Enigma Variations

by André Aciman

  * * *

  WHEN I STEP into the Plums’ home this evening, I am confronted by a replay of today’s lunch. Maud is seated in the middle of the large horseshoe sofa on their terrace next to him, their legs crossed, with their knees facing each other, creating an intimate, locked space between them. And as at Renzo & Lucia’s, her arm is nonchalantly extended on the back of the sofa with her hand almost grazing his hair again, that languid, whimsical Mauboussin smile fluttering on her lips, the same elbow, the same sleeveless arm, the same bracelet. Around them are four large floor candles, casting a shimmering glow over her skin. It’s a good thing I’d had only a beer with Manfred and decided not to drink anything else. I need to be in complete control of my tongue, seeing as I nearly risked ruffling things when calling from the tennis house. With another drink I might end up sending the two of them a glowering frown that barely disguises my displeasure.

  She is about to introduce him to me but he interrupts, seemingly very eager to meet me. “I am Gabi,” he says, setting down his drink to stand up to shake my hand. He looks me square in the face, beaming enthusiasm, a frank, spry, almost feral gaze that won’t look away. He is trim, handsome, with a touch of a blush on both cheeks that shouts athletic vigor and good cheer. I am intimidated but not at a loss for words.

  Tonight there are the Plums, plus another couple, then Mark, who is probably there for Nadja’s benefit, and then Claire, serene, even-tempered Claire who never laughs at anything I say and who must think I’m a total fop. Coming out of the kitchen, Pamela tells Duncan, her husband, that Nadja isn’t quite ready for someone like Mark, “She’s still on the rebound.” “Our born-again spinster should be over it by now, because, let’s face it, Sleeping Beauty she isn’t,” he says. “Shush!” says Pamela. “Just help me finish building this pyramid with these clementines here,” she tells Claire and me. Claire sets to work right away, as if she’d been building pyramids with fruits and vegetables all her life, while I laugh, having no idea how to build such a pyramid. I know what she’s thinking: He is so hopeless. Meanwhile, Pamela has hung up the phone and comes out onto the balcony to tell the guests that Diego and Tamar will be late as usual because of problems with their babysitter. “Besides,” she adds, biting her lips as she observes our progress with the pyramid, “I think they’re going through a rough patch.” “They’re always going through a rough patch,” interjects her husband.

  Duncan and Pamela are an older couple and love hosting younger guests. Meanwhile, I am terrified that their son Ned might be asked to join us for dinner. He always monopolizes the conversation, going on about some obscure artist he’s discovered and wishes to promote. But he is there only for cocktails I am told—needs to meet a very important client for an appraisal. “Our rising star at Sotheby’s,” says Pamela. I look at Maud. She has intercepted my sneering glance and is reciprocating it with a tacit, clandestine smirk of her own. In this we’re a team, and the silent back-and-forth between us confirms our solidarity. She’s my best friend. We read each other. “So, how was tennis?” Gabi asks. “Yes, pray tell us about your tennis,” Maud adds with her usual allegation that tennis is just a nickname for my latest fling with another college intern.

  I am once again tempted to send a stony glare her way. She senses I’m in no mood for jokes and she backpedals. “But he had a very good meeting this morning, and this means a lot.”

  “What kind of meeting?” asks Gabi.

  “We’re merging with a smaller house that’s been failing for years.” I say this hastily to avoid engaging in a conversation with him.

  “So why did you merge if it was failing?” asks Gabi a bit too abruptly. Despite his obvious charm, he must be a hard-bitten man who doesn’t mince words.

  I must have frowned at his question. “I am an Israeli who’s lived in Italy, not all of me is smooth velour yet,” he explains.

  “Where in Italy?” I ask, forgetting I should avoid asking questions, especially when I’m not eager to engage. But now that I’ve asked, I dread the answer.

  “Turin.”

  “Primo Levi’s town,” I add, relieved it isn’t Sicily.

  “Yes, Primo Levi and Carlo Levi and Natalia Levi and all the Levites of the world, down to the city’s most visible tower—more Jewish than Tel Aviv, which is where I’m from. Not surprisingly, my grandmother was from Turin and her last name was, take a guess, Levi too.”

  We laugh.

  “Gabi is a foreign correspondent.”

  Gabi has clearly been a soldier as well. He’s got it all, I think.

  “For which newspapers?”

  He rattles off a few names, then says, “Italy, France, Germany, Israel, the States—”

  “You name it,” I interrupt, to make light of his impressive catalog.

  “Gabi’s syn-di-cated,” says Maud, with the faintest touch of humor, both to compliment him for his successful career as a journalist and as a way of defusing the implied sarcasm in my comment by alleging we’re ever jovial by nature.

  She’s still on my team, but she’s got his back as well.

  This can go on for hours. We’re volleying sprightly crosscourt shots, but she’s the one putting a spin on the ball.

  “So explain to me why the smaller outfit is merging with yours?”

  “Is this the Israeli or the Italian asking?” I ask, irony still inflecting my voice.

  “It’s the Israeli wearing mercerized Gallo socks under roughshod army boots.”

  “Tactful answer,” says Maud.

  “Tactful or not, I know he’ll want to tell me everything about the merger before the evening is out. Can’t you see he’s already dying to tell me.”

  We burst out laughing.

  “They’re merging with us because they have a very solid backlist, which we want and which they’ll lose if they fold before the year ends.”

  “And by ‘us’ you mean you.”

  “And others.”

  “How many?”

  “We are legion,” I joke.

  “You must be very good at what you do.”

  I decide not to answer. But I don’t mind the flattery. I know what he’s up to. We’ve been exchanging mock potshots. He is targeting, I am deflecting. But this is not hostile at all. This is almost like flirting.

  Ned, the genius son, slaps down his glass on the meticulously set dining table and says he needs to leave. He’s stained the tablecloth.

  We look up from our little coterie of three. “And go in peace,” I mutter to Maud. Maud forwards my comment to Gabi, who doesn’t react and may not share our aversion to Ned. We may be bandying jokes between us, but in case I forgot, he and I are not on the same team.

  But then he says something I cannot hear. She tells him he’s totally wrong. “Won’t be the first time,” he replies, and the two start laughing. Either it’s about Ned or about one of my assistants. Or about me.

  At some point, perhaps to say something, I ask a question that comes naturally and that’s been hanging in the air: What brings him to the States?

  “I’m writing a piece on biotech companies specializing in gene splitting and cancer research.” There is a pause after this mouthful. “This is how I know Maud.”

  If his remark is meant to soothe me, it works. Now I know the official reason behind their lunch.

  I also know why she never thought of bringing up the lunch. It was routine PR stuff.

  But I’m not so easily conned.

  Dinner is announced. Everyone is so comfortably ensconced on the large sofa overlooking the city that no one stands up. Pamela announces that we are all far too friendly for formal seating at the table, we can sit wherever we please. But still no one moves. So she comes over to me and, extending both arms, pulls me out of my seat and says that to punish me for resisting, she’ll sit me at the head of the table. As usual, their large table is meticulously set for a feast, with its thickly starched linen napkins sticking out jauntily from wineglasses like overgrown blooms on steroids. Pamela notices t
he reddish stain Ned’s glass has left on the neatly pressed tablecloth. She examines it and hands the glass to the waiter, and all she mutters is, “One of these days, one of these days, kiddo…” On the way to the dinner table, Maud says she’d have strangled him. I take her aside, kiss her, and simply apologize for being late. I ask her when she got here. She was the first guest tonight and came up the elevator with dreaded Ned. “Full of himself, you’ve no idea. I’ll tell you later, but he is more repellent than ever.”

  She’s trying to shake me off by going on about Ned. I know the trick.

  When did Gabi get here?

  “Oh, much later.” So they didn’t come together.

  Of course, they could easily have planned it this way: You go first. No, you go first.

  The guests improvise a seating arrangement while Pamela decides to sit at my right. To my left is Nadja, who usually won’t speak unless spoken to, then next to her there’s Mark, who’ll speak to anyone provided it’s about himself. The two are meant to get to know each other, otherwise it’s going to be polite nonstarter talk all evening between Nadja and me. I am relieved that Gabi sits next to Mark. But before I have a moment to relish the arrangement, I notice that Maud has taken the seat between Gabi and Duncan, who sits at the other head of the table. I don’t like this at all. Next to Pamela sits Claire, while the seats for the couple in the rough patch are still empty.

  No sooner do Maud and Gabi sit than they pick up where they left off. They are engrossed in something. As with lunch, I see but cannot hear.

  When everyone is seated, Pamela waits a few moments, then taps her wineglass with a spoon and we all grow quiet. I hate the faux formality of speeches before dinner with people who are, as she just said, far too friendly. She, I have always suspected, may be the polished version of the rough draft her son still is. I begin to dread this dinner. Paula starts by welcoming us. Pardon the terrible mess in the hallway, she says, but we are all regulars here, and for some, this is our second home, but this is Gabi’s first time here, and so this dinner is to welcome him to what we hope will be his new home away from home, especially now that he is immersed in such important work.

  After toasting with Chassagne-Montrachet, everyone starts eating Pamela’s raw scallops, while silence hovers over the table.

  “What’s his work about?” asks Nadja, breaking the silence. Mark, whom I’ve known since college and who was always good at class participation, wants to show that he has been listening attentively and dutifully relates what Gabi’s work entails. “Most of us know nothing about cancer research, much less about gene splitting, so it’s always good when someone brings us up to date,” he says. He hasn’t changed since his student days—the first to raise his hand, the first to walk up to a teacher after class, the first to hand in his blue book. We talk about the very little we know about cancer research, but Gabi isn’t listening. Mark, I can tell, is trying to draw Maud’s attention, but she can’t hear him. All I can make out, despite Mark’s lengthy explanations about some latest developments in gene therapy, is that they’re talking about a small town called Enna.

  “Where is Enna?” Nadja asks, clearly less interested in Mark than in Gabi.

  “Enna sits on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere in Sicily. Like Masada,” Gabi adds. “There too a huge massacre took place, but this one was committed by the Romans who had decided to clean out the town of its inhabitants. Masada was more tragic.”

  “Why?” asked Nadja, who is no longer listening to Mark.

  “Oh, because in Masada the victims committed mass suicide to avoid falling into the hands of the Romans, who would have tortured them, killed them, or sold them as slaves. Enna, by the way, knew its heyday under Frederick. He founded the first university in the world, in Italy, and created a culture that housed Normans, Greeks, Arabs, Jews, French. Italian poetry, by the way, was not born in Florence as so many think, but in Sicily. The town of Enna was finally given back its original name by none other than Mussolini.”

  “What did it used to be called?” asks Nadja.

  “The Romans called it Castrum Hennae, meaning Castle Enna, but the name was further corrupted by the Byzantines into Castro Yannis, John’s Castle, which the Saracens, once they occupied Sicily, renamed Qas’r Ianni, which in Arabic means Yannas’s Castle. In Italian it was known as Castrogiovanni until Mussolini, who loved the grandeur of antiquity, finally dusted off its millennial tiers and allowed it to take back its true name.”

  Then, seeing that more of us are listening to him than he thought, he smiles, interrupts his description, and adds, “We’re all a bit like that, aren’t we? Like Sicily, I mean.”

  “How so?” asks Claire, who is probably speaking to him for the first time tonight. Claire would never have asked me to explain anything.

  “We lead many lives, nurse more identities than we care to admit, are given all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.”

  “And which identity is that?” asks Mark, clearly trying to score a point.

  “Might take too long to explain, my friend,” replies Gabi, “and, besides, we don’t know each other well enough yet.”

  But the mention of Sicily bothers me. As Gabi continues talking about Frederick II, I can’t help but look at Maud. I try to catch her eyes. But she knows why I’m looking at her, which is why she is staring away from the table and then looks down at her plate. She knows I’ve guessed the cause of her craze for Sicily and that it all has to do with him, doesn’t it? Never have clues been so transparent or fallen so effortlessly in my hands. One has to wait weeks, months sometimes, to link the pieces. Here, even thickheaded Ned would have put together the puzzle.

  Couldn’t they have rehearsed this any better? He was a soldier in the most sophisticated army in the world, and she, despite her quiet, subdued manner, has brains to outfox the emperor of tricksters. Didn’t they even have a plan?

  Maud asks him to tell her more about Enna, and Gabi right away launches into a long tirade about the life of Frederick II, about Enzo, his son who spent the last twenty-three years of his life in prison in Bologna, and of another son, Manfredi, who died in the battle of Benevento, and as Dante reminds us, biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto. Maud is holding her chin in another rapt Mauboussin pose that I find spellbinding. She is beautiful, she hangs on every word he speaks, she’s so in love, and the irony is that she may not even know how hopelessly smitten she is, while the other irony is that I’m not upset, though I should be and could easily see how another man would yell or slam his palm on the dining table in front of all the guests and, later that night, run his fist through the bedroom door when she locks him out because he’s become impossible to live with. And perhaps I am hurt but don’t know it either and don’t want to know it, because on hearing the name Manfredi, which I thought entirely mine to own in this room tonight, my mind drifts to the thrill awaiting me tomorrow morning at seven on the tennis courts. I’ll be playing with a champion. I want to tell everyone about my Manfred and how absolutely handsome he is when he takes everything off before showering and the marble of his hairless chest is so taut that one must struggle not to touch to feel whether marble is indeed like flesh. Today was the first time we’d exchanged more than banal locker room banter; usually I say a few words and he answers in fragments, almost as an afterthought, so that neither of us can say we actually talk. But today, something was different. I must have looked absent, fragile, angry; I had no one in my life. Is this why he finally sensed it was easy to speak to me? Because I looked scuttled and undone, human? Or was it the inflection of success on my face following this morning’s meeting that made me desirable? I wish I could recall his faint, tremulous German accent when he asked to play doubles. Would someone help me remember his voice and tell me more about him if I too uttered the name Manfred at the dinner table tonight?

  I am looking at her as she stares at Gabi, who is going on about the Holy Roman emperor who wrote a book on falconry while sitting in the
navel of Sicily, and all I’m doing is thinking of her in her favorite position. With her eyes closed, she loves placing her knees on my shoulders, which are his shoulders now, one knee first, then the other knee, her vagina pleading for him, which is where I know his left hand is right now, getting her all worked up as she struggles to keep her composure without altering that dreamy model’s look that says I am all jewels, I am all ears, I am all yours, all the way.

  How am I going to sleep with her tonight? Or touch her after this? And what if she attacks me in the middle of the night as she did the other night? Will it be with blighted love that I’ll respond, or will I go at her with venom and rage in my groin, knowing that even if she’s making love, it’s not with me. I’ll just be picking up where he’s let off—man-to-man business, with woman as the middleman.

  I’m looking at her. She is like someone new. I love her long, slender arms, and the shoulder that’s been completely exposed since this morning, and that necklace giving her a beguiling quality that I haven’t seen in a long time.

  The doorbell rings and we can already hear Diego’s and Tamar’s voices. “I know, I know, terribly sorry, but we so wanted to be here,” shouts Tamar from the hallway as she approaches the dining room. “But we haven’t even started dinner,” reassures Pamela as she welcomes the two, and we all hear Tamar’s rapid-fire series of shrill, hysterical giggles meant to absolve her for being late. Tamar swings her clunky square Goyard handbag as she walks around the table toward her seat and clicks open and shut her bag each time she forgets whether her cell phone is turned on or off. Diego, tall, with a full, blondish mane and a colorful pocket square in his dark jacket, sheepishly follows his wife and ends up sitting right next to Claire. He isn’t happy, his fashionable five o’clock shadow makes him look like a hired thug who’s just been scolded by his wife and told to wear a dinner jacket. The couple in the rough patch. Then, thinking of us, I realize we’re in a rough patch as well, except no one here even suspects it.