JUST THE FACT of getting away from the city. They stay in a summer house. She reads Tove Ditlevsen and thinks of all the similarities. How alike people can be, across all boundaries. He sits uneasily in the shade of the parasol. The fabric lends his face an oddly blue tinge. A newspaper has blown from the table, some hours ago now, and has disintegrated, its pages draping the shrubs, covering up the dry straw. What remains lurches through the garden, like an army in dissolution, soldiers searching for survivors. Are you thinking about your mother, he asks her. They look at each other. She gives a shrug: not really. She’ll be all right, he says, and looks down at his book again, only then to go on, how remarkable she is. You mustn’t think it’s you, you mustn’t think that at all. But I haven’t done anything wrong, she tells herself; you haven’t done anything wrong, he tells her. She nods.
There’s no one here, she whispers. They have come through the back garden, through the gap in the hazelnut, behind the house and the woodshed. Everything has been left so neatly, the dishwasher emptied, the table wiped. They have walked all the way from the summer house to Agri. But no one is here. They find some fizzy drinks in the fridge and sit out on the patio. Only that doesn’t feel right either. They feel like burglars. She hangs the key back where it belongs, on the nail under the eves. He sends messages to Copenhagen, a couple each day. She doesn’t care. It may be a bad sign, and she thinks about that. We’ll give it one last chance, she hears him say, mostly for his own benefit; it’s like he can’t be talked into anything, the sheer impossibility of him. And then coffee, drowsiness, exhaustion, perhaps the heat. They chink glasses in a toast. They drink, and make love, and live their separate lives, together again in the midst of the summer, in this recollected landscape, this recollected summer house. Do you remember this, remember that, the time I nearly broke that window helping your parents pull down the old cladding. Always the disputes of chronology, for which reason it’s easiest to leave it out when reminiscing, together. Where does that thought come from: that they are only together because they can’t stand the thought of having forgotten something. An odd mistrust of memory, an odd displeasure at its existence.
HER MOTHER SQUEEZES her hand. Sometimes it’s hard to understand, she says. She thinks she does, and yet tries to see the incomprehensibility of it. She stays with her parents for a few days, it is the winter holiday, they were supposed to have been together, she and the new man, the dead man’s successor, the nocturnal worker, while everyone else sleeps, a moonlight contract, the body refusing to give up anything at all. But only she is here. She keeps waiting to be, what — unhappy.
However it may look, that kind of sorrow.
The sofa is so deep you either have to sit on the edge and not lean back or else succumb with legs outstretched. She feels the springs through the fabric of the upholstery, hears their metallic complaint as she settles into place.
Her father comes home and nothing about him seems changed. He is the same person, though there is no guessing who. His moods are arbitrary, as if they depend only on themselves, regardless of circumstances. The time his father died, her mother gathered her daughters on the old red sofa, their legs dangling above the floor, it is as if all the furniture has grown smaller since then, the gardens shrunken, unlike nature, oddly enough, whose proportions are unaltered; wild. She told them Daddy very likely feels sad, that’s the way she put it. That they were to show consideration and be nice to him. And yet he came home and there was nothing to be detected, he was no more broken, no more repaired than usual, one minute at ease, the next quivering with tension. That constant unpredictability. I come home, abandoned by a man who passed through my hands and died; I come home, abandoned by the new man, and on neither occasion is he moved by it. In the midst of my doubting I will ever be alive again, or even want to be; I think to myself that in a way it ties us together. Both of us unpredictable. A rhythm that remains the same, regardless. A threat. They have already parted, or else they will never part. Nothing new under the sun.
SHE PRACTICALLY STOPS eating. Hardly anyone is concerned about the fact, and then suddenly they are worried sick. They travel to Italy, she and a girlfriend, and she perspires until thin, up and down the hills of Cinque Terra, in the streets of Levanto, where spring is coy and reluctant. It is the coldest spring in forty years, at least, says the eldest brother in the family-run hotel on the coast of Amalfi. They are the only guests, their guests. They sit in the café on the edge of the cliff, the sea its tall baseboard of blue. He tells her, as best he can in his own peculiar variety of English, that his parents are dead, that now only the three brothers remain. They don’t think they can afford a room, and are allowed to put up their tent on the patio in front of the house. He unlocks the door of an annex, leaving it open so they may creep in to sleep at night. The extravagance of the blue sea, Italian espresso maker in chrome and shining red, men in attendance. The Italian wants her to guess how old he is, but she doesn’t want to, she knows he is over fifty. He pulls a chair out at her table and sits down. She has no newspaper from which to glance up, nothing to put aside, and instead must rearrange her napkin. His lips begin to speak before he utters a sound, he wants to take her sailing with him, he says. Tonight. Fishing, he corrects himself. She dares not, declines, and feels she has never regretted anything as much ever before; the night that could have been.
A SINGLE ROOM. A bed beneath a window, a desk, their suitcases gaping. Her dress on the chair; and he on the bed, in the shade. The doorway teetering, a slab of hot light. A little window facing the sea. The Amalfi Coast. The sun is high, the rented room dark and cool. From outside they look like lovers.
She goes out onto the terrace and leans over the railing, is giddied by heat and altitude, the sea crashing against the rocks below, atomizing into spray, vomiting its white insides. He comes out and stands beside her, a bottle of wine in his hand. He drinks from it without any semblance of elegance, the slosh of its contents as he tips back his head to swallow. He goes back in and lies down again; he is tired, but cannot sleep. How can anyone sleep in this heat, he asks.
How can anyone do otherwise.
The roads here are gouged from the cliffs, half the time they lead through tunnels in the rock. The sudden astonishment of a view, a division of travel into dark and light, twisting the twine of day into rope of two continually interchanging complexions. He couldn’t be bothered to leave, and she wants to stay here forever. But the next day they pack their suitcases and head on as planned. There are no birds here, he says. Yes, there are, she says. They are sitting in a bus on the way to the train station. No one knows how long they must wait there.
IN NABOKOV’S LOLITA there’s a scene toward the end where the brutality of desire is revealed in a glimpse. It’s when the reader and the main character see Lolita, there in the bathroom, her distress. At once, a darkness is cast upon all that came before. You realize you’ve been seduced. You see yourself in that mirror, humbled, because you couldn’t see any better. Again, you have involved yourself in something you didn’t believe existed.