The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  On the Pincio Terrace, at the edge of the park, a pair of middle-aged men played guitars with a hat out for coins. The tourists, their bodies stretching toward the overlook, kept their backs to the song. Daphne drank her green bottle of juice in time-stretching sips.

  “So, who’s going to tell me more about this boy at school?”

  She held out her hand for change. Tom produced two fifty-cent pieces and a jingle of pennies.

  “If you don’t want to be with Mom anymore, does that mean you want to be with someone else?”

  While his brain asked the gods for another seizure, she generously left him, walked over to toss the coins in the musicians’ hat. She shook her hips in a pantomime of dance and returned to stand in front of him and pat his knees.

  “What is it about her you don’t like?”

  “Nothing, nothing; that’s not—” He couldn’t answer.

  “Do you think someone one day won’t like me?”

  Across the terrace, a woman in tall sandals stopped to consult a notepad—a shopping list, or directions. She had the willow shape of the Janiculum girl: thin, bendy, beauty coming off her in narrow leaves. But this was a different woman, with an equal capacity for being fallen in love with, for being abandoned.

  “Liking someone is not always an always thing,” he said.

  “So what’s an always thing?” Her little hands on his knees, her nearly young-woman face as open as a sunflower, unselfconscious and blazing brave. The pulse at her collarbone that predators would snap. A bag of bones, on the same road to dust as Tom.

  “Love,” he said.

  He passed Daphne off to his wife at the Fontana del Moro, the rose-smelling bag dangling on her tiny wrist. As he wrestled her into a final hug, the stone Moor above them pulled a dolphin from between his legs.

  His wife opened her arms—a surprise. Though she slapped his back like a friend, warmth came from each pat of her palm, and he felt briefly, guiltily, safe.

  “It’s been a trip,” she said.

  “You saved my life.”

  “Saved it from ease.” She had her hands on her hips now, as did Daphne beside her, two women making the shape of trees. “Saved it from certainty.”

  “Let’s not get too dramatic.”

  “Well, there’s a you-sized hole in California, should you ever get bored of convalescing in the Eternal City. I can’t promise weeping virgins or resurrections, but the lemon this year looks like it’s finally going to fruit.”

  As they crossed the piazza to their hotel, Daphne ducked between her mother’s legs, mimicking the dolphin, and Tom’s wife—still his wife—hoisted all sixty pounds of their daughter and for a few steps carried her like a squirming corpse into the crowd.

  He took seven milligrams of Aubagio.

  The valley at first seemed empty. No humans; no women, no children. He lay on the grass by the spring where he’d trapped the ostracods that had died. That was his fault. The nerves crusting over inside of him, that wasn’t his fault. A slick-backed beetle scaled his upturned hand. Osmoderma eremita, hermit, eremite. Smelling of leather. Something quietly flipped the water in the pool—turtle, fish, eel. No, not eel. Every organism in this half acre could be quantified. But the accuracy of biology wasn’t what Tom believed in; it was the feeling. I came from that; that’s dependent on this; this perishes and rots and releases the nitrogen that makes that grow; that converts carbon into oxygen and fills the lungs of this; this is iridescent and sparks lust in that; that is merely beautiful, that is beyond human understanding, that invokes not certainty but faith.

  An oak leaf sailed across his shoulder. The heat belied the season. Autumn was the time for burial. If he stayed still and held his breath, the leaves would cover him, their veins webbing his own, brown on blue. The beetles would begin nibbling. Hair into fiber, skin into cells. From the soil of his intestines the Boletus mushrooms would grow; a twenty-second-century emperor would dine on his shuffled molecules. Where would he be in spring, when neon baby leaves lit the dead branches in surprise? [Alive.]

  There was no end to rebirth. He could concede right now, declare it all too much, and nothing in him would fail to revive into something else. The beetle and the damselfly and the ostracod—no matter how many he misused, this water would always have more—the elm and the violet and the fig: these were the mirrors. Desire, impulse, hunger, choice, change. Choice? [I’ll allow it.] He rolled over, facedown in dampness, chlorophyll, worm castings; he stuck out his tongue. Tasted the metal of the earth.

  This was easiest.

  He imagined Daphne looking down at him, identification guide in hand. Yep, she’d say. A boy.

  He took seven milligrams of Aubagio.

  He’d bought his paper from Fabriano; the shop had been around since the 1200s, and he felt like that meant something. Dante, Raphael, Tom. He spread the pages on the table outside, weighted each down with a tile.

  Dr. Tromba,

  Grazie mille for the health care. I’m returning home in December; if you have any colleagues in Southern California you’d recommend, I anticipate continuing my regimen in America. (This was not always a guarantee; you should be proud.) I have absorbed your lesson, which is that I’m going to die regardless. To make it a story of trust and betrayal is as solipsistically human as one can get. To separate the flesh and the soul. I hope you get to see Alaska. (“You” being not an essence, but the rods and cones in your retinas.)

  He ate a plum, washed his fingers.

  Richard,

  Two sections of intro means half the prep time; thank you. First-years are sheep, yes, but also open of heart. I’ll reward them by making their exams open of book. As for midtenure, I should inform you that I plan to supplement my scientific publications with policy papers, my research being, I believe, more broadly relevant to public discussions of human impact on environment. I have also begun a poem. I attempt to rhyme crustacean with salvation.

  He reread a canto of Paradiso. “In drawing near to its desire / Our intellect ingulphs itself so far, / That after it the memory cannot go.” Except where desire is buoyed by memory, is compounded by time.

  Friend,

  Projecting my needs onto you—for freedom, wildness, lust—doesn’t erase your value. You own that without my having been there to witness it. Thank you for the indulgence. You could sell them to the Catholics and make a killing. Who knew suffering fools was such an act of mercy.

  He opened a Peroni, spun the bottle cap.

  Wife,

  I told Daphne love was undying—could literally not be killed, not with a knife or a bullet or boredom or time—and I’m growing to mean this. Thank you for the marriage. I’m sorry we couldn’t keep liking each other (like-liking, as the kids say). Very little turns out to be love—or else most everything is. I’m still deciding.

  He watered the potted bougainvillea. Someone else had watered it before he arrived, and soon someone else would water it again.

  Daphne,

  Don’t believe anything anyone tells you. Humans are liars, tricksters, cowards; yes, hiding in all of them are beautiful angels, midfall, but I’ll never believe you’re anything less than a Supreme Being. You always ask why I study ostracods. It’s because they’re small, like you once were, and have long stories to tell, like you do, and survive in spite of shit (pardon my language), which you will too. Space and time are just a series of reflections. You’re the hook of my life.

  He’d only mail half of them. He took seven milligrams of Aubagio.

  At the end of the following week, Aldo appeared with an A4 envelope and an American-sized soda, looking like he had photo evidence of a mayor’s affair. “Where is my sandwich?” he said.

  The tanks were filling up with specimens again. When the article was eventually published in Hydrobiology, no one would know about the generation of seed shrimp who’d laid down their lives for an error in scheduling.

  “He has them do yours prima. Sad face professor, they say.”

  “They
don’t say. Hand it over.”

  “Il panino al roast beef,” he said.

  Tom dug a few euros out of his pocket. “Shoo, get out of here.”

  “I want to see the news. You think it belongs to Jesus?”

  “I certainly don’t think it belonged to Jesus.”

  But when he pulled out the results and scanned through the jargon to find the punch line—1810 BP, ± 30—he was surprised to find himself slightly disappointed.

  “Ha!” the boy said, looking over his shoulder. “Not Jesus but Garibaldi!”

  “BP means before present,” Tom explained, stuffing the paper back into its sheath. “With present meaning 1950—don’t ask me why.”

  “So lo amo from my papa’s box is, che, twenty years after present? AP?”

  “What did you call this?” He held up the returned hook in its sterile laboratory bag.

  “Lo amo.”

  “‘I love.’”

  “No,” the boy said, laughing. “Lo amo, the hook.”

  “No—lo amo, I love it.”

  The boy counted his coins, swung on the doorjamb. “So when is it?”

  “140 CE, plus or minus thirty years. What do you think, is it Hadrian’s hook?”

  “Marcus Aurelius. My mother makes me learn: L’unica fonte di felicità è la virtù.”

  “And virtue, did she tell you how to identify that?”

  He flopped his arms. “Una piccola anima che trasporta un cadavere.”

  “An animal—”

  “Anima, soul. A little soul carrying around a corpse, that is a human.” The boy tapped a rhythm on the open door. “So, you want food?”

  “Piacere,” Tom said. “Pleasure. Pesce, fish.”

  “Now you make things up. I get you Fanta!”

  So the hook wasn’t Christ’s. No miracles would be performed today.

  It pulsed in his pocket all the way home, from the 71 to the 75, past Santa Maria Maggiore and round the Colosseum, past the pyramid where the girl had thrown rocks, through the Porta Portese, up to his own tree-lined street.

  He put the hook on his kitchen table, then moved it to a shelf in the bedroom, but it looked hungry there too, so he took it out to the terrace, where the twilight seemed to disarm it. What was the lure? [The same that leads to any sin: want.] To pull this hook across his brain, to score the nerves that were being stripped of myelin, to erase each vulnerability in turn until he became a smooth slate. A single star in a vast and empty sky. He closed his eyes. We all did the things we thought were right.

  The first strains of La Traviata swam over the open air. Up and up the violins. It’s how he always imagined the nervous system, his emotions like a bow. If he opened his eyes, he’d see his neighbor with the woman in his arms. The touch of their bodies, belly to belly, chin to neck, as timeless as loneliness, as uncertain, as riveting. Her stout ankles circling around his shined-up shoes. His fingers grazing the cloth of her sweaty dress, too tender. The strings manic with humanity. The worn Roman bodies shuffling on.

  “Scusi!” He waved a hand at the distant terrace. The couple paused. The lover made his confession to the dying soprano while a plane cut a slow path through the evening. “Lo amo!” He hurled the old fishhook across the dusk between them. The woman reached out her arms.

  The City

  [ 1559 ]

  “The pope’s nearly done for,” he said. “I’ve had a note.”

  Giulia patted her mouth with the napkin and put her elbows on the breakfast table, propping her chin in her hands. “Do tell.”

  After almost a week, the gash in his lip had scarred over.

  “Don’t be morbid. Bless His Holiness and whatnot, but the bugger’s been refusing my request to visit the chapel. Now the cardinal-nephew’s got hold of his correspondence, we’re being granted a tour.”

  “Is he really a sodomite, the pope?”

  “He’s senile and won’t know who we are—if we’re brought in for an audience, you’re to say you’re the Countess of Alvito, and I’ll be your husband.”

  “You are my husband,” she said.

  “He’s got a spider under his shirt about the Florentines.” His leg bounced restlessly under the table. “I haven’t seen what Michelangelo’s added since my father took me as a boy.”

  He insisted she wear her red brocade, even though it was heavy and the August sun had turned the streets into an oven. It cinched against her bruising breasts. She thought he wanted the pope to confuse her for a cardinal, but he said it made them seem like people of consequence. “We are,” she said. She swaddled herself in red, and he donned his suit with gold braids, and together they looked like a pair of servants in heraldic uniform.

  The strollers and shoppers and children out with balls were slow to get out of the horses’ way, assessing until the last moment whether they’d really be expected to move; the groom in his livery flicked his whip too limply to be considered cracking. One of their wheels knocked the corner of a fruit stand, and she saw the vendor snatching at his towers of apples before they collapsed. When they squeezed out onto the bridge spooling over the Tiber—straight and wide, the Castel Sant’Angelo on the far side like a great beckoning bowl—Giulia breathed deep, trying to hoard all the open air and the tang of fresh water before being plunged back into this city of dust and feathers. Outside the basilica, men hawked straw for pilgrims to sleep on. She was already jealous of their rest.

  Was the servant who greeted them at the pope’s residence really wearing a red tunic with gold braid? [There are worse Vaticatastrophes—imagine being in the receiving room in 1500, when lightning struck the palace and the roof collapsed, first crushing two curialists, then crashing through Pinturrichio’s vault in the Borgia apartments, knocking Alexander VI on the head in the middle of a papal audience. Was this punishment for his daughter’s wild wedding in the same rooms a few years before, when guests played that classic game of picking up as many candies as you can using only your breasts? In what tongue did the lightning speak in 2013, when it zapped St. Peter’s dome hours after Benedict XVI announced the first papal resignation in six hundred years? Or in 2120, when an electrical storm finally cracked the obelisk that’d shaded the reverse crucifixion of Peter, the bolt scattering Caesar’s ashes and the shards of the True Cross? Is someone up there weary of the pomp? Would He like perhaps fewer red velvet costumes? Listen, He never knew how to let a man down easy.] Giulia gave her husband a violent poke in the arm and swept into the Vatican with her head high and her bracelets jangling. The cardinal-nephew welcomed them in his personal salon and made his apologies for the pope’s absence and ill health. He didn’t comment on her beauty, an omission that would’ve been a breach of etiquette in the receiving rooms of Florence. She took it as confirmation that the day was already terrible and would only get worse.

  Two days passed between Maria’s second sitting in Florence and her own. When the note arrived requesting her presence in the upstairs library—the same widow’s weeds, please—she moved it from her right hand to her left and back, hoping she’d feel some tremor that would indicate the proper response. If the left hand felt suddenly itchy, it would be a sign of the Devil, and she must resist. But if the sun brushed past the clouds and lay upon her right hand while the letter was in her palm— She rolled the note into a pipe and stuck it in her shoe.

  “One could go swimming in this gloom,” she said, resuming her stance by the chair.

  “I was told it wouldn’t do to paint a widow with cheer.”

  “You missed an opportunity. ‘Your face alone illuminates the darkness,’ you could’ve said. I thought patronage was dependent on knowing how to flatter.”

  “Knowing who to flatter,” he said.

  She felt that warm jolt through her throat. She watched the colors come out of their doll-sized bottles: blacks and whites rubbed into gray, peaches, and maroons. He glanced up every half minute, his eyes on her golden fichu, on her hand curled atop the table, on the slant of her brow.

  “
Have you always had a talent?” It came out as a whisper; she was trying to keep her lips still. She thought he didn’t hear her, but he scratched the broken-off end of his brush in the small cleft of his chin and looked directly in her eyes. The whites around his irises were clear, bloodless.

  “Don’t we all?”

  “There’s the delusion,” she said. “I knew I’d find it. You’re an idealist. You probably believe prince and serf are loved by God the same.” She raised her left foot slightly to relieve the pressure from standing.

  “Made with the same organs. No, not loved the same.”

  She lifted her right foot. “And yet you think I’m not your equal.”

  “If you don’t stand still, this painting will have your feet switched, and then your husband won’t have you.”

  “If I wrote poetry, you’d admire me more?”

  He put down his palette and ran his splotchy hands through his hair in what could have been exasperation but wasn’t quite. When he stepped from behind his easel, she defensively put a hand on the wooden chair. Standing before her, two feet of air between their faces, he seemed so young. They were the same age.