Inside one of the lifeboats, Desdemona was saying, “Don’t look.” She was lying on her back. There was no goat’s-hair blanket between them, so Lefty covered his eyes with his hands, peeking through his fingers. A single pinhole in the tarp leaked moonlight, which slowly filled the lifeboat. Lefty had seen Desdemona undress many times, but usually as no more than a shadow and never in moonlight. She had never curled onto her back like this, lifting her feet to take off her shoes. He watched and, as she pulled down her skirt and lifted her tunic, was struck by how different his sister looked, in moonlight, in a lifeboat. She glowed. She gave off white light. He blinked behind his hands. The moonlight kept rising; it covered his neck, it reached his eyes until he understood: Desdemona was wearing a corset. That was the other thing she’d brought along: the white cloth enfolding her silkworm eggs was nothing other than Desdemona’s wedding corset. She thought she’d never wear it, but here it was. Brassiere cups pointed up at the canvas roof. Whalebone slats squeezed her waist. The corset’s skirt dropped garters attached to nothing because my grandmother owned no stockings. In the lifeboat, the corset absorbed all available moonlight, with the odd result that Desdemona’s face, head, and arms disappeared. She looked like Winged Victory, tumbled on her back, being carted off to a conqueror’s museum. All that was missing was the wings.
Lefty took off his shoes and socks, as grit rained down. When he removed his underwear, the lifeboat filled with a mushroomy smell. He was ashamed momentarily, but Desdemona didn’t seem to mind.
She was distracted by her own mixed feelings. The corset, of course, reminded Desdemona of her mother, and suddenly the wrongness of what they were doing assailed her. Until now she had been keeping it at bay. She had had no time to dwell on it in the chaos of the last days.
Lefty, too, was conflicted. Though he had been tortured by thoughts of Desdemona, he was glad for the darkness of the lifeboat, glad, in particular, that he couldn’t see her face. For months Lefty had slept with whores who resembled Desdemona, but now he found it easier to pretend that she was a stranger.
The corset seemed to possess its own sets of hands. One was softly rubbing her between the legs. Two more cupped her breasts, one, two, three hands pressing and caressing her; and in the lingerie Desdemona saw herself through new eyes, her thin waist, her plump thighs; she felt beautiful, desirable, most of all: not herself. She lifted her feet, rested her calves on the oarlocks. She spread her legs. She opened her arms for Lefty, who twisted around, chafing his knees and elbows, dislodging oars, nearly setting off a flare, until finally he fell into her softness, swooning. For the first time Desdemona tasted the flavor of his mouth, and the only sisterly thing she did during their lovemaking was to come up for air, once, to say, “Bad boy. You’ve done this before.” But Lefty only kept repeating, “Not like this, not like this …”
And I was wrong before, I take it back. Underneath Desdemona, beating time against the boards and lifting her up: a pair of wings.
“Lefty!” Desdemona now, breathlessly. “I think I felt it.”
“Felt what?”
“You know. That feeling.”
“Newlyweds,” Captain Kontoulis said, watching the lifeboat rock. “Oh, to be young again.”
After Princess Si Ling-chi—whom I find myself picturing as the imperial version of the bicyclist I saw on the U-Bahn the other day; I can’t stop thinking about her for some reason, I keep looking for her every morning—after Princess Si Ling-chi discovered silk, her nation kept it a secret for three thousand one hundred and ninety years. Anyone who attempted to smuggle silkworm eggs out of China faced punishment of death. My family might never have become silk farmers if it hadn’t been for the Emperor Justinian, who, according to Procopius, persuaded two missionaries to risk it. In A.D. 550, the missionaries snuck silkworm eggs out of China in the swallowed condom of the time: a hollow staff. They also brought the seeds of the mulberry tree. As a result, Byzantium became a center for sericulture. Mulberry trees flourished on Turkish hillsides. Silkworms ate the leaves. Fourteen hundred years later, the descendants of those first stolen eggs filled my grandmother’s silkworm box on the Giulia.
I’m the descendant of a smuggling operation, too. Without their knowing, my grandparents, on their way to America, were each carrying a single mutated gene on the fifth chromosome. It wasn’t a recent mutation. According to Dr. Luce, the gene first appeared in my bloodline sometime around 1750, in the body of one Penelope Evangelatos, my great-grandmother to the ninth power. She passed it on to her son Petras, who passed it on to his two daughters, who passed it on to three of their five children, and so on and so on. Being recessive, its expression would have been fitful. Sporadic heredity is what the geneticists call it. A trait that goes underground for decades only to reappear when everyone has forgotten about it. That was how it went in Bithynios. Every so often a hermaphrodite was born, a seeming girl who, in growing up, proved otherwise.
For the next six nights, under various meteorological conditions, my grandparents trysted in the lifeboat. Desdemona’s guilt flared up during the day, when she sat on deck wondering if she and Lefty were to blame for everything, but by nighttime she felt lonely and wanted to escape the cabin and so stole back to the lifeboat and her new husband.
Their honeymoon proceeded in reverse. Instead of getting to know each other, becoming familiar with likes and dislikes, ticklish spots, pet peeves, Desdemona and Lefty tried to defamiliarize themselves with each other. In the spirit of their shipboard con game, they continued to spin out false histories for themselves, inventing brothers and sisters with plausible names, cousins with moral shortcomings, in-laws with facial tics. They took turns reciting Homeric genealogies, full of falsifications and borrowings from real life, and sometimes they fought over this or that favorite real uncle or aunt, and had to bargain like casting directors. Gradually, as the nights passed, these fictional relatives began to crystallize in their minds. They’d quiz each other on obscure connections, Lefty asking, “Who’s your second cousin Yiannis married to?” And Desdemona replying, “That’s easy. Athena. With the limp.” (And am I wrong to think that my obsession with family relations started right there in the lifeboat? Didn’t my mother quiz me on uncles and aunts and cousins, too? She never quizzed my brother, because he was in charge of snow shovels and tractors, whereas I was supposed to provide the feminine glue that keeps families together, writing thank-you notes and remembering everybody’s birthdays and name days. Listen, I’ve heard the following genealogy come out of my mother’s mouth: “That’s your cousin Melia. She’s Uncle Mike’s sister Lucille’s brother-in-law Stathis’s daughter. You know Stathis the mailman, who’s not too swift? Melia’s his third child, after his boys Mike and Johnny. You should know her. Melia! She’s your cousin-in-law by marriage!”)
And here I am now, sketching it all out for you, dutifully oozing feminine glue, but also with a dull pain in my chest, because I realize that genealogies tell you nothing. Tessie knew who was related to whom but she had no idea who her own husband was, or what her in-laws were to each other; the whole thing a fiction created in the lifeboat where my grandparents made up their lives.
Sexually, things were simple for them. Dr. Peter Luce, the great sexologist, can cite astonishing statistics asserting that oral sex didn’t exist between married couples prior to 1950. My grandparents’ lovemaking was pleasurable but unvarying. Every night Desdemona would disrobe down to her corset and Lefty would press its clasps and hooks, searching for the secret combination that sprung the locked garment open. The corset was all they needed in terms of an aphrodisiac, and it remained for my grandfather the singular erotic emblem of his life. The corset made Desdemona new again. As I said, Lefty had glimpsed his sister naked before,