Free Girl in the Moonlight by Charles Dubow

although I didn’t know it at the time. Translated it roughly means “Love, love, until the night collapses.”
    One evening after dinner we walked the beach all the way to Louse Point. “I love this old beach,” she said. “My parents used to always bring me here when we were children. Sometimes I wish I never had to be anywhere else. I wish I didn’t have to go to college.”
    “Don’t you want to go?”
    For a moment she didn’t say anything. Then, “I don’t know. Not really, no. I don’t really see the point of it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it kind of terrifies me. The thought of devoting myself to one thing, even to something I love, seems so final. I mean, what if it’s not what I end up doing? Why waste all that time? It’s so forced, so artificial. Making people decide about the direction of their lives so early. It doesn’t make any sense.”
    I nodded. I was still two years away from having to face such a decision. But the thought of not going to college, of not going to Harvard, had never occurred to me. It would have been unnatural, like snow in summer.
    “Don’t you worry about such things?” she asked. “What you want to do with your life and being wrong?”
    “Aurelio seems to know what he wants.”
    “Yes. He’s lucky in that way. It’s always been easy for him. The truth is that he’d be crap at anything else.” She laughed.
    “And you?”
    “That’s the thing. I don’t know if I wouldn’t just be crap at everything.”
    Several nights later she couldn’t see me. There were other friends. She had been neglecting them, she told me. She’d call me tomorrow night, for sure. But then tomorrow came and again she was busy.
    The next day I went to the compound after work. There was no point in calling. “We never answer the phone here. We just expect people to show up if they want to see us,” she had told me. It was true. There was a constant stream of people moving in and out of the various houses throughout the summer. German boys in small bathing suits helping themselves in the kitchen. Pretty girls sunning themselves by the pool. Musician friends of Cosmo’s. Old friends of Roger’s, sleek-looking men with sideburns and second wives. Mercedes convertibles parked on the grass. Delivery vans dropping food, wine, and flowers. Kitty presiding over lunch for a dozen. A Babel of languages. Usually when I arrived Cesca would hurry to meet me, saying, “Thank God you’re here. All these people are driving me crazy.”
    Today, though, there was no sign of Cesca or her car. People I didn’t recognize were playing doubles on the tennis court. I skirted the Playhouse and found Aurelio in his studio painting a still life. I watched him work for a little.
    “Have you seen Cesca?” I asked after a while.
    “Not since she left.”
    “Left?”
    “Left. This morning.”
    “What?”
    “She left this morning,” he repeated.
    “To go where? For how long?”
    “She didn’t tell you?”
    “No.”
    “Last night at dinner she said she was leaving today for France for a few weeks. Some friends of hers have a château somewhere. They invited her and she went. She’s always doingthings like that. Here one moment”—he dabbed his brush in the paint on his palette and then applied it to the canvas—“and gone the next. Poof. Still, I would have thought she’d have told you, seeing as how you’ve been spending so much time together lately.”
    I stared at him, incredulous.
    “Wait. I almost forgot. She did leave something for you though,” he continued. “She dropped it off before leaving but I wasn’t really paying attention.” He put the brush and palette down, and wiped his hands with a turpentine-soaked rag. “Here it is.” He handed me a purple envelope, leaving behind a smudged thumbprint. “Sorry.” He grinned.
    I took it, still confused. Mumbling my excuses, I stepped out of the studio and walked toward the beach, where I sat on the sand and tore open the