They sat outside on a terrace at a café table covered by white linen drinking Valpolicella as a sunny day waned. A light breeze meandered southwest along the river valley, giving their shade, provided by a trio of linden trees, a nervous quality.
They had walked much of the day without once holding hands. They had stopped to rest. A restorative, they called it. They had done too few touristy things after believing too many touristy things and now their tour neared its end and they had barely seen even each other. None of it had worked.
She stared at her wine thinking how like blood it looked. “We forgot why we’re here.”
He sipped, leaned back, and squinted at her. “We’re here to forget.”
“We should never have come.”
The breeze rippled the edge of the table cloth against her shins.
He cleared his throat. “There’s only a day left.”
“I know.”
They watched people walk along the river wall. They watched shadows lengthen. They watched the flowing water and boats and the way the light glinted from red tiled roofs and windows across the river. Sometimes they looked at the linden leaves at their feet as the wind stirred them.
Chesney spun a table knife on her plate. It reminded her of a clock with only one hand left, spinning out of control, eating time at top speed.
He finished his wine and raised his hand for the waiter to refill his glass. When the waiter, a young, bored man in a grimy white jacket that did not reach his waist, came and poured, Lawrence, not yet Larry, tapped the table. “Leave the bottle.”
“That is not possible, sir.”
“Ah. So many things.”
“Yes, sir.”
Chesney watched the waiter’s feet as he withdrew into the café. “We should leave.”
“Mm.”
“We should leave Italy and go back to Germany and leave everything and just go back to the states and forget it.”
“We came here to forget.”
She looked at the river.
He watched a group of tourists buying cotton candy from a vendor near the river wall.
“We should just go back home.”
“Start over, you mean. So where’s home?”
She shivered as the breeze touched her hair in a way he had once touched her hair. “Can’t start over. There would just be doing something new. Doing it again starting fresh.”
“Do it right.”
She shook her head, feeling blamed and wondering if right applied to a process gone so wrong.
He finished his wine in a gulp. He stood and got out his wallet. He dropped a few lira on the table. The breeze stirred the money along with the leaves on the ground.
Chesney stood and smoothed her skirt.
Lawrence moved his empty glass so it sat atop the money.
“Did you tip?”
“Always.”
She nodded, glancing at a boat on the river, thinking about the word tip. She wondered if capsizing a boat in that river at this place would rouse emergency help. Maybe only tourists would notice, snapping their pictures. To vanish in a river in the middle of a busy little town seemed right to her.
“Coming?”
She followed him across the courtyard, leaves underfoot. They walked down terrace steps so they could continue along the river walk, past the lovers sitting on the river wall, past the cotton candy vendor whose cart smelled of spun sugar and childhood. Children scampered past like ducks. A barge sounded a horn as it approached a bend in the river.
Somehow it grew dark without her noticing the change and the breeze cooled.
“Do you have your sweater?”
She looked at the gooseflesh on her bare arms. The linen dress, so like the linen tablecloth at the café, felt like a shroud now, useless against the cold as she sank deeper into dark currents. “I think I left it on the chair at that place.”
“Damn it.”
Her mother had given her that sweater. No, her father. Or had it been her sister? Was there a way to remember? It did not matter now. “Someone will find it.”
“We can go back for it.”
“No.” She kicked at leaves and kept strolling, ignoring the chill on her skin. “Let it go. It doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe the waiter will put it aside for us.”
They both knew they would never return.
The river held light longer than its banks. It felt to Chesney that the hills to either side pressed inward toward the center. Inevitably crushed, she thought, liking the phrase.
He took her hand.
She snatched it back as if burned.
“What?” He looked at her as if he had hurt her.
“You startled me.”
“I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “It’s okay.” She knew they should not have come, should not have tried to forget. She knew she could never forget but already half wondered what had sent them on such a brief tour. He was stationed in Germany and they would stay there until the military considerations said otherwise.
She hated moving all the time yet felt she was standing still as night finally filled the river valley and lights flickered on like the embers of fallen stars.
They got back to the hotel and laid down without saying another word or touching. Somewhere in the middle distance a group of people talked and laughed and Chesney rolled over and faced the wall.
They cut their long weekend short and took trains back to Germany and Lawrence’s job and their empty rented house. Three months she had carried, only to drop it.
She figured something out. Forgetting was not the same as distracting one’s self from remembering.
“We can try again.”
That was the last gentle stupidity he had uttered to her, she thought. That was his whole stance. March up field and score and if the kicker misses, do it all again and hope for better results.
Seemed crazy to her.
Virginia Woolf put rocks in her pockets and walked into a river to rid herself of remembering. Chesney knew it had not been a crazy act. She understood the difference between rocks in your pockets and rocks in your head.
Didn’t she?
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