Free Beach Music by Pat Conroy Page B

it.”

Chapter Four
    T he next afternoon I led Ledare through different parts of the city and watched her watch Italian women, exquisitely turned out, moving along the narrow alleys toward their homes. A woman came out of a small boutique and walked toward us, making me step behind Ledare on the narrow walkway just off the Calle del Traghetto.
    Ledare stopped and stared at the woman, meeting her eyes, taking in what she was wearing, the high carriage of her walk, the beautiful legs, the thoughtless elegance, everything. She inhaled her scent.
    “You’ll get used to that,” I said.
    “I doubt it,” Ledare answered. “She is beautiful.”
    “There’s something magic about Italian women.”
    “She looked like she was spun from pure gold. If I were you, I’d follow that woman to the end of the line and never lose sight of her,” Ledare continued.
    I laughed and again moved beside her as we crossed through the Campo di Santa Margherita, where a group of small boys were playing soccer beneath the disapproving gaze of an elderly monsignor. An old woman watered a window box full of geraniums and an artist stood at the entrance of the Campo painting the whole scene in the late-afternoon light.
    I was deeply aware that I was walking beside one of the lives Ihad refused to live. Once our pasts were entangled in such complex ways that it seemed we were meant for each other if we allowed ourselves to surrender to the simplest lures of inertia. The friends of our childhood paired us off, almost by fiat. Our temperaments seemed tranquil and complementary from first grade on. Both of us, from the beginning, looked as though we belonged on the same side of the chessboard. It was my mother who first gave me the signifying key that Ledare was bashful to the point of torment. My mother taught me that beauty was often a fine, untouchable gift, but it almost always belonged to the world more than the girl. She spotted the burden and responsibility of Ledare’s unasked-for beauty and recognized that the child was lonely. Wordlessly, Ledare and I effected a merger of our solitudes, giving ourselves up to the main current in our lives. As we walked beside each other in Venice, both of us felt the force of a story untold and a journey not taken. It moved as a third person between us.
    I knew that Ledare was hard on herself for the choices she had made. But she had grown up in that pampered, baby-talking way that the South has of making its girls follow the paths of least resistance. Just when she thought she was learning to think for herself and make up her own mind, she found herself in perfect lockstep with her parents’ worst instincts. Though she knew she had long been immune to her parents’ gift-wrapped poison, she found it began to kill her only when she chose a husband. By a series of flawless stratagems and carefully thought-out choices, she managed to marry the one person who thought she was both worthless and contemptible. She married a man who was happy to ratify her most negative assumptions and sentiments about herself, and who eventually came to hate everything about her.
    When I was a young man I would have thought this kind of marriage rare. Now I believe it is as common as grass. I have seen enough loveless marriages to fill up most of the empty spaces in the desert regions of the American West. American mothers teach their sons how to break a girl’s spirit without even knowing they are imparting such dangerous knowledge. As boys, we learn to betray our future wives by mastering the subtle ways our mothers can be broken by our petulance and disapproval. My own mother providedme with all the weaponry I will ever need to ruin the life of any woman foolish enough to love me.
    Ledare hooked her arm through mine and for a moment we both were happy.
    Ledare had married one of those American men who used language and sex without regard to consequence or decency. Her love for him had damaged her confidence in her love for