Landscape With Traveler by Barry Gifford

Author:Barry Gifford [Gifford, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Landscape with Traveler, Barry Gifford, LGBT, gay, travel, novel, pillow book, passion, marshall clements
ISBN: 9780679737490
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1979-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

28

Ada

Returned

to

Athens

Ada returned to Athens at the end of September. Ilya and I stayed on in Heaven for six weeks, closed up the house and bar, and followed to spend a month with Ada, making huge spaghetti dinners with much wine and laughter. Then he and I went off to Spain and Morocco, where we lived in the cheapest of cheap pensions (at that time, very cheap indeed), lazed around, made love.

Ilya was furtive in all things. Unnecessarily, for I would have forgiven him anything. He wrote and received many letters. When he received one, he would read it and rip it into minute shreds. One, however, he left on a table by accident as we were going out to lunch one day in Tangier. We ran into an old acquaintance of his, with whom I left him, pleading fatigue. Back in our room, I undressed and got into bed. The letter caught my eye, and I hesitated only a moment. The letter fertilized a seed in me, and in the time it took me to read it, I had conceived, gestated, and borne that most hideous of all babes, jealousy. I recognized the name on the letter—an old lover of Ilya’s. The pages told the boy’s joy at Ilya’s impending visit to spend Christmas with him in Kenya, that he would expect him on the twentieth—four days away.

I replaced the letter. Ilya came back, and I pretended to be asleep. Whistling happily under his breath, he undressed, climbed into bed with me, and was soon asleep. I eventually slept and was awakened by Ilya’s ablutions. The letter was in shreds in the trash basket. At dinner that evening, Ilya was unusually charming and gentle. I was watchful, waiting—not without a certain detached interest—to see how he would do it. Over coffee, he began to talk of his tired old plan to own a string of bars around the Mediterranean, so that we could circulate among them as the season touched each one. He had never mentioned Kenya before. Now he told me he had been talking about Kenya with the man we’d met after lunch, indeed that he had decided to take a quick trip to look it over to see if a bar would go. I brightened and said that would be fun, that I’d always wanted to go to Kenya. His face clouded only for an instant. He thought he should go alone to save money. I was firm. If I was going into business in Kenya, I needed to see the place. This went on for three days, and I was beginning to enjoy it. Ilya was writing long letters every day, receiving none. We spent Christmas in Tangier.

Paris was next. Ilya received fat letters from Kenya. He didn’t answer them. In Paris, that city of bitchery and intrigue, my jealousy reached adolescence. Ilya was unfindable from time to time, returning to bed just before dawn. He was tired. I was patient, on the surface. “At midnight tears/run into your ears,” wrote Louise Bogan.

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