Everything Beautiful Began After Part 15

"Natalie?"

"My sister, didn't I tell you that-"

"She abandoned you? Your father had to bring you up?"

"We never knew our father. My mother wouldn't tell us, so no French house with shutters, no garden hose, no wine cellar, no vintage Citroen. We lived with our grandfather, and we took care of each other. And now she's gone off with some b.a.s.t.a.r.d in the south of France, and I'm here cleaning up your broken gla.s.s."

Henry just looked.

"You're not the only one with tragedy," she said and then started to cry. Henry held her and then walked her gently into his bedroom, where they lay down in the darkness.

A few hours later, Rebecca's life was spread before him like models of each event.

Henry would never know exactly how she felt when she remembered those moments of her life, but his desire to know was the beginning of a seriousness he had never known before with a woman.

After, he made chamomile tea. It was very late. The flowers softened in boiling water. They sipped it slowly with honey.

Then they kissed. Her necklace caught between their lips. Moonlight spilled across the bed, purifying them with its pale fire.

They fell asleep without making love, but were closer than ever.

The shutters were open, and a stiff breeze had claimed Athens, filling bedrooms, rearranging the tops of desks, touching everything and nothing, as if searching for something it no longer recognized.

Then Rebecca woke up. She wondered how much time had pa.s.sed. She turned to Henry's sleeping face. It opened and closed with the shadow of her watching.

Rebecca wondered if her mother had once lain in bed with her father under such a spell of happiness. She imagined swimming with Henry in the steaming waters of the Aegean. She would take him to Aegina. His hands on her waist, guiding her through the water. Then his cool brown flesh after swimming-his beaded skin not quite dry.

She imagined taking him home to France.

A flock of bending trees.

Orchards.

The telephone about to ring.

Her grandfather cutting an onion with the slowness of age.

The bag of bags behind the door.

Sitting in the garden together-maybe her sister would come.

All the different cheeses. Plums from a tree in the garden.

Then driving back to Paris on the A11. Speaking English in the car.

Walking in the courtyards of the Louvre Museum. It was a place she had always dreamed of going, but she had never found the courage to enter central Paris in case she saw her mother.

The crunch of stones beneath her feet.

The excitement of doing nothing.

New sandals.

Cool marble steps.

A few clouds unfurling against the porcelain blue of dusk.

A bath together in the hotel on Rue du Bac.

The sense of something larger, something grand and overpowering, like some great historical event unfolding silently around them.

What happens to one person is felt by everyone. The time to hide has come and gone. She must give everything to survive.

But then she fell.

Like a statue falling off a ledge into its own reflection, Rebecca plunged headlong into sleep.

Chapter Twenty-Six.

Morning felt like a different life.

The curtains had stilled to a slow blaze.

Her thoughts somehow washed away by the currents of sleep.

She woke to a room on fire with pools of morning. Henry lay on his stomach with his palms against the sheet.

And then his eyes opened.

He looked at her without smiling.

"You're here," he said.

"Me?"

"I've been waiting."

Rebecca put her hand on his forehead. "Are you dreaming?"

Henry sat up quickly.

"Were you dreaming?" she said.

"I don't know," he said.

"Was it bad?"

"I don't know. I've forgotten it."

"Would you tell me if it was bad?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Funny how we feel emotion when we're asleep," Rebecca said, turning away. "I wonder if we can when we're dead too."

It was still quite early, and so they didn't have to rush.

They mounted the Vespa around nine o'clock, and then joined the stream of traffic that would carry them past the towers of apartment blocks and factories, under the peeling bridges, past smashed cars rusting, past inaccessible fruit trees high up in the jutting rocks, and then out into the open heat of sand and scorched trees.

Rebecca rested her head on Henry's back. She could feel the vibration of the motor in his body. She felt very tired. Dreaming must have kept her up.

She was wearing the same clothes as when she painted the topless man. She imagined him in his kitchen boiling towels. The hospice van picking up the clean and dropping off the dirty. That would be the next drawing. The steaming pot. She wondered how she might sketch the steam. She thought of Edward Hopper struggling with the angle of his brush as he curved the gla.s.s in Nighthawks. Steam from the drinks machine. It was raining the day he painted it. He was drinking coffee for sure. His wife, Jo, asleep in the next room with one leg outside the covers. His brush kept time to her breathing.

When they arrived at the dig, the Renault was not there. Henry parked. They pulled off their helmets and carried them up to the tent.

Inside it was cool and dark. The artifacts lay in their bins as if in a deep sleep.

Henry pumped Rebecca a gla.s.s of water from the plastic barrel. Then he pumped himself one.

"I'm sorry about last night," he said.

"A lot came out."

Henry set down his gla.s.s gently and admitted that he felt very close to her, closer than he had ever felt to anyone.

"Make love to me," Rebecca said. Henry picked her up and lay her down on the long bench.

When they heard the Renault clunking its way up toward the tent, he didn't stop.

"Henry, I hear something,"

"Don't worry, they have to find the bricks for the wheels."

Outside the tent, in a world that was somehow disconnected to their lovemaking, Rebecca heard one car door shut, and then two distant voices.

One was the professor's, while the other lighter, younger, less certain.

Afterward, as they dressed quickly, Rebecca strained to hear the voices outside. Henry kissed her slowly on the lips.

"Thank you for telling me about your childhood last night," he said. "Now come and meet the genius we almost killed."

Chapter Twenty-Seven.

Rebecca opened the tent flap, but was blinded by the sun. George stopped walking when he saw her. Dust rose around his feet.

"Rebecca?"

Blinking wildly, she walked toward George, but stopped a few feet away.

"What happened to you?"

Then Henry came out.

"George!" he said. "This is my girlfriend."

The professor shook his head. "I may be old, but this is all very confusing-George seems to know Rebecca-which means that we all know each other already.

Henry gasped. "How do you know each other?"

George simply stared.

"Well-" Rebecca interrupted. "We've been friends for a while-pretty much since I moved to Athens."

"And why have you never told me about him?" Henry said in mock reproach.

"I did," Rebecca said. "The American."

"Jesus," Henry said with a laugh. "You were talking about George?"

George stared at the faces around him, not completely understanding what anything meant.

Time pa.s.sed, in which George was dimly aware that through some strange coincidence the two main characters in his new life, the two people that he cared for the most, would soon be forced to wash him away for the sake of clarity. He felt the deep bite of loneliness. He thought of the cemetery in New Hamps.h.i.+re, and he longed for the cold simplicity of it. Fractured sunlight through the orchard. The eternal sea beyond, churning the names of the dead.

George followed the professor into the tent smiling weakly, but Henry reached out and took his arm.

"I had no idea she already had a boyfriend," George said. "She didn't tell me."

Henry just looked at him. "We can talk later."

"Okay," George said.

"I don't want our friends.h.i.+p to suffer," Henry admitted.