Free I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck

in the backseat. Half turning, Nina pats his head as he tries to lick her hand.
    He knows, she tells Philip.
    He’ll be fine, Philip answers.
    You’ll have a good home, Roma, she says.
    They have difficulty finding Anselmo’s house, which is located in the interior of the island, a desolate, uncultivated area they have never been to before. The dirt road is rutted and bordered by stunted, twisted olive trees. It is near the airport, which, however, remains invisible to them, even as a small plane flies in low over their heads, nearly—or so it seems—grazing the roof of their car, its wheels down, ready to land.
    We’re going to miss our plane if we don’t find his house soon, Philip says.
    Anselmo, his wife, and his children are pleased to see them arrive. They offer refreshments but Philip and Nina are in too much of a hurry.
    La prossima volta,
Philip promises.
    Anselmo and his wife laugh. The children make a show of putting their arms around Roma and hugging him.
    Before leaving, Philip hands Anselmo an envelope full of money. Money to look after the dog, he says.
    Non si preoccupi signore,
Anselmo repeats,
il cane sará felice con noi.
Io sono felice, tu sei felice, egli è felice, noi siamo felici, she repeats to herself. In school, she learned how to conjugate Italian verbs and recite them by heart.
    And which past tense should she use now—the near past
io sono stato felice,
or the past perfect
io ero stato felice,
or the remote past perfect
io fui stato felice?
    Or, still yet, the conditional past
io sarei stato felice.
    Several weeks go by before Nina telephones the restaurant—Anselmo does not have a home phone—and she is told that Anselmo no longer works there. Anselmo, the person who answers the phone says, left a month ago. When she tries to ask about the dog, the person who answers the phone says he knows nothing about a dog.
    Taking another sip of wine, Nina again thinks about how Philip, a Midwesterner, was drawn not to fields of grain or to vast green plains but to the sea and to islands: Martha’s Vineyard, Belle-Île, Pantelleria.
    And how he became a keen sailor.
    His Hinckley Bermuda 40 has a sleek, French-blue hull, a solid butternut and teak interior, and shiny bronze fittings. The boat sleeps four comfortably, six uncomfortably, and, on it, they have sailed the cold waters of Maine and Canada—even, once, as far as Nova Scotia where, on account of the Gulf Stream, the water was surprisingly warm.

Hypatia
—Philip names the boat after the first known female mathematician.
    But, unfortunately, Hypatia met a gruesome end, Philip tells Nina.
    How?
    She was attacked by an angry mob of monks who peeled off her skin with oyster shells. She was skinned alive, then dismembered and burned.
    How horrible. Why?
    Her teachings were considered heretical. She wore men’s clothes and drove her own chariot through the city of Alexandria. She did not know her place as a woman.
    For a while, Nina resists sailing with Philip but, in the end, she gives in.
    In the end, too, she grows proficient: taking the wheel while Philip puts up the sails, catching the mooring without his having to come about twice, reading charts and cooking meals on the tricky gas stove. She walks
Hypatia’s
deck on her sea legs without holding on to the wire guardrail, and, finally, she has grown accustomed to falling asleep to the lap-lap of the waves against the boat’s hull and has grown to like the sound.
    Hypatia,
Nina mouths to herself.
    Bradycardia,
she says.
    Once a month, on Sundays, Philip stays in bed for most of the day—Winston Churchill, he has heard, did the same. Not to have sex, but to restore himself.
    Philip has breakfast and lunch in bed, but by midafternoon the bed is full of crumbs, spilled drinks, the Sunday paper, books, journals, pencils, his laptop, and Philip is forced to get up. While he showers, Nina tidies and makes up the bed.
    I feel like your maid, each time she tells Philip, who has come out of