Why I Killed My Best Friend (23 page)

“Anna, just let me send you one of the cassettes—”

“I don't have time for stuff like that, Maria. When people get all dressed up to go to some gallery opening, they're missing the whole point.”

“It's not a gallery piece. I don't believe in galleries, you know that.”

But she sighs at the idea of Syntagma, too. “The only sound we should be hearing in public squares is the shouting of slogans.”

I record that conversation, too. She'll be furious if she ever finds out, but for me art is as important as politics. As important as Anna.

“I hope it's just a phase.” As always, Antigone isn't eating her salad so much as playing with it. It's my day off and we're having dinner at a taverna in Exarheia.

“She hasn't set foot in the university in ages,” I say.

Antigone wrinkles her brow, and her face fills with tiny little lines.

“Why didn't you tell me earlier?”

“I thought you knew.” I'm sick of her treating me like Anna's keeper, like a detective agency with only one client.

She pushes her plate away. “I don't know where I went wrong. We were democratic parents, we never deprived her of anything,
she was always free to voice her opinion. These days she's just part of the herd—she asks permission from the party just to go to the bathroom!”

People at nearby tables turn to look at us. Antigone's voice has grown louder and louder, until now she's practically shouting. She hates the Communist Party even more than she hates the right. Her leftist politics are nostalgic, with a tinge of elitism. That may be what Anna is reacting against, just as I'm reacting against my mother's political agnosticism.

“How is your family doing these days? Your mother?” Antigone asks, as if she read my mind.

“She's fine, same as always, with her soap operas and her icons.”

“Part of the herd, just like Anna. Sometimes I wonder if you two girls were switched at birth.”

If she'd said that to me ten years earlier, tears of pride would have sprung to my eyes. Now I just take another bite of my food.

I drag my bed over to the window so the light falls on it, position a chair in the middle of the room like a statue. I haven't put anything on the walls since I rented the apartment, but now I hang some of my paintings. Kayo is coming! The Athenian sun, the arrangement of the furniture, the male nudes from my first year of art school—it all screams out how badly I want him. He's not HIV positive, it's not too late for him to change, to think seriously about bisexuality, and to pass from there into heterosexuality, into incurable love for me.

I keep breaking glasses at Brutus. I'm dreaming with open eyes: Kayo embraces me at the airport, we come back to the apartment, the light falls through the grates over the windows, we make love on the chair in the middle of the room, Kayo gives up modeling and helps me design posters about racism, minorities, AIDS. We go out at night to put up the posters, get caught in a downpour,
Kayo opens his arms wide and shouts, “This is how to really feel the rain!”

In actuality, though, there's an early heat wave, Kayo sleeps on the edge of the bed with one leg on the tile floor to keep cool, and when I try to get close to him, he says, “I'm hot, little one.” He breaks the news on the third day, as he's stirring a pot of pasta sauce on the stove.

“I've had an offer to go and work in New York.”

In a sudden flash, I see him on magazine covers, in karaoke bars, strolling down wide avenues, always with his arms spread wide, just in case it rains.

“What about Orgapolis?”

“I only do that for your sake. Collective action isn't really my thing, you know that.”

“What about me, then?”

“You'll come for visits.”

Kayo's princely temperament is out in full force on our evening walks to the Herod Atticus theater. He makes me look up at the moon. He tells me romantic tales about ghostly spirits and gods with animal forms. He recites poems by Kofi Anyidoho:
Because because I do not scream / You do not know how bad I hurt / Because because I do not kiss / on public squares / You may not know how much I love / Because because I do not swear / again and again and again / You wouldn't know how deep I care
. I should be the one speaking those words.

The people in my life are always going somewhere. First Anna, now Kayo. And I'm forever in the background, waving a handkerchief as they leave.

Anna is the first to taste the strawberries with whipped cream, and spits the bite out onto her plate.

“Merde, it's mayonnaise!”

Aunt Amalia wanted to welcome Anna home to Athens with a nice meal. She made us pasta, only she left it on the burner until it was a pile of mush. And now this: strawberries topped with mayonnaise for dessert. She's getting worse. She forgets things, puts her clothes on inside out, rings strangers' doorbells.

“Amalia, I'll have my strawberries plain,” I call to her in the kitchen.

“You girls are skin and bones with all your dieting!” she calls back.

Anna laughs until tears come to her eyes. I, meanwhile, am crying on the inside.

“What's going to become of Amalia? Of all of us, for that matter?”

“This thing with Kayo has made you too sensitive,” Anna says, wiping the mayonnaise off her strawberries with a paper napkin.

“So you're allowed to believe in your utopia but I'm not allowed to believe in mine?”

“Not all utopias are made equal.”

“Yours, as always, is better.”

“Don't be a baby, Maria. You take offense at the least little criticism. The only way to pose a danger to the system is to join a collective utopia. A utopia of the possible.”

I feel like we're back in grade school, sitting in our uniforms waiting for the bell to ring. We're bored of school, bored of life. We're anxious for something to happen, but we don't know what, and until it appears we chew on sharp, dangerous words.

“What a stupid island.”

Anna doesn't enjoy summer in Greece the way she used to. She sits in the shade in a long Indian tasseled skirt reading Alain Badiou's
Peut-on penser la politique?
Every so often she lifts her head
from the page and makes a face—at a woman in a gaudy bathing suit diving into the sea, or a man walking by, checking his Rolex. She doesn't wear makeup anymore, puts her hair up in a bun with a ball-point pen, lives like a monk on an apple and a bar of dark chocolate a day. I stopped eating for Kayo, she stopped eating to fight the system. I barely recognize our reflections when we walk past a shop window. Our elongated figures look like shadows, or characters out of a comic book. As always, Anna pulls it off brilliantly. The whole island of Paros is in love with her. The other day a boy turned to look at her and almost fell off his moped. Whenever she puts down her book, pulls out the pen, shakes out her hair and dives into the water, every single pair of eyes on the beach turns her way. On top of everything else, she's an amazing swimmer. Her body, still pale from the Parisian winter and our rented umbrella, is beautifully toned. Even if she spends most of the day lying down, reading.

“It's not the island's fault, Anna. It's your mood.”

“How about we put it to the test? Can we go to Donousa? Or Amorgos?”

So we change islands. We go to Amorgos, set up shop on an outcropping of rocks, surround ourselves in nature and solitude. Anna scrambles around with the help of a stick she found. She sits and reads in a wide-brimmed straw hat, feet dangling in the water. I, meanwhile, sweat and peel peaches with my penknife. Pairs of boys keep wandering over our way, and either whistle at us or ask what time it is, depending on how they've been brought up. They all assume that two girls on their own must be looking for company. They don't know Anna.

“Beat it!” she shouts.

And they do—sometimes baffled, sometimes cursing. Anna slides towards me on her behind, stretches out on her towel and
whispers in my ear, “Boys are monsters. You, you're my best friend.”

To seal the deal, she pinches me on the shoulder.

“Merde, Maria!” Anna looks me up and down as I button my pants, hunched over in our tent. I've done something wrong again.

“What's wrong?”

“Is that another new pair of pants?”

“You want me to make a list of all my purchases and submit it for your approval?”

“I'm afraid you're turning into your parents.”

“What did my parents ever do to you?”

“To me, nothing. The question is what they've done to themselves, and to you. Their only dream was the accumulation of wealth. And when they had to give up that wealth, they stopped being happy, too. Why do you think you won first prize in the drawing contest on Savings Day in the third grade?”

“Because the judges liked my drawing?”

“Your drawing was an encapsulation of bourgeois stereotypes. Just imagine, money falling from the sky! It's like an ad for the lottery!”

“And bank robberies and doves are better?”

“I don't claim to be better. But I try.”

“Whereas I don't try hard enough, is that it?”

She makes me feel useless. Unimportant. Stupid. She doesn't listen when I describe my sound installation. She says that capitalism is what's driving Aunt Amalia crazy. That my new pants are a symbol of the created desire for material possessions. That the storage room in Ikeja was the site of a traumatic experience, and ever since that day I've had a need to acquire. Me? A need to acquire? I always give her half of what's mine, I just don't make a big fuss
over it the way she does. Take half my sandwich, give me the man of your dreams.

“I can't be like you. I don't want to be. I don't like the way you are!”

Anna's eyes open wide, enormous. “You don't like the way I am?”

Merde, it slipped out.

“Have you seen a blond girl, my age, very skinny, with a dimple in her chin and one eyebrow that's half white? Wearing a red t-shirt and a black skirt with tassels?”

I've been scouring the island for her since yesterday. In bathrooms. Behind tamarisk trees. In restaurant kitchens. In hotels. What has she eaten? Where did she sleep? She ran off yesterday without her wallet. I open her backpack, rummage through her clothes, but what am I expecting to learn? Whether she's been honest with me? Whether she bought anything new, too? I go into all the bars, stores, and coffee shops on the island; I've become a regular private eye.

“You still haven't found your friend?” one waiter asks. “Maybe someone swept her off her feet?”

All that swept her off her feet was her inflated opinion of herself.

“What's wrong?” the waiter asks.

A sudden flash of understanding: Anna is putting my friendship to yet another test, just like when she ruined my drawing, or wanted to swap Raoul for Michel, or stole Angelos. She's following me, measuring the extent of my devotion. She'll appear again as soon as she finds my display of concern sufficiently moving. Or if I stop looking for her altogether.

I leave her backpack in the tent, gathering only my things. I write her a note:
Anna, you've been using me my whole life. You may be more beautiful, more intelligent, more committed to your ideas (though that much I doubt), but I'm tired of running after you. I want you to accept
me, the same way you accept your workers at the factory. You work hard to make them feel proud of themselves. Did you ever think about my pride? Maria
.

I tear the note up. There are no words to express my pride.

I thought you were something more than my friend: you were the sister I never had. Your behavior is making me re-evaluate my whole life, my priorities, my entire emotional world. You just left me there and went off. I could have fallen from a cliff. Were you always so selfish, or are you improving with age?

That's the kind of letter Anna has been writing to me this fall. Every two weeks or so I get an envelope with a French stamp and know exactly what's waiting for me: a tirade. She doesn't call, and doesn't pick up when I call. It's our era of vicious correspondence. I have no choice but to write back:
Anna, be serious. When I said I didn't like the way you are, I meant that I didn't like the way you act toward me. You pressure me. You want to have your own way. You can call that the utopia of the possible, if you want, but it's the utopia of
your
possible. You need to leave a little room for mine, too
.

She responds with something irrelevant:
You know how the work of philosophers falls into different periods? I like early Nietzsche, but not late Nietzsche. Well, I have fond memories of Maria One, but not of Maria Two
. I don't know what to say to that. I'm starting to think I have issues with Anna One
and
Anna Two.

I've forgotten what her voice sounds like. Sometimes I imagine her leaping out of bed with that tremendous energy of hers, rushing downstairs, running over to the café across the street and writing me a letter. Bitter, confused, with a pile of crumpled sheets of paper on the table before her—but those are just my fantasies. I'm sure she's fine. She'll have found a new group of friends, the hard-core kind she wants now, and they'll all eat together in their collective and discuss the utopia of the possible in a smoky, high-ceilinged
room. I'm sure they're all overflowing with revolutionary fervor, and have nothing but disdain for anyone who would buy a new pair of pants without absolutely needing them.