He decided the best way to start was with a long, languorous, wine-soaked, high-carbohydrate lunch among the idling classes. He strolled to a café on Piazza Navona and requested an outdoor table overlooking the square with its Bernini fountain. He looked at the fountain and reviewed the menu. When he caught himself poring over the first- and second-course offerings like rare manuscripts in the college library, he imagined Maize sighing fondly and shaking her head. Once a grind, Robbie, always a grind. Again he tried to surrender to the loose Italian spirit, letting the breeze play with his shiny straight hair, letting the burble of nearby water soothe him, letting the faint scent of chamomile (was someone having tea?) waft into his nostrils. But no sooner had he eased into the moment than a large bee hovered threateningly around his face like an announcement: Stop kidding yourself. Mellowness isn’t your strong suit. Maybe the most a high-strung person like himself could aspire to was fatigue.
It didn’t help that he was marooned in Rome for a week when he could have gotten the trip over quickly. What had he been thinking? When his father had blackmailed Robbie into showing up for his birthday celebration—when he’d insisted on giving Robbie his senior-year tuition in person, after years of Robbie deflecting his letters and phone calls to the States with varying degrees of politeness—Robbie immediately had two warring impulses: to pop into Rome as briefly as an overnight business traveler and to explore the Eternal City as thoroughly as possible, since he’d never seen it before and might never be back.
He shouldn’t have given in to the tourist side of himself, but he did. And his mother had encouraged him. When Robbie raised the possibility of a longer stay she seemed delighted by the idea that he’d be in Rome for a full week, just a stroll away from his father, though her ex-husband would think Robbie was there only for a matter of hours. “You know what, kiddo?” she’d said to Robbie as he debated the matter. “You’re right. Have a vacation. You’ve been working like a dog.” And when Robbie mentioned the extra cost she’d said, “I’ll cough up the dough,” and assured him it wouldn’t be too expensive. She’d smiled as if glancing at a lovely postcard.
So Robbie consented to see his father. But officially, at least, only for his birthday. He lied that he would fly in and out of Rome within twenty-four hours because he had tons of thesis research to do and he was sorry, that was all the time he could spare. He figured if anyone could accept a workaholic’s excuse it was his father. Although it was admittedly an odd situation, everything between them was strange—awkward, freighted, frosty. What the Italians would call freddo. In five years they’d barely spoken and they hadn’t seen each other at all.
His father had abandoned them without warning—absconded to Rome with a pretty and decidedly younger designer from his firm, having relocated his textile business to Italy over a number of months, as if America weren’t large enough to avoid the vestiges of his past or his ex-wife’s endlessly radiating scorn. Robbie still didn’t know what the bigger surprise was, the old man’s sudden defection or his furtive and deranged interest in sex. While Robbie was growing up his father showed no interest in typical businessmen’s fetishes—golf and sports cars, Cuban cigars and extramarital affairs—because he was too busy putting in sixteen-hour days at the office. But when he finally got around to philandering late in life, he made a diligent and serious commitment to it. Apparently he’d become as myopically focused on adultery as he was on his paperwork, to the exclusion of all else, so that anything short of abandonment would have seemed half-assed. Or so Robbie assumed.
After he left, the shock was like a vessel that opened up inside Robbie, an empty expandable vessel, and when Robbie saw it was there he felt obliged to fill it, and when he didn’t know how to fill it, it became an all-purpose receptacle for every emotion, all his confusing love and longing, all his spleen and rage, all the humor and irony he could summon as a fifteen-year-old whose father had bailed on him.
Although his father had been financially supportive since leaving (lawyers saw to that), Robbie’s mother had made the divorce extremely difficult and there’d been little contact between continents.
There were times when Robbie wanted to extend himself toward his father yet he found he lacked the limberness to do it, like a lame person with a madcap ambition to go rock climbing. He wrote e-mails he couldn’t finish or even continue past the first sentence. He picked up the phone and dialed all but the last digit of his father’s number, or dialed all the numbers and hung up at the sound of the European ring tones. And whenever his father made contact, Robbie found himself basically dumbfounded by a reverberating aftershock, unlike his mother, who if anything became more voluble after her husband’s disappearance.
“Italy!” she’d said to Robbie the week her husband left, at a meal where she’d had too much merlot. “You’re good with languages, kiddo. What’s Italian for ‘That sneaky bastard had a double life?’ ” When Robbie reminded her that he was taking high school French instead of Italian she said, “Just as well. Don’t tell me,” and she’d swigged a little more wine. “On second thought, I don’t want to hear a word of Wop spoken in this house by you or anyone. Ever.”
During another desolate dinner for two that same week she’d turned to Robbie and said, “What do you need a father for, anyway? To hell with him. He was never around. Nothing’s different. You don’t need a father,” and after a pause they’d both started laughing, hard and then harder, until they were breathless and red-faced, momentarily cleansed of resentment and grief and tension, and to Robbie’s astonishment he believed her. He didn’t need a father. He didn’t have a father anymore so he didn’t need one. His father didn’t matter if they decided he didn’t.
Now Robbie forced himself to order his entire lunch in Italian, pretending to be a native (or at least Continental) and trying not to overenunciate like a student. Certainly he could pass for Roman on his looks alone, his half-Italian blood giving him a head start. He had black hair, dark eyes, pale olive skin, and cool Milanese clothes even if he lacked an Italian’s sportiness and outwardly sated demeanor. He chose three courses—risotto, bollito misto, and semifreddo—and was already on his second glass of prosecco by the time he ordered. He made a point of informing the waiter that he didn’t need or want to rush through the meal (“Piano piano piano,” he said), which drew a “Certo!” and a smirk as if he’d just specified something ridiculously obvious, like the desire to eat with a fork.
He closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and counted to himself in Italian (uno, due, tre, quattro…), trying to smell the potted lantanas separating the restaurant from the square and struggling to be fully in the moment. But no sooner did he begin counting than he caught himself doing math—calculating exactly how many hours he had left in Rome (87), how many months since he’d clapped eyes on his father (62), and how many miles he was safely away from J. and the campus where they’d been staging their private little skirmish for the past semester (4,570). By the time he dug into his risotto, his head was buzzing like one of the Vespas that wove through the city.
Really, though. He should have more leisurely meals like this in America, especially now that he was going into his senior year of college. Both his mother and Maize had been encouraging him to take it easier forever. (“Straight A’s are fine, but you should make an effort to get a C minus in something just to prove it won’t kill you,” his mother had said.) He’d had to admit to himself that he’d inherited his father’s mechanistic work ethic—his tendency to labor robotically and sleep less than the average person—the same way he’d inherited his nose and the shape of his eyebrows. He wondered if his father had reformed since moving to a famously carefree country, but he doubted it. Otherwise, would he have scheduled his own birthday celebration for a weekday morning, as if it were a business breakfast meeting?
Just as well. Robbie hated dawdling. At college Maize could barely get him to hang out anywhere—the cafeteria or the student lounge or her dorm room one floor below his—before he jumped to more
pressing matters. He was forever bolting from his seat to announce that he had to return to work. He always had research to finish, a term paper due soon, a test coming up. He studied his life away in the isolated quiet of carrels and stacks and other badly ventilated areas while his peers slouched at bars and concerts and film screenings. Maize joked that she’d become promiscuous solely because Robbie was forever leaving her alone—what else was she supposed to do with all her free time? What she didn’t understand was that he’d have been dissatisfying if he’d lingered with her. When you got into the habit of leaving abruptly, staying put came to feel clammy and redundant.
Even if Professor J. hadn’t indicated to Robbie—again and again, sometimes bluntly—that he wasn’t keen on Robbie staying the night in his faculty apartment, Robbie would have fled back to his dorm before dawn anyway. But J. hadn’t grasped that until the end, when Robbie left his apartment forever, and when he did understand he’d acted astonished and mortally offended.
Still, Robbie didn’t consider himself a remote person. He wasn’t. He was a cauldron of unexpressed feelings. And he did eke out time at night and on weekends to have long, careening conversations with Maize in which they recounted seemingly everything to each other. He listened to Maize, about her hookups and her hair dyes (currently she was a redhead), her first readings of Marx and Freud and Plath (whose work she was ashamed not to like as much as Ted Hughes’s), and her attractions to a revolving series of men who Robbie thought weren’t nearly good enough for her. (“Shucks,” she would say whenever he voiced that opinion. “Pshaw.”) She listened to Robbie, about the progress of his research, his taste in designer coats and tennis stars, his worries about life after college, and his latest conversations with his mother, whose house was so dingy the maid couldn’t find the cobwebs she was supposed to sweep, though Robbie always saw them in any light, whenever he was forced to go home again.
He and Maize were like each other’s human diaries, or as close to that as he’d ever come with anyone.
But as with real diaries certain things got omitted. Six months after the fact, Robbie still hadn’t told Maize about his affair with J. He didn’t know why, since Maize was trustworthy and discreet and she wouldn’t blab to a soul. His reticence was admittedly perverse. The way he saw it, an affair was supposed to be a place to hide for a few hours a week, like a cheap motel room, but by being secretive he was still living there after the fact. If he checked in for too long it might start to look like his permanent residence.
J. was Robbie’s first and only affair. Robbie had been a virgin beforehand. It was an event Robbie was doing his best to forget about now, like someone in posttraumatic shock, although it still came back to him in lacerating flashes that tore the lining of his consciousness. Letting Maize in on the sordid details—the seduction, the breakup, the excitingly awful recriminations that followed—seemed increasingly pointless as the months passed, plus there’d be the weirdness of explaining why he hadn’t told her in the first place. He couldn’t explain that plausibly. He himself didn’t know why.
The only person who’d heard about the affair was Tonia Cantor, Robbie’s flamboyant Italian professor. Signorina Cantor had introduced Robbie to Professor J. at one of her louche weekend cocktail parties, where she and the other dangerously bored junior faculty got crocked in the presence of undergraduates invited to join in the hoopla. The only reason Tonia Cantor knew was that J. had elected her his sob sister after Robbie had ended it between them. Certainly Robbie hadn’t confessed anything to her first. At present he wasn’t speaking to either of them.
“Nothing subtle about you guys,” Tonia had observed one day after her party, where Robbie and J. had spoken solely to each other and tittered at anything even faintly amusing the other said. “I’m surprised J. didn’t prop a pillow under his ass,” Tonia had said, but Robbie had merely whitened and said nothing in reply.
Now he gulped the last of his prosecco. Better to forget about that for the moment. Better to relish every spoonful of his semifreddo and act airheaded like, say, the alcoholic drama major Maize had hooked up with recently and told Robbie everything about the next morning, once again making him feel like a tight-lipped nerd. Better to order a digestif with his espresso and gaze at the piazza and contemplate nothing more serious than an afternoon siesta.
“I would like the check, please,” Robbie said in English before he caught himself—not only slurring his words but slurring in the wrong language. Although he tried to cover by saying loudly and clearly to the waiter, “Mi fa il conto, per favore,” the ruse seemed pathetically pretentious all of a sudden. This wasn’t his homeland. He could try again next time if he wanted, but for the moment his cover was thoroughly blown.
* * *
The next morning Robbie woke with a vaguely hangoverish headache. He made a point of showering and shaving and grooming himself pristinely before he ordered his room service breakfast. While he sat there in his creased pants and button-down, waiting for the waiter’s brilliant handsomeness to fill the chamber like daylight, he texted Maize again. She was on lunch break from her summer job at a chain bookstore where romance novels and thrillers outsold serious fiction by twenty to one, counting the hours until her return to campus. So her patience was thinner than usual. When Robbie complained about his idleness she texted back, “Okay. We’ll make a deal. I’ll fill your empty time in Rome. You sit in a cinder-block basement all day stripping covers off paperbacks.”
“Sorry,” Robbie wrote her. He felt so bad about whining that he splurged on an international call his mother would probably object to having to pay for later.
“Why are you wearing a button-down, Robbie?” Maize asked when he called. “You should be lying buck naked on the bed humming ‘That’s Amore’ or something when that waiter shows up.”
Robbie barked a laugh. “Right, Maizie. Just my style.”
Maize enjoyed lampooning Robbie’s anal-retentiveness and modesty whenever she got the chance. She got a pass to do it because they went way back together, not only through three years of college but all the way through high school. She knew his parents from when they were still together and she knew a lot of his history. Not only was she aware of his teenage sexual fumblings, she’d participated in them to a degree and had never thought they were a big deal. Very little fazed Maize. She was precociously sophisticated for a girl who’d grown up in the suburbs, at least when it came to other people’s lives.
So on his first morning in Rome, Robbie e-mailed her about the bad dream that had woken him the night before, bloated with misgivings—a nightmare in which his father and his mistress, Clarissa, guided him through the rooms of their apartment, pointing out antiques and paintings and statues they’d bought on shopping trips, before throwing open the doors to a light-soaked bedroom in shambles. The striped curtains were tattered, the sheets were violently disarranged, and strewn on the bare mattress were vibrators, handcuffs, dirty underwear, bloody rags, and bottles of lubricant. It had the raw air of a crime scene before it’s cordoned off with police tape. When Robbie tried to avert his eyes, his father stole his arm around his shoulder and said, “Ma che cosa? What is this prudishness all of a sudden? We’re family.”
“Purely out of curiosity,” Maize e-mailed him back, “were the vibrators big?” Robbie claimed he couldn’t remember (in fact they’d been frighteningly large) and Maize let him change the subject. That was one of the many things he valued about her. She was still the shy and slyly insightful girl he’d loved back in high school, despite her recent tendencies to ask provocative questions and blurt out opinions. She knew just how far to push people and when to stop. If Robbie had the same talent, he’d never have accepted J.’s invitation to his apartment for a nightcap that turned into an all-nighter and a whole stormy semester.
“So if you’re not hooking up with the waiter, Robbie, are you at least taking pictures of the fabulous Roman men for me?” Maize asked him now on the phone.
“Yes,” Robbie said,
though he hadn’t. He hoped to rectify that today. He had no other plans besides using his camera, which was so tiny it fit in his palm. After breakfast he would wander around, soaking up the local color (Wasn’t that what he was supposed to do?), and capture the sights for Maize and posterity. Even at twenty-one he was aware that without reminders he could forget entire experiences if enough time passed. People and places and bits of knowledge: all of it could get sucked into a memory hole like a lost language or the ability to play a musical instrument. It had happened to him already with certain details from high school (What was the symbol for manganese? Who had sat next to him in ninth-grade English?), especially the details from the year his father left.
Of course, these lapses could be helpful. With enough time he might eventually forget the sight of J.’s constricted face staring him down on campus after Robbie broke up with him, not to mention the scary and wearying things they’d done with each other’s bodies before then.
“Oh Robbie, I’m so tired,” J. had said to him that first night in his faculty apartment at 3:00 a.m., after they’d finished conversational foreplay and Robbie’s attentions had gone rubbery from exhaustion. “I’m so old and so tired,” he’d said with a sigh, a tumbler of scotch in his hand, and then he’d dared lay his big blond head on Robbie’s shoulder haltingly, as if expecting a zing of static electricity.
It might as well have been a marble bust lying there; that’s how heavy it felt to Robbie as he sat stricken on the sofa, unsure of what to do next. The air around him thinned and thickened as it would for an asthmatic at the start of an attack. Because he knew he had to respond—do anything to break the suspense—he patted J.’s fluffy hair carefully as if it were barbed wire, barely touching it, a gesture that struck him as more fraternal than erotic. It was as if he was comforting an older pal rather than inciting him to make out. He imagined that in another few moments he would rise with a neutering yawn and a dissipated smile and beg off, saying “To be continued” or something equally ambiguous, to signal that they might try again another night if the opportunity presented itself.
The Intimates: A Novel Page 5