The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay Read Online Free Page A

There wasn’t any doubt that she’d over-thought herself into a corner. She craved a meditative narrowing of her life, a shrunken world of small things, its smallness fully lived in and with joy. Who used the word joy anymore? She knew that joy was what she needed; joy would do what drugs couldn’t. In practice, though, the ideal of freedom and spontaneity proved illusory; she came up with an itinerary and stuck to it. Following breakfast there was a morning at Blue Bay, and lunch in the café on the harborside: tepid broad beans in tomato sauce, a couscous feta salad and a small carafe of rough wine that sent her groggily into siesta. After a nap, the air-conditioning roaring, she swam at Octopus Beach, keeping out of Kurt’s way, and then returned to the hotel, reading on her bed and clock-watching. At 5:00 p.m. she went out and strolled around in the coolness of the late afternoon, browsing at the gift shop, looking once again at the same few things. A book went with her to dinner on the terrace, though she chatted a bit to the other residents, romanticizing her life at home into something interesting and honorable, before retiring early and lying sleepless till the small hours. This went on for seven days.
    The writing of happy postcards was easy enough. This is paradise and I may never leave : that was all that needed to be said on some of them, the words stretched across the open white field. Others got a fuller account. My day starts with warm bread and homemade apricot jam, eaten while sitting looking at the sea, in the shade of a day that’s going to be hot and blue, and ends with resiny white wine and wonderfully cool linen sheets that somebody else ironed. Swimming, eating, taking pictures, relaxing properly into a stack of novels, socializing when I feel like it and no dishwasher in sight: can life be bettered?
    The question of what to write to Luca, however: that took some thinking about. She couldn’t not send him a card. There was an option much better than silence, she decided, which was to be chummy with him and very clearly over things, post-obsessive and well, as she’d insisted at the airport that she was. But how to talk to him, to Luca, a man she no longer wanted to talk to, a man she felt almost violent about never seeing again, whose name made her fingernails press involuntarily into her palms? Sticking to food and drink was the answer. The quality of food and drink was a constant Luca preoccupation.
    Dear Luca, I’m sitting here eating yogurt with amazing island honey, which tastes faintly of herbs and also of brine. The wine is much better than it used to be, fruitier and fatter. You might even approve. You would have liked the swordfish that was barbecued last night. It turns out there IS a point to peppers stuffed with rice. Figs and peaches: that’s the trick. Like everything good, the sweet and the savory. But perhaps sunshine and fresh air make all the difference. See you soon, Nina .
    She was satisfied, reading over this before mailing it, that nothing was revealed or betrayed in its writing or reading; it wasn’t friendly or unfriendly. That’s what’s needed now, she reflected, ordering a second bottle of wine, smiling at Vasilios as he came to light the anti-mosquito candles: a position of perfect neutrality. Neutrality and sanity. She hadn’t added the line she was going to, about swimming out to the yacht that was anchored in the bay and how she’d swum right under it, as they had donetogether once when they were children, the two of them, while Paolo watched from the shore.
    Three days would have been fine. If she’d stayed for three days she could have regarded the visit as a triumph, but by the fourth morning the possibility of performance ripening into authenticity was gone, vanished in the night, and Nina woke with the old dread. She was afraid of the overscheduled empty day and longed for the comfort of work. She wished that she’d brought a manuscript. She worked as