So Shelly

by Ty Roth

  Cross-armed, he pulled his T-shirt up over his head and tossed it onto the concrete deck. Giddy, I’m sure, with the possibilities before him, he slipped out of his sandals and dropped his pants so that they covered his feet. He then dove into the water, swam beneath the surface, and stalked the girls’ bottoms like a great white. (A person’s chance of being killed by a shark is 1 in 264.1 million.) The girls scattered. Their squeals reached Gordon through the warbled distortion of the water, and he was once again comfortable and in his element.

  They played—literally played—for nearly an hour: shark tank, volleyball, keep-away, and chicken fights, and he taught them to call “Polo” to his “Marco.” Gordon felt as if he were thirteen years old again, splashing in the back bay with Shelly and Augusta. He couldn’t remember a happier time in the intervening years.

  The time machine was soon broken, however, and the games ended, when they heard the glass door to the living area sliding heavily on its track. Through the smell of chlorinated water, Gordon caught a whiff of an exotic perfume wafting in the air as he surfaced. He made out the shapely figure of a woman standing poolside with arms crossed as the girls called what Gordon took for helloes to the woman without the slightest hint of shame or concern for having been caught skinny-dipping with a boy.

  Tarsia Macri was the water nymphs’ mother. In her late thirties, she could have easily passed for twenty-five.

  Calmly, as if making the most mundane of requests, Mrs. Macri said something in Greek, and the girls, moaning their reluctance, swam to the concrete deck. They reached up, pulled and then pushed their glistening nubile bodies in perfect synchronicity from the pool, wrapped their towels around themselves, and scurried back, dripping wet, into the house.

  Alone with Mrs. Macri, Gordon waited for his scolding.

  “Well?” she said in a stilted English that perfectly matched Kattinka’s earlier invitation to jump into the water. Indicating that he too was expected to remove himself from the pool, Mrs. Macri revealed no obvious intention of chastising him for his behavior with her daughters, or any intention of averting her gaze.

  Unabashedly, Gordon mimicked the girls’ exit and stood, dripping, two feet in front of her, awaiting further instructions.

  Mrs. Macri slid her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and gave Gordon’s body a once-over from bottom to top and back down again. “What happened to your leg?” she asked.

  He actually appreciated her bluntness, especially compared to the idiotic manner most people employed in order to pretend not to notice, but before he could answer, she turned and walked away, announcing that dinner would be served in half an hour.

  As he showered in the guest bathroom, Gordon imagined several scenarios, in anticipation of what the Macri females had in store for the evening. The fantasy he settled on was that Mrs. Macri was a cougar who fed on the flesh and fluids of young men, in an ever-increasingly difficult quest to maintain her own youth and to forestall her inevitable march into the living-death of middle age. She used her daughters as bait to trap her victims and lure them to her lair, where she ravished and drained her boy toys in exquisite tortures that even Gordon couldn’t imagine but was dying to discover.

  His erotic musings were abruptly interrupted when a panicked Mrs. Macri burst in and threw his clothes over the top of the glazed glass shower door.

  “What’s going on?” Gordon asked, sensing that his burgeoning fantasies were going to remain just that—fantasies.

  “You must go,” she insisted as Gordon attempted to pull on his sopping wet clothes.

  “But—”

  “No talk. Just go.”

  From the pool deck, Gordon heard the bass voice of a man who, to inspire this kind of terror, could only be Mrs. Macri’s husband. The girls’ birdlike voices were intermingled with the man’s.

  With his pants barely covering his ass and his shirt worn inside out, Gordon, still soaking wet, carried his shoes and followed Mrs. Macri down to the first level, where she shoved him through the kitchen and out the back door.

  Dismayed and pouting, Gordon sat down impudently on the steps, which led to a rear alley. He finished dressing, gathered his dignity, made his way around to the street in front, and walked toward Athens in search of a taxi.

  It would seem that, at least for the first part of his stay in Greece, Gordon was still Gordon.

  But on a mid-July afternoon two weeks later, Gordon met a girl. I don’t mean the typical “Gordon girl” but one who sincerely interested him and with whom he developed an actual platonic relationship bordering on friendship. Although, it began inauspiciously.

  The beach was unusually crowded. Gordon and Hobhouse had begun to fold up their beach chairs early and head back to their rooms, when Hobhouse elbowed Gordon in the side and said, “Hey, look.” With a backward nod of his head, he directed Gordon’s attention to a petite young lady with her long black hair gathered into a muffin-sized bun. She lounged on her back in a relatively modest—for a Mediterranean beach—black bikini with silvery spangles reflecting the sunshine like so many constellations. On first glance, Gordon guessed her to be his age or maybe a little older. Her eyes and nearly half of her face were covered by a massive pair of sunglasses. Most interesting, however, was that she held a Greek language version of Manfred in one hand, and, while fully engrossed, she turned the pages with the other.

  “I can’t pass this up,” Gordon said, carelessly dropping his beach accoutrements to the sand. “This is fucking kismet.”

  He weaved around and stepped his way over a minefield of bronzed and baked bodies of all shapes and sizes until he stood at the foot of her chair like a human eclipse blocking the sun. “That’s mine,” Gordon said, hoping she could understand his English.

  Assuming he referred to the in-much-demand beach chair on which she lay, the girl said, with only a slightly stilted accent, “Fuck off. You Americans still think you run the world. The chair was empty. I took it. Now, go get a Big Mac.” (Heart disease is the number one killer of Americans in general but only the number five killer of teens.)

  Her attitude seemed more affected than authentic, as if part of a general attitude regarding American tourists.

  Gordon laughed, which really angered her.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked, lifting her torso and positioning herself on her elbows, now appearing genuinely annoyed. “You think it’s all some kind of joke, and then you’re shocked when jet planes fly into your skyscrapers. Only then, you stop with the laughing.”

  I know, not cool. But it made Gordon stop laughing all right. “I’m sorry, but I meant that. That’s mine.” He pointed at the iconic cover of her copy of Manfred, which she held against the side of her thigh.

  Confused, she sat up completely and looked around her and under a pile of newspapers for something she must have missed.

  “The book,” Gordon said. “I wrote it. Look in the back. There’s a picture. It’s a couple of years old, but I think you’ll recognize it.”

  She did as he suggested, then lowered her sunglasses and looked knowingly into Gordon’s eyes. “Now I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, but without any apparent regret for her anti-American rant.

  Rather than receiving the instant adulation to which he’d grown accustomed from his cultish readers, Gordon was surprised by her almost total lack of amazement or sense of privilege. “It’s my little sister’s. She left it in my bag. I had nothing else to read.”

  Noticing the bookmark hastily stuck nearly three quarters of the way through the novel, he said, “Well, at least your little sister must be enjoying it.”

  “My sister’s an idiot,” she said.

  The dark young lady swung her shapely thighs and winnowing calves to the side and off of the chair; her realignment revealed a tiny tattoo, between her ankle bone and Achilles tendon, of a pale yellow star outlined in red, with a matching “17N” in its middle. She stuffed Gordon’s novel and her newspapers into an enormous beach bag, which matched her suit, in a show
of disgust.

  Gordon quickly sat down beside her. “Wait,” he said. “Can’t we talk?”

  “Talk? Of what? And why? So you can ask me to show you around Athens while you pretend to be interested, until the famous boy author from America can convince the starstruck native girl to allow him inside her pants?”

  “I was thinking coffee, but I’m open to your plan.”

  She literally harrumphed and stood, before releasing and shaking her luxuriant hair so that it fell in shiny raven-black tresses over her shoulders and down her slender back. She bent forward at the waist, shook out some sand from her top, and then suddenly snapped to a vertical position while corralling her hair with both hands along the sides of her head. With a magician’s sleight of hand, she ran her locks through an elastic hair band and gathered it into a ponytail. Back arched, elbows akimbo, and breasts thrust forward and up, she momentarily struck a pose worthy of sculptor’s marble. Finally, after picking up her bag, she made a show of stomping away through the torrid sand without a word of farewell.

  Something about it was too over the top, too meet-cute, Gordon thought. Without much concern, he put the failed attempt behind him. He’d struck out before, and he certainly would again. Based upon the lecture he’d given me two years earlier at the Beacon regarding his courage in approaching girls, I’m sure he thought, “What’s going to happen will happen. There’s no sense worrying about it.”

  He hurried to where Hobhouse stood, watching and enjoying Gordon being blown off for a change. “Looks like the Mighty Casey struck out,” Hobhouse said.

  “That’s only the first swing,” Gordon replied.

  They returned to the hotel for a regenerative nap before diving headlong once more into the Athens nightlife.

  * * *

  “It’s her,” Gordon said, breaking the silence that had usurped the rightful place of dinner conversation. “She’s here.”

  He reached across the small circular table that he shared with Hobhouse at the O Glykis café, and pulled down the menu that Hobhouse had been studying with rapt focus. Hobhouse, like Gordon, enjoyed his food, and in large quantities. Whereas Gordon might compare their three-part days to a sort of triathlon, for Hobhouse, their daily routine was best described as a well-wrought three-act play: the beach served as rising action, and the clubbing as denouement, both sandwiched around each night’s climactic dinner, which he could patiently prolong for hours. Knowing that he wasn’t spending a dime of his own money only added to his culinary pleasure.

  The O Glykis was somewhat removed from the congested cafés on Eterias Square, so Gordon was surprised when he spotted the brusque brunette from the beach seated near the café entrance, out of which the waiters appeared and disappeared in their white aprons. He was certain that she hadn’t been there when they’d arrived. One of the waiters, Gordon noticed, paid particular attention to the girl, especially considering that she had ordered nothing but a coffee in the time that Gordon had been aware of her presence.

  “Who’s here?” Hobhouse asked, more than a little perturbed by the interruption of his dinner planning.

  “The girl from the beach,” Gordon said.

  “Well, that narrows it down to several thousand.”

  “The black bikini,” Gordon said, “reading my book.”

  “That’s an unlikely coincidence.”

  “You think so?” The sarcasm dripped. “I’m going over there.”

  “If at first …,” Hobhouse began, but Gordon was already gone.

  “I saw you,” she preempted him. “I saw you but did not care. I sat anyway, believing I made myself clear and you’d be a gentleman. But, no. Here you stand. Typical.”

  With his hands braced against the black iron chair in front of him, Gordon asked, “Why do you dislike me? I get the whole ‘stupid American’ thing, but don’t you think you’re being just a little unfairly prejudiced? I mean, you don’t even know me.”

  “Oh, I know you. I’ve seen you in the magazines and on the Internet. You are the all-American boy, no? You are everything I hate about your country, and now you are poisoning mine.”

  “Christ, comrade, relax,” Gordon said.

  As was the case earlier, she made a show of leaving, but as she rose, the overly attentive dark-haired dark-eyed (it seemed everyone in Athens was dark-haired and dark-eyed) waiter—with full sideburns flanking a gaunt face and protuberant nose beneath the longest eyelashes Gordon had ever seen on a man—made an almost imperceptible pause as he passed her table, while simultaneously locking eyes with the girl, and she slunk back into her chair as if on orders.

  Gordon sat down.

  “What if I told you that the guy you’ve seen in those magazines isn’t real? That I’m not that guy?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, while she stared over his, out into the street; she was either truly disgusted by Gordon or afraid of his charms. “I’d say you are a liar.”

  Gordon continued, “What if I told you that, even if I am in some small ways ‘that guy,’ I want to change? Would you believe me …” He had wanted to use her name in direct address, but realized he didn’t know it, so he paused, hoping she’d respond to his cue. And she did.

  “Zoe.”

  “Zoe?” Gordon repeated. “Is that short for something? Is there a last name to go with it?”

  “Just Zoe. That is all you need to know.”

  The waiter returned and asked, “Do you stay?”

  Zoe’s lips separated to respond, but before she could give voice to whatever her answer was going to be, Gordon gave a presumptuous, “Yes.”

  Gordon turned and signaled his intention to stay to Hobhouse.

  Exasperated but not surprised, Hobhouse smiled insincerely and flipped off Gordon.

  “What’s with the tattoo?” Gordon asked Zoe. Beneath the table, he felt her cross her legs in her dark denim jeans, as if covering the mark. “What’s the 17N stand for?”

  Because his description of the tattoo was accurate, and a simple Google search would identify the symbol anyway, there was no reason for Zoe to dissemble. “It represents the seventeenth of November.” She pronounced it as if it would generate a surprised response.

  “What’s that? Your birthday?”

  “No,” she said, thinking he must be the most ignorant boy on earth. “It is a”—she hesitated, choosing her words carefully—“a political organization.”

  “And you’re a member?”

  “Sort of.”

  “And you have to get a tattoo when you’re a member?”

  “No. Only I have such a tattoo.”

  “Why not a butterfly or a flower or your boyfriend’s, the waiter’s, name?”

  Gordon saw that Zoe was thrown by his characterization of her relationship with Rony, the eyeballing waiter; her face betrayed her surprise.

  “So, I’m right. He is your boyfriend.”

  “He is not my boyfriend, and it is irrelevant. For your information, the 17N were Greek patriots and freedom fighters.”

  “You said ‘were.’ But you also said you are a member of this … What did you call it? A political organization? So, which one is it?”

  “You are not like most Americans. You listen. But do you learn? That is yet to be determined,” she said.

  “I do,” Gordon said, “and I’m still waiting to learn the answer. Are you a member or not?”

  Rony stopped and refilled Zoe’s coffee cup, then lifted the glass pot toward Gordon. “Yes?” he asked, but Gordon sensed a greater implication in the gesture than the mere offer of a cup of coffee.

  Gordon waved his hand and said, “No. Thank you.”

  Rony turned again to Zoe, who shook her head, then answered Gordon’s question as Rony waited on the patrons in his section, giving regular furtive glances back at the two of them. “My father was a member. A founder, actually, but now he’s in jail.”

  “I take it that has something to do with this 17N?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he
do?”

  “He did many things—all for Greece.”

  “If he’s such a hero, why is he in jail?”

  “My father fought for the people against the puppets and appeasers in parliament who continue to whore out our country to foreigners and then persecute their own sons and daughters. My father is a great man,” Zoe insisted. “There are evils that must be done, sacrifices that must be made, even innocents who must suffer, for the greater goal of Greek sovereignty.”

  “Those sound like the justifications of a terrori—” Gordon began.

  Before he could finish the word, Gordon felt the cold sting of a slap across his face, which set off a ringing in his ears. With temporarily blurred vision, he watched Zoe rise. He listened as she declaimed, “Don’t you ever use that word about my father or my friends. We are no more terrorists than your own American revolutionaries. Like them, we demand self-rule in our own country. We would rather die than live under the boots of America, our so-called allies, with their military bases and economic blackmail, or live with the Turks despoiling Cyprus, or with any ties to the EU or the panderers from NATO.”

  With her point abundantly made and with his interest sincerely piqued, Gordon begged Zoe to sit down. The lesson in geopolitics was coming too fast for him to process through the ringing-turned-buzzing inside his head, but he appreciated her passion. With a show of reluctance, she sat down with her arms folded. With a puckered mouth, Zoe turned toward the street.

  “Tell me more,” Gordon said. “Please.”

  She turned her narrowed eyes toward him. “Why? So you can insult?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I want to know more about this 17N and whatever it is they do and why they do it.” The sudden burst of social concern was unfamiliar to him, but it was all so Shelly. Reflecting on the irony of it made him laugh.

  “And now you laugh,” she said.

  “I’m not laughing at you. I’m thinking of a friend back home who should probably be having this conversation instead of me.”

  “Is he too a famous writer?” she asked in a subtly mocking tone.