The Apprentice Lover

by Jay Parini

  The tea arrived on a trolley, wheeled in by Maria Pia. When I caught her eye, she turned away quickly, embarrassed or offended.

  “The Italians don’t like tea,” Vera said, pouring from a blue-veined china pot into hand-painted mugs, adding milk and sugar without asking how I liked it. “They think it’s only for bad tummies. I had to teach them how to make it properly.”

  I sipped the tea and inclined toward her, enchanted by the accent and manner. My experience of English people was limited to one or two examples. Mostly from reading fiction, I had in my head an anthology of virtues and vices I considered “typically English.” Vera had a passion for gardening, which seemed perfectly in keeping. But she was also the author of several well-known cookbooks, including The Feast of Italy. This seemed defiantly unBritish.

  Vera was twenty years younger than Grant, who had been married before, but all memory of that earlier union had been erased. Even Grant’s older children, two married daughters (roughly the age of Vera herself), were never mentioned—I would only learn about them from Grant’s entry in Who’s Who.

  “I can see we’re going to be good friends,” Vera said.

  I agreed, relieved to know that my own warm feelings were reciprocated, although her enthusiasm puzzled me. I had hardly declared anything of myself.

  “What you must realize is that not everyone around here is necessarily honest,” she said. “People lie all the time on Capri.”

  “We Americans are not so bad at lying,” I said. I was thinking about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, but kept this to myself. The Vietnam War would probably not be debated at the Villa Clio; indeed, the Trojan War seemed a more likely topic in these surroundings. “What about the Italians?”

  “Who cares?” she said.

  I was relieved that Maria Pia had withdrawn to the kitchen, though I guessed (rightly) that she didn’t speak much English. It would take some time to get used to Vera’s patronizing attitude toward the Italians, whom she considered mere children, barely capable of looking after themselves.

  “I fear I’ve shocked you,” she said. Her gaze opened, admitting me to a sense of intimacy. “The Italians are very sweet, but they’re deceitful. They will steal a plum from your pocket while you’re sleeping, then attempt to sell it to you when you wake up.”

  Maria Pia emerged from the kitchen with a tray of semisweet rolls glazed with vanilla icing, a specialty of Capri. I took one and thanked her.

  “Do you like her?” Vera wondered.

  As Maria Pia hovered beside me, the question seemed inappropriate, at best. “In what sense?”

  “Would you like to have her—you know—in bed?”

  I blushed, extracting a broad smile from Vera.

  “You needn’t worry,” she said. “She doesn’t speak English.”

  “It wasn’t that, I—”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve embarrassed you. Wicked old Vera, I must hold my tongue. We’ve become silly on this island. Say any bloody thing that comes into our heads. It’s a matter of our isolation. We’re cut off, you see.”

  “I like it when people say what they think.”

  “Then you’ll enjoy yourself hugely.” She sipped her tea and stared ahead.

  “Rupert mentioned a cottage in the garden,” I said.

  “It’s a shed, really. Used to be his study. Not very warm in winter, I’m afraid. A bit damp. But it’s getting warmer now, with spring and all that. You’ll be comfortable enough. There’s a bed, a table for work, and some chairs. Mimo was supposed to give you a sofa, but he’s unreliable.”

  “Mimo?”

  “The gardener who cannot garden. The island is full of such people: the plumber who cannot plumb, the painter who cannot paint, and so forth.”

  The way Vera leaped from topic to topic, like a bird from branch to branch, would have unnerved me, but my mother’s mind worked in a similar way, so I was used to disjunctive thinking. I waded bravely into her thought stream: “So Mimo works for you?”

  “Only in theory, like the other servants. Nobody really works around here, but we support their families. It’s the island way—a form of feudalism.”

  I could sense Maria Pia hovering behind me, still holding the tray of rolls.

  “This opportunity comes at the right time for me,” I said.

  “How very American,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Never apologize, darling. Let that be your first lesson in proper self-regard. Other lessons will follow.” She leaned close to me, taking my hand. I could smell tobacco on her breath, but it was not disagreeable. “I will promise you only one thing: I will tell you the truth, if and when it matters. Do you understand?”

  For reasons unfathomable to myself, I trusted her and nodded.

  “That’s super,” she said, with the faintest glimmer of a smile. “We’re going to be such good friends, Alex. I shall teach you to cook, and perhaps one day we’ll open a little trattoria. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  three

  My new home was a stone cottage with shutters on the windows, a blue door with a screen, and a flat roof made of terra-cotta tiles. It stood, as promised, at the bottom of the garden, not far beyond the dark-blue swimming pool (painted to reflect light in the manner of the Blue Grotto), and surrounded by cyprus trees that stood like centurions, their spears high. The flower beds on the seaward side of the house teemed with Vera’s handiwork, although only a few were in bloom. “Gaillardia, dianthus, fuchsia, agapanthis, iris, and tritoma,” she explained, with a schoolmarm’s delight in precision. “They’ll emerge in due course. One by one.”

  Mimo hovered in the middle distance, a shovel in hand. Like an old crow, he appeared to sink into his own black shadow, unshaven, dressed in dark clothes with a filthy cap on his head. I waved at him, but he didn’t acknowledge me.

  “Pay no attention to Mimo,” Vera warned. “He’s not quite right in the head. A mule, I believe.”

  “A mule?”

  “Kicked in the head. Ages ago.”

  With that, she left me to myself, saying that if I wanted a swim I could join Rupert at the beach or use the pool, which they had repainted and filled only the week before. It would not be hard to find her husband at the beach, she assured me, pointing in the direction of the sea. “The water is chilly,” she added, “but then, so is Rupert.”

  I saw her pass the window as I settled, dazed, on the bed. Vera was unlike anyone I’d ever met, and the atmosphere at the Villa Clio was both intriguing and a little scary. But I was willing and eager to put my doubts on hold. I had taken the plunge, and I would swim.

  The cottage was tiny, but everything I could wish for was here: a double bed (made up, in the Italian style, of twin beds pushed together), a side table with a lamp for reading, an oak dresser missing several knobs, and a three-legged table by the window with two cane chairs. There was a fireplace, a bookshelf, a dilapidated wing chair, and a small refrigerator that had already been supplied with fresh milk and butter. A sink and small stove in one corner were a gesture in the direction of self-sufficiency, and I found coffee and sugar in the cupboards, plus a crusty loaf of bread and a bag of semisweet Italian breakfast biscuits. The bathroom, created from what had recently been a feeding trough for swine, was small but serviceable, with a toilet and shower. Vera had explained that I should make my own breakfast, but that lunch and dinner would be taken with them, in the dining room. Rupert, she warned me, considered these meals an important part of life at the Villa Clio.

  The first thing I did was put my letters from Nicky in the bottom drawer of the dresser. A manila envelope held the dozen letters from Vietnam that had become my secret hoard of pain, and a source of inspiration. I did not want anyone to know about the letters or Nicky. A large part of my life now was about forgetting, and I would become expert in the craft. Nevertheless, I often felt Nicky beside me, in broad daylight, watching. We met directly in my dreams, talking in ways never possible when he was alive. I wanted to put things right a
nd make amends for my silly and cruel disregard for his intelligence and capabilities.

  My mother had marked him from early childhood as the lesser son, the one who would eventually cause trouble. In contrast, my father had been protective of Nicky, who was, like him, not an intellectual but “good with his hands.” When he went to Vietnam, my father had felt reassured, as if his years of standing by his son had been justified by this act of courage and patriotism.

  I tended to side with my mother. For years I shook my head whenever Nicky misbehaved, which was often. The more obnoxious and agitated he became, the calmer I grew. His blackness only whitened my whiteness. I had tried to argue with him, to explain that he was his own worst enemy, but he resisted me as he resisted my parents. Though I was the younger sibling, he defined himself against me; if I was getting good grades, he would get bad ones. If I went to catechism with enthusiasm, he played hooky, describing himself from the age of thirteen as an atheist, much to my mother’s horror. My quietness and tendency toward self-reflection only enhanced his chatty shallowness. That he demolished two cars by the age of seventeen surprised no one. He smoked cigarettes, drank with abandon, swore, and (as we learned after the fact) talked his pregnant girlfriend into an abortion during their senior year in high school. (Nicky could talk a mouse into hunting cats.)

  “Disturbed” was the word my mother used to describe my brother: one of those bland euphemisms families employ to disguise unnamable anguish and fear. Pegged by her as a child who would “come to no good,” his death in Vietnam had struck her as a logical development. Unfortunately, Nicky put more stock in my mother’s opinion of him than in my father’s. On some level, he believed there was nowhere for him to go, and had found a way to confirm a path of pathlessness by dying in a pointless war. (“Goddamn gooks live on both sides of the DMZ,” he wrote on arrival in Saigon, “and I can’t explain to you why we plant our flag for one and not the other.”)

  Having unpacked my few belongings, I undressed. There was something luxurious, after travel, about stripping and stretching out on a perfectly made bed. On my back, naked, I let my first impressions of the cottage assemble slowly, aware that these would undergo many revisions. No place ever appears the same after you have lived there for a week or so. After several months, the size of a room seems to increase with experiences that overlap, erasing (imperfectly) all previous ones, creating a palimpsest of sorts that invariably deepens and grows more complex.

  The afternoon light had acquired a powdery aspect, a dust of gold that lay thinly on every surface in the room. The breeze puffed through an open window on the seaward side, riffling the pages of my notebook, which lay open on the table. Already I was eager to scribble in my journal. I had decided before coming here to keep a strict account of my time at the Villa Clio, thinking that one day it would come in handy. (The possibility that one day I might write a biography of Rupert Grant had not escaped me, but I pushed the notion into the background. I did not want to think of my life as “research.”)

  Eventually, I put on my bathing suit and sat by the bookshelf in the shabby wing chair with springs pushing through the faded fabric. Other people’s books were always more interesting than one’s own, and I was curious about what volumes Rupert Grant would keep here. I guessed any books that meant anything to him would be in his study, but even his spillover interested me. A handful of thrillers by John Buchan and Nevil Shute abutted mysteries by Georges Simenon and Nicholas Blake. A tattered copy of Death in Venice wedged between two miscellaneous leather volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A Shropshire Lad tilted against volumes by Cecil Day-Lewis and John Betjeman. On the bottom shelf were two novels by Hugh Walpole and Old Calabria by Norman Douglas. It worried me that I had not read one of these books, and that some were completely unfamiliar.

  Feeling ignorant and slightly afraid of meeting Rupert Grant for the first time, I trekked down the path to the sea through a grove of olive trees to a bare knoll, where marram grass stirred in a dry wind from the north. The air, though bright, was cool. (I had not imagined swimming until May or June.) The beach was visible below, a rocky stretch of shingle whose whitish-gray pebbles could have, from that height, been mistaken for cockles.

  Just off the path, to the left, was a sheer limestone cliff, and I guessed the view from there would be especially dramatic. Though never comfortable with heights, I pushed through scrub to the edge. The vertical drop was about a hundred feet, and below were black rocks, their sharp blades poking through a swirl of surf. My head spun, as I suddenly envisioned myself pitching forward, falling helplessly, then smashing on the rocks. There was no easy way to die, but this would be horrible. I backed away to the main trail, gazing into the middle distance, feeling weak as I stumbled down the zigzag path.

  Rupert Grant stood in the water below, a milky surf swirling around his thighs. Well over six feet, he stooped slightly as he walked, but not like an old man; he was more like an English schoolboy, gangly and awkward. As I reached the headland, the details of his physiognomy assembled. The white hair had been the first thing that caught my eye as he walked toward me, moving with what seemed like a fierce yet highly controlled natural energy. He was tanned, though the skin on his chest was peeling badly, with the pigment washed out in small albino patches. The lines in his face, growing more visible as I approached, were deep, and the high cheekbones raised a spidery swirl of veins breaking close to the surface. His cheeks, when I got close, were pinkly veined: a result of heavy smoking. His eyes were slate gray, fallen from a younger blue.

  “Ah, you’re Lorenzo,” he said. His deep voice had the slight rustle of a Scottish accent.

  “I’m Alex.”

  “I prefer Lorenzo. Will that do?”

  “I don’t mind,” I said, faintly.

  “Good. It would be awkward if you did.” He saw I was not smiling, and that I looked away. “It’s more jolly this way. You have to invent yourself anyway, what? Adam in the garden, when he named the beasts, was the first artist. Old story. So it goes. We’re all pale ancestors.” He rubbed his chest with a red towel, flaking off skin. “I’m falling apart. Sixty-three tomorrow, so you’re just in time. We’re having a little festa, party on the beach. Good wine, I’m told. Roasting a pig, too. You’re a pig-lover, no?”

  I nodded, vaguely. His rapid-fire speech and odd linguistic mannerisms made the conversation difficult to follow. It also had the effect of distancing us.

  “You’ll meet everyone,” he said. “The whole bloody island is coming. Vera’s idea, not mine. By nature, I’m a recluse.”

  “Your wife suggested I should call you Rupert.”

  “Ah, she found you first. Clever girl.”

  “We had a cup of tea.”

  “No matter. You will like Vera. I do.”

  It seemed peculiar that he should say this about his own wife. Then again, marriage, from what I could tell at my limited vantage, seemed not always to improve relationships. My own parents, I was beginning to think, might well have found better mates. My father’s natural aggressiveness had been turned inward, giving him ulcers and stripping him of that grainy individuality one values in people. My mother had been prompted, by his self-annihilation, to assert herself unduly. She became a dragon folded in the gate of our house.

  “Are you settled?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I like the cottage.”

  “It will do. Unless you expand.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Add on. People on Capri are always adding on: friends, cats, lovers, ghosts.”

  “I don’t intend to add on.”

  “Good chap. I don’t mind occasional guests, but I can’t feed the multitudes. I’m not rich, you see. My novels don’t sell. Or most of them don’t.” The furrows of his brow deepened. “Do you know Bonano, your countryman? Never sells under a hundred thousand copies. Ridiculous man.”

  “I’ve never read one,” I said, to the relief of my new employer.

  What I knew of Domi
nick Bonano came from a profile I’d skimmed in a recent copy of Esquire. He was the author of fat potboilers sold mostly in airports, invariably bound in lurid jackets. One of them—The Last Limo on Staten Island—had achieved some fame as a movie, though I’d somehow missed it. Bonano lived in style in Anacapri in a many-level villa that had formerly belonged to a German industrialist. As I discovered, Grant had a mild obsession with Bonano, though they were far from genuine rivals. Nobody took Bonano’s multigenerational sagas about Mafia families seriously, though he earned millions in royalties and movie options.

  “You’ve had secretaries before?”

  “Several. Good chaps, mostly. One of them was a thief, but we fixed that.” His eyes seemed to glaze over, as if he were suddenly lost in thought. It would become a familiar shift: Grant losing contact with the present, slipping into a parallel universe. I would have to learn to bide my time while he journeyed to wherever. As suddenly as he would disappear, he’d return, usually drawing his hand across his face to reconnect with the moment. “As you know, I have two girls,” he said, “research assistants. Nice girls, Holly and Marisa. You’ll like them.” He explained that Holly had come from England about six months before me. “She’s quite talented,” he said, “writing a novel when she’s not working for me.” Marisa he described as “an Italian girl, who wants to become a journalist.” She had been with him for about two months. “The kind of work I do requires research, of course. Facts, as we say. But I’m not a slave to them. You have to take possession of facts. They’re never true until you make them true.” He shook his head like a dog that has just stepped from the water. “Wilde once said that the English are always degrading truths into facts. I try not to do that. Then again, I’m Scots, what?”