If Sylvie Had Nine Lives Read online

“All right, Syl, you have more to say.” He squeezed harder now across her fists. “Say it.” He leaned in, his warm breath blasting her face, the sweet of the ginger ale gone sour. “Say it!”

  “No!” she shouted. She would not put words to the unfinished gesture, his hand rising toward that lock of Julia’s hair as if to take it between thumb and finger and give it a tender twist. It was years since he’d raised his hand in such an unthought way to her own stray locks. “No.” If she were to give words to how he’d reached before he hesitated, there would be no setting that moment aside.

  “Come on, Syl. How do I know what you’re up to when I’m away? I don’t. But I know we’re us.”

  “Jesus, Erik.”

  Revelers ran by, mummies and vampires on the way from one party to the next. Syl half-expected them, wanted them, to rock the car and press their gruesome faces against the windshield, bounce on the hood, leer in at the windows, give her an excuse to burn away from the curb and send them screaming in their sweaty masks and their ripped up sheets. But they scurried on past. Hell anyway! She shifted into gear and stomped the accelerator, and the tires spun and caught. She managed a crazy right turn at the end of the block, almost in control, but then the wheels jumped the curb and the headlights shone on the rough grey bark of an elm and the right front grill crunched hard against it. Erik’s head whacked against the side window and Syl’s slapped back onto the headrest.

  “What the Jesus hell, Syl!”

  The moment the truck slammed into the tree was the moment she realized she’d had every intention of crashing into something. Either then, or it was hours ago, as she’d rummaged through the Christmas box looking for the bird, letting tin snowflakes and coloured lights and plexiglass icicles clatter on the hardwood.

  “My truck.” He raised a hand and she shrank from it, but he wasn’t preparing to strike, he was only groping into emptiness.

  What did he mean with his Jesus hell? Why should he be surprised? It had to end in a wreck, and this was the sort of wreck that was available just now.

  “My truck.”

  She got out and leaned against the tree. One side of her back blazed with pain, shoulder to hip.

  He came around to her. “Get back in. Come on.”

  “No. I’ll spend the night here.”

  “Where? With Calum and Mitch?”

  “Everyone’s got a couch.”

  “Okay, sleep on someone’s couch. Better yet, don’t sleep. Better yet, lie there and try to decide who it is makes you the madder: me, or yourself.”

  Standing clear, she waited as he backed and turned, as the wheels thumped off the boulevard and he drove away, one headlight out, bumper thunking. She sat down on the grass beside the scattered fragments of the broken headlamp, sweating cold into her bra, damp silk chilly against her breasts. She let out a giggle of loss and looked to the sky. She would have liked to catch sight of a constellation, any constellation, but there were clouds and there were streetlights, and her gaze found only a couple of pallid pinpricks. Ah well, she’d never really had a handle on the stars. Inherited myths. “Make your own,” she said out loud. “Make your own myth.” She said the next bit out loud too: “I wonder how that’s done.” She was wearing a little smile she sometimes put on to fool herself into confidence. Erik’s truck was a couple of blocks away now, two small taillights, dwindling.

  Nekyia

  OUTSIDE THE GATES OF HELL Sylvie bought a swingy green beach dress with swirls of tiny silver beads, a fling of bling to match her mood. Two full days of skipping out in northern Greece. Yesterday she’d been one of three academics on a panel of mentors, sharing mid-career wisdom with scholars so fresh you could make a salad of them and watch to see who’d wilt when the vinegar rained down. Day after tomorrow she would lecture on the use of the mask in classical theatre. But these two days between were all about holiday, and Will was here. “Where there’s a Will …” he’d said yesterday when she asked if they might drive off in his little red rental.

  As legend had it, the journeys of both Odysseus and Pindar had brought them here to the Nekromanteion to consult the Oracle of the Dead. Glory days. Of late, the site was apparently little visited; Sylvie and Will had seen only one other seeker as they wandered between the massive cyclopean walls wondering at the puzzle of polygon masonry. In the cavern below ground, where twice Will knocked his head on the low arches, Sylvie whispered, “Anyone home?” and Will whispered, “Not on your life.”

  They climbed back up the steep iron stairs into sunlight and went down the slope to the parking lot below the ruins. At the edge of the lot a lone outpost of enterprise shimmered in the heat — a thatch-roofed stall where beach dresses hung limp on plastic hangers; T-shirts, too, in four colours with flames rising from block letters: I HAVE BEEN TO THE GATES OF HELL.

  “A shame, such pandering.”

  “Don’t blame the vendor,” Will said. Sunlight silvered his curls, what was left of them. “He has to buy groceries too.” He lifted his sunglasses for a moment, the watered blue of his eyes familiar from all those years ago, and lovely to see. The rest of his face was, well, years older, and somehow less than itself. “Blame the people who buy that shit.” He gestured toward the rack where Sylvie had found her dress. His sunglasses settled back into place.

  She stuck her tongue out at him, feeling like a teenager — uncertainty, ache, squirming joy. She folded the bead-spangled dress, wrapped it around the black ceramic sheep, raku-fired and fragile, the size of her closed fist, that she’d carried across two continents and an ocean, and stowed the bundle in her shoulder bag. She’d meant to sit on the hillside near the ruins, alone and quiet, and break the sheep open. Leave the shining fragments in the grass, an offering to the oracle in exchange for guidance. That had been her plan when she packed her shoulder bag in Vancouver, but this morning when she’d woken at Villa Stavros, with Will in the next room, the urgency had ebbed. She knew, now, the answer to her question, had known since yesterday when he’d appeared, looking up at her from third row centre in the lecture hall, waiting for her to recognize him. The past made physical.

  Athena Rocks: Women Mentoring Women.

  Panel at the 63rd gathering of the International Association for Studies in Classics. University of Ioannina, 2004.

  Graduate-student moderator: This panel, Dr. Fletcher, is meant to give students like me the chance to gain practical wisdom from women like yourself, who’ve achieved a measure of, um, staying power. I’ll begin with a question most of us can relate to: How do you keep at it, when, on occasion, things get tough?

  Sylvie: Yoga every morning, without fail.

  [Polite laughter]

  Sylvie: It’s good that you laugh. A sense of humour is essential. [There are at least five men in the audience. What are they doing at a panel for women mentoring women? Looking to get laid?] But about the yoga: I’m serious. Patience. Practice.

  Student: Good point, Dr. Fletcher. But can you tell us what made you decide on an academic career?

  Sylvie: I had a job, just out of high school, in the basement of a university library. [That face — third row — no, it can’t be.] It was not all that interesting, this job. A way to get by, was all.

  Student [clearing her throat]: So you worked to put yourself through your undergrad —

  Sylvie: Wait, now. I was at that job five years before I even enrolled. I had several, um, delays. [Time off without pay. Self-loathing.] At lunchtime I would pick up one of the journals from the stack on my desk and read while I ate my sandwich. The Humanities, mostly. Within that, Classics. Day after day for years. The more I read, the more I began to believe, finally, that I could do this too, study these things and have my own ideas about them.

  Student [hesitating]: Uh-huh, and —

  Sylvie: Which had used to seem impossible. [Pauses.] I advise you to take a much more direct approach. My, uh, detours didn’t really — [A certain person I disliked and even feared but went ahead and fucked anyway] — what I want to say
is, get down to it: grad studies, post docs, those first positions. Keep at it. Avoid the sort of delay I let myself fall into. [Aunt Merry, her face gone so pale that the small vein at her cheekbone stood out, a lace of red, saying, What did you expect, dearie?]

  SYLVIE BOUGHT A passion fruit pop from the vendor’s ice-lined camp cooler. She held the sweating bottle against her cheek and let a chill drop of condensation slide into the crease under her chin. He dropped her change into her open hand and she said, Efharisto. She was somewhat familiar with the language, though not, as she’d explained to her host at the university yesterday, “on speaking terms”; a reader, not a speaker. All those years of picking her way through passages of Homer and the tragedies in Ancient Greek, earning fleeting epiphanies as the ambiguities of language swelled before her and she saw how the texts had been — were still being — reinterpreted, misinterpreted, overinterpreted; and this must be true of all of life as well, and wasn’t that a worry and a wonder and a joy? What, for instance, did πάθος, pathos, really mean? Press the word like a plum and meanings burst the sides.

  As Will made his own transaction with the vendor in rudimentary English, Sylvie lifted the strap of her bag from her left shoulder, swung it around and settled it on her right. She was certain, and she wasn’t. It would wait for another day, but she would still have her visit with the oracle, if only to lock in a decision already made. Any scholar worth her parchment will triangulate.

  They walked in the heat across the stony lot. “Your little red Hyundai looks like a hard candy on wheels.” Not an easy car to take seriously, but a good fit for the narrow roads. Sylvie looked again toward the ruins. She didn’t give a blue fart that scholars had come round to saying this wasn’t the site of the legends after all — more likely a large farm holding with walls to keep the barbarians out. Where was the fun in that? Where was the use? Better to imagine the ancients and their pilgrimages to what they took to be the entrance to Hades’ Underworld, home of Demeter’s lost girl. She’d hoped against logic to trick herself into seeing a flash of white, a fleeting glimpse of Persephone’s pale arm or ankle in the vaulted hall below, a hint of a daughter lost, then found. But no, just condensation on the walls and the smell of mould.

  Once past the village, Will turned off the main road. “Let’s explore.”

  “I’ll have to come back.”

  “To Greece?”

  “To the gates of Hell.” In a drawstring pouch inside her carry-all was a do-it-yourself ritual kit that, along with the raku sheep, would bide its time: two small stones that once in a while Sylvie heard tap against each other; a plastic bottle with a screw-top lid; and a bubble pack of Gravol — a couple of tablets might be enough to get her half-stoned, now that the strongest drug she did on a regular basis was Alberta rye.

  Will slowed and shifted for a sharp left. “You told me not to call it the gates of Hell. Cheapens it, didn’t you say?”

  As the car swung through the turn, Sylvie’s head bumped the passenger window. “Yikes, it’s like a maze here. Anything could come around the curve.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve always had a sixth sense for driving.”

  “But this is Greece.”

  Will made a raspberry, loud and wet. Spittle shone on his lower lip.

  Oleander bloomed tall and pink and powdered along the roadside. Their wheels raised a silver dust to coat the spear-like leaves with yet another layer. Now a sharp right, and Sylvie’s stomach swirled.

  “Why do you need to come back?” he said.

  “The same reason Odysseus came. The living ask for guidance from the dead.” She thought he might smirk, but he nodded.

  “Oh, look left!” she said. A whitewashed box on spindly legs at the side of the road; a small blue dome of a roof with a cross atop; a tiny arched doorway and a picture of a saint looking out. “Pretty little shrine.”

  “Oh God, somebody died right here.”

  “Or someone wants to thank a saint for saving them.”

  “Sylvie the mentor. Say some other wise things.”

  She fished in her carry-all, fingered open the drawstring pouch, worked a Gravol free of its bubble-card. “I’m not wise, wise guy, I’m knowledgeable.”

  “Say some knowledge, then. Some of your ancient Greek what-have-you. I could use it.”

  The tablet lodged at the back of Sylvie’s throat, and she swallowed twice. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Suit yourself, then.”

  Thirty years ago hardly a week went by that they didn’t know each other’s movements; now these shy failures of conversation. A burp rose past the lodged Gravol. “Okay, no, listen,” she said. “Tragedies. In classical tragedy you never saw death on stage. Blood, death, mutilation — it all happened out of sight.”

  “Drama without drama.”

  “No, no. Oedipus stabs out his own eyes — that happens off stage but then here he comes wearing his gory mask, blood running out the eye sockets. It’s the result you have to deal with. Which is so much more affecting than today’s big-screen violence.”

  “Did I just catch you practising for your presentation?”

  “I’m always practising for my presentation.”

  “Say some character actually dies off stage, then. How’s the audience supposed to know?”

  “Hue and cry. Wailing and gnashing of teeth among the loved ones.”

  They rounded a shrubbery-obscured curve to see two cars coming at them side by side with not a metre between them. Sylvie landed her right foot hard against the mat. As she tromped her ghost brake, Will tromped the gas. He made it, barely, to a break in the roadside bush and stopped there while the two cars blurred past. Sylvie and Will sat staring ahead, taming their trembles. Oleander was plastered flat against the glass on the passenger side like a painting in pink and green. Sylvie slid the window open and a fragrant branch of leaves and blossoms spilled in.

  “It’s gorgeous!” said Will. “You’re gorgeous. Look at you.”

  “I’m alive. That makes me at least feel gorgeous.” She bent her head to sniff a blossom.

  “You’ll get a bug up your nose. You can die that way.”

  She saw how he wanted her to laugh, so she did.

  He laughed too. “I’d have to build a pretty little shrine.”

  Student: Academic work, Dr. Fletcher, calls for a measure of confidence. Have you always been a naturally confident person?

  Sylvie [laughs out loud]: Think about that young woman dropping sandwich crumbs onto scholarly journals and trying to imagine being bold enough to write her own words. [These young women in the lecture hall, they have the world by the tail.]

  Listen: I built my career the same way I built myself, the only way I knew how. [Looks toward the third row.] Little by little by little and mistake by mistake, and each mistake a lesson.

  Student: For instance?

  Sylvie: For instance, I once offered an honest critique of the department head’s presentation at an international conference. He had, after all, asked me to please be frank and he even bought me a goodwill latté after I’d said my piece. That sort of honesty, I learned, will erase your chance at a merit increase even though — [laughs just enough to show this is no laughing matter] — even though you’ve had two articles accepted for publication within the year, and a revise-and-resubmit for a third. [For a further instance: doing your roommate’s fiancé can leave you royally fucked for nine months at least and somewhat fucked over for a lifetime after that.] [Clears throat.] Know who your friends are. Know who is not your friend. Chances are you’ll find more of the second than the first. All of you, I’m sure, will be more swift about it than I managed to be. [Will they? Do they, in fact, have the world by the tail?]

  SYLVIE AND WILL ate lunch on a terrace overlooking the Ionian Sea, side by side on a loveseat so both would have the panorama of the bay and the half-dozen white-sailed boats. Yogurt, fruit, walnuts, bread, Greek coffee. He turned his head to the side and popped something into his mouth. When Sylvie raised her eye
brows he said, “Vitamins.” Wind played across their faces. The sweat and stink of near-miss driving had soaked Will’s blue button-down, and he’d changed in the restaurant washroom to a black T-shirt, which he wore inside-out the way some of Sylvie’s students wore theirs.

  Beyond the basic catching up, including his dozen-plus years of working for a small press in Edmonton and her long clamber over the boulders of academe to arrive, finally, on what seemed a fine plateau to rest awhile, they’d found little to say, which seemed not right. They hadn’t touched on personal relationships or lack thereof, an avoidance between them like a balloon and neither one with the nerve to wield a pin. She nudged his arm with her elbow the way she used to do when she was nineteen. “You haven’t said what made you Google me? Fess up. Sorting through the past in the wake of a breakup?”

  “Ouch, but that’s a tired old trope to accuse me of. Cusack in High Fidelity. Besides, we never —”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’m doing the new trope. Searching out persons of note from my past, the nice and the nasty, so I’ll know whether to be gleeful or envious.”

  “What was it, then, when you saw I’d landed at UBC?”

  “Suppose I say astonished.”

  “You could be accused of stalking, you know, showing up without warning so far from home.”

  “I thought you might like the surprise.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “Man!” Will said, looking at the sun-spangled sea. “What could be more beautiful?” He wrung his thick white napkin in his hands as if answers, not to that question but to others, might drip out of the fabric and onto his lap.

  Kalos, Sylvie thought. Would that be the word? The waiter stopped to top up their water. Sylvie shaded her eyes with her hand. “Can you tell me something?”

  He remained motionless, bottle in hand.

  “Can you tell me the Greek word for beautiful?”

  “In what sense do you mean?” He widened his arms. “Beautiful like mass on Sunday? Beautiful like watching your child who is sleeping? It depends.”