At
sea, the water is lighter than lapis. Endless blue, the bluest blue, forget-me-not blue. If only I could find a word to anneal to the blue, a lucid, gossamer word. The ship’s bow raises a V of foam that folds over into the blue. I could stand on deck all day, just looking at this endless shift of patterning on the surface of the sea. Vinca, periwinkle—not quite. A lively blue, a wet enamel shine, a depth of blue. Sapphire—yes, that much play of light. A mystery with all the weight and expanse of land. In summer calm, exuberant.
At the first of the five formal evenings, the twins wear their preferred white lace, this time as strapless, fitted long dresses, time-warped from senior prom in Yonkers, circa 1945. With strands and dangles of rhinestones, they sparkle into the dining room and find their table for two. We enjoy the cold champagne, the resplendent captain graciously welcoming us, and the unruffled sea. How glamorous Ed looks in his Italian tuxedo, his “smoking” as it’s called by Italians who frequently leave off the second word of an imported term:
basket
, instead of
basketball
,
night
instead of
nightclub
. The band advances a few decades and plays “Saturday Night Fever,” then lapses back to “Misty.”
We
board a bus in the port of Piraeus and drive through shady streets into Athens, calm in early morning, plumbago falling over fences. Ed says, “Remember the line in
The Graduate
? The old guy advises Dustin Hoffman that the future is in plastics? Look at this.” Only ten million people live in Greece; five million live in Athens. Half of them have unloaded bags of trash along the road. We see startling litter everywhere: tires, barrels, crates, plastic sheeting, conduits, plastic bottles, plastic everything.
Suddenly we’re in the country, dusty olive trees, massive, maybe as old as the myth of Oedipus and Jocasta. We pass Thebes.
Thebes
. The cotton fields of Thebes, blue beehives, apartment blocks, Tiresias in the road. We cross plains planted with wheat and tomatoes. Along the edges of the fields, women sit behind blue boxes mounded with San Marzano tomatoes for sale. There—broken towers, a blue tractor, a man in a blue cap, then jumps into view an Austrian chalet selling Asian antiques.
We’re en route to Delphi, with perhaps a few questions for the oracle. When Jupiter wanted to find the center of the world, the omphalos, he released two eagles at the far corners. Where they met was Delphi. Would that we had oracles, who gave absolute, if often ambiguous, answers to essential questions for twelve centuries. Our guide for today looks bored. At the front of the bus with her microphone, she lurches with every pothole. Already she has irked me by asking how many of us have heard of Delphi. Then she asks, “Have you seen a map of Greece?”
I want to shout,
I was studying Greece before you were born
.
“Don’t say
Del-fie
!” she admonishes someone who has ventured a question. “It’s
Del-fee
!” I want to smack her for condescending, even though I did pronounce it
Del-fie
. As soon as we leave the bus, we break off from her strident voice. We have our own books to consult, with the imagined tones of an oracle reading to us, not her sandpaper voice. Proper pilgrims, we have brought a small bottle to collect some water from the holy spring, although we have brought no propitiatory honeypies for the snakes. We are walking on the foundations of literature, up the steep, stony path in the fiery heat. On walls of Delphi were inscribed: Σ, sigma, meaning “energy” and “one’s own force.” They also carved
Know Thyself
and
Nothing to Excess
, all still valid, though I’ve always been a fan of excess, siding with Colette, who said, “It’s no good having any unless you can have too much.” Blake went farther: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
The ruins—more extensive than I imagined—look like rocks picked up and made into walls and houses that are returning to their natural positions in the fields.
My grandmother, who died when I was eleven, waits on a rock outside the entrance. I spotted her on the bus, her very body, bosomy but thin and spongy, deer legs, white hair fluffed just right, and her little pointed chin and watery, sad blue eyes. She wore high heels to Delphi and could not climb up to see where the oracle held forth for all those centuries. Instead, she bought a hamburger and sat on a stone feeding it to the birds. The voile print dress is the same, and the bony ankles. I know she will smell of Shalimar, exotic and cloying. As we reboard the bus, she sits in front of me. I see that her hair grows low on her nape, as mine does. I expect her to turn around, recognize me, and say, “Why,
Frances
, my dear, after so many years,” but instead she swivels in the bus seat and says, “Darlin’, could you unhook my bra? I’m sure as hell not riding all the way back to the ship in the heat with this thing stranglin’ me.” My wafty grandmother, Frances Smith Mayes, whose mother was so importantly named Sarah America Gray. I oblige. And remember Apollo, god of prophecy, and all the gods who extract revenge if you come too close. Memory is like that, too. The layers unshuffle, about to reveal something, then show you only a wild card.
On the way back to the ship, I catch a glimpse of the Acropolis at sunset, far away, and lines by Kóstos Kariotákis rise in my mind: “And there beyond, the Akropolis like a Queen/wears all the sunset like a crimson robe.”
At
sea, at night, women’s fantasies come alive. The deep rhythms of the sea must retrieve primal longings. By day, they lounge or walk or attend lectures and performances in muted linen pants or shorts and simple shirts. At the dances and candlelight dinners on board, our main delight is not the good food or the music. It is the fabulous sight of a large Dutch woman in blue taffeta with puffed sleeves and a little bustle. A bustle! A straight yellow dress with an Empire waist reminds me of the bridesmaid’s dress I wore at my friend Anne’s wedding when she fainted from the heat and the priest just kept on with the ceremony until she revived. The twins, with upsweeps and dangling rhinestones, have switched for this gala, to black lace numbers with fake red roses around the scooped necks. Ed and I are in our anonymous Italian black. Others, too, are in this minimalist mode, tasteful, fitted sheaths, the discreet powdery colors and simple cuts. There’s the Isabella Rosselini look-alike, with tanned perfect shoulders and arms, riding into the ballroom like Aphrodite on the waves, her cloud of pink chiffon drifting from her ankles. There’s the young daughter of hefty, blond South Africans in her sea-foam silk dress with billowing sleeves, who looks like an Annunciation angel except for the dragon tattoo on her shoulder.
Our eyes are drawn to the flamboyant, the ravishing variety of the species on show. Ed likes a three-tiered muu-muu with enough fringe around the hem to bind a five-by-six rug. Following her, on the arm of her handsome husband, a red-haired beauty who looks as though she has somehow been expanded by a bicycle pump wears white Lycra so tight it fits like a plaster cast over her blimp-sized buttocks. The neck is V-ed to the last possible moment, revealing generous slices of Cycladic breasts. Where did she get long white gloves with diamond-shaped cutouts? I’m drawn to the woman with hair piled high, then cascading into curls. She’s in voluminous ruffles splotched with red flowers and what might be banana leaves. At around three hundred pounds, she looks like a moving garden. The gentlemen hosts go to work, and the band saws away at tunes the dolphins must dive far under the waves to escape.
In
Santorini the paint stores don’t have to stock a range of colors. Shelves of Aegean blue and stark white will do. White, white houses, white as bleached bones, with gates, windows, and doors of blue, a vibrating blue when fresh, fading through the seasons to chalky gray. The blue-trimmed domed churches are profoundly appealing, not only for their stark purity and isolation but because at a subconscious level they must remind us of the dome of the skull and the interior life. An occasional iconoclast has painted a door green or a fence lavender. Still, those are sea colors in shallows or at twilight. We are let loose for the day and have rented a car. Here I experience the legendary Greek light in the harsh landscape, which looks unbenevolent but also spaciously opens to the sun. The hills, almost treeless except for the fig, hardly intrude on essential sky and sea, and the lava-scoured land looks as plain as the sea. Few trees escape from the volcanic soil, except the fig. Stubby, but proof that this tree will have its way with rock or mountain or field anywhere in the Mediterranean world. Ed pulls over, and I get out to watch grape-pickers loading baskets with dusky fruit. The vines sprawl on the ground, as though unable to stand up against the hard sun. Even the middle distance shimmers in the heat, warping the lines of grapes. My head feels struck by the sun, the rays warping my skull. The Praxitilean ideals must have come from standing in a field in Greece, from realizing that finding the essentials of beauty is a reductive process. Take away the extras—but leave the hot wind, the hand cutting the grape, the sun filling your bones with arid light.
At
sea, I am loving the days. Blue, blue, we’re skimming, sliding over blue. At times I see rivers running in the sea, angling across the choppy tides. The color of blue—immortal. Cheery orange and yellow tenders with names like Herakles and Perikles toot out to meet us as we approach an island, then tug or guide us into harbor.
On deck in hard sunlight, the worshipers reveal their quadruple bypass scars (one fresh, puckered red), knees swollen and purple, withered cesarean slashes. On California beaches I’m used to seeing the gorgeous. Here, alongside those at the peak of perfection, the ancient, the obese, the damaged shed their clothes and forget their vein-popped legs, horn-thick toenails, liver-spotted skin. Facing the human’s last or ruined or excessive forms contrasts sharply with the archaic statues of human perfection we are seeing in the museums. The man we call Mr. Good Morning, for his enthusiastic greeting, lets out a long toot every time he stands. His posture makes the letter lambda, Γ. My eyes are riveted by a scarecrow man whose withered penis, so
huge
, hangs from the side of his wide-legged bathing trunks. I suddenly recall my daughter’s horse, Chelsea. One crane-legged man raises his drink and says, “Let’s party.” Yes, let’s.
Wanting to lose twelve pounds, I am especially drawn to the grandly obese. The loving mother with two frisky children lowers herself into the pool.
Good for her
, I think. The hell with people like me who feel as though a spotlight shines on them if they carry a bulge on the thigh, if the stomach is not concave. Her ankles merge seamlessly into Colossus of Rhodes thighs, overlapped at the knees as though a meltdown has begun. She has, remarkably, chosen a white suit. Backing down the ladder into the water, she looks like an albino hippopotamus; breasts, stomach, hips converge, hiding even from her the cleft of her sex. How light she becomes in the salt water. She frolics with her blond boy, her skinny girl, tossing them in the air, letting them splash with a shriek, until she hoists herself out with heavy effort. Luxuriating on a chaise longue, she falls asleep. The girl’s head rests on her breasts, in this life or the next the softest pillow she ever will feel against her face.
Late at night when I am alone on deck, I see the woman again near the rail in a red caftan, arms spread, dancing alone. A pleasure to the eye. At sea, she is goddess of the waves. Her heart is working overtime. Is she sleeping in the same bunk-width beds everyone else is?
We
love Náfplio, named for Náfplios, the son of Poseidon, on the coast of mainland Greece. Long shady esplanade along the sea, a sand-castle-type castle just offshore, pastel houses, and boisterous people. By chance we find the museum of the
komboloi
(worry beads). I’ve watched men fingering those beads in the cafés. The museum is Aris Evangelinos’s lifetime collection, displayed in a small house. He also makes and sells them. He has stories to tell. His fierce black eyebrows shoot up and down. “The beads are nonreligious in Greece,” he explains; “they are a friend, they are for the comfort of touch, for the clacking noise they make, for the color.” He holds up an antique
komboloi
made of amber. “In Muslim countries, often you find three sets of thirty-three beads for three prayers. The Hindus call them
mala
, meaning ‘prayer book.’ But in Greece they are companions to life. Friends. Many men are buried holding their
komboloi
. If you wear one around your neck, the evil eye knows to stay away from you.”
His collection includes beads made of snakes’ backbones, black coral, olive pits, ebony, flower seeds, mother of pearl, thread knots, yak horn, rare green amber, aromatic wood, ivory, and amber powder. Some are incised, limned with secret symbols. I pick out a bracelet-size
komboloi
of pale yellow onyx. I’m a paperclip-bender at my desk. I’ll try picking up this instead. We buy his book, and he signs it for us. At lunch I open it and read, “To my friends Frances and Edward with love, Aris.” Such moments make travel a deep pleasure.
Náfplio elicits the word
charming
. The major industry seems to be the benign production of gold jewelry. I look in several shops, admiring the hammered Byzantine crosses, rings of many-colored semiprecious stones, and coral pins. You can imagine living here, strolling along the water, sitting in the piazza listening to the wandering minstrels with their open guitar cases spotted with coins, which is what I do until time to dash to the ship, already sounding its bellowing horn for departure. Ed goes off to mail some cards, gets lost, and barely runs across the gangplank in time.
We
like getting dressed for dinner as we slip out of a harbor every night. Our mood as we enter the dining room shifts to celebratory. We’re having great dates. I begin to remember that I was quite good at flirting. Ed becomes more romantic, swooping out of his jacket pocket a small blue-velvet box. Inside I find gold earrings with round sapphires—the very ones I’d coveted in a jewelry shop. And I thought he was off looking for stamps. They will remind me of the color of the sea. After dinner we walk all around the deck. The stars are enough to break your heart, so intensely present, close enough to reach. They do not seem like the same stars that hang over the rest of the planet.