Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

Well—says Mira.

  And I always wondered, Mom, Maddie adds, not missing a beat. What did it feel like when you wore this.

  Mira has one of those maternal moments where one doesn’t bolt but just stops. She thinks, We’ve done the discussion, many times, and this question now is just what it seems. And she says, You know I can’t actually remember. The girl in that suit. Except that I wanted to be someone else so badly and I was running after it so hard that I didn’t have very much fun.

  Silence, as her daughter unwraps an extravagant short ruffled evening dress, also red. Mira recalls that Zenin bought it for her in Paris, that he insisted on it. Now the ruffles look flat and dull, like poppies in July.

  So now you have more fun?

  Yes.

  Even though you’re, um, a lot older?

  You mean dead and buried, don’t you? says Mira teasingly. Getting older isn’t so bad.

  Maddie looks at her incredulously.

  You don’t want the same things you did. You don’t care so desperately. It’s like being able to see in two directions at once. Knowing things makes up for a lot.

  Maddie continues to look at her as if she’s speaking a different language. So there is nothing to do but to give Maddie a big kiss. As Mira does so, she sees, reflected in the dusty glass, the mother embracing the daughter, who stares straight ahead at the vision of herself in red.

  1987 • DISCO CLONE

  It’s scary enough on the lips of Nancy Sinatra, but when Cristina Monet sings her eighties version of “Is That All There Is?” backed up by her Disco Clones, you feel the oxygen rushing out of the atmosphere, the world shrink-wrapped around you.

  Mira looks at herself in a bathroom at the Paris Ritz and notices she’s getting uglier. She’s been swimming in a mosaic pool that has Europop playing underwater. Alone, because Zenin has an appointment. Now she stands dripping on marble and takes a good look at herself in the fawning peach-colored light around the mirror. She’s observed that her clothes have begun to hang loose on her, and now she sees that her face has grown sallow and beakish and her hair on both sides of her forehead is thinning, just where horns would be if she were a devil. And she’s not even doing drugs.

  She’s starting to look like a junkie, even in luxury lighting, and she knows it is because she can’t eat or sleep because inside her there is something like a cord twisting tight so that her lips are drawn back in a rictus; her eyes are bulging like a trapped animal and she seems to be constantly trembling, though no one else seems to see it. Zenin calls her beautiful, wants her more and more. Mira’s days away from him are simply a counting of minutes and seconds until their next meeting.

  And there’s this feeling that is devouring her flesh. She knows it’s not just guilt or hopeless love. It is something far more profound, the stress of struggling upstream against her whole nature. The knowledge, in body and spirit, that she is traveling à rebours. Against the grain. She won’t help herself, but she can’t stop her body from telling the truth.

  At the Budapest Grand Prix, the doppler roar of the engines seems to increase the scorching heat, Eastern European midsummer heat enveloping a raw new track carved out of pastureland that still smells of the previous occupant, a collective dairy farm. Mira thinks that the candy-colored cars, the astronaut drivers, the ant swarms of mechanics in the pits all resemble the most monotonous kind of arcade game. But one of the cars, the Lotus, has Zenin’s name printed on it, and at the sponsors’ dinners she shakes the steel hands of the famous drivers and feels the hair on her body prickle from the charge of sex and death and money.

  Girls are everywhere. In the sponsors’ tent, a Brazilian runs up and throws her arms around Zenin. She has giant tortoiseshell earrings and hair down to her ass. Hey Brazil, he says.

  The girl gives one of those white-toothed Brazilian grins. Suddenly she grabs Mira’s left hand and loooks at her wedding and engagement rings. What’s this—are you engaged to Zenin? she asks in a different voice.

  No, says Mira, and the girl’s manner is once again chummy and informal. She tells Mira that she is a correspondent for a racing paper, that she follows Formula One all over the world.

  Mira tells the girl she is a magazine writer, and the girl winks and sticks out her breasts. I guess we’re in the same business, she says in a relaxed and friendly tone.

  The north of England, early on an October afternoon. On the motorway leading away from the small airport outside Newcastle, a man drives a Range Rover while singing “Barbara Allan.” He is a short, white-haired, bowlegged Englishman with red cheeks and eyes shaped like caraway seeds, and he’s driving Mira and Zenin and Zenin’s friend Macaco to a country hotel where they will attend a dinner and a ball given by one of Zenin’s British clients.

  The white-haired man is not a chauffeur, but an office employee of Zenin’s client who appears to know Zenin and Macaco from previous visits. Though they use first names with each other, the two Italians have ignored the driver since they left the airport and talk loudly in Italian about the Milan-Inter game of the night before. The man’s mellow tenor warbling of the old ballad is a mild protest against monumental rudeness, Mira thinks. She loves “Barbara Allan,” a favorite solo of folk-minded counselors at the Quaker summer camps she attended as a child, and hearing it as they drive through bronze woods and dun-colored rolling fields that recall western Pennsylvania fills her with unexpected nostalgia.

  When it comes to the last chorus, she can’t help chiming in: “O mother, mother, make my bed, / O make it soft and narrow…”

  Well sung! exclaims the white-haired man, and he and Mira finish the song together. “My love has died for me today / I’ll die for him tomorrow.”

  Macaco and Zenin stare. You’re embarrassing me, hisses Zenin.

  Later, as she shakes hands with the Englishman and thanks him for the ride, the man looks at her keenly and says in a swift undertone, My dear, you’re too good for these people.

  This is all on film somewhere. Mira dancing in the Tel Aviv Hilton at the bar mitzvah of Liberman’s son. Plump, glum Liberman, Zenin’s partner from London. Who stands beside Zenin as the snaking line of women dances by to an orchestra that suddenly sounds like a village band. Gorgeous wives and daughters, flown in from London, Paris, Sydney, Buenos Aires. Big-haired women with bodies maintained like formal gardens, encrusted in couture flounces and gilding and planetary jewels. Mira is wearing the red dress that she will shake out ruefully with her daughter in fifteen years’ time, and she is giggling, recalling her folk-dancing lessons from school, enjoying the fact that all these cosmopolitan beauties have kicked off their high heels and are tearing around the ballroom like shtetl wives and maidens.

  All weekend Mira’s been poking fun at Zenin, who has never even heard of a bar mitzvah and looks ridiculous with a kippah perched precariously on his shaggy head. They see nothing of Tel Aviv and spend their time between the hotel pool and a dozen parties.

  Later, an entertainment is announced and a pair of Brazilian dancers appear. Dressed in transparent body stockings over jeweled pasties and tangas, they do an acrobatic samba during which their brown stocky bodies seem to expand and contract like rubber bands, and then one gets on her hands and knees and the other pretends to ride her around the floor like a pony, beating her bottom with a little jeweled whip. The crowd explodes into laughter and applause, and then the bar mitzvah boy, Liberman’s son, blushing violet, is pushed out onto the floor, and while everyone claps, he bestrides the smiling girl and rides her around the circle. Then Liberman does the same thing. And then Liberman’s father, who has a long gray beard and a noble patriarchal brow but seems very agile, gets down on his hands and knees and lets the two girls pretend to ride him—walking straddle-legged on the tips of their toes—and flick his buttocks with the little whip, and the shouts and laughter from the guests becomes a roar.

  Zenin, bored by the chanted Hebrew longueurs of the religious ceremony he was forced to attend earlier, now brightens up, thinks that i
t’s hilarious, and that Liberman certainly knows how to throw a party.

  Mira stands in the cheering crowd, studies the dancers, who seem happy and quite professional, and wonders if she’s missing something.

  This feeling returns when she and Zenin are leaving Israel and are questioned at the airport by El Al security officials.

  What is this man to you? demands a beautiful tanned young woman in a military uniform. How long have you known him? Are you married or divorced? If you are still married, where is your husband? Who is this man? What is he to you?

  Mira gropes for answers. All the while seeing Zenin replying serenely to his interrogator in the booth up ahead. Not daring to imagine what he might be saying.

  LIBERMAN

  A cold fish, Zenin. A shark, really, though he has been a great friend over the years. When we met, when he needed a partner for Favolosi, I was still in my winklepickers and we were both thin enough to fit in those wasp-waisted seventies sport jackets, and Zenin was trying out wearing a big gold watch on his cuff, like Agnelli. That was two stone ago for me, though Zenin hasn’t plumped. My wife, Jen, calls him the Beanstalk, says he is the kind who never gets sick or dies early, just dries out and rattles, like a weed in a field. We used to argue over who was poorer growing up, me in the East End or him eating dead horse in that village of his near Venice. He is always the same, a genius at what he does, hardly a word to say for himself, a born thief, though he comes by what he has with cleaner hands than most Italians. He comes to see us once or twice a year, at the place in Essex first and now in Oxfordshire and Marbella. And both my wives and I have spent holidays on the boat. Gin palace, plane, houses, he has them all, though he doesn’t seem to enjoy them much. Women too. When I was younger and liked a bit of skirt, it used to put me out just the least bit, of an evening at Tramp, that the birds would be all over him. It wasn’t the dago accent or the money he spent—he was never mean—it was something they called mystery. Bollocks, I say. Anyway, he has had some beauties. Beautiful first wife, beautiful Australian girlfriend. Though he didn’t seem to enjoy any of them much. Then he suddenly announces he has a baby son, and we assume he’ll marry the girl. But no. That’s because he’s a stalk, says my wife. No heart. Shame, really.

  At Alex’s bar mitzvah—beautiful affair, the kind you remember when you’re lying in hospital with the respirator going—he shows up with yet another of his girls, a good-looking skinny brunette that looked as if she had some colored blood. A smart girl, classy, a writer, Zenin says, bragging. Harvard girl. I told her I have two girls and Alex at St. Paul’s, and you don’t get smarter than that in London. The girl talked to my Jen, and it turns out that she’s still married to somebody else. I wanted to tell her not to leave anybody for Zenin, says Jenny. But would it do any good? Mystery! I’ll give you mystery up the arse!

  26

  NICK

  2005 • FROG’S END

  Maybe the echo of this was always here. Nick walks through Froggy House, his family vacation place in Maine, videotaping as he goes. Not echo, he thinks. What’s the word for future echo? The sense in the present of what will be? Resonance? Too New Agey. Premonition? Presentiment? Too specific.

  There’s no word, yet it seems he’s right in thinking that the decades of summers in this house were always backlit by this act, the last one. Where Nick, bundled like a pneumatic mummy in layers of Patagonia down—years of London winters have not prepared him for the bone-gnawing chill of a Downeast April, and the house, an original saltbox disfigured by postwar restructuring, is only theoretically winterized—walks brandishing a lens at the geography of his childhood with the slow wary gait of a special forces soldier on recon.

  How many times in his life in England have his thoughts wandered through these rooms, picked up this view of the cove, handled a memory steeped in wood smoke and ionized pine and salt air, then let it drop.

  The kitchen, ludicrously small by today’s standards, its collection of Julia Child amber with age, its curtain of indestructible orange-and-white Marimekko cotton hiding the under-sink plumbing in what they teased his mother for calling “the Provençal manner.”

  The hallway with his father’s discolored collages of wine labels, his shelf of warped Goon Show records, his wistful, oddly feminine sketches of Camden Harbor, a cracked snapshot of Nick and Teddy in foul-weather gear, smiling like losers.

  The sitting room with its giant stone fireplace better suited to a ski lodge, its drafty picture window that looks out past squat Bullfrog Rock onto the cove, a flat corrugated stretch of sapphire where he and his father used to sit in the dinghy hooking dogfish, hoping for flounder.

  The boathouse, damaged by Hurricane Charley, and the jetty where he and Garcia used to hang out listening to the Fall and the Dead Kennedys and arguing about whether cunt could be used as a verb.

  The three Cooper family houses called Widowstown on the opposite shore, which for a whole summer he conned four-year-old Teddy into believing was China.

  The Sex Bathroom, scene of epic masturbation, rampant teenage fucking, and substance ingestion, where on different occasions both Nick and Teddy lost their virginity to cousins.

  The beds with their faded Pierre Deux coverlets, in one of which he spent his chaste wedding night with Mira, both of them comatose from the wedding, Mira snoring adenoidally, which she afterwards denied.

  The raspberry jungle that Nick set on fire one drunken September weekend during his freshman year, destroying the grass on their side of the cove and almost burning down the house.

  The army of ceramic and wooden frogs brought to his mother by houseguests over the years, three of which, with no particular explanation, smiling, she threw in rapid succession at his father one night.

  The wheelchair ramp his mother used during her last summers, that someone, probably Teddy, painted sky blue with large tadpoles that look like giant sperm.

  All this and more will begin to disappear tomorrow, when the caretaker’s wife comes to start packing up the house, which has been sold to a millionaire restaurant owner from Providence with twin boys and a pregnant second wife. The wife is good-looking and has taste. She will eliminate the seventies kitsch of the Reiver family and strip the house down to its essentials, then add extravagant extensions. Cedar decks, a cathedral-size kitchen with restaurant appliances.

  Bring it on, thinks Nick.

  For all the beauty of its setting, Froggy House has never been loved, never been a cult, as most Maine vacation houses are. His parents bought it from a Reiver cousin just after the death of Nick and Ted’s golden oldest brother, Meade. And certainly that is why there is the fundamental coldness of the two remaining sons toward the place. Because the endless, resolutely idyllic summers of sailing and blueberries were built around the empty niche in the family, the space that neither of them is ever good enough to fill. In fact, in spite of all the memories, there is pleasure at its sale, a certain relief, an undisguised glee at the whopping price it brings. Maine waterfront and tradition, in the hottest real estate market ever seen.

  When the market quiets down, he and Dhel intend to buy a vacation house in Quogue, near her sister’s place. But at this moment, Nick doesn’t own a square inch of land in the United States, and the thought gives him a curious feeling of freedom.

  And now there’s the video that no one will ever watch, but that had to be made. This final act of record, of official mourning for a house that was acquired as part of mourning. An act implicit in all his summers. Haunted by the phantom of his middle-aged self, graying blond hair swept back under a watch cap, cheeks slapped by the arctic spring wind, circling around with his camera.

  Outside his parents’ bedroom, he crunches into the frost-rimed blueberry patch to spend a minute filming Widowstown. China, across the cove.

  1987 • REVELATION

  One morning you wake up early and you see Mira with her back turned toward you as usual, her whole body shaking, not with sobs but just trembling like she’s got Parkinson�
�s or something, and you take her by the shoulders, lightly, because you haven’t touched her deliberately for weeks, and you sense that your fingers could become iron hooks and crush her bones.

  And you turn her around and inform her in a voice that does not admit other possibilities that now she is going to tell you the fucking truth. Because it’s time.

  A September morning, so early that Maddie is still asleep and there is no traffic noise, just a few clanks and shouts from the market vendors opening their stalls at the bottom of Via dei Serpenti.

  Into Nick and Mira’s room, across the gated blind alley where they once saw the thief, comes a strange incandescent glow that appears only during the clearest dawns in Rome, in the fall, when the tramontana wind from over the Appenines sweeps vapor from the sky. The light reflects in the wavering mirror of the nineteenth-century clothes press that stands at the foot of their bed. And shines on Mira, who sits on the tangled sheets, cross-legged like a storyteller, in her T-shirt and underpants, head bowed sullenly as, with a few melodramatic choked sobs, she steps onto the hard ugly road of revelation.

  In a low voice she says all the usual things, which to the two people concerned seem as fresh and new as the words I love you once seemed, their particular meaning reviving the faded substance of the old clichés the way faith reilluminates the words of the scripture.

  The old bitter message. I have betrayed you. I don’t love you any more. I love someone else. Our life together is at an end. Nick sits there in bed, also illuminated by that strangely gorgeous reflected light. Listening to what he already knows. Dimly aware of a harsh, specific satisfaction in some frontier of his heart, the awful pleasure of certainty. And realizing also that the fucking bitch is enjoying this moment of confession, if only for the relief that comes from cutting off a mangled limb.

  Around him he feels the city collapsing, like a slow-motion film of a bombardment or an earthquake. Not just Rome falling down, its ruins exploding into dust, but his personal city, the metropolis of certainties that sheltered him until now. When a bomb drops, when buildings topple, there is always a savage influx of sky. On the wall outside where he is staring, he can see the shadows of swallows sweeping cleanly through the sky in their huge bladed flocks, and remembers with some fragment of his brain that Roman seers sought signs of divine will in bird flight. A skill they learned from the ancient Umbrians.