The Afterlife (36 page)

She had taken to wearing her glasses less and less. The absence of frames gave her face a startled, naked look, even now, when she assumed her teasing expression. She asked, “Why would you want to kill me, making me live with somebody else? I just barely survived living with your father all those years.”

He was content to be dismissed, yet couldn’t make himself move off the sandstone walk, the ten yards or so to where his car was parked. This September day was beginning with high clouds, a few ribs of cirrus arched in the stratospheric cold. Some birds made a sudden flurry of noise in the old, half-dead pear tree. There was a buzzing in the air, a constant eating. The truck traffic on the Jersey Turnpike would be at its peak. “Think about it. About, you know, more ideal arrangements.”

“Lee, this house
is
my ideal arrangement. Now, don’t make Jenny late for her lesson. Girls love horses. Maybe that was why I resented Dad’s moving us to town—it meant I couldn’t ride any more. Here. Let’s see if I can make it to the road.” Holding on to his arm, she kicked off her slippers and stepped off the last stone barefoot. The icy shock of the wet grass sprang a delighted laugh: life. She hobbled with him to the side of his car. Her blue-veined feet were puffy on top, like a baby’s feet. “Now, I’ll be fine,” she recited, when they had stopped walking and she could get her breath. “I’ll take my pills and try to eat more and get some strength back. I’m sorry I let those city folk get the better of me yesterday. I had wanted so
not
to act up.”

She lifted her weightless, onionskin hand from his arm and found a footing on the uneven lawn which held her upright while he got into his BMW and started the engine. Seen through the open car window, in the morning light, her face looked defenseless around the eyes, the delicate skin owlish. “I’m sorry,” she said solemnly, “I let myself be so frightened.”

“You mean of the bla—?”

She was startlingly quick to touch his arm again, to stop his mouth. “Don’t even
say
it!”

Islands kept appearing outside their windows. Crete, Ogygia, Capri, Ponza. Calypso, who had became Neuman’s cruisemate, his wife at sea, liked to make love sitting astride him while gazing out the porthole, feeling between her legs the surging and the bucking of the boat. Her eyes, the color of a blue hydrangea, tipped toward the violet end of the spectrum in these moments. Her skin was as smooth as a new statue’s. He called her Calypso because the entire cruise, consisting of sixty-five passengers and forty crewpersons, was marketed as a duplicate of the tortuous homeward voyage of Ulysses, though everyone including their lecturers kept forgetting which port of call represented what in
The Odyssey
. Were the cliffs of Bonifacio, a chic and slanty tourist trap on the southern tip of Corsica,
really
the cliffs from which the giant, indiscriminately carnivorous Laestrygones had pelted the fleet with rocks, sinking all but the wily captain’s dark-prowed hull? Was Djerba, a sleepy hot island off of the Tunisian coast, distinguished by a functioning synagogue and a disused thirteenth-century Aragonese fort,
really
the land of the Lotus Eaters?

“Well, what is ‘really’?” their male lecturer asked them in
turn, returning a question for a question in Socratic style. “
Tí
Or, as the French might put it, ‘
Le soi-disant
“
Ding an sich
,”
c’existe ou non?
’ ”

Their on-board lecturers were two: a small man and a large woman. The man preached a wry verbal deconstructionism and the woman a ringing cosmic feminism. Clytemnestra was her idea of a Greek hero. Medea and Hecuba she admired also. She wore gold sickles around her neck and her hair was done up in snakes of braid. Our lovers—cruel and flippant vis-à-vis the rest of humanity in their ecstasy of love newly entered upon—called her Killer. The male lecturer they called Homer. Homer sat up late in the ship’s lounge each night, smoking cigarettes and planning what he was going to say the next day. He looked wearied by all his knowledge, all his languages, and sallow from too much indoors. Even while trudging up and down the slippery, scree-ridden slopes of archaeological digs, he wore a button-down shirt and laced black shoes. The lovers felt superior to him, in the exalted state brought on by repeated orgasms in the little cabin’s swaying, clicking, cunningly outfitted space. “
Aiiiieeee!
” they cried. “
Aiae, aiae!
We are as gods!”

There were rough seas between Malta and Djerba. Neuman threw up, to his own surprise and disgust. He had thought, on the basis of several Atlantic crossings in gigantic passenger liners, that he was seaworthy. Calypso, who in her terrestrial life had been raised on a Nebraska wheat farm and not seen the ocean until she was twenty-one and unhappily married, had no mal-de-mer problem; when he bolted from their table in the seesawing dining room she stayed put, finished her poached sea-trout, helped herself to his squid stew, ate all of the delicious little Maltese biscuits in the breadbasket, and ordered caramelized
pomme Charlotte
for dessert,
with Turkish coffee. In the tranquillity of her stomach she was indeed as a goddess—Calypso, the daughter of Thetis by Oceanus. Fleeing the dining room, Neuman held acid vomit back against his teeth for the length of his run down the second-deck corridor; when he got into his own bathroom he erupted like a fountain, disgustingly, epically. Ah, what is man but a bit of slime in the cistern of the void?

“You poor baby,” she said, descending to him at last. Her kiss smelled of caramel and brought on a minor attack of gagging. “I think I’ll spend the night back in my own cabin,” she told him. “After a spot of anisette.”

“Don’t go up to the lounge,” he begged, feeble and green-faced yet sexually jealous. “There’s a hard-drinking crowd up there every night. Hardened cruisers. Good-time Charlies. Tonight they’re having a singalong, followed by a showing of
Casablanca
. Whenever they show
Casablanca
on one of these boats, all hell breaks loose.”

“I’ll be fine,” she told him, her complicated blue eyes drifting evasively to the porthole, which was black but for the dim glow of the starboard lights and a diagonal slap of spray at the nadir of an especially sickening flop into watery nothingness. “Just because we have good sex,” she told him, firmly, “you don’t own me, buster. I paid for this cruise with my own money and I intend to have a good time.”

She was one of the new women and he, despite his name, one of the old men. Female equality struck him as a brutish idea. Just the idea of her having a good time—of trying to milk some selfish happiness out of this inchoate hyperactive muddle of a universe—doubled and redoubled his nausea. “Go, go, you bitch,” he said. His stomach, like a filmy jellyfish floating within him, was organizing itself for a new convulsion, and he was planning his dash to the toilet once she had
removed the obstacle of her trim, compact body, in its chiton of starched blue linen, belted with a rope of gold. She had good sturdy legs, like a cheerleader’s without the white socks. Hips squared off like small bales of cotton. Narrow feet in gilded sandals. “Easy come,” he told her queasily, with false jauntiness, “easy go.”

They had sized each other up at the start, in the ruins of Troy. She was standing in khaki safari slacks and a lime-green tennis visor on Level VIIa, thought to be Priam’s Troy if anything on this site “really” was, and he was down in Level II, not far from where Schliemann and his racy Greek wife, Sophia, had discovered and surreptitiously hidden a hoard of golden treasures from the middle of the third millennium before Christ. Now it was all a mess of mounds and pebbles and blowing grasses and bobbing poppies and liquid-eyed guides and elderly Americans and tightly made limestone walls most probably too small to have been the walls of fabled Troy. “Can this be all there was?” Homer was murmuring to their group. “
Est-ce que c’est tout?
A little rubbly village by the marshes? Schliemann decided, ‘
Es ist genug
. This was Troy.’ ” The poppies bobbed amid the nodding grasses. The rubble underfoot had been trod by Cassandra and Aeneas, venerable Priam and ravishing Helen.

The destined lovers’ glances met, and remet; they measured each other for size and age and signs of socio-economic compatibility, and he carefully climbed through the levels to edge into her group. Their group’s guide, a local Turk, was telling about the Judgment of Paris as if it had happened just yesterday, in the next village: “So poor Zeus, what to do? One woman his wife, another his daughter, straight from head—
boom!
” He hit his fist against his broad brown brow. “Each
lady say she the absolute best,
she
deserve golden apple. So Zeus, he looking around in bad way and see far off in Mount Ida, over there, you can almost see”—he gestured, and the tourists looked, raking with their eyes the vacant plains of Troy, vast if not as windy as in the epic—“he see this poor shepherd boy, son of King Priam, minding own business, tending the sheeps. His name, Paris. Zeus tell him, ‘You choose.’ ‘Who, me?’ ‘Yes, you.’ ” The American tourists, broiling in the sun, obligingly laughed; the guide smiled, showing a gold fang. “ ‘Oh boy,’ Paris think to self. ‘Problem.’ One lady offer him much riches, Hera. Another say, ‘No, have much glory in battle and wars, thanks to me.’ That was Athena, daughter straight from Zeus’s head. Third say, Aphrodite say, ‘No, forget all that. I give you most beautiful woman in world to be your wife.’ And Paris say, ‘O.K., you win. Good deal.’ ”

By now Neuman had drawn level with his tennis-visored prey. He murmured in her ear, “The ‘O.K.’ that launched a thousand ships.” A gravelly American witticism, here in this remote archaic place. He liked her ear very much, the marble whiteness and the squarish folds of it. It was feminine yet no-nonsense, like her level gaze.

She had sensed his proximity. The soul has hairs, which prickle. In profile Calypso barely smiled at the pleasantry, then turned to appraise him, calculating his physical and mental compatibility and the length of the cruise ahead of them. Nauplia, Valletta, Bonifacio, Sperlonga. O.K. As if by destiny, without planning it, they arrived at the lounge for pre-dinner drinks at the same moment. With utmost diffidence they chose the same banquette and, their increasingly excited recountings of their separate pasts far from finished, asked to be seated at the same dining table, as the sleek white
cruise ship slipped off the tight-fitting Dardanelles and slipped on the sequinned blue gown of the Aegean.

Malta, a fairy-tale island. Everything was sand-colored—a series of giant sand castles unfolded as they wormed into the harbor. Groggy from one of their seaborne nights of love, Neuman and Calypso, strolling slightly apart from the sixty-three other cruisers, wandered hand in hand through the bustling streets of Valletta, where every swivel-hipped pedestrian wore a dark scowl. The prehistoric Maltese blood had been suffused with centuries of Italian immigration. The palace of the grand masters of the famous persecuted Knights was gloomy with tapestries, and the ruins of the temples of Tarxien were so ancient and their purpose was so conjectural that one went dizzy, right there in the roofless maze of it all, under the blazing overhead sun.

In the harbor of Marsaxlokk, the little fishing boats had painted eyes on the prows; Neuman wondered, though, if they were sincerely magical or just painted on to keep tourists happy. So many things were like that now—the hex signs on Pennsylvania barns, the beefeater costumes at the Tower of London. The world had become a rather tatty theme park, its attractions trumped-up and suspect. A little rusty playground existed here in Marsaxlokk, and Calypso got on one of the swings, and Neuman gave her a push, both of them fighting the sadness welling from underneath—a black sludge leaking up through the grid of the “x”s in Maltese place-names, a dark liquid sliding beneath the progress of the tightly scheduled days, the certainty that the cruise would one day be over. They were both between divorces, which was worse than being between marriages. Their spouses had point-blank declined to come on this educational cruise, and these refusals hung in the air like the humming in the eardrums after a
twenty-one-gun salute. In the heat of Malta, on the hike from the bus up to the standing stones of Hagar Qim, her pink hand in his felt as sticky as a child’s.