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.
And wouldn’t this be the same in any city? But I admit, it was jarring against the backdrop of those grand neoclassical buildings, that architectural trilogy. And I admit I had my blind spots with this city, a city people either Orientalized or romanticized, two versions of the same sin. Even though it was the city of my birth, perhaps because of it, I was surely guilty of both. There’s no such thing as perfect vision, true, but how to rid oneself of blindness?
As I walked through the last of the traffic I was relieved to be walking alone, moving freely between the cars, up the sidewalks, through the park, and up along the side of Lykavittos, spared most of the mess.
•
Back at home, I went to my balcony. I think I was hoping to find the Captain, but his apartment was quiet. Around ten, I heard his key in the door and soon after I smelled cigarette smoke. I stepped out onto the balcony and waited until he registered my presence. A shift in his seat, a change in the air. Kalispera, Captain.
He returned the greeting. I heard the ice clink in his glass.
When I was a child my mother would pour her first drink immediately after her classes. She’d make me dinner and pick at something herself. My friends’ family dinners were an endless source of fascination. Mothers who ate at the table! Or my best friend’s mother, who always washed dishes while her husband and four girls ate; another lived only with her mother and brother, and after school her brother made us chocolate chip pancakes for dinner as he drank beer from a can. He was seventeen, usually shirtless. I loved him deeply.
“Were you close with your mother?” I asked.
“Very,” the Captain said, as if the forwardness of my question were routine, as if we’d always spoken this way.
“I’m fascinated by people’s mothers. But I was most comfortable in the houses where they felt invisible,” I said. “Or crazy.” As a young girl I had had the sense that it was my duty to take care of my mother, not the other way around.
I heard the Captain exhale. Shift in his chair.
I continued:
“The nights my father was gone, playing bouzouki in Greektown, my mother watched television in the den and drank. Sometimes I confused her cries with those that came from ER on television. I would wander from my room, where I talked on my princess telephone to friends, and stand at the door
