What Was Mine: & Other Stories (4 page)

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.

E
lizabeth’s next-door neighbors were having a barbecue. Though Elizabeth and Henry had lived in the house since his retirement three years before, they had only once eaten dinner next door, and the neighbors had only once visited them. After Henry’s car accident, the Newcombs had called several times, but when Henry returned from the hospital, they again only silently nodded or waved across the wide expanse of lawn when they caught sight of one another through the scrub pines that separated their property. Mrs. Newcomb was said to be an alcoholic. The boys, though, were beautiful and cheerful. When they were not joking with each other, their expressions became dreamy. The way they wore their hair, and their direct gaze, reminded Elizabeth of Clark Gable. She often saw the boys in Bethel. They were inseparable.

Though Elizabeth was repotting geraniums, her mind was partly on the boys next door, partly on her daughter, Louisa, who lived in Atlanta and who had had a baby the week before, and partly on Z, who had phoned that morning to say that he would stop by for a visit on the weekend. Her thoughts seemed to jump between those people in time with the slap of the softball into the catcher’s mitt next door. As they tended the barbecue grill, the brothers were tossing a ball back and forth. The air smelled of charred meat.

The day before, backing out of a parking space next to the market, Elizabeth had hit a trash can and dented the side of Henry’s car. Louisa had not wanted her to come to Atlanta to help out. Z’s fiancée drank a bit too much.

Elizabeth forced herself to smile so she would cheer up. Wind chimes tinkled and a squirrel ran across a branch, and then Elizabeth’s smile became genuine. It had been a month since Z’s last visit, and she knew he would be enthusiastic about how verdant everything had become.

Verdant?
If a dinosaur had a vocabulary, it might come up with the word “verdant.” She was almost forty-five. Z was twenty-three. After Z’s last visit, Henry had accused her of wanting to be that age. She had gotten a speeding ticket, driving Z’s convertible.

Henry suspected the extent of her feelings for Z, of course. The attachment was strong—although she and Z never talked about it, privately. She often thought of going to see the remake of
Reckless
with Z at a matinee in New Haven. They had shared a tub of popcorn and licked butter off each other’s fingers. Another time, they brown-bagged a half-pint of Courvoisier and slugged it down while, on the screen, Paul Newman drove more crazily than Elizabeth would ever dare to drive.

A few days ago, returning from the train station, Elizabeth had come to an intersection in Weston, and as she came to a stop, Paul Newman pulled up. He went first. Rights of the famous, and of the one who has the newer car. Although convertibles, in this part of the world, were always an exception and went first.

Next door, the boys had stopped playing ball. One probed the meat, and the other changed the station on the radio. Elizabeth had to strain to hear, but it was what she had initially thought: Janis Joplin, singing “Cry, Baby.”

The best songs might be the ones that no one could dance to.

On Saturday, sitting in a lawn chair, Elizabeth started to assign roles to her friends and family. Henry would be emperor … The lawn sprinkler revolved with the quick regularity of a madman pivoting, spraying shots from a machine gun.

Henry would be Neptune, king of the sea.

A squirrel ran, stopped, dug for something. It seemed not to be real, but the creation of some animator. The wind chimes tinkled. The squirrel ran up the tree, as if a bell had summoned it.

Ellen, Z’s fiancée, was inside, on the telephone, getting advice about how to handle Monday’s follow-up interview. She was leaning against the corner of the bookcase, drinking bourbon and water. Z detoured from the kitchen to the dining room to nuzzle her neck. He had come in to help Elizabeth, when she left the yard to get trays. One tray was oval, painted to look like a cantaloupe. The other was in the shape of a bull. She had bought them years ago in Mexico. Deviled eggs were spread out on the bull. The cantaloupe held a bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic. A lime was in Z’s breast pocket. A knife was nestled among the eggs.