Beginner's Greek Read online

  “A man, I think.”

  “Is he badly hurt?”

  “I don’t know. I think they’ve called for help.”

  Peter now pushed through the crowd and went outside. There were lots of people milling around the terrace. They were wet and their shoes sank into the spongy ground. One of his ushers raced up.

  “Peter! Peter!”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Somebody was hit. Out there.” The friend pointed. The floodlights from the clubhouse allowed Peter to see a knot of people on the fairway. Those on the terrace were gabbling. “What happened?” “Who is it?” “Isn’t it terrible?” “Lightning!” “Out on the course!” “How awful for Charlotte!”

  Peter began to run across the terrace. An ambulance had appeared. Cube-shaped and painted pea green and white, lashed by rain, it was making its way down a narrow road that led from the parking lot to the first tee with its red lights flashing and white lights burning blindingly in all directions. Peter ran toward it and then trotted alongside as it drove over the tees. Bouncing and caroming in an alarming way, it went down the bank that was in rough. Once on the fairway, the ambulance gained speed, tearing up the grass as it went. The driver sounded the siren to urge people to move out of the way, and then the medical technicians jumped out and ran to the victim. Peter caught up just as they reached him. The ambulance’s red lights continued to flash and the white ones were so bright and so numerous that it was hard to see, and they gave everything they fell on a flat, bled-out cast. The technicians, a man and a woman, wore latex gloves and their belts were laden with gear. A guest was kneeling down beside the victim; he was one of Janet’s friends, Dr. Smythe. As the technicians knelt, tearing open packets and Velcro patches, the doctor spoke to them loudly but indistinctly and then stood aside to let them do their work. Moving in an organized frenzy, they shouted jargon at each other while static and voices came out of their radios. One of the technicians yelled to the ambulance, and a second man jumped out of the back. He lifted down a cart that carried a box with cables running out of it, and, at full speed, pushed the cart up to the others. After a pause while her colleagues prepared the victim and the machine, the female technician applied the two paddles to the victim’s chest, jolting his body. The crowd gasped and took a step back. The technicians leaned over the victim. Then the woman gave him another charge. After another wait, she did it again, and once again the victim’s body leapt up like a flopping fish.

  The technicians huddled, taking readings again. Then their shoulders seemed to sag and their bodies to lose tension. They rose unhurriedly. The crowd was utterly silent. One of the technicians called over the doctor. They spoke and the doctor nodded; he knelt down and examined the victim for a moment, then rose and nodded again. Businesslike, but without urgency, the technicians drew the stretcher out of the ambulance. They rearranged the limbs and carefully lifted the victim onto the stretcher, covered him with blankets, and strapped him securely. They covered his face. Seeing this, people in the crowd let out moans and cries. The technicians popped open the undercarriage of the stretcher so that it was waist-high and wheeled it to the back of the ambulance, where they stowed it, after first popping it closed again. They approached the doctor. In the bright white light and flashing red lights they spoke for a moment, and the doctor scanned the crowd. His eyes lit on Peter and he pointed toward him.

  “Peter!” he called, and beckoned with his hand.

  Peter joined him and the paramedic in the field of the bright white and flashing red lights.

  “Peter,” said the doctor, “I’m so sorry. It’s the best man.”

  Peter had thought that he recognized Jonathan’s waistcoat. Still the doctor’s words stunned him, and he stared back blankly.

  The doctor tried again. “I don’t know his name,” he said. “I’m sorry. He was your best man. Your best man.”

  “Jonathan?” Peter managed to say. “You mean it was Jonathan?” The voice that came out of Peter didn’t seem like his own.

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said.

  “Uh . . . oh God. Jonathan.”

  The doctor allowed some time for the news to sink in, then said, “I’ll go to the hospital, of course. Is there anyone else . . . ?”

  Peter swallowed and took a couple of breaths. “Yes,” he said, “there is somebody. His wife is here.”

  “I see.” The doctor thought for a moment. “Peter, someone should ride in the ambulance. If you do that, I’ll find his wife and . . . explain. Then we can follow you.”

  This sounded like a wise plan to Peter. “All right,” he said. “But you don’t know her. Her name is Holly. She’s kind of tall and has reddish blond hair —”

  “Oh, her? I know who you mean,” said the doctor. Peter looked at him. He was stocky and his face was dented all over and creased with a hundred varieties of fine and thick wrinkles. His suit and shirt were wet and soiled. Peter could hardly think of anything specific about him. He was one of those anonymous figures who fell into the category of people who parents believed must be invited to weddings as a matter of course. Peter remembered that earlier he had been bouncing on the dance floor: a slightly soused doctor friend of his mother-in-law’s. At this moment, he seemed to have the noblest face in all of humanity.

  Peter hoisted himself into the back of the ambulance. The female technician was already inside and one of the men got in after Peter and closed the thick doors behind him. The stretcher sat in a bay in the middle of the enclosure. There were benches on either side. The place had a green glow to it and lots of equipment — dangling plastic face masks, tubes, tanks, monitors with dials. With a jolt the truck started moving and swung around in a wide turn and then slowly made its way back up the fairway.

  After a few minutes, Peter asked, “Was he . . . was there —”

  “We found no vitals when we arrived,” said the woman. “We did what we could.” She paused. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the man.

  So, dressed in his cutaway, with mud on his rented patent leather shoes and his silver tie blotched with water, having just married Charlotte, Peter rode off in an ambulance with Jonathan, who was dead.

  The ambulance arrived at the emergency room and the technicians told Peter to go into the waiting area. It was a clean place. The molded-plastic chairs (bright blue) and the linoleum floor (white, flecked with green, red, and blue) glowed with good upkeep. Despite the storm and the fact that it was Saturday night, the cases were few and didn’t seem very serious. Among the half-dozen people he saw, Peter couldn’t even distinguish between the patients and their companions. A TV was on. All of this contrasted sharply, and confusingly, with the turmoil within Peter. Where were the sirens and the blood and the paramedics bursting through doors with people on stretchers? These would have corresponded better with Peter’s emotions.

  An orderly or someone like that walked by and said to him, “They’ll take care of you over there,” and motioned to a counter with an opened glass partition. The woman sitting behind it gave Peter a ballpoint pen and clipboard with a form on it. Some interest, but not much, came into her face when she noticed Peter’s clothes. “Please have a seat and fill that out,” she said. Peter sat and looked at the form. It asked for the patient’s name and address and date of birth, your name if you were not the patient, relationship to patient, insurance, nature of injury, previous hospitalizations, current medications, allergies. Peter put the clipboard and pen on the seat beside him. Allergies. Peter happened to know that Jonathan had been allergic to shrimp. In college once they had been eating Chinese food with a girl whom Jonathan was pursuing. She was awfully pretty and had the sliest way about her and smoked Marlboros. One of the dishes had shrimp in it, which they didn’t know. Jonathan ate some and almost immediately began to turn red and swell up. Peter and the girl had taken him to an emergency room in a taxi. It wasn’t like this one; it was filthy and crowded with moaning poor people. Peter had thought abou
t that girl over the years. A thing with Jonathan had developed but not lasted very long. When she and Peter ran into each other from time to time, she acted in a friendly way toward him, but he clearly made her uncomfortable.

  Jonathan, Peter also happened to know, had had one hospitalization, to have his appendix removed. He had not smoked, he had not suffered from depression or any nervous disorders. He had never had cancer. He was taking one prescription medication, to control his cholesterol. He had a mild heart murmur.

  Peter knew all these things about Jonathan. He probably knew more about Jonathan, in fact, than anyone else did. He knew about the terrifying time when, as a child, Jonathan had been left behind on a train. He knew about the maudlin singer-songwriter whom Jonathan secretly adored. Although Jonathan never talked to anyone about his work, he had even told Peter about an idea he had for another novel: “It’s a coming-of-age story,” Jonathan had said. “I have it pretty well planned out, and it should be very moving. What it’s really about is the sexual awakening of Peter Randall, a boy just coming into manhood. He falls in love with his right hand, and they have this passionate emotional and physical relationship. At first, it’s only a sort of innocent playful romance: they walk on the beach, lie together on hot summer nights listening to the whip-poor-wills. Then this lust just overtakes them. It’s so intense that it’s almost frightening. But they must meet furtively, for theirs is a forbidden love. Oh, it’s very painful.”

  What else did Peter know about Jonathan? He glanced over at the list — heart, lungs, bones. Peter knew that Jonathan’s urine was not discolored, or anyway it hadn’t been the times he’d seen it. He knew that Jonathan had had a tetanus booster in the last ten years (they had gotten them together before a trip to Guatemala). He knew something about Jonathan’s broken foot, the third-degree burn on his hand. He had seen Jonathan’s snot, blood, piss, pus, spit, puke, and sweat. He had probably somewhere along the line seen his feces. What did that leave? Tears and semen. Well, those were for the girls. But that’s all Jonathan was now, wasn’t it? Just some fluids and goop and gristle dripping off his bones. Jonathan’s sensitive-looking fingers now lay limp, as did his tongue, as did . . . Cheese puffs and meat and cake and wine sat undigested in his stomach. The electrons racing along the neural pathways had come to a sudden stop and flickered out. The large wrinkly gray mass under Jonathan’s skull just sat there and oozed. That was it for Jonathan.

  Peter tried to figure out how grief-stricken he was. In his shock, and in the bright, antiseptic waiting room, it was hard to feel anything. Then, too, Jonathan had never seemed solid. He had never seemed like a human being weighted down with organs and worries. It was as if you could pass your hand through him. Flitting from one crowd to another, from one woman to another, Jonathan had not been a person who seemed fixed on earth. Indeed, he had never seemed to become mired in any aspect of life. He hadn’t had money worries. He had written easily. He had made friends easily. He had easily maintained a light diet of food, drink, and drugs. In his own way, he did fall in love, but even so, his relations with women never seemed to lead to crisis. He always recovered quickly from disappointments, and, no matter how inconstant he may have been, the women whose hearts he had broken still regarded him with remarkable indulgence and affection, or at least tolerance. There had been no stalkings, no two a.m. phone calls, no tableside appearances with wrists bleeding when Jonathan was dining with someone else. Jonathan had never seemed to meet resistance from the forces — gravity, friction — that others had to work against.

  So now this shimmering apparition was gone. Why should its vanishing confound Peter’s emotions or his sense of the world? It wasn’t as if Jonathan and he had shared some profound intimacy: if Peter were in the hospital with cancer, Jonathan might visit every day, but he would never hug Peter tightly and cry, “I love you, buddy! I love you!” Peter and Jonathan had never had a cross word, but neither had they ever said a word about anything of any importance. There was no hard evidence that they particularly cared about each other, and a claim that they did might not have stood up under cross-examination. In fact, Peter disapproved of Jonathan in so many ways — despised and hated him, really, for his disloyalty to Holly. What he should be thinking, he concluded as he sat in his blue chair, was Good riddance. The bastard got what he deserved.

  And yet . . . oh, Christ . . . he wasn’t actually going to start to cry, was he? There had been periods when Jonathan would call Peter every day. “Peter, what’s up?” Well, actually, Jonathan, I’m working. That’s what we do here at the office. “Oh, right. How are you getting along with your supervisees today? Being tough but fair?” I try. “And are you sharpening the saw, Peter? Sometimes I worry about that. I worry that you’re not sharpening the saw.” Yes, look —. Then Jonathan would ask if Peter had happened to see an item in the paper, or he would tell him some gossip, or he would recall the beautiful day at that girl’s parents’ beach house when, under the influence of a hallucinogen, she and her friend and they had eaten all those avocados, and the word avocado had set them into fits of laughter the rest of the weekend. Whatever the topic, Peter would soon be drawn in and discover that he had spent twenty minutes talking to Jonathan, twenty minutes he certainly could not spare. Finally, Peter would insist that he had to go, and Jonathan would say, “Okay, okay, but what are you doing tonight?” I’m not sure, I have a lot of stuff here. “Oh, come on, you can go out.” Jonathan would take Peter to a party at which, depending on the crowd, there would be the prettiest literary girls, or the prettiest art girls, or the prettiest rich girls, or the prettiest bohemian girls, or the prettiest actresses, or the prettiest dancers, or the prettiest musicians.

  Peter couldn’t think of any particularly self-sacrificing or meaningful thing that Jonathan had ever done for him. Jonathan had only provided him with affection, intelligence, energy, beauty, pleasure — life. Life. The tears began to come. What a selfish bastard he was, really. But still Peter wept.

  He heard footsteps and looked up. Here was Holly.

  4

  Holly’s hair was wet and tangled. She was pale — what a beautiful moonlike pallor, Peter thought, so different from her usual sun-warm blush — and her clothes were in disarray. Dr. Smythe accompanied her. His hair was plastered in stripes on his balding head. Peter could see that he had taken Holly in hand in a manner that was caring and professional. Peter began to cry harder as he approached Holly and embraced her. They sobbed together for a moment. “Oh, Peter, he loved you so much,” Holly said.

  “Holly,” Peter said, but he couldn’t continue.

  After a moment, the doctor said softly, “I’ll go see where things stand.”

  Holly and Peter held on to each other, sobbing and heaving almost in unison. Their bodies were touching along their entire length. With his eyes closed, Peter felt as if he were rapidly falling or rising with Holly in his arms. He couldn’t tell which direction it was. They were swirling down, or spiraling up, together somewhere as one, for just as he could not tell where he seemed to be going, he could not tell where his body stopped and Holly’s began. Holly stroked the back of his head and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

  Hearing Holly’s murmur and smelling her damp hair (wet leaves and wet wool), Peter felt himself even more lost within her. When he opened his eyes, he was shocked to see the clean, mundane waiting room, the blue chairs, the acoustical tile, the framed notices and the prints, a few colorful strokes depicting athletes. With instinctive simultaneity, he and Holly gently separated and held each other’s forearms. They looked at each other’s face. Holly was pale. Some straggly hairs were stuck to her forehead. Her eyes were red, and her whole face looked drawn. She had never before seemed ethereal, with such a translucent complexion.

  “Peter —”

  “Holly —”

  “Oh, Peter —”

  “I’m so sor —”

  They waited a moment, smiling a little, to collect themselves. Holly let Peter
go ahead.

  “Oh God, Holly. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s terrible. I can’t help feeling — if it had been another night — I’m so sorry. He was . . . he was . . . he was . . . he was . . .” No word came to Peter to say what Jonathan was.

  “I’m really just in shock,” said Holly. “You saw him?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Oh, how horrible! Will I have to look at him? I want to. I do. I have to. But I’m so scared.” She began to cry again.

  “Let’s sit down,” Peter said.

  They sat. Holly became a little more composed.

  “I was sitting in one of those anterooms talking to Charlotte’s great-aunt,” she said. “A funny name. Mrs. LeMenthe. She was telling me about her wedding day and how everything went wrong, but they all had so much fun. I talked about my wedding day too, and we were laughing. We both thought our husbands were the best-looking men in the world, and we laughed about that. We could tell something was happening because of the way people were walking by and talking, but we really had no idea. Then Dr. Smythe came in.” Holly gulped, and she spoke in a whisper. “He told me what happened.” After collecting herself for a moment, Holly went on to say that as Dr. Smythe led her out of the club, Charlotte had fallen upon her, wailing. Charlotte wouldn’t let go, and finally her father and brother had to pull her away. Then David Montague had driven Holly and the doctor to the hospital.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, looking at Peter with her chin trembling.

  They sat in silence, holding hands. Then Dr. Smythe came over with a doctor in scrubs. She told Holly that Jonathan had been pronounced dead on arrival and that there was no indication that he had suffered. She then said that it was necessary for someone to identify the body. Peter volunteered, but Holly said she wanted to see Jonathan. The doctor led them to a room with greenish light where a body covered in a sheet lay on a gurney. A woman with repulsive jowls asked Holly her name, address, and relationship to the deceased. Then she nodded at the attendant, and he pulled back the sheet to reveal Jonathan’s head and shoulders. He had some burns and his hair was singed; his skin looked like putty.