We'll Always Have Paros

Old friendships and new. The intoxication of young love. Long days at the beach, and lively evenings around the dinner table. At a Greek island villa, Andrew Sean Greer discovers the kind of joy that poets write about.

-  Andrew Sean Greer

WE LAND BY PROP PLANE on the Greek island of Páros, almost exactly two years late.

The plan had been to celebrate a friend's 60th birthday-but as we know, most plans in 2020 went awry. Time passed, Doug turned 60, then 61, and during those years spent in his New York apartment, love bloomed, and birthday plans gave way to wedding plans. And so we were all reinvited, two years later, to celebrate his marriage.

I understood very well. I spent those lockdown years in Milan, and love bloomed there, too, so I am bringing Enrico, my Italian boyfriend, who taught me how to cook Italian. I know very few of the invited guests; Enrico, none. It is to be a week in a glass house above the Aegean. "A murder mystery," I wrote to Doug when I accepted his invitation. Part of a long history of stories about characters trapped in a secluded place, like in Clue or an Agatha Christie novel or, I will later realize when I see the movie, Glass Onion. Doug asked who would be murdered. I wrote back: "Guessing is the fun part."

At the airport, Enrico and I are met by Thanos, a wiry, tanned man with wild white hair. He and his brother run a car-rental business together. "It's windy on Páros," he warns us, just as we feel a burst of the strong Meltemi breezes that have touched these islands since antiquity.

Páros has been famous since the sixth century B.C. for its flawless marble-Parian marble, it's called-used to make the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It is an island of beaches, mountains, and windswept rocky cliffs, scattered with broken pillars, sarcophagi, mosaics-evidence that the place was passed from the Greeks to the Romans, from the Byzantines to the Venetians, and from the Ottomans, at last, to independent Greece. Round-shaped Páros: an island worn smooth from so many hands.