Either way, it didn’t matter. “Are we done here?” I asked, painfully aware that I had come to the taverna after him, met his gaze, led him into the alley. “I have to get back.”
“That’s it?” he said. He waited. I didn’t move. Said nothing.
Finally, he shook his head and I watched him walk down the steps back into the garden of the taverna. Not his usual confident walk, loose limbed, with that absence of self-awareness. A heaviness. I sat back down in the bar. Nefeli gave me a look. Fady was gazing back over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, turning to the table. “There goes the neighborhood.”
“It’s fine,” I said to them both. I took a drink. But I had not prepared myself for seeing Aris in public, with her. I had not thought of how real it would feel, how final. Say what you will about it, our emotional dependence was significant. When we were apart we’d talk for hours on the phone, or online. He’d call me in the middle of the night to tell me something funny that had just happened. Other times for no reason at all. Maybe it was simply an intense friendship all along. We had all the components (affection, conversation, desire, closeness) but nothing to root it. I thought that was a question of timing, of logistics. But maybe it was not so complicated at all. Love is not an accumulation of traits.
I had never seen Aris look as sad as he had that early February morning when he brought me to the airport, after my parents’ funeral in Athens. We had barely slept. I was convinced something was wrong, that he was sick, because when you lose something close to you, you expect everything and everyone is next. The plane ride was terrible. The plane rides are always terrible.
Now, as the musicians continued playing, as Dimitra sang, I lost track of the rounds of drinks brought over to our table, the little pitchers and the ice and the raki. At one point Nefeli put her hand on my wrist, as if to tell me to slow down. Behind her my mother danced a hawk-like zeibekiko in a yellow dress, but the lighting was dim and I was drunk, and when I looked around later I didn’t see any woman in yellow.
On the walk home it began to rain, but I was so drunk I didn’t care. Yet I hesitated a moment at the door when I reached my building. I understood then that part of my uneasiness those last two days had to do with staying in this place, not at Aris’s. The assertive reclamation of this space as mine. Though I still hadn’t been able to sell the home in Chicago. I hadn’t been ready. Aris had discouraged it, too, which I attributed simply to his Greekness; no one got rid of family property here. It was the only way people seemed to survive. And to sell a family home is to reject a history, to walk through a one-way door. Those first few days in Athens, I had thought I’d fix up the apartment to get it ready for renters. For some reason it hadn’t sunk in that this is where I’d now stay. Despite the pain of seeing Aris, the night had filled me up—the music, the drinks, the dancing—and I felt that fervent, liberating joy I felt nowhere else in the world.
I let myself in with my new key, turned on a few of the lights. The apartment felt cozy and welcoming. I took a hot shower, dried my hair, and drank a cup of mint tea, then fell asleep atop the covers.
5
The Captain
When I woke the next morning I cleaned up the kitchen, the pan from the carbonara that we’d eaten in the middle of the night, and felt very sad. We had plans in Athens that evening with Eva and Aris and several others, but I wasn’t looking forward to the outing. Usually Katerina and I went out closer to home in Kifissia; it felt a bit disorienting, going out in Athens with her, as if my two selves—the man who lived with his family in the northern suburbs and the man who lived in Athens—should not meet.
When we drove to the center for dinner, though, I felt calmed by all the lights, the traffic, the noise of the city. As I was admiring the violet sky, Katerina groaned. “God, Athens is so ugly,” she said. “How do people stand it?”
I admit the transition from our cool leafy street to the grit of the center was a stark one, but I liked the traffic and the street art, and the ragtag bunches of young people who hung out in clumps were as much a part of the fabric of the city as anything else. Athens, to me, is a glorious city; I have traveled the world and it’s still one of my favorites. To call it ugly or a concrete-block city, as Katerina often did, was missing both the point and its beauty. She didn’t like New York City either, for instance. Katerina hated traffic, she hated chaos, and if she had her way she’d live in a quiet corner of an island, and that would be that. When in Greece she complained about it but couldn’t stand to be away from it, she realized, which matched the sentiment of many of our friends: reject it before it rejects you. There was a brain drain: many had gone to Western Europe, Canada, the States, but unlike generations past it seemed no one was really
