Edge of an Island

The weather was changing–Edwin could feel it in his bones. Getting chilly with the rising wind, and his arthritic knee was already aching–meaning weather to come. He tucked the afghan around his legs and under the seat of the wheelchair. Out on the sea, one moment sunlight was whitening the wave tops and the next veiling clouds turned the water to shades of silver to gray and back. Hard to tell how long the wet weather would last, though the thick grayness out on the sea suggested longer than not.

Should he stay by the promontory or retreat? The thought of being soaked before he could get back to the villa was an irritant to an otherwise fine afternoon, particularly because he knew the rest of the week held no time to repeat it. This was his time in retirement, time to claim he’d completed the course, his time to slow down.

The dream had startled him awake with its vividness, sending him tumbling back years to a previous day when he had made the trip from villa striding to this overlook on his own good legs. Legs that had betrayed him–or he they. The car accident was his, he needed to accept it.

Now he was living his own mundane version of a Henry James novel.

The dream centered on a fading memory of an affair from years past–so long in his past that, viewed from present circumstance, he could well have been living a different life, heading in a far different direction than where he’ been brought.

The old world villa had been discovered on a day trip to Capri–with a woman who showed him his life. Thirty years ago, thirty-five, was it that long ago? Turning forty himself and finding her in the same breath was like a whirlwind storm and bright sunshine in a single package–the storm of being gone from his thirties, abysmally lost to himself then discovering a way forward in the light of her eyes. Offering him salvation, perhaps, probably without intending to.

She wasn’t an indifferent soul; she was just too passionate, flying at altitude she forgot lesser mortals needed oxygen.

In a Positano bakery. On the Amalfi Coast. Being served bitter coffee and an apricot croissant, it started simply enough. He had watched her enter, looking somewhat tousled, her eyes betraying a lack of sleep and a wide yawn her hand covered indifferently. For all of that, she was fetching. As her gaze scanned the small room, she paused to take him in along with the rest of the scene.
She surprised him on approach. “Is this seat available?” with a clipped, English accent and a brilliant smile.

And if it had been taken, he’d have said yes, anyway. He cleared away the newspaper with alacrity.

“Edwin,” half rising and holding out his hand.

“Violet,” she shook it with extended fingers, juggling cup, carafe and plate with the other hand.

“You’re up cheerfully early. Leastways early for me.”

By their first several hours with refills, not moving off, and the waiter giving them the bald eye more than once, she laughed and said they’d better leave before they were tossed out.

“He’s just jealous.”

“Jealous?”
“Of me!” in a burst of candor.

With a hand, Violet flipped hair from her face and grinned. “Sure of that, are you? Saucy to say, Edwin.”

They strolled the narrow village street that made another serpentine bend every block or so, at points emerging directly alongside a guardrail and a near vertical drop to rocks and green water. No walkway against the waterside, so they joined the other pedestrians walking in the street. The traffic was desultory; no one was rushing to be anywhere, not what it would become in forty years.

“Lord, look at this view! How do people get any work done?” with a sweep of her arm and a small skip in stride.

Wandering, she led him into card and trinket shops along the way, pausing to hand items, turning tea cups over to read their bottoms, then entering the clothes shop, lifting sweaters to appraise them, judging the effect. “Do you like this one?”

He wasn’t fully registering the garment more her green eyes. The sweater she selected was white, open-knit cotton which she promptly draped across her shoulders, “For the sun,” paying for it in lire.

“It goes nicely with my shorts, don’t you think?”

To his mind, the brief rose-colored shorts went nicely with her slender, very white legs. This was unique in his life, this instant acceptance, this friendship offered by an intriguing woman.

She wasn’t so much a traditional beauty as she was fully present in the way she lived in the world. Slight frame, with a runner’s body–college cross country, she explained with a wave. And her hair–not unruly yet never perfectly coiffed with gold highlights from her time in the sun. Women he’d known would fret over unruly hair where she paid it little mind. Her freckles, he remembered. The freckles ran across her shoulders like tracks he learned to kiss, then breathe ever so lightly on her nape–just behind her ear.

“I’ve never been to the isle of Capri. Have you?”

“Passed it on the ferry coming from Naples,” he replied, “that’s all.”

“They’re queuing up now, looks like. Over there,” gesturing. “Shall we?”

And like that they’d joined the line to board the ferry now approaching the quay. A boatman was already standing at the bow, waiting to toss off the first line. He seemed not to concern himself with how the boat rocked in the waves. It was cool in the morning with a golden sun barely warming the air.

“Good thing I bought this,” tugging the sweater from her shoulders to throw it over her head, as the waves slapped the bow heading off into the blue Mediterranean. Had the Greeks sailed this far west? No doubt. They’d sailed the entire Italian peninsula.
The swell of the sea cut at an angle to the ferry’s course, leaning the boat one way then back, bringing her against him until he caught her waist, holding them both against the rail.

Grinning like the devil, she touched his cheek. “You should let your beard grow.”

What had he intended to get done today? Not so important.

The boat gently nudged the quay at the foot of the mountainous cliffs and they had arrived.

The funicular appeared to climb straight up the cliff face. They squeezed into the last car, the last two to make the run to the top. As the train patiently climbed, they passed houses perched on impossibly small ledges, each with its miniature flower garden glorying in the morning sun. Standing that close, he breathed in her perfume just faintly noticed. Everything about her was like that, casual and intentional, easy contradictions. Were the English all this unaffected?

Reaching the small plaza, they disembarked, pausing to take in the setting. Piazza Umberto–village shops running off on twisting lanes never visible for more than several buildings, shop owners sweeping the stoops, workmen leading donkey carts, an old man sitting on a stone wall smoking his pipe like time meant nothing more. Always the clean, crisp air, over their shoulders the sea, and in the distance Mount Vesuvius in the clouds.

Edwin remembered making a glorious time of it with Violet in Capri–in those days before so many boatloads of tourists like locusts swarmed over the fairytale rock.

That first visit with Violet, he missed much of the island’s details, being thoroughly distracted by her unconscious poses on the ferry crossing over, then as she wandered the island, leading him then returning to stand just before him with that broad smile. She wasn’t a flamboyant personality, more relaxed, graced with privilege though not flaunting it, modest yet driving him to distraction with her light airs–and her laugh that said the world was worth living in again.

The dancing air was what he remembered. Alive with the flavors of the blue sea about the isle. This place had been populated since before Rome, and it was easy to understand why. His first trip, he hadn’t expected to be quite as taken by southern Italy, and he hadn’t expected to be enraptured by her warm presence beside him, either.

Edwin was happy–happiest he’d been in a long time–happy to breathe this air and to be sharing his elation with Violet. Was it possible to fall in love with someone he barely knew? The need for it, his longing, had been with him since his marriage had dissolved the previous year, but the fact of it? Was this rational behavior? And if it wasn’t, what did that say about her? He knew by instinct she wasn’t an irrational woman. Or he hoped she wasn’t. For a lifetime he’d been skeptical of seeking perfection–in people, in a life–yet what was this?

Wandering the Via Krupp paralleling the shore below, they passed other couples, some with children and some past that age. Via Krupp–surprising to find a route named for the Kaiser’s favorite arms industrialist on an island so removed from that place and time. Always with the blue sea beyond as a reference.

“Do you have children, Edwin?”

“Two. Two boys.”

So they sat on the low retaining wall while the world passed, and he talked of the fiasco of a long marriage to a woman he’d known since college. And no doubt, the way he told the story, Edwin’s wife–his ex-wife–played the villain. He didn’t mean to make it sound like that, but when Violet said, “It must be hard, not being with them,” her quick, gentle sympathy touched him. It was indeed hard. Hard bearing the separation and hard wanting to share it more deeply than the light hand she laid on his arm.

“It must be still ahead of us. The map shows the street peters out near there.”

He remembered her voice–light, almost hoarse.
Villa San Michele. What had made them stop there? They’d had the entire island and only the day to see it, though this was where they’d hiked to. He still wondered why.

They nearly walked right by it trying to reach the water, or a view of it at the least. Still a private residence in those days, the gate was ajar, so they sidled in, slipping past the villa, down the long, wisteria-draped arbor to this outpost overlooking the Mediterranean. With statues mounting the low wall, it was a spectacular view, a hundred feet or more above the clear blue green water, waves splashing the rocky shore below, like a movie shoot in Malibu.

“Oh, Eddie, what a dream!”

Not trusting himself, Edwin’s only comeback was to wrap his arms around her–until the gardener rushed down the arbor screaming excitedly in Italian accompanied by a few universal gestures.

His first visit to Capri, he and Violet came on the ferry and returned on the last boat to Positano as the sun fell into the water in the boat’s wake.
Did he beg to sleep with her that night in Positano? Possibly–most likely–why else? Neapolitan pizza and beer for dinner, then watching the lights turn on around the harbor wrapped in each other’s arms. That first night they had spent naked and talking freely, making love, then telling stories. She told him of a neighbor she’d had sex with–secondary school age–how they’d done the deed after school when no one else was home and how they’d tried out positions Edwin wasn’t sure he completely understood, she not-coyly declaring she liked sex in all its forms. He told her he’d been a virgin until college, wanting her to believe he was what, innocent? Not so innocent with children, but still innocent of heart–it was important she knew that.
She was a few years out of college and he was the caricatured older, divorced man. Not a healthy, risk-free match, though he scarcely slowed down to consider it. He lost himself to touching her–watching her listening to music eyes closed and touching her often as she encouraged him. She liked her small breasts stroked, even more her nipples pulled bringing her close to orgasm, and she shivered when he breathed lightly on her neck, like it was some kind of heady aphrodisiac. She sought to ride him as often as be beneath him, her legs wrapping his waist.

Wasn’t there a way to keep this going, to keep her from not leaving him? He’d not felt this way in such a long time–maybe never. My god, he was a cad! OK, but even cads deserved happiness, didn’t they?

Subsequently, each year’s summer trip he made to Capri revealed more clues to the Villa San Michele’s more glamorous past when famous people came, writers and artists, the intelligentsia–before World War II laid Europe low. The villa had been the ambition of a wealthy Swedish physician. Edwin lived comfortably enough, but wealth at this scale was beyond his reach. It was an extravagance just to stay the summer. Why he kept returning to the scene, he couldn’t explain even to himself. And he’d given up thinking the poems he’d written in the aftermath were much good, mostly just misery bleeding out across the pages.

The wind was picking up, and the storm from the south had spread across the sky, hiding the sun. If he timed it, he could still make it back to the villa before the rain. Yet he remained.

Memories weren’t always kind. They didn’t seem gifts given to a long life, only reminders of the vacant days he now spent by himself. His senior years seemed no more graceful than his younger ones. Where had they gone? Wasn’t old age supposed to bring philosophical reflections on a life? Is so, why was he still restless? Restlessness was for the youthful and he was no longer that, whether or not he accepted it. Angst-ridden hours whiled away playing cards, what were they in the face of an hourglass running out?

Violet had told him most assuredly she wanted children, three or four, and the way she said it suggested a time far in the distance–a time not with him. Young as she was, children would be part of the deal, and even that late a date in his own life, he was agreeable to give them to her. Raise them like his own–they would be his. It would be like starting over, something he wanted as badly, so it would bind them in a common cause, so he hoped. Though when he talked about his own sons, she grew quiet, even pensive. It held her back–that his sons weren’t hers and that mattered. So he stopped talking about them.

He could fuck her, yet she stayed beyond his grasp.
That second night spent in the hot tub playing a game of ‘where fingers wandered,’ his then hers–Jesus, but he could remember that night! He still had sexual energy to spare–in those days he still believed he had a future. In the small walkup overlooking the tiny harbor in Positano, they’d made love like no tomorrow–and there weren’t so many of those left. After a meal of fettuccine al fresco and local wine when they’d both laughed until they cried. Or whatever other clichés came to mind. Not that he had minded clichés; he’d been too busy being one.

Could the older Edwin ever have counseled the younger Eddie to slow down, not be so impetuous? Show her his restraint, master his passions? At the time, no one else could persuade him. Back when he was too busy jumping off his cliff, scene at a time, it was hard to watch the replay.

Edwin knew himself well enough to recognize he wasn’t the best candidate for leaping from a plane, or climbing a vertical rock face on a whim. He wanted to believe he was as impetuous as the movie actors he watched on reruns, though more likely he was a homebody who had happened to fall in love with Violet who was all of those things, and briefly he’d lived that life with hers.

The end came abruptly, like a traffic accident he’d never seen crossing his line of sight. One week in Paris when she said she was suffering a yeast infection, the next in Zurich sleeping chastely apart like a long-married couple–strangers again–then silence. She’d turned him off like an old clock radio. Calling, his messages got no answers, letters, then even torrid emails, some pathetic poetry. Just like that. She’d as well have used a garotte on him–he wished she had. Chop, chop and he was sushi-grade done for the carving. Billy Joel’s Stiletto described what he wasn’t willing to put to it. Billy Joel’s femme fatale–was that who Violet had been? It stayed with him, this question, the one he refused to answer in the negative. Edwin struggled afterward to get on with his life, stumbling back into a mundane life of normality–sanity beyond his grasp.

The gusts were gaining strength, driving the first drops of rain, disrupting his reveries.

Capri had been an outpost since Roman times. Augustus Caesar, the Roman dude left his ruined villa for two thousand or more years for tourists to ogle. What was it about this place that had drawn him? View? You could see the Mediterranean from a thousand quaint places along the Italian coast, so why chose this one? Undoubtably the same reason so many tourists made the trip from Positano. The same reason an old man kept returning, summer after summer to bleed anew.

Whipped by the winds, the waves were slamming against the rocky shore, and the rain was racing across the sea, already halfway to shore in a misty veil. It would be on him momentarily. Edwin swore, spun the wheelchair around and yanked at the wheel rims hard as he could. He’d be soaked by the time he reached the villa, though did he care? The mundane had never drawn him.