Chapter 58
High summer. Greece.
A craft appears on the horizon. He recognizes it.
“Gianni Agnelli,” he says.
“You can tell from here?”
“Lines of the boat.”
We’re at the house on the island. He steps to the edge of the terrace. “It’s Agnelli.” He is annoyed. “I’ll go down.”
“Are you going to tell him I’m here?” I say as he starts toward the car.
He looks back. “Is that what you want?” I don’t answer. He smiles. “I didn’t think so. I’ll manage it.”
I wait on the unfinished terrace. Everything about these last days has felt that way—half composed, surreal. The island, Skorpios, is like nothing I’ve seen. Seventy-four acres. He had utilities laid in, two hundred varieties of trees planted, a villa built, an airstrip, a dock. He bought a second island nearby with a mountain on it to pipe fresh water to Skorpios. Sand shipped from Salamis to make a sandy beach. He has told me these things since I’ve been his guest here. He doesn’t ever spend the night on the island. The rooms in the house were built for visitors. He only sleeps on the Christina, moored in the bay off the coast.
From the terrace, I can see them below. Ari leaves the car running, the door open to signal he has no intent to socialize. He strides up to the boat as two men disembark. He was right. One is Agnelli. I recognize him now, the lean posture, that ease in how he stands. They look small from where I sit on the cliff above the trees. I shift my chair, so even if they were to look up, I’d fall into the shadow of the umbrella. Their voices rise. Ari’s telling them to leave. Agnelli and the other man get back into the boat and cast off. Agnelli looks up at the house. His eyes scan the terrace like he knows someone is there, but from that distance he can’t pick me out from the lines of the house. I am wood, stone, fabric, tile.
I’ve been in Greece for four days. I don’t want to go back. Not yet.
At home, Bobby is cementing his intent to run for the presidential nomination on an anti-war, social-justice platform. All summer, he’s spoken out in support of Blacks, even as waves of unrest sweep up from the South. News of unemployment and fall-apart housing. Riots erupt, leaving a wake of the dead. In Newark, a Black cabdriver is beaten by police, a neighborhood burned to the ground. It’s felt like the end of the world. At the Cape, the Kennedy machine is revving up again—meetings, campaign strategy sessions, rings left by their drinks on coffee tables, cigarette butts in the ashtrays. I found myself in the crush of it—nowhere I wanted to be. I’ve begun to plan a longer trip for this fall, to visit the ruins in Angkor Wat. The kind of trip I used to take, before I met Jack, the kind of adventure I dreamed about when I was young. I’ve wanted that lately—to find my way back into who I was then, those things that once brought me alive.
It was a July afternoon in Hyannis Port when Onassis called. He was coming to New York for two days. He asked if I’d be in town.
“There’s a dinner that weekend up here,” I said.
A pause, then, “So I won’t see you?”
“Not that weekend.”
“When are you coming to Greece?”
He always asked that question. This time I answered it differently.
“Three weeks from now,” I said. “Would that work for you?”
I told no one, not even Bobby. Definitely not Bobby.
I sleep with Onassis on the Christina. He makes love to me until my body aches, my mind split apart, gone. Everything is ended in those hours. I am only a body, a woman with no past.
Afterward, we lie on the bed in the cooler air through the open window. The dark gathers. The stars burn through. We stay up past midnight and he tells me stories of his childhood, about his adored mother, Penelope, who died, and his grandmother, who taught him that men have to forge their own destiny. He tells me how, as a boy before the occupation, he loved the port of Smyrna—the smells of coffee, fresh baked bread, pine tar, jasmine, the sounds of ship engines and folk music in the streets. He tells me how forty years ago, in August 1927, Pascia’s troops moved into the region. His father was arrested and thrown into a camp. Ari was captured and lied to the military about his age, pretending to be only sixteen. The soldiers let him go, and he devised a simple plan to free his father. It was only after he’d helped his father escape that Ari, with two hundred dollars sewn into a hidden pocket in his coat, left Greece for Argentina. A third-class ticket belowdecks in the ship’s hold, packed with other immigrants. In Buenos Aires, he worked as a telephone operator and fell in love with a woman who opened the doors of the city, then broke his heart and left him for another man.
“So curious,” he says, “the immigrant’s sense of always being split between two homes, two lands, two languages. It never leaves you. The country you came from and the feeling of being divided. You’re half past, half future. And when you leave the place you’re from, as I did, young, in the midst of war, for what might be forever, you know that, even if you return, the home you go back to will never be the same as what you knew.”
It’s unexpected—the vulnerable mix in his voice of passion and loss, grit, failure, hardscrabble dream. He smiles at me.
“This surprises you. You thought I was someone else. Is that it? Someone who just goes after what he wants until he gets it, who feels nothing, then moves on.”
“I never said that.”
“You don’t have to.”
My body is half under the sheet. He runs his hand along the edge of my breast. Silence then.
“You’re going to leave?” he says.
“I’ll come back.”
“When?”
“In a few months.”
“Or next year.”
“Before that.”
“Or the year after. Or seven years from now. It doesn’t matter. I’ll be here.”
His mouth is on me again. His hands everywhere. I lie back on the pillow, breathless, the inside of my left thigh sore from where his body did not mold easily to mine. It will ache in the morning. That weird aftermath of pleasure mixed with pain. I will be exhausted. The sun will wake me. I’ll have coffee and toast. I’ll swim, then sleep on the little beach, or on deck, somewhere in the sun.
I tell him that when I came to Greece before, I found it almost too beautiful, dangerous somehow, and when I left, a part of me was secretly relieved. Isn’t that odd?
“And now?” he says.
“It feels different to me now.”
He tells me his assistant Kiki describes me as a cat.
I laugh. “What did you say?”
“I told her someday you’ll bring John and Caroline to visit, and I will take them fishing.”
“Anything else?”
“No,” he says. “But I’d like that.”
I smile.
“Come back in October,” he says.
“I’m planning a trip to Cambodia. Apart from that, I’ll be with the children.”
“Stop in Greece on your way back from Cambodia.”
“I’ll have to see.”
“Are you going alone?”
“David Ormsby-Gore is going with me.”
He nods. “Safe.”
“Kind.”
“Is that a front? Or is he the real life behind the front?”
“David is a good friend, a front, and real life as well.”
“Three for three,” he says.
“All true.”
“No. Truth is what we eat and sleep and want and fuck and dream.”
I swim in the rain the day before I leave. A sudden storm. He told me it would come. Rain was rare in summer; the sky had been so clear and I did not believe him. We almost argued about it that morning. Then the wind changed. Vertical bands of clouds blew in off the sea, wrapping the island. I knew then he was right. The storm would come. It would not clear. The rain would last all day.
I swim in it. Heavy drops strike the surface, bounce, shot through with air and daylight. I feel a curious delight watching them and a strange splitting grief for what I can’t yet name.