Katerina, however, did everything with a married person’s consciousness, even now that we were separating. Or were trying to, anyway. Whether it was shopping for dinner or planning the kids’ outings or simply the way she moved through the house—quietly in the morning when up before me, or reading at night in the other room if I wanted to go to sleep. I suppose you could only be in the world this way for so long without reciprocation before it wore on you; but it would take a while for her to adopt the consciousness of a single person, a single woman, a thought I found difficult to bear.
That night, I woke around three and our bed was empty, and for a moment I felt inexplicably angry. But I went into the kitchen and found Katerina barefoot in front of the refrigerator, a faraway look on her face. I wondered how long she’d been standing there.
“You okay?” I asked.
She turned to me but her expression remained vague, still colored by whatever, or whomever, she’d been thinking about. Almost as if she did not recognize me, or had forgotten I was in the house. “Something to eat?” she asked. She lit the stove, reached up for the iron skillet, poured in some oil. When it was hot she dumped the leftover carbonara into the pan and cracked two more eggs over it, a dash of pepper, some nutmeg. We stood at the stove and ate it together, out of the pan, our bare feet touching.
3
Mira
That Aris wasn’t in Athens when I’d first arrived did not seem ominous at the time, though when I think of him telling me he’d be back in a few days I feel a quick flash of dread, a weight inside me.
A few mornings after I’d arrived, Aris returned from Brussels. I repacked a suitcase, leaving much behind, and headed to his place. I had planned to spend the summer living with him and working on a collection of essays, a departure from my usual scholarly work. From the sidewalk, I looked up at Aris’s building, the old neoclassical house where I had lived last summer and stayed many times before. I could see Aris on the balcony, but he wasn’t looking down, waiting for me; instead he faced the inside of the apartment, looking in at something not visible from the street. I called to him, and though he knew I was on my way a look of surprise passed over his face, as if he didn’t remember what I looked like, or what he was doing on that balcony in the first place.
But then he smiled, waved, and went inside to buzz me up. He met me at the landing and the moment I saw his face, of course, I knew something was wrong. In the corner of the apartment was the smaller shiny red suitcase I’d left last time. I did not yet know he’d filled it with all the things that had accumulated there over the years: books and clothing and a curling iron, several notebooks. When I see the pair of suitcases now in my own apartment, it’s an obnoxious reminder of the humiliation I felt that day.
“It looks so nice in here,” I said, moving through the flat, wheeling my suitcase behind me toward the bedroom. The place smelled lemony, freshly cleaned. The bathroom with fluffy white towels and the bed with light-blue sheets. Engagement gifts, though I didn’t realize that until later.
It’s when I stood in the doorway of the bedroom that he appeared behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Mira,” he said. “We can’t live here together.” His voice was pained and tender but also that of a man who was expecting a fight.
It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t saying he didn’t want to live together but that he didn’t want to be together at all. I don’t remember how much he told me then and how much I learned after the fact. Another woman, it had happened so fast, he hadn’t meant for it to become serious and now, he said, they were planning to marry. Her name was Eva.
Planning to marry. Also, she was having a baby.
I sat down on the bed.
“Mira. I couldn’t tell you over the phone. It would have been cruel.”
“When is she due?” I asked, looking down at the floor.
“Late summer,” he said.
So she had already been pregnant when my parents died. “You could have told me, in Chicago. Or in Athens, after the funeral.”
“It felt inhumane. I’m sorry. There was never the right time.”
In a foggy state of shock I hauled both my suitcases back down to the landing—no elevators—refusing his help. Aris stood on the sidewalk with me and my bags, assuring me not all would change between us, that he still wanted me in his life. I got into a taxi, and I could feel him standing in the street, watching me drive away.
•
Later in the evening, a little drunk, I scrolled through my messages, not replying to anything. More texts from Aris—Are you okay? Call me. Mira?—as well as from Nefeli and my friends Dimitra and Fady. My father’s cousins had called, but I didn’t want to call them back. They had been anticipating an engagement, a wedding, and I didn’t want to give them the smug satisfaction of knowing it wouldn’t happen. They adored Aris, a handsome, hypereducated man with a new seat in parliament, but his involvement with me baffled them. They knew—because my mother had told them—that we both had imagined what our lives would be if I moved to Greece for good. Get tenure first, Aris had said. You’ll be glad you did. And I was glad he felt this way, but when I did finally get tenure I felt no differently. It was not that I was that attached to teaching. Besides, so little of my job was teaching and so much was taken up with administration and meetings and navigating a department whose internecine struggles and alliances predated me. To be honest, I wavered between loving it and dreading it.
But perhaps Aris and I were both putting something off, or knew summers together, and Christmas, was enough, and maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with that. But to my father’s cousins it was not this complicated. To them I was not elegant enough, nor pedigreed enough, nor Greek enough; as if I had stolen him away from someone with better claims. I was their family, but I was not one of them.
Well. There would be a wedding. There was that.
Aris called again, several times, and finally I picked up.
“And she knows about me,” I said.
“In the sense that you exist.”
In the sense that I exist. I let him continue. Do I exist. I put him on speaker, set the phone on the table, needing the distance of his disembodied voice.
“That we had a history. I said your father was an old friend.”
This was true. I’d met Aris three times before we really became involved: once, age eighteen, on the island, where I prowled around with friends from my freshman year; second, twenty-one, when I had a summer job bartending at an American bar on the island and he’d show up during my shifts, usually alone, and talk with me when I was not busy; and third, on the ferry, as a graduate student. This was the time that stuck. But he had loomed in my mind, my heart, since I was a teenager. He was part of me as I was forming, part of this place.
“That we were together, Aris. Can’t you even say it?”
“Well, were we? Really together? Not since we both lived in Chicago. Not physically—not day in, day out.”
“You’re revising our history.”
“That’s what history is. Revision. Point of view. Of all people, you should know that.”
It was the meanest thing he ever said to me.
“Mira?” he asked finally.
“I’m fine,” I said. Aris wanted it to already be after, not understanding that the only way out is through. There was also the fact that he and my father had been particularly close. I understand that it would have been harder for Aris to leave me had my parents still been alive; once they were gone he had an escape.
“Would you even have wanted this?” he asked. “Marriage, a baby.”
“Of course,” I said, though neither of us completely believed me.
He was quiet, and he knew as well as I did that I had always resisted what was expected of me. Though I imagined marriage could be a beautiful thing, for me somehow it represented a sort of erasure. Couples often depressed me, and neat little families even more so. I don’t know. Maybe I would have wanted it now, here, the different me
in this different country.
•
The next morning, I called Nefeli and told her what had happened with Aris. I was dreading saying it out loud, as if saying it would make it true. But it was already true.
Half an hour later, she was at my door, telling me I looked terrible. She wore a black-and-white-striped T-shirt, jeans, boots, a red scarf wrapped stylishly around her neck. She didn’t seem surprised. I could not block her out, nor could I hide anything from her. I returned to Athens each year and was seamlessly integrated back into her life, the rhythm of her days. What happened all those other months? I didn’t know. We video-chatted from time to time, but since my parents had died everything blurred together.
I asked her if she wanted a coffee, and she followed me into the kitchen, her eyes resting on the new countertops, the modern light fixtures, the empty bottle of wine on the dining room table, the paper bag of my finished beers and my mother’s empties still on the floor. “What the hell,” she said.
My head hurt.
I pretended not to notice the disarray—how often in the next few months I would willfully ignore something right in front of me—and poured us each a cup. “Don’t drink so much, Myrto,” she said. “Especially alone like this. It will only make things worse.”
She held the warmth of the pale-blue mug close to her cheek for a few moments before she took a sip. She looked around at the sunny colors. “Haroula redid this?”
“My mother,” I said, and her face showed some relief that it had not been Haroula who’d re-created the apartment, as if to rid it of Nefeli’s presence. As a young girl I did not question the finer points of their relationship; they were simply Haroula and Nefeli. It was only after my freshman year in college, when I returned for the summer, that I finally knew them as lovers, partners, together. My parents had never explicitly mentioned their involvement but never denied it either. I suppose they might have been more socially progressive than I’d credited them for.
When I was a graduate student, in ethnographic studies, I read an anthropologist’s study on women in same-sex relationships in an unnamed Greek town. Many of them were married to men, had children, and did not refer to themselves as lesbian or queer. It might sound like they were victims of a conservative society, certainly true, but there was a wonderful progressive fluidity to it as a result: you can defy the system if you refuse to let it define you. It struck a chord with me, the freedom found between the lines and the way the women had navigated conflicting identities, broke barriers. I found myself deeply fascinated by these women, their nonchalance, their structured freedom. I am not making the hetero mistake of thinking that lesbian relationships are any easier than those between anyone else. It was this particular group, unwilling to declare one identity, that fascinated me. Was it oppression, or freedom? What intrigued me most was the way relationships were ended, the ritualistic collective grieving. How do you say goodbye to a relationship? I had never been good at clean breaks, old loves trailing behind me like shadows.
When we’d finished our coffees, Nefeli suggested we go to the sea, which to her was the balm for everything. Though in my opinion it was still too cold to swim, the sun was warm, and we’d eat lunch by the water. She had been working hard preparing an upcoming show, her biggest ever, and declared it would be good to get out of Athens.
She followed me into the bedroom as I gathered a few things for the beach. “Suffering is a chronic state,” she said as I threw things into a small bag. “I’m in this room with you, you see, and I’ve got this gun. And I’m holding it above you, waving it around your head, I’m chasing you around the room, and you’re wondering if and when I’ll shoot.”
I didn’t know then if she was talking about Aris or Greece, though later that summer, after she disappeared, I understood she’d been talking about herself. But Nefeli often spoke like a sibyl, and it had always seemed that she could sense things most others could not. I was also used to moments of deep joy with her: nights we’d laugh until we gasped for air, our stomachs aching. Just that morning, an old picture of us had popped up on social media: years earlier, the two of us drunk and laughing at a party on the island, me sitting on her lap at a crowded table.
She wandered out of the bedroom, and I heard the door to the apartment open as she headed into the foyer.
•
When we arrived, we dropped our things on the beach and took off our shoes. The sun felt marvelous. Usually Nefeli donned her goofy bathing cap and swam many laps back and forth, even when the weather seemed too cold. Today we both rolled up our jeans and shrieked as the water washed over our toes.
The day was bright, the sky a wild, changing blue. At the other end of the beach, a thin woman stood in a bathing suit and flippers, staring at the large rock in the distance, as if wondering what she was thinking in contemplating a swim. A bit farther down, at the end of the cove, was a beach chair nestled in the sand, a book atop it. Otherwise, we were alone. We walked through the scraggly beach grass up to the taverna that overlooked the sea. Light shimmered through the olive trees like an invitation to another world. We chose a table in the sun and ordered coffees.
Behind us sat a man alone, reading the paper. Across the terrace a blonde woman drank a frappé, while her two matching curly-headed children talked animatedly. She seemed genuinely happy. The man was cute, with faded jeans and a blue T-shirt. Brown hair messy from the beach, another cold-morning swimmer.
My phone lit up with two messages from Aris.
Nefeli glanced at it sitting between us. “This relationship will destroy you. Trust me.”
“No longer a relationship,” I said.
She looked at my phone. “I know Aris,” she said. “He’ll want it both ways.”
Maybe that was true. But did I? Nefeli turned around to face the man behind us, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask his opinion. Instead, she asked for a cigarette, and when he leaned over to light it his eyes were on me. I smiled with closed lips. He offered me one but I declined. All this took place silently, in the span of a few seconds, but Nefeli caught it and rolled her eyes. He went back to his reading.
I looked out to the beach. The woman with flippers was now swimming toward the rock. Nefeli’s words stung; less warning than accusation. She might have been right. But perhaps I had been the one who’d wanted it both ways, who’d grown comfortable inhabiting, straddling, two worlds.
“Just be careful,” she said.
I wanted to change the subject so I asked Nefeli about her upcoming show. She said it was bad luck to talk about it. I asked instead about her love life. A woman she’d been seeing was married to a man, which didn’t work out too well; there was a woman she liked in her tango class. “You’d think it would eventually go away, as the body changes. But no: desire is desire.”
We walked back across the cool sand and arranged our blankets facing the water. I pulled my shirt off over my head and lay down on my stomach. Nefeli was telling me about spending more and more time on the island, even teaching a community art class in the big municipal building at the top of the hill, at the port. “Mostly British divorcées,” she said. “Widows.” Her soft chatter was comforting. And as she spoke, I was surprised by my eyes welling up. Nefeli paused. She placed her hand on the small of my back. “I’m sorry,” she said. I closed my eyes and felt hot tears stream down my face. We stayed like this for a while, her hand offering me both comfort and permission. We didn’t speak. I listened to the waves pile up against the beach, then recede, steady and reliable.
I dreamt of swimming, of my mother swaying on a boat, telling me to breathe: One two three four five breathe. When I woke an hour later, disoriented, Nefeli was still staring at the water. I glanced at her through half-closed lids, and for a moment I saw my mother, young, smooth skinned, embroidered dress, bottle of beer at her hip. It’s written on the body, she said, or maybe it was Nefeli.
I rolled onto my side and Nefeli turned to me, noticing I was awake.
�
�Myrto, do you think I’ll ever have sex again?”
I hoped the simultaneous surprise and relief in my face came off to her as amusement. “Definitely. Why wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know. Eventually there is a last time, no?” She was quiet again. “He was looking at you, that man.”
I laughed. “He was looking at my breasts.” I couldn’t tell if she was telling me to distract me, or to make me feel bad.
Nefeli’s face changed then, her eyes focused on my chest. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I said.” She paused, looked back out at the sea. A sailboat had appeared in the distance. “You should just chop them off. Get it over with.”
Her tone was matter-of-fact, but there was something else there, something that gave me the same hot wash of shame my mother could give in an instant.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Our relationship was tinged with something I’d never been able to name, something she occasionally threw in my face.
“Haroula wouldn’t tell your family about me,” she finally said. “We hid twenty years of our life together. Do you know what that does to you, to be hidden?” She raised her water bottle to her mouth, drank. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand.
“I can imagine,” I said.
“I couldn’t handle her shame. In my fifties there were others. And then I just got tired of people. All the shit they bring with them. I meet someone new and too quickly see the beast beneath.
“Among our friends it was fine. Artists. But when Haroula and I walked hand in hand in London, or in New York? So nonchalantly? I still cannot believe that was me. Never in Athens. Maybe it was just the freedom of travel. But I don’t think so.”
Scorpionfish Page 3