears. At last, all at once, as if something had broken, she relaxed, crying again. I went on whispering a while longer, wondering how I was going to get both her and the horses home, since Tuka was in no shape to ride. “I love you, love you, love you,” I said. I would stake the horses, I decided, and send someone back for them.

I told Iona I could see no more of her, it was unhealthy. Luckily, I had work to occupy me. Lykourgos had a stack of documents for me to copy, his new labor and reprisals code. He used me, I suppose, not because he lacked scribes of his own but because, as always when the thing he proposed lacked humanness, he wanted my flaccid Ionian reaction. (In those days he still put his laws on parchment.) Not that I would be likely to change his mind; I knew that by now. I played out my role of righteous indignation not for righteousness’ sake anymore, but for art’s. To tell the grim truth, I could see no dignified alternative. I might stomp and bray and disembogue for Athens in a great show of outrage, but it would be an empty gesture: I would change nothing in Sparta that way either, and I knew I couldn’t face without a sneer or an obscene giggle the people at home who praised my righteous noise. I might strike out at Lykourgos — kill him, say, or make seditious speeches in the marketplace — but who but a fool would believe me if I struck out now, after years of silence, even bootlicking? I wouldn’t believe myself. I could do it, I was sure. I could as easily shuck off my dignity as Solon does his, but I would know all the while that I was acting not from noble principle but to appear a man of principle, or to please my old mother, or to break the dull routine of life, or for some other silly reason. There was, it seemed to me, a certain moronic virtue in giving Lykourgos my honest reactions to his monstrous ideas. Until one thinks of something better to do, one should do what one is doing. “Carry on!” as Solon would say. “Love, carry on!”

Two weeks later, I met Iona by accident on the street. She looked shocked, horrified, when she saw me, and she instantly turned away with a squeezed-shut, wounded, stubborn look, as though my face were a wolfish attack on her. I had known that my breaking off with her would hurt her, but I hadn’t guessed that the pain would last so long. Her look filled me with confusion. I did love her; she knew that. And not seeing her was right; she knew that too. I was not to blame for her misery: life itself was. Apollo’s seduction. Poseidon’s stupid restlessness. Yet she was miserable, so that I, too, was miserable. To continue the separation was empty righteousness — love reduced to arithmetic: Tuka’s love minus Iona’s love equals Virtue, three dead crows wired to a fence. But to end the separation was nonsense too. Tuka would be hurt and eventually, no doubt, Dorkis. I walked half the day, trying to make up some kind of reason for action. Around midafternoon I saw a donkey beaten by a screaming slave. A troop of Spartan soldiers walked past, eyes steadily front. Were such things omens? I concluded that the world was insane.

I went to her house that night. The door was unbolted. I went in. She was sitting on the floor, laboriously copying from a scroll, a page of Solon’s opinions that I’d given her weeks ago. She looked up in alarm, opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. I tried to think of something I might say I’d left at her house and had come for, but nothing came to me. I stood.