I remember the look on Erin’s face when it became clear that I was abroad without a map of my own—I think she saw me as foolhardy after that, as romantic to the point of a dangerous narcissism. I recall that while I was putting things away—my journal and my stove—and while Erin deliberated over landmarks and trails, Jamie made a survey of the chapel’s dirt floor, picking up the spikes and the stoppered vials, turning them around meditatively in her hands, and putting them back exactly where she’d found them, all without making any noise. She knelt there, scrunching her hair behind an ear, and wiped her nose on the inside of her shirtsleeve.
WE LEFT FROM THERE together because it was unavoidable—because we were going in the same direction, and because we were part of the same generation, and because we were Americans hiking in Italy—and because we all wanted to, finally. Of course, I might have gone on sitting on my rock when they began to gather up their things—I could have stayed by myself, since all that took was inertia—but instead I rose when they did, and the three of us went on, with no discussion of this arrangement. We passed some hikers so well dressed that Erin surmised they were Romans on vacation. We passed some Ladins with long-handled scythes who Erin proposed had been paid to be there by the Associazione Turistica. I suppose it was an element of my European mood to avoid replying with a witticism of my own, even while mulling some, but I can see now how Jamie was prominently responsible for my general muteness that day. I didn’t want her to disapprove of how I saw the world, though I knew there was an equal jeopardy in remaining tongue-tied. We stopped once and stepped off the trail to let eight cows come up, their bells tinkling, and because I was so self-conscious suddenly, I didn’t get out my journal. I’d been keeping it handy up to that juncture, walking with it in my left hand and my pencil in my right, but not now. I asked Jamie, that night, at a table in the bar at the Rifugio Lavarella, how many cows there’d been, because by then I was more comfortable around her, but at the moment, on the trail, I didn’t write or say anything. It had grown cold again, and windy, and while we waited there for the cows to pass I took mental notes on the languor in their progress, on how obliviously they shat, on the ivory complexion of their late-summer hides, on their bovine odor, their lowing, the action of their tails, but this relentless, even obstinate, gathering of impressions, to date so central to my continental travels, was now not only left unrecorded but undertaken in the context of the Shaw sisters. The Shaw sisters were robust walkers, though without forced enthusiasm, and with the white dust of the region in the leather of their boots, and both wore red wool socks. There was a gash in the knee of Jamie’s wind pants, and her palms looked wind-chafed. All this is what I noticed now, and also that I felt ancillary to them during their sisterly exchanges, a male third wheel and not a Shaw, instead of noticing the water in the streams, the carpeted meadows, and the crags.
Late in the day we passed, according to the Shaw sisters’ map, underneath Monte Sella di Fanes, and came into barren and colder country. In a saddle to the southeast was another rustic chapel, this one of unmortared stone, and below that was a slope cut by bands of rock and broken by rivulets, near the bottom of which we could see the Rifugio Lavarella, or the smoke from its chimney and the late sun against its west-facing façade, and beyond that was Lago Verde and a road snaking up from a valley of trees and pastures. I remember all of this because when we paused to take it in there was pink light against the stone pillars to the east of the rifugio, which prompted Erin to say “coffee-table-book-ish.” We stood a moment longer, and then Jamie intoned, “Now they would have the run home together,” but I was too embarrassed to ask her what she meant.
WE DRANK GRAPPA that evening. It’s made from grape skins and whatever else is left, the seeds and pulp, after a wine pressing. These dregs are distilled until a clear liquid results that retains, supposedly, the vapors left behind by the grapes gone to the vintner. I say “supposedly” since this was all explained to us, in English, by the rifugio’s bartender, who may not have been reliable as a source on this after-dinner drink, and who also warned that the grappa he was serving might sting our palates and taste a little flammable. Erin, after drinking hers as if it came in a shotglass, employed the term “solvent” before switching to German lager. The bar was full of smoke, from cigarettes and from the woodstove and from a few jaunty Tyrolean briar pipes. Its low ceiling was black, and its floorboards were warped. The windows were fitted with wooden shutters, but on this night they were open, so stars were visible. We had to lean on the bar for half an hour until a table cleared, and then we sat down and started a round of Hearts, with me keeping score on the inside back cover of my journal. I was happy to be there, drinking grappa and playing cards. The light was low, but there was a lit candle on a nearby sill by which we could see our hands, the abuse the tabletop had taken through the years from Alpine travelers—people had put ice axes and crampons on it—and each other’s faces. After a while, Erin went to the bathroom, so Jamie and I put down our cards, and I said that I would take a few notes if she didn’t mind. This is when she remembered that there’d been eight cows that day on the trail underneath the Sasso delle Nove.
Something else from my journal. When you’re feeling good about somebody there comes a moment when his or her appearance improves, and that’s what happened with Jamie that night in the rifugio bar. I’d thought until then that her green eyes were conspicuously too far apart, but from then on it hasn’t seemed so to me. “You might be wondering,” said Jamie, “why Erin is constantly trying to shoot the moon, even when she doesn’t have the right cards.”
“Some people play like that.”
“So far she’s losing by something like two hundred.”
“We can quit if you want.”
“My sister’s up and down,” said Jamie. “She’s had a good day, but tonight is bad, with the beer and the way she’s playing Hearts.”
I don’t want to hold forth, or write the way a teacher talks while standing at the front of a class, but I have to say that things are rarely simple. You don’t get to come across two sisters in the Dolomites, young and long-legged, both fair, and walk with them in the pink light and drink grappa beside them, without sooner or later coming to see that they don’t just embody your romantic fantasies. They’re themselves, too, with all that implies: in Erin’s case, a bipolar disorder. Her illness is now controlled by lithium, but not in ’74, in Italy, when her symptoms first came to light.
But I didn’t ask, in the rifugio bar, what Jamie meant by “My sister’s up and down,” and changed the subject to something I’d just written in my journal: “Now they would have the run home together.” “Erin and I’ve been cracking up over that line since high school,” said Jamie. “Since Mr. Cheadle’s class. Since Cheadle and his Hemingway stories. ‘Now they would have the run home together’ is the last line of ‘Cross-Country Snow.’ Nick Adams is skiing in Switzerland with George, only now he has to go back to the States because his girlfriend’s pregnant.”
“George?”
“His skiing buddy.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Well, it’s one of Hemingway’s poor-Nick stories,” answered Jamie. “Nicky doesn’t get to play anymore. He has to go home and face the music.”
IN THE MORNING, around five, I was awake and had my pack ready and wanted to go, partly because I always want to go, but instead I sat in the bar eating breadsticks left on a counter overnight, reading my notes, staring out the window, and nodding at other hikers who came in to have cigarettes and coffee for breakfast, and to look at maps together and talk in Italian or German, probably about the trails and the weather. Then I had coffee, too, with a cornetto, which I ate slowly while taking notes on the changes in the light outside the window as the minutes wore on, and more hikers came into the bar, where by now there was muesli and warm milk on the counter, and hard-boiled eggs, bottled water, and almonds and apricots for the trail, and I realized after a while that some of the hikers were ordering lunc
hes, which came to them out of the kitchen in small cartons. I ate some muesli. I ate an egg and had more coffee. All the while, I thought of leaving but didn’t get up. I nearly left on a couple of occasions, thinking that, all things considered, I still wanted to walk on my own, but instead I looked out the window. Other hikers, in groups, were on the trail already, disappearing around a bend to the southwest, and I took notes on how the details of their clothing faded gradually as they moved into the distance. My chair was uncomfortable, and I wrote about that as well. Then the Shaw sisters came into the bar at seven-thirty, and Erin, with a demitasse in front of her, asked me to look at the back page of my journal regarding her final Hearts score, and Jamie pursed her lips to stifle a laugh. I noticed that the color of Jamie’s eyes was variable, though since then I’ve come to see that most people’s are, according to the light: in the morning pallor of the bar, her eyes were gray instead of the green I’d noticed the day before.
The Shaw sisters didn’t seem to share my impatience. We sat with their battered map spread, and Erin said, “Hey, James, remember Tim Football? He used to have this phrase ‘cumulatively tired.’ That’s kind of perfect.”
“Eat something.”
“Neil,” said Erin, “do you have a car?”
“Have muesli,” said Jamie.
Erin put her head on the map and looked out the window. “Tim Football. Touchdown. Extra point. Third down. ‘Cumulatively’ was a huge word for that…” She didn’t finish.
“Understood,” said Jamie. “Let’s walk to San Vigilio.”
“We could also split cab fare.”
Jamie sighed, and Erin said, still staring out the window, “James, but what would Mom do?”
“What’s your call?” asked Jamie. “What are we doing today?”
Erin said, “I say languish. Minus the ‘l.’” She lifted her head and regarded me now as if my appearance in the bar surprised her. “We’re slowing you down,” she said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Yes, we are.”
When I didn’t answer she said, “Buongiorno, Neil. Grazie. Sorry. Now, James—could you bring me an egg?”
WE WALKED TOWARD San Vigilio together only partly because I’d said “No, you’re not,” and, starting that morning, I was complicit with Jamie in the coddling that was going on. Toward the middle of the day, we were passed on a road of white sand by trucks taking farmers up to cut summer hay, and we spoke with some hikers eating fruit and cheese on spread blankets who were Romans interested in the mushrooms of the region, in particular some rare truffles they pointed out in a guidebook, Erin supplying some Italian phrases to a conversation for the most part conducted in rudimentary English. We sat down there, and Jamie said to me, while Erin was preoccupied with being upbeat and charming, that there was no reason for me to feel obligated just because we’d met on the trail. I said I didn’t feel that—the kind of thing you try to say with as much neutrality as possible, so that your implied meaning remains ambiguous.
Later in the afternoon, we stopped near racks of firewood, near some axes leaning against a tree, in lower country, where the air was warm, and while Erin snored, Jamie and I sprawled with our heads against our packs watching finches flit among the spruces. I noticed that she had a small scab on her knee. One summer, my sister spent a lot of hours in the sun, lightening her hair with lemon juice, thinking this would make her look like a Californian, and that was the suggestion of Jamie’s hair, too, so that I wondered if she’d used the same technique. “So you don’t feel obligated,” she said.
“No.”
“Were you going to San Vigilio?”
“I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Later, another group of hikers came along, including a very small dog, an old man with two walking sticks, and a girl in gaudy orange bellbottoms. They hailed us, and we hailed them back. A man in felt knickers and high stockings, a feather in his cap, did the talking. There was some discussion, in English and Italian both, about the beauty of things. I heard the word splendidamente repeated. When they were gone, we stood up and got on our packs. “I’m officially OD’d on Italy now,” said Erin. “I can’t take any more great scenery.”
IN SAN VIGILIO, we booked rooms at the Hotel Monte Sella—expensive, but one night seemed justified. At dinner, two men in lederhosen sang folk songs, one with an accordion, the other with a guitar. We ate gnocchi, barley soup, and spinach pies, in that order, and then the waiters came in while the entertainers played what you might call a Tyrolean fanfare, and these waiters were carrying, by their heads, platters of beef haunch surrounded by pineapple and watermelon slices, lit sparklers stuck in the fruit throwing sparks across the meat and onto the floor tiles. The waiters had no English but leaned in and smiled and with their tongs put small potato balls or broiled tomatoes on our plates. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Erin said when the entertainers started yodeling. She pretended to an appetite but, claiming an attraction to down comforters, and to wood shutters thrown open to Alpine air, began to move toward bed: during the intermission before the final act of dessert, she dropped her napkin on the table and yawned theatrically, patting her mouth. “Please,” she said, on getting up to leave, “you don’t have to tuck me in, James.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Oh yes, you were.”
Erin added, sliding in her chair, “You and Neil can just sit here without me and, I don’t know, fall in love.”
WE WENT TO the bar. A lot of the hotel guests had moved into the bar to smoke cigarettes and drink thimbles of coffee. There were children in the foyer fighting in a mild way—a little boy in suspenders kicking a little girl—and outside our window other guests played table tennis. There was an elaborate armoire at one wall of the bar, a two-tiered cupboard with its upper doors left open, inside of which, on a silver tray, were bottles of complimentary port, brandy, and sherry. Jamie and I, across from each other in a booth, drank brandy out of snifters and played Kings in the Corner. For whatever reason, it was sometimes difficult to pick the cards up off that table, so Jamie would use a fingernail to get them started. She shuffled cards by aiming the close corners of the split deck at each other while throwing forward the flats of her elbows, and she dealt with small tosses. When you’re playing cards with people you watch their hands a lot and the way they use their fingers—it’s hard not to—so I noticed that Jamie would sometimes manipulate a card by pincering it between the pad of her middle finger and the nail of her forefinger, which seemed unusual to me. I also became self-conscious about my own hands, which are blunt. They’re the Countryman hands, good for squaring lumber and durable in cold weather, but decidedly inelegant carpenter’s mitts, right down to the broad nails and deeply dimpled joints, the wrists with their bony outside protuberances and the thick metacarpals with valleys between them. My hands are pawlike, and when I gesture with them in front of my students, employing them for emphasis as I talk, I’m sometimes conscious that they’re lacking in grace, and that was what I felt in the Monte Sella bar playing Kings in the Corner with Jamie.
We lingered. There were two things that mattered, from my point of view. The first was that Jamie went to Portland State University, which is only 172 miles from Seattle. The second was that she was saddened, nearly to the point of tears, by the fact that she didn’t know what to do with her life. “I take classes to take classes,” Jamie said. Yet she wasn’t being melodramatic—she was just being serious about her future in a way that got to me. Although, looking back, it’s probably even simpler. Taking nothing away from Jamie, her attractions, I was always ready, from the time I was thirteen, to marry the first girl who came along.
THAT NIGHT, WE DRANK a lot of brandy. Erin, said Jamie, had come to Rome in June on a student visa to take twelve credits of art history. In July, an art-history administrator called Jamie and, in a calm, even assiduous voice, explained that Erin was having psychological difficulties, which at the moment consisted of lying despondently in bed, so now
he was making use of the emergency number she’d provided. Jamie understood then that this administrator assumed he was talking to Erin’s mother. She didn’t tell him otherwise. She listened to him explain that the program had a good relationship with a clinic, and that Erin would get care, even on a Sunday. Rome on Sunday was generally quiet, but this clinic was responsive to the program’s requests. Failing that, there was a private home number the administrator could call in order to get around-the-clock attention. This ought to get results, but if it didn’t, he would try a second and a third number. Someone would help Erin, of this he was certain. Rome worked in strange ways, he said, but ultimately Rome worked. It was these protests, Jamie told me in the bar, that tipped the scales in favor of her going to Rome—say all of this hadn’t happened on a Sunday, maybe she would have stayed in Portland and not come to Italy. But it was on a Sunday. Jamie worked in the gift shop of a hotel—on evenings during the school year and for eight-hour shifts since the start of summer—but on Monday she told her manager that she had to quit because of a medical emergency in her family, and on Tuesday she went to a travel agent who helped her get a discounted fare which was nonetheless exorbitant because of short notice. I said I wondered what she’d told her parents.
“That Erin invited me to Rome.”
“That’s all?”
“It was kind of true.”
“How much was your plane ticket?”
“All my savings.”
I told her about my life-insurance money then. I was effusive, in part because I’d been drinking the Monte Sella’s brandy, but I suppose the gates opened for other reasons as well. In the end, I talked too much about myself. I told Jamie that I was going to be a writer. I celebrated train travel. The next day, on the trail—because a trail is good for privacy of thought, even when you’re with other hikers—I felt ashamed of my garrulousness. I was then and am now a believer in reserve, in brevity, and in the value of silence. I once saw a book called Mouth Open Already a Mistake, written by someone described on the flap as a Zen master, and though I didn’t thumb its pages, it did seem to me a title describing something I’ve known to be true—Mouth Open Already a Mistake. That’s the sort of thing that’s sometimes in advice columns. Even so, my mouth’s been open, at length, every day in my classroom. I’ve made my living opening my mouth. The bell has rung, as a bell rings to start and end the rounds of a boxing match, and I’ve come out with my mouth open. And all the while I’ve privately preferred silence. “The new year’s first snow: / how lucky to remain alone / at my hermitage” is from Basho, who for the most part has bored my World Literature students. That’s a class where we sit on old sofas and discuss, for example, Chinua Achebe. I like these conversations, most of the time, but nevertheless, I often see my life as an effort to thwart dialogue, and just about everything else, so I can be by myself, either by myself or taking, for better or worse, a kind of refuge in Jamie. This may or may not be the best sort of marriage, but it’s partly how ours has unfolded anyway. And I know, because she’s told me, that Jamie takes refuge in me, too, though she doesn’t incline, as I do, toward solitude. If she had her way, our two grown sons would come for dinner every night, and nothing would ever change.