Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “Funny,” said Marcus.

  “Just trying to keep things light, professor.”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  “And I really wish I could turn the fucking TV on,” said Brad. “But as Mick Jagger once said, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’”

  “God, I’m tired,” said Kristen.

  “Me too,” said Marcus, still looking sourly at Brad. “I feel like I didn’t sleep at all, but I was totally out the moment I put my head down.”

  “Me too!” said Kristen. “I don’t even remember getting into bed. But now I feel like I was run over by a truck.”

  “Maybe ease off on the booze today, hon,” said Brad, looking out the window.

  She shot him a quick, injured look, then gave Marcus and me an embarrassed smile.

  “Might not be a bad idea,” she said. “One can have too much vacation.”

  Brad snorted at that, a nasty, knowing laugh, though I wasn’t sure what—or whom—it was directed at.

  “I had bad dreams,” said Gretchen. She looked distant, troubled, and I didn’t think it was about the awkwardness of last night’s spat with Brad. “People asking me questions in the dark. Monsters. It was weird. I think I was tied up or something . . .”

  “Ooh,” said Brad. “Kinky.”

  Gretchen shot him a look so savage and hostile that she looked, for a moment, like someone I’d never seen before.

  “It was horrible,” she said. “It went on and on, and then . . . I guess I woke up. In my bed.”

  “Best place to wake up,” said Brad, unmoved.

  “What were they asking about?” I said.

  “What?” she said, turning to me as if just realizing I was there.

  “You said the monsters were asking you questions. What about?”

  “Oh, I . . .” She hesitated and seemed to fade for a second, her eyes narrowing as she tried to remember, then widening suddenly, as if something unexpected had swum into view. Something unsettling. “I don’t remember,” she said, her face suddenly closed.

  Now, I’ve told a lot of lies. I’m good at it, and I’m good at spotting when others tell them too. I wasn’t sure if it was because she wanted the attention, suddenly becoming the center of our glittering little circle as she had been the night before, but Gretchen was lying. If I had to guess, I’d say that it hadn’t begun as a lie but it had become one out of necessity as she blundered about in her own head, finding things and covering them up. I had done the same thing many, many times.

  I watched her as she put her coffee cup down, and I thought her hand trembled slightly. I was almost sure it wasn’t the tremble of someone caught up in the thrill of misleading other people, the giddy rush of having secret knowledge no one else has. Gretchen was afraid.

  Must have been one hell of a nightmare.

  I must say, I didn’t feel great either. Like them, I had slept like a log, but now I felt wearier than ever. It wasn’t just physical tiredness either. I felt slow-witted and a bit out of it. Marcus had asked me what I wanted for breakfast, and I had just stared at him, knowing he was talking to me but somehow not able to process what he said, and I had already taken three Advil for a headache that rumbled in the front of my skull like a tractor trailer. Maybe Brad was right. It was time to lay off the vino and whatever-the-hell cocktails Mel kept producing.

  “I need some air,” said Marcus. “This place is fantastic, but it doesn’t exactly circulate, does it?”

  “Fancy a walk?” I suggested.

  “Morning, people!” called Melissa, appearing from the other wing of the house and showing none of the half-awake misery that the rest of us were laboring under. “No walking off by yourselves. We’re heading into town for brunch. All of us. Won’t that be fun?”

  She said it beaming and in defiance of our mood, though she couldn’t bring herself to look at Brad, who was glaring at her. But once Simon and Melissa put their minds to something, it would take an act of God—or at least a major fight—to derail it, and twenty minutes later we were boarding the Mercedes in compliant, if surly, silence. Where we were going, however, had not been determined, and our fearless leaders were not in agreement.

  “Come on, Simon,” said Marcus. “For old times’ sake.”

  “The Diogenes?” said Simon. “No. There’s a dozen restaurants in a two-block radius. We never thought the food was that good there. We just kept going back because it was familiar.”

  “Exactly!” said Marcus. “We have to go at least once. Back me up, Kristen.”

  “Absolutely,” said Kristen. “For old times’ sake.”

  “Really?” said Simon. “Souvlaki and fries for brunch? Tomato salad drenched in olive oil? This is how you eat these days?”

  “Of course not!” said Kristen. “Which is why I want to do it here.”

  “I always kind of hated that place,” said Simon, and he wasn’t joking now. He meant it.

  Simon had always had a tendency to push minor irritation into belligerence. Little things might stay little—meriting no more than a raised eyebrow or a resigned sigh—or he might dig his heels in and fight his corner like there was something real at stake. Still, I tried to remember him bitching about the restaurant before, but couldn’t recall him ever saying anything of the kind.

  It was called Taverna Diogenes. It sat on the bus route from the hotel we had stayed in to Rethymno, though we had always walked there. It was less than five hundred yards from the Minos’s concierge desk, and it was someone there who had first recommended it to us.

  “Probably his brother runs the place,” Brad had observed, not unreasonably. The local community seemed tight and interconnected. It was like a hundred other tourist-oriented Greek restaurants on the island, but it had become our place, and we’d eaten most of our meals there.

  “You know, Si, it really might be fun,” said Melissa. “As they say, for old times’ sake.”

  They exchanged a look that said anything but fun, then Simon shrugged and turned away.

  “Fine,” he said.

  As we drove over there once more, Simon grew quiet—“just focusing on the road, Mel,” he snapped when his wife asked him what was wrong—and the rest of us, as if to compensate, seemed to wake up. Our mood lifted, and even my headache went away as the ibuprofen kicked in, so that by the time we reached the Diogenes, I was feeling much better and had developed a serious appetite.

  There were a few tables inside, but most were out in a flagstone-paved area by the road, surrounded by a low stone wall and canopied with a roof that was half thatch and half real grapevine. That had been a selling feature when we first arrived, the fruit hanging from the rafters above the table. It had seemed so exotic. Marcus told us some story about Diogenes wandering the streets at noon with a lantern. “Claimed to be looking for an honest man,” he said.

  The food was standard Greek tourist fare—a dozen or so main courses, a handful of predictable sides, retsina, wine, ouzo, and pints of Mythos beer served very cold. It was still run by a boisterous middle-aged woman called Maria and staffed by her children and their cousins, some of whom also worked around the hotel and the beach. One of the boys, a teenager who had taken an obvious shine to Melissa, had appeared in Marcus’s slide show. He led tourists on snorkeling and paddling expeditions around the bay, and I remembered him badgering us to join him, though we didn’t go. Mel had flirted with him till he promised to bring us all fresh local sponges recovered from the sea by his own hands. There had been a rack of them, bagged in cellophane, beside the counter, and a couple of baskets of larger ones that looked like great ocher corals. I had bought a small one from the hotel and used it religiously for the next two years till it finally disintegrated. But the kid had said he knew where the best ones grew and would bring one as big as his head for Melissa. I remembered his boyish pride, his determination to prove himself worthy of Mel’s glamorous favor, though he never delivered the sponges—not to the rest of us, at least—and he wasn’
t around at the end of the trip. I think Simon got tired of him buzzing around and may have said something to Maria. Or to Mel, for that matter. Still, I remembered his boyish grin, white teeth in a deeply tanned face, black hair and eyes to match, an exuberant, good-looking kid.

  Waiter boy, Mel had called him teasingly. I smiled at the memory.

  “You think they’ll remember us?” said Melissa, looking around.

  Sometimes that lighthouse smile of hers seemed designed to attract attention to herself as well as to shed her beatific light on the less worthy. She was doing that now, being conspicuous as she scanned the seating area.

  “Why should they?” said Simon sourly. “We were here for a week five years ago, and these tables have been full of people who looked and behaved just like us ever since. Oh, for God’s sake, Mel, just pick a table.”

  She chose the one we had always chosen, and I found myself surprised by the realization that she wanted to be recognized, that she wanted Maria and her kids to flock to her as to an old friend or to some princess or celebrity who had graced their humble establishment before. It reminded me of the first time I realized that Melissa’s glamour was not as effortless as she made out, when I caught her touching up her makeup in the ladies’ room after she came out of the sea. Annoyed that I had seen, she had snapped something catty about how it must be nice not to have to worry about how you looked.

  Perhaps this was the source of Simon’s irritation. He had anticipated some rerun of what Marcus and I had occasionally and privately called The Melissa Show.

  Starring Melissa! With special guest . . . Melissa! Written, directed, and edited by Melissa!

  We could go on for quite a while on that score. It was all in good fun—mostly, at least—but it contained a kernel of truth. Melissa liked to be the center of attention, and the only reason that no one minded was that the rest of us liked to be her adoring audience. I wondered if Simon had started to find that wearing, and I remembered Gretchen’s tale of the cataclysmic fight that had sent Mel to a bar by herself.

  Mel slumped into her seat, pouting at Simon, and we took our designated places. If Gretchen realized that she was, once more, butting in on a ritual reenactment from half a decade ago, she showed no sign of it.

  “God,” muttered Simon, studying the menu. “It’s exactly the same. Nothing has changed.”

  “Prices have gone up,” said Kristen.

  “A response to austerity measures,” said Brad wisely.

  In truth, we had seen very little of the much-touted collapse of the Greek economy, but that was because we were visitors with money and had been confined to tourist areas and activities. Perhaps if we spent more time in the local grocery stores and shops over the next few days, we’d see more. We’d also seen precious little of the waves of desperate immigrants coming across from North Africa and Syria, of which I had read so much about before leaving the United States. That, I’m ashamed to say, was something of a relief. I knew there were people in the world whose lives were exponentially harder than mine, but I didn’t want to be confronted with the evidence this week. Not while I was on vacation.

  God, I thought, what awful people we are.

  But then that wasn’t fair either. Maybe it was just me. And let’s not forget the maxim carved in the stone of the oracle at Delphi: “Know Thyself.” If I was an asshole, at least I knew it and, from time to time, tried not to be. Even so, my momentary relief at having dodged the poor and desperate shamed me, and I found myself wondering how much the locals, underneath the welcoming smiles, the necessary hospitality, really hated us. I wouldn’t blame them if they did.

  We ordered what amounted to “the usual,” even though we hadn’t been there for five years, but no one recognized us, something that clearly deflated Melissa, though Simon gallantly attempted to cheer her up by saying that the moussaka, kebabs, and grilled chicken were better than he remembered. In fact, none of the waitstaff looked familiar, and we discussed the possibility that the restaurant had changed hands since our last visit. We were counting out a stack of colorful euros when Maria herself finally appeared, looking notably older and clad in layers topped with a shapeless dress with a faded floral print and a stained apron. Marcus gave her a half smile and Melissa turned to her, standing to give her the full lighthouse effect.

  The older woman looked baffled at first and half turned away but then rotated back again, very slowly. She pointed squarely at Melissa and began jabbering in furious Greek, bearing menacingly down on us and gesturing with her hands. I couldn’t catch anything she said, though I knew she spoke decent English, but it was impossible not to read her face, her tone, her hands.

  Get out! they said. Get out now. And never come back.

  Melissa was distraught. The woman’s anger—it was fury, really—was terrifying to see, and I think that if Brad and Marcus hadn’t shielded Mel with their bodies, the restaurant owner would have attacked her physically. The woman’s fists had been balled and, crazy though it sounds, I found myself watching to see if they would stray to the cutlery on the tables. Her rage was volcanic: hot and sudden and capable of all manner of violence.

  As we got back in the car and sped in the direction of Rethymno proper, we struggled to make sense of it.

  “She must have confused us with someone else,” said Simon. “I’m sure tourists come and duck out on the check all the time.”

  “Seemed like more than that,” said Marcus. “It was . . . I don’t know. Personal.”

  “They’re a fiery people,” said Brad with a grin. “Hotheaded. Like the Sicilians.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Melissa, wiping her eyes. “I was so glad to see her . . .”

  Melissa was sitting in the back, Simon driving, Brad in the passenger seat. Kristen took her hand and gave her a soothing look. We were all trying to turn our shock and confusion into sympathy, but it felt odd, off balance, like we had started watching a movie halfway through and couldn’t make sense of the plot. We had also been drinking—it seemed we had been drinking constantly since we had arrived—and were feeling slow and a little buzzed.

  “Did any of you catch what she was yelling about?” asked Simon as he drove.

  We shook our heads, and he checked our faces in the rearview mirror, scowling.

  “Shouldn’t have gone,” he muttered, flashing a fierce look—somewhat surprisingly—at Melissa. For a split second Melissa’s face hardened and her lips drew back from her teeth as if she was going to turn on him, but then Gretchen was reaching forward and patting her shoulder vaguely, and she turned back to us.

  “I just said hello!” she said. “I smiled at her. I didn’t think she’d remember us, but . . . I don’t understand . . .”

  She sobbed.

  “It’s OK,” said Simon, conciliatory now. “A misunderstanding. It’s over.”

  “We’ll go shopping,” said Gretchen. It was offered as something that would cheer her up, but a mean-spirited part of me thought she also just wanted everyone to forget the incident because it didn’t involve her. How could it? She hadn’t been here last time.

  “She was so mad,” said Kristen to no one in particular. She looked stunned still, like she’d just been slapped awake. “It was . . . weird. Irrational.”

  “Maybe she has mental problems,” I said.

  “She didn’t use to,” said Marcus. “Not that we ever saw.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” said Melissa, her voice quavering, tears running down her face. “How can people be hateful?”

  “We’re gone now,” said Kristen.

  “But I loved that place!” Melissa blurted. “It was our place. We were there all the time. And now it’s ruined.”

  “You can’t think like that,” said Kristen. “So the woman has issues. You can’t let that spoil the past.”

  “Too late,” said Melissa, her grief turning sulky and resentful, as she turned to stare out the car window. The traffic was heavier as we got closer to the town proper. “She spoiled i
t.”

  “No,” I said, trying to sound breezy. “It wasn’t the same place, anyway. Not really. We’ll keep our version of the way it was in our heads.”

  “And it’s not like we would have gone back again,” said Brad. “Psycho lady or no psycho lady. The food was only . . . meh.”

  I saw the flicker of irritation in Simon’s face as he half turned, looking for a place to park.

  “I wonder why she—” Kristen began musingly.

  “Oh, come on,” muttered Brad to himself. “Who cares? Leave it.”

  Kristen turned to stare at him, but Simon was starting to reverse into a parking spot.

  “Down in back, please,” he said. “Thanks.”

  We were a couple of blocks from the town center.

  “I don’t know if I want to do this now, Simon,” said Melissa. “Maybe I should wait in the car. Take a nap.”

  “No!” said Gretchen. “Let’s get out, get some air. Clear your head. Spend some of Si’s money!”

  Melissa gave her a weary half smile.

  “And no one made any sense of what she said?” said Simon, putting on the hand brake. “The Diogenes woman. No one understood any of it?”

  Again we muttered our nos and shook our heads.

  “All Greek to me,” said Brad with his trademark grin, clambering out.

  “Dude,” said Simon. “You wanna be a person for a minute?”

  Brad stared him down.

  “You said it yourself,” he said. “We shouldn’t have gone.”

  “Yeah, but we did, and she’s upset so . . .”

  “You’re making a fuss over nothing,” Brad replied. “So some crazy Greek woman throws a fit because she thinks Mel is someone else? So what? Get past it.”

  “Jesus, Brad,” muttered Kristen.

  “What?” he demanded, rounding on her. “This is our holiday too, Kristen. Crying over some lunatic who runs a crappy restaurant isn’t my idea of a good time.”