...more

A waiter steps into his path, holding out a tray bearing a solitary glass of wine. My husband drinks it down in a single swallow, then looks at me and shrugs. The window of opportunity has closed. Vandoros is no longer alone. An older man with glasses is clapping him on the back as if they're old friends.

I go over, carrying my own drink, a glass of pink champagne.

"You think that's his father? Or do famous people come straight from God?"

He loosens his tie even more, then takes it off and stuffs it in his pocket.

"For Christ's sake! Did he really have to offer me a drink at that precise moment?"

"Did you really have to take it?"

The room has filled up. Men, women, and a few children whose parents must have dragged them there are perched on the edges of their seats, chatting or glancing out the windows, which rattle each time a bus passed by. Night has started to fall. Summer presses in from all sides, thick and sticky.

"Lots of journalists came."

He twirls the empty glass in his hand, covering it with fingerprints.

"Of course they did. It's an easy story, a sure thing," I whisper.

We set our bags down in the fifth row from the front, on the left, in the exact spot where writers look when they get nervous. My husband insists there's a particular place, which he calls a distraction spot. Whenever he gives a reading he always throws sideways glances at that spot, searching for comfort and acceptance.

Tonight the room is brimming with acceptance. Vandoros has had more success with his two novels than my husband has with seven. Everyone's talking about his strong, sturdy Greece, which emerges out of the past "with courage and clamor," as the title of his first book has it. They're talking about him, too: a second-generation Greek-American with a wrinkled crease in his linen pants and a cigarette always dangling from one hand.

"There's his wife!"

"Where?"

"Don't be catty. She's not that short."

But I actually hadn't seen her. I wasn't looking at anything in particular; I was in my own distraction spot, right there in my seat, swimming in a bog of elbows, knees, and plastic bags from bookstores. His wife belongs to that category of women who pass unnoticed, whose presence a room simply absorbs—until, that is, they open their mouths, gesturing vividly to give life and color to whatever point they're trying to make. Then she surfaces, shaking off her diminutive stature, her pale skin, the circles under her eyes. Her name is Pia Saunders. She's several years younger than I am, and takes part in all the contemporary art biennials.

My husband and I would never admit it to one another, but we both imagine them in the exotic locales where the biennials are held—Korea, Cuba, Brazil. Drinking cocktails at the hotel bar, half-slices of pineapple stuck on the rims of their glasses, then going back to their room drunk on happiness. And on a particular kind of happiness, the kind that circumstances provide. They don't need to look at the world through new eyes; the world has changed for their benefit: deserts and dugout canoes instead of apartment buildings and turnpike tolls. He writes on the hotel balcony—standing up, he says in interviews, like Nabokov. He gazes out at the lights of each new, exotic city trembling in the distance, and thinks of Greece, which he imagine as a tranquil, mythical sheep. She takes photographs and gives them titles like Our Little Secret or A Few Things I'd Like to Show You.

She's thrown a white shawl over her elegant dress—a white tunic with pleats that end at her ankles. She's massaging her temples and yawning. The evil eye, Vandoros writes in his new novel, is the fleeting but deep desire to step into the other's shoes, to sleep between his sheets, if possible with his wife.

I wouldn't want to sleep with Vandoros. But it would be a relief to me if he could read my mind and say, I understand, it's human, I used to think that way, too. I'd like for the four of us to go out for drinks after the reading, to talk about these kinds of things. At the end of the night they would invite us to come and visit them in New York, where Saunders carry an armful of sheets into the guestroom, and would linger so long, postponing the final goodnight, that in the end I would take the sheets from her arms and say, Come on, Pia, tomorrow's another day.

"What are you thinking?"

"Nothing."

And it's true, they aren't really thoughts. They're little shouts that never make it out, stray cries that form a halo around my head, as if to adorn some imminent, dramatic gesture of utter defeat.

Unfortunately. If only. Because.

Impossible.

I'd like.

Vandoros climbs the steps to the podium, hunched over. He has nothing to prove; he doesn't have to try to look like anyone but himself.

"What are you thinking?"

"Me? Nothing."

I know him. He thinks like I do, only in a more masculine way: without words. He'd like to melt into his chair as Vandoros clears his throat and says, in broken Greek, "Thank you for coming. Good evening."

"He's going to read with his gloves on? Is he crazy?"

"Maybe he has contact dermatitis."

"From writing too much?"

"Don't exaggerate. Look, he won't even take them off to shake hands with Stark."

The woman introducing him is an American philhellene with a double chin who has translated Cavafy. My husband crosses and uncrosses his legs. He slips his hand into the pocket with his bow tie. He sent her a book of his once, but never got a response.

"Today we are honored..." Stark is saying. And honor assumes its pious form. The women's heads turn like flowers turning to the sun, the men lean back with their legs apart as if they were sitting in the coffee house waiting for the mayor to start speaking in his own words about their lives. The waves of their presence wash over us as over a broken seawall.

My husband grips my hand in his, hard. Both of us hear the snapping of bone, but only I feel the pain. No one can follow me that far, that deep.

Something is out of joint.