Scorpionfish

  Of course Nefeli was ill. How had I not known, or, more accurately, how could I not have admitted it to myself? I’d attributed it all to depression alone, as if the mind were not part of the body. The stealing, the small rages, the gray pallor and the darkness below her eyes. From that very first outing to the beach when I’d arrived: it was all there, in plain sight.

  From the distance I could hear music. Singing, a coo of voices, minor keys: humming? Low registers and high ones, harmonies that intensified and retreated, growing quiet for a moment. At first I thought it was coming from one of the docked sailboats, some beautiful and eerie nautical choir. I looked around to see if anyone else heard it; it was so subtle I thought I was going mad. One second it would sound like praise and the other like lament, from keening to joy, taunting me like impish angels.

  I glanced around, wished I could share the moment with someone, if for no other reason than to confirm it. People walked by in twos and threes, couples holding hands, families, groups of loud teenagers. Nobody seemed to hear it.

  That’s when I noticed him, the Captain. His face was brown with sun, his shirt was pressed, his hair seemed longer, messy, and he hadn’t shaved in probably a few days. I almost didn’t recognize him, but the entire effect was quite lovely. I so rarely looked at his face. Only a glimpse here and there: over the balcony, a sun-drenched moment on the roof, a walk from the market on the street behind our building.

  “Mira,” he said. “Mira away from Athens.” He took a seat on the far end of the bench.

  “Please tell me you hear that,” I said. I could feel his glance. I raised my hand over my eyes to turn toward him in the flush of sunset. The sound, like a rush of urgent human voices. For the longest time he was quiet, and I wondered if I had spoken or just thought I had spoken.

  “It’s the wind moving through the sails.” He said a few other boat terms I didn’t understand, which he repeated in English, as though that might help: the rigging and the halyards. For some reason sea sickness hadn’t come to me until I was a teenager, despite the fact that children are more susceptible to it, but without question, for me to get on a sailboat is to spend it sick and leaning over the edge, just like my mother, forever wondering why I’d thought that particular time might be different.

  “The sails?” I asked.

  “Yes. Call them the sails.”

  I couldn’t explain the knot in my throat. I was afraid if I didn’t concentrate on the sound hard enough it would fade. “I could listen to this all night,” I said. I felt embarrassed and hoped all the emotion didn’t show in my face. But who was I kidding. I was transparent. All that from wind—like sirens, like sea nymphs.

  We listened. He glanced over his shoulder. Maybe he was waiting for his family. A few times I could see he went to speak but something stopped him, like a wall drawing down, blocking the words. It was the strangest feeling. I was going to ask him if he was okay, something I might do on the balcony, but here it felt too intimate. For a brief moment our hands touched, but neither of us pulled away. He folded his hand over mine.

  After a few minutes, he removed his hand, stood, and turned away as casually as he would have stepped back through the door of his apartment, and continued walking down the promenade. I walked in the other direction along the port, past the ferries and up the hill. I stopped at the small, scraggly beach at the end of town, where a young woman kicked a soccer ball around with her dog. There was a small fishing boat, moored in the sand, half in sea, half on land, its bottom flat and sinking as if it might belong there, might be best suited to that position.

  I don’t know why I felt so moved. I wished he’d sat with me longer, or that we’d taken a walk, but at the time I couldn’t find any words. As odd as it sounds, it was the first time we’d conversed in public. Perhaps I was afraid to disrupt that speculative space we had created for ourselves, my contingent freedom from my body. We had been constructing a fiction that had nothing to do with our individual realities. Yet something was happening there. An emergence.

  17

  Mira

  When the novelist called three days later to tell me that Nefeli had shown up at his house and was now staying in the guest room, the implication of his call was clear. I wanted to see her but because I knew something I was not supposed to know, I hesitated. That Nefeli wanted me to pretend I knew nothing made the deception trickier and obligatory and multilayered and exhausting. Her behavior was intense self-preservation: perform it, believe it, make it so.

  When I arrived in the village, Nefeli was in the small daybed, reading. I didn’t ask why she wasn’t staying in her cottage on the hill, though had I not known she was sick I would have. Or why she wasn’t staying in the private guest studio, where I usually stayed, but in the large back room of the main house that the novelist usually used as a study. The entire room was sparsely furnished in a way that made it feel even larger than it was. Now the space had been taken over by paintings, lining the entire perimeter of the room, backs facing out to hide their subjects. I could smell the reek of acrylic and thinner.

  She looked up, irritated, as if she’d been expecting me and I was late. I asked her how she was, and she said she was fine. She got out of bed and shuffled to the straight-backed chair next to the window. Beside it was a desk draped in a white sheet, covered with brushes and tubes of paint, small glass jars of what I assumed was solvent, sketch pads and pencils and drawing paper.

  I was in a loose sundress and sweating from the walk up into the village, but she was in flannel pajamas. I was supposed to pretend all this was normal for her at three in the afternoon, to be crippled by pain, to have her face permanently cringed. To not have responded to any of our messages. When I’d seen her last, after all, listening to the cicadas, it had felt like a goodbye.

  Now she was here in front of me but something felt off, as if this woman were only a shadow of Nefeli, a projection, an image beamed in from somewhere else. I touched her shoulder gently, and she eyed me strangely.

  “I ran out of space up there,” she said, waving first in the direction of her cottage and then to the paintings. She walked to the nightstand, poured herself a glass of water from a pitcher and drank it in one motion. “Do you want something to drink?” she asked, gasping.

  I felt as though I were choking. “Everyone’s been worried.”

  “Let them dye their hair pink, orange, green,” Nefeli said, “if they want to express themselves. Let them stand outside the metro with a megaphone and take a selfie. Look at them all, with their tattoos and piercings and strange clothing. Who cares.”

  I had been talking about me and Fady and Dimitra, but I lowered my voice, as if coaxing a cat from a tree. “Those young artists,” I said. “They admire you. They don’t want you to be silenced.”

  The softer my voice, the more infuriated Nefeli’s became. “They have no idea what that means. To be silenced. They talk so much they have no idea what they mean.”

  Nefeli seemed to be waiting for me to leave, which I did. I stepped outside, if only because I had no idea what to do with my body. I heard the gurgle of her water pipe, smelled the sweet smoke through the open window.

  I found the novelist coming down the hill, his legs a bit bowlegged; I realized he walked just like Aris. I’m surprised I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “I’ve never seen her this agitated,” I said, quietly. We moved away from the door.

  “She refuses to talk to me,” he said. “Yet she wants to stay in the house. Aliki brings her food and juice, says she’s often in conversation with someone not in the room. This morning Aliki helped her wash her hair, but Nefeli refused help drying it. It’s as if she doesn’t even hear me.”

  He told me she was staying up all night, drawing or painting. “I suspect she’s in unimaginable pain,” he said. Often during the days she disappeared to her cottage. Nikos drove her. She was too frail to take those narrow, uneven stone stairs herself, and he drove his pickup truck all the way to the door.

&
nbsp; Then, suddenly, the front door of the novelist’s house flung open. There stood Nefeli, framed by the arch. She was still in her pajamas, plus a drover hat and leather jacket.

  I felt as though I had been discovered with a lover by a jealous spouse. Her expression was pure disgust, but there was something frightened, dejected in her face.

  I’d betrayed her, somehow. By going along with the façade that we both knew I was going along with? I had thought that was the way she wanted it, despite my discomfort. I now think she wanted me to challenge her, all this time, to force myself to face it. She had been broken by Haroula, a woman who could never quite acknowledge their love, could never be as public as Nefeli would have liked. What is a relationship in secret? She wanted to know. It’s not real. It’s nothing more than a dream.

  I don’t know if I agreed, but I had spent a lot of time thinking of it.

  Had she thought we—I and the novelist and the Captain and Fady and Dimitra—were not talking about her? That I was performing obliviousness not only for Nefeli but also for the novelist and everyone else I encountered? That in our dealings I had also convinced myself she was fine?

  “I don’t want you to write about any of this,” she said. “Nothing. Not my art, not my love affairs. Definitely not my politics.” Then she waved her hand over her body, as if to say, Especially not this.

  “And you,” she said. “Even when I vanish.”

  “Please don’t vanish,” I said.

  “We deal with all of it and shield the men from its effects. Let them deal with the shit they create. You stupid girl. It’s all shit.”

  She was rambling, she was all over the place, as if time wound around her in spirals, saying one thing and then unraveling it the next moment. “Both of you: write this down. Why aren’t you writing this down? Your little books, your little stories.”

  “Your oral histories,” she said to me. “Your little projects. Bah.”

  “And you. Your stupid novels,” she said to him. “I dare you. Write it.”

  She turned back inside and we followed. She asked for some hot water and lemon. “I’m detoxifying my body,” she said with a cackle. But when I brought it to her in her room, she became exasperated.

  The novelist asked me to stay the night, and I knew it was because he thought Nefeli might need me. We sat on his balcony, which was narrow and long and overlooked the valley. From there the world felt nearly still, nearly calm, nearly sane. Nefeli slept, and though she was at the other end of the house we kept our voices low. I asked him about the scorpions, which Nefeli’s new paintings seemed obsessed with. Her new drawings had the faces of haggard women on the bodies of scorpions, or thin young women with grasping claws for hands, and segmented tails. It was gruesome looking, the most gruesome I’d seen her work be.

  He told me the only other place in the world he could imagine himself living—that he’d visited, at least—was Cuba. Maybe Spain. Landscapewise, culture, he said.

  He often talked in what seemed like non sequiturs; his novels were the same way. So I waited. It was as if no story had a true beginning, so you could always take it back and back.

  He had gone there with Nefeli, he said, to Havana, on first diagnosis, when she became obsessed with scorpion venom. It was before things were readily available on the internet, or, at least, available to them. “You had to go to Cuba. Nefeli insisted. So we went to get it and brought it back. It worked, for a while, or seemed to.” Now, she had found an easier way to get it but he didn’t think it was working.

  “You went together?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “The two of us. She needed someone with her,” he said. “Aris didn’t know,” he added.

  “You have a special friendship,” I said.

  “Don’t let that fool you. There’s nothing like the bond of marriage. Larger than life.”

  I had certainly heard such words before, but their sincerity, from him, shocked me. Do we all become more sentimental in our old age, or wiser? “I hope you will marry,” he said. “I’m sorry it’s not Aris. I wanted you as my daughter-in-law.” Whether he truly believed it, it moved me that he had said it. “When you’re young you think it’s all you want, and then you find it simply silly. As you get older you see what it means.” I wondered if he’d said these things to Aris before, about me.

  It may seem ridiculous now, considering my age, but it’s been only in the last few years that I’ve understood that independence and love need not be mutually exclusive, that we don’t have to give up one to have the other. Fady and Dimitra, both independent, both continuing to grow, to do their work, to make friends, yet something so solid between them. My parents had given me a controlling, smothering, nearly aggressive love, and I had never allowed myself, not with Aris and not with any man before him, to give myself to a relationship. How could it be that it took me until I had nearly turned forty to begin to know something of love, that I’d spent the greater part of my life living inside the rigid boundaries I’d crafted for myself?

  I had not realized what I had been missing. The beauty of growing up with a person. I had had that with Aris, in a way. Sometimes we’d lived together, other times apart; sometimes we broke up and would see other people, but then I’d come back to Greece or he’d come to the States and all would be forgiven. Yet in my mind I always imagined we’d end up together. Whatever that means. He was for me a representation not only of love but of Greece, of the place my parents and I had left behind, and as such I had somehow thought we were beyond the more common stresses of a relationship. We had become proficient at long distance and I mistook this for our relationship’s strength. He was always waiting for the relationship to begin, whereas I’d thought what we had was the relationship. Maybe I’d given him strength to move on. A solid foundation from which to leap.

  I didn’t drive back to the port that night, opting to stay in the guesthouse. As I crept through the gate, down the stairs, I couldn’t help but peek in Nefeli’s window, which was wide open, the light on. But she wasn’t there. The bed wasn’t made, a tangle of sheets. I glanced around the courtyard, expecting her to come up behind me.

  When I got back to the guesthouse, I went to the small bottom drawer of the bureau, the one where I always left my things. A few T-shirts, underwear, a few notebooks, and a plastic baggie full of makeup and pens. For a moment, I hesitated. Like Schrödinger’s cat, they were both there and not there until the moment I opened the drawer. I tried to remember the firsts: the first time I’d slept here, the first time I came to think of this space as my own, the first time I learned Nefeli was sick. I could barely recall a moment. I could barely recall chronology. I could barely recall what was mine.

  I’ve always slept soundly on the island, but Nefeli’s earlier scorn had unhinged me, as had being back in this place without Aris. I drifted in and out of awakenings, strange dreams, and paralyzed wakefulness. Finally, I was overcome with the desire to be outside.

  Three o’clock in the morning, midweek, and the village was quiet, so quiet I felt exposed, half expecting faces to emerge from the shadows, or figures to hold lanterns to my face. I focused on objects: doorknobs, the shadowy center of a tree trunk, an alcove, or a plant beneath a door.

  Strolling through those narrow streets at that hour, I experienced the same eerie sensation I’d felt sleepwalking through my own house as a child, unable to recognize it. I had to ask myself a few times if I was indeed asleep.

  When I reached Thanassis’s, I relaxed at the familiarity, though now that it was closed, empty, the huge plane tree seemed different, the restaurant spacious, cavernous. I walked right up the three steps and sat at a table, as if expecting to be served.

  My mother sat at the bar with my father and several other friends, and Thanassis was behind it. A carafe of raki in front of them, a haze of cigarette smoke. I didn’t recognize all of them. One of them was Traianos, a friend I’d loved, who died the night of my thirtieth birthday in a horrible, senseless accident. A woman with long
, straight black hair, her back to me, swayed her hips, and when she turned for a moment it looked like Nefeli, but it was not. There was no sadness in their faces. They were laughing, singing, drinking. For a brief second my mother caught my eye and she smiled—something warm and playful—but then she turned back to her friends. Somehow I understood this might be her last drink.

  The chairs had been placed on the tables. I sat down at my usual space, in the corner, where the seats lined the walls, a long booth along the side of the restaurant, facing the open canyon. I took one chair down and propped my feet atop it. From there I could see the tiny cemetery lit up, the lights from other villages, all the way down to the lights that lit the port, still bustling and alive at this hour. I felt sleepy, my body suddenly heavy. I wasn’t ready to go back to bed, but I felt as though I could sleep right there.

  Moonlight drenched the taverna. The village was so still I felt hypervisible, as if I were walking through the deserted terrain of one of Rami’s video games. I took a photo of the landscape in front of me: a physical correspondence to remember this numbness. The lights from a few clusters of houses lit up the side of the mountain. If I leaned over the edge of the half wall—up to my chest—I’d fall down into the ravine, into the valley. I felt safe there, though, on this side of the void.

  Then I felt a strange surge of joy despite the circumstances, and, for the first time in my life, inexplicably free.

  That’s when I glanced to the entrance and saw a tall figure there, glowing in the moonlight. I jumped, felt a strange pull behind my belly button, a tingle near the top of my spine. Half fear, half arousal. A man. A light-gray T-shirt and matching sweatpants, like a track star from 1985. Gray running shoes whose bottoms lit up like fireflies. The glint of his glasses. A familiar, pleasant feeling.

  The Captain. He looked to the bar, then back to me. I wondered what he saw there, what tableau of loss.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. He spoke in Greek. “You startled me, in fact.”