She frowned as he walked away, sorry, suddenly, that she had not been more compassionate. If one of the boys had really tried to run him down, of course she cared.
Andrew had walked off so fast that he had forgotten his cane.
She watched the sun sparkling on the water. It was so beautiful that it calmed her, and then she slowly surveyed the Mediterranean. There were a few windsurfers — all very far out — and she counted two canoes and at least six paddleboats. She stared, wondering which would crisscross first across a stretch of water, and then she turned, having realized that someone was staring at her. It was a young woman, who smiled hesitantly. At another table, her friends were watching her expectantly. With a heavy French accent, but in perfect English, the young woman said, “Excuse me, but if you will be here for just a little while, I wonder if you would do me a favor?”
The woman was squinting in the sun. She was in her late twenties, and she had long, tanned legs. She was wearing white shorts and a green shirt and high heels. The shoes were patterned with grapes and grape leaves. In two seconds, Christine had taken it all in: the elegance, the woman’s nice manner — her hopefulness about something.
“Certainly,” Christine said. And it was not until the woman slipped the ring off her finger and handed it to her that she realized she had agreed to something before she even knew what it was.
The woman wanted her to wear her ring while she and her companions went boating. They would be gone only half an hour, she said. “My fingers have swollen, and in the cold air on the water they will be small again, and I would spend my whole time being nervous that I would lose my favorite thing.” The woman smiled.
It all happened so quickly — and the woman’s friends swept her off so fast — that Christine did not really examine the ring until after the giggling and jostling between the woman and her friends stopped, and they had run off, down the steep steps of the Cobalto to the beach below.
The ring was quite amazing. It sparkled so brightly in the sun that Christine was mesmerized. It was like the beginning of a fairy tale, she thought — and imagine: a woman giving a total stranger her ring. It was silver — silver or platinum — with a large opal embedded in a dome. The opal was surrounded by tiny rubies and slightly larger diamonds. It was an antique — no doubt about that. The woman had sensed that she could trust Christine. What a crazy chance to take, with such an obviously expensive ring. Even though she was right, the woman had taken a huge risk. When Christine looked down at the beach, she saw the two men and the beachboy holding the boat steady, and the woman climbing in. Then the men jumped in, shouting something to each other that made all of them laugh, and in only a minute they were quite far from shore. The woman, sitting in back, had her back to the beach.
As he passed, the waiter caught her eye and asked if she wanted anything else.
“Vino bianco,” she said. She hardly ever drank, but somehow the ring made her nervous — a little nervous and a little happy — and the whole odd encounter seemed to require something new. A drink seemed just the thing.
She watched the boat grow smaller. The voices had already faded away. It was impossible to believe, she thought, as she watched the boat become smaller and smaller on the sparkling water, that in a world as beautiful as this, one country would drop bombs on another to retaliate against terrorism. That fires would begin in nuclear reactors.
Paddleboats zigzagged over water that was now a little choppier than it had been earlier in the afternoon. A baby was throwing rocks into the water. The baby jumped up and down, squealing approval of his every effort. Christine watched two men in straw hats stop to look at the baby and the baby’s mother, close by on the rocks. Around the cliff, going toward the swimming pool chiseled out of a cliff behind the Luna bar and restaurant, the boat that Christine thought held the French people disappeared.
The waiter brought the wine, and she sipped it. Wine and juice were usually cold. Sodas, in cans, were almost always room temperature. The cold wine tasted good. The waiter had brought, as well, half a dozen small crackers on a small silver plate.
She remembered, vaguely, reading a story in college about an American woman in Italy, at the end of the war. The woman was sad and refused to be made happy — or at least that was probably what happened. She could remember a great sense of frustration in the story — a frustration on the character’s part that carried over into frustrating the reader. The title of the story wouldn’t come to her, but Christine remembered two of the things the woman had demanded: silver candlesticks and a cat.
A speedboat passed, bouncing through white foam. Compared with that boat, the paddleboats — more of them, suddenly, now that the heat of the day was subsiding — seemed to float with no more energy than corks.
The wine Christine had just finished was Episcopio, bottled locally. Very little was exported, so it was almost impossible to find Episcopio in the States. That was what people did: went home and looked at photographs, tried to buy the wine they had enjoyed at the restaurant. But usually it could not be found, and eventually they lost the piece of paper on which the name of the wine had been written.
Christine ordered another glass of wine.
The man she had lived with for several years had given up his job on Wall Street to become a photographer. He had wanted to succeed at photography so much that he had convinced her he would. For years she searched magazines for his name — the tiny photo credit she might see just at the fold. There were always one or two credits a year. There were until recently; in the last couple of years there had been none that she knew of. That same man, she remembered, had always surprised her by knowing when Ground Hog Day was and by being sincerely interested in whether the ground hog saw its shadow when it came out. She and the man had vacationed in Greece, and although she did not really believe that he liked retsina any better than she did, it was a part of the Greek meals he prepared for their friends several times a year.
She was worrying that she might be thought of as a predictable type: an American woman, no longer young, looking out to sea, a glass of wine half finished sitting on the table in front of her. Ultimately, she thought, she was nothing like the American woman in the story — but then, the argument could be made that all women had something invested in thinking themselves unique.
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.