In Between Frames Page 6

  She came out of the bedroom, just in time to see him pulling on his shoes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what got into me. I don’t usually parade around in my skivvies for strangers, you know.”

  He smiled. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve taken photos of people in a far more advanced state of undress.”

  “Was it…arousing?” she asked. It was an honest question—she’d always been puzzled as to how artists who worked with nudes could go about doing their work without getting turned on—but she was halfway through it before she realized that Miles could construe it as a come-on. “I don’t mean it like that,” she added before he could say anything, and then she realized that that made even less sense and she still came across as some kind of wanton sexual hedonist and that wasn’t what she meant at all.

  Miles, though, merely laughed. “A lot of people ask me that,” he said. “And no. You’ve got too many other things to worry about to get turned on by someone’s boob.”

  She smiled back, relieved that he’s not reading too much into her words. “I need to stop over thinking things,” she said. “I just—I don’t want you getting the wrong idea, either, not with what’s happening with Stephan—“

  “And what’s the wrong idea?” he asked.

  “That I—“

  But she did like him, which was both a problem, in the sense that it complicated matters immensely when it came to dealing with Stephan, and the solution, because some part of her understood that Miles was the answer to her conundrum about finding love after David. Liking Miles didn’t feel like a betrayal to David, not the way Stephan did.

  “I mean, you do like me, don’t you?” he continued. “I mean, we talked for three hours last night, and then you asked me to spend the night.”

  “I do like you,” she said, throwing up her arms in exasperation. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I like you. I even want to get to like you enough to love you. But there’s Stephan—“

  “Screw Stephan,” Miles said. “It’s your life.”

  “Oh Miles,” she sighed, as she went to pour them coffee. “You have no idea how easy that is to do.”

  Part IV

  Miles stayed with her that morning, and went with her to the marketplace for that evening’s meal, helping her pick a bottle of wine, entertaining Mabel with stories of his travels. He and Mabel compared notes of London: she approved of cigar shops because they smelled nice, “even though Mummy doesn’t like cigars.” He told her of the Moroccan man’s flat, where he’d photographed the shepherd’s pie and all of the ingredients that had gone into it. “I wish we had a proper shepherd’s pie,” she sighed wistfully, which caused her mother to turn to her with a look of puzzled amusement. “You hated it,” Sam reminded her. “I always ended up tossing your portion in the bin.”

  “But you always made it with peas,” Mabel said. “I liked those.”

  “There’s no reason we can’t have peas,” Sam said, going over to the basket of pods and raking a few handfuls into the bag. She handed it to the vendor, who put it next to all of her other purchases. When she was ready, she’d tell him, and he’d ring up the sum for her. “But only if you help me shell them.”

  Miles watched this exchange, marvelling that it could have just as easily been taking place in the Safeway’s just outside Amherst, in Beijing, or Australia—and how at-home he felt, hearing Mabel’s soft, high voice and Sam’s gentle but firm stance on having peas but not pie.

  Mabel squealed happily, and then skipped away. Sam told him that her “job” was to go to the little wrinkled “nana” to get their bread. “It makes her happy, to be responsible for things,” Sam said. “I hope she’ll always be like that.”

  “You’re a good mother,” Miles said, as she paid for their groceries.

  Sam sighed and smiled sadly, threading her way through the crowd to find Mabel. They paused to marvel at the globe-sized eggplants, and face-sized leaves for dolmas, and cabbages the size of small babies. At another stall, acre-wide sheets of baklava and spanakopitas tempted shoppers. The market was always busy, Sam had told him—the single supermarket in the town had an abysmal selection even during the peak seasons, and really was only good for canned goods and bottled water. “Or, as the Greeks call it, fake food,” Sam had told him. Miles, having photographed what expats did with their food, couldn’t agree more, not after he’d seen—and tasted—some of the dishes that people were able to invent or reinvent with the wealth of foods available on the peninsula. The variety of stalls, some selling sausages, some selling pet food, some selling bolts of fabric, amazed him. It didn’t seem possible that the entire town had that much money to make trip to Loutraki worthwhile, and yet they were here, every week. Miles found the baklava impossible to resist and bought three squares of it, giving two of them to Sam.

  “A good mother would make sure her daughter is finished grieving for her dead father before she starts dating other men,” she said. “It’s only been three months.”

  “And we’re not dating,” Miles said.

  “Are you sure? You brought me flowers yesterday.”

  “Oh. You saw that.”

  “If it helps, I thought it was sweet.”

  Miles bit into his piece of baklava to save himself from the embarrassment of having to answer her. The honey-nut mix it was filled with was so sweet it made his teeth hurt, but it was distinctly different from the baklava he’d had in New York. The layers were crispier, the filling fresher. “This is one tasty treat,” he said.

  “Demetria makes them fresh every other day,” Sam told him, as she wrapped hers in a napkin before she started to nibble on it. She’d obviously done this before, as Miles quickly discovered that his fingers were soon dripping and sticky with honey.

  “I can understand why,” Miles said, as he licked his fingers in a futile attempt to clean them. “I’d buy these by the ton if I lived here.”

  Something shifted between them—the little “if” set them both to imagining their lives together in Loutraki: Miles wondered if she, too, was thinking of them spending a day like this, walking through the market, tentatively holding hands sometimes, with him stopping occasionally to take a picture with his smartphone, and her contemplating calamari rings for dinner that night, while Mabel darted in and out amongst the stalls on her little missions. Sam was looking at him strangely, and for a moment Miles dared entertain the notion that they were sharing the same thought. Then he realized that she was looking behind him. He turned around, and saw a man holding Mabel’s hand.

  “Hello, Stephan,” she said.

  Just like Stephan to ruin everything, Sam thought bitterly.

  “Hello, Samantha,” Stephan said.

  She sensed that she had to be very careful about what she said—Stephan was holding Mabel’s hand encased in his large one, and all he had to do was squeeze, accidentally or on purpose. Sam didn’t want to think he was that big of a jerk to want to hurt her daughter, though the side of Stephan she’d seen recently gave her good reason to suspect that he could do it. Stupid, to think that you could avoid him, she thought, cursing herself. Loutraki was tiny, not even a square mile, and everybody went to market.

  “Come to mummy, Mabel,” Sam said, holding out her arm.

  Mabel slipped out of Stephan’s grasp. “Stephan says he’ll take me on a boat ride!” she said, as she ran headlong into Sam.

  “A boat ride!” Sam said, feigning excitement. She shot Stephan an annoyed look. Was he trying to win her back, or make an enemy of her to her daughter?

  “Can we go, mummy?” Mabel asked. “Please?”

  Miles took the whole scene in with the silent appraisal of a photographer who’d seen it all. “Come on, Mabel,” he said. “Let’s go get some baklava from Demetria.”

  Mabel skipped away with Miles, leaving Sam alone with Stephan, bewildered, surprised, and wondering what kind of game Stephan was playing now. He’d stopped their Greek lessons, hadn’t come over or called her for two days, and now he wanted
to take Mabel out on a boat? Sam’s mind envisioned the worst—that he’d toss her overboard, or scuttle the boat—before shame could stop her from thinking. Stephan isn’t a monster, she thought. An immature, self-centered man, yes. But not a monster.

  “Are you serious?” she asked, in a low voice. “About a boat ride with her?”

  Stephan nodded, and jerked his head towards the harbor. There was sheet of plywood, crudely painted, leaning against one of the piers, and behind it, a little shack with no windows. She felt her lips move as she sounded out the letters. “Boats,” she said, finally. “Ten euros an hour.”

  “Not too much money,” he said. “Is much fun for a little girl.”

  The boats she saw were small dinghies with a single white triangular sail, striped with orange and yellow after the logo of the shop renting them out. There were no outboard engines—one errant wind, and they’d be out on the high seas in a flash. “No,” she said, finally. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “What’s so dangerous?” he demanded. “Calm seas—“

  “They won’t always be calm.”

  “There’s almost no wind.”

  “And what if there is?” she snapped. “Those boats have no engine. If you get blown out and then there’s no wind to blow you back, what then?”

  “That won’t happen,” he said, but without any of his earlier confidence. He was sullen in his defeat. She knew she won the argument, but all the same, it left a queasy feeling in her gut, because she’d already crushed his ego by refusing to be his girlfriend, and now spent five minutes insulting him for not thinking of anything so basic as basic sailing safety. How is he going to get me back for this, she wondered.

  “Stephan,” she said tiredly. “I know you meant well, and I thank you for offering to take Mabel on a boat. But it’s not safe, and I don’t—“

  “You mean you don’t trust me.”

  Well, yes, now that you mention it, Sam thought, frowning in irritation. “I never said that.”

  “But you mean that,” Stephan said. He spat on the ground in disgust. “And you let that strange man take your daughter—“

  “He’s not taking her on a boat.”

  “I teach you Greek for two months. I eat with you. I show you how to barbeque. And you don’t trust me with your girl, but that strange man you meet only two days ago, you give your trust to?”

  She didn’t have an answer for that. He did have a fair point: what did she know of Miles? And everything she learned about him last night and this morning—that his dead wife was named Nellie, that he was a photographer, his projects—became unknowable in the face of the doubt that Stephan injected. What if he was an incorrigible liar, a spinner of consummate tales, and secretly a child molester? Then again, what did she know of Stephan? What she did know—that he was almost thirty and still lived with his parents, entertaining dreams of fast cars and pretty girls, and was capable of a cruel, cutting kind of jealousy—didn’t work in his favor, either.

  But Stephan didn’t stick around to listen to her. He was walking back up the hill, in the direction of his parents’ shop. She looked around, wondering just where Miles and Mabel had gotten to, and for a moment the paranoia that Stephan had invoked flamed into a panic. Then she saw them sitting on a bench, pointing at the pigeons, playing an unknowable game with each other. Stephan wouldn’t have thought to do that for Mabel, she thought. He was not a bad man, she realized. He was hopelessly locked in a permanent adolescence, one that would last until his parents died, unless he found a wife who would mother him. Was that why he likes me, because I’m a mother? Sam found the idea disturbing, and not a little offensive. She was already a mother to Mabel—if he wanted a mother he ought to at least have had the courtesy to ask.

  “Mummy, are we going to have Stephan as our Greek teacher again?” Mabel asked, as she walked up to them.

  There was only one answer to that, an answer that Sam was tired of giving: “I don’t know, darling. I don’t know.”

  Part V

  Miles headed back to Athens that evening, ignoring the blips and beeps of his smartphone telling him that he’d received fifteen emails and thirteen voicemails from Gary. He’d fallen behind on his updates to his agent and he knew it—and, knowing Gary, fourteen of those emails and twelve of those voicemails consisted of various ways to say “What’s going on?”

  He had a few more shoots to do the next day, and he promised Sam that he’d come back tomorrow evening after he was finished. He couldn’t sleep at night in his hotel, so he put on a fresh shirt and stepped out. The air was still clinging to the last traces of the day’s heat, but the sky had deepened to purple and the streetlights began to cast their liquid orange light everywhere. He had no idea where he was going, or what to do. He just knew that he was intolerably bored without Sam and Mabel.

  And yet, it wasn’t as if he was doing anything especially fun with them. He might, had he stayed there, have combed the beach for driftwood and pretty shells with Mabel, and would now be lighting a driftwood fire on the beach, wrapping clams in seaweed and letting them steam, opening a bottle of a chilled white with Sam while Mabel dozed. Come to think on it, that does sound spectacularly fun, he thought. But men his age were supposed to be hitting the clubs, chatting up women. He wasn’t supposed to be so old on the inside.

  People milled around him, heading for the neon banners of discotheques or whatever clubs were called, here. The smell of cheap beer occasionally assaulted his nostrils as he walked, and some of the cooler nightspots smelled of tangy things grilling. He went into a bar/nightclub place where there were still open seats at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic and “whatever’s good”, and was given a shot of tsipuro while the bartender got his evening meal together. He drank down the shot while watching the slithery, lithe bodies of the young women, idly wondering how many of them had boyfriends, and how many of them had friends that thought they were boyfriends but weren’t, and at how strange it was that with so much information shared online these days, there could be so much confusion and so much could remain unknown.

  The food arrived, a sort of tapas-like assortment of olives, bread and sharp cheese, fried eggplant, and unseemly fresh figs. The gin and tonic came with it, looking suspiciously like Sprite, but when he tasted it the alcohol hit him like a freight train, and as the evening wore on his thoughts began to grow maudlin. How could it be, he mused as he walked, that we should know so much about each other, but so little of the people? That was what he liked about Sam—that he knew her. He didn’t know that much about her, but he knew her. He fell asleep at 3:00 a.m. with her name on his mind and a smile on his lips, certain, now, that this was love and not merely a crush.

  The next day, after a full day’s of shooting, answering all seventeen of Gary’s emails, and retouching his photographs, he suddenly remembered the film he’d dropped off at the drugstore. He made it to the drugstore just before it closed, paid for the photos despite the clerk clearly not-wanting to let him do so, and got into his rental car for the drive to Loutraki. He stopped just outside Athens to top off the gas, and there had his first glance at the new pictures he shot on the Leica.

  The photos of Athens were nice enough—protesters, but also of city life, grinding to a halt: people with studiously angry expressions finding out that their bus had been cancelled again, a mountain of trash and the stray dogs feasting on it. He was glad to see that the pictures came out much as he thought they would, crisp and clear and with no surprises—until he saw a photo of Stephan on a boat, sitting in the dark, his hands on his knees, holding a rope between them. There was something ominous about his carefully neutral face in that photo, and although Miles knew that there was nothing definitive about the rope, its presence in Stephan’s hands felt vaguely sinister.

  He considered calling Sam, but then he realized that, despite having spoken with her for hours yesterday and the night before, he never remembered to ask her for her phone number. What would he have told her, anyway? That he had a bad
feeling about Stephan?

  Nevertheless, he pushed the little Renault to its limit for the next forty minutes, and finally zipped down the hill and pulled up next to her cottage. The door was open again, which was probably a good sign, and when he went up to it, he could hear Sam telling Mabel, “…and your molars, now spit.”

  He knocked on the frame. Sam peeked her head out. “Oh, and here’s Miles!” she said to Mabel. “Just in time to say good night.”