Julien sat. “I taught Selin for three years at the Lycée,” he said, rapping the wooden table with his index finger. “I gave her private lessons for five years before that. I wrote her recommendation for the Conservatoire de Paris. I went to her first professional concert in Lyon. And I got a phone call every time some bastard made her cry. That makes her my kid, damn it. And then you, Fanis . . . you’re old enough to be her grandfather—”
“Not exactly,” said Gavriela.
“Please—” said Fanis.
“But he’s a womanizer!” said Julien.
All heads in the tea garden turned toward Julien. Gavriela raised her penciled eyebrows and expressed everyone’s thoughts with an old Greek proverb: “Eipe o gaidaros ton peteino kefala.” And the ass called the cock a bighead.
“Evil-hour!” spat Julien. “Have you got a mouth, Gavriela! Fanis has a right to his fun, but not with my kid. I don’t want any more teary phone calls.”
“Listen,” said Fanis, “we—”
“Emine,” said Gavriela, “another round of tea, if you please.”
Gavriela extended a loaded plate of butter cookies to Fanis. He took one to calm his nerves, but it was sour and malty, as if the butter had gone bad. Emine returned with the teas. In order to wash away the cookie taste, Fanis took a sip, but the tea was stale. It had obviously been sitting for hours.
“What I think the professeur means to say, Fanis,” Gavriela resumed, “is that, although you may be in love with Selin, you do need to think about what you have to offer her.”
“Offer her?” said Fanis. “We’re good friends.”
Julien rolled his eyes. “As if you could be friends with an attractive young woman. Look here, old man, you’re not fooling anybody.”
“I swear I haven’t tried to seduce her,” said Fanis.
“Cut it,” said Julien. “You’ve been with her for months. That’s why you’ve been so scarce. And why I haven’t heard about any new boyfriends.”
Gavriela hissed in disapproval. “In a few years, you’ll be a burden to her. Do you really want to weigh her down with your care?”
There it was again: Dr. Aydemir’s horrid little prediction in the form of friendly meddling. Why did Fanis have to give in to old age and illness? Why couldn’t he just have fun?
But instead of saying any of these things, Fanis shook his head, rose slowly to his feet, and walked out, paying no attention to Julien’s attempts to call him back. The bakery door closed behind him with a rude jangling that unleashed the tears he had felt welling in his eyes from the moment Gavriela had said the word “burden.”
23
In Winter and in Love
After kosmas had discouraged dimitris’s marriage proposal to Rea, the old journalist had had second thoughts. He had feared that Kosmas was right: perhaps Rea saw him only as a friend. The seventies are the age of platonic friendship, he told himself. He had already missed the love and marriage window.
Dimitris put Kosmas’s sourness out of mind and took refuge in his old refrain about freedom: “I’m single. That’s the way I like it. Free, without any Madame to give me trouble at home.” As the winter holidays approached, however, he wondered if Kosmas might have been wrong.
In December, Rea told Dimitris to start coming to tea earlier, before Kosmas returned from work, so that he could read the newspaper to her. She said that her eyes were going, but Dimitris suspected that this was a lie because one afternoon, when Rea was worried about the side effects of her statin medication, she put on her bifocals and read the minuscule print on the crinkly paper insert without any difficulty at all.
In January, when Rea fainted, Dimitris was her first visitor. He rushed over on the morning after the episode—just forty minutes after Kosmas had called him—with a pile of newspapers, a bag of salted pistachios, and two kilos of oranges.
“The nurse has arrived,” he called as he entered, brandishing the newspapers over his head like a trophy. Seeing Kosmas, Dimitris stopped abruptly: the boy’s eyelids were swollen and his face unshaven. “Time for you to take a break, kid,” Dimitris said.
“I can’t. The doctor said I have to keep an eye on her—”
“He didn’t say that you had to,” Dimitris replied. “He said that somebody had to.”
“Thanks. But I don’t want to impose. Besides, she never lets anybody see her without makeup.”
“At least tell her I’m here.”
Kosmas nodded and withdrew. Dimitris set the bag of oranges on the kitchen counter, rummaged in Rea’s drawers for the small plastic press he had seen her use dozens of times, and set to work. By the time he’d filled a tall glass with orange juice and emptied the pistachios into a chipped porcelain dish, Kosmas reopened the door to Rea’s bedroom and called, “She’s ready.”
Dimitris carried the tray as steadily as he could into the only room in the house he had never seen: Rea’s sunny boudoir. She was sitting up in her bed. Her hair was freshly brushed and loosely held by a headband. She had put on powder, fuchsia lipstick, and rouge. “You’re as beautiful as ever,” said Dimitris, kissing her perfumed cheeks. “It’s like nothing happened at all.”
That was a lie, of course. He glimpsed an electrode peeking out from beneath Rea’s nightshirt. He saw the small, V-shaped gash on her cheek, the bruise on her arm, the under-eye circles that were accentuated rather than covered by the powder, as well as the embarrassment in her expression. The important thing, however, was to make her feel beautiful.
Rea stopped the trembling in Dimitris’s right hand by clasping it within her own. “I’m glad you came.”
Dimitris surrendered to the loose silkiness of her hand. He felt a thrill in his chest and a stirring in his groin—not a full erection, of which he was no longer capable, but a fluttering, an “I’m still
