More Love

We lost a day on the flight and forgot it was St. Valentine’s and when we ditched our stuff and ran to catch the last light on the Acropolis, the first thing I saw other than the Parthenon was the red heart-shaped balloon. It flew solo over the city, trailing a ribbon just released, and I got weirdly dizzy, like it was me rising up forever from the ever-shrinking earth. But Matty was saying what she knew about those famous columns glowing butter-yellow through the restoration scaffolds, and words like doric and ionic brought me back to where I was. I felt suddenly wonderful. This is why we’d come, the permanence, the two of us planted firmly on super-ancient ground.

It didn’t matter to us that we’d forgotten the day. The three Valentine’s we’d spent together had been pretty much disregarded except for an afterthought-like “Happy Valentine’s” and some sex we’d have had anyway. But the day was a problem in that we were starving after twenty hours of travel and the restaurants were all booked up. We found ourselves wandering through a maze of tavernas stuffed with couples at white tablecloths and folk singers playing those little almost-guitars. Hunger met fatigue met being in an alien place and we were basically hallucinating by the time we found a table at a corner spot that didn’t appear to be marking Valentine’s at all. The waiter seated us outside, whisked some wax paper over the table and slapped down a small football of bread. Matty tried her Greek but he answered in English and brought us some giant beans and cuttlefish and a jug of diluted wine. I said, “Happy Valentine’s baby,” and Matty rolled her eyes.

The food tasted even better because it was so cheap. After the flights and the punishing exchange rate, we didn’t have much for the actual being-here. The only way we could afford ten days in Greece was the free apartment Matty got from Dmitrios, the prof who’d supervised her PhD. I can’t say I liked this guy Dmitrios, not only because the tenured job he’d acquired from his slim theoretical texts offended my sense of fairness but because he’d made some passes at Matty that would’ve felt like sexual assault to me if I’d made them. But Matty didn’t see it that way, she didn’t really give a shit, and I wasn’t going to be the guy who explains it. She and Dmitrios still emailed and saw each other at conferences, and there was a standing invitation to use his apartment in Athens and even his place on the island of Naxos whenever he was teaching back in Toronto.

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We decided to go for it. I needed time away, time to figure out what was next. My first novel had come out the year before and flopped, nothing so spectacular as a crashing bellyflop, more like someone who falls off a cruise ship in the night. Five concerted years of writing and however many of apprenticeship all just atomized on impact with the market. A handful of reviews, no sales to speak of, and in just a few months I’d gone from a promising young talent to a writer without an audience, a lurking attention-starved loser. Matty liked the book and sweetly hand-sold copies to family and friends, but the verdict that stuck with me was what my publisher said the last time we talked: “It just didn’t connect.” In terms of the next project, how to write my way out, these words were scrambling my brains, like how can I reach you, whoever you are, what do you want that only I can give? Maybe Greece could offer answers, but I also worried about being present for Matty in a fun touristic way. Lately I’d felt myself looking beyond everything in search of something more.

But Matty was her own kind of distant. Her writing had become pretty hard core. From what she’d share about it, the thing she was working on proceeded from the premise that the invention of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent was a diabolical turn in the history of the species, and this thesis had a way of souring all human endeavour, from constructing civilization to just getting out of bed in the morning. On top of that, the app she used to track her period said she was late, approaching very late, and though she always said she didn’t want kids, I already sensed a test beginning to loom. Like when she told me about the app, I could tell I wasn’t meant to share her worry in its fullness. It wasn’t that she wanted me to be excited, that would also be failing, more like she wanted some kind of equipoise wherein I’d want kids with her, especially her, if only our being broke, her family’s history of mental illness, and the whole impending climate thing weren’t at hand. I did my best to navigate all this, accepting the likelihood of failure, while praying for blood the way others pray for rain.

We were on our way back from dinner, graffiti on graffiti in the streets, when Matty said, “Did you notice that couple?”

“Yeah, what was their deal?”

They’d been at the table next to us sitting side by side, not across from each other, and I would’ve thought they were siblings had they not occasionally kissed, both with the same dark clothes, slicked-back shoulder-length hair, and big brown eyes, eyes strangely staring at us. At one point I accidentally looked at the woman. She smiled, I made no response, and the two of them started whispering in each other’s ears, no attempt to hide that they were discussing Matty and me. It was pretty uncomfortable, the tension of a stranger about to address you but with no address, just the tension sustained for the duration of the meal.

“They wanted to fuck us,” Matty said.

“Maybe you, baby.”

“You really hate admitting that you’re hot.”

“I can’t go around thinking I’m hot.”

“You can admit it to me at least.”

“They probably just wanted to make friends with some other English speakers.”

“They were French. And everyone here speaks English. And they didn’t talk to us.”

“Well then.”

“Did you like them?” she asked.

“I barely noticed them.”

Matty fobbed the entrance to the building and we went up a tiny elevator to Dmitrios’s place. It was gorgeous in a way I hadn’t noticed when we dropped our bags, full of books and good chairs in which to read them and with this whole glassed-in back room with a clear view of the Acropolis, the columns lit up like bones in the night.

We went straight to bed. Without the sun it was winter again and we shivered in the sheets, our skin marble hard, goosebumpy, and after a minute or two of rubbing together like fire makers we were having sex. There was always something oceanic about Matty when she was horny, like her sexuality was this vast ring of tide around me, and tonight she pulled me in so deep I felt the painlessness they say drowning is like, just open your mouth. When she was about to come, a picture flashed on my brain of her making love to a woman, and making love to a man, and her absolute insatiability, so much you could never share it all, made me come across her breasts like she liked.

After that we fell asleep in whatever time zone this was, the moon beaming through a perfect gap in the curtain, no clouds between us, just rock to rock. I swear I felt its white weight raise the unshaved hairs on my face, and I looked at Matty’s body wondering if it moved something inside her.

Dmitrios’s books called for ultra-radical environmental action, and if you set aside his biweekly intercontinental flights, he did walk the walk insofar as the Athens apartment was solar powered. I guess this is easy enough in a city where the sun shines like 350 days a year as it did when I woke up punch drunk with jet lag. It turned out to be grossly early, so while Matty slept, I tried taking a shower, but the solar panels needed all day to heat up and the water hit me like an overturned bucket of Gatorade. I pictured hot-blooded Dmitrios taking cold showers every morning, rinsing off his nightly fever dream of eco-violence.

Cold as hell, I made coffee and went to the glassed-in room and looked at the Acropolis. Even from here I could see the unlimited supply of tourists trudging up the stairs to the gateway. They seemed to be entering at the rate that people die in the world, and I suddenly saw them as the endless stream of dead entering the afterlife, an image I thought might be worth recording before wondering if I’d stolen it from another writer. I couldn’t remember who but it didn’t seem like my own, really nothing did these days.

Around noon Matty got up, enormously groggy, and staggered to the bathroom. When she came out digging sleep from her eyes, I looked at her. She shook her head.

First things first we went to the Acropolis. At the foot of the hill we joined the march of tourists up to the ticket booth. The great stones were amber in the sun, and Matty and I took the switchback marble steps hand in hand. At one point some tired old lady sat down and this guy I didn’t know was even there blew a whistle and shouted for her to get up and with a hounded look she kept going. Matty explained how big a problem it is that people steal pieces of the Acropolis. The Greeks have to guard their cultural history with the utmost jealousy while also sharing it out because it’s basically all they’ve got for an economy.

“There are just too many people in the world,” Matty said. “If everyone took their piece, there wouldn’t be anything left.”

In the Parthenon, where the sacred rites transpired, construction workers ran a deafening machine and a huge crane jutted through the roof. According to a plaque, there had been a massive explosion here in 1687 and they were attempting to restore the temple to its post-1687 explosion condition. I told Matty I hoped one day I too could return to my post-1687 condition and either she didn’t hear me or it didn’t land because she just squinted up at the blasted remnants of the frieze.

We let the flow of the crowd push us in an idle loop around the mind-bogglingly old temple and when we came around the rear I saw them, the couple from last night. They were sitting on a rock that offered such a splendid view of the building it was like a rock you had to book in advance. In the hot winter day they were audaciously overdressed in matching navy suits and big celebrity sunglasses, the two of them perched in the mass of nobodies like great dark birds. As soon as I saw them I knew they saw us, and I felt cheap and disappointing in my ill-fitting cords and brown ball cap.

I hoped Matty didn’t notice, but as soon as we got around the corner, she said, “Did you see them?”

“Yep.”

“You’re fascinated, aren’t you. You kept looking over.”

“They were staring at us.”

“It’s okay to be curious. There’s no judgment here.”

I don’t know the specific jargon, but Matty and I were what you could call ex-poly. When we got together three years earlier she made it clear she wanted something open, and I was coming off a long thing so that was fine with me. Given that she’s bisexual in addition to being extremely hot, Matty was unsurprisingly much more successful at this than I was. Not that I did badly, and not that I should’ve been comparing, but I only had pretty average experiences in terms of the number of people per fuck, namely two, and the time-worn male–female dynamic, while Matty did a little bit of everything in every gender combination imaginable. This could easily have been a source of jealousy for me, it wasn’t uncommon for us to run into somebody she’d slept with, but I wasn’t a jealous person, I tried to be modern in all things, and whatever contributed to my vision of her ravenous bottomless appetite made me love her with a fiercer admiration, like I was dating a sharp-toothed lioness.

But eventually we decided to go exclusive. It began on the night I woke up getting punched in the face. Matty had been seeing this woman who fell in love with her in a conventional possessive way that might’ve been good for the sex but was dangerously volatile, Exhibit A being how she snuck into Matty’s apartment one night and found us in bed and just started mashing my face in my sleep. By the time I woke up my nose was already broken and my lower lip was split. Still half asleep in the commotion of Matty’s shouting I had to defend myself and actually punch this woman back, frankly not something I’d ever thought I’d do, punch a woman in the face, until Matty and I subdued her and got her out of the house.

The violence made us a couple. Over the week or two of my recovery, Matty giving my swollen lips these feather-light kisses, our other partners fell away. Was it cowardice? Were we battered into monogamy? It didn’t feel that way. It was more like we’d crossed a threshold others didn’t understand into a more deeply earned togetherness. But maybe some unreformable part of us remained, an inner need for freedom gleaming knife-like in phrases like Matty’s as we made our way down the steps of the Acropolis: “Does it excite you that they want us?”

“It isn’t something I’d do without you.”

“And you want to do it with them?”

“I’m not even saying I want to do it at all.”

Against our better judgment we took a nap at the apartment and by the time we woke up it was dark and we were hungry for what our bodies thought was lunch. Dmitrios had recommended a restaurant so we copied it into Google Maps and followed the line through the twisting sidewalk-less streets.

I find being in Europe engenders sudden aspirations for huge lifestyle swerves, like maybe I’ll take up smoking, kiss men hello, do cold-water calisthenics. Then I enter what’s meant to be a fashionable place like this restaurant and they’re listening to Moby and the waiter’s T-shirt says Are You Down? and I want to scurry back to the New World with all its deadly sarcastic intolerance. We took a seat by the window and read our menus, the Greek alphabet like English bent out of shape. We could afford a glass of wine apiece and a few small plates.

“I have some thoughts about historical preservation,” Matty said.

“Okay let’s hear it.”

“I mean I suppose the temples were always being repaired. The original Parthenon, 100 percent original, probably stood for like a week before it had to start getting patched up. But those were repairs to functional structures, actual temples for real beliefs, like repairing the roof of your house.”

I took her hand across the table. She was so beautiful, my girl. She made everything sound true in an essayistic way.

“People lavished care on their temples in service of the gods they worshipped. Now we patch them up out of our need to make them last forever. Where does this need come from? We worship permanence itself, not the gods. Looking at the Acropolis, I was thinking we should just let a temple crumble if it’s dedicated to something we don’t believe in anymore. Give the old gods that final dignity at least.”

Right then the door behind her opened and they entered, impossibly, the couple. It was like they’d gotten all the same recommendations, our tastes shaped by the same algorithms. I tried keeping my face firm so Matty wouldn’t notice as the couple took seats at the bar, their legs so entangled it looked like they had six. The waiter brought them a bottle of orange wine in a bucket of ice.

“What is it?” she said.

“Nothing. That’s an interesting idea.”

Matty squinted right through me and turned around and saw them.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Are they following us?”

“Just ignore them.”

I ignored my own advice and glanced over. The woman smiled at me.

“Should we go?” I said.

“It doesn’t bother me. It’s you they’ve got all bothered.”

“Oh shit he’s coming over.”

I stared into Matty’s face until a shadow touched the table, and I looked up to meet the man’s calmly gazing eyes. An obviously expensive cologne engulfed us, and in close range like this, his skin was absolutely clear, radiant in fact, and I had the impression of someone who eats a lot of quality fish.

“Hello,” he said.

I said hello and Matty fake-smiled.

“My wife and I are going to have a drink at Skotádi later and thought perhaps you’d like to join us.”

His French-inflected English was so courteous it was hard to see him as a member of our generation.

“We go there every night,” he added, “so if tonight is not a good night, another time perhaps.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll think about it.”

With an untroubled nod, he said alright and went back to his wife.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“Why should you be sorry?”

“I feel somehow responsible.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.”

Matty put her fork down and said, “The guilt you feel is because you’re attracted to them.”

“I mean, they’re objectively good looking.”

“So you want to go for the drink?”

“I’m not saying that, I’m just not going to get into this thing where I pretend they aren’t good looking.”

“Do you like them?”

“Let’s say for a second I did.”

“Desire is intrinsic. You’re entitled to desire like everybody else.”

“I’m not talking philosophically, I’m talking about tonight. Like if I really wanted to go, would you do it with me, together?”

“With them?” she said, scrunching up her nose.

“That settles it then.”

“That settles it for me, it doesn’t settle it for you.”

After paying the bill we pulled on our coats. We’d have to squeeze past the couple to get out. Matty went first and shot right through like it was nothing, but when I came abreast of them, I couldn’t resist, I looked. I was ready to make some apology with my face, sorry but we aren’t the people you’re looking for, but they were just gazing at each other, immensely together, like we didn’t exist.

The next morning while Matty was in the bathroom I heard her make a sound like “Whoop!” She came out grinning and I knew it had arrived, her period, we wouldn’t have to face it. Borne along the iron flow, she was suddenly light and carefree. We had sex on one of her black sweatshirts laid over the couch in the glassed-in room and doing it from behind we could both look at the Acropolis. It seemed like something the Romans would’ve done when they conquered this place, a gratuitous stacking of pleasure on pleasure, and the orgy I was imagining also emerged from the pre-Christian world. At one point when I was on top she held me off by the shoulders and seemed to look into the recesses of my mind. I worried she could see the pictures there, neurons firing lightning-white behind my eyes, the both of us in braided limbs. But whatever she saw, she said nothing, and afterward I took another cold shower and watched the blood curl down the drain.

It was our last day in Athens before we left for Naxos, and the old gods had given us rain. We went to the archaeological museum, a sort of second-best idea. On the subway Matty started wincing with cramps and got up to make sure she hadn’t bled through the seat of her pants. I suggested we turn around, but she preferred to soldier on, so we ran through the ugly downpour and got in line with the many dripping others who’d settled for the same afternoon.

The museum consisted of rooms upon rooms of massive marble sculptures in varying states of destruction, one of those places where you look at the first ten objects with intense curiosity and then do drive-bys on everything else. I thought I’d like the really classical stuff, I’m pretty basic about art, but I spent the most time with the archaic kouroi, which from a plaque I learned were a whole genre of sculpture depicting nude male youths. The plaque said the sculptures celebrated the bliss of life and I felt that coming off even those with missing heads and smashed-off dicks. I couldn’t help but wonder, when was the last time I’d experienced the bliss of life? Other people, some much smarter, some much stupider, experienced it. The French couple with their shameless eyes, their orange wine, they knew it too, so why couldn’t I be like the beardless kouroi engorged with the bliss of life?

Please transform me, I silently begged. This is Greece after all, where tears become roses and nymphs become doves and even statues start walking around.

Back at the apartment, Matty took a painkiller and got in bed and I lay next to her looking at my phone as the room went dark. This was a brutal period, maybe the worst I’d ever seen her have, like her body was getting rid of something more. She didn’t talk much and had to change her tampon with astonishing regularity. At some point I ran out to the grocery store and got stuff to make a simple iron-rich dinner. We ate it in bed and after that just lazed there listening to the sounds of the street below.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“This must be boring for you. It’s our last night here. You should go out.”

“I don’t like leaving you.”

“There’s nothing you can do for me.”

“I’m okay here.”

I kept looking at my phone until she said, “What would you have done if I were pregnant?”

“I have no idea.”

“Think about it.”

“It’s your body. I would’ve supported whatever decision you made.”

Matty sat up against the headboard. “So if I’d wanted to go out and find an abortion tonight in some weird back alley, you would’ve done that with me?”

“I mean I don’t know about a weird back alley.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I might’ve suggested we wait until we get back and find somewhere clean, but if you absolutely needed to do it tonight, then yes.”

“And if I decided to keep it, if I got all starry eyed looking at the moon over the Acropolis and decided to keep the baby, what then?”

“I’d support whatever decision you make.”

“You aren’t angry? I’m making a totally irrational choice that will ruin your life. You don’t want to strangle me to death?”

“No.”

“I can’t believe you’d go along with it. I can’t believe you’d just give away your freedom like that.”

“Baby, I don’t know what you want me to say right here.”

“I want you to say what you mean. You’re worried that if you say what you want, you’ll lose everything. You can’t say you’d want to strangle me to death. You can’t even say you want to go out tonight.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“Tell me what you want.”

For a moment I contemplated what it would mean to go out and find the couple and the thought came with a hint of power.

“There doesn’t have to be a gap between your fantasies and your reality,” Matty said. “You don’t have to live in a world where you can’t express yourself.”

“Alright,” I said cautiously. “I want to go out.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay.”

I waited maybe thirty seconds before slowly getting up and slowly pulling on my clothes. Matty watched me in silence. When I had my shoes on, the keys in my pocket, I came back to the bedroom, plenty of time for her to change her mind.

“Come here,” she said, throwing out her arms.

I crawled on top of her.

“Enjoy yourself,” she said.

“You’re sure you won’t come with me?”

“I can’t,” she said. “It’s better this way. You’ll see.”

The rain had stopped. People were out. Motorbikes spat past, a sticky sound of rain coming off the wheels. I walked aimlessly for a bit, if it was going to happen, it would happen, but fate wasn’t going to take me there, the gods weren’t looking down from Mount Olympus. If this is what you want, you have to do it for yourself. I took out my phone and googled a few different spellings of the bar and followed the map until I saw the pink neon doubled in a blur on the wet asphalt, Skotádi.

It was a shoebox-shaped wine bar, the walls raw concrete, the long wooden bar like one great varnished slab of tree. The couple wasn’t there, just a few customers at the back and a woman at the bar staring into a bowl of olives. I’d been preparing for their eyes, and without them, I stood there with nowhere to go, no one to be. The bartender looked at me, which was enough to make me sit at the bar, where I ordered a glass thinking maybe they’d show, they always did.

Time passed. I had another glass. There was a turntable and a row of vinyl behind the bar, and the bartender didn’t have much to do besides change the record, and I just sipped wine and watched its black edge wobble as it turned. Maybe the rain had kept them in. Maybe they’d lost interest.

“Waiting for someone?”

I glanced up. The bartender was reading album notes. It was the woman at the end of the bar.

“No,” I said, “not tonight.”

“You speak English?”

“Yeah, Canadian, you?”

“Irish.”

She looked like a girl I’d have seen at a party ten years ago, someone in the background of old Facebook photos, with black tights and a houndstooth skirt and jet-black hair with bangs. This all helped awaken the old unused muscles of flirtation, and as soon as we started talking it was settled, nothing would stop it. She said her name was Rebecca and she was a barista here for an international coffee competition.

“And you?”

“Just visiting.”

“I guess Canada is pretty cold this time of year.”

I usually get defensive when the only things people know about Canada are its unimaginable coldness and remoteness, but they’re not wrong, it’s exactly like that.

“Freezing,” I said.

“What do you do?”

I slid over a few stools closer and said I was a writer.

“Really? What do you write?”

“Novels, stories.”

“Fiction.”

“Fiction.”

She started asking about my work, and when I gave her the well-worn pitch for my book, she responded with a rapt attention I could only attribute to Ireland, a country where I imagined writers still enjoyed some residual esteem.

Rebecca took out her phone and started googling the book and said it sounded really interesting, she was going to order a copy, and in fact she did right then and there. So at least I was moving units, and on that note, we decided to share a bottle, an incredible extravagance, but to hell with it, I wanted more. Every so often the door opened and I looked for the couple but eventually I stopped and just settled into chatting with Rebecca about our boring, completely different lives.

When the bottle was done, she said, “Smoke?”

She put on this surprising ostrich-feather-looking coat and we went outside. It was humid in a cold way, our breath flushing out in clouds. She lit a cigarette. It looked like a long piece of chalk in her bright red lips and when she tapped the ash away I closed my eyes and kissed her. There was an efflorescence of perfume and a taste of ash, and her tongue was very hard in my mouth, a reminder that the tongue is a muscle. We pressed like drunkards against the dirty brick wall and she unzipped the coat and my hands felt for breasts that turned out to be massive, much more than I expected or was used to, and in the shock of all this touch my brain misfired to the days and weeks after that woman attacked me in the night, the fear I felt when I went to bed that anyone could enter the house, anyone could enter the room, that I’d invited them in.

It was what you’d call a beautiful day to sail. At the port of Piraeus the ferry for Naxos sat tiered like a wedding cake and we clanged up the gangway with the other foot passengers while cars bounded into the dark belly of the ship. In a few minutes the ferry drifted from the pier, the turbines pushed us out, and Matty and I held hands on deck, looking over the blue-green water.

We didn’t talk about last night. I’d come back extremely late extremely drunk and taken another cold shower assuming Rebecca’s perfume still clung to me. Then I brushed my teeth for like ten minutes straight and rubbed toothpaste into my gums and slipped into bed, and early the next morning we were on the subway to Piraeus. For the next few hours we’d be neither here nor there and I didn’t want to talk about it now. There would be time on the island.

It was getting colder. People were going inside. Matty’s hair whipped around like crazy.

“I want to find the washroom,” she said. “Maybe get a coffee.”

“Okay.”

She let go of my hand and I gripped the rail, looking at the dark green mound of some other island floating by. We needed to talk, I just had to figure out what to say. Maybe the truth, that I’d made out with some random Irish girl until she pulled away and wiped her lip, seeming to know my mind had gone elsewhere. Then she’d bundled herself back into her coat, a quiet embarrassment in her goodnight, nothing I could do anything about. Or maybe Matty wanted to hear that the fantasy had come true. An encounter at Skotádi, a hotel suite, a piping hot shower, steam rushing out into the colder room as I heroically emerged, the couple already in bed.

But gazing down to where the ferry foamed the water, I dreaded what it would mean to say I’d broken our twosome open. My greater instinct was to lie, say I’d walked around a while, found a bar, had a drink, come home, and as I plotted this deception, I grew angrier and angrier. Matty had put the idea in my head, it’s like her thoughts became my feelings, and now I was going to concoct some stupid lie rather than tell the truth, say what she’d been hounding me for this whole time, declare my innermost desire which all at once was perfectly clear. I loved her, I wanted to marry her, I wished we were having a child. More love, that’s all, more love between us.

I’d propose to her on Naxos, no ring, it didn’t matter, and that’s when I sensed she’d been gone a long time. She’d probably found coffee and a place to read or something, so I went in. People sat around on their phones, a kids’ show playing on the communal TV. I couldn’t see Matty so I did a lap around the deck but she wasn’t there either so I did another, still nothing. It was silly, comical really, we must’ve been going around in the same circle at the same pace so I broke the pattern and went in the opposite direction. We didn’t meet. On a hunch I opened a door with big bolts and went down some stairs that kept going, the engine getting louder, the smell of grease, flight after flight until I passed through a door, it slammed shut behind me, and I was alone in a vault of cars with no passengers.

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