L'America

by Martha McPhee

  "You should have kissed him," Sylvia said later in their room. "He's famous." Beth had been thinking the same thing. Then she thought they were acting like silly eighteen-year-olds. They were silly eighteen-year-olds, desperate to understand passion, delighted by the attention of men, thrilled to discover the alluring power of sex. They had both had boyfriends, nothing serious though, no one who kept them up nights wondering.

  "But we're in Barcelona," Beth said, wanting to be serious and not silly. "City of architecture." She thought of the Gaudi buildings—Casa Battlló, La Sagrada Familia, Casa Milà—and she wanted to see their weird surrealistic contours, colors, shapes, dimensions, like a cartoon city. She put her head back on the pillow. She was tired. She didn't feel like crying anymore. That had passed quickly as the desire always did.

  "Let's be silly just for tonight," Sylvia said.

  "Let's get him to take us out to dinner," Beth said, sitting up suddenly. They both realized they were starving and that it had been a long time since they had had anything proper to eat. They liked that about traveling though. You lost weight.

  "Good idea. But then you'll definitely have to kiss him, you know."

  "Do you think that's all I'll have to do?"

  "He'd probably like it if you"—she made an obscene gesture.

  "Think so?" Beth stood up and looked in the mirror. The little room was small, windowless, and dark. The walls were thin. You could hear everything, but the girls didn't notice because they were drunk. Beth let her shirt drop off her shoulders and she looked at Sylvia in a coy alluring way, thinking as she did about Jacob liking her for her body, and of the power of sex. She wanted Carlos Alberto, soccer star she had never heard of (but whom she would discover before too long was indeed very famous), world champion of the world, to want her for her lovely body.

  "A kitten," Sylvia said. "One hundred percent sex kitten. We should get a great dinner for that body."

  Beth inched her skirt all the way up her thigh and then jumped up and down on the bed and started laughing uncontrollably; on some level she liked the idea of using her body to buy Sylvia dinner and without quite realizing it Beth wanted to see how far she could push a situation and still get out unscathed.

  "They were Carmelite nuns," Sylvia said, trying on a sudden seriousness that made everything quiet, even their racing heads. In the new quiet the muffled sound of Spanish music floated to them from another room.

  "What are you talking about?'

  "The nuns on the train. You know a group of them were slaughtered at the end of the French Revolution—guillotined for being enemies of the people. Poulenc wrote an opera about them. I heard it at the Metropolitan Opera House with my mother." Beth imagined them, Sylvia's mother in sturdy white walking shoes, carrying a pocketbook, trudging through New York City arm in arm with her daughter, a little scared by the bad things that could happen there, her coiffed hair protected by a scarf.

  "Quit being serious," Beth said. "You're scaring me. Shut off your brain. We're talking about my body now."

  Carlos Alberto, Brazilian soccer star, bought them dinner, and then he kissed Beth and she kissed him, in the street beneath the brothel. He was big and strong and the kiss was long and wet and full and a little like he was trying to eat her. Beth felt tiny as his arms wrapped around her, pulling her into his hairy chest. Then he held her away from him and looked her in the eye and told her that she was beautiful, the most tender thing he had ever put hands on. She thought about the little boy hit by all the metal of his red Ferrari. They both smelled of smoke and, of course, all that wine—more even at dinner. Cars zipped past on the streets. People bumped against them accidentally—two lovers in the night beneath a streetlamp. (Or was Beth mistaken for a prostitute?) He asked her to come to his room.

  "I'll come," she said, and then she tried to slip away, but he wouldn't let her. He kissed her again, almost as insurance. This time he kissed her softly as if his lips, his kiss, were serving to open her up to him. She was opening. He traced the edges of her ears with his fingertips. She could feel sensation shoot through her like ecstatic currents ricocheting this way and that, all the way to her toes. She had never made love before.

  "We're leaving," Sylvia said, bursting onto the street with much clamor. She stood before Beth and Carlos with both backpacks, one draped over each shoulder. Carlos scooped Beth possessively closer to him. But the spell was broken and all Beth could think was thank goodness. She smiled an enormous smile and looked at her friend. "Bea's waiting for us. She's passed her exams and she wants us to come travel with her."

  "You called her?" Beth asked, surprised. I thought you hated her, she wanted to say.

  "I called her and she's waiting." A train schedule flopped in Sylvia's hand. She wore black capris and delicate shoes that looked like ballet slippers. The pants and shoes belonged to Beth and had been hand-me-downs from Beatrice.

  With many apologies they disappeared, leaving Carlos standing alone, illuminated by the streetlight at the hotel's entrance.

  Later on the train to Milan, "It was a brothel," Sylvia said. "I realized when I paid."

  "And to think he would have gotten it for free when I could have charged him," Beth said.

  "Would you have fucked him?"

  "Watch your language, young lady."

  "I knew I needed to save you. I didn't want you paying for my dinner with your body." It all made sense to Beth now, Sylvia's arrival, deus ex machina-like, with her new plan.

  "Isn't there something about brothels and Barcelona? Something famous?" Sylvia asked.

  "Picasso," Beth said. "Yes. Something about brothels and Barcelona and Picasso. All my Gaudis, we didn't see a one."

  Later, Beth asked, "Are we even now?"

  "Nope," Sylvia smiled.

  Before all this, before the train divided in the nun-filled Spanish night, there was another chance in Breton's series, a chance which could have been, as well or in addition to or purely and simply, that hand of Lachesis. The other chance, or rather the first, was Beatrice Nuova. It was only by accident that Beth met Beatrice (a literal accident), and had she never met Beatrice, she would never have gone to Città or to Greece and she would never have met Cesare. And had she never met him, she would not have become herself.

  Beth enjoyed looking, from the perspective of time, at the sequence of events that lead to the unfolding of a life. Not just her own life but any life, any story in which something grand (or at least big) happens because of something seemingly inconsequential.

  Her daughter, Valeria (born in 1997, fifteen years after Beth's European journey with Sylvia), would have a penchant for this, too. Valeria obsessively traced the path of her mother's life—Beth's love affair with Cesare; her marriage to Valeria's father; her death. For example, on September 10, 2001, Beth had an appointment with a very rich bond trader named Bear who intended to loan her money for a new restaurant that she wanted to open. He had been a silent partner in her other restaurants (Como and Matera) and had always had private ambitions to be a chef and restaurateur. He lived vicariously through Beth and intended therefore to bankroll the new one—Preveena, a foray into Indian cuisine inspired by and named after her half sister's mother. Bear's daughter, a playmate of Valeria's, got sick, and this delayed the family's return from vacation in France by one day. The meeting was rescheduled for the eleventh—the morning instead of the afternoon because his afternoon was filled already with a house-hunting expedition in East Hampton (he'd planned to get there by helicopter) with his wife.

  Valeria would look nothing like her mother: she had dark hair instead of blond, big brown eyes set wide apart in a perfectly round face, and she was a good four inches taller. Indeed, she looked more like Claire, her grandmother, than Beth. But if Valeria looked carefully at her face she would be able to distinguish attributes there that were unequivocally Beth's—her large forehead, the perfect shell-like curl to her ears, the swirling pattern of her hair, which caused it to fall gracefully. These were her mothe
r's gifts to her and she would only see them as beautiful. What else belonged to her mother? Her father would say her determination, her will, her capacity to dream; her full cheeks, her smile, the very tone of her voice. Her father would remark, "I thought the tone of one's voice was learned." She loved the sound of her voice, loved to speak since she had been told her voice was her mother's.

  Valeria would remember a few things about her mother—her mother's long nails scratching her back, her arms, her legs. "Scratch," Valeria would command. She'd remember loving to be scratched gently by her mother before she fell asleep. She'd remember her mother watching her as she played make-believe by herself in her bedroom, her mother standing in the doorway for a good long time simply watching her child's imagination at play. In memory, a scrim of light would filter through the window to create a golden haze around the play world. Valeria would remember cooking with her mother, baking endless almond cakes, being reprimanded for eating too much of the batter. Valeria would hold on to these shreds, little seeds that grew into a mother, her mother. What else would Beth have given to Valeria, if? What if? What if? Maddening combination of words—all that promise and all that reality swirled together. What if the daughter of Bear, the rich bond trader (he had fiery red hair and a jolly smile), had not gotten sick (a slight fever as it turned out, not worth delaying a trip home, an appointment, a life)? What if?

  It would take Valeria a good fifteen years, the discovery of some letters (folded neatly in a box), the learning of Italian, several trips to Italy during high school (traveling with her father), and the meeting of Leonardo (Cesare's son) before she would fully understand the meaning of her name.

  Beth grew up at Claire in Pennsylvania, moving to New York in high school. In New York, Beth lived with her grandmother in an apartment overlooking the Hudson River on the Upper West Side. Her grandmother was a handsome woman with a strong jaw and pure white hair that had been white since her forties and that she kept in a bun on the crown of her head. She was active with the opera and gave tours of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Baroque rooms. Bernini was her specialty, though she was only an amateur. She liked to tell people that she was a novice so they would be all the more impressed by the vast expanse of her knowledge. She had been married to an engineer who died of cancer before Beth was born, leaving her with a nice monthly pension and social security, but she acted (and spent) as if she had a whole lot more. Her apartment was rent controlled and thus cost her very little, but it was grand and allowed her life to seem quite rich. She was an ambitious woman, especially for Beth.

  In Pennsylvania Beth lived with her widowed father at Claire, the commune he started with a loan from Claire's mother (the collateral for which was his life insurance policy). He came home from Turkey with Claire's body in a coffin and he cremated her and took her ashes to the apple orchard they had fallen in love with, and he spread the ashes there. And though he since had had his share of love affairs (Beth gained her half sister, Rada, whose mother, Preveena, was her father's lover for a few years), he never left Claire and vowed he never would. Beth went to school at the commune from fourth grade through eighth grade, but after her freshman year at the local high school her grandmother insisted that she go to private school in New York (a girl's school—uniforms and Latin and horseback riding in the park). It was a heady time. Friends taught her to befriend the doormen in her building so that she could sneak out late at night. ("Tip them, that's all," they wisely explained.) In the middle of the night, New York belonged to teenagers and bums. They went to the theater and to fancy restaurants. Sometimes they even went to clubs—Studio 54 and The Volt. They ate at all-night diners and slipped back into their homes just before dawn, their families unaware. The trick was to be bad in a sweet sort of way. Sometimes drugs were involved, pot and, on occasion, cocaine.

  In some ways Beth liked New York better than Claire. She liked the sophistication, the maturity, of her new friends, their curiosity about the world. After being in New York for only a short while, Beth found that Sylvia seemed so much younger than her New York friends. Eminently naive, Sylvia would chatter on about Friday night football games and Jacob's band, while the kids in New York engaged in serious subjects such as the new painting the Met just bought for millions of dollars (the most ever spent and was it worth it?). They played a game of who knew more, a game they didn't realize they were playing, but Beth could see them trying to outdo one another with their knowledge about everything, from art to clothes to countries to food. Though Beth dressed, when not in uniform, like she came from the country (jeans, Indian print skirts with work boots, bulky sweaters), and though the slick life of clubs and late nights and so much money was new to her, she could keep up with the conversation game. And she liked that because it was familiar and in some ways she had been playing it since her mother died and her father moved to Claire.

  But the person of concern here, for the purposes of this story, is Beatrice Nuova (Bay-a-tree-chay New-whoa-va), and nuova does mean "new." Bea came to Beth from Città in the summer of 1980 on a Rotary exchange and Beth loved her as much as she loved Sylvia if not (in some ways) more.

  The summer after Beth's first year of high school in New York City she and Bea did their first exchange—three weeks in each other's countries with Bea coming to America first. And just as New York had transformed Beth from a country girl to a city girl, Bea transformed Beth from an American girl to an Italian—or that was Bea's ambition, anyway. Bea with all her dark hair and her long nose and her voluptuous figure was a force with a will even greater than Beth's. She was bossy and demanding and loving and wanted Beth to learn Italian immediately. (Bea's English was perfect.) Beth became her pet, her project, and Beth was happy to comply. While Bea remained a spectator in America, happy to be the exotic dark creature from a foreign land of whom Beth's friends (especially those in Pennsylvania) did not know what to make, Beth adapted in Italy, eager to be transformed. With Bea, Beth wore her first string bikini, visited her first Mediterranean island (she had not imagined that water could be so many shades of blue, as if created simply so that it could be enjoyed by the human eye), learned her first foreign language (Italian) fluently. Bea began teaching it to her as they lay in the grass at the community pool in Orchard Hill, a town near Claire, with Sylvia and some other friends of Beth's. People gawked at Bea, lounging in her string bikini. "They're lucky I'm wearing my top," she had said, and continued with her lesson: " E' la vacca una persona?" Is the cow a person? And Beth: "Si, la vacca e una persona." With Bea, Beth discovered her love for Renaissance art, wandered for days in the Uffizi and the Vatican, studied the Belvedere Torso to discover why Bernini loved it best of all: it seemed in motion as if the missing limbs were still there. She learned to twirl (never cut) her spaghetti, learned to make her own pasta (of all sizes and shapes and colors). She learned not to be self-conscious topless on a beach (an Italian beach, that is). Beth learned about waxing versus shaving, though waxing hurt so much on the first attempt she preferred to leave one leg hairy for the days it took to gain the courage to rip the hair from the second leg. She learned (eventually) to ski and to sail and how to dive from rocks into the clear blue Mediterranean without losing the top of her string bikini. Beth learned to make cappuccino and to flirt even. She learned that staying up all night could be innocent—eating watermelon at a fruit stand at 2 A.M. with a large group of friends, spitting seeds. She learned about large meals in the middle of the day and a touch of grappa in the evenings—something special to help you digest.

  In the evenings Bea dressed Beth up in some of her smart Italian clothes and they rode to town on Bea's Vespa just like all the other elegant girls in their high heels, the boys nicely cleaned up and fragrant—nothing like Beth's male friends from Pennsylvania who took pride in their long hair and scrappy jeans and scruffy beards and who spoke incessantly about traveling the country in pursuit of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead and bragged about who could drink the most. Nor were the Italian boys like Beth's male
friends from New York, who dressed in wrinkled khakis and oxford shirts, and were always eager to have deep conversations about existential angst, even if they didn't quite know what that meant.

  Bea would take Beth's hand and they would walk through the streets of town. Bea's hand was soft and warm in hers. Beth wanted to walk down an American street holding hands with Bea or Sylvia, simply because it was foreign and unthinkable and would cause people to make incorrect assumptions. Bea's friends admired the blond American (whose long hair had been freshly cut by Bea into a more sophisticated shape: layers and wispy bangs). In Città, Beth felt a little like a celebrity, a curiosity—rare, unique, prized—and she adored the sensation of being at the center of things. She loved the history, the vast extent of it. She could feel the expanse of time and experience life across centuries by simply walking along a narrow street.

  The first summer when everything was new, Beth could not rest. She wanted to drink it all up: the pretty girls, the fragrant boys, the delicious smells of baking bread, the stores with their neatly arranged merchandise, stores you didn't dare enter unless you intended to make a purchase. Città made sense. Everything was so well cared for, flowers in all the windows, clean streets, sleek Citroëns and Mercedes and Peugeots that glided easily out of driveways barred with big electric gates behind which loomed well-shuttered villas in the midst of gardens thick with apricot trees. She loved the very shutters: heavy metal blinds that came down, with the big sound of metal rasping against more metal, each noon to keep out the sun and the heat so that siestas could be enjoyed in the cool dark of the home. At siestatime Bea's home became a dim and fragrant trove, scented by the aromas from the risottos or the pastas, the roasts or the fillets, the blanched vegetables, which lingered long after the big noon lunch had been cleared away. Each day Bea's extended family gathered around the table: Bea's father's father—a little, very old man who lived in an adjacent villa that had a basement filled with prized sausages and salamis hanging from the ceiling to keep dry, including a very rare salami made from horse-meat—and Bea's mother's sister and mother, and Bea's older sister. But after lunch the house fell silent while everyone slept. The whole town slept. The stores closed their shutters and the streets became quiet. Beth lay on her bed impatient for the siesta to end so that she and Bea could be out once again on the Vespa in this fascinating new world.