What Paola can’t know, but what Massimo intuits, is that Enzo is happier with Mima than he predicted. Mima had surprised him. Stole his breath. Cemented his love. After their wedding, after his early morning denials of her, after she had, before the priest and a few moments following Enzo’s hesitant, unsteady “I do,” responded in the clearest, most assured of tones “I do” (to the amusement of the congregation, none of whom older than twelve were in any doubt as to how things stood), at the reception, hiked up the skirts of her drop-waisted wedding dress, released her hair from the constraints of its pins and the too-tight, pearly tiara that pinched and threatened to give her a headache, downed a glass of her Zio Giovanni’s wine, led Enzo out onto the floor and danced with the passion of a flamenco dancer. Her smouldering assurance carried over into the hotel suite where she made love to him against the wall of the bedroom, in a cloud of steam against the cold tiles of the shower, in a surging sea of bubbles in the bathtub to the sound of eight roaring jets of hot water. There was no part of her body that she withheld from him—her mouth, her belly, her hair, her feet, the warm, scented bounty of her breasts—all the while making it seem as if she were an emanation, a creation of Enzo’s most fervent wishes and fantasies, like a genie released from a bottle that he had accidentally brushed, until Enzo ached with confusion and pleasure and astonishment.
Younger Enzo, although he is only five years junior to older Enzo, because he has gone to university and has travelled a bit—east to a debating competition at Dalhousie at which his team came in second nationwide, west on a high school ski trip to Lake Louise (where, although he had never skied before, he deftly mastered the relatively simple art of falling to one side while controlling the pull of gravity with bent knees, a trick that might, he thought at the time, be something like arguing in court, using the weight of precedent to pull the decision to one’s side of the argument)—because of these experiences, and because of his hopes and plans, younger Enzo existed in a different world, one in which one-night or only slightly longer relationships were possible, even desirable, and unexpected babies are not, in which virtually all hazards were banished through atheism, chemistry, prophylaxes, diligence and a cost-benefit analysis that included the danger of jeopardizing a chance at a clerkship at the Supreme Court of Canada or, failing that, at least the Court of Appeal. Nicolo’s younger brother had never yet had a sexual adventure that wasn’t planned and strategically negotiated by both parties. He was satisfied with this; this is not the part of his life in which he has ever wanted to take any risks. He had a woman friend, Nandita Dasgupta, in her final year of the accountancy program at the university, who slept with him once or twice a month, in order, as each said to the other, not to fall completely out of practice, much like now and again running the motor of a car that is not otherwise taken out of the garage. So efficient are they at this task that Nandita seldom takes the time to undo her long braid, although when she does so, Enzo is weakened, like the inverse of Samson in the Bible story, destabilized, disarmed inside its glossily swishing tent, which blurs the light and smells of soap and tea and licorice.
Nicolo has had a somewhat more complicated sexual life than either of his brothers so far, although not, perhaps, as fraught as his client Patrick’s, which is chaotic at best.
Patrick made his living in a random and occasionally frantic catch-as-catch-can manner as a reviewer, editor, script development consultant, assistant assistant producer and the like, being generally useful in a vaguely creative/organizational way, the kind of person likely to be brought into a flagging project after a very late-night meeting near the end of which someone would toss the stub of a cigarette into the scummy, pearly pool at the bottom of a cardboard coffee cup and suggest in an anxious but not unhopeful tone that perhaps Patrick might be asked to lend a hand—did anyone know what he was doing these days, didn’t everyone agree that Patrick, if asked, might have a solution for that portion of the project that had gone off the rails?
Patrick has been smitten, bitten hard by love, and Patrick impassioned is a hundred times worse than Patrick between his frequent, intensely felt, ephemeral affairs. He arrives these days to his sessions with Nicolo with alarming punctuality, but, once attired and presented to the equipment, he moons and droops and swoons.
“Ah, Nicolo,” Patrick sighs. “I can’t tell you how I feel. It’s impossible. No. Yes. I do have the word. Exalted. Exalted. That’s what it is. Exaltation.” He turns away from the rack of free weights and he grasps Nicolo’s shoulders fervently. “Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt like this?” His eyes burn raw and elemental as embers. “I ache!” he declaims. “It hurts all over.” He pedals on the elliptical bicycle like a maniac for five or ten minutes, and then drapes himself over the bars, his hands and head dangling, moaning.
“What am I going to do?” he asks, shaking his head, addressing the floor. “I love him far more than he loves me. It is hopeless. He’ll see that I am old and boring and ugly, and give me up. I like to stay in. Timothy likes to go out. He likes dance parties. I like dinner parties. He’s been dragging me out to clubs and restaurants at all hours and I have been trying and trying to keep up with him. I’m not a kid any more. I’m exhausted. My head hurts. My joints ache. I have a hangover every morning. I can’t keep it up. What can I do? I am addicted. I am addled. I am lost and bewildered and doomed. Advice! I need advice!”
Something is called for, it seems. Anything.
“My grandmother always says ‘Chi nasce tondo non può morir quadrato,’” Nicolo told him. “It’s a saying, from the south of Italy where my family comes from. What it means is that something that is born a circle can’t die a square.”
Patrick gazed up at Nicolo damply. It appeared something more was expected. Nicolo took a breath and thought hard.
“I think what it’s saying is that we all have our own natures,” he said. “And I think it is trying to tell us that it is important to accept what we are, instead of trying to be someone different. When we are teenagers, we like to be with people like ourselves. But, when we are older, we learn to understand and even start to like the fact that we are all different. A circle stops looking for other circles. It might find a square more interesting. Even if that doesn’t happen, the circle can’t try to become a square. It isn’t in its nature.”
Patrick shook his head slowly. “What’s that again? Ki nashay tondo non…?”
“Chi nasce tondo non può morir quadrato.”
Patrick nodded slowly. “Yes, you might have something there. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Let’s go and do some stretching,” Nicolo suggested.
Patrick disentangled himself from the bicycle and, his long arms hanging freely from his shoulders, followed Nicolo meekly through the crowded gym to the mats.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nicolo arrived ten minutes early for his first psychology class. The availability of university courses in the distant northern suburb where Nicolo’s family lived was a phenomenon of recent years. Over the past decade, in a bid for new sources of revenue, although not without misgivings, the city universities had begun to cast off some of their former aura of exclusivity and to engage in experiments at delivering “modules” of learning, like educational spores, beyond the borders of their historic campuses, first in carefully selected downtown locations, and then, confronted with growing competition from community colleges and institutions, many of which were offering all kinds of alternatives to students—courses by correspondence, classes on the Internet, movable classrooms in portable trailers—in parts of the city that some of the university faculty had never visited, except, perhaps, when they drove along one of the highways on their way to their northern cottages. Nicolo walked over from his parents’ house, allowing himself extra time in case he was waylaid by a neighbour and also in order to see whether the pleasure of walking to school was recoverable after a gap of several years—it was, but with some self-consciousness. He felt overgrown and not entirely sur
e of himself, returning as an adult to a formal classroom with its neat rows of desks. He was carrying his textbook and a new silver-grey laptop, which was thinner and lighter than the textbook, in a sports bag slung over his shoulder.
“Make your notes directly onto your laptop,” Enzo had advised him. “Highlight the key concepts as you go. You can sort and search through them more easily when you’re getting ready for the exam. And scout out the kind of person you might want to have in your study group. The good ones get taken early. A good study group is practically guaranteed to add four or five percentages to your final mark.”
Nicolo was the second student to arrive. Already in the room was a young woman with a broad back and solid arms and a thicket of short bristly hair cut into a geometric wedge above her neck. She had selected one of the tables at the front of the room and was busy arranging in front of her a stack of new notebooks, a plaid-printed plastic pencil case with a zipper, her textbook, a one-litre bottle of water, a metal box of geometry instruments and a small clear-plastic package of tissues. Nicolo chose a desk at the back of the room.
Over the next ten minutes, a dozen other students arrived, most of them younger than Nicolo. Only one or two were clearly older, including a man who looked as if he might be retired—he wore tan-coloured slacks, a loosely buttoned red cardigan, and a beneficent expression that he bestowed on everyone as he entered. He was the only other student who had come equipped with a laptop, a matte black rectangle that he held in his outstretched hands with obvious pride. At the last minute, a woman of approximately Nicolo’s own age, with long flat brown hair, darting eyes and slightly shaking hands, slid into the chair next to him. She was emptyhanded. She leaned toward him.
“Do you have any paper I can borrow?” she asked.
Her voice was low and grainy and pleasing; it reminded Nicolo of a toy instrument from his kindergarten class, two ridged sticks that were played by being dragged rhythmically against each other. Nicolo tore a few sheets from the pad he had brought with him and slid them over to her.
“Thanks,” she said. “Carla.”
“Nicolo.”
“Got a spare pen?”
Nicolo took one of his extras from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.
At exactly seven-thirty, a thin man dressed in professorial clothes—khaki trousers, beige shirt, tweedy jacket, unpolished loafers—strode through the door and up to the front of the class. He kneaded his hands together and cracked his knuckles, then ran his fingers through the strands of ginger hair on his brow, lifting them a centimetre above the top of his head and then patting them back into place.
“Welcome,” he exhaled. Then, more strongly, “Welcome, all of you, to an adventure in higher learning.”
Nicolo glanced sideways at Carla. She met his gaze and shrugged.
“O-kaaay,” she said from the side of her mouth, her voice sandpapery. “Because we live out here, he thinks we’re a bunch of dummies.”
The thin man turned and began to write with a marker on the whiteboard that was fastened to the front wall. He spoke slowly, sounding out the syllables as he wrote.
“I am Pro…fess…or…Wern…er. Pronounced Vvverner, not Wwwerner. Professor Werner.” He turned back and looked somewhat challengingly at the class.
“Any questions? Good. Let’s get started then. You will need to read chapter one of our textbook, Introduction to Psychology: Voyages in Understanding, before our next class in one week’s time. What we’ll be doing today is laying the groundwork for some of the ideas and lessons in that chapter.”
Professor Werner turned and wrote CH 1 FOR NEXT WEEK and GROUNDWORK on the whiteboard. He underlined each word twice.
“Any questions? Good.”
“There’s a textbook?” Carla whispered.
“Yes.” Nicolo raised his book and tilted it to show her the front cover. “You can get it at the university bookstore.”
“Can I see it for a minute?”
Nicolo passed the book over to Carla and then trained his attention on Professor Werner.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” Carla muttered after another moment. She held up the book, and inclined her chin toward the front cover. “‘Chapell, Strang and Werner, eds.’ And you paid a hundred and ten dollars for it? Some kind of a racket they got going, eh?”
Nicolo lifted his shoulders and let them fall, recognizing the gesture as one that his father made frequently around the house, signalling a kind of resigned acceptance of the generally wicked and inexplicable ways of the world. Eh bene. Oh well. What can you do?
Professor Werner erased the words on the whiteboard and drew in their place a pyramid shape, which he then divided with lines into horizontal slices. He wrote underneath it: MAZLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS.
“What is our most basic need?” he asked.
No one in the class spoke.
“What could we absolutely not do without?” Professor Werner prompted.
“He thinks we’re a load of idiots,” Carla whispered. She put up her hand.
“Food and water,” she said.
“Very good,” said Professor Werner.
“Food and water. Unless you have both of these, you won’t last longer than a few days.” He wrote the words FOOD AND WATER in the lowest level of the pyramid, and then drew a circle around them.
“This is existence at its most basic. With food and water alone, you might be able to attain the barest minimum level of subsistence. You exist but you are not exactly living. What do you think comes next?” He rapped with his marker one level up on the pyramid.
“A place to live,” the woman in the front row suggested.
“Excellent.” Professor Werner wrote SHELTER and then drew a circle around the word.
“Shelter. Safety. Warmth. Protection from the elements and from animals. A cave or hut or tent or longhouse or igloo or hut. Add a safe place to store, preserve and prepare food and water and you are getting a bit more out of life. You have sustenance and you have security. Nothing to sneeze at, but still pretty minimal. Once these needs are met, what do we need next?”
“Family?” came a suggestion.
“Good,” Professor Werner encouraged. He wrote BELONGING on the pyramid, one step up. “A family or tribe or gang that accepts you or at least tolerates you. Some group to be a member of. Then what?” Four rungs remained blank above those that had now been labelled.
“Television.”
“Education.”
“Transportation?”
“Sex.”
“Beer.”
“Who said education?” Professor Werner held up a hand, palm forward, to stem the cascade of suggestions. “Education may be closest to what I am looking for in the next two categories. We all have a fundamental need to achieve—for self-esteem, to have a sense of self worth and to acquire and hone our skills and understanding.”
He wrote ESTEEM in the next slice of his pyramid, and KNOWLEDGE in the one above that.
“What about beauty?” he prompted. The class remained silent.
“What about art?” Professor Werner’s hand hovered in the upper third of the triangle.
“Art?” a woman repeated, turning the word into a suggestion.
“Yes, yes.” Professor Werner’s voice took on a cast of impatience. “Our need for art, for symmetry, for order.”
“Aesthetic,” Nicolo said quietly. Then more loudly. “Aesthetic needs.”
The truth is that he had seen the word when he was reviewing his textbook and had asked Enzo what it meant, and had paid attention to how Enzo pronounced it, and so he felt that the professor’s glance toward him, in which he could read a subtle but plainly recognizable upward reappraisal, was dubiously earned. Professor Werner wrote AESTHETIC NEEDS in the next level of the pyramid.
“And at the top?” Professor Werner asked. “What is it that we strive for, and yet so seldom achieve?”
His face took on an ambiguous expression, one in which Nicolo thought it might be possible t
o discern that even Professor Werner, with his textbook, his precisely calibrated clothes, his vaguely and possibly faux East Coast accent, his degrees and honours and classes and students, even Professor Werner may have yet to attain all that he longed for.
No one spoke and Professor Werner didn’t prompt them. Instead, after a long minute, he emitted a long slow breath and then reached forward and wrote in looping letters, a change from the block capitals he had used below this, in the peak of his triangle, the word Self-actualization.
“The need to be fulfilled,” he said. He spoke quietly, as if he were speaking to no one in particular. “The need to be integrated, to fully realize our inherent human potential. That is what makes it all worthwhile, this gathering of food, hunting and storing up of provisions, building or buying a house, raising a family, getting educated, making or hanging art on the wall. This is the goal. Self-actualization. Achieving the goal of becoming the fullest possible person we can be.” Most of the students nodded and bent to write Self-actualization in their notebooks or on their laptops.
At the end of the class, Nicolo packed his computer and book into his bag and nodded to Carla, whose untidy notes, he saw, filled less than a quarter of a page. Her handwriting varied in size, starting small and growing larger, and it sloped down the page. She nodded back and jammed the pages containing her notes into the pocket of her navy-blue peacoat.
“Thanks for the paper,” she said, and then twisted her mouth in a manner that suggested a wry self-awareness. “See you next week, I guess,” she added, and she reached and touched Nicolo’s jacket just above his wrist once, lightly. She was close enough for Nicolo to smell her scent—like bread and flowers. There was something in the set of her head and shoulders that made her seem brave.
Advice for Italian Boys Page 9