The image had frozen. He closed his computer. A few minutes later, his phone rang.
“She just came crying at me,” his wife said. “Apparently your face started jerking and she thought you were having an episode, but you weren’t, it was just the— Do you want me to talk to her?”
That was the temptation. To let her do the work: the wooing, the loving, the mothering, the separating. She’d made all the decisions about what turned out to be the bulk of his life. So here he had fled, desperate to be free from the ease and risk of leaning. Let me be a man alone, he wanted to say, and then I cannot fail.
“Put her back on,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”
Murmurs, a sniff.
“It’s going to take her some time,” his wife said.
“What’s the latest from the Fortress of Silence?”
“Principal says her grades are still up. She’s just emotionally disconnecting. She pretended to be sick so she wouldn’t have to do this skit in history class.”
“You couldn’t have made me do a skit at that age.”
“This is Daphne. On the first day of fall she jumped on the kitchen table and sang her equinox song.”
“So what, you think it’s still about boys?”
“Have you talked to her about them?”
“Them? No, I haven’t sat her down and explained the migration habits of things with penises.”
“Well, none of this is making it easier.”
He’d thought Daphne was fine. Daphne was his ally, a genetic branch from his own twisted tree. She didn’t have needs the way his wife had needs—he didn’t have needs. But his throat was hot and his brain was shrieking, the way kindling does before it breaks and burns away.
“I’m not asking you to come home, but—” His wife sounded briefly like their daughter. Small. “Can you come home?”
The images flamed in his head like his life was a field set fire to, and his memories were the mice flushed out. Their courtship, the submerged panic, the wedding, the good days, the days of exhaustion and doubt, the pregnancy too soon, the drifting and hoping that drifting was healthy, trying to find a therapist who agreed drifting was healthy, Rome and her, the sparks set off in his joints, his electric marrow, the aching center of him, her warm body, the body whose warmth could not be calculably greater than his wife’s, and yet what was happening to the logic in him, it was melting, his whole rational life was on fire. Of course his brain was dissolving its own myelin.
“No,” he said, and was certain of his villainy.
On Wednesday, he took a bus to St. Peter’s Basilica and waited in a crowd of thousands until at the edge of the piazza a golf cart appeared, and the masses surged upward: mothers lifting their babies, nonnos craning, a construction worker next to Tom flashing his orange vest in the air. Papa! Papa! And the white ball of a man on the open cart waved back, his smile tender and permanent. Behind him, Tom heard the hiccup of muffled tears.
The pope took his place on the dais, settling into his chair like a collapsing soufflé. The cardinals flanking him bowed their heads in unison. The crowd shifted on its feet, wind through the grasses, but when the pope began to speak they quieted, leaned in. Tom put his hands to his neck. He wished to trick himself, temporarily, into belief.
In a statement that seemed to be about strong families—how to construct them, or perhaps prevent them from decay—the pope alternated between reading the prepared remarks and improvising when a thought struck him. The small white hand came up in a gesture of significance—the fingers clutched in an upturned beak—as he spoke of la forza delle donne. It wasn’t so much that families were built on the backs of women, but that women were strong enough to put up with all the shit of any family, ancient or modern or whatever new devilry was headed their way. Understanding every tenth word, Tom felt their bite.
The wind was causing havoc as it braided through the columns of the piazza, and at several points the pope’s dancing vestments blew across his face, muffling whatever instructions he had for the bastard men out there. A fallible pontiff, in the doctrinal age of infallibility, was somehow the most trustworthy. When he climbed back into his cart and motored away, one hand raised in perpetual blessing, the crowd cheered, crossed themselves, cheered louder. Religion, after all, was just a crowd aspiring.
She spun his wedding ring around his knuckle; it was caught by the eddy of his bone. He was trying to tell her about the throng, the mass, in both its meanings. How Francis was like a Beatle, how fervor has to center on something tangible, which made the Trinity all the more mystifying. Jesus, yes; God, all right; but what on earth was the Holy Ghost? [It was the love I sent to the Lord—a dove—that he regifted. It’s the passion of futility; another name for parenthood.]
“What’s she like?”
“Daphne?”
“No.” She squeezed his finger.
He hadn’t thought of the ring as a sign anymore. It was just a gold interruption between flesh and flesh. They were at a back table of a dark bar; she hadn’t wanted to go anywhere. She looked tired—something about an exam, or an interview. He had a terror that leaving and being left were two inevitable sides of a coin.
“We met at a lake,” he said. His wife had been wearing a hat the size of an umbrella, so her whole folded body was in shade. A wasp hovered at the plastic daisy on the brim. Tom had been staring—orange legs or yellow striped, he couldn’t tell from that angle—and when she said Don’t be so obvious, he pointed to the vespid. She hadn’t screamed but simply removed the hat and frisbeed it into the lake, the wasp following the silk stamens.
“Did you have a church wedding?”
“She’s patient,” he said. “Though I wonder if I weren’t someone she needed to be patient with, what else she could have been instead.”
She let go of the ring, finished her espresso. “I always wanted to get married in a church. Stupid.”
“It was a park, but we had a pastor.”
“The grander the better. Give me Santa Maria sopra Minerva, right? You don’t need to believe in God to want him to bless your bad decisions.”
He’d washed his hands and face of the sterile laboratory smell, had stared into the denuded refrigerator while thinking of something else, and had taken his satchel and a glass of wine to the terrace to watch the evening planes dodge the first stars. It was once again the purple time of day. He felt an absence, an unnerving quiet. His body was closing in on itself. His new tics, which had nothing to do with his sins, shamed him. He wanted to keep his body secret. This was one of the tenets of science, that knowledge unshared was hardly knowledge at all; perhaps a nervous system decaying without witnesses would never fully vanish.
He felt around for a pen beneath the crumple of articles and field notes in his bag but brushed instead against something small and rough. The fishhook. Looking like an old, old thing. He brushed it across his mouth, then ran his tongue over his lips. A faint taste of algae and rust. His father had been a history buff, collected bits of metal from the Civil War—one of the many reasons his wife didn’t warm to holidays with his family—and always thought objects were older than they were. The hook, hand-forged but precise, could’ve survived from the Dark Ages. Or, why not, it could’ve dropped from the tackle box of Simon Peter himself, the first fisherman. Ready to make miracles, banish doubt.
Something sharp ripped in his chest, and he thought it was a second episode of demyelination, that the sclerosis was now multiple, but no, it was just longing in its cruelest, most unidentifiable state. He wanted, and it hurt.
He brought the hook down to his bare legs, rubbed the iron through the hairs there, idly dug the point into his skin, just a little, not enough to hurt, only enough to feel. He turned it on its edge, that uneven barb, the roughness against his own weak flesh, dragged it a little deeper, only to make a scratch. It felt good, like his loneliness was centered there, like the vast sheets of yearning could be blamed on a single thread, and it was here: this thin raw mark on his
leg. Could he make himself bleed? [I know you’re not listening, ye of little faith, but let me stop you here, or attempt. I understand the urge—hurt being thought the cure for hurt—but can I say it turns my stomach? We burn here, we singe and certainly we suffer, but it’s the blood, God’s red animal milk, that queases me. For the sake of creative copyright, leave the torture to my instruments. I’ve never done a thing as great as made a man, but were I your silent God, I’d sob to see my creations split themselves asunder.]
But he wanted to see the inside of his body, wanted to see if it was recognizable. He needed to find himself somewhere. He dug in. He nearly saw the pain, a thin, sharp flash, surprising. But just a scratch until he squeezed the sides of the wound together, and there: the red beads that puckered to the surface, already with a gloss on them, the reflection of what? The moon? Had his blood ever seen the moon? [There will come a night when you’ll be struck by your unborn son’s bicycle as, unbalanced and glee-shrieking, he crashes into your knees. It’ll be a full moon, but that blood will be virtuous.] It felt like someone had plowed two hands into his flesh and was peeling it back, flipping it, was inverting him.
He wiped the fishhook on his shirt and dropped it in his satchel again. This must be how people on amphetamines felt. Just manifest the poison, go ahead and draw it out of the body, turn the vague clouds into real red blood, and move the fuck on. The clarity was intoxicating.
Put it to work.
He’d considered the effects of twenty-first-century pollutants on the growing patterns of his pond shrubs and tiny crustaceans, but he hadn’t figured out how to separate this century of human interference from all the others. The valley had seen sheep herding, failed viticulture, picnicking nobles, armed conflict, lost baubles, fishermen in togas. There was no wilderness. Okay. Change the definition of pollution. Introduce symbiosis.
He reached back into the satchel for the pen, pricked his finger on the hook, damn it, grabbed some loose sheets of paper, and took them back inside, where he turned on the light in the kitchen, an exposed bulb that temporarily blinded him, and started to scribble. The list of compounds he wanted to test grew longer. The necessary experiment: determining if ostracods were not merely hardy survivalists but had evolved to prefer the bitter taste of civilization. If nature, like faith, was a human construction.
The closet-sized pasta shop on Via della Croce smelled like an old man had come in from the rain and begun crushing fresh tomatoes with his feet. They had been twenty minutes in line, on a rare cool day, and everyone was underdressed and hustling to squeeze in. Two middle-aged women behind them were in raptures.
“This is exactly how I imagined it,” one said. She’d wrapped a blue scarf around her hair, hoping that someone would invite her on his Vespa.
Her companion was a little heavier, a little more sober. “One can hardly expect they’d have health codes. And no chairs?”
“That’s how they eat here. The olive oil helps, you know how slim they are—or sturdy, that’s the worst you can say. Just imagine.”
Tom raised his eyebrows at his companion. She nodded sagely.
“And their clothes—oh, if they sat, they’d ruin them! Look at that one in the green. All those pleats.” The Janiculum girl looked down at her swirling green skirt as the tourist continued. “That’s the reason we can’t be so stylish—we’re always needing to sit down, for dinner, TV, you name it. And then things bunch around the waist, you know, and we want to unbutton, or just slouch around.”
“Those little cafés have chairs,” her companion said.
“Well, yes, for tourists, obviously. Where’s the romance in sitting down? No, this is a city of action. You have to be standing up to fall in love.”
At the counter they were shown two plastic tubs of pasta, a tonnarelli in that heady tomato sauce and a pesto pachetti; they both pointed at the red one and grabbed their cups for wine. The man doled out meals like he was performing a sacrament. Four euros each, and they crammed into an open space at the bar along the window, swirling their pasta around plastic forks on plastic plates, their lips turning gory shades of red.
“Do you want a bite of mine?” she asked. A nest of noodles, the same as his, dangled off her fork.
He opened his mouth.
“Yours is better,” he said.
The woman with the optimistic scarf was guiding her companion out the door. “Plenty of fresh air outside,” she said, “and we can watch the people.”
“It’s quite oily,” the other said. She was eating as she walked, swayed by the promise of easy weight loss.
They disappeared behind a new crowd of customers.
“I’m grateful I’m here with you,” she said.
“And not them?”
“And not them.”
“I only wish we weren’t standing up,” he said. “It’s hard on the heart.”
She placed her fingers on his cheek, two in front of his ear and three behind, and lingered for an instant, the pressure from her smallest finger directing him toward her, that pinky caught in a curl, and he stood there, blank of mind, as she leaned up on her toes and asserted herself. Her mouth tasted like smoke—not cigarettes but campfires, like his mouth had gone camping in Wyoming. His first response was envy, that this person had untangled the knots of her life to such an extent that she could press her face on the face of a stranger without hesitation, as if she knew that each of her actions sprang from an innate wholeness and so was indisputable, as if love was a form of independence. His second response was a stabbing pain.
The City
[ 1559 ]
After the trunks from Florence had been put away and the footman had delivered the letter from her lover that she refused to open, Giulia listened at the door for the footstep of her husband—nothing—and then draped veils over the mirrors, took off her heavy skirts, and started in on the Battle for the New World, with the heathens on the verge of surrendering the high mount of Hispaniola. She thrust her umbrella into the rib cage of a writhing Indian; she spun around to lop off the head of a phantom approaching from behind. Blood spattered the silk upholstery. She grabbed the corpses by their ankles and swung them onto the bed to clear the field. A boy ran in front of her, his hands raised in a plea; she kicked open the window and hurled him by his hair into the street below. A man selling eels stared up at her.
On the island, not a soldier stirred. The lady knight Bradamante sheathed her lance and flipped a veil from one of the mirrors. Her eyes were dark and her hair was dark and her skin was darker than was considered pale. Inside her stomach an ant had taken hold. She held her side.
A knock on the door. “My lady, your husband requests your opinion.”
“I have no husband,” she shouted.
She squinted at her mirror self, who pantomimed. After resituating her breasts so she could look down upon their doughy tops like a shepherdess, and lacing herself loosely into both shirt and sleeves, she spotted her skirts still abandoned on the bed. Holy hell. She could take off her bodice and start over, or— She licked a few curls into place and left her room, yelling “Paola!” so her servant would know she was on the move.
On the staircase, a butler turned to look away.
At the head of the table, shelved between the platters and the porcelain, Bernardetto closed one eye. “My pet,” he said, “half of you is missing.”
She tossed the skirt of her underwear. “My legs are still invisible.”
“And if the cardinal had been here?”
“I imagine all the ladies he’s seen are without legs.”
She sat down with a long neck and nodded to the servant holding the carving knife, an unknown Roman hired for the occasion and quivering. She waited until her plate had been filled to her satisfaction—all grease and herbs and jellies—and began to eat with a fast succession of tiny bites, as she’d been trained. “Like a rabbit, dear,” her aunt had said. “No movement but in the lips.”
“How many will be at the church tomorrow?” s
he asked. On the sideboard behind the table stood a towering cake made of stacked savoiardi and tiny marzipan fruits, and though she was already growing full from chicken, she would not leave the table without demanding a slice from that mountain of sweet. After her mother died, they’d sent her into the hills outside Florence to live with the nuns, who tried to convince her that apples were a great treat—she’d nearly starved herself in defiance until they returned her with a note explaining that her fixation on sugar was preventing her from a proper concentration on Christ.
“You won’t be required to speak to any cardinals,” her husband said. “They’d just ask when you last attended confession.”
“They wouldn’t.” She snapped her fingers again and pointed at the cake, and the servant rushed toward it with a knife. “They’d ask about the money from the Pescara properties and whether we’d be interested in funding a monastery or two, or maybe a chapel made half of gold in Santa Maria dell’Orto, which is taking forever to be finished because they keep squeezing in more marble.” The slice descended before her, and she smiled at it like a putto had flown down from the ceiling. The ant was ravenous.
“Must’ve been your blaspheming that did poor Ciccio in,” he said.
Though her first husband—much older, now dead—had no use for banter, he’d taught her what he knew about the twisted paths of Florentine diplomacy. She’d been married to the new one four days and still wasn’t sure what of him was useful. His lips opened and closed, fishlike, when he thought he was being clever.
“And what will do you in?” she asked. The cake was a wet, melty cloud. Some cook had left the savoiardi too long in the liqueur. She thought of sending a box of the miniature almondy apples to the Tuscan nuns with a note: This is what a treat tastes like, you monsters.
“The withholding of your beauty,” he said.
The fork was still in her mouth. She never had to share a bed with Francesco, old Ciccio, because he had a mistress of thirty years who would nuzzle him just the way he liked—she once came upon them tangled in the yews, the half-toothless woman with a hand in his pants, her husband pressed against her neck like a child. For the second engagement, her cousin Cosimo swore to her innocence, and both families applauded. White as snow.
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