“I should never have let you persuade me,” said Ivan.
“Why don’t you just make the best of it?”
They did not linger. On the way out they squeezed past a party of Japanese men with cameras hanging from straps around their necks. Ivan stopped to give a few coins to the Renaissance man and Caroline patted the horse.
Ivan read in a magazine that thirty-five miles north of Rome was an outdoor hot spring sulfur bath, with swimming year round. Andiamo, he said. Let’s go! This spree in chilly November put them in an antic mood. In the rented Fiat Ivan played with the gearshift and explored the dashboard while giving a dramatic reading of passages from the operator’s manual. In his literal translation it became a zany comic text that had Caroline breathless with laughter. When they tried to adjust the seats, they bumped knees and heads and giggled wildly, and she had a fleeting vision of the two of them young and carefree forever, through a lifetime of madcap jaunts. Why couldn’t it always be this way? Whatever was wrong had vanished for the moment. Ivan must have felt the same, for out on the open road he put his hand over hers. “It’s not so bad, is it? With us, I mean? We’re having a good time.”
She clasped his hand.
First they smelled it, then they saw it. From outside, the bath was an austere rectangular building of whitish brick. They entered and reluctantly they parted—Caroline into the women’s dressing room, Ivan into the men’s—to meet again at the pool, shivering. The sky was bone white. The only other patrons were two stout elderly people who stood, immersed to the waist, at opposite ends of the pool. The man, whose sagging chest was covered with white hair, rubbed water over his flabby arms and shoulders.
“This is crazy!” Caroline said. “I’m freezing. And it stinks! Are you sure we should do it?”
“It’s warm in there. Come on. Time for your bath.” He yanked at her with both hands, teasing and pulling her to the edge of the pool.
“Don’t push me in! Don’t you dare!” she cried. “I’ll go myself.” She dived in. The water was warm. A steamy smell of decayed matter rose from the surface. Ivan dived in after her and came up pushing the long drenched hair back from his forehead.
“Doesn’t this feel terrific?”
“Yes, but what is that awful stuff floating around?” She pointed. There were blobs of it all over the pool. “It looks like shit.”
“That’s the sulfur, silly. That’s what’s supposed to do you so much good.”
“It still looks like shit. Floating shit.”
“Would you care to try some?” Ivan took a blob in his hand and came towards her.
“Get away from me with that! Yuk!” She fled underwater and darted away.
With impassive faces, the old people at their opposite ends watched them romping in the water. The white-chested man rubbed water incessantly over his arms and shoulders. The woman, whose broad face thrust forth from her yellow rubber cap as from a medieval wimple, lay on her back from time to time and floated without moving her arms or legs. When she began to sink she would right herself, and stare for a while before floating again. Coming up after a dive, Caroline saw two new people, a man and a woman huddled close together near the far edge of the pool, with their backs to her. Boy and girl, really, from the looks of them. He was stocky and curly-haired. She wore a black and white zebra-striped bikini, and her dark hair was coiled on top of her head and held in place by a barrette. She took a few steps away from the pool. For a slender, tall girl she moved with an odd heaviness. Her body didn’t click into position with the jauntiness of young women in bikinis. Her stance was odd too, tilted back and slightly arched. Ivan swam up behind Caroline and put his arms around her waist under the water. The boy put his arm around the girl and whispered in her ear. She turned around. She was hugely pregnant. The skin between the top and the bottom of her bikini formed a sphere tautly filled and stretched. Her belly button had popped out.
“Madonna! Is that the latest fashion?” asked Ivan.
Caroline smiled too, but her eyes had drifted out of focus. Everything blurred. The water, up to her breasts, felt suddenly hot.
The boy kept whispering and nudging at the girl, who kept turning away and retreating.
“Do you know who she looks like?” Caroline said. “Remember that woman Rusty, and Ed? The ones who left the baby alone? She has that same petrified look.”
“Yes, a little. I wonder what ever happened to that baby.”
“Suffocated, no doubt.”
Finally the young couple entered the pool from the shallow end. He held her arm going down the slippery steps. She swam off quickly, her long thin arms attacking the water, while the boy came over and began talking in a confidential way to Ivan. Smiling paternally, Ivan answered in a reassuring tone, and soon the boy grinned a farewell and swam away.
“What was that all about?” Caroline asked.
“She didn’t want to go in because she was embarrassed. She thought there wouldn’t be anyone else here on a Thursday morning. There usually isn’t. She didn’t bother to get the right kind of bathing suit because they’re expensive and ugly and in a month or so she’ll have her baby.”
“Oh.”
Ivan smoothed down her hair with long strokes. Under the water he ran his fingers along her bare sides, down her ribs, over her hips. He came closer, his eyes admiring. “Now you, in a bikini, are a splendid sight to behold.”
She turned away. “It’s all right, Ivan, really. You don’t have to.”
He swam off underwater, out of sight.
From opposite ends of the pool the old stout couple swam slowly toward the center, where they met and walked side by side to the shallow end. They climbed the steps in silence, wrapped white towels around their shoulders, and walked in silence to the exit, where they parted, she to the women’s section and he to the men’s. Caroline watched them disappear. She picked up a piece of the brown, porous sulfur floating nearby. It was light and papery, not solid as it appeared. It didn’t feel pleasant, but it was bearable to hold. Slippery and scummy, it draped itself around her open hand.
They tried to pick up their antic mood but it felt forced. The day was spoiled.
Since Caroline had never been south, they traveled into the Apennines, which Ivan said had a primitive, stark beauty. But on the way there was a mountain snowstorm, and they had to creep along a narrow road behind a snow plow for three hours. In Paestum they took an unheated room overnight to save money. It was November, but the snow was days behind them, and southern Italy was a warm place, they thought. The afternoon had been warm and drenched in sun, with the temple columns turning golden in the early twilight. Hours later a deep, dark midnight cold set in, an arctic cold. The air was thick with it. It crept inside their bones and nestled in their inner organs. Caroline’s nose was running. She forced herself to get up for one of Ivan’s handkerchiefs, but could hardly grasp it in her shivering fingers. She tossed their light coats over the blankets and brought their bathrobes back to bed with her. Even in fragments of sleep they kept the memory of cold; their dreams transmuted the theme of cold. Ivan moaned softly to himself. At about three in the morning he had an idea: there was hot water—they could take a shower. They fooled around for a while in the shower, tossing washcloths, but back under the blankets they froze again, waiting for dawn in grim silence, each resenting the other for having chosen the unheated room. In the morning the sun streamed in. Why didn’t we make love to get warm? Caroline thought, opening the windows wide. Why didn’t one of us suggest that? Was it just too cold for that?
All this put them out of sorts, yet they tried to be considerate, like traveling companions thrown together by war or natural disaster. Caroline missed her work. In the middle of the night she woke in strange rooms obsessed by a problem she had left unfinished, involving a higher-dimensional knot. If only she were alone in her office with a pencil and blank paper. She had purposely left all her notes and pictures at home, and now regretted it. There was little she could do in the dark but
ravel and unravel what was already accomplished. In daylight there was too much space to think. While Ivan raced around the hairpin turns she shut her eyes and thought about her life in broad, difficult ways, what she was doing, and how, and to what purpose, ways she hadn’t thought since the bleakest moments of her despair. She thought about great imponderables like hope and time and injustice, destiny and death, but her mind was not accustomed to such blurry ascents and she fell back repeatedly. She was trained for the exquisite conjectures of mathematics, which fitted the fine intricacies of her brain like microscopic tongues in microscopic grooves. She loved these conjectures, even though she knew that in the course of daily human life they did not matter. It was precisely for their gratuitousness that she loved them. The larger questions mattered a great deal, and she feared she was missing them somehow, as ancient weavers working on a segment of tapestry missed the grand design. Ivan was not missing them. With his lateral vision and his feel for history he was seeing them and suffering them in his veiled way. Because of her? Was she his useful paradigm of the obstacles of the world? Or in spite of her? Or was she irrelevant to what he was suffering, to his experience of life? Too inconsequential, a nuisance? Maybe she should get out of his way, then, and let him live and suffer in peace.
They returned to Rome two weeks later, at nine in the evening, to find the lobby of their small hotel deserted. Ivan rapped on the front desk and called, “C’è nessuno?”
The gray-haired owner rushed out from the small apartment off the lobby. “Gli americani,” he turned and called back. “Sono tornati.”
His wife, the padrona, rushed out too, followed by the bellboy and the chambermaid. They were all shouting. The padrona was in tears.
“Signore, signora,” she cried, running to them.
“Ma che c’è?” Ivan asked, setting down the bags.
The Italians encircled them with horrified faces.
“Il presidente, il vostro presidente Kennedy è morto,” the woman wailed.
“Oh no,” said Caroline.
“Sì, sì, è vero! Assassinato.”
The six of them crowded into the owners’ tiny living room to watch television. The padrone poured out six small glasses of a colorless, sharp-smelling liqueur. Anisette; it stung. The television coverage was live from the States—Ivan translated for the Italians. The instant of violence was replayed again and again: the President had a ragged hole in the side of his head, his wife’s skirt was spattered with blood. Not long ago, Caroline remembered, she had lost a baby too. The Italians cried, but Caroline and Ivan were too stunned to cry. The padrona brought out bread and cheese. No matter what happened, she said, people had to eat. During the war, during the Occupation, during the horrors, they always remembered that they had to eat to keep up their strength, though good food was scarce then. On the mantelpiece were framed photographs of three young people. The younger son was off working in Switzerland, their host explained through his tears, their daughter was married and living in Turin, and the oldest son had been killed in the war, by the Germans.
When, two days later, they walked past the American Embassy, a classical white building set back from the street on a bright green lawn, they found the high gates barred. Locked outside, Americans stood about quietly in clusters of twos and threes. Caroline and Ivan stood for a moment with them and walked on. A block away vendors were hawking their newspapers, shouting words Caroline could not understand. People rushed over to snatch up the papers.
“What could it be this time?”
“I can’t make it out. We’ll see.” Ivan bought a paper and leaned against a lamppost to read. “The man who they say shot Kennedy was shot himself. In jail.”
“It can’t be, Ivan. Calm down and read it again.”
He read it again, and showed her the picture on the front page. “That’s it. It’s what I said.” His face was slack and drawn. They had not slept. “My eyes hurt,” he said, handing her the paper. “Hold this. I want to take out my lenses.”
They left early, no longer in a holiday mood. Pacing and muttering, Ivan tossed his clothes into the open suitcase on the bed. “Now we’re in for it,” he groaned. “Now we’re really in for it. Before was bad enough, but now…”
“A brutto periodo.”
He turned on her furiously. “Will you please stop saying that stupid phrase? Do you have to trivialize everything?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, Caroline. I’m upset.”
“No, you’re right. It was a stupid thing to say. I’m sorry.”
They stared at each other, piles of clothing in their arms. “This is ridiculous,” said Ivan.
Yes, it was. Now they were in for it, she thought. They were really in for it, because it was clear that this marriage had nowhere to go. Over. End of an era: presto, swear in the next life before the body cooled. Shocked out of numbness, she found she was exhausted by grief. Non son più forte. She couldn’t hang on any more. For what? His ploy of rekindling from nostalgia had failed. They came for nostalgia but they got horror. She had been through all the ugly spells she had strength for. Nothing lasted. Even an elected emblem of stability…Look at him, a hole in his head, brains all over his wife’s skirt. Crowds weeping. Surely she could face so small a shattering, in the scheme of things, as leaving Ivan.
Late as usual, they boarded the plane out of breath, with the engines already whirring. Ivan had left a book in the hotel and insisted on dashing back. As they took off Caroline was making plans. She could get an apartment. He could keep the house and the car. He could have the TV. He could have the furniture. There wasn’t much she needed, only the phonograph and records—he didn’t care about music. She could live simply, like a Quaker or a hermit. A mattress on the floor. Ironic, how Ivan had turned out to be the one with accumulations—plants, books, magazines, prints, ties. She bore him no malice; she liked Ivan a lot. They could be friends. How banal, how unoriginal: they could be friends! But sooner or later everyone’s destiny was banal. Why strive to be forever original? It was arrogance. Even an arrogance as finely wrought as Kennedy’s could be shot down in broad daylight by an ignominious gunman, not even an anarchist.
They expected to find the country in a shambles, but everything was running smoothly. Disturbingly smoothly. They unpacked, Caroline got back to her higher-dimensional knot, Ivan collected his plants from the neighbors. She called Mark to see how the courses were going. No, she didn’t want to meet for lunch, but if he had any trouble he could get in touch. There was no hurry about her leaving. They were both shaken up, Ivan more practically so because a change in presidents meant a change in tone and eventually, as waterfalls trickle out into rills, a change in the flow of money for the arts. When things calmed down she would announce her plans. Meanwhile, winter came and she returned to work. A smooth ease settled over her, now that she had accepted her unoriginal fate. The pervasive bleakness of the land seemed to relieve her of private bleakness, and knowing her life with him was temporary, she began to regard Ivan from a great distance, to think of him in strangely objective ways. He is really a very good-looking man, she would think. He is really a very intelligent man. And very good-natured too. How fortunate to have known so fine a man so intimately. Such thoughts in their absurd formal expression, as if he were dead, made her smile to herself. Ivan caught her at it in the supermarket.
“What are you grinning at?”
She decided to tell the truth, silly as it was, since it was all over anyway. “I was thinking of your vocabulary, when you write. You use a lot of good words. I mean, sort of picturesque words.”
“Oh, come off it, Caroline.”
“No, really, I’m quite serious. Like the review you did last month. That book about the origins of Art Nouveau. That was a really good review. I liked the words. Tracery. Aperture. Patina.”
“They’re not so remarkable. If you read a lot of other criticism you’d see. In fact patina’s gotten too common.”
“Maybe. But stil
l, to get them all in one paragraph…”
He pushed the cart along with a shrug. But she could tell he was silently pleased, and confused.
She was waiting for him after work, standing under the movie marquee watching others buy their tickets. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Her blood raced with indignation. He was later and later every year, pathological; he didn’t want to be anywhere he had promised to be. Appointments, even, were coercive! He was crazy! She worked out a lateness coefficient and started to calculate what proportion of her life had been spent waiting for him, and how correspondingly good it would be soon, very very soon, never to wait again. With the figures multiplying in her head, she looked absently at the clusters of people approaching the main intersection a block away. At the corner they stopped as a body and waited for the light. A man caught her eye, who had detached himself from the crowd and paused to look at a display of books on an outdoor table. His profile was partly hidden from her, but she could see that he was tall and lean, and he wore a corduroy jacket. She liked the concentrated way he stood there, wrapped in a private calm, as though he could never be late and in a rush, never overworked, never taciturn. He inspired the first visceral flicker she had felt for a man in some time. Ah yes, someone like that. When he turned from the books to cross the street in a confident, unhurried stride, her first impulse was to laugh at herself. But on second thought it was not at all funny. He bent to kiss her on the cheek. “Sorry I’m late. I had to finish something up, and then the bus was so slow that I got out and dashed over. Did it start yet?”
Rough Strife Page 12