Advice for Italian Boys

by Anne Giardini

  “They’re ugly,” she shouted. “Why can’t we all admit they look like a mismatched pair of pug dogs? We might as well get that little fact right out on the table right now.” She slapped her open palms on the table. “It’s no use pussyfooting around it. They’re like Mutt and Jeff. Someone will just have to tell him. If he won’t use those infant models we found, you know, the ones with the gorgeous curly hair from Seattle, then someone will have to talk him into leaving that song out.”

  Patrick mentioned that he had been meaning to have a word.

  Meanwhile, the two Stevens were plugging a tangle of cables into the back of two computers and several matching electronic boxes at the far end of the table. “We’re ready. We’re ready,” one of them called out, and the other sprinted across the room and pushed two buttons on the far wall. One of these activated a mechanism that briskly closed the cream-coloured curtains. The metal cleats sewn to the top slid first, and then the rest followed, with a swish of the long, rich swaths of damask. The other button switched off the overhead lights. Patrick pulled a flying-saucer-shaped module across the table toward him and flicked a toggle that caused a coloured course of active light to beam from one of the black boxes onto a rippled screen formed by the closed curtains. Frankie could be seen on stage, a barrel-chested man in a stiff suit, wearing a high-necked shirt buttoned to the top and a wide, striped tie. An orchestra at his feet started up with a swell of violins and flutes. Frankie waited one beat, two, a third, and then opened his mouth into a perfect O and began to sing. No part of him moved aside from his lips and jaw. He was like a life-sized, wind-up automaton but one with a fabulous built-in sound system and hidden speakers. Occasionally he pressed an inward-turned fist to his chest and thumped himself there twice—a gesture meant to emulate passion. Once or twice he swivelled his hips. Otherwise he held his body immobile. Nicolo thought he might be able to see where the challenge lay: a paying audience would want to feel that they were in the presence of an actual breathing, living star, and not an over-mannered robot.

  Nicolo stayed for an hour and watched the group at work. He noticed how Patrick kept the discussion focused, worked the room for support of ideas that he considered valuable, and let other suggestions drift blamelessly away into the air. Patrick had a small black Palm Pilot that he used to send e-mails, and another mechanism, a silvery phone with a short antenna and multiple buttons, that he used to connect others in to the discussion or to convey instructions or leave messages. He kept page after page of notes in a small book and he reached every now and then to check or cross off a task that he viewed as completed. This was all a revelation to Nicolo, who had never considered the possibility that Patrick was capable of seriousness and that he might be good at the work that he did. When Patrick left for his massage, Nicolo walked with him to the hotel gym, and as they walked, Patrick gave Nicolo a description of Timothy—short, dark-haired, muscular, thinner than Nicolo, actually not unlike him overall but with round-lensed, wire-rimmed glasses—and the places he might be: the pool until eight o’clock when it closed, and after that, Sybarite’s Lounge most likely, or one of the other restaurants or clubs in the hotel.

  Nicolo found his room, which was a smaller version of the meeting room below, but with a bed the size of a tidy suburban garden plot instead of a conference table. He tested the various doors and switches as well as the vast mattress on which were layered not two but three sheets, the top two encasing a light, fleecy blanket the colour of wheat, and over that a white down comforter and then a silky, diamond-patterned pale gold bedspread. There were several doors in addition to the entrance; two pairs of doors opened to two closets and another hid the bathroom. The last door was dead-bolted, but seemed only to connect to an adjoining room. He read the labels on the short, round bottles on the marble counter in the bathroom. The contents each had a distinctive, glimmering colour: lime–mint mouthwash, rose–lavender soap, orange–oatmeal shampoo and lemon–sage conditioner. Bio-Seremic face cream (pale pearly blue) came in a miniature, corked test tube with a set of printed instructions pasted on the side. “Cleanse skin and then apply gently with balls of fingertips around areas that may be prone to lines prior to your habitual beauty routine,” it advised. In the top drawer of one of the two bedside tables was a Bible with limp vinyl covers. The book fell open in his hands when he pulled it out. Three twenty-dollar bills fluttered out from between pages 590 and 591 and landed at his feet. A previous reader had highlighted with a yellow marker a passage from the book of Matthew at the top of page 591. “When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.” Nicolo held the money in his hand, uncertain. The right thing might be to turn it in to the reception desk and let the hotel decide what to do with it. Or he could ask Patrick what he thought. Then he remembered what Zoe had said—“The best advice is not to take anyone’s advice.” He hesitated but put the money in his pocket.

  Nicolo ordered a burger and fries from a menu the size of a newspaper in one of the hotel’s sixteen restaurants, the first one he came across on the main floor, a brightly lit semicircle of tables under hanging stained-glass lamps several paces from the casino floor. Then he made his way through the entire complex, as methodically as he could, although it was a labyrinth of passages and rooms. He started at the pool, which was about to close, and then visited each of the restaurants and bars, passing several times through the vast, central casino. After an hour and a half, he sat down and drank a beer in the Silhouette Bar, at which the entertainment consisted of two women dancing, apparently naked, behind lighted screens that framed a bar at which the bartenders poured drinks with acrobatic panache, juggling glasses and bottles, and tossing olives and stir-sticks through the air. After that, Nicolo bought a roll of tokens from a cashier for ten dollars and used them to test a few of the slot machines on the periphery of the casino. All of his tokens had vanished within five minutes and Nicolo sat for a moment blinking in the machine’s flashing lights and jangling, mystified as to the appeal of this kind of activity. By eleven o’clock he could no longer shrug off a growing sense of the pointlessness of looking for a stranger in all of the hotel’s different zones, someone he would be unlikely to recognize even if he did come across him, and who might well have wandered away from the hotel in any event. He went up to his room, brushed his teeth and climbed between the cool sheets of the bed. He left his curtains open and for several minutes watched the cartwheeling lights that were reflected on the ceiling. If he dreamed, his dreams left no residue.

  On Sunday, Nicolo woke up early, sprawled across the enormous bed, surrounded by pillows and mounded blankets. He felt almost completely, but not uncomfortably, out of place. He turned on to his back and tried to work out how many nights he had spent somewhere other than his own bedroom in his parents’ house. No more than twenty-five, he thought, less than four weeks in aggregate, including camping trips with the Cubs and Scouts and visits to relatives.

  His appointment to meet Patrick at the gym wasn’t until ten o’clock, which was more than three hours away. He got out of bed, drank two glasses of cold water from the tap, had a blasting shower in the glass and marble enclosure in the bathroom, and shaved his cheeks and jaw by feel inside a lingering cloud of warm, dense steam. When he was ready he rode one of the polished, silvery elevators downstairs, and then hesitated in the almost-deserted lobby. Three women wearing short skirts and shiny tops wobbled in through the front doors and trailed across the lobby toward the elevators.

  Nicolo went outside and made his way through the hotel grounds out to the main street. For no reason other than to have something to do, he turned north and walked along a broad sidewalk, past the vast, sprinklered acreages of several other hotels as far as the second intersection, to a street marked Cathedral Way. He could see, a block and a half to his right, two large modernistic triangles that resolved themselves as he approached them into a tall, white steeple astride the shorter, wider blue equilateral of a sanctuary. A concrete and glass sign on the lawn
read, Archangel Gabriel Cathedral.

  The morning sun had by this time lightened the sky to a blank, lacy white, and the surface of the street and sidewalk had begun to shimmer as they were warmed. The inside of the sanctuary by contrast was dim and cool. The room was expansive and orderly, with chairs arranged in neat rows. A small altar at the front appeared humble under the massive overhead volume of vast, empty space. Nicolo felt at home, at ease inside this space, with its softened, scattered light filtered through tinted windows and its lazy currents of circulating air. He sat down on one of the chairs, in the closest approximation to his usual place at St. Francis—at the back, to the left of the entrance—and waited quietly, in what was closer to a dozing trance than to prayer, until the start of the 8 a.m. Mass. At the first strains of an unseen organ, he was pulled back to alertness. He was surprised to see that almost all of the seats around him had been taken. Could it be that gamblers came to pray for good luck, and, if so, were these the kind of prayers that were likely to be answered?

  The priest introduced himself as Father Godkewitsch. He was a very tall man, well over six feet, constructed of bones that seemed loosely jointed. He wore a white robe cinched with a cord at his waist. His sermon was on the eighth Psalm.

  When I consider Your heavens,

  the work of Your fingers,

  the moon and the stars,

  which You have set in place,

  what is man that You are mindful of him,

  the son of man that you care for him?

  You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour.

  You made him ruler over the works of Your hands; You put everything under his feet:

  all flocks and herds,

  and the beasts of the field,

  the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

  all that swim the paths of the seas.

  Father Godkewitsch read the Psalm through slowly, putting an oddly stressed emphasis on the nouns: “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars”—and he then lifted up his head and began to speak of his own father, whom he described as a simple farmer in the Midwest, a man who had tended the earth and livestock to little profit, and of his mother, who had ordered, cleaned and replenished a frugal childhood home. Nicolo didn’t follow the sermon closely. The reference at the start of the Psalm to the skies being the work of God’s fingers had snagged his attention. He recalled reproductions he had seen of the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that showed God as a muscular old man, with the pointing finger of an outstretched arm delivering the spark of life to a man. Adam, it must be. The Psalm reference seemed too solid and intentional to be intended as metaphor. Would God have the other parts as well, or was He disembodied fingers and hands? Nicolo considered where else in the Bible any part of God’s body was referred to. He knew there were many references to God speaking, which implied that He had a mouth, and to listening, which implied that He had ears. His feet were mentioned in the Psalm. Speech and listening implied a brain. Hands required arms. Feet clearly called for legs.

  The priest was talking now of Moses, an example of a person who had been elevated by God as referenced in the Psalm, and this reminded Nicolo of the very odd story about Moses in the book of Exodus, in which Moses, after speaking several times with an unseen God, asked for permission to see His face. God replied that Moses could not do so and live, but said that Moses would be permitted to conceal himself in a cleft in a rock, and as God passed by he would be permitted to see not God’s face but His back. A memory rose up, from years ago, when someone, one of his brothers or one of the other boys, had crowed at this story, “God mooned Moses!” and they had all picked it up for a week or two, in awe at the daringness of the boy who had started it. A fad had sprung up, he remembered now, of uttering as casually as possible, as an expletive or curse, the phrase “God’s Bum!” They had all been thrilled with themselves. Aside from that one episode, which passed after several months, Nicolo had never considered that God might have a form and parts decipherably human. A back seemed to Nicolo to absolutely require a torso, because what else could it be the back of ? There could not be a back without a front. Would the torso be complete lower down—that of a man or even possibly a woman?—or incomplete—some species of generic, undifferentiated figure? But if God were perfect, would He not be perfect in all of His parts? What would perfection require? And what would God, being unmarried, do with this part of Him? Neither urination nor anything else that humans do with these loose and amiable bits seemed possible. He shook his head, blinked, and glanced at the people sitting on the chairs beside him. There was no evidence that anyone else was contemplating the problem of God’s genitalia.

  He was grateful that the idea of God’s hands returned, displacing his more profane reflections. This time what came to mind was not the elegant image from the painting at the Vatican, but, as clear as any photograph, his father’s hands—short, broad, almost square from wrist to fingertip and from side to side, his father’s thick fingers holding the scissors over his customers’ bowed heads as lightly as the priest was now raising the host toward the soaring ceiling.

  Toward the end of the Mass, Nicolo placed the money that had fallen out of the hotel Bible into the collection plate when it was sent from hand to hand around the congregation. He felt as if a satisfactory transaction had been concluded. Maybe, he thought on his walk back to the hotel, this was what people meant when they said that a side effect of travelling was not only to see different things but to see things differently. Nicolo thought of his family, his work—the familiar things that rooted him in place—and of this trip and other risks and chances there were to take, both in the world and at home. It seemed to him that there was no contest between the two—home was best—but it might be possible to perceive it more fully coming back to it from another place.

  The workout room at the hotel proved to be another kind of cathedral. The lounge where Nicolo waited for Patrick had large windows on three sides that overlooked a garden, a green and white profusion of trees and flowers, a blue lap pool and half a dozen black tennis courts with the lines crisply delineated in white. He sat on one of two deep orange couches among layers of triangular pink and yellow cushions. Water trickled from several small backlit fountains made of round stones. The side tables were arranged with baskets of fruit, bottled water, and vases of flowers that gave off mingled sweet and musty scents.

  At ten-twenty, one of the attendants, a tall woman wearing a matching set of pale blue workout clothes, sleek low-hipped pants and a close-fitting, zippered top, and a white headband that held her long dark hair back from her brow, offered Nicolo a stemmed glass of fresh orange juice and a selection of crisp newspapers. He accepted the juice and two of the newspapers. The speakers over his head were emitting the latest Coldplay song. Just before eleven o’clock, Patrick arrived in his usual rush, but with less than his normal level of effervescence. He croaked his apologies.

  “We all worked until late, late, late, and then a few of us gave up and went out looking for Timothy. We looked everywhere but never found him.”

  Nicolo shrugged his shoulders to indicate that he hadn’t had any more luck. He rose and took Patrick by the shoulders and steered him toward the mats. Patrick flopped down on his back, did two straggling sit-ups, and then raised himself up on his elbows.

  “I gave up and went to sleep at two or three, and then in he wafted at ten this morning and folded into bed like a collapsing tent. He’d had a win on one of the machines—seven thousand dollars on a fifty-cent bet, if you can believe it. He’s always had more luck than he deserved. And so he and a few of his instant new friends made a tour of the bars. They hired a limo and kept it waiting wherever they stopped. Lots to drink, big tips, and the last thousand dollars coughed up for someone’s sob story, a dog at death’s door or something like that. He’s got nothing to show for it now but a big, fat headache and horrible pains in his stomach
.” Patrick leaned forward and peered at Nicolo. “Really, you know, when I really think about it, the way I really feel is, I was pissed that he didn’t tell me where he was going, and pissed that he didn’t take me with him, but I wouldn’t have liked it if I had gone, and I am more of a Cabernet Sauvignon kind of person than someone who could drink something made out of tequila and coconut and animal fats. So, what am I doing with him, really? Look how low love’s brought me.”

  The piped-in music ended and for some reason nothing came on to replace it. All that could be heard was the whirring and clicking of exercise machines and, in the distance, the lavatory-like sound of water falling from the unseen fountains.

  “I can’t tell you what to do. You know that,” Nicolo said.

  “Okay then, what would your grandmother have to say about it? She seems to have a maxim for everything.”

  “Well, it’s hard to know for sure, but what she might say is, ‘Falla cumu la voi, sepre è cucuzza’: Cook it any way you like, it’ll always be a pumpkin. He’s what he is. He’s not likely to change very much. So the question is, is this what you want?”

  Patrick let his elbows fall forward onto his raised knees. He rested his chin in his hands. “If I’m fed up with pumpkin,” he said, “do I still have to keep doing these stupid sit-ups? There really isn’t any point, is there? No one’s going to see my abs or care about them one way or another. No one.”