You don't want to keep these? I asked, giving her a second chance on a box of photographs.
My heart, she'd said. I can turn it off.
For years, I'd believed her.
But I know the truth now. What maniacs we are—sick with love, all of us.
A Bridge Under Water
Tom Bissell
FROM Agni
"SO," HE SAID, after having vacuumed up a plate of penne all'arrabiata, drunk in three swallows a glass of Nero D'Avola, and single-handedly consumed half a basket of breadsticks, "do you want to hit another church or see the Borghese Gallery?"
She had plunged her fork exactly ten times into her strawberry risotto and taken two birdfeeder sips from the glass of Gewürztraminer that her waiter (a genius, clearly) had recommended pairing with it. She glanced up and smiled at him (more or less) genuinely. The man put away everything from foie gras to a Wendy's single with the joyless efficiency of a twelve-year-old. He never appeared to taste anything. The plate now before him looked licked clean. When he return-serve smiled, she tried not to notice his red-pepper-and-wine-stained teeth or the breadcrumbs distributed throughout his short beard. They were sitting on the AstroTurfed outdoor patio of an otherwise pleasing restaurant found right behind the American Embassy in Rome. They had been married for three and a half days.
Again she pushed her fork into the risotto and watched steam rise from its disturbed center. "Think I may be a little churched out."
He snapped up another breadstick, leaned back, and rubbed his mouth. This succeeded, perhaps accidentally, in clearing the perimeter of breadcrumbs around his mouth. He had small eyes whose irises were as hard as green marbles, a crooked wide nose, and an uncommonly large chin. His thick and tinder-dry brown hair sat upon his head with shaggy indifference due to how quickly they had cleared out of their hotel room this morning after his rushed shower. She did not mind that he had overslept. The only reason she had not overslept was that she had never fallen asleep to begin with. His plum-colored linen shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum, showcasing a pearl-white chest covered in pubically corkscrewed hair. She felt a sudden urge to lean forward and button him up but did not want the doing of such small tasks ever to fall to her.
He bit the end off his breadstick. "It's not a church, strictly speaking. It's more like a crypt." Now that he was gesturing, the breadstick resembled a wand. "Mark Twain wrote something really funny about it when he visited Rome. Apparently it's decorated with the bones of all the monks who've lived there. Like four centuries' worth. The chandeliers are bones, the gates, everything. All bones. It's supposed to be really creepy."
"A crypt made of monk bones. Why didn't you say so? Let's do that."
His smile softened in a pleased way that made her realize how falsely polite his earlier, larger smile had been. "Funny girl," he said. The thing he liked most about her, he enjoyed telling people when she was in earshot, was her sense of humor. He was the only man who had ever said she was funny, and she wondered, suddenly, if that was one of the reasons why she married him. She was, in fact, very funny.
It had been a good morning, uncontaminated by the reactor-leak conversation of the previous night. They had hardly talked about things today, but she knew both of them were aware they would have to. It was the lone solid thing in their day's otherwise formless future. It was the train they would have to catch.
"Okay," he said, setting down his breadstick with an air of tragic relinquishment, "I'd really like to see the creepy bone crypt."
She put her hands on her only slightly rounded belly and gave it a crystal-ball rubbing. "Let the record show that the pregnant lady would like to see the Borghese Gallery."
The single drum of his fingers on the tabletop made a sound like a gallop. "One way to settle it."
She slammed her fork to the table with mock finality. "I'm not playing. Seriously. I won't do it."
He was nodding. "One way to settle it."
The man loved games of all kinds. Obscure board games, video games manufactured prior to 1990, any and all word games, but he also enjoyed purely biophysical games such as rock, paper, scissors—the "essential fairness" of which he claimed to particularly admire. He was, however, miserably bad at rock, paper, scissors, the reason being that he almost always took paper. She had once been told, as a girl, by some forgotten Hebrew school playmate, that while playing rock, paper, scissors you were allowed, once in your life, the option of a fourth component. This was fire, which was signified by turning up your hand on the third beat and wiggling your fingers. Fire destroyed everything. That this thermonuclear gambit could be used only once was a rule so mystically stern that its validity seemed impossible to question. She had told him of the fire rule when he first challenged her to rock, paper, scissors on their earliest date, which was not that long ago. At issue had been what movie to go see.
Now she said to him, "You do realize you always lose? You're aware of this."
He readied his playing stance: back against the chair, eyes full of blank concentration, right fist set upon the small shelf of his left hand.
She picked up her fork again and began to eat. Probably she would indulge him. "I'm not playing because it's boring. And it's boring because you always pick paper."
"I like its quiet efficiency. I could ask you why you always take scissors."
"Because you always take paper!"
"I am aware that you believe that, which means I'm actually taking paper to psych you out. Statistically I can't keep it up."
"But you do. The last time we played you took paper four throws in a row."
"I know. And I can't possibly keep it up. Or can I? Now, best out of three. No. Five. Three. Best out of fthree." He was smiling again, his teeth no longer quite so stained by the wine and pepper oil. She loved him, she had to admit, a lot right now.
He threw paper for the first two throws. She threw rock for her first just to make the game interesting. After his second paper she fished an ice cube out of her hitherto untouched water glass and threw it at him. On the third throw she was astonished to see her husband wiggling his fingers.
"Fire," he said, extending his still-wiggling fingers so that they burned harmlessly beneath her nose. What he said next was sung in hair-metal falsetto: "Motherfucking fire!"
She pushed his hand away. "You didn't even know about fire until I told you about it!"
"Look on the bright side," he said. "I can never use it again, and you've still got yours."
"Please, honey, please button your shirt."
They descended in silence the zigzag stairs of the apricot building she now knew was called the Capuchin Crypt, passing a dozen American student-tourists sitting on, around, and along its stone balustrade. The boys, clearly suffering the misapplications of energy that distinguished all educational field trips, spoke in hey-I'm-shouting voices to the bare-shouldered and sort of lusciously sweaty girls sitting two feet away from them. She was upsettingly conscious of the adult conservatism of her thinly striped collared shirt and black skirt—she was not yet showing so much that her wardrobe required any real overhaul—and her collar, moreover, had wilted in the heat. She felt like a sunbaked flower someone had overwatered in recompense, and wondered how much older she was than these girls, who seemed less young to her than another species altogether. And yet she was only twenty-six, her husband thirty-four. Two once-unimaginable objects, the first incubating in her stomach and the second closed around her ring finger, made her, she realized, unable to remember what being nineteen or twenty had felt like. Looking into the anime innocence of these American girls' faces was to discover the power of new anxieties and the stubbornness of old ones.
At the bottom of the stairs three tanned and lithe young Italian women walked unknowably by. She often felt herself bend away from people who knew how good they looked, but these women had such costume-party exuberance it seemed a waste not to stare. The belt? Three hundred dollars, easy. She somehow counted five purses among them. She hated th
e farthest girl's rimless aviatrix sunglasses only because she knew she could never wear them without fearing she looked ridiculous. It seemed impossible to her that the sun that turned these sprites clay brown was the same sun whose apparent gamma rays burned and peeled her. She looked down at her gray, pink-accented Pumas and then over at one of the growingly distant Italian's sassy red pumps. She had worn the Pumas only because she felt marriage should annul the desire to impress strangers, a thought that made her feel at once happy and vaguely condemned.
"That was creepy," he said as they turned toward where Via Veneto terminated at Palazzo Barberini. "Those bones actually kind of freaked me out."
She was still staring at her stupid shoes. "We could have spent that time looking at Bernini sculptures."
His hand lit upon her back. "We could still do that. I'd be happy to."
"No, it's okay. I'm tired anyway."
"You want to go back to the hotel?" His hand sprang away from her back as he checked his watch. "It's not even three yet." The hand did not return.
She did not say anything, thus sealing their hotel-bound fate. The next block or so was passed in silence, and they turned onto a tight, unremarkable side street (if any street in Rome could be considered unremarkable) made even tighter by the chaotically fender-to-grill-parked cars along both curbs. This was as residential as central Rome had yet seemed to her: hugely ornate wooden double doors with five-pound brass knockers and black-barred ground-level windows. The only word she could think of to describe it was post-imperial, which she knew was not even close to being historically correct. She liked this about Rome: whether you knew anything at all about history—and she knew a little—it forced you to think about history, even if in variously crackpot ways. In many cities, history was a loud voice at a party at which one felt underdressed. In Rome she felt history pressing in on all sides of her but in a pleasant, consensual way. Rome's weight was without expectation.
"Not entirely sure I like it here," he suddenly said.
She turned to him. "That's not a nice thing to say."
"No, no. I like being here with you. I mean I'm not sure I like Rome. The city. In and of itself."
She supposed she would have to hear this out but let his opportunity for explanation dangle a moment longer than felt polite. "Why not?"
"It really bothers me that everything is closed from noon to four, for starters, and that if you order a cappuccino after breakfast you're a barbarian. And I realized yesterday that I don't like how Italians talk to one another. Everything is so emotional. Like those women sitting next to us on the stairs the other day. Listening to them was like overhearing a plot to kidnap the pope. And when I asked that kid what they'd been talking about, he said, 'Shoes.'"
"I thought that was funny."
"You know my friend who lived in Rome for a while? What I didn't tell you is that his first apartment burned down—I guess the wiring was all fucked up—and after the fire was finally put out he and some firemen went inside to see what survived. Exactly one wall did, in the middle of which was this scorched crucifix that had been hung at the insistence of his landlady. There were any number of reasons why this wall survived the fire, but when they saw it all the firemen dropped to their knees and started praying while my friend just stood there. He made the point that you'd have to be astonishingly simple to believe in a God who'd let someone's apartment burn down but magically intervene to save a three-dollar version of his own likeness. He also told me that Italians are basically the most complicated uninteresting people in the world."
"You're being really interesting yourself right now."
"I'm not trying to be interesting." His voice had a real snarl in it. "I'm trying to objectively describe my impressions and tell you about my friend." Then he calmed down, or at least hid his anger more cunningly. "I'm sorry I made fun of your book last night."
Before their argument, while at a restaurant and while she was in the ladies', he had fished out of her purse the travel book she was reading about Italy. Its author was an American woman. When she returned to the table he began to read aloud certain parts in a dopey voice. "Listen to what she has to say about Rome: 'It's like someone invented a city just to suit my specifications.' Considerate of the preceding twenty-seven hundred years of civilization, wasn't it? This is priceless: 'It's like the whole society is conspiring to teach me Italian. They'll even print their newspapers in Italian while I'm here; they don't mind!'" He tossed the book onto the table and stared at it as though it were an excised tumor. Finally he said, "That is, without question, the stupidest fucking book I've ever seen you read."
The book in question was currently a bestseller, and the only reason she was reading it was that her mother had given it to her, just as she had given her (them) the gift of an Italian honeymoon. He too was a travel writer, though one who had never made it off what he sometimes called the "worstseller list." He had published three books (all before she had met him) and preferred writing about places, he had once said in an interview she was embarrassed for him to have given, with "adrenaline payoffs": Nigeria, Laos, Mongolia. (His honeymoon suggestion? Azerbaijan.) She admired his determination to love the unloved parts of the world, but, like all good qualities, it remained admirable only insofar as it was unacknowledged.
She decided to speak carefully. "I like that everything is closed from noon to four. It creates a little oasis in the middle of the day. I like that life in this city isn't based around my own convenience. I also like that people talk about dumb, pointless things like shoes with passion here. And I like Italians. They seem like totally lovely people."
"I guess what irks me," he said, speaking just as carefully, "is this fantasy that Italy exists only as a sensory paradise when it's got all these completely obvious problems."
"Okay. How about this: I hated your creepy bone church."
"Creepy bone crypt."
"In fact, I've hated every stupid church we've walked into." She knew she was asking for it here, and waited. He said nothing. Onward, then, into the dark. "You know I'm not comfortable in churches and yet you keep dragging me into them."
Five pounds of emotion seemed to encumber his face. "Please, let's at least lie down before we start talking about this again."
The hotel was many blocks away.
"Why," she asked, "do you want to take me into places you know I'm not comfortable in?"
His mouth set into an ugly little frown. "Because I think this discomfort of yours is ridiculous. I'm no more a Christian than you are. The ideology you suddenly feel so offended by is an ideology that would have had someone like me burning at the stake right next to you. That you can't separate the objectively aesthetic pleasure of churches from your own—" He stopped himself. Standing there, he began to rub his eyes. "Christ. Just forget it."
"My own what?" Now she had stopped too. They were outside the gate-lowered entrance of a cheese store, whose owner was probably off banging his noontime mistress about now, and good for him.
He fixed upon her an envenomed look, clearly resisting what he wanted to say. Religion, she knew, was what he wanted to say.
He recklessly took her hands in his. When she made no effort to return his clasp he rubbed his thumb along the valley between her index and middle-finger knuckles. His voice turned soft. "I cannot understand why you're so attached to being Jewish when you don't even believe in God. And why all of this is only coming up now. Not to mention why we keep fighting about it."
"And I cannot understand your difficulty in understanding this. It has nothing to do with God and your position is absolutely bizarre to me." With this she twisted her hands around so that she was holding his. "And it makes me, I have to tell you, extremely worried and sad."
Last night, after the restaurant, after the confrontation over the stupidest fucking book he had ever seen her read, they had argued, again, for the first time since the wedding, about their child, due now in six months. They had told themselves, in the weeks leading up to the wed
ding, that her accidental pregnancy after four months of dating was not the reason they had decided to get married. But it was clear to both of them now that this was quite possibly not the case. She knew he felt betrayed. His atheism was one of the first things he had told her about himself, and once things became serious he had quizzed her about her feelings concerning God, and she had answered that she had no particular feelings about God, other than a strong suspicion he did not exist. And this made him happy at a time when his happiness seemed to her a most precious and mysterious thing. All of that had begun to un-spool a week before the wedding, when she had mentioned (in passing) that it was important (to her) that their child would understand him- or herself (they had agreed on keeping the child's gender a surprise) as a Jew. She could not even remember the context in which this had come up— that was how uncontroversially she had regarded the matter. At hearing that his child would be Jewish, her husband had laughed, once and loudly, like a king at some forced merriment, before realizing his pregnant fiancée was not kidding. We'll ... talk about that later, he had told her. She did not let him, saying that it was beyond her ability to fathom how exactly this could bother him. What was there to talk about? She was Jewish, her parents were Jewish, her child would be Jewish. His position: Jewishness was and could be only a religion. It was not a race, because there were Chinese and Turkish and Indian Jews. He had met some himself. It was not a proper culture, because there were Sephardic Jews, for instance, whose culture was completely different from that of Ashkenazi Jews. He described to her—one of his less wise moments—some of those differences. It was not an ethnicity, because the idea of Jewishness being determined by matrilineal descent was a religious concept. Out came his feverishly marginaliaed New Revised Standard for citation. It was, therefore, only and solely a religion, and, he told her, he could not and in fact refused to live within a household, a family, in which religion played any role other than that of an occasionally bashed piñata. She could not argue against this reasoning, which part of her agreed with. She disliked Jewish tribalism as much as anyone and had managed to escape Hebrew school without learning how to read, speak, or write Hebrew. Once, after a nephew's bar mitzvah, the theme of which was Wall Street, and which her uncle had broadcastedly made known cost $22,000, she had actually renounced her Jewishness (for two days). But she was having a child, and while she did not want to raise Menachim Begin, a Chabadnik, or a Settler, she did want to raise a Jew in the way she was a Jew, the formalities of which she knew almost nothing about. Being Jewish was, in her innerland, nothing more than a faint but definite light, and it offered her no more pride or direction than that of a faint but definite light. His refusal to grant her, and their child, that tiny, private awareness seemed to her insane.
The Best American Short Stories® 2011 Page 6