by Jay Parini
Some true things are pretty obvious. Like the finale of Buzz Baxter, a nice dumb fucker who went to take a piss in the shade of a palm tree and stepped on a booby trap, then bang, and that’s it for Buzz—an arm here, a foot there. The ground was so thick with vines and shit, it took us two hours to cut an LZ for the chopper. We should have planted him there, the bits and pieces we could find. When the chopper was gone, taking most of him to Paradise, we found a glob of something dangling from another tree. That’s his fucking nuts, Mickey Donato said. His nuts are hanging on the tree. A nut tree, he called it. A funny guy, Mickey. But I think it really was the bastard’s nuts in a little bag of skin, bloody and mushy, a million sperm probably still alive and swimming around and wondering what the fuck hit them. Fink, the medic, shimmied up and scraped the glob into a plastic bag, and we buried it. “Nuts to nuts, ashes to ashes,” Mickey said, crossing himself. Now that made sense. Was too fucking true. The truest thing I’d heard in a long time around here.
Now the question of Good—another Biggie that Friar Makowski liked to rumble—is maybe harder than the question of True, if you want my opinion (which you don’t but will get anyway, since I’ve got all afternoon to sit here and can’t think of anything better to do but write this stuff). True is just the flipside of False; they are Siamese twins playing Ring Around the Rosie. But it doesn’t work quite so easy with Good. Or maybe it does. Come to think of it, it does. You probably can’t have good without bad. Or peace without war. I have seen both of these famous opposites here, and they are the same when you dig deeper. Good and Evil. Peace and War. Nicky and Alex.
After Buzz got blown away, it was so damn quiet. I swear it had been raining, but the rain seemed to catch midway between the clouds and the ground. Even the jungle noises stopped—the click of bamboo, and the billion trillion bugs who run their little machines at the same time, night and day. It was so god-awful still. And the expression on the dead bastard’s face, now that was true. His eyes wide open, looking at or maybe through the disaster, the complete fucking ruins around him. But what am I trying to say about the Good? A dead young man is not good. You can’t say that and continue to make sense. But why would it matter in the long run? Is death so different from life that we have to make such a fuss about the distinction?
In war, you have life and death rubbed under your nose in a way that doesn’t happen so much in civilian life. Everything is set up to make us believe we’re gonna live forever. But the fact is sooner or later, we’re all gonna die. Buzz Baxter was sooner. I’m at least gonna die later than him. Now that’s true, and it’s beyond repudiation, though whether it’s good or bad I can’t say.
For weird reasons—hey, maybe you don’t find them so weird, who knows?—I don’t want to die before I figure out some of this stuff. It would be nice to get a few answers to the Big Questions, just in case. Maybe I’d rather sit in the sun with a bottle of beer between my knees. But what choice do I got? When you see guys go down every day, you scratch your head and wonder what the point is.
Any suggestions, professor, and you know where to reach me. You don’t get me here, try c/o Ho Chi Minh.
Your very own,
Socrates
two
I’d been given a part of Grant’s work-in-progress about Capri to type, and I couldn’t get some pages about Tiberius out of my head. The emperor had been haunting me since I’d translated the passage from Suetonius. If the excesses described by Tacitus and Suetonius were even partially true, it wasn’t far-fetched that his friend, Cocceius Nerva, the eminent jurist, should feel moved to starve himself to death in protest. The sexual politics on Capri under this Lord of Misrule must have been unbearable at close range.
It was bad enough at the Villa Clio. I disliked the way Grant played Marisa and Holly off each other with a kind of sly malice, flattering them when necessary, fanning their desire for his attention as needed, chiding or ignoring—always to satisfy a private whim. I took notes, mentally. (It seemed foolish to write down anything along these lines—there was always the threat of something being read by the wrong eyes.) There he was, Rupert Grant, an experienced lover of the old school behaving in ways I considered despicable; yet on some level I envied his success. Marisa, Holly, and Vera were appealing creatures, each in their distinctive ways. And they doted on him, vying for his attention, willing to submit to his whims.
It could be muggy in June, and after five hours of typing, I often went to the beach. These watery escapes had become habitual, and I would go out a long way by myself, absorbed—a consciousness afloat, detached from the shoreline world. In fact, I had always gone to water for an escape, not only from the heat. I recalled hot summers in Pennsylvania, when the air stuck to your skin like cellophane and the birds were too exhausted to stir, sitting on the telephone wires in serial array, stunned. High humidity invariably provoked histrionics from my mother, who would sizzle and scream; my father would come home late from work, muttering under his breath. “Nothing but heat lightning,” he’d say.
He avoided her when he could, rising early, leaving the house in his Ford pickup for a construction site at six-thirty. Nicky got up next, frying things that left a fatty stench or slopping milk and Wheaties over the waxy cloth that covered the kitchen table. The “Breakfast of Champions” appealed to his self-image as a teenager, and he ate heartily and drank endless mugs of Tang, an artificial drink full of vitamin C. Soon after breakfast, he would pump iron on the back porch, trying to inflate himself. A lurid poster of the famed muscle-builder Joe Weider hung in his bedroom.
My mother objected to Nicky’s bodybuilding fervor. “That’s a sport for queers,” she would say. “Queers are weight lifters. They want to show off their muscles, their big bulges.” She never failed to serve up an example as evidence for the prosecution. “Maria Malfieri’s son, Rudy. Now there’s a pansy if I ever saw one! He’s a hairdresser in Wilkes-Barre. A good one, they say—gives a good perm. But my God, the muscles!” This kind of remark would infuriate Nicky, who invented ingenious ways to spite her, like posting pictures of famous weight lifters on the refrigerator or refusing to eat dinner (her cooking was sacred to her, the magical source of her power) while he skipped rope ostentatiously on the back porch, the thump thump thump reverberating in the kitchen while we ate silently at the table. Occasionally he sat in the kitchen while she cooked, cranking a dumbbell, “working on his pecs,” as he put it.
My mother rose late, coming downstairs with her hair in a net, her velour housecoat barely concealing her girth. Like a tree, she added rings every year; they gathered around the waist and beneath her chin. (My grandfather Alessandro once shook his head wistfully when he saw her straining to pry her body from a car: “Spamponata,” he said, meaning “a blown rose.”) By the time I reached high school, she had accumulated two hundred and twenty pounds—a weight at which she claimed to “feel just about right,” although the burden on her knees had begun to cause pain. The doctors warned her that she was a ticking time bomb, a heart attack waiting to happen, especially with her high blood pressure, but this only gave her ammunition. “I might as well have another helping, since I’ll be dead soon,” she would say at family meals, rather casually, as if commenting on the weather. One could hear, beneath this, the unspoken refrain: And you’ll be sorry you didn’t treat me better!
My relationship with my father was different. He was, in his way, a decent fellow who never quite understood the terms of his marriage. He had lived in the shadow of my grandfather, the head of the family, for so long that he had never quite found a voice of his own. He had gravitated toward Nicky for obvious reasons; for one, Nicky was “good with his hands,” and they could spend hours together hunched over a motor in the garage on weekends, fiddling with a carburetor or replacing a fuel pump. And Nicky had, from an early age, showed an interest in hunting and fishing. Although my bookishness puzzled my father, he never discouraged me. “Read,” he would say, discovering me on the back porch in a hammock, a book on my la
p. “It’s a good habit.” And one that he had never himself acquired.
I avoided both my parents whenever I could, skipping breakfast and slipping away to the river. The Susquehanna was silty and soft, lukewarm from July through early September. There was an isolated landing, half a mile from the Exeter Anthracite Company, which had long ceased operations but whose ghostly buildings—abandoned breakers and rusted machines—had never been razed. It was lovely there, and you could dive from the rocks if you kept it shallow. Sometimes I’d swim to the other side, under the bleached cliffs of Camel’s Ledge (as beautiful and menacing as Il Salto, with its desperate sheer sides below the Villa Jovis). Or I’d float on my back to the Coxton Bridge, its iron lacework a monument to the industrial age, which had its own peculiar grace notes. In the water, I felt free and selfless—a creaturely creature. Water was another element, wholly unlike my house, my family, and the stifling air surrounding them. All expectations dissolved in the swift current.
That feeling of wanting to escape gripped me as I picked my way along the dirt path beside the flowering broom, a bank of bright yellow, going down to the beach below the Villa Clio. What I needed was a good rinse in the sea. But Grant had beaten me to the punch, as usual. I saw him down there, lying beside Holly on the sharp pebbles: she with her top off, her breasts bare to the sun, white against the deep tan around them; they glistened as she rubbed them with tanning oil, the nipples taut. I watched greedily, guiltily. Grant in his sling bathing suit sat next to her, under his straw hat, in sunglasses, reading aloud, his voice inaudible but filling the air. He gestured with one hand, and Holly shuddered with laughter, bending to kiss him—a brief, filial kiss. He put down his book and touched her face, letting his fingers walk across her cheeks and forehead. Then they kissed deeply, lingering in each other’s mouths and arms, tumbling onto the blanket. I looked away.
“Naughty boy!”
I startled, turning to face Marisa, who had crept up behind me unawares.
“You are the Peeping Lorenzo,” she said. Her accent was thick and sultry.
“I was going to swim, but—”
“They were practically fuck, so you didn’t want to disturb them,” she said.
“Something like that.”
“Are you still pining to hold her?”
“I’m not pining,” I said.
“You are. And she’s annoyed from it.”
Her expression amused me. Marisa may have learned colloquial English during her time in England, adding to it lately at the Villa Clio, but she was still Neapolitan in her cadences, in the way she hung words together. She had merely placed little English cars on the crazy, looping roads of her Italian syntax.
“I don’t see why she would be annoyed,” I said.
“And who wouldn’t be so annoy?” she replied. “You hang around her like the dog-puppy. You wag your tail for her. ‘Bowwow. Please, could I have a bone, miss?’” Marisa meant to sound derisive, but a note of compassion softened her remark. I was perhaps more pathetic than objectionable.
“Everyone finds me amusing,” I said. “I should have gone into show business.”
“I hope you’re not so serious.” She put a finger on my lower lip, tipping my head toward her breasts. “Do you find me beautiful, Lorenzo?”
“I do.”
“I’m so glad for this. It would be unpleasant if you thought I was ugly. In Italy, it is not good to be ugly. Beauty is considered your duty, a morality.”
“You are definitely not ugly.”
“Oh, good. I am relief. So let’s swim in the pool together,” she said. “Nobody’s ever use it so much, but I love this pool. Don’t you think so?”
I followed, under her spell. At poolside, the travertine tiles glistened but were cool beneath our feet; the pool itself was absolutely still, a piece of fallen sky. The air smelled strongly of cyprus.
“Guarda! Scorpione!” Marisa cried, pointing at a small scorpion, which seemed paralyzed by the sun. “She is very poison.”
I stepped on the insect firmly with a bare foot, as I had seen Grant do—what he called “the old snuff-step.” According to him, if you crushed it quickly it couldn’t sting you. The exoskeleton collapsed under the ball of my foot, and the juices ran. I said, “Basta, così.”
“What a brave boy, Lorenzo!” Marisa said. Then she lay belly down on a lounge chair, leaving just enough room for me to sit beside her. “Now you put the oil on me, you hero.”
“You like to tease me.”
“Do what you are told,” she said. “I have given you a simple request.”
I obeyed happily, massaging the oil into her neck and shoulders. The scented liquid seemed to vie with nature for olfactory dominance, and nature was losing. My fingers trembled as I rubbed the substance into the small of her back. Ever so slightly, she lifted her hips. A glorious move. I sucked in my breath. It had been, it seemed, such a long time since I had been this close to anyone.
“You are very beautiful,” I said.
“You have meant this?”
“Absolutely.”
Marisa turned toward me, with a timid smile. “I will visit you tonight, no?”
“What?”
“I will come to your cottage. Eleven o’clock?”
“My cottage?”
“Yes, I will make the visit. I am like the village doctor, going house to house.”
I quivered inside. Could she really be saying this? “Eleven is fine,” I said. “It’s more than fine. I’m very happy.” My own language seemed to conform to hers: childlike and straightforward, almost naked.
“Bravo,” she said, as though I’d just put forward a tremendous performance of some kind.
I couldn’t believe I’d invited her, or that she had suggested it. It seemed wrong to interfere with Rupert Grant’s sexual arrangements, whatever they were. I owed him a certain loyalty, as his secretary. He had given me his trust, and I felt awkward about betraying him. On the other hand, I wanted something for myself, not nothing. I’d had enough of nothing in the past few months, and the sexual strain had become unendurable. Had I not seen him ignore or spurn Marisa on several recent occasions, I would have felt less inclined to accept her invitation. I found her alluring, though my attention had fallen mostly on Holly. Marisa had certainly sought my gaze at the table, in the garden, in the study. And once, in the piazzetta, she had briefly grasped my hand and squeezed it. I had squeezed it back, offering a slight smile. But there had been no explicit encouragement from me.
A shadowy figure loomed in the garden, near a tall cyprus. It was Mimo, who often seemed to hover like a black crow sunk in his own darkness, his wings pulled back. Standing with a rake in his hands, motionless, he watched us closely. His eyes hung there in space, small fiery black eyes, inhuman. I scowled back, but this had no effect whatsoever. He was leering at Marisa, and hardly noticed my presence.
“Mimo is fascinated,” I said.
She sat up and glared at him, forcing him to turn away. “He lurks everywhere,” she said to me. “Una brutta figura. I hate these men who are lurkers.”
Hearing this, I wondered if Holly considered me a lurker. I had surely done more than my share of lurking since my arrival on Capri. Though moving on a higher social plane, I was no better than Mimo, a figure in the shadows, the lascivious outsider, hiding in plain view, making una brutta figura. Even at Columbia, I had lingered on the edge of my small circle, not quite fitting in, observing the behavior of my friends with a cynical detachment that disguised nothing more than fear. In my final year, I lived off-campus in an apartment with several male friends, each of whom spent most of his time smoking dope or plotting the next stage of the revolution. I had been dragged to political meetings and antiwar rallies, held picket signs, and sat on the steps of administration buildings. I had marched on Washington and poured red paint (to signify blood) on the walls of the Department of Justice. But none of this activity had engaged me fully. I was still struggling to move beyond a fierce solitude that ma
de all social contact seem unreal. As the war grew increasingly insane, under Nixon, I found myself disoriented, unable to think, obsessing over my brother. I finally broke away, unable to bear the clamor inside and outside a moment longer.
As they would, my problems had followed me to Capri. I had been stalled, passive, and frustrated since my arrival, and it was now time to do something aggressive and positive, to “make it happen,” as Nicky said in one letter. “Whatever it is, you just got to make it happen, goddamn it. Make it happen.”
Now Marisa—lanky, oiled, athletic—plunged into the water, shattering the calm surface of the pool with a shallow dive, taking the length of it without needing an extra breath. The Capri light seemed to waver, swinging through the pool, turquoise. I watched her shadow in the water, slithering forward, sleek. When her head finally split the water, she flung back a swaddling of black hair: “Come in, Lorenzo! Don’t be so lazy! She is warm!” She kicked across the pool on her back, each splash retilting the light.
I watched her, waiting until she drew herself from the water, loose-limbed and slippery-skinned. She smoothed the wet, black hair behind her head. To myself, I quoted a favorite line from Catullus: “Vivamus, mea Lesbea, atque amemus.” (“Come, my Lesbea, let us live and love.”)
Now she walked toward me, her feet printing the travertine tiles. Yes, I said, I would be Lorenzo. I would be whomever, whatever, it took to make this happen, even if I jeopardized everything with Rupert Grant. It was time to live and love.
three
That evening I had been invited to the villa of Dominick Bonano in Anacapri. It was my second visit to the Villa Vecchia, meaning “old house,” though it was fairly new, built in the fifties by a wealthy German manufacturer of bathroom fixtures. “The guy made the best goddamn toilet seats in Germany,” Bonano told me, showing me around the house in May. Standing in the doorway of one bathroom, he said, with his usual eloquence, “This is the best place in Capri to take a crap.”