The Clover House

by Henriette Lazaridis Power

  “Looks good,” I say.

  “I think he looks like a young Demi Moore,” Jonah yells.

  Marcus shoves him in the chest, saying, “Callie, where’d you get this guy?” He messes up Jonah’s hair and tousles his shirtfront, his tie.

  “We got some big news on the New Bedford case today,” Jonah says.

  “Yeah?”

  “We won.” He gives me a big smack on the lips.

  “Seriously?” Marcus shouts. “You can’t upstage me!”

  “Jonah, that’s so great,” I say. I lean in and tell him, “Celebration sex tonight.”

  “Going for another beer,” Marcus says to me. “Because it’s my party. Want one?”

  “Ben has it.” The pint of lager is waiting for me on the counter.

  “Jonah, I’m so proud of you,” I say, and he looks sheepish for a second before his usual confidence returns. I am proud of him. I know that while he doesn’t mind the contract law that occupies most of his time, he truly loves the immigration cases he works on. With Nelson, who is raising his glass a few feet away from me, Jonah handles the prosaic cases, the ones lacking any political drama save that of someone’s craving for a home. The night I met Jonah, he was drinking here after a court date that hadn’t gone well. It was another New Bedford case, a Cape Verdean fighting deportation. Jonah sat at the bar in a sorrow that was admirable before I even knew its source. I could have found someone else that night, but I sat down beside him, drawn to that sorrow and pulled in by the growing quiet of our conversation.

  Marcus hands me my lager.

  “Now you can go toast Nelson too.” He’s playing up the self-pity.

  There are six of us here so far tonight: Jonah and me, Marcus, Ted and some woman he’s dating, and Nelson. After about an hour, Brian shows up with Mollie. Since they got married last summer, they never seem to arrive anywhere on time with the rest of us. Jonah and I can’t decide if it’s because they’re having lots of marriage sex or not enough.

  Eventually, I weave over toward Mollie and clink my current glass of beer with hers.

  “To our new stockbroker,” I say.

  “To the Broker Dude.”

  We drink and I think about what to ask Mollie. I settle for the generic.

  “How’s married life?”

  “Good. Good.” She nods as if I just asked her about work. I make a note to tell Jonah: not enough sex.

  “Hey, that’s pretty exciting about your trip,” she says, brightening.

  “What trip?”

  “To Greece. You guys doing a pre-wedding honeymoon?”

  I laugh to avoid having to answer.

  “Hang on, Mollie,” I say to her ear. “I’ll be right back.”

  I reach past Brian for Jonah and grab his sleeve.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  He turns with a smile that drops away when he sees my face.

  “Just a sec, guys.”

  He lets me tug him out the door onto the sidewalk.

  “Mollie asked me about our trip to Greece.”

  “Yeah, I mentioned the idea.”

  “You did more than mention it, I think.”

  “Okay, I told her I was going with you. Seemed like a great way to meet the folks. What’s wrong with that?”

  “I didn’t even know if I was going, and I told you I didn’t want to bring you with me.”

  “Bring you with me. Listen to you. It’s like I’m some child you’d have to drag along. I’m going to marry you, Callie. Is it so bad to want to come with you for a trip like this?”

  “This trip is so I can take care of my dead uncle’s stuff. It’s not a honeymoon, and it’s not a vacation.”

  “I get that. I’m not marrying you for the vacations, Cal.”

  I let go of his sleeve with an abrupt swinging motion.

  “Would you stop that?” I say.

  “What the fuck, Callie?”

  “What the fuck? That’s what I thought when Mollie knew all about the trip you’d planned for us.”

  “I didn’t do a whole plan thing. I just told her I thought it would be cool. I haven’t met anyone in your family, Cal, and I thought this was a good time. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at Mollie, not me.”

  He steps closer so that the cloud of his breath sinks down to me.

  “I don’t want to be mad at anybody,” I say.

  “Well, you suck at it. Bad day at work?”

  “Oh, shut up, Jonah.”

  He comes closer again and grabs my arms at the elbows. I wrestle free, yelling, “Let go,” even as I register Jonah’s surprise at my reaction.

  A man stops on his way into the bar.

  “You heard her,” he says to Jonah, who glances, perplexed, from him to me. He isn’t even touching me anymore.

  “She’s my fiancée,” Jonah says finally.

  The word hangs there like a burst of scalding steam. I am too mortified to say anything at all. It’s as if we’ve been caught using the wrong language in the wrong place—Greek in America, English in Greece—and rather than clarify and risk adding to the mistake, I turn away and walk home. I hope Jonah will bring my coat when he comes back.

  I don’t feel the cold, but by the time I get upstairs and into the apartment, I realize that I am freezing. I stand by the kitchen counter, shivering, replaying in my mind the moment when Jonah grabbed my arms. It’s not really that particular moment I see but a mood that I sense—a mood of alarm and desperation. So many times my father seized my mother’s arms like that, pleading his case and eventually making some declaration or ultimatum. Jonah has never done that to me before. In three years, we have never really argued. Now this.

  I gulp a glass of water down, noticing an ache knocking at the back of my head. He called me his fiancée, as if that explained why he could grab me like that, as if that established his right. He’s the one caught using the wrong language, not me. I set the water glass down and rock it from side to side on the counter, synchronizing its rhythm with the beating in my head.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been standing there when I hear the apartment door click shut. Jonah has my coat over his arm and drapes it carefully over the back of the couch, setting his briefcase down beside it. He stares at the floor for a moment and then looks up at me.

  “Think you might have overreacted a little?”

  “You can’t manhandle me, Jonah.”

  He sighs and goes to hang up his coat. He leaves mine on the couch.

  “Look, I’m going to Greece.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “This isn’t about you, it’s about my family and me.”

  “No need to explain, Cal. It’s always about you. I’m just a spectator to the grand mystery that is your life.”

  He yanks a cupboard open, then runs the tap hard into a glass. When he turns the water off, the pipes shudder. Water has splashed all over his sleeve.

  “You don’t let anyone in—or at least you don’t let me in; I don’t know what you do with other people you don’t happen to be engaged to—and you think somehow that gives you the right to live like a solo agent.”

  He gulps the water down.

  “Solo agent. What the hell is that?”

  “It’s you, Callie. On your own. Except when you need taking care of. Here.” He thrusts the glass out toward me. “Need some water for your hangover? Can I get you something? Can I, please?”

  “That’s enough, Jonah. I never asked you to take care of me.”

  “No, you never did. Because you never talk about anything.”

  After a long silence, I say the thing that I know we’re both thinking.

  “This is what I was afraid of, Jonah. This is why I wanted us to stay the way we were.”

  “You can’t think we’re having a fight just because we’re engaged.”

  “I don’t know. Would you care as much? Would I? The stakes are too high now.”

  “How can the stakes be high if we love each other?
”

  “See, this is what I mean. You don’t think it’s hard to be married, so I’m not allowed to think it’s hard. But I do think so. It’s hard for me. Don’t try to convince me I’m wrong when that’s what it feels like.”

  “Well, then, you’re lucky, because it’s not too late, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want to take the ring all the way off, Cal?”

  “No. I’m just saying—”

  “You don’t really know what you’re saying, do you?”

  This rankles more than anything. I’ve never seen this kind of bitterness in Jonah, but I recognize it as the rough edge of his lawyer’s charm. It’s all sour now, ruined. His win, the toast, the celebration: It seems irretrievable now. I repeat what I started the argument with, as if it’s my new mantra.

  “I’m going to Greece. When I get back, we should talk about things.”

  “Fine.”

  I walk to the couch and reach for my coat.

  “No,” he says, holding up a hand. “I’m the one leaving.” He grabs his coat from the closet and shrugs it on.

  “Where are you going?” There’s a note of panic in my voice. I only meant to hang my coat up and now he’s headed out the door.

  “Ted’s.”

  He pulls the door behind him, and at the last minute, mindful of the hour, he holds it and clicks it softly shut.

  The next morning, every sound I make as I get ready for work rings through the apartment. Heels on the wood floor, the toothbrush scrape, the coffee cup on the counter—all unanswered. I can’t help listening for the sound of Jonah’s key in the lock. I start at footsteps in the stairwell before I realize it’s the neighbors heading down. No, Jonah won’t come back until after I’ve gone for the day, and probably not until after work. They’ll tease him at the office for showing up in the same clothes. And he’ll have to put on a game face and make it look as if he had a big night after the win. I realize that I’m worrying about how Jonah will cope, and the disaster of our argument hits me again.

  There’s only one thing that can make my morning worse than it already is: I have to call my mother. I hold the phone for a good five minutes before I find the courage to dial. The double-grinding European ring makes me feel as though she and I are already fighting before the conversation even begins.

  “Yes?” This is the first time I’ve actually spoken to her in several weeks and her voice sounds, as always, both seductive and wary.

  “I’m coming tomorrow to take care of Nestor’s things.”

  “I told you not to.”

  “I know, but I’m coming anyway. That all right with you?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, Calliope.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. “It’s a busy day.”

  “How, busy? You just woke up.”

  “I can’t talk long, Mamá. Can we just talk about the trip?” I say.

  “Fine.”

  “I’m taking the bus from Athens.”

  “Can’t someone drive you?”

  “I’d rather take the bus.”

  “We never took the bus.”

  “Well, I have.” In the silence, I can tell she is registering this thought, startled at the reminder of my independent travels in her native country.

  “Suit yourself,” she says. “But you’ll be in there with all the onions and the chickens.”

  Just before I hang up, as we are going through the formulaic salutations of a Greek conversation—regards, health, kisses that are meaningless—I break the news to her.

  “I’m staying with Aliki.”

  Again, silence; pieces falling into place.

  “She has more room,” I say.

  “And what will your aunts say, when they see my own child isn’t planning to stay with me? You might as well put up a sign for all of Patras to see that says you don’t love and respect your mother.”

  She manages the indignant tone she is so practiced in, but it is clear that she is imitating something she has never quite felt—not the sense of slight or diminution but the desire to nurture and welcome.

  After work, Jonah returns from Ted’s. We spend the evening in a quiet détente. And we are the world’s most fatigued diplomats, feigning sleep whenever possible to avoid having to talk to each other until it is a plausible time to go to bed. We don’t spoon, and we turn carefully beneath the covers, mindful not to hog the blanket, or to touch.

  Finally, by Wednesday morning, I can’t avoid him as I hurry around the apartment, getting ready for work before the evening flight to Athens. I need to put in some time on the annual campaign at school before leaving it to Daniel. I watch Jonah as he crouches over his boots, one half of an English muffin in his mouth and the other in his hand. He stands up and can’t avoid my eyes. We take a long look at each other, and I see hope and pain and defiance flicker across his face. I expect he sees the same in mine.

  “Do you want me to call when I land?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’ll be first thing in the morning for you.”

  “Call my cell. It won’t cost too much. We won’t talk long.”

  “Jonah, we can talk, can’t we?”

  “I’m happy to listen, Cal, if you’ve got things to say.”

  I summon all my courage and lean toward him. We kiss once, lightly, on the lips, and that’s that. I go out the door, my body almost aching with the pull back to Jonah. My stride is jagged as I pick my way over slush piles on the sidewalk.

  As my plane flies from Milan to Athens over the Adriatic coast, I find myself imagining the moment of arrival in Athens, but I keep getting it wrong. I have never been to Greece in February, so I invest the place with the dry heat and white light of a summer landing. I remember emerging from the airplane as a child each June, holding my mother’s hand as I stood at the top of the movable stairs, bathed in sensations that most people would have found harsh. I relished the blasting heat and even the acrid smell of the plane’s exhaust, for I knew that they inaugurated three months of relative calm and that, though my mother had taken my hand, I would soon be pulled free of her into the summer’s embrace of my cousin, my aunts, and Nestor.

  What I can see of Croatia and Albania from the plane is gray and damp. The Adriatic should be tinged with purple, but winter has turned it into a steely blue. I will have to force my tongue into its old shapes as soon as the plane lands. I am afraid that I won’t know how to do it—how to be Greek.

  2

  Callie

  Thursday

  We arrive in daylight. The plane swoops low over suburban houses that are little more than cement boxes surrounded by small patches of short grass. Most are tidy, but many of the houses are only partly built, pillars of cement and rebar rising up from roofs that serve as storage areas. I see a rusty swing set on its side atop one house, a washing machine gaping on another. Here and there, I see a grove of olive trees and an old farm building painted with an advertisement for Misko pasta, in the red and gold colors I remember from my childhood. I recognize this world; I know this world.

  We come in above a series of little bays to the south of Athens and then fly over apartment buildings packed in tight, their gardens still lush despite the season. When the plane banks slightly, I catch a glimpse of the city, poured like milk in the basin between the mountains, and, down below, the glass-and-marble cube of the terminal. When the new airport opens next year on the other side of Mount Hymettos, this experience will pass into history, new aerial views altering the feel of arrival. This airport already looks old and almost foolish as we descend. It seems far too small and vulnerable for its mission.

  As the plane comes to a stop on the runway, several passengers applaud. The man in the seat beside me crosses himself.

  “Excuse,” says a woman standing next to me in the aisle.

  I make way for her as she twists and reaches up to pull her bag from the compartment. I help her bring the bag down. She has spoken to me in English, and I am bother
ed by this, though I know I have no right to be. A second later, the woman switches on her cellphone and begins to chatter in Greek to her husband. She tells him their new grandchild is a little pinched in the face now but is sure to fill out. As we passengers begin shuffling toward the exit, she turns to me again and says, in English, “Thank you.”

  I emerge from the plane into the damp air of a cloudy afternoon and walk down the clanking steps of the mobile stairway. I follow the crowd as we walk across the roaring tarmac into the hubbub of the terminal. I smile, because nothing has changed in the five years since I was here last. There is no line, just a crowd massed before the window of the single passport-control officer; there is still the click and hiss of lighters as the newly freed smokers light up beneath the NO SMOKING signs, still the simmer of impatience as people jostle one another for the advantage of an elbow extended, a hip turned.

  When I finally reach the window, the uniformed officer glances back and forth from me to my photograph. He must have an inkling that a petite woman named Calliope with dark, straight hair has Greek heritage. He gives me a little smile, and I return it and say my first words of Greek in Greece: “Geia sas.” To your health. It is the polite form of geia sou, the message I see on bumper stickers and menus across Boston. But there it shows up as Yasou! and it makes me wince. It conveys no particular meaning, serving simply as a kitschy proclamation of Greekness.

  I have no checked baggage, so I move quickly through the unmanned customs booth to the pay phones in a corner of the large main hall, where backpackers have rolled out their sleeping bags to rest. Stepping around the white-blond head of a young man with an Arab kaffiyeh wrapped around his neck, I find a working phone and make a call to Jonah’s cell.

  “Hey. I’m here.”

  “I checked online. I’m glad you called.”

  The line hisses.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d answer the phone,” I say.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d call.”

  Someone bumps my shoulder and the phone slips from my ear.

  “Did you say something?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “Well, I should go. I have to catch the bus. I do love you, Jonah.”