Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  A sandy stretch of road, complaints from that son of a bitch of a cab driver, and they turn out of the cane fields into the sudden blinding dazzle of the sea. A dark blue expanse beyond a small rocky cove strewn with plastic refuse, and dried seaweed.

  The driver stops the cab and gives a low whistle of amazement. For there, three hundred yards out, is the great white boat that, most of all these days, makes Zenin feel that he is Zenin. The Regina Confusa. A confirmation. Built by the Soria brothers of Viareggio, bought as a bargain from De Luca the Genovese when De Luca went bust. Lower than most, not like the other giant motor yachts shaped like steam irons you see lined up in the marinas in Monte Carlo or Porto Rotondo. A boat whose size invites satire, her decks designed to be carpeted with starlets. Now sitting in front of the small ugly cove like a swan in a puddle. White as a temple, an apparition from a romance novel or a gossip magazine, solid as an island out there in the Tyrrhenian in the midday sun.

  I brought it here for you, Zenin tells Mira, who has gone very still beside him.

  Not strictly true, since Zenin had ordered the Confusa transferred from Ischia to Civitavecchia, and they had to pass here anyway. But true enough. And he sees, with a stab of pure pleasure, that he has dazzled her.

  A Zodiac is already buzzing toward them, manned by one of the crew, a curly-headed young Pugliese. She takes off her shoes and gets into the launch like a sleepwalker, shading her eyes with her book.

  Lunch on the upper deck. Spaghetti with tartufi di mare, a white Frascati, thin but potent, a poached sea bass, fresh orange ice, coffee. The curly-headed deckhand moving back and forth with the dishes, observing Mira from all angles, judging her by the suntanned ghosts of other decorative women who haunt the boat. The white awning flapping in the breeze, the boat moving subtly like a breathing creature, the nondescript strip of Tyrrhenian coastline looking as all coastlines do under a heat haze from the water, like the promised land.

  Mira has two helpings of pasta. The girl is remarkably adaptive, Zenin notes. Already, the inquisitive look is brightening her eyes.

  Regina Confusa, she says. The confused queen. What does that mean?

  Every boat is named after a woman. But I have never been able to decide which one.

  You have a lot of girls.

  Not so many, Zenin says with a deprecating grin, thinking of how many, the troublesome weight of them all, the sisters, the daughters, the others.

  Are you married? she asks suddenly. In all their telephone conversations, she has never asked this before.

  I am divorced.

  Oh. An American tone of understanding. Divorce, thinks Zenin, is an everyday solution for them, like getting glasses for shortsightedness. But this girl can’t possibly understand what divorce meant in a provincial Italian town in the seventies. The first years it was legal in Italy. Somber family councils, a medieval air of excommunication, threatening notes on his car windshield, the priest suddenly thundering anathema through the varnished walls of the confessional. He doesn’t enlighten her.

  After the coffee, the well-trained crew vanishes so completely that the ship feels abandoned.

  What happens now astonishes Zenin. Printed indelibly in his mind long afterward is how Mira turns to him when they are belowdecks making the obligatory tour. He is eying her lazily, unsure as to whether he wants her or not. He feels indolent, at peace: it is almost enough that he amazed her with the sudden vision of who he is.

  They have passed through the big salon with its teak-framed Morandi and are standing inside the doorway of his cabin when Mira abruptly shuts the door behind them. And turns to him with her eyes blazing in a face suddenly grown pale.

  I guess this is where it happens, she says, speaking distinctly in a hard voice that surprises him. Would you like me to undress now?

  Zenin thinks she probably had too much wine at lunch. And the last thing he needs is a drunken woman making a scene on board. He makes a movement toward her that is both irritated and protective, as he might to one of his sisters who is making a fool of herself. But Mira shakes him off.

  No, she says fiercely. I chose to come here, didn’t I? I’m not stupid, or a child. I knew what climbing aboard this boat meant. Now let’s finish the deal the way you do it.

  As Mira speaks, she drags off her jeans and knit top. Afterward Zenin recalls the action as instantaneous, as if she had burst out of her clothes with sheer vehemence. Actually, she struggles impatiently, and finally kicks her way out of the jeans and underpants. But to Zenin, caught in a trance of surprise, she is one second dressed and the next naked, like a sword magically unsheathed.

  Like so many aggressive people, Zenin can’t bear bluntness in others. He is so shocked by the bizarre speed of her stripping and by her ridiculous ferocity that he just sits down on the end of his bed. With a flabbergasted expression that would be comical if anyone else were there to see it.

  And in the bland luxury of the stateroom, with its pale carpet and inlaid wood paneling, he looks at her body without the slightest trace of desire. A body whose contours are still nearly adolescent, like a bundle of slim branches, almost pathetic in its symmetry. He sees with no enjoyment the dark smudge of hair between her legs, the hair on her head spilling over her shoulders like wild foliage. He sees that she is shaking slightly, and that the brightness in her eyes is tears. He doesn’t understand that she is struggling not against him but against something in herself.

  All at once Zenin feels old and tired and disgusted with life in general. What has he been thinking of? All this trouble for a melodramatic American girl. Married. And completely insane. Matta da legare. It becomes urgent to get rid of her as soon as possible, ashore and out of his sight without complications.

  Dai, vieni, he says. Come on. Put your clothes on. Don’t worry. I will get a taxi from Ostia. And he is surprised by the ragged tenderness of his own voice, as if, without knowing it, he has been moved. Moved by the ridiculous theatrics she is pouring on as if she were a virgin about to be ravished.

  Later, when Mira comes up on deck with her face washed and clothes put to rights, she does not apologize. She just remarks in a reflective voice, as if to herself, that she doesn’t know what came over her, that she has been acting crazy, she feels crazy these days, that it must be something in the air, all the changes in her life. That she’s just realized she’s completely out of place in Rome.

  Zenin, furious, is silent. He has already ordered a pair of taxis, one to take her back to town, one to the airport for him. Has given the captain orders to continue on to Civitavecchia. He is impatient to get home, back to the office, can’t wait to see the last of this little bitch. Never again, he thinks venomously. Better a prostitute than this kind of ball-busting complication.

  But then, just after she climbs into the Zodiac with him, before the engine starts, she looks him in the eye and says in her gauche way; The two of us won’t see each other anymore. But thank you. Thank you for lunch.

  Zenin mutters something, still more angered that she should take the liberty of making a pronouncement that should be his. In fact he feels his anger growing into something like a decision. Perhaps, he thinks, he will let a certain amount of time pass and then call this troublesome girl again. Next time, he’ll be the one who decides how things turn out.

  The Zodiac speeds away toward the shore where the two taxis stand, the drivers goggling at the big white yacht that stands out in the afternoon like a dream and the man and the girl speeding toward them like pictures from a magazine. And the young deckhand with his curly hair and sun-blackened face catches Zenin’s eye with a subdued look of admiration at Zenin’s presumed swift conquest, and Zenin wants to slap him.

  THE DECKHAND

  My boss, Zenin, is old, ma è pieno di fica—but he gets lots of pussy. That’s how it is when you’re that rich. My cousin got me this job as deckhand, working from May to October when the Confusa goes to Antigua and there’s a whole new crew. When I started last year, I was seventeen and had neve
r left my village in Brindisi. I was no virgin, but the only live girl I’d seen naked was parts of my fidanzata, my girlfriend. But since I came on board the Confusa, I’ve got a close look at high-class pieces of ass like you see on television. Not just Italian—foreign, too. Actresses, models, once a princess. This last girl was American, a colored girl, cute, but not his usual standard, and in fact he didn’t even spend the night with her. Just a quick screw.

  Of course the girls want to marry him, but the boss isn’t having any. He had a wife already and that’s enough. So they come and they go. The rules for us are strict: always formal, no chitchat, no staring, even when they’re stretched out in the sun with their tits out for God and the angels to see. Or rubbing up against you when you help them into the dinghy. And some of those tarts really rub up against you. My girlfriend tells me that if she finds out I’ve been fooling around, she’ll slip aboard in some port one night and quietly, quietly cut off my balls. But there’s no harm in thinking. Lucky boss. Uomo fortunato.

  He makes a mountain of money selling those toys that come with the candy, but they say he was poor once. You can tell by the way he breaks into Veneto dialect. And by the way, when he’s alone, he eats white beans and onions, shovels them down just like my uncle the fisherman does. But Zenin’s like a different kind of uncle. To my mind he’s like what the old people call lo zio d’America. That means a man who left his family, left Italy, went off across the ocean to someplace like America and made a bundle. The uncle with his millions from America, that’s Zenin. He has what we all used to dream about back in the village.

  4

  MIRA

  2004 • DELIVERY

  So they are walking through Harvard Yard, mother and daughter. Mira, like a thousand freshman parents, is delivering a child to a new geography and life. Boston, in the unseasonably hot September, has a different tint of pollution from northern Italy, a texture of sunlight that makes the red-brick city seem vibrant and unreal, and both Mira and Maddie, groggy from jet lag, tired from a week of packing and combing the shops on Via Mazzini, dance along in the unconscious giddy feeling of vacation they always have on their first morning in America.

  Maddie, a chestnut-haired beauty who like the other freshmen girls towers over her mother—as we did over our mothers, thinks Mira. Where did it start, with Lilliputians?—is sick of questions about what it’s like to be an American girl coming to live in America for the first time. And questions about how she chose her parents’ college. She wrote about both on her college apps, and now wants everyone to shut up.

  Basta, she says to her mother. Enough. Mira and her children speak Italian to one another in the States, the way they speak English in Italy. As a secret language. And to show off a little, just a little, at fraught moments like this.

  Because, of course, the Yard is awash with emotion, as well as with cars, boxes, and bewildered freshman families.

  Above all, thinks Mira, there is the tide of young flesh, the stunning beauty of these immature faces now seeking one another, seeking out destiny, a key, in the features of strangers of their own age. And the parents—one of them me—blowing around them like dried husks. Wandering through the green lawns, the eternal bricks, like lost souls. Bemused by this one-sided tragedy of loss that their child feels with so much joy. A liberation for our children—what agony to understand this. And how much pain it takes to conceal it. And she recalls her own ecstatic relief when she saw her parents’ car disappear. And when she left her mother to fly to Rome.

  Many fathers are there, fathers jovial and paunchy in khaki shorts, hauling boxes, moving big shiny four-wheel-drive cars. Nick, of course, is not. He will come in from London after Maddie is settled and Mira has left.

  In a line for registering boxes or receiving keys, Mira flirts and plays one-upmanship with one father, who may just have been her year in college. Muscular, handsome, with small glasses, young face under gray hair. With the look of pink, steamed cleanliness that some rich Americans have.

  Beverly Hills, actually, he says. And you?

  Italy. Turin, says Mira, trumping him. You know, in the north. Barolo country.

  With mothers, Mira competes in the good old feminine tradition, with her Italian haircut, her expensive casual clothes, just right for ruefully lugging boxes, her chummy demeanor toward her daughter.

  You are the most gorgeous mom, says Maddie.

  Oh, go on—you know you’re the gorgeous one.

  Maddie has a cramped suite looking out onto billows of elms. A blond Chicago roommate with pipe-stem wrists and a squeaky voice, and a serious Mexican roommate with a high forehead and a mature air. Unpacking, they squeal over jeans, computers, leopard-skin pumps. They are ready to drag Maddie off, to become part of a frieze: the Three Graces. Their mythology, their world.

  But it’s not! Mira wants to scream. It’s my world. Nick’s and mine. The Yard is foggy with our ghosts. How many times did we kiss on these paths? Look, over there is the university church where we got married. That shimmer in the air—it’s our expectations, our daydreams, our future that didn’t happen!

  When they go to lunch, Harvard Square is full of dusty wind and street musicians. Black panhandlers with matted braids call Mira sister, and she hands them change along with a big grin.

  I’ll get in touch with my roots, Ma, I promise, Maddie tells her sarcastically in Italian.

  Near Starbucks they run into a Reiver cousin. A senior, a hockey player, six foot three, muscles, a round unawakened face. And blue eyes like Nick’s, now skating over Mira with embarrassment.

  Hey Maddie, you made it. You should come over for dinner. I’m off campus in Central Square. This is my girlfriend, Nessa. Nessa, this is my cousin Maddie. She grew up in Italy. And this is…this is…her mother…his voice trails off.

  Mira feels annoyed, then tolerant of his lack of manners. He’s a kid after all.

  I’m Miranda Ward. Maddie’s mother, she says with a warm sophisticated adult smile.

  The huge boy looks at her with those shockingly familiar eyes rimmed with wheat-colored lashes. Wondering. In a dull way, wary. You’ve certainly grown since I last saw you, Mira adds humorously.

  Once at her wedding she hoisted up this boy as he slept in a basket. A memory of that baby weight still resides somewhere in her right arm. And now he looks at her as if encountering a fabled monster. She knows that the Reivers have never forgiven her, and who knows what the boy has heard about her? She is the wicked aunt. A creature she always envisions as a smirking pantomime Dame with painted pink-and-white face, powdered hair, a beauty patch on her withered bosom. She feels a pang, though she knows nothing shows on her face. One thing wicked aunts know about is veneer. So Mira stands smiling, an elegant composed older woman on a street where she was once perilously young. Knowing that nothing is lost, that all times are one time. And knowing, though her daughter and nephew do not, that one reason they are standing casually embarrassed there on a street in Cambridge is because twenty years earlier, in a nearby garden, there was a happy ending.

  1981 • MEMBERS OF THE WEDDING

  Before Rome, before New York even, there is for Mira and Nick a certain June in Boston.

  One of the blissful Junes of college towns, pastoral seasons of graduations and weddings, when the rank humidity of East Coast summers is still just a languorous softness in the air, which smells intoxicatingly of youth and the future and white linen and green leaves. Young life all channeled into civilized forms. Diplomas and weddings and infinite hope, and with this particular marriage, something resolved. An old wound healed.

  The garden is attached to one of the old Radcliffe houses whose linoleum corridors are haunted by spirits of scholarly maidens who had to cram their studies and their furtive lovemaking into strict timetables. But the world has changed. By the opening of the nineteen eighties, boys and girls make love and ingest various chemicals at all hours in these halls.

  The changed times are why these two families, the Wards and the Rei
vers, are in the garden together. Mingling in the maple shade, eating poached salmon and drinking toasts in an atmosphere of scared conviviality. The black Wards, of Philadelphia and Washington, and the white Reivers, of Rhode Island and Maine. So conspicuous in contrast when divided into the groom’s side and bride’s side in Memorial Church, that a mischievous cousin of the bride—herself about to marry a white boy from her class at Yale—says the place looks like a chessboard.

  There have been the appropriate fairy-tale obstacles. Since the night at the beginning of senior year when Nick and Mira, struggling to set up camp in a high wind on Mt. Katahdin, watched their tent fly away, burst out laughing, and realized that there was nothing else to do but get married.

  A decision that triggers veiled protests. Veiled because both families, more similar than they guess, are filled with suburban liberals, strong on justice, weekend work camps, peace, affirmative action, mown lawns, sensible shoes, a Quaker-Shaker, old-school, civil-rights ideal of fellowship. Indeed Nick’s father, the small-town publisher, and Mira’s dead father, the public school principal, both marched in Birmingham and Washington. Unaware that their blood would be mingled in the next generation.

  And who is to say that this marriage isn’t what they marched for?

  But grandmothers fret that integration is one thing, marriage another. Letters fly, voicing qualms about how Nick or Mira will “fit in,” about their future happiness, about the identity of their children. Nick is the butt of white-boy jokes and political needling from a self-conscious dreadlocked cousin of Mira’s. And one of Nick’s aunts, after a few too many Bloody Marys, effusively asks Mira what tribe she’s from.

  When the engagement is announced, Nick and Mira’s friends torture them with cheesy ad-libs from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: …Don’t worry, Mother and Father, we don’t want children, and we’ll be living in Switzerland…

  This mild Montague and Capulet fuss, as it is somehow intended to, cements the bond between Miranda Alice Ward and Nick Strong Reiver. But though they feel star-crossed, they never think of eloping. Beneath everything they are good middle-class kids, and they want their wedding.