Scorpionfish, стр. 35

found the bed was made; the place looked clean. His dishes—an espresso cup, a saucer, a spoon, some plates and forks and knives—remained in the dish rack. It would not be unlike my father to suddenly meet a woman and disappear. As he got older, though, and as he felt his own relevance slipping away, his disappearances worried me.

I checked the closets for his two small suitcases, hard, light-blue Samsonites that he’d had since the 1970s. Both were there, but his small blue duffel was not. Strangely, I felt some relief seeing them, hoping he was indeed in the hills with Nefeli as the novelist had thought. He did not attend the christening.

Aris did, though, and he invited me for a drink the next day. We agreed to meet at the port, at the café associated with the distillery near our fathers’ village.

There was not much wind now, and the day was warm. I ordered a beer and drank it quickly, eating the pistachios the waitress placed before me. When she brought my second round, she was distracted by someone who had entered. I turned to see what had brightened her so, and there stood Aris. He greeted her politely and then spotted me, moving across the café to join me at the table.

He’d barely had a chance to sit when the waitress reappeared, beaming at Aris, who flirted back at her. He ordered an ouzo, glanced at my beer, and changed his mind. “And would you bring us some more nuts, please.” The waitress seemed happy to fill his request, and had he kindly asked her to unbutton her shirt she would have. He was the type of man who eyed women with that particular aggressive blend of admiration and possession.

I don’t know why I was so angry.

We sat on adjacent sides of the table, so I had a view of the harbor and he had a view of the promenade. Eventually the evening volta would begin. Right now the only people out were the tourists whose skin was least suited to the sun.

We exchanged pleasantries about the christening, about when we’d last been to the island.

“We met when I was a child, you know,” Aris said. “You were visiting for the summer, from university. I remember your Michigan T-shirt: a bright orange with blue letters. When we got home that night I asked my father for a shirt like that.”

This admission startled me. As a young man, I’d admired his father; had even imagined being a writer myself. Now here was Aris with political ambitions. We’d been born to the wrong fathers. Or perhaps there was no difference.

The waitress arrived, gently placing each item on the table, first Aris’s beer, then the frosted glass, then the small dishes of peanuts and olives. He smiled, offered her his studied attention in exchange, as if they had rehearsed their roles in this transaction.

“Katerina didn’t come,” he said.

“Still in Brussels,” I said. “They’ll come for the summer, when the kids finish school.”

Aris poured his beer into his glass. His mentioning of Katerina felt deliberate and loaded. But I was still thinking of the T-shirt. It was more yellow than orange, Michigan’s maize and blue. I had saved it for years. It was probably here, in my father’s house. I remembered that particular summer, the T-shirt, but not Aris the boy.

It was disconcerting to think of him as a child and me as a fully formed adult, the age where children were not even on my radar but I, an older college student, was on his. Did he see his own age in my face? To see us sitting together you wouldn’t think we were a decade apart. I don’t think so anyway, but we never think we look as old as we do; age is something imposed on us. Our inner lives remain the same. Or do they?

“Do you see her often?” Aris asked.

“She and the kids return for holidays, long weekends. Sometimes I go there.”

“I meant Mira,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. I thought of her reach for my arm, grazing her fingers over the exposed ink.

“She hates me,” he added. “Maybe she should.”

“She hasn’t mentioned you.” A punishing line, and with a bit of pleasure I watched it register on his face. What did he want with Mira? He seemed unable to let her go even though he was the one who’d left her. I’d noticed some Mira-isms in his speech, and they irritated me. Things I had picked up too: inserting an English all-purpose “like” into a Greek sentence: “kai eimai like.” I don’t know if he was looking for absolution or information, but sitting near those sailboats, I felt as if I were somehow betraying Mira. I have always thought loyalty a strange thing. We think it has to do with history, with oath, but it is nothing of the sort. It’s an impulse.

Aris then began to recount highlights of my father’s career, as if he were auditioning for the old man through me, or fishing for something I couldn’t see. The truth was that my father’s politics both did and did not concern me. He was always hoping to reenter politics, to find a moment that might make him feel whole again, but now, with his deteriorating mind, I’m sure he understood he could not. A warrior without a war. I did not share this with Aris.

The previous time I’d visited my father here on the island, I’d found on his shelves a memoir by the poet Manolis Anagnostakis, who’d written that the most exciting time of his life was when he was constantly being followed, that any minute he could be arrested and sent away. It gave him meaning. My father had prided himself on being a rebellious, revolutionary voice, yet now no one listened to him at all, let alone saw him as an icon. I had not asked what he thought of the young generation of politicians, but I can imagine: Babies, he’d