…(the rain and the smell of night

pulled at me. Confused me.) Everything means a choice,

she had said, getting one thing and losing one. The love still

held me, but all at once I could, despite the rain, admit

to myself what I really wanted was this clarity.

- Jack Gilbert, from his poem ‘Losing’

　

The billboards of Athens are bare, at least on the outskirts of the city. The squat apartment buildings, the endless monotonous rows of them, seem soot stained, perpetually the color of dirty teeth. The train from the airport is packed. Samuel makes sure that his arm, unseen, stays in contact with his daughter’s.

He tries to relax. Sofia watches the flabby outer city slipstream past. This is her first trip abroad; he let her choose the destination. “Athens,” she said without hesitation. She’d been on a Greek history binge.

Samuel, though, has been on so many of these trains in his life. So many cities and faces. Morocco and Italy, England and France. Spain, of course. Have they been worth something, all these train rides? Have they built some sort of foundation inside him? Hanna, his wife, always said he was too rigid: that he too readily attached himself to places, and people. Whenever they moved - and they moved a lot their first ten years together, as classical musicians tend to - it plunged him into a depression that took months to lift.

“If you know it’s going to happen, and you know it will pass, why not just skip the months of melancholy?” Hanna once asked.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he protested.

Stop thinking like an old man, he warns himself, watching his daughter watch the city. She’s thirteen. She has her father’s sallow complexion (much to her chagrin), and also his rosy hair and pellucid blue eyes. She has her mother’s high cheek bones, her prominent hips, the squared off and high ridged nose. From certain angles, in certain poses, she alarms Samuel with her maturity and beauty. Right now, for instance, her sweater is carelessly drooping off her right shoulder. He pulls it back into place, and she looks back at him, unaware that anything was amiss, and smiles.

“What’s up, Dad?”

“Nothing,” he says. “How do you like it so far?”

She shrugs, somehow conveying a jaunty optimism. “I like it. It looks a little dirty. But I like it.”

“Good.”

They ride in silence after this, jostling softly against one another, and strangers. Samuel thinks about Hanna, and about Spain, and about the stiffness in his fingers every morning, the stiffness that takes hours to thaw, like a late breaking Arctic ice floe. He wonders what Sofia thinks about. He hopes she isn’t disappointed by the ugliness of the city so far; he certainly is.

~

Their hotel is on a highway that connects downtown to Piraeus, the port. It’s a long, monotonous road that falls very gradually to the sea - which sparkles through the city’s haze in the distance. The highway is also, apparently, home to most of Athens’ strip clubs and sex shops. Samuel counts three of them within two blocks of the hotel.

They settle into their room, which is simple and unadorned. There are two double beds, both of them granite-firm, a sink, an old television set, and a shared dresser. The bathroom is down the hall. The concierge warned Samuel that the heat hasn’t been working. Sofia takes the bed closest to the window. If she strains her neck, leaning far out, she can see the Acropolis. He holds her by belt loop while she looks. She comes back smiling like a fiend, the happiest he’s seen her in a long time. I hope I remember this, he thinks, which is something he’s thought a lot throughout his life, though rarely something he’s succeeded at.

~

They spend the afternoon wandering the neighborhoods around the Acropolis: the Plaka, Monastiraki. They’re in that post-voyage delirium, when everything seems slightly absurd and vague, when nothing would be surprising. On a street corner, a man juggles fire. Why? How does one decide to be a fire juggler, and where does one learn?

The Plaka is a hilly labyrinth of boxy homes terraced into hillsides, a maze of staircases and furtive Byzantine churches. Samuel constantly consults his map while Sofia meanders ahead, content to be lost, and then he must run to catch her. She traces her hands over everything: the stone walls of ruined homes, church pews and idols of saints, broken pillars of marble in the shambled plazas that appear suddenly, like unexpected knots on a piece of silk.

“It smells weird,” Sofia says, crinkling her mother’s nose. He smiles at her: these smells get to him most. There is the odd mixture of petrol and urine that reminds him of Managua. Hanna and he visited there when they were twenty-two, spending two hallucinogenic weeks sweating and eating street food and shitting themselves dry and barely sleeping from the diarrhea and the heat. The olive trees, with their slightly bitter fecundity, recall Granada, of course, that luminous year when neither he or Hanna worked and they spent hours playing music (Hanna played her violin on the terrace and he played his cello in their bedroom) and stayed out late and ate poorly and drank too much and fucked every spare moment they had. It was a lost year, their best year, probably; or, one of them. They’ve had many good years. This was a personal myth he’d disproved: that marriage ended the good years, or that the good years ended after thirty.

They eat gyros from a cart for dinner. They return to the hotel early, before dusk. While Samuel drinks a beer and watches the BBC, Sofia takes a shower. She comes back in a towel, carrying her clothes.

“Dad, can you close your eyes while I change?”

He does, though he keeps sipping his beer.

After that she sits in bed reading. After a while she turns to him.

“Do you think I could have a foot rub?” she asks. “My feet are sore.”

“We walked a lot.”

“We did. So, what do you think?”

“Sure, of course.”

Samuel moves to the edge of his bed, and Sofia lies on the floor, lifting one leg at a time, resting her calf on her father’s knee while he slowly, distractedly kneads the soles of her feet. Foot massages are something of a family tradition. During the summers, he and Hanna would often sit on their back porch, reading or listening to music, watching night settle sonorously over their suburb, rubbing one another’s feet.

When Sofia changes feet, Samuel looks down at her. She’s sprawled on the wooden floor, head propped on a pillow. One hand plays absently with her wet hair, which is splayed behind her like the delta of a river; the other hand holds Hanna’s copy of ‘The Bell Jar.’

“Why are artists so depressed?” she asks at one point.

“That’s a good question.”

“Well, you should know. Why are they?”

He laughs. He‘d spent two years with the Philadelphia orchestra, and a decade before toiling with smaller groups. Now, he taught music to seventh graders, and conducted their orchestra.

“I don’t know, Sof. Really. It’s kind of torture, I guess, to devote so much of your life to a subjective thing. To watch other people that are worse people than you and happen to be more talented than you are. To feel unappreciated for your hard work. You can be bad at plenty of other jobs and make a living, but it’s tough with art. And you can be a very good artist and not get noticed.”

“Isn’t it the kind of person that becomes an artist, too?”

“Yes. Probably. We tend to be more sensitive, don’t we?”

Sofia smiles; Samuel remembers some of the fits Hanna would go into when Sofia was younger. He would be out buying groceries and get a call from six year old Sofia. “Mom’s crying,” she would say, “and I can’t get her to stop.”

“Will you be disappointed if I’m not a musician?” Sofia asks.

“No, of course not. I want you to find something that’s meaningful to you. As long as you do that - whether it’s music or literature or biology or even finance - and you work hard at it, I’ll be proud of you.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Sofia falls asleep on the floor, with the television still on. Across the streets sex shops blaze and pulse. Distantly, towering over the city, the Acropolis is lit angelically. Its broken columns are triumphantly white. He covers his daughter with a blanket, slips on his shoes and sneaks out to the street.

Across the highway a man shills hot dogs from a rickety cart. Everything here is like this, grimy and somehow tattered, as if picked up third hand from a relative who bought it second hand from a wealthy friend. There are three tables set on the sidewalk in front of the hot dog stand. A group of Japanese businessmen occupies one of them, their ties tossed over their shoulders while they slavishly eat the sloppy sandwiches. Samuel takes one of the other empty tables. He orders a dog with onions and chili, and a cold beer. The beer is surprisingly good, sweet and malted. He listens to the Japanese speak their frenetic tongue. He watches chicly dressed men entering and exiting the club across the street. Non-stop Sex Show, the sign advertises. It looks expensive, is what Samuel thinks. He orders another beer, watches the Japanese men disembark for the club. A group of young girls take the last table, talking loudly, excitedly, reeking of perfume probably bought from street peddlers. Their scent is acidic, acute. He thinks: that smell would cause me to lose my erection. He drinks slowly. A police motorcade whizzes past, dangerously fast. No one seems to notice.

When he gets back to the room the television is off and Sofia has crawled into bed.

~

They get up early the next morning.

“Maybe we could go in one of those,” Sofia says, nodding at a sex shop. Her voice lilts, as if to say, I’m only joking if you say no. “I need to learn about it someday, don’t I?”

“Not today.”

“Come on. It could be funny. It’s not like I haven’t seen stuff, anyway…”

“You’re too young for us to be friends already, ok, Sof?”

“We’re not friends?” she asks, and he can’t tell if she’s legitimately hurt or if she’s just fucking with him.

“Of course we’re friends. We’re not adult friends, though, which is different. At some point when you’re old enough you’ll realize that I’m just as lost and confused as you are, and that being an adult doesn’t mean that the world makes perfect sense. Or any sense. And then we can drink beer or wine together and laugh at the absurdity of things and be lost together.”

“Well I already know you’re lost and confused. That’s why you and Mom split up, right?”

He ignores this. “They wouldn’t let you in, anyway.”

“So you’re not lost and confused?”

He stops walking and looks at her. Her eyes are alight; she’s having fun.

“Some things you have to figure out alone, Sof. I know it might not make sense to you, but it’s just how it is.”

“Why?”

“Well…I guess it doesn’t make that much sense to me, either. But it’s the way of things, ok? Mom’s figuring out her stuff and I’m figuring out mine, and if we were together, we wouldn’t be able to do that.”

“You both slept with other people, didn’t you?” Before he can be too surprised, she interjects, “Mom told me.”

Jesus, Hanna, he thought.

“Sex is…complicated. Sometimes you desire things that you don’t love, or even like. But that doesn’t mean it’s ok to pursue those things. Because once you have them, you don’t feel good or fulfilled. You feel empty. But sometimes you love someone so much that sleeping with them, having sex with them, almost feels, well, wrong.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Dad.”

“Can we not talk about this now?”

“When do you want to talk about it? These are important things that I should learn.”

He wants to cry. He wants to sit down and cry. He wants to lie his head on Hanna’s stomach and cry.

“Later,” he says. “We’ll talk about this later, O.K.?”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

~

They spend the day visiting the ruins away from the Acropolis. Sofia is particularly taken with the small Byzantine churches hidden all over the city, nestled between shopping boutiques, or apartment buildings. She insists they make a votive offering in every one.

“I don’t want everyone to think we’re tourists,” she says.

“I think they know anyways, Sof.”

While Samuel sits down, Sofia wanders, looking at the relics and the frescoes. She mimics the old women: how they light the candles, and cross themselves, and kiss the idols. Samuel watches her in amusement. The churches are extraordinary. He imagines Christians huddling in them during the Byzantine era, during the wars with the Turks. Such long, unbroken threads of devotion and faith. The rituals are somehow less absurd here. There’s a historical weight to them.

When they stop for lunch the local school is just letting out. Hordes of kids are filing into the cafes, or just milling around outside, talking and flirting, smoking cigarettes. Some of the boys smile in Sofia’s direction, brazenly. Samuel pretends not to notice that his daughter, surreptitiously, smiles back. Where do these gestures come from? Movies? Television? Has her mother been giving her lessons? That furtive smile - the dip of the eyes, the right hand brushing her bangs away - that’s her mother’s gesture. He remembers it, clearly, from their first summer together, how enamored of it he was. They drove out to Gettysburg at the end of that summer; he remembers sitting on a monument near where Pickett made his fateful charge, and Hanna looked at him, head cocked sideways, and gave him that very gesture: eyes averted, hand across the brow. He thought, in that moment, the two of them alone on the silent field of death, that he loved this woman, that he couldn’t foresee a moment when he wouldn’t love her.

Maybe it was genetic, or inherent. He didn’t know.

“Dad, do you think we could sit at separate tables?” Sofia asks while they’re in line. She’s been inching away from him, lingering back as they move forward. The boys she smiled at are a few people behind them.

“Yeah. Ok. Sure.”

“I mean, you have your book, right? So you could read. I could just use some time to be alone.”

“Ok, Sof. That’s fine.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He sits alone and Sofia takes a seat three tables away. He pretends to read. She tries to look comfortable by herself, affecting an air of ease. She’s not bad at it, either, he thinks. She’s probably better at it than he is. Still, her mannerisms are contradictory. At times, she could pass for a young woman - the way she crosses her legs, for instance. But other times they’re those of a young girl, still childish - how she pulls at her hair and plays with it when she’s nervous.

The group of boys approaches her and she acts surprised to see them. Two of the boys sit down. Samuel strains to hear what they’re talking about, but the soporific din of the other diners provides them with cover. This is preposterous, he thinks. I shouldn’t have let her sit by herself. What the fuck am I doing? There aren’t any guidelines for this age. There’s nothing to prepare you for how to handle such situations. He’s forty-four; he should know what to do. But he has no fucking clue. At what point does he go over there and interrupt? Does he try to send her signals? Does he make it clear to the boys that he’s watching? And what if they exchange numbers, what if they invite her out? Maybe the whole damn trip was a mistake. Maybe they just should have gone to the Pocono’s and gone skiing for a long weekend. This is what he gets for being so romantic about Greece.

He remembers that Hanna lost her virginity at this age. It’d been to one of her second cousins, an older boy who she only saw at a large family parties, maybe two or three times a year. He was more like a friend than family, she’d said, a muscular confident boy who’d always treated her like she was older than she was. It happened at her grandfather’s eightieth birthday party, a large, cacophonous affair held on his estate in Maryland horse country. It was July, hotter than sin, she’d said, the grounds burnt to nothing, cicadas so loud that you couldn’t hear yourself think. They’d set up a big tent on the middle of a hill. All the adults stayed up until three or four in the morning drinking and dancing (which was typical of family parties). Hanna and her cousin - she never told Samuel his name - snuck off to a little dell, out of sight from the main party. He’d stolen a bottle of wine. They sat there and listened to the cicadas and looked at the hazy stars. “It just sort of happened,” she’d said, “he was kissing me, and it felt good, and then he was kissing my chest, and that felt good, and before I knew he’d pulled up my sundress and taken off my underwear, and it just sort of, you know, happened.” He’d been careful enough to pull her dress all the way up, so as not to get blood on it. The whole story had pissed Samuel off an irrational amount when he‘d first heard it. As if he’d never taken advantage of younger, naive women. Ever since he’s had fantasies of running into this cousin at family parties and beating the shit out of him, or humiliating him. Why? Hanna had never been bothered by it. “It wasn’t traumatizing or anything. We slept together at every party, when we could get away, throughout high school. He was cute.”

Samuel looks at his daughter and imagines his wife at that age: the lissome hips and pallid skin, the chatoyant eyes and nascent breasts. He wishes he’d known her then. Sofia curls a stray strand of hair behind her ear, dips her head and laughs. One of the boys touches her on the arm. Then, much to Samuel’s relief, they get up, and after awkwardly hugging and then waving and then hugging again, the boys go on their way.

After she’s certain the boys are out of sight Sofia comes over and sits down.

“Thanks,” she says.

“You have fun?” Samuel asks, trying not to let the strain show in his voice.

“Yea. I did. They were sweet.”

“Good.”

Sofia smiles absently and looks out over the crowd.

“Shall we go find some more churches?” Samuel asks.

“Sure. I’m ready.”

~

That night he calls Hanna. He’s sitting in the stairwell.

“Hey,” she says, sounding happy to hear his voice. He immediately feels calmer.

“Hey.”

“How is it?” she asks.

“It’s mostly good. The hotel is surrounded by sex shops and strip clubs. Sof asked me if we could go into one. And then at lunch she sat with some boys.”

Hanna laughs, earnestly. “Of course she did.”

“I don’t know how to handle that stuff.”

“Of course you don’t,” Hanna says gently.

“Well what do you guys talk about?”

“Everything, really. I’ve tried to have an open book policy regarding sex and love. She tells me about boys she likes. She asks me questions. She’s going to have sex sooner or later, Chico. I figure that it’ll be much better for her if she knows what’s going on, if she knows she’s supported.”

“Has she already?”

“Had sex?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God, no. She hasn’t. I promise. She’s in no rush. She wants it to be with someone she loves.”

“That’s good.”

Hanna laughs. “Oh, Chico. I miss you, you know. Despite all of this I miss you. How do things get so fucked up?”

“I don’t know,” he says. They sit in silence for a time. He tries to imagine her apartment, which he’s only seen a few times. It looks out on a street of antique shops. He imagines, briefly, another man walking through the apartment, completely at ease there. This wounds him, of course. Someone that isn’t him looking at her lapidary eyes, the tumble of her breasts and thatch of pubic hair, someone that isn’t him thinking: for this moment, this is mine. That sense of ownership is puerile and primitive, but he can’t help it. And it’s not as if he considered the possibility that Hanna would be wounded by another woman possessing his body. He likes to think he did, though he can’t remember. Even if he did, it didn’t affect him deeply enough to stop him. Of course, thinking about this is pointless. Three weeks ago Hanna told him she was seeing a woman. He’s not sure how he feels knowing that. The pain of Hanna with a woman is somehow more abstract and less threatening (naturally). It’s difficult to work up the same fury. It’s also not nearly as erotic as he imagined it might be: his wife in bed with another woman. Hanna’s right. How does life become so strange?

“Do you ever think of me with another woman?” he asks.

“Sure, of course.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Not really, no. I know that you love me and I love you, even if right now we’re on our own.”

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“You’ve always been more attached to things, to labels, than me, Chico.”

“True. I’ve tried not to be.”

“Yes, but it’s not you.”

“It’s not.”

“Try not to think about it, ok? You’re in Greece. You’ve always wanted to go there. It’s why Sof loves the place so much: she remembers you talking about it all the time.”

“I am enjoying it, I promise. It doesn’t mean that, every time I see something beautiful, I don’t think to myself: I wish Hanna were here to see this, too.”

“Well, you get half of me, instead.”

They both laugh. He’s crying, softly, although the tears aren’t in his voice.

“There’s this really good moment in Moby-Dick. Have I told you I’m reading Moby-Dick?”

“No, you haven’t. That’s ambitious.”

“I suppose. Well, there’s a nice moment in it. Ishmael and Queequeg are talking in bed, and Melville writes about old couples who talk quietly in bed all night, sometimes almost until dawn, remembering being young together. I thought of you, of course, and missed you.”

“Those were good conversations,” she says.

“Yes, they were.”

“We’ll probably have more of them, Sam. With a little luck, we can be one of those old couples.”

“That’d be nice.”

They sit once more in silence. It’s soft, pleasant. He thinks, rather foolishly, that he wouldn’t mind sitting like this for the rest of the night, knowing that she’s on the other end of the phone.

“I should go,” he finally says. “Who knows what Sof’s doing.”

Hanna laughs. “O.K., Chico. Give her a kiss for me. She’s already supposed to give you one from me, anyway.”

“I will. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

She hangs up and he sits for a minute longer in the stairwell, smelling the dank, cold air.

~

After he’s certain Sofia is asleep he sneaks out of the room again. He goes downstairs and walks down the street to the Intercontinental and sits alone at the end of the bar and drinks a whiskey. He doesn’t really have any intentions of meeting anyone, just needs a drink. He has two more whiskeys and drinks them in silence.

Outside he sits on the curb. Against all reason and sound judgment he pulls out his phone and sends Alana a text. Within two minutes she calls him.

“I’m in Greece,” he answers, slurring away most of the middle two e’s.

“My parents are in Russia. I have an international plan.”

He responds with silence. Why did he call? He asks this every time he calls her. Even when he was seeing her, he wondered what, exactly, he was doing it for (it was easier, then, of course: being in the presence of such physical dexterity, such unwitting and prodigious grace). After they fucked for the first time, he looked down, and despite her extraordinary beauty, he recoiled. He wanted to run, he wanted to contract into nothingness. Instead he sat in the bathroom for fifteen minutes; when he came out, and saw her there, sprawled languid and naked, he wondered what had come over him, how he could ever regret being naked with such a woman. But it happened like that every time they fucked: regret and shame in the half second after finishing, the overwhelming desire to be very, very far away. He always called her again within a few days. And so it went.

“You’d decided it would be best if we had no contact,” she says.

“Apparently I did.”

“Couldn’t stay away?”

“Apparently not.”

“You’re lucky I’m home. I’m usually out.”

“Doing what?”

“Dinner. Drinks. Dancing. Parties,” because of her accent she draws every word out, elongating every syllable with lazy charm. “There are always plenty of options.”

“You’re quite popular. I suppose that’s worth something.”

What was he hoping to get out of this? Phone sex? Reassurance that she missed him?

“When do you come home?” she asks.

“A week. I’m not here very long. Sofia has to get back for school.”

“Are you drunk?”

“A little.”

“Maybe you can come over when you get home. If you’re deciding that you want to talk to me again.”

Alana is a dancer. He met her the previous summer at a gallery opening. They have absolutely nothing to talk about. She talks about dancing, and she might as well be speaking Russian. She always had him for dinner, and he’d sit through two or three interminable hours of meaningless pabulum. Wasted conversation was one of the things he loathed most in the world - talking about nothing - and yet he endured it, time and again, because at the end of it, she took him upstairs and undressed. And despite the fact that he intensely disliked her, perhaps even because of it, the sex was probably the best he’d ever experienced - until the excruciating half second afterwards, of course. He’d always believed - and had always told his daughter - that for sex to be any good, it had to be grounded in serious, mature love. Alana continually proved him wrong. He wonders how it is that he and a woman he shares nothing in common with can be so well suited in bed: can know each other’s weak spots, can move so fluidly together, can achieve an almost somatic rhythm so effortlessly. Of course he’ll see her again. Of course he’ll visit that well of reassurance that Hanna has, for the time being, sealed off: that he’s attractive and desirable and good in bed. He wishes, at this age, that he didn’t need those things anymore. But he does.

“Yeah, that’d be fun.”

They’ve never spoken about any of this: the lack of common ground, the preternatural sexual chemistry. He’d like to say to her, “Can we cut out this dinner bullshit? This pretense of wanting to know anything about each other’s lives? We’re good at one thing together, and one thing only, so why bother with the other stuff?” But there are structures to everything. And although plenty of people are fine to admit that they are simply drawn to someone platonically, apparently it’s not acceptable to admit that the only attraction is physical.

“I should go,” he says. “It’s pretty late here.”

“Ok, Samuel. I’ll see you next weekend for dinner. Look forward to it,” she says and he can’t tell if it’s an affirmation or a command.

~

Before bed he walks down the dark hallway to the bathroom. It’s well after midnight. He’s drunker than he wanted to be. He sits down on the toilet. He should have gone to one of the sex shows. Why didn’t he? Sofia wouldn’t be any the wiser. It’s unlikely she’s old enough to connect the smell of cigarettes and stale alcohol to the source. How long has it been since he got laid? God, even the terminology kills him, makes him feel old. Weren’t these things supposed to moderate? Weren’t things like career and family supposed to provide reinforcement in diverse and meaningful ways - ways that would make sex unnecessary, or at least less relevant? He hasn’t slept with Alana since before Thanksgiving. He and Hanna made an aborted attempt at fucking over Christmas. Even in that failure they came out of it laughing, talking until three in the morning in her foreign apartment that makes him feel like a stranger with his own wife.

He sticks his head out the door and listens. There’s silence, or what passes for silence in a city: the muffled ambiance of traffic, the steady threnody of sleepless urbania. But his floor seems conked out. He quietly shuts the door to the bathroom and turns off the lights. He sits on the toilet and takes off his pants and opens his phone. In his saved photos section are pictures from Hanna. She sent them some years ago: she’d spent a summer doing a fellowship in Berlin. Before leaving she provided him with, ’materials for my absence.’ Those were her words. Sofia spent much of that summer at camp, so Samuel had been mostly alone. He’d made sure to keep these photos handy, on his phone and laptop. It wasn’t something he was proud of. Even alone, in his bedroom or hotel room, he felt drenched in guilt. As if somewhere, someone knew that he was objectifying his wife: that he was removing any semblance of personhood from her and turning her into pure odalisque. And the sad truth is, many of the orgasms he’s had to her photos are better than the ones he’s had while fucking her, at least these past years, when she’s treated their encounters as a responsibility, something to be endured instead of relished.

He smells mildew. Every noise becomes exaggerated, and gives him pause. Fuck, he thinks, either you’re doing this or you’re not. He looks at the photo on the phone, his wife sprawled in bed, legs spread apart, head reposed in a facsimile pleasure. It’s conceivable he might never see that again. He jacks off slowly, so the sound of skin on skin is minimized, so any light sleepers on the floor won’t be disturbed. Look at me, he thinks, listening for foot steps. I’m jacking off to my wife, who I’m separated from, who is sleeping with another woman. Jesus Christ. He keeps going. The phone goes idle, and he has to fumble with it to turn it back on. He’s sweating, and the toilet is beginning to slide out from under him. He must press a button on the phone every twenty seconds to keep the photo visible. The screen is maybe six inches from his face. There’s a scratch, from one of the many times he’s dropped the phone, across Hanna’s chest. It’s been a long time, and despite the circumstances, he finishes quickly. He keeps the damage limited to the toilet. His heart beats faster than he’d like, palpable in his neck and his pelvis.

He allows himself a few minutes to calm down, to sit in the cold dark. Then, he brushes his teeth and slinks off to bed.

~

They take a ferry to Santorini, of course.

It’s a large boat, one of the vessels used for winter travel to endure the unpredictable Aegean weather. Across from them is a sinewy, sickly looking man and his wife or girlfriend. His face is cragged from acne, bearded unevenly. He spends most of the trip blasting indecipherable music on his laptop, clapping along. He’s either impervious to the glares of the other passengers, or he lacks any and all self awareness. His partner is mortified. Her face goes red and she sinks in her chair, looking out meekly, apologetically, to the other passengers. Occasionally, Samuel thinks, she tries to dissuade him from listening to his music, or to at least turn it down. He meets her entreaties with outbursts. Samuel doesn’t speak Greek, but the man’s derisive tone, and her ashamed body language…well, it says enough. In theory Samuel is a pacifist. His parents were ministers. He watches this Greek piece of shit and fantasizes, vividly, about kicking his ass. Or, to be more precise, about murdering him. He can’t help it. He imagines bludgeoning his face into one of the lifeboat anchors. Or hurling him overboard. Christ, he thinks, let it go. Then the Greek unfurls a banner of vitriol at his partner, who seems, by all objective measures, to be reasonable and supportive (her awful taste in partner notwithstanding; but it’s difficult, or impossible, to know what insecurities and past wounds and inexperience drive desire), and Samuel feels his face seething. Sofia notices; she’s always been perceptive and sensitive when it comes to her father’s temper. She takes him for a walk around the ship.

“What a dick,” Samuel purges as they step onto the deck. “I’m sorry for my language, Sof.”

“It’s ok.”

“But seriously.”

Sofia looks out at the Aegean. It seems a gently tumbling tapestry of opal. The wind is chaotically handling her hair, sending it every-which-way. He notices the assured way she holds the railing. He stands beside her and looks out at the water.

“Do you know that Mom’s dating a woman?” Sofia asks.

“Yes, I do.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“How do you feel about it?”

He laughs. “I’m supposed to be asking you that.”

Sofia shrugs. “I think it’s cool.”

Samuel lifts his eyebrows.

“Sorry,” she says.

“No,” he says, trying to backtrack from the initial wound. “No, it’s fine. You can think whatever you want.”

“I mean, I want you guys to get back together. But I want you to be happy, too, you know. Both of you.”

“I know, Sof. We want that, too.”

“So, how do you feel about it?”

Samuel laughs again. “I don’t know how I feel about it. I guess I’d rather it be a woman than a man, if that makes any sense at all.”

“Yeah, it does.”

“Happy’s a tough thing, Sof. I think it’s a word people use too casually. Your mother being one of those people. She talks about happiness and I don’t know what she means by it. I don’t know if she does, either. I think she has this vague notion about it, but nothing more. Happiness isn’t a permanent thing, and I think a lot of people keep looking for it as if it’s a permanent thing. And they end up doing a lot of damage and a lot of hurt because of that. Life’s isn’t supposed to be comfortable. I’d be deeply suspicious of anything that comes too easily, or feels too comfortable. Life’s difficult and painful, and even the most beautiful things in life are often very difficult and painful. And I think, if you spend too much time looking for ‘happiness,’ without really defining what that is, you run the risk of not devoting yourself to anything.”

It’s a speech he’s mostly recycled from his Grandfather, who was a Lutheran minister for a small Wisconsin congregation; it’s what the old man told Samuel when he announced he wanted to be a musician - because it made him happy.

Sofia looks out tersely at the sea.

“Do you know what you told me when I was ten and I asked you what the most important thing in life was?” she asks.

“No, I don’t.”

“You said to be happy.”

He laughs again. “Oh.”

“You were playing your cello on the back porch.”

“Well, that explains it.”

“Can we go back inside? I’m cold. Can you promise not to kill that Greek guy?”

“No promises. But I’ll try.”

~

What moves him in Santorini is not the vistas looking down upon the white washed homes and chapels. It’s not the cafes that are swollen with tourists like himself (how he loathes feeling like a tourist, like part of a sluggish consumptive beast that drags its body up the Escher-like stairways, leaving an oily silm in its wake). What moves him is the lemon trees that fall like fresh hair over the stone fences. And the water moves him, too, the water on Saturday morning that runs in fresh rivulets down the alleyways while women wash their laundry; the way this water holds the sun.

~

They arrive back in Piraeus two afternoons later. The metro is on strike, so they board a crowded bus. The traffic eddies and breaks; people pour on, then flood off. Eventually they end up back at the foot of the Acropolis.

On their way to the hotel they walk past a worn, dirt soccer field. A few, frail lights rise from the sidelines and burn against the dusk. A ragged and impromptu match seems to be going on. They stop at the fence and peer through.

“Want to watch?” he asks.

“Yeah, sure.”

So they stay.

Sofia’s engaged with the game, and Samuel lets his mind wander. It’s impossible for him to see a field like this and not think of Hanna. They were twenty, and hadn’t known one another two weeks. It was summer, the end of summer in Philadelphia when the nights were languorous and humid and the air was so thick it had a physical presence. They’d gone out late one night, after midnight, to meet with Sam’s best friend, Henry, and his fiance, Elizabeth. They met at the local college’s soccer field, and until two, they played two-on-two soccer by moonlight. It was the first time he’d removed his shirt in front of Hanna - she remarked on this fact later - and after they’d finished playing, drenched and soaked, they’d lain on the turf, Hanna’s head on his chest, and looked at the hazy August stars.

It’s strange to think back on that now, after all these years. At the time, he didn’t think much of things with Hanna. She was nice enough, sure, and lovely, but he’d met plenty of nice, lovely women - and had had plenty of beautiful, enjoyable nights with those women. He couldn’t have known all the years that were to follow; except, now, he thinks that maybe he did. He thinks that maybe there was some pocket deep inside him, wherever intuition resided, that had an inkling of things to come, and, as such, held onto details from that night. Of course, this is likely just revisionism, one of the myriad ways his past is being reworked and recalibrated. He wonders if Henry remembers that night at all; he and Sarah divorced before thirty. Henry’s probably forgotten all about it. The moments that stick out, of course, are those at the beginning of things and when the end is in sight (or has already been crossed). It’s as if, he thinks, relationships were like a long sea passage. Those littoral memories dwarf the majority of the voyage: the rhythmic monotony of those familiar middle years. Which is a shame, really. He’s lost so many beautiful, mundane moments - moments that he would, right now, trade just about anything to revisit. A breakfast passed in silence. A quick run to the grocery store. The way she would walk past him and thoughtlessly kiss him on the head while he watched baseball. He yearns for the unconscious ease of a relationship midstream, the ease he so blindly took for granted.

He wants to talk to Sofia about this. He wants to tell her that she needs to hold onto beautiful memories when they come her way - to try, desperately, to live inside those moments, to not overlook them. He sees how distracted Sof can be. He knows that she’s got a million different stimuli bombarding her from every direction and shaping the way she processes information and experiences the world. She’s being conditioned to always wonder what’s next. And this scares him. He doesn’t want her mind to work that way: to constantly jump from one distraction to the next. He’d like her to appreciate stillness and stasis, to be able to experience a moment without growing anxious.

He knows this because he, himself, feels that anxiety. He sees how the internet and his smart phone and the innumerable new mediums of entertainment have eroded his attention span, his registry of beauty. Even now, he’s conscious of an intense, building desire to check his phone. Why? What could he possibly be missing? He checked it before they sat down. There’s nothing important that could have arrived in that span. But it’s not about importance. It’s about that niggling little voice in the back of his head that gets bored, and hungry, and wants to be sated. By what? By anything. By the meaningless provender of the culture.

And if he feels it this strongly, he can only imagine the sway it could someday hold over his daughter. Hanna, especially, has tried to barricade Sofia from this onslaught. He never told her how much he admired it: the limits on television and computer time, the hours she spent reading to Sofia, the long walks in the woods they took together. They’ve fought the good fight, so to speak. But there’s only so much they can do - eventually, they have to loose the world on her. It’s that awful paradox of parenthood. You lay the best foundation you can - even though, by and large, you’re doing that without any blueprint or training - but at some point, all you can do is let go and hope. They’re nearing that point. He’d rather they were nearing it together.

“You ready to go?” Sofia asks. “I’m bored.”

~

He calls Hanna again from the stairwell.

“How was Santorini?” she asks.

“Overrun with tourists. But beautiful, still.” He sighs. “I feel like we’ve missed the real Greece by about twenty years. But maybe that’s just me being nostalgic.”

“It’s probably a bit of that, but there’s also some truth to it, I suspect.”

“Maybe if we had longer. But, then, it’d be difficult to just up and leave for a few months to wander around Greece.”

“It’d be nice to do someday though, wouldn’t it?”

“It would.”

There sit in a long, easy silence.

“Are we ever going to travel again, Chica?” he finally asks. “I miss it. I miss traveling with you.”

“I don’t know. I hope so. But I don’t know.”

He wants to say: how can you not know? Can we please cut this happiness bullshit? We’re good together. We can talk about anything. We understand one another, as reasonably as two people can understand the other. We support each other. Our years together have been as fulfilling and as rich as two people could reasonably hope for. Was the sex perfect? No. It came in ebbs and flows. But that will happen after years together. And sex isn’t everything, or hardly anything, when you get right down to it. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, or my aorta could burst. Why waste another day apart from each other when we do, admittedly, love one another? We have a fucking daughter together. A beautiful, precocious daughter who is at a very dangerous time in her life and needs all the help she can get.

But he doesn’t say any of this. They’ve had that conversation, and there’s no convincing her. Because sometimes love isn’t enough. Because there are things she needs to learn on her own terms, and that means all he can do is let her go and hope.

“How’s the orchestra?” he asks instead.

Hanna plays violin in the Philadelphia orchestra. Samuel had played cello for two years, but then Sofia had been born… He won’t ever play like that again. He’s not fast enough. Those without a trained ear wouldn’t know the difference, of course. But that very small percentage of the population that knows, knows. Hanna was always more gifted than he was. She didn’t need the same level of diligence and practice. There were years, many years, when that hurt him. But now that anger seems petty and small, especially in the face of losing Hanna altogether. It’s amazing how much absence nullifies.

“It’s good. We’re just starting to work on Beethoven’s 9^th. God, Chico, it’s so fucking beautiful. There are times when I just break out smiling. I can’t help it.”

Samuel remembers playing it with her one summer when they played for a small orchestra in Maine. Sometimes they’d get lobster rolls at a little shack after their performances, bring a bottle of wine, sit out on the rocks and talk about music or meaning - the things twenty-four year olds in love discuss. They were so young then, but he remembers feeling so old.

“I’ll have to come watch.”

“You will. And Sofia will, too. Assuming we can get her to sit through the thing.”

“She will. She has your reverence. It’s there already.”

“It’s not just mine. It’s yours, too. I learned it from you.”

“We’re going to become strangers, you know. After twenty-four years.”

“We might.”

“I miss fucking you, Hanna. I miss it so much.”

“I know. And I’m sorry.”

“Do you miss it at all?”

“I don’t, no. I’m sorry. I don’t feel like I need sex right now. The thought of it makes me nauseous, to be honest. I’m sorry, I don’t know why. I know you tried so hard. It’s not your fault,” she says. “I love you, Sam, in some way. Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try to make it be enough.”

“You’re a good man, you know. I mean that.”

He laughs.

“I thought that would be enough. Maybe that’s a myth we tell ourselves. That if you’re a good man, if you love well, and honestly, that things will work out and you’ll avoid pain.”

“I think you try to be a good man because that’s the only way you know how, Sam. You don’t do it for the rewards. You do it because it’s the only way.”

“I should go,” he says. His indignation wants to get the better of him. He wants to say: have you forgotten all those times I supported you? All those times you sobbed and I was there? All those times you were lonely and I was there? All the patience and grace I mustered, that I’m still trying to muster? Shouldn’t that count for something? She would say that the world doesn’t work like that; that it’s not about tallying scores. And maybe she’s right. You’re a good man because, well, what else can you be?

“Ok. Enjoy your last day. I’ll see you sometime soon. We’ll get dinner, maybe lay in bed.”

“I’d like that.”

“I love you.”

“And I you, Chica.”

~

Sofia is reading ‘The Bell Jar‘ in bed. He looks at her, and the restraint that he’s been trying to muster breaks like a faulty dam.

“Can I ask you something Sof?“

“Sure.”

“What has Mom said?”

“What do you mean?”

“About the split. I mean, what’s she told you about things?”

She eyes him suspiciously; he’d promised himself he’d never ask Sofia this, that he’d never pry her for this kind of information. He swore to be bigger than that: using his own daughter as an intermediary and wedge, forcing her to be honest with him and betray her mother’s trust, or to lie to her father. He can’t help it right now, though. There’s a sinking in his gut that just gnaws and gnaws. It’s like that same vertiginous urge that causes one to inch closer and closer to the edge of a high building: that latent desire for annihilation.

“She’s said that she loves you, still. But that she doesn’t know if she’s in love with you anymore. That love can grow and change. And she needs to find out if she’s changed or if your relationship has changed. And that as much as you might tell her that you guys are great together she needs to know for herself and she’ll only know through experience.” There’s a peculiar, inward look to Sofia. Her eyes are narrowed at the brim of her nose, like she’s trying to get every word just right : like she‘s a bad stage actor trying too hard to remember her monologue. “That you‘re a good man but that you need to find out how to care for yourself. And that she‘s worried she‘s forgotten who she is without you, and wants to rediscover that person.” The poise with which she remembers and recites is astonishing. She might as well be speaking about herself, although Samuel doubts she can internalize what these sentiments might mean. He tries to remember being thirteen. He loved a girl a few blocks from his house named Erin Rose. He would ride his bike to her house and they’d sit on her lawn looking at clouds. Once she took his hand and he thought that that was probably the greatest moment of his life. He was going to marry her, because that’s what you thought when you first felt you needed someone: marriage, ownership.

He sits on the bed. Sofia gets up and sits beside him and rests her head on his shoulder and puts her arms around his waist.

“I appreciate the honesty, Sof. I’m sorry for putting you through that.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Well, still. I shouldn’t have.”

“It’s ok. I love you, in whatever way I think I’m supposed to love you, if that’s worth anything.”

“It’s worth a lot.”

~

The next morning they visit the Acropolis. It’s surprisingly empty, and they meander slowly through the ruined temples, the fields of debris, gradually winding their way around that great monolith of stone. When they finally reach the top, and the Parthenon unfolds in its full stature, he finds that what he feels most is a yearning: a yearning to be moved that somehow fails. How to make sense of something so resplendent? Can it possibly be internalized, processed, neatly extrapolated? It pales in comparison to the little churches, he thinks. Then he chides himself. It would be like choosing a piano concerto over a symphony. But sometimes, he thinks, smallness. That’s all: smallness.

Sofia tells him all about the history of it. How the architects of the Parthenon tapered the columns and raised the bases, at their ends, to lend them an air of straightness and perfection. How the fortress stood for millennia unconquered. She’s enamored of the place, flitting about excitedly, talking quickly. It’s a pleasure for him to watch, her passion. He wishes it could supersede the loneliness, the cataclysmic sense of loss and longing that pervades his insides. But it can’t, it can only exist alongside it.

There are dogs lying amongst the ruined pieces of marble, the remains of statues and columns. There are countless dogs curled up against these pieces of stone. How incredible, he thinks, that they can go where we can’t, can touch what we can’t, can see in perfect detail what we can’t - and they have no idea of this privilege. To them it’s just stone, a warm surface to bask upon in the sun.

She’s trying very hard to mask any disappointment. He wonders if she, too, is managing questions of scope and scale, of impression and processing. In her own way, she probably is.

They sit for a while on a stone, looking at the Parthenon head on. The wind comes strongly off the distant Aegean. Clouds mass like regiments over the city’s mountains, closing in. They stare in pensive silence, endeavoring to be moved.

“It’s almost too much,” she finally says.

He smiles. “Yes, it is.”

“Like, it’s amazing. And it’s gorgeous. But it’s just, well…so much.”

“And that’s fine, too.”

“Yeah. I guess.” The first timbre of disappointment.

“Hey, now you’ll know you’ve seen it. You can always say you’ve seen the Acropolis and the Parthenon. Many people haven’t.”

“I feel like it should be more than that.”

“Maybe. And maybe it will be later in life, maybe you’ll remember it differently and it will take on greater importance.”

“Yeah.”

“You ready?”

“Can I have a few more minutes?”

“Sure.”

He walks slowly away. He stands out of her line of vision and he watches her. She stares at the thing with enormous intensity; it is, of course, the way her mother stares at a sheet of music. As if there’s something hidden that can be found; if she just looks hard enough and for long enough, some beauty will be made clear to her that no one else has located, some word or symbol that somehow makes it all congruent: the barricaded past, her own minor life, that impossible unknown lying in wait. It has to do with truly seeing, he thinks. We’re all so caught in our own vortex, so convinced of our own superiority or rightness or giftedness. And then you realize how small a thing being talented is, or having a good eye for photography or a good ear for music. He was a world-class musician for a few years, and now he’s not, and someone else has taken his place and the world hasn’t noticed one iota. He’s here in Greece and no one cares. His daughter is going to enter this world soon. This world where there is a disparity between your own universe and everyone else’s universe, and maybe, if she’s lucky, she finds someone to share that with for a few years, the delusions and hopes and small irrelevant beauties that don’t matter to anyone but you and that other person, the one at your side, mortal and lonely and ephemeral. But they seem so important, don’t they? Even the smallest of those beauties seems so important, and he wants to stop everyone on the street and say: ‘Look. Please. Would you just look at that.’ But maybe that stranger just looks and shrugs, and says, ‘What’s so special?‘ So hopefully Sofia finds someone to share those beauties and delusions and sorrows with. But eventually one of them will get bored, or one of them will get restless, and then there’s no one to share those things with anymore, no one who will look and see in the same way you do. And then life becomes so terribly lonely: to look and be the only person who sees. But even this is it’s own kind of hard, stark beauty, because at some point during those years you forget how rare it is to find somebody who sees in the same way you do. Being the only one reminds you how remarkable it is that, for a time, you weren’t.

How can he wish this on her? How can he stand by and let it be inflicted upon her? What choice does he have in it?

Finally she gets up and looks around for him. He waves, and she bounds over.

~

After the Acropolis they start walking back towards the hotel. They have an early flight to catch. Clouds have rolled in off the Aegean, large and ominous columns and colonnades.

“Do you think it’s going to rain?” she asks.

“It might.”

They cut through the park west of the Acropolis. It’s a series of narrow paths that wend through cypress and pine. Eventually the main path opens onto a wide, tumultuous field of broken marble. It was once an amphitheater. The theater of the nymphs, he reads from the map. Sofia gallops ahead of him, running her fingers over the engravings. He sits down amongst the ruins and watches as she kneels down, touches the ancient stones.

“Dad, this is incredible,” she calls back to him.

He waves and watches. He sits somewhere in the theater’s center.

It was a Saturday in late September when Hanna told him she was leaving.

“Let’s go for a walk at the college,” she said, innocuously.

He looked out the window at the gilded, late season light. The first leaves were beginning their lovely dying. “Sure,” he said, “that sounds nice.”

They walked through the stone courtyards full of wilted hydrangeas. They stopped to admire the neo-Gothic stonework. It was a small college, typically Northeastern. She took his hand, firmer than usual, gripping it fiercely.

He looked at her and smiled.

They meandered their way to the school’s outdoor amphitheater, an alcove of terraced stone and tall, thin elms that swayed and sang in the benevolent wind. They sat on the stage’s proscenium. He marveled at the fleet shadows of sun and shade that swam over the earth and rock.

“So there’s no good way to do this,” she said after they’d sat a while in silence - a silence that he thought was terribly pleasant, and easy, the silence of many years and a shared appreciation for such quotidian loveliness: the susurrus of leaves, the fecund, burnt smell of autumn, the clarity of light that arrived like a benediction at the end of each summer.

“To do what?”

“To tell you that I’m leaving.”

“On another fellowship?”

“No,” she said, taking his hand. “No.”

By then it had set in. He felt something in his gut expurgate, like a trapdoor had been unlatched. She was already crying. He took his free hand and wiped her cheeks. He drew her forehead towards him so that they were pressed together, forming a very fragile chancel. Her face turned crimson, which it did quickly whenever she cried. At some point he started to cry, of course. The light’s beauty didn’t dissipate, though; the trees didn’t end their song. The only thing he could think was how beautiful everything seemed, his wife’s head against his, the new season at its apotheosis. He tried to think of something else, but his mind whirred impotently, capable only of registering the moment’s horrible grace.

The rain falls slowly, at first, but soon the drops are thick and heavy. He’s left the umbrella at the hotel. Sofia scampers back to him, hands over her head. Another gesture that is so redolent of her mother. He suspects there’s a specific memory he should have for this moment - Hanna running towards him in the same pose, shrieking - but for the time his mind is empty, and all he can intimate is that memory’s absence. It will probably come later, when he’s unprepared for it, stun with him its sorrow and beauty. He loops an arm around his daughter’s shoulders and they take off in tandem across the ruins.

“There, Dad, there’s a church,” Sofia says, pointing. She’s right: on the far side of the amphitheater, carved from the base of a hill, is one of the small, Byzantine churches. They make a beeline for it. Thankfully, the door is open, and they step inside. It’s no bigger than a breakfast nook. There’s a statue of the virgin, some lit candles sticking out of sand, four chairs. The arched ceiling is chipped, its frescoes barely legible. They shake themselves dry and sit down, the door closing behind them. Outside the rain beats percussively on stone, earth, wood.

“We never talked about sex, you know” Sofia says.

“Christ, Sof. Look where we are.”

“You promised. When else will we talk about it?”

He laughs.

“You always said that God likes sex since he created it,” she says.

“That was when I was pretending I believed in God so that you would go to church.”

“Well you don’t believe in him. So who cares if we talk about sex here?”

He sighs; she’s good.

“What do you want to talk about then?” he asks reluctantly.

“I don’t know. Maybe you should give me advice.”

He laughs. “You want advice?”

“Sure.”

He’s aware of how badly he wants to say something honest, something unmoored from his own pain. It’s so difficult to do that. How can he tell her that it’s beautiful when it will open her up to this kind of pain?

“I don’t know what Mom’s told you about love,” he begins. “But I don’t believe in true love, and I don’t think she does either. We were lucky to meet. We met by sheer chance. And it’s easy to look back on that luck and call it fate. But it probably wasn’t. If I hadn’t loved her, eventually I would have loved someone else. And that doesn’t lessen it, it’s just true. There’s so many people in the world to love, Sof. I hope you understand that, and always remember that. There’s not just one person to love.”

“Ok,” she says.

“And conversely, that means that just because you might love someone, it doesn’t mean you’re supposed to be with them. It’s awful, but you can love someone that doesn’t respect you, that doesn’t value or support you. Love doesn’t bind you to a life with someone, which is a common misconception. You love so you must live together. Love’s just a part of it. You have to like the person, too. You have to laugh. They have to respect you and you have to respect them. Love isn’t the be all-end-all. And neither is sex. Desire will wane, and sometimes disappear. But it usually comes back. It will never be as intense as at first. But that’s not a bad thing. It can have its own pleasures when it’s more temperate like this.”

He’s crying, and he hope she can’t notice. He hopes that the tears are indistinguishable from the rain.

“If you fall in love with anyone, eventually you’re going to lose them, Sof. And then that pain is going to be unbearable - or, almost unbearable. But it won’t last. Nothing lasts. Incredible joy, unbearable pain - all of it eventually passes. And the best you can do is to let yourself feel those things deeply. Feel the joy and feel the pain. Feel the boredom, too, when you’re bored. But realize that nothing is permanent. Appreciate things because you don’t know if you’ll ever feel them again. But especially loss. Don’t run from loss. The first time you love, you’ll do it recklessly, because you don’t know the danger. But once you do, once you know the pain, don’t hesitate to love again. Don’t try to avoid loss. Because loss is the only way to know that you’ve lived well. Extraordinary pain is a symptom of living meaningfully. And if you spend your life trying to avoid pain, then you also avoid love and beauty and joy, too.”

By now he’s openly sobbing, his voice choking. She reaches out and in the dark takes his hand. This causes him to choke on his tears, mucus spilling down his chin. “Christ,” he says.

“It’s ok, Dad.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is. Remember what you just said. Feel it.”

He laughs, cries. God, someone is going to love her someday. And they’ll probably hurt her. And then someone else will love her, and maybe she’ll hurt them. He wants her to never have to cry like this, but he wants her to love so fully that there’s no alternative. She holds onto his hand while he cries in the dark, the candles gasping with the wind, the faded faces of the saints looking down on them, their expressions inscrutable.

~

The rain won’t let up.

“What do you say we make a run for it?”

She smiles. “Ok.”

They get back to the hotel dripping and cold, but laughing. Sofia showers first, taking a long time, and Samuel sits in the room looking out the window at the day’s last, insipid light. He’s soaked and shivering, but he forgets himself for a while: forgets about his daughter and his wife and his failed ambitions. He watches the rain come down, the men making a dash for the sex shows, the hot dog vendor with his cart. In this forgetfulness, once he comes out of it, he thinks that maybe, eventually, he’ll again experience joy that is not irrevocably tethered to regret. If he learned to live so equitably with Hanna, perhaps, with patience, he can learn to live without her, too.

That night, the rain turns into a storm. Thunder rattles the ancient city, lightning dazzles the distant black sea. They’re both asleep by then, into their personal labyrinths of memory and foreshadowing, repression and shame. At one point the thunder grows particularly baritone. Samuel comes up, barely, to see the lightning thrash, its charged silhouettes. For that second he thinks he’s twenty-four again, the storm is coming off the Atlantic, the body across the room is Hanna‘s. But it’s so brief that maybe it’s just a part of his dream after all, a forgotten corridor of that labyrinth.

When Sofia comes up she’s twenty-one, a flat in Paris. The man beside her starts.

“What?” he asks. Her hand has come to rest on the inside of his thigh, that ridge of tendon.

The lightning plays with the room, fills it and then slinks out.

“Nothing,” she says. “Just remembering my father.”

But he’s already asleep again, and she sits there for a while, alone, watching the storm.