The Singer's Gun Read Free Page A

thinking of how beautiful the sea was and how much crassness and vulgarity lay between him and it. She had nothing to say at the ferry terminal either. She ducked away from his kiss and got on the ferry without speaking to him while he hung back uncertainly on the shore.
    The way she departed: standing on the ferry moving away from him over the water toward the city of Naples, looking at him where he stood. She was half-smiling in a way that he felt was meant to convey something—sorrow, hope, reproach?—but he couldn’t bear it and so he turned away almost immediately, while her features and her half-smile were still clearly visible and the boat still loud in the water, and he realized later that this had been the moment when the cord had finally snapped between them.
    He found himself repeating the motion at intervals in the weeks that followed, trying to recapture the clarity of that moment at the ferry terminal. Standing on the road near Sant’Angelo and looking out at the sea, for example, he would turn very slowly and deliberately away from the sunset, and he was invariably disappointed by the lack of finality in the movement.
    For the first two weeks on Ischia he did very little. Once he had explained to the hotel owner that he planned on staying a few weeks or possibly longer and worked out an arrangement for the off-season—“You will help me watch the place, yes?” the hotel owner said—the question of what to do next hung overhead like a cartoon thundercloud. He was waiting for an event, and thoughts of it crowded out everything else. He had ideas about his travel book but was too distracted to write anything. The room was so small that he felt claustrophobic unless the doors to the balcony were open, but then the sea was too blue, the air was too bright, and before long he found himself down in one of the cafés on the piazza with a glass of coffee and the International Herald Tribune , reading and absorbing sunlight and doing the crossword puzzle and watching the boats. Anton had no books with him that he hadn’t already read, which was a problem, and there was an enormous amount of time to kill. He was startled by how much he missed his cat. He’d rescued Jim as a kitten two years earlier, and the cat had been an adoring orange one-eyed presence in Anton’s life ever since. He went for long walks up the stairs of the town, past houses and gardens terraced up the side of the hill, and spent hours sitting by the harbor at night. On clear nights Capri was a distant scattering of lights. He could see it from his room but preferred to be down by the harbor, where you could walk to a certain point at the edge of the piazza, turn away from Capri, and imagine that nothing stood between you and the north coast of Africa. He harbored vague notions of escaping to Tunisia.
    “Are you having a nervous breakdown?” Gary asked, over a phone line crackly with enormous distance.
    “No,” Anton said. He was leaning against a wall beside the pay phone in the Sant’Angelo piazza, looking out at the boats moving silently up and down in the harbor waves. Imagining the phone lines running under the Tyrrhenian Sea. The piazza was deserted. There were people inside a nearby café that was frequented mostly by fishermen, but the restaurants and shops were shuttered and dark. The wind off the water was cold.
    “You’d tell me, right? Your best man and everything.”
    “Of course,” Anton said. “The question’s not unreasonable.”
    “What did you tell the office?”
    “What did I tell the . . .? Oh,” he said. “The office. They’ve probably figured it out by now.”
    “You didn’t tell them you were abandoning your job?”
    “Well, the job abandoned me first. And I didn’t know before I left that I wasn’t coming back again.”
    “So you’re not coming back.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You can see how a concerned friend might conclude there was something amiss,” said Gary. “Even if he hadn’t been