They exchanged a look that said anything but fun, then Simon shrugged and turned away.
“Fine,” he said.
As we drove over there once more, Simon grew quiet—“just focusing on the road, Mel,” he snapped when his wife asked him what was wrong—and the rest of us, as if to compensate, seemed to wake up. Our mood lifted, and even my headache went away as the ibuprofen kicked in, so that by the time we reached the Diogenes, I was feeling much better and had developed a serious appetite.
There were a few tables inside, but most were out in a flagstone-paved area by the road, surrounded by a low stone wall and canopied with a roof that was half thatch and half real grapevine. That had been a selling feature when we first arrived, the fruit hanging from the rafters above the table. It had seemed so exotic. Marcus told us some story about Diogenes wandering the streets at noon with a lantern. “Claimed to be looking for an honest man,” he said.
The food was standard Greek tourist fare—a dozen or so main courses, a handful of predictable sides, retsina, wine, ouzo, and pints of Mythos beer served very cold. It was still run by a boisterous middle-aged woman called Maria and staffed by her children and their cousins, some of whom also worked around the hotel and the beach. One of the boys, a teenager who had taken an obvious shine to Melissa, had appeared in Marcus’s slide show. He led tourists on snorkeling and paddling expeditions around the bay, and I remembered him badgering us to join him, though we didn’t go. Mel had flirted with him till he promised to bring us all fresh local sponges recovered from the sea by his own hands. There had been a rack of them, bagged in cellophane, beside the counter, and a couple of baskets of larger ones that looked like great ocher corals. I had bought a small one from the hotel and used it religiously for the next two years till it finally disintegrated. But the kid had said he knew where the best ones grew and would bring one as big as his head for Melissa. I remembered his boyish pride, his determination to prove himself worthy of Mel’s glamorous favor, though he never delivered the sponges—not to the rest of us, at least—and he wasn’t around at the end of the trip. I think Simon got tired of him buzzing around and may have said something to Maria. Or to Mel, for that matter. Still, I remembered his boyish grin, white teeth in a deeply tanned face, black hair and eyes to match, an exuberant, good-looking kid.
Waiter boy, Mel had called him teasingly. I smiled at the memory.
“You think they’ll remember us?” said Melissa, looking around.
Sometimes that lighthouse smile of hers seemed designed to attract attention to herself as well as to shed her beatific light on the less worthy. She was doing that now, being conspicuous as she scanned the seating area.
“Why should they?” said Simon sourly. “We were here for a week five years ago, and these tables have been full of people who looked and behaved just like us ever since. Oh, for God’s sake, Mel, just pick a table.”
She chose the one we had always chosen, and I found myself surprised by the realization that she wanted to be recognized, that she wanted Maria and her kids to flock to her as to an old friend or to some princess or celebrity who had graced their humble establishment before. It reminded me of the first time I realized that Melissa’s glamour was not as effortless as she made out, when I caught her touching up her makeup in the ladies’ room after she came out of the sea. Annoyed that I had seen, she had snapped something catty about how it must be nice not to have to worry about how you looked.
Perhaps this was the source of Simon’s irritation. He had anticipated some rerun of what Marcus and I had occasionally and privately called The Melissa Show.
Starring Melissa! With special guest . . . Melissa! Written, directed, and edited by Melissa!
We could go on for quite a while on that score. It was all in good fun—mostly, at least—but it contained a kernel of truth. Melissa liked to be the center of attention, and the only reason that no one minded was that the rest of us liked to be her adoring audience. I wondered if Simon had started to find that wearing, and I remembered Gretchen’s tale of the cataclysmic fight that had sent Mel to a bar by herself.
Mel slumped into her seat, pouting at Simon, and we took our designated places. If Gretchen realized that she was, once more, butting in on a ritual reenactment from half a decade ago, she showed no sign of it.
“God,” muttered Simon, studying the menu. “It’s exactly the same. Nothing has changed.”
“Prices have gone up,” said Kristen.
“A response to austerity measures,” said Brad wisely.
In truth, we had seen very little of the much-touted collapse of the Greek economy, but that was because we were visitors with money and had been confined to tourist areas and activities. Perhaps if we spent more time in the local grocery stores and shops over the next few days, we’d see more. We’d also seen precious little of the waves of desperate immigrants coming across from North Africa and Syria, of which I had read so much about before leaving the United States. That, I’m ashamed to say, was something of a relief. I knew there were people in the world whose lives were exponentially harder than mine, but I didn’t want to be confronted with the evidence this week. Not while I was on vacation.
God, I thought, what awful people we are.
But then that wasn’t fair either. Maybe it was just me. And let’s not forget the maxim carved in the stone of the oracle at Delphi: “Know Thyself.” If I was an asshole, at least I knew it and, from time to time, tried not to be. Even so, my momentary relief at having dodged the poor and desperate shamed me, and I found myself wondering how much the locals, underneath the welcoming smiles, the necessary hospitality, really hated us. I wouldn’t blame them if they did.
We ordered what amounted to “the usual,” even though we hadn’t been there for five years, but no one recognized us, something that clearly deflated Melissa, though Simon gallantly attempted to cheer her up by saying that the moussaka, kebabs, and grilled chicken were better than he remembered. In fact, none of the waitstaff looked familiar, and we discussed the possibility that the restaurant had changed hands since our last visit. We were counting out a stack of colorful euros when Maria herself finally appeared, looking notably older and clad in layers topped with a shapeless dress with a faded floral print and a stained apron. Marcus gave her a half smile and Melissa turned to her, standing to give her the full lighthouse effect.
The older woman looked baffled at first and half turned away but then rotated back again, very slowly. She pointed squarely at Melissa and began jabbering in furious Greek, bearing menacingly down on us and gesturing with her hands. I couldn’t catch anything she said, though I knew she spoke decent English, but it was impossible not to read her face, her tone, her hands.
Get out! they said. Get out now. And never come back.
Melissa was distraught. The woman’s anger—it was fury, really—was terrifying to see, and I think that if Brad and Marcus hadn’t shielded Mel with their bodies, the restaurant owner would have attacked her physically. The woman’s fists had been balled and, crazy though it sounds, I found myself watching to see if they would stray to the cutlery on the tables. Her rage was volcanic: hot and sudden and capable of all manner of violence.
As we got back in the car and sped in the direction of Rethymno proper, we struggled to make sense of it.
“She must have confused us with someone else,” said Simon. “I’m sure tourists come and duck out on the check all the time.”
“Seemed like more than that,” said Marcus. “It was . . . I don’t know. Personal.”
“They’re a fiery people,” said Brad with a grin. “Hotheaded. Like the Sicilians.”