CHAPTER 6

SWIMMING WITH APHRODITE

“WHY WOULD ANYONE want to go to Cyprus?” the man asked. He was a friend of a friend, and he happened to be a psychiatrist.

“Because it’s the most beautiful place in the world,” I answered, unhesitatingly. Cyprus was the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love and sex and desire—how could it not be beautiful? And why would anyone not want to see that? I was fresh back from Greece, at a pool party in Princeton. The psychiatrist traveled only in August and preferred guided tours. He had been hot-air ballooning in the Sahara. If I had been trying to impress him, I would have washed my feet. I had gotten caught in a downpour the day before, and the dye from my shoes had turned my feet purple. But I wasn’t, so I jumped into the pool.

Of course, Cyprus was a war zone: the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots had been fighting over it since 1963, in what was only the latest skirmish in a long, long history of conflict. In a way, that made it more attractive to me—magnetic, even. Cyprus was the very nexus of war and beauty, conflict and desire. In the words of the Michelin Guide, it was worth a detour—in my case, a seven-hundred-mile Mediterranean detour on the way from Athens to Istanbul.

My relationship with beauty (and love and sex and desire) had always been fraught. I was unable to look in the mirror without finding fault. I had a moon face and a red nose and a double chin and a space between my two front teeth. In makeup I felt like a clown. Cosmetics only emphasize one’s natural features, and unless these have some allure to begin with, what is the point? I’d seen the plainest-looking women at the office primping in the ladies’-room mirror, and wondered, Why are they wasting their time?

Beauty requires grooming and bathing. Beauty parlors and dry cleaners are named for Aphrodite (and for her Roman counterpart, Venus). Her name, by folk etymology (which is my favorite kind), means “foam-born”—Hesiod describes how she sprang up from the sea when the detached genitals of Uranus, the original sky god, sickled off by Kronos, hit the water sizzling. But when the goddess of love has risen from her bath, who cleans the tub?

When I poured libations to the gods and tried to cover the entire pantheon, to get them all on my side—Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Hermes . . .—often I would forget Aphrodite. Sometimes I dared to invoke her when I embarked on a thorough housecleaning. What other goddess might look with favor on the lifelong project of cleanliness? Was Aphrodite the patroness of charwomen? If I had a vexed relationship with beauty and love and sex, it was my own fault for entertaining thoughts like this.

Cleaning is serious business in Greece, thanks to all those crumbling ruins. Housewives are forever sweeping the floor. The Greek word for broom is skoupa, and on islands in the Aegean the σκούπα has its own aisle in the soupermarket. I had a Greek landlady in Astoria (having moved on from the Italian-American brothers) who saw rain as an occasion to take her broom outside and scrub the sidewalk. Through her and the sound of her infernal sweeping I made the association between brooms and witches. In Homer, Calypso, the nymph who keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years, bathes her captive, and one can imagine her blissfully sweeping out her cave, twirling the broom to make patterns on the earthen floor, as a prelude to seduction and lovemaking.

Many of the labors of Herakles involved cleaning, and his trick was to make it look easy, by, for instance, diverting a stream to muck out the Augean stables. In the aisle of cleaning products, this demigod is represented by a superior-strength brand of clothesline. But it is a mortal who gained worldwide fame as an all-purpose warrior against dirt: Ajax. He does dishes, he does laundry, he removes the bathtub ring—he even does windows. The great hero of the Trojan War resides in a spritzer bottle under the kitchen sink or a can of cleanser behind the toilet. Small wonder that Ajax committed suicide.

The traditional birthplace of Aphrodite is the island of Cythera, off the coast of the Peloponnese. It’s not a very big island, and she didn’t stick around. Aphrodite needed a bigger stage. She chose Cyprus, or Cyprus chose her. It is a strikingly beautiful island, girdled in blue, with voluptuous rocks and veins of copper. I went there intent on seeing as much as I could in a short time. There were Roman mosaics in Paphos, a city sacred to Aphrodite. There was a cedar tree endemic only to the valley of the Troodos Mountains, and a species of wild sheep called the mouflon. There was a monastery, Stavrovouni, that was overrun with cats (and is said to have a fragment of the True Cross brought from Jerusalem by Saint Helena, Constantine’s mother). I hoped to make it to the capital, Nicosia, where the war was most visible; a peacekeeping contingent from the United Nations guarded a buffer zone that cut through the capital, from city gate to city gate, like a jagged blue-and-white scar.

The true border of an island is its coastline, and that’s what most interested me in Cyprus: the surrounding sea. I had been to only a handful of beaches—Edgewater, on Lake Erie, of course, the Jersey Shore, Long Island, the Gulf of Mexico at Veracruz. Cyprus promised to have vast stretches of dazzling beauty, with sun twinkling on the water, and foam frilling toward the shore in choreographed lines of scalloped waves. I set my sights on a “beauty spot” that my guidebook said was “by legend the bathing place of the Goddess of Love.” It was near a beach, and word was that if you swam out to the rocks at Aphrodite’s beach you would be transformed into a beauty forever. I wanted to baptize myself in the waters of Aphrodite.

THE SOL PHRYNE had come from Venice and was bound for Haifa. I boarded in Rhodes with a deck-class ticket, after getting off a ferry from Crete. A backpacking elite—beautiful people with deep tans and tiny orange bathing suits—had staked out the sundeck: they had pitched tents and strung up clotheslines and were tossing a Frisbee for their dogs. It was as if the Sol Phryne were their personal chartered vessel. My own style of travel combined the spirit of backpacking with the burden of conventional luggage: I traveled light, but I had no sleeping bag or bottled water. Instead I had a striped cotton blanket I’d bought in Crete and a flask of whiskey.

I found a spot on a slatted bench outside the lounge, under an exhaust pipe. I needed to sleep, having stayed up all night on the ferry from Crete to Rhodes, flirting with sailors. The captain had invited me onto the bridge, with its vast array of gauges and gizmos and its unrivaled view of our path through the sea. The chief petty officer, a curly-haired young guy, tried to impress me with his worldliness. “I have been 46 days in Flussing,” he said, referring to Flushing, Queens. Once again, I had to explain that I was traveling alone, but I put the accent on the wrong syllable. “Don’t say that,” the young officer told me. I had said something like “I am a traveling cunt.”

He showed me his cabin and was playing with the buttons on my sweater when he was summoned to the bridge by the public address system. Returning to my seat, I fell in with an able-bodied seaman who took me down to the car deck, where we sat in a passenger’s Saab and listened to Greek music on the radio. He also showed me his cabin, which was way, way below, and had pinups on the walls and dirty magazines, and there ended—at least, for me—a dry spell. He was in charge of the anchor, so at every port he had to go up on deck and lower away. In the morning I wanted to be on deck again, and that’s when I discovered he had locked me in for safekeeping. I tried not to panic—surely he would be back soon. Finally, I managed to jiggle the hook out of the eye from inside and escape, climbing the ladderlike stairs and popping out of the hatch, to the amazement of the captain at his post on the bridge.

On the Sol Phryne, wrapped in my Cretan blanket, I dozed off on the slatted bench, and was woken by some young men who were standing on the bench at my feet, reaching through a porthole above me. They pulled out a square, flat package, like a brown paper pillow, and slapped it onto the deck. “Is that yours?” I asked, in Greek. (I wasn’t sure whether one addressed a suspected burglar in the formal or the familiar.) “You speak Greek?” one of the boys asked. “A little,” I said, and then demonstrated exactly how little by not understanding what he said next. He translated: “This crazy boy has a snake.” He toed the package, and it moved. I reverted to English—primitive English—bellowing “No snake!” as I gathered my belongings and moved.

I found a spot on a lower deck outside a nightclub, where an Israeli youth group was having a party. A band was playing American hits from the early sixties, my pajama-party years: “Let’s Lock the Door (And Throw Away the Key).” When the band finally quit, the kids took over, singing and beating tambourines. There was an explosion—my first thought was that someone had shot the snake. But a man who was strolling past had investigated, and he reassured me. “A bomb,” he said. Bombs were apparently not unusual on ships in these waters, but on this occasion the Sol Phryne did not sink.

At dawn, Cyprus was in sight.

IN THE PORT OF LIMASSOL, on the Greek Cypriot coast, I rented the only car they had left (or so I was told)—a yellow Fiat 500 Mini—and headed for Paphos, forty miles west. I studied the map. Cyprus, solid black, was inset against the white of the Mediterranean, with Europe, Asia, and Africa sketched in. She looked like a witch flying east, the curve of her tall pointy hat following the Turkish coastline, aimed at an inlet that would gladly receive her. Turkey could inhale Cyprus. Although it looked as if the island might have broken off of Turkey, Cyprus was created separately, heaved up from the depths of the sea. The rocks there are unique in the world. Because of its strategic position in the Mediterranean, Cyprus has been occupied by nearly every successive power in the region: the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Persians, the Greeks again (Alexander), the Romans, Constantine (the Byzantine Empire), the Crusaders, the French Lusignans, the Venetians, the Ottomans, and the British, until finally, cataclysms later, it became an autonomous state, which then became a battleground of Cypriots, falling into their own nationalist Greek and Turkish camps.

They drive on the left in Cyprus, a legacy of the British. The signs were in Greek and English, sometimes in Turkish, and, near the port, in German, French, and Hebrew. Distances were measured in miles, not kilometers. Gasoline was sold in liters, not gallons. I came of age crossing Pennsylvania on I-80 at seventy miles an hour, so I calculated that I could make it from Limassol to Paphos in less than an hour. I stopped at Ancient Kourion, which had a sanctuary to Apollo and a theater built on a slope with a jaw-dropping view. The Greeks had a genius for knowing where to build. A teenage boy was in charge of the sanctuary. A radio hanging outside the ticket booth was blasting pop music. I would have preferred meditative silence, but Apollo was the god of music; this young man was his proxy, and I was on his turf. I had the sensation, walking on what was left of the temple walls— low stone dividers between long-gone rooms—that, instead of the ruins’ evoking history, I was a ghost haunting the past.

When I got back on the road, the sun was starting to set, and I worried about finding my way to Paphos in the dark. I wasn’t sure the headlights were working, so I pulled off the road to check. The road hugged the sea, and what I saw when I turned to get out of the car made me forget about checking the headlights. White rocks studded the water, extending the land into the sea, which was a deep, pure blue, and the road behind me curved along the shore, a black ribbon threaded between low green hills—even the freshly painted white stripe down its middle looked like an adornment. All was still and silent. The place spangled, every element expressing its essence in shape and color: natural beauty meticulously groomed. The place was called Petra tou Romiou, and it was the celebrated birthplace of Cyprian Aphrodite.

The headlights were indeed not working, but I was so enchanted that I could not be too dismayed. I followed the white line as well as I could in the dimming light, and when night dropped its cloak of rich black velvet (hah!) and I found myself inching along a deserted industrial strip, I turned onto a side street and stopped in front of the first house with lights on. The family who lived there came out, and instead of trying to give me directions they all got in their car and escorted me to my hotel, the Dionysus. It had taken me five hours (with the stops to worship Apollo and Aphrodite) to drive forty miles.

After two nights on boats, I luxuriated in the private bath at the Hotel Dionysus. Then I went out for something to eat. Bouzouki music was coming from a restaurant. The bouzouki, or its predecessor the lyre, was said to have been fashioned by Hermes from a tortoiseshell and strung with sheep guts. It has a distinctive twanging sound, more exotic than a guitar. The owner of the restaurant was standing outside, as restaurant barkers do, and invited me in. He was very attentive, offering me an aperitif of Cypriot brandy and serving me a perfect meal: a salad of chopped cabbage and green tomatoes, swordfish souvlaki, French fries, and white wine. Any pub will give you a wedge of lemon with your fish and chips, but this plate came with an entire sliced lemon, which the owner showed me how to squeeze over everything, potatoes and all. Cyprus is rich in lemons.

Also in the restaurant were a few couples from England and Wales, the fisherman who supplied the restaurant (his son was playing the bouzouki), and two swarthy guys who had been out on the fishing boat, one of whom started to flirt with me but was suppressed by the owner.

“How long have you been in Paphos?” the Englishman asked.

“About an hour,” I said.

“How long are you staying?”

“I’m leaving in the morning.” He and his wife were there for two weeks. I have always been the kind of traveler who has to see everything within a five-hundred-mile radius. I had three days to see as much of Cyprus as possible before getting back to Limassol and catching a boat to Rhodes in time to connect with a smaller boat that left once a week, on Mondays, for ports in the Dodecanese. Maybe someday I would mature into the other kind of traveler, who stays in one place and soaks it up. Not today.

One of the fishermen joined me at my table, over the protests of the owner, and gave me some practice in Greek. Speaking very slowly, as if to a four-year-old, he told me his name was Andreas. I knew the word for “lights”—phóta, from phos (φως), as in phosphorus, the light-bearing element—and turned out to be quite fluent on the subject of broken headlights. He called over his friend, Grigori, who happened to be a mechanic. They offered to have a look at the car, and if they couldn’t fix τα φώτα that night, I could bring the car to Grigori’s garage in the morning. I told them I planned to drive to Nicosia, and they corrected me—Greek Cypriots refer to the capital as Lefkosia—and tried to discourage me. Why would anyone want to go to Lefkosia? It was a mess. The Turks, in occupying the north of the island from Morphou to Famagusta, had taken the best lemons. Grigori was from Famagusta, and if he wanted to visit his family he had to go first to Constantinople and then to Ankara to get permission. As a foreigner, I could visit the Turkish sector if I wanted to—Salamis was very beautiful, they said—but I had to be sure and get back before dark. “Why?” I asked. I wanted to get my headlights fixed, in case of emergency, but I did not plan on doing any night driving. “No one saves the bodies,” Andreas said.

After dinner, Andreas and Grigori walked me to my car, parked outside the Hotel Dionysus. They determined that the light switch was broken and gave me directions to the garage. I said good night and went into the hotel lobby, which was modern with fluorescent lights glaring off a tiled floor. A man seated in a chair rose up and approached me. It was the restaurant owner. He seemed to think I had agreed to meet him. He was a thin man with dark hair and glittery eyes. Andreas and Grigori had warned me about him. His restaurant was struggling, they said, and his wife had all the money. But what did he want with me? There was no one else in the lobby, no clerk at the reception desk. He took me by the elbow. “One kiss,” he said, leaning in. I had heard this before. “One kiss” was what Mimi had said in Crete as he steered me into the cave of the Minotaur. “One kiss” was what the able-bodied seaman had said on the boat from Crete to Rhodes. I knew what “one kiss” meant. It was meant to unlock the whole apparatus. I backed away from him and ran down the hall. As I opened the door to my room, he stood there, arms at his sides, and called imploringly, as if we were breaking up after a torrid affair, “Like this? Like this?”

MEN . . . WHY DID I WANT ONE? Did I want one? For the past year, I’d been on a self-improvement kick, hoping to eliminate anything that might prevent me from attracting a man. I was determined to beautify myself from the inside out. I’d made a list of doctors to consult: an otorhinolaryngologist for my ears (ota), nose (rhino), and throat (larynx); a throat doctor who specialized in singers to address my chronic hoarseness; an optometrist, from whom all I wanted was an updated prescription so that I could get new sunglasses for my trip to Greece and from whom instead I got a glaucoma scare and a diagnosis of “convergence deficiency,” which basically meant that, as a proofreader, I was in the wrong line of work. The dentist and the gynecologist competed for last and most-dreaded doctor on the list, and the gynecologist won.

The OB-GYN was Greek, which pleased me, though I didn’t like his looks. He was short with a square head and bristly black hair. His wife worked with him, while their son, who had his father’s bear-bristle hair, did his homework in the waiting room. This was a family weirdly at home in the world of female genitalia.

The word “gynecologist” is from the ancient Greek γυνή, pronounced (in the vocative) “goon-eye.” It is what Jerry Lewis would yell in Greek instead of “Hey, lady!” The word has settled into modern Greek as γυναίκα (“yee-neck-ah”), a slipperier, more lip-smacking word. Traveling in Greece with this etymological burden, I felt as if Greek men saw nothing of my face or eyes or hair but, like the gynecologist, zoomed in on the goon-eye.

“You will feel a slight pinch,” the gynecologist said as he examined me. I sank my teeth into the meaty part of my hand below the thumb. He asked about my “sexual relations” and I told him I had none: I was celibate. (I had a crush on someone who was not interested in me and I was biding my time till I was worthy.) A friend had confided that when she told her gynecologist she was celibate he insisted that she was a lesbian. “He started to ask about birth control,” she said, incredulously, “and then stopped himself, saying, ‘But you won’t need birth control, as you’re lesbian.’ ” Later, in his office, the Greek gynecologist said, “I find you in good health.” Then, snapping a rubber band around a brown medicine bottle that contained my cervical cells, he asked inquisitively, “You have no relations?” “Yes,” I answered brightly. “I have a brother.”

I also had a psychotherapist, to whom I reported this howler. The first diagnosis I ever received from a shrink (you had to have a diagnosis to collect on the insurance) was dysthymia. Unable to find it in the dictionary, I teased it apart by its roots: dys, the opposite of eu, meant something bad, as in “dystopia,” a bad place. For thymia, I remembered that in the Iliad, when a warrior was defeated in battle, he felt it in his thymós. The θυμός was the seat of the passions, which the Greeks located somewhere in the chest. (In English, the gland called the thymus is in the throat.) It means spirit, soul, heart, anger. A diagnosis of dysthymia meant I was downhearted. Was there a cure for that?

The shrink followed my medical adventures with some skepticism. She thought that my ears-nose-throat-voice-eyes-teeth problems were all “displacement,” and that what really wor ried me was my genitalia. I had trouble finding the female body beautiful. We had a running battle in which I maintained that my shame about my body was all my mother’s fault. Motormouth Mom was one of seven children, six girls and one boy. “He wanted a boy in the worst way, and he kept on getting girls,” she would say of her father. “Finally, on the sixth try, he got a boy, and he says to my mother, he says he says he says, ‘This one’s mine—you take care of the rest.’ ”

What I absorbed from this, and from the way my mother seemed to favor my brothers, was that a girl was worthless except for helping around the house. We were slaves to Ajax and the skoupa and the heraklean clothesline. I was obviously jealous, but I insisted to the shrink that I did not suffer from penis envy. The only thing I envied was the male’s ability to pee standing up. Then came a pivotal session. We were talking about hospitals, because my father, in Cleveland, was having surgery for an aortic aneurism. The shrink believed that I was afraid of hospitals because I associated them with being castrated. “But nothing ever happened to my ba—” I was halfway through that last word—balls—when I realized I had misspoken.

“Touché!” the shrink’s look said. I had refused to admit to penis envy, that Freudian cliché, but now it seemed I had something worse, a strain of penis envy of cosmic proportions. The shrink had brought me around to seeing that I had somehow cultivated a fantasy that I’d been born male and castrated at birth, a fantasy intended to shore up my worth in my own eyes. I thought all females were mutilated, made wrong, damaged, monstrous.

In mythology, it would be nothing to have someone take a sickle to your balls and scatter your seed all over creation, as Kronos did to Uranus, giving rise to foam-born Aphrodite. But in real life these cases are rare, especially among females. Preposterous as it sounds, the shrink’s interpretation explained a lot. Once, I heard my father, coming in out of the cold on a winter night, say to my mother, “I almost froze my balls off.” I tried using that expression—I was pretty sure I had balls; they were just round things, right?—and my mother burst out laughing. Another time, I was zipping my pants and my mother mocked me, saying, “You did that just like a boy.” She demonstrated by grabbing a wad of fabric at the front of her housedress and zipping up an imaginary fly. Mom was busting my balls.

I went from seeing a psychotherapist once a week to undergoing a full-blown Freudian analysis, fifty minutes a day, five days a week, for years, using up two lifetimes’ worth of mental-health benefits from my generous employer. I used to arrive at work with bits of Kleenex stuck to my eyelashes. Gradually, I saw that it wasn’t really my mother’s fault—she and I had just missed. Sadness was deeper than anger, and under sadness was love. Finally, one spring day, having gone swimming after a Greek class, I was sitting outside on the Columbia campus, balancing my checkbook and eating a hard-boiled egg, and I looked at the name printed on my checks: it was a combina tion of my grandmother’s first name, Mary, and my father’s last name, Norris. It was a feminine name, and it was my name (and my money in the bank), and suddenly it came to me that there was nothing wrong with me. I was not a mutilated male but an intact female, like half the human race.

I COULD NOT LEAVE PAPHOS without seeing the Roman mosaics. First thing in the morning, I checked out of the Hotel Dionysus and found my way to the “archaeological park”—a sort of theme park for students of ancient art history. The Romans who lived here two millennia ago paved their floors with stone mosaics, hundreds of small squares of colored stone—tesserae—arranged in scenes from mythology, embellished with vignettes from the natural world. The dig was ongoing, and the archaeologists were still trying to figure out the best way to display what they had uncovered, without resorting to Plexiglas. Visitors stood on a sort of catwalk that formed a grid some three feet above the floors of the homes of the rich and famous in a neighborhood dating to the second century AD, and peered down into their living rooms. The mosaics were dusty but well preserved: stone, if not quite eternal, is a lot more lasting than anything else on the planet. A splash of water would bring out the colors: soft burgundy, warm yellow, creamy white, rich gray, smooth black.

The floors were like tapestries made of stone. There was an astonishing variety of scenes: Theseus, the legendary king of Athens, who slew the Minotaur; Orpheus, the doomed musician, plucking his lyre; Dionysus, the god of booze, sprawled on the back of a leopard, his name spelled out in stones. The Greek letter sigma (Σ) looked like a “C” in ΔIONYCOC. I thought it was Latin, but it’s something called a lunate (moonlike) sigma. All the corners were decorated with flowers and animals: oxen, lions, fish, birds, the peacock associated with Hera. The images were framed with different patterns: waves or checks or the Greek key motif.

I had never thought about mosaic art before, but here was something practical (a floor), enduring (stone), beautiful, and orderly (the check pattern may have come from tesserated stone), and it aroused in me what I suppose is a naive response to art: desire. I wanted it. As Samuel Johnson said of Greek and lace, I wanted as much of it as I could get.

I left the mosaics all too soon and reported to the garage where my new friends Andreas and Grigori were waiting to fix my headlights so I could press on in search of Aphrodite and her baths. First we had Cokes; then we had a shot of Finnish vodka; then we had another shot of Finnish vodka (“for the other leg,” Andreas said). I protested that I shouldn’t drink and drive, but I needn’t have worried: I would not be back in the driver’s seat for hours. Grigori ordered a new switch for the car. Then he showed me a Citroën that he had totaled and was using for parts. He also had a Jeep, an American model from the thirties, in mint condition. He found a broken red triangle in his toolbox and repaired it. Meanwhile, Andreas pressed me to stay in Paphos: we could all go for a ride in the Jeep, and they would take me fishing. The new switch came, but it had to be converted (whatever that meant). Grigori disappeared, and Andreas, with his thick black hair and lush mustache, plied me with Greek, ever so slowly. He said it was raining in the Troodos, the mountains I would have to drive through to get to Lefkosia. He had never heard of the Baths of Aphrodite. I asked what he was doing that afternoon. I was just curious—surely he didn’t spend every day chatting up tourists in his friend’s garage—but he thought I was inviting him to come along. So I had to rescind an invitation that I hadn’t consciously extended. I told him no one understood why I was traveling alone, and before I could embark on my high-flown feminist ideals he said “Oúte”—“Neither do I.”

I did not have the facility in Greek to express this to Andreas, but if I hadn’t been traveling alone we wouldn’t have been talking together like this. When you travel alone, you are forced to engage with people. Otherwise, you’re stuck with whatever random song was running in your head when you woke up—the theme from “Mister Ed,” say, or “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” When you’re with someone from home, it is too easy to stay comfortable, in your own idiom and daily regimen and character. You never have the feeling of alienation that is so formative to an experience in a strange place. Living in Greek was a relief from my interior monologue. Because my Greek was limited, I concentrated on saying only things that were direct and essential. There was no place for small talk. Back at home, I was terrible at small talk. In the Mediterranean, no one knew that. I could make myself up as I went along.

If there was a drawback to traveling solo, it was eating alone in restaurants. A single woman needs to be very self-possessed to command a good table in a restaurant. But the upside of that was that I could skip dinner if I wanted and subsist on yogurt and oranges. I could be selfish. I didn’t have to consider how my decisions would affect anyone else. I could indulge my penchant for detours. I could slow down if I wanted—and every proposition from a man, like this one from Andreas and Grigori, to skip Aphrodite and go fishing on the sea instead of bathing in it, tempted me. But there was no reason to let anyone keep me from satisfying my own desires. Traveling alone was the only way I knew to go exactly where I wanted to go without having someone try to talk me out of it. I was no one’s slave. Life was about my next bed and my next ship and my next city or my next beach. Next! A beautiful word. For heightened pleasure, I would sometimes think of life going on at the office without me, of someone (not me) reading the endless columns of small print. I gloated.

Once in a while the perfect word would come to me spontaneously, and it did so with Andreas in the garage. I told him I was ανυπόμονη (anypómoni). Impatient.

When the lights were fixed at last, and I had paid Grigori—the car-rental agency would reimburse me later—and we three had drunk one last coffee together, I gave them both a chaste kiss goodbye and headed north.

It wasn’t long before I realized I had left Paphos without getting gas. I now understood that I wasn’t traveling on Pennsylvania’s I-80, but I still expected to see tall Mobil signs in the distance. In a hilltop village I stopped and used my Greek to ask a man who was walking down the street, “Where can I buy gas?” (I’d practiced.) He got in the car and directed me to the kafeneíon—the coffeehouse—whose patrons came out to give me directions and ended up forming a phalanx around the car and escorting me, on foot, to the garage, while I drove slowly, as if on parade. Instead of in underground tanks with a pump, the gasoline was stored in cans that came in two sizes, small and large. I picked the large one, the proprietor poured it into my tank, I paid in lira, and the men of the village whose coffee I had interrupted all waved goodbye as I pulled back onto the road.

So far, the only signs of war I had seen were a refugee camp outside Limassol and a lot of poured-concrete buildings under construction to house people relocating from the Turkish sector. An old man with his arm in a sling was hitchhiking in the opposite direction, and I turned around to give him a ride. I felt so rich here in Cyprus, in my little yellow Fiat with its tank full of gas, that I could not pass up an old man who needed a lift. As soon as he got in the car, the old man whipped off the sling—there was nothing wrong with his arm. Back in his village, where I had been tempted to stop anyway, he wanted to buy me a Coke. The kafeneíon was next to a coppersmith’s shop. Cyprus has been famous since antiquity as a source of copper. The coppersmith, surrounded by his family, tried to sell me a round thing with a lid on it. “What is it?” I asked. I couldn’t understand the Greek answer, so they translated: “Souvenir.” We all laughed. I wanted a souvenir, but if I was going to lug something all over the Mediterranean, it had to serve some practical purpose. This idyll of international trade was interrupted by the arrival of a Cypriot American man in a big flashy car, who silenced the coppersmith’s family and demanded to know, in English, how much I paid to rent the Fiat and, when I told him, announced that I had been cheated. I turned back to the copperware and chose a simple ladle with a shallow bowl, the edges of its long handle folded in on themselves. It is in my kitchen, turning green.

BACK ON THE ROAD, eager to get to the Baths of Aphrodite, I followed the map to Polis (City) and turned west along the bay. The baths were supposed to be six miles away, but I had no odometer and could easily misjudge a distance of six miles. Signs started appearing along the road with ambiguous messages like “Access to Aphrodite’s Beach.” That might be the one I’d heard of, but the Greeks were full of tricks: a restaurant could call itself the Baths of Aphrodite, post a sign, and lure a tourist miles from the mythical Baths of Aphrodite to their commercial namesake. And I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. This beauty spot that my friend Andreas had never heard of—was it an inland pool fed by a waterfall and surrounded by ferns and moss? Or was it a cove along the coast? Which would Aphrodite prefer? She was married to Hephaestus, the lame smith god. Homer tells the story in the Odyssey of the time Hephaestus was informed that his wife was carrying on an affair with Ares and devised a net that trapped the lovers in bed together, humiliating them in front of the other gods. Afterward, as Robert Graves puts it in his compendium of Greek myths, Aphrodite had come to Paphos to “renew her virginity.” Now, there’s a gift. The goddess also had a magic girdle that made everyone fall in love with her. (“Girdle,” an ugly word that conjures for me Playtex, must refer to some more flattering garment—perhaps a belt or a sash.)

I could no longer resist the invitations to the Beach of Aphrodite and turned off at one of the signs, which was in fact for a restaurant. It was sparsely populated, and the owner was occupied with a couple at a table. I bought two bottles of beer and escaped down to the beach by myself. There was a group of rocks offshore, some distance away, opposite a cove, and I headed in their direction. The beach was not sandy but sharp with small stones. I passed one couple and didn’t meet anyone else till I was almost at the cove of the rocks. A couple there saw me coming and departed—my invisible Gorgon shield on the job. I picked a place among the stones and thistles on the hillside and dumped my blanket and towel, stripped to my bathing suit, and waded into the water.

The best-known image of the goddess of love is Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, which shows her naked, on a half shell, arms and hair curving over her naughty bits, wafted ashore by a personified breeze. “Laughter-loving” Aphrodite was the original surfer girl. There was no danger of my being confused with her. I paddled out toward the rocks, which were farther away than they looked. This was not the place of ferns described in the guidebook. In fact, it was not in the guidebook. It was through the locals that I had heard of this beach and of the legend that if you swim among the rocks you will be beautiful forever. I was excited and had to calm myself down to swim the distance. This was not a race, after all, but a sensual exercise. What was the rush? I was used to being in a hurry, but I discovered that if I didn’t panic I wouldn’t run out of breath. The water was warm, the current gentle. No one was watching me. I tried out all my strokes: the dog paddle and the breaststroke and the sidestroke—first on one side, then on the other—and two backstrokes, the one with the frog kick and arms scooping water from underneath and the one with the flutter kick and arms arcing alternately over the head. I ran through the strokes in a series so that I could enjoy the view in every direction. This stroke, which I invented, is called the panoramic. It should be an Olympic event, with the gold medal going to the slowest, most voluptuous swimmer.

I prayed that I was in the right place: O Aphrodite (breaststroke), if I have ever neglected to bathe myself and manicure and perfume myself and bedeck myself (sidestroke left), if I have scorned to wear the girdle (backstroke), I ask you to overlook my flaws and accept this sign of my devotion (sidestroke right), honoring air and water (breaststroke), sweetness and light (dolphin dive). The water was warm and embracing, and the swimming took no effort at all. I sipped at the surface, tasting the salt. I could look back at the beach, with its low mounds of green beyond the shore, and up at the sky, which was cloudy over the mountains (Andreas’s warning that it was raining in the Troodos) but clear at the zenith, then out over the glimmer-gray sea to the horizon and ahead to the white rocks. They were a peeled white, like skin treated at a spa, and, close up, they were very suggestive. In the biggest one, I made out the figure of a woman with rounded limbs and full breasts bending over the water. When I reached her, I realized that the best part of her was submerged, a mossy shelf pricked all over with tiny mollusks. I hauled myself onto her lap for a rest. I could not believe it: I had reached the Rocks of Aphrodite, and it was as if all Cyprus belonged to me.

As long as no one was looking, I was tempted to take off my bathing suit. I had skinny-dipped only once before, in a pond in New Jersey, and it felt so daring: my heart had pounded as I got in deep enough to lose foot contact and begin to tread water; I had expected any second to hear a bullhorn and have the police roar into the water in an amphibious squad car and fish me out and book me for indecent exposure. To be naked in the elements—it can only be bad if someone disapproves, as when Yahweh (I-am-who-am) spotted Adam and Eve after the apple in the Garden of Eden. But I was strongly tempted. If a swim around the Rocks of Aphrodite was supposed to make me beautiful, the water had to touch all of me. I wouldn’t want to make the mistake of silver-footed Thetis, who held her son Achilles by the heel as she dipped him in the immortal waters of Lethe, leaving that one part of him vulnerable.

Reader, I stripped there on the rock and lowered myself back into the sea. Every nerve fiber was alive as I hovered in the water; there was no layer of Lycra between the sea and me. I clamped the suit between my teeth by its straps and paddled around the rocks like a retriever. I felt as if I had shed a woolen overcoat. The current pushed me gently back to shore and I washed up onto mounds of bleached seaweed, as cushiony as confetti. I felt reborn.

I ate my lunch on the beach—a cheese sandwich left over from breakfast, dried figs, a few cookies, prolonged by the beer, from which I poured generous libations to Aphrodite. I wished now that there were a man with me—someone to enjoy this with—but I had no regrets. Like the island of Cyprus itself, I wanted self-determination. My two wishes might conflict—it seemed impossible to have both love and independence at the same time—but it was liberating to admit I wanted them. And if I had been traveling with someone else I would never have ended up in this place.

I walked back to the car, saturated with beauty. Many tiny burrs stuck to my Cretan blanket. There was a dirt road winding along the hillside, so I could avoid hobbling over those sharp stones. For once, I let myself do something the easy way. I don’t know if anyone would say I was changed, but everything I saw was transformed. It was as if I were drugged. Colors of rocks, flowers, pebbles, grass, thistles, sea, cypresses and cedars—all were heightened in beauty and somehow graspable, more palpably there. After being in the sea, I was returning to my own element, to land, and I saw it all anew. I was a long way from home, where I had stood in front of the bathroom mirror with the Ajax and muttered, “Hideouser and hideouser.” When I got back to the car, I did something I hadn’t done in years: turned the rearview mirror toward me and rearranged my hair.