The Art Lover

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “I will tell you something,” I said.

  “What, you can’t get pregnant either?”

  I didn’t laugh, didn’t smile. Then I started to tell her, slowly at first. It wasn’t easy to talk about. I’d never told a soul, not the librarian who had befriended me and first showed me the great books of classical art; not the antiques dealer who had given me my first job; not any of the coaches who’d been annoyed by my tendency to dress and bathe away from the other boys; not Gerhard or any other work colleague or friend. Only Doctor Schroeder had known, and my mother and I had left his office before I was subjected to his questions or procedures.

  I told her about how I hadn’t noticed at first, as a boy; about how my mother had helped me cover it up; about how it had embarrassed and later enraged my father. I explained about the summer campouts and group hikes I had missed, as well as the youth organizations I had failed to join, and the impact that had made on my life in a day when military preparedness and group affiliation and the appearance of cooperation were everything. Even now that the problem was no longer visible or tangible, it had left a stain on my life.

  Maybe it was my fault for building it up, for leaning closer and closer, for lowering my voice at the awkward moments. Our foreheads were nearly touching. “I don’t have it anymore. But I did, as small a thing as it was, and that’s the story.”

  Her brow furrowed as she listened, trying to understand.

  “But what is it—what was it—exactly?”

  “A mark.”

  “But what kind of mark?”

  I opened my shirt and let her see the long, puckered scar across my ribs.

  “But is that it? Or was it there before?” She ran a delicate finger along the jagged, salmon-colored line.

  “The scar came after. It was much smaller.”

  “But what was it?”

  When I told her, she pulled away. She threw her hands to her face. She buried her eyes. It was a reaction that made my heart race because I had visualized it so often before—the revulsion and judgment of a stranger. She couldn’t help it; she was trying to hide it and squelch it. It took me a moment to realize she was convulsing, not with disgust, but with laughter.

  “That’s all?” she said, just beginning to catch her breath. “It probably looked like a mole. That’s really all?”

  My face blazed.

  “I’m so sorry.” She reached for my shirt, my chest—and missed, because I had scooted back and was leaning as far away from her as I could lean without falling off the bed. “No, I shouldn’t have laughed. But don’t you realize how common that is?”

  When I didn’t answer, she reached for me again, hand on my knee. “My goodness—hundreds of people have an extra nipple, I’m guessing. Thousands of people. I knew a girl with the same oddity. I knew a boy with six toes. I had a cat with six toes. I’m sure extra nipples are just as common. Liebling, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to embarrass you. Wait—don’t go.”

  But I was only going as far as the stool. I didn’t want to be touched, or laughed at, or condescended to, or sympathized with; I didn’t even want to hear the word she had said twice already, the name for the extra thing I once had. I had in fact already learned, in just the last few years, that my own birth defect—the visible part, anyway, because there always would be the question about what lurked inside, what other cellular strangeness or hereditary weakness existed—was minor and common.

  “As common,” I said, continuing my thought in midstream, “as being an imbecile. Or an incestuary. Or a gypsy. Or a Jew. Or infertile.” I was clutching the bottom of the stool just to keep my hands occupied. I was afraid of my own hands. “Yes, I am well aware that it is common.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was a mistake to tell you.”

  “I’m very sorry. But Ernesto—”

  “Ernst. I’m not Italian. Call me Ernst.”

  “But what happened after? Why is there a scar?”

  “Another time.”

  “Never mind,” she said, swinging her legs over so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed. She touched her lips to mine, waiting for me to respond, which I couldn’t help doing—which I did and kept doing, until she needed a breath. She let her robe fall open and she whispered into my neck: “Never mind.”

  We were experts at starting again, newly coined experts at seizing the moment, but perhaps that was the natural outcome of burying someone. There should be something good that comes from it.

  My hands were inside her robe, on either side of her waist at first, holding fast to this first rung on a ladder that stretched farther than my mind dared picture all at once. I moved my hand, and she pressed closer. I followed her curves, surveying everything quickly, anticipating many subsequent explorations, adoring and memorizing her.

  When my poorly shaved cheek rubbed against her skin, just above the line of her camisole, she murmured, “You missed a rough spot there,” and when I pulled away, she pulled me back. “I didn’t ask you to stop.”

  A moment later, she broke away to whisper, “Tell me what you wrote on the postcard.”

  “Ich bin verliebt.”

  “So soon?”

  “Ich liebe dich.”

  “Again.”

  “Ti amo.”

  “You’ve been consulting your dictionary.”

  “That one was easy.”

  “But I don’t believe it,” she said. It was a game, but one she didn’t mind playing. It was a game she had played with someone else who sounded like me, maybe even looked like me. What was the harm in that? At least that was her view.

  I rolled onto my back, taking her with me, and then changed my mind. Now I was on top, she underneath, and perhaps I was pressing too fiercely. She flinched, and I thought I’d reached a limit, done something wrong or moved too fast. But it was only the sound she had heard. She froze, listening—there it was, the soft, swift scratching. She cursed under her breath, pulling away from me.

  Tugging her robe closed, she hurried to the door and slipped through it, hand low to the floor, pushing away the would-be intruder, Tartufa. In a minute she was back.

  “Couldn’t we have ignored her?”

  “She would have kept it up all night. It’s because I let her sleep in here sometimes. She would have started barking, until Cosimo came and found her, and found us.”

  “You scared her off?”

  “I put her in the back of the truck and pulled down the door.” Rosina laughed at this, at the desperation of it.

  “Won’t she still bark?”

  We listened together, and there was the sound—a single muffled bark, a long pause, then another testing bark. But it was very faint.

  “That’s all right,” she said, pulling me closer, resuming what we’d started, but more gently now. She reached to unfasten my belt. “Let me help you.”

  “I’ll get to that.”

  More gently, more slowly, nothing wasted or forgotten. But it was like a phonograph slowing down—not just slower, but changing pitch. The new sound was one of uncertainty, with—here, the truly unfortunate thing—canine accompaniment.

  There was nothing fluid in this. Nothing elegant or well practiced. I tried harder, but harder was not better. Like a man drowning, I was only making things worse with my struggles, losing track of the woman beneath my weight—not just a woman, but Rosina—losing track of what had excited me, of all that she possessed when I had first seen her, not only physical beauty, but lack of shame. And all the while, I was still thinking of that dog, pushing its paws up against the door, scrabbling to get in.

  “I heard something.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Maybe someone . . . maybe Cosimo . . .”

  “We’re alone.” Then, joking: “There are no ghosts.”

  When I stiffened, she apologized. “I shouldn’t have said that. Kiss me.” Küss mich.

  But if I was afraid of any ghost, it wasn’t Enzo’s.

  Something was off. The i
nterruption, the distant barking, the time pressure, my own recall of her love for someone else, the question of what would come next, the argument we’d been having before which had returned to prick me, a thorn ignored but not forgotten. Something had hollowed out the moment. My hand paused too long, and she noticed, too. She pulled away slightly, though without closing her robe, so that she was sitting on the bed, half reclining, her body in full view.

  Her beauty was undeniable. I was not any less drawn to her.

  “I’m worried about the dog,” I said, because that was the easiest part to explain.

  “Still?”

  When I didn’t answer, she began to pull her robe closed again.

  “Please don’t. I want to look at you.”

  And though she complied, my own body betrayed me. My own vitality had ebbed, my own self-consciousness had returned, and yet the adrenaline was still there, poisonously unspent. Of course she wouldn’t love me. Of course she wouldn’t have desired me if we had moved more slowly, if she had looked carefully and examined me more deeply and considered what she was doing.

  And the act itself—it might have been disappointing. While this—looking at Rosina, seeing and memorizing her every contour—was a pleasure that would sustain me for months and years to come. Just as Rosina herself had predicted: a memory for later, but a memory of before.

  The moment before had always been the best moment. The moment at the starting line, just before the struggle and before the striving, before the questionable euphoria. None of it used up. None of it tainted, in the way that everything is ultimately tainted—everything and everyone. The moment just before the discus flies, when nothing has happened, when no one has succeeded or failed, won or lost. When everything remains possible.

  That’s how it had been, once.

  That’s how it should have been, still.

  Looking at Rosina was a pleasure, even with the poison in my veins, and the anger. But with whom was I angry? Not her. Not Enzo. Not even Keller.

  “I’m just going to close my eyes,” she said, releasing my hand before she rolled away. Could she really fall that quickly from frantic passion into unguarded sleep? But perhaps more time had passed than I realized. Yet more time passed as I listened to the soft, uncertain sounds outside and stared at the bunched sheets, the sensual slope of her robe-draped hip. My shirt and belt were flung across the stool, but I was still wearing my unbuttoned trousers.

  “Stupid dog,” I whispered, though the bark was so irregular, so faint, it was bothering no one.

  “Will you turn down the lantern?”

  “Must I?”

  “You can stay,” she said sleepily. “But don’t forget the light.”

  “Rosina—” I began. But what more could I tell her? What more could I ask? And anyway, she was already nodding off. “I’ll move to the floor later. Cosimo will be looking for me just before dawn.”

  She didn’t care what Cosimo thought, so why did I say that? Perhaps to cloak my own lack of performance in chivalry. I had spared her and her reputation. She had not asked to be spared. And still, she gave off warmth, and forgiving softness, which I found in the dark and curled up next to, wishing that sleep itself were unnecessary.

  It’s hard to remember how deeply a child sleeps, how deeply and without care, but that’s how I had slept once. Deep enough not to hear arguments, or the radio, or a barking dog, or neighbors coming and going, slamming the doors, even on a hot summer night with the windows open. I used to fall asleep with the smell of dinner cabbage in my nose and not wake again until there were different smells—a combination of bleach and potatoes that meant my mother had been scrubbing floors and making breakfast well before the rest of us awoke. In between were hours of safety and ignorance, which I had nearly always slept through, without complaint.

  So my father’s hand was already on my shoulder when I awoke in the near dark. He was pushing hard, pinning me to the bed. I thought at first he was falling onto me, that he had consumed a few too many beers and had been ejected from my mother’s bed and had come to share mine—because that had happened two or three times, when I was even younger and his own belly wasn’t quite so stout, when it was possible, just barely, to share a narrow mattress.

  But this time I was sixteen years old, and though beer was on his breath, he wasn’t anywhere near losing consciousness. In fact, he was strong. He pushed so hard on my shoulder that I thought it might dislocate. I tried to squirm away and felt the pop of my pajama button flying off—a comical sound, a comical feeling, except for the ache at my collarbone and the knowledge that more was coming.

  A moment of suspense and paralysis, next, as my mind located itself, clearing away the cobwebs of sleep: here was the room where I’d never feel comfortable again, the room I had to myself, slightly bigger than Greta’s, though she was older; a room I would have shared with my brothers if my mother and father had ever had any more sons—but they didn’t. I was his only hope, and his greatest disappointment. Across the room was the wallpaper patterned with pale blue and silver leaves that glinted in even the faintest light, leaves that turned into slim fishes, swimming under the surface of night; fish that would break the surface for many nights to come because I would never sleep as soundly again.

  I felt the fabric of my opened nightshirt bunching oddly beneath my armpit, followed by the strange, hard, flat pinch of something cold pressing against my bare rib cage. The pinch became a burn, and when I recoiled and cried out, he sat down on my right leg, pinning me even harder to the mattress. When I twisted my head to look, I saw the knife in my father’s hand, and the shaky, inexact surgery he was attempting to do.

  It hurts and it doesn’t hurt, when it’s your own flesh and you’re seeing the damage done, at close range. The hurt comes later. The nausea and lightheadedness come first.

  I always told myself later that it was because he was my father, mein Vater, someone I must obey. But maybe I would have been paralyzed by anyone cutting into me unexpectedly like that, as something wet spread across one side of my rib cage, the warmth turning immediately cold, as if I’d had a nighttime accident.

  Over the years, I tried imagining a different response: reaching up with a hand to dislodge the knife. Reaching up with two hands to push him off. Turning hard on one side, bumping my hip to his, rolling out from underneath him, using my greater youth and clearer mind to escape. Obviously, I was at the peak of my own strength and health. Obviously, it should not have been hard to get the better of him. If I had only reacted quickly enough, before my body and my brain shut down. If I had worked it out ahead of time, somehow. I imagined these scenarios so many times I must have burned them into my consciousness. I know I became a less sound sleeper, tossing and turning, practicing the escapes all too late.

  But what was done was done. He wanted it gone, and it was gone—the flesh on my side, the singular anomaly and patches of previously unblemished skin above and below, cut to ribbons. The blade had stayed mostly flat to my rib cage. It hadn’t pierced between the bones into any organs. As it happened, I simply lost a lot of blood. Later, I would acquire an infection from the dirty knife and the infection would do more damage than the quick surgery itself, and the memory would do more damage than the infection.

  My mother came rushing into my room as soon as she heard my confused whimpers. He fled to the living room where he collapsed into a chair, the knife still in his hands and the rambling excuses ready on his lips, justifying himself with every trembling syllable: “Now, he can join any team, any squad, any platoon. No more hiding or covering up. It was for him I did it. For him!” Greta dressed and ran to a neighbor’s home to use a phone, to call and wake a doctor, who came and found me wide-eyed in my bed, clammy and confused, every bit of color run out of my face and into the sheets and onto the floor.

  “Will you come to the funeral?” I asked Gerhard seven years later.

  “Of course.”

  “You understand, I don’t love him.”

  �
�Shhh, mein Junge, you don’t need to say—”

  “I’m not sorry he’s gone.”

  “That’s all right. But he isn’t gone. You’ll see. Fathers never are.”

  CHAPTER 13

  I’d been caught off guard once, but never again. This time, I was ready. So when something bumped the foot of the bed, when the electric torch clicked on and swept across the bedclothes and into my eyes, I reacted quickly. My hand thrust sideways to the nightstand, where at home for months after the incident I had kept a heavy volume of Aesop’s Fables—innocent-looking enough, but a weapon of last resort. Discovering no book, not even the electric lamp with a railcar-shaped base that I’d had since my tenth birthday, I kicked out with one leg and heard an answering expulsion of breath that confirmed contact with a doughy stomach.

  But that didn’t send him away. It only made him angrier, and I felt his hands wrap around my leg, just above my knee, pulling me off the bed and onto the floor. I felt his hands around my waist, pulling me sideways, tackling me to the ground. The torch had gone flying, its illuminating arc catching a flash of silver before falling to the ground. I fell back, rolled, and got to my knees—reaching, reaching, in this room that was bigger than it should have been, bigger and unfamiliar, until the fragments of reality slid into place: a rough wood floor, not the polished planks of my childhood bedroom; the iron-looped handles of a clothes dresser, not my own; a smell that was not cabbage or bleach or beer, the pedestrian smells of my childhood home, but an aggressive and somehow familiar cologne. I evaded the grasping arms and crawled forward, one hand patting everything I could reach, finding the side of the dresser, the right angle with the wall of the barn.

  Rosina, meanwhile, was shouting in the dark and scuffling around on the other side of the bed—trying to get under it, I thought at first, until I saw the light come swinging again, the found torch held in her shaking hands. “There’s a knife! Ernesto, I saw a knife!”

  Another desperate reach and I had something long and thin in my hands: a stick, no, the trowel-like, steel-ended truffler’s vanghetto. When the hands grabbed my bare calf, nails pressing into the flesh behind my knee, pulling me back with surprising force, I turned toward the groping. There was no question. There was no confusion. I knew what I needed and wanted to do, and when I felt the hands on my waist again, I twisted and leaned back, raised the tool, then pushed it in a downward motion with every bit of energy inside me. The steel made contact, cut, and separated from the shaft, but I lifted and thrust again.