Sure of You (18 page)

Anna gave her an enigmatic smile.

“I’ll be gone for a few days…is what I mean.”

“Yes, dear. Thank you.”

As the car pulled away from her, Stratos yelled: “Sappho the Russian.” It sounded like that, anyway.

“What?”

“It’s a hotel. Remember.”

She yelled after the Impala. “Sappho the what?”

His answer was drowned out by a chorus of barking dogs.

She finished up the breakfast dishes, then packed a change of clothes, locked up the villa, and hired a cab on the esplanade. The cabs here were all Mercedeses, beige and battered, with lurid and elaborate shrines to the virgin obstructing every dashboard. This was Mary’s island, really, not Sappho’s, and they never let you forget it.

The trip across the island took several hours along winding mountain roads. For most of the journey her driver plied her with cassettes of bouzouki music, so there was blessedly little call for conversation. Beyond the olive groves the landscape became barren and blasted, made vivid here and there by roadside memorials to people who’d gazed too devoutly at the virgin and missed a hairpin turn. She was thoroughly nauseated by the time they descended into the green farming outskirts of Skala Eressou.

It was a beach town, basically: two-story concrete buildings with tile roofs, a row of thatched tavernas forming a sort of boardwalk along the littered gray sand. At the edge of town, where she got out, a jumble of homemade signs offered various services for tourists. Among them, almost as crudely lettered, was one that purported to be official:

WELCOME TO SKALA ERESSOU

Please respect our customs and traditions.

Be discreet in manner and dress.

Happy holidays.

How fucking dare they? How many odes to discretion had Sappho ever written? She wondered if busloads of visiting dykes had become too demonstrative in the lap of the motherland and somehow horrified the Mary-worshipers. It made her want to rip off her shirt and grab the nearest woman.

She walked along the seafront tavernas to get the lay of the land. Most of the other tourists were Greek or German. The British voices were North of England, people on package tours, pale as larvae, buying sunshine on a budget. She spotted several pairs of lowercase lesbians along the way, but hardly enough to qualify the town for mecca status.

Thirsty and still a little queasy, she stopped at the nearest taverna and ordered a Sprite-and-ouzo, the drink she’d learned to tolerate in Molivos. She sipped it slowly, watching the beach. A bare-breasted fräulein with huge mahogany thighs was sprawled towelless on the coarse sand, reading a German tabloid. Her hair was bleached so white that she looked like a negative of herself. Mona made a mental note to pick up some sun block.

The beach curved down to a big gray mountain crumbling into the sea. There were wind surfers in the sparkling water and, just beyond the next taverna, a queue of bathers waiting for an outdoor shower. Despite obvious civic efforts at making the place look like a resort, there was an irrepressible seediness to Skala Eressou, which she found completely endearing.

But what of Sappho? Was there a marker somewhere commemorating her birth? Something noble and weatherworn, bearing a fragment of her work? Maybe she could buy a volume of the verses and read it while she strolled on the beach.

She tried three different gift shops and found not so much as a pamphlet on the poet’s life. The guidebooks she checked devoted a paragraph or two to the subject, but the details, at best, were sketchy and embarrassed: The poet had been born in 612
B.C
. in Skala Eressou. She had run a “school for young girls.” Her passionate odes to the beauty of women had often been “misinterpreted.”

Fuming, Mona stalked a statuary shop, where she passed row after row of plaster penises before pouncing on the only female figurine in sight. “Sappho?” she asked the clerk, pronouncing it “Sappo,” the way the Lesbians did.

The clerk frowned at her, uncomprehending.

“Is this Sappho? The poet?”

“Yes,” he replied, though it sounded suspiciously like a question.

“Forget it,” said an American voice behind her. “It’s Aphrodite.”

Mona turned to see a woman her own age, handsome and lanky, with a big Carly Simon mouth. “They don’t do Sappho. Not as a statue, anyway. Somebody told me there’s an ouzo bottle shaped like her, but I haven’t been able to find it.”

Mona returned the figurine to the shelf. “Thanks,” she told the American.

“You’d do better in Mitilíni. They’ve got a statue of her down by the harbor.” The wide mouth flickered. “It’s ugly as shit, but what can you do?”

Mona chuckled. “I can’t even find a book of her poetry.”

“Well, there’s not much left, you know.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“The church burned it.”

Mona grunted. “Figures.”

“You might try the gift shop on the square. They’ve got some fairly decent Sappho key rings.”

“Thanks,” said Mona. “I’ll do that.”

The woman went back to her browsing.

In the shop on the square Mona found the key rings—a crude profile on an enameled chrome medallion. They weren’t much, but they did say
SAPPHO
, so she bought a green one for Michael, thinking that it looked vaguely horticultural. Then she set off in search of a hotel that sounded like Sappho the Russian.

She found it on the boardwalk after a five-minute search. Sappho the Eressian. The room she rented there was spare and clean—blond wood, a single bed with white sheets, a lone lamp. She showered off the grit of the road, then anointed herself with sun block and changed into a crinkly cotton caftan she’d bought in Athens. She was much more comfortable when she returned to the beach and felt her wet hair kinking in the warm breeze.

She headed toward the big gray bluff, since the beach seemed less crowded at that end. The bathers grew sparser—and nuder—the longer she walked. When everyone in sight was naked, she skinned off her caftan and rolled it into a tight little ball, stuffing it in her tote bag. She spread a towel on the sand and lay on it, stomach down, feeling a warmth that seemed to rise from the earth’s core.

The nearest sunbathers were a dozen yards away on either side. She raked her fingers through the coarse sand and felt it roll away magically, like tiny gray ball bearings. There was a breeze off the water, and the sun lay on her big white bottom like a friendly hand.

This was all right.

The last time she’d done this had been in San Francisco in the mid-seventies. She and Michael had gone to the nude beach at Devil’s Slide. She had shed her clothes with great reluctance, feeling white and blobby even then. Michael, of course, had wussed out at the last minute, supposedly to preserve his tan line.

She missed him a lot.

She had wanted him to explore Lesbos with her, but the little fool had fallen in love on her and never found the time.

He wasn’t sick, Anna had insisted. He might have the virus, but he wasn’t sick.

But he could be. No, he would be. That was what they said now, wasn’t it?

Unless they discovered a drug or something. Unless some scientist wanted the Nobel Prize bad enough to make it happen. Unless one of the Bush kids, or Marilyn Quayle, maybe, came down with the goddamned thing…

She laid her cheek against the warm sand and closed her eyes.

Later, in the heat of the day, she strode out into the sea. When she was thigh-deep, she turned and surveyed the broad beach, the prosaic little town and distant dung-colored hills. She didn’t know a soul for miles. Anna and Stratos were on the other side of the island, napping by now, no doubt, or making love behind closed shutters, stoned to the tits.

She smiled at the thought of them and splashed water on her pebbling flesh. This has been a good idea, she decided, taking a holiday from her holiday. She felt wonderfully remote and unreachable, even a little mythical, standing here in the cradle of the ancients, naked as the day she was born.

On an impulse, she tilted her chin toward the sky and had a few words with the Goddess.

“You can’t have him yet,” she yelled.

She was pink by nightfall, but not painfully so. In her monastic room at Sappho the Eressian, she smoked one of Anna’s joints and watched as the lights of the tavernas came on, string by string. When she was pleasantly buzzed, she glided down to the pristine little lobby and asked the desk clerk, just for the sound of it, where she could find a good Lesbian pizza.

By the strangest coincidence, they sold just such an item at the hotel taverna. It was a truly awful thing, dotted with bitter-tasting little sausages. She polished it off with gusto, then she began to speculate about the quality of Lesbian ice cream.

“Hello,” crooned a familiar voice. “Find those key rings?” It was the woman with the Carly Simon mouth, a good deal browner than before. She was still in her walking shorts, but her crisp white shirt was a more recent addition.

“Yeah, I did,” said Mona. “Thanks.”

“What did you think?”

“Well…I bought one.”

The woman smiled. “It’s all there is, believe me.”

“It’s so stupid,” said Mona. “You’d think they’d notice there was…some interest.”

The woman chuckled. There was a comfortable silence between them before Mona gestured to a chair. “Sit down,” she said. “If you want.”

The woman hesitated a moment, then shrugged. “Sure.”

“If you’re about to eat, I don’t recommend the pizza.”

Wincing, the woman sat down. “You didn’t eat the
pizza
?”

“I can’t help it,” said Mona. “I’m sick of Greek food.” She held out her hand. “Mona Ramsey.”

“Susan Futterman.” Her grip was firm and friendly, devoid of sexual suggestion. Mona’s current contentment was such that she didn’t care one way or the other. It was just nice to have a little civilized company.

Susan Futterman lived in Oakland and had taught classics at Berkeley for fifteen years.

“I’m surprised it isn’t Futterwoman,” Mona told her.

“It was, actually.”

“C’mon!”

“Just for a little while.”

“Oh, shit,” said Mona, laughing.

Susan laughed along. “I know, I know…”

“I had a lover once from Oakland.”

“Really?”

Mona nodded. “She runs a restaurant in San Francisco now. D’orothea’s.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“You know her?”

“Well, I know the restaurant.” Susan paused. “Do you live in San Francisco?”

“No. England.”

She looked surprised. “For good?”

“I hope so.”

“What do you do?”

Mona thought it best to be vague. She hadn’t been Lady Roughton for almost a month and was beginning to enjoy the anonymity. “I manage properties,” she said.

Susan blinked. “Real estate?”

“More or less.” She gazed out at the strollers along the boardwalk. “There really are a lot of women here.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“It’s funny how just a
name
can do that much.”

“Isn’t it? Have you been down to the tents yet?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mona.

“You’d know,” said Susan.

Susan was a seasoned Grecophile and tossed back several glasses of retsina without flinching. Mona stuck with her Sprite-and-ouzo and was feeling no pain by the time they set off in quest of the famous tents.

They were down at the end of town, some yards back from the beach in a dusty thicket. Most of them weren’t tents at all but “benders,” like the ones the antinuke women had built on Greenham Common—tarps flung over shrubbery to form a network of crude warrens.

She was astounded. “Where do they come from?”

“All over. Germany mostly, at the moment. I saw some Dutch girls too.”

“Is it always like this?”

“Usually more,” said Susan. “This is the tail end of the season.”

Like pilgrims in a cathedral, they kept their voices low as they passed through the encampment. Here and there, women’s faces beamed up at them in the lantern light.

Sappho’s tribe, thought Mona, and I am a part of it.

Susan, it seemed, knew a woman in one of the benders: a young German named Frieda, square jawed and friendly, with a blond ponytail as thick as her forearm. She poured vodka for her visitors and cleared a place for them to sit on her sleeping bag. There were faltering efforts at an English conversation before Susan and the girl abandoned the effort and broke into frenetic German.

Unable to join them, Mona downed her vodka, then let her eyes wander around the bender. There was a battered leather suitcase, a bottle of mineral water, a pair of blue cotton panties hanging out to dry on a branch. On the ground next to her knees lay a pamphlet for something called Fatale Video, printed in English; the headline
FEMALE EJACULATION
leapt out at her.

She glanced at it sideways and read this:

FATALE VIDEO—By and for women only.

Thrill to Greta’s computer-enhanced anal self-love!

Sigh with scarf play, oral and safe sex with Coca Jo and

Houlihan!

Gasp at G-spot ejaculation and tribadism with Fanny and

Kenni!

She smiled uncontrollably, then looked up to see if she’d been noticed. Susan and the girl were still nattering away in German. The return address on the pamphlet was Castro Street, San Francisco. While she’d been becoming a simple English country dyke, her sisters in the City had been building their own cottage industries.