Tibby was actually quite proud of her answer. It sounded like exactly the right thing, even if it bore no relation to how she felt. She tried to catch her breath. She wished the opera singers would take it down a notch.
“That makes a lot of sense.” Effie sucked more on her drink.
“So then…” Effie put her drink down and readjusted herself in her chair. Her eyes were now locked on Tibby. “You wouldn’t mind if…”
Effie uncrossed her legs under the table. Tibby realized she too felt the need to put both feet on the floor. For mysterious reasons, Tibby held her breath.
“You wouldn’t mind if I went out with Brian?”
Things like this should not happen to Lena, Lena decided, looking at the bricks outside her window and then the gaps between them where the mortar had mostly worn away. They should happen to other people, like Effie. Effie, who, for instance, was more skilled at being a person.
The light got old and the bricks turned dark. The only concessions Lena made to the possibility of eight o’clock were putting on deodorant and brushing her hair.
In the latter movement was a memory, because she had also brushed her hair for him on the day of her bapi’s funeral. That was two years ago.
The feelings of loss from that time were multiple: Bapi’s death, her grandmother’s agony, her father’s harsh rigidity. And finding out about Kostos, of course. All of them had crashed together like malevolent winds. They had created a storm strong enough to suck in all the incidental qualities of that moment, however innocent: the particular pattern of clouds and the buzz of a certain kind of airplane, the smell of dry dirt and the feeling of having brushed your hair especially for a person you loved.
The storm had even sucked time into it—hours and days and weeks that didn’t rightfully belong to it, so that the time before it struck was freighted with the knowing sorrow of inexorability, and the time after it bore the bleakness of wanting things she could never have.
Within the memory of brushing her hair for him hovered the foreknowledge that Kostos would abandon her.
She remembered certain things he’d said. They kept at her all this time, like a talk radio station turned very low at the bottom of her consciousness.
“Don’t ever be sad because you think I don’t love you,” he’d said. “Never think you did anything wrong.” “If I’ve broken your heart, I’ve broken my own a thousand times worse.” “I love you, Lena. I couldn’t stop if I tried.”
The most haunting thing was not that he didn’t love her anymore. She could have accepted that eventually. The most haunting thing was that he did. He loved her from afar. (Sometimes that was the way she loved herself.) He loved her in a way that was preserved in time, that couldn’t be sullied. And she tended it in her careful, curatorial way.
She was lovable. She clung to that. She was worthy of being loved. That was what mattered, wasn’t it? Even if he had married someone else? Even if he had wrecked her hopes?
She was lovable. It was what she had. In her dreams, she heard him say he still loved her, that he didn’t forget her any hour of any day. She was unforgettable. That was the most important thing. Better, even, than being happy.
And where did that leave her? Alone on her Greek urn. Lovable but never loved.
She was free of risk. Bold within her limits.
It was the same old hedge.
It reminded Tibby a little bit of the child-catcher’s scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where his candy truck is suddenly revealed to be a cage.
Sitting there across from Effie, her cup of melted ice sweating on the table, Tibby watched the four solid walls turn into the bars of a cage. She was trapped. She had walked right into it, pleased with her own cool, lying head.
What could she do? What could she say? Effie had played it masterfully. Suddenly Tibby understood everything Effie had intended, every question she had asked. Effie did not hail from the land of Socrates for nothing.
Tibby couldn’t think anymore. She couldn’t hope to combat Effie. Her head bobbled.
“You would mind,” Effie concluded quietly, but Tibby could practically see the smugness peeking through. Effie looked ready to fly, to take her victory and run with it.
“No. That’s fine,” Tibby mumbled. What else could she say?
Up stood Effie. That was good enough for her. “Oh, my God. I am so relieved, Tibby,” she gushed. “You don’t know how worried I was. I couldn’t do anything until I knew you’d be okay.”
They were already on the sidewalk, Tibby following numbly.
Brian and Effie? Effie and Brian? Effie with her Brian? Was that what he wanted? He wanted to be with Effie? She thought of Effie’s cleavage.
“I’m just so glad it’s okay. Because Brian and I are like the only two people left at home this summer, you know? And I’ve—Well, anyway. But I wouldn’t even think of doing anything without making sure you would be fine.”
“I’ll be fine,” Tibby managed to say, just to finish the charade properly. Then she went home and fell apart.
The alleged Kostos did come at eight.
Lena hazarded a touch to his wrist before she submitted to the belief that he was three-dimensional. He was too warm to be a ghost, figment, or hologram. He had eyes and lips and arms that moved. He was in her time, in her doorway. She had to accept him.
And so she stepped back, considering him silently and without regard to her own presence. She was a pair of eyes, not a person to be interacted with. If he insisted upon being present, maybe she could disappear.
So he was Kostos. She thought her memory of his face should certainly have diminished the reality of his face, but it hadn’t. His face still had its power, she recognized, but as though from a distance.
He put out his hand and held hers, earnestly but without expectations. She stayed too far away to be read as wanting to embrace.
So he was Kostos and she was Lena, and after all this time and misery they were facing each other in a doorway of a student dorm in Providence, Rhode Island. She was watching it more than experiencing it. She was keeping track so she could tell herself about it later and brood appropriately.
There were people who lived in the moment, Lena knew, while she lived at a delay of hours or even years. And with that knowledge came the familiar frustration of wanting to club herself over the head with a combat boot if only to be sure of experiencing and feeling something in unison for once.
“I won’t stay if you don’t want me to, Lena.” Tentatively he took one step into the small room. “But there are a few things I want to say to you in person.”
She nodded, her mouth clamped and pointy like a bird’s beak. The sound of her name in his voice was jarring.
They should walk, Lena decided. Walking was easier because they didn’t have to look at each other. “We should walk,” she said.
In single file they walked down the hallway and three flights of stairs. She led him out of the building and toward the river. The air had grown kind, warm but not steamy.
She had the vague thought that they would walk along the place in the river where fires burned in the middle of the water on summer nights. It was one of the few tourist attractions of Providence, but she was too disoriented to remember what time they were lit or even quite where they would be.
“I didn’t know how you would feel,” he said, walking beside her.
She didn’t know how she would feel either. She had absolutely no idea. She waited to know as though someone might tell her.
She took him the wrong way. They wound up walking past a gas station and a 7-Eleven and picking their way along a busy road in the dark. She hadn’t the gifts of a tour guide.
She thought of Santorini and how it was beautiful and how Kostos knew the way. The thought struck her heavily,
almost like a boot, making her eyes sting.
“I’m not married anymore,” Kostos told her between speeding cars. He looked at her and she nodded to show that she had at least heard him.
“I became officially divorced in June.”
She was not freshly startled by this. Once she’d accepted his presence in her doorway, a part of her brain seemed to know he was no longer married.
With his solemn face he stood as they waited for a line of cars to pass. He was patient about it. They were both patient, perhaps overly so. They had that in common.
She steered them back in the direction of campus to a quiet bench in a green and dimly lit patch of garden between two administrative buildings. It was no olive grove, but they could talk.
“There’s not a baby,” he said gingerly. He seemed to have considered his phrasing in advance.
“What happened to it?” She felt bold to ask, but reasonable, too.
He looked at her openly. He hadn’t the anger or guardedness she’d seen two years ago. It was easier to talk about a baby that he didn’t have.
“Well.” His sigh indicated complexity. “Mariana said she miscarried. But the timing of it was hard to explain. Her sister told me privately that she hadn’t been pregnant, but had wanted to marry and figured a baby would come in due course.”
“But it didn’t,” Lena said.
She could tell by his gaze that he was measuring how much was the right amount to say. “I was angry in the beginning. I wanted to find out the truth. I refused to live…as a husband with her.”
Lena wondered at the meaning of all of this. What American man would talk this way?
“We lived separately after the first half year, but stayed married. I thought I couldn’t dishonor my grandparents by divorcing. It’s not accepted among the old families. It’s something that the newcomers and the tourists do.”
Lena recognized how deep in Kostos’s character was the need to please. The desire not to disappoint. It was another thing they had in common. He was the darling of all the families in Oia. He wanted to be lovable too, even if it meant setting happiness aside. His happiness and hers, it seemed.