Beach Music by Pat Conroy

herself. For five years, she had tried to recover a sense of equilibrium after her husband left her for a twenty-year-old woman who was physically a younger, flashier edition of Ledare herself. She told me she had made up a list of the men in her life whom she would trust to fall in love with if she ever felt strong enough to sally forth in those sharply contested fields again. I had been on that list until Ledare remembered that Shyla had committed suicide. When she remembered that, she had crossed me carefully off the list and put in phone calls to the other three men who survived the cut. Like the other women who knew me, Ledare thought I bore much of the responsibility for Shyla’s death, even though she knew little or nothing about our life together.
    From a bridge overlooking one of the minor canals, I pointed at two elderly craftsmen putting the finishing touches on a gondola. They were employed by the gondola factory that still made the boats by hand.
    “I’ve got a friend named Gino,” I said, taking Ledare’s arm. “His station’s not far from here.”
    “You figured out a nice way to make a living, Jack. I knew you could roast oysters and cook a pig, but I never dreamed you’d write cookbooks. And it never occurred to me you’d spend your life writing about beautiful cities and great places to eat.”
    “No one thought you’d write for the movies either.”
    “I think I did,” she said, turning toward me. “But I also think you just might have run away.”
    “I might have, Ledare. But it’s my call and I get to do what I want to do. It’s one of the few benefits of growing up.”
    “I sometimes tell friends in New York about what it was like growing up in Waterford, Jack. I tell about the crowd we ran around with—all of us—and they can’t believe the stories. They say I makeit sound like I grew up surrounded by gods and goddesses. They tell me I’m exaggerating. They never believe it. I tell them about Mike first, because they’ve all heard of him. Tell about you and your family. Shyla and her family. Capers and Jordan. Max, the Great Jew. Mother … I can never tone the stories down to make them believable. Was there one of us who didn’t seem smart to you, even then?”
    “Yeah.
I
didn’t seem so smart to me. Even then. Not smart enough to get out of the way.”
    “Out of the way of what?”
    “I didn’t know that everything you do is dangerous—everything—the smallest, most inconsequential act can be the thing that brings you crashing to earth.”
    “Were there any signs or omens? Tea leaves we could have read if we’d been alert?”
    “You’re not supposed to see the signs. They’re invisible and odorless and don’t leave tracks. You don’t even feel them till you find yourself on your knees weeping over their unbearable weight,” I said.
    I maneuvered her toward an alley that led past a trattoria and a dry cleaner’s with misted windows. The smell of garlic and hanging pork poured out of the trattoria.
    “I’ve never eaten in that trattoria. It must be new.”
    “How wonderful,” Ledare said. “Is that how we turn the subject away from the horror of it all?”
    “I’ve trained myself not to think about South Carolina much, Ledare. Especially those parts that only cause pain. Like Shyla. I hope you understand. If you don’t, pardon me, but I don’t need to ask your permission about what I get to think about. Nor do you have to ask my permission to write about anything you goddamn feel like. And never, not once, Ledare, have you written a word about what happened to us gods and goddesses of your childhood.”
    “Why, Jack, it’s been years since I’ve heard the president of my senior class give a speech,” she teased, smiling.
    “You shitbird, you trapped me.”
    “It’s funny, Jack, South Carolina’s always been the forbidden subject to me. I’ve never written a word about it, alluded to it in theslightest way, and never thought I would until Mike