I sat down next to him. “You don’t have to be that way,” I said.
“I am very set in my ways.” His hand, I noticed, was on my thigh, following, even at this dark moment, its sly and particular agenda. I moved it away. The dog lifted her head, sniffed, and jumped barking onto the floor.
“I’ll call Mrs. Todd,” I said. “I’ll try to persuade her not to throw you off the board. But I can’t guarantee anything. Now I have to go to bed.”
Willoughby stood up. I handed him a Kleenex and he blew his nose. “I assure you,” he said at the door, “that when I threw your cat over the fence, he was unharmed,” and I realized that whether or not this was true, he believed it.
“Good night, Willoughby,” I said.
“Good night, Jeffrey.” And I watched him go out the door and head down the street. I was remembering how when I was digging the grave that afternoon, I’d kept repeating to myself over and over, “It’s just a cat, just an animal, with a small brain, a tail, fur.” Then I started thinking about the night my dog—spooked by thunder—bolted out the front door and ran. For three hours I’d driven through the neighborhood, calling her name, knocking on doors. Various sightings were reported in a direct line from Mrs. Friedrich’s house, to the Italian deli by the train station, to the laundromat; then the trail disappeared. Finally I went to bed, making sure her dog door was open for her, while outside the storm railed on, and my dog, lost somewhere in it, struggled to make her way home. And what a miracle it was when at four in the morning she jumped up onto my bed—filthy, shivering, covered with leaves and brambles. Like the dogs of legends, she had found her way back.
I thought I’d had my brush with death then. I thought from then on I might be spared.
It must have been at that moment—when I was digging the grave, remembering how nearly I’d lost my dog—that the thought of murder came to me, growing more vivid with each thwack of the shovel against the stony earth. Really, I was no better than Willoughby; I just hadn’t been alone so long.
“I am a pathetic and desperate man,” I said to myself—trying the words on for fit—and standing in the doorway, watched Willoughby stumble home, bereft in the starlight. All along the street, houses were dark, and inside each of those houses were people with cats and dogs, and stories to tell: the time Flossie fell four stories and broke a tooth; the time Rex disappeared for weeks, then showed up one afternoon on the back porch, licking his paw; the time Bubbles was mangled under the wheels of a car. They would tell you, if you asked them, how they had to put Darling to sleep; how Fifi went blind, then deaf, then one day just didn’t wake up; how Bosco could jump through a hoop; how Kelly swam under water; how Jimbo begged, how Millie spoke, how Sophie ate nothing but tuna fish. The night was brisk, and somewhere distantly a dog barked. My dog growled, then barked in response. The distant dog barked back. Their conversation, like mine and Willoughby’s, might, I knew, go on all night.
Here is my story: When I was young, my family lived in Cleveland, and we had a dog named Troubles. Next door was a dog named Chips, and sometimes in the afternoon, when Chips wandered into our yard, my sister would yell, “Troubles, Chips is here! Chips is here!” and Troubles would leap up from wherever she was sleeping and bound into the yard to see her friend. Then we moved away to California, and Troubles got old and cranky and seemed no longer to like other dogs. Chips was still in Cleveland, or dead; we didn’t know.
One day my sister had a friend over. They were going through the old photo albums from Cleveland, and my sister was telling stories. “All we had to do,” I heard her saying to her friend, “was yell, ‘Troubles, Chips is here! Chips is here!’ and then—” And before she could even finish the story Troubles had leapt into the room once more, barking and jumping and sniffing the air. Something had lasted, in spite of all the time that had passed and the changes she had weathered, the trip cross-country, and the kennel, and the cats. My sister put her hand to her mouth, and tears sprang in her eyes, and like the young enchantress desperate to reverse the powerful incantation she has just naively uttered, she cried out, “Troubles, stop! Stop! Stop!” but it did no good. Nothing would calm Troubles, and nothing would dissuade her, as she barked and jumped and whined and nosed for that miraculous dog who had crossed the years and miles to find her.
Roads to Rome
Fulvia’s house: old, swollen bricks, a buckling terra-cotta floor. A child could stand inside the fireplace. In the middle of the kitchen is an oval oak table, big enough to seat twenty, which Fulvia bought at an auction of retired theater-set furniture. For many years she’d noticed it on the stage of the Rome Opera, where perhaps the grandeur of the gestures put its massiveness in perspective; more than one of the guests has joked today that Fulvia’s house may not be such a far cry from all of that. “Anyway, I feel like a minor character in Puccini,” Giuliana told Marco, laughing, out on the patio. Below them lush hills spread out, and in the distance, in the plain, they could see the spa—Terme di Saturnia—where until recently Fulvia spent most of her days, lazing in the hot sulfurous waters.
It is a lukewarm, drizzly afternoon, late in spring. Outside Fulvia’s house rain beats at the metal roofs and hoods of the twenty or so cars parked in the moss-covered courtyard. “My family,” Fulvia jokes to the American from where she’s lying, half covered in a blanket, on the worn velvet sofa by the fireplace. “Look around you, try to figure it all out.” The American turns. Giuliana, Fulvia’s daughter, has just come in from the patio with Marco. He was her best friend when they were teenagers, and then when he was sixteen he and Fulvia became lovers and she swept him off to Paris. For possibly unrelated reasons Giuliana ran away to India, became a junkie, then settled in Singapore, where she is now married, the mother of three children Fulvia has never seen. Across the room is Rosa, Fulvia’s closest friend and Marco’s mother, and his sister, Alba. Grazia, Marco’s wife, sits at the huge oval table with Alberto, the man she lives with. The man Marco lives with is the American. His name is Nicholas. Laura has just emerged from the bathroom; she is the mother of a little boy, Daniele, whom Marco has raised as his own, even though, biologically, technically, he is not his son. Daniele is outside, playing with Alba’s little girl, whose name is also Rosa.
“I think I’ve got it clear who everyone is,” Nicholas says.
“Not for long,” jokes Fulvia, and coughs violently. “More are coming. More come every day. Everyone wants to say good-bye because I am the queen and I’m dying. The queen! It’s funny. It’s amazing, really. Look at all these people, they are rich, well-educated, they are the best Italy has to offer. And they are ruined, every single one of them. You can’t guess. If you knew the drugs they’ve put into their veins, the things they’ve seen and done—corrupt, utterly.” She smiles, as if this pleases her.
“What are you saying about me now, cara?” Marco asks, in English. “You think you can tell Nicky anything, no one will understand, but you forget that some of us have been living in New York a long time now.”
“Nothing you haven’t already heard from me,” Fulvia says, laughing, then breaks into a rasping, huge, dangerous smoker’s cough.
Fulvia seems determined to die the way she has lived all these years: with drama and pronouncements. Just this morning a famous movie star whose villa is down the road came to pay a visit. Much was made over the movie star, pasta with truffles was prepared for her, as well as a rabbit and a salad of wild greens. Afterwards, from her place on the couch, Fulvia told the movie star she ought really to take more care choosing her films.
“And wasn’t that just like Fulvia,” Rosa says, after the movie star has left. She is drying dishes and speaking—ostensibly—to her daughter Alba, though Fulvia is within full hearing range. “Does it matter that poor Marina couldn’t get a part in a decent film if her life depended on it? Does it matter that she is about to be divorced and must take pills to sleep?” She shakes her head. “The creature deserves our pity, not Fulvia’s meanness.”
�
�You’re too sentimental, Rosa!” Fulvia calls from the living room. “The woman is richer than the pope. As for those American films she’s been in lately, she’d be wiser to make nothing than that kind of trippa.”
“Fulvia, you haven’t even seen Marina’s latest films,” Rosa says. “Not that that ever stopped you from passing judgment.” (Fulvia, for most of her life, has been a kind of all-purpose cultural critic for a famous Communist newspaper.)
“I saw one of Marina’s films,” says Giuliana. “She was a mafiosa whose daughter decided to leave the family. It was dubbed in Chinese, so it was hard for me to understand.”
“Probably better than the original. And you’re telling me to waste my money on garbage like that?” Fulvia laughs hoarsely. “Bring me a cigarette, carissimo,” she calls to Nicholas, who waits for someone to object, then, when no one does, fetches the ever-present box of Rothmans from the table.
“You’re jealous, that’s all,” Rosa is saying. “You would have liked to be a movie star too.”
“Oh, Rosa, shut up! You’re the one who’s jealous. You always have been, since we were girls.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I’m prettier,” Fulvia says.
“Ah, I see.”
“Because people care about me so, and want to visit me, and no one likes you.”
“Yes, it’s true,” Rosa says. “I’m an ugly duckling. What is her name, Cinderella? Every summer Fulvia invites half of Rome to this house, and who washes all the dishes? Who cooks the pasta?”
“You’ve always been the housewifely type,” Fulvia says. “Unlike you, I’m glamorous. Like that American soldier from the waterfall called me, during the war. La Glamorosa.”
“Marina told me something about that English lord down the road,” Giuliana says, coming into the room. “She says he likes to make love to women while wearing rubber boots inside of which he’s put live canaries. He bounces on the balls of his feet and feels the crunch—”
“Giuliana, that is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Rosa says.
“No, it’s true,” Giuliana says. “Marina went there for lunch last week, and there’d been a party the night before. When she walked in, there were ten pairs of boots lined up and the floor was covered with feathers.”
“Bah!” Rosa says. “Ridicolo.”
“I don’t know why you can’t believe it,” says Grazia. “Stranger things have happened, and within the walls of this house.”
“The only people more twisted than the rich Italians around here,” Fulvia says, “are the rich English.”
“Marina is a sick woman,” Rosa says.
“I wonder if that’s where Dario got it from,” says Laura.
“What?” Grazia asks.
“ ‘La Glamorosa.’ ”
Fulvia waves her cigarette in annoyance. “It was my mistake to tell Dario too many stories when he was young.”
Laura, looking distressed, says, “I’m sorry, Fulvia, I didn’t mean to mention all that.”
“You think just because I’m dying I’ve become sentimental? I’m not sentimental.” She blows out smoke dramatically. “No, ‘bored’ is a better word to describe my feelings about Dario these days. Bored with his myth. He was a naughty boy, and I loved him, but I am as bored with him as I am with Marina’s movies.”
“I saw Dario do Marina once,” Alba pipes in. “It was marvelous, he looked just like her.”
“Fulvia,” says Rosa, “you are not really so callous.”
Fulvia extinguishes her cigarette in an empty bottle of cough syrup. “I at least have no delusions. I say the truth. If people don’t like it, they can leave my house.”
“Excuse me,” Marco says, and walks out of the room, onto the balcony. Everyone watches him.
“Well, well, well,” Grazia says, after a few seconds.
“Who is Dario?” Nicholas asks.
Rosa, who is drying her hands on a dish towel, stops suddenly.
“I have to use the toilet,” Fulvia announces, rather grandly.
“Speaking of Dario?” Laura asks. Grazia suppresses a laugh.
“Very funny,” Fulvia says. “Rosa, can you get over here and help me? There’s not much time.”
“Yes, yes,” Rosa says wearily. “Giuliana?”
“I’m coming.”
Even though she can barely walk, Fulvia refuses a wheelchair. She says she prefers being carried around, “like a queen.” “Careful! Careful!” she scolds Giuliana as the two women pick Fulvia up from the sofa. “Don’t be a clumsy girl.”
“A mother of three, and she still calls me a clumsy girl.”
“When you start supporting yourself, then I’ll call you a clumsy woman,” Fulvia says as Rosa closes the bathroom door behind them.
“La Glamorosa,” Alba is saying. “That must have been part of his act too. Like when he did Marina Albieri.”
“La Glamorosa!” says Alberto, Grazia’s boyfriend, who up until this point has been busily engaged in cleaning his pipe. He grabs a tablecloth from a pile on the cabinet, drapes it over his shoulder, and starts singing.
“That’s a Patty Pravo song,” Laura says. “Did Dario do it? My Brazilian husband was so in love with her in 1968.”
“You have a Brazilian husband?” Nicholas asks.
“Perhaps, caro. Unless he’s dead. I haven’t heard a word from him since 1972, nor do I care to.”
Though Nicholas has been living with Marco in New York for just under a year now—Marco is employed by a large international drug company; Nicholas works at a bookstore—this is the first time they’ve traveled to Italy together. Of course, Nicholas was nervous about meeting Marco’s large, strangely shaped, and strange-sounding family—fearful that they wouldn’t like him, that they’d find him boring, bourgeois, or parochial. Fulvia especially. Everything Marco told Nicholas about Fulvia scared him. Marco had grown up with Fulvia and her children, and when he was sixteen and she was fifty, she’d taken him as her lover. It didn’t matter that Marco was the son of her best friend, Rosa, or that she’d changed his diapers; what she wanted, he said, Fulvia took. They lived together in Fulvia’s apartment in Paris for just over a year—the only year in their lives that Fulvia and Rosa didn’t speak, and don’t speak, about still. (That was considered the major calamity, the split between Fulvia and Rosa.) In those days Fulvia liked Marco to make love to her while holding her wrists together behind her back, and once he did this so tightly her wrists turned blue and started to bleed. Being a boy, he began, almost immediately, to weep, but Fulvia managed to calm him, wrap her wrists in gauze, and get by herself to the hospital, where she had to do quite a bit of talking to convince the doctor that what he was treating was not, as it appeared, a suicide attempt. Of course, the truth sounded so improbable that finally the doctor believed her.
It was Fulvia who told Marco he was gay. Announced it to him, in fact, quite casually, at a restaurant.
“And how do you know that?” a flustered Marco had asked her. (He was just sixteen, and easily unnerved.)
“A woman knows these things about a man,” Fulvia said. “Anyway, am I right?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m right,” Fulvia said. And she was. “But don’t worry over it, amore. It’s your nature. It’s good. Just start sleeping with other boys and don’t feel guilty.”
Marco was nothing if not obedient. He went off to find a boy, and found many. Eventually, for reasons mysterious to everyone except the two of them, he married Grazia, who was not thirty but twenty years older than he was. They lived together for a few years. Then Marco moved to New York with Laura, whose son he’d adopted, and Grazia moved to Milan with Alberto. Fulvia took as a new lover the doctor who’d treated her wounds and was eager to try out that sexual position her fondness for which had brought her to his hospital in the first place. His name was Caino, and he spent his summers in Capri, with his wife.
Almost instantly after Marco went off to find boys, Rosa an
d Fulvia became friends again, which was lucky, since summer was coming, and everyone was in an uproar about what would happen with the house if Rosa and Fulvia were fighting. Later, Grazia insisted Fulvia had timed it that way. An affair was an affair, but the summer house—that was a different matter.
Technically, it’s Fulvia’s house. She inherited it from her parents, who died in the war—they were both Resistance fighters—and since their youth, she and Rosa and all their husbands and children have shared it. When Fulvia dies, it will become Rosa’s property—“the least I deserve,” Rosa joked, after the pronouncement was made. “After all, Fulvia, have you once planted a seed or painted a wall or boiled a pot of water? I was the casalinga, summer after summer. It should have been mine years ago.”
“Don’t forget who found the furniture.”
“Don’t forget who dusted it.”
“Puttana.”
“Don’t call me a puttana,” Rosa said. “I’ve only had two husbands.” And Fulvia laughed. “Come here,” she called to Nicholas. She cleared a space on the sofa in the living room, the sofa from which she conducted the business of the house, then slapped the space like a baby’s bottom, shouting, “Sit! Sit!” Nicholas sat. “Now tell me, are you having a good time here? Are you enjoying your new Italian relatives?”
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