“Who said anything about children? I’m afraid of having them. I want to work with abstract concepts all my life. That’s what I enjoy. Incidentally, you seem to know an awful lot about joint occupancy.”
“I’m not interested in children right now, either. But we might change our minds, you know. You could wake up one day with a yearning in your bosom, Caroline. Right here. Or a longing in your womb. Right about here. An emptiness. A longing to be filled.”
“You don’t even know where anything is in a woman,” she said, and moved his hand. “A longing to be filled over there would mean hunger. Anyhow, I’m not sure we’re so well-suited. You can’t go by this. This is not ordinary life, Ivan. This is a dream.”
“There’s never any guarantee. Listen, baby, I’m not going to beg. Excuse me.” He reached over her to pick up the stack of Daily Americans alongside the bed. Sitting up, he began leafing through the back pages.
She would not read a newspaper with him naked in bed beside her. Not yet, anyway. But Ivan, at the mere mention of marriage, behaved like a husband.
She put her arms around him from the back. “Why can’t we just go on like this?”
“Because my money is running out. I have to go back in a few weeks and look for a job. Caroline, please, I’m trying to find a certain ad.”
“What ad?”
“For a used motorbike.”
“You never told me you were planning to buy a motorbike. Do you think it pays, for only a few weeks?”
“It’s not for me,” he said tersely. “It’s for Cory.” Cory and Joan were staying on till winter.
“Oh,” she said, and moved away. They even sounded married. The space between them felt cold, and Ivan very far. He would not like it if she touched him now. Did marriage confer rights? Did it mean you held bodies in common like so much jointly owned property? Ivan guarded his separateness. Once, watching him undress, she said as a joke, “It’s wonderful. And it’s all mine!” He had raised his eyebrows. “Mine,” he corrected. And just as well, Caroline thought. That left her to herself too. But this feeling now of hesitating to touch made her sad, and nostalgic, as if the best of life, its richest flowering, were past.
She regarded his head, dark, large-featured, and meditative, as if she had truly attempted to bore through and failed. If she stayed with him she would fail continually; that would be her life’s work. Maybe he could be peeled instead, in layers like an artichoke, till she reached the heart. Gobble that up and toss away the tough leaves and the chaff. But no, this one was something you might have to break to discover—a coconut, irregular and smooth; hard and dangerous and of manifold possibility, with a sweet pungent liquid concealed in the center, a nourishing milk like a mother’s.
She might never get to the mother’s milk. His talk was clever and off-center like his eyes, and most often a running companion to the instant, as if words were marginal to life; the past he put aside as soon as it became past. She knew very little about him, in the way of facts. If she probed he would tell her concisely what he thought, but not how. A mystery. Silent, his body spoke; the vocabulary of his touch was formidable.
She turned away from him. In a few moments she heard paper being carefully torn, then the stack of Daily Americans was tossed to the floor and Ivan’s arms were around her. “Let’s be friends,” he said.
She let him. For her, things were left too unsettled; she could not make love in such disorder. Her mother could never cook in a messy kitchen, either. The counters had to be cleared, the floor swept clean, the dishes from the last meal put away before the next was begun. She let him, as tired wives must sometimes let, she thought, offering little encouragement but no hindrance. He did it in silence and uncertainty. She felt for the first time the hardness of the floor in her lower back. Ivan believed in living simply, like a Quaker or a hermit. His bed was a lumpy mattress on the floor. When he was finished he gave her a hurt and puzzled look. Though she liked to pretend otherwise, she couldn’t tell whether he was wearing his lenses or not. He did not ask what was wrong and she volunteered nothing.
He poured two glasses of wine and handed her one, then put his clothes on. Caroline watched, enthralled by the way he brushed his coarse thick hair in front of the mirror, with long vigorous strokes back and forth like a farmer swinging a scythe through a field of billowy black wheat. Her back still ached slightly. After a while she wrapped herself in his red satin kimono and went to look out the window. The Japanese kimono, taleggio cheese, expensive coffee, Piranesi prints and custom-made leather sandals were a few of the exceptions he permitted himself while living the simple life.
Out the window the natural light was fading and soft street lights, house lights, and the garish yellow lights from across the square were coming on. A door opened below and Caroline saw the white horse with its keeper emerge for the evening. The horse was sleek and bare except for its halter, trimmed with two red pompons near the ears.
“The horse is out,” she said without turning around.
“Already?” Ivan came to look, standing behind her, still brushing his hair. One tuft stood out stiffly, as if infused with an electric current. She touched it and it fell. “Don’t you love me any more?” he murmured in her ear.
“Oh, Ivan,” she said hastily. “Of course I do. But this is a fairy tale.” She gestured down to where the white horse paraded smartly with its costumed leader.
“We won’t get like everyone else. I know it. I want to be sure you’re there.”
“You’re pushing me…”
The horse stood on its hind legs and cavorted in a circle, a little mocking dance. Ivan gave a heavy-hearted sigh. “Let’s go out and eat.”
“Do you want to eat there for once?” She nodded again towards the square, the horse.
He laughed. “Are you kidding?”
Ivan lived on a small square opposite a large restaurant called La Taverna Romanaccia. On a huge wooden sign hanging over the door the name was painted in fat bulging script that had a wobble, as if a jolly drunk had guided the brush. Every evening at about six o’clock three lean and gawky boys dressed in tuxedos carried out round tables and lined them up in the square. They laid checked cloths and set out tear-shaped citronella lamps. As dusk fell, the beautiful and immense white horse came out a side door and was led around and around the square by a short smiling man in Renaissance garments: a green and gold satin tunic puffed out at the upper arms and below the waist, mustard-colored tights, a scabbard hanging from the wide belt, high-heeled boots and a broad-brimmed tufted hat. Ivan called him the Renaissance man, and said he wished he could have his job, even though he wasn’t fond of horses—he wanted the costume. The Renaissance man and the horse paraded around the square till midnight, attracting tourists, Americans mostly, portly men in lightweight gray suits and women in pastels and white shoes; many of them patted the horse. As the early tourists filed in, music began, accordion music that could be heard in Ivan’s second-floor apartment. Every half hour or so it grew loud and full, when the accordionist came outside to play for the tables on the square. He played Italian tunes Americans liked to hear, like “O Sole Mio” and “Funiculi Funicula,” and an occasional melody from The Barber of Seville or Don Giovanni. Often when the tourists left, satiated, the men sluggish and the women languid, they gave a few coins to the Renaissance man. Ivan claimed he didn’t mind the noise and constant movement. His rent was cheap; many people would not put up with Romanaccia. In fact, he confessed, he loved it, corny as it was: the sign, the waiters dashing with steaming trays held high, the horse, the Renaissance man, the accordion. Purely as spectacle, of course. He would never eat there. He ate in small quiet restaurants where real Italians ate. Way past midnight, after La Taverna Romanaccia closed; while the gawky boys rolled up the checked cloths and carried in the tables and the citronella lamps, the Renaissance man in gray work pants and a smock came out and swept up the horseshit.
Caroline took off the kimono and got dressed to go out. Downstairs,
Signora Daveglio, on her folding chair and in her green club sweater, oblivious to the horse, the Renaissance man, the early tourists and the music, nodded at them from behind l’Unità.
“Bello, vero?” she commented unexpectedly, lifting her face to the heavens in surprised, almost grudging gratitude. The weather was indeed fine, crisp and cloudless. Signora Daveglio was often surprised at favorable weather. She nodded once again, abstractly, as if to commend the infrequent but welcome rightness of things. Ivan and Caroline proceeded across the square.
“Do you hear that?” Caroline stopped in the middle.
“What?”
“The accordion.” It was the tune from Cory’s and Joan’s wedding, the one with no name and no history, that climbed and plummeted like a kite in the wind. She could go in and ask; maybe this musician would tell her what it was. Except she didn’t want to know any more. Why pin it down, assign it a local habitation and a name? Let it be whatever it was, only let her hear it. It had every possibility, a wondrous, luscious tune. At least for the accordion, she amended, and for Rome and for summer.
They traveled for two weeks in a rented car to see the smaller cities north of Rome. In Arezzo they got sick and lay groaning in a hotel room for three days, while every few hours a boy in knickers brought them up tea. But in Lucca they felt restored. In gray weather Lucca had a muted, ancient splendor; they loved it as a shared dream. Through the steady, soft rainfall they walked on Lucca’s broad medieval walls and looked out over a mild hilly terrain. They went in and out of churches on cobblestoned streets to listen to the glorious singing, for it was a saint’s day, the festival of Sant’Anna, and Caroline’s birthday as well. She was twenty-four.
“Time you were married,” Ivan said back in the hotel room at night, raising his glass in a toast.
“It’s usually women who are so keen on getting married. Men are supposed to feel trapped.”
“I felt trapped when I met you; marriage is merely a formality,” said Ivan.
“What a charming thing to say.” Caroline sat in a straight, stiff chair near the door, across from Ivan, folding her arms into the wide secretive sleeves of his kimono.
“Why don’t you come over here?” His pose on the bed recalled Michelangelo’s Dusk, which they had just seen in Florence, brooding and menacing but seductive.
“Because you distract me.”
“From what?”
“From thinking.”
“What is there to think about? It’s almost time to go to bed.”
“Marriage is very intimate, Ivan. You take a person to be your family.”
He stroked his jaw and nodded sagely. “You fear intimacy. I see.”
“I don’t know a thing about you. You come out of nowhere, with no…no references, nothing. I have to take you completely on faith. What did you do over the past five years? What did you live on? You might have been married before. You might have children somewhere. You might have been in jail, or been a drug addict, who knows?”
“You know none of that is true. You just want to have everything spelled out before you make a new move, like a series of equations. All right, listen carefully, I’ll give you my résumé: I was never married, I have no children that I’m aware of, I was never in jail. I’ve worked as a reporter, and for a while I put up houses for rich people on the beach, but I quit both and went back to graduate school. I’ve fooled around enough with girlfriends. I don’t want to have to carry my hairbrush around late at night any more. I want to share the pots and pans and the food that’s in them.”
“It sounds like I’m incidental. I came along at the right time.”
“I never asked anyone else.”
She was silent for a while. “I don’t even know your right age. Remember, the day we saw the wolf, you told me you were a well-preserved sixty?” She smiled unwillingly, remembering that day.
“I was born in 1928.”
Typical. Like those authors in school they used to call “difficult,” everything he said required a collaborative effort. “You’re twenty-nine.”
“What a deduction,” he muttered. “Oh, but that’s your field. I forgot.” He took his book from the night table, Suetonius on the Roman emperors.
“Don’t read!” she said sharply. “I’m trying to talk to you.”
“I’ll read if I want to. I’ve said all I have to say on this subject. And don’t give me orders, either.”
She watched him coldly. He turned a page and suddenly raised his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to snap. Listen, Caroline, do you want to fight or—” He hesitated, glancing down at his book. “Or do you want to make love?”
“Fight or fuck, you mean. Isn’t that what you were starting to say?”
“Okay. Fight or fuck. You win.”
“Why can’t you say it, then? You think you can’t say what you want in front of a lady? Say anything you damn please. If we’re going to be married we have to be frank, don’t we? Uninhibited?”
Ivan groaned wearily. “I wish they had a TV. That’s the trouble with Europe, not enough TV.”
“Fight or fuck. Well, well. Is that the whole range of choices?”
He focused on her narrowly. “Maybe you’re right, Caroline. Seriously, I mean. This just might not work out. We have such…differences. Maybe we should forget about it, after we get back to Rome.”
“Oh no!” she cried, and rushed over to him. “Oh, please don’t say things like that. Of course it will work. This”—and she waved her arm at the straight-backed chair near the door, as if she had left there her perverse pleasure in dispute along with his maddening resistance—“all this is nothing. Nothing,” she repeated in a light, almost playful tone.
“It may be nothing, but I don’t enjoy it and you do. That’s the kind of difference I mean.” He was searching her face acutely. It was essential to win him back. She used the most primitive methods there were.
Later she spoke into the still air. “Ivan?” He might be asleep, but something alert in his stillness made her doubt it. She nudged him. “You said you fooled around enough. But what if I haven’t?”
His lips parted drowsily. “So do it later. Let me sleep.” His voice was thick with grogginess.
“Do you mean to say you’re giving me the…the…?”
“Oh, for Chrissake, Caroline.” He sat up. “I’m not giving you anything. It’s all yours. Have a little imagination. You’re so literal.”
She had heard that before. It was probably what drove her to mathematics in school, where the clarities of Euclid could reach across centuries with nothing lost in translation; solutions were right or wrong and propositions were binding. Then as in any discipline, as she advanced it mellowed, and ambiguity slithered in. Euclid was expanded upon: deeper questions arose. Everything changed when you looked at it in three dimensions, four dimensions, in the context of the world and of time. But even so. Even so, in mathematics ambiguity, no matter how prolonged, was always regarded as a temporary state of affairs. The prospect of life with Ivan frightened her.
Worse than literal, she was crude. One day her indelicate poking would mortally wound his discretion and he would not want to live with her any more. She watched him trying to sleep again. His hair, mussed and unstylishly long, and his soft vulnerable lips were precious and ephemeral, and she suffered a premonition of loss, like a piercing pain in the throat. What was it Molly Bloom said? well as well him as another. But she also said she liked Bloom because he understood or felt what a woman is. Did Ivan? It was too soon to tell. Not yet, probably. But he had possibilities.
“All right,” she murmured, stroking his hair. “I’ll use my imagination.” Most men nowadays, back home at any rate, had ugly crew cuts. She began to weave a tiny braid at the back of his neck. “It’s possible we might be very happy.”
“Happiness is not the point.”
Had his tone been oracular or pompous she would have laughed out loud. It was sleepily casual, however, and took so much for grant
ed that she wondered what was the point. But she couldn’t be so unimaginative as to ask right now.
“What are you doing to me?” He jerked away and felt the back of his head. The tiny braid stuck out, wiry and stiff. Caroline laughed as he tried to untwine it. Inept at women’s work, he tackled her instead, pummeling, and bit her shoulder gently. She bit back.
“Hey!” Ivan cried out in pain. When they compared bites, it was found she had unintentionally drawn blood.
“You see?” he said. “That proves that even though I’m physically more powerful I’m not the dangerous one. It’s you we have to watch out for.”
Ivan and Caroline didn’t mind that it rained continuously for a week—it was a warm light drizzle that gave a shine and a haze of romance to the architectural wonders they set out to see—but Signora Daveglio, polishing the mailboxes in the hall on the damp afternoon of their return, was plainly offended by the weather. Her black umbrella, closed in limp folds, stood in a corner of the vestibule, dripping in uneven rhythms on a pile of obsolete copies of l’Unità. Her greeting was a grunt and a displeased tilt of her chin skyward.
“Dunque,” she pronounced at last, magisterial with hands on hips. “Già sposati?”
“What is it?” Caroline whispered to Ivan as he shook his head no, with that smile again, the smile of the irresponsible but irresistible rake, which as far as she knew he used exclusively on Signora Daveglio and which never failed to placate her.
“She wants to know if we went away to get married.”
“Oh.” Caroline lowered her eyes. Now Signora Daveglio would stare at her again, not so much with disapproval—she was too far gone for that—as with pity and scorn.
“Ebbè…” said the portiera, shrugging philosophically. She spread her palms and gazed at the ceiling as if to query, with Lenin, What is to be done? “A Roma è stato un brutto periodo,” she informed Ivan.
“Anche a Lucca,” he responded, and led Caroline off toward the stairs.
“What’s that, a brutto periodo?” she asked at his door.
Rough Strife Page 6