A Visit from Jeff Mann

FEATURED AUTHOR—JEFF MANN A Visit from Jeff Mann________________ Kevin Oderman That must have been 1992, Spring. I was edging up to the abyss of a divorce, startled at how quiet things had become, and Jeff was howling, in freefall already, his own love gone fearfully bad. Still, I'd said come on over, and there he was, frowning at the daunting light, in Thessaloniki, in Greece, where the light gets a little ahead of warmth in Spring. Shut from love, as I remember it, we settled for excess. Oh, in the museum we stood staring down at the bones of Phillip of Macedón, the father of that beautiful and murderous boy, Alexander, but we soon turned from that to wander the town markets, markets since Roman times, and bought olives by the kilo: black, purple, and green, lush and large. We bought big rounds of figs, tomatoes and onions and cheese, and we bought a few bottles of retsina and ouzo and dense, pungent breads, and I could see Jeff was getting hungry. So we bought sweets, dusted deep in the green pistachios of Asia. And we took our heavy sacks on the long bus ride out to Perea, a deserted little beach town where I lived in a white apartment, a balcony looking out over vineyards, and we made Greek salads and dipped our bread in the oil and vinegar, and maybe our chins got shiny but we ate, the small glasses for retsina we filled often, and we drank, and that love-misery pulled back a little. A nightingale, a bird right out of poetry, sang a few notes from a tiny tree at the edge of the vineyard. So we ate the sweets and we sampled the ouzos, and I tried to explain why the one that smelled a little like sweat was especially prized, and Jeff got out a small notebook and looked like he might write a poem. And the next day we got hungry again and we started in on the restaurants. In the Kastra, sitting outside near the city wall, gazing down at the burgeoning light over the Thermaic Gulf, we washed down the squid and salads with a green retsina drawn straight from the barrel; and we walked under the arcades down a long passageway into the Ouzeri Aristotelous and ate the stuffed cuttlefish and grilled eggplant rounds and bitter horta with black wine; and then we took 32 carried orders across the street and on out to the table on trays held over their shoulders, and I thought Jeff was feeling better, because of the way he eyed the curly-haired waiters. And then, because we had to, though it was cold, we bused down the Halkidiki peninsula, shaped like a maimed hand with three fingers thrust into the Aegean, and we found a deserted cove, and there I watched as Jeff stripped down to his skivvies and waded out into the blue waves and wrestled with the sea gods. 33 ...