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the long table at the Kavouria.
    “Odd man he was, Rich and successful, he didn’t like to see the poverty and struggles, the joys and disappointments, of the other foreigners in Xania. I remember he particularly did not like Martin Bolder, the fact that he wrote a brilliant literary first novel and little else. He saw him as a silver-tongued fascist who tried to seduce every man, woman, and child to his way of thinking. They were always seen whisking important people from the airport to their house, and they always dined at another restaurant in the port away from us other foreigners.”
    “And he was always trying to cultivate a friendship with your cousin Christos, because he knew how wealthy and influential he was,” Liz added. “You won’t find him here, Rashid; he is long gone.”
    “The one I liked was that grand old English aristocrat with the double-barreled surname,” Rashid said. “He sat in the shade by himself. Never joined the table. He was always cordial to the group. They’d stop one by one and talk to him for a few minutes. Drunk from morning until night, and drunk again the same way the next day and every day. But always somehow to control. He carried his shabby clothes and intellectual sloppiness with a panache that made one think he was much more profound andsensitive than the travel books he wrote for a living indicated. Just competent they were. Charming, likable, intelligent. An old-time homosexual of the Maugham-Coward-Auden ilk. He stayed tucked up in one of the rooms in the same hotel six months of the year, year after year. His liver must have given out long ago, no?”
    “Yes, it gave up on him. He died here and is buried in the cemetery up on the hill above the port.”
    Humayun listened to the pair talking about the others whom she had shared those happy days with. They were talking about a woman called Marcia Maine, a dumpy, seventy-five-year-old Australian, revered if at all for a onetime opera hit. She had been in Xania for a very long time composing operas. Once a year, usually at Christmas, she invited them all for a drink. Her life was filled with visitors, invited guests who passed through Xania on their way somewhere else. The Australian musical world, along with avant-garde New York, waited vainly for her to repeat her success.
    Humayun remembered the woman and felt her presence and those happy days as if she and Rashid were living them all over again right then and there. She began to laugh and, slipping her arm through Rashid’s, she asked Liz in English, which was much more polished since she had last been in Xania, “There was a very odd man from Hollywood, a sort of half-man, half-girl — Teddy. Yes, that was it, Teddy Todd —”
    Rashid interrupted her. “Of course, Teddy Todd, that screaming queen.” Rashid laughed for the three of them. “He was a joke. A Hollywood cameraman. Hadn’t Joan Crawford stolen him from Hedy Lamarr, who in turn had hijacked him from Joan Bennett because he got their best angle every time? He had been coming to Xania long before any of us and spent several months of the year here.”
    Liz stopped laughing, took a drink of her beer, and said, “You two won’t believe it. He is still here. Still dressed by Rodeo Drive at all times. Still pounding out his interminable memoirs. Still appearing each year with a wow of a boy just old enough to pass for his grandson. He still leavesright before Christmas every year for Beverly Hills and a little tuck here and there to keep his face-lift in place. Remember how the other homosexual foreign residents tried to tell him to play down his queenliness and confine his voracious sexual appetite for Greek sailors to the port? Wasn’t noticeably successful.”
    “Teddy Todd. Do the Islanders still laugh at him but soak up his generosity, just as we all did?”
    “Seen any leopards with their spots changed? He still holds a small court of his own at a table on the other side of the Kavouria