smile. Andrew just shook his head in disbelief and accepted the first of what were to be many glasses of wine. They clinked glasses.
“L'chaim!” Phyllis said.
“What's that mean?”
“To life, you idiot; yours has just begun again.”
But why did it feel like it had just ended?
Andrew climbed high up the west slope of the Valency valley. A side stream cut across the footpath he'd been following as it raced downhill. He picked his way across stepping-stones and then stopped to take in the view. Over the eons, the almost infinitesimal friction of water slipping over stone had cut a winding channel deep into the surrounding plateau. At the outer edge of the sharpest curves, he could see where seasonal floods had chewed away at the friable slate bedrock, creating bluffs. Away to the east, the hills were patterned with neat, green fields. Here and there a cluster of stone farm buildings laid claim to the land. A distant single-lane macadam road with occasional wider passing places—looking a bit like an anaconda that had swallowed several pigs—wound down the opposite side of the valley, plunged right through the shallow river at the bottom, and slithered up the other side. And for as far as he could see, the fields were defined by ancient stone walls, some ramrod straight, others sinuous. It was as if the landscape had been stitched, the walls the warp and weft knitting the disparate parts into a coherent whole. There wasn't a single square foot of the world before him, he realized, that hadn't been shaped by the hand of man. But here, unlike so much of the landscape back home, that hand had brought beauty, not blight, to the land.
He was thinking that Phyllis would like this world, with its sensuous hills and valleys. When he'd let himself out of her apartment late that evening, months ago, she was fast asleep on the couch. There had been kissing. There had been caressing. There had been sweet words of caring and solace. But while Andrew had a prodigious ability to absorb alcohol without getting drunk, Phyllis did not; she'd passed out. He'd put a pillow under her head, covered her with a cashmere throw, and gone home. He had been sober enough to know he had no business having sex with anyone that day—maybe ever—especially a colleague from the university. He felt radioactive. He felt that in the dark, he would blink on and off—LOUSY HUSBAND—like a neon sign in the window of some disreputable corner bar.
Andrew had had no idea, not the faintest inkling, how to respond to Katerina's attack the day she left. He should have said something, he thought—and yet it was clear she really wasn't interested in a response. It was as if she was that famous plane in World War II, the Enola Gay: Drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and fly home. Don't look back at the destruction.
Even if she had stayed, though, he had to admit he wouldn't have known what to say. In his stiff-upper-lip New England Presbyterian family, feelings were neither expressed nor discussed—not in his presence, anyway. He couldn't remember a single display of emotion—either affection or anger—between his parents. He'd read enough as an adult to know that feeling pain was natural and that expressing emotion was only human, and yet he'd had no practice in either.
If he hurt himself as a child, his father would check him for damage, brush him off, pat his shoulder, and shoo him away with a hearty “You're fine, lad; off you go.” His mother's perennial response to any of his personal tragedies was “Don't worry; it'll be better before you're married” or, if her Irish Catholic roots were in the ascendant that day and overcame her Presbyterian reserve, “Offer it up, son”—as in, offer up the pain to God and get on with it.
So that's what he did after Kat left: He offered it up and got on with things.
Except that things didn't go well. It wasn't just that he felt shell-shocked by the breakup; that would have been handicap enough. But his work seemed to have hit a brick wall as well. He had been researching what he believed would be an important contribution to his field: a book he was calling “The Anatomy of Livable Places.” One summer when he was in grad school, he'd hitchhiked across Europe and been captivated by the way hill towns in Italy or Spain, or fishing communities in Greece, or villages in