by Andrea Lee
Instead, Nick says, London is a total mess—overpriced, filthy, and more girl gangs than the Bronx. But it’s awake. It’s got that future buzz that Asian cities have. It’s America that’s asleep. We’re at war, but we’re lost in a provincial daze.
So you’re not coming back to live in the States anytime soon. Mumsy and Carol and everybody are always asking.
You know the answer to that, Garce. No. I have a life. Dhel and the girls, school, work, friends. For the foreseeable future, the U.K. is where we are. And I like it.
Do you even feel American anymore?
I feel more American than ever before. Nobody lets you forget it. Not since we started colonizing Iraq. And you see stuff better from a distance. I can despise Bush and the neocons better if I’m despising Blair and Labour at the same time. Like having bifocals. Look at this face—Nick thrusts out his chin and leans close to Garcia. Does this look like the face of one who deserts the core values of his native land?
Hmmm.
Have I developed a reprehensible Yankee-Brit accent? Have I shirked my sacred paternal trust to make my three daughters into Red Sox fans? Have I denied them exposure to the Cars? To the Sugar Hill Gang? To Pop-Tarts?
Okay, okay, says Garcia. You’ve convinced me that you’re the same homegrown asshole we’ve always loved. Now can we order some marble cheesecake? And refresh my memory, before that place was the SoHo Club, wasn’t it some place you got thrown out of?
No, I got thrown out of Trax. Teddy and I. What I was trying to remember was where we stumbled on that drag festival.
Wigstock. Tompkins Square. I thought I’d walked onto a John Waters set.
And they start retracing the night landscape of the eighties until Garcia says, You know, I was thinking about what you said before. Don’t you think that all the quaintness, the feeling of being frozen in time is because there’s that big gap in the downtown skyline? The sun’s out, years have passed since nine-eleven, but we’re still breathing corpses. And sometimes late at night, it’s bizarre, but I think I see the outline of the towers. The lights and everything, like ghosts—architectural phantoms. So Nicko, I think you should have a little compassion for your old town. Everybody knows that you can’t just move along when you’ve had your guts blown out.
Garcia props her chin on her hand, stares owlishly at Nick, and adds in a mock-seductive whisper, Come on. You know you can’t do without us.
1986 • THIEVES
Surfacing from an entrancing dream where he’s playing electric guitar like a crossover genius in front of a classical orchestra—he can see his own head and jamming fingers gleam in the spotlight—Nick realizes that for once it’s not his baby daughter who woke him.
It’s Mira kneeling by the long bedroom window, peering outside through the velvet curtain, and calling him in a whisper. And when he joins her, he sees the reason: two men climbing the wrought-iron gate that shuts off the alley alongside their house from Via Panisperna. Silhouettes that drop down with silent ease, like acrobats. After the portiere’s chained Vespa, or looking for an unlocked window. Break-ins are so common in Rome that all their friends have stories, but this is the first time for Nick. On impulse, he speaks through the open window into the dank alley in a quiet, conversational tone.
Che cazzo fate laggiù? What the fuck are you doing down there?
The perfection of his Roman accent—he notices irrelevantly—is astounding, and so is the effect of his words on the thieves, who immediately back up jerkily like a video rewinding and fling themselves over the fence. In a minute there is just the alley—a noisome crack between buildings, home to a colony of feral cats who thrive on leftover pasta tossed down by the neighbors. That and the disturbed air of a warm March night.
Mira giggles and throws her arms around him. You drove them away, you brave boy.
We should call the carabinieri.
Why should we? Do you want noise and questions and bureaucracy? Let ’em alone, our skinny little thieves.
But they might come back.
No, I don’t think so. Mira speaks in a tone Nick has never heard before, absent, yet strangely indulgent. She’s never a coward, but it surprises him that she’s so casual about this.
How—he asks—how’d you see them anyway?
Oh, I was awake, says Mira with a yawn. Staring out of the window, communing with my coven of cats. Then they showed up over the fence like Mimes from Hell.
Still that curious tone in her voice, as alien to her husband as a strange smell on her skin. Amused and detached as if she were—he fumbles for the idea—not quite there. As if she herself, standing there so solid in her T-shirt and underpants, were really outside in the dark. As if in a dream he glimpses her naked, shadowed, in league with the thieves. Yet he’s still half asleep and there’s nothing to ask, is there? Nothing there, like the tingling absence left by a ghost, or a vanished intruder.
In the next room, little Maddie wakes up with a grumbling wail, and against all good pediatric advice, her young parents bring her into bed with them and they fall asleep curled up all three together in a moist stalky tangle of flesh that smells like nothing else in the world but family and safety. And the next day they tell Rocco, the portiere, who nails a spiral of barbed wire above the gate.
But much later, when Nick looks back to trace the beginnings of venom and suspicion, it is always that night he returns to, the night when the fear of robbers is eclipsed by one brief flash of certainty that he doesn’t know Mira—his chosen love, his best friend, his wife—at all.
GARCIA
My first memory of Nick is of an incredibly blond kid who was an incredibly slow and methodical eater—he’d be there at the table of his parents’ place up in Maine, forking up baked bean after baked bean for what seemed like hours after the rest of us cousins were allowed to get up. Eating calmly like Buddha would eat if Buddha ate baked beans. I think he ate so slowly because he was studying his food—he wanted to understand how everything worked, not scientifically, but in a humanistic way. Just like he’d spend hours drawing up the exact formations of Waterloo with those old lead soldiers that belonged to Uncle Jake. And later on, working out the precise scansion of passages from Beowulf and The Wanderer. But he wasn’t one of those weird control-freak boys. He just wanted to know and see everything, and even fix everything. Brilliantly, but like a brilliant amateur who needed to cover all the bases. Maybe because they lost Meade, the oldest son, and Nick felt he had to make up for that. We always knew that he’d be the one to replenish the family coffers.
Anyway, for a little kid he was exceptionally kind. I remember once in Little Compton when we were about six or seven, I was climbing a tree in a dress and ripped this huge hole in my underpants, and he just lent me a pair of his, first closing up the pee flap with a safety pin. He was never a prig—he was deep into sex and drugs and rock and roll when we were teenagers—and somehow I always saw him as the ultimate American character, like Huck Finn. So I’m always taken aback when we meet up in New York and I see this slightly jaded multilingual Citizen of the World. Carol calls him the Wandering Wasp. But he’s still playing those war games, fooling around with literature—I always think business types are so much more poetic than those money-grubbing real writers I have to deal with—and he’s got what looks like a domestic idyll over in London, so maybe the distance is what he was after all the time. After all, there were generations of sea captains in the family. Captains and missionaries.
15
ZENIN
2005 • CONFIDENTIAL
Cocco, did you ever love any of your women? whispers Zenin’s sister, Maria Cristina. She is dying of cancer, and so entitled to ask the kinds of questions that ordinarily lead Zenin to throw up a hasty wall of subterfuge. As she is entitled to call him Cocco, his hated family nickname coined by the string of sisters, one that reminds him of stinking outdoor toilets and the sweet American potatoes they ate all winter after the war. Cocco is a mocking abbreviation of cocco della mamma, Mama�
�s darling.
Of course, he mumbles, as he sits beside her trying not to look at her. Her skeletal face that under the gray stubble on her scalp looks startlingly like a boyhood photo he has seen of their father, in Sunday clothes somewhere in Istria. Her large blue eyes that as a teenager she flashed around far too boldly at the boys in town. She is the youngest sister, the arty 1968-style revolutionary. His least favorite sister, if truth be told, always lecturing him condescendingly about Gramsci, Lenin, Marcuse, Fanon, arguing in favor of the Red Brigades even when he, her capitalist-pig brother, was getting death threats. And not too proud later on to request a cushy job in the company for her husband, a brainless nobleman with politics further left than hers. But now, as he is about to lose her, as she has become an insoluble problem, she has become agonizingly precious.
They are sitting in a room as large and luxurious as a hotel suite, in a clinic overlooking a lake in Switzerland. They’ve called in and dispensed with therapies radical and traditional from all around the world. Veronese from the Istituto Tumori, the raw-foods man from Basel, the brilliant young Turk from Sloan-Kettering. All have been inspired, bribed, urged along by Zenin’s money but have run up against the indisputable fact of cells that want to die. No one knows whether it will be three months or six. And the baffled rage built up in Zenin’s cold heart, rage at impotence before a simple reality that makes meaningless the empire he has torn out of poverty and the past, makes this dying sister—a shape formed out of his blood, of the dust of his countryside—into something to be clutched as best he can.
Of course he says nothing about this to Maria Cristina, simply sits and stares at his big restless freckled hands while steely twilight rises on the lake and his ninny of a brother-in-law types something on a computer in the corner. But when her unexpected question comes, it links her curiously enough with women in his past for whom he has felt the same bafflement in helplessness and jealous clutching. One is Tere, the mother of his son. Another is the American girl, Mira. He thinks of them now, and it helps him sit on at the side of his wasted, breastless sister.
I’ve loved one or two, he says.
1986 • SAHARA SAND
The unpleasantness of the sirocco on the March afternoon when Mira and Zenin finally get together. Well, everyone knows what a sirocco is. Even people who have never been to Italy can talk about the sirocco, as they can about San Francisco fog or Bangkok smog: red grains of Sahara sand whirled like a biblical plague across the Mediterranean and up the peninsula in a demonic current of air that, like the mistral and the foehn, causes migraines, murders, and suicides before breaking in a burst of blood-colored rain. Everyone knows about the sirocco, which is as commonplace as falling in love.
Nick is immune to it as some people are.
Mira feels that her skull is being flayed from the inside, that she is breathing in the rubble of entire barbaric civilizations reduced to dust.
Zenin, the hypochondriac, dislikes it because it lowers his already low blood pressure.
In the leaden light of noon, Mira, head throbbing, takes a taxi to a fashionable restaurant among the umbrella pines of the Pincio and walks in high heels up the gravel path, past a Roman bust so worn with handling that it looks like a clown. Someone, with Magic Marker, has added a grinning mouth and a penis for a nose. Zenin, seated on the terrace, watches her arrive. With satisfaction, he observes the taxi driver’s eyes burning into her legs, sees the headwaiter defer, and watches her pass a table of Roman men, all tanned hides and silk and sunglasses, who look her over and say, Che bona! Bona means “sexy” in Roman dialect, but it comes from the same root as the word good.
Mira is right and good in this world because she has put on lipstick and high heels, and a short linen dress with a decent cut and a mustard-colored sash. Has become a luxury item as unmistakable as a black limousine. Zenin can’t imagine how much a masquerade this is. How different this Rome is from her own world only a few blocks away, of waking up with Nick and Maddie, of pushing a stroller out to the street market, of tapping frantically at the computer, of English language playgroups in the park, of nights of pizza and Fulbright fellows.
Zenin rises to greet her with a kiss on each cheek. Sei crescuita, he says teasingly. You grew up. You learned Italian. And you’re learning how to dress.
They sit ignoring the Pincio view spread below: domes, rooftops, antennae, and leafy terraces, all strangely vivid in the bilious light. And they eat a long heavy meal, a spring menu because it’s nearly Easter. Risotto with puntarelle, asparagus, fried artichokes, suckling lamb, white wine from the Castelli Romani. Zenin dips pieces of tough Roman bread into olive oil and tells Mira about the peasants who hunt puntarelle—fern shoots—and sprouting dandelions in the countryside around his town, and jokes about the American soldiers from the base near Vicenza and the crazy things they order in restaurants. And he’s pleased, he says, to see that Mira is as greedy as ever.
Neither of them feels the slightest bit awkward. And neither says anything about what has happened in their lives in the nearly two years since they’ve seen each other. Their ludicrous improbable false start gives them an odd feeling of having a past together.
He knew when she said she would meet him that she’d sleep with him. All that remains now is to follow the current. He reaches across the table and crushes her hand in his.
As they finish their coffee and rise to leave, Zenin is aware that all over the restaurant with its huge terra-cotta vases of orange trees and oleander, men are staring, envying him, wanting her. Even the headwaiter with his slicked white hair and smirking eunuch’s face. Neither Zenin nor Mira is even slightly drunk, yet as they walk out, the heavy sirocco air on the terrace, under the Pincio pines, lying over the roofs of the city, seems to slow down their movements. Full of dust and ghosts of the famous people who have been there, and pretty women like Mira who leave the table to go to hotels with men in the haunted afternoon. Full of lust and exhaustion.
And soon Zenin sits on a hotel bed, making no move to undress or embrace Mira, and commands, Spogliati. Take off your clothes. I want to see you.
He’s brought her to the d’Inghilterra in Via Bocca di Leone. The classic Baedeker hotel, where rich friends of Nick’s and Mira’s parents stay. But Zenin and Mira meet no one because they’ve entered through a side door where an elevator leads to a small two-room apartment lined in red velvet.
A big low bed with a formal cover of red damask. Gold-framed botanical prints that no one has ever looked at. Dark nineteenth-century cupboards where no one ever puts away anything. A slippery Empire couch that no one ever uses except to fling clothes onto or to perform sexual acrobatics too complicated for the bed. A seventies-looking giant television and a glistening white marble bathroom. Windows shuttered, bolted, draped blind with silk. It’s the kind of room Mira and Nick would giggle at, trade ironic comments about Victorian porn. Couldn’t you just see Nanà here—or Chéri, or Odette? Jokes to disguise their uneasiness at the straightforward eroticism of the suite, its banal power. It exists for one purpose only and is the color of blood, of valentines, of Babylon. It lies hidden deep in the city like a heart in a human breast. And faintly, from the cobblestone maze of shopping streets outside, rises the sound of the river of tourists flowing by.
Zenin—who has chosen the place because none of his friends go there—thinks it’s overpriced but correct.
And now with a feeling of profound satisfaction—because he loves above all things to be paid back—he watches as Mira obeys him and cancels out the moment when she flung her clothes off on his boat.
Calmly, without theatricality, she takes off the linen dress, the small undergarments that she knew would be seen when she put them on, and stands naked in front of him in her high-heeled shoes. Doesn’t pose, just stands. And as she does so, a strange thing happens to Zenin, something that never happens outside of the instincts he uses to do his deals: he sees things through her eyes as well as his own. Feels her mixture of excitement and shame
at standing there stripped in front of the tall man with the expensive, badly fitting suit. How brazenly pleased she is to show her body, unmarked by childbirth except for heavier breasts. Feels just for a second how much she has set aside to come to him. She knows that there will never be another moment like this, where she stands presented and beheld. That she will never be as powerful, and that part of the reason is that she is doing something she thinks is wrong. She feels as if she has come to the center of her life, to the center of a wood in which all the leaves on the trees are eyes. Or to the hidden center, the secret heart she has been searching for in the labyrinth of Rome.
She puts out a hand and touches his face and Zenin feels himself tremble. He shuts off the light and in the hotel blackout begins to tear at his clothes.
And fucking her is, as he knew it would be, like a reconciliation. Like two enemies surrendering in the same instant. Violent and silent recognition there in the dark. Her body is so young, so smooth, though a child has passed through it. Like a weapon or a piece of perfect machinery. And Zenin, who has begun to brood about middle age, about his miserable, stressful tycoon’s life, to worry about impotence, realizes that deep inside, without even knowing it, Mira loathes him. And because of this he’ll be able to be excited by her for a long time.
And then it is five o’clock, and like dozens of other women who have spent afternoons in that room, Mira has to leap out of bed and race in a taxi back to her life. Cheeks burning, thighs chafed, repeating to herself, Is that all it is? Then I can do it. I can be two people.