The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  Across the billowing dusk, the neighbor’s terrace was lit for a party. Between the roses and the homemade electrical tower and the laundry line hung strands of light, bell-shaped in the shadows. The man was half-dressed—an undershirt, creased pants, and shoes that cast a shine—repositioning card tables, weighing them down with glass bowls that held something heavy. Pebbles, or metal bolts. The first guests began arriving.

  He wanted to call the Janiculum girl and run ideas by her, ask if she thought he had emotions (yes, she’d say, too many), ask how to raise a girl to be as sure as she was. He put his hand out to the spot next to the lamp where he thought he’d left the fishhook. He’d forgotten about the carbon dating. On the windowsill was a multipurpose tool he’d used to open a beer a few nights ago. A corkscrew, a bottle opener, a penknife. Form and function—to satisfy its purpose, he ought to be puncturing something. He palmed it. Its metal was a relief on his skin.

  He called her in his mind.

  “I trusted it,” he said. “My body.”

  That was stupid, she would’ve said.

  “But I couldn’t have done anything different, right? The coding was already in place. I’ve got to stop seeing it as some kind of punishment.”

  Don’t you take responsibility for anything?

  The neighbor’s girlfriend had arrived now, if girlfriend was the term older people used, and they spoke to the other guests as a unit, arms glued to each other’s backs. At one point she disappeared inside, and instead of moving to another conversation, the man stood silently at the railing of the terrace, looking out into the night. Looking at Tom, in fact.

  He began again with thin lines on his thigh, but it didn’t feel like anything. His mind was wrapped in padding.

  “I avoid,” he said, “and prosper.”

  You don’t look like you’re prospering.

  “My daughter still loves me.”

  Your daughter thinks boys are systematically excluding her from the running of the world.

  “I can’t—”

  Bullshit.

  They’d turned up the music; some song had come on their tabletop radio that recalled a shared generational memory, and the man swung his lady into a two-step. Tom dug deeper, as if the disease could be found as strands of silver invading his veins and could be neatly extracted. Fished out. The pain began to jangle now.

  Make a decision.

  “I’m just trying not to hurt anyone.”

  Bullshit.

  “I’m just trying not to get hurt.”

  What will you give up so that when she’s your age, she can tell her asshole boyfriend—or girlfriend—to walk the hell out because she was raised to know how humans should be?

  He cried out. There was a gash on his leg; without thinking, he’d gone too far.

  He took seven milligrams of Aubagio.

  Rose, oleander, plumbago, pomegranate. The Protestant Cemetery—bodies laid in protest—was suffocatingly still. Cypress, pine, palm, eucalyptus. The Janiculum girl had affixed a note to his courtyard gate, addressed to Tomaso, asking to meet him here, as if dreams could lead to words could lead to touch. Robin, blackcap, starling, crow. Calmati, he’d murmured, and rubbed his chest. Red admiral, clouded yellow, fritillary, hairstreak. His child was flying away in two days—sun, moon, sun, moon—less time than Christ had taken to resurrect, and Tom’s heart and courage and myelin were still in a tumbling brawl. Tabby cat, tabby cat, black cat, calico.

  A stone dog draped its paws over the lip of a tomb, like it was feeling for its master. The cemetery’s packed terraces made it hard to spot the living. On some day of reckoning, the statuary would spring up: the weeping angel to brush away her tears, the recumbent man to wipe the dust from his shoes, the terrier to peel back the coffin lid and dive into the skeleton arms of its beloved. What of our bodies would survive? [Not your crusty nerves, not your greasy lesions, not even your tender thumbs. But ask the crypt keeper—Felix, felicitous—he who loves you more; he might tell you different. His own bones are moldering half a mile from here, unmourned.] While they waited, the living must mete out their pleasures. He’d stopped by the market in Testaccio for a bag of hot supplì. When he came upon her form kneeling in front of a marble column, his certainty was clouded with happiness.

  “A girl who drowned in the Tiber,” she said, standing, and he slipped his white hand into hers, marveling at its coolness. She let her hand be held long enough for him to breathe in, breathe out, and then she took it back.

  He held up his supplì. She smiled and reached down to the base of the column, below the stone waves out of which the drowned girl was being dragged to heaven by an importunate angel, and produced her own bag of supplì.

  He reached a hand toward her hip, but she stepped back, pressed against the grave. “In these sacred grounds, embracing is forbidden,” she said. “Along with the use of tobacco products, profanity, and the consumption of fried balls of rice and cheese. Disregard will result in fines.”

  “How much?”

  “To be honest, I hoped you wouldn’t show. I got these for both of us,” she said, digging into the grease-stained bag, “but once I had them, and could smell them, I had the most terrible thoughts. Like: if I hide behind the Russian crosses and cram them all into my mouth at once, will he even know I had them? If the intention counts more than the action, isn’t the fact that these supplì-enough-for-two once existed a kindness enough? Will he smell them on my breath? He’s probably not hungry. He’s a grown man; grown men are rarely hungry. They subsist on dewdrops and televised sports.”

  He reached into his own bag, bit a supplì in half. “We’re creating independent lives for ourselves.”

  She turned and began strolling through the headstones, occasionally touching them, as a woman might do in a clothing store. She leaned over to cluck at a feral cat.

  He looked up at the heat-drained sky. A stray vine from a climbing rose knocked against his shoulder. “Tell me what to do.”

  “You don’t want to look for Shelley?” She licked her fingers.

  “Mary or—”

  “Her flop-haired husband.”

  “Ah. ‘Nothing in the world is single . . .’”

  “And yet that’s the thing—you’re still the one who can do whatever he wants.”

  She led him through a brick wall, past a sleeping ginger tom, and out onto the wide lawn that flanked the Roman pyramid. In a shady corner, the stones of Keats and Severn, and Severn’s little boy, clumped together like a club. She dragged a sandaled toe across the cyclamen on Keats’s plot.

  “Somewhere down there is a letter from Fanny Brawne.” She ran a handkerchief across the back of her neck. “The last letter she sent, he wouldn’t open. Had it for weeks before he died, and he wouldn’t open it. I don’t know if it seemed grander to him somehow, or if he literally couldn’t withstand the pain. Can you imagine having— I don’t understand him. He could be so unsentimental—he said he was dying not like Romeo but like a frog in a frost—and then he’d turn around and write these speeches about martyring himself for Fanny. About how he used to scoff at people who were martyrs for religion, but his religion was love, and now of course he’d crucify himself for it.” She made a quick turn and headed for the pyramid. “He was a teenage girl.”

  She was crying.

  A frog in a frost. His hot little heart. He would’ve read the letter before he died. He was a scientist, he wanted all the information. But if he didn’t yet have the right love to give—the pure kind, unpolluted, or rather historically polluted, or symbiotic—taking it from others, no matter how willing, seemed a kind of theft.

  They leaned over the metal railing that protected the old folly and its dry moat. Two columns sprouted weedlike in the trench, lonely, lacking context.

  He rubbed at his jaw. “You asked me to be honest.”

  “I never did that.”

  And she was right; she never had.

  “Look at me,” she said, and she rubbed his eyebrow, grazed hi
s neck with her fingers, pressed a thumb into his sternum.

  He pulled her hand back. “Can I be the one to do it? For practice?”

  She put her arms behind her.

  “It’s not that I haven’t— Or that you in any way were—” He restarted. “Just because my marriage is a mess, or not messy enough, doesn’t mean it was right to—”

  “You don’t want to see me again,” she offered.

  “That’s it, yes. Not a truth but a necessity.”

  “Say it.”

  “It’s a fiction, it’s what I’m doing to save—”

  “Sometimes you’ve got to bite the bullet and break your own heart.”

  He stuck his foot through the railing and stared down at his shoelaces. The mud on the crisscrossed cotton, on the eyelets and aglets, probably held ostracods in suspended animation. “I’m the tiniest bit in love with you and I don’t know anything about you, and that’s unfair, and I think we should call it a day.”

  Two children on the cusp of adolescence went hurtling past, each brandishing a stick and whooping. A younger girl huffed after them, potbellied and violently angry.

  “No, that’s fair. We only love for the hell of it.” She turned back to the pyramid, threw a stone over the railing, then quickly checked that no cats had been hit. “Anything else you want to say before sunset?”

  A thousand things: every scrape from his childhood, his mother’s rhubarb pie, his third-grade inside-the-park home run, his obsession with birds, the confession when he asked the priest what masturbation was, the time he ran out of gas in Alabama and hitchhiked with a trapeze troupe, his obsession with bugs, how he didn’t know where to put his hands the first time he kissed so held them out behind him like a flying fish, vomiting onto his date’s prom dress, staying up for forty-three hours once in college because so many things were happening, seeing the Atlantic from thirty thousand feet, his obsession with invertebrates, finally beating his father in tennis, learning to knit when his mother had her cancer scare, meeting his wife—no—yes, he wanted to tell her about what that kind of love felt like, and that it was convincing because it was true in its own way, and how they fought without energy, and loved peacefully, and only told each other half of their whole life stories because at the end of the day they were simply separate people and could not be expected to care, to really care, about the way one of their hearts surged when as a child he watched the right fielder trip on a divot and his hard-hit ball went ricocheting around the field like Christ himself was toying with it while Tom ran all the way home, his tiny arms waving above his head.

  “No,” he said. Nor did he ask her. He was beginning to understand that self-sufficiency was a myth, a mist.

  He took seven milligrams of Aubagio.

  The lab was hot as hell and entirely dark: shades down, overheads out, day lamps off. The darkness was thick and silent. The room had the earthy smell of a well-stocked lake. Fishy and turbid, with a sweetness of pine. Where had he been yesterday? [The cemetery, with me.] The cemetery, with her. But he’d left notes on temperature control, surely. He checked the spreadsheet pasted by the door. There was his last name, and a blank where instructions for the assistant should have gone. He hadn’t written any because he’d planned to be in every day this week.

  He spun into the hallway. “Aldo!” A young woman hurried by, carrying a heavy sack with a few immobile limbs poking out. Deer? [Were the hooves cloven?] What was going on down the hall? “Aldo!” He’d almost brought Daphne.

  Alone in the room, double-checking the notes of the other researchers, Tom switched on the air-conditioning unit, turned the fans to high, flipped on the overhead lights. At the center table, his line of tanks looked like penitentiaries. He stood by the door for several minutes, trying to remember if anything said yesterday had been worth this outcome. Had romance finally brought him to the height of egotism? [Aren’t hearts and I both red? I jest. Love is collaborative. This city is a stack. Loving is layering, and then losing. This city is submerged, reborn. You don’t know how to do it until you’ve done it, and then you have to start over. You don’t know what’s underfoot until you’ve broken what’s above, and then you can’t go back. If you think, boy, with your spoiled-milk body and your desert heart, that life has been unfair and you are alone and the hurt of the world is a mirror, bravo, you’re correct; if you think you don’t deserve this, then fuck you. I strangled these bugs for a reason. Ego? We all play God to someone.]

  His hand still raised by the light switch, he imagined the last moments of their ostracod lives. A search for food: the mastication of the final scraps of algae, the knobby protozoa. Kicking around the roots of the duckweed, bumping into friends. Waiting for the late dawn to come. Trying to sleep in the dark. Rooting around for more food, feeling warmer. A pain in the belly. A certain loss of nerve. Will the sun show up today? Rubbing a leg along the hot glass of the tank, knocking the carapace until it pings, wondering what new world this is with such obstinate boundaries. The temperature rising. Watching an acquaintance succumb, its body kicking in a last paroxysm and then drifting to the bottom, a pale and translucent blot, its feelers curled as if for sleep. Circling around the corpse, wondering if it counted as food. Deciding not. Waiting for the sun. Tired of the dark water. Waiting, at least, for the man who makes the sun. The gnawing pain duller now, the legs tired from kicking around in the heat. The temperature rising. Pale shells drifting down. Eating the bodies okay now. Hours, days passing, but no time really, for the sun has yet to rise. Not understanding time. Not understanding the body, how it works, how it sustains life, how life is taken away, how the man at the switch determines if life is good, deciding that the man at the switch is false, and legs and stomach and brain are all there is, and drifting now because it’s easier to rest than kick. The bottom of the world is also glass, and all the other bodies are there. The antennae can feel them. It’s the final thing to feel. Brushing against the dead. The temperature rising. Still thinking—the secret kernel within the acquired hard doubt—the man will turn the sun on.

  Tom left the room; he couldn’t look.

  He forgot to take seven milligrams of Aubagio. Nothing happened.

  “Ciao, ciao,” Daphne said, waving her arm at the palms, the statues of men, the old men who sat like statues.

  The Villa Borghese was her favorite kind of wild: not just trees and ducks and water but hundreds of people, all, like her, loving the trees and ducks and water. They leaned on the wall overlooking the Piazza del Popolo and counted baseball caps below. When he woke that morning, alone in his rented flat, Tom had held his face in the mirror and said, “You aren’t dead yet.” He had to say it twice. Everything was gone except for her—the blinding solar heart of it all.

  “Bellissima,” a smoky-mouthed man said, passing his wrinkled hand just over her head. A touch without touching.

  “Bellissima,” she copied. “Ciao, ciao.”

  “I’m sorry you have to fly all the way home again,” he said. “You’re a migrating bird.”

  “We only came because we thought you were dying. Whoever the hospital got as a translator was—” She mimed the act of barfing.

  “Just ‘head injury,’ huh?”

  “Smash on the brain! Boom, blood!”

  He pinched the muscle where her neck and shoulder met; her laugh lassoed the obelisks.

  “The plane has good movies, it’s no big deal. Plus Mom gives me ten dollars for snacks before we board, no rules, so I can get M&Ms and chips and whatever.”

  “Carrot sticks and curds of whey.”

  “And anyway, you’re coming home at Christmas.”

  They’d spent Daphne’s last morning picking out a present for her mother. Tom and his wife had avoided being alone together; in the face of their daughter’s jet-lagged glee, sitting down to trade apologies had felt too grim. I’m sorry for not loving you being only one remove from I’m sorry I ever did. After an hour of trinket vendors, Daphne found a farmacia—not the shop Tom imagined, c
rowded with colored jars and dried skins and pots of herbs, something white and fetal drifting in formaldehyde, but a chapel of scent. The glossy side of the Renaissance. Two women in white aprons helped his little girl move through glass cabinets, smelling perfumes and soaps, toothpastes and foot creams. She was unblemished.

  “Scusami?” A woman had come in the shop trailing a teenage boy. “Simonetta è qui?”

  A white apron ushered her back; while a high-pitched argument about the church offering ensued, the boy paced in the tiny shop, his contained energy thrumming against the glass. Daphne, who’d been testing her language on her helper (buono, bello, piccolo), went silent. She took a menu of goods and prices and was as engrossed as if it were Black Beauty. Tom, standing in a corner opening and sniffing unidentified boxes, couldn’t help staring. The boy was oblivious of the nine-year-old. He’d found his reflection in the cabinet of potpourri and was pinching pimples. Daphne turned the menu over, and over again. She didn’t look at him; she didn’t blush. She’d been paralyzed. After a vigorous “Ma, basta!” the woman emerged from the back, a bag of products now swinging off her wrist. She yelled at her son (“Vieni! Porca miseria!”), and he smacked the edge of the countertop as they left. Daphne put the corner of the menu in her mouth and bit down.

  She picked out a portasapone, a holder of soap, made of wax and real rosebuds. “Real rosebuds,” she whispered, and inhaled. “Will the wax disappear?”

  “No faster than any of us,” he said, and blew a raspberry on her temple, spit-splattering her.

  While father and daughter shopped, his wife said she’d visit Livia’s frescoes at the Palazzo Massimo: a first-century room painted like a garden, anemones still blooming. The place was hardly mentioned in the guidebooks; why had she been so adamant about going, and going alone? [You haven’t named her—you shrink from definition—but she is no less brutally alive. There she sits, air-conditioned on a black vinyl bench, as distant from the frescoes as Livia once was, that Roman body stretched on golden sofas to admire the facsimile of the greenery just beyond the open door. A man comes in—Augustus—his eye attached instead to the snakes of her hair, the pale of her throat, her small jeweled mouth. They met when both were married, both wives womb-full, and laid down stepping-stones of divorce to cross their need for the other. From that transgression came Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula, Nero. Rome! When he leaves, mounts his horse to ride into history, she remains: a face, long limbs, recorded only as a shape, and only to the degree to which she’s loved. But nameless is not lifeless; I’m keeping notes. I collect silences in vials. You, you’re hardly Augustus, but still you’ll publish, your citation impossible to erase from the preserving sands of the internet, while unremarked hearts are reborn and reborn and reborn.]