“Would you even have wanted this?” he asked. “Marriage, a baby.”
“Of course,” I said, though neither of us completely believed me.
He was quiet, and he knew as well as I did that I had always resisted what was expected of me. Though I imagined marriage could be a beautiful thing, for me somehow it represented a sort of erasure. Couples often depressed me, and neat little families even more so. I don’t know. Maybe I would have wanted it now, here, the different me in this different country.
•
The next morning, I called Nefeli and told her what had happened with Aris. I was dreading saying it out loud, as if saying it would make it true. But it was already true.
Half an hour later, she was at my door, telling me I looked terrible. She wore a black-and-white-striped T-shirt, jeans, boots, a red scarf wrapped stylishly around her neck. She didn’t seem surprised. I could not block her out, nor could I hide anything from her. I returned to Athens each year and was seamlessly integrated back into her life, the rhythm of her days. What happened all those other months? I didn’t know. We video-chatted from time to time, but since my parents had died everything blurred together.
I asked her if she wanted a coffee, and she followed me into the kitchen, her eyes resting on the new countertops, the modern light fixtures, the empty bottle of wine on the dining room table, the paper bag of my finished beers and my mother’s empties still on the floor. “What the hell,” she said.
My head hurt.
I pretended not to notice the disarray—how often in the next few months I would willfully ignore something right in front of me—and poured us each a cup. “Don’t drink so much, Myrto,” she said. “Especially alone like this. It will only make things worse.”
She held the warmth of the pale-blue mug close to her cheek for a few moments before she took a sip. She looked around at the sunny colors. “Haroula redid this?”
“My mother,” I said, and her face showed some relief that it had not been Haroula who’d re-created the apartment, as if to rid it of Nefeli’s presence. As a young girl I did not question the finer points of their relationship; they were simply Haroula and Nefeli. It was only after my freshman year in college, when I returned for the summer, that I finally knew them as lovers, partners, together. My parents had never explicitly mentioned their involvement but never denied it either. I suppose they might have been more socially progressive than I’d credited them for.
When I was a graduate student, in ethnographic studies, I read an anthropologist’s study on women in same-sex relationships in an unnamed Greek town. Many of them were married to men, had children, and did not refer to themselves as lesbian or queer. It might sound like they were victims of a conservative society, certainly true, but there was a wonderful progressive fluidity to it as a result: you can defy the system if you refuse to let it define you. It struck a chord with me, the freedom found between the lines and the way the women had navigated conflicting identities, broke barriers. I found myself deeply fascinated by these women, their nonchalance, their structured freedom. I am not making the hetero mistake of thinking that lesbian relationships are any easier than those between anyone else. It was this particular group, unwilling to declare one identity, that fascinated me. Was it oppression, or freedom? What intrigued me most was the way relationships were ended, the ritualistic collective grieving. How do you say goodbye to a relationship? I had never been good at clean breaks, old loves trailing behind me like shadows.
When we’d finished our coffees, Nefeli suggested we go to the sea, which to her was the balm for everything. Though in my opinion it was still too cold to swim, the sun was warm, and we’d eat lunch by the water. She had been working hard preparing an upcoming show, her biggest ever, and declared it would be good to get out of Athens.
She followed me into the bedroom as I gathered a few things for the beach. “Suffering is a chronic state,” she said as I threw things into a small bag. “I’m in this room with you, you see, and I’ve got this gun. And I’m holding it above you, waving it around your head, I’m chasing you around the room, and you’re wondering if and when I’ll shoot.”
I didn’t know then if she was talking about Aris or Greece, though later that summer, after she disappeared, I understood she’d been talking about herself. But Nefeli often spoke like a sibyl, and it had always seemed that she could sense things most others could not. I was also used to moments of deep joy with her: nights we’d laugh until we gasped for air, our stomachs aching. Just that morning, an old picture of us had popped up on social media: years earlier, the two of us drunk and laughing at a party on the island, me sitting on her lap at a crowded table.
She wandered out of the bedroom, and I heard the door to the apartment open as she headed into the foyer.
•
When we arrived, we dropped our things on the beach and took off our shoes. The sun felt marvelous. Usually Nefeli donned her goofy bathing cap and swam many laps back and forth, even when the weather seemed too cold. Today we both rolled up our jeans and shrieked as the water washed over our toes.
The day was bright, the sky a wild, changing blue. At the other end of the beach,
