The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  She didn’t know if they would have greeted her if she hadn’t greeted them first. Certainly, they didn’t seem glad to see her.

  “Taking in the great churches?” Ivo said, with something like a sneer.

  “There’s a wonderful Civitali Annunciation here,” she said.

  “Oh, yes, but that’s not the jewel of the crown here. We’re here to see the mummy. Santa Zita. I believe the term is the ‘incorruptible body.’ But I think of her as Mrs. Bates. Norman’s mother. Right out of Hitchcock.”

  Theresa didn’t know what he was talking about, and he was quick to pounce on her puzzled look.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never visited Mrs. Bates? Oh, my dear, you must. It’s the biggest hoot in Lucca. Maybe in the whole of Tuscany.”

  The woman who worked in the little shop where Theresa had bought a postcard of the Annunciation opened the door slowly, with a pronounced reluctance. Theresa understood why the woman would be reluctant to welcome Ivo and his friends, but she wanted to say to her, I’m not with them, I’m not like them. I belong here.

  Sage put her thin arm through Theresa’s. “You’ve got to see this, honey, it’s absolutely awesome.”

  She steered her past the baptismal font to a side chapel, and brought her over to a glass casket. Sage, Ivo, and the two men, to whom Theresa had not been introduced, began to laugh, too loudly for a church, and Theresa was afraid the woman who had let them in would now feel it her right to throw them out. She didn’t want to look in the glass casket, but she couldn’t help herself. She also couldn’t help looking away. She had rarely seen anything that made the horror of deadness so real. Lying inside the glass casket were the remains of the dead saint, the skeletal hands folded, a rosary threaded through the bone fingers, and on the grinning skull a veil and a wreath of flowers.

  “You must definitely do something with this, Ivo,” said one of the men in what she assumed was a German accent. “Some kind of installation would be more than fabulous.”

  “I’m way ahead of you, Hermann,” said Ivo. “I’ve already got sketches.

  “She was a housemaid,” he said, “famous for her devotion to her employers. One day she left her stove to go and help the poor, and one of the other houseworkers, who was jealous of her employer’s regard, ratted her out. But when the employer came back, angels were at the stove, baking the bread that Zita was supposed to be baking. Now she’s the patron saint of lost keys. You pray to her if you’ve lost your keys. Particularly your house keys. I don’t know whether she’s good at car keys, it may not be her field.”

  He was looking at Theresa with his sharp dark eyes, waiting for some kind of response. Was she supposed to laugh, was that a requirement? But it was his father, not Ivo, who was her benefactor. She owed him nothing. She was free not to laugh. She was free to walk away.

  “I’ve got to take a look at the Annunciation,” she said.

  “What a good girl you are,” said Ivo. “No wonder the old man’s crazy about you. See you at the opening, I understand you’re Pa’s date.”

  “I look forward to it,” she said. She felt that it wasn’t wrong to lie politely in that way. But it was a complete lie; she dreaded going to the opening, and she was made uneasy by Ivo’s calling her Gregory’s date. But that, of course, was what he wanted. To make her uneasy. Congratulations, Ivo, she wanted to say. You’ve wrecked my peace.

  She wanted to run away from them, but she knew that they were watching her and so she walked very slowly towards the chapel where the Annunciation was. It was 4:30 but the sun was still high, and it fell through the white octagonal panes of the window and struck the rose-colored dress of the Madonna with a soft clarity. She took her binoculars from her bag; she wanted to study the modeling around the lips.

  She needed to take in the Madonna’s calm. She felt the contact with Ivo and his friends a defilement; and she felt foolish that she’d never known about the horrible mummy just near the entrance of the church where she had come day after day. They were right, of course, to mock the whole thing: the “incorruptible body,” the wreath of flowers and the bridal veil on the grinning skull, the legends and the devotions and the foolish credulous belief. She wanted to say: it has nothing to do with me, I have nothing to do with it, and, more important, it has nothing to do with Civitali.

  She heard a low rumble in the main part of the church. Ten or twelve women, most of them at least in their seventies, two of them younger, plainer, wearing head scarves and cheap shoes, were saying the rosary. If they came into the chapel where she was sitting, if they knelt before the Madonna, they would be inhabiting a different universe than the one she inhabited, a universe where style and provenance and restoration and attribution were the coin of the realm, and the subject matter, the Virgin visited by an Angel, was entirely beside the point. But to these women it was the point, they based their lives on it, as Civitali had. So was she in fact closer to Ivo and his friends than to these women? And to Civitali, who had created these figures as objects of devotion, as objects of believing prayer? She felt a sudden shame, as if she had no right to be there, no more right than Ivo and his friends. What would Civitali say to her if he appeared now, in the basilica, looking through her binoculars while, a few feet away, old women prayed the rosary? Would he have said, “You understand nothing of what it was I did. Nothing at all. I made what I made for them, not you.” Was Civitali, in his beliefs, closer to the people who prayed to the mummy than to her, who believed in nothing?

  The Annunciation happened to be in a church, but it would have served her purposes as well if it were in a museum or a private house. Better, perhaps. She wouldn’t have dreamed of praying to the Virgin. She was not someone who prayed. If she believed in transcendence, it was the transcendent power of beauty. There was no one she could speak to among the dead who she believed could make anything happen in the world or in her life. She did not even speak to her poor dead father, whom she could not imagine, even in eternity, having any effect at all.

  She thought she would buy something new to wear to Ivo’s opening; all her clothes seemed too floral and girlish and unurbane. But the prices in the shops on the Fillungo terrified her. She decided on a long scarf, which she thought would at least add an element of seriousness to her dress. Only after she’d paid for it did she realize that it was a deep rose color, almost the color of the Rose Annuciation’s dress. She bought a bottle of nail polish that pleased her by matching the scarf almost exactly. She polished her toenails. She remembered the first time she’d ever done that, when she and Maura went to Florida. Was that almost two years ago? Where would she be in two years?

  Gregory was waiting for her in the lobby. He was pacing up and down, eating up the small space with his long legs, his jerky strides. She knew that he was nervous. He was nearly silent on the ten-minute walk to the gallery. She wanted to say, “It will be fine, everything will be fine.” But she had no confidence that those words were, in fact, true.

  The gallery was actually a private museum, founded by a local industrialist Gregory didn’t know much about. It had been a palazzo built by a Renaissance banker, and the outside kept its ancient look, but once they were in the door, the present and the future declared themselves with a breezy insistence. The walls were white, and there were video displays flashing from every wall, and flashing signs recommending small plates for early to late luncheon. She saw immediately that she and Gregory were overdressed; everyone else was in jeans, except for some of the women, who wore short skirts that fitted their buttocks like bandages.

  Just at the top of the staircase leading down to the exhibition itself, a screen flashed the words “Lucca Then and Now, the Sacred and the Profane.” She and Gregory stopped to watch the screen. Alternating with the lettering was the image of a man whose body was almost entirely covered by tattoos. Theresa felt a wave of nausea rise up inside her. The tattooed man was standing in the posture of Civitali’s Dolorous Christ she’d seen in the Villa Guinigi, his arms opened in baffled
supplication, his face despairing.

  She wanted to take Gregory’s hand and say, let’s go quickly, before we see something terrible. But she knew that wasn’t possible. They made their way downstairs, entering a room that a sign on the wall informed them was a cellar that housed the remains of a Roman well. But she couldn’t pay attention to that. Now she had to read the words on the wall, Ivo’s words, explaining his work.

  LUCCA THEN AND NOW

  One of the major sources of Lucchese pride is the fifteenth-century sculptor Matteo Civitali. He didn’t travel much outside Lucca, so his fame is not as great as many believe it should be. Perhaps he is most famous for his (contested) contribution to the history of art: some say he was the first to depict the male nude. Without fig leaf, without even a loincloth. I like to think it’s true, because even then Lucca was a stuffy town. I’m trying to rescue Civitali, as a kind of trope for the mummification of the past (see the “incorruptible body of S. Zita in the basilica of S. Frediano”), to dislodge Lucca from the frozen place of a museum city—let’s hope it doesn’t go the way of Florence—and, in my work, to mix up categories, the gift of the postmodernist imagination. So, dressed in the clothes of Civitali’s Madonnas, we see one of Lucca’s proudest residents, Campari, born Giorgio Alcante, now star of one of the coolest drag clubs in Tuscany, CLUB SEXI LADY. In the posture of the suffering Christ, our own Lauro Z., owner of TAT TATTOOS, wearing a creation by one of the most innovative designers here, an Australian expat, Bonnie Lederer, whose reinvention of the tuxedo has been a big seller in her store, THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. I’d like to thank my beloved Sage Brooke for her work with costume, hair, and makeup—without which nothing of my work would be possible. Art lives, Lucca lives … and not just for tourists.

  Theresa had to acknowledge that he’d described his work quite well. The show consisted of paired photographs. There were photographs of two Annunciations and, beside them, dressed in identical costumes, his hair done exactly like the Madonna’s, was Giorgio Alcante, Campari, the drag queen. In the posture of the Dolorous Christ was the tattooed man. In the place of the mark of the spear, there was a tattoo of a dragon and, instead of the loincloth, a miniature tuxedo, with a bow tied exactly at the center of the clearly erect penis.

  She was afraid to meet Gregory’s eye. But looking around the room, she couldn’t see him. She went upstairs, thinking perhaps he’d gone to get himself another drink. But he was nowhere to be found.

  She had never been so angry in her life. She knew that was something people said all the time, and it wasn’t literally true for them, but it was for her. The circumstances of her life had made her feel that anger was one of those luxuries that, in her mother’s words, she simply couldn’t afford. She was the only child of old-fashioned parents who didn’t countenance anger in a daughter, and then she was the child of tragedy, the child of a destroyed father and an overworked, exhausted mother whom everyone called a hero. When she felt anger, it was a fire that was kept banked, well protected by walls of impermeable stone. But now she felt anger as an explosion; she saw herself a cartoon character; she imagined smoke coming out of her ears, so on fire did her brain seem.

  What Ivo had done was disgusting. It was perverse. It was wicked. What, she wondered, was the difference between wickedness and evil? Evil, she supposed, suggested a greater scope, and Ivo’s adolescent display would affect no one but his father and herself. He had mounted a small show in a provincial gallery; the notice that might be taken would be small and provincial. But he had defiled something that she believed to be of the very highest value. Purity of intention; it was a phrase that Sisters Jackie and Maureen used in describing some of the saints they admired, to encourage Theresa and Maura to work hard even at subjects, like math, that they didn’t like. She’d applied the words to the artists she loved as Sister Imelda did to her saints. Defilement. But no physical thing had been harmed. Could you defile an idea? Could you defile love and fineness and effort and skill and patience and an original vision? Certainly, he had tried.

  Never had the desire to punish someone seized her so entirely. People had hurt her before; her mother’s going off with George had seemed a kind of betrayal, not that she had chosen another man but that she had chosen such a coarse and vulgar braggart. But Theresa could forgive her mother, because her mother had had such a hard time. And she could forgive Tom because she had got a great deal out of what they’d had. Also because she felt he was too insignificant to want to punish; thinking of him as the husband of his wife, she despised him too much to want to direct the energy of punishment his way.

  But Ivo and what he’d done left her no room for compassion, gratitude, or the indifference made possible by a sense of one’s own greater power. Ivo was powerful; he acted from a position of strength, his gestures were strong, his aim exact. His desire to punish fed her own. She felt it in her mouth; it had a bitter taste, and its texture was sharp and cutting as if she were biting down with a ragged tooth on a capsule that released pure bitterness. The sharpness and bitterness were not without pleasure; she felt enormously alive; small seed pearls of sweat broke out along her hairline, and her blood seemed quick and thin, like an athlete’s primed for speed.

  She knew exactly what she would do. But it would have to wait till morning.

  She showered and tried to sleep, but sleep was impossible. She packed her bag. She counted the money left in the envelope Tom had given her: she still had two hundred euros in cash. She checked the credit balance on her MasterCard. She looked up the Trenitalia timetable, and the Alitalia website, and then Delta’s, and United Airlines, and USAir.

  She made herself stay in the room until 9:00, and she phoned and booked a taxi to take her to the station at 11:30. She wrote a note to Chiara: so sorry, had to leave at the last minute; will be in touch. She made her way to the café, where the owners seemed pleased to serve her cappuccino and cornetto without being asked. She told them she would be leaving that day, a work emergency, no no, nothing wrong with her family. Her family was fine. She looked up “hardware store” in her phrase book, and asked the owner of the café to recommend one in the neighborhood.

  In the hardware store, she asked the salesman for cans of spray paint, and picked up three. Yellow. Color of cowardice. Color, she hoped, of shame.

  The gallery opened at 11:00, but she knew that no one would be there that early. She smiled politely at the bored young woman at the desk, who was busy reading the Italian edition of Vanity Fair, then made her way downstairs, glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t followed.

  She looked at the photographs as little as she could. She didn’t have to look closely to do what she’d come for. She took the top off the first can, shook it, and covered the photograph of the drag queen Madonna with yellow paint. She did the same with all the others, and then put the cans back into her navy blue cloth carrier bag. Then, smiling pleasantly, she walked out of the gallery, bidding the Vanity Fair–reading girl goodbye.

  She brought her bags down to the hotel lobby, settling her bill with the sullen young man whom she’d spoken to only perfunctorily in her time there. Part of her planning included the knowledge that it was Chiara’s day off. She asked the young man to give Chiara her note, and he shrugged his shoulders, as if it were one more incomprehensible request from one more incomprehensible guest. The taxi arrived on time. The train was not late.

  She boarded the train, looking around her in case she was being followed by police. For the first time in her life, she had to think of herself as a criminal. Movies and detective novels had been no preparation for this sick feeling of anxious vigilance. The word “capture” suddenly became real, with its attendant images of confinement, darkness.

  She was surprised how easy it was at the last minute to trade her first-class ticket for an economy seat. She smiled her way through customs, hoping she wasn’t giving herself away by smiling too much, but the fat clerk merely wished her a good voyage.

  She’d booked her ticket t
hrough to Milwaukee. She couldn’t bear going back to New Haven; certainly she couldn’t face Tom. She had no idea where she’d go when she got to Milwaukee. Her mother had sold the house. Sitting at the gate half an hour before takeoff, she realized she was homeless.

  The thought of her own homelessness made her feel especially vulnerable to the law. She searched around in her mind to imagine a place of safety and could think of only one. She would call Maura. What time was it in Tortola? She would have to wake her, and Maura would be crabby, she was always crabby waking up. But she had no choice.

  It was almost a relief that Maura’s response was so predictable. “T, what the fuck. It’s five o’clock in the morning here.”

  “Maura, I’ve ruined my life.”

  “That’s pretty hard to do nowadays, even for someone with your work ethic.”

  What Theresa didn’t expect, but probably should have, knowing Maura, was that when she told her what she’d done, Maura laughed. “That might just be the coolest thing you’ve ever done,” she said.

  “But, Maura, you don’t understand. I probably can’t go back to Yale now. I can probably never go back to Italy. I may be wanted by the police.”

  “I think they’re too busy with pedophiles and arms dealers to worry about you. And maybe the Yale people will never find out. Their heads are so far up their tiny asses they might not even notice.”

  “Of course they will, my advisor will find out, the guy’s father is a friend of his.” She remembered that she hadn’t told Maura anything about Tom.

  “Where the hell are you, T, on what continent?”

  “I haven’t left Italy. I’m landing in Milwaukee, but I don’t know where to go when I get there.”

  “Sure you do. Go to the convent.”

  The convent. Of course. There were plenty of empty rooms there; the house had been built for many more nuns, and the ones who lived there now had no desire to sell it. She tried to imagine who would be there in the summer, who she hoped would be there. She hoped it wasn’t Sister Jackie; she would ask too many questions, offer too many solutions, not understand at all what had upset Theresa so much that she would commit what Sister Jackie (who was devoted to nonviolence, to the point that, as Sister Maureen said, it made you want to do violence to her) would call a violent act. She hoped it wasn’t Sister Imelda on her own, because she would just be puzzled. She wanted Sister Maureen there because she would get the situation, might come up with some ideas, would probably be annoyed at Theresa’s unwisdom, but wouldn’t go on and on about it after what might be a quick initial blast. As long as Sister Maureen was there, she realized that she wanted Sister Imelda, too, because of her unquestioning acceptance, her unquestioning belief that Theresa was “a wonderful girl.”