Two Six Eight: Electra

A memory from long ago, here on a rainy January night.

I was thinking today about Salonika, in northeastern Greece. It's Thessaloniki now, but I still think of it as Salonika, the name it bore in Ottoman times and during the Great War. No particular reason for thinking of it; I may have been idly looking at things from forgotten fronts of the 1914-1918 war. I was trained once upon a time to do History, and I still find odd corners of the world fascinating.

Thessaloniki, though... It's a word and a place that calls up a story from my teens.

In my final year at high school I dated a girl named Marsha. Lovely girl--- long, dark brown hair down past the middle of her back, eyes almost as dark as mine. Five foot six, I recall, with excellent legs. We weren't a serious couple, but we dated throughout the year; I even attended her prom. Her father was an executive with a shipping corporation, and he was always away on trips overseas. I did envy that rather a lot--- a life with travel, a life in aerodromes.

The summer after high school, the summer before I left home to go off to university, her father took his wife and daughter  with him on one of his trips. She wrote me from hotels in London and Rome and Athens.  She even wrote me on TWA and Lufthansa "in flight" stationery--- in those days, airlines still had things like stationery that passengers could use. She brought stationery back for me, too. Hotel stationery is a small fetish of mine. Some of it I kept for years. I loved getting letters from overseas, loved feeling even second-hand cosmopolitan.

Her father had to spend a few days in Thessaloniki. They stayed at a hotel called the Electra Palace. I looked it up on line, and it's still there. It seems to have been reno'd a few times since Marsha and her parents would've stayed there; I've no idea how it looked then. It's rated as a five-star hotel, though the website seems to suggest that its prices are substantially less than a five-star hotel would be in Manhattan or London. She sent me a postcard from Thessaloniki; I don't recall what was on it.

The story I learned later was that she'd been introduced to the son of one of her father's business contacts. He was a perfect cliche for the son of a wealthy Greek businessman of the day. Twenty-five or twenty-six, Mediterranean-handsome, an expensive smile, and a restored classic sports car--- a vintage MG, possibly. Marsha became his project.  He drove her through the city, drove her along the coastal roads, drove her up into the hills above the city. I've always imagined that he drove with his hand on her bare thigh from their first moments in the car. I can even imagine what she might've worn on a summer's day--- she had a khaki miniskirt that she liked a lot, and of course girls from where she  grew up lived in cut-off denim short shorts in summertime.

Hand on her thigh, obviously. And very soon, there was a fair amount of road head. There were parked-car encounters up in the hills overlooking the city. There may have been a shadowy figure sneaking out of her hotel room at the Electra Palace before dawn on a couple of nights. The road head would've been something she loved. She always did. They did go dancing at some expensive discos, too. It's still easy for me to imagine her in her favourite dance-floor look--- white silk blouse unbuttoned almost to the waist and worn next to the skin, black velvet short shorts, dress sandals. Easy, too, to imagine parked car encounters. Pulling up that khaki mini and straddling the Greek boy or stepping out of the parked MG to pull down her cut-off short shorts before climbing back in--- I can imagine either. I'd spent time persuading her to avoid underwear, but she may or may not have been following my suggestions in Greece. An MG cockpit was a tiny thing, and Marsha would've had to work to get herself into a driver's seat with him. She was flexible, though. I do recall that.

I remember that she bought a faded-pastel pink denim jacket in Athens. I do imagine her wearing that just over her shoulders with nothing underneath, smoking a joint with the Greek boy while they leaned on the hood of the parked MG.

The boy was seven or eight years older than she was, but I don't know if she ever thought about the idea of an older lover. She and I never talked about age. She and I were effectively the same age, which no girl in my life has been for years and years. Marsha was actually older than I was by four months--- a major thing in the days when the drinking age was eighteen rather than twenty-one.

I found out the details of what had happened in Thessaloniki later. She and I saw each other a few times when she got back to the States, but we were both planning to go off to university. I was going off to New England and she was bound for the Colorado School of Mines. It was only on Christmas break when we got drunk together and she told me the Thessaloniki story in detail. I couldn't be jealous. She and I had enjoyed being with one another and having our own encounters, but we weren't a serious couple. In any case, I was deeply involved with a girl in Connecticut, a girl who'd be in and out of my life with high drama for the next four or five years. So I couldn't really be jealous. I was envious, though, envious of the vintage MG and of her spending a month in Europe. Envious, too, of expensive hotel sex. She always liked men with sports cars; that was her particular kink. I do wish I knew more stories about that from her younger days.

I didn't keep a diary in those days, or at least not a formal one. I probably wouldn't have made notes about her encounter in Thessaloniki, though these days I would. My memory is still reasonably good, though I do run the risk of all older roues--- losing all the best stories here in the autumn of my years. I only regret that when she drunkenly told me about what she'd done I didn't pull her close across the bed and have her tell me all the details. I'd like to be able to savor her stories here when I can imagine them as happening in a distant world.