“Skala’s a shithole anyway,” he mumbles. “Too many tourists tripping over each other and expecting everything to be a postcard. Soulless shithole. It’s the hippies that ruined it. I pray I never find religion.”
Since the illusion of peace has already been broken, I decide to lay the facts down straight. There is nothing worse than the silence of expectation and all the plotting for the perfect second that never arrives. Plus, with all the August houseguests, I’m not sure when Charlie and I will speak again alone.
“There is no inheritance,” I tell him, my fingers pinching the seam of the vinyl seat. I don’t mean to sound pitiful but the pity is there, trembling in the words. “I went to see my father the day he died. I was going to ask him for a loan. For the first time I was going to beg him for money because that’s how bad things have gotten. And you know I’ve never asked him for a cent. But he died before I could, and he left me nothing. I guess I deserve that.”
Charlie doesn’t react. He continues gazing out at the blur of blue, here and there interrupted by the contrails of a speedboat.
“I just wanted you to know my situation.”
A minute passes, as if I have been talking passionately about breakfast.
“Don’t you think we’re too old to blame our deficits on our parents?” he murmurs to the glass. It’s a punch I’m not expecting, and I hook my fingers around the door handle to steady myself. Charlie, whose whole existence has been paid for by his parents, is lecturing me on financial maturity. In the backseat, I watch the future go dark. He isn’t going to help me. And all the money I have is tied to a truck heading in the opposite direction.
“I said a loan. I was going to pay him back. Don’t worry, I’m not here to ask you for a handout either. Forget I mentioned it.”
Charlie turns, his lips stiff and pained. I’ve seen that look before, on the corners of the Financial District, on the long sidewalks of Fifth and Madison, on every student of Buckland forced to work in a soup kitchen for volunteer credit. It is privilege encountering the mess of the weak, empathy offset with gratefulness. It isn’t pride. Pride is meaner and unguarded, sweeping into rooms rather than shrinking from them. This is the look of self-protection. I might as well be raving on about 9/11 in pajama bottoms while holding a cup for spare change. But Charlie makes a fist and taps it against my knee. He stares at me curiously, as if he only remembers my last outburst and not the entire conversation that preceded it. I have forgotten what a bad gauge Charlie has for censoring his thoughts. But I am still afraid of his eyes.
“Easy,” he says, loosening his lips into a smile. “I didn’t invite you all the way here so I could shut the door in your face. Things are going to work out. We can talk about it in a day or two. Can’t we have a nice time first?”
I nod, and he returns to the view.
“You’re planning on staying a while, aren’t you?” he asks.
“I’m here.” Here for as long as he wants me. For the rest of the ride we sit in silence, pretending to admire the water.
THE ONLY WAY to describe the hilltop town of Chora is that it’s fashioned like a wedding cake. A maze of white, curved walls appear built out of slathers of frosting. Paths branch and fork along tilted tiers, each cobblestone surrounded by thick, coagulated rivers of icing. Doors and shutters hang crookedly like fragile ornaments pressed in the whip. Small arched towers ring with matrimonial bells, and couples, lovers I suppose, wander around in the morning sun glare. I follow Charlie, who runs his fingertips along the walls like a boy gathering up a dollop to taste. A few cypress and evergreen trees erupt out of hidden gardens, and, after several narrow passageways, the gray-brown foundation of the monastery tilts upward like the top cake layer, yet to be decorated.
Two monks descend the slanted path we’re climbing, their legs moving through their black robes like steady pendulums. Their unkempt beards are the color of bad weather. Charlie nods as we pass them. Their body odor, sweetened by some unidentifiable herb, lingers behind. I give up trying to memorize the path to the house. My breathing is heavy, and my knees ache. I realize how flat New York is, the future conducted sidewalk-square by sidewalk-square, complicated only by the exercise of walk-up apartments. In an open doorway, a Greek family is sitting on a marble bench, and behind them a gold altar glints through the darkness. They seem to be partaking in a religious ceremony that requires candles and blank, passive stares.
“A lot of the homes here come with shrines,” Charlie explains. “The owners are required to keep them up. The monks police everything. Don’t ever forget who really owns this island.” He nods up toward the monastery.
At the next corner, a dozen cats eat from a spill of kibble that someone has poured out for them. Charlie kicks some of the stray kernels out of the path. Soon we’re in a tiny square, with two closed restaurants on either side.
“This is the Plateia. At night it’s a zoo,” Charlie says unhappily. “It’s like Mykonos parachute-dropped by party helicopters and sponsored by Grey Goose. Every European with a title and pair of white pants is up here mating. You missed the last baroness going home unlucky by about two hours. The young males of the island do pretty decently around sunrise.”
“Hoo hoo,” owls an old man resting cross-legged on a stone perch. He has long white hair and a magnificent hooked nose, from which his entire face spills back. Sunspots, brown and green, collect like mildew along the corners of his jawline. Charlie waves, and the man returns the gesture, a ruby glinting on his middle finger.
“I’ve imported a friend,” Charlie says, tapping my shoulder.
“In August?” the man replies, laughing. “Haven’t you enough?”
“We need more Americans,” Charlie answers.
“Oh, dear, I’m not certain we do. How’s your brother? Where is my godson?”
“Stefan’s working,” Charlie says.
The man flutters his eyelids. “He works too much to make any money. Hasn’t he learned that yet?”
Charlie smiles and gives a thumbs-up as a good-bye.
“Tell Sonny I expect a visit soon,” he shouts after us.
We turn down an alley too tight for the sun to breech.
“Who was that?” I ask.
“Prince Phillip,” Charlie says casually.
“Prince, like—”
“Yeah, like Greek royalty. He’s a family friend. And very special. Sensitivo. A mystic. He sees ghosts.” A prince who sees ghosts? Where is the teenage Charlie who stuffed forties of malt liquor down his pants in bodega aisles?
Twenty feet down the alley Charlie stops to open a red door with a brass doll hand for a knocker.
“You still alive?” he asks, noticing my hands on my knees.
Even as a kid, Charlie’s taste in décor was hopelessly old-fashioned. Charlie often bragged that he had a separate group of friends—“my downtown friends” he called them, with all of the wasted itinerancy that implied—but I doubted any of them ever visited his childhood bedroom. It was hard to imagine what they’d make of his tiger-skin footstools or the coral-inlaid Chinese screen behind which he stowed his collection of bongs. Still, the Konstantinou house in Patmos predates even his decorative touch. The interior is damp and chilly and every three feet seems to contain a sunken stair. Unfamiliar thieves in the night would surely break their ankles. Smoke-damaged saints peer out from painted wood panels. Miniature marble torsos and large marble heads recline in alcoves like mutant scientific specimens isolated in jars. A cedar chandelier hangs from a rafter beam over a rectangular sitting room. It’s furnished with a scarlet threadbare rug, a copper coffee table, a bookshelf, and what looks like a medieval torture chair. Only a puffy IKEA sofa by the bright, open windows gives a nod to the disposable new world.
“My grandfather bought this house,” Charlie says. “Built in 1387, remodeled never. Except for the bathrooms and kitchen. I had those redone two years ago.” He points to a burrowing staircase. “It goes down and down.”
A figure floats from
a doorway, the shape of a body in a black sheet. A woman in full burka carries a plastic laundry basket through the sitting room. Her wrists clink with bracelets and her fingernails are as silver as Charlie’s neck chain. I am stunned, unable to make sense of her, this shrouded Middle Eastern woman performing an ordinary chore, and there’s something frightening about her direct approach. Her bare feet clomp across the rug. She stops in front of me, the basket’s wet socks and underwear lifted between us like she’s offering a tray of food.
“Hello,” a low, oaky voice booms. Her eyes are Gulf-water blue, blinking wildly in the slit of fabric. “I’m Sonny, Charalambos’s girlfriend. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Charlie?” I glance over at him in panic.
His jaw twists to the side, and for a second he’s too aggravated to collect an answer.
“Sonny!” he screams. “Take that off!”
Laughter erupts from the burka, shoulders quivering. She lets go of the laundry basket and tugs off the black veil. Blond curly hair, the color of whiskey in sunlight, falls across her tan shoulders. Her face is muscular and paler than her arms with faint freckles pulsing around her eyes. She’s exactly how I imagined Charlie’s girlfriend: like a hypnotist’s watch, impossible not to look at in awe. She breaks down, snorting, her eyes searching not for me but for Charlie. He joins her laughter, holding on to the wall, almost hitting his head against it in hysterics.
“I’m sorry,” she manages to gasp. “I couldn’t resist. It was too good.”
“Your face,” Charlie says, nodding at me. “Perfect. Horrible. Sonny!”
She scoops up the burka, draping it between her arms.
“Isn’t it lovely, though?” she says. “We bought it in Cairo last December, and I really have to stop myself from wearing it. I get the whole political thing against it, but honestly it’s so freeing to walk around unbothered, no one looking at you, like you can just cancel yourself for a while.”
“Sonny’s an actress.” Charlie stumbles over to gather her around the waist. “She never cancels herself.” He fake-bites her neck.
“What kind of roles—” I begin.
“Was,” Sonny corrects, holding up her finger. “Was an actress. No longer. The only good Charlie’s ever done me is save me from California.” She slaps his chest. “And by the way, nice one.” She slips from his arms and snatches a canvas tote bag from the sofa cushions. She pulls out an ivory letter opener, its crystal handle imbedded with a seahorse. “Look what was in my bag while shopping at the market this morning.”
Charlie smiles. “Oh, good, you found it.”
“This has to stop,” she wheezes, delighting in the fact that whatever game they’re playing it’s likely not to. She presses the tip of the knife against Charlie’s heart. “It started with ashtrays.”
“Ten months ago?” Charlie guesses. “The Pera Palace in Istanbul.”
“Charlie was obsessed with the onyx ashtrays in the hotel room.”
“They were the right weight.”
“I told him not to take them. And when we got back here, guess what I find in my suitcase? Two onyx ashtrays.”
“But you got me back in Corfu.”
“We did need a blow dryer. Then it got worse, maniacal.” Sonny is relaying these incidents for my benefit, but she’s staring greedily at Charlie, as if he might disappear without her constant supervision—or vice versa. Her silver nails are clenched on her hips. It’s strange when someone speaks to you but doesn’t take you in. “I get stopped at customs on our way back from Tel Aviv. The officer unzips my luggage on one of those steel morgue tables under fluorescent bulbs, and guess what we both stare down at?”
Charlie’s laughing again, his face bloodshot, and he collapses sideways on the couch, burying his eyes in a pillow.
“A lamp,” comes his muffled reply.
“You shit,” Sonny yells. “A fucking bedside lamp, paisley shade and all, with its cord wrapped around its Ming base. Do you realize how much improvising I had to do to explain that? Did you pack your own bags, ma’am?” Sonny does a sound impersonation of a Greek customs agent. “Why, yes I did. And this lamp has been in my family for generations. I take it wherever I go.”
Her eyes are running and she wipes them. Finally the humor seems to be purely for her and not for Charlie. She breathes for a minute and glances at me.
“Anyway, now you’ve seen how awful we are.” She examines me matter-of-factly like I’m in need of summing up. “Ian, you have such beautiful brown eyes. Brown eyes and red hair is so uncommon. Charlie never told me how handsome you are.” I worry my eyes will be found tomorrow in one of Charlie’s suitcases.
Charlie sits upright, snapping his fingers. “The surprise.”
“Oh, god, I totally forgot.” Sonny moans. “I told her to wait downstairs. I’ll go and get her.” She darts down the steps, and Charlie shakes his head at me.
“She’s not awful. People are hard on her for some reason. She gets nervous around strangers, so she overdoes it a bit.”
I understand. We’re all salesmen in our introductions, promising all-expenses-paid vacations to places we ourselves have rarely visited.
“She’s very pretty,” I say. He rolls his eyes at the comment, as if I’m pointing out a quality as obvious as a stutter or the use of a cane.
“Yeah, it becomes quite a show when we’re at the beach. Greek men actually line up on the shore to watch her walk out of the sea. The Italians are subtler, or their girlfriends are more vigilant. She hasn’t made many friends on Patmos. Now, with our mystery guest, she has one.”
The onyx ashtrays must be located in another part of the house. Charlie reaches for a porcelain teacup dish that’s littered with pinched, expired butts. He rolls a cigarette on the coffee table. He didn’t smoke the last time I saw him. It’s a habit picked up somewhere in the last five years.
“It sounds like you’ve been traveling a lot.”
He lights the cigarette—he’s rolled it so tightly it looks too delicate in his hands—and leans back on the sofa, relaxing in the exhale of smoke.
“We’re here for half the year, and then in the winters we go to Cyprus and take little trips. Sonny’s trying to get interested in art history. Right now she’s big on rococo.” He grunts out a lungful of smoke. “I say that like it’s our pattern. We’ve been together for less than two years. Just so you know, she has a daughter, a seven-year-old named Ducklin.”
“Really? She seems too young to have a seven-year-old.”
Charlie nods and wipes his nose with his wrist.
“Duck lives with her father in L.A., a director, but she comes for visits. She’s here for August. Christos’s wife, Therese, looks after her. I told you, it’s a packed house.”
Voices echo up the stairwell. Sonny returns, pulling behind her an unwilling arm. The hesitant young woman has dark hair cut just below the ears, a mole dotting her chin, wide eyes already apologizing, and she wears a black silk blouse and navy trousers. There’s a feral boyishness to her slouched, uneven shoulders.
“Hi, Ian,” she says harshly, with a smile either forming or evaporating. It wavers between life and death. “I might be a surprise, but probably not one you hoped for. These two had me locked in their bedroom for the past half hour.”
Louise Wheeler. It’s her voice, severe where others would have been soft, that gives her away. Louise was my sophomore crush at our very-liberal arts college nestled in the velveteen shadows of the Berkshire Mountains (liberal on its grading system; liberal on drugs; liberal about turning the student body into a harem for visiting faculty; achingly liberal in the conservative tractor town that seemed forever on the verge of dousing its strident nemeses in gasoline). Louise and I dated for two months, had sex exactly six times, and we even did a two-week volunteer trip together rehabbing houses in rural Mississippi for owners who had no clue why we were gleefully tampering with their roofs and basements. Louise was a sociology major from Lexington, Kentucky, on scholarship, and m
onths before I found the courage to ask her out, she appeared mostly as fleeing knees and cheekbones in dark sunglasses and long unbrushed hair, passing along the quad to the library. She was so serious in school she’s the last person I’d suspect of spending a summer blowing around the Dodecanese island chain. For at least a week of those two months, we were terribly in love, or terrible at it. Louise threw me aside for a law student at UMass. I struggle to remember if that was before or after Charlie dropped out. Did Charlie know how viciously she dumped me? I look over at him and he’s wiping ashes off his shorts. Louise tilts her head, as if she’s draining water from her ear.
“Well, it’s great to see you,” she says.
I can still picture her in the computer room of Stearns Hall telling me succinctly that we’re over. It reeked of obligation and imaginary disappointment. But now the present has superimposed itself on the past, and she’s telling me we’re over in the computer room of Stearns Hall with her hair cut short and her head tilted, draining water from her ear.
Sonny, the only person with whom I don’t share a history, is a strange candidate to come to my defense.
“I hate seeing people I once slept with.” She claps my shoulder. “Does everyone want a drink? It’s not too early?” She slips out of the room, refuting all claims to this deflated surprise, and begins to bang cabinet doors.
Louise steps forward, as if still fulfilling obligations. Her lips open, exposing the familiar collision of her top front teeth. Louise came to beauty by different roads than Sonny, whose overt prettiness was no doubt foretold from blond toddlerhood. Louise once told me that she had weathered hard childhood seasons of awkward and homely, a survivor of tornados of ridicule and thunderheads of rejection, where it was probably safest to take cover in a school hallway with her head between her legs. Those early trials infuse her looks with a toughness and complexity that probably still reads as unattractive in Kentucky. She has the kind of face that changes depending upon the angle. Right now, at a quarter tilt, she studies me in the cautious way one enters a bathroom in a foreign country, unsure of the reliability of basic equipment.
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