ARCHIMEDES NIONAKIS

  I said it too. I didn’t say much more as I stood at the window looking from Karen to the twilit traffic to Karen again while she talked and wept and Paula’s eyes brimmed over and she wiped her cheeks. Then Paula took her to the bathroom behind the waiting room, and they worked on their faces and came out cleansed of tears and made-up again, walking arm in arm. Karen was plump. But, like all those others—and I know all is hyperbolic for only eight women, nine with Karen, but on that Friday afternoon their number seemed legion—she was not fat.

  Looking out my window at people driving home from work in the lingering sunset, the snow having stopped Thursday morning and the sky cleared overnight, I listened to Karen and thought of my brothers, perhaps the happiest Americans I know. I barely remember my father—I am not certain whether I recall him or merely have images from stories my brothers and mother have told—but my brothers remember him and the village where we lived. My father owned a small café and was also the mayor of the town, so when the Communist guerrillas came they took him with them, to the hills. They all knew him, and they said We have to take you because you are the mayor. Some months later one of them came through town and stopped at our house to tell my mother her husband was well. Kosta was ten, and my mother sent him with the man and a knapsack of food and wine, and they walked for two days to the camp in the mountains, where Kosta spent a day and a night with my father, who showed him to everyone in the camp and boasted of his son who had come to visit. It was, Kosta says, a gentle captivity. They treated my father well, and he could do whatever he pleased except escape. Kosta walked back alone, stopping at houses along the way. Later a guerrilla came to tell my mother that my father had died, probably of pneumonia, and they had properly buried him, with a marker, in the hills. She managed the cafe and cared for me, playing among the tables, and worried about her older sons and wrote to her brother in America to sponsor us.

  So my brothers have built a business and houses, and when I go visit them or, more important, when, unobserved, I see them driving in town, and I watch from the sidewalk, I know they are happy, as I do when I go to their shop and wait for one of them to trim what is left of my hair. They laugh and talk; for eleven or twelve hours a day, six days a week, they do this, and they make a lot of money from those women, as though, immigrants that they are, they had seen right away in the shoe factory where the heart of the nation was and left that bleak building and women’s feet and moved up to their own building, and later their homes, paid for by women’s hair. And remained untouched, unscathed: swam and skied and played tennis with their wives and children, indeed lived athletic lives as naturally as animals and never considered the burning of fat or the prolonging of life. As I run, not for my waist or longevity, but to maintain some proportion of my homo duplex, to keep some balance between the self I recognize and the little bastard who recognizes nothing as familiar, a quotidian foreigner in the land. My brothers watched with amusement, if even that, as their hair fell out. They celebrate all Greek holidays, as I do with them, and on Greek Easter we cook a lamb on a spit; they take their families to the Greek church, and I do not know whether they believe in God as much as they believe a father should take his family to church. They visit Greece, where now my father’s bones lie in a cemetery in our village, and I go there too, having no memories save those of a tourist who speaks the language and shares the blood, so that I have no desire for a Greek household as my brothers have made with their marriages here, nor do I have a desire for an American one. So this year in my apartment I have Paula, and I have a law practice that is only an avocation, and my only vocation is running each year in Boston the long run from my father’s country.

  Still Karen talked, seated at my desk, leaning over it, her hands outstretched, held and stroked by Paula’s. I looked at Paula sitting in the chair she had pulled up to a corner of the desk, and I thought I could tell my brothers now; it was clear to me, and I could explain it to them, could show them why I would not, could not, work twelve or eight or even six hours a day five or six days a week for any life this nation offered. I had not fled a village where I would roam without education till I died. I had simply been a five-year-old boy placed on a ship. I looked out the window again and thought of Lillian Clark and those terrible eyes and the Puerto Rican girl she had to free her of her work, so that she had nothing at all to do, while in the garage the steel of the Porsche drew into itself the February cold. I spun from the window in a moment of near glee, so that Karen stopped and sniffed and looked at me, wiping her eyes. But I stopped myself and turned back to the window. I had been about to tell her I was glad Jake had done it.

  She did not mention once, that entire time, the killing of Francis Clark. Nor did I ask her to. When she finished I told her we would take her home and saw at once in her eyes what I knew as soon as I had spoken: we could not do that, we could not enter or even drive to the front of Jake’s home, and I felt affection and respect like love for her then, saw her as a sixteen-year-old daughter who not only loved Jake but understood him too. She would have done everything again so she could clothe herself in smaller and smaller pants and skirts and dresses and blouses, but she would have done it with more care. And I remembered from somewhere, someone, in my boyhood: Don’t shit where you eat. It was the way my brothers ran their households, and perhaps one of them had said it to me. I told Karen that Paula would drive her to her streetcorner and I would phone her father. They both nodded and went to the bathroom. When they came out, I held Karen’s parka for her and told Paula I would see her at my apartment.

  I sat at the desk in the smoky and shadowed room—we had not turned on a light—then I looked up Jake’s number, closed the book, gazed at the window and the slow cars, forgot the number, and opened the book again. His street was not far away, and I wanted to give him time to leave before Karen walked into the house. Marsha answered, and I heard the quaver of guilt in my voice and heard it again when Jake took the phone, and beneath the warmth in his voice I heard what I knew I would see in his eyes. I asked him if we could have a talk.

  “Sure, Archimedes, sure. I’m on the way.”

  I waited outside, in the waning light now, and watched every . car coming from his direction. His was large, and American, and I peered at him through the window, then got in. He drove us to the ocean. I do not know why. Perhaps it was for the expanse of it, or some instinct sent him to the shore. But I do not want to impose on Jake my own musing of that day: perhaps he wanted a bar where no one knew us. He drove for half an hour, and we talked about my brothers and his and his sisters and his work at the factory. We did not mention my work or Karen or Marsha or his grown children. Now and then I looked at his face, lit by the dashboard, and his eyes watching cars and trucks, while they stared at his new life.

  He stopped at a restaurant across the road from the ocean; on the beach side of the road, a seawall blocked our view of the water, but night had come, and we could only have seen the breakers’ white foam. The empty tables in the restaurant were set for dinner, their glass-encased candles burning over red tablecloths; we went through a door into the darkened lounge and stood for a few moments until we could see, then moved to a booth at the wall, across the room from the bar. The other drinkers were at the bar, four men, separate, drinking quietly. The bartender, a young woman, came for the order. Jake said a shot of CC and a draft, so I did too and had money on the table when she came back, but he covered it with his hand, said, No, Archimedes, and paid her and tipped a dollar. He raised his shot glass to me, and I touched it with mine. He drank his in one motion; I swallowed some and said, “I’m defending George Karambelas.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve just talked to Karen.”

  “Ah.”

  He drank from the mug of draft and called to the bar: “Dear? Two more shots, please.”

  So I drank the rest of my whiskey, and we watched her cross the floor with the bottle and pour, and he gave her money again before I saw it in his hand, but I said: My round, Jake, and gave her my ten and told her to keep one. We watched her until she was behind the bar again, then touched glasses, and I sipped and looked at his wide neck as he drank. Then I said: “I’ve been wondering about the boat.”

  “The boat?”

  “That model. How did it break?”

  “I broke it. With my fist, on the desk.”

  “Why?”

  “How do you think he paid for it, Archimedes? You think he was a good man? An honest man? A good doctor?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why I broke it.”

  “Then what?”

  “He was sitting behind his desk when I broke it. He was waiting for—you know what he was waiting for.”

  “Yes.”

  He turned toward the bar, lifting his glass.

  “No,” I said. “Finish first. Please.”

  “Okay. That’s when he took out the gun. From his drawer. He took it out and he worked it, so he had a bullet in there, in the barrel, and it was cocked. You know something? I looked at that big hole in the barrel, pointed at me, and I looked at that son of a bitch’s face, and I wasn’t scared of that gun. I think because if I died I didn’t care. I can’t tell you how bad I felt. You don’t know; I can’t say it.”

  “I know.”

  I took our shot glasses to the bar and she filled them and he said loudly, to my back: “Archimedes. That’s my round.”

  “I’ll run a tab,” she said. I noticed then that she wore glasses, and in the light behind the bar was pretty, and I wanted to be home with Paula, only to lie beside her, and to sleep. I spilled whiskey on both hands going back to the booth.

  “She’s keeping a tab,” I said.

  Jake nodded, and raised his glass to mine, and I smelled more whiskey than I drank.

  “He told me to leave. How do you like that? He’s doing that to my daughter and giving her those pills, and he says to me, leave. Go home. So I didn’t move. I came to talk to that son of a bitch—”

  “He was certainly that, Jake.”

  “Yes. And you know how they are, those rich doctors, all the rich people, they’re used to saying leave, go home, and everybody goes. So what’s he going to do, Archimedes? Shoot me? Of course not. He’s got the gun and he’s behind his desk, but still he has to listen. Because I’m talking to him, Archimedes; I’m telling him things. So he gets mad. Him. And he comes around the desk with that gun, and I tell him I’ll shove that thing up his ass. Then I hit him. But, Goddammit, he hit his head. On the corner of his desk there, when he went down. Just that once. I hit him just that once, and the son of a bitch cracked his head. I can’t feel bad. For him. But let me tell you, since that night nobody talks in my house. Marsha and Karen, they just go around sad. And quiet. Jesus, it’s quiet. We talk, you know; we say this and that, hello, good morning, you want some more rice? But, oh Jesus, it’s quiet, and me too. I’ve just been waiting. You see, when they blamed it on George, I knew I had to go tell them. Every night, I’d say to myself: Tomorrow, Jake. After work, tomorrow, you go down to the station. Then I’d go to work next day, and when five o’clock came I’d drive home. I couldn’t leave them. My family. I don’t mind being punished. You kill somebody, you go to jail, even if he’s a son of a bitch. But every day I couldn’t leave my family.”

  “Monday,” I said.

  “What about Monday?”

  “Let’s do it Monday. That’ll give you two days to raise bail.”

  He drank the rest of his beer, then leaned over the table.

  “How much?”

  “Probably five thousand for the bondsman.”

  “I can get it.”

  “I could ask my brothers,” I said. “You might need ten, but I doubt it.”

  “No. I have some family. And I have friends.”

  He slid out of the booth, stood at the table’s end, held two mugs in one hand, the glasses in the other.

  “Well,” he said. “Okay. Yes: Monday.”

  He went to the bar, tall and wide and walking steadily, and I wanted to tell him not to bring me another shot, but I could not keep that distance from him, though my legs under the table felt weak, as if they alone, of my body, were drunk. Then he paid her, so this was our last drink, and I imagined Paula in the warm bedroom, lying on the bed reading her philosophy book, glancing at her watch. When Jake sat across from me, we raised the glasses, and I said, To Monday; then we touched them and I drank mine in one long swallow, exhaled, and drank some beer.

  “You said let’s,” he said.

  “What?”

  “ ‘Let’s do it Monday.’ What did you mean?”

  “I don’t charge much,” I said. “I don’t charge anything at all, for a good Armenian.”

  “Really? You? You want to be my lawyer?”

  “Jake, you’ll never see the inside of a prison.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “What about George?”

  “He won’t be my client anymore.”

  “But this weekend. He stays in jail?”

  “Only till Monday. What the hell: he shouldn’t drink so much.”

  His smile came slowly and then was laughter that rose and fell and rose again as we walked out of the dark lounge, to the parking lot and the smack of breakers beyond the seawall and into his car, where pulling down his seat belt, he turned to me and said, “Come to the house and have dinner.”

  “Another time,” I said. “I’ve got a woman waiting at home.”

  He squeezed my shoulder, reached across me and pulled my seat belt over my chest and snapped it locked, then started the car and turned on its headlights and slowly drove us home.

  Molly

  for George Gibson

  ONE

  WHEN CLAIRE’S HUSBAND left her and their daughter, she was twenty-five years old and Molly was three. By the time she was thirty Claire knew other men like Norman, knew them because their sad wives were her friends. These men were absolutely competent in their work, even excellent, better than others because more committed or obsessed. Or possessed. But they and Norman could not be husbands and fathers, unless their wives and children wanted little more than nothing, or little more than what money gave them. So Norman had left to be free, to work as an anthropologist all the way across the country in California, as if he needed that distance between him and Massachusetts to make final his leaving. Every month he sent Claire a check drawn on the Wells Fargo Bank in Pacifica. After receiving the third check, she divorced him.

  Norman was a tall, angular man who appeared clumsy: a coffee cup in his large and bony hands seemed to be in its last moments before fragmentation; a car in his control looked alive, like a horse that senses his rider is a novice and is deciding whether to be gentle and patient, or a rascal. But he was not clumsy. He moved that way, looked that way even at rest in a chair, because he seemed to live always in a world that was not physical. Or nearly always. At his long table in his large cluttered den he studied artifacts and catalogued them, and his hands and face then, his sloping shoulders and long arms, reminded her of a pianist’s. To him, his den was not cluttered: it was perfectly in order; but that order was for Claire an accumulation of objects that she knew were part of her own history in America and with Norman but now, unearthed and collected, had no connection with the world she lived in.

  She prepared meals that he ate as a pet dog eats its dry food, out of hunger while knowing there is better food he would gobble if only he could get it. But for Norman there was no better food. He did not smoke, and before dinner he drank whatever she did, and he took his alcohol as he did his food: quickly, and without visible pleasure or lack of it, and always moderately. Some evenings, with what she believed at the time was mischievous curiosity, she mixed herself a bloody mary or salty dog and gave him only the seasoned tomato juice or salted grapefruit juice, and he drank these, fooled and never knowing it. Then she realized he would not care if he did know it, and with scorn but fear too she saw him not as a fool but as a creature who needed almost nothing that she did. After that she nightly gave him juice and doubled the vodka in her own drinks, wanting to drink his portion as she sat across the living room from him, and Molly played on the floor between them and Claire drank until she was drunk: a drunkenness she masked so well that he could neither see nor hear it. She sat talking as though sober and smelling the food on the stove and in the oven and wishing he would suddenly die, drinking grapefruit juice in his large chair where he could not look comfortable, where his long arms and legs shifted and jutted out and would not rest in the chair’s sturdy depth.

  He touched and held Molly, and spoke to her, as absently as he ate and drank and drove and touched everything that was part of their lives. Before she began wishing for his death, she had at times felt compassion for him as she watched him with Molly, saw him as though deprived of his sense of touch and so removed from the world and condemned to move in it on a chair with motor and wheels. Also, during that time, she often read in his den while he worked at night, after his workday was over, and he had drunk his two drinks and eaten his dinner. She sat in a chair across the room from him, facing his profile at the table, and sometimes she lowered the book to her lap and with yearning sorrow that dampened her eyes she watched him fondle the old bottles and potsherds and crusted iron, the only things she ever saw him fondle, and she wanted his hands like that on her flesh. This was early enough in the marriage for her sorrow to include him, for her to feel that his steadfast lack of proportion was a curse on him too, and gave him pain he could neither voice nor heal. And then her sorrow included hope too: that as he grew older, toward thirty, and attained some of the achievement he wanted, he would change, would become a whole man whose pleasures as husband and father were two-thirds of his fulfillment instead of the third or fourth or even less they were now.