Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch Read Free Book Online Page A

taken me for a ride on his motorcycle north of Barcelona along the coast. We arrived finally at a long pier, busy with other motorcycles moving slowly up and down its long, wide boards leading out into the sea. We rode almost to the end of the pier. We stopped, and I looked out across the black expanse of water.
    A shift in clouds let the moon come through. Suddenly the water was alive, glittering and sparkling with a long, undulating ribbon of moonbeam. I can remember still how cold it was that evening, the salty smell of the air, the low hum of other couples as they rolled up and down the pier, and the mesmerizing play of moonlight over the water. Nico tried to get me started on a session of kissing and groping, but I pulled away, climbing off the bike to get closer to the sea. This view was what I wanted; I had never seen anything like it. The water was exploding with lights, like firecrackers in the sky, the light of the moon reflecting and multiplying across the waves. I did not want to leave. I wanted to stay out on that pier until the moonlight settled down. I wanted to be there when the sun came up and a different light, the warming glow of day, came over the water. But Nico was insistent that he had to get back to the city. I climbed onto the motorcycle, and we rode off. We both knew our relationship was over.
    As I walked through the museum the next day, I came upon a painting of a sunrise. It was not the sunrise I’d wanted the night before, orange and pink over a long expanse of water. But it was beautiful. The painting was a large landscape of dawn rising over a dark hillside. In one corner of the painting, a hermit is coming out of his cave in the hill. He has raised his eyes and pushed back the cowl of his robe to look out over the countryside. Apricot orange lines of sunrise glow against a pale gray background, lighting up the sky beyond the hermit’s darkened burrow. The grass along the edge of his cave looks frosted with icy dew, but beyond, on the hillside, small flowers unfurl under the sun’s first light. I don’t remember if birds were painted into the picture, but I do remember hearing them. I stood for almost one hour in front of that painting. I heard the birds and I felt the thawing wind of spring, the precious beat of living, the gratitude for another day granted.
    As I stood there, memories of mornings I’d woken early and gone out into a day just starting (the orange-and-pink-stained sky, the damp on the ground and the sharpness in the air, the birds) entwined with the experience of seeing this painting now before me. Layers of memories formed a cocoon around me: the night before on the pier anticipating a dawn, this painting, mornings in my past. Layers of time to be stored and later savored. The memories invoked by that painting, feeling the spring wind and understanding the hermit’s gratitude, smelling the flowers and sensing the icy dew, were memories that, when brought back, sustained and comforted me that cold, wet day in Barcelona. I knew, standing there, looking at the hermit in his hillside idyll, that I would not be lonely in Barcelona. I would awake to mornings and find the same joy shown in this painting. I could go out from this museum and call on my memory of that painting, and of the memories invoked by that painting, and I would feel good. And the memory of the evening before, the ride out to the end of a pier, arms wrapped around a boy I’d never see again, the cold and the salt and then the sudden flashing of moonlight across the water: I would hold on to that memory as well. And over the years, I have.
    I hold on to many memories. When my oldest son was just a few months old, I took him out onto the Great Lawn of Central Park. This was in the years before the makeover of the Great Lawn. Now it is a plush stretch of the finest Kentucky grass, interspersed with raked-sand ball fields and cared for by an army of workers (and they are militant). The Great