“But I have to go,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Outside, we stood beside his car. He gave me a long hug and a listless kiss on the cheek. As I walked away, his comment echoed from the night I’d seen him at the taverna: We can still have something. Of course I knew what he meant. I never thought that pureness between us, that freshness, what I thought was clean, easy love, could be altered. But I could certainly not have something, despite what had just happened between us.
Down the street was a new, trendy place that sold tiny little burgers out of an Airstream trailer housed inside an art gallery: lamb sliders with fig tapenade and goat cheese; beef with cheddar and bacon, Greek-style with mint and oregano, topped with feta. I sometimes stopped in for a drink, a plate of fries. The owner always smiled at me, small talk, insignificant flirting. Today I sat down, ordered a beer, and ate a plate of five sliders. My mother’s presence was palpable. I suddenly recalled her disdain when I’d come home one evening with a boyfriend and a little bag of hamburgers. It had been Lent, and my mother adhered to her Orthodox fasting, even though she had long before stopped going to church. Now, Easter had already come and gone, yet I could feel her disapproval so strongly that I worried if I turned around I’d see her there again, watching. Instead I licked my fingers, juice dripping down my chin afterward, like some satisfied, wild beast.
•
The next morning, I woke with a memory of the building’s rooftop. I recalled it with such force and clarity that I didn’t bother properly dressing before darting from the apartment, coffee cup in hand. I nearly locked myself out. The Captain was coming up the stairs after his run. If he thought it was strange to find me in pajamas, slippers, coffee sloshing on the floor, he didn’t flinch.
He reached out as if he were going to touch my cheek, but he didn’t, and we froze in that subjunctive, that what-if, for a moment. I looked at his hand because I could not look him in the eyes. I wondered if he knew Aris had waited for me in the car, that he had come up. I wondered if he had heard him smoking on the balcony. If they talked of such things.
“I’m going to the roof,” I said.
“I’ve never been up there,” he said. “Not past the storage closets.”
He followed me up the stairs, and for the first two flights we didn’t say a word. In fact we both seemed to be holding our breath.
On the last flight of stairs he stopped, and I turned to face him for a second. Even like this he was still taller than me. I caught a trace of grapefruit-rose and remembered something I had forgotten. The first time I met him, that first passing in the stairwell, I felt a flash of recognition that we might become lovers. Or a silent, mutual acknowledgment of some universe pulsing between us. It was a split second, like those movie theater ads that played a subliminal clip that had the audience racing to the concession stands for icy sodas and buttery popcorn. It’s why new lovers glowed like neon—that harnessed energy.
“Aris asked me how well I knew you,” he said. “Last night.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him the truth.”
The truth. I wondered what the truth of us was.
“He waited for me,” I said.
“Yes, I know.”
Though we had already been talking, though we’d had that little flirtatious interaction, it seemed our friendship truly began when we reached the landing, that moment we shoved open the door to the wash of sunlight. We stood in the middle of the roof together, and when I looked up at him I noticed him eyeing my cheek again.
Finally, he asked point-blank. “Did Aris do that to you?” His straightforwardness shocked me. I wanted to blame Aris for everything, but I laughed, so taken aback was I by the idea. I told him no. After I described what had happened at the pharmacist’s, the Captain’s voice grew thick, heavy. “It is sometimes too much.”
I turned away from him. Someone had brought two small, red beach chairs up to the rooftop, facing Lykavittos. Positioned between them was a Lavazza coffee can, probably as an ashtray.
And there it all was.
Dancing with my mother on this rooftop. The closeness of her cheek against mine, the scorching sun. It is June. How young she is! We are dancing, and she is singing to me a song whose lyrics I only partially remember but whose melody runs through me so clear. I am five. I do not realize she is drunk. Downstairs large suitcases are flung open on the bed, clothes strewn everywhere, and my father is packing. We are leaving for the United States.
“I forgot about this rooftop,” I said now to the Captain. In the sunlight his hair was not nearly black like mine or Aris’s, but light enough that Greeks might call him blond. His eyes, without his glasses in this sunlight, the color of camouflage: brown and green and gray.
“To be honest I’d never thought to look,” he said.
“Sorry again to have asked,” he said of my cheek.
“It’s okay,” I said.
My father busts through the door, onto the roof. He is livid. Though prone to his own rages, he was a gentle man and had, to my knowledge, never hurt my mother. He rarely spanked me, and when he did he cried afterward. My mother and I are facing Lykavittos but we turn our faces back to him. My face looks suddenly stricken, as though I have just realized he is upset, but my mother has her head swung back, her hair spilling down her back, that golden-yellow dress with the embroidery on the sleeves. My father reaches out to take me from her and leaves my mother there on the roof, dancing.
A parapet was now built around the rooftop’s perimeter, which I did not remember. I remember feeling worried she might fall off. How much does she drink a day.
I walked to the chairs but then passed them, to the ledge. The Captain didn’t sit either. Nor did he talk. “I have a lot of memories here,” I said. I turned to face him again.
My mother is on that roof with us, in that yellow dress: drunk, and singing. Another song we used to dance to: I’ll get myself a captain. She’s laughing, throwing her head back, and then she turns to me again and mouths: “He’s married too, koukla.” She turns away and clinks the ice in her drink. Almost empty.
The Captain smelled of fresh sweat, of salt, of the tangy barb of his deodorant. He walked to the edge of the roof, peered over the parapet. He stood like a soccer player at ease: hand on cocked hip. Together we looked up to Lykavittos and down at the city, coming alive under the early-morning sun. The Wednesday laiki was in full swing already, and the shouts of the vendors—cherries, apricots, lettuce—rose up in the air.
He knew I was interested in the histories of these Athens neighborhoods. He told me that when he was a child and would visit his uncle, who lived in the flat he occupies now, the neighborhood was much different. He pointed to the narrow road that ascended the hill and widened as it rose to Lykavittos: one neighbor had goats, he told me. And chickens who began their koukourikou before daybreak.
Very few apartment blocks lined this street then, he continued. “Before you were born, of course,” he added. In fact, if you walked just a block or two down, he said, on the way to Mavili, it was like walking through a tiny village. “I can show you later, if you like,” he said.
Sure, that would be nice, I thought I said. But I guess I didn’t.
“Maybe you want to be alone up here?”