What Was Mine: & Other Stories Read Free

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