When we got to Aegina, Anna gave him the once over. She says she finds him sort of boring, but she respects my choice. And now we’re sitting on the bed making plans.
“I’ll let you borrow my blue eye shadow,” she says. “You’re going to have to dress really carefully if you want to beguile him.”
It always surprises me when Anna talks about clothes or makeup or uses words like “beguile.” I’m still stuck on my old impression of her, totally sexless, still a child. I have to keep reminding myself of how irresistible she is in her khaki shorts and blue eye shadow.
“And stop biting your nails!” she shouts.
Anna’s nails are painted with clear polish. Her hair smells heavenly. She’s wearing a bracelet with green stones and half-moon earrings.
“Just show me what I have to do.”
Anna laughs. She paints a layer of polish on my nonexistent nails. Then she gets her hairbrush from the other room and does my hair, parting it in the middle. Finally, she lends me a pair of earrings and her new denim skirt. No more white face powder, no more dark lipstick. We’re girls again.
“Perfect,” she says.
“What about my glasses?”
“Your glasses are the most beguiling thing about you, Maria!”
She grabs my shoulders, turns me toward the full-length mirror on the closet door. I see her reflection first: that angelic face, her dimple, her eyes, two deep pools. For a second I imagine I’m her. But Anna shakes me back to reality: I’m completely colorless, my eyes and hair are the color of a smushed turd — who was I to make fun of Angeliki? And why does Anna have to be so beautiful? Why couldn’t there be a communist God?
“Say something, merde! Talk to him!”
Angelos comes up to us on his motorbike, rests one high-top on the sidewalk and revs the engine for no reason.
“You girls having fun?” he asks.
“Sure,” I say.
I feel like I might faint. Ever since I discovered those strange reactions my body has I’m shy around boys, I’m afraid they might somehow guess what I do in the bathroom. With Angelos it’s the worst.
Anna comes to my rescue. “Want to give us a ride home?” she says.
She gives me one of her famous pinches so that I’ll get on first and be the one to hug him around the waist. She hops up behind me, and it’s the most wonderful moment of the whole summer: Anna protecting me, Angelos driving me, guiding my way. I dream that we’re flying, that I’m weightless, that I’ve shed all thoughts, even my vagina. We’re bodiless. Angels crossing the sky.
When we pull up in front of the house, Angelos kills the engine and I plummet back to earth. I get off on the wrong side and my leg brushes up against the red-hot exhaust pipe. I refuse to scream, because Angelos is watching. I just bite my lips. There’s a perfectly round red mark on my skin. Angelos’s imprint, I think. Even the pain makes my love grow.
They put burn cream on my leg and wrap it up. I’m an invalid and everyone pampers me. They bring me a sketch pad. Anna reads me some incomprehensible passages from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes: an ancient sign which. . in the remote days of my earliest childhood. . afflicted me with a compulsion to speak which leads me to say “I love you” in one port of call after another, until some other receives this phrase and gives it back to me. Angelos buys me the latest issue of Mickey Mouse. Martha and Fotini make me chocolate mousse out of a box, then sit at the foot of my bed and chatter about this and that. I like to have them all buzzing around me. They’re my new family. We’ll move to Paris together, Anna and I will study psychology and art, Angelos can do a masters in geology. Martha and Fotini will cook for us.
Maybe God is a communist after all.
“Can I come in?”
Angelos pokes his head in the door.
“Of course,” I say.
He sits on the floor, directly opposite my bed. We start in on one of those philosophical conversations that never go anywhere. Education, people, death, that sort of thing.
“Are you thinking of doing a masters?” I ask.
“It depends. There’s this girl here. .” he says, smiling.
“Do I know her?”
“What do you think?” he crawls on his knees over to the bed, rests his chin on my pillow. “What I’m wondering is if she, you know. .”
“You could ask,” I say, and swallow hard.
“So I’m asking. What do you think?”
“I think she does. I’m sure she does.”
Angelos hugs me tightly, but doesn’t kiss me yet. He’s shy, bright red, and my heart is about to burst.
“So she told you?” he asks, sighing into my hair.
“What?”
“Anna told you she likes me?”
My temperature spikes. Aunt Amalia says I should have dressed more warmly. Kyria Pavlina thinks it’s psychological, the shock of my accident. I’ve found my explanation in the book by Barthes: Sometimes, hysterically, my own body produces the incident: an evening I was looking forward to with delight, a heartfelt declaration whose effect, I felt, would be highly beneficial — these I obstruct by a stomach ache, an attack of grippe: all the possible substitutes of hysterical aphonia. That’s the name for what I’ve got: hysterical aphonia.
Martha and Fotini bring me romance novels from the kiosk, which are always written by some Rachel or Betty or Nerina and have dramatic titles: The Misunderstanding, or The Price of Love, or Fleeting Time. They read them in a single day, bawling their eyes out, then have to wait until the next one is released the following Thursday. It’s the picture on the cover that interests me: a woman, almost always blond, gazing over her shoulder, hand on her heart, at the man walking up to her from behind, a glass of champagne in each hand. Or the woman is walking off, suitcase in hand, and the man is running after her, his tie loosened and flapping in the breeze. Or they’re dancing in the moonlight. Anna is nowhere to be found. I picture her with her hand on her heart, or packing a suitcase for a vacation with Angelos, or the two of them dancing in the moonlight. Barthes writes, as if he knew: Countless episodes in which I fall in love with someone loved by my best friend: every rival has first been a master, a guide, a barker, a mediator.
Aunt Amalia puts it more simply: “Your friend is a spoiled brat,” she says as she puts curlers in her hair.
Spoiled is right.
“She can’t just stay out until all hours without ever telling me where she’s going or where she’s been. What am I supposed to say to her parents?” Aunt Amalia can’t comprehend that there are parents in the world like Antigone and Stamatis, who you can call by their first name, or smoke in front of, or go to demonstrations with.
I roll over and pretend I’m asleep. Whereas actually I’m picking at the stuccoed wall, scratching into it with my nails. I, too, need to leave my mark somewhere.
A gentle breeze picks up, stirring the bougainvillea outside the window. Its shadow falls on the sheet, shaping human figures that kiss and part, kiss and part. Anna undresses in the dark and crawls into bed next to me. She wraps herself around me and starts to cry. Her tears trickle down my back, tickling me. With her arms around my waist it’s as if the two of us are speeding along on a motionless motorcycle. As if we’re headed at breakneck speed toward some interior spot, deep inside ourselves. Barthes writes, Jealousy is an equation involving three permutable (indeterminate) terms: one is always jealous of two persons at once: I am jealous of the one I love and of the one who loves the one I love. The odiosamato (as the Italians call the “rival”) is also loved by me: he interests me, intrigues me, appeals to me.