Why I Killed My Best Friend

by Amanda Michalopoulou

  “You’ll come for visits.”

  Kayo’s princely temperament is out in full force on our evening walks to the Herod Atticus theater. He makes me look up at the moon. He tells me romantic tales about ghostly spirits and gods with animal forms. He recites poems by Kofi Anyidoho: Because because I do not scream / You do not know how bad I hurt / Because because I do not kiss / on public squares / You may not know how much I love / Because because I do not swear / again and again and again / You wouldn’t know how deep I care. I should be the one speaking those words.

  The people in my life are always going somewhere. First Anna, now Kayo. And I’m forever in the background, waving a handkerchief as they leave.

  Anna is the first to taste the strawberries with whipped cream, and spits the bite out onto her plate.

  “Merde, it’s mayonnaise!”

  Aunt Amalia wanted to welcome Anna home to Athens with a nice meal. She made us pasta, only she left it on the burner until it was a pile of mush. And now this: strawberries topped with mayonnaise for dessert. She’s getting worse. She forgets things, puts her clothes on inside out, rings strangers’ doorbells.

  “Amalia, I’ll have my strawberries plain,” I call to her in the kitchen.

  “You girls are skin and bones with all your dieting!” she calls back.

  Anna laughs until tears come to her eyes. I, meanwhile, am crying on the inside.

  “What’s going to become of Amalia? Of all of us, for that matter?”

  “This thing with Kayo has made you too sensitive,” Anna says, wiping the mayonnaise off her strawberries with a paper napkin.

  “So you’re allowed to believe in your utopia but I’m not allowed to believe in mine?”

  “Not all utopias are made equal.”

  “Yours, as always, is better.”

  “Don’t be a baby, Maria. You take offense at the least little criticism. The only way to pose a danger to the system is to join a collective utopia. A utopia of the possible.”

  I feel like we’re back in grade school, sitting in our uniforms waiting for the bell to ring. We’re bored of school, bored of life. We’re anxious for something to happen, but we don’t know what, and until it appears we chew on sharp, dangerous words.

  “What a stupid island.”

  Anna doesn’t enjoy summer in Greece the way she used to. She sits in the shade in a long Indian tasseled skirt reading Alain Badiou’s Peut-on penser la politique? Every so often she lifts her head from the page and makes a face—at a woman in a gaudy bathing suit diving into the sea, or a man walking by, checking his Rolex. She doesn’t wear makeup anymore, puts her hair up in a bun with a ball-point pen, lives like a monk on an apple and a bar of dark chocolate a day. I stopped eating for Kayo, she stopped eating to fight the system. I barely recognize our reflections when we walk past a shop window. Our elongated figures look like shadows, or characters out of a comic book. As always, Anna pulls it off brilliantly. The whole island of Paros is in love with her. The other day a boy turned to look at her and almost fell off his moped. Whenever she puts down her book, pulls out the pen, shakes out her hair and dives into the water, every single pair of eyes on the beach turns her way. On top of everything else, she’s an amazing swimmer. Her body, still pale from the Parisian winter and our rented umbrella, is beautifully toned. Even if she spends most of the day lying down, reading.

  “It’s not the island’s fault, Anna. It’s your mood.”

  “How about we put it to the test? Can we go to Donousa? Or Amorgos?”

  So we change islands. We go to Amorgos, set up shop on an outcropping of rocks, surround ourselves in nature and solitude. Anna scrambles around with the help of a stick she found. She sits and reads in a wide-brimmed straw hat, feet dangling in the water. I, meanwhile, sweat and peel peaches with my penknife. Pairs of boys keep wandering over our way, and either whistle at us or ask what time it is, depending on how they’ve been brought up. They all assume that two girls on their own must be looking for company. They don’t know Anna.

  “Beat it!” she shouts.

  And they do—sometimes baffled, sometimes cursing. Anna slides towards me on her behind, stretches out on her towel and whispers in my ear, “Boys are monsters. You, you’re my best friend.”

  To seal the deal, she pinches me on the shoulder.

  “Merde, Maria!” Anna looks me up and down as I button my pants, hunched over in our tent. I’ve done something wrong again.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Is that another new pair of pants?”

  “You want me to make a list of all my purchases and submit it for your approval?”

  “I’m afraid you’re turning into your parents.”

  “What did my parents ever do to you?”

  “To me, nothing. The question is what they’ve done to themselves, and to you. Their only dream was the accumulation of wealth. And when they had to give up that wealth, they stopped being happy, too. Why do you think you won first prize in the drawing contest on Savings Day in the third grade?”

  “Because the judges liked my drawing?”

  “Your drawing was an encapsulation of bourgeois stereotypes. Just imagine, money falling from the sky! It’s like an ad for the lottery!”

  “And bank robberies and doves are better?”

  “I don’t claim to be better. But I try.”

  “Whereas I don’t try hard enough, is that it?”

  She makes me feel useless. Unimportant. Stupid. She doesn’t listen when I describe my sound installation. She says that capitalism is what’s driving Aunt Amalia crazy. That my new pants are a symbol of the created desire for material possessions. That the storage room in Ikeja was the site of a traumatic experience, and ever since that day I’ve had a need to acquire. Me? A need to acquire? I always give her half of what’s mine, I just don’t make a big fuss over it the way she does. Take half my sandwich, give me the man of your dreams.

  “I can’t be like you. I don’t want to be. I don’t like the way you are!”

  Anna’s eyes open wide, enormous. “You don’t like the way I am?”

  Merde, it slipped out.

  “Have you seen a blond girl, my age, very skinny, with a dimple in her chin and one eyebrow that’s half white? Wearing a red t-shirt and a black skirt with tassels?”

  I’ve been scouring the island for her since yesterday. In bathrooms. Behind tamarisk trees. In restaurant kitchens. In hotels. What has she eaten? Where did she sleep? She ran off yesterday without her wallet. I open her backpack, rummage through her clothes, but what am I expecting to learn? Whether she’s been honest with me? Whether she bought anything new, too? I go into all the bars, stores, and coffee shops on the island; I’ve become a regular private eye.

  “You still haven’t found your friend?” one waiter asks. “Maybe someone swept her off her feet?”

  All that swept her off her feet was her inflated opinion of herself.

  “What’s wrong?” the waiter asks.

  A sudden flash of understanding: Anna is putting my friendship to yet another test, just like when she ruined my drawing, or wanted to swap Raoul for Michel, or stole Angelos. She’s following me, measuring the extent of my devotion. She’ll appear again as soon as she finds my display of concern sufficiently moving. Or if I stop looking for her altogether.

  I leave her backpack in the tent, gathering only my things. I write her a note: Anna, you’ve been using me my whole life. You may be more beautiful, more intelligent, more committed to your ideas (though that much I doubt), but I’m tired of running after you. I want you to accept me, the same way you accept your workers at the factory. You work hard to make them feel proud of themselves. Did you ever think about my pride? Maria.

  I tear the note up. There are no words to express my pride.

  I thought you were something more than my friend: you were the sister I never had. Your behavior is making me re-evaluate my whole life, my priorities, my entire emotional world. You just left me there and
went off. I could have fallen from a cliff. Were you always so selfish, or are you improving with age?

  That’s the kind of letter Anna has been writing to me this fall. Every two weeks or so I get an envelope with a French stamp and know exactly what’s waiting for me: a tirade. She doesn’t call, and doesn’t pick up when I call. It’s our era of vicious correspondence. I have no choice but to write back: Anna, be serious. When I said I didn’t like the way you are, I meant that I didn’t like the way you act toward me. You pressure me. You want to have your own way. You can call that the utopia of the possible, if you want, but it’s the utopia of your possible. You need to leave a little room for mine, too.

  She responds with something irrelevant: You know how the work of philosophers falls into different periods? I like early Nietzsche, but not late Nietzsche. Well, I have fond memories of Maria One, but not of Maria Two. I don’t know what to say to that. I’m starting to think I have issues with Anna One and Anna Two.

  I’ve forgotten what her voice sounds like. Sometimes I imagine her leaping out of bed with that tremendous energy of hers, rushing downstairs, running over to the café across the street and writing me a letter. Bitter, confused, with a pile of crumpled sheets of paper on the table before her—but those are just my fantasies. I’m sure she’s fine. She’ll have found a new group of friends, the hard-core kind she wants now, and they’ll all eat together in their collective and discuss the utopia of the possible in a smoky, high-ceilinged room. I’m sure they’re all overflowing with revolutionary fervor, and have nothing but disdain for anyone who would buy a new pair of pants without absolutely needing them.

  “Don’t waste your time on her,” Kayo says. His voice sounds strange, coming to me with a time delay. I have to wait until he finishes each sentence before I respond, otherwise neither one of us can hear what the other is saying. If Anna were to hear his stories from the fashion world, she’d throw containers of yogurt at him the way they do at politicians. But he’s Kayo, my Kayo. It’s impossible for me to judge him. Of course I preferred how he was when we used to go to Orgapolis meetings together, but you can’t have your friends cut and sewn to order. That’s something Anna has never understood.

  “I miss you,” I say, and hear my own voice on the line, doubled, carrying a double despair.

  “I miss you too,” he answers. In New York it’s morning, Kayo is just waking up, and I really have no idea who’s sleeping at his side.

  Papandreou is dovetailing me again: he too has a secret correspondence, with Turgut Özal, prime minister of Turkey, over Cyprus. They meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and come up with an impressive agreement, largely because they avoid talking about the Cyprus problem. Anna and I meet at my place on Stournari, when she comes to Athens for New Year’s. There’s been nothing diplomatic about our own correspondence these past few months. So now we sit facing one another, on opposite sides of the coffee table. Anna is wearing jeans and sneakers, her eternal ball-point pen in her hair. I made sure to dress in my painting clothes, a gray long-sleeved t-shirt full of holes and covered in dried paint that I’m hoping she’ll like. I show her the catalogue from a group show I was in. She doesn’t throw it in my face. She just says, “So that’s what you’ve been up to.” We talk about how expensive things have gotten in Paris, whether we liked Alki Zei’s new novel, Achilles’ Fiancée, and then on an impulse I turn to her and ask, “Ve-ha? Ve-sa?”

  “Ve-ha-sa,” Anna says. That much we can agree on. We’re twenty-three, too old for unmixed emotions.

  Just like Papandreou and Özal, we too avoid discussing our equivalent of the Cyprus problem. We admit that our friendship is in crisis, but what can we do, these things happen. We open a bottle of wine she brought from Paris and clink glasses without meeting one another’s eye. The wine is terrible, practically vinegar, but neither of us says a thing.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember me?” She’s my age, short, plump, with green eye shadow and gold earrings shaped like daisies. She’s carrying a plastic bag full of strawberries and looks like a classic working girl headed home at the end of the day.

  “I do remember you, but from where?”

  “I’m Angeliki, we were in grade school together.”

  Merde! Angeliki, the smushed turd! She’s had the mole removed from her eyebrow. How on earth was I supposed to recognize her?

  “I’m exhausted, it’s been a long day at work,” she says, rubbing one ankle against the other. She’s dying to tell me about how far she’s climbed up the social ladder. She works at 24 Hours, a newspaper owned by financier George Koskotas, who was recently charged with sending bribes to members of Papandreou’s administration, hidden in boxes of Pampers. Angeliki just got engaged to a co-worker at the paper, too. If Anna were here now she would tell Angeliki off to her face, letting rip about how deep in PASOK filth she is, about the bourgeois institution of marriage, about all the diapers that’ll soon be coming her way.

  “What about you?” she asks.

  I tell her I’ll be graduating from the School of Fine Arts this year.

  “That makes sense . . .” She looks me up and down. When I’m working, I wear my painting clothes out in the street. I must look like a bum with my shirt full of holes and paint on my hands. She’s dressed for office work, in a suit and pumps.

  “Do you still see Anna?” she asks.

  Tough question. We talk on the phone every so often. We keep one another up to date about what’s happening in our lives as if giving interviews to a reporter—always holding back, never telling the whole truth. She tells me about her activist friends in Paris, about the group Ne pas plier and a writer named Natacha Michel who writes Maoist novels. I describe the preparations for the exhibit that the art school’s graduating class puts on each year.

  “Anna lives in Paris,” I answer.

  “So you’ve finally got some peace and quiet,” Angeliki says, flaring her nostrils. She’s one of those people who flare their nostrils instead of laughing.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s not dragging you around by the nose anymore.”

  Any minute now she’ll stick out her tongue and start chasing me around the square, shouting “teapot, teapot, teapot.”

  The student exhibit is a big hit. The rector gives a speech telling us not to sell out entirely to the system. The rector’s wife gets drunk and takes off her shoes. One of my fellow students, Loukas, douses me with champagne. Diana tells me I ruined my piece by turning it into an installation with actual phones and wires, that the real strength of the work was the idea of the wiretaps, of the voices layered over one another. All the rest is mere decoration.

  “You have to choose.” She’s not just talking about art, she’s talking about relationships, too.

  Perhaps she’s expecting me to choose her. But I choose Loukas. He’s small, always smiling, with hands weathered by paint. He comes back to my apartment and immediately starts playing with my things—what’s this, what’s that. I have no patience for something that has to pass through all the usual stages—first a drink, then a kiss, then a hand on the chest. I pull him toward me, onto the chair in the middle of the room, and my mind strays to Kayo and all that never happened. I close my eyes, conjure him up, bite his tongue all over again.

  “Slow down, little animal,” says Loukas.

  My desire evaporates.

  “Did Anna call you?” As usual, Antigone is practically shrieking. I hold the receiver away from my ear.

  “No. What happened?”

  Stamatis. A heart attack. He was lying in bed, working on his notes for his book, and died on the spot.

  “Was Anna with him?”

  “She’s the one who found him. She’s completely lost it.”

  For the first time in my life I rush to the airport without a suitcase, without even a change of clothes. It’s something Anna and I used to dream of when we were kids: flying off to Paris for a coffee. But what we had in mind wasn’t the coff
ee they serve at funerals, and certainly not at the funeral of her father.

  She’s a mess, nothing but a pile of bones. She’s wearing a long nightgown that’s the exact same shade of pink as the liquid antibiotic they give to kids. She won’t budge from Stamatis’s armchair, where she sits absentmindedly stroking the worn velvet. I haven’t seen her like this since the earthquake, or at least since the abortion. I make her tea, I bring her chouquettes from across the street, she doesn’t touch any of it. The house has been overrun by friends and colleagues of Stamatis who wander around in hysterics. My gaze falls on the old, familiar poster on the wall: I treat my desires as realities, because I believe in the reality of my desires. I’d like for us to leave, to escape all this. That’s the reality of my desires.

  “Should we go to the park?” I say.

  Anna puts on a pair of sneakers and pulls a long orange hooded raincoat over her nightgown. She looks like a patient just let out for her first walk in the hospital grounds after an operation. She lies down on the grass in Buttes-Chaumont and crosses her hands over her stomach. The ball-point pen falls from her hair. I grab it and draw a heart on her hand.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “A confession of love.”

  I lie down beside her, grab her and hold her tight.

  “I’m here for you, whenever you need me.”

  “And you’ll make all my wishes come true?”

  “Every single one.”

  “Then help me die. I want to die.” Anna clings to me and starts to sob, heartrending sobs that sweep me along with them. At first I’m crying for Stamatis, who will never call me mademoiselle again, never take me for coffee at the café across the street, never make false promises to anyone. And then I’m crying for Kayo, and for Angelos. For my butchered hair, my butchered finger, my vagina. For the uniforms that made us look like Maoist schoolgirls, for all the ridiculous things we learned in home economics and in religion class. For Aunt Amalia, serving strawberries with mayonnaise. For my father, who can’t tell the good guys from the bad. For my mother, for Gwendolyn, for all of Ikeja. And finally for Anna, my best friend.