by Alix Shulman
Now, looking back, I’m not surprised. Why else than for sex would a failing millionaire refugee be interested in a teenaged waitress? But at the time sex never entered my mind. I loved the old man and had thought he loved me a little too. I extricated myself as quickly as possible from his wispy embrace, and, begging to be taken to the station, left his drawing discreetly behind me.
One morning about a year later, as I was pouring out the breakfast coffee for my new husband, Frank came across Mr. Winograd’s obituary in the New York Times.
“Say, Sasha, what was the name of your millionaire? Winograd? He just died, and listen to this.”
It turned out that the story that had circulated about him at the Belleview Palace was all true—Nazis, diamonds, everything. His will divided his fortune among several nephews and a faithful nurse, and gave his paintings to the Metropolitan. I was not mentioned.
“I’d have thought from the way you talked about him that he’d have left you at least one painting,” teased Frank in that smug way of his I could never answer. “You must have loved him more than he loved you,” he twitted.
From the Times’s list of his maladies, it seemed that Mr. Winograd had died of everything. He was sixty-seven years old, and I had just turned twenty.
Four
Beneath the Pincio a pale mannequin bends
Under the leaden burden of green eyelids,
Proposes poses patiently and spends
Her last lire on a pack of gum.
Atop the dum-dee-dum Janiculum—
It was no use. I had been working on the poem for three mornings and I had only got through the easiest of Rome’s hills. Even if I managed to do the Janiculum today, there would still be the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Esquiline, the Quirinal, the Viminal—impossible. An opening paragraph of a short story, one stanza of one poem, and the setting for a play. Not enough. If only I knew how they were supposed to end; if only I knew what I wanted to say. I was a failure.
I snapped closed my notebook and looked across the piazza at the vivacious fountain. Young men in lean trousers and pointed shoes sat on the rim smoking while children played in the street. At least an hour more before I could begin picking a trattoria for lunch; too late to do a museum. Another morning shot trying to write, trying to be somebody. I might as well have gone to Pompeii with Frank’s Academy friends the Ericksons or stayed in Spain. The days were passing me by and I was closer to broke than to a solution. As I washed down my pink pill with my espresso, I wondered if I should see another doctor. Was the fuzz on my face spreading? I felt it with my finger. Insufficient ovulation—when would my treacherous body stop playing tricks on me?
I finished my espresso, left a tip on the table, and put out my cigarette before crossing the piazza to the shady side. In Italy nice women don’t smoke in the street. In Spain I had ignored the customs, laughing when Manolo warned me I could be arrested for kissing in the street. But I had had a man to protect me then; now I was no longer up to it. My nerves were in such a state that I needed all my energy just to survive the ordinary indignities of walking alone; I wasn’t going to ask for trouble over a lousy cigarette. When in Rome … But of course it wasn’t just Rome; it was everywhere. Everywhere, harassed by day, afraid by night. Why? Eyes to the ground, I passed the young men smoking on the fountain’s rim and followed the ancient paving stones back to my hotel, self-conscious of every step. I stuck out all over.
I knew it was supposed to be flattering to be hissed at, but it was not. At best—when I felt good about myself—it was annoying, like the aggressive solicitations of derelicts; there was no way to ignore it and every response was wrong. At worst—when I felt bad about myself, which was most of the time these days—it was a humiliating assault. A woman needed an excuse for walking the streets alone. Like blacks in white neighborhoods back home, we had to walk with our eyes to the ground. In fact, the only sure way to walk the streets unharassed was to be with a man.
The obvious excuses—a guidebook, a novel—seldom worked. They didn’t even enable one to sit reading in the park. “Good book?” a man would ask, sitting down beside me on the bench in New York or Rome, and I would either have to insult him, jolly him, or get up and move on. Easier not to sit in the park. Once, back in New York, in the subway station late at night a drunk had started pawing a woman down the platform. I went to find a transit cop. When I returned with one, the drunk had disappeared, and the cop graced us with his wisdom instead. “You’re lucky this time, girls, but it should be a lesson,” he said. “You girls should know better than to wander around alone at two A.M. You should be home.”
It was always the same story, in subways or suburbs. From my beginnings in Baybury Heights, a nice neighborhood where we moved because it was “safe,” it was always the girl who was kept in the house after school if a boy molested her, never the boy. Ostensibly she was kept in for protection, but how was it different from punishment if she couldn’t even play on the street? Since boys would be boys, they might be scolded, but no one ever kept them indoors; they could take care of themselves. No one ever said “girls will be girls”; for girls were expected to be ladies. Every Baybury girl was early taught her place through the ritual rape called “pantsing.” My own occurred one muddy March day in the third grade.
My best friend Jackie was staying after school to practice on the bars that day, so I stayed too. We were practicing a new trick: over-and-over-two-legged. It was a hard trick, but I mastered it. On the bars practicing was what counted; lithe and limber, I practiced and was good. Over and over we went, skirts and hair flying down and then up, the skin behind our knees smarting from the friction with the steel, until the pain finally forced us to stop. We gathered up our trading cards and were just heading through the Victory Gardens for the road when Jackie remembered she wasn’t going home after all, she was going to wait for her mother at her cousin’s house down the street from school.
My stomach flopped over as though I were still on the bars. Without Jackie, I would have to walk unprotected past all the vacant lots on Auburn Hill. I looked back anxiously for someone else to walk with, but there wasn’t a soul in the playground.
Jackie and I started walking slowly down Cranberry Road. It was still wet enough from the previous night’s rain for a few worms to remain on the sidewalk, and we walked slowly to avoid them. I hated the sidewalk worms. Besides, the skin behind our knees smarted if we went quickly. But no matter how slowly we walked, I knew the moment was coming when we would have to separate.
Finally we reached Jackie’s cousin’s house. With no visible regrets, Jackie turned into the drive, kicked at the gravel, and said goodbye.
“See you tomorrow,” I managed to answer, as though it were any other day. And then, proceeding by myself to the end of the block where I turned reluctantly into Auburn, I began my lone descent of the hill.
Dawdling as I walked, I pretended nothing could happen. What was there to be afraid of? Didn’t I know all the boys in my class? Not even they, I told myself, would want to hide in the weeds among worms. When I saw the grasses moving on the flat of the hill just before the descent, I began to think the whole walk home was a dream, that the sidewalk worms were really snakes moving the grasses. Please get me home, I begged of nobody I knew under my breath. Tensely I gripped my trading cards. I quickened my step as I neared the spot where the grasses moved, then marched past, eyes ahead, heart pounding, fingers crossed, not daring to look around.
Just as I was ready to break into a gallop for the final stretch home, a red bandanna descended over my eyes, and I was dragged backwards off the sidewalk into the wet field.
“Get her down!”
“Get her ankles!”
“Quick! Sit on her!”
It was happening, then. I was going to be pantsed.
“Somebody sit on her,” I heard again.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” I cried, thinking I would suffocate under the blindfold.
Someone pulle
d my arms over my head and pinned them down at the wrists, others took my legs, squeezing at the ankles, holding them from kicking until someone else sat on them.
“Let me go!” I kept crying until my words melted into tears. I felt humiliated by my tears (cry baby! cry baby!), though I cried as much from rage as from fear.
When I was finally able to catch my breath I began to fight, kicking and biting, as though there were some possibility of fighting free. But of course there was none.
They gripped my legs at last and, raising me from the buttocks, ripped off my underpants. Then they forced my legs apart at the knees and held them open for one endless moment, staring deep into my secret. No one touched, no one spoke; they saw, their eyes burning me like dry ice.
It wasn’t shame I felt then, only hot, inexpressible fury. You, Melvyn Weeks! You, Bobby Barr! You, Richie Englehart! You, Nazi Richard Conroy! But in the end I was stripped even of my wrath. For the project of my pantsing, once completed, seemed to lose all its appeal to its perpetrators. Stripping me had been only a gesture, an afternoon diversion for a lazy day. Maybe the third-grade boys of Baybury Heights Elementary School already felt seen one, seen them all, or maybe they were only interested in power. For, a moment later, they pulled me shaking to my feet and pushed me back on the sidewalk as though they were my friends. They threw my pants and my trading cards after me, and ordered me on pain of “getting it” never to tell anyone what had happened. Then they ripped off the blindfold, gave me a shove, and diving quickly back to their hiding places in the wet field, finally set me free.
• • •
Grown men didn’t do things like that to us—not in broad daylight, not without an excuse. They kept us in place with veiled threats and insinuations; and they only undressed us mentally, an indignity it was hard to prove. But walking alone was still a problem. In Spain, where no one had felt qualified to interpret my motives, my celebrity had kept me immune from judgment. In Munich I had been justified by having a husband. But here, as a single woman assumed to be in the running, I was subject to all the abuse the Romans could dish out. It is not always, as Mae West says, “better to be looked over than overlooked.” All those dashing Italians I had fallen for in my first enchantment with Rome—Giuliano, the guard at the Colosseum; Angelo, the guide; Mario and the other cowboys on the Piazza di Spagna who followed American women to the cafés of the Via Veneto and whispered extravagant phrases in their ears between sips of Cinzano-soda—those romancing Italians were so full of mocking adulation that they could barely conceal their contempt. I gave them up when I realized that for them I was interchangeable with every other presentable American of a certain age, even the poor starlets who hung around the Via Veneto. Romans collected Americans as Americans collected Romans: parasites all. I felt better now, knowing I could refuse them, but I still had to face them in the restaurants and cafés, at parties and on the street.
I walked into my hotel, too weary for midmorning. I was way off schedule. I would have to face the world twice today.
“Any messages?” I asked at the desk.
“No messages, signora.”
I walked up the three flights to my room.
Stockings and underwear were strung across the room on a portable clothesline. They stretched from bedpost to light fixture to doorknob, cutting off access to the chair. So much dirty laundry. I made for the bed. Why shouldn’t I take a siesta like the Italians? So what if I took mine before midday? I knew I ought to be giving myself a pep talk, studying the guidebook to regain my enthusiasm, picking out my afternoon excursion. But little puddles were forming under each piece of laundry dripping onto the discolored marble floor of my room, and I wasn’t up to tourism.
So much had changed since I had first arrived in the Eternal City full of energy and resolve. On my husbandless high, I had slid into my new life with wide eyes and a loose schedule, taking Rome slowly like old wine. One sight a day, preceded by plenty of homework. Like James’s lady, Isabel Archer herself, I had gone about Rome in a “repressed ecstasy” over the “rugged ruins” and “mossy marbles,” wandering among ruins that had once been emperors’ palaces. I had sat in cafes behind dark glasses watching the crowds, or, tiptoeing through naves and apses, been dazzled by medieval mosaics and Renaissance paintings. To be taken for more than a superficial tourist while I wrote my play was all I’d wanted. “I’ll be living in Rome for a while,” I had written everyone at home, giving a genuine street address, not merely American Express.
Now, after only a few months, I had apparently succeeded. Even when I conspicuously carried a guidebook, no one took me for a tourist any more. I was becoming a fixture at this cafe and that tabac. But far from being fulfilled by my permanent status, I had become exposed. The only purpose I could produce had vanished. If I wasn’t a tourist, then what was I doing here?
People had various justifications for being in Rome. Frank’s old friends the Ericksons up at the American Academy were here on a prestigious grant—that is, Paul Erickson was. There were painters here, businessmen, and plenty of genuine tourists too, distinguishable by having departure dates. Some had eccentric purposes, like the twenty-one-year-old Oklahoman I met at the Vatican who, passing for a tourist, briefly attached himself to me, even courting me by the guidebooks. After a week of Alfredo’s for fettuccini Alfredo, Sistine Chapel for Michelangelo, Via Condotti for neckties, he finally confessed what he was up to. (Too bad; I had enjoyed being with such a seeming innocent in that sly old city, a tourist again myself.) We were exploring a recess of the catacombs together one Sunday, searching out ancient Christian bones with flashlights, when suddenly he touched my arm gingerly and threw himself on my mercy. His father, he said, had sent him abroad to get laid.
No shit! I tried to imagine my father sending me to Europe to get laid. There was a smell of old martyrs in the tomb. I felt old and jaded.
Now, he said, it was almost time for him to return to the States and he still hadn’t made it. Wouldn’t I help him out? I, married, with nothing to lose, an older woman, a Jewess, worldly, understanding—
“You’re a sweet boy, George, but I’m off sex.” He probably didn’t even find me pretty.
“I didn’t think you would. I just thought—I mean, I hoped—”
“I’m really sorry, George.”
“Oh well. It’s been very nice knowing you anyway, Sasha. I liked you.”
If I wasn’t a tourist, then what was I doing here? The streets answered for me: Manhunting. Like secretaries on a cruise; like “career girls” in Washington; like college girls, nurses, entertainers, stewardesses, actresses, models—like all unclaimed women: looking for a man. No answer I could give was half as good as Nancy Erickson’s “my husband is at the Academy,” though what Academy wives actually did was of interest to no one. They kept house, visited the ruins, studied Italian or Italian cooking. Some took special courses arranged by the Academy for Academy wives. Even so, in some ways poor Nancy Erickson was better off than the starlets and models on the Via Veneto who all had that recognizable haunted look, as though they were being spooked. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were pure parsley, nothing but garnish—worthless without a man to adorn. If they sat alone in a cafe they kept looking nervously at their watches, pretending they were waiting for someone in particular. I knew that syndrome. Mannequin was the perfect word for them: somewhere they had given away their souls and now they had only bodies, lovely bodies, left to show.
My program was different from theirs, but in form only. Mornings writing in some cafe; lunch; Roman culture in the afternoon; dinner. And always my book to read. They looked at their watches pretending they had a man; I looked at my book pretending I didn’t want one. But we were all waiting. As I observed the models from behind my book, I wondered if they knew all about me, too.
“What are you doing in Rome?” “Studying Roman culture”; “gathering material for a play.” However sincerely I gave my answers, they all sounded as flimsy as “I’m an actre
ss, temporarily unemployed.” The moment we appeared on the streets available, we were all tossed into the same salad, consumed fresh or deposited in the crisper to wait. It was impossible to make oneself out an exception. And so, as the weeks slipped by, I found myself spending more and more time like this, just lying around in my room avoiding the streets, watching the puddles under the laundry enlarging drop by drop into days and weeks, waiting. Waiting for messages; waiting for inspiration; waiting for my money to run out.
The buzzer, like a shot of adrenalin, startled me off the bed.
“Pronto, pronto”—my best Italian word.
“Telefono, signora; signore Leonardo Bucatelli.”
“I’ll be right down.”
Quickly I inspected my face and ran a comb through my hair (impossible to leave the room without); then, avoiding the puddles on the floor, I picked my way to the door and dashed down the stairs to the lobby to answer the phone.
I had met Leonardo in the American restaurant I sometimes went to for a hamburger with catsup and french fries or a chocolate milkshake. Reading The Portrait of a Lady while I ate, I had noticed out of the corner of my eye one of the lean-trousered Italians eyeing me through dark glasses from across the room. While my eyes stayed on the book, I tracked him with my antennae, getting ready to rebuff him if he sat with me. But when I peeked up, I saw him walking to my table with Gregory, the restaurant owner, for a proper introduction.