Read Online Drowning Lessons by Peter Selgin - Free Book Online Page B

sweet chestnut, and Calabrian pine. The old forests (Andrew read in his
Rough Guide
) were gone, consumed to build houses and ships themselves consumed by earthquakes and wars. They drove through a series of dry, dusty villages, places to get gas or food that earned no mention in their guidebooks. They invented a little game. As Andrew drove, Karina would ask him to describe something: an object, a vista, a feeling. Andrew would venture a sentence, which Karina would transcribe into his sketchbook, and which they would each improve upon, with Karina crossing out words and adding new ones. Then she would read the finished product out loud.
    â€œBravo!” Karina would say. Or, “Not so good.”
    In Áyios Galinas they found a vacant hotel, with rooms across the hall from each other. On their way to dinner, a blackout extinguished the entire village. They groped down the dark, winding road to the harbor, where they found an open restaurant on the water, sustained by candles and generators. The silence delighted Andrew, no loudspeakers, no disco, only their voices and the tinkling of forks and spoons and the ocean waves lapping against the harbor wall, going
shush, shush
, demanding more silence. Andrew ordered an omelet and wine, and Karina did the same.
    Then the power came back; the music blared; the sky broke with light and noise. Andrew laughed — ancient Greece was gone, and so was his trip, almost, and any chance to be with this woman as more than a chauffeur. After dessert, in the dimly lit doorway of a house they happened to walk by, a serious-facedyoung man tuned his guitar while his girlfriend rolled a cigarette and placed it gingerly between his lips, and this simple gesture made Andrew want to throw Karina on the beach and make furious love to her. Instead, back at the hotel, between both of their opened doors, he said good night.
    â€œGood night, Andrew.” She kissed him on the cheek.
    â€œDescribe to me the color of the sea.”
    Andrew tapped his pen against his sketchbook. It wasn’t really yellow blue, or aquamarine, or azure, or any color you’d find in a watercolor box.
    â€œWell?” said Karina.
    â€œI’m thinking.”
    Nor was it the blue of the sky, or robin’s eggs, or sapphire, or tourmaline. For too long, poets had been getting away with saying that things were like other things. Andrew would put a stop to it. Here; now.
    â€œI am still waiting,” said Karina, combing her fingers through her hair.
    Nor should they be allowed to get away with such expedients as “the blue of dreams.” The sea is no dream, no sigh, no murmur, no memory. Andrew set his descriptive sights on the far shores of verisimilitude, where, he thought, poetic rendition might meet scientific accuracy. “Impossibly blue” was ridiculous. Homer called it the “wine-dark sea,” but that was because the Greeks had no word for the color blue. Then again Homer was blind.
    â€œYou have given up?” said Karina.
    â€œI have not! Patience!”
    And when you scoop up a handful, what do you get? Clear brine that slips through your fingers, the home of spiny urchins.What looks so dreamy from a distance turns to salt water. From a great enough distance the whole world turns dreamy blue, absorbing, seducing us. Hence, the Blue of Absorption. The Blue of Arousal. Of Seduction … Andrew scribbled frantically.
    â€œI am still waiting,” said Karina.
    â€œGot it,” he said at last, clearing his throat. “The sea is the color of flirtation, the promise of ecstasy with no guarantee.”
    Karina rose in disgust to her feet. “I’m going swimming,” she said, and ran, dove, and splashed into the sea that Andrew had so eloquently failed to describe.
    Rethymnon, a former Venetian port, town of minarets pointed phallically skyward, balconies of hand-hewn oak, intricately carved doorways of cramped shops. The multicolored clay-tiled