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
