I stayed in the kitchen and read at the counter. Eventually, the twins must have fallen asleep as well because the house settled into quiet. The stillness of midday. I considered going outside for a cigarette. Katerina had always asked that we smoke outdoors, and the habit remained. After all these years I have come to prefer it. I like the ritual of stepping out of my space and into another, my balcony an urban observation deck. Even on the ship I smoked in the open air, never in my cabin, never enclosed.
But I decided to skip the cigarette and wandered down to the den, which was on the bottom floor and opened up to a small garden. I sat at the desk and opened the drawers, rifling through my things. I don’t know what I was looking for. The domestic always made me restless, as if I were waiting for something to happen. After I was asked to leave the ship, I cleared out my cabin. One box was filled with little papers I had tacked up everywhere. Katerina found the notecards and Post-its and threw them away. I was enraged and went out to the dumpster in my bathrobe, trying to salvage them. “It was garbage!” Katerina said. She followed me outside. “Scraps of paper. There was nothing there.” But there had been angst on her face.
It was odd, for Katerina had long ago stopped trying to clean out my things. There were things I gave up in marriage but there were things that I would not, and these artifacts now, more than ever, stood as a marker of my former self. Proof that he’d existed.
A few days after that, I had found several boxes wrapped on the bed. Katerina followed me into the room and smiled, told me to open them. “Happy birthday,” she said, almost shyly.
The first had held two athletic shirts, the kind that wicked away sweat, and a pair of basketball shorts. The second, a pair of expensive jeans she’d seen me glance at in an overpriced boutique. The third, though, held a leather-bound journal and a gorgeous pen. “I won’t mistake this as garbage,” she said, and I hugged her close.
•
We had carbonara, my favorite, for dinner. And perhaps because of the travel, the children grew tired soon after and went to sleep early. Katerina and I watched television together on the couch, a quiet closeness I’d forgotten I’d loved, until she announced she was exhausted and going to bed.
“I should call my father,” I said. Katerina nodded. My father always expected me to come to him. I should call, I should visit, I should make the effort. It had been this way since I went back to the States for university. He was used to people coming to him: for political favors, for homage, for conversation and advice, like a mob boss.
I let the phone ring and ring, but no one answered. Finally I hung up, not wanting to wake him if he was already asleep. I would call in the morning.
I listened to Katerina in the bathroom getting ready, heard the water as she washed her face, brushed her teeth. I imagined her taking out her contacts, pulling her hair back. All the small rituals I knew so well. I waited until I heard the light click off before I went in myself.
But I paused in the doorway of our bedroom. I felt hesitant to get into the bed we’d shared for so many years.
“What is it?” Katerina asked, sensing me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Should I sleep here?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. She was already under the covers.
I met Katerina when I was in my late thirties, and we married in my early forties, so there had been many women before her, mostly a series of relationships from which I always ended up fleeing. After we had the twins, I transitioned from sailing routes in the Pacific to ones in Europe, and while the change was difficult, the rhythm of my life on the Aegean was soothing in its own right. The inky-blue sea, the white froth of waves, the black dome of the nighttime sky opening each morning to each familiar port: small houses dotting the arid hillsides, scrubby patches of bright flowers, bleating goats. The landscape of my youth.
Though I switched to those shorter routes for my marriage, my family, Katerina would still argue that I’d missed the twins’ most important years. And it’s true; when I’d return home my kids eyed me bashfully, with interest—an intriguing, benevolent guest in their home. After being at sea, the skies in Kifissia had always seemed low, and the different schedule of my days as the twins grew—take them here, pick up some milk, help with the homework—though busy, felt featureless.
To Katerina I’ve been mostly faithful. Though I would never have thought this way as a younger man, now I think what so often drives people to infidelity is not sex but space. And because I was so often at sea I had space. Sometimes at sea I nearly forgot my other life, could almost not imagine it. What kind of man does this, forgets about his wife and children? I suppose I was that sort of man. My problem, one of them, was that I did not operate with the consciousness of a married person. I don’t mean I went out at night like a wild bachelor, but I moved through space without thinking of the other person, without a deep awareness of that person at all times.
Katerina, however, did everything with a married person’s consciousness, even now that we were separating. Or were trying to, anyway. Whether it was shopping for dinner or planning the kids’ outings or simply the way she moved through the house—quietly in the morning when up before me, or reading at night in the other room if I wanted to go to sleep. I suppose you could only be in the world this way for so long without reciprocation before it wore on you; but it would take a while for her to adopt the consciousness of a single person, a single woman, a thought I found difficult to bear.
That night, I woke around three and our bed was empty, and for a moment I felt inexplicably angry. But I went into the kitchen and found Katerina barefoot in front of the refrigerator, a faraway look on her face. I wondered how long she’d been standing there.
“You okay?” I asked.
She turned to me but her expression remained vague, still colored by whatever, or whomever, she’d been thinking about. Almost as if she did not recognize me, or had forgotten I was in the house. “Something to eat?” she asked. She lit the stove, reached up for the iron skillet, poured in some oil. When it was hot she dumped the leftover carbonara into the pan and cracked two more eggs over it, a dash of pepper, some nutmeg. We stood at the stove and ate it together, out of the pan, our bare feet touching.
3
Mira
That Aris wasn’t in Athens when I’d first arrived did not seem ominous at the time, though when I think of him telling me he’d be back in a few days I feel a quick flash of dread, a weight inside me.
A few mornings after I’d arrived, Aris returned from Brussels. I repacked a suitcase, leaving much behind, and headed to his place. I had planned to spend the summer living with him and working on a collection of essays, a departure from my usual scholarly work. From the sidewalk, I looked up at Aris’s building, the old neoclassical house where I had lived last summer and stayed many times before. I could see Aris on the balcony, but he wasn’t looking down, waiting for me; instead he faced the inside of the apartment, looking in at something not visible from the street. I called to him, and though he knew I was on my way a look of surprise passed over his face, as if he didn’t remember what I looked like, or what he was doing on that balcony in the first place.
But then he smiled, waved, and went inside to buzz me up. He met me at the landing and the moment I saw his face, of course, I knew something was wrong. In the corner of the apartment was the smaller shiny red suitcase I’d left last time. I did not yet know he’d filled it with all the things that had accumulated there over the years: books and clothing and a curling iron, several notebooks. When I see the pair of suitcases now in my own apartment, it’s an obnoxious reminder of the humiliation I felt that day.