The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  As she spoke—first to Mazzo’s personal assistant and then to the man himself—I listened through the walls of the bad-smelling chamber of jealousy. She’d told me once that she’d been intimate with “a fair number” of boyfriends before we met, and perhaps because of that she was always at ease with men. But, to my ear at least, she always sounded more than merely at ease—not flirtatious exactly, but something that went beyond simple comfort. She’d greet a client at the door of one of her salons, receive a kiss on each cheek, hold on to his hand, stand close, and the simplest remark—“Massimo, it’s been too long, really”—would seem to me to carry a note of physical intimacy, even if absolutely nothing of a physical nature had ever taken place between them. This tone, this silky familiarity, was like a lighted match tossed onto the barnful of dry hay that was my insecurity. We’d had a hundred fights about it. I was always wrong, I know that. I admit it. I’d had a number of lovers, too, in my twenties, and probably sounded the same way to her when I spoke to women. And yet, there was always this nagging whisper of doubt—was something going on? Had something gone on? I don’t know whose jealousy was more intense, hers or mine.

  Try as I did over the years of our marriage, I could never seem to banish it from my thoughts. Now that we were living separately, rather than being easier, it was much worse. Probably other estranged couples slept around and didn’t worry about it: that was part of the arrangement. But it had never been part of the arrangement for us. We’d never talked about it directly, but from time to time one of us would say something that suggested we were still faithful, that there might still be hope for a reconciliation, that there were already enough complications between us without adding lovers into the mix. Friends of mine—and friends of Rosa’s—found this arrangement strange to the point of impossibility. But, strange though it might have been, it was our reality. We were past our sexual prime; we both worried about upsetting Anna Lisa by bringing lovers into the mix; we’d both been raised old-style Catholics, and both sets of parents—mine and hers—had stayed with each other until death. Maybe those were the reasons, or maybe it was something else, an out-of-date notion of fidelity to a vow. Or an unspoken hope.

  Still, as she cooed into the phone with Antonio Mazzo and I piloted the Maserati along the coastal road north, the little snake of jealousy raised its head again and slithered through my thoughts.

  “Caro mio,” she began, “my dear, my idol, how are you? How have you been? I’m in pain from the fact that I haven’t seen you for so long. Actual, physical pain…Yes, yes, awful, terrible, couldn’t be worse…Exactly. And I have a favor to ask. I’m traveling with three eccentric friends—we’re just south of Ravenna, coming up the coast—and I’m wondering if you might be able to let us stay with you for a night?…Yes?! Oh, you’re a saint, an idol. There’s no one like you on earth, really! But I should tell you that there’s a catch, Antonio. For reasons I’ll explain at some later date, we have to have absolute discretion. No one can know about the visit, would that be possible?” At this point Antonio must have said something ironic and humorous, a sexual innuendo probably, because my lovely wife threw back her head and laughed, and the laughter went on and on, followed by a series of aftershock chuckles. I glanced back in the mirror at the Pope. He had his eyes closed and seemed to be praying. Pray for me, Holy Father, I thought. Pray for me now that the heat of jealousy doesn’t cause me to burst into flames right here on the seat in front of you. Pray for me that my insecurities don’t pollute all the love and dignity in me. Pray that my wife stops talking this way to her men friends.

  When Rosa finished with her little symphony of laughter she said, “That complicates things. But it’s workable, I think. It might even make it easier. A masked ball, you say? One of your famous parties? You’re the Great Gatsby of Italy, sai? Do you know that?…But are you sure you have room?…Oh, you’re just the finest man God ever created, truly. I miss you so much! We’ll be there in two or three hours, depending on traffic and our need for food…Thank you, thank you, my love! Ciao!”

  She closed the connection and sighed. I went through a yellow light just as it was turning red. “Careful, Paolo!” she said. “The last thing we need now is to be stopped by the police.”

  I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek. Took a breath. Said, “The call went well?”

  She turned and looked at me. I had tried to keep any hint of jealousy out of my voice, but a note had sneaked in; I was sure she detected it. “Perfectly,” she said, in an acidic whisper. “Ideally. Magnificently.”

  “We can stay?” I whispered back.

  “He has a massive old villa just outside Padua and he happens to be there this week. I’m so glad I called him. No problem at all, he said.”

  “No problem to host your ‘eccentric friends’?”

  “What should I have said, Paolo? What term should I have used?”

  “How about ‘my husband and some eccentric friends’?”

  I could feel her studying me, and not in a sympathetic way. I tried to keep my eyes on the road. “How about,” she said, “ ‘my husband, who, as you know from the recent news, is an internationally wanted kidnapper…and our good friends the Pope and the Dalai Lama’? Would that have made you feel better?”

  “And what’s this about a party?”

  “And what’s this about changing the subject? Antonio must be ninety. There’s nothing sexual between us, never has been and obviously never will be. Your mind is filth.”

  “You brought up the Parisian bordellos a little while ago.”

  “A joke.”

  “Fine, but tell me this: how can we go there if he’s hosting one of his parties?”

  “It’s a costume party, masks, et cetera. It’s perfect. And the house is so huge that even if we don’t want to party we’ll probably have our privacy.”

  “You’re forgetting who we’re with.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Mazzo is the king of decadence and we’re bringing two holy men to his lair. That doesn’t strike you as slightly problematic?”

  She tsked impatiently. I knew this sound like I knew the sound of our daughter’s voice. It signified many things: impatience, disdain, regret, superiority. I felt guilty, stupid, childish…also justified.

  “How I love that sound,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. I know you don’t like it. It’s a bad habit of mine, but what I don’t think you understand is that the two people in the back of this car aren’t like you. They aren’t corruptible. They’ve been praying and meditating and fasting for, what? Fifty, sixty, seventy years? Going to one party where there happen to be—God forbid!—actual women, real alcoholic drinks, isn’t going to suddenly turn them into sinners. What do I have to do to get you to stop worrying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying. I was thinking, just before we saw Anna Lisa, that she’d be so happy at the chance to spend an hour with the Pope and the Dalai Lama. It’s a rare opportunity, a gift, a great moment in history, something to treasure. I’ve been trying to tell myself that, too, so I can get past the worry. But I’ve always had a terrible fear of going to prison. The food. The cramped conditions. The company of violent men.”

  “The spiders,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry, that was mean. But you’re being neurotic again. Please stop.”

  “Fine, okay. I’ve always wondered why you don’t have a fear like that.”

  “I do,” she said. “But it’s a secret…Someday I’ll tell you, but I’m too ashamed right now.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Not now. No. I can’t.”

  We went along for a kilometer in a cold silence, and then she said, “The recording will clear you of suspicion.”

  “As long as people believe it’s legitimate. As long as my enemies don’t get involved and try to twist it somehow.”

  “Well, then I’ll ask the Pope to sign a written document saying you aren’t guilty. Would that make you less anxi
ous?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll do it,” the Pope said from behind me.

  “I, too,” the Dalai Lama said. And then he added, “For some money,” and enjoyed another spasm of laughter.

  “I’ll try to relax then, much as it goes against my nature.”

  “Your nature is a Buddha nature,” the Dalai said, between chuckles. “Pure as the sky. Rest in that.”

  “And stop giving your wife so much trouble,” the Pope added. “She’s gone to great lengths to use her contacts to help us.” I felt him put a hand on my shoulder, give me a quick massage. “As have you. Relax, enjoy. Say a prayer and let the worries go. You’re going to be a grandfather soon. Think of that gift from God!”

  “Rest in that,” the Dalai Lama advised.

  I tried, really I did. As we crossed the low hills of the Veneto and made our way toward the beautiful city of Padua, a place I’ve always loved, I made a tremendous interior effort to leave the worries behind. Worrying was a form of control, Rosa had told me after some of our arguments. A desperate attempt to bend reality to fit an imagined picture in our minds. It was, almost without exception, imposing the future on the present. It was an insidious species of fear disguised as logic.

  She had a hundred ways of describing it, and over the years I’d marveled at the fact that she seemed immune to it herself. “Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out,” she liked to say. Or: “Let’s think about that tomorrow.” Or: “Bad outcomes are almost always worse in your imagination than in reality.” From the moment she announced she was pregnant I’d lived in a state of near-constant terror, watching what she ate and drank, anticipating bad news in doctors’ offices when we went for her checkups, making sure there was nothing around the house that might cause her to slip and fall, doing research on hair-color chemicals and birth defects. And then, once Rosa actually went into labor, my mind presented me with every awful possibility, every medical disaster and horrible illness. At one point in her long ordeal the fetal heartbeat monitor showed that our baby’s pulse was sinking from well over a hundred—normal—down to eighty, then sixty-two, then forty-one, and my own pulse went in the opposite direction. The nurses, calm as meditators on a cushion, readjusted Rosa’s position and the pulse went back to normal, but by then I had sweated through my shirt.

  In the end, of course, as Rosa had always believed it would, everything turned out fine. Our daughter was born healthy, and had remained healthy throughout her childhood and adolescence and now into her twenties. I was happy about that, naturally, though I couldn’t help noticing that Rosa’s life moved along with only a minimum of upset. She started a business and it grew like a fern in the rainforest. I started a business, worked hard, did everything I should have done, and it withered and died. “Worry attracts trouble,” she liked to say. Which only gave me something else to worry about.

  Still, beginning with that conversation on the road to Mazzo’s villa, I tried. I told myself I would live to see our grandchild, that Anna Lisa’s pregnancy would move forward without incident, that Piero would make a good husband and father, that the recording and letters from the Pope and the Dalai Lama would be a kind of insurance policy against any potential future troubles. That if I lost my position I’d somehow survive. As we passed through a flatter landscape near Forli—Mussolini’s birthplace—I thought again of my mother leaping into Lake Como, and my father’s ritual of running naked around the house, outdoors, in the dark, whenever he sold a painting. I wanted to be that kind of person—unafraid, a risk taker and celebrator, immune to jealousy.

  Instead, I was me.

  Avoiding the Autostrada and its surveillance cameras, we stayed on Route S16 through Ravenna, then crossed the rather flat and featureless plain to the east of Bologna, a landscape of sunflower fields, the lazy Reno river, and close-packed tile-roof settlements that consisted of a church, a place to buy gas and pizza, and a few dozen stone-and-stucco homes. I asked Rosa to help me in my battle against anxiety by not turning on the radio, and she kindly agreed. S16 led us through a last tangle of traffic and into Ferrara, a city famous for the high medieval wall that surrounds it, a history of substantial Jewish populations, and for being the birthplace of Girolamo Savonarola, the fifteenth-century Dominican priest who liked to burn books he considered tainted by heresy. Ultimately, Savonarola himself was hanged and a pyre was built under the gallows. (As my father would say: “What goes around…”)

  Despite that sordid history, we decided to stop. We were hungry. “Let’s just buy food and eat al fresco someplace,” Rosa suggested. “Less chance of being recognized.”

  I found a parking space opposite Ferrara’s white-faced cathedral, and Rosa and I went off in search of food, leaving the holy men in the warm backseat—windows open. Both the Pope and the Dalai Lama told us they’d use the time for prayer, that we shouldn’t hurry, shouldn’t be too concerned about what we brought back for lunch. A little fruit, some bread, bottles of mineral water—that would more than suffice.

  I have a theory—not very original—that certain key moments from our past crouch in the crevices of memory, hidden there, sometimes forever, below our conscious mind. Invisible, yes, but I suspect these memories form the roots of our deepest insecurities and fears.

  As Rosa and I hurried along the hot sidewalk in Ferrara, something lifted one of these primal memories into the light. I don’t know what it was—a few notes of an old song playing in a second-floor apartment, a voice that sounded like my mother’s or my father’s, the smell of a particular meal being cooked in the kitchen of a nearby café—but some mysterious trigger unearthed a pottery shard from early childhood, something long buried and nearly forgotten.

  I was four years old. It was summer. I must have wandered out the back door in a moment when my mother and father weren’t paying attention to my whereabouts—a rare occurrence. Maybe he’d thought of something he wanted to add to one of his paintings and had slipped into his second-floor studio. Maybe she was on the phone with a dealer in Paris or Berlin, focused on the negotiations, dates for a show. In any case, I wandered into the backyard, strolled around there in my shorts and bare feet, and then opened the back gate and toddled along a path that led into a shallow ravine overgrown with bushes and small trees. In spring, a river ran through that low territory, but this was midsummer, the river was a muddy trickle, the foliage thick. I kept going deeper into the brush. After a few minutes I grew tired, found a stone to sit on, and moved my feet back and forth in the warm mud. For God knows what reason I had the idea that I would hide from my parents there. After a short while I became aware of them calling. Even at that age I sensed the change in the tone of their voices, from casual to nervous to panicked. But on purpose, stubbornly, mischievously, I didn’t call back to them, didn’t move. I suppose this was a kind of sin, or the instinct toward sin: I knew I was causing them distress, but some sly impulse made me stay silent.

  It went on for probably ten minutes, no more. Eventually my father came down the path, and eventually he saw my white shorts there near the muddy stream, saw me sitting on the stone. He must also have seen the expression on my face, which, in memory at least, was a species of devilish smile, a small victory over the giants that ruled me.

  My parents never hit me, not once. In fact, I could count on the fingers of two hands the number of times they raised their voices to me or to each other. But as Rosa and I walked along in Ferrara’s centro, looking for a place to buy food, I remembered, with a surreal vividness, the tone of my father’s voice after he’d carried me angrily and a bit roughly back into the house. He set me down on both bare, muddy feet on the kitchen floor and he and my mother shouted at me, telling me what an awful thing I’d done. There were tears coursing down my mother’s face—I remember that—and I remember how, when they were finished, my father lifted me up in the air so that my mother could rinse my feet in the sink, then he took me by the hand, led me to my room, and slammed the door behind him when he left. I lay facedown on
the blanket of my bed and wept. After a little while my mother came in and sat beside me and told me, in a much calmer voice, how terrified they’d been, what a foolish thing it was that I’d done, how I could have been hurt, or worse. She brought me into the kitchen and made me pasta with pesto, and in another few minutes my father came downstairs, calmer by then, and put both hands on my little shoulders, looked into my face, and apologized for yelling but said I was never, ever, ever to do something like that again.

  And, of course, I didn’t. My childhood memories are full of warm light—the trips we took, the laughter at dinner, the softness and kindness of my mother and the supportive camaraderie of my dad. But that one dark moment had been buried, and when it resurfaced, I suddenly felt that a curtain had been pulled from a tall window, the window had been thrown open, and I was standing there looking down at my younger self. After that summer day, I had been the most obedient of boys, pathologically obedient. I didn’t curse or drink or make love until my third year of university. I didn’t miss Mass until I was twenty-four, not once.

  Later on, naturally enough, there was a period of rebellion, but even that was relatively mild, a bit of carousing, a few casual girlfriends. Really, the only times in my childhood that I went against my parents’ wishes were the times we visited Giorgio in South America and slipped away on our adventures. When we returned, he protected me from the chastisement of our parents, taking the responsibility on himself, the older cousin who should have known better.