He stared at her. She held his gaze, then broke out laughing. He was joking, obviously.

“You’re such a liar.”

They talked for hours, sitting together on the bench, sometimes getting up to stroll, but talking always, about whatever came to mind—music and art and books and travel and history and politics and cooking—teaching, learning, questioning, and explaining, but always talking, the words splashing down with the authority of abundance.

An observer would not have seen in them the heat of new desire. For this passion that they were feeling now, but hadn’t yet announced, was old, having existed for thousands of years, in thousands of stories, in thousands of minds as a thought: If you were going to spend a month on a desert island and you could only take one person, who would it be?

That evening, the sun hit the water in a cataclysm of streaking pebbles. Orange balls with fluttering tails of purple, red, and gold.

Sitting on the bench, high above the water, Sylvia imagined herself far away. In her mind the Promenade was the terrace of a house on a hill. And the rippling waves, clay-colored from the sun, were the overlapping roofs of the nearest town—a hundred miles away.

She’d used their hours of conversation to shade in the sketch he’d given her. She knew now that he’d lived in several countries, had met Claire through Ian, and had published two collections of poetry with a small press in England. But more important, she now had a sense of his visions and values. He was an idealist. A romantic. If he weren’t so phosphorescently intelligent she’d be inclined to say naïve.

How does he function in the modern world? she wondered. He didn’t have a computer, and had no plans of getting one. He wrote in longhand, then transcribed on a manual typewriter. He didn’t even own a date book. He’d never held a job in his life, had never even tried, and had always done “this and that” to support himself as he pursued his art.

This and that. She chuckled to herself now, still surprised, as she considered some items on his résumé—bartender, English teacher, factory worker, translator, jeweler, cab driver, auto mechanic, florist, short-order cook, farm laborer, nightclub bouncer, roadie, encyclopedia salesman, market huckster. And what did he have to show for all this grunt work? Where was his payoff after the sacrifice? Where was his Wailers gig?

What did he have to show? she asked herself again, as if the answer were merely waiting on a prompt to reveal itself. A noncareer as a painter? A coupla poetry books and a piece of land he was thinking of farming?

And he clearly hadn’t settled down. What had he been doing in London? “Visiting friends,” he said, “and doing some writing workshops.”

There was something compelling in his madness, though … something inspirational … something noble in his pursuit. Because he was someone with choices who had chosen to do this, to live simply.