Lies That Bind Us(51)

“Of course not!” said Kristen. “Which is why I want to do it here.”

“I always kind of hated that place,” said Simon, and he wasn’t joking now. He meant it.

Simon had always had a tendency to push minor irritation into belligerence. Little things might stay little—meriting no more than a raised eyebrow or a resigned sigh—or he might dig his heels in and fight his corner like there was something real at stake. Still, I tried to remember him bitching about the restaurant before, but couldn’t recall him ever saying anything of the kind.

It was called Taverna Diogenes. It sat on the bus route from the hotel we had stayed in to Rethymno, though we had always walked there. It was less than five hundred yards from the Minos’s concierge desk, and it was someone there who had first recommended it to us.

“Probably his brother runs the place,” Brad had observed, not unreasonably. The local community seemed tight and interconnected. It was like a hundred other tourist-oriented Greek restaurants on the island, but it had become our place, and we’d eaten most of our meals there.

“You know, Si, it really might be fun,” said Melissa. “As they say, for old times’ sake.”

They exchanged a look that said anything but fun, then Simon shrugged and turned away.

“Fine,” he said.

As we drove over there once more, Simon grew quiet—“just focusing on the road, Mel,” he snapped when his wife asked him what was wrong—and the rest of us, as if to compensate, seemed to wake up. Our mood lifted, and even my headache went away as the ibuprofen kicked in, so that by the time we reached the Diogenes, I was feeling much better and had developed a serious appetite.

There were a few tables inside, but most were out in a flagstone-paved area by the road, surrounded by a low stone wall and canopied with a roof that was half thatch and half real grapevine. That had been a selling feature when we first arrived, the fruit hanging from the rafters above the table. It had seemed so exotic. Marcus told us some story about Diogenes wandering the streets at noon with a lantern. “Claimed to be looking for an honest man,” he said.

The food was standard Greek tourist fare—a dozen or so main courses, a handful of predictable sides, retsina, wine, ouzo, and pints of Mythos beer served very cold. It was still run by a boisterous middle-aged woman called Maria and staffed by her children and their cousins, some of whom also worked around the hotel and the beach. One of the boys, a teenager who had taken an obvious shine to Melissa, had appeared in Marcus’s slide show. He led tourists on snorkeling and paddling expeditions around the bay, and I remembered him badgering us to join him, though we didn’t go. Mel had flirted with him till he promised to bring us all fresh local sponges recovered from the sea by his own hands. There had been a rack of them, bagged in cellophane, beside the counter, and a couple of baskets of larger ones that looked like great ocher corals. I had bought a small one from the hotel and used it religiously for the next two years till it finally disintegrated. But the kid had said he knew where the best ones grew and would bring one as big as his head for Melissa. I remembered his boyish pride, his determination to prove himself worthy of Mel’s glamorous favor, though he never delivered the sponges—not to the rest of us, at least—and he wasn’t around at the end of the trip. I think Simon got tired of him buzzing around and may have said something to Maria. Or to Mel, for that matter. Still, I remembered his boyish grin, white teeth in a deeply tanned face, black hair and eyes to match, an exuberant, good-looking kid.

Waiter boy, Mel had called him teasingly. I smiled at the memory.

“You think they’ll remember us?” said Melissa, looking around.

Sometimes that lighthouse smile of hers seemed designed to attract attention to herself as well as to shed her beatific light on the less worthy. She was doing that now, being conspicuous as she scanned the seating area.

“Why should they?” said Simon sourly. “We were here for a week five years ago, and these tables have been full of people who looked and behaved just like us ever since. Oh, for God’s sake, Mel, just pick a table.”

She chose the one we had always chosen, and I found myself surprised by the realization that she wanted to be recognized, that she wanted Maria and her kids to flock to her as to an old friend or to some princess or celebrity who had graced their humble establishment before. It reminded me of the first time I realized that Melissa’s glamour was not as effortless as she made out, when I caught her touching up her makeup in the ladies’ room after she came out of the sea. Annoyed that I had seen, she had snapped something catty about how it must be nice not to have to worry about how you looked.

Perhaps this was the source of Simon’s irritation. He had anticipated some rerun of what Marcus and I had occasionally and privately called The Melissa Show.

Starring Melissa! With special guest . . . Melissa! Written, directed, and edited by Melissa!

We could go on for quite a while on that score. It was all in good fun—mostly, at least—but it contained a kernel of truth. Melissa liked to be the center of attention, and the only reason that no one minded was that the rest of us liked to be her adoring audience. I wondered if Simon had started to find that wearing, and I remembered Gretchen’s tale of the cataclysmic fight that had sent Mel to a bar by herself.

Mel slumped into her seat, pouting at Simon, and we took our designated places. If Gretchen realized that she was, once more, butting in on a ritual reenactment from half a decade ago, she showed no sign of it.