Free White Vespa by Kevin Oderman Page B

again about the gym on the paraléia. Paul hated gyms; the smell reminded him of grade school locker rooms and the rough kids he hadn’t always been able to charm. They’d been too stupid to charm, the kind of kids who burnt circles on the inside of their arms with cigarettes just to show how tough, how insensitive they could be. As if he’d doubted it. But he thought maybe he’d have to put up with the smell if he wanted to stay the slow decline of his body. Life was going to be less fun when he wasn’t so handsome, he knew it. At least, he thought, he’d still have the money.
    He heard a rap at the door and called out, “It’s open.”
    Yórgos pushed through the door but hesitated on the threshold.
    â€œIt’s all right, okay, we’re all boys here.”
    Yórgos stumbled coming in and red-faced set the two plastic bags on the table. He waited while Paul searched the shorts he’d dropped at the foot of the bed when he’d gotten in. Without Pru. He’d ditched Pru and “a Mary” when it became obvious they were going to want to talk. They shouldn’t have wanted that; they weren’t good at it.
    He found the money and gave Yórgos too much, not asking how much the watermelon and half dozen oranges had actually cost.
    â€œâ€™ Phristó, ” Yórgos said, backing toward the door.
    â€œWait a minute.” Paul shook a few cigarettes from an open pack and dropped them in Yórgos’s outstretched hand.
    â€œCareful,” he said, “they’re habit forming.” Paul didn’t think Yórgos understood, but it amused him to deliver the warning.
    Still, Yórgos nodded as if he did understand and said, See you, as he sprinted through the door, leaving it open behind him.

    Paul shut the door and started in on push-ups. Even in sets of ten he did them badly, too quickly and reaching for the floor with his chin. He thought he’d try to win Anne over, as a little experiment, a test. He could understand her resentment. When their father had died, he’d got all the money. She’d got none. She hadn’t come to the funeral; she hadn’t even inquired about the terms of the will. But he knew their father had left her nothing but an old dictionary with a bookmark tucked into the pages, to show where he’d underlined one word, liar . When his father’s dismayed lawyer had disclosed the bequest, Paul laughed. Thinking about it now, he shook his head. Such are the ironies, he thought, snorting. What had their parents expected? That they wouldn’t lie to avoid the switch? As far as he could see, they had run the house as a virtual school for liars. He’d graduated. Anne had flunked out.

Twenty-three
    16 Sept.
    Â 
    Walking the road from Nikiá, walking alone as I’ve grown used to, I was thinking about silence, not the silence of landscape but the silence of the human mouth kept shut. I was thinking about the religious, how some take vows of silence, and what it might get them. I thought of the wonderful expressiveness of a mute girl, a girl Max befriended when he was only eight or nine, how her lips seemed always about to speak or seemed as if they had just spoken and what she was going to say or had just said was all illuminated by her lips, how they would have shaped the words if there had been words to shape.
    But maybe that was an adult’s response; I saw it in other adults, other parents come to collect their kids at school, the way they hung on that girl’s lips. Max, I think, did not, nor the other kids who called her friend; they looked in her eyes, and something implicit passed back and forth between them. Maybe silence was still a familiar to them, and all that could be said with the eyes was quite enough.
    Now, back, pencil scratching on these white sheets, I know it is Max’s own silence that haunts me, that my mind ran to the girl to keep free of Max. It was Max who