Blackbird Madness

They married after that first impulsive date and promised to never see the other again.

She was reading the first time he saw her. One of those unforgivable books that convince the young they can change the world before they realize too much has already been set in motion without them.

For days she appeared at the edge of the square, folded into a warm stone nook that overlooked the Aegean. Always in the quiet laze of the late afternoon, when he was only beginning to prepare the cafe for the dusky press of nighttime souls thirsty for wine and conversation. The square would be empty of anyone but tourists who had not yet remembered how to savor the slow beauties of time.

Tonight, he finally crossed the twilight square with a glass in hand.

“You’ll find this helps with the inevitable disappointments of life and literature.”

She turned bright eyes on him as she pressed the book closed. “You’ve read it.”

“And lived it too.”

She accepted the wine and swirled it in her glass. “I’ve no idea what I’m doing.”

“In life or with the wine?”

“Let’s start with the wine.”

He told her to look for the faint orange hue at the rim of the glass. That was the giveaway for a merlot. The first raspberry-plum sip slipped between her lips.

She admitted she’d noticed him too, working in the cafe across the square. It was hard to miss the only other soul moving through the quiet siesta hours. He acknowledged his usual place was the family’s vineyard on the mainland. He was only here to help a friend with the cafe in the bustling tourist months.

She tapped the book in her lap. “What luck you’d be here to hate this as much as I do.”

He learned she preferred the ancient classics, the philosophies and the dramas, the epics that stretched thousands of years into the past. She was here on a dig, helping to restore the old theater. Aristophanes had always been her favorite.

“The one where the women deny sex to stop their men from going to war?”

She laughed. “Exactly that one.”

“My favorite too. Perhaps in theory more than practice.”

He asked her to join him at the cafe. The friend who owned the establishment would not begrudge him a few moments, perhaps even an accidental first date, with a woman who loved the old Greeks as much as he did. Time moved differently on the island. That was the whole point.

They huddled at a small table nestled in an alleyway just beginning to warm with the first glow of evening candlelight. The ever-present sea winked knowingly at them.

They came eventually to Euripides and the story of Medea and her Jason. “There’s a couple who should have considered divorce,” she remarked.

Her flippancy thrust him into an improbable honesty, and he confessed he wasn’t just helping an old friend. He was mourning a broken marriage, one that he himself had ended once he understood he did not hold enough love in his heart for forever.

By now, a half-empty bottle of merlot sat questioningly between them. A plate of pomegranate seeds waited beside it.

She reached for a seed. “I’ve got someone back home. He wants children. I’m not sure.” She was to leave tomorrow.

“What will you do?”

She knew the answer but was not ready to speak it.

He poured more wine into the silence. He told her the merlot’s name had come from the blackbird, a creature that could travel between worlds and bring change. Sometimes death, sometimes life.

“Just like Persephone after she ate the pomegranate.”

He took a seed for himself. “Everyone always says she had a sad fate, but I think change is not so bad.”

The weight of cares long ignored began to melt from the faint lines at her eyes. He saw the truth even before she spoke it. “I haven’t been brave enough to admit my relationship died a long time ago too.”

“Is that why you’re hiding on an island thousands of miles from home?”

“I could say the same of you.”

He gestured expansively with the wine. “I drink and seduce women with my knowledge of dead playwrights. It's a time-honored way to grieve.”

“You may have a point there.”

The merlot had eroded any residual shyness. She reached for his hand, the one that still rested on the table. A mutual understanding, long elusive, flooded through the touch. Confession of the unutterable had served to loosen the shell of loneliness that had held them both for so long.

He was still holding her hand when they rose. He led her into the village’s only bookshop, burrowed next to the village’s only cafe. He knew what he was looking for.

She leafed through the gift, eyes betraying nothing but curiosity. Why this book? Why me?

He could only say it was his favorite. Something to remember this improbable night by. She would learn why later, only when she read it.

Outside the bookshop, she kissed him. Though the reassuring warmth of an old familiarity had flowed through the touch of their hands, he was still surprised. When she kissed him a second time, he allowed himself to admit how it felt to be seen by someone else for the first time in years. It was a homecoming.

She led him to the edge of the village, where the ancient theater, long quiet, cut into a hill overlooking the sea. The water glowed distantly behind what had once been a stage, a silently willing audience for the night’s events.

They climbed to the highest tier of crumbling seats and observed a silence in appreciation of the beauty. This time, he kissed her.

When they pulled apart, she confessed it was sad to think they were the last ones left in this ruined place where there had once been so much life. Her heart broke most days in the work she did, excavating a past devoid of those uncommon flickers of spirit. The kind of flickers that had colored every moment since that first glass of merlot.

He agreed. “We are lucky to have such moments.”

“I feel as though I don’t deserve it.” He suspected she was thinking of home, the difficulty of the decisions she knew she had to make.

The corners of his mouth had lifted in reply. “That’s just how we humans are. Weary of our sadness, yet suspicious of the least happiness.”

“Would you ever marry again?”

“I would only ever marry the moment. Anything else would seem like disrespect.”

He thought he saw something in her eye. Perhaps it was an invitation put there by Aphrodite herself, woken from centuries of sleep to stir drama in a ruined theater.

Mischief from the goddess made him speak again. “Perhaps a moment like this one. What do you think?”

She said immediately, “I'd marry this moment too, but only if we promise to never see each other again. It wouldn't seem right otherwise.”

He did not protest. Her charming madness perfectly matched his own. It was madness only because most others in this world could not see its sense. This feeling could only be held in their memories where it would be safe from the assault of time’s stubborn march to resentment. Though the two of them were not so old, they had lived long enough to understand such inevitabilities.

They descended to the shore. He woke a ship captain he knew to be a judge and a drunk. The captain softened when he saw their offering of more merlot. A spontaneous marriage of strangers was not the oddest thing he had seen. Sailors lived in uncanny worlds. The captain accepted the bottle, welcoming the strange on land as he often did at sea.

“A bizarre fairy tale we’ve found ourselves in,” the woman observed.

“Are you its princess?”

“Evil stepmother. We’ve glimpsed a dream I won’t let either one of us keep. That’s what makes it so wonderful.”

“You archaeologists. So caught up in dramatic mythologies.”

“Not your first archaeologist?”

“Not my first marriage. But surely my last.”

They stepped into the captain’s boat and pushed away from shore.

He’d sworn to never marry again unless the universe offered up a good reason. It seemed insanity was to be that reason, which was better than many others he’d heard. The insanity honored a perfect night and the slight breath of life from a heart he had long feared to have gone cold.

The only place for such loveliness was transience. The other people and obligations all involved in the longer run of life, telling one where to be, who to be, and how to be it, could only ruin such delicious madness.

This kind of perfection lasted for only one night - one date - and a bottle of perfect merlot.

Though it could have been the third bottle. Or fourth. Even the ship captain was eyeing them with an appraisingly knowing brow.

The first wisps of Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn were beginning to pluck at the edge of the sea, teasing apart the young horizon. Soon, it would be light outside. She would have to go to her train. The real world whirled ever closer, insisting on solemnity and sensibility.

But for a single night, he’d found a woman to dance with him in defiance of it all.