The Names

She had the kind of fair skin that seemed to admit light, almost to provide a passage for light. Maybe it was her guileless manner that heightened the impression of such open texture-that and her stillness, the way she collected whatever was in the air, gathered objectively, our conversation, our world complaints. I remember how she turned her head once, moving into a patch of sun, her left ear going incandescent, the edge and outer whorls, light penetrating finely, and how I thought this moment was the one that would come back to me when I wanted to think of Lindsay years from now, the haze that rimmed her downy lobe.I told her I'd be seeing Tap soon. We climbed the street named after Plutarch, slowly, bending to the effort. The sky above Lycabettus resembled an island sky today, saturated with color, blue deeps and soundings. This island sense was enhanced by the whitewashed chapel at the top of the hill, the tending presence, not so much surrounded by the sky as adhering to it, belonging to it."Will you be seeing Kathryn too?”"If she's not living in a hole somewhere up the coast.”"Does she write to you?”"Occasionally. Usually in a rush of some kind. The last lines are always scrawled. Even in Tap's letters I don't feel her presence. Shouldn't there be a feeling of her presence behind them? It occurred to me just recently that she doesn't read his letters anymore. In a way his letters told me more about things, essential things, than hers did. We exchanged some sense of ourselves through him. A mysterious sense, an intuition. But I don't feel her presence anymore. It's another connection closed down.”"You don't feel her presence but you still love her.”"I make too much of love. This is because I've never been massively seized by it. It was never an obsessive thing for me, an obsessive tracking of someone or something. You can break clear of obsessions. Or they just dissolve. But this happened slowly. It grew around me. It covered everything, it became everything. I'll tell you what the shock is. To live apart is the shock, the seizure. This is what I register daily and obsessively.”"In novels lately the only real love, the only unconditional love I ever come across is what people feel for animals. Dolphins, bears, wolves, canaries.”We both laughed. We wondered if this was a sign of some modern collapse. Love deflected, love that could not work when it was given to a man or a woman. Things had to work. Only small children and animals in the wild could provide the conditions in which a person's love might find a means to perfect itself, might not be thwarted, dismissed, defeated. Love was turning mystical, we thought."When are you two going to have children?”"We're our own children.”She smiled in the private way she had, the slowly deepening way, amused perhaps to have hit upon a truth. She'd only meant to make a small joke but had found something in the sentence that made her want to think about it."Seriously. You ought to have children.”"We will. We want to.”"When does he get back?”"Tomorrow afternoon.”"Where is he?”"It's written down somewhere. Cities, hotels, airlines, flight numbers, times of arrival and departure.”We walked under the locust trees, fifty yards away from the place where the street becomes stepped, climbing in four or five levels toward the pale crags."This is the conversation we were supposed to have on Rhodes," I said."When he went swimming?”"He left us on the beach. There was a deep pause. We were meant to talk importantly about things.”"I couldn't think of anything. Could you?”"No.”"That was the one day it didn't rain," she said."When we all squeezed together on my balcony, passing David's flask.”"Oh that plummy sunset.”We decided we'd walked far enough. There was a small narrow shop, a grocery store that offered little more than yogurt, butter, pyramid cartons of processed German milk. Two chairs and a small metal table stood on the sidewalk, waiting for us."You ought to make the visit a permanent one," she said. "Stay there, see what happens.”"It rains.”"Not that we don't want you back.”"She purposely chose a rainy place.”"How big the world is. They keep telling us it's getting smaller all the time. But it's not, is it? Whatever we learn about it makes it bigger. Whatever we do to complicate things makes it bigger. It's all a complication. It's one big tangled thing." She began to laugh. "Modern communications don't shrink the world, they make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, they connect more things. The world isn't shrinking at all. People who say it's shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm." I didn't know what she meant by this but it sounded funny. It sounded funny to her too. She had to talk through her laughter. "No wonder people go to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don't trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books that tell them how to run, walk and sit. We're trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications.”I sat there and watched her laugh. She wore the same jade dress she'd gone swimming in, that summer night by the sea.