Whether his politics concerned me was irrelevant; I was always in its path. When I was younger he and a group of his allies were involved in some scandal, and that’s when I made my first escape. As far as I could get from Greece without going to the moon. To be off-land, on the other side of the planet, no ground connecting us. To stay at sea somehow, stateless. Rootlessness was my anchor.
“Any advice?” Aris said finally. I knew from his smile and the tone of his voice that he was no longer talking about my father, or politics, that he’d returned to the topic of Mira. Or maybe we’d been talking politics this entire time. “As the son of a politician, that is.”
“Not much different than being the son of a novelist,” I said. “Laundry hanging on the line.” Because my father had been almost a compulsive philanderer, or perhaps despite it, I did not chase women. Or maybe I did. I’m not sure. But with Aris there, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t care if he thought I was exactly like my father.
Aris looked at me over his tall beer glass, leaned in a bit. “She’s still important to me.”
Was this a confession, a defense, or a threat? I said nothing.
Then the waitress returned and they resumed their outrageous flirting, and when she left the table Aris looked ready to continue our conversation but Eva had appeared, walking toward us in a flowered dress, her hair shiny and clean, well-rested and eager to be with her fiancé again.
I invited her to join us, but Aris stood and said they had plans. We fought over the bill enough to play our roles, but I insisted, kept my hand covering it on the table, and Aris was eventually forced to concede.
After they left, I waved to the waitress, who had disappeared, a bit pouty after Eva’s appearance. I asked for another beer and stared out at the sailboats, the slow, metronomic swaying of their masts.
What I also remember from that summer: I was back from college, and one particular night I came out of a bar near the port and saw my father’s friend Minas with a much younger woman. She was sitting on one of the low walls at the edge of the sea, and he was standing in front of her, running a hand up and down her leg. Braided brown hair, cutoff shorts, a bright-yellow embroidered blouse, turquoise bracelets on her wrists. I was twenty-one, and she was not much older. The jeans were cut so short that the pockets hung out below the hem.
Minas, then with a full head of shiny black hair, held one of those dangling pockets between his thumb and forefinger while the rest of his hand moved underneath. There weren’t many people around, but even had there been they were behaving as if they were completely alone. She playfully moved his hand away, but I could tell that he had put his hand there many times before, made her throw her head back in pleasure. At the time I felt disgusted by him, as I knew and liked his wife, but I thought of that young woman for weeks after that, when I was alone with myself: her heavy eyebrows, her full lips, the long muscles of her legs. A few years later, when Aris’s father had written about two couples and a love affair, Minas had refused to speak to him for over a year, claiming he’d taken details of his life. Minas had thought he and his lover were hiding in plain sight. In reality, they were just in plain sight. Years later, I’d asked Minas about it. “Everyone knows everything,” Minas had said. But what had really surprised him was that Aris’s father had sworn he had not been writing about him. He was, in fact, writing about himself.
I had told Mira about this. She had read the novel. “It’s always the jilted spouse who feels like a fool, but everyone knows they’re the least foolish of the bunch,” she said. Then she was quiet, and I heard her shift in her chair. “I guess the novel absorbs everything around it. But the things we think we see in novels,” she said, “are the ways we want to see ourselves. Besides, are our lives really that original?”
What is in store for any of us besides the sins of our fathers? Sins we run from until we commit them ourselves? Though my father was absolved of any wrongdoing after his political scandal, the shame remains, the shadow around his name. Who stayed loyal to him has shaped his life. I always have acted as though his life was of no consequence to me, but of course it has been what has most shaped me. It was how I was formed. It doesn’t matter that I drifted so far away: he was, he is, like a city hanging on a high cliff, impossible to ignore.
I was tired of all these men behaving as if there were no consequences. I suppose I had been one of them myself.
When I arrived back at the house, sleepy after all the beer, my father was still nowhere to be found. I lay on the bed, flat on my back, replaying the conversation with Aris to myself. I thought of the T-shirt he’d mentioned and jumped up to paw through the old chest of drawers. I kept some clothes here, mostly old things to sleep in or wear to the beach.
Sure enough, there was the shirt. I tried it on. My tattoo, which I didn’t have then, peeked out of my left sleeve, the tentacles of an octopus. I had been skinnier. How much of that young man, before college, before the navy, before children, was still left in me, and what had the child-Aris seen? Did he still see the cocky twenty-year-old kicking a ball around on the beach?
I placed the T-shirt atop the dresser. I intentionally buried old shirts in my drawers so Katerina would not notice and therefore not throw them away. Now I suppose I wouldn’t have to worry about that. All these last moments; my days had become populated by them.
The final months of my time on the Pacific, before I was to marry, I was nearly crippled by last moments. Midwalk through a bustling market in Ho Chi Minh City, I’d think about how I’d never walk through here again, never smell these stalls with those stinky, delicious fruits; these places where I bought fabric for finely tailored shirts that I still own, spending what there would be half a monthly salary. I’d never hear the particular cadence of the language, never sip that strong coffee. I’d probably never again feel the quiet stillness of Kyoto, where no one even used a horn; or pull into the spectacular port of Shanghai. The tenderness of those places for the last time, as touristy as my gaze was, was so crippling that in some ports I could barely leave my cabin. My crew would leave for dinner and I would tell them I did not feel well, that I needed to catch up on work. I fell in love in Casablanca only because, as I realize now, I knew it was a last moment, a traveler from London whose father was Irish and mother was Egyptian. Nothing happened between us, nothing physical, that is, but I even thought about her during my wedding, and when the doctor who delivered the twins had the same corkscrew curls and perfect eyebrows, I could feel it in my groin, the twisting throb of closing opportunities. I felt it again today, like descending deep into the bowels of the ship, the recesses of the engine room, the heavy doors locking shut behind me. Lights out.
•
I dreamt of Aris and Mira, but only Aris’s face was clear. Mira was like a character in a book that I felt I had both vividly imagined yet could not entirely see—long hair, a shoulder, her wrist stacked with bracelets. I was conflating that drink with Aris and that time I saw her in the taverna in Exarcheia. I was imagining her walking by and seeing us there. In my mind I saw Aris get up and chase her through the crowd. I saw his petulance and her anger, then his anger and her petulance. Her lips dry from the heat, her eyes accusatory; the way her cheek still held a faint pink mark. He touched her hair and then her hip and guided her off the path of the street, next to a postcard stand and a kiosk, where she bought a bottle of water, took a long drink, and wiped her chin and throat with the back of her hand. There was something wild about her, unpredictable. She made no eye contact while he talked. The way he touched her hair before they parted, the way it felt salty and textured, the way her back moved away from him into the crowd.