The Golden Mean (24 page)

They’re well used, torn and marked, some lines underscored and others struck through. He has some I don’t. When I turn back to the bed, he’s watching me.

“Yours,” he says.

“I’m greedy. Even now, and I let you see it. Forgive me.”

“I don’t forgive you. To be alive is to be greedy. I want you to be greedy. I want everyone to be greedy. You know he came to see me?”

I’ve lost the thread. “Your father?”

“My father’s dead. Alexander. Speaking of greedy. One day that monkey’s going to open his mouth and swallow the whole world.”

This costs him; he coughs until his whole being is concentrated in a long, gagging exhale that purples his face and closes his eyes to slits, like blind Tiresias himself. The housemaid, hearing, returns to the room with a cup of water and lifts him upright with a practised grip until his breathing eases. He sips, sags, sips again. She settles him back, smooths the covers, puts a palm briefly on his forehead, and gives me a nice look to say hurry up.

“You need to sleep,” I say.

I rise and arrange myself to go. I’m not sure what gesture to leave on. Perhaps I’m too aware of my own movements because of his stillness, or because he’s an actor after all and would know just what is needed, how to hold your hands when you leave someone for the last time. I bend to kiss his forehead. He opens his eyes again, obviously in pain now, and I hesitate.

“You need to love him better,” he says. “Alexander. He knows the difference.”

I go the last distance, let my lips touch his wrinkled forehead, which is not cool, not feverish, but warm, humanly warm.

FOUR

P
OOR
P
ROXENUS
. My sister’s husband tried so hard to be a father to me in those obscene first weeks after my parents’ deaths. He spoke gently, patted my back, frowned in concentration on the rare occasions that I spoke. But I was already such a cool boy, and my physiology was such that grief made me cold. So I overheard him telling my sister, Arimneste, on the ship from Pella to Athens, when they thought I was asleep in my bunk. He presented his bafflement to her as a medical diagnosis. I had rare blood and humours, and ran cool in the tubes where others ran hot; was it his fault he found my company distasteful? He was a naturally warm man, as she was a naturally warm woman. They wept, they spoke their love for the dead, they found succour in the rites of mourning, and then they moved on. They were like friendly dogs, but I was a lizard.

“Ssh.” Arimneste was feeding the baby again; I could hear the rhythmic sucking. Arimnestus snored quietly in the bunk above mine. “He’s not a lizard. His skin is warm when you touch him.”

“That could come from the outside, absorption from the sun,” Proxenus said. “I really do think he’s afflicted. The body needs to weep to release the excess fluid caused by grieving. How is he releasing the fluid if he isn’t weeping?”

Arimneste said something I couldn’t hear and they both laughed quietly. I rolled over in my bunk and they stopped.

After a minute Arimneste said, barely above a whisper, “Mother used to say he had the ocean inside him, but that it was his great secret and I must never tell anyone. She said if he wanted to talk about it he would, but we must never push him. We have to let him go about things in his own way.” She was weeping herself now. “Oh, Mummy,” she said, and to Proxenus, “I’m sorry.”

“No.”

The creak of a bunk. I risked a look: Proxenus getting down to sit with her and the baby on the floor, to kiss her cheek and stroke her hair. I closed my eyes again.

“Is he finished?” Proxenus asked, meaning the baby.

“Almost.”

After she settled the baby in his basket, she and Proxenus had sex in their bunk: delicate sex, almost silent, mindful of the baby and of Arimnestus and me. I listened with interest. Their love culminated in Proxenus sighing heavily, once.

“I can’t see that school being good for him,” Proxenus said after a while. “More brooding and living in his head. Maybe we should take him back to Atarneus with us after all and find him a wife. He can work with me, as my apprentice.”

Arimneste said something I couldn’t hear.

“We’ll find him his own house, then.”

Arimneste murmured again.

“You’re a bit cold, yourself,” Proxenus said. “All right. You know him better. Maybe this Plato will work wonders. Can’t say I’ll miss your big brother, though, in the meantime.”

·   ·   ·

“W
HAT DO YOU MEAN
, he’s not here?” Proxenus said.

The one named Eudoxus explained that Plato had recently departed for Sicily, to attend to the education of the young king there.

“And when do you expect him back?”

Four, five years? But I was welcome to begin my studies with this Eudoxus and his companion, Callippus, in the meantime. As acting director of the school, he would oversee my education as scrupulously as the great man himself.

“Years?” Proxenus said. Surprised; not distraught.

That night we ate with Eudoxus and Callippus, and sometime during the meal it was decided we would stay the night. The twins and the baby were staying in the city with relatives of our mother.

Proxenus went to his room early to write letters. Restless, I visited our cart in the courtyard and helped myself, quietly I thought, to a fist-burying handful of raisins.

“Still hungry?” a voice said.

“Always.” Carefully lidding the amphora.

Eudoxus gestured for me to accompany him, and led me through his gate and into the road. “We’ll walk, yes? This way our voices won’t disturb your guardian, or Callippus.”

“What’s he working on?”

Eudoxus laughed. “He’s sleeping. He keeps bird’s hours. He’ll be up at sunrise tomorrow, piping his little song.”

I told him I didn’t know what that meant.

“Working, writing,” Eudoxus said. “We work a lot around here. What do you think of that?”

It was a lovely road we were walking, lined with olive trees, fragrant with flowers from the public gardens we were passing. The school was on the city’s outskirts. Quiet, almost like country, but no country I knew: sweet and warm and comfortable, even at night. The South, then. Eudoxus
(trim
was the word I wanted for him: trim of beard and belly, trimly clothed, so trim and tidy and modest in his appetites, I noticed at supper, waving away meat and wine for a little fruit and water, that he probably could have trimmed a few years off his age without anyone guessing) put a brief hand on my shoulder, squeezed, and let go.

“I was so sorry to hear about your father. Your guardian does him great honour, bringing you to us, and so promptly.”

“I don’t think he knows what to do with me.” My voice was rusty; I’d barely spoken to anyone these past weeks. “He’s trying to find me a place to live.”

“You might stay with Callippus and me,” Eudoxus said. “If you should choose to stay. If your guardian should make that choice. Several foreign students lodge with us.”

I thanked him.

“Whose decision is it, anyway? As a matter of interest?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“I’ll show you around, tomorrow.”

I liked him for that, for not leaving a beat. “Will there be a lecture?”

“In the morning.” Eudoxus himself would speak on a mathematical problem set by Plato before his departure for Sicily. “It should be well attended; you and your guardian will get a good sense of our students and of the atmosphere here.”

I asked him if he remembered Illaeus.

He laughed. “Very well. Excellent poet, horrible mathematician. I shall have his mess to undo, I suppose, in you.” When I told him that was an empty room rather than a messy one, he laughed again. “Come on.” He cut into some trees. “Want to see where you’d live?”

We had circled back without my noticing. Set away from the main building, deep in the garden, was a smaller house with lights in the windows although it was late. We could hear low, young voices and laughter. Eudoxus tapped a knuckle lightly on the door, then pushed it open. Half a dozen young men sat around a low table, drinking and arguing about something on a piece of paper they passed from hand to hand.

“New student,” Eudoxus said.

I saw I would be the youngest. They greeted me, smiling, friendly. The one who’d answered the door led me deeper into the house to show me the dormitory with its rows of sleeping mats, all clean and comfortable enough, while Eudoxus stayed in the front room, grinning, to look over the piece of paper.

“Do you want to stay here tonight?”

“Yes.”

The young man had a flop of hair like my brother and a lazy eye. I was prepared to like him. I was prepared to like all of them, why not, and their math problem too.

The next morning, Proxenus and I hung back under the colonnade while the big courtyard filled with members of the Academy who had come to hear Eudoxus. I struggled to follow the talk, while Proxenus looked around, performing a more pragmatic calculation. Afterwards, at the meal, he told me he liked what he saw. Well dressed, serious men from good families. He had recognized some faces. Later he took Eudoxus aside for a little stroll. I knew they were talking about money. The school didn’t charge tuition, but my board would have to be covered. I knew I had plenty of money and land: an estate in Stageira from my father and another at Chalcis from my mother. Money would not be a problem.

My housemate with the lazy eye drew me over to some other young men. “We’re going into town. Want to come?”

I nodded. “I have to say goodbye to my family.”

Proxenus had sent a messenger ahead to the house of our city relatives, so that the twins were already waiting in the street with the carts when we arrived. I kissed the baby, Nicanor, that Arimneste held out for me, and embraced Arimnestus.

“Those yours?” my brother said of my housemates, who hung back a little, respecting our farewells.

Eudoxus had told them of our parents’ sudden deaths, and told them too, I guessed, of my own numbness. At least, they hadn’t yet asked me why I didn’t talk. They probably looked freakish to my brother: indoor skin, no weapons, skinny arms hanging down. Freakish brains, like mine.

“Friends,” I said.

Arimnestus knew I didn’t know how to make friends. I could see he wanted to say something, some advice he was afraid to offer. Finally he brought our foreheads together in an affectionate butt and whispered, so Proxenus wouldn’t hear, “Relax. Drink a little more.”

I nodded.

Arimneste hugged me long but said only, “Take care.”

Proxenus had never dismounted. I was sorry, in that moment, that he so disliked me, read me so wrong.

“You come to us in Atarneus when you’re done here,” he said.

“Write,” Arimneste called, holding the baby up to see me.

The carts were already moving, sending up dust. I held my hand up, kept it in the air while they moved away. I wanted to die.

“All right?” my housemate said.

They knew a place where we could eat, a two-storey house on a busy street in a commercial district. Over bread and meat skewers at a long table someone produced the piece of paper from the night before, and they were off again. I wandered away from the table, deeper into the house, looking for somewhere polite to piss.

“Through there,” a woman called from the kitchen. She waved a shooing hand at me. “Through, through.”

I went through the door she meant, into a bedroom, and found the pot in a corner. When I turned around there was a girl sitting on the pallet on the floor.

Outside, I took my place again on the bench. “All right?” my housemate said again.

It was an hour’s walk from the door of the little garden house to the door to the girl’s room, a walk I made many times over the next few months. It never cost much; we hardly spoke. Back at the school there was a library where I spent most of the rest of my time. Occasionally there were public lectures in the mornings; occasionally a symposium in the evening. I could attend or not; my time was my own. I thought of Perdicaas and Euphraeus and their snotty dinners: the ritual measuring and watering of the wine, the blessing, the rehearsed disquisitions on set topics, the learned quips, haw, haw. One night I spoke too, some ideas I’d been putting together about the forms that everyone here talked so much about, the ineffable essences of things. I was not much keen on the ineffable, and said so, carefully. Surely things had to be rooted in the world to make any sense at all?

“The boy smells of the lamp,” someone said, making them laugh. They were pleased, and curious too. So they’d been watching me after all, waiting.

I would always smell of the lamp, I knew that. I lacked spontaneity; my wit was dry as mouse droppings, and as measly. I needed to put in the hours, yes, late hours over the lamp, exhausting myself. I had lied to Eudoxus. The inside of me was not empty, but viciously disordered. On the ship to Athens we’d been sitting below at a meal, my sister passing out plates of food, when a sudden swell sent everything sideways, she and the baby tumbling over, food swept to the floor, plates and cups shattering, everyone crying out. My mind was like that now, prone to such sudden upendings. Some days all I could do was wake and roll over and sleep some more. My housemates, by some instinct, left me alone. Some days I knew I would never have to sleep again, and produced monuments of work that were pure luminous hammered gold genius. Less so, the next day. I learned never to show or speak of my ideas to anyone until I’d sat on them for weeks like a broody hen, checking and rechecking, making sure everything was strapped down tight and shipshape. Oh, good, steady, studious, boring me, who worked that girl over and over, used her hard, and came shouting when there was no one to hear.

In my nineteenth winter, word came that Plato was returning early from Sicily.

“What’s he like?” I asked Eudoxus at supper. I’d almost forgotten he was the reason I was here at all. I could more or less manage my life as it was, my Illaeus-life of sex and books and a fair amount of privacy, and I feared change.

I had pitched my voice quietly but it made no difference: because I spoke little, people stopped to listen when I did, and because I was bright, people loved what ignorance I let show. It turned out I was the only student who hadn’t met him. He liked to approve admissions himself, and I was the last he’d considered before leaving for Sicily. Voices around the room competed to enlighten me. He was nobility, descended from the great Athenian statesman Solon on his mother’s side and the god Poseidon on his father’s. His family had been active in politics and he had been expected to go that route, but he was too fastidious, too moral, and occupied himself instead with political and pedagogical theories, theories he had tried to implement in Sicily. But the young king there was already well schooled in tyranny and debauchery, and wasn’t interested in the kind of beatific restraint Plato preached; so interpreted Eudoxus from the letter he read to us over our meal. Plato would be home in two weeks.