What Was Mine

IN AMALFI

On the rocky beach next to the Cobalto, the boys were painting the boats. In June the tourist season would begin, and the rowboats would be launched, most of them rented by the hour to Americans and Swedes and Germans. The Americans would keep them on the water for five or ten minutes longer than the time for which they had been rented. The Swedes, usually thin and always pale, would know they had begun to burn after half an hour and return the boats early. It was difficult to generalize about the Germans. They were often blamed for the beer bottles that washed ashore, although others pointed out that this wasn’t likely, because the Germans were such clean, meticulous people. The young German girls had short, spiky hair and wore earrings that looked like shapes it would be difficult to find the right theorem for in a geometry book. The men were more conventional, wearing socks with their sandals, although when they were on the beach they often wore the sandals barefooted and stuffed the socks in their pockets.

What Christine knew about the tourists came from her very inadequate understanding of Italian. This was the second time she had spent a month in Amalfi, and while few of the people were friendly, it was clear that some of them recognized her. The beachboys talked to her about the tourists, as though she did not belong to that category. Two of them (there were usually six to ten boys at the beach, working on the boats, renting chairs, or throwing a Frisbee) had asked some questions about Andrew. They wanted to know if it was her father who sat upstairs in the bar, at the same table every day, feet resting on the scrollwork of the blue metal railing, writing. Christine said that he was not her father. Then another boy punched his friend and said, “I told you he was her mari.” She shook her head no. A third boy — probably not much interested in what his friends might find out, anyway — said that his brother-in-law was expanding his business. The brother-in-law was going to rent hang gliders, as well as motorcycles, in June. The first boy who had talked to Christine said to her that hang gliders were like lawn chairs that flew through the air, powered by lawn mowers. Everyone laughed at this. Christine looked up at the sky, which was, as it had been for days, blue and nearly cloudless.

She walked up the steep stairs to the second tier of the beach bar. Three women were having toast and juice. The juice was in tall, thin glasses, and paper dangled from the straw of the woman who had not yet begun to sip her drink. The white paper, angled away, looked like a sail. Her two friends were watching some men who were wading out into the water. They moved forward awkwardly, trying to avoid hurting themselves on the stones. The other woman looked in the opposite direction where, on one of the craggiest cliffs, concrete steps curved like the lip of a calla lily around the round façade of the building that served as the bar and restaurant of the Hotel Luna.

Christine looked at the women’s hands. None of them had a wedding ring. She thought then — with increasing embarrassment that she had been embarrassed — that she should have just told the boys on the beach that she and Andrew were divorced. What had happened was that — worse than meaning to be mysterious — she had suddenly feared further questioning if she told the truth; she had not wanted to say that she was a stereotype: the pretty, bright girl who marries her professor. But then, Europeans wouldn’t judge that the same way Americans would. And why would she have had to explain what role he occupied in her life at all? All the boys really wanted to know was whether she slept with him now. They were like all questioners in all countries.

It occurred to her that the Europeans — who seemed capable of making wonderful comedies out of situations that were slightly off kilter — might make an interesting film about her relationship with Andrew: running off to Paris to marry him when she was twenty, and losing her nerve; marrying him two years later, in New York; having an abortion; leaving; reuniting with him a few months later at the same hotel that they had gone to on the first trip to Paris in 1968, and then divorcing the summer after their reunion; keeping in touch for fifteen years; and then beginning to vacation together. He had married during that time, was now divorced, and had twin boys who lived with their mother in Michigan.

She had been sitting at Andrew’s table, quietly, waiting for him to reach a point where he could stop in his writing. She was accustomed to doing this. It no longer irritated her that for seconds or minutes or even for half an hour, she could be no more real to him than a ghost. She was just about to pull her chair into the shade when he looked up.

He told her, with great amusement, that earlier that morning an English couple with their teenage son had sat at the table nearby, and that the Englishwoman, watching him write, had made him a moral example to her son. She thought that he was a man writing a letter home. She had heard him ordering tea, in English, and — he told Christine again, with even more amusement — assumed that he was writing a letter home. “Can you imagine?” Andrew said. “I’d have to have a hell of an original mind to be scribbling away about a bunch of stones and the Mediterranean. Or, to give her credit, maybe she thought I was just overwrought.”

She smiled. For anyone to assume that he liked to communicate about anything that might be even vaguely personal was funny itself, in a mordant way, but the funnier thing was that he was so often thrown by people’s quite justifiable misperceptions, yet rarely cracked a smile if something was ludicrous. She had noticed early on that he would almost jump for joy when Alfred Hitchcock did his usual routine of passing briefly through his own film, but when she insisted that he watch a tape of Martin Short going into a frenzy as Ed Grimley on Saturday Night Live, he frowned like an archaeologist finding something he had no context for and having to decide, rather quickly, whether it was, say, an icon or petrified cow dung.

She had come to realize that what fascinated her about him was his absolute inadequacy when it came to making small talk. He also did not think of one thing as analogous to another. In fact, he thought of most analogies, metaphors, and similes as small talk. Nothing that caught Diane Arbus’s eye ever interested him, but he would open a book of Avedon’s photographs and examine a group shot of corporate executives as if he were examining a cross section of a chambered nautilus. When something truly interested him, he had a way of curling his fingers as if he could receive a concept in the palm of his hand.

The day before, Andrew’s publisher had cabled to see when the book of essays could be expected. For once he was ahead of schedule with his writing, and the cable actually put him in a better mood. There had been some talk, back in the States, of the publisher’s coming from Rome, where he had other business, to Atrani, to spend a few days with them. But just as they were leaving the States, Libya had been bombed, flights were canceled, people abandoned their travel plans. In the cable, the publisher made no mention of coming to Italy. There were few Americans anywhere around them: Libya and Chernobyl had obviously kept away those Americans who might have come before the season began.

Christine looked at the sky, wondering how many hang gliders would be up there during the summer. Icarus came to mind, and Auden’s poem about the fall of Icarus that she had studied, years ago, in Andrew’s poetry class. It was difficult to remember being that person who sat and listened, although she sometimes remembered how happy she had been to feel, for the first time, that she was part of something. Until she went to college and found out that other people were interested in ideas, she had settled for reading hundreds of books and letting her thoughts about what she read pile up silently. In all the years she spent at college in Middletown, she never ceased to be surprised that real voices argued and agreed and debated almost throughout the night. Sometimes, involved as she was, the talk would nonetheless become mere sound — an abstraction, equivalent to her surprise, when she left the city and lived in the suburbs of Connecticut, that the sounds of cicadas would overlap with the cries of cats in the night, and that the wind would meld animal and insect sounds into some weird, theremin-like music. Andrew was probably attracted to her because, while others were very intelligent and very pretty, they showed their excitement, but she had been so stunned by the larger world and the sudden comradeship that she had soaked it in silently. He mistook her stunned silences for composure and the composure for sophistication. And now, in spite of everything they had been through, apparently she was still something of a mystery to him. Or perhaps the mystery was why he had stayed so attached to her.

They had lunch, and she sipped juice through one of the thin red plastic straws, playing a child’s game of sipping until the juice was pulled to the top of the straw, then putting her tongue over the top, gradually releasing the pressure until the sucked-up juice ran back into the glass. She looked over the railing and saw that only a few beachboys were still there, sanding the boats. Another sat at a table on a concrete slab above the beach, eating an ice cream. Although she could not hear it from where she sat, he was probably listening to the jukebox just inside the other café—the only jukebox she knew of that had American music on it.

“You’ve been flirting with them,” Andrew said, biting his roll.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “They see me every day. We exchange pleasantries.”

“They see me every day and look right through me,” he said.

“I’m friendlier than you are. That doesn’t mean I’m flirting.”

“They’re flirting,” he said.

“Well, then, it’s harmless.”

“For you, maybe. One of them tried to run me down with his motorcycle.”

She had been drinking her juice. She looked up at him.

“I’m not kidding. I dropped the Herald,” he said.

The archness with which he spoke made her smile. “You’re sure he did it on purpose?” she said.

“You love to blame me for not understanding simple things,” he said, “and here is a perfect example of understanding a simple thing. I have put two and two together: they flirt with my wife and then, when they see me crossing the street, they gun their motorcycles to double the insult, and then I look not only like an old fool but a coward.”

He had spoken in such a rush that he seemed not to realize that he had called her “my wife.” She waited to see if it would register, but it did not.

“They are very silly boys,” he said, and his obvious petulance made her laugh. How childish — how sweet he was, and how silly, too, to let on that he had been so rattled. He was sitting with his arms crossed, like an Indian chief.

“They all drive like fools,” he said.

“All of them?” she said. (Years ago he had said to her, “You find this true of all Romantic poets?”)

“All of them,” he said. “You’d see what they did if you came into town early in the morning. They hide in alleyways on their motorcycles and they roar out when I cross, and this morning, when I was on the traffic island with the Herald, one of them bent over the handlebars and hunched up his back like a cat and swerved as if he were going to jump the curb.”

She made an effort not to laugh. “As you say, they’re silly boys, then,” she said.

Much to her surprise, he stood, gathered up his books and tablet, and stalked off, saying over his shoulder, “A lot you care.”

She frowned as he walked away, sorry, suddenly, that she had not been more compassionate. If one of the boys had really tried to run him down, of course she cared.

Andrew had walked off so fast that he had forgotten his cane.

She watched the sun sparkling on the water. It was so beautiful that it calmed her, and then she slowly surveyed the Mediterranean. There were a few windsurfers — all very far out — and she counted two canoes and at least six paddleboats. She stared, wondering which would crisscross first across a stretch of water, and then she turned, having realized that someone was staring at her. It was a young woman, who smiled hesitantly. At another table, her friends were watching her expectantly. With a heavy French accent, but in perfect English, the young woman said, “Excuse me, but if you will be here for just a little while, I wonder if you would do me a favor?”

The woman was squinting in the sun. She was in her late twenties, and she had long, tanned legs. She was wearing white shorts and a green shirt and high heels. The shoes were patterned with grapes and grape leaves. In two seconds, Christine had taken it all in: the elegance, the woman’s nice manner — her hopefulness about something.

“Certainly,” Christine said. And it was not until the woman slipped the ring off her finger and handed it to her that she realized she had agreed to something before she even knew what it was.

The woman wanted her to wear her ring while she and her companions went boating. They would be gone only half an hour, she said. “My fingers have swollen, and in the cold air on the water they will be small again, and I would spend my whole time being nervous that I would lose my favorite thing.” The woman smiled.

It all happened so quickly — and the woman’s friends swept her off so fast — that Christine did not really examine the ring until after the giggling and jostling between the woman and her friends stopped, and they had run off, down the steep steps of the Cobalto to the beach below.

The ring was quite amazing. It sparkled so brightly in the sun that Christine was mesmerized. It was like the beginning of a fairy tale, she thought — and imagine: a woman giving a total stranger her ring. It was silver — silver or platinum — with a large opal embedded in a dome. The opal was surrounded by tiny rubies and slightly larger diamonds. It was an antique — no doubt about that. The woman had sensed that she could trust Christine. What a crazy chance to take, with such an obviously expensive ring. Even though she was right, the woman had taken a huge risk. When Christine looked down at the beach, she saw the two men and the beachboy holding the boat steady, and the woman climbing in. Then the men jumped in, shouting something to each other that made all of them laugh, and in only a minute they were quite far from shore. The woman, sitting in back, had her back to the beach.

As he passed, the waiter caught her eye and asked if she wanted anything else.

“Vino bianco,” she said. She hardly ever drank, but somehow the ring made her nervous — a little nervous and a little happy — and the whole odd encounter seemed to require something new. A drink seemed just the thing.

She watched the boat grow smaller. The voices had already faded away. It was impossible to believe, she thought, as she watched the boat become smaller and smaller on the sparkling water, that in a world as beautiful as this, one country would drop bombs on another to retaliate against terrorism. That fires would begin in nuclear reactors.

Paddleboats zigzagged over water that was now a little choppier than it had been earlier in the afternoon. A baby was throwing rocks into the water. The baby jumped up and down, squealing approval of his every effort. Christine watched two men in straw hats stop to look at the baby and the baby’s mother, close by on the rocks. Around the cliff, going toward the swimming pool chiseled out of a cliff behind the Luna bar and restaurant, the boat that Christine thought held the French people disappeared.

The waiter brought the wine, and she sipped it. Wine and juice were usually cold. Sodas, in cans, were almost always room temperature. The cold wine tasted good. The waiter had brought, as well, half a dozen small crackers on a small silver plate.

She remembered, vaguely, reading a story in college about an American woman in Italy, at the end of the war. The woman was sad and refused to be made happy — or at least that was probably what happened. She could remember a great sense of frustration in the story — a frustration on the character’s part that carried over into frustrating the reader. The title of the story wouldn’t come to her, but Christine remembered two of the things the woman had demanded: silver candlesticks and a cat.

A speedboat passed, bouncing through white foam. Compared with that boat, the paddleboats — more of them, suddenly, now that the heat of the day was subsiding — seemed to float with no more energy than corks.

The wine Christine had just finished was Episcopio, bottled locally. Very little was exported, so it was almost impossible to find Episcopio in the States. That was what people did: went home and looked at photographs, tried to buy the wine they had enjoyed at the restaurant. But usually it could not be found, and eventually they lost the piece of paper on which the name of the wine had been written.

Christine ordered another glass of wine.

The man she had lived with for several years had given up his job on Wall Street to become a photographer. He had wanted to succeed at photography so much that he had convinced her he would. For years she searched magazines for his name — the tiny photo credit she might see just at the fold. There were always one or two credits a year. There were until recently; in the last couple of years there had been none that she knew of. That same man, she remembered, had always surprised her by knowing when Ground Hog Day was and by being sincerely interested in whether the ground hog saw its shadow when it came out. She and the man had vacationed in Greece, and although she did not really believe that he liked retsina any better than she did, it was a part of the Greek meals he prepared for their friends several times a year.

She was worrying that she might be thought of as a predictable type: an American woman, no longer young, looking out to sea, a glass of wine half finished sitting on the table in front of her. Ultimately, she thought, she was nothing like the American woman in the story — but then, the argument could be made that all women had something invested in thinking themselves unique.

The man who wanted to be a photographer had turned conversations by asking for her opinion, and then — when she gave her opinion and he acted surprised and she qualified it by saying that she did not think her opinion was universal — he would suggest that her insistence on being thought unrepresentative was really a way of asserting her superiority over others.

God, she thought, finishing the wine. No wonder I love Andrew.

It was five o’clock now, and shade had spread over the table. The few umbrellas that had been opened at the beach were collapsed and removed from the poles and wrapped tightly closed with blue twine. Two of the beachboys, on the way to the storage area, started a mock fencing match, jumping nimbly on the rocks, lunging so that one umbrella point touched another. Then one of the boys whipped a Z through the air and continued on his way. The other turned to look at a tall blond woman in a flesh-colored bikini, who wore a thin gold chain around her waist and another chain around her ankle.

Christine looked at her watch, then back at the cliffs beyond which the rowboat had disappeared. On the road above, a tour bus passed by, honking to force the cars coming toward it to stop and back up. There was a tinge of pink to the clouds that had formed near the horizon line. A paddleboat headed for the beach, and one of the boys started down the rocks to pull it in. She watched as he waded into the surf and pulled the boat forward, then held it steady.

In the shade, the ring was lavender-blue. In the sun, it had been flecked with pink, green, and white. She moved her hand slightly and could see more colors. It was like looking into the sea, to where the sun struck stones.

She looked back at the water, half expecting, now, to see the French people in the rowboat. She saw that the clouds were darker pink.

“I paid the lemon man,” Andrew said, coming up behind her. “As usual, he claimed there were whole sacks of lemons he had left against the gate, and I played the fool, the way I always do. I told him that we asked for, and received, only one sack of lemons, and that whatever happened to the others was his problem.”

Andrew sat down. He looked at her empty wineglass. Or he might have been looking beyond that, out to the water.

“Every week,” he sighed, “the same thing. He rings, and I take in a sack of lemons, and he refuses to take the money. Then he comes at the end of the week asking for money for two or three sacks of lemons — only one of which was ever put in my hands. The others never existed.” Andrew sighed again. “What do you think he would do if I said, ‘But what do you mean, Signor Zito, three sacks of lemons? I must pay you for the ten sacks of lemons we received. We have had the most wonderful lemonade. The most remarkable lemon custard. We have baked lemon meringue pies and mixed our morning orange juice with the juice of fresh-squeezed lemons. Let me give you more money. Let me give you everything I have. Let me pay you anything you want for your wonderful lemons.’ ”

His tone of voice was cold. Frightening. He was too often upset, and sometimes it frightened her. She clamped her hand over his, and he took a deep breath and stopped talking. She looked at him, and it suddenly seemed clear that what had been charming petulance when he was younger was now a kind of craziness — a craziness he did not even think about containing. Or what if he was right, and things were not as simple as she pretended? What if the boys she spoke to every day really did desire her and wish him harm? What if the person who wrote that story had been right, and Americans really were materialistic — so materialistic that they became paranoid and thought everyone was out to cheat them?

“What’s that?” Andrew said. She had been so lost in her confusion that she started when he spoke.

“What?” she said.

“That,” he said, and pulled his hand out from under hers.

They were both looking at the opal ring.

“From one of the beachboys,” she said.

He frowned. “Are you telling me that ring isn’t real?”

She put her hand in her lap. “No,” she said. “Obviously it’s real. You don’t think one of the boys would be crazy enough about me to give me a real ring?”

“I assume I was wrong, and it’s a cheap imitation,” he said. “No. I am not so stupid that I think one of those boys gave you an expensive ring. Although I do admit the possibility that you bought yourself a ring.”

He raised a finger and summoned the waiter. He ordered tea with milk. He looked straight ahead, to the beach. It was now deserted, except for the mother and baby. The baby had stopped throwing stones and was being rocked in its mother’s arms. Christine excused herself and walked across the wooden planks to the bar at the back of the Cobalto, where the waiter was ordering tea from the bartender.

“Excuse me,” she said quietly. “Do you have a pen and a piece of paper?”

The man behind the bar produced a pencil and handed her a business card. He turned and began to pour boiling water into a teapot.

She wondered whether the man thought that a pen and a pencil were interchangeable, and whether a business card was the same as a piece of paper. Was he being perverse, or did he not understand her request very well? All right, she thought. I’ll keep it brief.

As she wrote, she reminded herself that it was a calm sea, and that the woman could not possibly be dead. “I had to leave,” she wrote. “There is no phone at the villa we are renting. I will be here tomorrow at ten, with your ring.” She signed her name, then handed the card to the bartender. “It’s very important,” she said. “A woman is going to come in, expecting to find me. A Frenchwoman. If you see someone who’s very upset—” She stopped, looking at the puzzled expression on the bartender’s face. “Very important,” she said again. “The woman had two friends. She’s very pretty. She’s been out boating.” She looked at the card she had given the bartender. He held it, without looking at what she had written. “Grazie,” she said.

“Prego,” he said. He put the card down by the cash register and then — perhaps because she was looking — did something that struck her as appropriately ironic: he put a lemon on top of the card, to weigh it down.

“Grazie,” she said again.

“Prego,” he said.

She went back to the table and sat, looking not toward the cliff beyond which the French people’s boat had disappeared, but in the other direction, toward Positano. They said little, but during the silence she decided — in the way that tourists are supposed to have epiphanies on vacations, at sunset — that there was such a thing as fate, and that she was fated to be with Andrew.

When he finished his tea, they rose together and went to the bar and paid. She did not think she was imagining that the owner nodded his head twice, and that the second nod was a little conspiratorial signal.

From the doors that opened onto the balcony outside their bedroom she could see more of the Mediterranean than from the Cobalto; at this vantage point, high above the Via Torricella, it was almost possible to have a bird’s-eye view. From here, the Luna pool was only a dark blue speck. There was not one boat on the Mediterranean. She heard the warning honking of the bus drivers below and the buzzing sound the motorcycles made. The intermittent noise only made her think how quiet it was most of the time. Often, she could hear the breeze rustling the leaves of the lemon trees.

Andrew was asleep in the room, his breathing as steady as the surf rolling in to shore. He went to bed rather early now, and she often stood on the balcony for a while, before going in to read.

Years ago, when they were first together, she had worn a diamond engagement ring in a Tiffany setting, the diamond held in place by little prongs that rose up and curved against it, from a thin gold band. Now she had no idea what had become of the ring, which she had returned to him, tearfully, in Paris. When they later married, he gave her only a plain gold band. It made her feel suddenly old, to remember things she had not thought about in years — to miss them, and to want them back. She had to stop herself, because her impulse was to go into the bedroom and wake him up and ask him what had become of the ring.

She did go in, but she did not disturb him. Instead, she walked quietly to the bed and sat on the side of it, then reached over and turned off the little bedside lamp. Then she carefully stretched out and pulled the covers over her. She began to breathe in time with his breathing, as she often did, trying to see if, by imitation, she could sink into easy sleep.

With her eyes closed, she remembered movement: the birds sailing between high cliffs, boats on the water. It was possible, standing high up, as she often did in Italy, to actually look down on the birds in their flight: small specks below, slowly swooping from place to place. The tiny boats on the sea seemed no more consequential than sunbeams, glinting on the surface of the water.

Unaccustomed to wearing jewelry, she rubbed the band of the ring on her finger as she began to fall asleep. Although it was not a conscious thought, something was wrong — something about the ring bothered her, like a grain of sand in an oyster.

In time, his breathing changed, and hers did. Calm sleep was now a missed breath — a small sound. They might have been two of the birds she so often thought of, flying separately between cliffs — birds whose movement, which might seem erratic, was always private, and so took them where they wanted to go.