A House Like A Lotus Part 17

I wanted to ask, 'Will you be here when I come back?' I mumbled, 'I still don't want to go.'

She smiled at me. 'You'll go, Polly, if only for me. You won't disappoint me.

Now. Go help Ursula. And let's have a merry meal. I've had a rich life, Polly, and I'm grateful indeed.' She gave me a gentle hug, then a small shove, and I went out to the kitchen.

I could ask Urs what I couldn't ask Max. 'Urs, if I go to Cyprus, will Max be ... will Max be alive when I get back?'

'I can't answer that, child. I don't know. There are no tidy answers to Nelson's. But things aren't going to get better.'

'I don't want to go.'

'You must. You know that. Part of growing up is learning to do things you don't want to do.' She looked at me gravely. 'Child, I promised Norris Ormsby I'd go back to Charleston next week. Just this once more. I've made it clear that it's the last time. Max won't ask you to stay with her, now that she knows that you know. She won't want to burden you. But I'm going to ask you to come stay with her overnight. Are you up to it?'

'Yes,' I said.

'It's a lot to ask of you. I know that.'

'You don't need to ask. I want to be here.'

'You're a strong child, Polly.'

-It's all a front, I wanted to say, but I didn't. And I didn't mind when Ursula called me child. I'd have hated it from anyone else.

159.

She handed me a plate of cold chicken and ham. 'I hope you're not going to regret these months since Sandy brought you over to Beau Allaire as his Christmas present to Max and me.'

'Never!' I cried. I've learned more in these past months than I've ever learned in school. I could never regret them.'

'Never' is a long word.

"Am I never going to see you again, after I take you back to the hotel this afternoon?" Zachary asked.

"It's been wonderful being with you," I said. "I've had a marvelous time.

I'll write you postcards from Cyprus."

"I want more than postcards. You really do something special for me, Polly, you really do. Do you honestly enjoy being with me?"

"I wouldn't be with you if I didn't." Zachary evidently didn't even suspect that I was anything but a social success in Cowpertown and that having a young man after me was a totally new experience.

"Mount Parna.s.sus isn't that far beyond Delphi, O G.o.ddess mine," he said, "but I.

won't trace any of our route. Did you do your homework?"

"Sure." In my mind's eye I saw Max sitting with me on the verandah swing, showing me pictures and sketches, got a whiff of her perfume, of Beau Allaire's flowers in the spring. "Mount Parna.s.sus is sacred to Dionysus, and the Thyiads held their Bacchic revels on one of the summits."

"I'd like to have a Bacchic revel with you." He took 160.

one hand off the steering wheel and pulled me close to him. I must have stiffened. "Relax, pretty Pol. I'm not going to hurt you."

I did relax during the ferry ride. We stood on deck and the light of sun on water was so brilliant it was almost blinding. The sea was choppy, white-capped, with a high wind which dried the spray as fast as it blew up at us. To our right was a barren coast of stony mountains, with only a little scrubby-looking vegetation on the lower slopes. I wondered if it had been greener for the Dionysian revels; I could hardly imagine them on hard, bare stone.

The sea got choppier and choppier as we approached land, and the sky more lowering. "It rained last night," Zachary said. "I forbid it to rain today."

But as we got back in the Bug to drive off the ferry, big raindrops splattered against the winds.h.i.+eld. Zachary swore. Then, "There's a place nearby where we can have a gla.s.s of tea and see what the weather's going to do."

The small restaurant he took me to was right on the sh.o.r.e, and we could watch the rain making pockmarks on the water. The waiter seemed sorrowful but not surprised when Zachary asked for tea and nothing else, and while we were drinking it the skies opened and dumped quant.i.ties of water, and then, abruptly, stopped.

"I have a rug for us to sit on," Zachary said. "I think we can drive on and have our picnic." The sun was out, and the wet flagstones outside the restaurant were steaming.

The wind was still strong, and it was a wild, warm, early afternoon of swiftly s.h.i.+fting clouds which went well with the grandeur of the scenery. Zachary drove to a grove of ancient pines, from which we had a view of a 161.

crumbling temple, the stone s.h.i.+ning and golden in the post-storm suns.h.i.+ne.

Zachary spread a rug over the rusty needles, and we ate comfortably, protected by the trees, which swayed in the wind, sounding almost like surf. Zachary popped a wrinkled little olive into his mouth, and then lay down, looking up at the blue sky through the green needles of the pines, a high, burning blue with golden glints.

I looked at one of the crumbling columns. "It's so old-"

"And gone," Zachary said, putting his dark head in my lap. "As our own civilization will soon be gone. It's a never-ending cycle of rise and fall, rise and fall. Except that there's a good possibility we'll end it." He spat out the olive seed. "With the new microtechnology, there'll be less than a fifteen-second lapse between the pressing of the b.u.t.ton and the falling of the bombs. All those bomb shelters people have built, my pa among them, will be useless. There won't be time to get to them. When it happens, it'll happen without warning."

I pushed his head off my lap. "Shut up."

"Ow." He rubbed his head and put it back on my lap. "It might happen now, in the next few seconds. A light so bright we'd be blinded, and heat so intense we'd be incinerated before we realized what had happened. It wouldn't be a bad way to go, here, with you."

I pushed at his head again, but he didn't move. It's one thing to contemplate one's mortality realistically, another to wallow in melodrama. It was almost as though this strange young man was deliberately inviting disaster.

"Don't be an ostrich," he said, "hiding your head in the sand."

"I'm as realistic as you are, but it doesn't do any 162.

good to dwell on the horror. n.o.body wants it, and it doesn't have to happen."

"Give a child matches, and sooner or later he'll light one."

"We had an essay contest, not just our school, but the whole state, on how to prevent nuclear warfare, and I wish the President of the United States would listen to the kids."

"Did you win?" Zachary asked.

"I was a finalist. At least I was able to speak my piece. And we have to live as though there's going to be a world for us to live in."

"What's the point of making plans?"

I countered, "What's the point of not making plans?"

"We're at the end of our civilization, let's face it."

"Oh, Zach." Absently I began to run my fingers through his hair. "Think of all the groups who decided they knew exactly when the end of the world was coming, because of the lineup of planets, or some verse from Revelation, and dressed up in sheets to wait on some mountaintop for Judgment Day. Or had big Doomsday parties. And refusing to live, because it wasn't worth it when the end of the world was so close, and even selling their property-and then, when the world didn't end at the predicted moment, there they were."

"I'm not selling my property," Zachary said. "You needn't worry about that.

Just in case, I'll hang on to what I have."

"You can't take it with you."

"I'll keep it till the last second. I've got five thousand dollars in traveler's checks with me right now."

I did not like this aspect of Zachary. I'm realistic enough to know the possibilities for the future, but there are some positive ones, too, as I reminded Zachary.

163 /.

There are people like Sandy and Rhea whose work is about diametrically opposite to Zachary's father's, though I didn't mention that. A lot of doctors are refusing to take part in emergency medical-disaster planning, making it clear that it's unethical to delude people into false beliefs that there are any realistic mechanisms of survival after an atomic war. More and more people are rising up against nuclear stockpiling. At home. Abroad.

We don't have to blow up the planet.

Max said once, 'We do make things happen by what we think, so think positively, Polly, not negatively. When you think you are beautiful, you are beautiful.

If you believe in yourself, you will do well in your life's work, whether you choose acting or writing or science.'

It was a warm summer evening and we were out on the verandah upstairs, off Max's room, watching night fall. The sky over the ocean was rosy with afterglow, which Max said was more subtle than the sunset. The ceiling fan was whirring gently.

In the purply sky above the soft rose at the horizon a star came out, pulsing softly so that it was more like the thought of a star than a star, and then there it was, followed by more and more stars.

Max pointed to the sky. 'The macrocosm. Stars beyond countless stars.

Galaxies beyond galaxies. If our universe is finite, as many astrophysicists believe, there may be as many universes as there are galaxies, floating like tiny bubbles in the vastness of s.p.a.ce.'

'Tiny bubbles?'

I was sitting on a low stool at Max's feet, and she reached out her fingers and ma.s.saged the back of my neck gently. That's where I get tired when I write a lot, and I'd just finished my last long paper of the year for Miss Zeloski.

164.

'The last time Urs and I were at your house, Rosy and Johnny were blowing bubbles, lovely little iridescent orbs floating in the breeze. And when one thinks of the macrocosm, and then the microcosm, size makes no nevermind, as Nettie would say.' She laughed gently. 'Is a galaxy bigger than a quark? I lean more and more on the total interdependence of all creation. If we should be so foolish as to blow this planet to bits, it would have repercussions not only in our own solar system but in distant galaxies. Or even distant universes. And if anyone dies- a tree, a planet, a human being-all of creation is shaken.'

How different that was from Zachary. Frightening, but in a completely different way, because it gave everything meaning.

'Never think what you do doesn't matter,' Max said. 'No one is tooinsignificant to make a difference. Whenever you get the chance, choose life. But I don't need to tell you that. You choose life with every gesture you make. That's the first thing in you that appealed to me. You are naked with life.'

And wasn't that what drew me to Max, that abundant sense of life?-pointing out to me the fierce underside of a moth clinging to the screen; fireflies like a fallen galaxy on the dunes in front of our house; the incredible, pulsing life of the stars blooming in the night sky, seeming to cling to the Spanish moss on the old oaks.

I looked at the crumbling golden columns near Zachary's picnic spot, the chipped pediments, and thought that Max would see in them not the death of a civilization but the life. I got up and walked slowly toward the temple, and Zachary followed me.

He dropped his doom talk. "When am I going to see you again?"

165 /.

"Uncle Sandy has plans to take me to various places for the rest of the week, and then I'm off to Cyprus."

"I like Cyprus. I'll come see you there."

"No, please, Zachary. I'm there to do a job, and I'm not going to have time for anything else."

"How long is this job?"

"Three weeks." We'd reached the temple, and I sat on the still-damp stone of a pediment with a lotus-leaf design. Did the Greeks think of the lotus as flowering into an entire universe?

Zachary counted off on his fingers. "Three weeks, okay, I may go to Turkey for a while, then. How're you getting home after the conference?"

"Cyprus Airlines to Athens, then on to JFK in New York, and then to Charleston."

"You change planes in Athens?"

"Of course."

"How long do you have between planes?"

"Nearly three hours."

"I'll meet you at the airport, then, and we can have a bite together and a chance to catch up. When we get back to the hotel, write me down your flight numbers."

"Okay, that would be fun." I tried not to let on just how thrilled I was that he didn't want to drop me when Sandy and Rhea arrived.

He touched my nose, then my lips with his finger. "I can't imagine anything nicer than fun with you, Polly. You're like a bottle of champagne just waiting to be uncorked. Or don't you like that a.n.a.logy?" I had turned away, and he pulled me back. "I didn't mean to hurt you, sweet Pol. Since you haven't told me anything, I can't help blundering." He pressed my face against his shoulder, gently.

166.

It was nearly seven when we got back to the hotel.

Zachary insisted that I give him the Cyprus Airlines flight number, so I let him into my room just long enough to check my ticket and write down the information for him. He was looking around the room, and I'm sure it gave him the impression the O'Keefes are a lot richer than we are. But I didn't explain.

He kissed me goodbye, and electricity vibrated through me. But we don't have to act out everything we feel. I'd learned that much.

"I've got to call Uncle Sandy's room. Thanks, Zach. These have been good days for me. Really good. Thanks."

"Believe me, the pleasure was mine. And this is not goodbye, Pol, you're not going to be able to get rid of me this easily."

I hoped he would be at the airport to meet me at the end of my three weeks in Cyprus. But I thought I'd better not count on it.

I rang Sandy and Rhea's room, and he answered.

"Polly! We arrived about an hour ago and got your message. Glad you were off doing something. Been having a good time?" There was both question and challenge in his voice.

"Yes. I have. I met a guy from California-did Uncle Dennys tell you?"

"He mentioned it."

"I've been off sightseeing and doing things with him."