L'America

by Martha McPhee

  But he would come back. He would come back for Christmas bearing a green silk hat made by his milliner lover. All spring he would write Beth letters asking her to come to Italy.

  But she would meet James. He would tuck his poems between the handlebars and the bell of her bike. His smile would cause a thousand butterflies to flutter about in her chest. Instead of flying east to Italy, she would drive west across America, understanding not at all why, pulled by some invisible force away from what she thought she wanted most. And why? Why? Because he did not love her anymore? Because of ambition? Because she was a dreamer? Because of Claire? Because she was Claire's daughter? Claire smiles, seducing the camera, Jackson, and the viewer with the possibility of what lies beyond—for what lies beyond is infinite and she is not capable of believing otherwise.

  But always, for the rest of her life, Beth would ask the question: Does he love me still?

  Six

  Possibility

  She was a part of him, like an organ. A part that hurt, ached in the center of his chest, in his head, his arms, his feet, the smallest bones of his toes. Yes, the pain dulled with time, but the ache, some memory of it, would remain, a scar from a long-ago surgery that throbs in the cold. Surgically, you could say, he removed her from him. Excised her with the knife of hate, the obvious antidote to love. Excised her with betrayal, humiliation, lies, until he couldn't stand her for her weakness, for her unstoppable love, that American will believing it could conquer all, the hubris. See her there crying? See her there desiring him still? See her there with her heart torn open by hope? The depths of hope, its deep recesses, its bottomless wells. Five years, that's how long it took. Even so, he loved her still.

  In the late summer of 1986, after nearly one year in America, Cesare returned home. He kissed his mother. He kissed his father. He kissed his sister. He kissed the maids. He unpacked his bags. And then he started telling stories, stories that made them all laugh—stories about the commune, Jackson in his dark office surrounded by clippings; stories about selling berries, about being a merchant for a moment, negotiating stiff prices; stories about the grandmother and her Indian and the tuxedo (Cesare modeled it for his family), about the grandmother promptly falling asleep at the opera after the rising of the curtain and the first aria of long Lohengrin. Before the opera the grandmother realized that Cesare didn't have the proper shoes. Rather than let him wear any old shoes, she had their taxi stop at a pharmacy where she bought black velvet slippers. "E vero?" the sister asked wide-eyed with her smile, her curly blond bob pulled back by a gold ribbon, flapper style. It seemed Laura was as amazed by the notion of a pharmacy selling slippers as by wearing slippers to an opera. Cesare escorted the grandmother into the grand hall with the enormous Chagalls and all the people in their elegant dress. She played the part of old patron, noticed Gregory Peck and pointed him out (indiscreetly) to let Cesare know that they were among the best. Cesare showed his parents and his sister the flimsy velvet slippers, passed them around to be admired. "Che ridere, che buffa, come ridicolo." And the sister laughed, of course, the mother laughed, the father laughed big and brilliantly, a laugh larger than his small size. Cesare told them stories of eating Indian food with his fingers, of all the greasy excuses for fast foods. He told them stories of the furniture hauled off the street, of the kids opening fire hydrants in order to cool off in the summer heat, of the mixture of people, of the all-night stores, of the limousines and the dogs (yes, the dogs) that are chauffeured around in them (Mrs. Gimbel's poodle had his own car and driver). And they laughed more and couldn't stop. His father's laugh was magnificent to witness, breaking his face into warmth and tenderness, the laughter sparkling from it like a crystal in sunlight. His laugh made the mother laugh all the more. For a good long stretch they laughed, the laugh of relief because Cesare was home and because he was laughing (even if fondly) at America and because they knew the dream was finally over.

  After settling in, windsurfing with his friends on the lake, a quick trip to Elba with his parents, cruising Città on his American bike (he bought it in New York, put a bell on the handlebar, and rode it all over the city), after an attempt or two to encourage his friends to embrace football, he got down to the work of completing his exams. He moved to Milan, lived with his sister, attended classes at the university every day, studied for and took his last exams, passed them with the highest grades he had ever received. He began work in earnest on his thesis, wrote it in three months, the words spilling from him as easily as water running from a faucet. In November, he started officially at the Cellini bank in Città. The hat lady, Greta, was his first client. She was Florentine with red hair and a big infectious smile. She came to him with a dozen hats, silk and velvet and leather with feathers and without, with and without fur, with felt cutouts and crystal beads in a rainbow of colors. She tried the hats on for him and then she tried them on him, adjusting them in front of the mirror. Her long fingers drifted gently across his cheeks and neck, and her big smile held his in the mirror for an instant. He looked charming, inviting in a fuchsia bonnet with a big fuchsia bow tied beneath his chin. Admiring her reflection, he kept thinking, She's Italian—as if that fact alone were amazing and precious and utterly inconceivable. Soon thereafter they began sleeping together and soon after that he bought Beth a hat—the green silk pillbox that reminded him of the one Valeria wore in Benvenuto's fresco. The purchase was his first cruelty. At Christmas he flew to New York to give it to her himself.

  She met him at the airport, standing there with her hopeful smile, in a pair of white drawstring pants for summer, a sheepskin coat he had given her, and bright red pumps. She had been anxious about what to wear, had borrowed from the roommates, had tried to get it right. Her lipstick matched the shoes. She looked ridiculous. Any fashion sense she had gained in Italy she had lost as if her anxiety over the fate of their relationship had undermined her confidence and weakened her judgment. He could only think of Greta and her fingers and of the hats she liked him to try on and the undeniably beautiful fact that she was Italian with big Italian eyes and a big Italian smile and the fine Italian sense of design. He stayed one week. Everything he had found romantic before he found distasteful now: the furniture, the cockroaches living in the stove, the traffic noise, the incessant sirens and their red forbidding lights. He even noticed this time, had not before, the stalls in public bathrooms—how people's ankles and feet could be seen as they publicly performed a very private act. He had no interest in going to Claire. The people there somehow seemed ridiculous to him now, Jackson who would never leave, Sissy Three in competition with a dead woman, Preveena unwilling to let the saris go, and poor little Rada.

  "Your family," he said to Beth after she asked him if he'd like to go to Claire. Just the way he said the words indicated how he felt. And the slight shift of his head, that particularly Italian gesture, dismissed her entire family as odd. She felt both deeply offended and deeply injured; as though he had finally seen the thing she had feared most her entire life. She had known that feeling as a little girl playing in the normalcy of Sylvia's house, enacting dramas of normal lives with Sylvia's Barbies and all their convertibles and their campers and their dressing tables and clothes and Kens. Sylvia's family was nothing like hers: Dinner on the table at 5:30 sharp. Mother alive, mother at home, mother who packed lunches each morning for her two girls, who sent her good husband off to work with a kiss. Beth had never allowed herself to think of her family as odd; her family was simply her family, but she had always been drawn to families like Sylvia's and Bea's and Cesare's. Now Cesare sat in a chair from the street, ripped floral pattern, the window behind him open even though it was cold and winter, because the steam heat was just too hot. The sheet-curtain danced in the cold-hot air. "Your family is completely crazy."

  When Beth opened the small oval hatbox decorated with drawings of important Florentine buildings and saw the delicate green hat nestled in white tissue, she knew everything—that on her head she was to wear the designs o
f her love's lover. She saw how Cesare watched her as she held the hat, meticulously looking for signs, trying to read in her expressions what she gathered, inferred, understood. She saw how he watched her with both pain and glee and how though he would not have been able to admit it so directly he wanted to cause her grief and sorrow. He wanted the hat to say everything that he could not. He wanted the hat to say, How could you think that I would leave Italy, my family, my life? Wind up here like any other immigrant to hear the news of my father's death over the phone in the middle of the night as my children, lying in their American beds, dreamed American dreams? How could I ask that of you? Trap you in a world that would ridicule your interest in pizza, in restaurants?

  She knew what he wanted the hat to say. She would not let him do this to her, to them. So her face remained cool, expressionless, steady with that confidence he loved, the confidence of the maroon coat. She turned the hat around in her hands, noticed the label stitched into the interior bowl of the hat: Greta Ceseretti. She pictured the woman. She went to the mirror, placed the hat on her head, tilted her face to the left, admired herself in the mirror. His eyes were still trained on her. The radiator hissed. The apartment was cold. The mirror, too, she had found on the street, had spent hours restoring the elaborate wood frame, filling in wounds with wood putty, painting it gold. She turned to him, more beautiful, in the hat, it seemed, than he had ever seen her. Her hair hung long and full, flowing from beneath the hat, which crowned her pale winter face. "It's lovely," she said.

  For the next five months he wrote to her, he called her, pleading with her to come to Italy.

  Spring passed, then summer. James waltzed into her life with his sweet poems and his spontaneous plans for a trip west, with all the confidence of a handsome boy fond of a precious girl. He took her words, her declarations of love (in the field of sunflowers) as truth. He had no experience to teach him not to trust, to consider deceit. In his head he made elaborate plans for her to come with him to Los Angeles. He could see her there as well as anywhere pursuing a life of food.

  All across America, in every campground they visited, on every overnight hike they took, they made gourmet meals by the campfire. He had a special bag with tiny canisters devoted to herbs and spices. "I love you," she said again, after one such meal. The meal, cooked at twelve thousand feet in two pots above a campfire, the peaks of the Rockies purple in the fading amber light, was called Khoresh-e-Fesenjan, or chicken stew with pomegranate sauce served with barberry basmati rice. Beth had learned the recipes from a woman at Claire, Nasim, who left Iran in 1978 during the revolution because she had protested a bit too much as a student. She was a sweet yet severe woman with short curly dark hair and a large black mole to the right of her lips. Beth did not know her well since Nasim had only recently found her way to Claire, but Beth had been drawn immediately to her ability with rose water and rose petals and pomegranate seeds. Her fingers worked those ingredients like magic. James had bought the barberries and the rice from an Iranian market in New York City before leaving. Then beneath the stars, so thick it did seem feasible there were more stars than grains of sand, Beth declared her love again, admiring everything free about this man and his singular ability to cherish her passions. She was in love with his love of her. They lay together in the conjoined sleeping bags, limbs entwined. It was very dark and very bright, somehow simultaneously, and the sky shimmering with the morning stars and the morning planets. They lay together in this way, her eyes wide while he slept, waiting for the old moon to drop beneath the horizon, for the morning to rise, silver, like water draping the earth.

  After the explosion at Old Faithful, however, James turned the Lincoln east and they headed home. It took them one day to break up; that was all. She cried. He cried. She hated seeing him cry. He said, "It's hard on the ego to accept you don't love me." He said it with his charming eyes smiling and a confidence that made Beth almost fall in love. "I'm sorry," she said, not bothering anymore to deny anything. In fact, what she wanted was to finally tell him everything: How it ached, how it hurt. How she didn't understand why she wasn't able to let go. How she believed unstoppably that she and Cesare were meant to be together, as if it had been predetermined, written by fate, by the hand of Brahma on their newborn foreheads. (She had learned from Preveena about this Hindu myth.) How she did not understand, not a thing, how people casually let people into their lives and then just as casually let them go. James was a kind man. He would listen. He would offer advice. "You know it has nothing to do with you?" Beth finally said. They were seated in the car somewhere in Wisconsin, near cornfields. Signs for cheese were everywhere. She never wanted to return to New York. She wanted to be on the road forever. "Sh-sh," he whispered, and leaned across to seal her lips with his index finger, indicating I know. He knew. She knew.

  Somewhere in Indiana, in a cheap Motel 6 with faded curtains and a lumpy mattress made more lumpy by the Magic Fingers mechanism that rocked the bed with a quarter, she developed such a bad stomachache she put herself into shock. James had to take her to the emergency room of a local hospital. Doctors swarmed around her (it was not a busy night), sticking needles and tubes into every orifice of her body. "It could be an ectopic pregnancy," a doctor in blue scrubs suggested, looking at James with an expression that indicated a desire for confirmation, as if James could rubber stamp the doctor's diagnosis. Beth's face shaded with panic, all its variations contorting her round cheeks and eyes, her large forehead. "But will I lose the baby," she asked. "Will I?" she kept asking. "Will I lose the baby?" She looked at James with terror in her eyes. She was all concern for the baby, wanted the baby as if it would answer some inexorable question. But it wasn't a pregnancy of any sort. It was simply fear, gripping her in the gut and twisting itself around her insides like a vine around a tree, choking the tree. She was released from the hospital. Nonstop he drove her to New York. He helped her unload her suitcase and backpack at her apartment on Sixth Avenue and then he drove her uptown to her grandmother's garage in front of which he kissed her hard on the cheek in a brotherly way. She watched him walk down the street with a hollow feeling because she knew he was a loving kind good smart man. She watched him leave, afraid all over again at the hardness she was capable of and of how suddenly and unequivocally alone she was with the buildings rising all around her and people rushing past, brushing her this way and that as if she were nothing more than one of those stray bags caught in the bare branches of a tree.

  She had to give up the apartment on Sixth Avenue, but through Sissy Three she found a studio on York and Seventy-fourth: a walk-up four floors above a dry cleaner, the fumes of which wafted through her window day and night. She breathed in the sweet chemicals wondering, not caring, what harm it would cause at some later point. On the roof of the apartment across the courtyard, workers would whistle, seeing her through the curtainless windows. The apartment belonged to a friend of a friend of Sissy Three's from her hand-modeling days. The tenant didn't want to give it up because the rent was only three hundred dollars a month. The tenant left Beth a series of twelve signed checks in the exact amount of the rent. It was Beth's responsibility to deposit the rent each month in an account this person, Georgia Lazar, had established solely for the purpose. Then Beth would need to wait ten days for the check to clear. At that point she could mail Georgia Lazar's prewritten check to the landlord. After a year they would renegotiate. Georgia Lazar, Beth knew, had married and moved to a million-dollar home in Connecticut, but she had lived in this apartment for ten years while she struggled in New York. It was as good as hers and she wasn't going to give it up. If she gave it up she would be giving up all possibility of ever returning to New York City. (Years later, when Beth thought of New York's hold on people, she pictured Georgia Lazar: a slender fierce woman, unkempt hair flying about her face, fists clenched, sharp-jawed, pushing her way through the crowds, holding fast to her piece of the promise.) Before Beth at least three other people had lived in the apartment pretending to be Georgia Laza
r. "In New York," Sissy Three had said, "real estate is everything. Keep that in mind and you'll do fine." Even though Beth had lived in New York for years, it suddenly became a new and unfamiliar world with a network of schemes and games she wasn't sure yet how to negotiate. While in school she had been oblivious to and protected from the intricacies of surviving in the city. Though the apartment was what it was, small, dark, filled with fumes, she found herself wishing the lease were in her name. And that desire alone seemed to be her initiation into the longing that is the fuel of those schemes, the longing which either causes one to leave New York or to thrive there.

  With the remains of her street furniture and a few things from her grandmother (a set of silver for dinner parties, lace tablecloths, fine cotton sheets, and an oriental lamp with a ripped shade depicting a bird in flight), Beth brightened the place up. Even so, it remained dark. Her grandmother would call now and again. Usually she inquired after "the Italian." "Don't let him get away," she would warn. On the stereo Beth listened to Claudio Baglioni and Lucio Dalla and Lucio Battisti and wondered what Cesare was doing and wondered what in the world she wanted, what she would make of herself? She was truly alone, for the first time in her life. Her best friends from college had moved away, as had her roommates Veronica and Jane; they'd scattered across America, to Boston and Chicago and Los Angeles and Detroit, even. Bea was in Italy and it had been a long time since Beth had heard from her. She had married and vanished into a new life. Sylvia stayed in touch with letters and postcards from trips she would take with various boyfriends. She lived in San Francisco, attending Stanford's graduate program in creative writing. Occasionally Beth received short stories in the mail, describing their adventures in Greece. In her dark apartment, Beth felt very alone. Often she wanted to call James, fly to L.A., and make a life with him there, cooking Persian food and listening to his lectures on the geology of America. Friends she didn't know as well had gone to Wall Street, worked in banks, making far more in their first year than she would for a long, long time to come. She would run into them at awkward moments. Sometimes she'd find them at a table in the Amalfi Pizzeria where she still had a job. They would be finely dressed in suits, gold around their necks, pearls in their ears, the occasional diamond engagement ring glowing like the very sun. "I thought you'd made it," one might say (as in, I thought you'd made something of your life), while Beth stood with her pad and her pen poised to take their order. Beth would say, "The pizza here is very good," taking no credit, paying no heed. "So we've heard," they'd respond. "That's why we're here. I read that it's the best in New York, outside of Italy. We were in Rome this summer and..."