John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

He said, looking at the plate and smiling as if the question were possibly silly, “Tuka, what’s going on between Mom and Dad?”

“Nothing,” she said, too quick-witted. “That’s the problem.” The knife slipped through the cheese as if through butter.

He smiled, not showing he was weighing the answer. “Mom’s acting really strange,” he said. “Sometimes she leaves me with the kids and she doesn’t come home all night. I wonder where she goes.”

Did Tuka suffer a twinge of alarm? We hadn’t known, Tuka and I, that Iona sometimes slept away from home. I don’t know yet where she went, or why — assuming Miletos was right about her absences. Revolution, no doubt. The news worried me when I heard it later. But Tuka was not thinking about the rebellion. Did she quickly search her mind for times I too had been missing? I don’t know, of course. I know only that Miletos asked it, or anyway that Tuka said later that he asked it, and that Tuka told him that Dorkis and Iona were breaking up, that Iona had, oh, a “crush” on me. “Lots of women do, from time to time,” she said. “You get used to it.” (I can imagine the lightness with which she must have said it, the false bravado of securely loved wife forever having to pick up the pieces for heartbroken women, and I can imagine the pain she did not see in the boy whose mother had been reduced to another poor helpless infatuate whore.) Did she go on to talk about middle age, the feeling Thalia talked about, that life is huge and everyone is cheated? I know why, if she did. Because she loved Miletos and confused her own troubled nature with his, and wanted to ease with her brittle quick tongue the pain he too must sooner or later come to, like all who live.

But whatever they said, the boy did not show that he was hurt. I talked with him briefly as we left the house, and he was cheerful, eagerly looking forward to a job he was starting in the moruini, out at the stables on one of the farms.

Two nights later I received a message from Iona, saying she was staying at an inn and wanted me away tomorrow so that she could talk with Tuka. I could hear the exact tone of her voice in the flatly recited message: it was husky; sorrowing and drunk. She mentioned, in a single obscure sentence, that Tuka had said terrible things about us, and about Iona and Dorkis, to Miletos. I was frightened, frustrated by the span of time and space between the human voice that had dictated the message and the mechanical echo on my stoop. It was late — near miduight — and the message, delivered by a dark-faced boy who spoke the words twice over, then vanished in the darkness, had, it seemed to me, the character of a summons. She named the inn, and all her phrases had a checked violence in them, like tornado weather, that I couldn’t shrug off until morning. I knew for sure that she’d been drinking. The tremor of anger is always there, just edging the surface like a crocodile snout, when Iona’s had too much wine. And I guessed that it was not entirely her son’s pain that enraged her. She could have defended herself (and wouldn’t have needed to) against a direct attack from Tuka. But she had no defense against Miletos’s innocent grief, in which, whether she admitted it or not, her own guilt — not as he saw it but as she saw it, looking at herself through her son’s eyes — shone clear. I was afraid, in a word, that, hurled back into a childhood vision of goodness that even children know for a half-truth — thrown back into memories of family happiness that she seemed to have destroyed by selfish, however unconsummated lust — she would kill herself. I knew well enough that I was probably exaggerating. People rarely commit suicide except to punish loved ones, and though Iona was fond of Tuka, in a way, or had been once, Tuka and she weren’t close enough for that. But whatever sense might argue, I was afraid. Fear was in the air, in those days. Worse even than now. There’s a kind of healthiness in open violence — scattered fires against the skyline, roars of rioting and looting: the healthiness of a good gust of wind in an electric storm, or an honest heart attack after riddling weeks of mysterious malaise. In those days you were forever waiting, watching for signs that the trouble was over, or else not. Someone had to go to her, I thought, and it obviously couldn’t be me. I would sleep with her, and if ever I slept with Dorkis’s wife, it was not going to be by chance. And so, incredibly, I sent Tuka.

From the point of view of the omniscient, indifferent gods, it must have been amusing. As Poseidon’s lightning bursts forth between thunderheads, shattering the darkness and sending down rain like a thousand swords, driving small animals into their burrows and birds to the silent depths of trees, so Tuka burst in in her terrible splendor on the darkness of Iona’s room.

“You bitch!” she said.

But as the earth spreads wide in the lightning glow and opens its furrows and seams to the rain, so Iona rose sweetly wide-eyed from her pillow and stretched out an arm to her adversary.

“Why, Tuka!” she said.

In short, they were both as reasonable as possible, given the circumstances. Tuka adopted the point of view that she’d told Miletos all in a last-ditch effort to save the two marriages, that she’d warned Iona that she’d tattle to Miletos if Iona continued to see me (which may have been true. Who knows?), and that she’d done it all, to tell the real truth, for Iona’s good and Dorkis’s. Iona adopted the point of view that she couldn’t understand what on earth made Tuka believe she had cause for jealousy, that she and Dorkis shared a love more profound than words could express, there had never been the slightest question of that! and that her sole concern in this squalid affair was that Miletos might now respect Tuka less, Tuka whom he loved as a sister. They were both, I know without having been there, simply brilliant, though one couldn’t exactly call what they had together a conversation. Iona wept, clutching her covers to her bosom, and said, “Tuka, dearest, dearest Tuka, you’re sick.” Tuka said (a parting shot), “Lie there and masturbate!”

And so they both won hands down. Iona talked to me later, briefly, distantly (because Tuka had won). She was worried about Tuka. There was no problem now with Miletos or Dorkis: they had talked, she said. Miletos, when he came home from his first day of work at the stables, had eaten supper apart from the others and had gone to his room. She’d pursued him there, and when she’d asked what was wrong he’d come out at last, weeping, with “Mother, why are you leaving us?” She’d answered that she wasn’t — an honest answer. (All of us are honest second by second, and she was talking with the son she loved. How could she dream, that instant, that she had ever dreamed of leaving — if she had?) She’d probed further, and he’d told her the rest of what distressed him, and she answered all that honestly too. Considering. They talked about love, and she told him, honestly, of her feelings about me, her feelings about Dorkis, about Tuka. And so it was true, there was no problem with Miletos. He remained our friend. The problem was Tuka. She’d gone again past all human limits, and Iona, who had never seen it before, believed Tuka incapable of love for anyone, certainly indifferent if not hostile to Iona’s whole family. Even if that were false, as Iona hoped it might be, Tuka’s anger was not a thing you walked into twice. Iona told herself two stories, both half-truths and mutually exclusive but nevertheless as real for her as two large owls in a tree. That Tuka was insane, a physical threat to me and to our children. And that Tuka had acted at my instigation, breaking off a “relationship” that I was too gentle, that is, cowardly, to bring to an end myself. She could be, supported by these theories, fond of me as an aunt is of a nephew who has some terminal disease, but her “crush” on me, as Tuka put it, was done with. Also, ironically, she no longer needed me. Thanks to Tuka (though this was hardly what Tuka had in mind), or thanks directly to Miletos’s grief, which first found words that night in the kitchen when Miletos and Tuka were cutting cheese — but sooner or later would have had to find words, with Tuka or without — Iona had fallen in love, once more, with her family.