The Clover House (15 page)

After a few moments, there are no more floats, just large groups of identically costumed dancers. Several men and women are pushing children in strollers, their costumes miniature versions of what their parents are wearing. My
parea
’s interest shifts to the people gathered immediately around us. Maki and Stelios are standing on their chairs and trying to knock each other off, to the jolly annoyance of whoever is standing nearby and being buffeted by the arms and legs the two men wave to keep their balance. Andreas jumps down from another chair and crouches in front of Anna. She jumps onto his shoulders and holds the purple hat with one hand as Andreas rises to full height. He grasps her thighs and slides his fingers up as high as he can. She laughs and smacks his head playfully.

I look at Stelios, who is still play-fighting with Maki, unconcerned. Carnival, I guess. And then I look at Stelios again. It’s a good face to look at—angular and lean, with dark hair curling slightly now in the humid night. He sees me, and I tilt my head to one side and smile. He smiles back just as Maki, sensing weakness, aims a hip check at Stelios’s side and knocks him to the ground. Maki raises both fists in the air and shouts, “Winner!”

“
Skáse
, shut up,
ré maláka
!” Stelios laughs over his shoulder. He comes toward me and crouches before my chair. “Come on,” he says.

I grab his shoulders and jump up. He puts his hand on the small of my back, beneath my peacoat, and presses me forward
against his head as we begin moving through the people. His shoulders are warm, his shirt slightly sweaty. His hands squeeze my thighs as I sway from side to side. It feels good. I’m not drunk enough to forget about Jonah, but I am drunk enough not to care. I’m riding that expanded consciousness that lets me see my bad behavior without changing it—and fools me into thinking that awareness makes it all right.

I allow my fingers to slip under Stelios’s scarf, where I can feel the stubble of a day’s beard. His head moves back against me.

“Where to, Miss Notaris?”

I lean forward and speak softly, letting my lips touch his ear.

“Anywhere you like, Mr.…”

“Pappamichaïl.”

“Anywhere you like, Mr. Pappamichaïl.”

The sounds of the parade grow fainter as we go toward the harbor and away from the center of the city. From my vantage point up on Stelios’s shoulders, I see couples twined together behind cars and kiosks, and I wonder if one of them is Anna and Andreas.

“Put me down,” I say, and he obliges, holding my legs behind him as I slide along his back. We are standing very close to each other when he turns, and I am sure that we both want the furtive grappling going on all around us.

“Let’s go find Anna,” he says after a moment.

“Sure,” I say. “Let’s find Anna.” I try to ignore the fact that I’m more than a little disappointed.

He leads me back a block and then along a road parallel to the harbor. There are smatterings of Carnival festivities here—musicians, dancers, children with their parents. I see now why there are children here: On the sidewalk before a row of simple,
brightly lit tavernas is a group of stalls selling balloons, masks, and various trinkets. Among them, I spot the purple hat. Stelios, without registering surprise, goes toward it.

“Geia,”
he says, slipping his arm around Anna’s waist.

“You found us,” she says. “This is where I always come,” Anna says to me. “It’s a ritual now. We always buy something as a souvenir. Last year it was this hat and now we’ve come back to find something else.”

We begin to look through the merchandise, most of it plastic and made in China.

“Found it,” Stelios calls, and we gather around him. “Look at these. They’re pretty nice, probably handmade.”

“From Zakynthos,” says the stall owner, a middle-aged man in a bulky down jacket. He shows us a dowel from which are hanging wooden-beaded bracelets on thin leather cords. The beads are painted deep red, like blood. Anna takes one.

“It’s like an abacus,” she says.

“Yes,” says Stelios. “A bracelet for my sexy mathematician.”

“Four, please,” Anna tells the merchant, and gives him the money. She puts hers on and passes the others to Stelios. He takes my hand and slides a bracelet over my knuckles.

“For
all
the sexy women,” he says.

“Me too,” Andreas says, waving his wrist in front of Stelios’s face. “I’m sexy too.”

It is ten-thirty now, too late to catch one of the many performances going on in the city’s theaters, so we continue along the street past the stalls and the tavernas to find a bar. We settle on one that makes crêpes stuffed with chocolate and honey. Now I’ve been with these people long enough that we have our own inside jokes from earlier in the evening. They don’t seem to care that they only just met me, and neither do I. But eventually
I give in to jet lag, faking interest as my eyes close, and then dozing off altogether. I wake up at one point with my head on Andreas’s shoulder. He smells of cigarettes.

Sometime later, with Maki lost to the crowd, the four of us head back to the center of town, our arms clasped together out of glee and a need for support. I tell Stelios I should be getting home.

“Don’t go now. They’re already in bed at this point. What difference will a few more hours make?”

But that is what I am worried about. Like my mother, I have no key to Aliki’s home. If Aliki and Nikos are in bed, I will have to wake them or keep roaming the streets until we all crash on someone’s floor.

At the corner of Kolokotronis and Kanakaris, Anna pulls us all to a stop.

“Pact!” she says, freeing her arms from Stelios’s and Andreas’s grasp. “We keep these on for the entire Carnival, and when we return next year”—she swoops around exaggeratedly to me, emphasizing the words—“we will wear them as a sign of our
parea
.”

“Indeed! Done!” we all say, thrusting our braceleted hands in the air.

At Aliki’s building, I take a deep breath and press the buzzer. I am startled to hear it answered immediately. She has been waiting up. With one foot holding the door open, I kiss my friends good night and vaguely agree to various offers for the next day without really paying attention.

Aliki is in her bathrobe, standing in the open door to the apartment. She presses her finger against her lips silently and follows me into my room.

“What happened to you? I was worried.”

“I’m so sorry, Aliki. I went looking for you.”

“In a bar?”

“No, really, Aliki, I did. I wanted to be there with you. At the parade. Then I found these friends and we watched the parade. I couldn’t find you.”

“No,” she says. “We didn’t take Demetra to a bar.”

She shakes her head at me and leaves, returning with a glass of water for me. I drink it and go to bed, the smell of smoke in my hair and beer on my breath.

Callie

Saturday

Aliki is standing over me, saying something. As I open my eyes, I am conscious of the hangover I deserve: the aching head, the felted tongue, the lids clicking over dry eyes. Aliki seems to relish the discomfort she sees on my face.

“What time is it?”

“It’s already eleven. I don’t think I’ve seen you like this since that time we went to Kythira.”

“Oh, God.”

“Yeah,” she laughs. “Remind me again, was it you who thought we should all go skinny-dipping?”

“I didn’t know there wasn’t a moon!” I remember how long it took us to find our clothes in the dark afterward and how we all stumbled around on the island beach, boys and girls, wet and suddenly ashamed of our nakedness. I clutch my head. “Don’t make me laugh,” I moan.

She watches me try to compose myself.

“Listen,” she says, “I have to go with Demetra to the Children’s Carnival. Nikos is coming too, and we’re meeting Marina and her family. You met her the other night.”

“Too much information. You’ll make me barf.”

“You already did,” she says. Suddenly I remember rising in the night and vomiting in the toilet. I look around me, as if for traces of the mess I must have created.

“I’m so sorry, Aliki. I left last night just a few minutes after you’d gone. I thought I’d be able to find you.”

“I’d say your plan failed pretty spectacularly.”

“It was stupid, I know.”

“I can’t have you staying here if you’re going to carouse like that. Demetra doesn’t need to see that.” Aliki tries to catch herself, but it’s too late. She’s right. No little girl should have to see the adults she cares about losing control or, worse, going missing.

“I get it, Aliki. Believe me, I get it.”

“At least leave a note, Calliope. This isn’t Kythira. It’s a city. I had no idea where you were. Demetra was worried, and I made something up so she wouldn’t be upset.”

“I’m sorry, Aliki,” I say, taking her arm. “I promise I won’t do that again.”

She rolls her eyes at me. “When you’ve gotten yourself together, there’s some cake you can toast for breakfast. Butter’s on the counter. Our key is on the hall table, and I’m leaving the key to Nestor’s house. I’ll be at the kids’ Carnival all day.”

“I could come with you.”

“Demetra doesn’t want to be late. And you won’t be ready in time.”

This hurts, but I understand.

“You can go on over to Nestor’s by yourself.”

“I look just as foreign as yesterday, Aliki.”

“If anyone asks you, you can explain it to them.”

“I’m sorry, Aliki,” I repeat.

“It’s all right,” she says. “Stop apologizing.”

I’ve made her laugh, and that makes me happy.

I lie in bed for a while, thinking of everything I did last night. At first, I’m embarrassed. I drank too much and got carried away. But that’s not quite right, and the truth is that, though the alcohol made it easier, I knew what I was doing. I run my fingers over the beads of my new bracelet. Something more could have happened with Stelios. As this thought forms, another comes suddenly: Something still could. In the three years since Jonah and I got together, I haven’t touched another man that way. But it feels as if his proposal has changed everything. Now that we’re engaged, he seems cautious and I’m afraid. Marriage looms over me like a sword of Damocles, hardly a good image for a blushing bride.

I’m not sure what I’m most afraid of: that my marriage to Jonah will fail, or that I might actually achieve the happiness I long for. As I stare up at the guest-room ceiling, I ponder the easy way out. If I ruin the marriage before it has a chance to start, I can save myself the despair of failure. Jonah won’t be a laceration of the heart that I will have to bear forever. He’ll be like Luke, and Sam, and Pete, just a guy who didn’t work out.

It’s now five in the morning Boston time. I sit on the edge of the bed for a while, as if at sea, letting my vision settle in its gimbal. I resolve to stand up and, holding on to the walls and doorjambs, I make it to the foyer, wondering if I should call Jonah again and explain. But I don’t reach for the phone. I don’t trust myself. Or, more accurately, I trust my body; I just don’t trust my heart. I sit there for a while longer and then gingerly make my way around the apartment, getting dressed for another session at Nestor’s house.

I go slowly down Ellinos Stratiotou, breathing in the damp air off the Gulf of Patras. My head begins to clear, but I still feel as though the slightest provocation will bring a repeat of Aliki’s
toilet. I have not eaten anything this morning. I feel in my pocket for Nestor’s key, with its fob in the shape of a thistle, the words A
ULD
L
ANG
S
YNE
embossed on the back side. A souvenir from one of his trips. There is, doubtless, a vial of coarse Scottish beach sand or a chunk of Scottish rock somewhere among all his boxes.

I hang my coat on the rack in the foyer and stand looking at the scene of all I have to sift through. It is too much. Repeating Aliki’s steps from the day before, I make a passable cup of coffee and take it to Nestor’s study, where I stand looking out the French doors to the back garden. During my summer visits, the garden was always an arid space, almost unbearably hot, with the sun baking off the walls and the paving stones.

Nestor ventured into it only twice a day, to fill a bowl with water for those tortoises he kept there. Not turtles, as my mother so promptly pointed out. It must have been a suitable environment for the tortoises, because I remember seeing them every summer until I grew too old to play with them. Though I knew better, I always snuck out into the searing heat of the garden during the middle of the day, when I was supposed to be resting. Nestor would doze off as he listened to music, and I would click open the glass door that led out from the cool of the study and feel the sudden pressure of the sun on my skin and clothes. Within seconds, my scalp felt hot enough to lift off my head, but I never retreated. Around me were three high walls and the tall glass doors of the house; above me was a simple square of pale-blue sky; at my feet, the ordered black and white squares of the garden tile.

I could never induce the tortoises to do anything except pull their heads into their shells. They rejected my offers of lettuce or water; they refused to be steered toward the shade of a bushy weed. When I dared to place them on the paving stones, as
though they were pieces in a board game, they snapped at me and drew their heads back inside. I suppose these were odd pets for me to be playing with. But to me then, the tortoises were exotic, something I could be proud of in a way. When I daubed water on them, I brought out the rich pattern of browns on their shells. With their heads pulled in, they became perfect disks of color and design.