Marta ~ May 23

 

Oh, on Greek summer mornings how bright the sun was out there on the terrace, the roof garden that was ours though the building was only 3 stories high in a select part of Athens because that's the way the bad guy I was with rolled ~ a bit like my father in his tastes, not like my father in his psychoses. 

 

The floor of the roof garden was terra cotta and it wrapped around the apartment in an el-shape, the outer and inner edges lined with flower beds raised a couple of feet up off the ground. We grew zinnia. Other things too. I didn't choose any of them. No one could do any choosing there except him, and maybe his cute little blonde daughter who knew how the game was played as well as any of us. 

 

The time I was in the apartment alone for a couple of weeks. By then I had a job and even my own place so I was doing them a favor, to look after things. Watering the garden my main responsibility and he drilled me on how crucial it was and not to screw it up and kill everything. So I watered like a champ and when they came back he shouted that I had watered much too much. How could he tell? Because soil had run out from the bottom of the flower beds. He could see it. So could anyone if they looked, but he had a nose for any clue to other people's mistakes.

 

I thought of Mark, his partner, this morning as I waited for Bird to finish sniffing something. I was gazing at a graffiti scribble that looked a little like the scribbles Mark used to make, and I thought how Mark might have been an artist, like Keith Haring, if he'd survived and been encouraged, and I imagined talking to Mark now, if he had lived, how we might have looked back at those times. I imagined Mark as a fully grown man, not the boy in his 20s who could be shy and sweet and then cruel when he had the upper hand.