“That’s it?” he said. He waited. I didn’t move. Said nothing.
Finally, he shook his head and I watched him walk down the steps back into the garden of the taverna. Not his usual confident walk, loose limbed, with that absence of self-awareness. A heaviness. I sat back down in the bar. Nefeli gave me a look. Fady was gazing back over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, turning to the table. “There goes the neighborhood.”
“It’s fine,” I said to them both. I took a drink. But I had not prepared myself for seeing Aris in public, with her. I had not thought of how real it would feel, how final. Say what you will about it, our emotional dependence was significant. When we were apart we’d talk for hours on the phone, or online. He’d call me in the middle of the night to tell me something funny that had just happened. Other times for no reason at all. Maybe it was simply an intense friendship all along. We had all the components (affection, conversation, desire, closeness) but nothing to root it. I thought that was a question of timing, of logistics. But maybe it was not so complicated at all. Love is not an accumulation of traits.
I had never seen Aris look as sad as he had that early February morning when he brought me to the airport, after my parents’ funeral in Athens. We had barely slept. I was convinced something was wrong, that he was sick, because when you lose something close to you, you expect everything and everyone is next. The plane ride was terrible. The plane rides are always terrible.
Now, as the musicians continued playing, as Dimitra sang, I lost track of the rounds of drinks brought over to our table, the little pitchers and the ice and the raki. At one point Nefeli put her hand on my wrist, as if to tell me to slow down. Behind her my mother danced a hawk-like zeibekiko in a yellow dress, but the lighting was dim and I was drunk, and when I looked around later I didn’t see any woman in yellow.
On the walk home it began to rain, but I was so drunk I didn’t care. Yet I hesitated a moment at the door when I reached my building. I understood then that part of my uneasiness those last two days had to do with staying in this place, not at Aris’s. The assertive reclamation of this space as mine. Though I still hadn’t been able to sell the home in Chicago. I hadn’t been ready. Aris had discouraged it, too, which I attributed simply to his Greekness; no one got rid of family property here. It was the only way people seemed to survive. And to sell a family home is to reject a history, to walk through a one-way door. Those first few days in Athens, I had thought I’d fix up the apartment to get it ready for renters. For some reason it hadn’t sunk in that this is where I’d now stay. Despite the pain of seeing Aris, the night had filled me up—the music, the drinks, the dancing—and I felt that fervent, liberating joy I felt nowhere else in the world.
I let myself in with my new key, turned on a few of the lights. The apartment felt cozy and welcoming. I took a hot shower, dried my hair, and drank a cup of mint tea, then fell asleep atop the covers.
5
The Captain
When I woke the next morning I cleaned up the kitchen, the pan from the carbonara that we’d eaten in the middle of the night, and felt very sad. We had plans in Athens that evening with Eva and Aris and several others, but I wasn’t looking forward to the outing. Usually Katerina and I went out closer to home in Kifissia; it felt a bit disorienting, going out in Athens with her, as if my two selves—the man who lived with his family in the northern suburbs and the man who lived in Athens—should not meet.
When we drove to the center for dinner, though, I felt calmed by all the lights, the traffic, the noise of the city. As I was admiring the violet sky, Katerina groaned. “God, Athens is so ugly,” she said. “How do people stand it?”
I admit the transition from our cool leafy street to the grit of the center was a stark one, but I liked the traffic and the street art, and the ragtag bunches of young people who hung out in clumps were as much a part of the fabric of the city as anything else. Athens, to me, is a glorious city; I have traveled the world and it’s still one of my favorites. To call it ugly or a concrete-block city, as Katerina often did, was missing both the point and its beauty. She didn’t like New York City either, for instance. Katerina hated traffic, she hated chaos, and if she had her way she’d live in a quiet corner of an island, and that would be that. When in Greece she complained about it but couldn’t stand to be away from it, she realized, which matched the sentiment of many of our friends: reject it before it rejects you. There was a brain drain: many had gone to Western Europe, Canada, the States, but unlike generations past it seemed no one was really happy with the decision, saw it as temporary. They were not making a new life but instead trying to keep the old one afloat.
When we parked the car and walked a few blocks down Kallidromiou—I knew the restaurant Eva had suggested was in the center but I had not expected to be back in this very neighborhood, where I took my long walks—I noticed she was tightly clutching her purse. Alone here I blended in just fine, I suppose, but Katerina in her blue silk blouse, her perfect eye makeup, her hair styled that afternoon—I braced myself for dirty looks. I wondered why he’d chosen this place until I realized Aris, striving politically, wanted to be seen out among this bunch: the people, the rebels, the intellectuals, the anarchists.
I hadn’t seen Aris in years—this evening’s plans had been arranged because his new fiancée, Eva, had long been a close friend of Katerina’s—and even so I only vaguely remembered him. I did not yet know his history with Mira. He was younger than I, by nearly a decade, and when he stood next to me, I noticed that an outline of his body would have fit perfectly into mine. The same mold, scaled down by 7 percent. His shoulders were narrower, his hips thinner, and when I stood to greet him and we both settled into our chairs our eyes met, the eyes of the outsiders, the men brought in by marriage. I glanced at the others, all engaged in animated discussion; if anyone noticed my discomfort they didn’t mention it.
We talked of insignificant summer things, he asked about our kids. Even though our obvious connection was politics, we steered clear of it, though he said nice things about my father, whom he admired very much. Our fathers, both well-known and revered, if not respected, had made their homes on the island. His father had already been in the public eye for his socially astute, acerbic novels, and when called upon he was still a powerful voice. “Few sons are the equals of their fathers,” Athena says in The Odyssey.
I drank a lot of tsipouro. Everyone was talking about a reality television series, based off an American show, which was based off a Swedish show, where a group of good-looking strangers are dropped off on an island and made to compete for resources through strange games. I had not seen the show, but in this world, in this country, at this moment, it seemed in bad taste. But when I said so, Katerina rolled her eyes and everyone laughed. “Come on,” another said. “At this moment it’s exactly what we need.”
A few people came by, snapped photos not so surreptitiously with their phones. Eva was regaining attention: fifteen years ago she had starred in a few Greek movies and some French ones, but in her thirties she had disappeared. Depression, near misses, and a string of bad love affairs had kept her in a constant state of neurotic attachment, unable to focus on her work. But with her recent comeback she’d become suddenly political, as if a new generation’s Melina Mercouri. Her eyes, large and dark brown, had an unsettling depth to them, and she’d always looked at me as though she knew something I didn’t. I had to admit that she and Aris seemed well-matched.