The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [29]
He held out his hand. I gave him the coin and walked away, back up the long hill, without looking back.
I went to him for three years. I learned more about him—that he had lived in Athens, studied with a great man there named Plato, had been a star bright himself, briefly—and I learned nothing more than I had learned that first day: that he was a drunk with a tooth for young boys, who didn’t like me or my father but badly needed our money for wine and sex. He needed these so much. Some days he was too drunk to teach, and I stayed in the shadows and let him ramble on about his glorious youth and every petty remembered grudge and grievance, tits he had nursed at for years, that had led him to this time and place, where he would die. Other times he spoke of Plato, still in Athens, still nurturing young men such as he had once been, young prodigies. “Maybe one day you’ll go to him, star bright,” he said, and the idea seemed to take root in him as he spoke it, for he mentioned it again once or twice when he was more sober, said he would write to recommend me, said the man would remember him and would take him seriously. “I can’t do this forever,” he would say, which I believed—he had some sickness in the chest and by the end kept two cups on the table, one for his wine and one for the wine-coloured clots he spat up. He was never so drunk, though, that I could slip away without him giving me a coin and having me procure a child for him. Once he even asked for a girl. “Variety,” he said, laughing at the surprise on my face. “You must taste all the fruits of the world. Curiosity is the first sign of an intelligent mind.”
I found a prostitute my own age, fifteen or so by then, whose face opened up when I approached her and closed again when I explained the situation. She said the coin wasn’t enough. I turned to walk away.
“Not enough for that old bag of blood, I mean,” she said. “It’s enough for you.”
My sister had married Proxenus a few months before and gone to live with him in Atarneus, where she was now, at thirteen, expecting her first child. Arimnestus’s training with the pages had given him biceps and soldier’s slang and a flop of hair over the eyes and a lazy grin. People liked him. People, girls.
“Where?” I asked.
She led me into another hut a few doors down. An old woman poking at the hearth with a stick got up and left when we came in. The girl sat me on the bed and sucked on me until I went weak and the room tipped over into sweetness. My father had told me that touching myself would turn my fingers black and my mother would know what I had been doing, and I had believed him. For long moments I thought this girl was murdering me in a way I had never heard of. I thought I was dying, had died. When I finally sat up, the girl smiled, grudgingly, with one side of her mouth.
The next day, Illaeus said nothing about the missing girl or the missing coin.
I haven’t said what he taught. At first history, geometry, a bit of astronomy. He had books that he kept hidden, in a hole in the floor or behind the cloths on the walls or in some other place altogether, I couldn’t tell. I would arrive and he would have one or two sitting on the table in front of him. He would assign me to read and then summarize what I had read. Exercises of memory, I said once, dismissively (I was good at them), and he corrected me: exercises of attention. Once he asked me if I agreed with a particular passage from Herodotus, about the battle of Marathon. I told him I didn’t think it made sense to agree or disagree; it was history, facts.
“Of course.” It was a year before he asked me the same question again, about the same passage.
“An exercise of attention,” I said.
“Don’t be such a braggart smartass. I get so sick of you I want to puke.”
“No, you don’t.” I knew he had come, if not to like me, at least