I nodded, keeping my gaze on the flat expanse of the sea. Somehow we’d never spoken of this before. “And your parents?”
“We fought over politics, not sex,” she said.
How could we distinguish the two? How could we extricate identity from anything, from politics, from the art we make, the stories we tell, the things we feel? But I knew to drop it.
She pulled her beach bag onto her lap and began rooting around for something. “People become uncomfortable when you can’t be pinpointed. Ambiguity makes people nervous. I’ve had two loves of my life, very different. One was when I was very young. It was also something we kept hidden. He was married.” She looked up at me to see my reaction.
“Not judging.”
“We were in a camp together during the junta.” Nefeli pulled out a little metal cigarette case painted with a watercolor of the Eiffel Tower. Inside were several tightly rolled joints and a pale-green lighter. She lit one of the joints, took a long drag, and then continued. “I loved this man, also an artist. It was mostly emotional anyway. Chaste. I was confused then; I didn’t understand my own sexuality. But it didn’t matter: he walked off the boat into the arms of his wife, the first I’d known of her. I remember her trench coat, her open, happy face, and I knew I never again wanted to be a ridiculous girl.”
Even though I had not known her then, Nefeli was easy to imagine as a teenager: the wide, amber-colored eyes, her hair still long and shiny and black. She continued: “He loved me like a little pet you take care of. You know what can happen to women in those camps. And when we returned, when the junta was over, he asked Nikos”—she paused, in case I hadn’t yet made the connection, though I just had—“the Captain’s father, to look after me. For years, I think he bought my paintings, instructed by this man. Eventually I think he gave them to Haroula.”
Nefeli stubbed out the rest of the joint, put what was left back in the small metal tin. “The body and mind are the same thing,” she said. I suggested lunch. We walked back to the taverna and sat at a table half in the sun, for me, and the shade, for Nefeli. Both the blonde woman with the kids and the handsome man were gone. Now, a table of sunburned tourists drank beers from frozen mugs.
We sat there a long time, ordering first a salad and then some fried zucchini that only I ate, and some fava. Nefeli didn’t eat meat and refused to sit with others if they did. We shared a beer and then another. Eventually she got up to use the bathroom, and when she returned she declared she had paid the bill, that she was tired and wanted to leave.
Nefeli immediately fell asleep as I drove, but after twenty minutes she awoke. We were nearing the center. The traffic was terrible. A strike, a protest, a 5K run—Nefeli wasn’t sure. “You know which two countries report the highest levels of stress?” she asked, staring out the window. I glanced at her so she’d go on, and she turned to me. “Greece and Iran.” She let out a deep breath.
The road felt like an enormous parking lot. Young men wandered between the stopped vehicles, dangled gadgets and toys in front of windshields, a captive audience in the gridlock, and I was surprised when Nefeli handed a man a couple of euros for a little wind-up toy.
After an hour we reached Nefeli’s, and I parked her car in the lot below her building. We each got out and hugged goodbye, but she hesitated before taking the elevator up. “I need to show this to you,” she said, scrolling through her phone. “I’m sorry I waited this long.”
I was hoping it had to do with her new work, something from her show. But it was an online magazine, and not even one of the more horrible ones, basically hypothesizing Aris and Eva as a couple. Eva was a fairly well-known actress, Greek French. In the past she’d done mostly smaller, artful movies, often French, but a new international hit with a Greek director had catapulted her into the spotlight. And Aris, after all, was a rising politician. They were both attractive and intelligent, and the Greek newspapers ate this up. I couldn’t bear to read it and handed Nefeli back her phone. “I’m sure these sorts of things are everywhere.”
“Scroll down.”
I did and was startled by my younger self, smiling like an idiot, walking up a marbled, narrow island street. It was more than a decade ago; I don’t think I was even thirty. I wore cutoff jeans and a blue bikini and held an ice cream cone—who knows where they’d unearthed this photo. The picture was juxtaposed with a horribly unflattering shot of Eva smoking a cigarette, looking angry. I had seen her in movies years before and knew she was beautiful, but the photo unfairly depicted a tired, too-thin actress who was not aging well.
Until, of course, the love of a man changed that: the next photo told a different story, the two of them together, each looking impossibly youthful. Eva had a deep intelligence in her eyes. Aris was smiling big, looking at something out of the picture, and Eva was looking up at him. When was this taken?
“I’m glad you showed me.” Of course I felt sick.
“You’re lying,” she said. “But in case someone else brought it up.”
“Who else reads this nonsense?” I asked. I was furious at the stupid magazine. It might as well have read, Upcoming politician rejects well-fed American and transforms aging, starving Greek actress.
Aris had stayed with me those two weeks after my parents’ deaths, in Chicago, helping me clean out their things. From there we made arrangements about where in Athens they would be buried. He tossed cardboard boxes of old magazines into recycling bins as if he were shooting baskets, and we made a race of how much we could discard in the shortest amount of time. I ran in and out of the house in a frenzy, but when I found the boxes of my father’s old records, I crumpled into Aris’s chest, and we didn’t do any more with the dumpster that night. I’m trying to reconcile those tender moments with the fact that already, at that time, he was with Eva. The worst part of a betrayal is trying to reconstruct the events around it: what you knew then and what you know now. But I have to believe his tenderness then was sincere and not simply a manifestation of his guilt, of the fact that his second narrative was occurring simultaneously. I know human relationships are complex and multilayered and fluid, that it is possible to feel things for more than one person, to want two opposing things. Eventually, you have to choose.
Still, it didn’t make it any easier to handle.
But besides the shame of Aris’s other romantic narrative, I felt spied upon retrospectively, as if something had been taken from me without my knowing it. Even in our tell-all, display-all world, I use social media sporadically. The few photos circulating of me have been posted not by me but by friends. Perhaps it’s the dissonance that’s too much, the fragments that never make a whole: here I am in a bikini on the beach, here I am with a glass of wine and a big grin, here I am giving a lecture, here I am by the sea.
I told Nefeli I’d see her that weekend, at Fady and Dimitra’s. Then I turned and headed down the sidewalk toward my apartment.
I admit that I don’t always see the things people say about Athens—it’s dirty, it’s chaotic. Sometimes I’m not even sure what people are talking about. It’s a city. There’s traffic. If anything, people are always sweeping the sidewalks and washing the staircases. But after the sea that day, the freshness of the breakup and the sting of those photos, Athens felt like an assault, like all its violations were announcing themselves to me, questioning my decision to be there—the traffic stopped everywhere and people honking their horns, frustrated in their cars. Every car, it seemed, confined couples and lovers bickering over the route not taken; or sitting silently, the passenger staring at their phone and the driver at something ahead they could not see. I noticed all the boarded-up buildings, the closed businesses. I ducked down a side street and passed a young man in a blue-and-black flannel shirt rolling up his sleeve, his other friend watching, waiting. Sure, you might have run into a person strung out near Omonia, wandering around the Archaeological Museum, far before this new crisis. I distinctly remember Haroula telling me, when I was eighteen, in English, as if this could not be uttered in Greek: Watch out for junkies. Yet unless I was in a particular neighborhood at night, I never really noticed, but Nefeli, who seemed to absorb the shame of the entire nation, claimed people shot heroin on the streets the way Americans walked around with their giant cups of coffee. If my American friends had said something like this I would have bitten off their heads.