Two young backpackers walked by, looking lost, but the sight of me hurling things into a dumpster, dressed like a lunatic and holding a glass of whiskey, probably didn’t make me seem a person to ask for directions. They hurried past me, in the shamed way we deal with the insane—the man murmuring to himself on the bus, the crazy lady in the central square feeding the pigeons.
Of course I couldn’t not think of Aris, the way we’d emptied the entire brownstone that way, in a frenzy. Garbage bag by garbage bag: underwear drawers, socks, papers, and old bills that perhaps should have been kept, but I heaved those into the dumpster, too.
It may seem that because I took Aris’s news with such nonchalance that I was not hurt by it. I was. But I don’t construct a narrative of myself as a loyal, faithful girlfriend, unraveled by Aris’s sexual infidelity. It was more complicated than that: our relationship had never been conventional. It was that he’d moved on, completely present in this new life with Eva, and we had not even had a proper breakup, a proper goodbye. We never assumed sexual fidelity but we, at least I, assumed some sort of loyalty. Maybe I was naïve to actually think there was a difference. What I had taken for devotion was simply complacency, the most dangerous state of all.
No, I wasn’t naïve. But I wasn’t not naïve either. I could say this about almost anything, my life of betweenness. I was not reeling. A pregnancy, a life with someone who was not me, one that had begun months before I knew. This is what doubled me over. Aris had been living two parallel lives and now they had met. I, too, had been living two lives: my life in the States and my life here, but somehow my rootlessness had become its own sort of trap.
Back in the house, I felt relieved by the absence of things that did not belong to me. Two of Nefeli’s paintings hung over the couch, several long-faced women seated around a table. I called her yet again but she didn’t pick up.
No, I was still reeling. Had I not still been reeling from the breakup I would have understood Nefeli’s behavior to be direr than I had. That her odd behavior was not artistic tempestuousness but something more bruised, desperate. Even self-destructive.
The couple on the beach had thought they’d seen two women out there swimming, and I wondered who had been out there with me and what had happened to her. Maybe I was both in the water and on land, all at once. Maybe I had somehow finally really split myself in two: the woman I was then and the woman I was becoming, both of us out there carving through the waves. I sipped my drink and wondered how long it would be before my mother emerged from inside me, how long I could keep her hidden deep inside before she broke through my skin, triumphant.
16
Mira
That evening, after my afternoon at the sea, I was anxious, buzzing, unable to sit still. I tidied up, went through a few things, found a few books I’d wanted to read. Kyria Voula, whom I had not yet seen but who seemed to appear when I wasn’t around, had left a bowl of strawberries on the table, and a small ceramic pot of homemade yogurt in the fridge, which I ate. She’d taken down my laundry and folded it on my bed. I would remember to leave her some money. I texted Dimitra to call me, then went out for a walk.
The port was crowded. At the far end, passengers boarded the ferry. I ate a souvlaki on a bench, looking out at the small sailboats, the fishing vessels, the larger, more elegant crafts whose owners either stood in front, proud and admiring, or were nowhere to be found. I was gripped by loneliness.
Of course Nefeli was ill. How had I not known, or, more accurately, how could I not have admitted it to myself? I’d attributed it all to depression alone, as if the mind were not part of the body. The stealing, the small rages, the gray pallor and the darkness below her eyes. From that very first outing to the beach when I’d arrived: it was all there, in plain sight.
From the distance I could hear music. Singing, a coo of voices, minor keys: humming? Low registers and high ones, harmonies that intensified and retreated, growing quiet for a moment. At first I thought it was coming from one of the docked sailboats, some beautiful and eerie nautical choir. I looked around to see if anyone else heard it; it was so subtle I thought I was going mad. One second it would sound like praise and the other like lament, from keening to joy, taunting me like impish angels.
I glanced around, wished I could share the moment with someone, if for no other reason than to confirm it. People walked by in twos and threes, couples holding hands, families, groups of loud teenagers. Nobody seemed to hear it.
That’s when I noticed him, the Captain. His face was brown with sun, his shirt was pressed, his hair seemed longer, messy, and he hadn’t shaved in probably a few days. I almost didn’t recognize him, but the entire effect was quite lovely. I so rarely looked at his face. Only a glimpse here and there: over the balcony, a sun-drenched moment on the roof, a walk from the market on the
