On the way home Aliki placed her hand on his. Fanis thought it was a friendly gesture, or perhaps even one of pity, so he squeezed it and held on until the phaeton pulled up at her doorstep. She, too, missed Kalypso, he reminded himself, and his mourning had been delayed far too long.
Aliki showed Fanis to the guest room. The sheets were freshly ironed and smelled of rosewater. The inlaid tables were polished and covered with starched doilies. The curtains, he could tell, had recently been washed and rehung, and the hardwood floor was waxed to a shine. Either Aliki was one of the best house-widows on the island or she had been preparing for him for over a week. Perhaps her invitation to spend the night had not been as impromptu as it had seemed. After a few minutes, she brought him a pair of her dead husband’s pajamas, wished him a pleasant dawn, and withdrew. Fanis felt immense relief. They were just good friends after all.
The tinny pulse of the crickets soon carried him off to a June evening half a century before. He smelled the fatty smoke of roasting meat and saw the gnarly pines twisting into dark shapes before the broad wall of the sea as he sat joking with his friends, a few meters away from the little clearing that served as a dance floor. Despite the money his mother had spent on lessons, Fanis had been too shy to ask Kalypso to a rumba. He had watched her sing and laugh with her cousins on the other side of the restaurant, but he hadn’t been able to push himself past the devastation that he knew he would feel if she said no. It wasn’t until the end of the evening, when somebody announced the last dance, that Kalypso had skipped over to him and said, “Are we ever going to cha-cha?” She was fifteen then, and ten times braver than he.
Fanis felt her homemade blue gingham dress beneath his sweaty palms. He saw her open-mouth smile, felt the whip of her ponytail. As sleep overcame him, the memory morphed into a dream: they rose into the sky, still dancing, and flew to the other side of the island, where the tall trees grew. “Set to,” she whispered, pulling an axe and an adze from behind her full skirt. “Make your sailing bark.” Then she disappeared, leaving him alone and at a loss, for he had no idea how to use an axe and adze.
Fanis awoke. He tried to make sense of the shapes and shadows to which he had opened his eyes but, like a disoriented traveler in a foreign land, he recognized nothing. A light shone under the door. He groped his way to it and shuffled down the hallway to a bright bedroom perfumed by pink garden roses peeking out of an eighteenth-century Persian Qajar vase. Inside, Aliki was sitting on her sofa in an off-the-shoulder lace nightgown that seemed overly elegant for a regular night’s sleep.
“I had a dream,” said Fanis.
Aliki patted the brocade sofa cushion. “Come. Have a seat.”
Still confused, Fanis entered, sat down beside her, and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.”
Fanis was taken aback. “How did you know I’d have a strange dream?”
“I didn’t. But I knew you’d come.” Aliki pointed at the steaming porcelain teapot on a Chippendale piecrust table. “Look, I already made you a chamomile tea.”
“Chamomile? Men never drink chamomile. Not good for the . . . you know.”
“Guess it’s not for you, then,” she said with a smile. “What about mint?”
Her effort was touching. Nobody had taken care of him like that since his mother died. “Maybe in a little while,” he said. He leaned his head on Aliki’s soft, sloping shoulder, breathed in the weedy scent of the chamomile tea, and took a peek at the current state of affairs: sagging wineskins. They couldn’t compare to Daphne’s lemons, but he also couldn’t imagine Daphne taking care of him like that. And Selin? He couldn’t afford to think of her right now.
Fanis yawned. He was feeling drowsy again, but he didn’t want to leave. A few seconds later, he felt Aliki’s hand on his knee. Was she mothering him? Or . . . ? He lifted his head to ask about the mint tea. At the same moment, Aliki leaned forward to plant a kiss on his forehead. Their lips met by accident. Fanis jumped to his feet and murmured something about feeling better and not needing the tea.
“It’s no trouble,” said Aliki, fiddling with the top button of her nightgown. She scanned his face as if she were searching for some sort of go-ahead. “I’ve been dreaming of this moment my whole life.”
Fanis tried to let her down softly. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. You see, I could never get involved with one of Kalypso’s friends. It would be disrespectful to her memory.”
Aliki grabbed her satin robe from the back of the sofa and drew it over her shoulders. “Kalypso’s been dead for over half a century.”
“I know, and . . . you’re lovely, Aliki, but . . .”
“Sit, Fanis,” said Aliki, in a quieter tone. “Let’s talk about this.”
He obeyed but perched himself on the opposite end of the sofa, his fingers buried between his thighs and his knees glued together.
“Fanis,” said Aliki. “I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve. Sure, I married somebody else, but I never stopped imagining your face on the heroes of the romance novels I used to read with a flashlight while my husband slept. And now that we’ve both been widowed, it’s like life gave us a second chance, don’t you think?”
“Certainly, but—”
“No buts,” said Aliki, inching closer to him. She put her finger to his lips.
Fanis felt panic flood his body. In a few seconds he was on his feet and out the door, calling over his shoulder, “We’ll talk in the morning.”
He stumbled back to
