The Names Read online

  “Lloyd’s wants to declare the Gulf a war zone,” he said. “That could double the tanker premium.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I got some playback from a Kuwaiti defense meeting. They’re figuring a worst-case scenario. Lloyd’s is. Tanker hulks littering the strait. The robed ones are muttering in their beards. Even the parent is nervous about the prospect. It impacts on almost everything they’re involved in.”

  “A war zone.”

  “It has a ring, doesn’t it.”

  He wanted to know about Turkey. I had precise figures for nonperforming loans. I had classified telex traffic between bank branches in the region. I had foreign exchange factors, inflation rates, election possibilities, exports and imports. I had cars lined up for gasoline, daily power cuts, no water coming out of household taps, crowds of unemployed young men standing on corners, fifteen-year-old girls shot to death for politics. No coffee, no heating oil, no spare parts for combat aircraft. I had martial law, black markets, the International Monetary Fund, God is great.

  I’d been given the scrambled telexes by my friend David Keller, a credit head at the Mainland Bank. Much of the other material I’d been given by our control for Turkey. The streets of Istanbul were data in their own right, the raw force, the unraveling. The rest came from our contacts at the World Bank and various research institutes.

  We’d circled back and were heading downhill, single file, along a narrow sidewalk. He talked to me over his shoulder.

  “Where are you from? Did I ever ask?”

  “Medium-sized town. Pennsylvania.”

  “I’m from Jersey City.”

  “What do you want me to say, George? We’re a long way from home?”

  We crossed the street to avoid a deposit of soap suds.

  “Do I want to go to the Acropolis?”

  “Everybody goes,” I told him.

  “Is there climbing?”

  “They all do it. The lame, the halt.”

  “What’s up there exactly that I have to see it?”

  “You go to Naples to look at dirty pictures.”

  “I have to finagle that. This is nothing,” he said.

  Five minutes later we were in the office, two modest rooms connected by an arched opening. My secretary, a middle-aged woman who liked to be called Mrs. Helen, was at a funeral in the north somewhere.

  Rowser took off his shoes and asked to see telexes, notes, memoranda, whatever I could give him. Stamped documents, rows of figures. As he settled into his reading I felt myself beginning to perceive the silence, the eerie calm that closed in gradually every time I came in here from the street. The building was in a cul-de-sac, a preciously quiet spot in a city hardened to noise. Noise is a kind of rain to Athenians, an environment shaped by nature. Nothing can prevent it.

  “When do you leave, George?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “TW?”

  “Right.”

  “Expect a stop.”

  “It’s nonstop.”

  “Expect a stop. Shannon or Goose Bay.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “They take off without full tanks. They tell you it’s too hot here and the fuel expands. Or the runway’s too short and the fuel is heavy. It’s the fuel all right. More expensive here. They like to fill up elsewhere.”

  “It comes back to that.”

  “No escape,” I said.

  He went back to his reading. I sat at my desk with a lemon drink, watching him. He had a dozen nervous gestures. He touched his face, his clothes, blinking almost constantly. I imagined him stranded in Goose Bay. Big empty remote innocent Labrador. Scraped-clean-by-the-wind Labrador. No politics, no risk. The place would be an offense to him, a white space he could not know through numbers. He would die there, gesturing.

  Summer nights belong to people in the streets. Everyone is outdoors, massed against the stonescape. We reconceive the city as a collection of unit spaces that people occupy in a fixed order of succession. Park benches, café tables, the swinging seats on ferris wheels in the carnival lots. Pleasure is not diversion but urgent life, a social order perceived as temporary. People go to movies set up in vacant lots and eat in tavernas that are improvised according to topography. Chairs and tables appear on sidewalks, rooftops and patios, on stepped streets and in alleys, and amplified music comes gusting across the soft night. The cars are out, the motorcycles and scooters and jeeps, and there are arguments, radios playing, the sound of auto horns. Horns that chime, that beep, that squeal, that blast a fanfare, horns that play popular tunes. Young men on the summer hunt. Horns, tires, crackling exhausts. This noise is annunciatory, we feel. They are saying they are on the way, they are close, they are here.

  Only the men in their local cafés keep indoors, where the light is good and they can play pinochle and backgammon and read newspapers with enormous headlines, a noise of its own. They are always there behind the floor-to-ceiling windows, skeptics before the cadences of life, and in winter they will still be there, in place, wearing hats and coats indoors on the coldest nights, tossing cards through the dense smoke.

  People everywhere are absorbed in conversation. Seated under trees, under striped canopies in the squares, they bend together over food and drink, their voices darkly raveled in Oriental laments that flow from radios in basements and back kitchens. Conversation is life, language is the deepest being. We see the patterns repeat, the gestures drive the words. It is the sound and picture of humans communicating. It is talk as a definition of itself. Talk. Voices out of doorways and open windows, voices on the stuccoed-brick balconies, a driver taking both hands off the wheel to gesture as he speaks. Every conversation is a shared narrative, a thing that surges forward, too dense to allow space for the unspoken, the sterile. The talk is unconditional, the participants drawn in completely.

  This is a way of speaking that takes such pure joy in its own openness and ardor that we begin to feel these people are discussing language itself. What pleasure in the simplest greeting. It’s as though one friend says to another, “How good it is to say ‘How are you?’ “ The other replying, “When I answer ‘I am well and how are you,’ what I really mean is that I’m delighted to have a chance to say these familiar things—they bridge the lonely distances.”

  The seller of lottery tickets comes dragging along, his curious stave all blazoned with flapping papers, and he calls a word or two into the dimness, then walks some more.

  The motion is toward the sea, the roads lead to the sea, the cars come down as though to spawn among the warships and trawlers. In a taverna along the coast we were nine for dinner, lingering well past midnight over wine and fruit. The Kellers, David and Lindsay. The Bordens, Richard and Dorothy (Dick and Dot). Axton, James. A Greek named Eliades, black-bearded, deeply attentive. The Maitlands, Ann and Charles. A German doing business.

  For most of its duration the dinner progressed like any other.

  The Bordens told a story in alternating voices about having car trouble on a mountain road. They walked to a village and drew a picture of a car for a man sitting under a tree. Dick traveled a lot and drew pictures wherever he went. He was friendly, cheerful, prematurely bald and told the same stories repeatedly, using identical gestures and intonations. He was an engineer who spent most of his time in the Gulf. Dot was a mother of twin girls, talkative, cheerful, weight-conscious (they both were), an energetic shopper, ready to lead expeditions to American brand names. Dick and Dot were our comic book couple. Once their stories were told, they were content to make background noises, to laugh easily and pleasantly, rewarding us for the allowances we made.

  “I’m good at faces, bad at names,” she said to the Greek.

  I watched Lindsay talk with Charles Maitland. Other voices at my ear, an old man strumming a guitar near the wine casks. She was the youngest of us by a wide margin. Light hair worn long, light blue eyes, hands crossed on the table. A mood of calm, a sunbather’s marginal apartness. She had a broad face, conspicuously
American, and of a type, the still hopeful outer suburbs, the face in the train window, unadorned, flushed by some outdoor task.

  Charles said something that made her laugh.

  This clear sound in the music and dense talk called up the voices of women passing below my terrace at night. How is it possible that one syllable of laughter, a spray in the dark, could tell me a woman was American? This sound is exact, minutely clear and telling, and I’d hear it rise through the cypresses across the street, Americans, walking, single file along the high wall, lost tourists, students, expatriates.

  “Travel is a kind of fatalism,” Charles was telling her. “At my age, I’m beginning to sense the menace ahead. I’m going to die soon, goes the refrain, so I’d better see the bloody sights. This is why I don’t travel except on business.”

  “You’ve lived everywhere.”

  “Living is different. One doesn’t gather up sights in quite the same way. There’s no compiling of sights. I think it’s when people get old they begin to compile. They not only visit pyramids, they try to build a pyramid out of the sights of the world.”

  “Travel as tomb-building,” I said.

  “He listens in. The worst kind of dinner companion. Chooses his moments.” He made a fist around his cigarette. “Living is different, you see. We were saving the sights for our old age. But now the whole idea of travel begins to reek of death. I have nightmares about busloads of rotting corpses.”

  “Stop,” she said.

  “Guidebooks and sturdy shoes. I don’t want to give in.”

  “But you’re not old.”

  “My lungs are shot. More wine,” he said.

  “I`wish I could see a merry twinkle in your eyes. Then I’d know you were kidding.”

  “My eyes are shot too.”

  Lindsay was in some ways the stabilizing center of our lives together, our lives as dinner companions, people forced by circumstance to get along. In a way, despite her age, it was logical. She was the one most recently removed from a fixed life. It said something about the world of corporate transients that we saw her as a force for equilibrium. No doubt she gave David the latitude he needed. She would enjoy his moments of dangerous fun and be uncritical of the corollary broodings.

  Second wives. I wondered if there was a sense in which they felt they’d been preparing for this all along. Waiting to put the gift to use, the knack for solving difficult men. And I wondered if some men tore through first marriages believing this was the only way to arrive at the settled peace that a younger woman held in her flawless hands, knowing he’d appear one day, a slurry of blood and axle grease. To women, these men must have the glamour of a wrecked Ferrari. I could see how David would be one of these. I envied him this reassuring woman, at the same time not forgetting how much I valued the depth of Kathryn’s resolve, her rigorous choices and fixed beliefs. This is the natural state.

  The German, named Stahl, was talking to me about refrigeration systems. Below us a slack tide washed against the narrow beach. A waiter brought melon, whitish green with spotted yellow rind. These mass dinners had shifting patterns, directional changes of conversation, and I found myself involved in an intricate cross-cut talk with the German, to my right, on air cooling, and with David Keller and Dick Borden, at the other end and other side of the table, on famous movie cowboys and the names of their horses. David was going to Beirut the next day. Charles was going to Ankara. Ann was going to Nairobi to visit her sister. Stahl was going to Frankfurt. Dick was going to Muscat, Dubai and Riyadh.

  Two children ran through the room, the guitarist started singing. At the far edge of auditory range, through all the cross-talk, I heard Ann Maitland, in conversation with this man Eliades, switch briefly from English to Greek. A phrase or short sentence, that was all, and she probably had no motive except to clarify or emphasize a point. But it seemed an intimacy, the way her voice softly closed around this fragment, it seemed a contact of some private kind. How strange, that a few words in a foreign language (the local language, spoken at surrounding tables) could float through to me, suggesting the nature of a confidence, making the other dialogue seem so much random noise. Ann was probably a dozen years older than he was. Attractive, bantering, sometimes unsure of things, drawn taut, with a self-mocking imperial way about her and beautiful sorry eyes. Did I begrudge her a sentence in Greek? About Eliades I knew nothing, not even which one of us he was connected to, or in what way. He’d arrived late, making the customary remark about normal time and Greek time.

  “Topper,” Dick Borden said. “That was Hopalong Cassidy’s Horse.”

  David said, “Hopalong Cassidy? I’m talking about cowboys, man. Guys who got down there in the shit and the muck. Guys with broken-down rummy sidekicks.”

  “Hoppy had a sidekick. He chewed tobacky.”

  David got up to find the toilet, taking a handful of black grapes with him. I drew Charles into the colloquy with the German, deftly, and then went around the table to David’s chair, sitting across from Ann and Eliades. He had bitten into a peach and was smelling the pit-streaked flesh. I think I smiled, recognizing my own mannerism. These peaches were a baffling delight, certain ones, producing the kind of sense pleasure that’s so unexpectedly deep it seems to need another context. Ordinary things aren’t supposed to be this gratifying. Nothing about the exterior of the peach tells you it will be so lush, moist and aromatic, juices running along your gums, or so subtly colored inside, a pink-veined golden bloom. I tried to discuss this with the faces across the table.

  “But I think pleasure is not easy to repeat,” Eliades said. “Tomorrow you will eat a peach from the same basket and be disappointed. Then you will wonder if you were mistaken. A peach, a cigarette. I enjoy one cigarette out of a thousand. Still I keep smoking. I think pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing. I keep smoking to find this moment. Maybe I will die trying.”

  Possibly it was his appearance that gave these remarks the importance of a world view. His wild beard covered most of his face. It started just below the eyes. He seemed to be bleeding this coarse black hair. His shoulders curved forward as he spoke and he rocked slightly at the front edge of the chair. He wore a tan suit and pastel tie, an outfit at odds with the large fierce head, the rough surface he carried.

  I tried to pursue the notion that some pleasures overflow the conditions attending them. Maybe I was a little drunk.

  Ann said, “Let’s not have metaphysics this evening. I’m a plain girl from a mill town.”

  “There is always politics,” Eliades said.

  He was looking at me with a humorous expression. I thought I read a tactful challenge there. If the subject was too delicate, he seemed to be saying, I might honorably go back to cowboys.

  “A Greek word, of course. Politics.”

  “Do you know Greek?” he said.

  “I’m having a hard time learning. I’ve felt at a constant disadvantage since my first day in this part of the world. I’ve felt stupid in fact. How is it so many people know three, four, five languages?”

  “That is politics too,” he said, and his teeth showed yellowish in the mass of hair. “The politics of occupation, the politics of dispersal, the politics of resettlement, the politics of military bases.”

  Wind shook the bamboo canopy and blew paper napkins across the floor. Dick Borden, at the head of the table, to my left, talked across me to his wife, who was on my immediate right, about getting on home to relieve the sitter. Lindsay brushed past my chair. Someone joined the old guitarist in his song, a man, dark and serious, turning in his chair to face the musician.

  “For a long time,” Dot said to the German, “we didn’t know our exact address. Postal code, district, we didn’t know these things.” She turned to Eliades. “And our telephone number wasn’t the number on our telephone. We didn’t know how to find out our real number. But I told you this, didn’t I, at that thing at the Hilton?”

  The peach pit sat on Eliades’ plate. Isle leaned forward to extend a cig
arette from his pack of Old Navy. When I smiled no, he offered the pack down one side of the table, up the other. Ann was talking to Charles. Was this the point in the evening at which husbands and wives find each other again, suppressing yawns, making eye contact through the smoke? Time to go, time to resume our murky shapes. The public self is weary of its gleam.

  “It is very interesting,” Eliades was telling me, “how Americans learn geography and world history as their interests are damaged in one country after another. This is interesting.”

  Would I leap to my country’s defense?

  “They learn comparative religion, economics of the Third World, the politics of oil, the politics of race and hunger.”

  “Politics again.”

  “Yes, always politics. There is no place to hide.”

  He was smiling politely.

  Ann said, “Do you need a ride, Andreas? We’re about to leave, I think.”

  “I have my car, thank you.”

  Charles was trying to signal the waiter.

  “I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves. TV. Look, this is Iran, this is Iraq. Let us pronounce the word correctly. E-ron. E-ronians. This is a Sunni, this is a Shi’ite. Very good. Next year we do the Philippine Islands, okay?”