My Venice and Other Essays (9780802194039)

by Leon, Donna

  Luckily, I was in New York on the day that my friend arranged to meet Jason, so I went along to have lunch with them. We met in a small restaurant on Columbus Avenue, not far from Lincoln Center. Jason, who had said nothing about his appearance in his ad, though he did give his age as “over fifty,” turned out to have two suspicious holes just behind the corners of his jaw. Round, they were the size of raisins and about as deep. As he talked, I propped my head on my palm, one finger tapping at the same point on my own jaw as I smiled brightly at Jason, caught my friend’s eye, and mouthed the word “lift.” Somewhere I recently read that almost half of the cosmetic surgery performed in the United States is done on men, they too now caught up in the need to maintain the appearance of youth well into middle age. One hopes that they do not all emerge with the telltale raisins.

  Jason was an executive in an investment company, twice divorced. He was troubled that so many things were wrong with the country and believed that the only way to save us all was to return to “family values.” Yes, Americans really do say these things. At no time did he display any curiosity in what we thought about these topics. Nor did he, apparently, hear the least dissonance between his belief in family values, his divorces, and his face lift.

  As soon as we’d finished coffee, I developed one of my sick headaches and said I really did have to go home to have an aspirin. He seemed surprised that we both got up to leave and refused to accept our offer to pay for lunch.

  Jason provided me with more evidence in support of another of my observations about American men: they don’t listen to women. I’m not sure they listen to one another very much, but I’m sure they don’t listen to women. This might explain the vast number of times Americans use expressions like You know, I mean, like, and um as verbal fillers to, as it were, keep their hats on the conversational seat while they think of what next to say. I have sometimes found it illuminating, during those infrequent times when a small gap is offered in one of these monologues, to observe that I’ve discovered that fried scorpions are quite delicious or that I’m sure mad cow disease is in the drinking water. I have yet to receive any acknowledgment of these remarks.

  The last was Robert, whom we met for coffee, my friend no longer willing to commit more time than that for a first meeting, and certainly not willing to meet one of these guys without what the cops call “backup.” Robert (“well-educated, financially secure professor”) was in the café when we arrived and seemed pleased to meet us both. In fact, Robert was pleased about every­thing: the coffee, the day, the fact that we had been such good friends for so long. Hell, if you’d explained the second law of thermodynamics to Robert, he would have been pleased about that, too.

  For Robert, you see, had gotten in touch with his true self, was centered, had found his inner child. He’d tried psychotherapy, had Robert, had tried religion, aromatherapy, est, but was now sure that he’d found true peace in the pages of one of the current bringers of peace and wisdom whose books fill the self-help sections of thousands of bookstores all across America. All we had to do, you see, was get in touch with our own feelings, seek centeredness, and we too could experience the same magical transformation. Naturally, he taught sociology.

  Listening to Robert, caught up in his frantic goodwill, I was put in mind of a description in Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot:

  Eternal smiles his emptiness betray

  As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.

  It was enough for him, as seems to be true for many American men, to think good thoughts in order to consider himself a fine, interesting person. All he had to do was desire that good things happen, and that was more than enough to persuade him that he was thereby rendered infinitely worthwhile, even fascinating. His interest in his own inner workings was absolute. He had created a solipsistic world that excluded an interest in things like art, history, or politics, except, of course, in how they affected him. Or his inner child, I presume.

  This time, it was my friend who had one of those sick headaches, and we went back to the apartment to read the Times, eat Häagen-Dazs, and reflect upon how difficult it is to find a suitable man in New York.

  ON AMERICA

  My Family

  It’s the opening line in Anna Karenina, isn’t it, the one about happy families being the same and unhappy ones being unhappy in their own way? Because it’s Tolstoy, and he presumably knew about such things, I’ll let it pass, though it occurs to me that what families are in their own way is weird. Perhaps happy or unhappy but decidedly weird. As kids, we assume that our family is the standard, for that’s what we see. After all, we end up talking the way they do, having their social and fiscal ideas, dealing with stress or drink or the law in pretty much the same way they do, so it’s but a little jump to thinking that such behavior is normal, no matter how peculiar that behavior might be.

  We observe strangeness in other people and in their families. God knows I saw a fair bit of it when I was a kid. But perhaps because we have so little experience of the world, we don’t register it as weirdness at the time and don’t come to that assessment until we’re older. At the time, we’re so busy learning and seeing and looking around that we have little time for judgment or discernment: we just take it in.

  It is only later that we come to judge or at least take a critical stance, or maybe what we do is turn an objective eye on what appeared normal and, in the process, see that it might not have been so.

  In this context, I think of Dickens and all those bizarre minor characters who fill his books: the old man who tosses sofa cushions at his wife to get her attention; Wemmick and his aged parent; Uriah Heep. When we first read these books, the characters seem unreal, almost as though they’d been dropped down from another planet. It is not until we reread the books as adults that we realize how filled the world is with Uriah Heeps and how much soft aggression exists in many marriages. So when we look back on our families from the vantage point of adulthood, perhaps of age, we begin to see that some of the things they did might have seemed more than a little strange.

  Part of the cast during my childhood were my mother’s three aunts, who lived together in a twelve-room house. Aunt Trace was a widow, though I never learned more about her husband than that he had been a pharmacist (this created endless room for speculation as to the cause of his death); Aunt Gert and Aunt Mad had never married. These three women lived in perfect harmony in the house, and by the time I was old enough to visit them they no longer worked if, in fact, they ever had.

  They played cards, specifically bridge. Their days were filled with cards, as were their evenings. They had a circle of women friends with whom they played. Because they went to church on Sunday, they did not play bridge on Sunday, not unless the church had a bridge evening. And Gert cheated. My mother delighted in telling me about this, since Gert was a pillar of the church. Over the years, she had developed a language of dithering and hesitation that was as clear a signal to her partner as if she had laid her cards faceup on the table. “Oh, I think I’ll just risk one heart.” “I wonder if I dare raise that bid to two clubs?” Since I never played bridge, I can’t decode these messages; it was enough for us to know she cheated. The stakes were perhaps, after four hours of play, a dollar. But she cheated. She also gave thousands of dollars to charity every year and was wonderfully generous with every member of a large, and generally thankless, family, but cheat she would.

  She also had a “colored” friend, quite a rarity in New Jersey in the 1950s, but Gert had a black woman who was part of her bridge circle. None of the other women wanted her as their partner, so Gert always chose her. The woman played badly and so Gert would always lose when they played together, but bring her she would and play with her she did. And have her to Christmas dinner, by God.

  I remember little things about Gert. She always put the flowers in the refrigerator at night so they would last longer; she telephoned and complained to the parents
of any child who stepped on her grass; she always wore a hat when leaving the house. Toward the end of her life, after Mad and Trace had died, she was left alone in the twelve-room house and could not be persuaded to sell it and move to a smaller place. Not until, that is, the race riots in Newark, when Gert grew convinced that ravening armies of angry blacks would storm up the main road from the ghetto and encircle and destroy her house, though it was a safe ten miles from the ghetto. So she sold it and moved into a pokey little six-room apartment. She died soon thereafter and left, in the linen closet, the sheets and towels that had been part of her dowry. Beautiful, hand-embroidered linen and all unused. I still have six table napkins.

  Uncle Joe the plumber was another one. All Joe ever wanted to be was a farmer, but his father insisted that he learn a trade, and so Joe became a plumber, and a good one, though I know he didn’t much like being a plumber. The only thing he had to say on the subject, when I asked him what he had to know to be a plumber, was, “Payday’s Friday and shit don’t flow uphill.” In his middle years, he moved away from the city to a farm in northern New Jersey, where he abandoned pipes and sinks and rode his tractor all day, planting and harvesting and happy as a mudlark. In front of his house he built a small wooden stand, where he sold fresh flowers and vegetables. He spent his evenings poring over seed catalogues and, it would appear, his investment folder, for he died a multimillionaire.

  My brother, three years older than I, also inherited my mother’s general chipper stance toward the world as well as the almost total lack of ambition that has characterized our lives. And he has, to a remarkable degree, what the Italians would call the ability to arrangiarsi, to find a solution, to find a way to get around a problem, land on his feet.

  Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the story of the dirt. His last job, before he retired, was as manager of an apartment complex of about a hundred apartments. His job was to administer contracts and rent payment as well as to see that the buildings were sufficiently well cared for. At a certain point, the owners decided to convert the buildings to gas heat, and that meant the old, oil-burning system had to be removed, as well as the storage tank that lay under one of the parking lots.

  The demolition men came and took out the furnace, then dug up the tank and removed it. Whereupon arrived the inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency, declaring that, because the tank had sprung a leak some time in the past and spilled oil into the earth, the dirt that had been piled up around it was both contaminated and sequestered and could not be removed save by paying a special haulage company to come and remove it.

  My brother, long a resident of the town, knew a bit more about the connection between the inspectors and the haulage company than the average citizen, this because of his hunting buddies, some of whom belonged to an organization that—hmm, how to express this delicately?—worked at some variance to the law. (We’re in New Jersey, Italians, the building trade . . . get it?) And so he had some suspicions about the actual level of contamination in the dirt.

  As fortune would have it, he was about to leave for two weeks of vacation, and so, the night before he left, he called one of his hunting pals, who just happened to be in the business of supplying landfill to various building projects and who just happened to be a member of that same organization. My brother explained that he was going to be away for some time and that his friend, whose name he never disclosed to me, was free to come in at any time during the next two weeks and pick up the dirt that surrounded the excavated hole where the tank had been. The only caveat was that the trucks had to be unmarked and had to come at night.

  Two weeks later, tanned and fit, he and his wife returned from vacation, and as he stepped out of the taxi that had brought them from the airport, he looked about, like a good custodian, at the buildings and grounds that were in his care.

  Shocked by what he saw, he slapped his hand to his forehead and exclaimed, “My God, they’ve stolen my dirt,” whereupon he went inside and called the police to report the theft.

  The same was to be found on my father’s side of the family, though legend rather than witnesses provides the suggestion of strangeness. There was his uncle Raoul, bilingual in Spanish and English, who always answered the phone in heavily accented English and, when he found himself asked for, responded that he was the butler but would go and inquire “if Meester Leon was libre.” It was Raoul, as well, who once got in a taxi in front of his New York hotel and had himself taken to Boston.

  My father’s uncle Bill lived in a vast, sprawling mansion about fifty miles north of New York City and was often disappearing for short or long periods of time to the various banana republics of South America and Central America. The official story was that he was in the coffee trade, but then why all those other stories about meeting various heads of state while surrounded by machine gun–toting guards?

  Uncle Bill was married to the painted woman of the family, Aunt Florence, who suffered the dual handicap of being not only divorced but Jewish, married into a Spanish-Irish Catholic family. Further, they had lived together, “in sin” as one said then, before their union was sanctioned by the state, the clergy wanting no part of them. In the face of these impediments, we were all more than willing to overlook the fact that she bore a frightening resemblance to a horse and was, to boot, significantly less intelligent than one. Her mantra, which she repeated openly whenever we visited, was that a woman must pretend to be stupid so that a man would marry her. My brother and I never saw evidence that she was pretending.

  And yes, this comes to me now that I think about them all: Henry. Henry was their Japanese cook, a sort of unseen phantom who was said to be in the kitchen, though none of us ever laid eyes on him. It is part of family lore that Henry had written in his will that he left his life savings to the United States. Because he died without either a will or a living relative he got his wish.

  My father’s brother, my uncle, a man of stunning handsomeness in the photos we still have of him, was an officer in the merchant marine. He was rumored, though neither my brother nor I can recall the source of this rumor, to have been a lover of Isadora Duncan, though surely I was too young to know who she was when I first heard this story.

  Family memories, family mysteries.

  Tomato Empire

  Americans of my generation sucked in the Protestant work ethic with our mother’s milk. Like it or not, the idea that one was meant to study and work was one of the building blocks of our minds. Most of us had as little choice about going to university as we did about going to elementary school: that was what one did, and then one sailed off and got a job. Those of us who enjoyed studying simply stayed on board a little longer and let the ship carry us on to our doctoral studies, waving to our classmates as they rowed away to jobs as teachers or lawyers or engineers.

  A person could pass years, decades, in graduate school: apply for another grant, accept a job as a professor’s assistant. And the cruise went on.

  At a certain point, however, the economic consequences of our absence from the real job market became evident. Fellowships and teaching assistantships allowed for genteel poverty, granola, and Birkenstocks but they did not permit trips to the opera, much less to Italy.

  The problem was best stated by Dickens, who has Wilkins Micawber opine that “when inflow exceeds outflow, the result is happiness; when outflow exceeds inflow, the result is misery.” Thus it sometimes behooved me during the far too many years I remained in graduate school to see that inflow exceeded outflow and thus spare myself the misery of a year in which I did not spend a few months in Italy.

  In the seventies, I lived in Massachusetts, completing my studies at the university. My parents lived in New Jersey, only a few hours away. I visited them occasionally. My mother, a passionate gardener, always planted a few dozen tomato plants; I have no idea why, since it is impossible for two people to consume the produce of more than a few tomato plants. The
garden was located at the back of the property but distantly visible from the major road on which our house was located.

  Newton’s apple fell one afternoon when I was visiting, working in the garden with my mother. A woman approached and asked if she could buy some of my mother’s tomatoes. Nothing better than homegrown, is there? My mother refused, filled the woman’s arms with tomatoes, and sent her away happy. Then, turning to me, my mother said, laughing, “I could probably make a fortune if I sold them instead of giving them away.”

  Sold them instead of giving them away? Sold them instead of giving them away? Sold them instead of giving them away? Could Karl Marx have asked a better question?

  It was then legal, in the state of New Jersey, to sell produce from your garden, so long as you both grew and sold it on your own land. A few miles from my parents’ home, an old friend of theirs had a commercial farm, where the public could go and pick baskets of tomatoes or peaches and then pay by the basket. Is not the key to commercial enterprise the difference between wholesale and retail prices?

  The next morning, I arrived at Mr. Vreeland’s farm at seven and picked six or seven large baskets of tomatoes and took them back to my parents’ home. I took a collapsible table, covered it with an old oilcloth, and placed upon it a few small wicker baskets, each containing about a kilo of tomatoes. I set it up at the side of the road and turned my attention to the reading I had to prepare for the coming semester: if memory serves, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf.

  By two that afternoon Grendel and his mother were dead and I’d read and taken notes on the first part of Beowulf. And sold all of the tomatoes. The next morning, I doubled the number of baskets I filled, which meant—ah, capitalism flows like ichor in our veins—I doubled my earnings.