“Her ghost meets me when I open the book from home. It is her copy of Death in Venice, the one she read in high school, in the years before I knew her. It is stained with suntan oil. She must have read it on a beach somewhere and imagined that water city.

I leaf through it. She writes 'important' in the margin next to Aschenbach's musings on the artist. 'Who shall unriddle the puzzle of the artist's nature? Who understands that mingling of discipline and license in it is so deeply rooted?'

She scrawls 'important' again on page twelve. She puts a question mark next to the word puerile, which she has circled. It is coupled with sensuality, underlined.

Puerile means childishly silly, Lola. It means juvenile.

Also there's a question mark next to 'very much he feared being ridiculous.' For what to this teenager could seem ridiculous in Aschenbach's delirious quest for beauty in a dying city?

'Solitude gives birth to the original in us,' I read, 'to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.'

I am toute seule. And I am afraid.

'The trip will be short and he wished it might last forever.'

I picture her as a girl on a beach reading Death in Venice and taking notes, underlining, making comments in the margin. And one day I will love her.”

The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Carole Maso