Scorpionfish

  It was only about twenty minutes after everyone had left for the movies that I grabbed my keys and was out the door, driving to the center of the city. When I pulled into my apartment building’s underground parking, I felt my insides swerve. I bought a beer from Sophia, who grinned at me as though betraying involvement in some sort of secret plot. I let myself in, walked across the old floors still wearing my shoes. I opened up the windows to the early evening.

  I drank my beer on the balcony, waiting.

  And waiting. I went to Sophia and bought another bottle. She was talking to the man who owned the karate place down the way, so I was able to come in and out without interrogation. I returned to my balcony. There was no telling how long I could wait, or what, really, I was waiting for. For all I knew Mira was out of town, or sleeping at a new boyfriend’s; maybe she’d decided to go to the island, too. Athens was becoming unbearably hot.

  If she did show up, now, I’d have to leave anyway. Saturday-night traffic: it would take me a while to get back to Kifissia. I’d already pushed my luck. If Katerina was home with the kids before I was, I’d just tell them I went to the local taverna for dinner.

  On my way out of the building I ran right into Nefeli. Though I’d attended her exhibit, I hadn’t seen her in years. I still thought of her the way she’d been when I’d been a teenager, she in her late twenties. I’d met her often in Athens with my father. There’s one time in particular that still stands out, the marks of forced exile all over her face. It was winter. Back then, her black hair was longer than any woman’s I’d ever seen, and she wore a thick white turtleneck sweater, a thick headband. All those big layers made her look tiny, fragile, but she had smiled at me, grabbed my cheek. “Does your mother know you’re out?” she asked. She’d called me “little captain” before I was even a captain, but my grandfather had also been a captain and had felt betrayed, I think, by my father’s move to politics. Perhaps I chose it, unconsciously, as a sort of atonement for the sins of my father. My father, of course, took it—took everything—as a slight.

  “Have you seen our Myrto today,” she asked.

  I had never heard anyone use her Greek name. “Not today,” I said. Unfortunately.

  “I need something from her place,” she said. “But I have a key,” she added. She’d lived here for years, after all.

  “How’s my father,” I asked. Despite having spent nearly a week on the island, I hadn’t managed to see him. Minas had assured me he was fine, staying at Nefeli’s cabin on the mountain. I had assumed he was with her, but now here she was.

  She looked particularly vulnerable and I felt a rush of tenderness toward her. “Oh, he’s fine,” she said, but I didn’t believe her. I think she must have realized this because she asked if I understood what was happening to him. “His mind, it’s not the same. But we understand one another. We share the same fears,” she said.

  “The same fears,” I repeated, hoping she’d elaborate. She didn’t. I told her I was going to the island again, this time for the summer. She said she was returning soon as well. And probably not coming back.

  “Until winter?”

  “Not coming back,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I waited for her to speak again. Her comments had rattled me. “Oh, don’t worry about him,” she said at last. “It’s only melancholia.” Then she tipped her head, as if trying to see me from a different angle. “What is it that defines you?” she asked.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, and when I hesitated she waved her hand between us, as if dismissing what hung there. When I hugged her goodbye I could feel her delicate bones beneath her sleeveless black shirt, like the tiny bones of a quail.

  Driving home, Nefeli’s question loomed large in my mind. Two things, for many years, have defined me as a man: the sea and my marriage. As imperfect as my relationship with Katerina has been—though I do believe that the definition of a relationship is imperfect; it was something I’d read somewhere when I was a student and had returned to the island after a painful breakup—I did not know who I would be without her. Take my life at sea out of the equation and I was an empty shell, needing reconstitution. But with what materials? Who was I before Katerina? Before the sea? I’d have to go so far back as university, studying literature, the pleasure of the language, the young guy who kicked the soccer ball along the beach while the young Aris watched, both of us dreaming of what might lie ahead. Yet I studied engineering anyway, then returned for my military service, and the navy. So instead of disappearing into words, I escaped into the sea, a different place of the imagination. And now I seemed to be escaping again—not to the sea but away from it.

  The apartment, then, which I’d previously seen as an escape, a liminal space between my domestic life in Kifissia and my solitary life at sea, had become the place I’d begun to redefine myself. I’d come to love it the way I loved that island village where my father has made his home, a place I’d never felt landlocked but instead as if I were soaring above the earth.

  And somehow this had to do with Mira. That night, as I was falling asleep, it occurred to me with a sort of urgency that the balcony allowed us to be two things, to occupy two places, at once. The meeting in the metaxi, the in-between, the what-if. It was a limbo, but one in which I strangely felt whole in the split.

  •

  We reached the island just after noon. Usually the kids were anxious to swim, but today they were moody and inconsolable. Ifigenia had refused to pack her bag at home, and Katerina, exasperated and knowing we’d miss the boat, did it for her. Nikos texted his friends the entire time, wanting to continue some video game they played together online. I didn’t know there was such a thing, and when I mentioned that to Katerina, she looked startled that such important details of his life I had only just now realized.

  The house near the port had been purchased by my father years ago for me and my brother, with the plan that each of us would spend as much time as we could there with our families. Though neither of us had a great relationship with him, it pained him that we, his sons, were not closer with each other. My father’s house in the village couldn’t accommodate all the children, nor was it near the water where they always wanted to be. However, since my brother never visited Greece, the house felt like ours.

  When we arrived, we went through the usual rituals: refilling the refrigerator with groceries from the port, putting the fresh towels in the bathroom and the sheets on the bed. There was a particular smell to the island house—stone and sea and small lavender soaps shaped like seashells that sat in a dish next to shells the twins had collected—evoking in me such wild nostalgia that I decided I would need to leave sooner than I had anticipated.

  The kids were in their room, getting ready to go to the beach. I told them I needed to see my father, that I was going to stay with him. I felt ashamed; they were not idiots. Of course they knew that their parents’ marriage was not a normal one, and their sad, downturned lips broke my heart. “Okay, Dad,” they said.

  I hugged Katerina at the door.

  When I told her several days ago that I felt it best if I stayed at my father’s until she returned to Brussels, we’d fought. There would be no way to forestall the conversation with the children, which she feared would ruin their summer. And I felt torn, of course, wanting to do what was best for them. Yet the minute I’d seen the island come into view from the bow of the ferry, I knew I couldn’t do it. It would be too painful. In Athens, I had learned to live my split lives. But not here.

  Yet the emotion I felt at the moment was less sadness than shame. Ashamed because I had assumed my half presence in Katerina’s life would be enough, ashamed that I had failed. And devastated because I did love her, and if she had been giving me clues to try to repair the marriage, as she claimed, I had missed them. I had let her down, just as I’d let down all the others. To continue this attachment was purely prolonging what had to come.

  I suppose my father stayed with Nefeli because he was
lonely, but it was unbearable to imagine my father’s loneliness. According to Nefeli, he liked to be around her while she created something. His bees were just down the road from her cottage, and she said that sometimes, when she was working, she’d stand on her roof and see him down there, moving slowly with his beekeeper hat and gloves, going about his routine. He’d begun making beeswax candles, brewing honey wine, gardening. So many things I could not imagine.

  My father asked me to meet him at Thanassis’s, but when I arrived he was not there, which was not unlike him. My father not only expected me to come to him but also to wait, even when he was young and I was overwhelmed with the twins. But now, he was difficult to find. When was the last time I’d actually seen him? The past year for me was a blur.

  I was not meeting with my father for any sort of reckoning; I did not expect to suddenly shift our relationship. Once it’s solidified in its habits, which it had, years and years ago, we can only hope for its best possible version. But as I’d walked from my car to the center of the village, I decided I’d tell him Katerina and I were splitting. Otherwise, he’d wonder why I wasn’t staying with them, and I surely didn’t want him to think I thought he needed supervision. Did he?

  Whether as buffer, foil, or insurance in case he decided not to show up, my father had invited Minas to join us. He welcomed me, poured me some raki, offered me some little marinated fish. Minas lived in the village in the winter but fished in the warmer months, when he lived in a small house, nearly a shack, not far from the shore. I had hoped he’d give me greater insight into my father, his recent behavior, but like many others of his generation they refused to speak of such things, a sort of self-preservation of dignity to not disclose the wreckage of aging. My chest felt tight, and I don’t know if it was anger or a bruised tenderness or something in between.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Minas asked.

  I didn’t answer, of course. I felt tense. I remembered what Mira had said about my father, about consciousness and memory as the story of a self, even if the story seems muddled or confusing.

  “Your father is coming, don’t worry,” Minas said, and this affection, this man of his generation covering for him, smoothing over his forgetfulness, broke my heart. But soon my father indeed appeared, in dark jeans and a light denim shirt, his thick hair combed back like an actor’s, cigarettes in his front shirt pocket. He had a tan and wore a beard, which he hadn’t in years. He looked startlingly handsome.

  I stood, and I was surprised that my father hugged me, and tightly. He was an affectionate man overall, but rarely with me. Not since I’d been a boy. It’s as though he was forgetting his habits, his resentments, his way of being in the world. “You look good,” I said.

  He pulled at his shirt collar. “A gift from Nefeli,” he said, beaming.

  Minas called him a handsome fucker and my father said: “Well, at least I still have my looks.” His expression clouded for a moment, but then they both broke into laughter, the two of them laughing as though it were the funniest thing in the world.

  •

  Later, when I told my father about Katerina, he had not reacted the way I’d expected. Instead, he put his hand on my arm and asked if I was okay, if I needed anything. He asked if he could call Katerina and I said yes, of course. I slept at his house that night, and he did too, following me into my room and talking to me awhile at the edge of the bed, like he might have done once or twice when I was a child. I woke in the night to hear him through the wall, talking in his sleep, long paragraphs I could not decipher, as if he were giving a speech.

  The next evening, I went to see the kids and Katerina for dinner. After, the twins had gone with friends to the outdoor cinema a few blocks away, so we were alone. I told Katerina my father was no longer a man I recognized. He was a different person. But to himself, he was the self he always was; I don’t think he recognized the difference. Her lip quivered, and she burst into tears. I followed her into the bathroom, where she sat atop the toilet seat, and I put my hand on her head. “Don’t worry,” I said. “He’ll be okay.” Katerina had always loved him, I knew. She hugged her face to my hip. “I know,” she said. “It’s not that.”

  I sat down on the floor, my feet up on the tub’s ledge. “I need to see where this goes,” she said. “I will regret it if I don’t.” At first I thought she was talking about us, about our marriage, and my heart soared. But then I realized she was talking about someone, something, else. She curled into me, and we stayed like that awhile. Finally, she stood up, washed her face, and I knew it was time for me to go. It was then that she said, “I wish it could all be more—I don’t know. I wish it could all be more.” She kept apologizing, and I could see she was in deep pain, but mostly I knew that the pain was because I, somehow, had abandoned her first.

  14

  Mira

  We woke to the news of the vandalism. Fady called early in the morning to tell me the story, which was not much of a story but simply an event, a series of details that he kept repeating as if some sense might arise from their recitation. Over the night, vandals had destroyed the megaphone installation, those outside the museum and the few around the city. I insisted we go have a look, try to clean it up. Nefeli, of course, didn’t respond to our calls or messages.

  We went anyway, Fady and Dimitra and I. A crowd of young people had already gathered, wanting to clean it up, to restore it. The long line of megaphones that lined the walkway headed to the museum, that circled the entrance, had been kicked in, holes punched through, covered with graffiti. The cameras, interestingly, had not been disturbed, though it had happened in the middle of the night and they were not on.

  Dimitra told them to wait, to see what Nefeli wanted. They all stopped what they were doing and looked at us as if we were all crazy. I’m sure when we’d turn away they’d shoot photos of themselves there, their smooth-skinned faces lighting up each other’s screens. One woman—dyed black hair, heavy boots, velvet leggings despite the heat, the rest of her slight, sweet looking—asked if she was sure, said that Nefeli was allowing herself to be silenced.

  “Let it be, please,” Dimitra said.

  “But what about expression,” another asked.

  “Expression,” Dimitra said, the register of her voice shifting, as if Nefeli were speaking through her. “Whose expression?” As if the first time hearing the words, trying them out on her tongue. “Is that what you think art is for?”

  •

  Nefeli sold five new paintings, just like that. The vandalism had given her new street cred. Oddly enough, all this had temporarily invigorated her, given her work another element, another chapter. But none of us saw her. She responded to texts, but sporadically. Yet she was aware of the attention. She did a radio interview, and one of the arts-and-culture magazines wrote a feature on her, but she refused to appear in public. Fady spliced some of her interview comments into the soundscape. Her voice, disembodied this way, was eerier than I could ever have imagined:

  Art is not about expression. Art is about porousness.

  And the one that killed me: Art is a conversation with the dead.

  I went with some friends to the taverna, the one with the chandelier that had hung in Tito’s home, beneath the painting by the Serbian artist Nefeli had known. The owner recognized me and asked if I’d seen her. I wished I had better news.

  Her disappearance made me feel as though I were fading too. Midafternoons I’d open a beer and fall asleep again until evening. I missed the Captain. I missed being invisible yet seen, the feeling of being so alive in my body yet not of the body at all. What a relief it was sometimes to be not-looked-at, to feel my edges sharpen again, less worn down by the gaze. I closed the shutters, with the urgent desire to disappear.

  I wasn’t getting any work done. And as for university business, I’d open my e-mail and see a note from a colleague wanting to form some ad hoc committee, or from students needing something. “Hey Mira,” the notes began, if they addressed me at all. Though th
ey referred, often in the same note, to my male colleagues as “Professsor.” I’d close the e-mail, my arms too heavy to type a response. I knew I was lucky to have this good position. I knew I should not take it for granted. It was as if my academic life in the States no longer existed or mattered. Yet I had the constant feeling I was forgetting something.

  I’d sometimes wake late from a nap, make more coffee, and begin to write. Or attempt to. Then I’d be wired, so I’d have another drink. Some days the birdsong would be in the courtyard, the morning light graying the sky, by the time I’d be able to fall asleep. This repeated for several days, which blurred together.

  But then one day Dimitra called at 12:30. I’d missed my class at the school, my tutoring with Rami. I apologized, told her I could make it there in an hour. She said not to bother.

  She called again an hour later to ask, “Should I be concerned?”

  “About?” I asked.

  “This is the second class you missed this week.”

  The second? I pulled out my phone to check the calendar.

  “Is everything all right, Mira?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a few bad days.”

  How much. How much does she drink.

  I showed up the following afternoon to make up for the missed classes. Dimitra was also there, with Rami, who wouldn’t look me in the eye, but I could see him scanning my face when I looked away. Suddenly he’d become a teenager, shooting up several inches, his voice dropping an octave. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to make excuses—work, exhaustion, grief—but I knew what such apologies sounded like.