Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne
For Kelley
There is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
—CAVAFY
HYDRA
ONE
High up on the mountainside above the port, the Codringtons slept through the dry June mornings in their villa shaded by cypresses and by awnings rolled down over the doors. They lay in pajama-clad splendor among their Byzantine icons and paintings of Hydriot sea captains, unaware that their daughter Naomi had taken up early swims, that she dressed in the cool of her own room an hour before daylight, half reflected in a wishbone mirror. She put on a cambric shirt with French cuffs and a leather thong necklace, slung a small denim beach bag over her shoulder, and then made her way down the whitewashed steps that ran below her father’s house. She walked to the port along a narrow helix of steps, through landings with iron grilles and sudden views of the sea where the stone arches retained the nocturnal cool; the wild lots with their signs reading Poleitai and the marital bedrooms now open to the sky and filled with motionless butterflies.
Down by the town Naomi passed the Hotel Miranda with its chained anchor strung against a wall and a door that opened into a secret garden sunk in a blue glow of plumbago. A priest sat on the step as if waiting for something, and he gave her a nod. They knew each other without knowing each other’s names. The holy beard that remained the same, the girl who walked with silent steps summer after summer as if she couldn’t hear anything around her. At the toy port she walked around the overpriced yachts without stopping at the cafes. She climbed above the tourist harbor and out onto a path above the sea, silent in her espadrilles at first, then singing and counting her own steps. She passed a row of cannons set into the wall, the monument to Antonios Kriesis, wind-shredded agaves leaning like totems out of the hillside. She went around the island northward on a track that led to the little bay called Mandraki, a place where her Greek stepmother often said the waters never moved. She had never discovered why piles of rusted machinery lay by the side of the path, boilers and girders, cement mixers long ago pitched among the flowers.
At the crest of the hill above Mandraki there were a few imposing villas with long walls around them, their door knockers shaped as heads of Athena. Below it the bay held a run-down little resort called the Mira Mare where, on the beach, a small seaplane had been dragged up and its windows covered with screens. Frames of parasols with no straw lay in disorder in the lot behind the beach, but past Mandraki the path was uncontaminated. It wound toward Zourva through scrubland hillsides, and there great fields of stones swept down to the water in a blistering wind. The water was almost black before the sun rose high enough to lighten it. This was where Naomi always swam, sometimes half hoping to die, until she was too cold to continue and her fingers went numb.
She never told her father and Phaine about her morning swims and there was no need for them to know. What would they have said? Solitude was a value that meant nothing to them. They wouldn’t have understood that every morning she felt the same listless and vague expectation, the same dissatisfaction with the tempo of the world as she knew it. She sometimes thought that she had internalized this perpetual disappointment since childhood, though she could never quite put her finger on her unconscious reason for doing so. Or perhaps it was the island itself. The summers that went on forever, the afternoons too hot for purely animal activities. And worse even than these, the ancient bohemians whom her father and stepmother mingled with. The stunning emptiness of it didn’t even bore her; it made her feel superior to the island’s hedonism but without being able to suggest an alternative to herself.
Afterward she dried herself on the stony slopes among the wasps. She wrote in the small diary she carried with her while across the straits lay the low and promising shadow of the mainland. Beyond the haze lay the Argolid and the jetty at Metochi, both too far off to really see. It was usually eight or so by the time she had walked back to Mandraki and wandered into the resort looking for a coffee. High above the cove, raw mountainsides held up a white sanctuary in the first sunlight. She had always, during her childhood, imagined saints living there, hermits beaten by winds. But they had never appeared. The boys laying out the umbrellas and regimented loungers on the strip of sand knew her by now. The flirtations had subsided and they regarded her increasingly with a sullen skepticism because she had, a hundred and one times, rebuffed their advances.
Before long, her eye was drawn to the lines of navy towels spread out on the sun loungers in the heat. It was shabby but secluded; sometimes the former was the price for the latter. The bay was so small that the ocean in front of it possessed a wide-angle immensity in comparison with the cramped beach. There, in any case, two women had already arrived, clambering down from the path with their beach bags, straw hats quivering as they moved, with the prudent agility of beetles.
They lay on two loungers and the boys came down to them with trays of iced water, and it was clear that they came there every day and that the staff knew them well. They probably ordered breakfast and lunch with plenty of alcoholic drinks in between, because there was a familiarity in the manner of the Greeks. The resort was dying, paying non-guests were as vital as guests. It was an older woman and a young one, perhaps a mother and daughter. But Naomi didn’t recognize them from the endless parties to which her father and stepmother were invited and to which she also subjected herself since there was nothing else to do on the island. They weren’t famous, then, and they weren’t the Beautiful People and Jimmie and Phaine probably didn’t know them either. Nevertheless, here they were, drinking their coffee out of big blue cups and flicking away the flies with—of all things—a pair of tropical-weather fly whisks. The girl was remarkably fine, slender, spun-gold hair, too white for that sun, which made her eyes look even more desperate and avid. When the light hit them they gave off the inhuman glow of blue gemstones. The whisks were amusing and she inwardly approved, even when the accents floated over and seemed to suggest they were American. So they were, and before their coffee was consumed they had looked up at the British girl with her yogurt and honey on a wooden spool and their eyes filled with a light and homely curiosity. You too, at Mandraki?