5. Isadora
CHAPTER FIVE
ISADORA
Ifind Konstantine in the library at midnight on the seventh day.
I have been in this house a week. We have eaten at the long table each night.
We have not spoken to each other across it.
Theron came with his young wife Calliope to most of the dinners, Adrian to all of them, Stavros to half.
The cousins did the talking. I was observed.
No one asked me a question. Konstantine has not touched me since the courtyard, if the folding of a coat can be called touching, which I have decided, on reflection, it can.
Sophia has come to my room every night, and every night I have read to her until she fell asleep against my side.
Konstantine has come for her every night.
He crosses the room for his daughter and for nothing else.
He has not sat at the foot of the bed again.
He lifts her from my side at the end of every reading, carries her to her bed, stops at my threshold on his way out, and says one Greek sentence.
A different one each night, archaic, the sort of sentence from an old book.
On the fifth night it was: Even the sea rests, koré.
On the sixth he stood a moment longer than the other nights and said: My daughter dreams better this week.
I could not tell whether it was a report or a confession.
On the seventh night I do not stay in my room after Sophia is carried out. I dress and walk down.
I have learned that the library is where he goes when he does not sleep. I learned it from Yia-Yia, who did not tell me; from Adrian, who did; and from Sophia, who said one afternoon, with her chin on my arm, “Babá reads in the room with the door at the bottom of the stairs.”
The door at the bottom of the stairs is open, and the room behind it is lit.
Konstantine is at the long table with a book spread in front of him. One is a Sophocles I recognize. One is a Cavafy. The third is older, leather-bound, the paper gone the color of weak tea, and it is a book I do not know.
He looks up when I come in. He does not stand, and he does not close the books. In this family the standing still is a language. A man who stands when a woman enters is being polite. A man who stays seated is telling her the room is already hers.
I cross the library and stop at the corner of the table, where his hand rests on the third book.
“What are you reading?”
He looks at the page. When he answers, it is in his low voice, in the archaic Greek of the book itself.
“A passage in the Iliad. The one where Hector returns to the city and meets his wife at the gate. She knows he is going to die. He knows he is going to die. They speak about their son.”
I know the passage. It is the one where the baby cries at his father’s helmet, at the horsehair crest nodding over him, and Hector laughs, takes the helmet off, lays it shining on the ground.
Two people laughing at their own child’s fright with the war standing at the door.
My mother read it to me when I was twelve.
She wept, would not say why. Now I am twenty-two in a dark kingdom, and I could tell her.
“Yes,” he says, watching me. “I thought you would know it.”
“Why are you reading it tonight?”
“Because,” he stops, turns the page, looks at me, “because I have been thinking about it for a week.”
“Why?”
“Tell me one thing your father loved, Isadora.”
The question is not the one I expected. Questions about my father have come at me all my life dressed as accusations, or flattery, or bait. This one arrives plain, from the man with the best reason on this earth to ask none of it.
I look at him, at the book, back at him, and I answer in the formal mode my father required at every dinner of our lives.
“Me. He loved me.”
Konstantine goes still. Not the stillness he wears in the courtyard, which is armor. A different stillness, further in.
“That is the only true thing anyone has said to me about your father in five years,” he says at last.
I have not wept in three years, and I will not begin over a compliment paid to a dead man’s love. I lift my chin instead.
“Did you bring me here to make me sorry for what my father did to you?”
“No.”
“Did you bring me here to use me against my brothers?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“I have not decided.”
“You have had seven days. That is enough time, in this family, for a Drakos man to make a decision about a woman.”
Something moves at the corner of his mouth, in the place where a smile would sit on another man. He stands, crosses the library, and stops one meter from me, as if my father had taught him the distance too.
“I am going to ask you a question, Isadora, and I want the answer, and if you lie to me I will hear it.”
“Ask.”
“Did you come to me a virgin out of strategy or out of fact?”
I have been waiting all week for a question of some kind. I did not expect this one, and I did not expect it to come from a mouth that has not been used to speak to a woman in five years, asked without cruelty.
“Out of fact,” I say. “There was no strategy. I was raised in a convent in Switzerland until I was nineteen, and in seclusion at my father’s house in Patras until last week.
My brothers did not arrange my marriage because my father did not consent to one.
I have not been alone with a man other than my brothers and my father since I was nine. ”
“I see.”
“Are you going to ask the other question?”
“Which other question?”
“Whether I want you to kiss me, Konstantine Drakos.”
He breathes once. I watch it move through him, the most I have seen this man’s body confess to.
“Do you, Isadora?”
“Yes.”
He bends and kisses me.
The kiss is small and careful, the kiss of a man who has not kissed a woman for years and has decided to relearn the gesture one motion at a time. His hand comes up slowly and rests at the side of my throat, just below my ear, his thumb at the corner of my jaw. He kisses me once.
It is the first time in my life I have been kissed.
I expected to think of that while it happened, to stand apart from it, take notes. I do not. There is only the warmth of his mouth, the weight of his hand, old paper and salt in the air, and somewhere underneath it a slow fright.
He pulls back and looks at my eyes.
“Mikrí mou.”
Mikrí. Little one. I have read this in a Cavafy my mother once gave me, the endearment a Greek man uses for the woman he has decided to keep.
I do not answer.
“Tell me to stop, Isadora.”
“No.”
He bends and kisses me again.
The second kiss is longer. He keeps his hand at my throat, gentle, the thumb at the corner of my jaw, his mouth moving on mine with a patience that undoes me more than hunger would have, until my own hands have closed in the fabric of my dress to keep from reaching for him.
“Mikrí mou. Go to bed.”
I look at him. “Will you come to my room tomorrow night?”
“If you ask me to.”
“I am asking you to.”
“Then yes.”
He walks me to the door of the library. At the threshold he says, in his low voice, in the Greek of the book still open on his table: “Go to bed alone tonight, Isadora. There will be tomorrow.”
I go upstairs and lie there in the dark, the bed pressing into my shoulder blades.
My fingers rest where his had been, against the soft hollow of my throat, the place his thumb had stroked once, almost absently, while his mouth was on mine.
The skin there feels different now. Warmer.
As if the print of his hand has sunk beneath the surface and is still living there.
I keep my eyes open to the black ceiling and let the memory return in pieces. The shadowed corridor. The sudden nearness of him. Two fingers tipping my chin up. The first brush of his lips, almost nothing, then the second that was everything, my mouth opening under his without thought.
My free hand drifts down over the cotton of my nightgown.
I have never done this. In the convent the body was a thing to be ignored.
Desire was a word that belonged to other people’s stories.
Yet the kiss has left a restlessness under my skin that will not settle.
It coils low in my belly, an unfamiliar ache that tightens every time I remember the press of his chest against mine, the low sound he made when I had answered the kiss.
I gather the hem of the nightgown and draw it up past my thighs, until the cool night air touches the bare skin of my stomach.
My hand follows, palm flat against the soft plane of my belly.
I have touched myself here before only to wash.
Never like this. Never with the deliberate intent of finding out what the ache wants.
Lower. The soft curls between my legs are already damp.
The discovery startles me. I freeze, fingers hovering, heart beating hard enough that I can feel it in my throat beneath the hand that still rests there.
Then I let my fingertips settle, exploring the outer folds with a shyness that makes my cheeks burn even in the dark.
I am wetter than I knew a body could be.
Slippery. Sensitive in places I have never thought to notice.
I part myself carefully, mapping the shape of my own sex, learning by touch.
The little peak at the top startles me when my finger brushes it; a bright, sharp spark races up my spine and my hips twitch without my meaning them to.
I do it again, slower, circling, and the spark becomes a pulse.
My breath shortens. The hand at my throat tightens, not choking, only holding, as if I need the remembered pressure of Konstantine’s fingers to anchor me while my body does something new.
I think of the kiss. Of how his mouth had opened mine.
Of the way his hand had slid to the back of my neck and held me there, steady, while the world tilted.
I imagine that same hand lower, between my legs, replacing my own uncertain fingers.
The thought makes me press harder, circle faster.
Two fingers slip inside almost by accident and the stretch is strange, not painful but so intimate that a soft, startled sound escapes my throat.
I bite my lip to keep quiet, the habit of silence stronger than the new pleasure.
My hips lift to meet my hand, thighs falling open wider against the mattress. The wet sounds are soft in the dark room. I keep the image of him fixed behind my closed eyes and the heat of his mouth holding me in place while I come apart.
The climax takes me by surprise, a tightening rush that starts deep and radiates outward in rhythmic pulses.
My back arches off the bed. A broken gasp tears free before I can stop it.
My inner muscles flutter around my fingers.
My whole body shudders once, twice, a third time, the pleasure so intense it borders on frightening.
When it eases I lie still, breathing hard, nightgown rucked around my waist, thighs slick. The hand at my throat slowly loosens. I feel different. Claimed by something I have only just discovered I own. The ache is quieter now, replaced by satisfaction and a new curiosity.
I do not know how long I stay like that, learning the shape of the aftermath the same way I learned the shape of his touch.
Eventually I draw the nightgown down again, turn onto my side, and press my face into the thin pillow.
Sleep comes slowly, but when it does it carries the taste of his mouth and the echo of my own quiet moan.