13

Sweet Nymph and Old Hag

After the others had gone, Fanis helped carry the tea and coffee things into the kitchen. An hour later, while he was enjoying his last tea on the patio and admiring the vinca vines, which were turning a glowing orange-green in the pre-sunset light, Aliki appeared in the doorway with her purse in hand.

“Let’s go have some fun,” she said.

“How?” asked Fanis.

“We can take a phaeton to the promontory, have lamb ribs for dinner, and get drunk.”

“I’m in,” said Fanis.

They locked up the house and walked arm in arm to one of the streets where phaetons queued for customers. The first in line was a red carriage with turquoise seats. Fanis haggled for his usual senior discount, then said to Aliki, “When ascending stairs or entering carriages, in the interests of propriety, men should always precede women.”

With that he climbed inside and offered both hands to Aliki. But even with his help, she couldn’t manage to take more than one foot off the ground. The driver tossed aside his whip and offered to help by giving a boost from behind. After some strategic planning and a coordinated effort, Aliki finally landed on the carriage seat with a jolt that startled the horses. Fanis straightened his sweater vest. The driver wiped his brow, threw away the cigarette that had been hanging from his mouth, hopped onto his bench, and snapped the reins.

It wasn’t exactly the ride with Daphne that Fanis had planned while listening to the great Sinatra after his visit to the barbershop, but it was pleasant enough. At the open-air restaurant, Aliki chose a table beside the pine trees that had once sheltered impromptu dances, and in the course of the evening they ate more grilled lamb ribs and drank more house wine than their doctors would have approved. Just after the waiter had cleared the table, Aliki looked over the blackness of the sea, toward the glowing lights on the Thracian shore, and said, “I’m so glad you stayed. Sometimes I get a little lonely.”

“I’m glad you invited me,” said Fanis, smiling as convincingly as he could. The truth, however, was that he couldn’t stop obsessing about how things had gone with Daphne. He had certainly scored points with the dance number, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that she preferred his rival. She had faced Kosmas squarely whenever he spoke, carelessly—and somewhat rudely—turning her back to others in the process. That wasn’t a good sign.

Aliki took out her pink pill box, opened the Sunday Evening compartment, and swallowed its contents with a gulp of water. “You don’t take anything?” she said.

Fanis recalled the embers of Dr. Aydemir’s prescriptions hovering above the sink, like fireflies. Thank God he had burned those nasty threats of living decomposition. He should never have accepted them in the first place. The box of blue pills dispensed by Pharmacist Sözbir, on the other hand, had been a pleasure from the moment Fanis’s fingers had touched the precious cardboard. He had placed it like a trophy on its own private shelf in the medicine cabinet, confident that, with its help, he would be able to beget a son to carry on the Paleologos name.

“What would I need pills for?” said Fanis. He took a sip of the deep red wine and held it in his mouth for a moment, savoring the hints of dried fruit, fig, and oak. “Illness can’t get you if you refuse to acknowledge its existence. Just the other day I read something about a goiter sufferer who was doing just fine until they made him do a biopsy. He died three days after seeing the C-word on paper. They said his body had dealt with the cancer for years and years, but the mind couldn’t handle it for more than a few hours. So I say to Hell with doctors.”

“But you wouldn’t ignore symptoms, would you? If you had them?”

“Of course I would. Most of them are in our heads anyway.”

Aliki met his gaze. Their table’s only lighting was a string of holiday bulbs woven into the vine trellis above their heads, but Fanis saw well enough to recognize the worry in her fading blue eyes. “Is there something you’re not telling us?” she said.

“No,” said Fanis. It wasn’t a lie. It was a Greek Truth: something that had to be said to avoid problems.

“That’s a relief,” said Aliki. “Anyway, you’re still a fabulous dancer. Do you remember the rumba we danced here?”

Fanis fumbled: “Eh . . . sure.” He had danced so many cha-chas, waltzes, and rumbas with so many girls. It was, of course, probable that she had been one of them.

“You were the best dancer back then. All the girls wanted a turn with you. How could you remember us all?”

“Of course I remember,” said Fanis. He took a deep breath of the sea air. “You had on that dress . . .”

Aliki grinned. “The pink organza! You do remember. God, could you wiggle those hips. That’s why we loved dancing with you so much.”

“You were quite good yourself,” said Fanis. “Good timing, soft hands.”

“Afterwards,” said Aliki, “you went straight back to your fiancée. I was jealous of Kalypso because she was such a good dancer. I was even a bit jealous of Daphne this afternoon. I wish I could still move about like I used to.”

“Ka—” said Fanis, but he couldn’t complete the name. It choked him. Although they had been taking tea together for at least a decade, neither Aliki nor Rea had ever tried to dig up the past by mentioning Kalypso. He had always been grateful for their tact.

Fanis remained silent for a while. Aliki praised Kalypso’s beautiful dancing, her singing, and her intricate embroidery, which Aliki had never been able to match, try as she might. She reminded him that his fiancée had once broken a heel after failing to follow one of Fanis’s fancy moves. As a result, both Fanis and Kalypso had fallen onto the pine needles.

“I miss those days,” said Aliki. “I miss Kalypso, as well as my parents, my husband, and all who have gone. Do you miss your wife?”

It must have been the wine that made Fanis reply, without any of his usual artifice, “Not at all.”

“Do you miss Kalypso?”

“Terribly. It’s as if I’ve gone through life without my right arm.”

He finished his wine. He felt that she was near. He could hear her laughter, the laughter of all those nights on the island, the laughter of all those young men and women. He tasted the saltiness of Kalypso’s skin after she had lain on the beach, baking like a lobster. He felt her lips brushing the tip of his ear. He heard her singing one of Roza’s songs. It was a party tune, playful and upbeat, but the voice was lachrymose and dark. It whispered in his ear, “Let’s go home.”

Fanis echoed her: “Let’s go home.”

“All right,” said Aliki.

The response startled Fanis. He hadn’t realized that he was speaking out loud. Damned vascular dementia. Now he was talking to himself. He wondered if Aliki could feel Kalypso’s presence, but he didn’t dare ask. Instead, he thanked her for the evening and asked for the bill.

“But you’re my guest,” said Aliki.

“Impossible,” said Fanis.

“Always such a gentleman.”

“Someday we’ll all be dancing again,” he said, picking at a piece of honeydew melon to avoid meeting Aliki’s gaze. “You’ll see. When we finally cross over to the other side, there will be plenty of rumbas.”

On the way home Aliki placed her hand on his. Fanis thought it was a friendly gesture, or perhaps even one of pity, so he squeezed it and held on until the phaeton pulled up at her doorstep. She, too, missed Kalypso, he reminded himself, and his mourning had been delayed far too long.

Aliki showed Fanis to the guest room. The sheets were freshly ironed and smelled of rosewater. The inlaid tables were polished and covered with starched doilies. The curtains, he could tell, had recently been washed and rehung, and the hardwood floor was waxed to a shine. Either Aliki was one of the best house-widows on the island or she had been preparing for him for over a week. Perhaps her invitation to spend the night had not been as impromptu as it had seemed. After a few minutes, she brought him a pair of her dead husband’s pajamas, wished him a pleasant dawn, and withdrew. Fanis felt immense relief. They were just good friends after all.

The tinny pulse of the crickets soon carried him off to a June evening half a century before. He smelled the fatty smoke of roasting meat and saw the gnarly pines twisting into dark shapes before the broad wall of the sea as he sat joking with his friends, a few meters away from the little clearing that served as a dance floor. Despite the money his mother had spent on lessons, Fanis had been too shy to ask Kalypso to a rumba. He had watched her sing and laugh with her cousins on the other side of the restaurant, but he hadn’t been able to push himself past the devastation that he knew he would feel if she said no. It wasn’t until the end of the evening, when somebody announced the last dance, that Kalypso had skipped over to him and said, “Are we ever going to cha-cha?” She was fifteen then, and ten times braver than he.

Fanis felt her homemade blue gingham dress beneath his sweaty palms. He saw her open-mouth smile, felt the whip of her ponytail. As sleep overcame him, the memory morphed into a dream: they rose into the sky, still dancing, and flew to the other side of the island, where the tall trees grew. “Set to,” she whispered, pulling an axe and an adze from behind her full skirt. “Make your sailing bark.” Then she disappeared, leaving him alone and at a loss, for he had no idea how to use an axe and adze.

Fanis awoke. He tried to make sense of the shapes and shadows to which he had opened his eyes but, like a disoriented traveler in a foreign land, he recognized nothing. A light shone under the door. He groped his way to it and shuffled down the hallway to a bright bedroom perfumed by pink garden roses peeking out of an eighteenth-century Persian Qajar vase. Inside, Aliki was sitting on her sofa in an off-the-shoulder lace nightgown that seemed overly elegant for a regular night’s sleep.

“I had a dream,” said Fanis.

Aliki patted the brocade sofa cushion. “Come. Have a seat.”

Still confused, Fanis entered, sat down beside her, and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you.”

Fanis was taken aback. “How did you know I’d have a strange dream?”

“I didn’t. But I knew you’d come.” Aliki pointed at the steaming porcelain teapot on a Chippendale piecrust table. “Look, I already made you a chamomile tea.”

“Chamomile? Men never drink chamomile. Not good for the . . . you know.”

“Guess it’s not for you, then,” she said with a smile. “What about mint?”

Her effort was touching. Nobody had taken care of him like that since his mother died. “Maybe in a little while,” he said. He leaned his head on Aliki’s soft, sloping shoulder, breathed in the weedy scent of the chamomile tea, and took a peek at the current state of affairs: sagging wineskins. They couldn’t compare to Daphne’s lemons, but he also couldn’t imagine Daphne taking care of him like that. And Selin? He couldn’t afford to think of her right now.

Fanis yawned. He was feeling drowsy again, but he didn’t want to leave. A few seconds later, he felt Aliki’s hand on his knee. Was she mothering him? Or . . . ? He lifted his head to ask about the mint tea. At the same moment, Aliki leaned forward to plant a kiss on his forehead. Their lips met by accident. Fanis jumped to his feet and murmured something about feeling better and not needing the tea.

“It’s no trouble,” said Aliki, fiddling with the top button of her nightgown. She scanned his face as if she were searching for some sort of go-ahead. “I’ve been dreaming of this moment my whole life.”

Fanis tried to let her down softly. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. You see, I could never get involved with one of Kalypso’s friends. It would be disrespectful to her memory.”

Aliki grabbed her satin robe from the back of the sofa and drew it over her shoulders. “Kalypso’s been dead for over half a century.”

“I know, and . . . you’re lovely, Aliki, but . . .”

“Sit, Fanis,” said Aliki, in a quieter tone. “Let’s talk about this.”

He obeyed but perched himself on the opposite end of the sofa, his fingers buried between his thighs and his knees glued together.

“Fanis,” said Aliki. “I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve. Sure, I married somebody else, but I never stopped imagining your face on the heroes of the romance novels I used to read with a flashlight while my husband slept. And now that we’ve both been widowed, it’s like life gave us a second chance, don’t you think?”

“Certainly, but—”

“No buts,” said Aliki, inching closer to him. She put her finger to his lips.

Fanis felt panic flood his body. In a few seconds he was on his feet and out the door, calling over his shoulder, “We’ll talk in the morning.”

He stumbled back to his room, locked the door behind him, and spat out the open window. After crawling back into bed and pulling the covers over his head, like a shy virgin, he said aloud, “She tried to take advantage of me!”

Early the next morning, Fanis grabbed a towel from the dresser and crept down the hallway to the bathroom. Thank God, he made it without being heard. He cranked the shower lever to its hottest setting, stripped, and stepped inside for a good think session. While letting the hot water run over his face, he decided the Kalypso thing wasn’t going to be enough. He had to come up with a better excuse. As soon as his chest was fully sudsed, he recalled Julien’s crush on Aliki. Although the professeur flirted outrageously with women young enough to be his granddaughters, he still hadn’t made a move on Aliki because he was afraid of ruining the friendship. Fanis hated to betray Julien’s trust, but ultimately he would be doing a good turn to both his friends by setting them up.

Fifteen minutes later Fanis entered the kitchen fully dressed, his belt drawn more tightly than usual. Spread before him were savory pastries, garden tomatoes, plates dressed with cheeses, tiny ceramic bowls with homemade jams, and a freshly brewed pot of black Turkish tea. Fanis sighed. He tasted a small portion from each plate, just as he used to dance one song with every girl, but he was as distant as he would have been with a beauty he had pursued and possessed the night before. After his second cup of tea, which he drank scalding hot, he declared that the breakfast had been “nectar and ambrosia” and announced that he had to be off to catch the ten-thirty boat because his godson was arriving that afternoon for a two-day visit—his standard getaway excuse.

“At least eat your breakfast,” said Aliki.

Fanis glanced at his watch. “I had a wonderful time yesterday, a thousand thanks, but the ferry—”

“You said we’d talk in the morning.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I?” Fanis noticed a smudge of blue eye shadow on Aliki’s cheek. Apparently she’d missed the mark. He finished his tea. “Listen, Aliki, you’re a lovely woman, inside and out, but, you see, it’s . . . the professeur.”

“Julien?”

“Yes. He’s in love with you. Has been for years.”

Aliki threw down her napkin. “Please. He tells me I’m too fat for the chairs at Neighbor’s House.”

“It’s an odd way to flirt, I admit. But Julien has a thing for full-figured women. You see, he confessed his feelings, and from that point on, it becomes a matter of honor for me to step aside.”

Aliki squinted. “Fanis Paleologos, are you lying to me?”

Fanis leaned toward her, looked directly into her eyes, and said, “I would never do such a thing.”

“This is nonsense,” Aliki snapped. “If the professeur likes a woman, even remotely, he doesn’t hesitate.”

“He doesn’t hesitate when he’s joking, but when he’s serious it’s a different thing altogether.”

“Then why hasn’t he spoken to me?”

“Perhaps for the same reason that you never said anything to me. When you’ve been friends for a long time, it’s awkward.”

Aliki’s cheek began to twitch. “But I never caught even a hint, not for a second. . . . Are you sure?”

“What can I say, Aliki? You’ve stolen some hearts yourself, though you’re too humble to notice.”

She sat back in her chair, dazed. “Even if it is true . . . that doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to be sighing aman, aman for him. I mean, I can’t just cancel my feelings for—”

“Shh!” Fanis put a finger to her lips. “All I’m saying is think about it. For me. Now”—he tapped his watch—“I had a fabulous time. A thousand thanks for everything, but I must be going or I’ll miss the boat.”

“Are we still on for next Saturday? You know . . . the antiques?”

He air-kissed her forehead and said, “I’ll call you.”