by Alex A King
Tonight:
She peels her skin off his, skin damp and glowing with light sweat. “Was that good?”
His heartbeat takes its time finding normal. “Always.”
“Do you mean that?” She drags a fingernail across his chest, carves her name there.
“Mmm hmm.”
Max,” she says, in a petulant girlish voice. “Are you going to marry me?”
Okay, should have seen that one coming. Now what?
He kicks the covers aside, ditches the condom. “If I ask you, you’ll know.”
Kaboom!
Anastasia takes the top sheet with her. Wrapped from head to toe in cotton, she gathers her clothes, stalks into the bathroom.
The door slams and clicks.
This is his cue: Anastasia wants to be pursued, cajoled. Won.
And Max doesn’t like games.
He takes his time. Pulls his boxer briefs on. Sits on the edge of the bed and scratches his head, while he thinks about his current crop of patients, thinks about scheduling the Jeep for maintenance.
Eventually he gets up, knocks on the bathroom door.
“You don't love me. What else could we possibly have to talk about?” The door muffles her voice.
“You're putting word in my mouth. I never said that.”
“If you're just using me for sex, be a man and tell me.”
They’ve had this argument before – at least twice. “Anastasia, just come out and talk like an adult. You’re making something out of nothing.”
“No! You don't tell me what to do!”
The familiar hiss of the shower tells him the conversation is over. He stands there until it stops.
“Do you want me to tell you if I'm going to propose? Wouldn't you prefer a romantic surprise? Isn't that what women expect?”
Anastasia is driving him crazy. At this rate he’s going to end up marrying her just to stop the insanity.
“Maybe,” she says, after a short pause. “Leave me alone now.”
Back to the bedroom. After five minutes of pacing, he flops on the bed and groans. He really needs to piss. His apartment has only one bathroom.
Decision time about his future with Anastasia has come sooner than he anticipated. He was hoping for some prolonged fun and games while he sorts out his feelings – if he even has any for her.
Shit, he has no idea what he wants.
Anastasia’s controlling him with that pout and that hard-soft body.
Is that enough?
She has a point: They have nothing to talk about. That’s not what she meant, but doesn’t make it less true. She has no interest in his work, resents his patients, hates the Jeep, and never opens her own purse to pay for anything.
Not that he minds spending money on a woman – he’s spent all kinds of money on girls and women over the years. But an offer would be cool.
Then there’s that body, that face, that heat.
Anastasia is electric.
But there have been plenty of other women, many of them electric.
Question is: Is she special?
The bathroom door creaks. Anastasia comes out, skin damp, firm breasts bouncing, smile on her face as if their argument never happened.
Her towel hits the floor.
She pins him to the bed, and Max, he just lies there, faking helplessness, waiting to see what she’ll come up with next.
Anastasia doesn’t say a word. She wiggles her way backward and downward, until he’s buried in her throat.
He moans – he can’t help it. She’s good. She elevates sex to art.
Max, you’re a fucking idiot. Walk away, man. Walk away.
Run.
18
VIVI
THE LONG ARM OF the Mediterranean curls northwards, past the east coast of Greece, to form the flat palm of the Aegean Sea. Its fingers twist and turn around the islands between the mainland and Turkey, and the crook of one digit holds the calm seas of the Pagasetic Gulf.
Vivi knows this because Google Maps said so.
Now she’s getting a load of the real deal in tiny oval-shaped chunks. A hundred swirling shades of blue. Cerulean bleeding into aquamarine bleeding into cyan bleeding into ultramarine.
Melissa is missing it all. Eyes shut, ears clogged with white buds, she’s busy being fifteen. When Vivi leans over her to get a better look, Melissa frowns, buries herself deeper in the seat.
The plane dips closer to land. Grey and brown buildings with their red roofs materialize out of the blips and dots. The Acropolis rises, a goddess above her subjects, Parthenon forming the crown upon her head. The crumbling ruins look whole. Easy to imagine how it looked on opening day.
Vivi tugs one of Melissa’s buds out. “You’re missing the best view ever.”
It’s a big burden – huge, but Melissa indulges her mother. Her nose wrinkles. “It looks like a big dirty city.”
Yeah, it’s a big dirty city. It’s obvious the shades of brown and gray are buildup from smog and dust, and the streets are jammed with thousands of bug-sized vehicles. But Vivi isn’t about to let a little dirt overshadow the adventure.
“Look. There's the Parthenon. Remember during the Athens Olympics when we saw it all lit up? You said you wanted to see it in person more than anything in the whole world. Everything back home is so new and shiny compared to this. This is living history. This is where you came from.”
“You're worse than Grams. Greece this, Greece that. I'm going to the restroom.”
“Forget it, Kiddo.” Vivi nods to the lighted Fasten Seatbelt sign. “We're stuck here until we land.”
“Figures,” she says, jamming the bud in her ear. But she doesn’t quit looking out the window.
The airport shows up with its miniature runways and toy blocks. Time to get the plane into position.
The ground charges.
They don’t crash.
An electrical current zips through the crowd. Phones out, texts sent. Mostly tourists onboard, weighted down with the requisite morbidly obese travel bags. The plane jerks to a stop at the terminal and passengers rise from their seats like the walking dead. An army, lurching towards the doors, wielding their belongings.
Vivi waits until they’re no longer in the decapitation zone, then they work their way out.
Hot on the jet bridge. Breathing is like kissing a handful of molten sand. Eyes everywhere; a security guard carrying a machine gun looks through them, constantly on the lookout for the next potential terrorist.
Vivi grabs her daughter’s hand. “These guys mean business. Stay close to me, okay? I don't want to lose you in this place.”
Signs in Greek and English all over the place, arrows pointing in a million different directions. “Let's get our bearings and figure out where we're going.”
Melissa shrugs. “Shouldn't we just follow the rest of the people from the plane?”
Great plan. They do that.
Until Melissa has to pee.
In the restroom, Vivi stifles a scream. She has carry-on luggage under her eyes, and she’s wearing a Shar Pei.
There’s a whoosh and Melissa appears in the mirror. In flats she’s almost Vivi’s height. “Carnival mirror?”
The hag in the mirror says, “Nope. That’s how we really look.”
“Wow. Not cool.”
Immigration is a breeze. The immigration officer is one of those new-fangled robot people who work in airports now. He asks wooden questions and scans their faces for lies. With a stamp to their passports, he waves them on; time to process the next body in line.
Their luggage isn’t lost, and they have nothing to declare. And they must look okay, because customs waves them through.
They are almost charmed.
19
VIVI
THEY’RE GOING TO DIE, and it will be the cab driver’s fault.
He picked them up at the airport’s exit, a round guy in a Greek fisherman’s hat.
His mustache asked, “Where you go?”
“The Liosion bus station,” Vivi said.
“No train?”
“Does it go to Volos?”
“Eh,” he said, raising both hands. “I don't know, I just drive taxi.”
“In that case take us to the bus station.”
“Okay.”
Now he’s zipping in and out of traffic like he took driving lessons from NASCAR. Melissa is a pale sheet hanging from the handgrip, and Vivi knows she’s just as limp.
“You want to see Olympic stadium? Maybe National Garden?”
“Just the bus station.”
“You are sure?” The mustache rises and falls in the rearview mirror.
His tip is shrinking by the second.
“I’m Greek, so stop trying to con me.”
He laughs big. “You are not Greek, you are tourista.”
“My parents were born here, which makes me Greek. So just take us to the station.”
Grudging respect on Melissa's face. Finally Vivi is doing something right.
“You are American, yes? I have cousin in America. Maybe you know her?”
Surely he isn’t serious. “I doubt it.”
“She lives in New York. Do you know it?”
“Sure, I've been there a few times.”
“Where you live?”
“Oregon.”
“That is close to New York, yes?”
“Nope.”
“How far can it be? America is not so big.”
“Two days drive – if you don’t stop.”
He twists in the seat, until he’s looking her in the eye. The cab is still moving. “I don't believe it.”
“Look at a map.”
He goes back to the road. A honk from behind and he smashes his foot on the gas pedal. Another honk, from up ahead, and he slams the brakes, blasts his horn. Tires screech.
“You know Robert DeNiro? Maybe he is your friend, eh?”
“No.” She swaps her terrified face for a bored one, but he rolls right over her.
“Are you sure? He's very famous. Best actor in the world.”
“I know his movies, but I don’t know him personally.”
“You are certain?”
The traffic starts to move again.
“Positive.”
Vivi reads his mind: Stupid American.
“People say I look like him.” He points to a mole on his face. “Say hello to my little friend,” he says. “That sounds like him, yes?”
Melissa bites her lip, goes far, far away.
“Scarface. That was Pacino.”
“No! It was DeNiro.”
“Pacino.”
He swivels in the beaded seat, face like a rock. “Prove it!”
“I'm in a cab – your cab – how am I supposed to prove anything?”
He turns back around, smashes his palm on the horn. “Go to the devil!” he hollers out the window. “It is DeNiro.”
“Fine, it's DeNiro. You win.”
He grunts again, zooms another few feet before crunching down on the brake. Oh look, they can fly.
“Get out,” he barks. “This is bus station.”
He tosses their bags on the grimy sidewalk, waves his hand for the fare. Ten percent tip. A fair price for a near-death experience.
Melissa covers her nose. “It smells weird.”
Swanky place. Doesn’t reek too much of stale urine and old tobacco.
“Try not to breathe,” Vivi says.
She steers them past a group of old men sitting in a smoke cloud, all the way to an empty bench. The old men fiddle and flip their worry beads, gold teeth shining at the pretty women. She dumps their bags, says, “Sit. Stay. If anything weird happens, scream.”
“I’m not a dog. Woof.”
So her kid’s a smart ass. Vivi’s glad to see the return of her spark. “I mean it. I'm going to get bus tickets.”
A woman with a bad perm and a pretty smile sells her two tickets to Volos, departing in about an hour. Vivi drops coins in the pay phone and leaves a message for her aunt.
Ten minutes out of Athens and Vivi’s asleep. Two hours after that she wakes with a head full of cotton and salt in her eyes. Melissa gives her what’s left of a warm Coke.
Caffeine and sugar don’t take long to strike. She comes alive, more or less.
They’re on a bus with a mixture of tourists and natives. It’s language soup in here. A bit of everything from all over Europe. Lots of pale-skinned people in eye-gouging colors, wearing sandals for the first time in what looks like forever. But they’re happy-happy. And who wouldn’t be? It’s paradise on the other side of the window. Even the dry patches are new and different. Vivi likes the way nature struggles in places, the way the olive trees punch their fists out of the dirt and claw up toward the sun.
“What’s that smell?” Melissa says.
* * *
Most people who follow showbiz news know the story of how a bunch of actors trained for months so they could be in a movie cobbled together with special effects. Their Thermopylae pass was a green screen, their King Leonidas some Scottish guy. Three hundred Spartans play-fought and play-lost to a CGI Persian army, while a giant Xerxes (clearly an escapee from a BDSM porno) flipped between stomping his foot and gloating.
What most people don’t know is that the real world Thermopylae stinks.
Hot springs.
Greece sits on a nest of fault lines.
* * *
Vivi says, “Sulfur.”
“It smells like really bad farts.”
“So hold your nose.”
“I am holding my nose. See?”
A group of Germans sees Melissa holding her nose and they start to laugh and hold theirs. Then Melissa is laughing at their laughing.
“Po-po,” the old Greek woman across from them says, waving a hand in front of her face.
Vivi can’t help herself – laughter spreads faster than Ebola.
* * *
The bus is in decent shape, but it’s the wrong shape for prolonged sitting. Vivi is a volatile mixture of uncomfortable and anxious.
Hurry up, hurry up.
Slow down, slow down.
All the way into Volos.
Now that she’s basically a captive in a tin can, she has time to think about what she’s done. There’s something unsettling about the idea of staying with family she’s never met. Eleni grudgingly arranged for Vivi’s aunt Dora – Eleni’s older sister – to meet them at the bus station. From there they will travel the few minutes or so to Agria, a fishing village that used to be its own entity, but has now (on paper) been assimilated into the city. Resistance was futile.
Vivi doesn’t know a thing about her aunt, except that she’s apparently a small snake. She’s seen pictures, black and white and wrinkle-free, but that’s it. Nothing about character and temperament.
Stress, stress, stress.
Now they’re here, and she’s steering Melissa ahead of her, off the bus and into the vindictive light. She barely has time to step away from the door, when she’s accosted by a pillow with arms.
“Vivi, you are here! Come, let me look at you!”
Her aunt has an addiction to exclamation points, while her younger sister lives an italicized, underscored life.
She’s a big woman, but soft in body and face. Greying hair, but so what? She wears it like she’s happy for it to be there.
“Thea Dora?” Vivi asks. Thea being the Greek word for aunt.
“Yes, I am Thea Dora.” She reaches for Melissa. “And this is little Melissa. What a beauty!” The large woman leans back and spits without letting saliva fly.
Melissa looks horrified.
“It's okay,” Vivi says in English. “It's to ward off the evil eye.”
Turns out her aunt speaks English.
“Yes, the evil eye. You do this when someone pays you a compliment. Evil likes to attach itself to beauty, so you spit to cancel the compliment. It is one of the old, Greek ways, from the time when we had our own gods.”
> Melissa's eyes grow even wider. “Do you believe in God, too?”
“Of course! It is his work we do when we remove the evil eye. Just do not mention it in church, that is all, or they will chase us away with their brooms.” Mischief dances naked in her hazel eyes. “And now come, we will go home. You both look like you could use a good meal.” She shakes her head. “So skinny, you American girls. My daughter – your cousin Effie – she is fat. She eats too much, does nothing for exercise except nag her husband and children.”
She talks and talks and talks her way to a tiny BMW, circa nineteen-eighty-something, with rust bubbling all over its yellow paint. Sea air loves to eat. The car has two speeds: fast and faster.
Thea Dora’s mouth runs on the same engine. Questions, historical factoids, gossip – she never stops.
“Your mother and I, we used to dive off that pier every day during summer,” and, “Look, they make the best frappe in town right there.” And, when a man walking two donkeys with packs comes into view: “Look, a Greek car!”
Vivi laughs.
“What's frappe?” Melissa asks. “Is that like a Frappuccino?”
“Iced coffee. You will try some when we get to the house.”
“Mom doesn't let me drink coffee.”
“You don’t let the girl drink coffee?”
“Maybe this once,” Vivi says.
Melissa shoots her a look.
“How is my sister?” Thea Dora wants to know.
“The same. She never changes.”
Not a grain of sand on the beach. The shore is made up of rocks and pebbles, but swimmers and sunbathers don’t seem to care. The water is slightly more perfect than the weather – that’s what matters.
Thea Dora laughs at the sky. “That is Eleni. Our parents were stricter with her. It was a big scandal when she married your father.”
Vivi perks up. “Scandal?”
But her aunt is three conversations down the road already. “See, there is our Church, Agios Yioryios – St George.”
An elderly woman in black is lugging a huge red bottle up the road. She’s leaning way left, hem bobbing several inches above a black knee-high stocking.