Girl Meets Greek

November 24, 2003 6:59 a.m.

(I thought I would lighten things up a bit.)

When I first met the Greek language he was sleek and sexy in a black trenchcoat, with alpha and beta cufflinks. He had those bruised eyes and rounded vowels all the girls go wild for. He had such lithe declensions and long lashes, fluttering my way over a stack of parchment and Xeroxed Loeb editions. I wanted him like a gutter whore, writhing and screaming out dactyls in the night.

At first it was all right. He brought me flowers and I wrote out his letters in the morning. We cut quite the figure on the town�him all darkly mysterious and me with great black cow eyes, staring dreamily into his aorist forms. I would clutch him to my heart and swoon over the trilling consonants, the rough breaths, the muscled inflections. I could smell him on my clothes at night, and he whispered sweet hexameters into my ear.

Then once I conjugated the 3rd person plural aorist of luw as luoi and he slapped me hard with his great, calloused hand. I had a black eye for two weeks. Then I mistranslated gignomai late one wintry eve and he stubbed out a hand-rolled cigarette on my arm. Before long, it became clear that he was a dangerously violent dialect, with serious verb-chart management issues.

But I still loved him. The way he would look at me sometimes, his hair disheveled from a night of frantic translation�my stomach would flutter and my heart would swell, just like in the old days. He told me how much he needed me, that he couldn�t live without me�how could I refuse? But I knew it couldn�t last, especially after that night.

We were having Plato for dinner with a side of Herodotus and everything was fine, when all of the sudden he exploded: �You�ve been seeing Latin behind my back!�

�No! I mean, yes, we�ve gone out a few times, but we�re just friends, I swear!�

�Don�t lie to me! It�s all over town! You told me you were a Hellenist and now I find out you�ve been whoring it up with that, that�ablative! How could you do this to me?�

�It meant nothing, I swear!�

But he didn�t listen. He punched me in the belly and tore up our beautiful little apartment in a storm of hurled curses and vicious iota subscripts. Nothing I could say would calm him. After he had fallen asleep in a drunken haze of infinitives, I packed my suitcase sorrowfully and left him, careful not to wake him. As I shut the door, I looked one last time at his classic profile in our bedsheets and stifled tears.

A few months later I saw him in a caf�. He was dressed in that old, familiar trenchcoat. One look and I knew I could never really leave him. He gave me a sidelong glance and whispered a few stanzas in his throaty, intimate voice and I was his again.

But this time I�m going to play it right. I don�t have to answer his calls if I don�t want to�I�m an independent woman, after all. I can read him like a book�when he starts making trouble with passive behavior and irregular verbs I just tell him to come and see me when he can control himself. As long as he behaves like a gentlemen, everything is wonderful. And when he acts up, I just threaten to go back to English and he smartens right up.

I think we�re going to make it, he and I.

--Anais