Isadora finds water to be a pleasant companion, one that accepts all who are willing to walk into it

An idea was once presented to me by a man in a bar. He was a Christian man and a sailor, and he silenced the room with two hands to announce that we are obliged all our lives to embody only one of three forms: a sea, a storm, or a boat. Obviously he felt that the triumvirate fit nicely into these categories, with God the Storm, Christ the Sea, and the Spirit navigating the twain, but he noted that his idea had a broader application in love and war.

Immediately I claimed to be a clipper ship, propelled by my own agency and guile; this was called down by the assembled, and the sailor pointed out that a boat would never speak first. Undaunted, I claimed the sea next, vast and roiling, a resilient bed for rest and death, accepting the world’s comets and slipping cliffsides, its poets and steamships, and holding it all without judgment. They nearly laughed me out of the bar for trying to suggest that I would harbor anything but myself.

And so that leaves the storm! Violent on the liquid plain, wrecking ships and dumping murk without thought or conscience, destroying everything in its path. They say it’s your friends who know you the best, but drunks have a way with your worst.

I’ve lately found it easier to consider more or less impassively the idea of being pulled out with the swells and dragged under, waterlogged and sunk like a true poet, one foot wedged under the wing of a shipwrecked prow, the rest of me prized away by fish and larger creatures. The ocean plays a little sleight of hand as the thought of a peaceful death holds my attention long enough for the waves to bring me back to shore.

Stumbling to my feet, I find myself shivering cold and far from where I went in. My cape is gone and I must walk up the coast in my romper, looking for it. The thing is thick jacquard and should be easy enough to spot, as it resembles a beaded tablecloth. My romper soaked and sticking to me doesn’t make life any merrier. If I’ve walked by the cape already, it already slipped from the rail and was buried under a thin inch of sand. If not that, children may have taken it for a bit of fun, or, worse, one of the well-meaning women folding towels for the resorts weighed the heavy fabric in her hand, figured a guest left it by accident, and surrendered it to her employer, requiring me to approach every concierge desk in order to inquire, where they will naturally have me arrested and taken away, and a journalist will publish a photograph of the saltwater puddle I leave on the court bench.

Before I resign myself to cut a dripping path for the plaza, a man emerges from a covered porch, holding the cape like a banner and shouting his apologies, making a show of shaking it out as he runs and showing me both sides upon his arrival, as if he is about to perform a magic trick. The man is thirty at most, with a slight figure and a nervous facial tic that makes it look as if he is using intermittent pursing pressure to soothe a cut between his lips. He looks guiltily about, and at first I wonder if I caught him in an impropriety with the cape: beating time upon it to accompany a Fillmore march, draping it about the shoulders of a bad dog, shredding its ends to fill an ornamental pillowcase, boiling it in water and drinking its tea or similar. Of course he must only feel ashamed to see me in the romper, which has wedged itself into every one of my wedgible parts. Handing over the garment, he bows and runs away, a loping run across the sand, looking as if he has never run anywhere in his adult life. The whole thing passes without a word between us.

Back at the house, I find three messages tucked into the doorframe from Duse, despite the fact that I saw her already this morning. The wooden gate claps, and I go out to find her messenger boy, stopped in his tracks halfway up the path. When I ask him to tell her to expect me in the afternoon, he drops a fourth letter and runs. It’s the second time I’ve had this treatment today, despite the fact that I have been sober all the while and it is not quite noon. I go to her before she puts the whole postal service on notice.

Duse has her baubles out again. Fat glass drops hang from horsehair thread in the window over the sink, collecting the light and dispersing it in rays: red chases orange across the yellow-hinged cabinets, and emerald takes a seat on a footstool in the blue corner. Her shoulders are pinned by violet. We sit and watch each other in silence, which started as a game and is lately becoming more serious. The violet light grazes her collarbone. Her expressions mirror mine, fading from one to the next.

She has made it her business to know Viareggio, starting with which mothers will spare their sons for little tasks around the house in exchange for her occasional presence in theirs. The boys bring her sandwiches and deliver messages, they tell her the best route to the beach and the busiest cafés. She probably has them spy on me. She wants to know the town because she plans to die here. I’ve seen her sample the earth, crouching to pinch the sand and observing it like a scientist before bringing it to her mouth. If only we could all be so fastidious.