“It’s no wonder I remain in limbo.”
•
At what point did I shift in my seat, sit cross-legged, and touch his arm? At what point did I stand to refill our water glasses? At what point did we finish the beer and get another? The details of the chronology are hazy but the events are clear, hyperfocused. When I returned with a full carafe of water the Captain pulled me onto his lap, facing him, and my hands fell naturally around his neck, played with that fine hair there, then moved down over his shoulders. He let out a long breath, something between a sigh and a groan. He moved his hands under my shirt. “Is this okay,” he asked.
I remember the early purply light, and the sunrise, which came way too soon.
18
The Captain
I returned to my father’s home at dawn, and when I woke a few hours later I replayed the night with Mira in my mind. When I went into the kitchen, my father was having his breakfast on the terrace that overlooked the valley. I poured myself a cup of coffee, adding a lot of milk and sugar, and stood at the counter, trying to delineate where the night had ended. I brought the coffeepot outside and refilled my father’s cup. He thanked me absentmindedly, like I did this every day, and stirred in his sugar. The church bells chimed, but otherwise the village was quiet.
My father was always meticulous about his breakfast: a loaf of bread on a wooden tray, a cloth napkin draped over it, a serrated knife to cut it. A little pot of butter, a little pot of jam. Fruit. Brewed coffee; Greek coffee was for the afternoon. He usually read the papers but they sat stacked on the table, untouched. He saw me eye them and shrugged.
When I sat he passed me the bread and asked me again about Katerina. Was he being polite or did he know something more? I wondered what Katerina had told him. Had he heard me leave in the middle of the night, then return at sunrise? Not interrupting, not saying a thing, my father listened to me talk for some time.
“There are no secrets,” he said to me, and I could tell he also knew I was no longer working. But his tone was not accusatory, as I would have guessed. Just matter-of-fact. It was early but the sun beat down, and I had to keep wiping my brow with a napkin. My father, though, appeared unbothered by it. In fact, he seemed overall quite well that morning, not forgetting words or mixing things up, or acting as though the very distant past was right behind us in the kitchen. I knew this didn’t mean much—I guessed he was always best in the morning—but it calmed me a bit.
My father cut up a nectarine and handed me a slice. He would never say something like, Whatever makes you happy. It’s not the way he saw the world. Happiness, to him, was a by-product, not a goal, an idea I was beginning to share.
After breakfast, I drove to the closest beach for a swim.
It was the less-traveled side of the island, away from the port. But the road to the water had recently been widened and cleared, and now crawled with rental jeeps and foreign plates and a minimart, a few rickety beach bars. I could hear the whoops and cries of tourists posing for photos, men flexing their muscles and looking dumbly at the camera, women with that empty, stupid-faced stare that at some point so many not-stupid women took on as customary.
I turned around and drove to the more secluded, lesser-known cove nearby. At the far end a couple slept, faces down, their bodies splayed out like starfish. I took a quick dip to cool off, then read for a while, a book of short stories organized around the stops of the Athens train, my breathing slowing to that pleasant, slow reading rhythm. Every so often an image from the night before: a shift of the body, a look on Mira’s face, her bare shoulder, would come into my mind, and I would stop reading for a moment. And I had told her so many things, things I could barely admit to myself.
Then I took a long swim. When we were at the beach, I always splashed around with the kids, playing games, but I can’t remember the last time I swam out with no purpose. I missed the sea deeply: being on it, being in it. Then I stopped moving and floated on my back awhile. Though I can’t say I hadn’t enjoyed this period of idleness—I had, very much—I was too young to retire. I wasn’t ready. I allowed myself, for the first time, to wish for something: it was my own hesitation that kept me from even acknowledging a need. My marriage had long ago become unsalvageable, perhaps, but maybe my job was still within reach. I would call my boss again this afternoon. If not that job, another one.
When I emerged from the water an hour later, the starfish couple was packing up their things. The woman had long black hair and wore a black striped
