“It looks so nice in here,” I said, moving through the flat, wheeling my suitcase behind me toward the bedroom. The place smelled lemony, freshly cleaned. The bathroom with fluffy white towels and the bed with light-blue sheets. Engagement gifts, though I didn’t realize that until later.
It’s when I stood in the doorway of the bedroom that he appeared behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Mira,” he said. “We can’t live here together.” His voice was pained and tender but also that of a man who was expecting a fight.
It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t saying he didn’t want to live together but that he didn’t want to be together at all. I don’t remember how much he told me then and how much I learned after the fact. Another woman, it had happened so fast, he hadn’t meant for it to become serious and now, he said, they were planning to marry. Her name was Eva.
Planning to marry. Also, she was having a baby.
I sat down on the bed.
“Mira. I couldn’t tell you over the phone. It would have been cruel.”
“When is she due?” I asked, looking down at the floor.
“Late summer,” he said.
So she had already been pregnant when my parents died. “You could have told me, in Chicago. Or in Athens, after the funeral.”
“It felt inhumane. I’m sorry. There was never the right time.”
In a foggy state of shock I hauled both my suitcases back down to the landing—no elevators—refusing his help. Aris stood on the sidewalk with me and my bags, assuring me not all would change between us, that he still wanted me in his life. I got into a taxi, and I could feel him standing in the street, watching me drive away.
•
Later in the evening, a little drunk, I scrolled through my messages, not replying to anything. More texts from Aris—Are you okay? Call me. Mira?—as well as from Nefeli and my friends Dimitra and Fady. My father’s cousins had called, but I didn’t want to call them back. They had been anticipating an engagement, a wedding, and I didn’t want to give them the smug satisfaction of knowing it wouldn’t happen. They adored Aris, a handsome, hypereducated man with a new seat in parliament, but his involvement with me baffled them. They knew—because my mother had told them—that we both had imagined what our lives would be if I moved to Greece for good. Get tenure first, Aris had said. You’ll be glad you did. And I was glad he felt this way, but when I did finally get tenure I felt no differently. It was not that I was that attached to teaching. Besides, so little of my job was teaching and so much was taken up with administration and meetings and navigating a department whose internecine struggles and alliances predated me. To be honest, I wavered between loving it and dreading it.
But perhaps Aris and I were both putting something off, or knew summers together, and Christmas, was enough, and maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with that. But to my father’s cousins it was not this complicated. To them I was not elegant enough, nor pedigreed enough, nor Greek enough; as if I had stolen him away from someone with better claims. I was their family, but I was not one of them.
Well. There would be a wedding. There was that.
Aris called again, several times, and finally I picked up.
“And she knows about me,” I said.
“In the sense that you exist.”
In the sense that I exist. I let him continue. Do I exist. I put him on speaker, set the phone on the table, needing the distance of his disembodied voice.
“That we had a history. I said your father was an old friend.”
This was true. I’d met Aris three times before we really became involved: once, age eighteen, on the island, where I prowled around with friends from my freshman year; second, twenty-one, when I had a summer job bartending at an American bar on the island and he’d show up during my shifts, usually alone, and talk with me when I was not busy; and third, on the ferry, as a graduate student. This was the time that stuck. But he had loomed in my mind, my heart, since I was a teenager. He was part of me as I was forming, part of this place.
“That we were together, Aris. Can’t you even say it?”
“Well, were we? Really together? Not since we both lived in Chicago. Not physically—not day in, day out.”
“You’re revising our history.”
“That’s what history is. Revision. Point of view. Of all people, you should know that.”
It was the meanest thing he ever said to me.
“Mira?” he asked finally.
“I’m fine,” I said. Aris wanted it to already be after, not understanding that the only way out is through. There was also the fact that he and my father had been particularly close. I understand that it would have been harder for Aris to leave me had my parents still been alive; once they were gone he had an escape.
“Would you even have wanted this?” he asked. “Marriage, a baby.”
“Of course,” I said, though neither of us completely believed me.
He was quiet, and he knew as well as I did that I had always resisted what was expected of me. Though I imagined marriage could be a beautiful thing, for me somehow it represented a sort of erasure. Couples often depressed me, and neat little families even more so. I don’t know. Maybe I would have wanted it now, here, the different me in this different country.
•
The next morning, I called Nefeli and told her what had happened with Aris. I was dreading saying it out loud, as if saying it would make it true. But it was already true.
Half an hour later, she was at my door, telling me I looked terrible. She wore a black-and-white-striped T-shirt, jeans, boots, a red scarf wrapped stylishly around her neck. She didn’t seem surprised. I could not block her out, nor could I hide anything from her. I returned to Athens each year and was seamlessly integrated back into her life, the rhythm of her days. What happened all those other months? I didn’t know. We video-chatted from time to time, but since my parents had died everything blurred together.
I asked her if she wanted a coffee, and she followed me into the kitchen, her eyes resting on the new countertops, the modern light fixtures, the empty bottle of wine on the dining room table, the paper bag of my finished beers and my mother’s empties still on the floor. “What the hell,” she said.
My head hurt.
I pretended not to notice the disarray—how often in the next few months I would willfully ignore something right in front of me—and poured us each a cup. “Don’t drink so much, Myrto,” she said. “Especially alone like this. It will only make things worse.”
She held the warmth of the pale-blue mug close to her cheek for a few moments before she took a sip. She looked around at the sunny colors. “Haroula redid this?”
“My mother,” I said, and her face showed some relief that it had not been Haroula who’d re-created the apartment, as if to rid it of Nefeli’s presence. As a young girl I did not question the finer points of their relationship; they were simply Haroula and Nefeli. It was only after my freshman year in college, when I returned for the summer, that I finally knew them as lovers, partners, together. My parents had never explicitly mentioned their involvement but never denied it either. I suppose they might have been more socially progressive than I’d credited them for.
When I was a graduate student, in ethnographic studies, I read an anthropologist’s study on women in same-sex relationships in an unnamed Greek town. Many of them were married to men, had children, and did not refer to themselves as lesbian or queer. It might sound like they were victims of a conservative society, certainly true, but there was a wonderful progressive fluidity to it as a result: you can defy the system if you refuse to let it define you. It struck a chord with me, the freedom found between the lines and the way the women had navigated conflicting identities, broke barriers. I found myself deeply fascinated by these women, their nonchalance, their structured freedom. I am not making the hetero mistake of thinking that lesbian relationships are any easier than those between anyone else. It was this particular group, unwilling to declare one identity, that fascinated me. Was it oppression, or freedom? What intrigued me most was the way relationships were ended, the ritualistic collective grieving. How do you say goodbye to a relationship? I had never been good at clean breaks, old loves trailing behind me like shadows.