“It’s a real yacht,” he eventually did say to Naomi, his face bright with appreciation. “Do you guys fish on it? You could catch bluefins.”
Naomi caught Sam’s eye at last and there was silent laughter between them. As they walked to the boat along the gangplanks, they exchanged a private Yassou, and to Naomi Sam looked exceptionally vibrant, more so even than the previous day. Perhaps it was the dowdy uniform that played to her strengths. There was also a blush from the sun.
They boarded the yacht and the boy rushed around inspecting everything with many a guttural “Wow!”
“There’s a bedroom down there,” he called up to his father. “There’s a sign over the bed that says Disgrace.”
“That’s an artwork,” Naomi explained.
She and Sam went out onto the back deck and sat in the chairs there. The sun hit them and the crew set up the awning. The table had been arranged with an ice bucket, a cooler, glasses, and china plates. Sam looked up at the burned brown hills and something in her bristled. It was like the Middle East, a corner of Lebanon or Syria centuries ago. Slaves moving among the saddled donkeys in the caves high up among the glaring rocks. It had its enigma. It wasn’t quite what she had expected. As they moved off into open sea the mountain named for Eros rose above the toytown of cafes and discos and scuba shops. She saw people walking along the path above Sunset and the early-morning swimmers on the flat rocks below it. The collective pantomime of a holiday. Then the crew turned up the engines and they moved swiftly along the coast, passing Vlychos and the Haldanes’ house. And then Amy was there waiting for them with an energetic wave, like a gaunt lone figure in an Andrew Wyeth painting; the yacht sounded its horn. They went past Molos and the remoter headlands, Cape Bisti and Tsigri Island and the Aghios Konstandinos. Then they turned in to follow the edge of the island as it led to Cape Aghios Ioannis. On this far side there were no houses or roads; the beaches were hemmed in by dramatic cliffs and rock formations. The sea looked darker and more volatile. When they anchored for a first stop the waves came hard against one side of the boat, shaking it gently. Under the awning the group was served with fruit juice and coffee, croissants and tulumba. Some music was put on—calypso, Naomi explained, and some Louis Armstrong from the soundtrack of High Society. Her father loved it. She took Sam down to the bedroom and they changed into their bathing suits. Sam saw that there was indeed a tubular neon light above the bed that spelled out the word Disgrace.
“It’s sick, isn’t it?” Naomi whispered. “It cost him twenty thousand dollars.”
Sam looked around the disorderly melange of art, the bedside lamps made of solid glass and the Keith Haring panels inset into the walls. It could have been so cool, she thought, but somehow it wasn’t.
They went back up to the deck and found the crew lowering the steps into the water. Jeffrey and the boy peered over at long thin gar speeding through the blue like animate needles. The shore was about a hundred meters away, a comfortable swim. From the boat the sandy bottom was now visible, a shimmer of dark gold. Sam and Naomi put on rubber flippers and masks but decided to do without the snorkels. They slipped down into the water and quietly swam away from the calypso, the brilliant silverware, and the anxious fatherly gaze. Jeffrey was thinking that, after all, he was not so sure about this self-assured British girl. She had prized his daughter away from them a little, and he and his wife were both aware of it. But it seemed to him that it was not deliberate. Naomi was one of those people who exert an entirely unconscious influence on others and who cannot be held responsible for the effects. It was tropism, not conspiracy. This, of course, made her more dangerous. His earnest and upright mind was, moreover, ruffled by her ease of movement and her offhand manners—they seemed to him proof of a superiority that he would have to belittle in order to survive.
—
They were at the shore in minutes, hauling themselves back into the air and lying flat on boulders facing the yacht. They could still hear Louis Armstrong and the calypso rhythms, and the crew had broken out a bottle of champagne, probably as much for themselves as for their unknown and unimportant guests. The foam shone for a second as it spewed into the water. “Eviva!” Naomi shook out her wet hair and leaned back. Once again, that aristocratic ease of movement and gesture, and Sam did the same, stretching out her toes with their crimson warlike paint. She had painted them the night before. There was a rustle of lizards darting under rocks and she turned, but they were faster than her eye.
After a few minutes they got up and climbed a steep hillside. They had soon reached a platform from where they could look down at the boat and the father and son hunched together playing chess under the awning. Sam thought how restful it was to be separated from them finally, away from the bickering and the family trivia. One of the crew was swimming around the boat, his voice carrying up to them with great clarity. “To nero einai gamo kryo!” one of the others called back to him. Their tongues had loosened in the absence of any Greek speakers.
The hillside behind them cast a shadow far out into the water that just clipped the aft of the boat and dimmed the little Greek flag hanging there. Another disheveled slope led down to a cove congested with rocks and rubble, a place that must have been well out of sight of the boat. There was something tempting about it, with the absence of a track and the cactus proliferating across it. They got up. As they slipped out of view of the boat Jeffrey looked up and felt a moment of unease, but the crew didn’t notice. A small shadow had suddenly passed across his world. But the crew knew that Naomi was familiar with the island. In reality, the girls were exultant. The opalescent purity of the sky, the absence of cloud and contamination, made them feel secure. They skipped off down the shelving stones toward the second cove and the heat rose up toward their faces.
Sam felt freer as soon as she was out of her father’s sight. She remembered the warning her mother had uttered to her earlier in the day about the sun. To hell with her, though. To hell with the family brand. Her skin liked the sun’s ferocity.
“What does skatofatsa mean?” she asked as she trailed her guide.
Naomi turned and said, “Shitface.”
“Is it a useful word?”
“I use it pretty much every day.”
“Skata-fatso. Fantastic.”
“Fatsa. You can use it in America.”
At the far side of the cove they sat again and caught their breath. The boat had disappeared behind the land’s shape, but they could still hear the music from High Society. When the wind swept across the hillside, however, it vanished and all they could hear was dust and grit flying.
“Should we keep going?” Sam asked. “Maybe they’ll follow us and pick us up farther on.”
“I didn’t bring my phone. We’d have to wave to them from somewhere.”