Don't I Know You? Read online

  Not eager to be a wallflower at the orgy, I was about to leave when I saw Nick and Sally embrace and then slide onto the ground, until he was on top of her. Wow, this I can’t handle, I thought, and headed for the door. I had to detour around them but they didn’t seem to see or notice me. It was dark outside. I stumbled on the path and then, voluptuously, I let myself fall, and roll down, down the side of the cliff, scraping myself a little until I came to rest at the base of the cliffs on the cool sand. I lay there, fully abject, hoping someone would see me and assume that I was dead.

  Soon enough, the wild dogs came sniffing around, poking their wet noses into my face until they got bored and moved on. I lay there for a long time until I was shivering. I heard a group of kids leaving the party cave, still noisy, but they took another path. My efforts to be conspicuously shattered and derelict were not having an impact. So I got up, brushed off the sand, and went back to our empty cave.

  The next day I went down early to the Mermaid to begin my solo drinking. I had moved on from The Bell Jar to The Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda, a book about spiritual enlightenment and not in any superficial self-help way. It was harrowing, in fact. I dearly wanted to be razed like that, obliterated, suffused with a shower of white light across the top of my brain. The thirst for transcendence was keen.

  On Sundays Delfini’s offered pancakes, for the homesick Americans. I was wondering how raki would go with pancakes when the door opened and Joni Mitchell came in. She was wearing a sort of patchwork jacket with nice ivory linen pants, and bare feet. She had her leather sandals in one hand and a notebook—a six-ring one just like Nick’s—in the other. No doubt she’d heard about my predicament.

  “Hey,” she said. “Want some company?”

  She sat down and lit a cigarette. One of my few remaining rules was not to smoke before noon. But I inhaled her smoke happily. Gauloises, thick and strong.

  “Is Nick off somewhere with Sally?” she asked, getting right down to it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I think it’s bullshit.”

  “What is?”

  “This free-love thing. It’s bullshit. It’s only free for the guys.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not like monogamy has a great track record.”

  “But don’t you find,” she said, drawing hungrily on her cigarette, “that if you love someone, you don’t want them to sleep with anyone else?” She squinted against the blue smoke. Her cheekbones were amazing. “You just don’t. Whenever I do it myself, at least I know it’s hurting someone.”

  Carey came out of the kitchen with a plate of pancakes and a pitcher of honey. He put a black coffee down in front of Joni. The two of them kissed and she wiped a fleck of something off his cheek.

  “What time are you off?” she asked.

  “Another hour. It’s market day in Mires, so we’re closing early.”

  “We can go to the red cove this afternoon.”

  “Cool.” Carey went back to the kitchen.

  “How long are you staying?” I asked Joni. I decided that I liked her company. There was something about her that reminded me of home, of Canada. Her complicated, aggressive shyness. I poured a little red wine in her water glass.

  “I don’t know. Every day I keep meaning to leave.” She laughed quite boisterously. “I’m supposed to be back in L.A. working right now. There are people there waiting for me to cough up more songs, put out another album. But I don’t like the way music works when it turns into a business.”

  “I love Ladies of the Canyon. I play it a lot back home.”

  “Really? That feels like another person now.”

  “Can’t you just make the sort of record you want to make?”

  Joni laughed and drank her coffee.

  “Trust me, it doesn’t work like that,” she said. “Can I have a pancake?”

  “Help yourself.” She reached over with her fork, silver bracelets jangling.

  “I know it’s crazy here, but L.A. is even crazier. Although there’s someone there I do miss.” She lowered her voice. “Despite this one,” she said, with a nod toward the kitchen.

  “Who is it?”

  “A musician. We were living together. But it’s kind of hard for musician guys with me, because … I’m good too, you know?” She shrugged. “Not my fault.”

  “Men are fragile,” I said firmly. The raki was kicking in.

  “Graham isn’t. And I’m difficult, I know I am.”

  “Well, I’m not difficult enough,” I said, but she didn’t pick up on that. My mood lifted. I began to feel the expansiveness that comes with the company of a smart, frank woman. Joni was just struggling to be herself, to stay herself, and so was I. Maybe there was something even freer than free love.

  “I’m going to give you some advice,” said Joni, “because I’ve seen the two of you around. Also I don’t much like Sally. With her Juilliard, I-don’t-play-folk-music thing.

  “You should leave Nick, and leave Matala,” she said, drawing on her cigarette. “He’s not good for you. He’s attractive and smart, but he’s not going to let you thrive.”

  These sentences filled me with a sense of conviction. Yes, Joni Mitchell was right, and I would leave the next morning on the six a.m. bus. We raised our drinks and clicked them.

  “To jealousy.”

  Shortly after, Carey came out of the kitchen and they left for the red cove. I ordered more wine. It would be six hours before Nick was home. Another eighteen before the bus to Iraklion left.

  * * *

  We had no alarm clock, but I trusted myself to either wake up, or maybe to not sleep at all. The bus left from the far end of the beach at six a.m. sharp. In keeping with the new terms of our relationship, I didn’t discuss my decision with Nick, nor did I keep it a secret, as I began to organize my things for packing. I would leave him the can opener and cooking knife, for instance. I’d catch the bus to the night ferry to Athens and then make my way back to England. Maybe I’d find someone to hitchhike with in the Athens hostel. Back on the road, I might recover myself. I knew the hard part would be shaking off this dreamy martyred spell and leaving Matala. Momentum would take care of the rest.

  Luckily, the roosters began crowing before the sun came up. Nick happened that night to be asleep beside me. In the dark I got dressed, rolled up my sleeping bag, and tied it to my pack. Nick either slept on, or lay there in silence. I scrambled down the cliff and hustled across the beach, jog-walking as the heavy pack thumped up and down on my shoulders. I’m doing it, I thought with a spurt of joy, I’m leaving. Then I heard a sudden guttural roar, like a tractor starting. No. The sun wasn’t even up! By the time I got to the little square that marked the end of the road, the bus was already over the first rise and out of sight. The sound of the engine took a long time to fade.

  Perhaps it had been empty; it often was. But the driver was adamant about keeping to his schedule.

  Well, I thought, I tried. I gave it a shot. I felt I only had it in me to make the effort once. Maybe destiny had other designs on me. I trudged back to the cave in my “good” shirt and jeans, unrolled my bag, and lay down beside Nick without saying a word.

  Later the next day, I saw we needed flashlight batteries and went through Nick’s coat to find some change. While I was rummaging around, the cursed journal fell out of his pocket. My rule had been, if it’s not open, don’t open it. But if it flips open, I get to read those two pages.

  It was the most recent entry, about this and that, nothing lurid. Then he began a fresh paragraph, a single line.

  “Rose tried to leave today.”

  * * *

  Because I didn’t manage to leave Matala, or Nick, we simply picked up where we left. There was the matter of our nonrefundable plane tickets home, after all. So two weeks after I failed to catch the bus to Iraklion, Nick said goodbye to Sally. I gave Hoot and Beano a hug. Then we rode across the island, took the night ferry to Athens, and got back on the road. We had
heard that sleeping on the roof of the Guhlane Hotel in Istanbul cost 24 cents a night, and the only ID you needed was your signature on a clipboard.

  Why did I stay? To begin with, I was then, and would always be, a too-accommodating person. People-pleasing on the surface. Underneath, anger-lava. I blame it partly on a solitary childhood—my older brother was in school, my father working long hours—with my intelligent and depression-prone mother. She made the most of motherhood and housewifery, she was relentlessly creative, but the job used only fifteen percent of her. And depression is terribly preoccupying. It narrows you, shuts you down. When I was very young I think I adapted to her emotional absence—to an impression of love as absence. Or at least, something less than intimacy came to feel like a safe and familiar place to me. Which in turn meant that I cultivated a protective absence in myself too.

  So I can’t heap it all on Nick. At the age of twenty-four, important parts of me were missing.

  In the Athens hostel we met someone who was headed for India and wanted to get his blue Volkswagen van to his brother in England. Could we drive it back for him? We gave him $200 in Travelers Cheques and he handed us the keys. The entire undercarriage could have been upholstered with Turkish hash, but that never occurred to us. Hippies trusted one another upon sight. If you had long hair and sandals made from old car tires, you were good. Nick and I were tired of hitchhiking at this point, plus we could save money by cooking meals and sleeping in the van. Although I wasn’t keen on more cooking, it did give me pleasure to buy a cheap nesting set of toxin-leaching aluminum pots.

  By 1970, the hippie circuit in Europe was as well mapped out as a Michelin tour of three-star restaurants: Amsterdam (cafés where you could smoke dope), Ibiza and Formentera (beaches, artists, Euro-bohemia), a rent-free week or two in the caves of Matala or a pension on Hydra, followed by the obligatory trek to Istanbul (cheap hash and bus rides to India). Some kept on heading east, to spend the winter on the beaches at Goa. The more enterprising had already made the pilgrimage overland from London to India, in vans or retooled school buses painted in psychedelic designs, and had come back home with carpets, jewelry, and Indian shirts to sell at the Portobello Road Market.

  Or, they didn’t come back.

  As with all faintly domestic dwellings, I was quite taken with the van. It had a dangerous kerosene-powered stove in the back, otherwise taken up by a plywood platform and foam mattress covered in a batik Indian bedspread. There was one curdled pillow, and the rear window featured orange burlap curtains. The handiwork of some long-departed girlfriend.

  The curtains reminded me of my childhood in Burlington, in a suburb defined by the whole concept of covered windows, with their mysterious apparatus of gliding tracks, boxy valances, and nylon sheers. A proscenium arch for the theatre of family. My mother had once reupholstered our living-room couch, an unfathomable skill. So a van with burlap curtains spoke to me.

  A couple hostel kids, Scooter and Naomi, came along for the ride to Istanbul and to share the driving. Scooter had worked as a roadie for Three Dog Night, and Naomi was studying Sufi dancing. They were on their way to the beaches of Goa for the winter. I was a little nervous about Naomi because she was pretty and dark-haired, but she was too flower-child for Nick’s taste. Scooter was a weedy, bearded, affable guy who was used to long rides in cramped spaces. I was grateful for their company because things hadn’t settled down between Nick and me. He was writing less in his journal because I had asked him to please not leave it in my path. I suppose my snooping had contaminated it. But he was thinking what he didn’t write.

  Nick and I planned to go as far as Istanbul, then make our way to England to deliver the van in time to make our flight back to Toronto. But secretly, I had decided that I might keep heading east if things weren’t right between us. I would go to India too—go all the way, for once. My habit was to turn back, always. I had turned back in Morocco. Had bailed on Portugal. I said no too often, out of fear and caution. This time maybe I would buy a seat on one of those psychedelic buses with no shocks and just keep going. Rip up my ticket home.

  Then Nick would be sorry. Then he’d really feel it.

  Nick seemed exactly the same as he had been before we came to Matala, just friskier, like a dog who’d had a good run off the leash. After a few days, the rhythm of traveling enclosed us and carried us forward. We never spoke of Matala. But in the pictures he took of me with our Kodak Brownie, on some beach or beside a fountain, I had a wary and ironic shadow in my eye, a new look.

  After Athens, the plan was to drive through the day and night to Istanbul, with Scooter and Nick taking turns at the wheel. I didn’t have my license. So we hurtled through Thessaloniki, with a stop for lunch in a café that played deafening Greek music, sinuous and sobbing. We still weren’t used to urban clamor after the weeks on Crete.

  As night fell, Nick was at the wheel. We were moving through rural Turkey, where the main highway was a two-lane unlit road. No gas stations, no 7-Elevens. Very few cars. The four of us were quiet, lulled into a road trance as the dotted lines on the asphalt flowed into the cones of our headlights and then were swallowed up by the blackness behind us.

  Green runaway pigs. That was my first thought. Low, round green creatures were scurrying across the road, and we were about to mow them down. Nick swerved the van onto the shoulder, where our headlights caught a mud-coated truck on its side in the ditch, its big rear wheels still spinning. Then we saw a figure lying crumpled on the road. Had we hit him? The green pigs, we realized, were cylindrical tanks, probably full of propane, that had fallen off the truck when it had either driven off the road or been hit by someone else who had sped away. Someone ahead of us on the road.

  The man on the pavement was making low, grim sounds. I knelt down and felt his neck; he was alive.

  “Hello! Hello, excuse me? You’ve been hurt but we’re going to help you,” I said, like a lifeguard ordering kids out of the pool. “We’re going to take you to a hospital.” That seemed unlikely. We had no idea where we were. The man’s eyes were open, beseeching, but he did not respond.

  “Om mani padme om,” Naomi chanted, unhelpfully.

  Insects whirled in the path of our headlights. The absolute country silence was alarming, except for a ticking sound as the truck wheels revolved. Nick reached into the cab, turned the ignition off, and poked around looking for identification. Naomi got the bedspread out of the van and tucked it around the driver while Scooter carefully, carefully rolled the runaway green tanks of propane off the road. Our man wasn’t bleeding, which seemed more ominous. I consulted a tiny pastel map of all of Europe, and saw that Istanbul could still be hours away.

  This is what you get when you drive a car, I thought angrily. Even someone else’s. Next thing you know, you’re cleaning up after things like this. A car means consequences; you become part of the whole mess.

  Then the Turkish man turned his head and I saw there was a ragged gash on his forehead, and his black hair was matted with blood. His eyes were open now but unfocussed. Gingerly I tested his limbs. They seemed to work.

  “We shouldn’t move his neck,” said Scooter. “It can, like, screw up his spine forever.” Nick was still searching through the glove compartment of the truck, looking for the man’s papers. For the comfort of print.

  “Nobody’s going to turn up with a gurney,” I said with newfound authority. Naomi was doing some sort of deep-breathing exercise to center herself. “We either leave him here, or move him into the van.” Using the blanket as a sling, the four of us bundled him into the back of the van, where he moaned on the foam bed and I guiltily found myself worrying about bloodstains on the sheets. His skin was ashen.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “we’re going to find a doctor. You’ll be okay.” He closed his eyes, but I could see his coat collar jerkily lift and fall, like a shivering mouse.

  “Use one of my T-shirts to wrap his head,” I told Naomi. “They’re on the back shelf.”

  Dodging the gr
een tanks on the shoulder, we set off in fearful silence. Nick drove, trying to be as gentle as possible when he changed gears. Scooter was using his thumb in an attempt to measure kilometers on our map.

  “We never buy decent maps,” I said to Nick in a tone of despair. This was a touchy subject between us, how much money to invest in maps. I wanted individual ones for each country; what was the point of a map where France was the size of a Chiclet?

  “There’s one road to Istanbul, and we’re on it,” said Nick. His knuckles on the steering wheel were white. “You should be looking for road signs instead.” I stared into the lonely cone of yellow from our headlights, straining to glimpse a light, any signs of a city, as we listened to the groans of our friend, who lay with his head wrapped in my good blue Biba T-shirt.

  And if he died on the way? Would anyone believe that we hadn’t hit him? He didn’t smell of alcohol, and there was no evidence that he had skidded off the road. So someone did run into him, and then drove away. What would the police make of us? This was the same year that a young American, Billy Hayes, got caught trying to smuggle hash out of Turkey, and went to prison for the next five years—a horrendous experience he later described in the book that Oliver Stone then turned into Midnight Express, a lurid movie full of unpleasant stereotypes about the Turkish people.

  We had already heard rumors that the Istanbul police were brutally cracking down on hippies. We didn’t want to mess with them. They would search the van, and Naomi had smoked a joint on the way; there would be seeds, papers, evidence.

  Anyway we weren’t supposed to have to deal with these sorts of problems—we were just doing our thing, in various foreign countries, peaceably. Neither birth nor death was supposed to be on the agenda. I’m on the pill, for God’s sake, I found myself thinking, irrationally.

  We came to the outskirts of Istanbul. Highway signs appeared, one with a stick figure prone on a bed. We followed the signs through gray sleeping streets to a hospital that in no way resembled the overlit institutions of home. This cur-yellow, two-story building could have been the back door to a food-processing plant. Our man was still alive, and marginally less pale. When we tried to carry him, he swayed to his feet instead, shivering. We helped him through the doors into Emergency, where the nurses accepted him nonchalantly, like a pizza delivery.