Enzo came into the kitchen and poured two short glasses of their father’s homemade wine, which was almost as purple and rich and rough as the musto from which it was made every fall, and which had the sweet odour of decaying roses. He slid a glass of wine across the table to Nicolo, sat down, pushed a long strand of hair behind his ear, and pulled one of the course descriptions toward him. He began to read through them with his characteristic focus, his hands curled around his brow to concentrate his gaze. Nicolo drew a sip from his glass, circulated the wine around his tongue and into the roof of his mouth, and then swallowed. The wine had a familial taste, warm and sweet and strong. He had already divided the courses into two piles, in and out, and was working on reducing the most likely pile to one or two. Enzo reached across and ran through the subjects that Nicolo had eliminated. After a few minutes, he pulled out a piece of paper and pushed it at Nicolo.
“This one,” he said, and stabbed with his forefinger at the title of the subject he had selected. “Psychology 101.” He pushed a strand of hair back from his face.
“Why psychology?” asked Nicolo. “I was thinking of a first-year accounting course or something about investing.”
“You work with people. You’ll be better at it if you understand how your clients think. What motivates them. How to recognize and get them beyond avoidance tactics. Let’s face it. People don’t like to exercise. We’re lazy really, most of us; we want to take shortcuts. That’s why they can sell so much crap on TV, those diet pills and miracle exercise machines and drinks that are supposed to speed up your metabolism. People are going to be paying you to make them do something they actually don’t want to have to do. The reason they hire you is to help them to succeed despite themselves. You’re going to need to know what kinds of strategies you can use, not to manipulate them exactly, that won’t work for long, but to manoeuvre them into working harder so they can get what they want. People often unconsciously sabotage their own good intentions. I’m sure you see it all the time. Learning how people think and what will make them work will help you understand why people do the things they do. Anyway, once you get rich you can always hire an accountant or an investment adviser.”
Nonna came from the living room into the kitchen, silent as a shadow on her slippered feet. She must have fallen asleep in her armchair in front of the television; her short, dove-coloured hair fell in disarray, like ruffled feathers, and one side of her face had the white and crumpled appearance of unironed linen. She turned her head and blinked slowly at her two grandsons as they sat with their heads together at the table, conferring in low tones over their glasses, and then she shook her head severely. She turned in her thumb and the two middle fingers of her right hand and waggled the first and smallest fingers like two horns at Nicolo and Enzo.
“Alla cira si vidi lu core,” she said in an admonitory tone. On the face the heart may be seen. It must have seemed to her, perhaps from their complicit expressions, that they were plotting misdeeds, as they had sometimes done as boys, and she thus warned away any possible harm their discussions might engender. Nonna switched on the stovetop, which burst alight with a brief hiss, and a red-orange flame with a halo of blue, into the still air of the kitchen. She filled the kettle with water, placed the kettle on the burner, and turned and shook her head emphatically at the brothers, tsking under her breath. Then she made her way back to her chair in the living room. The heat from the gas flame made the drops of water on the outside of the kettle spit and burst. The kettle groaned and then slowly began to exhale a moistly rising sigh.
“Okay,” said Nicolo, who was in that instant suffused with a strong sense of the absolute and fundamental unknowability of each one of us to anyone else, even our closest family members. He shrugged and let his weight fall against the back of his chair. “Psychology. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. It’s somewhere to start anyway.”
“Come on up to my room,” said Enzo. He stood and gathered one or two of the brochures in his hand. “We can register you online right now, before the class fills up.”
They left their empty glasses sitting on the table. Over the years they had learned to take care to leave or create enough work for both their mother and their nonna to feel sufficiently needed within the small household. Deliberate divisions of labour had been created in the household, watertight compartments of work. Their mother cooked their meals and planted and kept up the garden. Their nonna washed and ironed the clothes. Paola made bread, sauce, pizza and pasta. Nonna made their beds and dusted and tidied their rooms. When Nonna took sheets from the line after washing and prepared them to be put away in the cupboard in the hall, she always folded them first widthwise, and once when she saw him watching her, she explained to Nicolo that she did this to divert any lurking bad spirits away from the household, for the dead lie in their final linens lengthwise and it would be unwise to invite misfortune into the house through the carelessness of seeming to prepare for a death.
Everyone in the family was used to the odd, totemic piles of stray objects that Nonna created as she worked. Because she had a limited frame of reference, Nonna was sometimes unable to separate the important from what could be jettisoned. A shirt button, a business card, a flyer, the plastic cap from a ballpoint pen, a single cufflink, three linked paperclips and an insole might be gathered together and left neatly folded inside a handkerchief in the top drawer of the dresser. She would leave on the windowsill the cap from a can of shaving cream in which she had placed a golf tee, several bank withdrawal receipts, the stub of a pencil, a tie clip and the empty transparent holder for a roll of tape. The boys understood that these symbols of their lives outside the houses were mysterious to their grandmother. They cleared away these collections periodically, and this gave Nonna the opportunity to create new inexplicable groupings from different materials—bottle caps, twist ties, mateless socks, cheque books, nail clippers, ticket stubs, coins, the minute metal clips that had held a new pair of socks together at heel and toe, toothpicks, wrapped mints from restaurant counters, tokens, stamps, maps, pens, envelopes and tags—all manner of unrelated items bound together only by their peculiar, quotidian gravity, which Nonna had no means to measure or to weigh.
Within three days of signing up for Introduction to Psychology on Enzo’s desktop computer, Nicolo received, via Enzo’s Hotmail account, an e-mail with an attachment that confirmed his registration and listed details about the location, dates and times for the course. He was pleased to see that the classes included three lectures on motivation and emotion, and another on stress, coping and avoiding. He was beginning to see Enzo’s point, that an understanding of all of these might be useful to him in his work at the gym. He asked Enzo to pick up the textbook at the university bookstore downtown, and Nicolo began to work his way through the first chapters at the kitchen table in the evenings after work.
Nicolo had learned that his new clients came in an assortment, ranging from least to most difficult, although each presented an individual challenge. The O’Briens were the least demanding and seemed to be the easiest to please. Clarissa always deferred to Alden, allowing him to set the pace. Alden’s progress was slow because he didn’t like to be moved on to something new until he was certain that he had completely mastered whatever Nicolo had been teaching them. On the first day they came, Nicolo started them in one of the smaller weight rooms, one that held the simplest machines, the kind that were adjusted by pressing buttons that increased or decreased the level of resistance by adjusting the air pressure in shiny cylinders. Nicolo had intended to rotate the couple in their one-hour session through several of these machines, then move on to spend a few minutes on free weights, then the bicycles or treadmills or stair climbers for some aerobic exercise, and then finally over to the mats to stretch, but the entire first hour was spent showing the O’Briens (really only Alden; Clarissa caught on quickly and then Nicolo could see that, although she remained close beside them, her attention drifted) all of the possible positions and levels of difficul
ty of two of the leg-press machines. During the second session, they focused on an extended biceps curl, except for the last ten minutes, which Nicolo insisted they spend stretching on the mats. Alden was taken with a back stretch that Nicolo had adapted from a yoga position called the cobra, and they spent, it felt to Nicolo, five minutes on every one of Alden’s seven cervical and twelve thoracic bones. The hour ran late, but Alden took evident pleasure in the machines and in the stretching, and Clarissa seemed to be happy enough that Alden was content, and so the time passed easily and without conflict.
Monica Faye was next in difficulty. Monica’s conversation during the hours she worked with Nicolo was almost exclusively about her ex-husband and his imminent remarriage.
“I dumped him like a sack of hammers,” she told Nicolo during their first workout session together. She was lying on her back on a blue mat, her hands locked behind her head, straining her way through the second of eight sets of crunches. “I dumped him like a sack of hammers three times in a row and each time I turned around and took him back again like an idiot, once for each of the other girlfriends, at least the ones I know about. First, little Carley with the curly hair. Then weird Wendi. She was tall and bony and disjointed, sort of like Olive Oyl in the old Popeye cartoons, you know? Then that ridiculous Suzanne, not a brain in her head. I’m sure there must have been—urrrgh—others, because that’s just the kind of guy Gordo is. None of them worked out very well for him—well, they wouldn’t, would they?—and he always seemed so sweet and contrite and untended and rumpled and unhealthy and tragic afterward. So then, what happened was, the fourth time, I dumped him for good. I’ve always been a fan of Brigitte Bardot—you know the French actress? against furs and seals?—and what she said was, Always leave first; be the one to decide. But that was the one and only time that he finally didn’t come begging like a puppy for me to take him back. That one was Hayley. I said, yes, please God, when he asked me for a divorce. I wish her—unngh—well. He hasn’t a clue, though. Not the remotest, foggiest notion of a clue. He’s used to having me around to come running back to, to reassure him and pat him and fix everything and sweep up the wreckage. She’s a cute little thing, only twenty-four and sweet and not too bright. She really can’t have any kind of idea what she’s getting into husband-wise, although I tried one time to tell her. They felt they had to—ahhhhh—invite me because they want the kids to come and because I’ve been such a good sport about it all. Well, why wouldn’t I be, it’s not as though I want him back. Lexie’s going to be the—urgh—flower girl. Well, she’s maybe a little old at twelve and with her growth spurt she’s not exactly what you might call dainty—how am I going to find low-heeled pink shoes that aren’t like boats in a woman’s size eight?—but she’s never—huhh—been one before, so here’s the big chance, eh? That’s got to be eighty at least. I don’t know how you can listen and keep count at the same time.”
Monica wanted results faster than they seemed to be coming. She weighed herself at the end of each session on the scale against the wall outside of the women’s change room.
“I need to be no more than a hundred and thirty pounds, one thirty-four or -five at the absolute, outside, top, top max,” she said, joggling the weights on the scales to see if she could get the right-hand end of the lever to move a fraction lower. Nicolo was impressed, as he always was, by her clarity of purpose and the specificity of her goals, but he was beginning to believe that their relationship might provide him with an opportunity if not an obligation to suggest more personal, longer term goals. He began to try to derail Monica when she set off on a description of her ex-husband and his impending marriage, and to encourage her to talk about her children or her plans.
“Do you think I should take that cooking class that Sue recommended?” Monica asked Nicolo at the end of one session. “Or there’s this new diet. Have you heard about it? All steak and cream and butter, but no carbohydrates. It doesn’t make any sense at all, but I’ve heard that people swear the weight melts away like magic. Carbs are just like poison, that’s the theory. If you stop eating bread and pasta and white flour, your body will start to eat into your own fat reserves. The cave people didn’t eat carbs and we shouldn’t be eating them either. Or something like that. Maybe it was the Neanderthals. Were they the ones that lived in caves? In the south of France? And made those paintings? Anyway, you’re supposed to get really bad breath as your body starts to feed on itself, but apparently that only lasts for a while, and then your body adjusts.”
“Try the cooking class,” Nicolo replied. This was not difficult advice for him to give. Sue’s class couldn’t hurt, and it might give Monica something to think about, a distraction from her weight and her ex-husband. He thought sometimes of what he understood medical students were taught about their chosen profession: Above all, do no harm.
Nicolo thought that Enzo, who had already completed four years at the university and half of his first year of law school, might have some advice on how to deal with Monica. Beginning at age nine or ten, around the time that the boys had first begun to differentiate themselves from one another and to take on more distinctive personalities, Enzo had become a reliable source of information and then adviser to his older brothers. He absorbed facts effortlessly, quickly discerned patterns and trends, was swift to acquire new terminology and was shrewd at deducing motives. Enzo was modest about his abilities around his brothers, however; Nicolo had the keenest moral sense, he said, and older Enzo was the most tenacious. Nicolo described Monica to Enzo one weekend afternoon when they were turning the compost pile in the backyard.
“Ah,” said Enzo. He grunted and pushed his heavy fork through a frozen surface layer of earth. They were in the deepest corner of the yard, using a pair of ancient, rusting, wood-handled pitchforks that, although they seemed venerable enough to have been brought from the old country, in fact had been bought with the house, abandoned by the previous owner and found leaning together like a long-married couple, along with their near relatives, a shovel, a hoe and an edger, all of similar vintage, in a dim, cobwebbed corner of the garage. A steamy emanation rose up from the softly stewing underlayers of leaves, grass and kitchen peelings as they were turned, and a rich, mushroomy odour filled the air.
“Neurotic,” Enzo said as he lifted his pitchfork with its load of peels and eggshells and coffee grounds, and he explained the meaning of the term to Nicolo, who had heard it before but had not understood how to match it to a set of human behaviour.
“There are greater and lesser degrees of neurotics,” said Enzo, stopping and shaking his head so that a hank of his hair fell forward across his brow and into his eyes. He pushed it away with the back of his hand and then rested for a moment and leaned into the handle of his fork. “This sounds like a milder case. But still to be taken seriously. Neurotics are interesting people, and can be great friends when life is going well, but when things go badly you will find that they tend to try to assign blame. Generally they are loyal to the people they trust. Better overall to stay on their good sides.”
Up a notch from Monica in concern were the brother and sister, Phil and Bella Fell, although so far it was difficult for Nicolo to explain to Enzo why he felt this way. They were almost entirely passive, trailing Nicolo from machines to weights to bikes to mats without questioning his intentions or his plan. Neither of them ever made suggestions or demands. They stood together, side by side, slowly blinking, heads tipped, fingers clenched into loose fists, during Nicolo’s explanations, and they followed his instructions precisely, if mechanically. Their form was good for beginners, but Nicolo found that they lost heart quickly. They tended to turn to him after only ten or fifteen reps, in a single motion, as if with one thought, and their compressed expressions indicated, clearly, What next? They had no small talk, even between themselves, and so Nicolo laboured alone under the effort of providing conversation, which he had come to learn moved the hour sessions with his clients along more efficiently—an encouraging word or two to smooth
out the transitions between stations, a few distracting comments during any task that was strenuous or repetitious, a joke or bit of gym news toward the end. The Fells almost never responded to his comments about sports, the weather or front-page news. Nicolo had once had his hearing tested in a thickly soundproofed booth, a small dark room in which the walls and roof were covered with what looked like hundreds of black Styrofoam egg trays. Inside, with the door tightly closed, his words fell heavily from his mouth without any reverberation or echo from the surrounding walls. Speaking to the Fells was like that. His sentences were flattened by their blank impenetrability. His words didn’t seem to reach any farther than the outer edge of his own lips.
In addition, the Fells seemed incapable of feeling encouraged or discouraged.
“Is everything okay?” he would ask. Or: “Do you think you can do that?” Or: “Shall we move over to the free weights?”
“Yes-s,” they would reply almost in unison, words almost overlapping, at different inharmonious pitches, their heads tilted. There was seldom any request for more information; they followed his directions exactly as he set them out, without question, deviation or improvisation. They were always impeccably neat—they didn’t even seem to sweat—but Nicolo had learned to turn his head to the side when they spoke. They both had breath that reminded him of the compost heap in the backyard, a warm, acrid and repellent smell like eggs that had turned.
And then there was Patrick Alexander, who was becoming a steadily increasing challenge. Nicolo had not yet fixed on any system to manage Patrick or to predict what he would do next. Patrick’s faults varied wildly from day to day. If it were just that he was late, or had forgotten his gear, Nicolo could have planned around these shortcomings. But Patrick sometimes didn’t arrive at all, or he came on the wrong day, or he came an hour early, or on time and on the right date but without his gear, or at the right time and with the right equipment but completely distracted and unable to follow Nicolo’s instructions. Patrick seldom demonstrated any memory or understanding of what had been thoroughly shown and reviewed and reinforced during the prior sessions. Patrick was always charming and apologetic throughout. He motioned toward the heavens. He struck his forehead with the flat of his hand. He smacked himself a glancing whack at the back of his beautiful haircut. He wrung his hands as if they were damp towels. He made deeply chiselled expressions of dismay. He bowed. He cringed dramatically. He explained, exclaimed, declaimed and apologized. He all but wept. He was eminently forgivable, every time, and Nicolo did forgive him, even grew fond of him. He made room for him in his schedule if possible when he appeared, and filled in his absences with other work. No harm of any duration was ever done, and Patrick paid for all of his sessions even if he missed them. He wafted his golden credit card in front of whoever was on cash at the front desk, crying “Pay poor Nicolo! Double! Triple! Whatever it takes!” But Nicolo was beginning to dread the sessions with Patrick. He wasn’t running out of patience—he seemed to have been born with an infinite store—but his time with Patrick left him feeling exhausted and with a mounting sense that he was failing to provide whatever it was that Patrick really wanted from him.
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