The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [88]
“Through there,” a woman called from the kitchen. She waved a shooing hand at me. “Through, through.”
I went through the door she meant, into a bedroom, and found the pot in a corner. When I turned around there was a girl sitting on the pallet on the floor.
Outside, I took my place again on the bench. “All right?” my housemate said again.
It was an hour’s walk from the door of the little garden house to the door to the girl’s room, a walk I made many times over the next few months. It never cost much; we hardly spoke. Back at the school there was a library where I spent most of the rest of my time. Occasionally there were public lectures in the mornings; occasionally a symposium in the evening. I could attend or not; my time was my own. I thought of Perdicaas and Euphraeus and their snotty dinners: the ritual measuring and watering of the wine, the blessing, the rehearsed disquisitions on set topics, the learned quips, haw, haw. One night I spoke too, some ideas I’d been putting together about the forms that everyone here talked so much about, the ineffable essences of things. I was not much keen on the ineffable, and said so, carefully. Surely things had to be rooted in the world to make any sense at all?
“The boy smells of the lamp,” someone said, making them laugh. They were pleased, and curious too. So they’d been watching me after all, waiting.
I would always smell of the lamp, I knew that. I lacked spontaneity; my wit was dry as mouse droppings, and as measly. I needed to put in the hours, yes, late hours over the lamp, exhausting myself. I had lied to Eudoxus. The inside of me was not empty, but viciously disordered. On the ship to Athens we’d been sitting below at a meal, my sister passing out plates of food, when a sudden swell sent everything sideways, she and the baby tumbling over, food swept to the floor, plates and cups shattering, everyone crying out. My mind was like that now, prone to such sudden upendings. Some days all I could do was wake and roll over and sleep some more. My housemates, by some instinct, left me alone. Some days I knew I would never have to sleep again, and produced monuments of work that were pure luminous hammered gold genius. Less so, the next day. I learned never to show or speak of my ideas to anyone until I’d sat on them for weeks like a broody hen, checking and rechecking, making sure everything was strapped down tight and shipshape. Oh, good, steady, studious, boring me, who worked that girl over and over, used her hard, and came shouting when there was no one to hear.
In my nineteenth winter, word came that Plato was returning early from Sicily.
“What’s he like?” I asked Eudoxus at supper. I’d almost forgotten he was the reason I was here at all. I could more or less manage my life as it was, my Illaeus-life of sex and books and a fair amount of privacy, and I feared change.
I had pitched my voice quietly but it made no difference: because I spoke little, people stopped to listen when I did, and because I was bright, people loved what ignorance I let show. It turned out I was the only student who hadn’t met him. He liked to approve admissions himself, and I was the last he’d considered before leaving for Sicily. Voices around the room competed to enlighten me. He was nobility, descended from the great Athenian statesman Solon on his mother’s side and the god Poseidon on his father’s. His family had been active in politics and he had been expected to go that route, but he was too fastidious, too moral, and occupied himself instead with political and pedagogical theories, theories he had tried to implement in Sicily. But the young king there was already well schooled in tyranny and debauchery, and wasn’t interested in the kind of beatific restraint Plato preached; so interpreted Eudoxus from the letter he read to us over our meal. Plato would be home in two weeks.
“It’ll be all right,” he added, so only I could hear.
WE WENT DOWN TO the port to meet his ship,