When we’d finished our coffees, Nefeli suggested we go to the sea, which to her was the balm for everything. Though in my opinion it was still too cold to swim, the sun was warm, and we’d eat lunch by the water. She had been working hard preparing an upcoming show, her biggest ever, and declared it would be good to get out of Athens.
She followed me into the bedroom as I gathered a few things for the beach. “Suffering is a chronic state,” she said as I threw things into a small bag. “I’m in this room with you, you see, and I’ve got this gun. And I’m holding it above you, waving it around your head, I’m chasing you around the room, and you’re wondering if and when I’ll shoot.”
I didn’t know then if she was talking about Aris or Greece, though later that summer, after she disappeared, I understood she’d been talking about herself. But Nefeli often spoke like a sibyl, and it had always seemed that she could sense things most others could not. I was also used to moments of deep joy with her: nights we’d laugh until we gasped for air, our stomachs aching. Just that morning, an old picture of us had popped up on social media: years earlier, the two of us drunk and laughing at a party on the island, me sitting on her lap at a crowded table.
She wandered out of the bedroom, and I heard the door to the apartment open as she headed into the foyer.
•
When we arrived, we dropped our things on the beach and took off our shoes. The sun felt marvelous. Usually Nefeli donned her goofy bathing cap and swam many laps back and forth, even when the weather seemed too cold. Today we both rolled up our jeans and shrieked as the water washed over our toes.
The day was bright, the sky a wild, changing blue. At the other end of the beach, a thin woman stood in a bathing suit and flippers, staring at the large rock in the distance, as if wondering what she was thinking in contemplating a swim. A bit farther down, at the end of the cove, was a beach chair nestled in the sand, a book atop it. Otherwise, we were alone. We walked through the scraggly beach grass up to the taverna that overlooked the sea. Light shimmered through the olive trees like an invitation to another world. We chose a table in the sun and ordered coffees.
Behind us sat a man alone, reading the paper. Across the terrace a blonde woman drank a frappé, while her two matching curly-headed children talked animatedly. She seemed genuinely happy. The man was cute, with faded jeans and a blue T-shirt. Brown hair messy from the beach, another cold-morning swimmer.
My phone lit up with two messages from Aris.
Nefeli glanced at it sitting between us. “This relationship will destroy you. Trust me.”
“No longer a relationship,” I said.
She looked at my phone. “I know Aris,” she said. “He’ll want it both ways.”
Maybe that was true. But did I? Nefeli turned around to face the man behind us, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask his opinion. Instead, she asked for a cigarette, and when he leaned over to light it his eyes were on me. I smiled with closed lips. He offered me one but I declined. All this took place silently, in the span of a few seconds, but Nefeli caught it and rolled her eyes. He went back to his reading.
I looked out to the beach. The woman with flippers was now swimming toward the rock. Nefeli’s words stung; less warning than accusation. She might have been right. But perhaps I had been the one who’d wanted it both ways, who’d grown comfortable inhabiting, straddling, two worlds.
“Just be careful,” she said.
I wanted to change the subject so I asked Nefeli about her upcoming show. She said it was bad luck to talk about it. I asked instead about her love life. A woman she’d been seeing was married to a man, which didn’t work out too well; there was a woman she liked in her tango class. “You’d think it would eventually go away, as the body changes. But no: desire is desire.”
We walked back across the cool sand and arranged our blankets facing the water. I pulled my shirt off over my head and lay down on my stomach. Nefeli was telling me about spending more and more time on the island, even teaching a community art class in the big municipal building at the top of the hill, at the port. “Mostly British divorcées,” she said. “Widows.” Her soft chatter was comforting. And as she spoke, I was surprised by my eyes welling up. Nefeli paused. She placed her hand on the small of my back. “I’m sorry,” she said. I closed my eyes and felt hot tears stream down my face. We stayed like this for a while, her hand offering me both comfort and permission. We didn’t speak. I listened to the waves pile up against the beach, then recede, steady and reliable.
I dreamt of swimming, of my mother swaying on a boat, telling me to breathe: One two three four five breathe. When I woke an hour later, disoriented, Nefeli was still staring at the water. I glanced at her through half-closed lids, and for a moment I saw my mother, young, smooth skinned, embroidered dress, bottle of beer at her hip. It’s written on the body, she said, or maybe it was Nefeli.
I rolled onto my side and Nefeli turned to me, noticing I was awake.
“Myrto, do you think I’ll ever have sex again?”
I hoped the simultaneous surprise and relief in my face came off to her as amusement. “Definitely. Why wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know. Eventually there is a last time, no?” She was quiet again. “He was looking at you, that man.”
I laughed. “He was looking at my breasts.” I couldn’t tell if she was telling me to distract me, or to make me feel bad.
Nefeli’s face changed then, her eyes focused on my chest. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I said.” She paused, looked back out at the sea. A sailboat had appeared in the distance. “You should just chop them off. Get it over with.”
Her tone was matter-of-fact, but there was something else there, something that gave me the same hot wash of shame my mother could give in an instant.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Our relationship was tinged with something I’d never been able to name, something she occasionally threw in my face.
“Haroula wouldn’t tell your family about me,” she finally said. “We hid twenty years of our life together. Do you know what that does to you, to be hidden?” She raised her water bottle to her mouth, drank. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand.
“I can imagine,” I said.
“I couldn’t handle her shame. In my fifties there were others. And then I just got tired of people. All the shit they bring with them. I meet someone new and too quickly see the beast beneath.
“Among our friends it was fine. Artists. But when Haroula and I walked hand in hand in London, or in New York? So nonchalantly? I still cannot believe that was me. Never in Athens. Maybe it was just the freedom of travel. But I don’t think so.”
They’d been together, on and off, for eighteen years. Then Haroula moved to London, though she’d spent her last years back in Athens, in my apartment. But that was only the beginning of the end. Their relationship was a slow, painful fade.
“Most of my friends who are lesbian, queer, have always known,” she continued. “Yet only half of them are out to their families. Maybe it’s different now, for young people. I can see it. But Greece is still a terrible place to be queer.” She told me she’d had a quiet but vibrant community here, though after she and Haroula broke up she broke away from them. It was too painful.