Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  She stops as Aunt Sissie opens her eyes for a minute. The old woman’s eyes, bluish with cataracts, look eerily large, set in nests of wrinkled skin that resembles cracked clay. She hardly looks human to Mira but rather like some ancient all-knowing extraterrestrial creature. She studies the sisters for a minute, adjusting the drip on her emaciated arm. And Mira and Faith stare back, transfixed the way they used to be years ago when she’d catch them giving each other Indian burns in church.

  I love you girls, Aunt Sissie whispers.

  1986 • CLOTHES

  One day Zenin buys Mira some clothes. He goes to the most stylish shop in the city, a place owned by a cousin to whom he once loaned a lot of money. All the rich provincial women shop here, including his ex-wife, his sisters, and Tere, mother of his son.

  Is she blond or dark, dottore? asks the shop assistant.

  Dark. About so high. Size, slender.

  Then I suggest, dottore—

  Zenin suppresses a grin as mountains of clothes appear. Day and evening suits and dresses, belts, bags, shoes. All with the deep glow of expensive fabric or glittering with the fake gems and embroidered gold that designers have loved in the last few seasons. His cousin, sly bastard, must be trying to work off his debt in one blow. Yet it pleases Zenin to say yes or no, to heap up millions of lire worth of clothes until the envious eyes of the shopgirl grow round like cartoon characters. He’s worked so hard all his life that he’s never before indulged in the simple millionaire’s pastime of dressing his mistress.

  The next time he sees Mira, after they make love, he says, I brought you a present.

  Her body stiffens. No. I said no presents.

  It’s nothing at all. Just look.

  Mira is willfully ignorant of fashion for someone who has lived in New York. She buys cheap clothes from whatever shop catches her eye, or goes around in T-shirts left over from college. She looks at the Roman women traversing cobblestone streets in short skirts, fitted jackets, and high heels as using an idiom that just doesn’t translate.

  Now, naked except for a pair of underpants, she stands staring at a huge square suitcase covered with a web of gold initials. She knows the design means money, but apart from that it leaves her feeling curiously illiterate.

  Go on, open it, says Zenin.

  When she sees the clothes, she can’t think of anything to say. Part of her wants to slam a fist into Zenin’s face and walk out. But another part makes her lift the suitcase lid like a child opens a toy chest and plunge her hands into the layers packed in tissue paper inside. She’s never felt anything like it. Satin, wool, leather, cashmere, and velvet packed together like a dense new element. Soft, so soft. And rising from it an almost imperceptible fragrance: the smell of luxury. She thinks of Ali Baba, of all plunderers dipping their hands for the first time into treasure, and she never wants to take her hands away. And at the same time, she feels trapped, for the first time understanding what it means to belong to Zenin.

  He stands beside her and pulls out a suit. Put it on. Please.

  He helps her, zipping the skirt and buttoning the jacket as if she were a child. Then leads her to the mirror. Look.

  The suit is made of wool, not the wool of school uniforms and ski sweaters but soft as the pelt of a mythical animal. Feather-light, lined in slippery silk, it clasps her as if it has known her all her life, as if it loves her. And it is red, not the valentine red of the Hotel d’Inghilterra walls where they spent their first few times together, but what Mira sees as a perfect red. Not warm, not cold, the red of brides in medieval pictures, the rosso porpora of cardinals’ robes.

  And the girl she sees in the mirror is transformed into a girl in an advertisment, in a dream, a girl framed by old cities and the triumphant illusion of an unknown place. A girl like those she has seen stepping into and out of shops on Via Condotti. A girl certainly not like her natural self, but mesmerizing.

  Valentino, says Zenin. Indifferent to his own appearance, he knows the name of all objects, all products and styles, that the world associates with status. Most of the women he knows live for these things. Beg for them. Mira’s savage ignorance—like a Wild West Indian, he jokes to himself—has annoyed him and made him feel vaguely powerless. Now, watching her fall under the spell of the red suit, he experiences the same satisfaction a trainer might feel who has managed to bridle a half-broken colt. Satisfaction mingled with slight pity. He hands her a pair of black silk shoes with stiletto heels and the transformation is complete.

  He pulls out a velvet dress. Try this now. Versace.

  And Mira obeys, pinning up her wild hair, not taking her eyes off the girl in the mirror.

  They work their way through the layers in the suitcase. The shop-girls have guessed well; the clothes might have been made for her. Zenin dresses and undresses her like a ladies’ maid. And as he does, he teaches her the names of the designers. Fendi, Missoni, Montana, Alaia.

  Laughing, despising herself, she repeats the names, because he is so earnest, almost religious about it, because he has never before been so tender and attentive.

  Later he says, I’ll have the hotel send the suitcase to your house. In the morning, when your husband isn’t there.

  You’re mad. I can’t take these clothes home.

  They’re yours. You can find a place to hide them. Or—Zenin pauses—do you want me to throw them away?

  Mira is silent.

  A few days later, she drags the suitcase out from under the bed in the spare room to show a girlfriend. The friend is a voice student from South Africa, with skin the color of dark plums; a Methodist, fat and beautiful and preachy. She lives in a hostel near Via Prenestina and has been scolding Mira ever since Mira confessed about Zenin one afternoon. You have a good-looking husband who loves you, her friend is saying as Mira unzips the suitcase. What do you need with an old Italian man? A dirty old rich man? You should send this stuff right back.

  Just look, says Mira.

  Her friend looks, plunges her hands in, as Mira did, gently unfolds the red suit. She is quiet for a moment, touching a pair of shoes, a coat, a satin bag. Then she lets out her breath and looks Mira straight in the eye. An unreadable, purely feminine look.

  Keep it, she says.

  FAITH

  Once when my sister was about seven and I was nine, she shoved a piece of soap in her ear. It was after dinner in the summer, and Mom and Dad were sitting outside in the backyard reading the paper and I was just settling down to watch TV because it was Mira’s turn to clear the table, when Mira starts howling from the powder room and it turned out that the crazy girl had tried to smell a piece of Yardley soap through her ear. Then Mom has to rush her to Temple emergency room and I end up with the dishes. I don’t want to play the good girl—bad girl, Martha–Mary Magdalene routine, but this is so typical. She was always flighty and nosy, always getting in a fix and out of her responsibilities.

  I was the prettier one, everybody said. The one who behaved herself.

  When we played, Mira was always a buccaneer or a treasure hunter or James Bond.

  And we won’t even go into when we were teenagers and those sex poems she published in the creative-writing magazine.

  She married Nick, and of course it imploded, because holding on to your first marriage requires backbone. But Mira married a white boy and went off to Italy as one of her adventures and then got bored when she found out it was work like anything else.

  That’s how I see it, anyway, though she never talks about what happened. But I’m sure whatever it was, it was her fault.

  I read my sister’s books and articles, I do. If they’re suitable, I even recommend them to the school librarian, though I have a nagging suspicion that one day she’ll make fun of me in one of them. Make fun of good old American Faith, Hope, and Charity, as she used to call me.

  Anyway, how it goes is that she swans in from Europe for a holiday here or a funeral there. And I get on with things. She’s settled down, I admit, and has a lovely family now w
ith that nice guy Vanni—who must have the patience of Job. But whenever I’m talking to my students or my own daughters about inner strength and serious goals, about morality, I have an opposite example in the back of my mind, and that’s Mira.

  20

  NICK

  2005 • VERDE

  Dude, this is awesome, says Nick’s brother, LT. You did this?

  Yes, I, the Lord almighty, snapped my fingers and it came into being. No, doofus, I told you it’s a client.

  LT, short for Little Teddy, in some circles known as Tedward the Unsteady, widens his protuberant pale eyes in mock alarm as he has done since he was a hyperactive four-year-old and Nick at seven threatened to shove him off the Sunfish. Nowadays he’s three inches taller than Nick, a former varsity wrestler, not fat but tanklike—as only American athletes get, thinks Nick—lighthearted, foul-mouthed, and balding. And he should still be on Ritalin.

  The brothers met up in Shanghai last night, and now push their way into a packed cocktail crowd under green lights in the Grand Hyatt ballroom. The launch of a new gin. A mountain of green bottles forms the centerpiece of the room, with a dancing laser show of emerald helixes above and green strobe lights zooming against black velvet walls. The pretty crowd is part expat, but mainly tireless South China social troopers, old and new orders of tai tais fluttering their designer labels like knights’ standards. Nick sees the beverage company CEO for Asia and the gorgeous Singaporean PR director holding court over by the bar with the SAP Mendocino software guy, besides a half-dozen friends and acquaintances of his from Beijing and Guangzhou. The tycoons, as expected, have stayed home.

  I think I figured out that the theme is green, says LT, swilling his second glass of the specially created cocktail.

  The drink’s called Green Icon. Cheesy, but effective. And there are supposed to be green icons displayed around the room. A Buccellati emerald, a famous jade Buddha, a piece of Wimbledon—

  A leprechaun’s ass? Shit, there is some serious pussy going on. And not just Chinese. What’s with all the icy blondes?

  Second-string Russian models. There’s a direct pipeline from Byelorussia.

  That is some ill pussy. And I dig the phat French house beat. Seventies Eurotrash discos always rock.

  Nick watches LT’s round yellow head with its pink bald spot bobbing above the crowd as he toddles off toward the bar, and wonders as always how it is that a middle-aged white American male can talk dated preppie hip-hop and live. Even in China, where middle-class teenagers are just exiting their Ol’ Dirty Bastard phase. But Teddy, a hedonist since he was a fat towheaded toddler gobbling stolen Milk Duds, gets away with it, the way he gets away with everything without even using irony, through the simple pleasure he takes in anything that is not his. Other people’s girlfriends, other people’s cars, drugs, music, and money. Ex–St. George’s stoner, kicked out of Colby for pasting his bare ass on the wrong windshield; ex-manager for a defunct white rap group—thus the jargon—ex-manager of a failed Provençal restaurant in Napa Valley; now curiously solvent from a mysteriously successful Internet business he has set up to buy and sell classic cars.

  Now he’s shown up in China and announced to Nick over dinner—Nick’s treat—at Sens & Bund that he’s leaving his long-suffering girlfriend, Morag, to marry a Dutch dermatologist he met when he sold her an Aston Martin that once belonged to a minor television actor. They’re madly in love. She wants a big white wedding at the Santa Clara Auberge du Soleil. And a honeymoon in Tuscany.

  Nick protests. You just can’t marry somebody you met five minutes ago when you sold her a car.

  Not just a car. An Aston Martin DB4. The altar of true love.

  And what about poor Morag? She put up with all your shit over the years and gets dumped? Teddy, you’re not exactly marriage material. You’re over forty and you’ve fucked most of the female population of North America.

  As did you, my brother, retorts LT equably. In your prime, working your way around your bouts of fidelity. Everything on two legs and some, dare I say, on four. It’s about moving on from one phase to another. I never thought I’d be into heavy metal, but now I’m listening to German progressive stuff. Queensryche. Dream Theater. Like that. By the way, did you know that the Nazis invented the first sexbot? Kron-hild, they called her, and she was Aryan and anatomically correct. Isn’t that wild?

  You can’t argue with Little Teddy. When Nick calls Dhel from his hotel room, she scolds him. Anyone would think you’re jealous, she says.

  It drives me crazy when fools go on about love.

  Who are you to judge what’s love and who’s a fool? demands his wife from all those thousands of miles away. All of his girlfriends and wives have always had a weak spot for LT.

  Now Nick watches as his enormous sibling surges out of the crowd with two glasses of Green Icon held high. His face is shining the way it used to when he successfully pilfered something of Nick’s.

  Come on, best man, drink to me, says LT. Toast my bride and the future. In green. Verde, como te quiero verde—how the fuck does that Spanish poem go?

  Nick grabs the glass. First, to the bridegroom, he says.

  1986 • VINES, WATER, CASTLE

  If she’s acting like a bitch, screw around a bit and clear your head. Then you can decide whether to keep her, kick her out, or kill her.

  This advice comes from Nick’s friend Lorenzo, a union lawyer in his forties sometimes called Lorenzaccio for his evil tongue and sometimes Rambo for his habit of toting a machete as he leads Sunday jaunts along lost Etruscan roads.

  Seven thirty in the morning, the July sun already blinding over the Sabine hills, and the two have run four kilometers down the dusty road from the farmhouse Mira and Nick have rented. This summer, which will be their last together, they are spending on the slopes of Lago di Bracciano. Bracciano, liquid eye of an extinct volcano, rimmed in gritty black beaches and tourist restaurants specializing in eels, is said to be haunted like all the lakes in Latinium. Beautiful beyond hope with its hazy blue depths and vine-covered slopes, the Orsini castle crouched at one end like a beast at a watering hole. The lake has a disorienting simultaneous feeling about it, as if time were blurred and a million past and future lives floated in its atmosphere, without the gross material weight that is history in Rome. Popes, dukes, Partisans, Roman generals, Samnite guerrillas, Etruscan kings, Swiss tourists, all present, all unimportant. As if a series of transparent stage sets have been laid one over the other, giving the landscape in every direction a shimmer, like something seen through tears.

  Nick and Lorenzo have run through the standing wheat and faded poppies and the bullrushes that lie along the shore path. Here they pause, sheeted with sweat at their halfway point, in the shade of a fig tree that sits on a spit of land that extends into the water that is already beginning to be dotted by sails in the distance. Among the wasps and the ferment of the ripe black figs hanging on the branches and rotting on the ground, they piss, gulp water, jump into the lake, and swim a few strokes before starting back. Nick marveling privately at the energy contained in the older man’s small hairy potbellied body.

  Lorenzo never stops talking when he runs, his bearded simian face turning delicate maroon as he lectures Nick about everything from the weeping Heraclitus to the latest scandals in the Craxi government. About ancient and modern heroes: the bloody last stand of the Italic League rebels against the war machine of Sulla’s legions at Sentinum; Di Pietro nowadays, battering at the tawdry gilt fortress constructed by the villains of Tangentopoli. Talks as well with lubricious anatomical specificity about the women he is seeing (this summer, a surgeon’s wife from Modena, convent educated, insatiable).

  But this is the first time he has commented on the marriage of his two young friends—i neonati, the Newborns, as he calls them privately—though anyone can see that the marriage is poised at that interesting brink of dissolution that attracts spectators, scavengers. Noble rot.

  The Newborns’ vacation house—decorated wi
th slightly too much toile de Jouy by a niece of the old princess—brings to life the American dream of Italian pastorale.

  Platters of pasta and fava beans devoured in the pergola shade of a baroque vine. Moonlight vigils to watch the wild boar come snuffling out of the forest to raid the kitchen garden. Ethnological trips to country dance halls; to Communist unity festivals; to local gastronomic celebrations of every type, from strawberries to snails; to Gubbio for the phallic festival race of Sant’Ubaldo; to Orte for the mating dance of sacred portraits.

  Then there is the peasant family on the property, who in spite of their blaring Berlusconi television, speak a brambly dialect—surely related to pre-Latin Oscan or Sabellian—and make satisfying feudal references to “his excellency, the prince.” Above all there is the view, the intrusive beauty of the sweep of vines, water, castle. Nick commutes to work through the traffic of the Cassia each day, while Mira writes in an earwiggy but atmospheric tower room.

  Their small daughter, terra-cotta brown in the sunlight, squealing with joy as she rolls about with a litter of white Maremmano puppies. The cheap Frascati, the mild drugs, the daring talk, the flirting, the self-conscious nudity. An ever-changing cast of houseguests, young Americans with expensive teeth and resonant fellowships, minor artists and musicians, aristocratic Roman and Tuscan riffraff in quilted shooting vests.

  A happy, wise, and good world, thinks Lorenzo, who has rented out his own country house to rich Swedes and so visits the Newborns almost every weekend. But with something rotten behind it, as is always the case. Et ego in arcadia. And you don’t have to look too far. He likes Mira, who is smart and a nice little piece, but he sees that she’s got that hard bloom on her that means that she is putting horns on her husband. Who loves her. The odd thing is that she loves him too.

  Hence Lorenzaccio’s charitable and diplomatic suggestion.

  Nick is still ass-deep in the lake, his old washed-out Harvard running shorts ballooning ridiculously in the murky water around his waist. His wet torso, the older man enviously notes, has the lapidary symmetry of an old statue. It glistens in the sun, the soaked scanty chest hair dripping downward in a V. Ah, youth. Silly twat, Mira.