“Is Clarissa a student?”
“Not that I know of. She sure doesn’t dress like one.”
Robbie couldn’t think of a single woman on campus who wore makeup or high heels or a slinky silk dress like Clarissa’s, even at night. Dressing down was a badge of intellectual pride for all the females at their college, except for a few French teachers and Tonia Cantor, who sometimes went so far in the other direction she looked displaced and tawdry, like a chanteuse who’d stayed up so late she’d failed to notice it was dawn, she was still wearing a boa, and her mascara had smeared.
Maize texted him, “What I’m trying to figure out is why your stepmother was hanging out at a university.”
“She is not my stepmother. They are not legally married,” Robbie replied, as though typing in his mother’s voice.
“Whatever,” Maize wrote back.
Since last night he himself had been trying to figure out what Clarissa was doing near the university. The mystery of her actions—her phantom appearance and disappearance while Robbie’s father was at work—gave him a thrill that didn’t really kick in till he got back to the hotel, where he ate alone and gluttonously in the dining room. He was starving for greater knowledge. His desire to explore the situation and see where it would lead felt almost scholarly to him. But when he hinted to Maize that he might return to the same café at the same time today, in the hope of following Clarissa again, she wrote, “Robbie! Come on. Do you really want to do that? Creepy.” And when Robbie didn’t respond, she added, “You’re in one of the world’s great cities and you’re headed back to teeny tiny Rhode Island soon. There are better things to do with your time. And it’s not like you won’t be seeing her in a few days at your father’s.”
“Of course,” he replied. He asked Maize what she was doing to pass the time at the bookstore but he barely skimmed her answer. He’d already made up his mind to return before he signed off.
Clarissa did show up at the café again, albeit an hour later than the day before. She crossed the same square, drawing the same swarm of male gazes, and walked exactly the same route Robbie remembered, though this time she was more casually dressed, in linen slacks and a blouse and flat shoes that helped her move faster across the cobblestones.
When she reached the same apartment building, she didn’t go inside. She buzzed and spoke to the intercom and waited, pivoting in Robbie’s direction, so that he had to turn his back and walk away. When he got to a distant storefront window he feigned engrossment in the goods on display, which seemed to belong to a medical supply company. There were wheelchairs and crutches and walkers and canes—all the paraphernalia of paralysis—as well as a male dummy wearing leg braces and a youthfully jaunty cap while carrying notebooks. Was he supposed to be a student? Robbie kept staring intently like someone having the horrific premonition of a disabled future. He willed himself to keep looking and waiting a few minutes before he allowed himself to stop.
When he dared glance back up the street toward Clarissa, she wasn’t looking in his direction anymore. Not in the least. She was embracing a tall young man who kissed her on the forehead and the nose as she tilted her head upward toward him, smiling beatifically. Then she kissed the man back, welting his cheek with her rosy lipstick.
Clarissa laughed as the man held her close to him, his muscular arm scissored around her waist. She wiped her lipstick off his cheek with her thumb and forefinger, firmly yet tenderly, like a mother cleaning the face of child who hasn’t yet learned how to eat. They looked straight into each other’s faces and spoke as she continued to wipe, wetting her thumb with her saliva. In that brief custodial moment it was as if no one else in the world existed for them or for Robbie, zooming in on them myopically. Tall and handsome and pressed to each other, the two made a lovely little island in the middle of dun-colored shabbiness, casting breezes toward the shores of a less fortunate coast. It was hard not to be transfixed.
But then Robbie blinked, and the rest of the world returned, and she was just his father’s mistress touching another man on a gritty street corner.
That was when he remembered to raise his camera and take a shot.
They didn’t notice. They had turned away from him and started moving in the opposite direction.
He used his camera to record the way they strolled—arm in arm down the street—and the way Clarissa’s head fell onto the man’s shoulder now and then as they walked, and the way they held hands across the table when they stopped at an osteria for lunch. The big square diamond on Clarissa’s left hand glinted whenever it caught the light. By the time they’d finished their meal, Robbie had gotten off a dozen shots from various angles. Still they didn’t notice him.
Robbie guessed the man was even younger than Clarissa—in his late twenties or thirty at the most. He had an unlined forehead and black hair and aqueous blue eyes that were especially striking in someone with dark coloring. His fine profile was nicely spoiled by a coarse nose, and his body was beefier than most of the men Robbie had seen in Rome so far. It looked like a body that made the ground shake if you were close enough to it. Although his leather jacket and jeans and T-shirt were nothing special, they gained stature from cloaking someone so big. Even if this man and Clarissa weren’t so handsome together, they’d probably look superior due to their height alone.
Robbie felt his groin thrum. It titillated him whenever the man grasped Clarissa’s hands in one of his big paws. At the same time it made him queasy. Desire had always rattled up a maelstrom in him—lust combined with fear combined with envy combined with a sense of utter hopelessness—but it was even more complicated now, looking at this magnificent specimen overshadowing his father, who was older and shorter and whose honor was being violated while his son watched.
When Clarissa and the man left the restaurant and walked back to the apartment together, they didn’t embrace anymore. It was as if they’d spent their ration of affection for the day. Robbie decided he didn’t need to see anything else for now. But he did follow Clarissa the next day and the day after, infused with a sense of tingling anticipation. When Maize e-mailed him, he wrote that he was “soaking up the local color” and “doing this and that” while he waited around for the reunion.
Clarissa didn’t meet with the man again, as it turned out. But it hardly mattered to Robbie. The daily hunt gave him purpose and he had photos to prove he wasn’t imagining what he’d seen. At night he asked the concierge to lock his camera in the hotel safe as if it were an heirloom.
* * *
As it happened the pictures turned out wrong—oversized and in a weird format. Through miscommunication or willful misunderstanding on the part of a Via Barberini photo processor, the shots of Clarissa came back as mock postcards rather than regular prints. They were thick as cardboard, with the image of Clarissa and her man on one side and a blank space on the flip, bisected for addressing and writing vacation messages. A tacky tourist gimmick Robbie hadn’t asked for—at twice the price of regular prints. And to make matters worse, the processor had made three copies of everything instead of the single set Robbie had ordered.
How annoying and frustrating that Robbie lacked the capacity to argue about it. In that helpless moment at the photo store it seemed his whole life could turn out that way—having just enough vocabulary to get embroiled in situations without knowing how to extract himself. He wished Tonia Cantor were around to help him with his meager language skills just then, to tell him the things he didn’t know how to say. When she’d tipped her allegiance to J.—a switch she’d called simple human sympathy for a complex and troubled person—Robbie hadn’t understood why and it scared him. It scared him even more when she divulged how J. had enlisted her help with an ambush: he’d asked Tonia to invite Robbie to her apartment for dinner so he could be there waiting, to have it out with Robbie in person.
It was good of Tonia to warn Robbie about that. But when she did it seemed imperative to get away from both of them as fast as he could.
�
��Why the fuck aren’t you returning my calls? You’re freaking me out here,” Tonia said in one of her increasingly long-winded voice mails. She left five or six at a time because Robbie didn’t answer her and because his machine kept cutting her off. Finally she got the drift and stopped calling.
Now he pored over the ridiculous pseudo-postcards, battening on details instead of the larger whole: the rose of Clarissa’s lipstick; the shine of her gold earrings; the leather strand around the man’s strong neck; their toned arms wrapped around each other’s waists and shoulders as they strolled toward the osteria; the plumpness of their kneadable backsides; their mouths yawning in laughter when one of them said something amusing; their hands—the man’s big and veined, Clarissa’s smooth and long—touching each other’s forearms for emphasis as they spoke. How superfluous. They were clearly enjoying each other’s company without any hand signals. They were obviously hanging on each other’s every word.
And all that lovely time, there was Robbie just outside their nimbus of contentment. Trying not to draw too close to be noticed. Watching and waiting for what would happen next, like a demoted god who saw everything but lacked the power to steer events.
It gave him a chill as he sat in his hotel room; it was like he’d been spied on rather than the other way around. Maize was right. It was creepy. It dredged up dank and unseemly emotions. Despite the fact that his philandering father deserved to be cuckolded by his much younger mistress, Robbie was offended for him. Clarissa was betraying not only his father but everything he’d cast off to be with her: his country, his house, his wife, Robbie himself. She was saying that none of those sacrifices mattered, that she could do anything she wanted to his family and they’d roll over. They were that weak and passive. The joke was on them.
Robbie felt his blood pressure spike as he contemplated it. Anger pulsed in his throat like something ready to rupture. At that moment Carlo rapped on his door with breakfast, making Robbie start in his seat. He took the knocks as a signal—an announcement from his conscience or someplace deeper than he could identify, calling him to action. He broke into a light sweat.
“Un momento, un momento!” he shouted through the door. He paused a few seconds. Then he pulled off his shirt and pants and examined himself in the bureau mirror. He greeted Carlo wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, at once proud of his unusual brazenness and worried that he was acting half-deranged like Tonia Cantor—Tonia, whose entire demeanor more or less said, Here I stand naked before you. How do I look?
Carlo’s eyes bugged at the sight of Robbie’s bare torso. He was too startled to chirp his usual “Buon giorno.” He hesitated before crossing the threshold into the room.
Slowly Robbie turned away from Carlo, showing him the smooth back that matched his hairless chest. He walked toward a window that was covered up like the windows in his mother’s house. When he parted the curtains he felt his towel loosening. He resisted the impulse to tighten it and stood there bathed in the morning light. And when the towel fell to the floor he let it fall. He turned fully exposed to face Carlo, who had set down the breakfast tray and was moving toward him now with a widening grin.
* * *
Although he had two full days to figure out what to do with the postcards, he couldn’t fix on anything definite. No sooner did he imagine himself telling his father “Your girlfriend is a whore” than he pictured himself saying nothing and simply laying the postcards of Clarissa and her man on his father’s lap, letting them speak for themselves. No sooner did he imagine this than he saw himself delivering the postcards anonymously to his father’s office in an envelope marked CONFIDENTIAL, or leaving them behind in the apartment where his father would find them later—in a file folder or suit jacket or sock drawer—before he remembered that he didn’t know where his father’s suit jackets or sock drawers were anymore, and couldn’t very well root around the apartment looking for them.
As Robbie trudged down Via Condotti toward his father’s apartment for their reunion, he was still turning over his options. The postcards bulged in the breast pocket of his sport coat and beat against his chest like a second heart. Although it was too early for tourists to be out in force, he already felt claustrophobic from plowing through his own crowded thoughts. It didn’t help to be passing one of the hotels he’d abandoned earlier in the week, wondering if anyone there would notice him looking even more dissatisfied now than when he’d left. When one of the valets nodded in his direction, he lowered his gaze to the pavement and picked up his pace.
That was how he’d responded whenever J. had flared into sight last semester. He’d stare at the ground intently as if searching for a dropped coin, not caring if he bumped into anyone so long as it wasn’t J., whose survivor’s instincts as an untenured professor stopped him from accosting Robbie in public. He kept walking myopically toward his destination. And he did the same thing when he saw Tonia, only he had to practically jog away because she cared far less about protocol than J. Rather than avoiding messy scenes, she embraced them.
How ironic it was, Robbie stalking Clarissa so soon after he himself had been pursued by J. Maybe surveillance was a condition of ardor: Robbie tracking Clarissa; J. and Tonia pursuing Robbie; Clarissa looking into the eyes of a man who wasn’t her husband; Robbie’s mother staring blankly out her living room window as she tried to chase thoughts of Robbie’s father from her memory. Maybe that’s what love was, a roundelay of hunts and substitutions, and who you ended up with wasn’t your fated partner but whoever happened to be around whenever your energy gave out, as when the music died in a game of musical chairs and you pounced on the nearest seat. If there was a chair available at all. People wrote about love, and talked about love, and sang about love, and made metaphors about love all the time. But they didn’t know what love was.
* * *
Now he rang the buzzer of his father’s apartment. Now he entered the elegant marbled lobby and took the gilded cage of a metal elevator to the top floor. When his father threw open the double doors of his penthouse, light flooded the corridor and half-blinded Robbie. All he could discern for a moment were three heavily backlit silhouettes in front of him, and before he knew it the largest of these was engulfing him in a bear hug while he stood there stiffly, worrying about the postcards getting crushed against his chest, nearly suffocating. When Robbie reminded himself to breathe, his father smelled exactly as he had when Robbie was a child, of talcum and cotton and some sort of evergreen. Tears sprang to his eyes as if his father’s arms had squeezed them out of him by brute force. He was curious what he himself smelled like to his father. Was his scent familiar to him, too, or had the hormonal changes of adolescence rendered him unrecognizable?
“Roberto!” his father was saying loudly into his ear. “Roberto! Robertino!”
Finally he released Robbie and introduced him to the other two silhouettes on the threshold—first Concetta, the aproned maid, and then Clarissa, who startled Robbie by kissing him on both cheeks. “We’re both so thrilled you’re finally here,” she said in a deeper voice than he’d imagined her having as he’d watched her. She took him by the forearm and guided him inside gently, as if he were a handicapped friend who might otherwise crash into walls.
Their apartment wasn’t what he’d expected. Although it was large and expensive-looking, with many high-ceilinged rooms and thick moldings and open views toward distant hills, the furnishings didn’t match his father. Gone were the brooding antiques Robbie remembered from the old man’s offices and private rooms back home, replaced by streamlined sofas and chairs in light, soothing fabrics—ivory linens and cream velvets—with pale wood tables, tan cashmere throws, and bright silk pillows that popped against the neutral tones surrounding them. The long Italianate windows had no curtains or shades, maximizing the sunlight, and the doors to the terrace were open so that lush air wafted through the rooms, swirling over the inlaid floors and bouncing off the tall white bookcases, which were stocked with surprisingly serious titles—books
Robbie had read in college or hoped to read in the near future.
Was this truly his father’s home? Did his father really live here? Lavish, he could hear his mother say bitterly as if she were spitting, though its luxuriousness was more understated than that. In any case, Robbie had to admit to himself that it was appealing.
“Clarissa decorated this whole place herself,” his father said, “from top to bottom, with nobody else’s help.”
“Oh, that’s not true, Philip. Don’t shortchange yourself.” Clarissa touched his father on the shoulder and turned a wide rectangular smile on Robbie. “Your father has great taste, but he thinks it’s unmanly or something to care about furniture. He had a much bigger hand in this place than he admits.”
Robbie returned Clarissa’s smile. Clearly she was lying. The only room that looked at all like his father was his “home office” at the back corner of their apartment, which was exactly like his home office back in the States. It had none of the cool gliding modernity of the rest of the interiors. Instead there was a massive, ornately carved mahogany desk topped by a brass banker’s lamp, and a tufted Chesterfield sofa in cognac-colored leather, and Louis XIV chairs in dark green chenille, and a Persian rug with muddy brown and ocher tones. The office windows were swathed three ways—with shades, sheers, and heavy curtains—just like the windows in his mother’s house, and here too the shades were three-quarters down although it was daytime. At home almost all the natural light got sucked up by the décor, making it hard to read or eat or even breathe without turning on a lamp, and giving the whole place a clandestine quality, like a temple.
“Wow,” he couldn’t help saying as he looked over his father’s office. “Let me guess who decorated this room.”
Clarissa chuckled. “Yeah. We call it the grizzly bear’s den, where your father hibernates with his bills and papers and invoices. No one is allowed to enter it, on penalty of death. Not even poor Concetta. She’s forbidden to tidy it up.”
The Intimates: A Novel Page 8