A Life in Men: A Novel by Gina Frangello Page B

visiting his fellow pilot, the shorter Titus, a certifiable Greek who owns a villa in Mykonos. In the clarity of morning, Nix is embarrassed by the absurdity of the language associated with their evening:
Zorg, Titus, villa
. Who has names like Zorg and Titus? Who refers to their house as a “villa”? It is as though she has wandered by mistake into a romance novel, the cover featuring Zorg shirtless, his tanned, muscular arms encircling petite Mary. She rolls her eyes in the semidarkness. This eye-rolling is all for her own benefit, of course, since Mary—who would normally be laughing with her (they might repeat, “Zorg,
Zorg
!” in increasingly freaky tones until they were hysterical)—is so horny she has lost her sense of humor.
    Nix’s lips are not swollen, because she did not kiss Titus, but her breath and stomach are sour and her skin is sensitive from the sun and her hangover. Mary keeps barking at her to “get ready” or “they’ll think we’re not coming,” so she drags herself to the shower in the dinky bathroom adjoining the bedroom she and Mary have rented in a private home. No sooner has she shampooed her hair, however, than the water backs up, brown and smelly. She tries to outrace it, rinsing her hair quickly, but the backup soon overtakes the short lip of the shower stall and the room begins to flood. Mary, already dressed, scurries to get the woman who rented them the room, while Nix sits on her mussed twin bed, white towel matching white bedspread matching white walls, shampoo drying on her hair. On Mary’s return, the woman hollers at them in Greek for a good five minutes before roughly gesturing at Nix to get dressed. Nix puts her bikini on under her cutoffs, figuring her morning will now entail having to finish rinsing her hair at the beach once they’ve been evicted; however, the Greek woman only leads them around the corner and down the block, into another room furnished almost identically to the first. There—though not before demonstrating how to turn the shower faucet on and off several times—she takes her leave of them.
    “They’ll think we blew them off!” Mary whines again, so Nix hurries through her hair-rinsing in the new, unflooded bathroom, skips applying makeup, and dresses again in the clothes she hastily threw on moments before. She knows she looks unfit for the cover of Mary’s romance novel, but this suits her just fine.
    Although the girls are more than forty minutes late, Zorg and Titus are still waiting in Taxi Square, calmly sipping espresso, which Greeks simply call “coffee.” By night, their olive skin and dark eyes had seemed nocturnal (“like melted pools of chocolate,” Mary drunkenly rhapsodized), but in the daylight, their suave European handsomeness looks shiny and conspicuous, as though it has been painted on and scrubbed with a brush. Even Titus is considerably better looking than Nix took him for in the bar. The moment they see the girls approach, the men stand, Titus scattering some coins on the table. In quick succession, Mary and Nix have their cheeks kissed, one-two, one-two, and for a brief, frozen moment, Nix sees herself for exactly what she is: a terribly young midwestern girl who has grossly mistaken Skidmore for sophistication. For the first time, she begins to feel giddy: today is just the beginning, the prelude to her semester in London, the onset of her Education. Zorg has a rental car, but Titus mounts his scooter, and Nix is happy to climb on behind him while Mary has to get into the boring old car, which looks like the one Mary’s father drove when they were in grade school.
    Nix’s hair dries quickly on the winding road to Plati Yialos, a resort area a couple of miles away from Mykonos proper. By the time she dismounts the scooter, she has forgotten she is not wearing lipstick or mascara; she has forgotten her tomboyish jean shorts; she feels infused with the sun and breeze of the scooter ride, as though her limbs and hair and