The peculiar name he’d been given, the first name of Bertrand, was his father’s idea, after Bertrand Russell—the father an intellectually frustrated owner of fishing boats who wanted actually to be an English writer and thinker.
Well, Anna said, the career of V. S. Naipaul must drive him crazy.
Bert made the funniest face in response—
Oh, he said. My lord. You have no idea, man! No idea!
Anna laughed.
I swear he gets up in the morning and if Naipaul is mentioned in the paper or on the BBC or even just comes into his mind he starts to shake and tells my mum, now I have to go back to bed. Of course he doesn’t go back to bed, he goes to his boats, you know. But with a look on his face. I call it grouper face. He looks like a grouper. You’ve seen a grouper?
No, she said.
I’ll show you a grouper, he said.
Promises, promises, she said. He never did show her a grouper.
* * *
COME THE END of that summer she invited her parents to New York, got them a nice hotel suite for three nights, bought them theater tickets, she even went with them to one of the plays, while Bert was working. She didn’t do musicals, she told them, but they knew this already about her. They of course were from Pennsylvania and were perfectly happy to do musicals. One night she and Bert took them to a traditional sawdust French bistro in the Theater District, Tout Va Bien, on 51st Street. Another night, Bert dined with them then went to work at midnight; it was traditional Italian, La Strada, on 46th.
These places opened after the war, she said.
Which war? Bert said.
They all looked at him.
Oh, that war, he said. They laughed.
These restaurants—plenty of them around town, a bunch on the Upper East Side—were already passé in a way she liked. She was pre-nostalgic.
Guys came back from France and Italy, she said. I guess some of the people who emigrated capitalized on the new familiarity. Can you imagine, this was exotic.
No one, Bert said, coming back from England would have been demanding an English restaurant, though. No no.
Why not? her father said. It was his conviction that the highest moral achievement was to be pleasant when in public, and largely silent at home.
Well, to put the matter in the simplest terms, Bert said, English food is disgusting.
Well then, her father said. That certainly explains it.
You were in France, Anna’s mother said, to Anna. It was almost an accusation.
Yes. Italy too for a few days. We flew to Rome.
We? her mother said.
A friend and I, she said.
The friend in question was Molly but Anna would not give her mother the satisfaction of being assured it wasn’t a man.
On their third and last night Anna took her father for a nightcap in the hotel bar, a too-modern room with a curving bar in black and red. In its favor was that it was almost empty.
Bert had gone to work his monster shift at the hospital, she had attended Tom and Viv at the Public Theater with her parents; she had little interest in contemporary theater but this play she had actually wanted to see. Now it had put her in a rage.
That T. S. Eliot wasn’t a good man, her mother said after the play.
The play totally distorted their history, Anna said. That’s why it feels so good and so right for the moment: it’s a bunch of sentimental lies. And the actors were all wrong.
Her mother, an early sleeper, went up to bed; her father was a lifetime member of the insomnia club. Anna at sixteen and seventeen and eighteen, coming home late, used to encounter him in the room called the study, kind of a funny room with a TV and couch and big mahogany desk with leather top and a desk chair of green leather brass-tacked to a cherrywood frame. The desk and its chair were exclusively her father’s territory, only he was allowed to sit there; but the couch and TV, if he wasn’t ensconced at the desk, were open territory. He had a painting on the wall, an oil he was rather proud of, depicting a bear up on hind legs, teeth out, gripping a tree. They shook the trees to impress females, he told her. When she was little she wondered what female bears found impressive in this tree-shaking bit. An odd picture for her mild-mannered father, not only to have but which to give pride of place—perhaps he had longed for that kind of wild virility. The thought was amusing and poignant.
You want brandy? Anna said. We should have a brandy.
Well, it’s a special trip I guess, her father said. What a vague man he was. Never yes, or no. Some sentence pronouncing an unwillingness to be full-fledged in willing or not willing. In her youth she hadn’t realized how often this vapid quality manifested socially, though his capacity in their relationship actually never to be there, or to say anything with force or conviction, these she had known well.
She ordered them each a Martell. A little cold water on the side.
I’m really angry at you guys, she said, after her first sip of the cognac.
Well, I guess we knew that, her father said. He took a sip and quivered.
You know, it wasn’t easy for us, he said after a silence.
She was glaring at him, she felt it but couldn’t quite stop it. Perhaps if she stared into the amber-brown Martell.
We lost both our children—Mark, then you, her father said. What did we do? What did we do that made us deserve that?
She wanted to say, you’re small-hearted people, but that was vicious and not entirely true, for look at him now. Look at the suffering in his face, after all these years. Christ, why did she feel for this man? This was what men did to you, fathers, husbands, lovers, all of them. Showed so little emotion that you yearned for it and then when you finally got it you forgave them and wanted to comfort them. Fuck that. Fuck that.
She said, When Mark took off, after the calls, when time stretched out, measured in Mark minutes, Mark hours, Mark days, Mark months, and then Mark years—
He went to say something. We—
No, she said. No. Let me finish. It was normal and it was inevitable and it was suffering of a kind I found terrifying. I still find it terrifying. I still don’t have a family because of it. I had to get away from it. I had to insulate myself while I was there and—
What could we have done—
You could have wrestled that grief out of you over time or worked through it and not so deeply embraced it. You could have, I don’t know, begun to fucking live again. Or try, for your child, to live again. With me as your actual living breathing daughter, the new center of your world, not just a reminder, not just a place holder in a landscape of sorrow. But that’s an impossible thing to ask, really, isn’t it? Mark didn’t die or get kidnapped and he wasn’t left brain dead after a drunken teen car accident; he walked away and didn’t call and made you wait. For twenty years.
And then before she could properly resist, it came up and swept over her and she began to cry, gulping sobs, tears soaking her face, falling into her lap, her nose running, her mouth open but unable to articulate the sentence she needed to say, it was playing in her head, over and over and over: I love my brother, I love my brother, I love my brother. Where has he gone? My beautiful brother? She never did say it.
* * *
A HONEYMOON, BERT had a week, a full year after the marriage. Back to la bell’Italia. Starting in Rome for her (she had more time, Bert was meeting her in Florence), ending in Venice. It really was an extraordinary place. Anna had expected something more concocted, less authentic, but no: the light was like a blessing. It was the essence of physical beauty, really: light on forms. The forms were largely stone and masonry, the colors infinite variations within a certain range, from sandy yellow in Rome, through red brick, terracotta, charcoal farther north, to pale mauve and dried blood on the crumbling walls of Venice. They had taken the train from Florence to Padua—they stayed in Padua to save on the hotel. Nothing was cheap in Venice but everywhere else, with the dollar at near eighteen hundred lire, was cheaper than cheap, nice rooms in a pens
ione for twenty thousand lire, full meals for two with three courses, wine, fruit, coffee, a little cheese, for thirty-five. Less than twenty dollars. They came into Venice one day by train, one day by bus. Some Italians they’d asked told them, oh take the train, the bus is twice as long, and other Italians told them, you must take the bus, it’s half the time of the train. Each took about thirty minutes. It was remarkable how assertively the Italians gave you directions that were wrong in every crucial respect.
On their way to Padua from Florence: the countryside in Tuscany and Emilia and Veneto: well, it was famous and it was famous because it was so fucking beautiful. She wanted to see it all, own it almost. Not own it as in proprietary ownership: own it as in know it, internalize it, have it. Live in it. She wanted to see Ravenna and the Palladian villas in Vicenza. More. She wanted to see where Joyce and Svevo had wandered in Trieste. She didn’t have the time or the money. But she loved what was in front of her. To walk in Venice. You figured it must have been a cliché, the beauty of the place, and unendurable with the tourists, but it wasn’t, it was absolutely vivid and self-renewing. The tourists were like the fifty thousand pigeons in the Piazza San Marco, a slightly unpleasant but remarkable aspect of all that made the place so astonishing. You went down the narrow alleyways and wider calli or along the minor canals, your eye accommodating a new palette for the universe, the thousand shades of ocher and red, the buildings peeling to reveal abstracts in every grade of sand and taupe and rose, sepia and sanguine, all breaking away in the constant moisture, one revealing the other beneath it and a third shade beneath that. And overhead, spilling from the windowsills, lush geraniums in scarlet and crimson and ruby and cerise, all reds, only reds, and such narrow walks the windows opened on, how did they get the sun—but the Italians could breathe and produce flowers. Down every shadowed way you came quickly to an end, had to turn right or left, and you saw chalked on the wall a childish simple arrow, to the right or left or occasionally both. It took Bert and her a bit to figure out the arrows. They referred to one of two destinations, depending on which direction you were walking: going one way, the arrows pointed to San Marco; going the other way, to the train station.
Bert one day wanted to see an exhibition she had no interest in—Gli Atroci Machini di Tortura nella Historia; Atrocious Machines of Torture in History, translated literally: it was the biggest hit in Venice and was held over.
I take a medical interest, Bert told her.
Yeah, sure, she said.
He went off, she walked. They had seen some paintings that morning in one of the old palazzi. Everything a crumbling wreck yet you knew it would all still be there, would endure another century, or two or three. Longer than her own country’s experiment in violent capitalism run amok. She came upon the Grand Canal and followed it a short distance to the Ponte Rialto, where they’d agreed to meet, and sat down at one of the café tables set up at canal’s edge on the pescaria, what the Venetians called their quays, or this one anyway; it was a café next to the stone steps leading up to the bridge. A German café, so she ordered a beer first, it was excellent, dry, just cold enough but not too. She had a sandwich with it, thin prosciutto and a sharp cheese. Then a coffee and then another. She had a book—the Blue Guide, Northern Italy: From the Alps to Rome—she opened it to the proper pages, Padua–Mestre–Bassano–Venice, but she did not read it. She simply sat there, back to the tourists passing up the pescaria onto the bridge, and watched the water, which seemed to move in several directions at once, catching the light; she watched too the gondole and gondolieri maneuvering them, boats clapping against the quayside with the sound of tight lumber on smooth stone, or up against each other, like stringless guitars knocked together, that sound of hollow wood; the gondolieri took on passengers at a short stairway perhaps ten yards down the cobbled walkway from where she sat; and at a table beside her there was planted an ancient-looking couple, clearly not Italian, English in fact, though she wouldn’t know it until they spoke, after an hour of silence. In the meanwhile they stared into the half distance and smoked filterless cigarettes one after another down to the nubbin before ponderously mashing them with the toes of their shoes against the stones. They were both angular thin, desiccated, slightly stooped from a shortage of calcium, pale in the way of northern Europeans. They wore the bleakest possible expressions. Their unhappiness, sitting in total silence for so long—while she waited for Bert, read a few lines, looked at the water—it fascinated her. How does one end up there exactly… what sort of tortured emotional isolation would be required. They moved each limb slowly, like two tortoises in the sun, to lift to lips their glasses of white wine (of which they consumed a great deal), to meticulously place the glasses back on the table, to bring cigarette to mouth, eventually to drop cigarette and lift foot to extinguish it, leaning over slightly with eyebrows arched in interest at the forceful procedure, making sure the thing was done completely—grind, grind, grind. They’d been given an ashtray but did not use it.
Finally, the woman spoke up, out of nowhere, addressing her partner with the driest of dry upper-class English accents:
What are you going to do with all your money, John?
A longish silence while she (and Anna, and the universe) awaited the answer.
I don’t know, he finally said, shrugging his face, if such is possible, a grimace of uncaring, a flicking of his cigarette, brushing a bit of ash from his pant leg, not looking at the woman, though she, it seemed for the first time, was clearly looking at him.
Invest it, I suppose, he said.
After which they returned to their sunlit rock of silence, two lizards. It seemed to Anna they must have needed the warmth to bring their blood up to an operable temperature.
Anna paid with her newly acquired VISA card. The Italian trip would put her in hock, by perhaps eighteen hundred dollars, maybe a little less. Added on to the law school loans, which would total about twenty-five thousand. She wanted on graduating to do nonprofit work. Nonprofit should be her middle name.
* * *
BACK IN NEW York, she found Bert in the kitchen one afternoon when he was home, a rare event, him being home, his hours so long—he was rearranging the dishes in the dishwasher. He seemed furious. He was furious.
It looks like you’re tossing the dishes in here from horseshoes’ distance, he said, hammering the rack back into the body of the machine.
I can’t believe you’re actually angry about this, she said. You’re never fucking here and when you are here, rare of rare days, this is what you get up to, emotionally? What’s the matter with you?
She found out soon enough what was the matter with him. Monogamy and domesticity and the need sexually to roam was the matter with him. He was, she discovered (it wasn’t that hard to discover, after a few suspicious moments and then two days of painful urination), a serial cheater. She threw him out after twenty-three months.
He said, We can get past this. I don’t want to be divorced.
Of course you don’t want to be divorced. That’s a condition and you’re a doctor so you don’t want to have a condition. Except being married to me is a condition too and not a label. You think you want the label, but what it really is, to be in a relationship, it’s not symbolic. It’s a living organism. It bleeds and shits on the floor. It requires attention and care. Now it requires two shots and a round of antibiotics. You’d know all about that.
Don’t, he said.
Do! she said. Do! And I will! The relationship of two people—it’s work. You don’t have a fucking clue. It’s been obvious for a while—I started to see what it meant, what it is, this relationship, and I watched you not seeing it or caring to see it. I thought—but he will! Except he won’t. So fine. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to hold out anyway. The quicker we end it, the better. Find someone who lives as much in the gesture and the symbol and the label as you do. A trophy wife. You’ll need a higher salary but that’s in reach. So move out and go find her.
You’re a cunt, he
said. That was all he said; he just looked at her with a molten anger.
He continued the look. The moments in life when men frighten you: this was one. He finally rose and grabbed a jacket and keys and slammed out.
When he had moved out completely and she’d reconfigured the apartment so that it felt like hers, she made it her business to sleep with one of his colleagues. She’d really wanted to. A sweet man of preternatural good looks, on an exchange from Italy. It didn’t last long, just a few weeks.
I feel bad about this, he said. He gestured. What we’re doing.
Oh don’t, she said.
If she’d known someone she could trust to do it, she’d have enjoyed being photographed in bed with the Italian.
I’d love to have pictures of us, she said. I’d send them to him.
Oh my god, he said. Please god. You won’t do that.
Do you see a camera? she said.
He yanked himself halfway up in bed and looked right and left, up at the ceiling. She laughed. He flopped back down.
The last time she saw Bert, outside the courthouse downtown, near the Serra wall and Foley Square, he looked at her and said, I’m sorry, you know.
That’s great, she said. Thanks. You might change one day. But no marriage can survive if it involves one person sitting around waiting for the other person to change. That’s for fools.
She was getting shrill: or no, she was about to get shrill and wouldn’t permit it.
But thank you, really. I wish you the best.
I wish you the best. Jesus fucking Christ. It was like she was a polite HR executive putting the finishing touches on his dismissal. Then an awkward hug and her life in marriage was over.
And of course she wondered: what was happening with George? She had heard he was engaged, they must be married by now. To Marina. Like a boatyard, funny.
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