So Shelly (21 page)

The summer between my sophomore and junior years—between Shelly’s and Gordon’s junior and senior years—as I worked on my writing and website, Shelly was on North Bass, and Gordon was overseas. The three of us were largely incommunicado (nothing atypical as far as I went, since the
Beacon
had been my only consistent link to either one of them and, obviously, there was no summer edition). That June, my mother passed away, and not long after, Tom displayed signs of the onset of his tuberculosis.

At only twenty years old, he felt the burden of being the man of the house, and he didn’t always deal with it in what you might call “appropriate” ways, especially after Mom died. He’d made some pretty shady friends at work who’d introduced him first to pot and cocaine and eventually to heroin. I know I should have done something, but put yourself in the situation we were in, and you tell me what you would have done. To make matters worse, Tom had been lazy in treating
his diabetes (number six killer of Americans), and neither of us had healthy eating habits. I assumed that his lingering cough, constant lethargy, and weight loss were due to the drugs and poor diet.

His health deteriorated. He was fired from his job, for his constant coughing was giving everyone the fantods as they wondered what he might be spreading. Besides, he looked like a zombie; his appearance was enough to drive potential customers screaming from the restaurant.

When I finally convinced him to go to the clinic at the county health department, the doctor diagnosed his tuberculosis (not to mention his drug usage, which led the doctor to also have Tom tested for AIDS—negative thus far). The precautionary test for TB ordered for me came back negative. Tom was prescribed a combination of antibiotics that required vigilant regimentation, which I knew he would struggle to maintain, in order to be effective. But at least he was being treated.

My mother had died in her sleep. One noontime in late June, I realized that I hadn’t heard her stir all morning. I found her lying in bed, already bluing. I knew she was dead, but I called 911 anyway. Then I called Tom. One of the EMTs notified the same cut-rate funeral home that had handled my father. By midafternoon, my mother was on a gurney being wheeled from house to hearse. She was buried next to my father with even less ceremony than his “blue light special” interment. It sounds awful, I know, but her death was sort of anticlimactic. She’d all but died that day years earlier when my father had received his ALS death sentence.

With my mother’s passing, we felt freer to seek any and
all of the governmental assistance for which we were eligible but that our father had abhorred and our mother, as head of the household, had been too cataleptic to pursue. Pride and honor are nice and all, but you can’t eat them, and they don’t pay the utilities.

Thinking Shelly might go with me to the cemetery, I called her house. But the woman who answered the phone (I assumed it was her stepmother) curtly communicated that she hadn’t seen Shelly in days. She offered me Shelly’s cell number, but by that point I’d already determined it had been a bad idea to call, so I didn’t take the number. I figured that Shelly was preoccupied with the goings-on at North Bass that summer anyway.

Although I completely lost touch with Shelly from when school let out in June until it began again in early September, in between composing and posting new poems to my website, I was able to follow Gordon’s book tour through blogs on his professionally administered page. So much happened to all of us during those months he was away. It was the summer that changed everything.

After bleeding dry the overwhelmingly female market of young adult readers in America, that spring Pandroth had unleashed a number of foreign language editions of
Manfred
into the European market. Its author, accompanied by his agent, Ms. Martin, and his mother, followed soon after—fangs bared. When the four-week tour of book signings and appearances concluded, Gordon successfully bullied his mother into allowing him extended vacation time, with a
brief visit to western Turkey and a prolonged stay in Greece, both of which had held a special place in his imagination since his early readings of Homer. In an effort to ease Catherine’s worry, Ms. Martin arranged for Johnny Hobhouse, a recent Columbia grad and an intern at her agency, to fly over and serve as Gordon’s chaperone for the remainder of his pilgrimage.

Upon his liberation from his matronly cotravelers, Gordon’s blogs grew infrequent. I mostly learned of his Aegean adventures and Shelly’s own quixotic summer the following fall from Shelly. Apparently, Gordon emailed her with occasional updates, attaching photographs of himself in various locations. In one that Shelly shared, he was dripping wet inside a peeled-to-beneath-his-waist wet suit as he emerged in the half-light of dusk from a large body of water. According to Gordon’s email, he had just recreated Leander’s swimming of the Dardanelles, a strait separating the Aegean Sea from the Sea of Marmara, not far from the ancient city of Troy.

The idea for the swim had originated years ago at the Rood, where Willie had shared the story of Leander and Hero, and had even posed Gordon as Leander for one of his sketches. In the myth, Leander of Abydos and Hero of Sestos fall in love during a chance encounter at a festival honoring Aphrodite. However, Hero’s parents refuse to allow their daughter to enter into a relationship with a boy from the rival city-state directly across the Dardanelles—or the Hellespont, as the strait was then named. In defiance of her parents, Hero agrees to Leander’s plan for her to light a lamp in her bedroom tower window as a landmark by which he
can navigate as he braves the turbulent waters and secretly swims to her. The ritual continues nightly. One evening at the onset of winter, however, a strong wind extinguishes Hero’s lamp in the midst of Leander’s crossing and leaves him floundering, directionless, until he drowns in watery confusion. Spotting his lifeless body washed up on the rocks beneath her tower on the following morning, Hero throws herself from the window to die next to Leander.

When Gordon finally emerged from his swim, he was met by Hobhouse, who snapped the photograph sent to Shelly. As it turned out, Hobhouse had more than a few wild hairs of his own, and Ms. Martin couldn’t have picked a less suitable chaperone for her boy genius.

From northeastern Greece, they relocated to the Athenaeum InterContinental luxury hotel, located twenty minutes from the nightlife of downtown Athens but near to the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the Temple of Apollo. The hotel’s close proximity to the metro made it an ideal launching pad for their planned adventures. Initially, their itinerary consisted of the stuff of standard Greek vacations, but it was soon discarded in favor of a more epicurean, less touristy stay. The pair began sleeping until noon, and then commencing their daily ritual of afternoons spent at the beaches of Glyfada, light dinners and coffee in any of the numerous cafés in Athens, and clubbing until dawn.

One morning, however, Gordon broke from their established cycle of sloth and debauchery, cut short their morning slumber, dragged the hungover Hobhouse from bed, and rode the municipal bus from Omonia Square to Cape Sounion, the southernmost tip of the Attica peninsula.
There they visited the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon. As if to touch the past and to link himself inextricably with his self-acknowledged patron god forever, Gordon snuck past the barriers and carved his name into the base of one of the remaining pillars, while Hobhouse distracted the security guard with a perfectly timed bout of vomiting.

“That is as close to immortality as either one of us will ever come,” Gordon told Hobhouse upon extricating himself from the cordoned-off temple.

“Whatever,” Hobhouse moaned, badly in need of some serious hydration and a nap before the night’s revelries.

Hobhouse quickly grew accustomed to being blown off by Gordon whenever his ward made the company of a local beauty. In fact, on their first full day in Athens, while the two of them were shopping in the boutiques of Kolonaki, Gordon met three sisters who, in Hobhouse’s estimation, were all in their early to middle teens. Made uncomfortable in their company by his own relatively advanced years, Hobhouse excused himself.

Gordon, meanwhile, accompanied Teresa, Mariana, and Kattinka to their suburban home northeast of downtown Athens. Among the three of them they didn’t appear to share ten words of English. The Macri sisters’ home was a four-story Grammatikos stone maisonette with a view of the Evoikos Gulf, and was worth more than a million euros. Compared to downtown Athens, it was rural, uncongested, and, if nothing else, free from the incessant smog that lingered over the ancient city.

No sooner had Gordon set foot on the dark German hardwood of the first-floor living room, than the squealing sisters scattered to their respective bedrooms. Gordon stood stock-still among a collection of abstract sculptures and paintings until the girls returned; each was wrapped in a bath towel and nothing else. Gordon had a sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t the first boy they’d collected and brought home.

Teresa, the one Gordon thought to be the youngest (perhaps thirteen), took him by the hand and led him, followed by her two sisters, through a sliding glass door into a first-level pool and Jacuzzi area. Without ceremony or hesitation, the sisters dropped their towels, joined hands at the pool’s edge, and jumped in as Gordon watched.

Treading water, the three formed a line of synchronized swimmers and turned to their guest. “Well?” Kattinka, the oldest, asked.

Cross-armed, he pulled his T-shirt up over his head and tossed it onto the concrete deck. Giddy, I’m sure, with the possibilities before him, he slipped out of his sandals and dropped his pants so that they covered his feet. He then dove into the water, swam beneath the surface, and stalked the girls’ bottoms like a great white. (A person’s chance of being killed by a shark is 1 in 264.1 million.) The girls scattered. Their squeals reached Gordon through the warbled distortion of the water, and he was once again comfortable and in his element.

They played—literally played—for nearly an hour: shark tank, volleyball, keep-away, and chicken fights, and he taught them to call “Polo” to his “Marco.” Gordon felt as if
he
were thirteen years old again, splashing in the back bay with Shelly and Augusta. He couldn’t remember a happier time in the intervening years.

The time machine was soon broken, however, and the games ended, when they heard the glass door to the living area sliding heavily on its track. Through the smell of chlorinated water, Gordon caught a whiff of an exotic perfume wafting in the air as he surfaced. He made out the shapely figure of a woman standing poolside with arms crossed as the girls called what Gordon took for helloes to the woman without the slightest hint of shame or concern for having been caught skinny-dipping with a boy.

Tarsia Macri was the water nymphs’ mother. In her late thirties, she could have easily passed for twenty-five.

Calmly, as if making the most mundane of requests, Mrs. Macri said something in Greek, and the girls, moaning their reluctance, swam to the concrete deck. They reached up, pulled and then pushed their glistening nubile bodies in perfect synchronicity from the pool, wrapped their towels around themselves, and scurried back, dripping wet, into the house.

Alone with Mrs. Macri, Gordon waited for his scolding.

“Well?” she said in a stilted English that perfectly matched Kattinka’s earlier invitation to jump into the water. Indicating that he too was expected to remove himself from the pool, Mrs. Macri revealed no obvious intention of chastising him for his behavior with her daughters, or any intention of averting her gaze.

Unabashedly, Gordon mimicked the girls’ exit and stood, dripping, two feet in front of her, awaiting further instructions.

Mrs. Macri slid her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and gave Gordon’s body a once-over from bottom to top and back down again. “What happened to your leg?” she asked.

He actually appreciated her bluntness, especially compared to the idiotic manner most people employed in order to pretend not to notice, but before he could answer, she turned and walked away, announcing that dinner would be served in half an hour.

As he showered in the guest bathroom, Gordon imagined several scenarios, in anticipation of what the Macri females had in store for the evening. The fantasy he settled on was that Mrs. Macri was a cougar who fed on the flesh and fluids of young men, in an ever-increasingly difficult quest to maintain her own youth and to forestall her inevitable march into the living-death of middle age. She used her daughters as bait to trap her victims and lure them to her lair, where she ravished and drained her boy toys in exquisite tortures that even Gordon couldn’t imagine but was dying to discover.

His erotic musings were abruptly interrupted when a panicked Mrs. Macri burst in and threw his clothes over the top of the glazed glass shower door.

“What’s going on?” Gordon asked, sensing that his burgeoning fantasies were going to remain just that—fantasies.

“You must go,” she insisted as Gordon attempted to pull on his sopping wet clothes.

“But—”

“No talk. Just go.”

From the pool deck, Gordon heard the bass voice of a man
who, to inspire this kind of terror, could only be Mrs. Macri’s husband. The girls’ birdlike voices were intermingled with the man’s.

With his pants barely covering his ass and his shirt worn inside out, Gordon, still soaking wet, carried his shoes and followed Mrs. Macri down to the first level, where she shoved him through the kitchen and out the back door.

Dismayed and pouting, Gordon sat down impudently on the steps, which led to a rear alley. He finished dressing, gathered his dignity, made his way around to the street in front, and walked toward Athens in search of a taxi.

It would seem that, at least for the first part of his stay in Greece, Gordon was still Gordon.

But on a mid-July afternoon two weeks later, Gordon met a girl. I don’t mean the typical “Gordon girl” but one who sincerely interested him and with whom he developed an actual platonic relationship bordering on friendship. Although, it began inauspiciously.