Harold nods.
“It’s been happening a lot lately.” Carol steps down from the ladder, turning her head from side to side. “And you know what I keep thinking of? You know what keeps popping into my head? That time when we were in Spain, when we had our first paella together, at that restaurant with the flamenco dancer. Remember? The very dark restaurant that felt like a cave. All the candlelight. The flamenco dancer had a yellow dress, and you were wearing a red shirt.”
“Seville.”
“Right, Seville. It’s funny. I don’t have many vivid memories from that long ago, but that one just popped back. It feels like it happened yesterday.”
“It’s a nice memory”—Harold’s stomach clenches—“I wish I could remember it.”
“It keeps coming back now.” His wife shakes her head again, as if shaking the memory away.
Thinking of Spain, Harold can resurrect only one moment: sitting on a hill in La Mancha, looking over the arid landscape. There had been a bare tinge of evening’s approach, a retreating glow on the scrublands, an advancing mineral tint. They’d looked out at the distant town of Cuenca, its ancient stone houses jutting over a cliff, and he’d absorbed that picture into his brain, imprinted it there. He had deliberately frozen that moment when he turned to the woman at his side, soon to be his wife, and told her that he was happy.
Now Carol disappears into another room of the house. The tap of her clogs on hardwood floor punctuates the quiet. His brain continues to hold aloft the image of the Spanish vista. Then it quavers in his mind’s eye and goes dim.
From outside comes the bleat of a bird. An ugly tune. His wife’s clomping, too, has become irritating. Harold goes into his office, closes the door, and turns on his jungle sounds—a gift from one or another of his children. He sits on the easy chair and lets the jungle wash over him. With the shades drawn, the bright Sunday afternoon progresses unseen. The weekends are beginning to make him feel old. He is aware of vague aches in his body. His jog was hard this morning, and his cholesterol count is a problem, a maddening genetic hand-me-down. There are cocky young bastards in his office with designs on his leadership. Fifty-nine, he reminds them, is the prime of a man’s life.
But one day, he knows, the board will elect to force him out. They’ll retire him, impose a blank second act for his life. At that juncture, perhaps, he might like to enroll in medical school. People begin new careers all the time. His business experience would be helpful, he thinks, in making difficult judgments, dealing with difficult patients.
He sits at the computer and looks again at the admissions page for Harvard Medical School. They require a college transcript, test scores, letters of recommendation, an essay. He chuckles at the thought of the essay, his explanation of this sudden shift in his life, a man who could buy the whole medical school if he wanted.
He thinks about that. He thinks about buying a medical school, enrolling himself in it, paying the doctors to teach him.
The sound of raindrops and monkey calls deepens his reverie. Curiosity, he read somewhere, is part of the recipe for happiness. Perhaps following its pull is the only way to upend the mind’s more tedious, workaday functions. Perhaps happiness is nothing more than that—the cessation of logistics, a broad clearing of the decks.
He feels that his own potential for curiosity is still there, but atrophying more each year. Math and science had come so easily to him when he was younger. He’d always assumed that his life would follow that path—a brightly studded path of organs and numbers and knives. Instead, he found economics. It’s true that his inquisitiveness has served him well in his chosen field. He’s absorbed the tenets of finance, learned to handle the instruments of business the way a surgeon handles his scalpels, with a sure grip and steady purpose. He’s made leveraged buyouts, one by one, with clinical precision, taking his targets by surprise. In the best cases, it feels like hunting. Stalking a company, studying its inner workings down to the behavior of individual executives. He predicts the moment of weakness, then waits for it, sometimes for years. It is obsessive, he knows, but he always takes his quarry. It has kept him limber for decades.
Ultimately, he has no regrets about the direction his life has taken. He is a businessman who enjoys reading science magazines in the evening. His is a comfortable living, with three substantial cars, a number of well-tended acres on the water.
On vacation in Kauai, the Christensens buy coconut halves from the barefoot men on the beach, and the almost-grown daughters learn to make leis. Near the end of the trip, Harold’s wife lies flat on a towel under the sun.
“I’m thinking about Spain again.”
“Again? The paella?”