WE’D GONE TO ITALY A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO. We spent a week on the Amalfi coast. It was a place John Steinbeck said would be ruined if visited by more than five hundred people at a time. There were probably twenty times that. The narrow roads cut into the side of the rock cliffs were tire to tire with tour buses, cars, motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, anything with wheels, all moving in impatient jerks and jolts. The sidewalks were not much better, crowded with pedestrians walking in all directions, or worse, standing and taking selfie after selfie and holding up everyone else. It was crowded and chaotic and it was not ruined. There was nothing, it seemed, that could undermine the inherent calm of the place, quiet buildings dug into the steep hills – some of them have been there hundreds of years, outlasting this army and that – the boats that floated in the bay the way they had for centuries, the blue calm of the eternal sea that seemed to wash up to the shore and into the air and over the top of the cliffs continuing on into the calm blue sky. You couldn’t ruin any of that, but they sure did try.

We stayed above the chaos and crowds, in a hotel named after Neptune, overlooking the bright houses, the majolica-domed church, the slender strip of sand and the Tyrrhenian Sea. We would have breakfast at the hotel in the morning and then walk down the two hundred or so steps to the beach, sit under the sun or under an orange and blue umbrella until it was time for lunch. We would make our way back to the hotel, shower and walk to some place to eat. Then go back to the hotel and sit by the pool until it was time for a nap or we needed to escape the heat. Frank preferred the pool; I liked the beach. I wanted to watch the waves. I was as white as paper; I would have burned myself to ash if it hadn’t been for Frank. It’s an overly precious way of saying it, I realize, but I like the phrase. He would set up the umbrella, remind me to “apply sunscreen regularly,” and slightly fuss over me in ways that were newly endearing. The waves came and went in their steady procession. I watched them with great satisfaction. I get poetic thoughts in my head, the bright sun on the waves, repeating over and over makes me think how easy it would be to be free, free of our life, free from Froehmer and the men like him who pick up the phone and get all they want and think it’s easy because of people like us. I don’t begrudge Froehmer anything. I don’t regret how we live, Frank and me. I only think about how easy it would be to leave it behind.