Chapter 18 Greek Apology
Ihad, in my professional life, written a great many impact assessments.
The skill required — the one they never put in the job description — was the ability to hold two things at once: the data you had and the data you needed to draw a conclusion, and to be absolutely rigorous about which column something belonged in.
The phone call belonged in the insufficient data column.
I had been putting it there, firmly, every time it tried to move, for two days.
It kept trying to move.
* * *
On the morning of the third day — a Saturday, high season, the outdoor tables already filling at nine o'clock with people who had the look of tourists who had planned their holiday around a seafood lunch in a harbour taverna and were committed to having it — I was restocking the napkin station when he appeared at the edge of my peripheral vision and said, with the directness that was simply how he spoke, and which I had at some point over eight weeks stopped finding alarming: "Did I say something. "
It wasn't a question, exactly. It had the shape of a question but the delivery of a statement, which was a distinction I'd noticed about him early on — the way he'd already assessed whether something was likely to be a yes or a no before he asked it.
"No," I said. I was counting napkins. This was important. The napkins needed to be counted.
"Did I do something."
"I'm fine," I said.
A pause in which I could feel, without looking, the quality of attention he was bringing to this. "Fine," he said, in a register that meant he was filing this under not true but not pressing.
"There are forty-seven napkins," I said. "I need about sixty for a full Saturday service."
"I'll get Theria to pull more from the back." He paused. "If something happened — "
"Nothing happened," I said. "I just — " I stopped myself. I'd been doing that, the just. He'd pointed it out two weeks ago and I'd been trying to catch it before it came out. "Nothing happened. I'm fine."
He looked at me for a moment with the flat, direct assessment that I had catalogued in considerable detail over eight weeks and which I was currently being very careful not to think about cataloguing. Then he went to find Theria.
I counted the napkins again. There were still forty-seven.
* * *
The Greek apology happened around half two, during the post-lunch lull when the kitchen was doing prep and I was resetting tables and Lex was coming out of the storeroom with a crate of olive oil.
We reached the same doorway at the same time from different angles, which was a thing that happened in a busy taverna approximately twice a day and which had stopped requiring any sort of choreography or comment between us somewhere around week four.
What it required was one person to pause and the other to pass.
I paused. He came through. I stepped slightly the wrong direction to let him by and his forearm caught mine — very briefly, barely a graze — and I said, automatically, what I had been practising in my laminated card Greek, which was Συγγν?μη, which means sorry, which is a word I had been pronouncing correctly, or so I had believed.
Reader, I had not been pronouncing it correctly.
I know this because Lex did not say anything in Greek at all, or den pirazi, or any of the several things he would normally say in response to an unnecessary apology.
He went very still for a fraction of a second.
He did not say anything. He set the crate of olive oil down with the careful deliberation of a man processing something privately, and then he went back to service prep, and I continued to the tables, and neither of us mentioned it.
An hour later, I was collecting menus from table eight when Theria appeared at my elbow.
"You speak Greek," she said. This was not a compliment, exactly, but it wasn't criticism either. It was more of an observation with an expression attached.
"I'm learning," I said. "Cards. I've been using the laminated cards."
"I know," she said. "I can tell from which cards." She paused. "You said something to Lex."
"I apologised," I said. "For bumping into him."
"Yes," said Theria. "More or less." She straightened a menu. "What you actually said was closer to I am grateful for your umbrella."
I stopped.
"The vowels in συγγν?μη are — " She made a gesture that conveyed both sympathy and the specific challenge of Greek vowel sounds for English speakers. "The card is correct but the pronunciation is — you've been saying the wrong syllable."
"And Lex — "
"He didn't say anything," said Theria.
I thought about this. I thought about the fact that Lex corrected my English — gently, precisely, once, at the first available moment that wouldn't feel like a rebuke.
That he had corrected my napkin-folding technique and my incorrect description of the fava to a tourist and my persistent confusion between tables nine and eleven.
That there was a laminated card specifically because he'd noticed I was misinforming people about recycling.
He had not corrected my Greek.
Not once. Not in eight weeks of me attempting words off laminated cards and asking Theria for pronunciations and occasionally, boldly, deploying a Greek phrase at a non-Greek-speaking tourist because the island had made me ambitious in this way, apparently.
"He corrects everything else," I said.
Theria looked at me with the expression of someone who has said the thing they meant to say. "Yes," she said, and went back to the kitchen.
* * *
I thought about it for the rest of service, which was not the same as thinking about it usefully.
Here is what I had, if I was going to do this properly: Lex did not correct my Greek.
Lex corrected, with efficiency and without malice, almost everything else I did wrong.
These were two data points. The gap between them was a thing I could either interpret or leave blank, and the difficulty was that I had been leaving a great many gaps blank since April and the strategy had begun to feel less like caution and more like avoidance.
* * *
Priya came by after service. She had been very patient, in her way, which was to say she'd been watching me for two days with the particular quality of attention she normally reserved for her most interesting interview subjects, and had said nothing except "fine" and "good" and occasionally "yes" at the right moments.
"You've decided what it means," she said, when I sat down across from her on the terrace.
"No," I said. "I haven't decided anything."
"Mm," said Priya.
"That's not helpful."
"I know," she said. She poured from the water jug. "What does Theria think?"
"I didn't ask Theria."
"You've been talking to Theria all week."
"About the job," I said. "Service things. The ordering system." I paused. "She told me I said I am grateful for your umbrella when I was trying to say sorry."
Priya put her glass down slowly. "To Lex."
"Yes."
"And he — "
"Didn't say anything."
Priya was quiet for a moment. Then she made the small sound that meant she was recalibrating something.
"What?" I said.
"Nothing." She picked up her glass again. "Tell me exactly what Theria said."
I told her. The correction he didn't make. The pattern of corrections he did make. The eight weeks of laminated cards and wrong pronunciations that he had apparently heard and not mentioned.
Priya listened in the way she listened to things that were important, which was completely, with a stillness that was different from the stillness of not listening.
"And the phone call?" she said.
"Still filed under not enough to go on," I said.
"Yes," said Priya. Which was also Priya at her most useful and simultaneously most maddening.
"I'm not doing what I did with Dominic," I said. "That was trust without verification. This is — the opposite direction of the same error. I'm not going to run to conclusions in either direction."
"That's very sensible," said Priya.
"It feels terrible," I said.
"Yes," she said. "Sensible often does."
I looked at the harbour. The evening ferry had come and gone and the waterfront had settled into its late-August rhythm — fewer tourists now than two weeks ago, the peak having peaked, the island starting its long slow exhale back toward itself.
In another three weeks it would be September and the light would be different.
I had not booked a return ticket.
I had not booked a return ticket in eight weeks, which was — I was aware, with the part of my brain that had once been very good at this sort of thing — no longer an accident.
"Priya," I said.
"Yes."
"Theria is considering a job in Athens."
"I know," said Priya. She had the look of someone who also knew several other things but was waiting to see which one I was going to arrive at.
"Lex would need to restructure things if she went."
"Yes," said Priya, carefully.
I sat with this. The harbour went on being the harbour.
Somewhere across the water there was Barba-Nikos's light and the low sound of a radio playing something with a lot of bouzouki, and Derek's cat was investigating the drain again, and it was August on Kaliroi, and I was a person sitting on a terrace with her first real friend in years, not arriving at a conclusion.
"I don't know what he was saying on the phone call," I said.
"No," said Priya. "You don't."
"I could ask."
"You could."
"It would mean explaining that I heard."
"Yes."
I considered this. I considered the particular shape of asking someone about a conversation you'd overheard a fragment of in a language you didn't speak, the way that would require me to say I walked past the corridor and slowed down when I heard my name and then walked very quickly away and spent forty-seven napkins pretending nothing happened — and while I was a person who had, in this same period, walked into table four twice and apologised to a man about his umbrella, this particular version of vulnerability felt different.
"Not yet," I said.
Priya nodded. She had known I was going to say this. She had the particular quality of not being surprised by the things you did that were bad for you, which was, in its own way, the most comforting kind of friendship.
* * *
I walked home the long way, through the backstreet that ran behind the taverna, which took me past the closed kitchen window where a light was still on, which meant Lex was still in there doing the thing he did at the end of every service, which was to put everything back exactly where it belonged so it would be ready to become tomorrow.
I did not stop.