In Memory of Konstantinos Drougos
My first thought when I hear the question is Who uses Facebook anymore? And then – even if you do, this is not the sort of thing you call someone to discuss, so I must be dreaming. Anyone who dreams intensely (and also sometimes rather idiotically) should be able to make sense of this logic. Except here Alketas is repeating the question, louder and more pointed, on the other side of the call I’ve just taken: Do I have Facebook on my phone and if so, could I open it now, because someone has just called to tell him Konstantinos Drougos has died and this is how they learned it. From a series of condolence-driven GIFs on his wall.
I am in the middle of a meeting at Chez Michel with two of my partners and a new client, about to gather feedback on the product we’ve just built for him, when the call comes. The phone has been ringing steadily for the last five minutes, which is the only reason I don’t ignore it. I have a meeting with Konstantinos tomorrow, I explain, in a tone you use with someone slow and tedious you don’t have to pretend to think otherwise about, so he can’t be dead. Dream / red wine logic locked and loaded, I swipe over to our recent thread and send him a useless Ελα as if this will surely conjure up the tidy proof needed to move on. To appease Alketas though, I ask Mike, who has all the apps (yes, all of them) and is beside me already admiring something on his device.
There is a five-minute pause while Mike discards all the Konstantinoses it is not before he lands on the one it is. He looks at me gently and I can feel the worst arriving through this unexpected kindness. “I’m sorry,” he says, and I can tell when he takes what is left of my hand, he means it. The waitress arrives simultaneously with the ποικιλία we’ve ordered, a mountain of cheese and stray meats she settles unceremoniously between all of us and the news. I blindly grab a handful of napkins and my purse and walk outside before I become someone who needs to be handled.
I once described Konstantinos as what would happen if a teddy bear became a person by accident. He had a stoic comfort to him, the sort of person you could find yourself beside anywhere on the spectrum of human circumstance and feel a shade better for it afterward. He carried a slightly maverick quality, moving in more directions at once than I could always follow across maritime, which was also part of what intrigued me. He seemed to have clarity about the big picture though – or at least one of them – and I wonder if having felt settled with the lower riddles added to the warmth and ease with which he appeared to enjoy being himself and all that entailed. You learn, as a woman, to read for motive when men offer help unsolicited; with him, I never had to, which is rarer than it should be.
Last May, he surprised me with an invitation to the Hellenic American Union’s collection of Michael Skoullou at a gallery in Kolonaki, an exhibition tracing an Athens that no longer quite exists but won’t entirely accept it. We had dinner afterwards with Nikos Liapis nearby at the unrivaled A Fine Mess, which ended up surprisingly being less about work and more sparring about the conditions under which we manage to be kind to each other, what makes it easier in some places than others. We’d been steadily drinking the Thymiopoulos Xivomavro rosé throughout the meal – it being summer and all – but when the waiter bestowed a dark chocolate behemoth of a dessert on the house, Konstantinos switched us to California Zinfandel, which could have been a soundtrack to several of my years in San Francisco and one I hadn’t revisited since exiting the US. For him, it was an episodic favorite in New York among a certain cast of characters. I decided then to steer us to a game that Tomas Estes and I loved, back when I worked in agave: sip and tell whatever story you’re immediately dropped into. It became one of those evenings that ends reluctantly only because it has to. The following afternoon he wrote to say he’d picked a few bottles of his own to celebrate St. Constantine next week and to see what other memories he might untangle in the process. He closed with Thank you, dear Emma. You’re a star – this kind of tending we pretend we don’t need until someone offers it.
Later that summer, when my trip to London is canceled last minute and I am here without a ticket to the HSA Gala, he will find a way to include me at his table, even though everyone else I’ve asked has told me it’s impossible. I’ll return the favor weeks later, bringing him as a guest to an invite-only Endeavor event at Beef Bar during the heat wave, where he’ll raise the first glass to Further & Further and tell me to keep writing in the same breath, as though one without the other would be a kind of betrayal. After, about ten of us will end up swimming at Kavouri. Some will be stung by jellyfish. Others will lose glasses to the sea or have books carried off by a ghost crab conspiracy or other mysterious meddling. Everyone will agree it was worth it.
The last time we’ll see each other is at the Hellenic Chinese Chamber of Commerce 30th Anniversary in November. I find him among the reserved seats in the front for various dignitaries, but he offers me the empty one beside him as soon as he spies me passing his row. We both stand to record Procipou’s speech, eloquent and succinct as always, and still one of the cleanest explanations I’ve heard of why the Net Zero Framework didn’t pass. Afterward, during the reception, I will laugh my heart out (ξεκαρδίζομαι—Greek, as usual, has a single word for what English reaches for in pieces) while I catch him dancing by himself to the Four Tops’ “I Can’t Help Myself.”
Outside Chez Michel, I call W. but he doesn’t have the words I need. It’s too soon, but also no one does, so I claw through my bag until I find my notebook.
This is what I manage to say.
You will be missed.
