by Jay Parini
Grant stood now, gradually unfolding upward, his knees cracking. “Bloody old knees,” he said. He folded his arms and cleared his throat, suggesting that he had something further to say. His facial muscles twitched. As I knew, he often prefaced significant remarks with a slight reshuffling of the throat’s mucous layers. The twitching meant that what he had to say was important but difficult. I helped him by shutting the book on my lap and saying nothing. That silence provided enough draft so that his words could be sucked out.
“I rather thought you should know that I’ve asked Marisa to leave.”
“What?”
“Marisa will leave us. She hasn’t worked out terribly well, her research. She’s a lazy girl, as you will have noticed.”
“She tries.”
“Tries what? Her assignment was to find material on Capri. I sent her to the Cerio archives. But for what? She’s done nothing. Spends most of her time by the pool. It’s distracting for everyone.”
“This is my fault,” I said.
“Actually, Lorenzo, it has nothing to do with you.”
“It does,” I said. “We have made love.”
Grant smiled. “Oh, dear,” he said, feigning shock. “I assumed it was just fucking.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“That doesn’t surprise me. You’re a young man, and you’re an American. The combination is lethal.”
“I’m not as stupid as you imagine.”
“I don’t imagine anything. You have done a good job for me. You are pleasant company, for the most part. And you don’t intrude.”
“Glad to be of service,” I said, amazed that sleeping with one of his concubines did not count as an intrusion.
“Don’t upset yourself over this, Lorenzo. Really, there is no point. I’ve made up my mind. But given your attachment to the girl, I thought you should hear it from me.”
“Kind of you,” I said.
Perhaps to comfort me, he said, with a biblical intonation, “This, too, shall pass.”
I thought for a moment, then asked: “So when will she be going?”
“She and I have yet to discuss the details.”
His lack of generosity toward Marisa upset me, and I was tempted to make a bold gesture and resign, believing that her precipitous loss of stature in Grant’s eyes was closely related to her affair with me. I was also annoyed by his self-centeredness, his conviction that everyone was at his disposal.
“I’m not shoving her out the door,” he added, seeing that I was upset.
“Marisa cares about you,” I said.
He frowned. “She is a young and silly girl. You mustn’t be sentimental, especially when it comes to girls.”
“She likes it here.”
“There’s nothing for her on Capri,” he said. “You don’t know anything about her, Lorenzo. Her life is in Naples.” He saw my eyes cloud over and grabbed my wrist. “You needn’t worry. She will dazzle them in years to come. I recognize her abilities: she’s quite clever in her way. This whole thing is my fault, not yours. I made the initial mistake by hiring her. I hadn’t thought out the consequences.”
With that, he left me alone under the tree, upset and uncertain. I had a terrible feeling about Marisa, and was not so sure about myself. Closing my eyes, I found myself thinking about Pennsylvania, juxtaposing Grant with my father. On the surface, the differences between them were beyond calculation. Grant was thoroughly cosmopolitan and seemed to have read every author since Homer. He had been to Oxford, and he knew everybody who was anybody from Auden to Alec Guinness and Noel Coward. He had been awarded the Queen’s Medal for poetry, and (like any self-respecting bard) had refused the job of Poet Laureate. His name had recently been floated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, but his conservative politics reduced the chances of his actually getting the award. My father, by contrast, had no formal education. He read nothing except the sports pages of the Wilkes-Barre Record. Beyond a small circle of builders in Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties, he knew few people. Yet my conversations with Grant and my father bore an eerie resemblance. In both cases, I felt that bridging the gap between them and me required a huge effort.
It was more difficult to think of my mother in relation to Vera. I didn’t see the volatility in Vera that was my mother’s stock-in-trade. Nor did she suffer from the insecurity that dogged my mother: an Achilles’ heel inherited from her own mother, an immigrant from southern Italy who never adjusted to life in the New World, where the assumptions of peasant village life never quite applied. Yet Vera could, like my mother, be intrusive. She had prodded me about Toni Bonano, suggesting that we were ideally matched. “Don’t make the mistake of reaching only for what you can’t have,” she said. “It’s like in cooking. What’s available—fresh and local—is always best.” She claimed that Toni’s mother adored me, and that Bonano himself found me extremely likable. “What’s wrong with Toni?” Vera kept asking, as if anything were wrong with her.
It was obvious she thought I was queer, and that Patrice was my secret passion. “He’s awfully dear,” she would say, “but I shouldn’t have thought him your type.” She had nevertheless welcomed him to the Villa Clio with open arms, as if he were my boyfriend. It had recently infuriated me when she suggested I bring Patrice “as my date” to a party at the Bismarcks. “Eddie will understand,” she said, slyly.
My mother never played games with me in the Vera manner. She preferred overt conflict, and would pit me against my brother or my father, often successfully. She appeared most contented when everyone swirled around her, snapping and bitching at each other. The faster we all spun, the calmer she became, as in the paradox of the wheel. Only Nicky seemed regularly disposed to shove a wrench into the spokes, bringing the whole display to a shrieking halt.
I rarely talked about my family in front of Grant, but once—prompted by Vera—I complained in his presence about my mother. “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother,” he said.
Slowly, I began to rethink Grant’s witticism. Perhaps I was blaming my mother when the situation was more intricate that it appeared? My father had chosen to marry my mother for reasons of his own. He liked to appear the good guy, the gentleman; however, like everyone else in the world, he bore angers and resentments. He needed someone to carry these bad feelings for him, and my mother had proved an able vessel. She swarmed with grudges that might properly have been his, and was easily offended by his potential enemies. Even her eating seemed to keep him slim. (“Have another scoop of that ice cream,” he would say, though the doctors had warned them both that her dietary habits could easily lead to an early death.) Her precarious health apparently balanced the scales in such a way that my father himself never missed a day of work in three decades due to illness.
My mother’s letters arrived every week on Thursday or Friday, scribbled on blue U.S. airgrams, invariably folded in such a haphazard way that I could never open them without destroying some of the text. They began sweetly enough, but would soon degenerate into barely concealed accusations and complaints. She was “unwell” most of the time, alluding to her swollen feet, painful knees, breathlessness, high blood pressure, ringing ears, and palpitations. Nobody in the family took her problems seriously, though the doctors had warned her she might not have long to live. She herself (rather disingenuously) dismissed their concerns, saying that doctors had been predicting her demise for as long as she could remember. “If I live till you return from Italy,” she wrote in early July, “I promise to bake your favorite cake: lemon poppyseed.”
Apart from the fact that lemon poppyseed was actually her favorite cake, not mine, I disliked the veiled threat. If she were to die before I returned, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. I might never recover from the sense of having killed my own mother. “The doctors say there is nothing I can do,” she wrote. “I should probably try to lose a few pounds.” A few pounds didn’t begin to describe it. She needed to lose sixty or seventy pounds, and still she would seem obese to mo
st people. What puzzled me was that one never saw her gorge herself, although she ate substantial meals (and her preferred foods were hugely high in fat) and nibbled constantly. She had been through the usual diets: the various high protein regimens, the grapefruit diet, the avocado diet, and so forth. They never worked because she ate whatever she pleased in addition to the special diet foods and supplements. To say that she ate between meals was misleading. She never wasn’t eating. Her hand reached perpetually for something: nuts and candies, bits and pieces. She seemed to consume the world around her.
I addressed letters to my father and mother, aware that he might never read them. But I needed his presence in the greeting as a buffer, a way of making sure that my letters were not directly aimed at her. And I kept my revelations general. Often, I simply described various scenic spots on Capri and told of my excursions. I mentioned Patrice, in passing. I referred to Father Aurelio and mentioned that I had been to mass as well as confession. I talked about Vera’s cooking, taking care to avoid over-praising her results. (That would only have been taken as criticism of my mother’s cooking.) I wrote about Grant’s obsessive writing habits and described his study in detail. Never once did I mention either Holly or Marisa; that would have made no sense, and only worried them. My first visits to the Bonano villa in Anacapri were elaborately chronicled, with close attention to the decor; again, I made no mention of their daughter.
Nor did I refer to Nicky in my letters home. Each of us in the family was grieving, but it seemed we could not help each other. We had failed Nicky in our separate ways, and there was no chance of repairing this now. Death was so frighteningly absolute, a high stony wall between the living and the dead that could not be crossed.
Nicky’s funeral had been bizarrely impersonal, with that closed casket draped in a flag. The local VFW had sent a contingent of motley veterans to the cemetery, each of whom came to salute a war hero on that snowy morning in December, making assumptions about Nicky’s attitude toward the war that I knew were false. As I knew from his letters, he did not think of himself as a hero, fighting for something called “freedom.” He often derided LBJ and the bureaucratic elite around him who had sent young Americans to intervene in a civil war they never themselves understood. “One thing they don’t seem to get,” Nicky wrote, “was that the Chinese and the Vietnamese fucking hate each other.” He also said, “the only dominoes falling around here are in the American barracks, where a bunch of bored guys got nothing better to do.”
The priest at the funeral—a young fool recently attached to the parish—was annoyed by having to perform another ceremony so near to Christmas. His words of eulogy were generic, and he teetered on the brink of emotion only once, referring to the “great personal sacrifice that the Massolini family has made for freedom.” I tried hard to suppress a grin, recalling Nicky’s words in one letter: “Nobody in Nam thinks we’re saving the world from anything. We know the truth, which is that powers above us and behind us push and pull. We’re piss-ant pawns, moved about on this green jungle of a board. Looking for checkmate. So what if a few of us are lost in the game? It’s only a fucking game.”
One Sunday afternoon in late June, Grant and I took a walk together after lunch. On the way home, we stopped at the cimitero acattolico, where non-Catholic citizens of Capri, mostly foreigners, were buried. (“I shall lie here myself,” he said, “and look forward to the day.”) Among the many headstones that caught our attention was that bearing the sacred name of Norman Douglas, the novelist and natural historian who had lived most of his adult life on the island. Douglas had been a notorious pedophile, a sybarite who relished any form of sensual pleasure. He had also been a meticulous student of the region, and had devoted himself to the ecology of Capri, urging its preservation and planting countless trees over many decades. On a dark slab of verde serpentino marble that marked his grave were the words of Horace: Omnes eodem cogimur. We are all driven to the same place.
Thinking of Nicky, I had taken comfort in those words. A cold comfort, perhaps, but something that would sustain me in the days ahead, when I’d need every resource I could muster.
two
Marisa stood in the doorway of my cottage, wearing a large purple hat—the sort that English women wear to weddings—with a brim that shaded her face. She also wore dark glasses to hide what I assumed was the redness of her eyes.
I had rarely seen her in the past few days, as she avoided meals at the villa—a final affront to the Grants, for whom the dining table was a primary scene where their secular liturgy was enacted beneath a huge Neapolitan clock that ticked slowly and loudly. Nobody was going to kick her out, and it struck me as perfectly possible that Marisa might linger, awkwardly, for a month or two, just to make Grant’s life miserable.
Now Marisa lurched toward me, smelling of wine. “Do I visit you again, Lorenzo? I will come tonight, if you say it. You have made love so nicely to me, I don’t forget.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” I said.
“You have not found me sexy?” Her voice was plaintive, childlike, and her lips formed a kind of pout. “I have remember this night forever, you sexy man.”
“I liked being with you, too,” I said.
She shook her head. “Vera has told me the truth about you.”
“And what’s that?”
“You have love this Patrice, the French boy. Is this what you want? A boy to love?”
I suppressed a cynical smile. Could Vera have really stooped this low? It seemed unlikely.
Marisa persisted. “So you are sad that he has denied you. I can understand you on this. We have much in common.”
“I don’t want to sleep with Patrice.”
“Or Toni, the American girl?”
“We are friends,” I said, “and that’s it.”
“You are lying. I have seen you having lunch to her in the piazzetta. She is very beautiful, and I am not ignorant.”
I just shook my head.
“Please, I am sorry about this, Lorenzo.” She took off her sunglasses and wiped her eyes. “I have not been so easy to you, I understand. Forgive this.”
I felt sad, but could not explain my feelings to her. I could not explain them to myself.
“You are beautiful, too,” I said. I touched her cheek with my fingertips, as though she were a piece of marble statuary.
“Don’t you touch me!” she said, slapping away my hand. “Don’t you think to touch me again!”
She turned and walked away, a mystery. And I felt an ache inside, aware that I wanted her again. I thought of calling her back, saying, “Yes, please come tonight! I will be waiting for you!” But I knew my own heart well enough to understand that I would be faking a kind of affection I didn’t own. That was the worst kind of lie, and it would have been cruel. What I had already done was cruel enough, and there was no point in compounding my crime.
three
“You’ve hurt Marisa’s feelings,” said Holly, coming upon me in the garden late one afternoon. I was about to walk along the Pizzalungo—a wild scarp of land that swirled around Mount Tuoro, with its pine thickets and pink jagged rocks dominating the southeast region of Capri from the Grotta di Forca to the Grotta di Matromania.
“She told you that?”
“She said you were rude to her.”
“I didn’t mean anything.”
“You didn’t mean,” she echoed, shaking her head. “You don’t like her anymore? Is that it?”
“I like her fine,” I said. It was an awkward admission. I certainly bore no ill feelings toward Marisa, but I didn’t want her as a lover. That was preposterous, although I had behaved abominably, in a way that embarrassed me and frustrated her. “It’s not that kind of relationship.”
“What kind is that?”
I wondered if she was being coy. “We’re not really lovers,” I said.
“Lovers,” she repeated, neutrally, as though adding to her vocabulary in a foreign language. In truth, I adored hearing her say that w
ord, and wondered if it might ever be used to describe us.
“I’m going around the Pizzalungo,” I said. “Would you like to come?”
“I suppose. Why not?”
“In another words, you have nothing better to do.”
Holly gave me one of her quizzical looks, wrinkling her nose and drawing her eyes slightly together. I liked the way her eyebrows dipped toward the center. Her forehead was smooth and shiny, and her hairline formed a slight widow’s peak—a feature that appealed to me immensely. “I’d actually like to take a walk with you, and it’s not so complicated as you make out. You turn everything into a little drama, don’t you?”
“Maybe I should write plays?”
Holly sighed. I could see that my self-obsession was boring, and I vowed to change. I must stop thinking about myself, about my writing, about the effect I was having on people. Life at the Villa Clio had worked its evil magic on me, and I was becoming someone I didn’t like.
“Have you been to the Punta di Massullo?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“There’s a house there, the Villa Malaparte. You must see for yourself.”