Cast in Doubt (24 page)

I wish I could keep my mind on it. I am not one who can keep his mind on what is actually before him; I am more involved in what I see in my mind’s eye. It is prosaic but true. I tend merely to register the physical world, my surroundings, but then, in a matter of no time at all, have in view a whole range of associations—a mountain range, if you will—which looms in front of me, and off I go. I might consider the mountains in the distance, their rough beauty, how purple they appear, but the color purple might lead me to the term “purple prose,” for example, which then always brings to mind Alicia and how Alicia has been written about.

Alicia. I see Alicia when I first knew her. She is young, willowy, graceful, nearly ethereal; her face is before me as if pasted on the windshield. Years ago she took a trip into the mountains, which she did not invite me to join. A friend had arrived from France and she devoted herself to her—another opera singer, I believe. Alicia is a devoted friend, one capable of loving. There are few of those. I easily slide to the opposing concepts, and to Stan-Greenish thoughts, to hate and betrayal. I ponder anew what I have often pondered before. These repetitions are as annoying as they are compelling and absorbing. If Alicia hates Helen, as she seems to, what is the true reason? Has it anything to do with Helen? What exactly are Alicia’s feelings toward Helen? Are they murderous ones? Would Alicia murder Helen? Would Alicia be capable of murdering anyone? And why not? What about Helen? Would she have strangled her sister for her father’s love or his fortune, though he probably has no fortune—a psychiatrist earns well but not spectacularly. He may have inherited a great fortune. Just as I would have if my father hadn’t lost much of his, if there hadn’t been the Great Depression, and if and if. And what of Gwen and Alicia? What of them right now? Where does John sit in the equation between them? Is John sitting or reclining right now, is he recumbent on a bed of silk?

John. The idea of him arouses in me a range of emotions, a mountain range of feelings, of highs and lows, a violent, lusty landscape, which can be quite uncontrollable. The one thing one cannot control is lust. But it is what we most often control, or are controlling most of the time, or are most controlled by. I don’t want to think of him, he is not on the map right now. He is not on my course, and I have not plotted him there. Isn’t it odd, the two significant meanings of plot—one having to do with a conspiracy, the other with a story. Perhaps all stories are conspiracies. But there, my paranoia is showing. I am happy to be alone.

In real life one cannot find the single, unmistakable, absolute event or fact that drives everything and everyone forward. It is, this motive, what makes a compelling if thin narrative, for the stories I particularly admire relish ambiguity and happenstance. One character meets another—the servant is there, so Raskolnikov must kill her as well. How does it take shape that someone, even someone like me, will do the unexpected? I hope to work these ideas into Household Gods. Is it now, at this precise moment, that I joke to myself about being off the road yet again?

It is well past lunchtime. I have arrived at a small village and spy a taverna that appears to be open. I pull up to the side of the road and park the car. I am not thinking anything special as I am hungry—famished—and a little tired. The owner leads me to a table on the terrace. A breeze blows and the air is fragrant and rich. It is more than comfortable here, it is pleasant, and its pleasure is ordinary, inexpensive. Overhead is a trellis, a grape arbor. All is as it should be. This taverna, this scene, is in no way extraordinary. It is, and I am, comfortable, yet something is missing.

I order grilled sardines, a salad, and a bottle of mineral water and the white wine I drink. Fortunately they have it. After one glass, I am tranquil. With the second glass, I am impatient and want more wine and, I suppose, action. John might put it that way. I can almost hear him pronounce it, can imagine his lips loosely forming the words. Horace, you want action, man. I do want something or want for something. For lack of a better word I will name this luck. If I were lucky, a Gypsy would appear and sit beside me at this table. As this does not happen, my meal is unadventurous and undisturbed. Even disappointing.

I drive toward the coast. I don’t care to stop or to make a detour. I see no strange encampments along the way. Had I chosen the faster way, I would already have been on the southern coast, quite near to the dot on Helen’s map which signified where she had probably gone. But I am not sure if that is the case, or if she had been the one to leave the map lying there, with its mark. Thinking about this is ludicrous, in one way and confusing in another. I drive, plagued by the uncertainty of it all, and of how this isn’t and wasn’t like me, to go flying off in pursuit of a mere girl, even one like Helen.

I am discouraged, but hasten to encourage myself to have patience. If Gwen were with me, no doubt she’d caustically remark that I need patience but need more to be the patient. I’d bet the conversation would take such a linguistic turn. I would bet that, were she here to take the bet. I swing around on the road, the road to Mandalay, to somewhere. I am indeed going somewhere.

Gwen says one always goes somewhere, even if it’s nowhere. She entered into psychoanalysis in the late 1960s, but rarely talks about it seriously, or at all, with me, in any case. It is another of her secrets. It may be something that she could share with Helen were she not so antipathetic to Helen, and why is that? Wouldn’t it be beyond coincidence if her analyst were Helen’s father? The idea excites me. Such a fact might easily have created in Gwen the extreme distrust and dislike of Helen she has. It is much too farfetched. It would serve a certain kind of plot. Or fate. Though I do not accept the concept of an externally derived or driven fate, I remind myself that the root of fate—
fatum
—and story—
fabula
—is the same,
fari
, which means “to speak,” and, in the past participle, “to be spoken.”

One cannot fail to see that there is a way in which a story and a fate proceed similarly, the causes for action or inaction lying within the character as well as within the environment, the conditions surrounding the characters, those the characters were born into. When the situation seems too unlikely, the reader will no longer willingly suspend disbelief, will not accept the outcome. The reader will demur: it does not seem that that could have happened. Didn’t the Victorians change the endings of particularly wrenching tragedies? In a sense, the story itself has a fate, which must be discovered or discerned first by the writer. Yes, that is so, I think. But Helen’s father as Gwen’s analyst wouldn’t do, except as a fantasy. I suppose I oughtn’t to have finished the wine. Still I did mix the wine with water.
Fateri
means to acknowledge, to confess or admit. Confession is rooted or yoked to fate and story, which makes ultimate good sense. Confession and admission—neither do I do easily or at all. Yet I know they are always a part of what I write, even if inadvertently.

I have no idea where I am and pull over to the side of the road to check the map again. I seem to be going in the right direction. I rarely get lost.

Arriving at Kissamos in just over an hour, or perhaps more—I am not timing myself—I decide against stopping. But I do enter the town and drive along several streets, to scan the scene and the people. The stores are similar to my town’s, though the town itself is smaller. Here people beep their horns rather too insistently.

Uninspired, I continue on my way. My mood shifts, swings down, and I am suddenly overcome by a vexatious idea: I will never find anything or anyone, not the Gypsy, certainly not Helen. I have been on this journey, this adventure, not even a day. It is like me to indulge in hopelessness, in a futility so great I could not imagine a future different from a lackluster present. (I note that future and futility may not have the same root, though future in Latin,
futurus
, means “that which will be,” which implies fate but not through its being spoken.) This limitation is probably why I am a writer. I do not want to confront the severe differences between what I would imagine and set on paper, and what I might find should I venture to live it, to act upon or to enact it. Mother called me a dreamer. She said it affectionately, even though she knew, as did I, that that very quality was what caused my father to abandon me, in a sense. My mother’s voice had a clear, bell-like tone. Dreamer, Horace, you’re such a dreamer, dear! Even now her words ring like the sweetest of chimes.

Oddly enough, reflecting this way restores me to a better frame of mind, because it is like me to think such things, depressing and poignant as they may seem to others. The familiar is a comfort, whatever that may be, the most inconsequential thing, something insignificant to anyone else. One often cannot explain it to others or even to oneself, still one knows it somehow. Something that would appear to be nothing to a friend is precisely the big nothing to oneself. Now that’s a good title, The Big Nothing, another one for Stan Green. I drive even more slowly so as to write it down.

The sight of the coast, too, restores my spirits, though I am wondering with some regularity by this time how Yannis is and whether or not Gwen has read my letter and how well or ill she will have taken its contents. Of course I cannot know this, and while it is useless for me to conjecture about it, I do. A particularly stirring view of sky, sea and mountain pricks my attention and I drive down a small road that will take me nearer it. This road is unpaved and rocky and I drive less than a mile, whereupon I reach a clearing and park the car. I get out, stretch my arms and legs, and allow myself the pleasure of contemplation. I am not certain where I am.

I must record an incident that were I reading this I should probably not accept it as fact. But it is true. In this lonely area, off the beaten path, as it were, and without a thought in my mind. I came upon first a Gypsy woman, not the Gypsy woman, but one who looked as if she could have been her mother, or at least a relation, and then her children, or children, and some Gypsy men. They appeared from nowhere, at least I thought that for a moment, until I realized that I had by chance come upon an encampment. My excitement cannot be measured. It was a dream come true. I was lucky. Still it is really not so strange, as there are at least eighty thousand Gypsies in Crete.

Happening upon them like this, I am shaken, almost breathless. I had no plan, yet, I exhorted myself heartily, that is the plan. From what I had read about them, I still did not know what to expect, nor had I been tutored or prepared in the ways of greeting them. I knew I wanted them to know instantly that I was not like the others—the
gadje
for whom they had disdain, yet whom they also feared, from whom they might steal or at whom they might sneer.

I decide that the best action is inaction—I will do nothing. I will wait.

With my back to them I stand looking at the view for some time. I have no way of knowing if they are looking at me. I think they must be—at the least they must be aware of my presence. It is better just to let them study me, without any intervention on my part. I am not frightened in the usual sense, my heart is not pounding, but I am very much conscious of the fact that there is only one of me and several or many of them. The odds are on their side should things go awry, I remind myself. On the other hand, I am strangely sanguine. They will quickly learn that there is nothing to fear from me.

It is growing colder and getting dark. I turn, not too quickly, and walk back to my car. I grab a bottle of ouzo. Without hesitation and with a cheerful alacrity, I carry the ouzo to the older Gypsy woman, who seems to be the clan’s matriarch. There is a younger woman, a girl, beside her, I see now. She is bedecked and bejeweled, wearing a striped dress that looks like a bathrobe I once had. She herself is very like a photograph of a Gypsy I once saw in a New York gallery, I think. They both are, in fact.

The older woman stares at me and accepts my offering. I then announce in Greek that my name is Horace. She nods. Then I state, also in Greek, that I am a gadjo, living in Crete, but that I am originally from America, that I was born there. She appears to be startled, I suppose by my declaration that I am not a Gypsy, for of course she knows without my telling her that I am not one of them. What I was hoping to do was to indicate that I had some knowledge of them, their language and ways, that I was not merely one of the stupid sedentary ones. But after her initial surprise, the woman breaks into peals of laughter and repeats what I have just said to the family, even the children—all have gathered about us—and then she slaps me brusquely on the back. With surprise I too realize that my presentation of self is humorous and chuckle along with her, with all of them. The oldest of the men—the chief of the family, perhaps—opens the bottle of ouzo, from which we all drink. Glasses of many types and sizes have appeared as well as a large pitcher of water. I mix my ouzo with water by the light of a lantern that hangs above us.

Several rounds of liquor are consumed in a short time, which is characterized by liveliness and gaiety. At some point we all move into a large caravan that is parked behind a clump of trees and bushes, and along with the ouzo and raki and other liquor, which one of them had brewed, there is also some food. I am thankful for that. I am also grateful to them for their hospitality. I can sleep there should I want to. That is also lucky because I should not drive.

The men tell stories; they take great pride in their narrative skills. The storyteller, I know from my reading, is beloved among the Gypsies. In the community, the stature of a man is to a large degree determined by how well he speaks. One of the stories told is about why the Gypsies are the smartest people on earth and another has to do with why the Gypsies steal. The former is long and involved, the latter short and devilishly ambiguous. When Christ was to be crucified, a Gypsy stole one of the four nails meant to nail him to the cross, the one meant to pierce Christ’s heart. Before he died, Christ, out of gratitude for the Gypsy’s theft, stated that forevermore the Gypsies could roam the world and would be the only people free to steal. All the Gypsies laugh loudly at this story. I smile but am confused, perhaps contrite, as this is the very attack that I—and others—would have mounted previous to my brief study of them. It is an awkward moment, but it passes quickly with the arrival of more food.