Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You

a pamphlet on the poet’s life. The guidebooks she checked devoted a paragraph or two to the subject, but the details, at best, were sketchy and embarrassed: The poet had been born in 612 B.C . in Skala Eressou. She had run a “school for young girls.” Her passionate odes to the beauty of women had often been “misinterpreted.”
    Fuming, Mona stalked a statuary shop, where she passed row after row of plaster penises before pouncing on the only female figurine in sight. “Sappho?” she asked the clerk, pronouncing it “Sappo,” the way the Lesbians did.
    The clerk frowned at her, uncomprehending.
    “Is this Sappho? The poet?”
    “Yes,” he replied, though it sounded suspiciously like a question.
    “Forget it,” said an American voice behind her. “It’s Aphrodite.”
    Mona turned to see a woman her own age, handsome and lanky, with a big Carly Simon mouth. “They don’t do Sappho. Not as a statue, anyway. Somebody told me there’s an ouzo bottle shaped like her, but I haven’t been able to find it.”
    Mona returned the figurine to the shelf. “Thanks,” she told the American.
    “You’d do better in Mitilíni. They’ve got a statue of her down by the harbor.” The wide mouth flickered. “It’s ugly as shit, but what can you do?”
    Mona chuckled. “I can’t even find a book of her poetry.”
    “Well, there’s not much left, you know.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “The church burned it.”
    Mona grunted. “Figures.”
    “You might try the gift shop on the square. They’ve got some fairly decent Sappho key rings.”
    “Thanks,” said Mona. “I’ll do that.”
    The woman went back to her browsing.

    In the shop on the square Mona found the key rings—a crude profile on an enameled chrome medallion. They weren’t much, but they did say SAPPHO , so she bought a green one for Michael, thinking that it looked vaguely horticultural. Then she set off in search of a hotel that sounded like Sappho the Russian.
    She found it on the boardwalk after a five-minute search. Sappho the Eressian. The room she rented there was spare and clean—blond wood, a single bed with white sheets, a lone lamp. She showered off the grit of the road, then anointed herself with sun block and changed into a crinkly cotton caftan she’d bought in Athens. She was much more comfortable when she returned to the beach and felt her wet hair kinking in the warm breeze.
    She headed toward the big gray bluff, since the beach seemed less crowded at that end. The bathers grew sparser—and nuder—the longer she walked. When everyone in sight was naked, she skinned off her caftan and rolled it into a tight little ball, stuffing it in her tote bag. She spread a towel on the sand and lay on it, stomach down, feeling a warmth that seemed to rise from the earth’s core.
    The nearest sunbathers were a dozen yards away on either side. She raked her fingers through the coarse sand and felt it roll away magically, like tiny gray ball bearings. There was a breeze off the water, and the sun lay on her big white bottom like a friendly hand.
    This was all right.
    The last time she’d done this had been in San Francisco in the mid-seventies. She and Michael had gone to the nude beach at Devil’s Slide. She had shed her clothes with great reluctance, feeling white and blobby even then. Michael, of course, had wussed out at the last minute, supposedly to preserve his tan line.
    She missed him a lot.
    She had wanted him to explore Lesbos with her, but the little fool had fallen in love on her and never found the time.
    He wasn’t sick, Anna had insisted. He might have the virus, but he wasn’t sick.
    But he could be. No, he would be. That was what they said now, wasn’t it?
    Unless they discovered a drug or something. Unless some scientist wanted the Nobel Prize bad enough to make it happen. Unless one of the Bush kids, or Marilyn Quayle, maybe, came down with the goddamned thing…
    She laid her cheek against the warm sand and closed her eyes.

    Later, in the heat of the day, she strode out into the sea. When she was thigh-deep, she turned and surveyed the broad beach, the prosaic little town and distant dung-colored hills. She didn’t know a soul for miles. Anna and Stratos were on the other side of the island, napping by now, no doubt, or making love behind closed shutters, stoned to the tits.
    She smiled at the thought of them and splashed water on her pebbling flesh. This has been a good idea, she decided, taking a holiday from