Intimate Distance (4 page)

A pounding crash, the waves reared up and drenched his trousers. She laughed out loud. This young man, he didn't smile as he wiped his glasses carefully with a clean handkerchief. The spray salted her lips and she licked them slowly, showing her tongue.

Fanning coastline, jewelled water and death rocks. Poor Aegeus; threw himself off the cliff when his son didn't come back from Crete. All bad sons. Stern fathers, stern temple. View of heaven and water and no world in between. I close my eyes. Darkness, shot with streams of red and yellow. Capillaries of light. Blue water. Clear sky. My mother's pupils, shiny as a bird's in the dark. My eyes shut, Zoi carrying me on the wave of his need. I can't even call it desire.

7

THE KITCHEN IS
a mess after lunch: dirty plates and lamb bones and glasses with rings of wine around them. The television is on although there's nobody watching it. I've just made up my mind to turn it off and start cleaning when I hear a shuffle behind me.

‘Mara?'

Zoi's voice is low, almost a whisper.

‘I got the contract – and I won't have to work nightshifts anymore. I meant to tell you on Friday but things got in the way.'

I don't kiss him. I wipe my hands with stiff fingers on a teatowel. No congratulations. No answering flicker in my eyes.

‘Well? It's a great opportunity for me. For us. I know you didn't want to stay in Athens, I know you didn't like living here, but we can move now, maybe somewhere nice, Psychiko even –'

‘I don't want to stay in Athens.'

‘Ssh.'

He looks around, afraid of waking his parents from their nap.

‘Look, it's just another short-term contract. Only six months this time. We'll even be able to afford to rent a villa. Some trips to the islands.'

‘You said we'd go home, for my mother. Remember?'

‘Come on, stop being a child. It's only six months. I promise we'll leave at the end of the contract if you still don't like it here. I promise.'

I turn my face up to look at him properly for the first time in weeks. I'm shocked at how he's changed, the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes deepening, the pores on his cheeks larger, his forehead broad and red under the harsh kitchen light.

‘Alright. When are we moving? Straight away?'

‘Give me a chance, Mara. I haven't settled in yet.'

‘I want to get a job as well. I'm tired of sitting around here with your mother, being ferried around by Dimitri.'

‘Forty per cent unemployment and you talk about getting a job.'

Then he sees my face.

‘Really, you don't need to work. You're here on holiday after all.'

‘Doesn't feel like much of a holiday to me.'

He stops, spreads out his hands, tries to draw me to him but I'm rigid.

DIMITRI AND I
go out more – in the day, when Zoi's at work. One morning, we become slowly drunk in an underground bar; branches of candles all around, reflecting their flames into mirrors. I take his hand and he laughs as if it's funny we should touch. Flanges of fire around our heads. He and I, in the midst of the flames. Drinking, not speaking, my head leaning on his shoulder: the day becomes sad and happy and exciting and slowly an animal contentment steals over us both in the dim shadows and flickering light.

We walk home from the trolley stop together and Dimitri comes uninvited into my bedroom. The apartment is empty. Kiki and Yiorgo are visiting relatives, more and more relatives. Zoi is still at work. Dimitri runs his finger up the line of my back as I bend over the bedside table. I tell him to go. Not angry, just tired.

‘Please, Dimitri. That's the last thing I want. What I want is a nap.'

He stands by the door. I sit on the bed undoing my hair, laying out a T-shirt, making my quiet preparations. I unhook my bra, taking it off from underneath my dress: a practised motion. I reach under, not looking at him, behaving as though he isn't there, watchful, by the door. Take off my underpants as I sit on the bed, sliding them down one outstretched leg, then the other. He's so still, waiting.

‘Take off your dress,' he says in a small voice. ‘Quickly,' he whispers, as I shake my head. ‘I just want to see you.'

I'm so drunk all I want is sleep. My head is heavy and fuzzy, as though I'm someone else. Dimitri is insistent.

‘I only want to look once. Just for a second.'

Maybe if I let him he'll let me sleep. So I slowly and deliberately raise my dress to the level of my stomach then take it off all in a rush, warm from the heat off my skin. I stand up close to him at the half-open door, kiss him on the cheek and abruptly walk back toward the bed. I can feel him looking at me, at the way I walk, at the way my thighs rub together and my feet turn inward.

Then I hear the door close behind him very slowly and softly. I hear his footsteps grow fainter down the corridor to the kitchen, the fridge opening and the clink of ice in a glass.

8

EFES, WINTER 2012

WE WOULD MEET
past midnight at an outdoor café lit by streetlamps. Every night after a shift I was late and every night Zoi sat waiting for me beneath the striped awnings, tattered, that clung to the highest wall of the mosque. His linen suit and long crossed legs. My dirty jeans and stained T-shirt, the tips of my fingers smelling of food. I strained to see him as I hurried along the crowded street, scanning the low tables hung with coloured cloth, the assortment of wooden benches. He would order baklava, always four tiny pieces, but we never managed to eat them all. The sweet apple tea, though, we gulped down as if draining each other, satisfying our desire.

I told Zoi everything then, anything I could think of, all there was to tell: desires, goals, childhood traumas, the burden of my mother's love. I talked and talked and he merely sat back looking at me without a hint of expression on his face. I stopped mid-sentence.

‘You're not listening to a word, are you? Or maybe you don't follow, I'm talking too fast.'

‘No, no. But I do get distracted looking at you. I lose my bearings.'

I was aware that he only looked at my lips when I spoke, not my eyes.

‘I'd never say any of this if I thought you could understand what I was saying. I'm counting on your lack of English for my confessions. Though at times I feel it's better than mine.'

He laughed with me then grew silent, withdrawing from my gaze.

‘Zoi? Are you okay? What have I said?'

‘I understand everything, Mara.'

We kissed in the shadows away from the street, cautiously, like two people learning from each other to be tender after a lifetime of doubt.

9

ATHENS, SUMMER, 2013

WHENEVER I'M ALONE,
Dimitri appears. He comes upon me in the bedroom while I'm brushing my hair. He disturbs me when I sit chewing a pen with my wad of paper, vacant expression on my face. He knows I'm copying out poems then, and I can see it endears me to him, as if I'm entering a high, treacherous territory he'll never have the courage to scale. Yet he entices me away with sightseeing and beaches and cafés and bars. We've found a way of communicating that's comfortable; he speaks in Greek and I in English. He takes me to secret places and I feel the thrill of pretence, the illicit nature of our appearance together. It makes my eyes bright and my movements languorous, full of the promise of things to come.

At the Royal Gardens we run hand in hand through sprinklers, under showers of water, spurting liquid, arbours of light. Escaping the relentless traffic and all those frantic people, into the coolness of the park. Flopping down breathless beneath mastic trees, sour scented. I turn to face him. What is it about this boy? He's a few years younger than me, just out of the gawky phase of adolescence. His face draws me, pulls me in. Those creased eyes, the smooth forehead, that loose mouth. He's tired; maybe it's that. All those night shifts in a Kolonaki bar. Or is it sadness? Disillusionment. His face echoes mine in some peculiar, disassociated way.

I feel the connection behind my eyes in pinpricks of compassion and conscience. He blinks, looks away. But I'm kissing him on the mouth now and somewhere in the dark reaches of my mind I can remember doing this before, in a time far away, with a man that was him and yet not him and my lips know what to do, my hands circle his skull so tightly and while his eyes are creased shut, mine are wide open, I'm tumbling, grasping, falling headlong. I don't give myself time to think but I repeat it in my head, repeat the phrase, it's Dimitri, it's Dimitri, it really is. I allow myself to become excited by the feel of his body, let myself grow loose, without edges, feel my outlines merging into his and yet I also feel the dark thrill of control, the haze of power. His face so close, my nose buried in his cheek, his ear in my mouth, his hands rough on me, his eyes still closed, shutting me out.

‘Stop,' I say. ‘Look me in the eye, at least.'

He opens his eyes, leans back on the grass. His hair is ruffled and there's a bright spot of red on one cheek.

‘I'm looking at you now.'

‘Now kiss me. Kiss me and look at me.'

He comes forward, covers my mouth with his. He's gentle, a mere brushing of the lips. I draw his head hard into me and shut my eyes, inhaling his breath in tender resolution.

10

SYDNEY, SPRING, 2017

I'M AWAKE AND
it's dawn. I stand on the balcony, gazing into the park, shielding my face from the early sun. I think of my mother, comatose downstairs. Her devotional neck, that suffering face. Her failed relationship twenty years ago. My own tug of love and defiance and with Zoi. My eyes are unaccustomed to the brightness and I stumble inside, trusting my instinct to find a way through the corridor, blurring the old sepia images on the bathroom walls. Olga as a bride, bareheaded, hand on hip, the other rattling the ice in her glass. Her eyes are focused on her drink, bluish milky liquid, cold in her hand as she flirts with boys and forgets she's a married woman now. Bel canto inflections pervade the air. She poses in the photograph like some archaic statue in fluted robes; a wedding dress she made herself, my father's dark face squashed behind her.

I feel an absurd twinge of guilt at her hard life and the inevitable decline of love. This train of thought invariably leads me to Zoi. His trusting mouth. My indulgence toward him, the subtle worming expiation of guilt that followed each time I betrayed him. His face, his body. I've been down this path many times before. Foolish. Do I still love him? Irrational. I think of his open hands, strong eyes. Maybe.

Of course I got pregnant. I was sleeping with both men, daily. And when I found out I had no idea whose it was. Even now, I look at Pan and wonder. He has so much of both brothers in him. One day, when he's older, a teenager, I'll tell him the story. At some point he deserves to find out, and to choose whether to take it further. And I will carry no weight of blame; I refuse it.

When I found out I was pregnant in Athens, I kept staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. I leaned over the basin, willing myself to vomit. A swell of nausea rose, and just as quickly subsided. The speck, the soul, a child; red in whorls of white. A shaft of light pierced through the window. I heard neighbour's voices in the next apartment, uninspired toasts. Dimitri came to my side and rested his head on my shoulder so that his face was also framed in the mirror. We looked at one another, eyes focused on the other's face.

‘Well?' I could see his lips forming the word as though they belonged to somebody else.

Near the plughole lay the discarded test wand. It was stained a pale baby-girl pink. Dimitri's hand was on my head, his fingers working in my hair. I could sense an anxiety filling me, spreading now slow, now quick through my body.

EVERY DAY, WHEN
everyone was gone, Dimitri and I would go back to bed, scattering his sheets with crumbs of fresh bread, surrendering to the soft coolness of each other's skin, each other's naked arms, in a cocoon of darkness shot with light from the street. He was careful of my growing belly and our lovemaking was stilted, formal, like the couplings seen in Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Reckless, we no longer tried to find anywhere else discreet or neutral. Always, in these hushed still afternoons, the gypsies in their trucks broke the silence on suburban streets violently with their repeated refrain:
karpouzia
,
karekles
, watermelons, plastic chairs going cheap – two unlikely phrases that will be forever associated in my head.

I would rip off my dressing gown in front of him, twirl slowly with my arms over my head. There was no denying it: my belly was rounder, hips filling out, breasts like somebody else's. I looked closer into the mirror then shocked myself by smiling at my reflection. I'm becoming a woman, with a woman's body. I marvelled at the swell and curve and breadth of it. Carrying another being inside me, an explorer in unknown territory. A living landscape on my skin; the crazy tracery of veins under the surface, bumps and cracks and lines like an early cartographer's map of a new world. For the first time, I was excited by the idea of these changes. No matter I looked older, riper. I could accept now that this was happening to me.

Of course, the situation was unbearable. But the illusion that it was only temporary, that it must change somehow, even if we didn't yet know how, made it slightly more tolerable for all three of us. Zoi didn't know what to think, or what it was he should be objecting to, and grew more and more torn between the desire to act and his denial of the irrevocable, convincing himself that once the baby came all would be forgotten. Dimitri only let himself live from moment to moment, from the time he saw me alone to the next time we were together. The long black stretches of time between those moments were ephemeral. And the birth of the baby couldn't intrude.