Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

by Alix Shulman

  As soon as we were introduced, Leonardo picked up my book, turned it over, and said in English but with the lilt of Italian, “Ah, Henry James.”

  “You know Henry James?” I asked surprised.

  “Leonardo’s half American and his wife is American,” said Gregory, as though that were explanation enough.

  “My former wife,” said Leonardo. He asked if he could sit with me, then ordered American coffee.

  I was impressed that he did not start in whispering sibilants in my ear. In the course of the conversation he mentioned he was leaving the following evening for Sicily.

  “Sicily! How lucky you are!” I said.

  “Why don’t you come along? I’ll be back in less than a week.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure. I have some work to do, but it will be nice to have company the rest of the time. Gregory can vouch for me.”

  For the first time in months I did not feel, sitting with a man, as though I were parading before the judges.

  Speeding down the famous coast into the fragrance of lemon trees and the soothing breezes of the Mediterranean, Leonardo told me his story. His father was Italian, his mother American. He had grown up rich in Italy, then gone to college in Florida. There he had taken a full-blooded American wife, transplanted her to Rome, and given her “everything.” He would never understand how she could, only months before, have left him for Miami. “Isn’t it a woman’s duty,” he cried, throwing his arms dangerously in the air on one of that shoreline’s spectacular curves, “to live where her husband lives?” When his hands returned to earth, one of them made for the steering wheel, and one of them made for me.

  I suppose it was foolish of me not to have made my position absolutely clear before setting one foot inside Leonardo’s white Alfa Romeo. I ought to have declared straight out: No fucking; I want to see scenery, not bed sheets. But as it was, the blue miles were speeding by and my explanation was still only an unconfirmed hypothesis. It could not, as I had hoped, go without saying.

  Finally I cleared my throat and began. (It’s always so hard to explain oneself.) “It’s not that I’m against sex on principle,” I heard myself saying. “It’s just that it usually makes for unpleasant complications.” When I looked over, Leonardo was eyeing me suspiciously.

  It did sound prudish—shades of Girl Alive—it was not what I meant.

  I tried again. “I mean, in principle I believe in free love. But in practice, I try to avoid it.”

  His look was getting worse—as though I were some sort of proselytizing religious creep. I still wasn’t saying it right. The sea breeze, free and capricious, mocked my failing efforts at precision.

  “What I mean is,” I tried one last time, shouting now to cover my uncertainty, “I like you very much and I’m sure we’ll have a fine time together in Sicily, but I never intended that we’d sleep together. I mean, can’t we take separate rooms and split the expenses?”

  It sounded absurd, like something out of a B movie or a teen-age novel. Listening to myself, with the voluptuous smell of lemon trees enfolding us and now and then the rush of the sea, I was ashamed to find myself sitting inside a rather unpleasant American prude. I knew she was a fraud: there were times when she fucked like a bunny, yet now she was acting like a Midwestern schoolteacher, sounding positively dowdy. No wonder the poor driver looked uncomfortable. I wanted to expose her, but I knew I couldn’t say a word without becoming implicated. Well, she would just have to explain herself; I had all I could do to watch the speedometer and the treacherous road, on which Leonardo, finding himself a captive, was driving faster and faster in a futile effort to escape.

  Part way down the coast we stopped for the night in Sorrento, where I rejoiced to see my first unpotted palms. The air was lush as the song. I stood awkwardly aside as Leonardo spoke to the desk clerk in Italian; more awkwardly still when he informed me that there were no single rooms left, only double rooms at fifteen dollars apiece. “Do you really want a separate room?” He seemed almost as embarrassed as I. And what could the desk clerk be thinking?

  My position was untenable. “I guess we can share a room,” I said.

  In the room, we were both surprised to find only one (double) bed. “I’ll sleep in the chair,” offered Leonardo.

  It was insulting. Did I impress him as really so inflexible that I would insist he spend the night sitting upright in a chair? “That’s all right,” I threw back, moving off to the bathroom with my toothbrush and robe. “We can share the bed.”

  Lying next to Leonardo in the dark, sensing the hot breath in his lungs and the blood in his veins, I felt miserably misunderstood. How had I managed, despite such care, to wind up once again in this predicament? My life looked like a repeating decimal. Lying apart on my side of the bed was tantamount to declaring myself frigid. That silly prude in the car had contaminated me with her dowdiness, and now I needed a good cleansing.

  “Goodnight,” said Leonardo politely.

  “Goodnight,” I said. But longing to merge with my antithesis into a clean, new creature, I made some slight sign for Leonardo to approach me.

  Our encounter in romantic Sorrento was quick and gentle, of little moment in itself; but as we fell apart to sleep I felt it take on a special significance. For, as unwittingly as a Typhoid Mary or the lucky one-millionth depositor in the Bank of America, uncircumsised Leonardo Bucatelli obligingly becoming my twenty-fifth lover, had boosted my lifetime average up over one a year. Another first.

  The next day we drove down to Messina where there was a car ferry to Sicily. On the way, Leonardo inquired into my views. He listened thoughtfully as I denounced the double standard, sexual hypocrisy, and lechery. I used the largest words I knew to defend my position. He nodded gravely now and then, treating me with all the respect due a woman who not only fucks but insists on paying her own way. Mine, he said, was a rare and liberal doctrine. “I have always preferred intelligent, liberated women to the beautiful sluts on the Via Veneto.” Though he noted my words as pure philosophy, appreciating that he had stumbled onto a good thing, he had no idea what to make of me.

  Sicily meant Taormina, the pride of the travel folders, with perfume added. In the mornings in Sicily we took our breakfast together on the terrace of our hotel overlooking the sea, and after gobbling those rich native pastries that are made so poorly by comparison in Rome, we went separate ways, coming together again at suppertime. Enchanted by the Sicilian seaside I, who had never before seen free-growing cactus, steeped myself in the surprise of cactus fruit sparkling like garnets in the sunlight and the magenta profusion of bougainvillaea. Leonardo set off in the mornings in a business suit to act out PR Man for a prestigious American firm, and spent the afternoons in bermuda shorts marching through the streets of the picturesque village with his camera glued to his eye like any American, snapping his own native hibiscus. Nothing but sex ever passed between us.

  In order to avoid the stigma of being a whore, I posed as an intellectual, abandoning all pretensions to voluptuousness. It was scary to find myself in sensuous Sicily disarmed of my best weapon. Instead I used my second best. “Don’t you go anywhere without your notebook?” asked Leonardo. Oh, I was hooked on my book. “You know,” he said, joining me for an hour on the beach, appraising me coolly in that hot sun, “you ought to get yourself a bikini. Your body is really very nice. You should show it off a bit.”

  Discovered by some foreign connoisseur, like the Greek ruins of Sicily! Leonardo’s invidious compliments only provoked more of my bookish rhetoric, so inappropriate in that tropical setting. I turned my back to the sun to hide my mustache (if any) and took refuge in the warm water Ulysses himself was said to have sailed.

  Floating on the surface, I communicated with the outer world through a snorkel and studied the stylish fishes who swam up to my mask enticing me after them, only to wriggle effortlessly out of my reach after prizes of their own. Though my back burned, that warm water was my element and those fishes my parad
igm. It was they whom I missed when the time came to ferry back through Scylla and Charybdis and drive on up the coast to Rome.

  I could tell by Leonardo’s manner as soon as I picked up the phone in the Alberto lobby that there was something wrong. I hadn’t heard from him once since we had returned to Rome, and now all of a sudden he had to talk to me about something “very serious.”

  “Is there something the matter, Leonardo?”

  “Yes. We’ll talk about it later. Do you want to meet me at the Ristorante Navona in an hour?”

  “An hour’s fine,” I said. “I hope it’s nothing terrible.”

  “We’ll talk about it at lunch,” he said ominously.

  Anyway, lunch. Whatever he wanted to discuss, at least today I wouldn’t have to brave a restaurant alone. “Ciao,” I said and returned to my room to fix myself up.

  Perhaps, I thought, slipping my feet into Italian shoes, I’d give the poem another try tomorrow after all; maybe the play would come too if I could loosen up.

  Leonardo, suntanned and manicured, sat chewing a toothpick and girl-watching behind his dark glasses. It was a little past noon—the most revealing hour under the cruel Roman sun. The café glittered elegantly in its finely wrought Piazza Navona setting. As I fluffed my hair and walked to his table, Leonardo popped up to pull out a chair for me. “Let’s sit inside,” I said, shading my face.

  Inside, I had the good sense to keep talking all the way through the pasta, so that we were well into the meat course before Leonardo came to the point. Even during the small talk he had revealed his mean intentions by sprinkling the conversation with sarcasm like so much grated cheese. Now, despite visible efforts, he was barely able to keep the fury out of his voice.

  He wiped his mouth and put down his napkin. Was I aware, he asked at last, of being ill?

  Yes, I was.

  Then why, he demanded, had I not warned him about my disease before assaulting him in bed? Why had I not at least allowed him to take precautions? However the same stunt may have been pulled on me, there was no excuse for me to pull it on him, who had been nothing if not kind to me.

  I put down my fork, rising to the attack. “Wait a minute, Leonardo. Who assaulted who?” Vindication rose in my throat. “I told you as soon as I got into your car that I had no intention of sleeping with you.”

  “Yes, you told me your intentions. You and your high-minded theories. I was fool enough to fall for them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He gripped the table and pushed a reddening face toward me. “Your disease. I’ve caught it.”

  I relaxed, relieved. “But that’s impossible, Leonardo,” I said kindly, resuming the meal. “In the first place, what I have isn’t catching. And in the second place, even if it were, you couldn’t get it. It’s a female disease.”

  He looked at me with contempt. “Look, Sasha. You might as well face it. What I’ve got is gonorrhea, and I got it from you. Now, if you have any concern at all for the people of Italy, you will come quietly to my physician and take the cure.”

  The people of Italy! I took a long, stalling swig of my wine to let it sink in: The clap. Souvenir of Spain? As I reached for the carafe to fill my glass again, Leonardo mounted his assault.

  The words go whizzing by my ears, but I am barely able to catch them. Leonardo has abandoned the polite formality with which he usually speaks his mother’s English for the passionate gesticulation of his father’s countrymen.

  I duck as he calls me una donna pericolosa (a dangerous woman!), but at last the accusation “carrier” catches me square in the ear.

  I—a carrier! Quickly I compute: from the time I left Spain until I was led astray by this PR man I’ve slept with no one but my husband, who doesn’t count. Though I can as easily have caught it from Leonardo as he from me, I note he’s the one doing all the shouting. His voice rises and my lofty persona dissolves. I see I had better behave. Even if they’ve done no other damage yet, the insidious bacteria have already destroyed my image.

  Yes, I must have a cure. A V.D. victim needs all the help she can get. The embassy won’t bail me out of this, the Ericksons would snicker if they knew, and all those foreign doctors with their shots and pills have likely been operating on a false diagnosis. I’m afraid it’s Leonardo’s help or no one’s: I’m utterly alone.

  Over dessert we reconciled. With the magnanimity of a gentleman, Leonardo assured me that the cure would involve nothing more than a routine series of penicillin shots which we could take together. At least, I consoled myself, it would be a good reason to get up and out in the mornings. Sipping our coffee we were thick as conspirators, and when we finally left the restaurant for the doctor’s office, it was arm in arm.

  “Eccola!” exclaimed the doctor excitedly, as Leonardo, gazing into the microscope’s eyepiece, scrutinized a tiny precious part of me smeared on a slide. I bared my buttock and received the needle.

  During our cure, Leonardo and I grew closer than we had been in Sicily. We met for breakfast each morning at a cafe near the doctor’s, unless I had spent the preceding night at his place. We stretched out our single bond like taffy. There was nothing aphrodisiacal in the antibiotic; it was just that, sinners together, we suddenly had more and worse in common than with anyone else.

  The tourists were swarming to Italy and we were just over our cure when some rich friends of Leonardo’s came to Rome on an extended honeymoon. Nice Americans. Jumping to the usual conclusions, they assumed I was in love with Leonardo. They were so solicitous I could tell they felt sorry for me. It was unbearable.

  “I understand you’re separated from your husband,” said the wife sympathetically, wandering with me among the ruins. Up ahead her husband and Leonardo had stopped to study the map of the Forum. “Is your husband in Italy too?”

  “We were living in Munich when we separated. He’s probably gone back to the States by now.”

  There was an awkward silence. “And how long do you plan to stay in Rome?” she asked politely.

  I had used up all my answers. “Till my money runs out I suppose; after that I just don’t know.” The very words that had once proclaimed my daring now rang of defeat.

  We caught up with the men following the tourist map through the Forum—the Forum where Vestal Virgins had once guarded the sacred fires with the power of their chastity; the same Forum where Isabel Archer had turned away the most eligible suitors on the continent. I hung back while the others talked over old times until the sun set and it was time to choose a restaurant. Spaghetti alla Carbonara? Zuppa di Pesce alla Romana? Carciofi alla Giudia? Let the newlyweds choose among the specialties of a Rome I had already tasted.

  In the back of my mind I was deciding I really mustn’t see Leonardo any more.

  No question my nerves were shattered. I was oversensitive and touchy. My excursions had become a sham: I found myself leaving the maps in my room and turning corners at random to avoid the street people. All the ruins started to look alike. My writing was a failure, and I abandoned it. Each foray into a restaurant was an assault, with everyone seeing I was eating alone. What is she doing here? I could see them wonder; Doesn’t she have a man? Isabel Archer had finally married, and just as her story promised to be resolved it turned out it was only beginning.

  And mine? Was twenty-four old or young? Was I ugly or beautiful?

  The frightened face in the mirror had the haunted look of the mannequins. Just under the surface I sensed a fine network of ugliness which might begin showing through any moment. Too late to start a career; too late even to go back to school. I, who had always prided myself on being the youngest in the class, couldn’t now join those chain-smoking women who “went back to school” after having their children. I remembered them shyly attending our classes wearing either sensible shoes or clothes embarrassingly young for them, trying to speak an alien slang. I had cringed for them as the young men, suppressing sneers, momentarily suspended debate while they asked their female questions. I
knew I would never be able to survive that.

  On my twenty-fifth birthday, alone in my room, I received a cable from New York. It was from Frank. HAPPY BIRTHDAY. TIME TO COME HOME. The next day on an impulse I put my wedding ring on again, and after that it was much easier to walk the streets. I even wore it to a farewell party up at the Academy the Ericksons threw before they sailed for home. They invited everyone they knew, including a genuine Italian princess. All the Americans, drinking sparkling lambrusca as though they would never taste it again, kept singing “Arrividerce Roma” louder and sloppier the drunker they got. In the days following, most of them left Italy for another academic year.

  The tourists were leaving too. It became possible once again to view the Sistine ceiling without stepping on someone’s toes. The Roman pines stayed green, but the days had already perceptibily shortened; the sugar maples would be turning on Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway. Maybe Frank was right; maybe it was time to go home.

  Five

  The ink had not yet dried on my high school diploma when I rushed off to begin my future at Eliza Baxter College of New England University in western Massachusetts. I was in a big hurry. With a time schedule based on Dr. John Watson and not a minute to waste, I was all set to do the four years of college in three so I could enter law school at nineteen and pass the bar at twenty-one. I had the whole thing mapped out.

  But somewhere during my sophomore year my fine resolutions turned to dreams as I fell hopelessly in love with philosophy.

  The romance started innocently enough. Like any lover I can recall intimations of the affair long before it began in earnest—a lingering glance, a chance meeting in the library, a greeting withheld. I still smile remembering an even earlier time when I wouldn’t have looked twice at philosophy, it so smacked of religion.