“Can I ask what you’re doing here?” I say to her. “I mean, I didn’t know you and Charlie were still friends.” I’m not angry. It was too long ago. I don’t feel more than a little thorn of humiliation, a splinter in the finger that you rub almost to suffer a bit of pain.
“I found her on Facebook,” Charlie says, dabbing his cigarette in the dish. He says it like he ordered her off the Internet.
“No, I found you,” Louise replies, retreating to the medieval chair. She sits down and tries unsuccessfully to position herself comfortably in its sharp contours. Has anyone since 1387 been able to make a nest out of that torture device? “And we kept in touch. I’ve been spending the summer in Europe as a break from law school. I was in Paris last month—”
“Sonny went up to Paris at the end of June. Rococo research,” Charlie says. “I saw that Louise was in Paris, so I arranged a lunch.”
“It wasn’t a lunch, it was the Louvre,” Sonny corrects him, carrying a bottle of vodka and four red tumblers. “Let’s go out on the balcony. Ian’s traveled eight thousand miles. I’m sure he’d like to sit outside.” She kicks open a glass door, and the three of us follow her. Charlie brings his dish and rolling papers with him.
The white stucco porch overlooks a garden, thistle green and fragrant with jasmine and sage. A tiny, whitewashed shrine, as bright as butcher paper, glimmers far below under the branches. Giant maroon and yellow bees orbit the leaves. In the distance, the island dips down, swerving its coastline like an alcoholic at the wheel, until it disappears into the sea and the dense blue haze of the horizon.
Sonny places the glasses on a metal table. Three matching metal chairs are fitted with emerald cushions. Charlie props himself on the wall of the balcony, holding the dish awkwardly at his chest, as if he’s drinking tea. A pot of purple nightshade sits in the corner. Sonny shoves her finger in its soil and tugs on a petal.
“Has Therese been watering?” she asks. A hose lies by the pot, but Sonny doesn’t reach for it. She backs away in her tight shorts and begins pouring out equal shots of vodka. “So Louise and I hit it off in Paris, and I convinced her to skip Madrid in August and visit us instead.”
“Madrid’s way too hot in August,” Charlie agrees, setting the plate on the wall.
“Madrid’s a dead city,” Sonny proclaims. “You can always tell a dead city by one simple rule: Do the young people go where the tourists congregate for fun? If your hotel bar is crammed with nightclubbing locals, you know there’s really nothing interesting going on. That’s the problem with New York these days, another sad fatality.” She shrugs, as if New York were an alley cat that was euthanized before it managed to get adopted, depressing but what can you do? “Living cities take work to understand. Although we’re crazy about the Prado in Madrid, aren’t we, Lamb? The Goyas make me want to kneel on the stone floor and weep.”
Charlie, or the Lamb in Charalambos, smirks at me. Sonny is overdoing it again. As an actress, Sonny must have learned the trick of stealing every scene from the other performers. I wonder if the burka routine was orchestrated to outshine the surprise of Louise. But I recall Charlie’s concern about her splitting any day. Sonny must also know when to rein it in. Quietness on her could be a cause for paranoia.
“I think I’m staying where you are,” Louise says, glancing over at me. “In Charlie’s cabins near Kampos.”
“That’s right,” he says. “But if you two don’t get along, I promise the connecting door bolts from both sides.”
“You can keep yours bolted,” Louise whispers with a repentant grin.
“Cheers.” Sonny raises her glass. “Yamas. To Ian.” We each clink and follow the universal law of direct eye contact. These faces are too easy, too beautiful, I think, members of Charlie’s kingdom and not mine. The vodka is cold, the first gulp slipping down my throat like a tiny, supple frog.
“Ian was working in Panama for a while. Gangs, wasn’t it?” Charlie asks. “Helping the drug cartel?”
“I wasn’t helping the drug cartel.” I groan. “But you do realize that it isn’t so simple as blaming the gangs for drugs. When you’re poor and your government aims to keep you that way, sometimes that’s your only option. We were trying to foster other alternatives.” My attention is on Louise, who listens with eyebrows raised. The vodka has unlocked the horrible need to show off.
“Ian’s a professional big heart,” Charlie concludes. “And then back in New York, what was it, homeless cokeheads in Brooklyn?”
“Crack addicts in the Bronx.”
“Oy.” He winces.
“I think that’s really impressive,” Louise says harshly. For a mathematical second, me plus vodka plus Louise’s approval equals resurrected love. She touches my hand on the table, her nails bitten and unvarnished. There’s a tiny black cross tattooed on her ring finger, blurred by doses of sun. “I’m sorry to hear about your father,” she says.
“Oh, Jesus,” Sonny wails, wiping her lips. “I am too. I should have said that right away. And instead I’ve been making a bunch of crass jokes. Why didn’t you remind me?” She gives Charlie a scalding look. “Was your father old? As old as Charlie’s father?”
“No. He was only sixty-seven.”
“That’s too young,” Sonny decides. “There should be so much more time. My family has the habit of living well into their hundreds.”
“That’s an expensive habit,” Charlie says.
Sonny picks up the bottle and refills my glass. She goes to refresh Louise’s drink but it’s still full. Louise has been holding her glass and lifting it to her mouth in esprit de corps, but she was never much of a drinker.
Charlie starts to roll another cigarette but is interrupted by a young man leaning halfway out of the balcony door. He couldn’t be older than twenty-five, with dark, joyless eyes and skin the shade of erased pencil. He has on a blue Speedo and rubber water shoes. He is not well made. His legs are as thin as arms and his chest is sunken, a canyon of matted black hair. There’s a small mark in the center of his forehead, in the shape of a priest’s thumb on Ash Wednesday. He glances disinterestedly at the drinking party around the table.
“Rasym,” Charlie says. “This is Ian.” I lift my hand, and Rasym looks at it dubiously, as if I’m about to propose a high-five. “Rasym’s my cousin from Nicosia.”
“Did you have any weird dreams last night?” Sonny asks him delicately.
“No,” Rasym says, refusing her bait. “Could I borrow the car to drive to the beach?” It’s a stronger voice than his body lets on, and its bluntly dismissive of Sonny and all of her cautious kindness. She takes the wound like a veteran, skirting her eyes to the trees. Charlie pats his pockets, comes up empty, and heads inside to retrieve them. On his way in, he turns to me.
“Can you drive a stick?”
“Badly, but yeah.”
“There’s a second motorbike at the cabins. You can use that. Louise can take you home tonight on hers.”
Louise’s ears redden at the prospect of driving me back, my legs and arms wrapped around her in the erotic arrangement of sharing a motorbike. Three puncture holes line her earlobe, but nothing fills them. They’re scars of earlier vanities.
“Prepare for crazy dreams,” Sonny says to me while fixing the lock on her bracelet. “There’s something about Patmos that brings out nightmares. I swear.”
“It’s true,” Louise concurs. “Last night I had an insane one about sharks. I couldn’t climb out of the water where a Great White was lurking. I kept getting halfway out and slipping back in. I woke up in a sweat.” I like imagining Louise waking up this way.
“There are no sharks in the Aegean,” Rasym says with the coldness of a fact-checker.
Sonny ignores him. “Tell Ian about the dream you had two nights ago,” she says to Louise.
“Don’t mention that! Don’t!” But the pressure of telling it is too great and Louise submits. “My arms were cut off and I was sold into sex slavery. I can’t believe we’re still talking abo
ut it! Are you satisfied?”
“Yes, mildly.” Sonny laughs and stares at me. “There’s a man two houses over who arrived in June, a psychologist from Chicago. Apparently, he had a dream that told him it was his destiny to live on the island of the Apocalypse. Like a divine calling he couldn’t shake. So he up and left his wife and rented a house here. Rumor is he’s also a pedophile. I won’t let Duck get within twenty feet.” She consults Louise while chewing on her lip. “Do you think that’s true?”
“Which part?” Louise says bluntly, as if imparting useful information.
A figure slides behind Rasym and steps onto the balcony. His hair is white-blond, flame-like even in the shade. He’s as skinny as Rasym but inordinately fit, with blue veins protruding down his arms like the fins of old sports cars. He smiles so intensely it’s almost hard to look at, like looking in the direction of loud music.
In Charlie’s absence, Sonny takes over introductions. “This is Rasym’s boyfriend, Adrian. He’s from Kraków. Now that’s a city.” Adrian nods, a more benign fact-checker.
“Good to meet you,” he says in what sounds less like an accent than a speech impediment, a freight train of consonants clunking over a broken track.
Sonny taps the bottle. “If you get a glass from the kitchen, you can have some.”
“No, I have a long swim to the goat island today.” He pats his stomach, never easing out of his smile. I get the feeling he will keep smiling until someone asks him to stop.
I stand up to use the bathroom. “Downstairs,” Sonny directs, intuiting my purpose. The staircase is so dark I brace my hands on the cool, coarse walls to find my footing. The lower floor is a colony of austere, dust-mottled bedrooms. The largest one with a gold bedspread and a jewelry box upturned on the dresser, earrings and chains strewn across its surface, must belong to Charlie and Sonny. The next room is fitted with a lonely row of stuffed animals and preteen romance books for Duck. A child’s white caftan hangs on the door like a doomed snow angel. Across the hall is an explosion site: suitcases overflowing like clogged sewers; iPods and headphones knotted together by their cords; swimsuits, fossilized by seawater, left in clumps on the brick floor. Two maroon passports embossed with different ideas of an eagle sit on a bookshelf, Polish and Cypriot.
The final room contains just a slender cot with a brown blanket spread neatly across the mattress. There are no signs of inhabitance. The luggage rack is empty, as is the open armoire. A monastic hush fills the space, somber as a sacristy with its treasures packed away or the first day of summer camp with the gloom of hard trials ahead. I pass through the room to its adjoining bathroom. Red marble runs across the floor and rises to scoop out an enormous tub. Three dying cacti line the sink counter, along with a half-filled vial of medication made out to Charlie’s older brother, Stefan, from four years ago. As I pee, I wonder if Charlie has purposefully stuck me in the faraway cabins with Louise, out of some misguided matchmaking scheme; or maybe the past five years have rendered me an undesirable interloper so close to his bedroom. On my way out, I notice a picture lying on top of the armoire. It’s a photo of two boys in suits standing next to each other, their arms at their sides, as if lined up for comparison. Neither smiles. It’s Charlie and his brother from the days when cameras still used film and moments seemed both more orchestrated and more haphazard.
I never really knew Stefan growing up. He was four years older, boarding-schooled in Pennsylvania, cerebral and humorless—he endured jokes the way an alcoholic endures sunlight, with a wince and a short-fused smile. Stefan’s only detectable passion was a love of tennis, if a boy loving a sport can be considered a personality trait. I remember he attended Princeton and dove instantly into the Konstantinou family business. I also remember that he and Charlie never got along. In the photo, their faces and bodies are deceptively similar, their skin a yellow Mediterranean bruise faded by northeastern winters. But they weren’t similar. Stefan never had Charlie’s warm-blooded charm, the kind of charm that could seduce an egg from its shell.
Feet stomp up a flight of steps from the floor below. Charlie races past the doorway with a jingle of keys, but he stops and reverses. He rests his arm on the top of the doorframe, black armpit hair flaring from his T-shirt sleeve.
“What are you doing in here?” he asks lightly.
“I was using the bathroom,” I reply. I almost expect him to march into the bathroom and urinate, like a dominant dog obliterating my mark with his own. “Hey, why are you exiling me off to northern Siberia when this bedroom is free?”
“Northern Siberia happens to have the better beaches,” Charlie says, walking over. “And don’t tell me you aren’t secretly ejaculating at the prospect of you and Louise stranded in the hills all alone.”
“I think you might have already left college, but Louise dumped me. Like a garbage bag on the curb. It’s great seeing her and all, but I’m not trying that again.”
“I hadn’t left yet,” he says, laughing. “I’m the one you came crying to. You threw up in my bathroom. Ian, that was forever ago. She’s right in front of you now. You’re welcome.”
“Why did you stay friends with her?” I ask.
“Why wouldn’t I? And I’m glad I did. She’s been great for Sonny.”
“Can’t I just stay here?”
He shakes his head. “This is Stefan’s bedroom. I got the whole house, but he got this bedroom, which he never uses. I think he pays Therese to ensure that no one else does either. Every summer he says he might come for a visit, but he never shows. He lives in Dubai now, handling the regional operations of the family firm. My father’s on his last legs, or really his last wheelchair, and Stefan’s being groomed as his replacement. Fluffed really. He’s still the asshole you barely knew and loved.”
“How’s his tennis?”
“Ha!” Charlie clucks, rubbing my shoulder. “Exactly. Finally someone who remembers what a robot he was. You know he finally found a girlfriend. Their hobby was learning Finnish together—Finnish in Dubai. And guess what, when it was over they broke up in Finnish. Might as well get some final practice in, right? Even his romances have to double as learning opportunities. Not a minute wasted.”
“They finished in Finnish.” Charlie doesn’t acknowledge my joke. He peers down at the photo on the armoire.
“Look at us, so stiff, like we’re being measured for our coffins.”
“So you aren’t part of the family business. Are you working? Or are you officially retired?”
His thumb digs into my shoulder bone.
“I work,” he says defensively. “God, you sound like Stefan. Do you think I’m just sitting around breaking my toys? I work my ass off, actually. Let’s go upstairs and you can see for yourself.”
He grabs the picture and carries it up with him. At the top of the steps, he tosses Rasym the car keys. Adrian is already lugging their beach gear out the door, and Rasym follows him without a good-bye. Charlie flaps the photo in his hand and turns, hunting for a place to stow it. He finally yanks a green Bible from the bookshelf and tucks the snapshot into the pages.
“If I die, shake my books,” he mutters.
Outside on the balcony, Louise and Sonny are whispering at the table with their heads bent close. “This is becoming one of those centuries,” Sonny says, as if she’s weathered enough of them to discern a contrast. “Honestly, it was only the twentieth century that was rational. I think the twenty-first will be more like the others. Unreal, cleverer. Although we’re only in the shallow end.”
Charlie tugs on her ear as he guides me toward the view. He points at the southern tip of the island, to a yellow patch by the sea. “That’s a port called Grikos, which most of the private boats use. But a little farther south—” He runs his finger along the coastline, stopping on a dent of land half obstructed by cliffs. “That’s a tiny port I’ve rented from the monastery for my boats.”
“What boats?”
“I’ve built up my own fleet. Refurbished yachts I rent out to
tourists for sailing around the Aegean. I know it isn’t a construction empire, but it’s my own. I’ll show you tomorrow when we go out. This house belonged to a captain dynasty. Hundreds of years of men who made their money from the sea.”
“Make sure Christos brings fresh towels tomorrow,” Sonny warns, leaning her head back to stare up at us.
“Don’t invite Miles,” Charlie snaps.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Sonny says softly, pressing her hand against her eyebrows to block the sun. “He’s good with Duck.”
“He’s obsessed with you,” Charlie says coldly.
“I really think he is,” Louise confirms, shaking her drink.
“He’s not,” Sonny swears. “Or so what if he is? Competition’s getting too tough for you? Afraid I’ll run off?”
“He was a pretentious leech when I knew him as a kid, and he’s still exactly the same. ‘I’m Miles Lyon-Mosley,’” Charlie singsongs, prancing in place. He makes a fey adjustment to the dish on the balcony. “‘This must be just so, ’” he whines. “‘Now, Charles, drinking in the morning simply isn’t done in proper London. At my estate in the Cotswolds, we have a saying—’” Charlie mimes aristocracy badly. It’s an ugly performance, cruelty showing through, and it’s strangely depressing. I want Charlie to be better than that. I’ve forgotten how flinty his face becomes when he’s angry, the wrinkles at his eyes hardening, his nostrils trumpeting.
“I bet he has an estate,” Charlie murmurs, easing out of Miles. He slaps me on the back. “Quick, Ian, three gunmen in black balaclavas burst through the front door.”
I almost choke from laughing. Sonny turns around in her chair.
“Black baklava?” she says. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” Charlie tells her. “An old joke between us.” Sonny won’t like a game in which she isn’t a player. She grabs the bottle of vodka and stands up.
“I’ll get a fresh one,” she says.
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