The Names

We found a room above a grocery store in a beaten seaside town with a rubble beach, cliffs dropping sheer to the sea. I was glad to be there. We sat each to a bed in the darkish room, attempting to put ourselves at a mental distance from the rocking car, the lurches and turns of the day. It took a while to believe we were off that last flooded track.The old grocer and his wife invited us down to di

What do you know about them?They weren't Greek.How do you know that?You see it right away. Faces, clothes, ma

In the morning, a couple of minutes out of town, I saw a dark shape come out of the scrub near the road, an instant with a speed and weight to it, something near the right front wheel, and I hit it, a dull sound trailing off behind us, and kept driving."What was it?”"A dog," he said."I saw it too late. It ran right into us.”He said nothing."Do you want to go back?”"What's the point?" he said."Maybe it's not dead. We can find somewhere to take it.”"Where could we take it? What's the point? Let's keep driving. I want to drive. That's all.”The rain was a torrent now and people started coming out of the fields, people I hadn't known were there, mostly the old and very young, shrouded in coats and shawls, riding donkeys, walking head down, leaving on tractors, whole families on tractors with umbrellas and blankets and plastic sheeting held over them as they crowded between the massive tires, moving slowly toward home.

I sat in the office alone, sending telexes, doing numbers on the calculator. It seemed to me that ever since the first of those island nights I'd been engaged in an argument with Owen Brademas. I wasn't sure what the subject was exactly but felt for the first time a weakening in my position, a danger.I also felt I was ahead of myself, doing things that didn't correspond to some reasonable and familiar model. I would have to wait to understand.Why had I gone to the Mani, knowing they might be there, and why with Tap? Was he my safeguard, my escape?I read reports, drafted letters. Mrs. Helen arrived, chiding me for being in so early, for looking so worn-out. She went to the alcove to make tea, Zou Zou Bop Golden tea, which someone had brought back from Egypt.I worked until ten that night, enjoying it, finding a deep and steady pleasure in the paperwork, the details, the close-to-childlike play of the telex, of tapping out messages. Even putting my desk in order was a satisfaction and odd comfort. Neat stacks for a change. Labeled folders. Mrs. Helen had devised for herself an entire theology of neatness and decorum, with texts and punishments. I could understand, faintly.I went home and made soup. Tap had left his hat behind. I resolved to stop drinking, although I'd had only a couple of glasses of wine in the last week or so. It was a setting of limits I thought I needed. A firmness and clarity, a sense that I could define the shape of things.

Lindsay Whitman Keller, eating an olive.Voices around us, some vague occasion of the Mainland Bank, a suite at the Hilton. People stood with their hands in the air, eating, drinking, smoking, or they clutched their own elbows or engaged with others in prolonged and significant handshakes."Is this an assigned duty?" I said."Spouses have no rights. Good thing I have my teaching job.”"Good thing David's not a hard-liner.”"This one I had to attend. Something to do with the future of Turkey. Unofficially, of course.”"Has the bank decided to let them live?”"Banks plural.”"Even more ominous.”"What's your excuse?" she said."Hard liquor. I've been working day and night and not minding at all. This worried me.”Two men seemed to be barking at each other but it was only laughter, a story about a plane skidding off a runway in Khartoum. The bank wives stood mainly in groups of three or four in their corporate aura, tolerant, durable, suffused with a light of middling privilege that was almost sensual in its effect, in the way that a woman's arrangements with a man are a worldly thing, bargained over and handled and full of knowingness. The forced suburbia of these women's lives, the clubby limits of the 1950s in some dead American pasturage, here was a dislocation with certain seductive attributes and balances. The duty-free car, the furlough allowance, the housing allowance, the living allowance, the education allowance, the tax equilization, the foreign assignment premium. Often the women stood with a man in attendance, a flawlessly groomed Pakistani or a Lebanese in a well-tailored suit. Bankers from poor countries dressed like military men. They looked alert and precise and slightly in pain and they spoke a brisk and assured English with a blend of shortened forms. JDs were Jordanian dinars, DJs were di