“I’m going to try to sell my grandparents’ house finally.”
“Oh.” It was a complicated “oh.” Eudoxia wasn’t going to leave it at that.
“I think my dad was pretty happy that I volunteered.”
“I am sure he was. When do you go?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Dear me. And return?”
“I bought an open ticket for the way back. I don’t know how long it’s going to take.”
“You don’t mind going back there? After what happened?”
Lena didn’t stop to think how to say these things in Greek, she just said them in Greek. “Of course I do. I mind everything after what happened. I mind being here or being there. I mind thinking about it and not thinking about it. I mind walking and I can’t stand still. I need to do something.”
“Oh, my dear one,” Eudoxia cooed sympathetically.
Lena felt her eyes filling with tears. She thought of Tibby’s mother. “It’s hard for everyone,” she said.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
Lena was stunned, but the way Eudoxia said it made Lena know she meant it. Slowly in Lena’s mind a picture evolved of the two of them trundling through the airports and climbing the steep paths of Oia. “Doxie, you are very kind to offer.”
“I have savings, you know. I could keep you company. I could help sell the house. I know something about real estate. Anatole says I could sell a Bible to the Pope.”
Lena pictured the two of them side by side, hand-delivering Tibby’s letter to Kostos in London. She almost smiled at the thought. Imagine if Eudoxia met Kostos. Then Lena would never, never hear the end of it.
“The plane leaves early tomorrow morning,” Lena said.
“I can pack quickly. I am a light traveler. You don’t even know that about me.”
The tears in Lena’s eyes spilled over. “I am touched that you offered. I really am. But I can’t take you from Anatole for so long. What would he do? He might starve. He might die of loneliness. And besides, I will be fine. I don’t mind going by myself at all.”
Eudoxia sighed. She was quiet for a few moments. “All right, then. But if you change your mind you can call me anytime tonight. I will be home.”
“Thank you, Doxie. I will.”
“It will be good practice for your Greek.”
Lena hung up the phone and lay down on her bed and cried a puzzling brew of tears. It was probably good you couldn’t flip the love switch, because sometimes it was what you needed, even if you didn’t want it.
“I had an idea,” Brian said to Bridget on her second strange morning in Bowral.
She looked up from the kitchen computer, where she was trying to find a flight back to the States and ruefully facing up to the fact that she had come on a one-way ticket, had made no provision for the future, and had not one single plan for what happened next.
“Well, more like a favor,” he said.
“Okay,” Bridget said. She was in penance mode. She was ready to do a favor.
“You know that software project I told you about.”
“Right.”
“Well, I was wondering if you could give me some help.”
She turned to him. “I don’t really know anything about software,” she began, “but—”
“No.” He sort of smiled. “I was wondering if you could look after Bailey for a few days. So I could work.”
“Oh.” Now she felt embarrassed. She was unused to the feeling. “Right. Well.” There was no way she was going to come right out and say no to him. “I don’t actually know anything about taking care of kids either. I’m worried I would mess it up.”
“Bee, it’s not like there’s any science to it. Figure she’s like you but wears a diaper and needs to sleep and eat a bit more often.”
Bridget nodded hesitantly, wondering if this statement was strictly informative or if there was an insult in it.
“But if you don’t want to, I understand.”
“No, I will. I’ll do it. I’ll try.” She heard herself agreeing before she’d quite talked herself into it.
“Thanks. It would make a big difference to me,” he said. He looked like he meant it.
“I’m happy to,” she said. It was rare that she spoke dishonestly. She wondered if she looked as diminished as Brian did.
Carmen was standing in the Vera Wang boutique attempting to buy the most expensive wedding dress in New York City when she heard the special ring tone of her agent, Lynn. “Hi, Lynn.”
“Sweetie! I’ve got an unbelievable piece of news. Grantley Arden is casting for his Katrina opus and he wants to meet with you. They’ve already set up the production office in New Orleans. He wants you to go down there and talk to him and a couple of the producers. They’ve already got Matt Damon committed.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No.”
“When?”
“They want to meet next month on the twenty-eighth. That gives you some time. But I think you should go a few days early and get a feel for the place. Have you been?”
“No.”
“Well, you need to go. Listen to the accents, walk around, eat some food, absorb everything you can. It’s a film about the city. You really need to take it in. That’s what Grant kept telling me. I’ll email you the script as soon as I get it.”
“I’m working until March twenty-fourth.”
“So leave as soon as you finish. And plan to stay an extra week in case they want to get you on film or have you meet the studio people. I don’t want you coming home without an offer.”
When Carmen hung up, her heart was pounding. The saleslady wheeled in a rack of dresses, but Carmen couldn’t look at them. How could she think about wedding dresses at a time like this?
Carmen thanked the saleslady and apologized and walked out to the street. She walked up and down Madison Avenue calling every member of her team, and then she called Jones.
“I’m blown away,” he said. “Do you know anything about the part?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Carmen, this is big. This could be the biggest thing you’ve ever done by far.” She had to hold the phone away from her ear because he was shouting.
“I know.” After Jones she called her mom.
“Is it like, an audition?” her mom asked.
“They want to meet me,” Carmen said impatiently. “You aren’t really expected to audition at my level,” she heard herself adding somewhat haughtily. She realized she sounded like Jones when she said it.
“Oh. Right.” Her mother was on her heels, which was a place Carmen was constantly trying to put her but never wanted her to be once she was there.
Carmen relented. “But it’s basically like an audition.”
“Are they meeting with other people for the part?” her mom asked, which Carmen interpreted to mean “You haven’t really got anything worth bragging about yet, have you?”
When she hung up with her mother she considered calling her father but decided not to. Unlike her mother, her dad would assume she had the part won and the contracts signed. He would probably go around telling people she’d landed the starring role. So it went, when you were an idea.
Carmen felt hollow and unsatisfied as she walked downtown. She felt like she’d just left a three-star restaurant with no food in her stomach. Her fingers ached to make a few more calls. But she couldn’t call Bee. She couldn’t call Lena, and God knew she couldn’t call Tibby. How fast her sweet wine turned to vinegar.
It was that old feeling: if she hadn’t told the Septembers yet, it hadn’t really happened. She thought of her alleged wedding, her robotic efforts to push it forward. Her life as it unspooled without her friends was no life at all.
Lena wore brown and put the red dress in her carry-on bag. She worked up her courage through seven hours in the air, such that after the plane landed at Heathrow she marched directly to the women’s restroom. She wriggled out of her sweater, T-shirt, and pants. The stall w
as tiny, of course, and she kept whacking her elbow into the metal wall.
“Hello?” came a voice from the next stall over.
“Nothing. Sorry,” Lena said, half undressed and fully discombobulated.
The red dress was hitched up on one side and twisted when she came out of the stall. In the mirror she saw that her hair was sticking up in back. There were dark circles under her eyes. The black tights did not look good at all. She thought despondently of the nickname she’d had in high school, Aphrodite. What the hell happened to you? she wondered.
She went back into the stall and banged around until she’d gotten the tights off and the ballet flats back on. She looked down at her bare legs. They were pale, but at least she’d shaved them the day before. How cold was London in February? She looked down again. Her skin was already mottled and goose pimply. I am terrible at this, she thought.
She brushed her hair. She put on mascara and lipstick. She tried to put on eye shadow, but it made her look like she’d been in a fist-fight. She washed it off and tried again. By the third time, she gave up on the eye shadow. She put on gold hoop earrings.
After several dozen people had come and gone, babies had cried and been changed, and a toilet had overflowed, Lena gazed unhappily at the final product. She reached into her bag and took out the envelope with the precious address.
I should call first, she thought. But she didn’t have the number, and according to a live, living London operator it was indeed unlisted. She felt idiotically grateful talking to a real voice on the other end of the London telephone.
It was weird to just show up at his address. But it was weird to do this in the first place. It was weird for Tibby to have written Kostos a letter. It was weird for Lena to travel thousands of miles to deliver it in person when she didn’t even know what was in it. But this was her project, and she was doing it, God help her, in a red dress.
She pictured Tibby’s face as it looked in the graduation picture that haunted her every day from her computer screen. I wish I could have loved you better than this, Lena thought, but this is what I’ve got.
Don’t wear fear
or nobody will know you’re there
You’re there.
—Cat Stevens
London was cold in February. That wasn’t surprising. Lena sat in the back of the train with her threadbare wool coat wrapped around her. She practically ran, regretting the decision to ditch the tights, from the train station to the Underground.
She had mapped this route carefully several days before and checked it over many times since. It involved the airport train to the Underground, and a few bursts of walking in between.
Kostos lived in a place called Eaton Square, off the King’s Road. When he’d lived in London long before, after the summer they’d met, he’d lived in a place called Brixton, over a pub and diagonally across from a place called the Speedy Noodle. She remembered so distinctly the feeling in her chest when she saw a letter come through the mail slot with the address written on it in Kostos’s neat-for-a-boy handwriting. She remembered so distinctly the feeling of writing that address out carefully on one envelope after another.
Brixton Hill, Lambeth. That was the start of a poem for her. It captured a feeling. Eaton Square, less so. It was newer to her, and time and memory helped bestow poetry. It was a little colder-sounding, she thought, less evocative. It had its power, though. How many times had she stared at the address, trying to picture it, trying to picture the Kostos who lived there and the moods and ranges of the place?
She spent a few moments orienting herself after she emerged from the Tube stop called Sloane Square. She walked the wrong way a couple of times before she found a street name that seemed right.
She found the street and a row of houses with relevant numbers that appeared to be going in the right direction.
Fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. She stopped and checked the map she had printed out. His house was apparently five numbers farther down a row of stunningly posh and handsome town houses. Did that mean he lived in one of these?
She slowed her pace. Eaton Square was seeming colder by the minute. Her legs were not simply cold, but numb. She checked her map and then the address as he’d written it on the envelope again.
She tentatively walked past another house and another, wondering if these were the kinds of buildings that were divided into flats. They were awfully big to belong to one owner, weren’t they? If they were flats, she hoped Kostos’s name would be indicated on the buzzer or mailbox or something.
She carried on very slowly, as though a powerful wind were pressing against her, until she reached number twenty-eight. She looked up at it. It was a sort of glowing white limestone with a portico, and ornamental trees on either side of a grand and glossy black door.
She scanned the area around the door for a panel of buzzers, but there was just one, an elegant button set in a polished brass plate. There weren’t numerous mailboxes, there was one, also brass. Was this his front door; were these his perfect little trees, his upstairs windows? Could she really walk those three steps up to his door and push that button?
Her feeling of intimidation had melted away in his presence in Oia, but now it was back in force. He was a rich and successful man. He lived in a mansion in the middle of London. He had lunch with the treasury minister. What was Tibby thinking, sending him this letter? What was Lena thinking, delivering it?
In fact, what in the world was she doing here? There was no sense in which she belonged. She felt like she’d been Photoshopped into the scene. The whole enterprise struck her as childish, akin to passing notes in seventh grade.
She looked up at the house again. It was six forty-five London time. There were lights on. He was probably home.
She glanced again at the mailbox. Could she just leave it there? How strictly did Tibby intend the “in person”?
She walked up the first stair. She put her hand in her bag and took out the letter. She took another step. She looked at the mailbox. She took another step and carefully eased it open. Without breathing she put the letter inside and turned around. She walked down the three steps and stopped.
No, she couldn’t do this. What if she’d made a mistake? What if he didn’t live here anymore? And more importantly, she’d come all the way here to deliver a goddamned letter in person and she was going to deliver a letter in person.
Tibby was trying to get her not to be a chicken, obviously, and Lena wasn’t going to go and subvert Tibby after all this. What did she have to lose anymore?
Lena turned around and walked back up the steps. She plucked the envelope out of the mailbox and pushed the doorbell before she could think another thought.
Her heart was throbbing. She pictured Kostos only three months before, lying on the couch across from her, his arms around her ankles.
She could do this. It didn’t matter that his house was gigantic and he had multibillion-dollar deals to make. He cared about her. He’d loved her once—so much that he’d bought her a ring and thought he wanted to marry her. Granted, he’d thrown the ring into the Caldera and sworn against her name, but she had been important once.
She held on to the image of his sleepy face on her grandparents’ couch as she waited for the door to open.
The door opened, but it wasn’t his face that appeared. It was the face of a dark-haired woman in a black cocktail dress and heels. It was a beautiful face wearing dark pink lipstick, made up for a night out. Maybe this wasn’t where Kostos lived anymore.
Lena had to reach down to find her voice. “Is this the residence of Kostos Dounas?” she asked. She was shivering inside her coat.
“Yes, it is. Can I help you?”
The woman’s face appeared suspicious to Lena, and not welcoming. Lena looked down at the envelope in her hand. “I have something for him,” she said faintly.
The woman put out her hand. “I can take it.”
Lena looked at the white manicured hand with the glinting sapphire ring on the th
ird finger. She looked again at the letter, addressed in Tibby’s handwriting. This was far worse than the mailbox. She knew this was not what Tibby had intended.
“Is he here, by any chance?” Lena asked timidly.
The woman sized her up, and Lena felt unbelievably cold and self-conscious. “Are you a friend of his?” she asked.
“Yes. An old friend,” Lena answered courageously.
The woman seemed to be considering. She took in Lena’s old coat and her bare legs. She took a step back and turned toward the stairs. “Darling, you have a caller,” she shouted merrily, as though Lena were no more than a puzzling, weirdly dressed joke to her.
Lena stood frozen. Why hadn’t she thought of this? Of course he was “darling.” Of course. He wasn’t a student, living with four roommates in a flat across from the Speedy Noodle, writing longing letters to Lena. He was a powerful man living in a big glittering house in a fancy neighborhood, the darling of a woman with a sapphire ring and a mean stare.
Lena crossed her arms, clutching herself protectively, and finally permitted herself an unsettling and obvious question: Was this woman his wife?
Kostos hadn’t said he was married when they were in Santorini together, but what was the need? He was being nice to her, pitying her out of devotion to her dead grandparents, and besides, she hadn’t asked him one single question about his life. It wasn’t like he’d been hiding anything. The idea that she was any longer a potential match probably hadn’t occurred to him.
Lena’s eyes sought the stairs behind the woman, because she saw some movement there. She watched in a strangely serene state of self-punishment as Kostos walked down the grand staircase. He was also dressed for an evening out, but his shirt was not yet buttoned to the top and his tie was not yet tied. His hair was still wet, presumably from a shower.
She caught the whole picture, the stunning yet mean woman standing inside the door, the glorious Kostos descending the stairs, the glowing interior of this gorgeous house of theirs, the mass of pink lilies on the hall table. Click. She got it all in a single frame, and the picture of it all together was devastating.