All that swept her off her feet was her inflated opinion of herself.
“What’s wrong?” the waiter asks.
A sudden flash of understanding: Anna is putting my friendship to yet another test, just like when she ruined my drawing, or wanted to swap Raoul for Michel, or stole Angelos. She’s following me, measuring the extent of my devotion. She’ll appear again as soon as she finds my display of concern sufficiently moving. Or if I stop looking for her altogether.
I leave her backpack in the tent, gathering only my things. I write her a note: Anna, you’ve been using me my whole life. You may be more beautiful, more intelligent, more committed to your ideas (though that much I doubt), but I’m tired of running after you. I want you to accept me, the same way you accept your workers at the factory. You work hard to make them feel proud of themselves. Did you ever think about my pride? Maria.
I tear the note up. There are no words to express my pride.
I thought you were something more than my friend: you were the sister I never had. Your behavior is making me re-evaluate my whole life, my priorities, my entire emotional world. You just left me there and went off. I could have fallen from a cliff. Were you always so selfish, or are you improving with age?
That’s the kind of letter Anna has been writing to me this fall. Every two weeks or so I get an envelope with a French stamp and know exactly what’s waiting for me: a tirade. She doesn’t call, and doesn’t pick up when I call. It’s our era of vicious correspondence. I have no choice but to write back: Anna, be serious. When I said I didn’t like the way you are, I meant that I didn’t like the way you act toward me. You pressure me. You want to have your own way. You can call that the utopia of the possible, if you want, but it’s the utopia of your possible. You need to leave a little room for mine, too.
She responds with something irrelevant: You know how the work of philosophers falls into different periods? I like early Nietzsche, but not late Nietzsche. Well, I have fond memories of Maria One, but not of Maria Two. I don’t know what to say to that. I’m starting to think I have issues with Anna One and Anna Two.
I’ve forgotten what her voice sounds like. Sometimes I imagine her leaping out of bed with that tremendous energy of hers, rushing downstairs, running over to the café across the street and writing me a letter. Bitter, confused, with a pile of crumpled sheets of paper on the table before her — but those are just my fantasies. I’m sure she’s fine. She’ll have found a new group of friends, the hard-core kind she wants now, and they’ll all eat together in their collective and discuss the utopia of the possible in a smoky, high-ceilinged room. I’m sure they’re all overflowing with revolutionary fervor, and have nothing but disdain for anyone who would buy a new pair of pants without absolutely needing them.
“Don’t waste your time on her,” Kayo says. His voice sounds strange, coming to me with a time delay. I have to wait until he finishes each sentence before I respond, otherwise neither one of us can hear what the other is saying. If Anna were to hear his stories from the fashion world, she’d throw containers of yogurt at him the way they do at politicians. But he’s Kayo, my Kayo. It’s impossible for me to judge him. Of course I preferred how he was when we used to go to Orgapolis meetings together, but you can’t have your friends cut and sewn to order. That’s something Anna has never understood.
“I miss you,” I say, and hear my own voice on the line, doubled, carrying a double despair.
“I miss you too,” he answers. In New York it’s morning, Kayo is just waking up, and I really have no idea who’s sleeping at his side.
Papandreou is dovetailing me again: he too has a secret correspondence, with Turgut Özal, prime minister of Turkey, over Cyprus. They meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and come up with an impressive agreement, largely because they avoid talking about the Cyprus problem. Anna and I meet at my place on Stournari, when she comes to Athens for New Year’s. There’s been nothing diplomatic about our own correspondence these past few months. So now we sit facing one another, on opposite sides of the coffee table. Anna is wearing jeans and sneakers, her eternal ball-point pen in her hair. I made sure to dress in my painting clothes, a gray long-sleeved t-shirt full of holes and covered in dried paint that I’m hoping she’ll like. I show her the catalogue from a group show I was in. She doesn’t throw it in my face. She just says, “So that’s what you’ve been up to.” We talk about how expensive things have gotten in Paris, whether we liked Alki Zei’s new novel, Achilles’ Fiancée, and then on an impulse I turn to her and ask, “Ve-ha? Ve-sa?”
“Ve-ha-sa,” Anna says. That much we can agree on. We’re twenty-three, too old for unmixed emotions.
Just like Papandreou and Özal, we too avoid discussing our equivalent of the Cyprus problem. We admit that our friendship is in crisis, but what can we do, these things happen. We open a bottle of wine she brought from Paris and clink glasses without meeting one another’s eye. The wine is terrible, practically vinegar, but neither of us says a thing.
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember me?” She’s my age, short, plump, with green eye shadow and gold earrings shaped like daisies. She’s carrying a plastic bag full of strawberries and looks like a classic working girl headed home at the end of the day.
“I do remember you, but from where?”
“I’m Angeliki, we were in grade school together.”
Merde! Angeliki, the smushed turd! She’s had the mole removed from her eyebrow. How on earth was I supposed to recognize her?
“I’m exhausted, it’s been a long day at work,” she says, rubbing one ankle against the other. She’s dying to tell me about how far she’s climbed up the social ladder. She works at 24 Hours, a newspaper owned by financier George Koskotas, who was recently charged with sending bribes to members of Papandreou’s administration, hidden in boxes of Pampers. Angeliki just got engaged to a co-worker at the paper, too. If Anna were here now she would tell Angeliki off to her face, letting rip about how deep in PASOK filth she is, about the bourgeois institution of marriage, about all the diapers that’ll soon be coming her way.
“What about you?” she asks.
I tell her I’ll be graduating from the School of Fine Arts this year.
“That makes sense. .” She looks me up and down. When I’m working, I wear my painting clothes out in the street. I must look like a bum with my shirt full of holes and paint on my hands. She’s dressed for office work, in a suit and pumps.
“Do you still see Anna?” she asks.
Tough question. We talk on the phone every so often. We keep one another up to date about what’s happening in our lives as if giving interviews to a reporter — always holding back, never telling the whole truth. She tells me about her activist friends in Paris, about the group Ne pas plier and a writer named Natacha Michel who writes Maoist novels. I describe the preparations for the exhibit that the art school’s graduating class puts on each year.
“Anna lives in Paris,” I answer.
“So you’ve finally got some peace and quiet,” Angeliki says, flaring her nostrils. She’s one of those people who flare their nostrils instead of laughing.
“What do you mean?”
“She’s not dragging you around by the nose anymore.”
Any minute now she’ll stick out her tongue and start chasing me around the square, shouting “teapot, teapot, teapot.”