The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  Theresa saw that Gregory would not say a word in her defense, or in his own. He opened the champagne. “To Theresa and her brilliant career,” he said and poured them each a glass. Sage took one sip and held it in her mouth for at least half a minute before swallowing. Ivo downed his and said, “We’re out of here. Nice meeting you.” He pulled Sage to her feet.

  “I’m sorry, Theresa,” Gregory Allard said. “I think I’ve told you that Ivo can’t forgive me. And he seems to enjoy not forgiving me. I don’t think he’d know what his place was in the world if he weren’t the person who couldn’t forgive his father.”

  Theresa knew that she did not forgive her mother. Still, she would never have dreamed of speaking to her like that. But, she wondered, did that mean that she had more in common with Ivo Allard than she did with his father? Or ordinary nice people like Chiara, who loved their parents and enjoyed their company?

  The grim-faced servant brought them their dinner: tortellini in brodo as a first course, then a roasted chicken and a plate of spinach surrounded by sliced lemons, leaving on the sideboard a salad in a crystal bowl rimmed with silver.

  “It pleases me to be able to tell you—I suppose it is a sort of bragging, but, well, what of it?—that the chicken was reared here and the olive oil is from my trees and the wine is ours. It pleases me very much indeed.”

  “It’s wonderful here,” she said. “Everything is so beautiful.”

  “It requires a tremendous amount of attention, the upkeep is staggeringly expensive and difficult; well, everything is difficult in Italy, except when it isn’t, which is when you know somebody who turns out to be the cousin of a cousin who can open any door.”

  “Speaking of which,” she said, “I may need your help. One of the pieces I most want to see seems to be in a church that is never opened. Santa Maria dei Servi. And there’s another in a church in the countryside, Mugano, that can’t be got to by public transportation.”

  “Nothing easier,” he said. “I’m sure I can find someone who’s the cousin of a cousin. And we’ll make a jaunt to Mugano; have lunch outdoors in a little trattoria I know there. Nothing simpler.”

  For dessert there was a sweet wine and cantucci, and Gregory Allard offered coffee, which he said he would not drink himself. She refused it, too; she knew she would already have trouble sleeping tonight because of what she’d seen.

  He showed her his Roman medals and a bronze that he’d brought back from Cambodia, and some watercolors of Naples from the late eighteenth century. After a while he sat down and stretched his legs and raised his arms over his head. “And now,” he said, “I’m afraid I must take you home. I fade rather early. People say that the old don’t require much sleep, but actually I require quite a lot. And I do adore sleeping. Everything about it: my bed, my covers, my lovely pillows. Yes, sleeping is one of my greatest pleasures now. Perhaps that says something about a nearness to death.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “You seem so young and so alive.”

  “We’re all alive until we’re not,” he said.

  The fog had thickened and Gregory Allard beeped his horn every few seconds as they made their way down the winding narrow road.

  “You mustn’t worry, I’m an excellent driver,” he said. “It’s one of my two real physical skills. Driving, and carving meats. You know my father went to a special course just to learn how to carve. And I must say he was a dab hand at it, and I’m offended by the hacking that passes for carving at most tables, I must say.”

  She tried to relax her grip on the handrest, but she did find the drive on the nearly invisible road rather alarming. She was glad when she saw the lights of the city, and even the narrowness of the streets, where it seemed you might always be scraping your car against some ancient wall, seemed a relief after the near-blind drive.

  “I wonder if I might ask for the pleasure of your company tomorrow,” he said. “I want your opinion on that piece the antiques dealer is saying is a Civitali.”

  “Oh, Mr. Allard, I don’t think I’m qualified to make that kind of judgment.”

  “My dear, I’m not bringing you as an expert, just a friend with a very good eye. And by that time I may have found the cousin of the cousin who might be able to get us into Santa Maria dei Servi.”

  They agreed to speak in the morning. Theresa thought she would be awake all night, from the excitement of having seen the two Civitalis, but she fell immediately into a deep dreamless sleep, from which Gregory Allard’s phone call awakened her, asking if they could meet at the antiques shop in an hour. He was already standing there when she arrived, pacing up and down, looking more than ever like a grasshopper in his green Lacoste shirt and khaki pants.

  She could see it in the window a hundred feet before she got to the storefront; a statue, four feet high, that was once polychrome but the color had faded to a pocked beige. The arms were missing and one of the shoulders was degraded. But the posture was unmistakably Civitali’s. But she told herself, it would be very possible to make a mistake. Perhaps it was Civitali’s, perhaps it was only by someone in his school, perhaps it was only someone who had seen his work and been influenced by it.

  Something in her was aroused by the statue, by the kind of puzzled supplication that she had seen in both the suffering Christ and the young virgin of the Annunciation. But she would not say anything yet.

  The owner of the antiques store was younger than she expected, and more nervous than she believed it was in his interest to be. He kept rubbing his hands together and putting his first three fingers to his lips, then moving them away and rubbing his hands together again.

  It was clear that he and Gregory Allard had had many conversations about the piece, and even Theresa’s Italian was enough to let her know that they used their words only as placeholders, not using them as vessels of information.

  Gregory Allard introduced her to Signore Calvi as a graduate student of art history at Yale, a specialist in Civitali. He mentioned Tom Ferguson’s name. This seemed to make Signore Calvi even more nervous, and Theresa wanted to say to him: “You needn’t be afraid of me. I’m nobody. I have no authority at all. Nothing I say will be of any consequence.”

  But seeing the intensity of Gregory Allard’s gaze as it fell on her, she knew that was only partly true.

  It seemed entirely remarkable that she was in the company of someone who might be able to make this beautiful object his, take it into his home, purchase it as you might purchase a refrigerator or a telephone. Or a perfectly ordinary, perfectly serviceable chair or desk.

  “I think it’s earlier than your pieces,” she said to Gregory, speaking English. “You can see the gestural energy, but he hasn’t quite achieved his full refinement, and he’s still heavily under the influence of Rossellino and Mino da Fiesole.”

  Gregory Allard nodded and said, “Not in front of the children.”

  So he would be bargaining, she thought, as she had seen women in the market bargaining about tomatoes.

  She tried to understand what it was about this statue that made it stand out, almost jump out from the other things in the shop, some of which were very lovely, some as old, or older. What made it more desirable, as you might desire one person standing among a clutch of perfectly attractive, perfectly presentable others? Some charge emanated from it, some envelope surrounded it, so she could feel the hair stand up on the back of her neck and the skin on her forearms prickle. She told herself she must be cool and analytical. She looked at it from all angles. She ran her fingers over the wood. And again all she really wanted to say was “It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful.” But actually, that wasn’t all. Now she wanted to say, as well, “You should buy it.”

  They excused themselves and made their way to Paola’s for lunch. She could tell that Gregory Allard didn’t want to talk until they were seated, until, perhaps, they’d had something to drink.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked.

  She said aloud the words, words she knew to be daring, that had be
en in her mind. “I think it’s beautiful. I think it’s wonderful. I think you should buy it.”

  “But do you think it’s a Civitali? I’m a bit suspicious. Even with the missing arms, the price seems a little low. Calvi says he’s giving me a break because he’d like it to stay in Lucca, but I’m unwilling to trust that kind of sentimentality in a dealer.”

  This was a side of Gregory Allard she hadn’t seen: a rich man who bought beautiful things but wanted his money’s worth. But what did worth mean? She wasn’t sure she liked this in him. No, she was sure, she didn’t like it, and the dislike made her bold.

  “Does it really matter if it’s a Civitali?”

  “One doesn’t like to be cheated.”

  It occurred to her that she had probably never worried about being cheated because she had never owned anything that anyone would want to cheat her of, had never had enough money so that anyone would want to do her out of it. And in the same way that Chiara’s happy family made Theresa feel alone and a freak, Gregory Allard’s wealth made her feel the strangeness of the way she had, until now, lived. The question arose: What was he paying for? The look of the thing, or the name attached to it? Was he buying something that would give him pleasure every time his eye fell on it, or was he looking ahead to the moment of resale, and the hope of making a profit? Or was it something else; would he be paying for a connection, a physical proximity to someone long dead, the primitive need to touch what the beloved dead had touched, a lover’s desire for anything that proved that the beloved had inhabited the world, a consolation for the loss or the impossibility of presence? An ancient magic, but one that money could buy. So was it love, or commerce, at work in the decision Gregory Allard would now make? Or was it possible to separate them?

  “You should buy it if you think it’s beautiful and wonderful. Do you love it?”

  “I like it very much. It often takes me a while living with something to experience what I would call love. I suppose that’s very New England.”

  “If you don’t love it, you shouldn’t buy it. If you love it, or if you think it’s beautiful and wonderful, you should buy it whether it’s Civitali or not.”

  Gregory Allard blinked his grape green eyes, as if he were surprised at being spoken to in this way. “But you see it isn’t just money I’d be cheated of. I’d be cheated of the real. So little in this world is real, is authentic; anything can be a copy of anything. I suppose one reason one desires objects like these, by an artist one feels attached to because the attachment seems like a living thing. And so if that turned out to be a lie … Well, one would feel a terrible fool for being cheated of it.”

  She instantly regretted what she’d said, remembering how disrespectfully his son had spoken. So he wasn’t unused to being spoken to in this way, and the thought of being in some way like Ivo appalled her.

  “Please forgive me, Mr. Allard. I had no right to speak as I did. It’s all very new to me.”

  “On the contrary, dear Theresa, and you must call me Gregory. You raise questions that I certainly ought to have thought about, but somehow never have. The question of what I’m paying for. What an extraordinary person you are, and now, stung a bit by your candor, I’m trying to discern whether you are extremely naïve or disproportionately wise for your years.”

  “Perhaps I’m simply rude.”

  “Believe me, my dear, I know rudeness when I encounter it. You were taken up by an idea, aroused by it, and what a rare thing that is. As a collector, I think a lot about rarity. And you are a rare person.”

  Paola came over and shook her finger at Gregory. “Are you going to eat or just discuss, discuss, discuss?”

  “We will, I hope, Paola, do both. What do you recommend?”

  “It’s very warm today, so a cold tomato soup, some chilled prawns with garlic and parsley, and then a wonderful goat cheese which I found in the market in Orvieto. For dessert, a lemon ice.”

  “A summer meal from a dream of summer,” Gregory said.

  Theresa remembered that he had used a similar phrase about the horse. “The Tuscan dream of the white horse.” Was it that he believed that everything good was only a dream, only unsusceptible to loss or snatching if you called it a dream, out loud?

  “Gregory, you are a failed poet,” Paola said.

  “A failure in many things,” he said.

  “But in greatness of the heart, a very great success.” She turned to Theresa. “My daughter has many troubles of the mind, and Gregory helped her to find the right doctor, the right medication. She has very nearly a normal life now, and it is all because of him. And what can I do in return? Recommend chilled prawns and a lemon ice. Not, dear Gregory, what we would call a just recompense.”

  “That’s quite enough out of you, Paola, when my tongue is hanging out waiting for the tomato soup.”

  Money, Theresa thought. He was able to do good because of money. It made so many things easier. She wondered what it made more difficult, as it was reputed to do.

  “I have good news,” he said. “The cousin of a cousin … he happens to be a cousin of a cousin of the man who cleans my drains … has arranged for us to be let into Santa Maria dei Servi later in the week.” Theresa clapped her hands and actually said, “Oh goody,” and was embarrassed, until Gregory laughed with her.

  “How wonderful that you can be as pleased as a child by what will, after all, be your life’s work. I think it is the most fortunate thing in the world to be able to make a living doing what you love.”

  “I’ve always thought that was such a strange phrase,” Theresa said. “Making a living. As if living was something that could be made. Or not made. And all because of money.”

  “Money,” said Gregory. “Let’s not think of money until at least the sun has set.” He raised his glass of Pinot Grigio. “To not thinking about money,” he said.

  “Agreed. And thank you, Gregory, for everything.”

  He lowered his head and said, “My dear.”

  The next five days were peaceful and harmonious. She breakfasted at her café, took a picnic on the walls, or treated herself to a ceci pizza—unless Gregory had phoned to invite her to Paola’s. She worked four hours in the morning, sometimes in archives, where she would leave with dusty fingers and a cache of information which she believed would be of no use to her but which she equally believed she had to have examined. She lunched, napped, and then worked until dark, when she had a late dinner and took herself to bed, exhausted, pleased with herself and the sense of days well spent. Some days she talked to almost no one; some days Chiara was free for a coffee or a drink, but some days Theresa didn’t come home until she was off duty.

  She wanted to take another look at the Rose Annunciation, just to refresh her spirits, hoping that sitting in front of it in the dim quiet would inspire her to focus her thoughts and coalesce some of her ideas. The day before, at lunch, Gregory had asked her what she thought she might write about for her dissertation. He had said it very lightly and calmly, and this allowed her to speak calmly, in a way she never could have to anyone else, particularly anyone at Yale. Something about him suggested a large leisure, space and time for things to unwind themselves; the exact opposite of the professional anxiety that was part of her academic life.

  “I have very conflicting ideas. I want to look closely at the work, and what I most like is doing formal analyses, so after I see the other Annunciations I could certainly do some sort of comparison, but I find it so difficult to write about what I see in a way that’s not stultifyingly boring. I could do a monograph, but that’s very out of fashion: it certainly wouldn’t help my job prospects. It’s very difficult, Gregory, to find the right words for what is beautiful. And yet that’s what I have to do, or, as my old professor says, things get lost if you don’t nail them down in writing. I could go in a completely different direction,” she said, eager to speak, using him only as a wall on which to project her ideas, not noticing the marks that might already be there. “I’m very interested that a
lot of the restoration work done on the Civitalis was done in the thirties. I’d like to explore what the aesthetics of restoration were under Fascism. Restoration is always about a view of history, and I wonder how that played out then. Civitali seems the antithesis of that overlarge Roman aesthetic, that Mussolini brand of looming, but anyway it might be interesting.”

  “You know, I first came to Italy in 1954. The War had only been over for nine years. But no one talked about it. They still don’t, not really. The Italians like to believe that everything bad that happened under Fascism was forced upon them by the Germans. Just recently, I was at a dinner party with very close friends, all around my age, and they tried to come up with a definition of Fascism and said it was impossible. I thought: it’s not impossible, it’s about the abrogation of free speech, and civil rights, and the punishment of dissent by brute force. But I didn’t say anything because they had all lived through it and I had not. It’s a very interesting idea, your idea about restoration under Fascism.”

  “But I feel I’d be abandoning Civitali for a more general topic, and that makes me feel a bit guilty.”

  “Well, of course you’ll come back here when you decide. And please know that I would be honored to have you as a guest in my home if you need to stay in Lucca for an extended period. As you see, I have an almost shameful number of rooms.”

  “That would be wonderful,” she said. His offer, made as they sat in his garden waiting for lunch, gave her a sense of relaxation that was supported by the sweet smell of the new hay. This was the atmosphere she lived in, a mood of calm lightness that surrounded her as she approached San Frediano. But as if it were a protective glass covering, like the glass cabinets Gregory had built for his Civitalis, it shattered as she approached the steps of the basilica and saw Ivo Allard, Sage, and two men, with identically shaved heads. One was wearing white jeans and a black T-shirt, the other black jeans and a white T-shirt. The jeans and the T-shirts were tight, emphasizing the well-muscled bodies of both men.