Traveling with Pomegranates (39 page)

I guess the second time is the charm—the museum on the Acropolis is open. Finally, I’m going to see the relief that archaeologists have given two names—the
Mourning Athena
and the
Contemplating Athena
. Take your pick.

The whole museum consists of a few white rooms with accenting panels of Mediterranean blue. Every artifact here was found on the Acropolis, many of them offerings to Athena or adornments on the temples. Stopping before a carved owl, Letta explains its role in Athena’s mythical story: “It is one of her symbols—a bird with the ability to see all around. It points to Athena’s quality of seeing and understanding. She is the Goddess of Wisdom, after all.”

Letta tells us that when she was a little girl, there were still owls roosting on the Acropolis, small and gray, like the ones Athena is often depicted holding. I’m reminded of the owl feather that has sat on my desk back home. Before this trip, I dreamed about a gray owl that swooped through the doorway of my apartment and flew into every room. I woke, jolted. In my head I kept hearing what Athena said to me three years ago in an earlier dream:
You can see me anytime you want. All you have to do is dream
. But I never did. This dream, however, felt like a visit from her. The thrilling sensation I got watching the owl fly through my apartment stayed with me all that day.

I walk through the brittle afternoon light that slants through a large museum window, noticing how it illuminates the remnants of muted paint on the Korai, or maiden sculptures. At the end of the hall is the relief I’ve been waiting to see. It is taller than I expected, more than lifesize. Letta informs us the relief dates to 460 BCE, around the beginning of the Golden Age of Pericles. I stare at the way Athena’s forehead is bowed against her spear. She is barefoot, one hand on her hip and a pensive expression on her face.

In 1998, when I saw this image in a book, Athena looked as if the fight had gone out of her. I know now it was I who felt defeated. Today, two years later, I have a different impression. The cast of her face strikes me as contemplative rather than mournful. To me now, this is a look of contentment.

At 5:00 P.M. I wait in the lobby of the Electra Palace Hotel for Demetri. Swinging my bag onto my shoulder, I walk to the end of the lobby desk and look out the front door. I’m a little jumpy about meeting him, only because it has been so long since I’ve seen him and I don’t know what to expect—how much he will have changed, whether meeting him now as a friend is a reasonable idea, or whether, once a romance is over and done, it is better to just walk away. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, but the relationship was significant to me in a way that went far beyond Demetri himself, and I cannot shake the feeling that what I wish for by this encounter is closure.

I glance again at the door. It occurs to me that he may not even show up.

During the past year, Demetri and I exchanged Christmas cards, Easter cards, and infrequent letters. I wasn’t accustomed to receiving Easter cards, and he wasn’t accustomed to Christmas cards depicting ice-skating nuns. “Your card was unusual,” he wrote.

Our letters were the efforts of two people trying to be friends, but stuck in pen-palish language:
Hi. How are you? The weather here is . . .
I continued to write because I wanted his friendship, and because I felt badly about what happened before—failing to show up or even answer the phone when he called. I wanted to make it right.

In my last letter to him, six months ago, I told him I was getting married and also that I was coming to Greece with my mom this fall. Months passed and I heard nothing back. Then in late August, a battered letter arrived, having endured an arduous, three-month postal excursion to our new apartment.

 

He wrote about his plans, his friends, his car. It went on for two pages. Then he closed with this:

I wrote back suggesting five o’clock, October 19, in the lobby of the Electra Palace Hotel—it was the only free time I had in Athens.

I told Scott about the meeting and that I hoped I had his blessing, explaining how badly I felt for avoiding Demetri last time. “Besides,” I said, “how often is a person in Greece anyway?”

“Apparently every other year,” he joked, and then, “I’m okay with it.”

Scott did seem unconcerned, but I wasn’t sure
Demetri
was up for the meeting. When I left for Greece, I had not heard a word from him. Did he get the letter? Did he ignore it?

Demetri walks into the lobby ten minutes late, wearing a thin leather jacket. He looks taller. A more grown-up version of the lanky nineteen-year-old I met on a sidewalk in the Plaka.

“You look the same,” he says. “Your hair is shorter, but still . . . the freckles.”

“And you’re taller,” I tell him.

We walk toward Apollonos Street, into the sound of motor scooters sputtering like chain saws. He says, “The weather is nice.”

“It’s a lot like home,” I respond.

When we arrive at Mitropoleos Square, Demetri gestures to a table at an outside café near the cathedral, not far from where Mom and I were once besieged by hungry cats. After we’ve dispensed with the awkward small talk, he leans his elbows on the table and looks at me. “So, are you happy?”

“I am,” I say, and it’s not a pleasantry. I actually am.

As the server places two small cups of coffee in front of us, I think about Scott, how I could not imagine my life without him. About the puppy we want to get. The book I want to write. The trinity of Athena, Mary, and Joan, who travel with me now. I think how my experience in the underworld has brought me to a new sense of myself, the way my self-rejection has turned into acceptance and a new way of valuing myself. As painful as that was, I wouldn’t change any of it.

“What about you?” I ask.

“I’m studying this summer. It’s okay.” I listen as he elaborates, noticing more ways he has and has not changed. His hair is just as dark, his eyes as brown, his manners as courteous. But there seems to be a serious quality about him that I didn’t notice before. He throws a pack of cigarettes on the table, and that’s a marked difference from the person who told me cigarette smoke made his head hurt. Perhaps we both have a shorthand version of each other.

“Did you ever learn any Greek?” he asks.

“A little.”

“Let me hear.”

I toss out random phrases I remember from my language tapes.
Ine oreo.
It’s beautiful.
Nomizo.
I think so.
Alithia?
Really?
Dhen katalaveno.
I don’t understand.

“It’s good,” he says, and sips his coffee. “Did you bring pictures of your wedding?”

“A few.” I reach for the envelope in my bag and spread the photos on the table. Me in my wedding dress, standing with my mom, then dancing with my dad, and finally Scott and I cutting the cake.

“He might look a little Greek,” he says, pointing to Scott. I laugh at that. I want to ask him if he knows the phrase “As American as apple pie.” Sliding the photos back into the envelope, I say, “Will you be getting married anytime soon?”

“I have a girlfriend, Helen,” he tells me. Of course, Helen—the face that launched a thousand ships. He looks at his watch. “I have to meet her shortly.”

After the bill comes, I pull out my map of Athens and ask him to pinpoint the restaurant where we danced. It has bothered me that I’ve forgotten its name and location. I want to always know the spot where I danced on a tabletop.

“I’ll take you,” Demetri says. “It’s not far.”

We walk to the corner of Mnisikleous Street. “The restaurant used to be up there,” he says, pointing. We stand beside kiosks of sunglasses and leather belts and stare at a narrow lane leading to a building painted antique gold.

I recognize it the instant I see it. “Did you say it
used
to be there?”

He nods and leads me up the steps, to the door. “It’s an art gallery now.”

I peer through the windowpanes, remembering how Demetri and I slipped outside after dancing. We kissed in the spot where we are standing right now, and where I’d looked up to see the Acropolis in the distance.

He is quiet. His hands find their way into his coat pockets.

“
Signomi
,” I say. I’m sorry. “I wrote it in a letter, but I wanted to say it in person. I never wanted to make you feel like you didn’t matter to me.”

He puts his hand on the back of my arm. “I know.”

Back at the hotel, we stop outside the doors. He gives me a hug.

“Good-bye, then,” he says.

“Bye.”

He walks back in the direction we came from.

I watch him for a few moments, then head through the lobby and onto the elevator, pressing the button that will take me to the rooftop.

Soon this spot atop the hotel will be crowded with people sipping drinks and watching the sun slump over Athens, but right now I have the place to myself. I have the whole city and a postcard view of the Acropolis.

I take the chair by the rail. Propping my feet on a planter of marigolds, I gaze at the eastern end of the Parthenon. The bare rock of the Acropolis seems to pare things down to what feels irreducible and true.

I picture Demetri walking away on Nikodimou Street and try to understand just who he was to me.

I feel some sadness. This visit with him was an ending—I know I’ll never see him again. I feel a strange happiness, too, as I begin to see my relationship with Demetri for what it is: an event in time
and
an event in the soul. Our experience together is more than moments in a restaurant or on a dance floor, more than a brief romance. It’s about what I learned that night and what became freed inside of me. Demetri helped me break through my self-imposed limitations, my smallness, my pathological safety. I cherished him because he introduced me to myself, he caused me to fall in love with my own life.
That’s
what carries the charge, and that’s what will go on in me. It’s so easy to mix that up with the person.

The sun has slipped behind the clouds, hidden except for a haze of yellow. As the beeping of car horns fades on the streets below, I rummage through my bag until I find the graduate school rejection letter I’ve been carrying around since we arrived in Greece.

Two years ago, the letter felt like a dead end. It eventually came to represent my entire historical collection of rejections and failures. I brought it all the way over here in order to tear it up. I wanted to do it
here
. That seemed fitting. But now that the letter is in my hands, I see that it was really a catalyst, a beginning, and I decide I will keep it. I am who I am because of what the letter set off in me.

The tint over the city turns to bronze. As the lights around the Parthenon blaze, I feast on the sight, then head downstairs, thinking of home and everything waiting.