Send Me A Lover (15 page)

We descend a set of narrow, uneven stone stairs to a room that buzzes with the din of happily wined and dined Greek patrons. It’s white-walled, with one wall a virtual wine cellar of barrels, and an uneven, pock-marked floor painted, ‘Thalassa,’ Georgios tells me when he sees me studying it. ‘Greek blue.’ There are only about a dozen tables, but each is crammed with convivial Greeks. A handsome boy with a ponytail, dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans—the owner’s son, as Georgios tells me—moves back and forwards between the tables and a tiny kitchen, keeping plates of food coming in steady waves. I smell garlic and charred aubergine and ouzo and wine and lamb and cigarette smoke and coffee and olives and hot pink flowers and fresh fish, and somewhere on my anatomy, the perfume that Mam assaulted me with before I disappeared out the door. ‘Want a little squirt of it up your skirt?’ she asked me.

‘No! You pervy old woman!’

‘Hey—less of the old!’

‘The only thing that might be getting up my skirt tonight is a mosquito. And even then, it’ll have to be lucky.’

She’d cackled.

At the far end of this room is a grubby, open window that looks carved, like an afterthought, into rock. Out of it is a view, not of the ocean, or charming Zante town, but of the inner belly of a hacked down cypress tree, and, the sky.

It’s by this window that Stavros, the son, seats us. Before we can even ask for it, a carafe of red wine lands splashing on our table, along with two glasses of ouzo and a plate of tiny white fish. ‘
Marides
,’ as Georgios explains, ‘flash fried, served with extra virgin olive oil, lemon and oregano. Ouzo and fish are a partnership you must try.’

‘And Stavros here just happens to know we wanted this?’

‘Stavros knows that what I like you will like.’

‘That’s pretty arrogant of Stavros.’

‘Arrogant Greek men. Are there any other kind?’

‘That’s why we love you.’

‘Of course.’

I gaze at the fish, unable to resist a small tease. ‘Pity I’m vegetarian though.’

He freezes with his fork on the way to his mouth. ‘You are?’

‘Yep.’

He frowns. ‘You don’t eat meat or fish?’

‘Neither.’

He appears to be fallen. I can’t keep up the tease for too long. ‘I’m not. I’m kidding.’

He narrows those raisin-like eyes. ‘You are not vegetarian?’

‘No.’ I grin. ‘Honestly. I love fish. And meat. But especially fish.’

‘I suppose this is you getting back to me for the olive tasting.’

My face breaks out into another smile. ‘I’m paying you back,’ I correct his English. ‘Yes, I could be.’

‘Here,’ he rolls up a thin disk of deep fried aubergine with mint—the newest arrival to our table—dips it in some twinkling honey-coloured liquid then leans across the table and aims it at my mouth.

‘Apparently since I was about three months old I’ve managed to feed myself.’

‘Open,’ he tells me. So I open and he pushes it into my mouth.

‘You can lick my fingers.’ He holds out his fingers.

‘I think I’ll pass.’

His turn to smile now.

We get through the appetizers, and the ouzo goes down far too easily, as does the conversation. Then we’re served long and strand-like fried cheese called
saganaki
, with lemon squeezed on it, followed by a traditional
bourghetto
, which he tells me is a seafood stew of courgettes, potatoes, tomatoes, sea snails, limpets, cuttlefish and octopus, piled high. Every ingredient tells a story for Georgios, reflecting his love for food. ‘You know once, as a boy, I spent the entire summer living on the island of Pretza and this is all I ate—
bourghetto.
Every day. I was so sick of it I couldn’t eat it for years. Now of course, I know that I lived like a god.’

‘That’s like the kid who gets filet mignon at home but always wants a McDonald’s hamburger. That’s what my husband used to say about growing up in a well-off Toronto family. He ate like a king but he wanted to eat like a runaway teen.’

‘McDonald’s hamburger is shit, no?’

It surprises me to hear him say shit. I laugh. ‘Not far off!’

He quickly says, ‘Did you love him?’

I ply sticky cheese off my fingers, looking at this table that’s so laden with food that I almost don’t know where to start. I don’t want to talk about him, and yet I want to talk about him. ‘I couldn’t have loved him more.’ I meet his eyes.

‘Did he know it?’

I look back at my plate. ‘Oh… I fought with him a lot. Because I always had to have the last word. Jonathan expected it and I’d have hated to let him down.’ I roll my eyes at myself, at how I used to be, thinking of all the ways I would reinvent myself if I had the chance to have Jonathan back again. ‘Jonathan was very controlling and sometimes you had to argue with him or… get walked on.’

He ladles seafood stew onto a plate for me. ‘Fighting is good. If you fight it is because you care… But you grieve like how you loved. You loved him with passion and deeply, so you grieve for him deeply, with passion. It seems unfair.’

‘Love is unfair.’

‘Losing somebody, when you do not expect it, is unfair.’

I turn very still, can barely swallow the mouthful of food. I play over his words again, just to make sure I am not jumping to the wrong conclusion here. Then I ask him, ‘How do you know it was unexpected?’

He seems to contemplate this, and I think, wait a minute, this is something else I have noticed about him. He always seem a little puzzled by his own observations. ‘Well, he died young, yes? Unless you married an old man. Anybody who dies young… is unexpected.’

Unless it’s cancer, I feel like saying. But maybe I am making too much of this. So instead I tell him, ‘Well his death was unexpected. Jonathan was killed in a car accident.’ He doesn’t react, seems to just wait for me to tell him more. ‘We’d just got back from a holiday in Barbados... He’d gone out to work, and I was having a lie-in. When the knock came on my door, I just assumed he’d been in work ages ago, and yet there were two people standing there, telling me that Jonathan was dead.’ I feel a tension build between my eyes, but just as quickly, it subsides. ‘I don’t remember much after that, just going back to bed and his side was still warm… I didn’t know if it was from him, or because I’d rolled over there once he’d got up.’ I shake my head, the tension returning to my bones. ‘It mattered so much to me whose body heat it was. Because if it was his, I wanted to lie there and save it there… I wanted to keep his heat underneath me like that.’ I look up at the stars now, thinking how Jonathan once told me that stars are lights from suns that have long since burned out. Jonathan knew things like that. Because Jonathan would have paid attention in all those classes in school, whereas I would have just sat there rolling my eyes, because school was boring, teachers were boring, and I was just doing time until I could get on with living my life. I wonder, now, if Jonathan’s watching me from up there, from among those burned out suns. Maybe he too is a light that goes on shining long after the power source has been shut off. I hope. I hope with everything that is in me.

A gentle breeze wafts in through the window, slightly lifting my hair. Georgios follows my gaze. Maybe I have said too much, said things that are too personal.

‘Is it still hard for you to talk about him?’

I shrug. ‘Sometimes I still feel it, right here, when I think about him.’ I punch a fist into my ribcage. He watches the action of my hand. ‘Less often than before, of course. But when it hits me it’s still as strong as that first day.’

Yet the memory of his face isn’t. It’s like a portrait done in charcoal that has had the edges rubbed out. Right now, in this star-lit restaurant lit, across from Georgios, who is so easy to talk to, it’s particularly blurry.

‘But it seems to me it’s not a pain for the words left unsaid, for wrongs that were not made right. There is no conscience in this pain. Maybe? You loved him and he knew because you told him often enough.’

‘You put things very well for a foreigner,’ I tell him. Stavros glides between tables with plates held over his head, a tea-towel hanging from his pants’ belt. Suddenly a strong waft of garlic stings my eyes. ‘You’re wrong actually, though. There is a conscience. I do have regrets.’ I run my hands up my bare arms and look into the belly of the cypress tree, meaning no more questions right now. He doesn’t press me. I regret every minute of unhappiness I ever brought down on us, even if they were trivial little unhappinesses in the grand scheme of things.

We eat in silence for a while, listening to the raucous chatter from other tables, but my mind hangs on what he’s just said. ‘Jonathan had an epileptic seizure at the wheel of his car,’ I tell him.

‘And you never got to say good-bye to him.’

‘No.’

This is what I regret most.

‘And you think it would have been easier if he’d died of cancer, and then you would have had time.’

For a moment or two the beat of my heart seems to pulse between our gazes. ‘We’d been talking about having a baby. We’d ordered hardwood floors for our bedroom because Jonathan was convinced the carpet was making my asthma worse; Jonathan was going to put them in that weekend. The Runner’s Room had just rung saying the pair of trainers he’d ordered had finally come in…’ My voice sounds insistent, on the edges of anger. ‘I remember thinking he couldn’t be dead. I was convinced I was going to wake up and he’d be beside me, and I’d feel so relieved, and I’d realise how precious he is to me… how my life would be unthinkable without him.’ I rub my arms again, suddenly feeling cold even though it’s not cold in here. ‘I’ll never forget what it was like to have somebody be there, and then not be there, you know… so starkly like that. No more phone calls throughout the day, little check-ins to see how I was doing, see if I wanted to order in or go out for dinner, to complain about his secretary… He used to say that sometimes he just wanted to call because he liked to hear my voice…’ I smile, the cosy routine of married life revived in me. ‘Yet all his things were there, you know. His toothbrush sitting in a pool of water, his dirty clothes in the laundry bin, his sandals by the door, that had his toe-prints in the sole… I thought those footprints had to be proof that he was still alive. But they weren’t. They were just the last tracks of him ever having existed.’

I look out of the window, distantly, while he pours water for us. ‘Isn’t it funny how when you look at the stars there’s always one that seems to twinkle more than the rest?’

He follows my gaze again. ‘But we can all see them differently. Maybe the one that twinkles most to me isn’t the one that twinkles for you.’

I smile. ‘I think I like that idea somehow, that we each have our own star that twinkles for us.’

I spear a black olive. ‘Sorry to turn the evening bleak. It’s odd I’m telling you stuff I’ve not even told close personal friends.’

‘Normal, no? To tell a stranger.’

‘Yet you don’t feel like a stranger.’ I smile at him. The rest of my wine in the glass goes down easily and he tops me up, looking pleased with my comment.

‘He could have killed somebody if there’d been another car involved.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘He’d only had one other seizure before. It was while he was writing his exams in law school. He thought it was because he’d been popping caffeine pills to stay awake all night to study. The doctors prescribed him Tegretol—it stops you having seizures… Jonathan took the prescription but never took the pills.’

He listens without reacting.

‘But a month or two before he died he’d complained of having weird déjà vu sensations. He described it as doing or saying things he’d done or said before, in the exact same way. He said it was eerie, as though he were reliving a moment that was too precise to be repeated. He said he got a strange metallic taste in his mouth when it happened… I just wondered if he was working to too hard. That’s why I booked us Barbados…I wanted him to go see the doctor, but Jonathan had to do everything on his terms… I was always on at him to stop being such a mad driver, especially since he’d bought the new sports car.’ I shake my head in exasperation. ‘When he died I was angry even though I knew the accident had nothing to do with speed. But now, I accept this recklessness was who Jonathan was, and I’d probably not have loved him if this one rebellious shade to his personality had been missing.’ He listens well, seems to understand me, even though I know I’m talking in too much detail, and not really making allowances for the language barrier. ‘After the accident, I spent hours on the Internet reading up about epilepsy. It turns out that those weird little sensations he kept getting were actually things called petit mal seizures—a loss of consciousness in their own right.’