The Apprentice Lover

by Jay Parini

  “Let me introduce Wystan,” she said.

  “We’ve met,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “In the piazzetta this morning,” he said, looking at me coolly. “We had a little seminar, didn’t we?”

  Vera looked at me strangely, as if aware for the first time that I had a life apart from her and Rupert. I didn’t only exist while lounging in their presence. I was, indeed, a whole forest of falling trees with nobody but myself to hear them crashing to the ground.

  Grant himself entered from the kitchen with a glass of whiskey, Holly trailing. She had obviously been crying, but I saw she was dressed for our journey: jeans, leather shoes, a sturdy cotton sweater—one I’d seen her wearing in Salerno and Paestum. I tried to catch her eyes, but she turned away.

  “Alex has already met Wystan,” Vera said.

  Grant ignored the remark. “How can you drink that bloody stuff, Wystan. Tastes of motor oil.”

  “I prefer good vodka, to be sure,” he said.

  We pulled up chairs, forming a semicircle around the visiting poet, listening as he continued a conversation with Grant that had been underway for some time. He had left New York, he said, forever. It was “too much like Calcutta, only without the amenities.” He didn’t like Richard Nixon, nor did he trust Henry Kissinger. Christ Church, his old college in Oxford, had made him an honorary fellow, offering the use of a college house in the garden behind the Senior Common Room—a tiny cottage, where Anglican clergy were often housed.

  “Ah, the Anglicans,” said Vera. “Many are cold, but few are frozen.”

  Auden had doubtless heard this before, but smiled politely.

  “You’re the archbishop of poetry, what?” Grant said, barely concealing his irony. “Stephen will be killing himself.”

  “Stephen has become a bore,” said Auden. “Spenders his time trotting about America.”

  “Giving poetry a bad name,” Grant added.

  “The fees are grand,” Auden said. “I don’t think anyone actually reads Stephen now, do you?”

  “They never did,” said Grant.

  They referred, I knew, to Stephen Spender. Grant always made fun of the line, “I think continually of those who are truly great.” “Nobody ever thinks continually of anything,” he said. “Do you, Lorenzo?”

  He and Auden kept the conversation mainly to gossip about old friends and associations—a gambit that naturally excluded me and Holly. I realized how uncomfortable this name-dropping made me. Even Vera looked at a loss, hearing that blizzard of names torn from the contents of an out-of-date anthology: Edgell Rickword, Bernard Spencer, Peter Hewitt, Roy Campbell, E. J. Pratt. A whole generation had sunk like Atlantis into the wine-dark sea of literary history, from which few names are ever recovered.

  At seven—very early by Italian standards but typical of the Grants—we went into the dining room, aware that Vera would have prepared a feast for Auden, beginning with scrippelle ’im busse—lovely crepes in beef broth, a speciality of Abruzzo. She had promised to teach me how to make them, but that never happened. There was, as usual, a small pasta dish, followed by succulent pork rolls: cotechino in galera. They were wrapped in prosciutto, browned in sautéed onions, then baked. The dessert was among my favorites: almond cake (torta di mandorle). I had smelled the almond aroma as soon as I entered the house that evening. It felt like a signal from Vera, a sign of truce.

  I listened intently to the conversation, my palms sweaty, watching the black-handed Neapolitan clock on the mantel as it swallowed the minutes. Each fat tick reminded me that my time at the villa was coming to an end. The wine that night was a white Trebbiano—Vera had heard me compliment it one evening—and I found myself drinking more heavily than usual, with Maria Pia’s cousin, young Alfredo, filling my glass almost compulsively. Barely through the main course, the room seemed to enlarge and contract. I saw Auden’s massively wrinkled face (which he described as looking “like a wedding cake left out in the rain overnight”) through alcohol-distorted vision. But the wine also gave me the courage to inject my own opinions into the conversation, as when Auden referred to Kissinger again and I began a monologue about Cambodia, suggesting that it was insane to attack that hapless nation. There would only be disruptions and reprisals.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Lorenzo,” Grant said, sternly, when I stopped for breath.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” he said. Blue veins were bulging in his temples, and his lips stretched thin. “You’re like most young Americans. They know nothing of history, but they’re full of opinions—ignorant and childish opinions.”

  “Better than the English young,” said Vera, rising to my defense. “What a gormless lot they are!”

  Holly dipped her eyes to the table, gormlessly.

  I felt confused, and wanted to pound my fist on the table and shout something terribly incisive, but could think of nothing appropriate. I did not at all want to pursue this subject. I’d been sucked into a whirlpool, and it was time I extricated myself.

  “I should relax, Rupert,” said Auden. “One doesn’t want a coronary at our age.”

  Auden, bless him, assumed control of the conversation now. He began to lecture us on his favorite detective novels, saying it made one feel so “cozy and complete” to lie in a warm bath and read them. He told Grant he should consider writing something along the lines of Dorothy L. Sayers, whom he described as one of the best novelists of the century.

  Grant, with a lofty sigh, said, “Wystan, you’re such a schoolmaster.”

  Auden demurred. “Please, dear. School mistress.”

  I laughed sharply, but realized as I leaned back in my chair that it was nearly eight-fifteen. It would take at least twenty minutes, probably more, to get to the Marina Grande. I glanced at Holly, leading her eyes to the clock.

  “I must go,” I said. “I’m afraid I have a headache.”

  Vera looked at me in a puzzled way.

  “By all means,” said Grant, delighted to see me go.

  I passed through the kitchen and stepped into the violet shade of the garden to wait for Holly, who emerged some minutes later. She had apparently contracted the same headache.

  “The last ferry is often late,” I said, trying to reassure her as we hurried toward the gate.

  The last thing I recalled of the Villa Clio was the smell of wild cyclamen, soft and mournful, more like the memory of a smell than the thing itself.

  seven

  The serpentine descent to the harbor by taxi was a blur, bringing us into the Marina Grande at ten minutes past the hour. We fetched our things from the bar and lumbered toward the docks. I had Holly’s cumbersome bags in either hand. Unease flowed through my body, making me queasy.

  Patrice came running toward us, waving. “She have gone,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “This ferry to Napoli. She has disappear without you. The time is passed, and you have missed her.”

  I shook my head. It was impossible to return to the Villa Clio now, heaving our suitcases, tails between our legs. We’d have to wait in the Marina Grande until morning, staying at a hotel. “Fucking hell,” I said.

  “Not to worry, Alexi. I have Giovanni to help,” Patrice said, fluttering his wings, beckoning. “Please, come this way.”

  Rather dazed, we followed him to the western part of the harbor, where yachts and local fishing boats were tied up for the evening, hip to hip. Giovanni’s ungainly vessel idled at the dock, deep-throated, ready to board. The water had turned deeply sanguine in the harbor, and a yellow moon hung in the sky like some improbable lantern, lighting the way to Naples.

  “Giovanni and I will take you,” he said. “He has no problem. I have engage the boat for you.”

  I looked quizzically at Giovanni.

  “Napoli, no?” he inquired, with a sweet smile.

  “Napoli, sì,” I said.

  “Andiamo, subito,” he called, matter-of-factly, revving the engines
in neutral as Patrice helped Holly onto the deck. I lowered our suitcases in, then leaped aboard as Patrice untied the lines.

  There was a click as the gears engaged, followed by a low groaning sound of the engine. The familiar marine smell of diesel mingled with salty air, the boat yawing from side to side, lifted by currents. We followed a bright yellow swath of moonlight on the water, making our way across the Bay of Naples toward what, for me, seemed like the greatest mystery of all, my life to come.

  “I am sad for this,” Patrice said, quietly, with a hand on my thigh. “You are my best of friend, Alexi,” he said.

  “And you’re mine,” I said, my thoughts turning to Nicky. Funny how good you can feel, he’d written, when you hear certain things, which is probably why we say them. To cheer ourselves up. To make it possible to put one foot in front of the other without losing it.

  I glanced briefly at Holly, who watched Capri dwindle in the dusk behind us, sinking from view. But I refused to look back myself. I had looked back enough for a man of my age, and from now on, my direction was forward. That was my only resolution, and one I knew I could never keep.

  epilogue

  I left Capri under cover of darkness, not thinking that thirty years would elapse before I set foot on the island again.

  After landing in Naples with Holly that night, we found a cheap pensione near the harbor, then traveled the next morning by train to Rome, where an English uncle of hers owned a gloomy modern apartment overlooking the river on the Lungo Tevere della Vittoria. (He preferred Florence, where he also kept an apartment. We saw him only once, for dinner, in a restaurant near the Pantheon.) Our relationship, such as it was, hobbled along for several weeks. We made each other miserable until, near the middle of October, she asked me to find another place to live. By that time, I was more than ready.

  I traveled for two months, in France and England, then returned home for Christmas. Columbia welcomed me back for the spring semester, and I graduated only a year behind my class. The next three decades were—how could they not be?—eventful. My mother died in her early fifties, her heart in tatters, but my father lived on until 1997, by which time Massolini Construction had dwindled to a mini-version of its former self. Needless to say, I never went into business with my father and grandfather.

  In a desultory way, I managed to write four books of poetry and three novels—a modest production, although I like what I accomplished, as did a modest gathering of readers. I taught here and there, eventually landing a permanent job at Bowdoin, in Maine. Recently, in the Atlantic Monthly, I published an essay on Rupert Grant, drawing on those months at the Villa Clio for atmosphere. For the most part, I focused on his verse, which I’ve increasingly come to respect. I referred to him as “one of the last English poets whose work one actually memorized” and said that I’d learned the essentials of my craft from him.

  I didn’t say, of course, that I’d come to despise him, and that his way of gobbling up those around him had left a sour taste in my mouth. I never mentioned Marisa or Holly, or the problems faced daily by Vera. I never mentioned his narcissism and spite for other writers. As a negative model, Grant had powerfully affected me, and long ago I decided it was better to live my life honestly and lovingly, with respect for those around me, than go to my grave with a trunkload of literary honors.

  Some months after the essay appeared, I received a note from Capri. The Grants and I had not been in communication since my rude departure, even though I’d promised to write. Even after three decades, I recognized Vera’s meticulously formed letters in black India ink—familiar because she had written several recipes by hand into my notebook, and I still used them. She wrote:

  My dear Alex,

  Your piece on Rupert was sent by a friend in New York. It was quite charming. I do hope this finds you well, old thing. Do visit the Villa Clio again if you discover yourself in these parts. We’re a long way from anywhere, of course.

  It was signed, “Affectionately, Vera.” I found it puzzling that she had said so little, after all this time, and that she had signed it with affection. Yet the note eased old and deeply rooted feelings of guilt. I’d left like a thief, not even bothering to thank my hosts, however difficult they had been. They had taken me into their lives at a time when I could not have been an easy guest: wearing my troubles on my shirtsleeves, moving uncertainly among various propositional selves—many of which I gladly abandoned as soon as I found my footing in the adult world.

  An invitation to a literary conference in Naples put Capri within easy reach only a few months later, and I took this as a sign. Arriving in that dilapidated city a day early, I thought of trying to find Marisa’s grave, but the logistics of that made it seem impossible. I realized now how often I thought of her, and—most vividly—her terrible death. I had been writing poems about that event for many years, yet I still didn’t understand what happened, or whose fault it was, or why she had gone to such an extreme length. That kind of thing moves beyond the realm of understanding.

  I boarded a crowded hydrofoil for the island on a clear morning in late September, unsure of what exactly I would find at the Villa Clio. What I knew about Grant in the past decade was sketchy enough. Until the mid-1990s, he had occasionally published poems in places like The New Yorker and the Times Literary Supplement. They were wistful verses, mostly about the persistence of desire in old age—a theme borrowed from Yeats but embodied with an unmistakably Grantian inflection. His last full collection, Love and Lemons, had won a prize in Britain in 1989, prompting a number of lengthy reconsiderations of his career. There had been no new novels for two decades, but a fairly recent television adaptation of Siren Call had kept interest in his fiction alive. He would have just passed his ninety-third birthday a few months before.

  Despite the lateness of the season, the ferry teemed with day-trippers, mostly Europeans. Capri had, if anything, grown in popularity since I had lived there. Disembarking at the Marina Grande, I felt dismayed by the profusion of hotels, restaurants, and tourist shops that lined the quays. The yachts in the harbor appeared more numerous and larger than those I’d remembered, most of them flying international flags. I had to wait for nearly half an hour to get a taxi to the piazzetta.

  A certain dread mingled with curiosity as I retraced the path to the Villa Clio, although the decades had done less damage to the surroundings than I’d have guessed. The piazzetta absorbed its tumult of visitors with dignity, as ever, and the Camerelle still smelled of laundry soap and cat piss. The sun was brilliant along the Tragara, and I found the view of the Marina Piccola and Mount Solaro as dazzling as before. Apparently the lack of roads on Capri and its steep terrain had prevented the kind of development that had ruined much of the Amalfi coast. Rich people preferred to drive up to their holiday villas in Land Rovers nowadays, even in Italy.

  I was let into the Villa Clio by Maria Pia, who had changed in the usual ways. She was plumper now, with ankles like tree stumps. Her silvery hair was oddly unkempt, unwashed, and the hair on her arms was coarsely matted, thick, swirling from wrist to elbow. I remembered the mustache, but the unsightly birthmark on her cheek surprised me. Had I somehow not noticed that before? She dipped her head toward me, in recognition and respect, but there was an element of contempt in her expression, as if she still resented the manner of my departure.

  “Venga qui, professore,” she said, as she had before I had genuinely earned that title. I was led into the kitchen, where Vera stood at the counter with her hands deep in a bowl of flour. I couldn’t help but smile. It was as if she’d been standing there for the past thirty years, waiting for me.

  “Hello,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. I had sent a note ahead, so she expected me.

  “Hello, Vera,” I said, kissing her on either cheek. “Nothing seems to change around here.”

  “I have,” she said, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. “I’m rather a wreck.”

  “Not true,” I said, “you look wond
erful.”

  “What complete bosh,” she said.

  But she did. She was smaller than I remembered her, but just as lively. Her gray eyes glinted, flecked with green. Her hair had gone whitish gray, but it shimmered, cut straight above her forehead. Her face seemed remarkably free of wrinkles for a woman over seventy, and she had never added an ounce of fat. If anything, she had grown thinner.

  “I need a drink,” she said, reaching for a bottle of sherry. “We’ll have lunch in an hour. You will stay, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I sat for a while with her in the alcove, answering a flurry of questions about my life. I had a wife now, yes, and two children—twins, now seventeen. I was a professor, and had written numerous books. She seemed genuinely pleased for me, and wished I had brought my wife, Alice, whom I met while doing graduate studies in comparative literature at Yale, having switched from classics after Columbia.

  “Next time,” I said.

  I asked about Grant with hesitation.

  “He’s not been well,” she said, confirming what I’d heard. “It’s his memory, you see. I don’t know what to call it. Senility? Dementia? He hasn’t recognized anyone in four or five years.”

  I asked to see him, and she directed me to the garden. “He sleeps there most of the day, under his tree,” she said.

  I remembered that lemon tree, where I had sometimes gone myself to sit in imitation of the master. Going into the garden, I discovered a shrunken version of Rupert Grant, now asleep in a canvas chair, barefooted. He wore ragged trousers and a shirt that looked like a painter’s palette, stained with a variety of meals past. A straw hat shaded his face, and his chin slumped on his chest. There was no fruit on the tree behind him.

  “Hello, Rupert,” I said, hovering.

  He sniffed several times, then snorted. Looking up, his eyelids quivered, then opened; the eyes themselves appeared cloudy, full of mucus. The lines on his face had become deep rivulets of perspiration, and his hair had grown long and white, resting on his shoulders behind the hat. His feet were knobby and lobster-red, the toenails brownish yellow.