What Was Mine: & Other Stories Read Online Free

behind the Luna bar and restaurant, the boat that Christine thought held the French people disappeared.
    The waiter brought the wine, and she sipped it. Wine and juice were usually cold. Sodas, in cans, were almost always room temperature. The cold wine tasted good. The waiter had brought, as well, half a dozen small crackers on a small silver plate.
    She remembered, vaguely, reading a story in college about an American woman in Italy, at the end of the war. The woman was sad and refused to be made happy—or at least that was probably what happened. She could remember a great sense of frustration in the story—a frustration on the character’s part that carried over into frustrating the reader. The title of the story wouldn’t come to her, but Christine remembered two of the things the woman had demanded: silver candlesticks and a cat.
    A speedboat passed, bouncing through white foam. Compared with that boat, the paddleboats—more of them, suddenly, now that the heat of the day was subsiding—seemed to float with no more energy than corks.
    The wine Christine had just finished was Episcopio, bottled locally. Very little was exported, so it was almost impossible to find Episcopio in the States. That was what people did: went home and looked at photographs, tried to buy the wine they had enjoyed at the restaurant. But usually it could not be found, and eventually they lost the piece of paper on which the name of the wine had been written.
    Christine ordered another glass of wine.
    The man she had lived with for several years had given up his job on Wall Street to become a photographer. He had wanted to succeed at photography so much that he had convinced her he would. For years she searched magazines for his name—the tiny photo credit she might see just at the fold. There were always one or two credits a year. There were until recently; in the last couple of years there had been none that she knew of. That same man, she remembered, had always surprised her by knowing when Ground Hog Day was and by being sincerely interested in whether the ground hog saw its shadow when it came out. She and the man had vacationed in Greece, and although she did not really believe that he liked retsina any better than she did, it was a part of the Greek meals he prepared for their friends several times a year.
    She was worrying that she might be thought of as a predictable type: an American woman, no longer young, looking out to sea, a glass of wine half finished sitting on the table in front of her. Ultimately, she thought, she was nothing like the American woman in the story—but then, the argument could be made that all women had something invested in thinking themselves unique.
    The man who wanted to be a photographer had turned conversations by asking for her opinion, and then—when she gave her opinion and he acted surprised and she qualified it by saying that she did not think her opinion was universal—he would suggest that her insistence on being thought unrepresentative was really a way of asserting her superiority over others.
    God, she thought, finishing the wine. No wonder I love Andrew.
    It was five o’clock now, and shade had spread over the table. The few umbrellas that had been opened at the beach were collapsed and removed from the poles and wrapped tightly closed with blue twine. Two of the beachboys, on the way to the storage area, started a mock fencing match, jumping nimbly on the rocks, lunging so that one umbrella point touched another. Then one of the boys whipped a Z through the air and continued on his way. The other turned to look at a tall blond woman in a flesh-colored bikini, who wore a thin gold chain around her waist and another chain around her ankle.
    Christine looked at her watch, then back at the cliffs beyond which the rowboat had disappeared. On the road above, a tour bus passed by, honking to force the cars coming toward it to stop and back up. There was a tinge of pink to the clouds that had