“Then we have a chance to help. I’m a lawyer—that’s what we do.”
Sam rolled her shoulders and her tone was suddenly dismissive.
“Really? I don’t think that’s your reason. I think you want an adventure.”
“Well, if I did, it’s not a crime.”
“No, it’s not a crime, but you’re talking to me like a lawyer. When in fact you don’t know who he is.”
More gently, Naomi admitted that she didn’t. All right, she thought, maybe I’m atoning for coming from money that I didn’t earn. But would that be so bad? She lowered her voice and tried to be more persuasive. “Wanting to help the helpless is not an uncommon desire, and if you want me to explain it I’d say that I’m determined to make a difference. It’s not just an adventure. And if it is, it’s one with a purpose.”
“My ass.”
Sam pursed her lips and her face lost its color. She hadn’t really meant it, and she realized that what she’d said a few moments earlier sounded cowardly. Accordingly, she doubled down in order to disguise the fact.
“It’s such a dumb situation to put yourself in. Now I have to hide something from my father, and I’ve never done that.”
“You’ve never hidden anything from him?”
“No.”
“That’s hard to believe. Anyway, I can’t see what difference it makes. What’s he going to do if you tell him?”
“It just feels gross.”
“Trust me,” Naomi reassured her. “We should really wait and think a bit before we do anything. I know you’re interested to see what happens and you can rise to the occasion if we decide to help a migrant, but it can’t be something that’s really ours if your father knows about it—admit it!”
“Let me think, then. It has nothing to do with my dad.”
“Come on, let’s have some tsipouro and go home.”
But Sam had felt the needle used against her, and the little wound bled. Before long, however, her mood picked up, spurred by the pomace brandy. Naomi gave her a crash course on this lesser-known Greek liquor. There was anise-flavored tsipouro and the plain kind. There was Tsililis and there was Kosteas; there was Idoniko without anise and Babatzim with it. Unlike ouzo, tsipouro was made from grapes and you could taste the pomace. And the anise here was fruity—Naomi taught her how to say one word for it, glykaniso. Tsipouro was also peerlessly alcoholic, it prised apart mind and spirit. They forgot about the Arab on the far side of the island and began talking about upcoming parties instead. Naomi explained to her how the scene worked in the summers: the families who returned every year, the famous artists who set up their studios between June and September, the influx of journalists and interns and hangers-on that made the parties unpredictable and fun. They knocked back three rounds of ouzo. Night had fallen without their noticing it, and the alleys glowed with their creamy whitened walls. Windows opened in the houses; from the upper floors came the sound of pianos and Tosca and Greek heavy metal. A smell of booze began to touch the air, but very lightly. The restaurants slowly filled up. The lights grew brighter. Into their own came wanderers and drifters looking for friends and interesting strangers, which meant of course pretty ones. Sam was alert with curiosity. It didn’t seem possible that such a social world could exist on such a small island. Many of them knew Naomi. They came up, embraced her, glanced with a smile at the young sidekick and stayed for a drink or two. There were some young Americans, too, boys more cynical and worldly than anyone she knew, and she was interested in the effect they had on her. Even the New York ones were not from her world, they were not what she was used to. Perhaps it was because here they were out of their element and therefore unleashed. Their eyes had a different cruelty and freedom. Their schools and parents were far distant and out of mind, and they were free to do as they liked: on their way to other people’s houses, to drinks parties on terraces above the port or yachts stationary for the night in the harbor. That was what summers were for. Soon Naomi and Sam were being whisked up to one of these parties as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
They went to the villa of an elderly American painter whose name Sam should have known but didn’t; it was surrounded by one of the island’s characteristic high walls, and in the garden behind them tortoises inched their way through a garden of long grass studded with enormous fallen lemons. But why, she wondered, did they have candles soldered to their shells? This was Naomi’s world, and nothing about it was obvious. Yet there was an air of madness and fun that would probably last all night and without foreseeing it she had been dropped into that atmosphere at just the right moment.
The painter Ed Milne was there with his wife, both ancient and burned to a handsome crisp by thirty reckless summers, and on the walls were his creations, small oblong abstractions of pale gray and blue with titles in Greek that she couldn’t understand. Oinopos Ponton, and so on. The rooms looked Ottoman as she wandered through them with her highball—a Turkish official had built the villa at the end of the eighteenth century—and soon she had lost Naomi and was among strangers, innocent and beautiful, as she was well aware, and with the added advantage of being unknown to them all. It was an advantage that might only last a single night, but it was a huge one all the same. But not all strangers enjoyed this privilege. She thought of the other one on his cliff sleeping out in the open, and she wondered whether he did, in fact, enjoy an advantage by virtue of being unknown. She couldn’t tell yet because he was not a stranger of the same sort. He was, thus far, almost entirely a creation of her own imagination.
FIVE