She had that frustrating dreamlike confusion of racking her brain for the answer and then forgetting what the question was. There was a question, wasn’t there? She thought of asking him.
“I should have called first,” he murmured.
She recognized that her heart was beating either many more times or many fewer times than it was meant to. She considered. Maybe it would stop altogether. Then what was she supposed to do?
For some reason she pictured her chest opening like a cupboard door and her heart sproinging out at the end of a coil.
Was she awake? She could have asked him, but he was the last person who would know, having no place in reality himself.
“I think I might sit down,” she said faintly. She was like a corseted girl in an old movie, taking the big things sitting down.
He stood in her doorway with the question on his face of whether he should come in. He looked worn out and rumpled. Maybe he really had come all the way here.
“Maybe you could come back later,” she said.
He wore the look of being tortured. He didn’t know what to make of her. “Can I come back this evening? Maybe around eight?”
She found herself wondering, did he mean eight her time or his time? She only confused herself. “That would be fine,” she said politely. Could they really be in the same time?
If he came back at eight, she decided, listening to the door close, tipping over onto her pillow, that would strengthen the case for his being here.
On that same scorching Thursday at the end of July, the security guard called up to Tibby’s room and told her she had a visitor.
Immediately she thought of Brian, even though she hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since she’d returned from Bethesda. She felt her heart quicken. “Who is it?” she asked.
“Hold on.” Tibby heard muffled conversation. “It’s Effie.”
“Who?”
“Effie. Effie? She says she’s your friend.”
Tibby’s heart changed its stride. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said.
She wet her hair down and pulled on a tank top and a ragged pair of shorts. Suddenly she was worried something might be wrong with Lena. She flew down the hall to the elevator.
Effie was practically in her face when the elevator door opened in the lobby. She backed up quickly, stumbling as Tibby burst out of it.
“Is everything okay?” Tibby asked.
Effie raised her eyebrows. “Yes. I mean, I think so.”
“Where’s Lena?”
“She’s in Providence.” Effie acquired that subtly damaged look she got when confronted with the reality that Lena’s friends were not equally her friends.
“Oh. Right.” Tibby realized it might sound mean to say So what are you doing here? Rather, she waited patiently for Effie to explain what she was doing there.
“Are you busy right now?” Effie asked.
“No. Not really.”
“You’re not like, rushing off anywhere or anything.”
“No.” Tibby was imploding with curiosity, with the sense that something was afoot. She’d been alone a lot.
“Do you want to go get a cup of coffee? Is there a place around here?”
Effie looked a bit nervous, Tibby decided. She was jumpy. Of her total of four hands and feet, not one was staying still. She was wearing a short strawberry pink wrap dress, which revealed an impressive amount of cleavage.
“There are a million places around here.” Tibby counseled herself not to be impatient or mean. It was actually really sweet that Effie had come all the way here to see her. Did she want advice on something? Was she suddenly interested in film as a potentially glamorous career? Did she hear there was a disproportionate number of cute boys at NYU maybe? Not that there were. “We can get iced coffee at a place on Waverly.”
“That sounds great,” Effie said. She wiped a coat of sweat off her upper lip.
“Are you in New York for a while?” Tibby asked as they walked along, fishing for clues.
“Just the day,” Effie said.
At last, equipped with a two-dollar iced coffee for Tibby and a five-dollar raspberry white mocha frappuccino for Effie, they sat at a dim, cool table in the back of the café. An opera in Italian was playing over the speaker to the left of Effie’s head.
Effie’s drink was so thick she had to really suck to get any of it. Tibby watched and waited.
“So you and Brian broke up,” Effie said finally.
“Right.”
“I couldn’t believe it when I first heard it.”
Tibby shrugged. Was this the preamble? Where was it going?
“Do you think you’ll get back together?” Effie asked. Her expression was not demanding. In fact, she mostly fiddled with the paper from her straw.
“I don’t think so.”
“Really?”
Tibby tried not to be irritated. Was Effie just trying to make pleasant conversation? Because it wasn’t all that pleasant.
“Really.”
“Huh. Do you think you are over him?”
Tibby looked at her carefully. “Do I think I am over him?”
Effie opened her hands as though to show there wasn’t anything in them. “Yeah.”
“I’m not sure I would even know.”
Effie shrugged lightly. She sucked on her drink. “I mean, like, would you be upset if you found out he was going out with someone else?”
As Tibby replayed those words, she felt her brain turning inside out like a salted slug. Her vision grew distorted and she blinked to get it back into focus. She tried to keep her face on, to remain calm.
What did Effie know? Had she seen Brian with another girl? Was Brian fooling around with some girl all over Bethesda? What had Effie seen? What was going on?
Tibby drank her coffee. She breathed the air. She listened to a tenor hollering just over Effie’s head. She could not lose it in front of Effie. Effie, no matter what her cup size, was still a little sister.
She desperately wanted to ask Effie what she knew, but how could she without seeming like it bothered her? Like she was upset and disturbed and blindsided by the thought of it? She couldn’t.
“You would be upset,” Effie concluded.
Tibby had her pride, if nothing else. “No,” she said finally. “I would be a little surprised, maybe. But look. I was the one who broke up with him, right? It wasn’t like I didn’t know what I was doing. I totally did. I didn’t have any doubt that it was time for us to break up and that, for me, it was the right thing to do.” Suddenly Tibby realized that talking felt better than thinking.
“Really?”
“Sure. I mean, it was really over. For me, it was over. Brian should do whatever he wants to do. He’s totally free to go out with anybody he wants. Really, he probably oughta go out with somebody else if that’s what he wants to do.” Tibby felt like her head was teetering slightly on her neck. Like one of those dumb bobble-head figures people put in their car.
Effie nodded and sucked on her so-called coffee, her eyes wide, listening intently. “Would it matter if it was someone you knew?”
Never had Tibby imagined pure torture in the guise of Effie Kaligaris in a wrap dress sucking a pink drink. Someone Tibby knew? Who was it? Who was Brian with? Someone she knew? Brian was hooking up with someone she knew? Who was it? How could he do that to her? Tibby racked her brain to think of who it could be.
How could she ask and not betray her abject misery? How could she not ask and continue to suffer like this?
“It would,” Effie proposed solemnly.
Once again, Tibby gathered herself. She could fall apart later. She could call Lena and get the truth. She could even call her mother if it came to that.
“Why should it?” Tibby said, tapping her fingers in a poor facsimile of nonchalance. “Why should it really matter if I knew the person?”
Suddenly every damn singer in the opera seemed to be screaming at the top of their lungs. “The point is that Brian is n
o longer my boyfriend and I am not his girlfriend.” Tibby was almost shouting. “Who he goes out with is totally his business. Who I go out with is totally mine.”
Effie nodded slowly. “That makes sense.”
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.