But then he smiled, waved, and went inside to buzz me up. He met me at the landing and the moment I saw his face, of course, I knew something was wrong. In the corner of the apartment was the smaller shiny red suitcase I’d left last time. I did not yet know he’d filled it with all the things that had accumulated there over the years: books and clothing and a curling iron, several notebooks. When I see the pair of suitcases now in my own apartment, it’s an obnoxious reminder of the humiliation I felt that day.
“It looks so nice in here,” I said, moving through the flat, wheeling my suitcase behind me toward the bedroom. The place smelled lemony, freshly cleaned. The bathroom with fluffy white towels and the bed with light-blue sheets. Engagement gifts, though I didn’t realize that until later.
It’s when I stood in the doorway of the bedroom that he appeared behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Mira,” he said. “We can’t live here together.” His voice was pained and tender but also that of a man who was expecting a fight.
It took me a minute to realize he wasn’t saying he didn’t want to live together but that he didn’t want to be together at all. I don’t remember how much he told me then and how much I learned after the fact. Another woman, it had happened so fast, he hadn’t meant for it to become serious and now, he said, they were planning to marry. Her name was Eva.
Planning to marry. Also, she was having a baby.
I sat down on the bed.
“Mira. I couldn’t tell you over the phone. It would have been cruel.”
“When is she due?” I asked, looking down at the floor.
“Late summer,” he said.
So she had already been pregnant when my parents died. “You could have told me, in Chicago. Or in Athens, after the funeral.”
“It felt inhumane. I’m sorry. There was never the right time.”
In a foggy state of shock I hauled both my suitcases back down to the landing—no elevators—refusing his help. Aris stood on the sidewalk with me and my bags, assuring me not all would change between us, that he still wanted me in his life. I got into a taxi, and I could feel him standing in the street, watching me drive away.
•
Later in the evening, a little drunk, I scrolled through my messages, not replying to anything. More texts from Aris—Are you okay? Call me. Mira?—as well as from Nefeli and my friends Dimitra and Fady. My father’s cousins had called, but I didn’t want to call them back. They had been anticipating an engagement, a wedding, and I didn’t want to give them the smug satisfaction of knowing it wouldn’t happen. They adored Aris, a handsome, hypereducated man with a new seat in parliament, but his involvement with me baffled them. They knew—because my mother had told them—that we both had imagined what our lives would be if I moved to Greece for good. Get tenure first, Aris had said. You’ll be glad you did. And I was glad he felt this way, but when I did finally get tenure I felt no differently. It was not that I was that attached to teaching. Besides, so little of my job was teaching and so much was taken up with administration and meetings and navigating a department whose internecine struggles and alliances predated me. To be honest, I wavered between loving it and dreading it.
But perhaps Aris and I were both putting something off, or knew summers together, and Christmas, was enough, and maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with that. But to my father’s cousins it was not this complicated. To them I was not elegant enough, nor pedigreed enough, nor Greek enough; as if I had stolen him away from someone with better claims. I was their family, but I was not one of them.
Well. There would be a wedding. There was that.
Aris called again, several times, and finally I picked up.
“And she knows about me,” I said.
“In the sense that you exist.”
In the sense that I exist. I let him continue. Do I exist. I put him on speaker, set the phone on the table, needing the distance of his disembodied voice.
“That we had a history. I said your father was an old friend.”
This was true. I’d met Aris three times before we really became involved: once, age eighteen, on the island, where I prowled around with friends from my freshman year; second, twenty-one, when I had a summer job bartending at an American bar on the island and he’d show up during my shifts, usually alone, and talk with me when I was not busy; and third, on the ferry, as a graduate student. This was the time that stuck. But he had loomed in my mind, my heart, since I was a teenager. He was part of me as I was forming, part of this place.
“That we were together, Aris. Can’t you even say it?”
“Well, were we? Really together? Not since we both lived in Chicago. Not physically—not day in, day out.”
“You’re revising our history.”
“That’s what history is. Revision. Point of view. Of all people, you should know that.”
It was the meanest thing he ever said to me.
“Mira?” he asked finally.
“I’m fine,” I said. Aris wanted it to already be after, not understanding that the only way
