The beach transcended everything, the even sand by the water flecked with bird tracks, green light pouring through the near surf, the further water blueberry-colored. Despite the crushed cans, the wet plastic bags like fake jellyfish, the fiberglass boat parts scrubbed raw by surf, the cinderblock hotels further on, the sea managed to stay separate and wild. I let myself stare at it twenty minutes, half an hour, before I turned and walked down the beach, stepping on tiny, avalanche-prone sand mountains that resisted my passage.
A week before I'd woken to a white room, beside me white sheets flipped to uncover a hollow gone chilly. Something seemed different about the quality of the sunlight: whiter, emptier. Across the bed, the bedside table lay empty; the pile of shucked clothing was gone from the floor. The other bag was gone. He was gone.
The first pain wasn't a release but felt stuck, without an outlet. I was afraid it would imprint itself on Naxos, but I decided to stay anyway. Naxos and Crete, two Minoan places, had been my main suggestions for the itinerary; I didn't want to leave Naxos just because Thad had disappeared. I did change hotels, though, partly to get a single room.
I had more peace after Thad left. Lately he'd burned me out, always doing, acting; even in repose, his body panted like a pent dog awaiting a command. His activity pressured me, as if I should act too.
On some level I'd thought we had an agreement. He was the energy in the relationship, the legs; I was the brains. We'd met when he was in my brother's statistics section; my brother had a rep for eating students alive, but with my tutoring Thad passed the class. As his girlfriend, I was still the tutor. I tried to be good for him. He wasn't supposed to take self-actualization so far he left me, though.
The even sand flecked with bird tracks, green light in the near surf, further out the wine-dark sea.
Kastraki Beach lay bare, day after day; it was late October, the season was over. I wanted to move to a room on the beach, but I couldn't find anyone to rent from. Scuffing through blown sand in the loop of empty streets, I came upon a woman watering geraniums, poppy-red in a galvanized pot, but she shook her head when I asked her about rooms. So I took a single in the Kastro, Naxos town's old Venetian quarter: one room of a palazzo, some former administrator's house. Wooden beams crossed the high ceiling; the negative spaces were painted mustard yellow. The room was narrow, clean, with a cheap bed frame stained green-blue. On Sunday, the bells of the nearby church rang violently, but in the silence afterward, you could hear the sea.
Every day that week I drove to Kastraki, walked the beach, sent my thoughts floating out into the water.
On the eighth day, under an overcast, the feeling of the beach had changed, maybe just because the weather had changed. The sand under my sandals felt hard and cold, concrete under a loose layer of grit. Spongy balls of dark-green seaweed like a kind of ocean moss lay across my path; when I kicked one, its response was as dead as a deflated soccer ball's. The sun poured on the water a sheet of light, tarnished silver; slowly the light moved inland.
Against the shine, a dark object bobbed. A log. A dolphin. A human swimmer.
My first impulse was to take off running. That would have looked pretty silly. But I didn't want to deal with people, least of all a kamaki, a harpoon, as the Greeks call them, hustling an American girl. I turned abruptly and walked back toward my rental car.
As I passed, I saw lying in the sand crumpled jeans, left as they'd been stepped out of, a striped shirt, a towel. I felt like kicking myself for not noticing them before. I tried to reason with my bad mood: it's not like anyone had signed a contract I had the beach to myself every day. I was lucky I'd gotten it alone as long as I had.
Something in my peripheral vision made me turn.
He walked out of the sea walnut-brown, naked, shining, long black hair snaking down his chest and back. Wiry, not tall. I felt a shock of recognition: his skin was the same color as mine; he was from my tribe. I shook it off. The connection was random, not meaningful. Half the boys in Greece had the same coloring.
He looked at me quizzically before I turned back and race-walked away; then he smiled. All the way back the image of him made my mind itch.
At sunset the next day, I went to take pictures of the Portara, a monumental marble doorframe, the remains of a temple, on an islet reached by causeway from Naxos harbor. The guidebook said it was cliché to have your picture taken there. I just wanted to photograph the Portara itself, stained with sunset. A touristy thing to do, but I got to act like a tourist; I was a tourist.
After the sun set, the colors got better, against the darkening blue; the greenish floodlights came on, and the old stone sparkled, catching the light like pavement that contains ground glass. A pair of lovers wandered, hands tangled, wishing I would go away. I wanted a picture of the whole door, phosphorescent green against the navy sky. I backed down the shallow slope a few steps, then further; finally I had to crouch. As I framed and took my shot, I felt someone watching me.
Feeling self-conscious, I stood up and stepped away, too quickly; as I did the watcher came forward. We connected solidly; I felt a muscular body under clothing. The man caught me by the elbow a moment to steady me, then let me go. "I'm sorry," I said, in English, then corrected myself: "Signomi, signomi."
"I understood you the first time," he said, grinning, in American English.
I stepped back, to see him properly. Then I blushed, though it was too dark to see. It was the guy from the beach. "I saw you the other day, didn't I?" he said. "A little chilly for a swim, you were thinking."
"Right." He smiled. A pause fell; the air sparkled with questions. Should I drop it? Should I pick it up? He seemed to want me to choose. Light reflected from the path lit his face green from below. Part of me didn't want to deal with him; part of me did.
"Do you want me to take a picture of you and the Portara?" he asked. "It is traditional." He grinned.
I paused a moment, but his grin disarmed me. "Why not?" I didn't have to tell people the guidebook said it was cliché. So he took the photo, me green, uncertain, half-smiling, half-frowning: one of the few pictures I have of myself from Greece.
We went to dinner at a fish restaurant. The waiter seated us inside, by a tank of fish: green, restless, turning endlessly in their salt water. The waiter thought we were Greek; I took it as a compliment. "Do you want to do this family style?" I asked my companion as the waiter withdrew. "Sharing things? -- I don't even know your name."
"Denys." He extended his hand, formally, smiling. I shook it.
"Arianna."
The waiter led us to the refrigerator to pick our fish: red snapper, iridescent pink on its flanks. I ordered horta, wild greens; Denys got French fries. I teased him about the greasiness, but I ate half of them.
Darkness fell past the glow of the fish tank. I could barely look at him, he was so good-looking, like a prince in a Cretan fresco: snaky hair, lashes black as if mascaraed, built like a dancer. I wondered whether he slept with boys or girls, and whether he wanted to sleep with me.
That was crazy, though. I couldn't think about having sex with him. I was in no place to start anything. Below these thoughts, part of me hummed and whispered to itself.
"Have you had citron?" he asked. I shook my head. "It's made from lime leaves. Do you want to try some?" I nodded. It appeared in a tiny liqueur glass.
I sipped and looked up curiously. "But it barely has any taste."
He smiled. "It's the smell." A hovering hint of green, evanescent as air. I met his eyes, and something wavered between us. Sex.
I retreated.
He thought it was funny when I wanted to split the bill, but he let me pay my share. Out on the cobbled street, a wash of yellow light poured from the restaurant; coals lay pink under ashes on the grill outside the door, where they'd cooked our fish. A pair of turquoise shutters shone green across the narrow lane. "What do you want to do?" he asked. "Do you need to get back?"
My first instinct was to withdraw, go back to my green-blue bedstead, read by the rust-flecked bedside lamp half-falling from the wall. But what harm would it do just to kick around with him? "It's my vacation. I can do what I want," I said, smiling at him, tugging the monofilament of sex between us. His face responded. He has to be straight, I thought.
"I have a couple bottles of wine back at my place," he said. "Local stuff, but good, not what you get in the stores. Then we could go -- I know where we could go. I'll show you. It's a surprise. If you don't like it we can go someplace else."
He drove toward Agios Prokopios, to a low bungalow behind a manicured box hedge, with a view of the shore. I waited in the car. I could see through the shutters fixtures in brass and oak, understated, not the usual exuberant Greek tackiness. I guessed that his room was twice as expensive as mine. He came out swinging the bottles in a cloth bag, filling the car with his personality; the impression floated away.
We backtracked and took the airport fork. He turned down a dirt road, gravel crunching under the tires. A moped buzzed past us; a slow-moving tractor, its single working headlight a Cyclops' eye, let us pass. To either side, past tall windbreaks of reeds, lay cattle pastures, wafting the smell of dung.
From the road he pulled into a recently graveled lot, where a low, brown adobe building sat. Having gone to a lot of archaeological sites, I recognized a ticket taker's kiosk. Denys killed the engine. "It's a temple of Dionysos, or so they think," he said. We climbed out.
A placard beyond the gates said it was the Sanctuary at Irea. A heavy chain and padlock fastened the gates. Looking through the chain-link fence, Denys said, "I take a proprietary interest in this site. I know the restoration team." He put his hands out cupped, offering me a leg up to climb the fence.
I studied his face. "As long as we're quiet no one will notice," he said. "You can't see the car from the road. -- We won't hurt anything, any more than any tourist would, less if anything. And I've paid my share of site fees."
I took off my clogs, tossed them over the fence, and put my bare foot in his hand. His palm to the palm of my foot, an electric current.
The site was simple but had a feeling of completion because its foundation was whole. The bases and a few feet of shaft from five marble columns stood around the marble floor. The white stone shone dimly, lapped and hazed in humid brown-purple night. Crickets creaked; the reeds whispered; the lights of houses twinkled in the wind.
Denys uncorked the wine and poured a libation: "To our host." Then he sat back against a column, took a swig, passed the bottle. I drank a mouthful: fruity red, warm, sweet, like how I'd imagined wine as a kid. "Give me your foot again."
I eyed him, then leaned back on my elbows and lifted my foot. "You're a dancer," he said, rubbing my instep.
"I was."
"Not anymore?" I shook my head. He kneaded the base of my heel. "What now?"
I smiled, a little painfully. Besides the question, he was knuckling into my fascia. "That's what I'm trying to figure out. What about you?"
"I'd like to start a winery. My family used to make wine. You might say I have wine in my blood." I felt more than saw him smile. "But I need more experience, and I need capital."
He spoke lightly, as if capital was something you could find by the side of the road, like an abandoned couch. I recalled his bungalow. A rich boy, then. A turnoff. I'd known a couple, smooth on the surface till you hit the gravelly under layer; if you didn't want them for their money they understood less than if you did. "What have you done up to now?" I asked.
Again the smile, a little deeper, warning me. He traded feet. "This and that. I ran a coffee shop in Portland." A play-toy he'd dropped when he got bored. But I didn't know that for sure.
"Portland, Oregon?" He nodded. Feeling a little nauseated, I almost didn't tell him, but then I did: "I live in Seattle."
"Do you?" The balls of his thumbs went further and further into my foot, but I trusted them, more than I trusted his voice. Only the threads of touch and sound connected us; I could barely see him in the dense twilight. A little against my will, my feet and I were relaxing into a sensuality in which he seemed almost too comfortable. "So what are you going to do?" he asked.
"In high school, I was good at math and science." Something in his silence stung me, as if this didn't impress him. "Quite good. I won a Westinghouse award."
"Mmm." His tone came as humorous.
I felt a tendril of resentment rise; he'd made me boast, then he'd teased me. "My parents are both college professors, my dad in physics. I had to rebel against academia. Now I've been a professional dancer for a few years, and I've had decent roles, but I'm never going to be a principal in a first-rate company. So why not go back to what I'm best at? But how, is the question. And where."
A pause. Then he said, "Come to California with me. You can go to Stanford, and I'll apprentice in the Napa Valley." He lifted my leg and licked the sole of my foot from heel to ball.
I snatched my foot back. "You asshole. Don't make fun of me." Besides laughing at my academic pretensions, which was rude since I'd only told him since he'd asked, it was nasty to tease me with the image of commitment. He didn't know about Thad, but his remark was clueless, made to any single woman.
He frowned. "Don't be mad. If I'm laughing at you, I'm laughing at myself too." I returned his frown. What did that mean? He tried to read my eyes in the near-darkness, to see how angry I was. "I didn't mean to laugh at you." Leaning over, he braced his palms on the marble flagstones and kissed me.
I responded. He continued, kissing muscularly, as if for competition; I drew back, kissed him lightly. Every time he lunged, I withdrew.
Then, still a bit angry, I straddled him, mock-pinning his wrists to the column. He slipped away and caught my hands. "You are a dancer, aren't you?" he said.
"I was."
"You've got rhythm." He set me away from him. "Have some more wine."
I crossed my arms, feeling my aroused nipples against my thumbs. He found and tipped back the bottle; I watched his Adam's apple rise and fall. He wiped his mouth and handed me the bottle.
"You want to get me drunk and take advantage of me," I said, miffed my advance had been rebuffed.
He shook his head. "I want to get you drunk and see who I'm talking to."
"I should go home and go to sleep."
His gaze challenged me. "All right," he said.
He walked me to my room, up steep Venetian streets. The cats along the way greeted him gravely; he let them smell his fingers, scratched behind their ears. The wind whispered, rattled shutters, shook the black fingers of the fig tree across the floodlit tower, framed in a Gothic arch.
We stood at the bottom of my steps, opaque white marble in the neutral-colored night. It amazed me how much the Naxians make from marble. Even the dry-stone walls partitioning the fields were marble. "You're not staying on the island long, are you?" he asked.
"Another week, I think. Then back to Athens, and home." Originally I'd planned to visit other islands, but after Thad's disappearance I'd felt like staying.
"I'd like to see you tomorrow."
A long pause. Under the mockery in him I felt an edge of wistfulness. "All right."
In the morning, I went back to the beach. I sat down facing the sea on a set of concrete steps over the dunes, built for a closed restaurant; their electric blue had faded to periwinkle. The concrete was cold, not yet dry from a soaking; the wind was up, blowing grit in my face. Opaque waves, the color of the overcast sky, threw long shocks of foam. I hunched for protection against the wind and stared at my hands folded before me, the wrinkles of my palms, the narrow band of my grandmother's ring.
My self-protective side said I shouldn't spend time with Denys if it meant sleeping with him. And it would. Thad and I had only broken up a week ago; I couldn't afford any more emotional upheavals. Though the break with Thad didn't feel new.
When I'd first met Thad, he'd played college baseball, an outfielder: he'd been so lovely stretched for the ball, the muscles of his arm taut, his forearms' hairs gold filaments. I loved the intellect of that body, the way he married the space around him. No one in my family saw that; they all lived in their heads. He was kind in those days, straightforward, above the petty infighting of math geeks. And straight, unlike most of the dancers.
But even at the beginning, there was a separation, between the jock and the dancer; different tastes, different friends. Then when Thad had faced the choice I faced now, of leaving the physical life, he'd become a salesman. He did well on the strength of willpower and good looks. But I couldn't respect sales; it went too far against my prejudices.
Why did a smart girl like me date a stupid boy like him? My brother had asked me that. I didn't think Thad should be dismissed as stupid, but it was true I was smarter than he was. Maybe I dated him because it was easier than dating guys of my own intellectual caliber; I could be in control. But people don't just do things out of fear. I was drawn to Thad by beauty. Watching his face, his body, I paid obeisance to beauty as I did in dancing. But his beauty wasn't enough to make me patient with the ways he didn't meet me.
If he'd talked to me before he left, though, I would have tried to make him stay. I might have succeeded; I was better with words. So he'd done without words.
In the whipping wind, I cried, though it seemed redundant. After a bit, the sky started raining on me, as if in imitation; it made me smile, a little unwillingly. I breathed out evenly and looked toward the sea, at the foam trails on the sand, the steel-grey waves tossing to shavings, the horizon a fuzzy band of white.
These last few weeks, as parts of my life calved off, I'd tried to float forward till I found things to take their place. But doing that took time; I couldn't jump on Denys like a life buoy just because he'd happened to appear.
Back in my room, I just had time to wash and change before I went to meet Denys. It would have been easier to stand him up, but that would have been too rude. We could have lunch, and I could explain myself, and we'd be quits. If it was awkward, I could go to another island, somewhere off the itinerary I'd planned with Thad.
I aimed for the Italian place at the end of the harbor. He'd said it had good coffee. The rain had ended, the wind died down; milky clouds filled the sky. Filtered sunlight sheened the slick of water on the harbor walkway. I looked across at the rectangle of the Portara, opaque grey against the diffusely lit sky. The day said, Quiet, quiet.
He was there before me, sitting outside; he smiled briefly as I waded past the wood-veneered chairs and tables. His skin looked sallow, washed out in the white light; circles hung under his eyes like bruises.
We each ordered a cappuccino. The erotic tension between us seemed to have drained away. He smiled at me glancingly. I didn't feel equal to starting the conversation.
"I have to tell you the truth," he said.
It came as a punch to the stomach, though I'd been planning to brush him off. "Likewise."
"I suppose it's good I feel this sense of hurry, because you're going to leave. It makes me more honest."
I looked into my brown-stained milk foam. "I can't really speak to that, can I? Since I don't know what you're going to say." I looked up. "Honesty is good, isn't it?"
His eyes asked me to shut up and let him talk. "I came here with a guy. A lover. He's gone now." He flicked his long eyelashes. "I'm careful and everything. But I'm not just some het boy."
"But -- " Last night, he hadn't been pretending. But why continue this discussion? Wasn't I brushing him off? Why make him drag out personal information I'd never need to know?
Why couldn't this just be a fling? "Why do you need to tell me anything?" I asked.
"I've gotten in trouble before with women -- "
"This could just be simple. I don't know your last name. Why do I need to know your sexual history? That's why we have latex."
He stared at me, frowning, not trusting me. "I just got done breaking up with someone," I said. "I could do this for play, but I don't want to talk about permanence. You scared me last night."
He began, almost indistinguishably, to smile. "You mean you just want to have an affair?"
That wasn't what I'd started out to say, but -- "Why not? Pretend I'm a boy."
He smiled rather more broadly. "I don't think I can." His look and his tone together made me blush.
---
A week later, I sat naked, my feet in the surf's edge, almost too cold but unwilling to get up and dress. The gulls in the air dove crying and playing tag.
As if I could do anything just as an affair. As if the tentacles inside you don't reach out and grab hold in every orgasm you have or behold; as if that rose, hot liquid doesn't change you when it shoots through you.
He could swim in water colder than I cared to, and he was out in the restless grey ocean, black hair slopped around his shoulders.
Earlier in the week he'd taken me to his friends' vineyard, brick-red earth from which sprang row on row of grapevines, a few with grapes still unharvested, waiting for the pinch of frost. Lifting a double-handful of fruit, deep blue-black, Denys rubbed away the dusty bloom on one grape then another to present a shining cheek, and gave them to me: sweet as jelly, full of juice and seeds. He and his friends and I drank wine together, speaking first English then Greek, and as they moved into the language I didn't know he translated for me, for a while; at last all I understood was their laughter. I smiled and let my attention drift off the balcony to the night sky, full of stars as the grapes were of seeds. The stars stared back at me, not reassuring. I was no longer a tourist.
Over the week Denys and I had told each other more about ourselves. I'd explained about Thad. He'd told me that for years in Portland he'd sold mushrooms, pot, Ecstasy; he was just getting out of that. Too many of his friends had gone to jail, but quitting meant changing his way of life.
"So getting a girlfriend is another way of becoming respectable," I'd said a little bit ago, digging in Kastraki's sand with a stick.
He raised his eyebrows. "It's not a question of respectability. With the drugs, it's about being legal. And I've always liked girls."
I dug further with my stick, exposing the wetter, darker, less friable layer of sand under the free-shifting surface. "Do you really want to be with a girl? Or do you just want that to be your face to the world?"
"It's not some abstract girl. It's you." He reached out, stroked my cheek upward with his finger: a gesture like taking a bird to perch.
I met his eyes. "Do you want to give up boys?"
He took my hands gently, drew me closer. "Do I have to?"
I stared at him; I didn't answer. How could I consider that? He shrugged. "I'm going for a swim."
Now the sea spread before me in colors of metal, silver, pewter, aluminum, and I saw his head and could tell he was watching me. I stood and walked slowly into the cold water. As I began to swim, it seemed to warm up. I sculled out, breast-stroking, and passed him.
I flipped on my back and floated. Letting go of thought, I surrendered like an infant to the ocean, to the peace of emptiness.
Along the horizon a margin of sunlight shone, as if you could pick up the lid of clouds and find a sphere of gleaming white: a shining world bigger than ours, which sent light to us. I saw from above my struggle to be open to new things. Sometimes a wave bore me up; I glimpsed the infinite breadth of silver ocean, how small and easily dropped my limitations were. But no mind could encompass that vision all the time. Afterward, I had to cope with the rocks where I fell, the details, everyday life. Both the silver breadth and the rocks were true, part of the whole.
The water was too cold to stay in long. I swam back, stepped out, sitting on the woven straw mat dried my hair. Denys got out too. "Are you mad at me?" he asked.
I shook my head. Peering out from under the towel, I said, "Let's leave it for now, okay?"
He walked toward me on his knees and engulfed me, towel and all, lay on top of me holding tightly. I spread my palm and fingers against the bony center of his chest and felt his heart thumping. "You catch the plane in the morning," he said. I nodded. "I'll be back in Portland in a few weeks. Can I call you?"
The water from his body was beginning to soak through the towel. I reached outside the towel and wrapped my arm around his shoulders. "Yes."
He sat up and peeled off the towel, and the bright white light of the sun covered us.