He is happy. He’s probably doing what they call “drinking in.”
The waitress brings him water and a menu. “Anything to drink for a start?”
She’s a slender middle-aged woman with an oval face, teaspoon chin, long straight nose, corded neck with a deep hollow just above the clavicle. Her blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail, but a number of wisps have worked free to curl like smoke around her ears and peek up from her crown. Her forehead and the hollow of her neck glow with perspiration. She’s wearing jeans that bunch at her knees, sneakers, a blue polo shirt with a collar faded to aqua.
“No, thank you, water is fine.”
“I’ll be back for your order in a minute.”
He watches her retreating back and tries to discount his feelings of attraction. He’s read somewhere that many men are attracted to waitresses, the hypothesis being that it stems from male desire to have females serve them unquestioningly, even constrainedly. He finds it disturbingly plausible.
The menu lists clam chowder, cream of tomato soup, baked haddock, meat loaf, N.Y. strip streak, etc. It could be from his childhood. He has a feeling that in a place like this the fish would not be good. Maybe not the meat, either. When the waitress comes back, he orders eggplant parmesan, chooses salad for the side. Can’t resist watching her walk away again, tucking the pencil behind her come-hither right ear.
At some point during his elementary school years, his class was shown a travel film about the island of Corsica. All Mark later remembered was an aerial shot of a car on a narrow road rounding the flanks of a vertiginous coastline. That one image remained in his mind, and for years afterward whenever he or his equally studious, unadventuresome friends idly speculated about traveling in the far future, he invariably said he wanted to go to Corsica. The world was a big place, so he liked having a specific plan. The last thing he wanted to do was investigate other options, still less find out more about Corsica, as either of those things might undercut his decision. (Only much later did it occur to him that the film clip in his head looked very much like a Matchbox car negotiating curves in a mountainous blanketscape.) So when, after four years of hard study intercalated by working summers, he finished college and saw that he had enough time before graduate school to carve out three weeks, he bought panniers, a tent, and a camp stove, packed up his ten-speed, and flew to Nice, where he caught a ferry to the fabled isle.
He still knew nothing about Corsica beyond the fact that it had mountains, a coastline, and roads (plus Napoleon). Using his terrible high-school French, he bought food and a map in the port town, then biked into the hills. With the aid of his map he chose the narrowest and wiggliest roads, biked over mountain ridges and down valleys filled with maquis, through small stone villages that seemed largely abandoned. The landscape was arid, but for the first week it rained every day. His tent was too small and his sleeping bag got wet and free-range cattle wandered into his unofficial campsites at dusk. The palms of his hands went numb from the handlebars and his ass hurt. He wasn’t unhappy, but he pondered his inexplicable foolishness at expecting some sort of magical encounter or revelation based on nothing but a decade-old image in his mind from a travelogue.
There came a day halfway through the tour that he spent battling headwinds, fixing a broken spoke, and getting run off a dirt road by an old priest in a battered station wagon. He stopped in a town to buy food and gauze bandages, waited out an afternoon shower under an awning, then biked higher into the hills. The clouds in the west were breaking up. As he looked for a possible campsite on either side of the rural road, he felt tired, out of sorts, bored. He came to a smaller dirt road that diverged to the right. He had learned by now that the best campsites in this steep and stony landscape were to be found along unused byways that once led to fields or hamlets now abandoned. He leaned his bicycle against a rock and walked up the side road, trying to determine if it was indeed unused. After about fifty meters he found a flat grassy patch that would make a fine sleeping spot. He turned around. He had a view all the way down the craggy mountain-slope to the sea in the west. Just above the horizon, the sun had broken free of clouds. He looked at the burning orange orb, the bruised purple clouds flanking it, the glittering sea, the rosy broken rocks of the Corsican mountains, the dark green vegetation glowing in the light, the one-lane rough mountain road curving along the contour line leading toward his bicycle, which also glowed, looking trustworthy
