by Andrea Lee
Nick struggles to get away from the fire and the approaching soldiers and the sight of that monstrous blind singing face, and wakes up to find himself covered with sweat and fighting with one of the four slablike pillows on the bed in his room at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou. He gets up and goes to the bathroom and stares at his naked cadaverous self in the greenish fluorescent light. Stares with a masochistic appreciation, possible only at three A.M. in a Chinese hotel bathroom smelling faintly of mildew, at sad orchidaceous genitals, baggy slit eyes, porcupine hair, and incipient potbelly. The sights and sounds of the dream have not receded—as in very few dreams, the images remain hard and clear, and he feels his defenseless physical self contained in it like a tortoise in a shell. The feeling he understands very clearly is an anger so ravenous, so voracious for revenge, that the razing of a city, the sack of a civilization, is nothing.
Venice, he thinks.
Then he says aloud, I should have killed that fucking bastard. I should have cut off his balls and shoved them down his throat.
He is left feeling drained and vaguely ashamed, as if he has had a wet dream. And relieved that Dhel is not with him. He turns on CNN and watches the market reports and the news. A mine explosion in China. A car bomb in Israel. Women and children hunted through caves in the Sudan. American soldiers staked out on rooftops against a sand-colored glare. He just watches the pain of the world flash by, without having obscene conversations out loud with heads of state, as he usually does when he is alone in hotel rooms. After a while he is able to sleep.
1987 • THE PROCESS
People fall in love in an instant, but it takes longer to fall out of love.
Mira and Nick no longer fuck, but in the night when they are asleep they move toward each other and fall into a desperate embrace like two drowning people. Their pulses synchronize, their anguish lifts. Mira’s devouring thoughts of Zenin, Nick’s willful blindness, all of it departs with heavy wing strokes, leaving husband and wife sleeping embraced. The babes in the wood, huddled together against cold and death. All the lies, the contrived arguments, the discussions where he demands to know what is going on and she says nothing, nothing; all the circling hostility that makes unhappy families just as boring as happy ones—all this lifts in a few magical nighttime hours. Sometimes Maddie climbs out of her bed in the next room and sneaks in with her mother and father, so they wake up in the morning with her damp curly head and solid warm body squeezed between them, proof of their connection.
And they still laugh together. There’s still their shared culture, the fact that they were born in America in the same year, played the same playground games, watched the same commercials, felt the same boredom in families that, though of different races, shared the same blithe suburban hopes for their children. They still laugh at Italy.
At the television special on the fattest family in Italy, where the mother gravely describes cooking four kilos of spaghetti a day.
At Italian heavy-metal music.
At Italian porn-film titles, like Anal Vices of Sister Benedetta.
At a Roman waiter, elegant and grave, walking out of a restaurant bearing a tray of leftovers, followed by a line of cats, their tails ceremoniously aloft.
When they laugh together, Nick feels a glimmer of hope and Mira feels roused momentarily out of a dream. There’s no place for humor in the places Zenin brings her to. When she laughs, she looks timidly at Nick with something curiously beseeching in her eyes. But after a minute she turns away.
And that happens as well when they wake up entwined in the bed. Pretending to be asleep, to be stirring, Mira pulls back from that intolerable warmth. And he pulls back too. And then they yawn and say unimportant things without looking at each other. And Mira gets up and digs for her running shoes in the big dark armoire, the Bluebeard’s closet that conceals her guilt, the clothes that Zenin has given her. Their day begins with a retreat.
No one would guess that in the old bedroom with its beamed ceiling in the center of Rome, in their American bed, they had been braided together, breathing like one person. That in the middle of that bed, almost every night, there was a truce, as on battlefields when Christmas flares are set up on no-man’s-land, and both sides down their guns for a day.
KIP EISENBERG
My research focus these days is kinship patterns and marriage settlements with particular emphasis on the documents in the Dandolo clan archive, but I’ve gotta admit off the record that the core story still turns me into a seventh-grader. I get shivers thinking about the old guy with his eyes ripped out brooding for decades, looking eastward over the Adriatic. And what did he feel after he’d put a prostitute on the patriarch’s throne? After he’d stolen the bones of half the apostles and burned Eastern glories of Christendom to the ground? After they carried off the bronze horses and the Theotokos of Nicopeia? Was it enough for him? Is anything ever enough?
24
ZENIN
2005 • FAMILY PARTY
Zio, is it true that you had an affair with Brigitte Bardot? asks Zenin’s nephew, a pain-in-the-ass Bocconi University graduate.
The annoying thing about getting old, thinks Zenin, about becoming the undisputed ruler, the zio or nonno—uncle or grandfather—in the family, is that if you’ve had any kind of interesting life, you become a goddamned legend. A legend is a fossil. A fossilized turd. He gives an inward snicker, looks gravely at the Zenin clan gathered twenty-seven strong around his sister’s vast dining table. It’s a cresima, confirmation, luncheon for his favorite niece, a nine-year-old monkey who is the only child to have inherited Zenin’s Mongolian cheekbones, and who now bounces joyously in her seat fondling a string of pearls he’s given her.
Twenty-seven sitting at a table. Including:
Zenin’s two daughters, neither of whom has their mother’s translucent blond beauty, and who have, in their mid-thirties, become tweedy matrons with flat pumps. One brainy, one horsey, both with a long-cultivated air of patient reproach toward their father.
Their husbands, his sons-in-law, interchangeable scions of local impecunious nobility, expert mountaineers and glacier skiers, useless in the office.
Their six children, Zenin’s grandchildren, a mannerly blond swarm in Tyrolean sweaters, who after lunch will attack Zenin, pull his ears, rifle his pockets for chewing gum and drag him off to play James Bond on the PlayStation.
Zenin’s adored son, Daniele, home for the weekend from Milan. As handsome and unassuming as usual, occupying his cherished niche in the family with the naturalness of a shepherd boy playing a flute in the woods.
Caterina, Daniele’s girlfriend, a pretty, rather bovine girl of eighteen, conservatively dressed, serenely ignoring the fact that no one thinks she’s good enough for Daniele.
Daniele’s mother, Tere, the brava ragazza who tried unsuccessfully for so long to marry Zenin and is now completely absorbed into the family, looking tanned and attractive in a well-cut jacket and Sicilian coral jewelry.
Zenin’s present girlfriend, Mariella, the jolly blond antique dealer, who has cunningly forged an alliance with Tere, with whom she is discussing chakras while blowing smoke rings in Zenin’s direction.
Zenin’s mother, ninety-four years old, spooning up pastina in brodo at one end of the long table, her dyed hair pinched up in a frail helmet, her cataracts covered by a pair of purplish sunglasses that make her look like an insect. Occasionally hissing an order at the Croatian nurse who sits beside her.
Zenin’s three younger sisters, called from time immemorial Le Tre Grazie—the Three Graces—though only one of them is called Grazia. Not triplets, but inseparable—identical blue-eyed crop-haired ladies who together run a private animal shelter and a natural-foods store.
Their husbands, who work for Zenin. One of them, his marketing director, actually knows what he’s doing.
Zenin’s oldest sister, Betta, recently widowed, looking like a dowager empress with her crest of thick white hair, her large black-clad frame and huge pearls. Her
face red from too much wine, her expression absent as she expertly directs the two Sri Lankan housekeepers in white jackets and gloves who are serving an enormous dish of semolina and béchamel sauce.
A horde of nieces and nephews ranging from toddlers to university students. All of them good-looking. Cheerful, tall, healthy, with thick hair, strong teeth. Products of seaside summers and winters skiing in the pure air of the Dolomites. Confident, well-mannered, filling their end of the table with a subdued chirping of laughter and pranks between cousins. Sometimes Zenin looks them over when they are gathered like this and thinks about lice, boils, runny noses, bluish bare knees, and the stink of the courtyard toilet when he was growing up. When polenta with a little sugar was a treat.
It gives him a curious mixture of pride and suffocation to sit here as the center, the defining force of this huge visible structure of family and wealth. The modern suburban villa of his sister, with the oriental rugs and every surface covered with silver wedding favors. They are an extension of him, like his factories, his offices and workers, the landscape, the city where he grew up. Yet at the same time they bore the tits off him with their dependency and demands, with the transparent hopes of the younger males to unseat a sclerotic Zenin and snatch his power.
And there is always something between him and his family, the same curious wall that keeps him apart and alone wherever he goes.
He takes a sip of wine, and in reply to his nephew’s question starts to brag. No, it was Danielle Darrieux. I met her in Cortina when we were all stuck there during the big snowstorm of 1970. Four meters of snow and no electricity. Agnelli was there, and Vedova, the father not the son, and two of the Niarchoses.
But Papa got the girl! exclaims his younger daughter, in a fond tone.
Zenin looks around and sees that everyone—his son, his mother, his girlfriend—is looking at him with the same affectionate indulgence with which they looked earlier at the newest baby and the confirmation girl in her white lace dress. The alarming thing is how his family, his land, and his past, accept everything, even the worst parts of him. So it is impossible, as he learned long ago, to ever free himself.
A fucking legend, he thinks.
Later, when coffee is being served, his eldest daughter walks up to him with her youngest child, a two-year-old girl, and places her on his shoulders. Go on, give her a ride, shout his relatives. Act like a real grandfather for once!
1987 • ASTONISHING
Zenin becomes demanding. Finds improbable ways to contact Mira, to put his mark on her. Telephone calls from his secretary, who pretends to be Mira’s friend, tickets waiting for her at the airport, elaborate presents, jewelry, a sable coat. Each time they meet he talks to her of love and marriage, without really asking her to marry him. Everything he does is designed to detach her from her husband and family, yet he has no exact plans for a future with her. It is visiting her, as she lingers in this space of tension and desperation between two worlds, that excites him. It doesn’t occur to him that the greatest part of his attraction to her is that he is damaging her, and that she seems worth damaging.
She is his escape, his cloak of invisibility, and he still loves to astonish her. With his jet, with the excuse of her work, he is able to fly her to his home, or to far-off places for a day or night or a weekend.
Some places where they go:
To the Grand Prix in Budapest and Monte Carlo.
To a hunt ball in Northumberland.
To Paris, to London, to New York.
To a bar mitzvah in Tel Aviv.
To Biarritz.
These trips to such far-flung glamorous places are oddly similar. Always rushed, with cars and taxis dashing to and from small airports or heliports. Fat silk tassels on the keys of hotel suites that all resemble, in their anonymous opulence, their gilt and pelmets, the furnishings in Zenin’s own house. Expensive shops where salesgirls assess Mira with the diluted professional envy born of constant exposure to rich men dressing pretty younger women. Expensive dinners, either in gastronomic temples with silver plate covers or in rustic inns where owners with deferential chumminess recommend course after course of overpriced peasant fare. Parties, clubs, piano bars, all the places where rich people come to be rich together and steal other’s women and talk about where they will see each other next. Each place with the same mixture of hip-hop and classic soul and Europop. They always play “Reckless” by Afrika Bambaataa.
They fuck, they eat, they dance, they buy clothes for Mira, they fuck again, they leave.
Zenin, who travels with only a razor and a toothbrush and a clean shirt, enjoys packing Mira’s suitcase. Folding the clothes neatly in categories the way his mother used to do for him many years before. After this peculiar little ritual, he delivers Mira back to her own world. And he goes off feeling strong and excited by his power to snatch a woman out of one dimension and place her into another. By the fact that, though she tries to conceal it, she is amazed.
MEGAN—A SALESGIRL
Shawn and the other girls say it’s that French actor, and I’m like, come on guys, real celebs get appointments, and are you so ignorant that you can’t tell French from Italian? I’m considered the store intellectual and they kind of like it when I give them a hard time. Rodeo Drive is crawling with Eurotrash and most of our walk-ins are older, rich French, Italian, or German tourists trying to impress their younger wives or girlfriends or some chick they picked up here in LA. This tall guy in serious need of a haircut strolls in and orders up the leather Alaia skirt and peplum jacket for his girlfriend who looks sort of Puerto Rican and has a cute figure even if she does have to go pee before she can zip the skirt. And she models it for him and looks great, but he’s busy checking out all the rest of us sales assistants in our Alaia and Versace like we’re some harem he gets included in the price of the suit. And then he pays in cash the way the Italians and the Colombian drug dealers do, and though he’s quite low key about it, you can tell he’s getting off on everybody seeing the size of the roll he’s got in his pocket. It’s a classic, all these men behave like that. I’m taking notes, and once I get into film school I’m going to do a short film just called “Fitting.”
25
MIRA
2006 • MOTHER’S GLASS
Eighties theme parties, says Mira with gloomy relish. They’re high on my list of stuff not to dwell on.
Hate to break it to you, Ma, but we have nineties parties too.
Maddie’s home on spring break and she and her mother are rooting through old clothes. They’ve dragged two huge battered Chinese lacquer chests into the middle of Mira’s bedroom and popped the locks, releasing into the bright afternoon a powerful stink of camphor and the almost imperceptible musty smell of fabric that is turning historic.
From the open windows come the shouts of Maddie’s half brothers up on the hill where they are building a fort in a dry creek bed. High, screechy little-boy voices that seem to ring against the cloudless sky. It’s early March, the bare woods still dusty gray and brown except for a carpet of wild garlic and trillium and the odd primrose. Dust motes dance in the sunlit air of the bedroom, with its iron bed and hundreds of books, and Mira can see herself and Maddie framed, backlit, in the speckled depths of the pier glass over the fireplace.
This green-and-black print is awesome. Look how full the skirt is.
This was Little Granny’s from the fifties. Come to think of it, I wore this to a party myself when I was about your age. Mira remembers standing in the living room back in Mount Airy, hauling in the velvet belt, glancing smugly at her mother, who would never wear the dress again.
Only now does she connect the moment with a photograph of her mother at sixteen or seventeen, caught swinging her foot on a stoop in North Philadelphia, dressed for some Girls’ High theatrical in a lace dress made for Mira’s grandmother.
A basic pleasure, she thinks, to put on the old lady’s dress and steal the past. Or is it stealing the future? How does the sonnet go? “Thou art thy mother
’s glass…”
A few things—a couple of linen sheaths from the sixties, a gold lamé fifties evening gown from Neiman-Marcus—Mira keeps in her closet and wears with the proper vintage irony. But these trunks she keeps stored away, rarely opened except to dump in more camphor once a year. They mainly hold the clothes Zenin bought for her, hidden now as when she was married to Nick. Vanni makes fun of them and calls the sable coat vulgar.
Maddie pulls the tissue paper off the red suit, which to Mira seems to have taken on the antique tints of the faded brocades in her bedroom. Gorgeous, breathes Maddie. I remember this one. I thought you were, like, a goddess.
You were too little to remember this. And I never wore it around you.
Yeah, you did once.
Maddie puts on the suit. She is taller, with bigger breasts and bones than Mira. A Valkyrie, high school varsity crew, with her mass of curls and the same seraphic face she had as a child. Nick’s face. Unlike Mira, Maddie has beauty that does not come and go. In the pitiless equinoctial light she is like an unadorned fact. And Mira’s heart, as always, contracts with a mixture of pride and envy.
But the suit, which barely buttons over her breasts, makes Maddie all curves, like a Vargas cartoon. She and Mira burst out laughing.
Let’s be honest, says Maddie. I look like a ho.