by Nino Ricci
The next day Verne returned from the break and stopped by my room.
“Hey, Vic, how were the holidays?”
“All right, I guess.”
But I couldn’t bear the deadness in me when I spoke. The line between present and future, who I was and who I imagined I’d be, seemed dissolved; I saw only the endless perpetuation of things as they were, my small illusory rallies, my steep descents.
I thought: I will do it. There seemed nothing between the thought and the act now but empty space; I would come to the point where I’d crossed it.
There was a notice in the residence lobby for the university’s counselling clinic. I had seen it a hundred times, had somehow assumed it had nothing to do with me; but now its message stuck. For several days I circled around the idea as around an enemy, trying to find its weakness; and then one day I was simply there in the centre’s office.
The receptionist was cheerful, condescending.
“What can I do for you today?”
I had to fill out a form. I imagined the impression I made, a mental case, gloomy, unshaven, my hair spiky and uneven from the crude cut I’d given it.
I was assigned a young woman in a loose, flowered maxi and a muslin blouse, a hippie type.
“Hello, Victor, I’m Marnie.”
I followed her down a narrow corridor, then another. She walked with a slow, long-strided tranquillity; with each stride her thighs shimmered briefly into shape against the fabric of her skirt.
“You’ll have to excuse the office,” she said. “I have to share it with another student. Very straight.”
She gave me a smile of complicity. Her candour made me uneasy, made me feel she’d assumed some affinity between us that I had to live up to now.
The office was small and cramped, institutional; two metal desks had been lined up against the walls as if stored there. I sat on a black vinyl couch and Marnie across from me in a large desk chair, her legs pulled up beneath her.
“So. What would you like to talk about?”
I had rehearsed a hundred different responses but they all struck me as false now exactly because I’d rehearsed them.
“I dunno. I guess I haven’t been feeling very good and stuff.”
“Emotionally or physically?”
“Emotionally, I guess.”
Marnie nodded, slow, reassuring, seeming a careful impersonation of what a counsellor was.
“How would you say you felt? Sad? Depressed?”
“Depressed, I guess.”
“Was there something that happened, something that made you depressed?”
“No, I dunno. It’s just that things didn’t go very well last term, I started smoking up and stuff.”
Everything had started wrong. I’d made her think I was inarticulate, simple-minded, had the sense I was inventing some other person, not me, as I spoke. We went on to talk about school, about friends, about doing drugs, and yet everything I said seemed at once true and beside the point. Mirrored back to me through her my problems appeared unambiguous, two-dimensional: I was merely lonely, merely shy, merely depressed.
But at the end of the session she reached out and set a hand on my knee.
“It sounds like you’re pretty bummed out,” she said, and there seemed even through her sad-eyed counsellor’s earnestness such a bald recognition of how I felt that my throat tightened with emotion.
I began to see her every week. After the first few sessions the hope of some sudden impending change in me began to fade: I’d expected her to take me up through my life as through a film of it, building toward some final resolution, but each session seemed a new beginning, brought out the same inarticulateness in me, the same evasions. Somehow I couldn’t strike the spot that would crack open the truth of things, felt always a swerving, the instant I came up against what I couldn’t put into words and took refuge in what was merely acceptable, a second-guessing of what Marnie might expect from me. What kept me going at first was only the relief at each session’s end: I muddled through, hardly speaking sometimes, hardly able to string together two honest words, and then came out at the end as into fresh air again, seeming somehow to leave the worst part of myself in Mamie’s office till the following week.
We talked about my wanting to kill myself. I held back at first, afraid of exceeding the bounds of what Marnie might find acceptable; but then when she reacted with her predictable calm I felt a kind of disappointment.
“You have the right to decide to kill yourself. Some people make that choice. But I want you to promise you’ll call me first if you ever feel close to it. Anywhere, any time. I’ll give you my number at home.”
Something in me shrank from taking on this responsibility to her, felt as if in a breath she’d acknowledged my right to kill myself and then made me surrender it to her. And yet the instant obstacle now of that imagined call seemed to serve its purpose, already making the thing seem unlikely as soon as the thought came to mind.
There was a mat-lined room around the corner from Mamie’s office where we did body work. I’d stand on one leg, one hand lightly holding Mamie’s for balance, and let myself fall when I grew tired; I’d get down on all fours, Mamie’s hand on my belly like an ember at the centre of me, and let the muscles relax in my belly and groin. Marnie seemed to think of the body as an extension of the earth, talking about reconnecting with the earth’s gravity; and there was something comforting in this vision of things, its animal freedom, the mind seeming a tiny place within it, merely the last refuge of the body’s slow self-forgetting. But while I could grasp the sense of her theories, somehow I couldn’t muster the faith to surrender myself to the truth of them. In the exercise room once, Marnie had me crouch on the floor and then without explanation draped herself over me like a sack, her breasts, her groin, pressing into me, the weight of her slowly closing me down; and though I could guess her intent, knew I ought to heed my body’s slow scream for release, still I couldn’t find the true moment in me when instinct and thought overlapped.
“I think it would be a good idea if you tried to get me off of you.”
There were other exercises, word associations, role playing; and then the grittier work of looking at my week, my life, the slow haphazard foraging in the past. I wanted to dredge to the bottom of me, bring up all my anger and hate, everything that was missing in words like “lonely” and “shy”; but echoed back through Marnie my reactions to things seemed at every point understandable, predictable, sane.
“What I’m hearing from you is you didn’t feel you had the right to break up with her, that you felt trapped because of that, that that’s where your anger was coming from.”
And in the end these statements seemed not so much solutions we’d groped towards as a coming back, the discovery merely of the shape I’d arranged things around from the start, always the sense in me afterwards of some darkness I hadn’t stepped into, a line I hadn’t crossed.
She asked about my mother’s death. It was the issue we’d seemed to circle around from the start, that I could feel Marnie drawing me back toward with a textbook determinedness. But though I’d thought I could simply set out all the facts with a spare, unsentimental concision, recreate whole the slow unfolding of my mother’s disgrace, of her death, now that the matter sat clearly before me there seemed a lapse in my memory like a hole in it. I could hardly call up an image of her, could remember only flickering details like the lingering fragments of a dream, the echo of footsteps in a hall, two eyes staring out from a stable door. I had the sense for an instant that I’d mistakenly thought of as real some story I’d only imagined.
“I dunno,” I said finally, “I guess I don’t really remember much, I was pretty young and stuff.”
Marnie was sitting straight-backed across from me, intent but also oddly self-contained. I thought of her thinking of me, trying to make me out, and felt a throb of affection for her like a pain.
“Victor, look at yourself, how you’re sitting.”
I had
huddled into a corner of the couch, my knees up and my arms wrapped around them, a parody of withdrawal.
“The few times you’ve mentioned your mother it’s been the same, your whole body just closes right down.”
I expected some gloss from her, some pointing out of the obvious, but she let the moment hang silent between us.
“I guess our time’s up,” she said finally.
Then already we’d begun to approach the end of spring term. We continued on as before but something had changed, the sense of working toward any revelation. I seemed under the full tyranny by now of the image I thought Marnie had formed of me, the complex dynamic of wanting her good opinion and not believing in it, of silently holding her in contempt for it and yet daring less and less to expose it to any risk.
And yet I’d got on with my life, had felt from the outset of my visits a kind of temporary reprieve as if the final question of my worth had been suspended for the time being by them; and then slowly I’d begun to make friends, to do well in my classes, till gradually the largeness of my despair had seemed to dissolve into the everydayness of things, into my small, familiar frustrations and hopes. Nothing had happened and yet everything after all had changed, not the making over I’d hoped for but the subtle shifting of things that made them once again bearable.
We came to our final session. Marnie was just finishing a Master’s and would be leaving the university at the end of term, but she suggested I call her at home when I got back in the fall.
“I’d like to see you again,” she said. “As a friend.”
“Okay. That would be nice.”
There was an instant’s awkwardness when I got up to leave and then we hugged.
“I feel kind of teary,” Marnie said, and laughed. She seemed genuinely moved, her eyes glistening. I hadn’t expected this from her, saw our whole time together skew as if it had grown suddenly real, as if I’d missed till then some crucial element in it, some crucial possibility.
“I guess maybe we’ll see each other in the fall,” I said.
“That would be nice.”
But already walking back across campus I’d let her slip from my mind, felt only the niggling residue of her, the strange lingering pleasure and guilt of parting.
XX
At home that summer I had the sense I had to be accommodated like a visitor, a new formality in how the others treated me as if I couldn’t be expected to understand any more how things worked there. Only Aunt Teresa seemed comfortable around me, casual and confidential, speaking to me in an unusually colloquial English and calling me Victor instead of Vittorio, something I couldn’t remember her doing in the past.
There were tensions. We were building more greenhouses, three of them, running south from the boiler room to the irrigation pond, and my father and uncle were in the midst of some argument. All the familiar patterns, the familiar displacements, Tsi’Umberto’s sharp condescension toward his wife and sons, my father’s silences, the sense when they were near each other of two shadows, two glooms, silently hovering. Domenic had been brought in as some sort of partner in the new greenhouses but appeared grim with the new responsibility, his old rebelliousness still smouldering in him. He had a girlfriend from Detroit now who he brought down once to a wedding, a strawberry blonde with wide hips and pasty skin, and all night long he and his father seemed dark as if with the unspent resentment of some long, festering conflict.
A strangeness had formed around Aunt Teresa like a force field, something to do with her lingering odd religious inclinations, never talked about though the evidence of them was plain enough now, in the magazines she still received, in the meetings she went to every Thursday. But there was more to it than that, or less – the religion seemed merely a marker she used to distinguish herself, to make clear to the rest of the family, to other Italians, that she wasn’t one of them. There was nothing of the smug benevolence of faith to her, only the old cynicism, but backed up now by the threat of an unspoken moral prerogative; she was friendly with people, ready to laugh, to joke, and yet the threat was always there. At the beginning of the summer I was drawn to her because she appeared the one person with whom I could be myself, have a normal adult conversation; but it grew clear finally that her cynicism took me in too, whatever weakness I showed her seeming only to buoy her up in her own superior view of things.
My father had been elected president of Mersea’s Italian club that year. I couldn’t fit this fact into any image I had of him, had always thought of him as irredeemably crippled, outside of things; and yet he’d got by, made a way for himself, was to all appearances the very figure of success. He was the president of the Italian club; he had built up a prosperous farm. The new greenhouses would give us nearly four acres under glass: only a few inglesi and Dutchmen and four or five of the older Italian families had more. At parties at the club he was the one now to whom people came, whom families passed by to greet before supper, whom the men, weighty with confidences, sidled up to at the bar. What had seemed before a child’s sullenness had become in its consistency a kind of dignity – that was what people appeared to honour in him, that he had remained always true to his misfortune, his shame, respectful of it as to the memory of the dead. His very sinew and bone seemed shaped now by that struggle, since his operation his body having taken on a tawny muscularity like something slowly worked down to its essence, with none of the look of well-fed complacence of other Italian men his age.
Yet there remained something shambling about him, a creeping disorder at the edge of his life that might have been simply a comfortable indifference, the last secret retreat of his truer, less driven self, but that struck me as sad somehow, a failure of will, the threat against which everything else had been precariously won and held. He’d bought a new car recently, a cobalt-blue Olds, whispery with comforts, all hydraulics and murmurs and whirrs, an uncommon indulgence for him. But he treated it with the same mix of crude immigrant carefulness and neglect that he showed anything new, covered the front seat with a stretch of old, flowered tablecloth to keep it clean but left bills, church programs, cigarette packs, to collect on the floor, left the body spattered with insects and mud; and he seemed to repeat in it the tension in him between some dream of completion, some belief in himself, and the small apathy that slowly undermined it, just as after his first boyish ministrations he’d let the new boiler room slowly resolve itself into burgeoning islands of clutter, and just as he’d let the farm itself, despite his occasional sudden bouts of cleaning, slowly decay along its edges, the ramshackle barn, the garbage-strewn slopes of the pond, the chaos of brambled junk and rusting implements that lined the path to the back field.
Our house as well had surrendered itself to a slow deterioration, the walls discoloured, the floor tiles yellowing and worn, the kitchen counter rotting with damp around the rim of the sink. Loose tiles on the stairwell and in the entrance hall had been crudely tacked down with nails; tears in the vinyl of the kitchen chairs had been covered with electrical tape or simply been left to gape, wads of stuffing protruding. Aunt Teresa cleaned haphazardly, had the lassitude of a mother who’d just seen her children leave home; my father complained to her but there was a tiredness in his anger, something blunted or broken by the years of Aunt Teresa’s belligerence, her refusal ever simply to yield herself to the notion that they shared a household she was the woman of.
“Don’t think you’ll have me to look after you the rest of your life.”
And there was a hardness in her threat that made it sound plausible, made me think she’d seen through the waste of the life she’d had with us and was silently plotting her escape.
In the bathroom creeping moisture had begun to erode the plaster around the edge of the tub, chunks of it fallen away to reveal metal mesh and empty space behind. Taking baths I thought of my father, my aunt, sitting naked and alone there as I was, all the years they’d done that while the room had slowly decayed around them. I began to cry once, slow, heaving sobs that came up from
my belly and chest – there seemed a darkness in things too deep to contemplate, a grief so endless that no crying could ever exhaust it. For perhaps the first time since school had ended I thought of Marnie, of all the things I hadn’t told her, wanted to render up to her now the whole of this moment, the cooling water, the crumbling wall, the room’s strange quality of light, amber and unreal like an autumn twilight after rain.
I worked together with my father a few days on the new greenhouses, the two of us setting rafters in place on the purlins while Rocco and Domenic followed behind to clamp them down. There was a tentativeness in him that seemed to want suddenly to include me in things, that hung in the air between us like a question.
“The young guys now it’s different, with school and everything, you can learn the right way to doing things.” His English made him seem vulnerable, rustic. “Half the time we just take a chance, we don’t know if it’s gonna help. You just learn every year. I thought if Rocco or Domenic did some course but their father just wanted them to work, that’s his business.”
But it hurt me to see him so shyly loquacious, to feel his need: I had nothing to offer him, wanted to be on good terms with him but only to disentangle myself from him, to define more clearly the line that divided us. In my vision of the future he had no place, was simply a liability to be gotten beyond.
I didn’t see Rita until the end of June, half-expecting some invitation that never came, then appearing impulsively at the Amhersts’ one evening gloomy with resentment; but afterwards my visits took on their old regularity. Certain details in the Amhersts’ house stuck out suddenly, idiosyncratic, the cow figurines on the window-ledge in the kitchen, the crocheted doilies in the bathroom, small touches of domesticity I hadn’t noticed before, that seemed out of place in my memory of Mrs. Amherst. But beyond these petty observations I seemed to take away from my visits nothing that was pleasurable or new. If there was any logic in the visits at all, what drove me to continue them despite their awkwardness, their tedium, the guilt I felt on returning home, afraid my father could read in me my skulking betrayals of him, it was only in the vague belief that my persistence would somehow be rewarded: Rita was all I had in Mersea, nothing else left there to hold me, not my family nor my abandoned friends nor the place itself, which had never seeped into my marrow, become home, my visits now merely a kind of waiting, some claim I was laying on Rita’s future.