by Jay Parini
“Here you go,” said Bonano, putting on the table before me a signed copy of The Last Limo on Staten Island. “First edition,” he said. “My hair wasn’t so gray,” he added, pointing to the author photograph.
I fingered the neon-colored dust jacket, which featured a stretch Caddy (1959, jet black, with gigantic fins) parked beneath the portico of a Greek Revival mansion. “Thanks,” I said, “but you didn’t have—”
“He’s got two hundred copies in the basement,” Rose cut in. “We’re never gonna get rid of them before they go moldy. Take all you want.”
Bonano sighed. “Thanks, Rose.”
I read the inscription. To my fellow writer and paisano, Alex. Forget the fancy stuff! Tell good stories!
“I’m glad to have this,” I said. “If I can think of any good stories, I’ll tell them.”
“Why don’t we let the children alone?” Rose muttered, sotto voce, to her husband.
“Yeah,” he said, “sure. Good idea. Help yourself to more cognac, guys.”
After another drink, I followed Toni to the pool for a midnight swim. “There are bathing suits in the poolhouse,” she said, pointing to a tiny building at one end of the garden. “Help yourself.”
I did so, and when I emerged, she was already in the water, having slipped into a bikini herself while I was changing.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “Come in.”
I leaped, clumsily, splashing her. We treaded water for a few minutes, head tilted back. A billion stars sprinkled over us, and I quoted some lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! / O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!”
“You wrote that?”
“I wish,” I said. “A Victorian priest wrote that, a Jesuit.”
“Sounds like a Jesi,” she said, lifting herself to the side of the pool. “Are you religious?”
“Gnostic,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“My own thing.”
“Cool,” she said, lifting herself from the pool.
I watched her closely, taking in everything.
Her body fit naturally with the setting—a garden sculpted from the wild, tamed by travertine and tile, illumined by recessed lighting that seemed to caress this little world’s cunningly wrought surfaces: bushes shaved into perfect globes against the background of umbrella pines and camellias, a maze of paths with stone benches set artfully beneath woven canopies of vine. Toni might have been a marble statue—so smooth and molded, the lines classically drawn, idealized beyond the point of eroticism, which seems oddly and perversely to depend on error, visual mischance, a touch of formlessness.
“Do you like my body?” she asked.
“I do.”
She responded by diving into the water again, flipping onto her belly before she jackknifed and plunged to the bottom. I was still treading water, watching her form as it shattered into angles and shapes like a Cubist painting. Her head broke the water only a foot in front of me.
I reached to touch her hair.
“We can meet another night,” she said, ducking away from me. “Daddy is waiting up for me. He always does for a week or so when I come home. Then I become Old News.”
I told her I could meet again whenever it was convenient. My schedule at the Villa Clio was flexible. I had no plans, no obvious commitments. Indeed, I could see no direction whatsoever in my life. I merely stumbled from moment to moment, day to day, person to person. Though not unpleasant, it was the next best thing to chaos.
We dressed quickly, then she walked me to the gate, where we kissed politely, a peck on the lips.
“Call me,” she said. “I get bored here.”
“I will.”
Stumbling to the piazza of Anacapri over crooked paving stones, I wondered if Toni Bonano would become a friend or a lover. It was impossible to tell, but either possibility was fine. In truth, I needed a friend more than a lover, a reference point outside the crazy circle of the Villa Clio. I needed someone to say, Alex, they’re all nuts. Remember, they’re all nuts.
four
The clock in the tower of San Michele la Croce gonged twelve times as I made my way home, having crossed from one side of the island to the other by taxi. By now, I recognized many faces in the piazzetta, a mix of resident foreigners and locals who could be found, in some combination, on any night of the summer under one of the colorful awnings, a glass of grappa or espresso on the table before them, a cigarette in hand. Capri came alive at night, and even small children (always dressed to the nines) were allowed to parade with their parents, fare un giro, making “a circle” in society at late hours that, to an American, reeked of child abuse. I caught sight of Patrice, transfixed in conversation with Giovanni at the opposite end of the square. To avoid them, I ducked into a side alley, hurrying along the Tragara, back to the Villa Clio.
Moonlight bathed the grounds, turning the lawns ghostly; every blade of grass seemed distinct, otherwordly in the phosphorescent glow. I stood for a moment in the moon’s full light, transfixed. Beside me, Vera’s flowers shone colorless, white as stone. All the bedroom lights were out—the Grants retired each night quite early—but I found my way easily to the cottage by following the pale gravel path.
In those days I slept naked, especially on hot nights. Without bothering to turn on a lamp—the moonlight was more than sufficient, pouring through windowpanes onto the tiled floor—I began undressing on my way to bed, dropping bits and pieces behind me: a sweaty shirt, shoes and socks, a pair of jeans, my boxers. The cool sheets of the bed would feel welcoming. Built of stone, the cottage always retained a certain musty coolness, and a fragrant cross-breeze swept between the open windows, never failing to create obliging conditions for sleep.
I realized, before I hit the bed, that I was not alone.
“You have been late, no? And drinking!”
“Marisa?”
“I have waited too long for you. You make me so angry, Lorenzo. We have made arrangements, no?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“Don’t argue it. You have been to the bar, I can smell. The men in Naples are like this when they go to the bar.” She draped her arms around my neck, pulling me toward her breasts. Like me, she wore nothing.
I resisted, slightly.
“You don’t like my body?”
“No, I do. I like it very much.”
“So be here,” she said. “It is a very short life.”
I could hear Nicky in my head, urging me on. “Just do it,” he was saying. Yes, Nicky, I said. Yes.
Our bodies lengthened beneath the sheets and the world was soon all skin, teeth clattering as we kissed, clicking like ice cubes in a glass. I tasted the tobacco on her breath, but it was not unpleasant. Her arms circled me, and she pressed close, rocking against me with her hips, now undulating with quick, sharp pelvic thrusts. I was startled by the length of her, the sense that her body seemed to extend in every direction for a thousand miles. Her long black hair was wonderfully thick and rich, and she had recently washed it—the shampoo was fresh and clean. I took long, slow breaths.
“Make love with me,” she said, her voice hoarse.
I said nothing, but followed her instructions, sinking into my first full sexual experience in many months, savoring the liquor of her body. I drank her in, loving the soft fuzz of her pubic hair, the moist brush of skin and tongue. When I finally came into her, she was wide beneath me, her legs as open as I could possibly have wished for. She was wet and warm. I floated out to sea on this raft of pleasure, forgetting everything that had ever happened in my life, ignoring everything to come.
Afterward, Marisa sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while I lay half asleep beside her, too exhausted to contemplate anything so rational as a consequence. I had been completely in thrall to instinct, and didn’t mind at all. The experience had felt absolute, unmediated, and commonplace in the best way. Before long I fell asleep, my arm across her stomach. A deep and apparent
ly dreamless sleep overwhelmed me, as if the unconscious were going to let me off the hook for once. When I woke, soon after dawn, I noticed that she had gone, and that the moon, too, had fallen across the sky, dragging with it the whole night sky.
I sat in bed with Rilke’s letters, fumbling for a passage in the seventh letter that I recalled dimly and wanted to reread. “For one being to love another,” he wrote to young Kappus, “that is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the ultimate and last test and proof, the work for which all other work is mere preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.” I underlined that passage, knowing I had a great deal to learn about this subject. “But young people err so often and so grievously in this,” Rilke continued, “they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion.”
That morning, more than ever, my life was just those things: untidiness, disorder, and confusion.
five
For days I wandered around the Villa Clio in a state of dread, certain that the ax would fall. In one scenario, I imagined Rupert Grant appearing at the door of my cottage, blowsy-faced with whiskey, his eyes watering. He would tell me how much I had hurt him, accusing me of betrayal. I would be asked to pack my bags at once. In another vision, I saw him sending Vera in his place. She would come with sad eyes, and speak softly, and tell me that under the circumstances I should probably consider blah blah blah. In the worst scenario, Grant would burst into my cottage in a rage, a pistol in hand, demanding satisfaction. But nothing of the sort happened.
Instead, I remained in my cottage or strolled the gardens of the villa in a confused daze. One morning, I sat on the cliff overlooking the bay below the Villa Clio, listening to the sea grind its teeth below. Falling from great heights had always been a recurrent nightmare, and this particular cliff seemed to beckon. I went there to confront my fear, hoping to tame something inside of myself. I sat on the edge, dangling my feet, as if tempting fate. With a feeling of triumph, I walked away, having temporarily mastered some dark impulse toward self-destruction.
I had wondered about Vera’s reaction to the news, which I assumed would reach her—there were few secrets at the Villa Clio—but she was blithely unchanged. At one point, she mentioned that Marisa came from a “rough background” in Naples, and described her father as “a violent lout” who abused his daughter. But that was it.
The response of Grant had worried me the most; Marisa was, after all, “his” girl. To my relief, he seemed warmer than ever toward me, asking to see my latest poems. “Don’t be shy, Lorenzo,” he said. “I’d be delighted to see what you’re doing.” When I told him there were no latest poems, he instructed me to write some. “Write about whatever concerns you,” he said. “A poem is a shared burden.” He put a large hand on my shoulder, saying that I had done a good job of typing his manuscripts and answering his letters. He wanted me to take on more responsibilities soon—perhaps to dig into the Suetonius translation again. He suggested that I might get equal billing on the title page as cotranslator.
I was flabbergasted. Perhaps he was relieved that I had made love to Marisa? It was obvious that Grant favored Holly, but his exclusion of Marisa in the past month had begun to upset the rhythms of the household. Vera had commented, wryly, that Marisa had been neglected of late, and that her “mooning about” would send everyone around the bend. “You’re a great man,” she said to Grant in the kitchen one afternoon, when it was just the three of us, “but I don’t believe you’ve kept our darling Marisa satisfied.”
Vera raised the subject again only a few days after I’d made love to Marisa. We were having a glass of wine on the terrace behind the kitchen when Vera said, “I’ve seen the girl pouting by the pool. It’s ridiculous.”
“Perhaps Alex will lend a hand?” Grant said, bemused. “Won’t you take the girl to the piazzetta for a drink? A good chance to practice your Italian.”
“Alex has other fish to fry,” Vera said. “His prospects have apparently improved.”
“Tell all,” Grant said, as if I were not present.
“Miss Bonano is intrigued by her compatriot.”
“Ah, the Italian American connection!”
I shook my head in disbelief. They could simply not resist this kind of ironic banter, at my expense. And I was an easy target.
“Toni is quite attractive,” Vera said. “One could surely do worse.”
“One has,” Grant said.
The ubiquitous British “one” lodged at the center of so many sentences at the Villa Clio, deflecting scrutiny, enhancing the already thick air of unreality. “One” was never to blame, and “one” rarely offered apologies.
That Vera knew about my exploits in Anacapri startled me. I’d had only one conversation with Toni since meeting her at the Villa Vecchia, although we had made plans to have a picnic on Mount Solaro on the coming weekend.
Vera understood my confusion. “I had lunch at Da Gemma with Rose yesterday,” she said, referring to a popular local restaurant. “She mentioned that you and Toni had got on rather well. Apparently the girl is smitten.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“Everyone is smitten with Alex,” Grant said.
“Indeed,” added Vera.
“Toni and I got along well enough,” I said.
“I don’t know why,” said Vera, “but I have a distinct feeling about this. Mamma Grant has a wonderful sense of intuition. Famous all over the island.”
“Vera hears wedding bells,” Grant said. “I rather think he’s having himself a good time. I don’t mind. A young man’s fancy, and so forth, what?” Grant winked at me. It was reassuring but odd. He seemed to like a sense of male camaraderie. I had slept with Marisa, and he knew it and didn’t seem to care. He also imagined—or so I guessed—that I had, or would soon, sleep with Toni. This wasn’t bad, since it meant I was not serious about Marisa, which would have made things complicated. He was probably relieved that my attention had wandered away from Holly. She was his focus, emotionally. His interests might shift in time, but at present she compelled his attention, and he didn’t want competition from me.
Unfortunately, Holly held my attention, too. I was consumed by thoughts of her, and found myself writing her name in my journal, over and over. Just to spell the name gave a kind of secret pleasure. I treasured all glimpses of her, especially if I caught her unawares: sitting by the pool, with her ankles crossed, or reading beneath an ilex in the garden. Large feelings of tenderness toward her welled up in me as I watched her. She seemed wholly self-absorbed at times, lost in some daydream of god-knows-what. I wished I could get inside her, not just inside her skin but inside her mind. I wanted to live at the center of her experience. She represented a kind of sophistication that I could only envy.
For me, most cultural knowledge had come through the pages of books; but Holly had been taken through the great museums of the world by her parents. She talked off-handedly of visiting the Prado, the Louvre, the Hermitage. She had been to operas in Paris and Milan, in London and New York. She could join in when Grant, in a moment of boozy inspiration, launched into an aria from Puccini or Verdi. She knew the names of the mythic characters in Wagner’s cyclical extravaganzas, and she could be found listening to Beethoven’s late quartets, which she knew intimately. By her bedside—I had crept into that room more than once, my heart pounding in my throat—she kept novels in French and Italian. Her only lapse in taste, as far as I could tell, was a volume of poetry by Kahlil Gibran. (I kept asking to see her own novel, but she refused. “I don’t believe in showing things till they’re ready. My drafts are frightfully rough,” she said.)
I summoned courage and typed one of the few poems that I considered finished from my journals and left it on Grant’s desk. It was, obliquely, a love poem for Holly. Everything I wrote came out that way, yet
this one at least had the virtues of concealment, with the feelings that lay beneath it subdued by form. (I recalled a line from Emily Dickinson: “After great pain a formal feeling comes.”)
Grant asked me to come to see him for morning coffee, another ritual imported from Britain. He usually had coffee with either Holly or Marisa, although Marisa had not recently been invited. I had supposed that Grant and I would be alone, but found myself sitting beside him with Holly working at a side table in one corner of the study.
“Don’t mind her,” Grant said.
“I don’t,” I said, rather feebly.
But I did mind. I minded a great deal, given the subject of the poem, and my feelings about Holly. I had somehow wandered, naked, onto a public stage, and the audience was primed for a good laugh. I could feel the blood rising in my cheeks, my ears hot and prickly.
I watched Grant as he ran his finger down the page, as if reminding himself of the poem. Spidery red lines filled the whites of his eyes, and his finger trembled: a sign that he’d been drinking too much the night before. “I’ll say it aloud, Lorenzo. It’s often useful to hear a poem. The words, they take on another aspect. The flaws often emerge. One tends to miss them when reading to oneself…skip over them. What?”
He read slowly, giving each word its due weight, lingering at the end of each line, though my enjambment at several points begged for the sense to spill over onto the next one. There was a Celtic lilt in his voice that actually enhanced them, lifted them in unexpected places.
I wander alone beside the sea at dawn,
half wondering if I am real or not;
reality eludes me. I’ve been brought