The Names

"An early night for Owen.”"Maybe an early season," she said. "The chairman of the graduate program paid a visit. He's been in Athens, conferring with the ASCS. A reevaluation is in progress. But it may be good news in the long run. We could get going again as early as April next year. May at the latest. That's the word.”"With Owen?”"With or without. Probably the latter. No one knows what Owen's plans are. It's this loose structure that's caused so much trouble around here.”"Trouble for everyone but you.”"Exactly. I'm the one who's benefited. And Owen is sure I'll be able to come back. So. At least we have a rough idea how things stand. It's what you've been wanting.”How easy it was to sit there and reorganize our lives across the jet streams and the seasons. We were full of ideas, having learned to interpret the failed marriage as an occasion for enterprise and personal daring. Kathryn was specially adept at this. She loved to round on a problem and make it work for her. We discussed her proposals, seeing in them not only distance and separation but a chance to exploit these. Fathers are pioneers of the skies. I thought of David Keller flying to New York to eat banana splits with his children in a midtown hotel. Then back across the sea to consolation and light, Lindsay tanning bare-breasted on their terrace.Kathryn and I agreed. She and Tap would go to London at summer's end. They would stay with her sister Margaret. They would find a school for Tap. Kathryn would take courses in archaeology and allied disciplines. And I would find it easy, if expensive, to visit. London was a three-hour flight from Athens, roughly seven hours closer than the island was."In April you return.”"I ought to be able to find a better house to rent, now that I know people here. And Tap will follow as soon as school is over. It could be worse.”"I'll get to see the Elgin marbles," I said.We also agreed I would sleep on the sofa that night. I didn't want to leave them alone after what had happened in the other village."I'll have to find clean sheets. We can put a chair at one end of the sofa. It's not long enough.”"I feel like a kid sleeping over.”"What excitement," she said. "I wonder if we can handle it.”"Is that a wishful note I hear?”"I don't know. Is it?”"An uncertainty, a suspense?”"It's not something we can sit around discussing, is it?”"Over local wine. We're stuck in a kind of mined landscape. It's easier when Owen is here. I admit it.”"Why do we bother?”"We were practical people in marriage. Now we're full of clumsy aspirations. Nothing has an outcome anymore. We've become vaguely noble, both of us. We refuse to do what's expedient.”"Maybe we're not as bad as we think. What an idea. Revolutionary.”"How would your Minoans have handled a situation like this?”"A quickie divorce probably.”"Sophisticated people.”"Certainly the frescoes make them out to be. Grand ladies. Slim-waisted and graceful. Utterly European. And those lively colors. So different from Egypt and all that frowning sandstone and granite. Perpetual ego.”"They didn't think in massive terms.”"They decorated household things. They saw the beauty in this. Plain objects. They weren't all games and clothes and gossip.”"I think I'd feel at home with the Minoans.”"Gorgeous plumbing.”"They weren't subject to overwhelming awe. They didn't take things that seriously.”"Don't go too far," she said. "There's the Minotaur, the labyrinth. Darker things. Beneath the lilies and antelopes and blue monkeys.”"I don't see it at all.”"Where have you looked?”"Only at the frescoes in Athens. Reproductions in books. Nature was a delight to them, not an angry or godlike force.”"A dig in north-central Crete has turned up signs of human sacrifice. No one's saying much. I think a chemical analysis of the bones is under way.”"A Minoan site?”"All the usual signs.”"How was the victim killed?”"A bronze knife was found. Sixteen inches long. Human sacrifice isn't new in Greece.”"But not Minoans.”"Not Minoans. They'll be arguing for years.”"Are the facts that easy to determine? What, thirty-five hundred years ago?”"Thirty-seven," she said.We sat facing the hill that loomed above the village. It didn't take me long to see how shallow my resistance was to this disclosure. Eager to believe the worst. Even as she was talking I felt the first wavelets break on the beach. Satisfaction. The cinnamon boys, boxing, the women white and proud in skirts like pleated bells. Always the self finds a place for its fulfillments, even in the Cretan wild, outside time and light. She said the knife had been found with the skeleton of the victim, a young man fetal on a raised structure. The priest who killed him was also found. He was right-handed and knew how to sever a neck artery neatly."How did the priest die?" I said."Signs of an earthquake and fire. The sacrifice was linked to this. They also found a pillar with a ditch around it to hold blood. Pillar crypts have been found elsewhere. Massive pillars with the sign of the double ax. There's your massiveness, James, after all. Hidden in the earth.”We were silent awhile."What does Owen say?”"I've tried to discuss this with Owen but he's weary of Minoans, it seems. He says the whole tremendous theme of bulls and bulls' horns is based on cuckoldry. All those elegant women were sneaking into the labyrinth to screw some Libyan deckhand.”I laughed. She reached over the candles, put a hand to my cheek, leaned forward, standing, and kissed me slowly. A moment that spoke only its own regretful ardor. Sweet enough and warm. A reminiscence.Observing the rules I stayed outside until she fixed up the sofa for me and went to bed. In the morning we would make it a point to talk of routine things.