“Tablecloth,” said Susanna.
“Tablecloth,” Maritsa repeated. Susanna and Jerry smiled encouragingly.
“Algae like tablecloth!” said Gabor.
Susanna said, “Where did you learn English?”
“In England,” Gabor said. “’Fifty-six. Someone put me on back of motorcycle. I am ten year old. They take me to England and put me with professor’s family. Very sympathique. I stay five years, learn English, then the daughter gets pregnant, the professor has me deported back to Hungaria.”
“He deported you?” said Susanna.
“An ethics professor,” Gabor said. He looked at Maritsa, then back at Susanna and Jerry. “Well, okay, anyway, there is more to life than algae like tablecloths.”
“Amen!” said Jerry. Susanna leaned so far forward she pulled sharply back, afraid she might have singed her bangs in the candle. Maritsa touched Susanna’s arm in a calming, maternal way.
“Not that you would know from this conference,” Gabor said. “Speeches, speeches. I am sick. Like school. Tomorrow I am not going to panels. I am tired. Tomorrow we look at art. I know very well Milan museums. You will come?”
Jerry said, “I think I should stick around. Susanna can go if she wants.”
The hotel lobby was glossy black with an atrium skylight admitting one dramatic shaft of light, like a Weimar nightclub crossed with a Mongolian yurt. Maritsa huddled in a corner of the black leather couch, practically hugging the standing ashtray. Gabor lounged beside her with his back to a mirrored column. “Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“Fine,” Susanna said.
It felt good to be wearing blue jeans in this lobby full of Armani; crossing it, they fell into a companionable pack-like stride. Gabor hailed a cab and held the door for the women, then jumped in beside the driver and began gabbing in Italian. Maritsa stretched her legs till her feet touched the front seat. Susanna had never felt so stiff-backed and prim, it was a new experience. When Gabor stopped talking, the driver shrugged and hit the gas. Maritsa and Susanna went flying as they squealed around a curve.
Gabor wheeled around in his seat and said excitedly to Susanna, “Ayi, I love how these guys drive! They are the real cowboys. Not that pig John Wayne, your husband was right. Is nothing to ride a horse alone in desert. But to drive a hundred kilometers an hour in traffic! This trip will cost monthly salary of average Hungarian professor. Lucky, Milan is paying—” He broke off for an argument with the driver about directions.
“How do you know the city so well?” asked Susanna.
“On the way back from England I live awhile in Italy. Again, romantic trouble, is best for me to take off. Now that I have my Maritsa I am through with all that stuff.” He twisted even further around so he and Maritsa could lock gazes.
Gabor did know the museums; he was a connoisseur of sorts. His taste ran to trompe l’oeil and dark late Renaissance narrative paintings of bizarre miracles. He was a great fan of Archimboldo’s—“vegetable pipple,” he called them.
“This is my favorite painting,” he said, in front of an immense canvas entitled The Miracle of the Bees. In the painting a crowd was gathered around a baby from whose mouth issued a swarm of bees, curling up toward the ceiling. At least a dozen times he said, “This is my favorite painting,” and hurried from favorite to favorite, ignoring everything else.
Nothing could have been further from Jerry’s Michelin approach, and it exhilarated Susanna to be hustled past the tourists with their guidebooks. Gabor was eager to show them an elegant stiletto hidden in a Renaissance crucifix. He said, “This was made to be used only once. God, I love the Italians!”
They took cabs from museum to museum, like bar-hopping, thought Susanna. They wound up near the Duomo, Gabor yelling at the cabdriver as they hunted for the Ambrosian Library. Finally Gabor jumped out and grabbed Maritsa’s hand and pulled her inside a building and up a long stone staircase. Susanna skipped along after. “What’s the hurry?” she said.
“Hurry is because we are approaching my favorite painting,” Gabor said. “Not my favorite. MY FAVORITE. Many times I say favorite but this I mean is my favorite. Astonishing, no?”
It was astonishing, all right—Bramantino’s The Virgin Enthroned with Saints—an unexceptional Mother and Child, the ordinary saints, but on the floor at Mary’s feet were two gigantic figures lying on their backs, drawn in showy perspective so you looked from behind their heads to their feet. On the left was a corpse—was it Christ?—and on the right was a human-sized dead frog. The corpse was naked but the frog was dressed in knee breeches and a livery jacket.
Maritsa pointed to the frog and said something in Slovenian. “Frog,” said Susanna, and Gabor said the Hungarian word for frog.
“This is your favorite painting?” said Susanna. “Your favorite favorite?”
Gabor shrugged. “I like this frog. Is funny. It gives me a feeling. In all Milan is nothing gives me such strong feeling. Except maybe that Piero, that egg hanging from a string. But I think not as much as this frog.”
Really, the most astonishing thing was how wretched this made Susanna. So Gabor liked a picture with a peculiar frog—why should that make her think her whole life was a misunderstanding and she would have to disassemble it all to begin to straighten it out? She had married the wrong person, ended up in the wrong place. It wasn’t as if she’d trade Jerry for a crazy Hungarian whose favorite painting was a Virgin enthroned with Christ and a frog. But Gabor reminded her of what she had forgotten. Somehow she had forgotten that for some people it’s fine, it’s enough if something’s funny and gives you a feeling. She was so tired of everything having to teach you a lesson, preferably a lesson about the end of the world.
“Coffee at once!” said Gabor. “Doctor Gabor’s orders! That way, too, is art like food—too much can make you sleepy.”
Not far from the Ambrosian they found a bar and went in and stood at the railing. Gabor ordered three espressos and three rakis. “You know raki?” he said. “Is Turkish. Very good for too much museum.” He tossed back his raki and chased it with the espresso. Maritsa coolly did the same, and Susanna had no choice.
“Stamp-collector bar,” Gabor said. “Sundays, stamp collectors set up tables in the square for buying and trading, and when they finish they come here and drink grappa.” In fact, the walls were decorated with murals of giant stamps, and maybe on Sundays it drew a philatelist crowd, but right now it looked like a gay bar. Young men stood in couples and in little groups. Feeling better than she had in the museum, Susanna held up her raki glass. “Works like magic,” she told Gabor.
“I tell you!” said Gabor and ordered another round of raki and another espresso. “Doctor Gabor prescribes!”
Both bartenders were peasant women, straight off the farm or the vineyard, still in housedresses and aprons, unusual in this city where everyone dressed like salespeople in boutiques. They were chatting with a customer, a woman the size of a ten-year-old, dark-skinned, probably gypsy. Two braids hung to her waist. She wore a faded floor-length skirt and a kid’s long-sleeved striped polo shirt. A curly-haired child clung to her skirt. Susanna recalled an older child they’d passed playing in the doorway. The woman puffed angrily on her cigarette as she chattered to the barmaids in Italian. She kept pacing and turning sharply with little disdainful shakes of her hip.
“I love the gypsies,” Gabor said. “They are tough people, believe me. After we fail, Greenpeace, conferences, all this blah-blah, everything failed, poisoned, civilization bye-bye, the gypsies will still be here when all of us are finito.”
“Not cauliflowers?” said Susanna.
“Please?” Gabor said.
“The raki is something,” she said. Even Maritsa, she noticed, was starting to look a bit green.
“One more. And espresso,” said Gabor. “Then we will have the right dose.”
After that round Susanna knew it had been a drastic mistake. The world around her got painfully loud, then syrupy and slow. All at once s
he was aware of the gypsy woman watching her. She felt as if she were watching herself, and she thought distinctly: “I am having a hallucination.”
The vision couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but in that time she saw the end of the world, empty canyons of buildings in a depopulated city, like some post-nuclear Hollywood set, except that it was Milan, deserted but for the gypsy woman and her children, sashaying idly in and out of empty restaurants and shops, bored and petulant, neither happy nor sad that all this was now theirs. Susanna watched for a while and then it rushed away, and she felt herself rising over Milan, over Italy, then above the earth, not the familiar earth, pockmarked, green and blue. This was a new earth, a bald earth, shining in the black sky, white and brilliant and polished, like a ping-pong ball lit from within.
The next thing Susanna knew, she was in her hotel bed looking up at Jerry. For a moment she saw his face as an Archimboldo: cauliflower skin, carrot nose, green-bean eyeglass frames. He said, “Raki and espresso. Dynamite combination.”
“Gabor?” she said.
“He was abject,” said Jerry. “I gather it was quite a scene, him carrying you cave-man style through the lobby.” Jerry was smiling at her. His voice was nasal with false urgency, like a forties newsreel announcer.
“I think I’m sick,” said Susanna. “I was hallucinating.”
Jerry said, “Raki isn’t Dr Pepper.”
Susanna said, “Jerry, the weirdest thing. I had a vision, a hallucination. But before that there was a moment…it was like sometimes we’d be in cathedrals with those machines you plug a hundred lire in to light up the frescoes for a minute. Always, just before the minute was up, I’d see something in the paintings. But when the light went out I would lose it and forget what it was. Well, there was a gypsy woman in the café, and just before I felt so strange, I looked at her and thought, She looks exactly like me. We could be twins and she knows it. Of course it was ridiculous. We looked nothing alike.”
Jerry stretched out beside her and gazed down into her face. How old he looks, she thought guiltily, how unhappy and exhausted. Everything showed in his face, everything they both knew now, that they could not go on together, their marriage would have to end and she would have to leave him to face the death of the planet without her. She knew that Jerry was seeing in her the heartlessness of the young: unlike him, she still had time to fix some part of the world, and if it was ending, she still had the strength to enjoy what was left. And who was Jerry, really, to make her feel guilty about it?
“You don’t look anything like a gypsy,” said Jerry. “You look like Tinker Bell.”
Tears came to Susanna’s eyes. “I know that,” she said, not because it was true but to fill the silence in which she might otherwise have to face the fact that she had married a man to whom she looked like Tinker Bell. An unpleasant buzzing in her head reminded her of Gabor’s painting. Was the miracle the appearance of the bees or the getting them out of the baby? She said, “It was just a feeling I had that something was telling me something.”
“Telling you something?” said Jerry. “Please. Keep your feet on the ground.”
RUBBER LIFE
THAT WINTER I READ a lot and worked in the public library. A fog settled in on my heart like the mists that hung in the cranberry bogs and hid the ocean so totally that the sound of the waves could have been one of those records to help insomniacs fall asleep. Always I’d been happy when the summer people left, but that fall I couldn’t look up when the geese flew overhead and I avoided the streets on which people were packing their cars. Always I’d felt that the summer people were missing something, missing the best part of something, but now it seemed that I was the one being left as they went off, not to their winter office life, but to a party to which I had not been asked, and I felt like you do when the phone doesn’t ring and no mail comes and it’s obvious no one wants you. Of course I had reason to feel that way. But oddly, I hadn’t noticed. How strange that you can be satisfied with your life till the slamming of some stranger’s car trunk suddenly wakes you up.
I was trying to be civilized, cooking fresh produce till the market ran out, although it was only for me. The house I was caretaking had a microwave oven that seemed important to resist. The microwave surprised me. It was a colonial whaler’s house, white clapboard with a widow’s walk, so perfectly restored and furnished so obsessively with period pieces that all the comforts of modern life were tucked away grudgingly in some hard-to-find wing or upstairs. There was a cherrywood table on which I read while I ate. I had promised myself: no television till 10:30, when Love Connection came on. I loved that show with its rituals of video dating, its singles who rarely loved each other as much as they’d loved each other’s images on TV.
The house was supposed to be haunted—but so was every house in our town; a resident ghost could double what you could ask for summer rent. The Carsons, who were returning from Italy in the spring, told me their house had a ghost they’d never seen or heard; they could have been referring to some projected termite problem that never materialized. I didn’t listen too hard. I’d heard similar stories in several previous houses, and such was my mood that fall that it depressed me to admit that ghosts were yet another thing that I no longer believed in.
I read through the evenings and weekends. I found out how not to OD. When I got tired there were books I could read for refreshment, fat non-fiction bestsellers detailing how rich people contract-murdered close relatives. I skimmed these books as fast as I could and let their simple sentences wash through my brain like shampoo.
I couldn’t read at work, except on quiet mornings. We were surprisingly busy. Our town had a faithful daytime library crowd—young mothers, crazies, artists, retirees, the whole range of the unemployed and unattached. The best part of my job was seeing them come in from the briny winter cold, into the shockingly warm, bright library where the very air seemed golden with the fellowship and grateful presence of other people.
At first I read mostly new books, picked indiscriminately from the cartons that came in. Most of them were boring, but I liked knowing how to live with tennis injuries and diseases I hoped never to live with. I preferred these to books about why women lose men, books that made me so anxious I’d fall asleep reading and wake up long before dawn. It was a winter of lengthy biographies: lives that seemed longer than lives lived in actual time. I read a book about Edith Wharton and Henry James, and then I read Edith Wharton. I felt so close to Lily in The House of Mirth that when she took opium and died, an odd electric shiver shot across my scalp. We had six Edith Wharton books. When I finished them, nothing else seemed appealing and for a while I felt lost.
Then I became interested in a man named Lewis and the problem of what to read was solved because now I could read what he read. I put aside the books he returned and later took them home. To start, these were mainly cookbooks with photos in which dusty bits of Mexico or Tuscany peeked disconsolately at you from behind shiny platters of food. The first time I noticed Lewis—one of the summer helpers must have issued his card—he was returning a book he opened to show me a huge plate of black pasta on which some mussels had been fetchingly strewn.
“Isn’t it wild?” Lewis said. “Isn’t it pornographic?”
“How do they make it black?” I said.
“Squid ink,” Lewis said. He looked at me almost challengingly, perhaps because our town was very health-conscious, on strict natural and macrobiotic diets that would probably not include squid ink—though you might ask why not. The previous week, at a potluck Sunday brunch, I got up to help clear the dishes and was scraping grapefruit shells into the compost pail when my hostess said, “Stop!” It wasn’t compost, it was the tofu casserole main course. After that, the black pasta looked as magnificent as the walled Tuscan city behind it, and when I said, “Have you ever made this?” there was a catch in my voice, as if we were gazing not at pasta but at a Fra Angelico fresco.
Lewis said, “No, I use the pictures for attitu
de. Then I make up the recipes myself.”
I wondered whom he cooked for, but didn’t feel I could ask. It crossed my mind he might be gay—but somehow I thought not. After that, I paid attention: Lewis came in about twice a week, often on Mondays and Thursdays; I always wore jeans and sweaters, but on those days I tried to look nice.
One day a Moroccan cookbook segued into a stack of books about Morocco which I checked out for him, longing to say something that wasn’t obvious (“Interested in Morocco?”) or librarian-like (“Oh, are you planning a trip?”). If he was en route to Marrakech, I didn’t want to know. When he returned the Morocco books I guiltily sneaked them home. That night I sat at my table and read what he’d read, turned the pages he’d turned, till a hot desert wind seemed to draft through the house, and I felt safe and dozed off.
He chose topics apparently at random, then read systematically: theater memoirs, histories of the Manhattan Project, Victorian social mores, the Dada avant-garde, Conrad, Apollinaire, Colette, Stephen Jay Gould. I read right behind him, with a sense of deep, almost physical connection, doomed and perverse, perverse because to read the same words he’d read felt like sneaking into his room while he slept, doomed because it was secret. How could I tell him that, with so many books in the library, I, too, just happened to pick up The Panda’s Thumb?
No matter what else Lewis borrowed, there were always a couple of art books. He renewed a huge book on the Sistine Chapel three times and when I finally got it home I touched the angels’ faces and ran one finger down the defeated curve of the prophet’s shoulders. He often had paint on his clothes, and when I’d convinced myself that it wasn’t too obvious or librarian-like, I asked if he was an artist. He hesitated, then went to the magazine shelf and opened a three-month-old ArtNews to a review of his New York show. There was a photo of a room decorated like a shrine with tinfoil and bric-a-brac and portraits of the dead in pillowy plastic frames. He let me hold it a minute, then took it and put it back on the shelf. I was charmed that he’d given me it and then gotten shy; other guys would have gone on to their entire resumes. I wanted to say that I understood now how his work was like his reading, but I was ashamed to have been paying attention to what he read. After he left, I got the ArtNews and reread it again and again.
Peaceable Kingdom Page 4