Panos could not imagine how he would have coped without Lea and Stratos. His university career absorbed him but it did not, could not fill his life. He had to adapt to the Greek reality of connections, political and familial, which determine to a large extent a career‟s advancement; to become familiar with the Greek terminology in his subjects; to deal with the students‟ frequent sit-ins and seizures of the university and the professors‟ strikes. Moreover, he did not feel ready to embark on a new emotional attachment despite the opportunities available in the university milieu. He was handsome, young, single and the female population's interest, inside and out of his department, was more than obvious. His after-hours escape from loneliness was, for the time being, solely the company of Lea and Stratos.
A few months went by. By the middle of June, Lea left for Limnos and two weeks later Stratos followed her. She resumed her painting and Stratos tried to convince her to collect the more conventional paintings for an exhibition on their return to Athens in the fall. She was reluctant to do so. She did not feel she could part with the good ones and felt uncomfortable with the thought of exhibiting what she considered somewhat second-rate.
“There is nothing that is second-rate in your work,” Stratos told her.
“I do not need to sell,” she answered. “I do not need the money.”
“I know that,” Stratos replied, “but an artist cannot hoard. It is almost unethical. He cannot be a miser. He must share his creations. And then, I honestly believe you are there, at the very top of Greek painters. Better than most of the fashionable moderns. A woman, too. There is not a single one amongst them.”
“Oh, we shall see,” she answered. “At the moment what is important for me is to paint.”
Until the end of July, she painted and then she took a break. The holiday season went into high gear with friends and parties, cultural activities and interminable dinners at the port, with sorties to recommended tavernas in neighboring villages and the new luxury hotels that sprouted on the island and sported music and dancing. Once again, after the celebrations of the Annunciation of the Virgin on August 15, Myrina started emptying. Panos was invited to spend the last ten days of August in Myrina in the company of his friends. He had sorely missed them when they left Athens and his life seemed desolate in their absence. Even before the university recessed in August, he left for England to see Iason. He settled in a hotel in Kent near Ceres‟s home and assumed the duties of a nanny.
Panos‟s meeting with Ceres was strange. He was diffident. He did not really know where he stood with her. His feelings were largely unchanged. He loved her, respected her, admired her many qualities, found her physically attractive and yet her detached attitude, her present private life unknown to him and her obscure intentions cooled the mad passion he once felt for her. He loved her but the pain, the anxiety and 33
constant thought of her were gone. He had lost her and his resignation and equanimity surprised him. The question he had asked Lea about Ceres also applied to him. Where did all that love go? His love, this mad passion for his beloved Thimitra. She, on her part, was both affectionate and not too familiar with him. She was a woman who had taken her decisions and had no lingering doubts. Mrs. Ploughright and the Professor were best of all. Apart from little Iason, that is. Friendly, neutral and civil, they put Panos perfectly at ease. He felt he was not an altogether disastrous episode in their life.
He fathered a delightful English-looking grandson with their daughter, who was now coming into his own, brightening their life and their only reservation was that Iason had not his father near him.
In the month that Panos spent in Kent, Mrs. Ploughright would prepare little Iason and round about ten Panos collected him in his pram to spend the day with him.
They strolled to nearby parks where Iason left his pram and played in the sand clearing of the children‟s playground or on the grass or with his father on the various swings and slides. He was already nearly a year and a half old and could walk and run precariously and charge with excited little cries on all the dogs, big or small, that came his way. Panos spoke to him in Greek and Iason was a little puzzled at first. He seemed to understand that this was a different language. After a few days, he took it in his stride and started recognizing phrases and words. A little before noon, Panos administered his bottle of milk and an hour or so later gave him his Gerber meal and fruit compost, changed him if he was wet and put him in the pram for a nap while he pushed him leisurely along the pleasant little university town. When Iason woke up, there would be a second visit to the playground before he delivered him to Mrs.
Ploughright at five in the afternoon. She received him with a smile and a blessing to Panos for the little holiday he provided her with. If the Professor was in, Panos was usually invited to share a glass of port and they would talk of Greek mythology and the philosophers, the pros and cons of returning the Elgin marbles, the genius of Pythagoras and the Greek temples in Sicily. He rarely saw Ceres on weekdays. He returned to his hotel to rest and, later, went out to a pub for drink and a meal before turning in. It was the month for his son. He left him with tears in his eyes and a taut heart. Ceres and Iason accompanied him to the railway station. It was an emotional parting. He embraced and kissed them for a long while and could not bring himself to board the train.
“Good bye, my Thimitra,” he told her. He knew he would not be using that name again. “Whatever paths our lives may take, I want you to know that you were the woman of my life.”
“I love you, too, Panos, but I shall never forgive you for this,” she answered.
Slow and subtle changes were taking place in Lea and Stratos‟s marriage. Their age difference, though not great, was at that critical point where it mattered. It would, perhaps, not have been so significant at the end of a long life together but they had just barely completed a year as a couple. Their emotional congruence was unchanged. They loved, respected and hugely admired one another. Their emotional interdependence was total. The question of physiology, of the natural processes of aging, however, started intruding in an almost ideal relationship. Some post-menopausal women often seem to have a second sexual blooming, a heightened need for physical sexual activity.
Lea had just crossed the threshold of fifty. Stratos, on the other hand, in his early sixties, was experiencing a waning of his sexual drive. He felt it and it worried him. He was aware that Lea often wanted him and he was unable to respond. It was not the original problem of impotence. He was virile but the time he needed to recuperate 34
from one sexual contact to the next, to feel his desire for intercourse build up again, kept on lengthening as time passed. Despite her passionate nature, Lea was never sexually aggressive and rarely tried to initiate their lovemaking. She used discreet and insinuating ways to arouse him. A brief, suggestive nightie with no underclothes, sleeping in the nude or a dab of perfume would signal her mood, her need. It was up to Stratos to respond, or not. Sometimes he would wake up at night to find her gently stroking her genitals. It usually aroused him and lovemaking would follow. At others, he would watch her and caress her and when she finished would kiss her and tell her,
“I‟m sorry, my dear. I‟m especially sorry because I love you so much.”
“Do not worry, Stratouly,” she would reply, “I just felt a little tense. I have become adept at relieving myself in this way.”
Panos arrived in Limnos on August 20. He had just spent a few depressing days in Athens after his return from Kent, visiting his parents, sitting aimlessly at the cafés in Kolonaki and mainly thinking of Iason. He missed his son terribly. He missed the happy little English boy that had not a whit of resemblance to his father. Ceres was slowly fading from his consciousness and Iason was replacing her in his tortured thoughts.
This trip to Limnos, all of a sudden, seemed like temporary salvation. His excitement mounted as the plane approached the island in the early morning flight. Lea and Stratos met him at the airport and Panos was so emotionally stressed that tears rolled down his eyes as he embraced Lea. They had cleaned and prepared a room for him at Stratos‟s house next door and told him to go and rest for a while.
Panos could not possibly stay indoors. He washed, arranged his few belongings in the room and walked to the port, his heart pounding with happiness. He had breakfast at the Aeolos and watched the commotion of passengers disembarking from a ship that had just arrived. Then, he walked to the army camp and visited his former officers who had treated him with special consideration during his military service. A few of the younger officers he knew were still there and they came to shake his hand.
When he left the camp, it was only ten and he felt restless and energetic. He started walking up the mount to the church of St Thomas.
He reached the top in less than an hour and he sat and looked at the glorious scenery. A fresh, sweet-scented wind was blowing. Myrina sprawled far below him, in the sun, soundlessly, was like a deserted ghost village. Only the odd ship coming and going, the smoke emerging from the smokestack of the electricity generating plant just outside the village and a tiny cockroach car snaking its way towards the nearby village of Kaspakas indicated that life was in full swing. Panos felt his depression lifting. A sense of euphoria flooded his being. He had not realized he loved this island so much and that this love and nostalgia was due to Lea. He closed his eyes and saw her standing there, furiously slashing at her canvas, as if her life, her very breath, depended on it. Next year he would spend summer in Limnos. He would have Iason with him. That was a sure thing.
By the time, he returned to the Romeikos Yialos it was well past noon and he found Lea and Stratos sitting at the Terrain.
“Where have you been, you crazy boy?” asked Lea.
“Oh, walking about. I could not stay at home.”
“You look much better.”
“I am. I am, indeed. It is so nice to be back in Limnos. So wonderful to see you both.”
“Sit down. Tell us about your stay in London. The way you looked at the airport, it could not have been so good.”
35
“Kent. I spent the whole month in Kent with Iason.”
“And Thimitra?”
“There is no Thimitra any more. Just Ceres. I hardly saw her. It is all over, Lea.”
“Of course, my dear. I could have told you. I should have warned you.” Panos told them of his stay in Kent. His extraordinary attachment to Iason. The transfer of the vast love he had for Ceres to Iason. The happiness he felt with his son.
His unbounded love for this English little boy. His heartbreak on his departure.
Stratos stared at Panos in wonder.
“Unbelievable,” he mused. “It is my life all over again. I wonder, Panos, will this duplication continue?”
“I hope not,” said Lea. “It must be terrible to know your future in advance. I do not understand all this human silliness of resorting to mediums and fortune-tellers to find it out.”
“I keep on thinking about it,” said Stratos. “You know, Lea, the urge is coming stronger than ever. Do you think I should start?”
“Writing? Of course, Stratouly. Have I not been goading you on?”
“This parallel life gives me an idea for a plot. I have wanted to put some thoughts down in writing all my life and I never had the time. Now a plot is germinating and, perhaps, I shall pepper it with my philosophy of life. Oh, nothing profound, of course, just simple, practical ideas that I have gathered from my experiences, hard work, disappointments, pain, but also happy moments in my life, all along our inescapable march to the big sleep, our grave.”
They talked and talked. Lea was enthusiastic and happy with her two men.
Stratos, a little lost in his plot and Panos, unusually talkative. Myrina had overshadowed Kent, at least for the moment. A couple of hours later they went for a swim at the bay next to the camp.
“Remember?” said Panos to Lea.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Remember, what?” asked Stratos.
“This is where we met,” Lea explained. “The bay was deserted and we came for a swim. Just the two of us. Separately. Then Panos came and introduced himself. A mournful, strange, thirty-year-old soldier.” She laughed. “A mathematician, no less.” The ten days passed like a dream. Stratos started writing that same afternoon and Panos went for a long walk with Lea. They all dined at the port in the evening. It was nice and quiet. Most holidaymakers had left but the diehards like Lea and Stratos were still around and the drift of people was reduced but not overly sparse. Myrina was still lit up, the Castro still hovering in mid-air, luminous and dominant, and the Terrain and the other seaside cafés on the Romeikos had their handful of customers to keep their waiters busy. The next few days occupied the trio with pleasant conversation, swimming, writing for Stratos, painting for Lea, long, leisurely walks, in company or separately, merry lunches and dinners with the fine wines of Limnos and all too soon Panos had to depart for Athens to prepare his courses for the coming university session.
He waited for his friends. He seemed to have lost the ability to relate to other people. He missed Lea. Stratos too but Stratos, to him, was peripheral; a sort of father figure. Something akin to his own, maddeningly busy father whom he hardly ever saw, however frequently he went to his parents‟ home. He was at either out-of-town conferences or receptions or, forever, in the operating theatre at the hospital. As a 36
result, his mother had become a biribomaniac . Panos wondered how serious or interesting a card game called biriba could be. Apparently it was. As serious and subtle and complicated as bridge. Or so she claimed. At least, she would be home at certain predictable hours and he could go and see her.
Lea was another thing. She was a mother, a sister, a friend, intelligent and caring, and an attractive woman. She was ripe, experienced and uninhibited. How strange that his initial, elusive revulsion of her had changed to a need. It was the need to see her, to be with her, to bask in her sharp views and intellectual conversation. He wondered if he was falling in love with her. Drop by inexorable drop, the cup was about to overflow. He no longer saw a man‟s face. He craved for the smile that dazzled him.
The thought of her youthful naked body on the beach of Thanos constantly tortured and aroused him. His sexual continence was no help at all. He waited for her.
They arrived in Athens a month later, at the beginning of October and the trio‟s routine resumed but not intact. Stratos had plunged into his novel. It absorbed him and fascinated him. He often stayed at home in the evenings to write afraid that an outing might disperse his ideas and insights. He urged Lea to go with Panos to the jazz club or the film they had planned to go all together. His age was weighing on him more and more and the solace of his writing, his thoughts, his memories and creativity formed a parallel life that was very seductive. It was so very much alive and real. He was slowly entering the age when memories usurp reality, the here and now, and even the future.
Perhaps not quite for an average person but certainly for a writer.
Panos and Lea found themselves increasingly on their own. Even when Panos visited them at their home in the evenings, Stratos would be in his study writing away and the two friends would have a drink and talk. They would arrange next evening‟s program and ask Stratos if he would be joining them. He often did, especially if it was to go out for dinner but he tended to avoid events that kept him up late. Lea neither encouraged nor discouraged this tendency. She let things take their natural course. She was happy that Stratos had found something that absorbed him as much as painting absorbed her. She liked his writing, the way he expressed himself, his sober evaluations intertwined with passionate beliefs. She liked the altruism of a compassionate human being that was conveyed in his writing. It was of the man she had grown to love.
In Panos, on the other hand, she had the young and energetic companion who brightened up her evenings and accompanied her to the cultural events that had become an integral part of her life. They became attached. His disposition, his humor, his personality seemed to have changed. He lost his mournfulness. He was gay and talkative. He had, finally, wrested himself free of Ceres. Iason was, of course, ever present in his thoughts but even his little English son had entered into a context of normality with the trips to Kent that Panos took every couple of months to see him for a few days.
Lea, often but half-heartedly, told Panos that it was not normal. He had to find a woman. How did he manage? He was too embarrassed to tell her. He would just smile and say,
“But I do have a woman.”
They would look at each other for a moment and change the subject that was troubling them both. Late one evening, returning from the cinema, outside her apartment building, as she kissed him goodnight, he held her and kissed her passionately on the mouth. She responded with a passion and energy that surprised them both. It was not the safest of places for lovemaking but they could not draw apart.
They stopped when they heard footsteps approaching and walked away. No words were exchanged as they enlaced each other and walked hurriedly to his flat. There was just 37
the thirst and hunger of desire. It was a pent-up craving of sexual deprivation on both sides, reinforced by friendship and love and raw physical attraction. They made passionate, violent, noisy love repeatedly without a break quenching a thirst and sating a hunger they had suppressed for too long. Then, they dressed and Panos accompanied Lea back to her house. It was almost two. They walked slowly, her arm around his and into her coat pocket like that first day in Myrina. They looked at each other every few steps and smiled tenderly. They had renewed themselves and crossed a barrier. Panos did not know where to, or in what direction. They had no time to talk.
“I feel terrible,” he told her as they were walking.
“I know. You truly are a ninny. I feel glorious.”
“I am in love with you.”
“Is that why you feel so terrible?”
He turned to her and smiled at her taunt.
“No, of course not,” he said. “It‟s because of Stratos.”
“Oh, for Heaven‟s sake! Nothing has changed.”
“Don‟t you love me?”
“Of course I do.”
“And nothing has changed?”
“No, nothing.”
He was quiet for a while trying to figure out her way of thinking, her logic.
“In a way, that‟s a relief,” he finally said.
“Life is too short for regrets. Too short to forego such ecstasies.”
“You do make me wonder sometimes.”
“You do, too. You‟re such a conventional little lamb.” They kissed at the entrance of the building. Tenderness and wild passion do not always pair together but when they do, one truly understands the meaning of bliss. Such was the sweetness of their kiss.
Stratos was reading in bed when she entered the flat.
“Good evening love,” he told her. “Why were you so late? I was starting to worry.”
“We went for a drink after the movie. How did it go with you?”
“Oh, okay. The usual. It‟s coming along.”
Lea undressed and went in for a shower, which surprised Stratos because she usually showered first thing in the morning. He heard her drying her hair with the dryer and a while later she came out smiling, hair dried and brushed, gloriously naked and slipped into bed next to him. What a beautiful woman, he thought, but it was late and he was tired. He shut the light, heard her regular breath and muffled snore.
Panos walked back to his house deeply troubled. He did not regret what had occurred with Lea. He would have done it again. He was in love with her but could not suppress the feeling that he had committed an unethical act. Yes, he was a conventional little lamb and perhaps that was why Lea never stopped astounding him. The folk wisdom, the learned psychological treatises and even the assertions of women themselves claim man to be polygamous but the woman strictly monogamous. A woman cannot love two men at the same time and yet, Panos thought, here we have our Lea in love with two men. If their love affair continued, an intelligent man like Stratos was bound, eventually, to become aware of it. Not only that, how would one bear the thought that Lea was also sleeping with the other? Who, finally, was the more complacent, Panos or Stratos?
The life of the trio, on the face of it, did not change. The three of them regularly went out to dinner together though much less frequently to cultural events. Stratos was 38
more likely to stay away than go to a concert or a play he was not particularly keen to see. When they found themselves alone, Lea and Panos were more inclined to gravitate to Panos‟s flat and make love for a few hours than go to the scheduled event of the day.
The riddle that lodged in Stratos‟s mind was not caused by her coming back late at night. She was now home on time. It was a myriad of small pointers. Vague answers to his questions about the play or the film; about a singer or an actor; about the jazz combo. It was the peaceful exhaustion on her face, the air of repose and happiness, the blue hue beneath her eyes. The shower she took before going to bed on these occasions and the instant sleep that engulfed her. The soft snoring that was normally absent but almost routine after their own lovemaking.
Stratos wondered, with a constricted heart, if Lea and Panos were lovers. Did the affair go back to Limnos or was it something recent? He was not sure. She was so good and loving with him. She never refused his lovemaking. Was always warm and tender and called him Stratouly. He made love to her, to try her out, after her evening showers and she was willing, yielding and passionate and enjoyed his lovemaking. He was at a loss. He did not want to bring the subject up while he was not absolutely sure about it. Moreover, even if he were, he was not sure he would or should do anything