Beautiful Soon Enough

Undertow

Undertow Medieval Dubrovnik rises from the tide to the mountain, and its music hasn’t been shattered yet. Years before the Serbo-Croat warblood spits across its hills, yet again, those cobblestones blaze in the Adriatic sun. An ancient village built on slopes, it’s like a smoked topaz in the coastal light. A dictator’s portraits hang next to crucifixes above wooden beds in every house, and up and down the stairs built into its hills, summer festivals bring music pilgrims to its altars. We’re among them. 154 berdeshevsky We’re among them and there’s a painter, Jacques, who wears a woolen black beret in the heat and travels with his plump and breathless wife, she plays the violin. She plays and he’s memorizing new colors to use for the deaths of the sun. There are two cello soloists who play alone for the night heavens and need no audience. I hear them from our window. I never want to sleep. I use the soft pedal when I practice on the piano in the afternoon-dark salon, I don’t want to be noticed yet. Not for that. I have a knife-thin waist and I’m very young and on a summer holiday with my strict conductor-father and his elegant second wife. She wears thin white silk; she says it helps her to remain cool. I’m hot. I watch her, how she never stains. We meet the painter-violinist couple at a Friday concerto, and they invent a shared Sunday luncheon party on a monastery island, out there in the siren-songed Adriatic. It’ll take a motor launch to get there, an adventure. I’ve dreamed of sirens who waited for Odysseus: of luring. I want that word in my mouth. Luring. I want to sing like an ocean. On Saturday, I’m riding in a crowd of black-eyed Croats, our bodies packed in like plumped fowl for the block. I’m a wild card. I want attention. On that crowded bus, I just allow my hip to rub against a full-lipped Serbian boy who’s wearing pale cotton shorts, until we both know exactly what’s happening, and we turn our heads away from one another so that no one notices. I blow him a daring kiss when my father and his wife and I leave the bus at our stop, and my father rages at me, because of the kiss. On Sunday that same boy is the driver of our motor launch. I can’t look at him. The monastery lies some sea-miles out from the Dalmatian coast. I sit in the stern and stare at the water. The water’s eyes are closed. The monastery is set in the middle of a glass-still lake. A tiny island inside an island, like a baby in a womb. I think how it’s waiting to be born, how the nuns there will never know a man. We walk on boulders and over a wire-cabled bridge above a divide. We walk on dry undertow 155 air. We arrive at a public garden in the monastery grounds where our sumptuous luncheon is to be prepared. I’m learning to like elegance. I want to like white, and silk, like my father’s wife. The painter Jacques, in his woolen black beret, his wife on his arm, my strict father and his pale wife and I are the monastery’s guests. Jacques has influence. I stare straight ahead. I walk faster than the rest. I’m eager as a hungry goat. I love how the boy blushes. I like his warning in careful English, when we land—this island gathers two different water currents , the side where we have beached is kind and receptive. The far side is dangerous, no one should enter the sea there or get the idea of swimming on that side—a word to the wise. Everyone else smiles. At that moment, Jacques and I have caught one another’s glance and something is said in absolute silence, a sudden desire, stated. Desire is white in the center, and outlined in charcoal in places, and calculated in places, and modern, and metallic and obvious. We each want to see the dangerous side. Our party continues across the stones and the cabled bridge to our waiting meal. Course after course is served by young...