For a long while the albums just stayed on the coffee table, buried under magazines or Harriet’s fan mail. Then one day when I was coming up the front walk, I looked down and saw a ginkgo leaf. It was as bright as a jewel. I was amazed, even though the neighbor had had that tree, and the leaves had blown over our property, for years. I put the leaf on the coffee table, and then it occurred to me that I could put it in the brag book — press it between the plastic pages — maybe even add some other leaves.
The next day, I put the leaf underneath the plastic, and then I went out and started to look for other leaves. By the end of the week, the book was filled up. I have no memory of doing anything like that as a child. I did collect stamps for a while, but the leaves were a different thing entirely.
To be truthful, there are a few pages in the book right in the middle that aren’t filled, but it’s getting cold and the leaves are losing their color fast. It may be next year before it’s filled. I worked on the front of the book because I had some sense of how I wanted it to begin, and then I filled the back of the book, because I found the perfect leaf to end with, but I wasn’t sure about the rest. I thought there might be some particularly unusual leaves, if I went far enough afield.
So yesterday I drove out to the woods in Batesville, to look. If I’d been looking for birds, there were certainly enough of them. It was the sort of day — with all that blue sky and with the tree bark almost jumping out at you in the strong light — that makes you think: Why don’t I do this every day? Why isn’t everybody out walking? That’s the mystery to me — not that there are so many duplicitous people and so many schemes and crimes, but that out there, in the real world, people are so rarely where they should be. I don’t usually think about mortality, but the albums were a present commemorating forty years of marriage, which would put anyone in mind of what had happened, as well as what was inevitable. That day in the woods, I thought: Don’t run away from the thought of death. Imagine a day at the end of your life. I wasn’t thinking of people who were hospitalized or who saw disaster coming at them on the highway. I was thinking of a day that was calm, that seemed much like other days, when suddenly things speeded up — or maybe slowed down — and everything seemed to be happening with immediacy. The world is going on, and you know it. You’re not decrepit, you’re not in pain, nothing dramatic is happening. A sparrow flies overhead, breeze rustles leaves. You’re going along and suddenly your feet feel the ground. I don’t mean that your shoes are comfortable. Or even that the ground is solid and that you have a moment when you realize that you are a temporary person, passing. I mean that it seems possible to feel the ground, solid below you, while at the same time the air reminds you that there’s a lightness, and then you soak that in, let it sink down, so that suddenly you know that the next wind might blow you over, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. You might squint in the sunlight, look at a leaf spiraling down, genuinely surprised that you were there to see it. A breeze comes again, rippling the surface of a pond. A bird! A leaf! Clouds elongate and stretch thinly across a silvery sky. Flowers, in the distance. Or, in early evening, a sliver of moon. Then imagine that you aren’t there any longer, but at a place where you can touch those things that were always too dazzlingly high or too far in the distance — light-years would have been required to get to them — and suddenly you can pluck the stars from the sky, gather all fallen leaves at once.
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.