A Bright Soothing Noise

My New Life

143 My New Life Once or twice that week we exchanged glances. On Friday night, at the Proteus, she was watching me. Saturday night, same club, same crowd of locals, she worked her way closer. The same leather jackets and sunglasses at the far end watched me, too. She was a very young woman, a girl even, with a small, pretty face, a large coil of black hair tied over her shoulder with a loose string. Even when she stood near me, she didn’t seem to mind how I admired her air of sophistication, the narrowness of her wrists as she tapped the ashes off her cigarette, the quick quality of her eyes. She nodded perfunctorily when I gave her my barstool. Sunday morning she passed by as I sat on a bench in the plaza, reading the Herald Tribune. She said, “Good morning” in English and I asked if she would join me. Soon, we had some laughs. Twice she touched my hand. “How pretty you are!” I said. “You are staying at Greben’s, no?” she said. “How are the rooms?” I checked down the street: no one. An organ played inside the church. Across the street, the door of the Proteus was open. We went quickly up the stairs to my pension and she admitted right after I closed the door that she was only fifteen. Later she 144 A BRIGHT SOOTHING NOISE made owl-eyes at my naked chest, my belly, then up and down my legs and covered her face. “How ugly you are!” she said. “Maybe this will help,” I said and poured Jack Daniel’s in a glass. We each had a gulp and she pushed me down onto the bed. All through the afternoon we whispered sugary insults back and forth and she laughed too much. I put my fingers on her mouth and she kissed them. A constellation of motes sparkled in the dusty light of the window and now and then through the courtyard we heard the village: a schoolboy calling his friends, a new baby crying, the sirens of the police. The odors of sunlight and the warm Adriatic, a half mile away, mingled with the fragrance of my freshly soiled bed sheets and her cigarettes. All through that afternoon, she laughed many times but as the night went on she laughed less. She cried once or twice with unexpected passion. She cried out more often than that. In the early morning blackness, we sat up in bed. Her hair covered her small shoulders and much of her face. She produced a tin foil of hashish which she smashed and expertly rolled into a wad of tobacco. We smoked it and I listened for a long time, as if from another room. She talked quietly about her mother, whom she considered no better than a slave, how her brothers were ignorant peasants who would take turns beating her when she went home. She described the family mule named Benito, the litter of piglets that had come April first, her dream of going to university or traveling to England someday, even America. She asked and I told her I had stopped on the way back from a corporate retreat in Athens a month ago and stayed. What more could I have said? That my marriage and profession both represented the ultimate victory of form over content, both a lifelong rehearsal for a wellmanaged death? That I loved my daughters but hated the life I had given them—the London prep-schools, the credit cards, the presumption of superiority—as much as my father hated what he My New Life 145 gave me? That he had been head counsel for IBNJ for twenty-five years? After that he was CFO for almost ten more and by the end had grown his budget from three to ten billion dollars. Almost a year ago, very early on New Year’s Day, the first bright cold morning of his official retirement, after having used up his last vacation days after Christmas attempting to paint with watercolors , he rinsed out all his brushes, put them in a coffee can and stepped out in his pajamas onto the porch facing the harbor in Marblehead, Massachusetts, tied one end of an extension cord to the flagpole and the other around his neck before he stepped over the railing. “For the life of me,” I...