The Apprentice Lover by Jay Parini Page B

Unfortunately, Nicky put more stock in my mother’s opinion of him than in my father’s. On some level, he believed there was nowhere for him to go, and had found a way to confirm a path of pathlessness by dying in a pointless war. (“Goddamn gooks live on both sides of the DMZ,” he wrote on arrival in Saigon, “and I can’t explain to you why we plant our flag for one and not the other.”)
    Having unpacked my few belongings, I undressed. There was something luxurious, after travel, about stripping and stretching out on a perfectly made bed. On my back, naked, I let my first impressions of the cottage assemble slowly, aware that these would undergo many revisions. No place ever appears the same after you have lived there for a week or so. After several months, the size of a room seems to increase with experiences that overlap, erasing (imperfectly) all previous ones, creating a palimpsest of sorts that invariably deepens and grows more complex.
    The afternoon light had acquired a powdery aspect, a dust of gold that lay thinly on every surface in the room. The breeze puffed through an open window on the seaward side, riffling the pages of my notebook, which lay open on the table. Already I was eager to scribble in my journal. I had decided before coming here to keep a strict account of my timeat the Villa Clio, thinking that one day it would come in handy. (The possibility that one day I might write a biography of Rupert Grant had not escaped me, but I pushed the notion into the background. I did not want to think of my life as “research.”)
    Eventually, I put on my bathing suit and sat by the bookshelf in the shabby wing chair with springs pushing through the faded fabric. Other people’s books were always more interesting than one’s own, and I was curious about what volumes Rupert Grant would keep here. I guessed any books that meant anything to him would be in his study, but even his spillover interested me. A handful of thrillers by John Buchan and Nevil Shute abutted mysteries by Georges Simenon and Nicholas Blake. A tattered copy of Death in Venice wedged between two miscellaneous leather volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . A Shropshire Lad tilted against volumes by Cecil Day-Lewis and John Betjeman. On the bottom shelf were two novels by Hugh Walpole and Old Calabria by Norman Douglas. It worried me that I had not read one of these books, and that some were completely unfamiliar.
    Feeling ignorant and slightly afraid of meeting Rupert Grant for the first time, I trekked down the path to the sea through a grove of olive trees to a bare knoll, where marram grass stirred in a dry wind from the north. The air, though bright, was cool. (I had not imagined swimming until May or June.) The beach was visible below, a rocky stretch of shingle whose whitish-gray pebbles could have, from that height, been mistaken for cockles.
    Just off the path, to the left, was a sheer limestone cliff, and I guessed the view from there would be especially dramatic. Though never comfortable with heights, I pushed through scrub to the edge. The vertical drop was about a hundred feet, and below were black rocks, their sharp blades poking through a swirl of surf. My head spun, as I suddenly envisioned myself pitching forward, falling helplessly, then smashing on the rocks. There was no easy way to die, but this would be horrible. I backed away to the main trail, gazing into the middle distance, feeling weak as I stumbled down the zigzag path.
    Rupert Grant stood in the water below, a milky surf swirling around his thighs. Well over six feet, he stooped slightly as he walked, but notlike an old man; he was more like an English schoolboy, gangly and awkward. As I reached the headland, the details of his physiognomy assembled. The white hair had been the first thing that caught my eye as he walked toward me, moving with what seemed like a fierce yet highly controlled natural