The Apprentice Lover

by Jay Parini

  Life at the Villa Clio continued as though nothing had happened. Marisa might well have gone to Naples to visit her family or taken another job on the island. It unnerved me that neither Grant nor Vera ever mentioned her at the table during the days immediately following her death. They seemed to talk aggressively of other things: the unusually “close” weather, upcoming visitors to Capri, or the latest literary gossip from Britain, which came via Sunday papers that arrived from London at the tobacconist’s stand in the piazzetta on Wednesday afternoons. I said, rather bluntly, during dinner one evening: “Marisa seems to have disappeared without a trace.”

  My remark instantly provoked Grant. “You want to know about history, Lorenzo?” he said. “Well, Marisa is history. Put her from your mind.”

  Holly saw my distress and entered the fray on my side. “Alex is right,” she said. “We shouldn’t avoid the subject. That would be unhealthy.”

  Grant put down his knife and fork to sip a glass of Corvo. “Avoid?” he said, as if nibbling at the word to taste it. “I’m not avoiding anything, are you, Vera?”

  “Marisa was a troubled girl,” Vera said. “But let’s not be morbid. Certain topics are bad for the digestion.”

  Holly wasn’t going to drop the matter so easily. “Marisa was not a passerby who happened to tumble from a nearby cliff,” she said. “She was a member of this household.”

  “Oh, do stop it,” Vera said. Her attitude toward “the girls” always wavered, but now I heard in her voice a distinct note of hostility, not only toward the ghost of Marisa but toward Holly as well. Her husband’s “little goatish hobby” had, after all, eroded her patience.

  After a polite pause, Nigel spoke up. “Dead girls are disgusting,” he said. “Did you see what happened to her head? Like a burst cantaloupe.”

  “Niggy, please,” said Nicola.

  “Yes, do be quiet,” said Vera to her son.

  “No, Mater, I shan’t. I have every right to speak.”

  “Let the boy make a fool of himself,” said Grant. “It’s the only way he’ll learn.”

  “To be like you?” asked Nicola.

  “I say,” said Grant, lifting his bushy eyebrows, “you’re feeling Bolshie, what?”

  Nigel grinned broadly. “Stroppy old Nicola.”

  “You’re such a git,” Nicola said.

  “Bollocks,” he said. “I’ve got every right—”

  “Please, children!” Vera looked at them severely.

  “They’re not children,” Grant said. “Don’t infantalize them. They’re almost adults, if I am not mistaken.”

  Holly stood, disgusted by the conversational turn. “You’ll excuse me,” she said.

  “As you like,” Grant called after her.

  I watched Holly carry her plate into the kitchen. Not another word was said until she had left the villa, the door into the garden slapping behind her. Maria Pia hovered in the hallway, anxious. The fact that she didn’t understand English probably increased her agitation.

  “She’s becoming a bore,” said Grant.

  Vera nodded, drawing her knife and fork together to one side of the plate to indicate that Maria Pia should clear it away.

  “I must excuse myself as well,” I said, rising.

  “The exodus continues,” Nigel intoned. “But not this little piggy!”

  Vera looked at me slyly. “Crostata di ricotta?” She and I had worked together that morning on a ricotta tart, and she thought it would be difficult for me to pass it up.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  She looked away stiffly. “Suit yourself.”

  Grant shook his head, mockingly, then drilled a stare into my back as I left the room. His disdain was familiar; nevertheless I disliked the feeling it produced—a mixture of hostility and fear. I knew I could not remain on Capri, in his company, much longer.

  Mimo lurked in the garden, a black hunching form. There was something of Caliban about him: distraught, unhappy, ill-at-ease with his lot. He caught my eye and pointed toward the path to the beach. He seemed already to know I was chasing Holly, but how was that possible? In any case, I thanked him as I passed, although he simply withdrew into the shadow of a large umbrella pine.

  I caught up with Holly not far from where Marisa had made her despairing leap. It was early evening, with the sea below phosphorescent, the surf quiet, the sky indistinguishable from the water itself. Holly sat on a bluff, with rocks tumbling below her in a kind of frozen avalanche. Her ankles were deep in marram grass, with thistles beside her, her hands folded in her lap. Had I been a painter, I’d have wanted to seize that image, to preserve it forever in all its intensity.

  “He’s become a parody of himself,” Holly said, as soon as I fell within earshot. I guessed rightly that she referred to Grant.

  “Nigel is worse,” I said.

  “He’s just imitating his father,” she said.

  I agreed with a grumble, aware that I had myself been caught imitating him on more than one occasion. “It surprises me that Vera goes along with the program,” I said. “She’s more intelligent than that.”

  “It’s not a matter of intelligence,” Holly said. “She’s powerless.”

  I didn’t know how far I could tread along these lines. Obviously Holly had been party to the dynamic she now criticized, a willing participant in Grant’s fantasy. She herself had played a huge part in making Vera’s situation untenable. But I didn’t want to press her about any of this. That would have been fatal to our relationship, such as it was. And as I had gotten everything wrong about Marisa, I didn’t want to make the same mistake with Holly. What did I really know about her motivations?

  “God, I want to get off this island,” Holly said, tossing a stone to watch it tumble down the scree.

  “To leave Capri?”

  “This place is perverted.”

  “Why don’t we go together?”

  Holly turned to me, unmoved.

  “We could just go somewhere else for a while,” I said.

  “Is that a proposition?”

  I blushed. “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “You did mean.”

  “All right, I did.”

  “You’re as bad as Rupert, aren’t you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “So do I,” she said. “This is definitely not a proposition, but have you seen Paestum?”

  I shook my head. I’d read about the Greek ruins at Paestum, but hadn’t seen them. I’d hardly seen anything of Italy beyond Rome and parts of the Amalfi coast en route to Capri.

  “I shall take you there,” Holly said. “It might be good for both of us.”

  As we sat there, absorbed by the changing sky and sea, I hesitated to say anything more. For reasons beyond my understanding, Holly had invited me to travel with her to Paestum. Where this would take us, I couldn’t tell, but was willing, even eager, to see.

  six

  A fog lay on the water most of the way to Salerno, but I didn’t mind, sitting on the aft deck, my backpack stuffed with everything I would need for a week of travel. Holly, too, had a backpack—a battered “rucksack” that “had been her father’s, in the army.” She wore a pair of faded jeans, with a pink windbreaker over her T-shirt. She was reading Borges, the Argentine fabulist. In addition to Rilke—I felt isolated without it—I had brought Love’s Body, a book you didn’t read so much as reread, hoping to understand it better the second or third time around.

  I had felt obliged to tell Grant that we would be gone for a few days. It was, in fact, a Thursday, so we could think of this as merely a long weekend. There had been no official work schedules at the Villa Clio, and I had been given assignments in a random fashion, then abandoned to my duties. Grant merely assumed I would accomplish my tasks in due course. In recent weeks, I’d been proofing articles for various English and American magazines: Grant churned these out at high speed, mostly because of his compulsive need to see his name in what he called “hard type.” And there was also the co
mpulsion to express his opinion on a range of matters, from the nature of love to the follies of the British Labour Party. “I can write about anything,” he said, “as long as they don’t wish for more than two thousand words. Above two thousand words, you have really to know what you’re talking about.”

  Grant seemed only mildly surprised by the news that Holly and I were going away for a few days. I had interrupted him in his study one morning, aware that he had probably been at his desk for several hours by the time I knocked. He nodded, then asked if the proofs of an article destined for Encounter were done. (I had finished those proofs several days before and passed them back to him—a surprising lapse of memory for Grant, who usually knew exactly where every project stood.)

  I also told Vera about our excursion. Unpredictable as ever, she seemed happy for me. “What a brilliant chap,” she said.

  I guessed (it was only a hunch) that she enjoyed the notion of rivalry between Grant and me. If one assumed that Holly posed a threat to her marriage, then it made further sense that she should want to see my prospects with Holly improving. On the other hand, my notions about marriage and relationships had been rerouted so many times in the past four months that I hesitated to assume anything. Perhaps Vera was merely being ironic?

  I loved that foggy crossing, with the visual world diminished, and the universe of sound and smell raised to a fine pitch. In particular, I liked the way Holly’s scent mingled with odors of diesel fuel that swept the deck. The old ferry groaned and rattled, as though barely able to heave its load of travelers—mostly tourists—from the Marina Grande to Salerno, with stops at Positano and Amalfi.

  We docked at the broken-down pier in Salerno at about four. The fog had burned off, and the city itself glowed above the harbor, a panorama of terraced buildings, their fading pink and biscuity facades soaked in late afternoon light. It had become turgidly hot and humid, and we made our way slowly toward the medieval Piazza Amendola, il centro. Along the via Mercanti, a narrow close overhung with vine-strewn balconies and terraces, we found the Casa di Fiori. Holly had been to this pensione before and assumed control, asking the elderly padrone for a large double room. She emphasized the need for two beds, and he nodded conspiratorially.

  We followed him up a damp stairwell with pocked walls and various images of the Virgin Mary along the way. There was a lingering smell of burned olive oil in the passageway outside our room, and I could hear a man and woman arguing brutally in what sounded like German in the adjacent room.

  “Due letti,” the padrone said, leading us into the large, mustard-colored room, with a view of the street from an iron balcony. The toilet, he explained, was down the hall, but we had a sink to ourselves, and a real wardrobe. A bulb dangled from a fraying cord in the plaster ceiling. The two single beds were pushed together, forming a double bed. The padrone pounded on the wall to still the arguing couple. “Tedesci,” he said, as if to explain their bad behavior.

  Holly and I had dinner in the piazza, under a striped awning. She was frank in her conversation, telling me stories of her childhood, her parents, her younger brother, still a student at Cambridge, and her previous love affairs. Again and again, she spoke of her father, whose superior wit and charm filled the entire family circle with a beneficent glow. He was gentle, but authoritative. Some described him as charismatic, although she doubted that such a term applied. He appeared frequently on BBC television, where his opinions on mental health were eagerly sought.

  The only subject not discussed by us that evening was Rupert Grant, though I brimmed with unasked questions. Why had she put herself in such a situation? Did she love him? How did she really feel about Vera? What did she hope to gain from this interlude on Capri?

  “Tell me about your father,” she said.

  In response, I explained that Salerno had peculiar resonance for me because of my father’s participation in the invasion, which came near the end of September, in 1943. He had been twenty, a shade younger than I was now. It was his first experience of battle, although he’d been well prepared during a four-month training period in North Africa, where mock invasions had been meticously staged. The army had constructed a fake town, like a Hollywood set, with wooden fronts and streets, high and low buildings. They went through all the motions, learning to leap out from cover, ready to fire; learning to expose as little as possible. They were lectured on the etiquette of occupation, too. Americans were not Germans, the officers said. They would not brutalize their victims.

  My father had told me a little of this, and I had spent time in the Columbia library, reading accounts of the training, visualizing the Salerno landing itself. And now I was here. I was eating dinner, eating pasta, drinking wine, only hundreds of yards from where my father came ashore.

  I told Holly that I once asked him if he thought that the Second World War was a necessary war, and he shook his head sadly. “You never know anything, as a soldier,” he said. He’d never heard of Salerno before. He’d had no particular feelings about Hitler or the Italian fascists. What he understood was that everybody else was doing what he was doing, and there was a general agreement that the war needed fighting. He also knew that if he didn’t go, he would have felt like a coward.

  “How did he feel about your brother, and Vietnam?” Holly wondered.

  I told her that my mother had opposed his going to Vietnam, but my father was largely silent on the subject, saying only that a man had to figure these things out for himself. He supported Nicky, and was proud of him. When I pressed him, he said that if we didn’t defend ourselves in Southeast Asia, we’d have to defend ourselves in California.

  I pointed out the weakness in that argument, of course. American interests were hardly threatened by a civil war in a remote part of the Asian world. The Chinese were not even friendly with the Vietnamese, so collusion wasn’t the issue. If Vietnam fell, one did not expect the dominoes to continue falling. Our intervention could only have the effect of widening the war, destabilizing the region. Who knew what might happen in Cambodia, in Laos, in surrounding countries? We might truly antagonize the Chinese, forcing them to act more brutally than they otherwise might. I was just repeating the familiar arguments, having heard them so many times.

  I knew that my brother’s and my father’s wars were unrelated, but I also understood that both were somehow connected to our primal urge to tear down the things around us—a feeling that overwhelms the child in the schoolyard who kicks over the block castle built by a friend, or built painstakingly by himself. I had firsthand knowledge of this urge. Indeed, there were days when I wanted nothing more than to bomb my own private Hanoi, to get rid of everything that annoyed, obstructed, or challenged me. I demanded an escalation of the emotional troops. I wanted to search and destroy anything that got in my way.

  “Why don’t we go to the beach now?” Holly asked, after we had finished our espresso.

  “Not now,” I said.

  “You seem pensive,” she said. “Is it your brother? What was his name again?”

  “Nicky,” I said.

  “Were you just thinking about him?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “You never talk about him.”

  “I guess.”

  “Were you terribly close?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I wasn’t a very good brother.”

  She didn’t press me, and I was grateful. She understood that if I’d wanted to talk about Nicky in any detail, I’d certainly have done so. She had opened a particular door, but I had refused to enter that room.

  We got back to the pensione early, and Holly said she needed to sleep. I, too, felt exhausted by the events of the past week and wanted to sleep, and the idea of sleeping near Holly was enticing, even without the prospect of lovemaking. I sat in a chair, the single armchair in the room, and read while Holly changed into her nightgown. Before long, she had curled up on her side of the double bed and fallen asleep.

  Eventually, I crawled into the cool sheets, taking care not
to disturb her. I listened to the rhythmical flow of her breathing, and slowly absorbed the scent of her, now so familiar. I felt a great longing for her, a wish to lie naked beside her. But I was glad for what I had now, however meager. I had her company and good will, and I was about to fall asleep with her only a short distance from me. Close enough to touch, if I dared. But I didn’t. She had clearly not invited me to reach across the slight divide between us. So I took care not to breach that gap. In fact, I rolled away from her to sleep, so that anyone looking down from above would have seen us as oddly Janus-faced: a single entity with opposing views of the world, and separate dreams.

  The circumstances of my sleep—in Salerno, with Holly beside me—made for an abrupt waking. I was at first disoriented, wondering where, and who, I was. But gradually the room dawned, and my situation clarified. I listened for a while to Holly’s deep, slow breathing, then turned toward her. Her hair was splayed on the pillow, and her cheek puffed out in a childlike way. I worked hard to suppress the urge to pull her toward me, to kiss her eyelids and lips, her neck, her breasts. I wanted to lie beside her and absorb her, and be absorbed.

  It was not quite dawn, but I couldn’t lie there. So I dressed quietly and left, hoping to return before Holly was even awake. The beach at Salerno called, and what I’d been unwilling to confront some months before seemed possible now. The Allied landing area wasn’t ten minutes by foot from the pensione, but I hurried, hoping to get there before the sun rose, as had my father, twenty-seven years before this morning, though he had approached from the water.

  Having read so much about this phase of the war and the landing, I wanted to see the actual place, in appropriate light, and imagine the events that had altered my father’s sense of the world. “Nothing was the same after Salerno,” he said, when I pressed him on the subject. An inarticulate man, he could go no farther. But he’d gone far enough for me to comprehend the crucial nature of that experience in war.