The Golden Mean: A Novel Page 3

  “Had a good time?” I say. “Out again tonight?” Jealousy pinches my sentences, but I can’t stop myself. The pendulum swings hard left today.

  “Come with me,” he says. I tell him I have to work, and he groans. “Come with me,” he says. “You can be my guide.”

  “I can be your guide here,” I say.

  “I thought I caught a glimpse of the number three last night, by the flower stall in the market,” he says. “It was hiding behind a sprig of orange blossom.”

  “Known for shyness, the number three,” I say.

  “Is Pella much bigger than you remember?”

  “I wouldn’t remember a thing,” I say truthfully. “The city has probably tripled in size. I got lost this morning trying to find the baths just here in the palace.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to find your father’s old house?”

  “I think it’s part of the garrison now. Shall I show you the baths now that I know the way? We can work after that. You still have a headache, anyway.”

  “Headache,” Callisthenes confirms. “Bad wine. Bad everything, really. Or not bad, but—vulgar. Have you seen the houses? They’re huge. And gaudy. Like these mosaics everywhere. The way they talk, the way they eat, the music, the dancing, the women. It’s like there’s all this money everywhere and they don’t know what to do with it.”

  “I don’t remember it that way,” I say. “I remember the cold, and the snow. I’ll bet you’ve never seen snow. I remember the toughness of the people. The best lamb, mountain lamb.”

  “I saw something last night,” Callisthenes says. “I saw a man kill another man over a drink. He held him by the shoulder and punched him in the gut over and over until the man bled out of his ears and his mouth and his eyes, weeping blood, and then he died. Everyone laughed. They just laughed and laughed. Men, boys. What kind of a people is that?”

  “You tell me,” I say.

  “Animals,” Callisthenes says. He’s looking me in the eye, not smiling. A rare passion from such a mild creature.

  “And what separates man from the animals?”

  “Reason. Work. The life of the mind.”

  “Out again tonight?” I ask.

  THE NEXT MORNING I return to Arrhidaeus in his room. His face is tear-stained and snot-crusted; his nurse gazes out a window and pretends not to hear me enter. The boy himself smiles, sweet and frail, when he sees me. I wish him good morning and he says, “Uh.”

  “Any progress?” I ask the nurse.

  “In one day?”

  I help myself to a cloak hanging on the back of a chair, which I drape over the boy’s shoulders. “Where are your shoes?”

  The nurse is watching now. He’s a prissy little shit, and sees his moment.

  “He can’t walk far,” he says. “He doesn’t have winter shoes, just sandals. He never goes outdoors, really.”

  “Then we’ll have to borrow yours,” I tell him.

  Eyebrows up, “And what will I wear?”

  “You can wear Arrhidaeus’s sandals since you won’t be coming.”

  “I’m obliged to accompany him everywhere.”

  I can’t tell if he’s angry with me or frightened of being caught away from his charge. He glances at Arrhidaeus and reaches automatically to wipe the hair from the boy’s face. Arrhidaeus flinches from his touch. So, they’ve had that kind of morning.

  “Give me your fucking shoes,” I say.

  Arrhidaeus wants to take my hand as we walk. “No, Arrhidaeus,” I tell him. “Children hold hands. Men walk by themselves, you see?”

  He cries a little, but stops when he sees where I’m leading him. He gibbers something I can’t make out.

  “That’s right,” I say. “We’ll take a walk into town, shall we?”

  He laughs and points at everything: the soldiers, the gate, the grey swirl of the sky. The soldiers look interested, but no one stops us. I wonder how often he leaves his room, and if they even know who he is.

  “Where is your favourite place to go?”

  He doesn’t understand. But when he sees a horse, a big stallion led through the gate, he claps his hands and gibbers some more.

  “Horses? You like horses?”

  Through the gate I’ve caught a glimpse of the town—people, horses, the monstrous houses that so offended my nephew—and I realize my heart’s not ready for it, so I’m happy enough to lead him back to the stables. In the middle of a long row of stalls I find our animals, Tweak and Tar and Lady and Gem and the others. Arrhidaeus is painfully excited and when he stumbles into me I wonder from the smell if he’s pissed himself. The other horses look sidelong, and only big black Tar takes much of an interest in us, lifting his head when he recognizes me and ambling over for some affection. I show Arrhidaeus how to offer him a carrot from his open hand, but when the horse touches him, he shrieks and flinches away. I take his hand and guide it back, getting him to stroke the blaze on Tar’s forehead. He wants to use his knuckles, and when I look closely I see his palm is scored with open sores, some kind of rash. I’ll have to find him an ointment.

  “Do you ride?” I ask him.

  “No, sir,” someone calls. It’s a groom who’s been mucking out the straw. “That other one brings him here sometimes and lets him sit in a corner. He’ll sit quiet for hours that way. He hasn’t got the balance for riding, though. Doesn’t need another fall on the head, does he?”

  I lead Tar out into the yard and saddle him. It’s raining again. I get Arrhidaeus’s foot in my cupped hands and then he’s stuck. He’s stopped laughing, at least, and looks at me for help. I try to give him a boost up, but he’s too weak to heft himself over the horse’s back. He hops a little on one foot with the other cocked up in the air, giving me a view of his wet crotch.

  “Here,” the groom says, and rolls over a barrel for the boy to stand on.

  Between the two of us we get him up alongside the horse and persuade him to throw a leg over the animal’s back.

  “Now you hug him,” the groom says, and leans forward with his arms curved around an imaginary mount. Arrhidaeus collapses eagerly onto Tar’s back and hugs him hard. I try to get him to sit back up, but the groom says, “No, no. Let the animal walk a bit and get him used to the movement.”

  I lead Tar slowly around the yard while Arrhidaeus clings to him full-body, his face buried in the mane. The groom watches.

  “Is he a good horse?” he calls to Arrhidaeus.

  The boy smiles, eyes closed. He’s in bliss.

  “Look at that, now,” the groom says. “Poor brained bastard. Did he piss himself?”

  I nod.

  “There, now.” He leads Tar back to the barrel and helps Arrhidaeus back down. I had expected the boy to resist but he seems too stunned to do anything but what he’s told.

  “Would you like to come back here?” I ask him. “Learn to ride properly, like a man?” He claps his hands. “When are we least in the way?” I ask the groom.

  He waves the question away. His black eyes are bright and curious, assessing, now Tar, now Arrhidaeus. “I don’t know you,” he says, without looking at me properly. He slaps Tar fondly on the neck.

  “I’m the prince’s physician.” I rest a hand on Arrhidaeus’s shoulder. “And his tutor. Just for a few days.”

  The groom laughs, but not so that I dislike him for it.

  EURIPIDES WROTE THE Bacchae at the end of his life. He left Athens disgusted by his plays’ losses at the competitions, so the story goes, and accepted an invitation from King Archelaus to come to Pella and work for a more appreciative (less discriminating) audience. He died that winter from the cold.

  Plot: Angry that his godhead is denied by the Theban royal house, Dionysus decides to take his revenge on the priggish young King Pentheus. Pentheus has Dionysus imprisoned. The god, in turn, offers to help him spy on the revels of his female followers, the Bacchantes. Pentheus, both fascinated and repulsed by the wild behaviour of these women, agrees to allow himself to be disguised as one of them to inf
iltrate their revels on Mount Kithairon. The disguise fails, and Pentheus is ripped to pieces by the Bacchantes, including his own mother, Agave. She returns to Thebes with his head, believing she has killed a mountain lion, and only slowly recovers from her possessed state to realize what she’s done. The royal family is destroyed, killed or exiled by the god. The play took first prize at the competition in Athens the following year, after Euripides’ death.

  We all love the Bacchae.

  The actors huddle together downstage, except for the man playing the god, who stands on an apple crate so he can look down on the mortals. He’s not very tall. For the performance they could dress him in a robe long enough to hide the crate. That’s a good idea.

  “Pentheus, my son … my baby …” the actor playing Agave says. “You lay in my arms so often, so helpless, and now again you need my loving care. My dear, sweet child … I killed you—No! I will not say that, I was not there!” an actor says. “I was … in some other place. It was Dionysus. Dionysus took me, Dionysus used me, and Dionysus murdered you.”

  “No,” the actor playing the god replies. “Accept the guilt, accuse yourselves.”

  “Dionysus, listen to us,” the actor playing Agave’s father, Kadmos, says. “We have been wrong.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the director calls, “Now you understand.”

  “Now you understand, but now is too late. When you should have seen, you were blind,” the actor playing the god says.

  “We know that. But you are like a tide that turns and drowns us.”

  “Because I was born with dominion over you and you dispossessed me. And I don’t—”

  The director interrupts, calling, “Kadmos!”

  “Then you should not be like us, your subjects. You should have no passions,” the old man upstage says reprovingly.

  “And I don’t,” the actor repeats, and when no one interrupts him continues. “But these are the laws, the—the laws of life. I cannot change them.”

  “The laws of life,” the director calls.

  “The laws of life,” the actor repeats.

  “It is decided, Father,” the actor playing the woman, Agave, says. “We must go, and take our grief with us.”

  There’s some business with a sheet of cloth, allowing the actor playing Dionysus to slip offstage, unseen by the audience, leaving the crate behind. I amend my idea to stilts.

  When the actor playing Agave takes a deep breath and says nothing, the director calls, “Help me. Take me to my sisters. They will share my exile and the years of sorrow. Take me where I cannot see Mount Kithairon, where branches wound with ivy cannot remind me of what has happened. Let someone else be possessed. I have withered. Fuck me, but I have withered.”

  Afterwards, over wine backstage, the director shakes his head and says, “Amateurs.”

  “You won’t get professionals here,” I say.

  He’s an Athenian, this Carolus, with a drinker’s genial blob of a nose and a husky, hectoring way of running the world. The actor playing the woman, Agave, at a livelier table across the room, makes a leggy chestnut mare.

  “That one looks the part, at least,” I say.

  “He does indeed,” Carolus says. “That may have been my mistake.”

  At the actors’ table there’s much merry jostling of chairs to make room for me, though I refuse to sit down. They’re still in their costumes and are enjoying themselves voraciously.

  “Better every time,” I say.

  I’ve taken to haunting rehearsals ever since I stumbled on them the day we arrived. When I returned later that day to apologize to Carolus for the interruption, he too was apologetic. He suffered headaches and insomnia and his cast was made up of locals, mostly clowns and jugglers, acrobats, and one or two musicians. “I think of Euripides seeing this and I die,” he told me. “I die and die again.” When he discovered I knew the play, had seen it in Athens in my student days, we compared notes and realized it was his own Dionysus I had seen. He had been young enough then, still, to get away with it: dark-haired instead of white, thrilling-voiced, intense. The boy he’s got for the role now is pretty enough, but dense and oddly prim. He has to be taught to walk like a cock and not a hen. Aging Kadmos, trained as a clown, fancies himself a professional, though he’s never done tragedy, and considers himself the actors’ spokesman. He takes their complaints to Carolus and delivers them long-windedly, pleased with his own diction. Agave looks nice in a wig but simpers and minces and forgets his lines. Pentheus often misses rehearsals, with no explanation. He’s away today.

  The actors are playing a drinking game, tossing the ball of rags they’ve been using for Pentheus’s head amongst themselves; whoever drops it has to stand and drain his cup while the others hoot and jeer. I rejoin Carolus. I like him. I like having a friend near enough my own age. Older, actually, but not old enough to be my father, and I like that, too. And still the embers of a sexuality not quite spent; you can see it when he gets angry. He likes men, told me so early on, and didn’t mind when I told him I didn’t. I speak dialect with the actors but not with him. We talk about plays and theatre generally, tell each other about productions we’ve seen. I don’t have much to offer that he’s unfamiliar with.

  I ask him what makes a good tragedy. He thinks about this for a while. A companionable silence between us while the actors slowly drift away, bidding each other stagy goodbyes, and the rain increases, drumming at the roof like fingers. He’s got good wine from somewhere, not the local.

  “Funny question,” he says. “A good death, a good pain, a good tragedy. ‘Good’ is a funny word.”

  “I’m writing a book.” The response I default to when my subject starts to look at me strangely. And maybe I am, suddenly, maybe I am. A little work to bring me back here when I reread it years from now, to this rain and this cup of wine and this man I’m prepared to like so much. The comfort here, this little sanctuary.

  “Gods, man,” he says. “Are you crying?”

  I tell him I’m unwell.

  “What kind of book?” he says.

  “An analysis.” I’m thinking through my mouth. “In two parts, tragedy and comedy. The constituent elements of each, with examples.”

  “Tragedy for beginners.”

  “Sure,” I say. “A gentle introduction.”

  “How are you unwell?”

  I tell him I cry easily, laugh easily, get angry easily. I get overwhelmed.

  “That’s a sickness?”

  I ask him what he would call it.

  “Histrionics,” he says. “What do you do for it?”

  I tell him I write books.

  He nods, then shakes his head. “My father had the same. I wish he’d written books. He was a drunk.”

  I wait for more, but there isn’t any.

  “A good tragedy,” he says. “I think you’re a dabbler.”

  I lean forward. I tell him that’s exactly what I am. I suggest the stilts.

  He laughs, then falls silent again, long enough for me to wonder if our conversation is over and he’s waiting for me to leave. I clear my throat.

  “It’s the whole course of a character’s life,” he says. “The actions he takes, decisions, the choices that bring him right up to the present moment. Having to choose.” He points at me. “That’s what I want to say. You’re surrounded by evils, a banquet of evils, and you have to choose. You have to fill your plate and eat it.”

  “And comedy?”

  He looks at me like I’m stupid. “Comedy makes you laugh. A couple of slaves buggering each other, I’ll have that and thank you very much. How would you say that here?”

  I think for a minute. “Ass-fucking,” I say in dialect.

  He grunts. He likes it.

  “That’s it?” I ask.

  Carolus shakes a reproving finger at me. “I won’t have you slighting the comedies. They were my living for the first few years. Lysistrata without the props, if you know what I mean. I got a reputation for that one. I was jus
t a teenager then.”

  “You started young.”

  “I did, man.” He grasps himself between the legs and we laugh. “It was the family trade. My grandfather was Tiresias in the first production of Oedipus the King.”

  “No.”

  “He was. After him, my father took up the role.” He looks at me and says nothing for a moment. Then: “I kept the mask he wore that night. I’ll show it to you sometime, if you like.”

  “They let you?” I mean the company. Good masks are expensive, irreplaceable.

  “He stole it.”

  I nod.

  “No masks for this crew.” Carolus waves a hand at the table the actors have lately abandoned for a dive in town. “I haven’t the time or the money. They’re all so stiff anyway, I doubt anyone will notice the difference.”

  “You’re too hard on them. Dionysus is improving, with your help.”

  His mouth goes bitter. “Don’t patronize me,” he says. “You think I wanted to end up here?”

  “It’s funny how often I hear that about Pella.”

  He’s not interested. “You know who’s going to be all right? The only one? Pentheus. You know why? Because I’m going to end up playing him myself if he misses one more bloody rehearsal.”

  “Fucking,” I say.

  “One more fucking rehearsal. You’ll have me passing for a native by Friday. Where is that cunt, anyway?”

  Something lands on the table between us: the ball of rags the actors used for Pentheus’s head. It’s come unwound, trailing a rag-tail like a shooting star. The grubby, soft white bundle lands almost soundlessly, not even overturning our cups. The paint on it, eyes and mouth and some pinky gore, is smudged like a child’s drawing.

  “That wouldn’t scare anyone.” The boy steps from the shadows. I wonder how long he’s been listening to us.

  “It’s you, is it?” Carolus winks at me. “Monkey. What would scare us, then?”

  The boy looks up at the ceiling. “A real head,” he says.

  Childish bravado, but Carolus is nodding, eyebrows raised. A show of seriousness; I’ll play along.