Read Those Who Walk Away for Free Online Page B

Ray. We’re having dinner tonight at the Excelsior on the Lido. Would you like to join us?”
    “I’d be glad to come over, if I can see you alone for a while after dinner,” he said, as politely as ever.
    “Sure we can,” Coleman said affably. “Okay then, eight-thirty or nine at the Excelsior?”
    “I’ll join you after dinner, thanks very much. Good-bye,” And he hung up.

5
    R ay thought that eleven would be early enough to arrive at the Excelsior. At ten, he had a toasted cheese sandwich with a glass of wine, standing at a counter, then walked to the pier on the Riva degli Schiavoni from which the boats to the Lido departed. There was a quarter of an hour wait. Grey-blue clouds passed slowly over the stars, and Ray thought it might rain. A middle-aged couple also waiting for the boat were having a depressing quarrel about rent money which the husband had lent or given to the wife’s brother. The wife was saying that her brother was worthless. The husband shrugged miserably, looked into space, and answered his wife in the terse language of ancient matrimonial warfare:
    “He paid it back before.”
    “Half of it. Don’t you remember?” she asked.
    “It’s done now.”
    “It’s gone now. We’ll never see it again.”
    The husband lifted a string-tied cardboard box and shuffled to the gate as the boat pulled in, as if he would love to creep away from his wife, on to the boat, anywhere, but the wife was right behind him.
    He and Peggy had never quarrelled, Ray thought. Perhaps that had been part of what was wrong. Ray considered himself—because he had been told it often enough by other people—easy-going, which was on the helpful side in a marriage, he supposed. On the other hand, Peggy had never been demanding, had never held out for anything he thought unreasonable, so there had simply been no occasion for quarrelling. He hadn’t particularly wanted to spend a whole year in Mallorca, but Peggy had ( some place very primitive and simple, simpler even than southern Italy ), so Ray had decided to look on it as a long honeymoon, and had decided he could spend the time well by painting and reading, especially reading art history books, so he had agreed. And the first four months, she had been amused and happy. Ray could even say the first eight months. The novelty of the rather barefoot life had worn off by then, but by then she had been painting, fewer hours a day but more constructively, he had thought. His thoughts trailed off, and he was as lost as ever for a reason for her dying. Coleman now had her paintings, had corralled every one, and also all her drawings, and had shipped them to Rome, not asking Ray if he might like one. Ray reproached himself for having let it happen. For this, Ray felt extremely bitter against Coleman, so bitter he tried to forget it whenever he recalled it.
    He looked now at the Lido lights, a long low streak ahead. He thought of Mann’s Death in Venice , of the hot, festering sun beating on that strip of land. Passion and disease. Well, this was not at all the weather, there was no disease, and the passion was only in Coleman.
    Ray followed the now silent couple on to what seemed a colder dock at Piazza Santa Maria Elisabetta, set his teeth against the wind, and went to ask the man in the ticket-booth in which direction the Excelsior lay. It was a ten-minute walk across the island on the wide Viale Santa Maria Elisabetta, then a right turn at the Lungomare Marconi. The dark, glass-fronted houses to right and left, built for summer residence, looked desolate. A few bar-caffés were open. The Excelsior was a large, lighted place, and one could tell at a glance that it would be well heated. Ray turned the collar of his trench-coat down, smoothed his hair, and went into the dining-room.
    “Thank you, I’m looking for some people,” he said to the head waiter who had come up to him. There were not many people in the dining-room, and Ray saw Coleman’s table almost at once.