In the nineties, Larry took our party-giving proclivities abroad when he began a European touring business. Pied piper-like, he led his clients on lingering wine-drinking evenings in Verona’s Piazza Bra, the swallows circling, the passeggiata swirling. Daily three-hour lunches and dinners. An entire (magical) afternoon spent lunching on the island of Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon under a grape-vined arbor. A two-week long party. And, as with our infamous evening in Tombstone, people had the time of their lives; most of them signed on for more trips.

Pied piper-like, he led his clients on lingering wine-drinking evenings in Verona’s Piazza Bra, the swallows circling, the passeggiata swirling. Daily three-hour lunches and dinners. An entire (magical) afternoon spent lunching on the island of Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon under a grape-vined arbor.

“It’s not required to be an alcoholic to go on my dad’s tours, but it sure helps,” our son once quipped. Never one to be able to enjoy more than a glass or three, some time in my early fifties I reached a point where my increasingly finicky body couldn’t tolerate even an ounce of Riesling. Surrounded by people eager for the next, and then the next, bottle of Sauvignon or Chianti, I felt increasingly out of my element. I began to feel (am I a teetotaling grouch for saying this?) frustrated, downright bored — and, in the midst of all that sociability, often more lonely than if I’d been by myself. As the tour director’s wife, I was responsible for being gracious to all and supportive of my husband. Who, usually by the time we climbed the stairs to our room at night, was stumbling drunk, and, within minutes, snoring like an oncoming train. More than once I slept in the hotel bar.

In her memoir The Spiral Staircase Karen Armstrong speaks of learning to live in solitude, with a silence that eventually settled around her like “a soft shawl.” She describes the way that gradually she “felt at home and alive in the silence, which had a dimension all its own.” It doesn’t work, she adds, “to listen to a late Beethoven quartet or read a sonnet by Rilke at a party” (184).

Of course there were times — and many of them — during Larry’s tours and our parties when I did feel wholly alive, when the room, or the piazza, shimmered with a numinous glow. With or without alcohol, a great party can produce a certain magnetic hum, as though everyone is vibrating at the same frequency. (No wonder in recent years the young flocked to raves.) But as the years progressed, I began to find myself needing lower frequencies. I hungered for unbroken hunks of time to muse, write, and read.

Dinner parties for friends, work parties, pre-tour parties, post-tour parties, two, then four, five trips a year — finally, I overdosed. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry says at one point when the major has been trying to get him drunk, “Half-way through the wine I did not want any more. I remembered where I was going.”

It was after Steve and I became close friends — and for many months we were, as long-time colleagues, just friends — that I remembered where I had once been headed. Where I was going before being distracted by the University of Arizona’s beer busts and drunken luaus, when, at seventeen, I had dreamed of a life surrounded by book-lined shelves, together with a fellow reader and writer, someone quiet and contemplative, peaceful to be around.

Someone who — after we returned home from being married in the woods, after my son played his guitar and sang “It’s a Gift to Be Simple,” after three dozen of us joined hands and pranced through the house to a CD of the Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, and after we had waved goodbye to the last guest — smiled at me and said, “That was good! And now, we can be alone.”