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suicide?”
    â€œBecause no one has ever bought me roses.”
    â€œI wish you would forget about roses. You are an angry man, I think. What has made you so angry?”
    â€œI used to take myself to a barber and get a shave,” said Andrew. “I loved the feel of warm shaving cream, the stropping of the blade on leather, the clean, efficient rasps of the razor as the barber stretched my skin, the touch of efficient but caring fingers. Unfortunately, barbers no longer shave people. Matters of insurance. Maybe that’s why I’m suicidal.” He yawned.
    â€œI’m not ready to sleep,” said Karina. “Come, let’s go to town.”
    In the dark, they picked up their towels, rinsed the sand off their feet, and made their way to the green frog. They drove to the center of Makrigialos, a kind of Ocean City, New Jersey, but with pine trees and mountains, where they dined at a seaside taverna to throbbing disco music and Karina looked at Andrew’s sketches. Meanwhile, he watched the dark sea lap at the pilings and realized he hadn’t felt lonely once since meeting Karina on the dock. Her sparkling, yellow blue openness balanced his brooding, wine-dark depths. He felt as if he’d known her forever.
    Back at the house, on a terrace draped with bougainvillea, they shared a bottle of retsina and cookies from the taverna. Andrew sniffled: he was catching a cold. Karina proclaimed that with his sniffles Andrew had eliminated any possibility of their being lovers. “So now we shall never know if what you say is true,” she said, smiling.
    Just after the moon set, Andrew woke. His cold had gotten worse, and his stomach growled: wine and cookies. He blew his nose, gulped down two aspirin and half a Valium with some water,and tried to go back to sleep. When he couldn’t, he pulled on his slacks and walked along the beach. Pelicans and seagulls glided down the cliffs; the shore smeared itself with fog. He walked a long way, past the lighthouse and tied-up fishing skiffs, until dawn stained the eastern sky. Bierce had it right: it was easier to look elsewhere for comfort, even to inanimate things, like paintings or the sea. He walked, sandals in hand, kicking at stones. Now he
was
lonely. And what did loneliness consist of? Dashed hopes? Disappointment? The total absence of passion or pain? The loss of something one never had to begin with?
She thinks I’m angry
. Even in sketching, Andrew looked outside himself, to other objects, other people, as if they were mirrors, showing him who he was, giving him back to himself. The sea is a big mirror, he thought. A vast, nauseating mirror that gives us back to ourselves clean and refreshed, like a box of shirts from the Chinese laundry.
    When he returned, he found Karina drinking orange juice on her balcony. She smiled and waved, the morning breeze fluttering her hair. “Where are we going today?” she called.
    â€œWe could keep going east,” he shouted up at her, “to the tip of the island, or head back through the mountains.”
    â€œLet us head back,” said Karina. “I am sick of the sea.”
    Soon the little green frog wrestled the hairpin curves, averaging twenty kilometers an hour through steep bluffs clad in wild oregano, sage, and thyme. The bluffs were home to the horned Cretan ibex, the
kri-kri
so often depicted in Minoan art, a creature so shy and elusive it’s been labeled extinct. They saw goats, cows, gulls, swallows, geckos, chameleons. As they rounded a sharp turn, a vulture hung in front of them, motionless, a stuffed trophy suspended in midair, its tail feathers ruffling so close to thedriver’s window Andrew felt he could reach out and touch them. Then it swooped out of their sight, down toward the distant sea. Karina turned to Andrew with a wild, astonished look. It would have been the perfect time to kiss her, had he not been driving.
    They drove past cypress, evergreen oak,