I think now that I was a little jealous, all that newness ahead of them. Katerina thought Eva was as beautiful as ever, but she often said this of her friends. Men never bothered with such statements. If a man was handsome we didn’t have to tell all the women at the table about it. Or we didn’t notice. Then again, if you grew up in Greece where men on talk shows slap women on the ass and adult women are called “girl” until they’re fifty, perhaps you’d want to beat men to the punch, to take away some of the power by assuming it yourself. Later, Mira surprised me by saying that maybe being called a “girl” carried with it a certain air of independence. Before you became a woman, or a wife, the word was the same. Still, to talk so brazenly about other women in the company of women, there’s something aggressive, demoralizing about all of it. Anyway. I have never quite fit with ideals of Greek masculinity.
Katerina seemed happy to be there, which gave me a certain feeling of contentment. But the conversation at the table, petty gossip disguised as politics, the chatter of my childhood, bored me, which had me looking around the taverna. It was then I spotted Mira. She headed across the garden, a confident walk like she’d been here many times before—that’s when she saw me. Or, really, that’s when I guess she saw Aris, the two of us together, and the look of confusion, even betrayal, on her face has stayed with me, particularly because then I had no idea what would have caused it, or perhaps because now I do. I had the urge to get up and follow her, say hello. To say I was going to a bank machine or to get cigarettes or even to disappear to the bathroom and out the back of the bar into the narrow alleyway. I even began to stand. All of this was happening undetected by the rest of our table, yet it seemed at that moment all eyes were on me, on us.
Aris’s chair tipped back as he leapt up, but he caught it. His standing shut mine down, and it was he, not I, who walked after Mira.
At first I thought it was coincidence. After all, what are the chances? But coincidence is story, is it not? He was focused on her; he followed her. I looked around the table but everyone was engaged in conversation and no one noticed Aris slip away. Mira walked more quickly, in front of him. When she turned the corner, she looked back and our eyes met. I waved just as she was eclipsed by a group of waiters carrying trays in the air, another group of diners taking a seat. When they passed both she and Aris had vanished.
“See someone you know?” Katerina asked. She was smiling, in the middle of another conversation, looking around the taverna with curiosity.
“A friend of my father’s,” I lied, waving my hand in the direction of several tables.
Eva, on Katerina’s other side, turned to us. “Where’d Aris go?” she asked.
Somehow I felt unaccountably guilty. I made an excuse for him: the cash machine, I thought, or out for cigarettes. Katerina looked at me oddly, and she and Eva turned back to the other conversation.
Where did they go, Aris and Mira?
I glanced around the taverna again. Later, when I thought of that evening, those minutes seemed to encompass the entire night. Mira’s expression. My slow-motion wave. Their absence together.
A loud roar rose up from our table: the husband of one of Katerina’s friends had told a joke. I laughed again. A laugh always disguises another emotion, whether it’s pain or desire or shame.
An old girlfriend once told me that I only loved women who could not really hurt me. That my fear of commitment, my hesitation, was an adolescent longing for some perfect fantasy, a way of avoiding pain. I admitted she was right. Admitting and accepting share the same root, though I was having problems with the latter. Maybe I’m quick to try to find flaws in other relationships, to view them with suspicion, because I understand something was lacking in mine. But what. That is the thing. But what.
When Aris finally returned through the front entrance of the taverna, looking distraught, I felt a swell of retribution and rage—origin unclear—and relief. When Eva asked him where he’d gone, he tossed some cigarettes down on the table. I swear he looked at me when he did it, an aggressive smugness. I glanced around again. Mira was gone.
Have you seen those silvery, flying fish that glimmer over the water? It’s only until they slip beneath the surface that you register what you’ve glimpsed, wonder whether the ship’s wake sends them flying into air or if they’re jumping, leaping of their own accord. You want to hold them in your hands, examine their wings.
•
The next afternoon at the airport, Ifigenia hugged me tightly and tied a few bracelets she had woven around my wrist. Nikos seemed unmoved. “See you, Dad,” he said, in English. They had gone to an American school in Athens and continued in one in Brussels, and their American-accented English, so natural to my ear, still seemed strange coming from my children. Katerina hugged me tightly, and at that moment I did not want to let go. Though she had been more set on the separation, I know sometimes she wavered. I did too.
Perhaps this is why I drove back to our home in Kifissia. Yet I quickly found the silence disorienting, the absence of the kids, the television, Katerina’s soft voice. I opened all the windows to hear the birds, the comings and goings of the quiet street. I didn’t realize how noisy my neighborhood in Athens was until I experienced the quiet of the suburbs.
By midnight I was back on my street: Armatolon kai Klefton. I slipped out to the balcony and looked over the garden, lit up by the moon.
Minutes later Mira’s door slid open. I wondered if she’d bring up the taverna, or Aris, or what I was doing there with him. I realized it was my turn to speak.
“Kalispera, Mira.” I pictured her the way she looked at the taverna: a loose dress gathered around her waist with a string, boots. When she walked away I could make out the lines of her figure, her ass. Her long hair was tied back in a ponytail and it swished back and forth like a flag.
“Hi,” she said.
Asking her about Aris seemed aggressive, accusatory. I waited to see if she brought it up first, but she did not. Instead she talked about Nefeli, and her voice—low, a little scratchy—calmed me.
I was not thinking of sex, no. Not directly. But that night, trying to fall asleep, I was aware of her asleep on the other side of the wall.
•
My brother called the next day. He lives in Detroit, had followed me to Michigan when I returned for college, and never left. He studied economics, works in finance, and, to be honest, I don’t know what he does except that he does well. He votes Republican and is very punishing about the Greek situation. He thinks Greeks should pay back the debt, cent by cent, regardless of the suffering. He does not see it in terms of geopolitical complexity. He does not see it in terms of compassion. The money was borrowed; it needs to be repaid. End of story. Perhaps his own internalized shame.
Moments like this, I feel my anger rising.
To be honest I didn’t think he was really calling for me but to inquire about our father, with whom his relationship was fraught, like mine. Our father’s leftism, the junta, had frightened my brother, who came of age during that time. But his sharp turn to the right had been a shock to both my parents. My father could get over his living in the States—my mother, after all, was Greek American, from Detroit, and we’d lived there for several years when I was a child, during the junta—but this transgression was more unforgivable than my brother’s refusal to name his first-born son Nikos, after him.