“Don’t we all?” Kosmo Zablov lamented, placing his fingers over the mouthpiece.
The phone stopped ringing and a bored voice came on the line. “Yes, hello, front desk?” Zablov inquired. “We have a dead mouse up here.”
A LEGACY OR A RESIDUE
The rosy sun skimmed the water, as if dipping its toe to test the temperature. The simple beauty of the sky made Lily smile. It was one of the few uncomplicated things in her life right then. The sun, the water, and Etor, the hotel gigolo, who sat beside her imparting his particular brand of wisdom.
“A woman should never travel alone,” Etor chided. “Especially one of childbearing age.”
Lily chuckled at how he could sound like a prim schoolmaster, all the while sporting a most fashionable pair of chartreuse swimming trunks that left little to the imagination. She tossed her head back, enjoying the tickle of a lone droplet of sweat that rushed down from her neck and into her cleavage.
“I’m not alone,” she teased. “I have you.”
Etor had taken to joining Lily around sunset, sitting cross-legged on the rocks, as they watched jellyfish bob on the swelling surface of the Pélagos Sea. His lined face was still handsome, but Lily figured he was only a couple of years shy of retirement, as men half his age courted the attention of the same vacationing countesses who used to buy Etor’s supper and handmade Italian shoes. The ladies were only a decade or so older than the bronzed Cretan now, and stared with growing resentment at the silvery roots of his auburn hair.
“You need a man,” Etor asserted. “A Greek man. The Americans can’t handle you.”
Lily had had a man. Richard. Of the Philadelphia Putnams, not the Boston Putnams, as he’d been quick to point out.
Aquamarine eyes, a thick, ungovernable mane of honey and rust hair, and a mother who hummed “Tangerine” as she sneered at Lily through her gin and tonics. Pooh was her name, of all things. Pooh, short for Abigail. Pooh, as in Oh, Pooh. No, Pooh! And Pooh, you didn’t! Pooh, who’d talked of Richard’s old girlfriends—girls who hadn’t seemed quite right to her in their time—with a breathy nostalgia usually reserved for the one that got away. And Pooh, who had bullied her son into law school and dangled that victory in Lily’s face like a diamond watch. Never mind that Richard would make a terrible lawyer, at least as Lily saw it. Even if he did continue to breeze through his studies with the same ease that he claimed to absorb Byron.
Poor Richard. He has the soul of an artist, his friends would say. Although not the talent, Lily had wanted to add on more than one occasion after their relationship had begun its slow flush down the pink porcelain toilet of his mother’s new powder room.
Poor Richard, he’s too much of a gentleman to give that Greek girl the heave-ho now that it’s come this far. No one actually said it—that Lily knew of—but the sentiment was there. It was the uninvited guest at every party she and Richard attended together, every family dinner; unrelenting in every look, polite question, and feigned interest in what Lily was reading. Even that was subject to censure in the most well-bred possible way, naturally. It was, to the people in Richard’s circle, unseemly for a woman to enjoy Bellow, Hemmingway, O’Connor, or Nabokov, God forbid.
But it wasn’t Richard’s friends who really got to Lily in the end. It was the barely concealed look of relief on Richard’s face the night she “released him from their engagement” that Lily found so damned infuriating. His crafty, humiliating way of manipulating her into doing his mother’s will.
Spineless bastard.
“Lilia, Lilia, Lilia,” Etor yawned, splashing his sun-torched chest with palmsful of chilly salt water.
Lily patted Etor’s shoulder and ran her fingers through her waist-length hair. The thick, black threads tangled around her knuckles, as day upon day of sunbathing was making her ends brittle.
“Would you mind?” she asked, removing a tall vial of olive oil from her beach-bag. Etor sprinkled the oil over her hair, massaging it into her dry ends.
“Of course Kástro is no place to find a husband,” Etor reminded her. “Only adulterers and seducers come here.”
Kástro, or Old Town Monemvasia, as it was known to tourists—was notorious for offering what the flashier getaways never could—secrecy. Lily had nothing to hide on this—her last, she swore to herself—trip to the tiny peninsula, but she had plenty to hide from. And it wasn’t just a broken engagement; one that came with the added embarrassment of having to admit once again that she was a screw-up when it came to matters of the heart. No, Lily realized, the heart was too specific a category. Most people back home just thought she was a screw-up. Period.
It was why she’d grown to hate Boston. And the whole Eastern seaboard, except for New York. Because despite how hard she’d tried to fit in—at Dana Hall, at the goddamned Junior League—Lily just couldn’t stand the stuck-up, intellectual pomposity of the men, or the prim, icy-cool affectations of girls who moved in cliques so armored you needed barbed wire cutters just to say hello. The same girls who feigned propriety with the right kind of boy from seven to nine p.m., then slipped a cute waiter a little note about where to meet for some real fun. Lily knew all too well that she wasn’t the only girl at Dana Hall who’d had more than the prescribed three lovers you could take and still remain vaguely respectable. The snooty pricks who’d wooed her onto their plaid couches knew that, too, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she wasn’t one of them.
She’d thought Richard was different.
And he was, at first. Late night coffees, introducing her to poets she pretended not to know, finding her family funny and eccentric instead of brash. Richard was the only non-Greek guy who’d ever had the guts to take Lily home; she had to give him that. But putting up with the long silences, the droll weekends at his parent’s “beach” house—a place set on the frigid, un-swimmable waters of Northeast Harbor, Maine—had proved to be too much. For both of them.
Her father told her not to think much about Richard of the Philadelphia Putnams. He was destined to spend his life in old money oblivion, breathing rarified air and eating bland food.
Not like her, Daddy said. Lily was the daughter of a Hellene. One who came to America at fifteen—alone—and made his own way. Theron Tassos had worked the docks, then the avenues and the markets, among other things, while the fathers of boys like Richard sipped their brandies and talked of the world’s stage as if they were on it as anything more than a ceremonial ribbon.
Malakas, her father called them. Jerk-offs.
They may have been just that, but it didn’t change the fact that Lily’s father thought too highly of her. If Lily was the mighty Hellene in Theron Tassos’ fantasies, she would’ve never tried to gain entry into Richard’s world in the first place—pining for their stamp of approval like a hungry beagle. She would have never put up with the not-so-subtle inquiries, Are you going to wear that to Mother’s? The dry, fervent kisses followed by the panted pleas to go down. That was something the Betsys and Lindys of Richard’s world didn’t do. Not well, anyway.
“Go to Greece,” her father had urged. “A few weeks on the Peloponnese will remind you of who you are.”
Only it hadn’t. It didn’t. It wouldn’t.