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Adam Berendt in her family or among her acquaintances. Saying, goading, in his expansive, kindly voice, “Marina, what are these hills exactly? That you haven’t climbed?”
    It was the pure Socratic method. The impersonal quest for Truth.
    Marina felt the unease, and the excitement, of the hunt. Not she was the hunted, but the elusive Truth. For there was nothing personal here.
    Was there?
    Adam, you. You are the hills! Loving you .
    Loving a man. Fully, sexually .
    Instead, Marina said, in a lowered voice as if ashamed, stumbling on the path and blinking away tears, “I—I’d wanted to be an artist. As long ago as I could remember. There was no one else in my family who had such notions. We were a practical family. My father was a high school teacher, it was a job. My mother, before she got married, a nurse. They worked, they earned salaries. Me, I had ‘visions.’ I was an excitable, nervous girl. In college, at the University of Maine, I understood that, to be an artist, you must filter your vision through technique. I became interested in sculpting and pottery. But not conventional pottery—experimental, odd work. Pottery that doesn’t sell! It was calming, I seemed to fly out of myself in a kind of trance. After graduation, this was in the eighties, I lived with some friends in Provincetown, very cheaply, and I was happy there, a local gallery sold some of my things, then I got restless and moved to San Francisco, and for a while I was living in a wonderful ramshackle old ranch house in Mendocino, you’d have loved that place, Adam!—instead of the river outside your house, you’d see mountains. A mountain is a kind of vertical river, isn’t it? And the light cascading down. I was happy there, and doing some decent work; for a long time I’d been out of contact with my family, they hated my life, they didn’t want to understand it, then my father got sick and I came back east, and something happened there, between me and what I was doing, between my hands and what they touched, and that’s fatal for an artist, isn’t it? It was as if I’d lost my nerve.
    A young artist has courage, maybe the courage of ignorance. Then you lose that courage. I didn’t know it at first. I kept going for a while, Middle Age: A Romance
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    mechanically. I loved my work but it became too important to me. It was my life, my breath. It was obsessive. I did sculpting, I suppose you could call it, on a smaller scale than your work, and in natural forms, not metal, but it exhausted me, I couldn’t sleep, my head was filled with ‘visions.’ I wanted to create astonishing things that hadn’t been imagined before. I wanted so badly—” Marina felt the old, sick excitement; she’d been speaking rapidly, heedlessly. Why am I doing this. Exposing myself. As if it could make this man love me!
    They’d ascended the hill, and were in an open, grassy area; wild rose was blooming in white clusters; to the east, miles away, the Hudson River was of the hue of weathered stone, flattened by distance, without motion as a design in wallpaper. Adam, who’d climbed the hill without betraying exertion, he whose legs were hard-knotted with muscle, twice the size of Marina’s slender legs, waited a respectful moment before asking, “How long was this phase of your life?” “About a year. A year and a half. I ran away to live again in New York, with a friend. He was an artist, too. And he had a commercial job in graphic design. I believed I loved him, it was part of my desperation.” Adam asked, “And then what happened, Marina?” Marina said, “I don’t know. I’ve tried not to think about it. I don’t
    ‘dwell’ upon the past. I had a collapse, I guess. I suppose I was sick, physically. I seemed always to have a fever. I was terrified to sleep, I was anxious and angry all the time. Everything I touched, I seemed to destroy. My hands had turned against me. My lover couldn’t live with me, he said. I drove him away, and