I moved to go past him, but he grabbed my arm. I didn’t want to talk and I certainly didn’t want to argue. What did I want, then? A fresh wave of shame washed over me, the thought of him wandering this neighborhood hand in hand with his fiancée. I wanted to see it, to go back into the taverna and get a good look at them together. I wanted the sting of it. Hell, I wanted to watch her in their house, taking a shower, fucking Aris in his bed, having an orgasm on the kitchen counter, her expensive heels falling to the floor as she curled her toes. I wanted to watch him touch her body. I wanted to see. What she had, what she was. What I wasn’t.
I was sick; I was losing the plot, but for a moment that’s what I wanted.
“Mira,” he said.
“You hate this neighborhood,” I said.
Eventually we’d cross paths. I was still close with his father; we both visited the island regularly. Yet if Aris was thinking this, he didn’t have the cruelty to say it.
“I didn’t—” he began, but didn’t finish. “This isn’t easy for me,” he said.
It is impossible to piece together where something went wrong when all we have are memories, and memories of memories. You could take them all and line them up, each moment, but it would never add up to a life. What makes a life is the white space, the glue that holds everything together. It is impossible to know, impossible to understand. I had thought everything lay in the unsaid.
I couldn’t look at him. “What exactly do you want me to say? You want my blessing, for fuck’s sake?”
“You know how much you mean to me,” he said. “Always.”
“But you love her,” I said. For years I had simply assumed, projected, that because I felt that invisible line linking us, no matter what, that he did too. I was dizzy. Affection and love are not the same thing.
“It’s not only about love,” he said. “You’re simplifying.”
“I don’t know. I think it is,” I said.
I felt like I had woken up from a deep sleep unsettled, confused, trying to make sense of what was real and what was not.
“We can still have something.”
I looked into his eyes a moment, trying to read what he was saying, what he was offering or asking for. Was this guilt or truth or something in between? I had become an extension of Aris’s self, and sometimes I think he didn’t realize that I was a separate entity, not just something that lived both inside him and very far away.
Either way, it didn’t matter. “Are we done here?” I asked, painfully aware that I had come to the taverna after him, met his gaze, led him into the alley. “I have to get back.”
“That’s it?” he said. He waited. I didn’t move. Said nothing.
Finally, he shook his head and I watched him walk down the steps back into the garden of the taverna. Not his usual confident walk, loose limbed, with that absence of self-awareness. A heaviness. I sat back down in the bar. Nefeli gave me a look. Fady was gazing back over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, turning to the table. “There goes the neighborhood.”
“It’s fine,” I said to them both. I took a drink. But I had not prepared myself for seeing Aris in public, with her. I had not thought of how real it would feel, how final. Say what you will about it, our emotional dependence was significant. When we were apart we’d talk for hours on the phone, or online. He’d call me in the middle of the night to tell me something funny that had just happened. Other times for no reason at all. Maybe it was simply an intense friendship all along. We had all the components (affection, conversation, desire, closeness) but nothing to root it. I thought that was a question of timing, of logistics. But maybe it was not so complicated at all. Love is not an accumulation of traits.
I had never seen Aris look as sad as he had that early February morning when he brought me to the airport, after my parents’ funeral in Athens. We had barely slept. I was convinced something was wrong, that he was sick, because when you lose something close to you, you expect everything and everyone is next. The plane ride was terrible. The plane rides are always terrible.
Now, as the musicians continued playing, as Dimitra sang, I lost track of the rounds of drinks brought over to our table, the little pitchers and the ice and the raki. At one point Nefeli put her hand on my wrist, as if to tell me to slow down. Behind her my mother danced a hawk-like zeibekiko in a yellow dress, but the lighting was dim and I was drunk, and when I looked around later I didn’t see any woman in yellow.
On the walk home it began to rain, but I was so drunk I didn’t care. Yet I hesitated a moment at the door when I reached my building. I understood then that part of my uneasiness those last two days had to do with staying in this place, not at Aris’s. The assertive reclamation of this space as mine. Though I still hadn’t been able to sell the home in Chicago. I hadn’t been ready. Aris had discouraged it, too, which I attributed simply to his Greekness; no one got rid of family property here. It was the only way people seemed to survive. And to sell a family home is to reject a history, to walk through a one-way door. Those first few days in Athens, I had thought I’d fix up the apartment to get it ready for renters. For some reason it hadn’t sunk in that this is where I’d now stay. Despite the pain of seeing Aris, the night had filled me up—the music, the drinks, the dancing—and I felt that fervent, liberating joy I felt nowhere else in the world.
I let myself in with my new key, turned on a few of the lights. The apartment felt cozy and welcoming. I took a hot shower, dried my hair, and drank a cup of mint tea, then fell asleep atop the covers.
5
The Captain
When I woke the next morning I cleaned up the kitchen, the pan from the carbonara that we’d eaten in the middle of the night, and felt very sad. We had plans in Athens that evening with Eva and Aris and several others, but I wasn’t looking forward to the outing. Usually Katerina and I went out closer to home in Kifissia; it felt a bit disorienting, going out in Athens with her, as if my two selves—the man who lived with his family in the northern suburbs and the man who lived in Athens—should not meet.
When we drove to the center for dinner, though, I felt calmed by all the lights, the traffic, the noise of the city. As I was admiring the violet sky, Katerina groaned. “God, Athens is so ugly,” she said. “How do people stand it?”
I admit the transition from our cool leafy street to the grit of the center was a stark one, but I liked the traffic and the street art, and the ragtag bunches of young people who hung out in clumps were as much a part of the fabric of the city as anything else. Athens, to me, is a glorious city; I have traveled the world and it’s still one of my favorites. To call it ugly or a concrete-block city, as Katerina often did, was missing both the point and its beauty. She didn’t like New York City either, for instance. Katerina hated traffic, she hated chaos, and if she had her way she’d live in a quiet corner of an island, and that would be that. When in Greece she complained about it but couldn’t stand to be away from it, she realized, which matched the sentiment of many of our friends: reject it before it rejects you. There was a brain drain: many had gone to Western Europe, Canada, the States, but unlike generations past it seemed no one was really happy with the decision, saw it as temporary. They were not making a new life but instead trying to keep the old one afloat.
When we parked the car and walked a few blocks down Kallidromiou—I knew the restaurant Eva had suggested was in the center but I had not expected to be back in this very neighborhood, where I took my long walks—I noticed she was tightly clutching her purse. Alone here I blended in just fine, I suppose, but Katerina in her blue silk blouse, her perfect eye makeup, her hair styled that afternoon—I braced myself for dirty looks. I wondered why he’d chosen this place until I realized Aris, striving politically, wanted to be seen out among this bunch: the people, the rebels, the intellectuals, the anarchists.
I hadn’t seen Aris in years—this evening’s plans had been arranged because his new fiancée, Eva, had long been a close friend of Katerina’s—and even so I only v
aguely remembered him. I did not yet know his history with Mira. He was younger than I, by nearly a decade, and when he stood next to me, I noticed that an outline of his body would have fit perfectly into mine. The same mold, scaled down by 7 percent. His shoulders were narrower, his hips thinner, and when I stood to greet him and we both settled into our chairs our eyes met, the eyes of the outsiders, the men brought in by marriage. I glanced at the others, all engaged in animated discussion; if anyone noticed my discomfort they didn’t mention it.
We talked of insignificant summer things, he asked about our kids. Even though our obvious connection was politics, we steered clear of it, though he said nice things about my father, whom he admired very much. Our fathers, both well-known and revered, if not respected, had made their homes on the island. His father had already been in the public eye for his socially astute, acerbic novels, and when called upon he was still a powerful voice. “Few sons are the equals of their fathers,” Athena says in The Odyssey.
I drank a lot of tsipouro. Everyone was talking about a reality television series, based off an American show, which was based off a Swedish show, where a group of good-looking strangers are dropped off on an island and made to compete for resources through strange games. I had not seen the show, but in this world, in this country, at this moment, it seemed in bad taste. But when I said so, Katerina rolled her eyes and everyone laughed. “Come on,” another said. “At this moment it’s exactly what we need.”
A few people came by, snapped photos not so surreptitiously with their phones. Eva was regaining attention: fifteen years ago she had starred in a few Greek movies and some French ones, but in her thirties she had disappeared. Depression, near misses, and a string of bad love affairs had kept her in a constant state of neurotic attachment, unable to focus on her work. But with her recent comeback she’d become suddenly political, as if a new generation’s Melina Mercouri. Her eyes, large and dark brown, had an unsettling depth to them, and she’d always looked at me as though she knew something I didn’t. I had to admit that she and Aris seemed well-matched.
I think now that I was a little jealous, all that newness ahead of them. Katerina thought Eva was as beautiful as ever, but she often said this of her friends. Men never bothered with such statements. If a man was handsome we didn’t have to tell all the women at the table about it. Or we didn’t notice. Then again, if you grew up in Greece where men on talk shows slap women on the ass and adult women are called “girl” until they’re fifty, perhaps you’d want to beat men to the punch, to take away some of the power by assuming it yourself. Later, Mira surprised me by saying that maybe being called a “girl” carried with it a certain air of independence. Before you became a woman, or a wife, the word was the same. Still, to talk so brazenly about other women in the company of women, there’s something aggressive, demoralizing about all of it. Anyway. I have never quite fit with ideals of Greek masculinity.
Katerina seemed happy to be there, which gave me a certain feeling of contentment. But the conversation at the table, petty gossip disguised as politics, the chatter of my childhood, bored me, which had me looking around the taverna. It was then I spotted Mira. She headed across the garden, a confident walk like she’d been here many times before—that’s when she saw me. Or, really, that’s when I guess she saw Aris, the two of us together, and the look of confusion, even betrayal, on her face has stayed with me, particularly because then I had no idea what would have caused it, or perhaps because now I do. I had the urge to get up and follow her, say hello. To say I was going to a bank machine or to get cigarettes or even to disappear to the bathroom and out the back of the bar into the narrow alleyway. I even began to stand. All of this was happening undetected by the rest of our table, yet it seemed at that moment all eyes were on me, on us.
Aris’s chair tipped back as he leapt up, but he caught it. His standing shut mine down, and it was he, not I, who walked after Mira.
At first I thought it was coincidence. After all, what are the chances? But coincidence is story, is it not? He was focused on her; he followed her. I looked around the table but everyone was engaged in conversation and no one noticed Aris slip away. Mira walked more quickly, in front of him. When she turned the corner, she looked back and our eyes met. I waved just as she was eclipsed by a group of waiters carrying trays in the air, another group of diners taking a seat. When they passed both she and Aris had vanished.
“See someone you know?” Katerina asked. She was smiling, in the middle of another conversation, looking around the taverna with curiosity.
“A friend of my father’s,” I lied, waving my hand in the direction of several tables.
Eva, on Katerina’s other side, turned to us. “Where’d Aris go?” she asked.
Somehow I felt unaccountably guilty. I made an excuse for him: the cash machine, I thought, or out for cigarettes. Katerina looked at me oddly, and she and Eva turned back to the other conversation.
Where did they go, Aris and Mira?
I glanced around the taverna again. Later, when I thought of that evening, those minutes seemed to encompass the entire night. Mira’s expression. My slow-motion wave. Their absence together.
A loud roar rose up from our table: the husband of one of Katerina’s friends had told a joke. I laughed again. A laugh always disguises another emotion, whether it’s pain or desire or shame.
An old girlfriend once told me that I only loved women who could not really hurt me. That my fear of commitment, my hesitation, was an adolescent longing for some perfect fantasy, a way of avoiding pain. I admitted she was right. Admitting and accepting share the same root, though I was having problems with the latter. Maybe I’m quick to try to find flaws in other relationships, to view them with suspicion, because I understand something was lacking in mine. But what. That is the thing. But what.
When Aris finally returned through the front entrance of the taverna, looking distraught, I felt a swell of retribution and rage—origin unclear—and relief. When Eva asked him where he’d gone, he tossed some cigarettes down on the table. I swear he looked at me when he did it, an aggressive smugness. I glanced around again. Mira was gone.
Have you seen those silvery, flying fish that glimmer over the water? It’s only until they slip beneath the surface that you register what you’ve glimpsed, wonder whether the ship’s wake sends them flying into air or if they’re jumping, leaping of their own accord. You want to hold them in your hands, examine their wings.
•
The next afternoon at the airport, Ifigenia hugged me tightly and tied a few bracelets she had woven around my wrist. Nikos seemed unmoved. “See you, Dad,” he said, in English. They had gone to an American school in Athens and continued in one in Brussels, and their American-accented English, so natural to my ear, still seemed strange coming from my children. Katerina hugged me tightly, and at that moment I did not want to let go. Though she had been more set on the separation, I know sometimes she wavered. I did too.
Perhaps this is why I drove back to our home in Kifissia. Yet I quickly found the silence disorienting, the absence of the kids, the television, Katerina’s soft voice. I opened all the windows to hear the birds, the comings and goings of the quiet street. I didn’t realize how noisy my neighborhood in Athens was until I experienced the quiet of the suburbs.
By midnight I was back on my street: Armatolon kai Klefton. I slipped out to the balcony and looked over the garden, lit up by the moon.
Minutes later Mira’s door slid open. I wondered if she’d bring up the taverna, or Aris, or what I was doing there with him. I realized it was my turn to speak.
“Kalispera, Mira.” I pictured her the way she looked at the taverna: a loose dress gathered around her waist with a string, boots. When she walked away I could make out the lines of her figure, her ass. Her long hair was tied back in a ponytail and it swished back and forth like a flag.
“Hi,” she said.
Asking her about Aris seemed aggressive, accusatory. I waited to see
if she brought it up first, but she did not. Instead she talked about Nefeli, and her voice—low, a little scratchy—calmed me.
I was not thinking of sex, no. Not directly. But that night, trying to fall asleep, I was aware of her asleep on the other side of the wall.
•
My brother called the next day. He lives in Detroit, had followed me to Michigan when I returned for college, and never left. He studied economics, works in finance, and, to be honest, I don’t know what he does except that he does well. He votes Republican and is very punishing about the Greek situation. He thinks Greeks should pay back the debt, cent by cent, regardless of the suffering. He does not see it in terms of geopolitical complexity. He does not see it in terms of compassion. The money was borrowed; it needs to be repaid. End of story. Perhaps his own internalized shame.
Moments like this, I feel my anger rising.
To be honest I didn’t think he was really calling for me but to inquire about our father, with whom his relationship was fraught, like mine. Our father’s leftism, the junta, had frightened my brother, who came of age during that time. But his sharp turn to the right had been a shock to both my parents. My father could get over his living in the States—my mother, after all, was Greek American, from Detroit, and we’d lived there for several years when I was a child, during the junta—but this transgression was more unforgivable than my brother’s refusal to name his first-born son Nikos, after him.
My brother came to Greece rarely now. As a younger man he claimed he simply could not afford it, did not have the time, and now his absence was normal. He has always rebelled against my father while at the same time deeply needing his approval. Last year, my nephews, his two sons from his first marriage, showed up with their mother. She, my brother’s ex-wife, recently remarried: another Greek husband, from Crete. This incenses my brother. My nephews say she’s happy. She learned the language a long time ago, when she married my brother, and speaks it fluently with those flat, round vowels, the hard letter ells, the open, lax drawl. She’s a kind, smart, sweet woman, and I’m surprised she fell for my brother in the first place.
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