The Apprentice Lover

by Jay Parini

  I could think of no response.

  “Lorenzo, dear boy,” he said, managing to get some affection into his voice. “Go to your cottage. Type my manuscript, or read, or wank, or write something of your own. I’ll pick over it, if that’s what you want.”

  The whole conversation was too confusing, too troubling, and I couldn’t digest the large lump Grant had put into my emotional stomach. Tactfully, he ignored my distress, putting on his sunglasses as a way of dismissing me. His head dipped forward, into the book, and his finger moved down the page to locate the exact place where he had left off.

  I went back to the cottage, determined to go my own way. I didn’t need his literary conversation or counsel. The fact that he’d known so many writers, that he knew so much about the craft of writing, was an accident of personal history. I would make my own history, independent of him, and not be reduced to a mere satellite in his universe, a minor moon revolving around his planet. The Sun King could go fuck himself.

  eight

  Late one afternoon, toward the end of May, I came upon Holly and Marisa on the beach. They sat beside each other in low canvas chairs, an empty bottle of wine between them, and their glasses tipped in the sand. Except for meals, I rarely found them together, and was surprised to see them here. (My assumptions about their rivalry—which existed more in my head than in reality—were hard to disrupt.)

  “Swimming?” I asked, kneeling beside them.

  “My head is,” said Holly. She wore a two-piece suit that exposed a slender, pale belly.

  Marisa leaned toward me, her dark hair falling forward across her eyes. “The sea is too cold,” she said. “I am not so British. They can swim in the ice!”

  “Has he been mean to you?” asked Holly.

  I looked at her blankly.

  “Rupert is a wicked old man,” she said. “He says he offended you. You wanted a tutorial, and he refused.”

  “I wasn’t offended,” I said, though my voice betrayed my feelings. “And I wasn’t looking for a tutorial.”

  “He should be punish,” said Marisa. Her toenails shimmered like cherries.

  “He’s a bear of very little brain,” Holly said. “Pay no attention to him.”

  I sat on the pebbles beside them, leaning back with my weight on my wrists, staring at the sea—a bronze shield of light, with a sailboat stalled on the horizon. “He doesn’t know it, but I’m learning a lot from him,” I said.

  Marisa raised her eyebrows. “For me, I am learning nothing,” she said. “My work is a disaster.”

  “You’re not working hard enough,” Holly told her.

  “So I am,” she said, thrusting her jaw forward. “It’s my concentration that is broken.”

  I was surprised by this adamantine aspect of Marisa, a hardness and self-conscious assertion of herself. Before this, she had struck me as pouty and distracted, a purely sensual creature. Like Grant, I had thought of her, and Holly as well, as physical more than spiritual beings, and my shallowness upset me.

  Suddenly Rupert Grant stepped from the water, not twenty yards away, shaking his head to clear his ears. He was already as tanned as most lifeguards in July, although his skin was leathery and dry. The flabbiness in his stomach suggested that he’d once been much heavier.

  “The great white god himself,” Holly said, as he walked toward us on the pebbles, stepping carefully.

  “I see my little class has gathered,” he said, wiping his face with a towel. I could see the blue veins in his legs bulging—the skin translucent in places. There was a yellow fungus growing in his toes.

  “We’re at your feet,” said Holly.

  “I hope you’re taking care of Lorenzo, what? He requires some shepherding,” Grant said.

  “I’m happy to do it,” said Marisa.

  Grant leaned toward me. “Be careful, she bites. I’ve got the wounds to prove it.”

  “I’m not as edible as I look,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” said Grant. “You’re perfectly delicious. Like a sweet from one of Vera’s cookbooks.”

  “I’m going to swim,” I said, racing toward the cool, metallic surf. I needed to cleanse myself, to clarify the muddy waters sloshing about my brain. I still believed the Villa Clio was a good place for me, and that I would improve as a writer in the presence of a master. And I was still fascinated by the world that Grant, like Prospero, summoned from the air around him. Yet the seeds of disquiet had been planted in the past weeks, and I was afraid they would soon mature into towering, unwelcome plants.

  nine

  I sat one evening with Peter Duncan-ones on the terrace of his villa, Casa di Fiori—a damp, narrow house that hid behind an artfully arranged garden. (“It’s a tedious little place,” Vera had confided to me, “but the terrace is charming. Peter often paints on the terrace.”) Peter and I had just finished a cool bottle of Lacrimae Christi (“the tears of Christ”). A fan of light swept over the terrace, with the sun slipping into the sea below, setting the water ablaze.

  “You mustn’t mind Rupie,” said Peter, in response to my account of a conversation with Grant that had particularly upset me. “It’s got nothing to do with you. He’s a haunted house.”

  “He had a very bad war,” said Jeremy, his companion.

  “Nonsense,” said Peter. “He had no war at all. He had a commission of sorts, but worked for the information office in London. One of those lucky bloody sods who was too young for the first war and too old for the second.”

  “I was referring to his first marriage,” said Jeremy.

  The villa perched just above the Belvedere Cannone, overlooking the via Krupp and the Marina Piccola. It was, as Peter admitted, a “poky little villa,” but he had no money to speak of. His paintings rarely sold, “except to tourists from Arkansas or Nebraska,” who bought them for decoration, not for art’s sake. Jeremy, on the other hand, had made some money in London real estate, so they lived in modest comfort. (Jeremy spent most of his time cooking, showing all the signs of having mastered the art: a bloated stomach and a series of receding chins. Even the fat around his knees jiggled.)

  I visited Peter now and then, mostly for consolation. He was unfailingly kind and willing to listen and advise. He could seem facetious and facile—the perfect model of the English dilettante—but that was only a mask he wore in public. I found him more subtle and pleasant than he wanted to appear. He was not his own best advocate.

  His relationship to the Villa Clio was complex. Grant genuinely respected him as a person (not as a painter), and Vera genuinely respected him as a painter (not as a person). Between them, they formed a coherent, and humane, response to a man who gained a good deal of self-respect from his association, as he put it, “with the Grant circle.”

  “Rupert doesn’t actually realize how famous he is,” I said.

  “Oh, darling, he does,” Peter replied, taking a long drag from his cigarette, holding the pinkie finger with his family’s signet ring apart from the rest of his hand. He often wore a paisley smoking jacket around the house, as if expecting Noel Coward for drinks. “Rupie likes being famous, but he doesn’t like people recognizing him or fawning. It’s a quandary, you see. Fame without any of the benefits of fame.”

  Jeremy brought us each a little plate of what looked like green-speckled dumplings.

  “Rabaton alessandrini,” he said. “Ask Vera about them. It’s her recipe.”

  As I later discovered, they were easy to make: you churned stale bread and Swiss chard through a food mill, added some herbs, eggs, ricotta, and parmesan, then shaped the rabaton into palm-size balls and dropped them into boiling vegetable broth. When they rose to the surface (as with tortellini), they were done, so you rescued them, sprinkled them with grated cheese, glazed them with butter, then served them warm.

  “You’re an angry young man, Alex,” Peter said, seizing the wheel of our conversation rather abruptly and steering into a thicket.

  “Me?”

  “I’m only saying this because
I’ve taken a liking to you. Otherwise, I’d never be so honest. Usually, it doesn’t pay, does it? I mean, who needs it?”

  “I never thought of myself as angry.”

  Jeremy, his mouth obscenely full, leaped in: “I’m to blame, dear,” he confessed. “Just the other night I said to Peter, something is wrong with the boy. I think he’s depressed. And Peter mentioned that Vera had noticed it, too.”

  “That’s true,” said Peter. “Vera has seen you sulking and brooding. Young Hamlet, she calls you.”

  I wondered to what degree this was true. Did I sulk and brood? In my own sense of things, my mood had dramatically improved since setting foot on Capri. Before leaving the U.S., I had felt lethally unhappy. In any case, it irked me to think that others were speculating on my mental health. As far as I could tell, I was calm, even-tempered, accommodating. I reminded myself less of Hamlet than Polonius, as described in Eliot’s Prufrock: “Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous.” The quotation now filled me with self-loathing.

  “Is it the girl?” Peter asked. “Girls will do this to red-blooded boys like yourself.”

  “Holly?”

  “Marisa, actually,” he answered, surprised. “I gather you fancy Marisa.”

  “I do, but I prefer Holly.”

  “Or Patrice?” Jeremy smiled coyly. “Now he’s my type—those hard buns.”

  “Alex is not musical,” Peter said. “Are you musical, Alex? I don’t think so.”

  They both looked at me intently.

  “It’s an old-fashioned term for queer,” Peter explained.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I see, you’re not sure.” It was not a question from Peter but a statement. “Nobody is ever sure. But at your age, they are especially unsure.”

  “I’m sure,” Jeremy said. “I’ve never really understood the point of women.”

  The fact was I didn’t want to discuss any of this. “Why are you both grilling me?” I asked, putting down my plate of rabaton. “This place is fucking insane.”

  “Our little casa?” Jeremy asked, with mock horror.

  “This island,” I said, rising to my feet. “Nobody seems to realize there’s a war going on. A fucking war!”

  Peter and Jeremy looked at me as if I were mad.

  “Vietnam!” I shouted.

  After an awkward moment of silence, Peter said, tentatively, “You’re a liberal, is that it?” His detached manner, which implied superiority rooted in self-control, infuriated me. It was as though he were discussing a specimen in a museum, holding my heart in sterile pincers to examine its slimy workings.

  I would not let go. “Don’t either of you read the papers? This is a goddamn brutal and idiotic war. We’re killing people every day, including women and children. American men are dying as we speak.”

  “Dying for what?” Jeremy asked, raising a supercilious eyebrow.

  I hurled my glass at the terra-cotta floor.

  “Do be calm,” Peter said to me, though glaring at Jeremy.

  “Maybe I don’t want be calm when people are dying.”

  “It’s been going on for a long time,” Peter said. “Wars, rumors of wars. It’s a by-product of empire. When I was a child, the British did this sort of thing. Now it’s your turn.”

  “This war is no rumor.”

  “We’re not on opposite sides or anything,” Peter said. “I consider Richard Nixon a piggie-wiggie.”

  “We liked LBJ even less,” added Jeremy. “That accent. Appalling. He apparently would interview reporters while sitting on the loo.”

  I could see there was no point in extending this particular conversation. Both Peter and Jeremy meant well, but they had not come crashing up against the Vietnam War as I had. They had not lost a brother, a home, a whole imagined future. They didn’t know that everything had changed for me. That I could hardly write to my parents, they were so bitter about my leaving. That I dreamed about Nicky night after night and fought to keep him from dominating my waking thoughts. Nicky my friend and enemy, my adviser, my sounding board, the butt of my jokes, and the only one who would ever actually get most of them. We had, between us, formed a kind of whole, as in Plato’s parable; it occurred to me now that I might spend a lifetime searching for the other part.

  PART THREE

  amo, amas, amat

  one

  As Nicky’s tour of duty lengthened, his letters from Vietnam became more reflective, even philosophical. This was, for me, an unfamiliar aspect of my brother, who had never seemed terribly inward or prone to self-scrutiny. At home, he was too busy defending himself against all comers, on guard most of the time, striking attitudes, ready to parry each blow that came with an equally strong countermeasure. That I had dismissed him as dumb or crude, even to his face, upset me. I should have realized that brothers, as the old Neapolitan saying goes, are versions of each other.

  But I had reasons for behaving badly. Nicky could resort, when threatened, to violence as a way of showing me who was in control. From an early age, he knocked me around, often “accidentally” inflicting a bruise. (I still bore a scar above my right eye, just below the hairline, where a rock opened a slice that required several stitches. Nicky, of course, swore he’d aimed well over my head, but similar incidents happened again and again.) By posing a physical threat, he attempted to control me, and it worked fairly well for most of our years together. If he wanted something, he took it, and all I could do was call him names, complain to my parents, or take subversive, retaliatory measures. By my early teens, I’d become practiced in the terrible art of passive aggression.

  Apart from occasional attacks, Nicky was not typically mean or selfish; his generosity was even surprising, given the position he’d been stuffed into by my mother. I suspect he considered himself unwanted, except by the unwashed, pimpled, foul-mouthed creeps from Wilkes-Barre and Nanticoke whom he considered his friends. What held them together was devotion to six-packs of beer and harsh, unfiltered cigarettes, which they often wore in the sleeves of their T-shirts. If the rest of us wore scented aftershaves, Nicky and Company, as I called them, appeared to bathe in the mechanical fluids that kept their various engines purring.

  “That son of mine, Nicky, he can’t do anything right,” my mother was often overheard to say on the telephone. (She spent a good portion of each day on the phone with her friends from the St. Ann’s Circle, a group of parish women who met once a month for bingo and traveled in a group to Scranton every summer to make a Novena.)

  “Nicky’s gonna be fine,” my father would counter, flashing a shy smile that revealed a gold tooth in front—a peculiar deformity that always embarrassed me in public. (Why did no one else have a father with a gold tooth? Where, I used to wonder, did one even get a gold tooth?)

  Around our house, it had been Cain and Abel to the hilt. I only began to view Nicky in a different light when, in his letters from Vietnam, I heard an unexpected note of clarity and grace, a kind of hip articulateness that must have been buried there all the time, waiting to emerge. In the moral forcing house of war, my brother matured at breakneck speed, and could hardly contain himself in writing to me, putting on a self-performance that surprised and dazzled me. There was still the edge of superiority that all older brothers have, although in Nicky’s case he felt so inferior to me, intellectually, that it dulled that edge. I found in those letters a brother I hadn’t known, a friend and confidant, and looked forward to his return from the war, believing we could repair the damage done before; I felt sure that a long and fruitful brotherhood lay before us.

  One letter, in particular, changed my sense of him definitively. It was written from a camp near Quang Tri, the area where he spent the last three months of his life, mostly on recognizance missions, although he was also involved in Search and Destroy—a tactic peculiarly suited to the madness of Vietnam. “You just walk through the jungle looking for trouble, waiting to be ambushed,” as Nicky said. “It’s maybe the scariest damn thing
that any human being can do. Every snap, crackle, and pop in the jungle drives you nutty. And what is a jungle except snap, crackle, and pop?” The wonder is that anyone came back alive from those excursions.

  Dear Asshole,

  Here I am, deep in shit, and not even worried. Isn’t that a bitch? I mean, if I didn’t know there was somebody waiting to blow my head away, I’d say I was on vacation—a tourist, taking in the sights, on some fucking safari.

  Nam is many things to many people, but it’s also a place for philosophy, let me tell you. I spent some pretty intense nights talking with Eddie and the guys, and we got farther than Friar Makowski ever got in that class I took at King’s: Philosophy 101. What is True? he used to ask us. In Vietnam, you don’t ask that question. Nothing is true in Southeast Asia. It’s made up, start to finish. The reasons for the war are not true reasons. Maybe there are no true reasons. And the politicians from Nixon on down are lying to the public. That’s what politicians do. They lie to the public and to the generals who lie to the lieutenants who lie to the sergeants who lie to us: that’s the real Domino Effect.

  The mission is everything, they tell us. But I’m no missionary, and that’s a problem here. I don’t see that I’ve got a mission to kill some poor skinny bastards who think it’s cool to run around in black pajamas or live in rat-infested tunnels for months on end. It’s their country, isn’t it? I mean, they are free to kill each other if they like. But even they don’t seem to know what the people of Vietnam really want. I can’t even keep the gooks straight in my head: VC, Minh, NVR, Chinks. South or North Vietnam, they say, makes about as much sense as South Rhode Island and North Rhode Island. Truth begins with the line between North and South, somebody in Washington, D.C., said. But who drew that line? Who is making up stories to justify their actions?

  It’s not that I’m against stories. Around here, we tell stories all the time, invent them and pretend they’re true. If they make us feel good, they are called True. If they scare the shit out of us, we yell Liar!