You embark on a circuitous train route to Vienna via Florence. Donna reads the Herald Tribune while you stare out the window at Tuscany. Tuscany goes by very quickly with its pears and its apples and its tile roofs. As the train rolls along the hills you look for the picturesque olives mentioned in the guidebook but when you don't see any, you realize you have no idea how olives grow: trees? vines? bushes? It doesn't matter. The pears that hang like yellow tear drops from the trees are fascinating enough. You both exclaim over their mammoth size whenever you see them in the market, but every time you point them out to Donna on the train trip she glances up just after they disappear.

She reads the front page of her third newspaper so far this morning, and laughs at you reaching for the Lifestyles section. You ask her why she can't just relax, why she has to make everything into work.

"I was just kidding around. " She looks at you as if you are the one behaving strangely. "I didn't mean anything by it." She folds the front page up in her lap and turns away from you to look out the window.

You know she's right; you should read the real news about the European currency crisis, the neo-Nazis killing foreigners and the El Al plane crash. But she makes it seem as if your interests are somehow peripheral to the real world. You don't know when this happened. You know it wasn't always like this. You can remember the two of you happily reading the Times together in bed on Sunday.

"You used to like to read the paper too," she says in a voice muffled by her fist, and the turn of her head to the window. "You're the one who always insisted on the Sunday Times."

You want to remind her it was only for the Arts and Leisure section but you know that's not the point. Instead you remind yourself that this conversation is headed for territory you can't handle. You turn back to the article about the woman whose husband is a transvestite. There is a great picture of him in fishnets. Then you read "The Guru Quotient" to find out which gurus are cult-like. You wish you had a guru. You wish you had a cult. You wish you had a direction besides the train from Naples to Vienna.