Payback

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Payback Page 11

by Mary Gordon


  Pietro was at all the musical evenings, but he and Agnes had barely spoken. On one of their visits, Jo and Christina were helping to clear the plates from the evening’s refreshments and Pietro was putting the furniture back to its original position. Jo and Christina were complaining about the heat and asking where they might go to swim, and Pietro said, “Nowhere near Rome…the beaches here are horrors. Brutta, brutta. You must come with me to my family’s house on Lago di Fiastra in the Marche.”

  It made Agnes feel strange that suddenly they were all invited by someone whom she ought to have known, but somehow did not.

  The weekend was full of people attached to the di Martini family. Everyone slept anywhere—beds were apportioned, but every morning there were people on the living room floor in sleeping bags, or on one of the rickety couches. With what was clearly mock exasperation, the mother of the family trailed after her children, saying, “Do you never pick anything up…do you never understand that windows must be kept open, doors shut…do you have to use so many towels.” And Pietro or one of his brothers, all a foot taller than their mother, and fifty pounds heavier, would pick her up and twirl her around and call her strega, strega mamma, witch mamma, and everyone would bustle around as she sat on the couch and somehow, a temporary order was restored.

  “You must forgive my family’s disorder, they are, every man jack of them, quite harum-scarum,” she said to her American guests in English, explaining that she had studied in London for a year and enjoyed speaking the language.

  Agnes hadn’t realized how much she’d missed swimming. New Canterbury abutted the Atlantic, and a quarter mile from her house there was what New Englanders called a pond, what others would call a lake, and every year she prided herself on being the first in the ocean, the first in the pond on Memorial Day, the last to swim in both of them in the chill of October. She was never happier than when she was swimming, relishing the release from gravity, the water making lightness real, the detachment from the earth like an astronaut, only not so lonely.

  But this was not like any swimming she’d ever done. The water had no tinge of grayness in it, as all North American water did: What should I call it, she asked herself as she was swimming out farther than the others, is it turquoise or aquamarine? She imagined that when she got out, her skin would be iridescent, covered with something like sequins, and when she shook the water from her hair the drops would shine like jewels. She swam out, far from the others, and for the first time since Heidi had run off, she felt lightness; she felt delight.

  And then she noticed that she wasn’t alone. Pietro had swum out. “My mother was afraid you’d decided to swim to Greece,” he said. “My mother worries about everyone. It’s what she does.”

  Agnes resented his intrusion, but it had happened to her many times: she would swim far out and someone would come after her, breaking the membrane of her perfect world.

  “Please tell everyone not to worry. Ask Jo and Christina. I’m famous for swimming long distances.”

  “There is no need for you to come back, then, if you’re happy. I hope that you are happy.”

  It had been so long since she had thought it possible to use the word in relation to herself that she laughed, then saw he was offended.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just…oh, I don’t know, I think people expect Americans to be happy one hundred percent of the time.”

  “But you see, I know that you are not.”

  “Not what?” she said, feeling a playfulness that surprised her. “Not American or not happy?”

  “Oh, I know you are American. I can tell by your mania for ice in your water. And the way you relished all that white food at Thanksgiving.”

  She was grateful for his tact in not pursuing the question of her happiness. And for not insisting that she return to shore.

  She enjoyed watching him swim away, unrushed but moving steadily through the water, with a kind of lightness she’d begun to notice in all of his movements. She watched him get out and dry himself with a small pink towel; it had been so long since she had taken any interest in any man’s body that she had to remind herself that her interest was not the interest she was taking in the water, or the trees of Rome or the fountains. She remembered what she had lost—a sense of herself as a body drawn to other bodies—and was not sure she was willing to have this new sensation. She wished that she could just stay in the water, cool, detached, alone.

  But when they returned to Rome, she began to look forward to Jasper’s musical evenings in a way she hadn’t before, and she was glad when Pietro stayed behind to help with the furniture. She found herself looking at him almost furtively, when he was playing in the quartet and there was an excuse for her eyes to rest on him. She saw that all his gestures were curved; most men, when they spoke, used chopping gestures, slicing gestures, but he seemed to shape the air with a deliberate non-coerciveness. She found herself wondering about the way his body seemed to combine unlikes but still present a harmonious whole. The question of how he gave the impression of slightness and broad-shoulderedness at the same time. She determined that it was because his arms were quite long, the biceps muscular but the forearms slight, leading to hands that could almost be called feminine, his calves thin but his thighs well muscled.

  He missed one musical evening, and she felt deprived, let down and disappointed, like a teenager whose favorite rock star had canceled a performance. She knew she was acting like a teenager, a teenager with a crush—what a word for it, she thought, implying simultaneously unseriousness and annihilation. She told Jasper that she had decided to buy a bracelet she’d been looking at for months in a shop on the Via dei Coronari, and she said while she was there—did he suspect the exaggerated sense of the accidental in her tone—she’d be glad to pick up some tobacco from di Martini’s. She deliberately didn’t say Pietro’s name, as if that would provide a clue that Jasper would take between his teeth and run with. Like a puppy making off with the family lunch.

  * * *

  —

  Di Martini’s Tobacco. Gone now, she thinks. In its place, another antiques store, specializing in Asian art—she didn’t like to think of what might be its provenance. Di Martini’s Tobacco…source of her comfortable income…Pietro’s family’s comfortable income since the early twentieth century. DI MARTINI—the letters of what would be her name, gold script against a background of black marble. 65 Via dei Coronari, just off the Piazza Navona. One of those streets tourists find by accident and then consider their private treasure. A street of beautiful ochre walls covered by vines.

  She remembers that day, the day she pretended to just happen to be in the neighborhood, oh, and while I’m here I’ll just pick up Jasper’s tobacco…Pietro is behind a counter, holding in his feminine hands a pipe with a carved ivory bowl.

  Seeing her at the door, he excuses himself to his new customer, rushes from behind the counter, taking her hand, half pulling her into the store, kissing her on both cheeks. “Welcome, welcome,” he says. “To my commercial establishment, let me take your coat, what a lovely scarf…it’s a bit warm in here, I hope you won’t be uncomfortable.” And the customer, a German, resentful at the loss of Pietro’s attention, walks out of the store, closing the door with a loud, accusatory bang.

  “Oh dear, I think I’ve made you lose a sale,” she says.

  For the first time, she sees his characteristic response to any misfortune, the raised shoulders, the upturned palms, the nearly uninflected syllable, “Beh.”

  He cups her elbow and leads her up the wide staircase to the second floor. She feels for the first time what she will always feel in the shop, that she has been spirited through, or allowed behind a door into a dream world: another time, a fantasy of a deliberately male, deliberately polished civilization, the transgressive, slightly shameful thrill of being the one girl—you would always be a girl there, never a woman—allowed into the
men’s club, fascinating artifacts whose use sometimes she can only guess at. The delicious smell of pipe tobacco—confectionary but carnivorous.

  It is a shop, everything is for sale, but everything about it suggests that any transactions resulting in the transfer of hard cash are rather beside the point. There are leather couches, carved coffee tables covered with magazines devoted to the love of pipes, leather-covered books—English mostly—memoirs, accounts of exotic travels or the creation of formal gardens. Pietro knows everyone who sits in the deep sofas or fingers the pipes on display on the open shelves.

  One area of the store is especially devoted to cigars, and she feels swoony because of the insistent but deliberate seduction of the expensive smoke.

  “This,” he says. “And you will forgive me if I seem to be attacking your country…is my blow against American imperialism…a counterblow to the one America has dealt to Cuba because of its phobic anticommunism.” (Everyone in his family, she will learn later, calls themselves some kind of communist, although they seem not to feel the conflict created by the source of their wealth: commercial, capitalist.)

  “Here we are able to provide for the Italian connoisseur—and, it must be said, for Americans, who have felt the loss created by their country’s foolish obstinacy—the finest Cuban cigars. At the same time, I am proud to say, contributing to the health of Fidel’s economy.”

  Entering the shop, she purposely put behind or buried any puritanical scruples…even in the first days of her romance with Pietro, it was known that tobacco killed. But it was impossible to believe that anything connected with this artful welcoming and above all civilized place could be in any way destructive.

  Gone now, all gone…and what reasonable person could say it was not for the good.

  But she has lived in Italy too long to believe in the ultimate power of reason.

  * * *

  —

  The day of her first visit, he invites her to lunch and then wonders if she might be free for dinner that Saturday. She was embarrassed at her own excitement at the invitation, as if it were her first date. But it was her first date after the collapse, the shattering of her old life. Her life after Heidi.

  When she was with him, the lightness that had been hers when she swam in Lago di Fiastra returned. She was drawn to his lightness as a freezing person would be drawn to a fire, a fire that did not blaze and crackle…only a constant comforting warmth…that gave no sign of possible diminishment or possible harm.

  He said he was exhausted by the high volume and supersaturated palate of both his country and his family; he had made an early and surprisingly successful decision to find life amusing whenever possible, interesting always, as a scientist finds whatever evidence he comes upon of interest. He was passionately non-introspective. When he had no choice to respond to an event that was sad, unfortunate, tragic, disastrous, he resorted to his all-purpose monosyllable, “Beh.” One of his most frequent comments was: “We will hope for the best.”

  She had no impulse to share with him what had happened with Heidi; rather, her impulse was in direct opposition; she would keep it from him and him from it, as you would keep a healthy person from the site of infectious disease.

  When she looked into his eyes, she saw that there would be no place in his understanding of the world for her sense of having been marked permanently by an act that nearly everyone else called an accident…not your fault not your fault, everyone would say…but she knew the truth that pounded in her skull—not constantly, as it had been, but she was never free from it…your fault your fault. She imagined how he would respond: he would be dismissive; he would be impatient; an initial sympathy would give way to a frustrated incomprehension. So when thoughts of Heidi intruded, she willed them away, challenging herself to come up with the right words to describe his eyes…the two she came up with were both unsatisfactory: root beer, ox blood. She rejected both because she associated him with her father, who loved an old-fashioned hard candy called root beer barrels and whose favorite shoes were a color called oxblood. And it was clear that Pietro and her father could not have been more unalike.

  Did all women, on the verge of love, she wondered, compare the potential beloved with their father? When she thought of her father, she thought of the word grave. A grave man. Possessing gravitas. He was denser than Pietro and shorter; his legs (for years, he’d bicycled everywhere, long before it was fashionable), both calves and thighs, heavily muscled, his biceps unremarkable, his shoulders tending toward the narrow, his palms wide, his fingers rectangular or squarish. He brooded; he ruminated; his laugh came from the middle of his chest, reluctant, like a car starting reluctantly in winter. What was the opposite of gravitas, she wondered, that quality Pietro had that drew her to him? Lightness seemed too light…because what he had contained its own force, its own power, a power to lift her from the nullity that had been hers since Heidi had disappeared. She could not imagine Pietro disappointed.

  Nine months of dinners, hand holding, and increasingly unchaste kisses passed before he invited her to Arezzo for a few days. It was January and the famous antiques market was on and he told her she could buy lovely things for a fraction of their worth and after a day when the city was crowded with shoppers it would be empty and they would have the Piero della Francescas to themselves. He talked about it as if it were an outing to buy antiques and look at art; nothing was mentioned about hotel accommodations, and certainly nothing about sex.

  They were both twenty-eight; neither was a virgin, she’d slept with two boyfriends before Roger and Pietro was Italian; she didn’t ask but hoped that his experience was not scandalously wide. But with the same surprise that had struck her when he first asked her to dinner, they surprised each other at the delight their first encounter brought, as if they had been hungry for a particular food that they had heard of but not discovered.

  “Lovely,” she said, running her hands up and down his body, wanting the English word, the word of home.

  “Lovely,” he repeated to her, and she realized that the boys she had slept with before had been boys only.

  The following September he asked her to marry him, and she refused him.

  “But why,” he said. “We love each other. We are young and healthy. There is no reason for this.”

  “We’re happy as we are,” she said. “So many marriages are unhappy. I don’t want things to change.”

  “I will persist,” he said, and did not press her then. “Because I do want things to change. I am tired of what Jasper calls our ‘naughty weekends,’ and yes, I agree it would be unseemly for us to come together in the home of my parents or in Jasper’s home…although I am not quite sure why.”

  She couldn’t explain to him that somehow, despite his appetite for rough trade, the image of her room as a shrine to some idea of her as a girl was important to Jasper.

  She couldn’t tell him that the reason she couldn’t marry him was that it was not possible for her to choose a normal, safe life for herself, a secure position in the world, when Heidi could be anywhere, unsafe, unlodged, unplaced. She allowed him to believe that it was because she was reluctant to leave Jasper on his own.

  But then, she became pregnant. A fierce animal joy, an animal pride rose up in her and she wanted this baby…and yes, she told Pietro, now they must be married.

  Only Pietro’s family and Jasper and her parents came to the wedding. The reason for the hasty marriage was not kept secret; no one was shocked; everyone was pleased.

  One day a couple of months later, walking home from the market, she felt a cramping, and then, to her horror, a gush of water, right there on Via Fornaia. She rushed home, went to bed, phoned Pietro and the doctor. But there was nothing to be done.

  Miscarriage. Suggesting a failure of attention or a train not caught. Was this preferable to the clinical Italian phrase aborto spontaneo…spontaneous…suggesting a desire on
the part of…could that be the right word, fetus…suggesting something cooked up in a laboratory rather than in what should have been the safe haven of a womb. Five months. A child but not a child. Nevertheless, hers.

  Even in the darkest days after Heidi’s disappearance, she had never felt more alone, never more a failure: this was rooted in her flesh and her flesh only. There was no one who could share what she felt because no one had known this—what, this creature, this being—its growing life had been a secret only the two of them had shared. Pietro was kind, but temperamentally was made uncomfortable by sadness, and she had no impulse to express to him what he could never understand. When people said, “You’re young, you’ll have healthy children and all this will seem like a distant memory,” she wanted to strike them to the ground, or at least walk out of the room. Her mother came, and sat, and held her hand…but her mother had not experienced what she had, and her mother couldn’t know that part of her grief was her sense that she had brought it on herself, that it was her just punishment for what she’d done to Heidi. In loco parentis, “in the place of the parents,” that was what they were told was their role as teachers, and so she was taking the place of Heidi’s highly inadequate mother. She had failed her, the primal female test: she had deserted the child at her moment of greatest need. So perhaps it was right that she should not have her own child, nature understanding that she was, in her very essence, unfit.

  And yet a kind of desperation took her over…she must have a child…stronger even than her sense that she did not deserve one: the necessity to have a child, the nullity of a life without one.

  It changed things between her and Pietro. Their bond, which had grown gradually rather than following the lightning path of a coup de foudre, had nothing in it of the tragic, and so had no place for a sense of failure and loss as deep as this. Lovemaking had something of a job about it, a task with a product in mind, and both of them grew almost to dread it; the failure seemed to fall on them both. There was no reason, no reason at all, the doctor said, that she should not have a healthy baby. But it did not happen. Month after month, her period came on time, each month a disappointment tinged with what she knew was foolish hope, each spot of blood a cause for tears. How primitive it was, how melodramatic: the sign of blood. A messenger without language or with two words only, yes/no. And then the information traveling in a hot wire from the female base up through the stomach and the spine to the brain: Bad News, Bad News Again.

 

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