Phaedra Harrow. She came into my life, or I into hers, at a party held by the Ad Hoc Garbage for Greece Committee. Back in February the New York landscape had consisted of garbage, tons upon tons of garbage, its collection waiting upon the settlement of the sanitation workers’ strike. Somebody is always on strike in New York, and this time it was the garbage men. The city was hip-deep in potato peelings and empty plastic containers, and packs of rats left sinking tenements to forage in the streets. It is perhaps illustrative of the current state of New York that the strike was three days old before anyone noticed the difference.
In any case, a group of prominent Greek-Americans, including one actress and twelve restauranteurs, took it upon themselves to organize the Garbage for Greece operation. It was conceived as a sort of viable alternative to Care packages; for five dollars one could send ten pounds of garbage to Athens, thus helping clean up New York and expressing one’s feelings toward the Greek military junta in one swell foop.
Well. In ten days the strike was settled, with the result that the program never got off the ground (although the garbage did, finally). I don’t think much more would have happened anyway. The main idea had been to garner a little newspaper space – very little, sad to say. But the group had retained its esprit de corps, and the night before Easter the group was throwing a party to celebrate the end of winter. And the party itself was an unqualified success. The membership of the New York chapter of the Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society was present in full force. The founders of the committee bankrupted their respective restaurants to provide food and drink. There was lamb roasted in every possible fashion, pilafs of rice and pine nuts and currants, fluffy and gooey confections of dough and walnuts and honey. And there was wine.
Lord, was there wine! Case upon case of retsina and rhoditys and mavrodaphne, wine to sip along with the food, wine to swallow along with the fiery speeches, wine to swill while George Pappas plucked his oud and Stavros Melchos pounded his copper drum and Kitty Bazerian offered up a furious dance as tribute to the cause of Hellenic (and sexual) freedom.
Phaedra Harrow. She stood in a corner of the cavernous banquet room drinking retsina from a half-gallon jug. Her hair was a glossy dark-brown waterfall flowing down her back almost to her waist, which in turn was small, which the rest of her emphatically was not. She wore what was either the ultimate miniskirt or a rather wide cummerbund. Her legs began precisely where this garment left off; clad snugly in green mesh tights, they ran a well-shaped course to her feet, which were tucked into a pair of green suede toes-turned-up slippers of the sort cobblers make for elves. Her sweater had been designed to drape loosely, but it had not been designed with Phaedra in mind. It fit snugly.
I saw her from halfway across the room, and I stared at her until she looked my way, and our eyes locked as eyes are wont to do. I walked to her. She passed me the jug of wine, and I drank, and she drank, and we looked into each other’s eyes. Hers were the color of her hair, almond-shaped, very large. Mine are nothing remarkable.
“I am Evan Tanner,” I said. “And you are a creature of myth and magic.”
“I am Phaedra.”
“Phaedra,” I said. “Sister to Ariadne, bride to Theseus. And hast thou killed the minotaur? Come to my arms, my beamish boy.”
“O frabjous day,” said Phaedra.
“And would you hang yourself for love of Hippolytus? He’s naught but a loutish lad and hardly worthy of your attentions. Do you believe in love at first sight?”
“And second and third.”
“Phaedra. Easter is upon us, and Phaedra has put an end to winter. Now is the winter of our discotheque – ah, you laugh, but that’s the real meaning of Easter. The rebirth of the world, Christ is risen, and the sap rises in the trees. Do you know that just a dozen blocks from here Easter will be properly celebrated? There’s a Russian Orthodox church where they do this particular holiday superbly. Singing and shouting and joy. Come, my Phaedra. This party is dying around us” – a lie, it went on exuberantly for another five hours – “and we’ve just time to catch the midnight Easter service, and I love you, you know-”
The Russian services were glorious. They were still in progress when we left the church around two. We found a diner on 14th Street and drank coffee with our mouths and each other with our eyes. I asked her where she was from, where she was living. She quoted Omar: “I came like water and like wind I go.” And, more specifically, she said that she did not presently have any place to stay. She had been living with some hippies on East 10th Street but had moved out that afternoon; everyone was high all the time, she said, and nobody really did anything, and she had had enough of that sort of thing.
“Come to my place,” I said.
“All right.”
“Come live with me and be my love.”
“Yes.”
And as our taxi raced from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side, she settled her head on my shoulder. “I have things to tell you,” she said. “I am Phaedra Harrow. I am eighteen years old.”
“Half my age. Do you believe in numerology? I think the implications are fascinating-”
“I am a virgin.”
“That’s extraordinary.”
“I know.”
“Uh-”
Her hand pressed my arm. “I am not anti-sex or frigid or a lesbian or anything. And I don’t want to be seduced or talked into it. People try all the time-”
“That’s not hard to believe.”
“-but it’s not what I want. Not now. I want to see the whole world. I want to find things out, I want to grow. I’m talking too much now. When I drink too much I talk too much. But I want you to understand this. I would like to stay with you, to live with you, if you still want me to. But I don’t want to make love.”
At the time, what I wondered most about this little speech was whether Phaedra herself believed it. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t even believe she was a virgin, for that matter. I had long felt that the species was either mythological or extinct, and that a virgin was a seven-year-old girl who could run faster than her brother.
So all the way home I was certain I knew how we would celebrate the coming of spring. I would convert my couch into a bed, and I would take this fine, sweet, magnificent girl in my arms, and, well, write in your own purple passage.
The best laid plans of mice and men sometimes aren’t. Phaedra certainly wasn’t. At my apartment I was shocked to discover that she really meant just what she had said. She was a virgin, and she intended to remain a virgin for the foreseeable future, and while she would willingly sleep with me with the understanding that we would do no more than share bed space in a platonic fashion, she would not countenance any sort of sexual involvement.
So I made the couch into a bed, all right, and I put her to sleep in it, and then I went into the kitchen and made myself some coffee and read several books without being able to pay much attention to them. A mood, I told myself. Or a monthly plague, or something. It would pass.
But it never did. Phaedra stayed at my apartment for just about a month, and it was as acutely frustrating a month as I have ever spent in my life. She was in every other respect a perfect house guest: absorbing company when I wanted company, perfectly unobstrusive when I had something to do, an ideal companion for Minna, a reasonable cook and housekeeper. If the delight that was Phaedra had been purely sexual, I would have quickly sent her away. If, on the other hand, I had not found her so overpoweringly attractive, I could have quickly adjusted to the sort of brother-sister relationship she wanted to maintain. Unless one possesses the mentality of a rapist, after all, one regards desire as an essentially mutual thing. Lust cannot long be a one-way street.
At least I had always found this to be the case. Now, though, it wasn’t. Every day I found myself wanting the cloistered little bitch more, and every day it became more evident that I was not going to have her. The obvious solution – that I find some other female with a more realistic outlook on life and love – worked better in theory than in practice. I was not, sad to say, a horny adolescent who purely and simply wanted to get his ashes hauled. There are any number of ways to ameliorate such a problem, but mine was something else again. When lechery is specific, substitutes don’t work at all; they make about as much sense as eating a loaf of bread when you’re dying of thirst.
This went on twenty-four hours a day for a month, and if you think it sounds maddening, then perhaps you’re beginning to get the point. After the first night Phaedra had moved into Minna’s room and shared Minna’s bed, so at least I didn’t have to watch her sleep; but even at night the presence of her filled the apartment and addled my brain.
Yet I couldn’t even talk to Phaedra about it, not at much length. Any conversation on the subject served only to heighten my frustration and her guilt feelings without bringing matters any closer to their logical conclusion.
“It’s so wrong,” she would say. “I can’t stay here any-more, Evan. You’ve been wonderful to me and it’s just not fair to you. I’ll move out.”
And then I would have to talk her into staying. I was afraid if she moved out I would lose her. Sooner or later, I thought, she would either give in or I would cease to want her. It did not happen quite that way, however. Instead, I was like a man with an injured foot, limping automatically through life without being constantly conscious of the pain.
Hell. I wanted her and didn’t get her, and by the end of the month I had grown used to this state of affairs, and then one day she said that she had to go away, that she was leaving New York. She wasn’t sure where she was going. I felt a dual sense of loss and liberation. She was half my age, I told myself, and desperately neurotic, and her neurosis seemed to be contagious, and much as I loved her I was bloody well rid of her. So she moved out, and for a while the apartment was lonely, and then it wasn’t. There was, briefly, a girl named Sonya.
And now it was the middle of October, the one month of the year when New York is at its best. The air has a crispness to it, and the wind changes direction and blows most of the pollution away, and on good days the sky has a distinct bluish cast to it. Spring had been drizzly and summer impossible and it stood to reason that winter, when it came, would be as bad as it always is, but this particular October was the sort they had in mind when they wrote “Autumn in New York,” and I had been looking forward to it for months.
So before the week was out I was on the other side of the Atlantic.
Chapter 2
On my fourth day in London it rained. It had been doing this more or less constantly since my arrival, sometimes with fog as an accompaniment, sometimes without. I got back to the Stokes’ flat a few minutes after six, rerolled the umbrella that Nigel Stokes insisted I carry, and went into the kitchen. Julia was hovering at the stove, and I hovered beside her, as much for the stove’s warmth as for hers.
“I’m just getting tea,” she said. “Nigel’s shaving, I think. It’s desperate out, isn’t it?”