Let Me Explain You (12 page)

They shook hands and called each other
malaka
, which established that things were all right between them even if they had not talked in many weeks, was it months? The last thing Hero had said to Stavros was, “I'm sorry you're having a hard time,” and Stavros had said, “The only hard time I'm having is with your wife,” and Hero did not like anybody to disrespect his wife, as Stavros knew, and Stavros did not like his compatriots to see him having a hard time and publicly acknowledge it. So—here they were,
na epanorthosei.
They called to the waitress Kelly for some
mezedes
. Stavros specifically asked for crunchy pickles, a favorite of Hero's. That was the first thing in mending, the right food.

Hero said in Greek, “I got your message on the Facebook.”

“It looks like you were the only one.” The message, sent to all of them, had said, The Last Supper with Stavros Stavros Steve Mavrakis.

Hero surveyed the five other place settings. “No daughters?”

“No daughters.”

“No Carol?”

Snort. “Of course not.”

“Who is the fifth seat for?”

Stavros leaned over and tucked the fifth place mat beneath his own. “The fifth was a mistake.”

“Well, you did only send the invitation out today. Maybe the girls had plans.”

“That's right, but you're here. Doesn't that prove that also they should be here?”

“It proves nothing more than I like a free meal.”

Hero sat back. He accepted Stavros's little pour of ouzo. You poured a little, because it said, We Take Our Time Here. And it said, There Is Much More to Come. We Are Only Just Beginning to Connect over Conversation, Which Is Nonthreatening. He and Hero sipped a while, listening to the no-imagination lyrics of soft classic rock sung by a bald middleman singer that Stavros had heard many, many times and did not want to hear again before he died. Stavros hoped that whoever put the next dollar in would pick a song by a woman.

Hero said in English, “Are you sick, Steve?”

Stavros shook his head. Listening more to the music than to his friend. “I am dying.”

“Dying how? This is incurable?”

“It is incurable.”

“The doctor, he told you so?”

Stavros stroked his powerful mustache, which it was more powerful than Hero's naked but heavy lip, hoping Hero would get the point. “We are beyond doctors here, Hero.”

Hero pushed the sleeve up on his right arm. Underneath, on the skin, was a single stitch. “You see this,
re
? It was a mole, and before it was a mole it was a freckle. They took it out because that mole grew horns and ate the freckle and all the other moles around it.”

Stavros waved his hand. How could you compare a freckle to what was coming for him?

Hero said, “You want to know what I think? I think you're not dying any more than the rest of us.”

“Oh no? And suddenly you are an expert also at dying?”

“Ela, Stavro. What is upon you is
xenitia
. You are suffering because you forget who you are. Your girls, they forget who they are, too. You miss your homeland, you pine for it in the way only a foreigner knows how. Maybe you need some little vacation—go back to see the relatives, reconnect with your roots. You have become in exile not just from your country, but also from your family.”

“Don't talk to me like I don't know
xenitia
. I know
xenitia
naked from her inside out. Not like you, Hero, who turns his back on his own motherland.” Which was true and not true, because Hero had assimilated quickly, willingly, enjoying a success in the United States that allowed him to return to the old village three, four times a year just to act the celebrity. But did he have real relationships with family anymore? No.

Here it was, that itchy silence between the two longtime companions that had caused them trouble in the first place.

This Last Supper was going all wrong. Every time Stavros tries to have a goodbye, he makes an enemy. Hero is his best friend. He needs to somehow make him realize that these are precious minutes being wasted and that what he has summoned Hero for was to say, Thank You for Being More than a Friend: For Being a Possibility in My Life. And what is he doing instead? Pouting. He is pouting over Hero, while Hero is very aggressive with his crunchy pickles, and taking the little seeds in the pickle broth and mashing them with his thumb into his mouth.

Hero shrugged. “You don't want to know what I think. So, let's instead order a few plates from your special menu.”

Stavros brightened. Yes, food, how could he forget? The way to mend all things. We break the back of our individual sufferings over bread. He said, “I'll have Marina send out her duck. Hero, it is like tasting a young bride.”

Hero shook his head. “Doctor says no fatty meats. And no young brides. Anyway”—he tipped more ouzo into his glass—“don't you know they force-feed those birds to make them so fat?”

This was incredible from Hero, for whom he had reserved the duck especially. “No duck?”

Hero licked his finger. “Birds are not supposed to be fat in nature. We have to stick to the natural order of things, Stavro. Such as, do not count your death before it hatches.”

This time, Stavros knew to be patient and make his way in. He spoke to Hero as if Hero were a child who did not know what he wanted. He said, “You do not understand, Hero. You have never understood, because your life is a dream. I have to accept what my life is and what it isn't.”

“My friend.” Hero clapped him on the shoulder. He stared dead into his eyes. He was crunching on the crunchy pickle, but everything else about him looked at Stavros in serious friendship. No, even more than that, like Stavros was the king and Hero was consoling him about his kingdom's deficit. “You are depressed, and you should see somebody.”

“Hero, this is not what I call you here for. You come to my place to say this to me?”

“You are a lonely man, Stavro. That is all that is happening here.”

Stavros was sorry before he said it, but his eyes went red. He saw only the man at the door with the puffed-up umbrella, the couple feeding money into the jukebox to pick more middlemen to sing to them, the waitress expertly pouring coffee into a mug across a business meeting, the cashier accepting small bills, a family eating a simple dinner, people giving orders in his establishment. And a smell so sharp, he could not recognize it, but it was filling him inside and outside. All this and more made him say, “I may be lonely, but nowhere near as lonely as your wife.”

Hero grinned, but it was the way glass grins when you break it. He patted Stavros's shoulder twice, like he was the child. He said, “Let me know when the next supper is.”

Stavros watched his friend walk out and wanted to call to him. He knew it was that easy and simple, if he could just reach for Hero with an apology. You didn't mess with Hero's wife. You honored her the way Hero honored her. But if this was his Last Supper, should Stavros have to make himself into a whimper? Wasn't mending mostly about forgetting? Such as,
Hero, forget what I said and remember only my intentions.

It was breaking his heart, his friend's back to him.

It was bringing him knowledge of the smell that had appeared so suddenly it burned his nose hairs, and brought tears to his eyes, and made him say the worst thing. It was incense he was smelling. But the thread of incense was disappearing as fast as it came, just like his old friend Hero.

Hero, You and I Are Countrymen! Hero, You and I Invent a New World Together! Hero, I Did Not Mean It. Hero, You Are a Great Man. Hero, Come Back. Hero, I Want to Drink and Remember All the Ways We Made It Through the Rough Life Together. Hero, Who Will Be with Me at the Final Goodbye Now?

There was nobody left.

As for Us, We keep our watch and wait the final day.

Dear Dina,

I have written letter on letter to you. It is not because I am not a person of letters, but because writing, it is not satisfying. It does not get close enough to what must be said. I write one draft that blame you for everything; I write another draft that save you of everything. Neither is true.

We enter life in the same way that we leave it—unsure what is happening. All we can ask is those who have know us, our friends and enemies, to witness. You and I, we both start from the same sea. You remain sand—every time you think you escape a wave, it pull you back in. Not Stavros. Stavros becomes glass. The sun shines through the man you once knew as only a speck on the Beach of Life.

Marrying you was the devastating decision of my life. You ruin me and you ruin my children. This is why: they hate me. It is unnatural for girls to hate their father, and that is why they live unnatural lives. But daughters are not only daughters but also adults, and hate is something you choose, not something of inheritance.

If Stavros Stavros as a young man were here with me, he would say, Do you open your mouth for the birds to circle back and shit in it? He would say, Why don't you also give Dina your
arxidia
so that she can smush them into bits the way she did to headlights, taillights, windshield, back window, rearview mirror of the car you love more than anyone in the world. Remember thirty years ago? Remember, Dina, I could not escape you and you could not escape me? What a difference the world was? I am no more this young man, and neither are you, and we are no longer young and understand that a person can escape almost anything?

The truth is that you and I, in many ways, begin life together. And so we must end life together. That is why, Dina, I ask: you be my executor.

A rap on the windshield. Stavros jumped. His heartbeat zippered through his body, shot up his arms and into his legs, and continued to radiate, as pain, from his shoulder. The papers crumpled in his hand. Was his heart having an attack? For a moment he imagined the long angel of God with his farming tool come harvest him a few days too early. God and his angels did not fly you home or cart you up to heaven in some bassinet. They picked through the rock and dug you out of the earth, because you were potato with too many eyes made dull from being far underground too long; and you were dirty, you were blind, and you could not return. The gloved hand rapped again. A black umbrella obscured the knocker's face, and he mistook it for a cloak of death, and then a potato sack of death, and he felt very afraid. It had Stavros crying, “Not yet!”

A woman's voice, muffled, said, “Get out of my parking spot.”

The woman moved menacingly closer to his driver's window. Through the ribbons of rain, he could just make out her face, and understand it was not death come for him but his ex-wife. Unless, in life, death took the form of your ex-wife.

“Dina,” he said, and rolled down the window enough for his voice to get out. “What are you doing in this rain?”

Hearing her name shrank her back into a woman, but then she puffed herself up again and said, “What are you doing,
malaka
? This is my house.”

By house, she meant apartment. The buildings were joined and identical, including the rusting railings, and there was communal trash and assigned parking spaces. The pretend brick façade was yellow-brown, which did not to him look like a color but like a color with mud on it. The Dina he knew belonged here.

He was not sure what to answer. He thought about asking her to let him in and then he will make himself known. He also thought, maybe just hand her the letter and drive away? But that was not the plan. This was important enough to be here in person. The letters did not work on their own: apparently they could be misunderstood or ignored. The calls following the letters, the Facebook invitations to a Last Supper dinner party—these did not work. With his family, nothing worked. His campaign was failing. But with Dina, he would get an explanation, a face-to-face, a conversation that could make him heard, even if that had never been exactly true before. Because she owed him. But more to the point of because—for the second time in their life, he was picking her; and he knew that for Dina, nothing mattered more than being chosen. And knowing Dina, he would need to go over some paperwork with her to make sure she is doing his wishes right. One thing he had never figured out was marrying women who were good with wishes or business.

He said, “I am going for a coffee. Would you like a coffee also?”

Dina stared at him. “You show up after fifteen years for coffee?”

“Or we go for a smoke.”

The water running down his window helped him see her both as she was now and as she was when they first met. Her face not so hardened, though even then it had been too much like clay. Her big red lips and uncontrolled mouth, which always reminded him of live wires. Her Greek nose, long and pointy and now darker than the rest of her face. The black ugly short hair, which even when it had been long had seemed mannish. The lazy eye—he called it a slow eye because it was only a little lazy—that had made him fall in love with her, even though he was left with the impression that she would have lived a much happier life had she been born without it. At one time the eye had been a thing he wanted to cradle, something he found very appealing in her; but then she learned how to control it, and there was nothing vulnerable left, nothing in her he felt compelled to protect. Dina stared him down through the window, and he could barely see any problem with her eye at all.

She said, “No, we're not going for coffee. Unlock the doors.”

He did, and expected her to come to the passenger seat, but she got into the back. Dina, never doing things as a normal person. She shook out her umbrella, but still, water got onto the seats—good thing he chose leather. He saw that the umbrella had a little gold brain on the top. To say what about her, exactly? She leaned forward enough that it made her look taller than she actually was, and as if she was seated both in the back and the front. She looked very fit, not eating so much sweets. Why were all his exes deciding to look pretty now that he was done with them?