“Oh, you have to,” she said.
Marcos came up to Iara from behind. He wrapped his arms around her and grinned at me over her shoulder.
I said, “Have you seen my husband?”
“Forever ago,” he said.
INCIDENTALS
Italy; traveling.
Ravenna, the fourth city in a week. Everyone is tired. I’m tired. Tom—a friend of the man who will become my husband—is in charge of planning. Ravenna, a city in books, important history, famous architecture, Dante’s tomb.
Have you even read The Divine Comedy? he asks Tom on the train from Florence to Ravenna. They are old friends, friends from childhood.
Parts, sure, Tom says.
Midway through my life, says the man who will become my husband.
I woke and found myself in a dark wood, Tom finishes.
We have been living in hotels, trains. Squares with fountains, languishing in the dead Italian afternoons, the air swollen with summer heat. It seems impossible at times to find a waiter, a shopkeeper. In the piazzas, tables and chairs sit empty, umbrellas folded; birds sleep. Everywhere we go has the stillness that follows an evacuation.
Another hotel. In the lobby, I can feel the authoring presence of money: calm electronic music, tastefully muted colors, careful attention to materials, glass and burnished metal. There is a carafe of chilled water with slices of citrus and cucumber, and we all drink some. Tom’s girlfriend, Kathryn, is especially thirsty. She hasn’t been feeling well—the heat, the rigors of travel. She’s a graduate student in literature writing a dissertation that has something to do with Eliot, Stevens, and Stein; in her mind the three writers combine in a pattern I can’t understand, even after several days of listening to her talk about them. She is kind, but conversation with her is intimidating. She is preoccupied with her future, calculating the benefits and trade-offs of various tenure-track positions. Her life, even accounting for its difficulties, has signposts and measures of success that mine does not.
He touches my arm and then speaks with the desk clerk. The clerk asks for a credit card, incidentals.
Incidentals, the clerk says, pronouncing the word gently in continental English.
He takes out a credit card, and as he hands it over, I hear the background hum of his professional life.
It is my third visit to Europe. Once, a trip with my parents to England and Scotland, at the end of high school; and then Paris, during college, to improve my French.
In the past year alone he has been to London, Geneva, Brussels, Frankfurt, and Madrid, all for work. This in addition to Beijing, Tokyo, Hong Kong.
He is calm in airports, unworried about arriving shortly before a flight, unperturbed by the mechanical sounds inside the plane during takeoff and landing, indifferent to the officials at immigration and customs.
It is all background hum.
His phone has an international plan that allows him to read and respond to business e-mails during the trip. He claims to be doing this as seldom as possible.
The first order of business in Ravenna is the Basilica di San Vitale. It is a plump, crouching thing. Tourists enter and exit, following paths marked by the tourists before them, as if by chemical scent, like ants. Tom has a camera and takes pictures, and when he offers it to Kathryn, she waves it away, interested purely in looking.
Inside, the expanding mosaic of angels on the inner bulge of the ceiling, the Byzantine elaborateness of detail. I say, Eliot wrote a poem about Ravenna.
“Lune de Miel,” Kathryn says, without hesitation: she has the power of immediate recall. It is like conversing with a card catalog.
A honeymooning couple, touring Europe, I say.
But the basilica they visit isn’t this one, she says. It’s a different basilica, just outside Ravenna.
Which is it? Tom asks.
She says the name and Tom shakes his head, already losing interest, not on his list.
Kathryn wanders to another nave.
He comes close to say, I don’t think I could take you anywhere in the world where you wouldn’t be able to supply a literary reference.
This is the right thing to say. I take his hand.
Is the couple happy? he says.
The couple?
In the poem.
Not really, I say. Instead of having sex they’re scratching at mosquito bites. I think Eliot’s point was to show their small lives in relief against the permanence of European culture.
Sounds uplifting, he says.
By the time we leave the basilica, everyone is hungry, and we embark on the herculean task of finding something to eat in Italy in the middle of an August afternoon. In the end this means cheap pizza, served to us by a gregarious Egyptian man who narrates a condensed autobiography while we wait for slices to warm in the brick oven. He has lived in Italy for thirty years, his daughters are Italian, he loves Americans. No one talks much while we eat.
It is obvious that Kathryn wants to return to the hotel and lie down, and Tom finally suggests it.
In the room, I try to rest, without success. I don’t want to be inside. He is answering work e-mails. I say I’m going for a walk, and he kisses me, barely looking up from the small laptop he uses for travel.
Tomorrow afternoon we’ll take a train back to Rome, and then the flight to New York. Tom and Kathryn have a longer trip, San Francisco—she’s at the University of Berkeley and he works for Google, stock options already vested—and they will spend one more night in Rome, the Eternal City.
I leave the hotel without a plan and run into Tom almost immediately.
She’s sleeping, he says.
He’s working, I say.
He mentions that Kathryn gave him permission to visit Dante’s tomb without her.
So I follow Tom.
I find him easy to talk to. He is obviously intelligent, but wears it lightly; unlike Kathryn, he doesn’t stop midsentence in search of a better or more exact word, and allows his thoughts to peddle out imperfectly, with normal human habits of cliché, lacunae.
We speak casually of the things we saw in Venice, Florence, already taking the shape of memories.
Florence and Ravenna are the cities of Dante’s birth and death. They had a dispute over his bones. In Florence, a tomb stands empty, the symbol of the city’s regret over the loss of its native son.
Dante died of malaria, I say.
Sure, Tom says. Italy was like Africa then.
All of Europe was, I say.
We turn a corner and step into cool shade. A little white mausoleum. We read the inscription. A small, fat man with an enormous camera hanging from his neck says something to me, first in Italian, then in Spanish. Finally he detects my incomprehension and smiles.
Thank you, he says.
We don’t spend long. Tom takes a few photos. O.K., he says.
But before we start to walk away, Tom says, You can probably tell that things aren’t great with Kathryn.
I don’t answer. He isn’t looking at me. He is looking at Dante’s tomb, pretending to read the inscription again.
I’m going to talk to her once we’re home, he says.
I understand that by talking to her he means ending the relationship. Tom tells me, in some detail, what’s wrong. From the way he speaks, I have the sense that he’s saying some of these things out loud for the first time, experimenting with how it feels to say them. Because he isn’t looking at me, I return the favor, and stare at the dirty white marble of the tomb, insects there, the blocks of shade where it is hidden from the sun.
At last I ask if he’s already talked about this with his friend, the man who will become my husband.
I think he would judge me, Tom says, and finally meets my eye.
I want to ask what this means, but pressing him seems out of bounds, somehow.
I’m sorry, I say instead, because it is the natural thing to say.
Tom nods.
We leave, and walk together for a while in silence, vaguely in the d
irection of the hotel. We pass a restaurant that is just opening. From the heat of the road, the interior looks cool and hospitable. A girl is folding cloth napkins. Tom asks if I’d like to stop for a drink.
Yes, I say.
We order a bottle of rosé. The waiter pours two glasses and plunks the bottle into a bucket of ice on a stand by the table. It becomes clear that we won’t speak further about Kathryn. I understand that what Tom told me is something he expects I won’t divulge. And he is right—I won’t. I won’t tell him, ever, what Tom said to me at Dante’s tomb, even after Tom and Kathryn marry, a wedding at which my husband will give the toast, and I won’t tell him even after they have a child, and then a second, in rapid succession, as Kathryn abandons her academic career in favor of motherhood, something I would have found impossible to imagine of the woman who corrected my memory of which basilica in Ravenna the couple visits in Eliot’s “Lune de Miel.”
A waiter refreshes our glasses before Tom can reach for the bottle. The girl who was folding napkins before now brings platters of antipasti from the kitchen and places them on the bar—cold meats, arancini, eggplant caponata, globes of baby mozzarella in oil and herbs.
Do you think it’s complimentary? Tom says.
The only other customers, an older couple, rise from their table and fill plates with food from the bar. Tom and I exchange a look and then do the same. By the time we sit down, the waiter has refreshed our glasses again.
The food is delicious. I feel a deep sense of pleasure and gratitude at the almost magical appearance of this food and the insanity that it is being provided to us at no cost. For a moment the world seems generous. More platters come out from the kitchen.
We wonder aloud at the propriety of taking seconds, thirds, and then we do it anyway, scooping piles of food indecently onto the little appetizer plates.
Tom is laughing, I’m laughing, the waiter smiles as he empties the last of the wine into our glasses, indulging us.
And then Tom is telling me about a party at someone’s apartment on the Upper East Side.
This was when I still lived in New York, he says, before you guys were dating.
We went out a lot, he says.
Tom tells me that at this party on the Upper East Side they saw Salman Rushdie, fresh off his most recent divorce, hitting on women in their twenties and eating a sandwich.
So they were at a party, in this story. They were peripheral guests, friends of the friend of someone else’s friend. An exclusive party that wasn’t in reality very exclusive. I sense the solidity, the full shape, of the memory behind the sketch Tom is giving.
The way Rushdie was holding that sandwich, Tom says, holding it with his hand at his waist, while he talked to a woman—I mean, crumbs were falling on the floor.
I laugh and say, He writes like a man who would let crumbs fall to the floor.
Kathryn was there, he says. And Kendra was, he adds, as if surprising himself. Kendra, I realize, is an old girlfriend, and after a moment I even remember the name, mentioned once, in passing, then forgotten.
For a moment, Tom is silent, and I wait to see if he will say more.
You aren’t like the girls he used to date, Tom says.
And then the conversation drifts in another direction, and then it is too late to ask what he means by this.
The bill comes and Tom waves me off, hands the waiter some euros, and then we return to the hotel, the heat of the day finally relenting. In the room, I expect to find him still on his laptop, but he is lying on the bed. He seems to have been waiting for my return. He asks what I’ve been up to, and I tell him about the food, and apologize for being tipsy, and he laughs and kisses me. The sensation of lips mixes with the wine in my blood, and suddenly I want sex, and I move a hand into the waist of his pants before noticing a strange expression on his face, one I can’t quite interpret, and then I see the ice bucket with the neck of a bottle sticking out, a crown of gold foil.
Oh, I say.
And then, because of all the afternoon’s activity, it is almost ten o’clock when we are sitting down to dinner. Over the first sips of wine the conversation is entirely consumed with Kathryn’s and Tom’s admiration of the ring, asking where he bought it, what was my reaction, what was going through my mind. I say that I probably said yes because Tom had gotten me drunk already, and we all laugh, and while the others are laughing I realize that he surely would have told Tom beforehand, he would have showed his oldest friend the ring; even though I bumped into Tom that afternoon seemingly at random, I begin to wonder if it was all part of a plan, Tom keeping me away from the hotel so that I could return and be surprised. I have been drinking for hours and know I am drunk, but the feeling is safe, pleasant, nothing more than the inner radiation of emotion. We recount the stations of the trip, a little nostalgic already, our week of vacation coming to an end, punctuated by the proposal. I study Tom, his face as he turns toward Kathryn, but see no trace there of what he confessed to me.
We order mindlessly, cheeses, vegetables marinated in oil, pastas, fish and meat. Everyone eats from everyone else’s plate. It is a day and night already breaking apart into vivid blotches of memory, like stains on a white tablecloth, and I realize I am talking quite a bit, enjoying the lapidary construction of sentences, syntax itself more pleasurable to my wine-excited brain than the actual content of the sentences. I laugh. Who else does this, I think, who else talks merely for the sensation of words snapping together, resolving miraculously into structures, into the beautiful architecture of sentences. I manage to stop talking and let conversation swirl around me. Waiters go by in black shirts, black pants. Espressos drop onto the table, someone has gelato. Then the bill comes, handwritten, thin paper on a metal tray. I feel the men reaching for their wallets. No, I say, no, I want to buy everyone dinner, it’s our last night, this is my treat, I say, even as I am fumbling in my purse for money, I am a woman engaged to be married.
That’s O.K., he says.
His wallet is open. Tom’s wallet is open.
No, really, I want to, I say. I realize that I haven’t looked at the bill and have no idea how much it is.
You shouldn’t, he says, more quietly.
We can split it, Tom says.
I feel the glance that passes between the men.
I haven’t paid for a thing all week, I say. I want to pay for something. I want to use my money.
My voice—I hear it. It is emotional. It is too much. But it is something now I can’t control. They all hear it as well, and their hands retreat from the tray with the bill. They think perhaps I will come to my senses, agree to share the cost, but in a single motion I pick up the bill, fold it around my credit card, and hand it to the waiter.
There, I say. There.
But I already know what is going to happen. The waiter is going to tell me that the restaurant accepts only cash, because this is Italy, and I, who don’t have nearly enough euros to cover the bill, will be forced to relent, and my companions will act as if this isn’t a humiliation, as if nothing has happened, and I will try to play along, I—a woman engaged to be married and drunk on Italian wine—will insist nevertheless on emptying my wallet of what’s there, not more than forty or fifty euros, and the man who will become my husband will mix it with his money, Tom’s money, organizing it by denomination, counting and recounting, and then he will say, as the others begin to stand, chairs scraping against the tile, he will say, I think we’re good.
THE DISASTER OF HETEROSEXUALITY
Marcos said the protests, the outbreak of popular discontent, confirmed his long-held view of things. “Brazilians are tired of the usual politics,” he said. Later I mentioned our conversation to Iara. She made a face.
There was a lot of opinion out there about Brazilians. This was opinion that lived in its natural habitat, the Internet. The opinions seemed to belong to people who had spent a week in Rio on vacation and now considered themselves experts—the Internet being the natural habitat, also, of experts.
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Brazilians bring a certain flair to the way they express themselves. Brazilians are friendly and free-spirited. Brazilians are comfortable in their own skin. Brazilians are so nationalistic and arrogant. Brazilians love fireworks. Brazilians love children. Brazilians are extremely devout. Brazilians eat a much more balanced diet than a lot of Europeans/North Americans. Brazilians have mastered a way to bend the rules to accommodate their needs. Brazilians tend to live life at a slower pace, and this carries over into business. Not all Brazilian women are extremely hot. Some are just hot.
I would say that the average Brazilian weighs what the average American weighs. And I’d estimate that the percentage of Brazilians who are exceptionally attractive is comparable to the percentage of Nigerians who make a living from e-mail scams.
Which is not to discount the fact that living in Brazil felt different from living in America. That being among Brazilians felt different from being among Americans. That there was a lot of cheek-kissing. That the physical element of everyday conversation was significant, the incidence of touching in everyday conversation. That Brazilians indulged their children to an aberrant degree, and were loath to scold them. That Brazilians really did run a lot of red lights, and I heard fireworks in our neighborhood almost daily.
When you’re a foreigner, it’s difficult to resist that kind of thinking altogether, categorical thinking. Brazilians are. Brazilians do. Brazilians believe.
“That’s because Italians are just Brazilians who were born in Europe!” said a man as he touched my shoulder, and then, for good measure, my elbow. He was a Brazilian who was born in Brazil.
I asked for a coffee with milk. The waitress stared at me as if I hadn’t said anything. I spoke the words again; and still the waitress stared. I waited. I tried once more, a coffee with milk. They were the simplest words. A brief moment went by. Then the waitress walked away. I didn’t know if this meant she had understood me, and would bring me a coffee with milk, or if she had given up.
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