“Are you listening?” he says, or he thinks he says, but he may not have spoken out loud. The question is rhetorical, a means to an end, and the end is to garner a pause before he continues. He has his back to her now and is facing the open window as if it were a blackboard, a slate to be written upon, and not the blue-black Aegean Sea with its spits of white as if the gods have brought in a plastering contractor and the contractor, sloppy at his work, keeps losing bits from the trowel to land out there, beyond the broken arm of Santorini’s caulder. He will be 70 soon, and his fingers busy themselves inside the pockets of his sweater, both left and right hands having found enough wooly lint in the pocket seams to scrape into tiny balls he rolls between forefingers and thumbs. It is useful, this rolling of useless material, this waste, because he rolls with a certain mindless rhythm, and he needs that, or so it seems, that connection to unconnectedness on one level while remaining connected elsewhere on another.
He has his back to her now but knows she has closed her eyes and stopped listening in that way the young and lovely have of closing their eyes and slipping into other realms, daydreams or the replay of real things that have been there for them — obstacles or delights along one path or another, recently, or, perhaps, as distantly as in their childhoods.
She is not listening, but the patio wall, each stone set within its mortar, seems turned and tuned into his every word. Even the two straight-backed blue chairs at the table on the patio seem turned, expectantly, toward his stance inside the cool white-plastered room, between the blue shutters, in his drab cardigan sweater with the pockets and his worrying fingers.
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