Everything on the Line

by Bob Mitchell

  “Bene, caro mio…,” Giglio says, then recites from his encyclopedic memory snippets of a passage from Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier:

  a certain sprezzatura that shall conceal design and show that what is done…is done without effort and almost without thought…we may affirm that to be true art which does not appear to be art…I remember having once read that there were several very excellent orators of antiquity, who…strove to make everyone believe that they had no knowledge of letters; and hiding their knowledge they pretended that their orations were composed very simply and as if springing rather from nature and truth than from study and art…

  Again, the huh? look.

  As he hears himself describe to Ugo the concept of sprezzatura, Giglio’s mind wanders back to when he himself was thirteen and saw for the first time the classic Fred Astaire film, Cappello a cilindro (Top Hat), and how magical Fred’s dancing was and how seemingly effortless but how hard he must have practiced! And from then on, this was always his point of reference whenever he thought of sprezzatura, and whatever the context.

  “Allora, let’s put it this way,” Giglio says. “Do you remember when we visited the Accademia last week to look at the David statue by maestro Michelangelo?”

  Ugo remembers and smiles a big smile.

  “And remember when we talked about how it was funny how David could look tense, with those bulging veins in his right hand and the way he twisted his body and his chest muscles and that fierce stare, but at the same time look calm and relaxed, with the resting of his slingshot on his shoulder and his bent wrists and knees and how his feet were positioned?”

  Ugo recalls it well.

  “Well, can you imagine how hard it was for Michelangelo to create that feeling, and, on top of it, to make it out of a huge, heavy block of marble that he had to chip away at, little by little, day after day and month after month, for nearly three years?”

  Ugo’s smile turns into a look of awe.

  “And that, Ugo Bellezza, is sprezzatura! It is the rare person who can create something of beauty that will last a long time without it really appearing to have been hard work. Something that required great practice and great effort and the sweat of one’s brow, but that seems to have been done naturally and with ease.”

  Giglio looks at Ugo and is thinking about the astounding similarity between the young tennis phenom and the David sculpture: the curly hair, the strong hands, the sturdy physique, and most of all the intensity of the look in the eyes.

  The two Bellezzas take a moment to digest, not only the delectable dinner, but also the food for thought. Ugo, whose brain, like his body, is a sponge hungry for knowledge and growth. And Gioconda, who had studied history at the Università degli Studi di Firenze and was planning on going to grad school when her husband took his own life when Ugo was just a toddler, dashing her dreams of academe. But she has kept up her love of the past and adores hearing her dearest friend Giglio talk to her and her son about art and music and literature and history.

  “Now, Ugo,” Giglio says, “why do you suppose I am talking to you about sprezzatura?”

  Ugo has an inkling, but shrugs anyway.

  “Well, you know we always get around to talking about tennis, don’t you?”

  Ugo’s inkling begins to grow.

  “And you know how I’m always telling you about practicing hard so that you can save your energy and ease into your shots more gracefully?”

  Ugo now has an ink.

  “And when you work hard and prepare well, you have this feeling of knowing just what to do and sensing what is right, and then you are able to hit shots that are out of the ordinary without seeming to be straining or tightening up?”

  Aha, Ugo’s face says.

  “Sprezzatura!” Giglio and Gioconda shout, smiling broadly and in unison.

  “Sì,” Giglio continues, just to dot his i’s and cross his t’s. “A number of the great players in the glorious history of tennis had this rare ability to create beautiful shots without appearing to be working hard at it. Lenglen and Pietrangeli and Santana and Orantes and Nastase and Borg and Panatta and Leconte and Federer. And it is no coincidence that they are all from Europe, where beauty thrives! But today, somehow, we have lost the essence of the game in favor of the lust for power and brute strength. And now it is time for another Renaissance, for the return of beauty to the game of tennis! After all, isn’t creating le belle cose, beautiful things, the whole point of being here on earth? No matter what a person does in life. We are each capable of creating our own belle cose. A carpenter is. And so is a teacher. And a writer. And a mailman. Your mamma is when she performs her magic in the kitchen. Or when she tells you those wonderful bedtime stories. And you, Ugo Bellezza, you are creating your belle cose with your tennis. And it is un dono divino, a gift from God.”

  Virgilio Marotti, exhausted yet exhilarated from his inspired lecture, picks up his wineglass and raises it high. “And now, I would like to propose a toast to the two Bellezzas—”

  “Ai due Bellezza!” Gioconda and her son echo, and the three glasses clink.

  “And also,” Giglio continues, “to beauty!”

  “Ed anche alla bellezza!” the other two echo, and the three glasses reclink.

  And Giglio smiles warmly at Gioconda and then at his beloved pupil and recites a silent prayer of thanks for all that is good and decent and wonderful in the boy’s life. He cannot help, however, rereading in his mind’s eye the letter Ugo’s mom had received from the doctor just a few weeks after her son’s birth, a letter she had shared with Giglio when they first met and that will forever be branded in his brain:

  Cara Signora Bellezza,

  Le scrivo per confermare la mia diagnosi iniziale. Sono desolato di doverla informare che, a causa della rosolia che l’ha colpita in gravidanza, l’udito di suo figlio Ugo risulta irrimediabilmente compromesso.

  Con profondo rammarico, Dott. Marco Calcinaro

  For Giglio’s tennis prodigy and Gioconda’s only child, life on earth is pretty much perfect. Except, of course, for the one minor detail established by this fateful letter.

  Ugo Bellezza is deaf.

  4

  Survival

  AN AERIAL GLIMPSE OF MANHATTAN reveals not so much a metropolis as a teeming geometric ant farm.

  But whereas the inhabitants of a real ant farm perform movements that correspond perfectly to one another and are for the communal good, the figurative formic residents of Gotham scurry, helter-skelter, at cross-purposes and in desultory directions.

  This little antie goes to market, this little antie walks home, this little antie shops for roast beef, this little antie’s on the phone, this little antie is so sick and tired of the rat race in the office and living alone that he doesn’t pay attention to the traffic and almost gets creamed by a cabbie, but he barely escapes and to be honest? he is feeling right now like running back to his tiny apartment and taking that Smith & Wesson .38 out of the top night table drawer and once and for all putting himself out of his frigging misery.

  At eye level, the scurrying insects now assume human faces, and not too many are smiling. The air is brisk, freezing actually, on this twenty-third day of October, 2043, and most of the 566,943 pedestrians in the megalopolis are in a separate world and oblivious to coinhabitants, but they all share one thing in common, one urge, one desire, one goal.

  Survival.

  The stakes are high in this restless ant farm, and it is no place for the meek or the mild.

  It is 5 P.M. on this Friday eve, and the milling masses have just bolted from the office to begin their weekends as early as possible. The most frantic activity is occurring in the epicenter, the Times Square area, where the bustling multitudes are rushing to subways, fighting for cabs, bumping into one another as they jockey for position in the frenzied race to just get out of there. Each denizen, breath cruelly visible and rising in great gray billows in the frigid autumn air, is a miniature steam engine employing survival rather than
coal as a means of locomotion.

  Above and looking down at them all with an unrequited stare is a huge Nike billboard that reads WIN OR GO HOME. The irony is lost on the oblivious throngs: Is their choice to return now to their abodes the equivalent of waving a white flag? And are the ambitious ones still holed up in their workplaces and burning the five o’clock oil the ones who have opted for victory?

  On the corner of Forty-first and Seventh, a chestnut vendor, his face wizened by decades of wind and heartache, warms his gloveless hands above the sizzling merchandise. Aside from the single bag he sold about an hour ago, he has spent his entire afternoon—and much of his adult life—watching countless numbers of his fellow humans pass him by, looks of pity or disdain frozen on their faces.

  Far from and high above the madding crowd, in the luxurious penthouse at 200 East 57th Street, the Spade family is about to sit down to an early dinner.

  “Sonuvabitch!” Ira Spade bellows, holding a copy of the New York Chronicle in front of his face.

  “Did you see this, Avis?” Ira yelps at his wife, who is in the kitchen putting up the water for the lobsters. “Says here that President Obama is planning to pull our troops out of Mongolia! What the hell is that, huh? Goddamn Democrats have been wanting to cut and run from there ever since we tried to establish freedom and justice for all eight years ago.”

  Avis, preparing a tossed salad, yes, dears her husband of nearly twenty years.

  “Cut and run!” Ira goes on. “That’s just like Malia Ann! And just like daddy Barack did over thirty years ago, when he waved the goddam white flag and pulled us out of Afghanistan! Too bad W. didn’t have any sons, or one of them’d be prez right now, and for damn sure we wouldn’t have this goddam aggravation!”

  In his room, at the far end of the sprawling compound, Jack Spade lies, supine, on his bed. He is reading Brad Gilbert’s tennis classic Winning Ugly, the chapter titled “Destroying Your Opponent’s Game Plan.” Snapping his fingers rhythmically, he is listening to 97-year-old Mick Jagger’s new SCD, I Ain’t Old I’m Your Brother, courtesy of the iSuperMiniPod chip that has been surgically implanted in his left ear.

  Jack’s room is the tornado typical of a normal thirteen-year-old. So much detritus covers the floor—tennis stuff, video games, half-emptied bottles of Gatorade, a red-and-white electric guitar (a Fender Vintage Hot Rod ’57 Stratocaster)—that the gorgeous tan Berber carpet buried beneath is only visible here and there, sporadic bald spots on the bushy mane of gear, paraphernalia, and accessories.

  On the back of the door is a collage of head shots cut out and fashioned together by Ira Spade himself, photos of many of the father’s real-life heroes, and consequently heroes of the son, too: Woody Hayes, Bobby Knight, Vince Lombardi, Pete Rose, Jimmy Connors, George Steinbrenner, and George W. Bush. At the bottom of the framed enclosure is Ira’s favorite quote, ergo Jack’s, a pithy and charmingly redundant one by former Yankees owner Steinbrenner:

  “I hate to lose. Hate, hate, hate to lose.”

  Taped on the wall on both sides of the large window are posters of the punk/funk/rap/rock/pop groups Bismuth Maiden and Piggly Wiggly.

  Most noticeably, on the wall over his bed is a quote that was blown up to 72-point type and framed neatly for Jack by Ira. The words are reputed by QB Roman Gabriel to have been said by Redskins coach and fiery competitor George Allen, regarding the roast beef sandwich he was eating at the time:

  “That roast beef is a loser. All the winners are out there, alive, walking around, eating hay.”

  Ira Spade enters the room, and Jack whistles twice, which automatically closes the Mick Jagger PodFile and stops the music.

  “Time to kill lobsters!” Ira announces.

  Jack bolts out of bed like he was shot out of a blunderbuss. The two Spades jog into the kitchen like excited schoolmarms, and awaiting them at the marble counter by the fridge is the perfect name for a rock group.

  Avis and the Three Unsuspecting Crustaceans.

  With demonic glee, Ira Spade stalks the crawling black beauties and lowers them, one by pitiful one, into the bubbling cauldron on the stove.

  “Yesssss!” he hisses with a ghoulish smile, watching them descend to their demise. Jack hisses and smiles ghoulishly, too.

  Avis, like the lobsters, endures the massacre with a silent and dignified resignation. Do her eyes deceive her, or are the poor crustaceans looking back up at her from the bottom of the pot with their beady little opaque eyes, pleading for her and her alone to save them, their last hope on their way to meeting their spiny maker? In some deep place in her soul, she is shocked and enraged by the cold-blooded crime just committed by her husband and enjoyed by her eyewitness son. It is only her abiding loyalty to Ira and her love for Jack that prevent her from shrieking “Murderers!” at them both and chasing them out of the house with her wooden salad utensils, instructing them never to darken her door again.

  Powerless to commute the sentence of the lobsters, she watches helplessly as they go gentle into that good night.

  “See how they turn that bright, beautiful red? Now ain’t that purrr-dy?” Ira drawls to Jack.

  “Y’know,” he continues to his son, “these boys are born losers. Know why?”

  Jack does not.

  “Because like George Allen’s roast beef sandwich, when they walked right into that lobster trap, they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. Made no attempt to escape, to fight for their lives, to figure out how to survive. Now that’s what I call a real loser!”

  Jack nods obediently.

  “Now that I think about it,” Ira rants on, “if you take the b and the t out of the word lobster, what do you think you get?”

  Avis figures it out. Jack scratches his head.

  “Loser!” Ira answers, cracking himself up.

  “Yep,” he continues, “it’s win or get boiled alive. Dog eat dog. You or me, buddy. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed. Just remember what Darwin said, especially every time you step onto the tennis court. Survival of the fittest! He sure got that one right, ol’ Charlie did.”

  Father pats son on sturdy shoulder and son looks up and smiles obediently and mother dutifully drains lobsters and puts them on plates and tosses salads and brings all this, plus drinks and table settings and nutcrackers and those teeny lobster forks, to the dining room table, where her hungry cavemen await.

  Jack Spade is a strikingly handsome young man whose face, beneath a mop of straight black hair, features piercing brown eyes, an aquiline nose, and thinnish, bowed lips. One might say a cross between Johnny Depp and Elvis.

  His fingernails, bitten to the bone, are nothing but nubs.

  Ira Spade, by contrast, is the poster boy for what happens when a modestly handsome child grows up and starts to get old and loses the looks of his youth. At first glance, his face invites a double take on the part of the viewer, who might assume that he is wearing one of those Groucho-Nose-and-Specs masks, the ones with the fake fur eyebrows and the black plastic glasses and the fuzzy black mustache and the bulbous nose.

  Seated next to Jack, he is the After, his son the Before.

  Beneath the table, the family dog, Akuma, a black Doberman/pit bull mix, sits and bides his time, a vulture hoping for some unconsumed crustacean carrion.

  Ira cracks open his red beaut with gusto, eviscerates the shell, stuffs a hunk of white flesh into his mouth. While he chews, he strokes his thick black mustache with his stubby fingers as his left eye twitches frantically, a tic he has had since birth and that kicks into high gear whenever he gets the slightest bit aroused.

  Jack is struggling with a claw, and Avis asks if she can help him crack it open.

  “He’s a big boy, Avis, goddammit, he can do it himself!” Ira spews from across the table at his spouse.

  The words catapult Ira Spade back to the evening of December 31, 2010. He is ten years old, and his Dad, Victor, is returning home from a pre-New Year’s bender that began at the office in the early afternoon and ended at the
bar of the Grand Hyatt on East 42nd Street in Manhattan.

  Ira and his mother, Victoria, are finishing their New Year’s Eve dinner she had cooked for just the two of them.

  Victoria is doing the dishes, and Ira is sitting at the dinner table of their uptown Manhattan flat minding his p’s and q’s, when the front door crashes open and in wobbles Victor Spade, loaded for bear and with a belly full of Old Grand Dad.

  Victor’s breath, reeking of cheap bourbon, fills the entire Spade apartment quicker than you can say felony charges for being an abusive husband and father.

  The soused abuser peers at his son, ten years of resentment and frustration fueling his inner fires. He teeters up to the dinner table until he is within eighteen inches of his only child, and Victor is glaring out of those unforgettably wild eyes, eyes right out of the movies and the world of art, a satanic combination of Regan MacNeil’s in The Exorcist and Mr. Gower’s in that heartrending “poison capsules” scene with young George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life and those of the pitiful firing squad victim raising his arms aloft in Goya’s Executions of the Third of May, 1808.

  Victor Spade looks deeply into Ira’s eyes, the eyes of this son he never really knew or loved, and bellows, with a passion fueled by cheap bourbon and anger, “You’ll never be anybody!”

  The four words sear into Ira Spade’s ten-year-old brain as if they were imprinted there by a branding iron.

  Ira’s cell TelevideoPhone rings, rousing him out of his reverie. As he opens the phone, he wipes the lobster juice from his mustache and silently swears for the trillionth time that he will make damn sure that his only child will turn out to be somebody, and how.

  “No, Odi. No, this is really a bad time. Just sat down to dinner,” Ira says to the screen, where Odi Mondheim’s ugly puss looks out at him. “Then Jack and I are gonna hit for a coupla hours at the club. Gimme a call back around ten. Righto. Yeah, I heard a few things about him. Oh, just that he’s Jack’s age and he’s a hot shit over there in Italy. Gotta go now. Speak later.”