“Speak.”
“Michael told me the same thing in the Paperback Exchange. Those were his exact words: There are a lot of things about life that you don’t understand. He’s probably right. I mean, look at Margot and Woody. They love each other. The happiest time I had in Florence was when I first came and stayed with Margot and Woody for almost three weeks. It was like being a family. And now Woody’s leaving. He’s going back to the States. I don’t understand. Margot told me on Wednesday, after we went to the Uffizi. I don’t understand. Then there’s Michael and Beryl. They’re still together. And look at Anna Karenina. You can see why she’d leave Karenin, but what goes wrong with Vronsky? Why does she become so spiteful? And Kitty and Levin. That’s so beautiful, but look at Tolstoy and his wife. The things Woody told me about that marriage . . .”—she pushed out her lips and made a burring sound—“. . . forcing her to keep a diary and then insisting that they read each other’s diaries and then getting mad about everything, and not letting her have any of the money from his books, and then running away at the end, and he wouldn’t let her see him when he was dying in a railway station in the middle of nowhere.”
She looked at Guido: “You’ve got a philosophy of life,” she said. “You explain it.”
“I’ve never read Anna Karenina,” he said.
“You can borrow my copy. But seriously, Guido.”
“I don’t think anyone can understand a long-term marriage,” Guido said. “A long-term marriage is the most mysterious thing in the world. Take my mom and dad. Now you expect an Italian man to fool around a little, right? And my mom puts up with it. In an Italian marriage there’s a little wiggle room —”
“For the man,” Miranda interrupted.
“True. But when you think about it, for every man that fools around, there’s got to be a woman that fools around too, right?”
“Unless all the men are fooling around with the same woman.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “She’d have to be pretty busy, or maybe you’ve got a hundred different guys fooling around with fifty different women. That’s probably more like it. But the principle is the same.”
“What’s the principle?”
“The principle is . . .” Guido said, but then he hesitated, and then he laughed.
They passed Orvieto, towering above them on their right, and were coming to Montefiascone, but Guido still hadn’t figured out the principle.
They discussed the rules of marriage, of Italian marriages and of American marriages. They asked each other, are the rules the same for men and for women, and are they the same for couples who’ve been married twenty or thirty years as they are for young married couples? Is it okay for young married people to fool around because they are, well, young and hot-blooded, or is it bad for them to fool around because they’re newly married and should still be in love? Is it okay to fool around after a certain age—say fifty—because you’ve stuck it out for a long time with the same partner and deserve a little holiday now and then? Or is it bad to fool around when you’re past fifty because you should know better, you should have figured out by now how to control your passions? And are there men like Zanni, strong men full of the life force, who are exempt from the rules of ordinary morality? Men like Picasso? Goethe? Guido’s dad? And are there women like this?
Guido couldn’t think of any examples.
“How about Peggy Guggenheim?” Miranda asked. “Or Maria Callas? Or Catherine the Great?”
Guido didn’t know.
“And who makes up the rules anyway?” Miranda wanted to know. “Are these rules based on anything really out there, or are they just customs based on resentment, the resentment of those who are too afraid to take what they want from life, so they don’t want others to have it either?”
They reached the outskirts of Rome at about seven o’clock without having resolved a single one of these important questions.
There was someone else Miranda hadn’t “seen.” Guido himself. Guido was the son and nephew of the two men—I FRATELLI GRAZIANO—who owned the movie-supply company, who owned the dollies and the big crane and the Panavision camera and the Chinese lanterns and the klieg lights and the miles of cable and the generator and the rain machine. She realized this when they pulled into the lot on the outskirts of Rome, near Cinecittà, and were greeted by the night watchman.
“The boss’s son,” she said. “And I thought you were just a dolly grip.”
“Just a dolly grip?” he said, and she knew that she still didn’t have it right.
“Sorry,” she said. And then she said, “Why am I always apologizing to you?”
“I told you,” he said. “You’ve got to treat yourself with more respect.”
It was already dark. Guido didn’t have a car, so they had to ride his Vespa down Via Tuscolana all the way into the city, about five kilometers. She held on tight and kept her eyes closed most of the time, wondering what she’d do for a nightgown that night and for clean clothes in the morning, and remembering bits and pieces of Roman Holiday, one of her mother’s favorite films, with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Or was it Gregory Peck? Princess Anne takes a holiday from being a princess and rides around Rome on the back of a Vespa, and then when Cary Grant, or Gregory Peck, parks the Vespa outside the Colosseum, she takes off and knocks over fruit stalls and café tables and artists’ easels. Miranda thought maybe that was what she needed too: a Roman holiday, a holiday from being herself.
But when Guido finally dismounted, outside the Graziano family palazzo in Trastevere, where he had his own apartment, she was too tired to do anything but take off her clothes and climb into bed while Guido went to get his dog, Peppino, who’d been staying with his parents. Lying in bed, she tried to remember Roman history. She’d taken a special topics course when she thought she was going to be a history major: “Women in the Ancient World: Sappho, Artemisia, Cleopatra, Cornelia, Julia (Augustus’s daughter, or granddaughter?), Octavia, Agrippina, and the vestal virgins who would have been buried alive for doing what she’d come to Rome to do. She was thinking about the vestal virgins, about being buried alive, and the next thing she knew it was morning and Guido’s dog, some kind of hunting dog, was nuzzling her face, interrogating her with his nose, asking her, with his tongue, who are you and what are you doing here?
There was a note from Guido taped to the bathroom mirror: he’d gone to get their luggage from the movie truck at the lot.
Guido’s father, mother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and sister and her husband and their three children all lived in the same palazzo, and they all ate Sunday dinner together.
Miranda had expected Guido to keep her a secret. “Do they know who I am? What did you tell them?” she asked.
“I told them you were someone special.”
“Does your dad know that I’m above the line?”
He laughed. “Not anymore you’re not. The shoot is over.”
Miranda wasn’t sure she wanted to be someone special, but she didn’t have a choice. She sat with Guido at one end of a long table, near Guido’s uncle, his sister, and his sister’s husband, who all spoke English.
Guido’s father sat at the other end of the table and talked directly to Miranda, explaining the different dishes that Guido’s mother kept bringing in from the kitchen and the wine, pausing from time to time to let someone translate for him. He asked her about Florence as if it were a foreign country. What did the people eat there? Was Chianti wine as acidic as they said it was? And about the movie: He wanted to hear about the boom of the crane getting stuck, about how his son had saved the day. He wanted to hear it in Miranda’s own words. Where was she when it happened? What did the director do? And he explained in some detail how he personally was going to replace the old ball bearings on the pivot point with oil-impregnated sleeve bearings. Guido’s sister, Lucia, translated, and Guido’s mother kept up a running commentary of her own, which was translated by Lucia’s husband, insisting that a star like Miranda wasn’t
interested in ball bearings and pivot points. What Guido’s mother was interested in was the love story, the romance with Zanni. She was almost in love with that man herself, she said. She’d seen every one of his films.
At the end of the dinner, which lasted most of the afternoon, Guido’s father went down to the cantina and came back with a bottle of Fragolino from the year of Miranda’s birth, 1961—she was two years older than Guido. He toasted her in Italian, and Lucia translated, though Miranda suspected she wasn’t translating everything. He went on to say that Guido was almost thirty years old and that it was time for him to get married, and then Lucia refused to translate anymore, and they dipped their little cookies, cantucci, in the Fragolino, which tasted, to Miranda, like strawberries.
That night Guido and Miranda made love like an old married couple, as if they’d skipped over a stage in their relationship. If Miranda was uneasy, it was because she thought that Guido was on the edge of saying he loved her. She recognized the signs: he’d start to say something and then say something else, and he kept asking inappropriate questions: does this feel good? does that feel good? would you like me to . . . ? She thought that Guido was waiting for her to come before saying what he had to say, but she was too tired, and too full, and after a while what they were doing started to feel like work, and she told him to go ahead, and she could see that he didn’t know what to do, that he didn’t want to go on ahead and leave her behind, but she cocked her body so that he couldn’t hold himself back, and then for a few seconds he was gone and she was alone in the dark. He went into the bathroom to dispose of the condom. She heard the toilet flush. When he came back she was curled up on her side. He curled up behind her, and she thought that now he was going to tell her that he loved her as a sort of consolation prize. But he didn’t say anything, and pretty soon he was asleep, and she didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed.
In the morning, Guido wanted to show Miranda the city, his city, the real Rome, Trastevere, where the most authentic Romans lived. He wanted to show her the mosaics in Santa Maria in Trastevere, the oldest Christian church in Rome, and then drink a caffè in the piazza and look at the fountain. Then lunch at Casa della Fornarina, where Raphael’s mistress had lived, and after lunch they could climb up to the dome of San Pietro. “It’s really wonderful,” he said. “You’re in this tight little winding stairway. It’s steep. It’s hot. It’s dark. There aren’t any windows. It’s like being in the womb. You can’t go back down, and it takes forever. Sometimes people panic, but you really can’t go back down. There’s no room. Not with people coming up behind you, like other souls waiting to be born. And then you step out into the light. It’s like being born again. You’ll see.”
But Miranda didn’t want to see, didn’t want to be born again. At least not yet. She wanted to have her own Roman avventura, wanted to discover something by herself, wanted to follow the real Margot’s itinerary on the day that she’d followed the real Sandro to Rome and said good-bye to him in the train station. She could see that Guido was disappointed, but he took her to the station on his Vespa. They bought a map and he helped her locate all the places that had been important to Margot. She didn’t know when she’d be back, she said. Probably late afternoon. Then they could do something together. You could still climb the dome at five o’clock, he said, but after that it’s closed.
She waited for Guido to leave, and as he left she pretended she was Margot, watching her lover, Sandro, walking arm in arm with his wife, walking out of the station and out of her life, never looking back. From the station she walked to Santa Maria Maggiore to see the confessionals lined up like porta-potties. Margot had tried to make a confession here, but the priest had shouted at her and turned her away. Then Campo dei Fiori, where Margot and Sandro had stayed, and then the French church, San Luigi, where she’d looked at the Caravaggios with Sandro, and then the Pantheon. She circled the Pantheon till she found the fountain-pen store where Margot had spent her last lire on a Montblanc. Miranda already had a Montblanc, but the pens were so beautiful she was tempted to buy another, an Aurora or a Pelikan or an eight-sided Omas.
She stopped for a dolce and a cappuccino on her way to the English-language bookstore near the Spanish Steps. She wanted something to read for the trip home. It was three o’clock. She asked for directions at the American Express office. There were two English-language bookstores nearby, one in Via dei Greci and one in Via della Vite. She cashed five hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks. She had plenty of money and thought she’d go back to the fountain-pen store. Margot had more than one fountain pen, after all.
In the Anglo American Book Company on Via della Vite she picked out one of Margot’s favorite Nero Wolfe novels. She scanned the fiction section for The Sixteen Pleasures and found three copies of the American edition. There was a British edition too, and an Italian translation. She looked at it and thought of buying it, and then another browser, a woman who looked like her mother—or what her mother would have looked like if she’d been Italian—spoke to her in Italian. Miranda had to apologize. “Non parlo italiano,” she managed to say. The woman spoke to her in English.
“It’s really very good,” she said. “I’ve read it in English and Italian.” She asked Miranda where she was staying and offered to walk with her as far as Largo Torre Argentina. “It’s not a tower,” she explained, “in case you’re wondering. And it’s got nothing to do with Argentina. The earliest temples in Rome are there, and an unofficial cat sanctuary—like the ones at the Protestant Cemetery and the Colosseum. We’re working to get a law passed to make it illegal to sfrattare cats from places where they’ve established a home. To kick them out.”
The woman had been a singer in the Coro Romano but had been forced to take early retirement. She’d always loved cats and had become a gattera, a cat lady.
The cat sanctuary was in one of the temples that had been excavated in the piazza, forty feet below street level. The cat ladies came every morning at eleven o’clock. There was no running water. They brought water in buckets to clean the cages. They needed volunteers, the woman said, and contributions. Miranda, who had seen the collection box for cats in the Protestant Cemetery, gave her all the money from the traveler’s checks she’d just cashed. Thousands of lire, huge banknotes. “Signorina,” the gattera protested, “it’s too much.” But she put the banknotes in her purse.
Miranda got out her map, and the gattera showed her how to get back to Guido’s. It wasn’t far. Just across the Ponte Sisto to Trastevere.
Miranda stopped on the bridge and looked down at the sluggish Tiber. She remembered that she’d never told the gattera that she was the actress who was going to play Margot in the film. It was four thirty. Guido would be waiting for her, but it was probably too late to be born again. What Miranda knew was that love is a choice, a commitment. Love is moving on past infatuation, past fantasy, to reality. But everybody knew this. She thought of Margot’s advice: whatever she was going to enter into, she should do it wholeheartedly. With no reservations. But she barely knew Guido.
What would Margot do?
She still had no idea, but it didn’t really matter. She was on her own now.
Director’s Cut
Michael had been afraid that after the break it would be hard to find their rhythm again, but everything had gone smoothly. Zanni had ripped the fake fresco off the fake wall of the fake Badia Fiorentina, and Miranda, with minimal coaching from Margot, had stitched together the gatherings of the fake Aretino. Sitting on an apple box, Michael had watched it all happen.
He had not gone to the clinic for another leuprolide injection, and no matter how much Beryl scolded and wheedled, he’d refused to make another appointment. He was through with leuprolide. He’d agreed to check himself into Sloan-Kettering as soon as they got back to New York, and then the children were coming to the city for a reunion, and then he’d see. Beryl had made all the arrangements.
He and Beryl left the morning after the wrap party,
but instead of going to Venice, as planned, they changed their minds at the last minute and flew to Naples. Neither of them had ever been south of Rome. They wanted something different. Beryl had gone to the little travel agency in Piazza San Pier Maggiore and booked a room in a small hotel on the Spaccanapoli which, according to her Red Guide to Naples, bisects the city, following the course of the old Roman Decumanus Inferiore. She’d bought several guidebooks, in fact, and had a long list of things to see in addition to Naples itself: Pompeii, Herculaneum, the Amalfi Coast. The hotel—Soggiorno Sansevero—would arrange all the trips.
Michael didn’t want to see anything. He wanted to be somewhere where he could just be. Somewhere where he didn’t know anyone. Somewhere where nothing was familiar. He remembered going with Beryl to Mykonos as a young man after a shoot in the south of France. What a pleasure: there was absolutely nothing one felt obligated to see. No monuments. No museums. One hot afternoon they’d walked across the island to a deserted beach. They’d eaten a picnic lunch and drunk a bottle of Samos Sec in a little cave and were drowsing off and they’d seen a woman walking along the deserted beach. They’d watched as she took off her swimsuit and swam out into the Aegean. She swam out so far they couldn’t see her anymore, and then she swam back, put on her suit, and walked back along the beach.
Of course, there was plenty to see in Naples. It wasn’t in Beryl’s nature not to see as much of it as she could. Michael was weak, and he’d been losing weight, but he thought that his appetite had been improving since he stopped the leuprolide. A private car and a guide—arranged by the hotel—would take them to Pompeii and Herculaneum the next day and then for a drive along the Amalfi Coast on Wednesday. But as they were walking back to the hotel from the Duomo, a young man on a Vespa roared by and grabbed Beryl’s large Vuitton handbag. The taxi driver had warned them—one of several warnings—but now it was too late. Beryl was dragged by the arm down Via Tribunali. “Let go,” Michael shouted, but it wasn’t in Beryl’s nature to let go. She rolled to one side and managed to tip the Vespa over. The young man took off running. Beryl still had her bag. And a sore shoulder and a broken nose.
The Italian Lover Page 26