One Way or Another: A Novel by Elizabeth Adler Read Free Book Online Page B

with his lot in life. After all, what could be bad about sipping a decent wine in a shady spot with the cheerful chatter of voices in a mix of languages around you, the clink of ice in glasses, the smell of roasting meat in the air, the dish of green olives on the table, and of course, the small dog’s soft head resting on his foot, as always. Three things spoiled this image. The mystery girl. Martha’s absence. And a memory. A slice of his past that, try as he might, he was unable to shake off.
    It was strange, Marco thought, the way the past had of creeping up on you, just when you thought you had finally dismissed it. He never talked about what happened. Not even to Martha. Nary a word. It was locked in his heart, in his brain, forever.
    He had been so young, eighteen, ingenuous, curious, eager for life, and for love. He thought he’d found the love part right away, his first week in college where he was studying, of all things, economics. This was, of course, at the insistence of his father, who viewed his son’s artistic talent and style—the long hair, the faded jeans, the ubiquitous T-shirt—as a personal offense.
    “Ours is a family of bankers and businessmen,” he declared when Marco presented his case for art school. “There’ll be no messing around with artsy shit here.”
    So Marco had had no choice but to strike out on his own, work three jobs to put himself through Rhode Island School of Art, living in a shared dump optimistically called an apartment in a bad neighborhood where you’d better have eyes in the back of your head if you wanted to keep your money in your pocket, whatever small amount that was. On those streets you could buy heroin for three bucks a packet, and addicts were desperate people.
    It was a long way from his upbringing in the spacious gray clapboard house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, where a sea mist hung everlastingly in the air and the cushions smelled of damp, and roaring fires were lit every evening; where you stood, warming your backside while the front of you still felt the chill, an experience he and Martha found they had in common. Apparently vast old houses in England suffered from the same dampness, the chill that could never be quite excluded unless, in the Brits’ case, one put a small fortune into updating the central heating system, and which Martha told him only the newly very rich ever did.
    “The rest of us,” she’d said, “just put on another woolly.”
    Marco remembered thinking “woolly” an intriguing word, so much more descriptive and charming than “sweater,” implying softness and warmth rather than overheated sweat. It had been the basis of their first conversation, in fact. In that coffee shop he’d watched Martha un-stripping layers of scarves and jackets, an outer quilted green one, then a black gilet, worn over the black pearl-buttoned cardigan, that she’d called her “woolly.”
    It was that seemingly perpetual Atlantic mist that had drawn Marco to the warmer ends of the earth. To the south of France, the shores of Italy, the beaches of Greece and Turkey. He loved the smell of sun-warmed rocks, the salt tang of the sea, and most of all the color palette. The first time he experienced it, he was on a trip alone trying to salve his conscience, eking out a couple hundred dollars over as many months as possible, sleeping where he could, in some long-dead grandparents’ small whitewashed room in a village not unlike the village where he now found himself, only perhaps even more remote; or on a fishing vessel where the rough seas made him ill. The sea had been his blessing and his tragedy. That he had now overcome the memory and loved his small place with its water view was the best, and hardest, decision he had made in his life.
    Back then, though, he had slept rough, grown a beard by necessity, carried his few belongings in a canvas knapsack, taken a job here, a job there, anything he could get where they paid him in cash, enough for the