At every pore with instant fires …’
It does not, you conceited bastard, it does not, and it never will. Besides, where would I buy you a sheath in this town? I can hardly ask Aunt Lucia. Scotty, maybe, has some. But can I ring him up, Hi, this is your cousin, Anna, could I borrow a condom?
It was his turn to take breath, as he accelerated towards the poem’s end, and I found I wanted to hear it, wanted to very much. I was thinking, too, My Rosa wanted words, more and more words. When Tommaso was silent, she filled up the empty space around her with her own stories, her own scripts. Here I am, I’m being given some, and they don’t mean a thing, too, which makes it even better, lighter, no problem. How funny it is, perhaps I will go to bed with this sixty-year-old father of five because if I don’t I’m not sure that I wouldn’t blame myself if the Fun City link somehow didn’t get established; and it can’t do much harm, besides he might be good at it, and God, that would be fantastic, if he were good at it.
‘Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:’
What will it cost me? Nothing. (And it cost Rosa and Davide and then you and your sisters and your mother so much.) It will cost me nothing. Or will it?
And he came to the last lines, and spoke them to me quietly down the line,
‘Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.’
‘Anna,’ he said, after a beat, ‘Don’t you agree? How often does this happen? To people together, to people like us?’
He’s bats, I thought, He’s completely bats. I could see him, pink with pleasure through his suntan. Aloud, I managed, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Anna!’ he continued. ‘I’ll send my car for you. At six. Where are you staying?’
I choked out, ‘I can’t. We’re all going out. It’s a family thing. It’s impossible.’ I was relieved.
‘Tomorrow then.’
I spluttered on, ‘I’m staying with my aunt. In Grovetree. You can’t come there.’
‘Anywhere. Why not? My driver will fetch you and bring you home. Give Loella the address.’
Loella came on the line again, and I told her.
23
PARNASSUS, 1985
WHEN I GOT back into the car to drive back to Aunt Lucia’s, I became convinced that I’d jumbled the number of her house – it was typically Parnassian, seven figures long. I wondered, should I tell Loella? Or Marylynne? Or Rosemarie? Perhaps the driver would never find the house. Two numbers transposed could mean a difference of several miles. Perhaps I’d done it on purpose. Perhaps my slip of memory would reprieve me. Or cheat me, depending on which way I looked at the possibility of having it off with Mr Van Mond at all.
As I drove back up the canyon from the freeway, heat was glinting in the pockets on the twisting road and the giant spiky aloes and paintbrush palms were aureoled in a miasma like mustard gas, yellowish and thick; at the house, Nicholas was mixing a cocktail at the counter of the outdoor bar, with mashed yucca leaves he’d peeled from the withered bole of the big plant on the terraced garden, sprigs of oleander, Coca-Cola syrup, tomato juice and spates of ice cubes from the automatic dispenser in the kitchen that he had discovered as soon as we arrived. It was the best toy I could have found for him in California. His great-aunt Lucia didn’t mind; she cried, ‘That machine can make buckets of ice cubes in minutes, like I can do three washes in half an hour. This is America, darling, we carry a lot of weight! When I think how our mammas used to work. They never went out.’ She sighed. ‘They were always washing, washing, washing. In the kitchen. Me, I like to go out. Let him play.’ So Nicholas spawned ice cubes all over the floor in a monumental cascade, and when he saw me coming through the screen door, ran up with his green pottage and I drank in make-believe and pronounced it delicious.
You were swimming with Lucia and Imma; in flowery bathing caps, you were breasting it round the sandal-shaped pool with a gentle stroke, keeping your heads well above water, the three of you like crested water birds hardly ruffling the surface of the water as you processed round and round. ‘You come in. Keep fit, like us,’ called out Lucia. ‘We get out and it’s your turn.’ There wasn’t room for another swimmer in the pool high above the foggy spread of the city. Lucia spoke as if she were giving instructions out of doors in a big wind: in imperious bursts of her Italian American, pitched high and loud to carry further, ‘I know how to frighten away muggers with the way I talk,’ she would say, chuckling, with her thin arms on her hips, head cocked. She regarded me, as I stood draped in my towel, hesitating to take it off and invite the sisters’ expert inspection of my points.
‘Want some ice cream?’ said Lucia. ‘We have all kinds, you name it.’ I shook my head. ‘I like tall girls,’ she continued, since my height was about all of me she could see. ‘Your mother, now, she was always beautiful and tall, like a model.’ Lucia herself, just about five feet and a bit, was so thin she probably weighed less than Nicholas.
She offered food, though we were about to go out, as you pointed out. But still she urged us. As for herself, though, her throat felt too narrow to eat, she said. Swallowing made her feel she was asphyxiating.
‘I’ve got a date,’ I said, in my best American, watching the pool cleaner chugging over the surface of the water, nosing out the edges like a live insect buzzing at the entrances of flowers.
‘A lovely girl like you, of course you have,’ said Lucia, throwing a cloak of scarlet towelling with a flower-petal ruff over her shoulders. She winked up at me, ‘Who’s the lucky beau?’
‘He’s sending a car for me, at six tomorrow, is that all right?’ I turned to you, and asked, ‘Do you mind looking after Nicholas, again?’
Nicholas, now at my side, stamped his foot, ‘You’re always going out. You said we were on holiday.’
‘I am not,’ I cried, squeezing him tight, and feeling his little eel-like body whip around in my arms, no longer a baby’s, but lean and spare and strong. How fast they grow, how soon he’ll be a man, I thought. Aloud I said, still squeezing hard, ‘You’re not the only one who’s going to have a good time in California, you’re not as selfish as all that are you?’ I kissed his face and he printed a small kiss on my cheek, grudgingly, and allowed me, ‘If you promise that you’ll be here afterwards, and never go out any more. Promise!’ I promised.
She went on looking at me, ‘Why doesn’t a lovely girl like you have a husband? I don’t get it. If I had a daughter like you, I’d be worried about fighting them off.’ She described a shape in the air, a beautiful me, unknown, ample, erect.
I shuffled in my towel.
You agreed, from behind Lucia. ‘Anna has got a lovely figure, really. But she doesn’t like one to see. She didn’t want a husband, you know. She got rid of him!’
‘She got rid of him!’ Lucia grinned. ‘You modern girls. You carry a lot of weight.’
Nicholas was inside, I could see him through the screen door onto the balcony, watching the football game, eating ice cream like his great-uncle Marty beside him. I was glad, for once, that he was occupied in this manner. I said, ‘I didn’t “get rid” of him. We parted. We agreed we’d drifted away from each other. It wasn’t a contest.’
‘That’s right,’ you said, loudly, so your sister could hear. ‘They’re friends now. Men and women, today they can be friends. It’s no longer how it was for us. They know each other. Hah!’
‘Our mamma, you know what she said? Marriage is a sealed envelope. You never know what’s inside. Not till you get to open it. That’s it. That’s how it was for us.’
When the three sisters had gone in to change out of their bathing suits, Lucia’s husband Marty came out, almost furtively, and bucketed into the pool; water heaved up and splashed the counterfeit lawn around it; he crawled around vigorously, working up a storm, his black curls slicked down shiny by the water, his
powerful shoulders breaking the surface. (Lucia said: ‘Not a grey hair, Marty’s still, ah, so handsome. That young dog-minder who comes here to walk the dog, I don’t like it. He gives him ideas about going back to the bachelor life.’)
I went into my powder-blue room with the old soft toys which had belonged to my cousin Beatrice, and kept calm. I thought of Nicholas. I thought of not having Nicholas. I thought of Ephemera. I thought of how much I liked working. How I could write at the same time. I thought of being ill once when Nicholas’s father had cared about me and nursed me. I thought of driving him very very fast on holiday just for the hell of it, blazing towards the Atlas Mountains ahead in a fury of dust. And so I counted my blessings, as they say. Or at least I tried to, like a nun saying her rosary to keep down the urge to scream, I concentrated on the alliance I knew I had experienced. I tried to make it real.
My uncle Marty heaved himself out of the pool; it whooshed back as if he’d pulled a cork on it. I heard him say to Nicholas, looking at his legs, ‘I see you lucked out, Nick, the family problem’s passed you by.’ He stood, dripping, in front of him and pointed to his knees, then described an x in the air. ‘Knock knees. I don’t have them. You don’t have them. But the women – they’ve all got them. And there’s no surgeon can fix that. Not even these clever guys who’ll fix just about anything you want. See their ads in the paper? New eyebrows, new eyelids, new you name it. Aw, you’re too young.’ Nicholas was wide-eyed, as his great-uncle, nodding solemnly, shifted the towel around his shoulders and turned about and passed through the screen door into the house where the sisters, cloistered and whispering, were dressing.
I showed Nicholas the way my knees overlap if I put my feet together. ‘I couldn’t be a ballerina, could I?’ I laughed. ‘That’s what he meant. But you’re all right, as he pointed out, you’ve got your father’s legs.’ I paused.
Nicholas pressed his feet together and stood up, knees level. ‘But I don’t want to be a ballerina,’ he said with disgust. Suddenly homesick, I proposed to him, ‘We’ll telephone Daddy later, shall we? Would you like that?’
It was our turn to get in. The water was as hot as a sulphur spring. Nicholas jumped in on top of me, then out, in and out, discovering that he could keep his eyes fixed on the gigantic humming city in the distance below and then plunge down into the water all of a sudden and have the pool slap total, oblivious, antenatal blindness into his eyes.
When I went into the house again, I could hear the sisters, sitting at the table in the kitchen in their robes, cooing at one another. Lucia was briskly attending to them, serving morsels of melon and lightly browned muffins. After his brief dip, Marty was again roped off from the women’s confederacy, and was sitting in front of the Hepplewhite-style TV cabinet and the grunts and cheers of the game, with a copy of Modern Maturity across his knees.
Lucia was saying, ‘No one ever loved me, not really loved me.’
You protested, fiercely. ‘No, Lucia, that’s not right, you’re remembering wrongly.’
‘I’m a sensual woman, and I know.’ Lucia was firm, tears quivered in her voice. She took a cup of instant coffee out of the microwave where she had heated it, and sipped at it reluctantly.
‘Not sensual, surely,’ put in Imma. ‘We were never sensual. That’s not nice.’ She shook her head softly.
‘Sensual is not sexual, darling, don’t worry. Not the same thing at all. I’m not sexual! Poor Marty! He’d like it, that’s what he would like for sure.’ She jabbed her chin in his direction.
‘We would all like to be loved, to be properly loved.’ You sounded regretful. ‘Yes. But it happens to very few.’
‘You see,’ Lucia, triumphant, cried out ‘You agree! I was never loved.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ you said. ‘I was thinking of myself.’
‘Everybody always loved you. You’re the cocca, the big cocca of our father, the cocca of our family, everyone who ever saw you loved you straightaway. You’re the princess. You know how to please. You do.’
Imma, resigned, patient, said to you, ‘You please everyone.’
‘You make me sound like a streetwalker! Beastly!’
‘Naah! When we say you know how to please in America we don’t mean nothing bad.’
‘Come on now, we’ve got to get dressed.’
They dispersed, Lucia waving away the offers of help from her two sisters. ‘What do I have a dishwasher for?’ she cried. From their different bedrooms off the wide split-level shaggy-carpeted living room, they continued to talk to one another and I, apart in my room, could still hear them. Your voice rose in pitch talking to them, as if the years were peeled away, and the high tones of your youth came back with the return of your mother tongue. All three of you mixed in English words: like a dress from the past, Italian still fitted you, but it needed to be let out here and there, with new fabric to accommodate your grown shape, your lot of experience. I lay on my cousin’s bed and eavesdropped on the interrupted intimacies that wrapped you softly in the nest. I wondered how it could be that you loved one another still in such an uncomplicated way.
You passed Lucia’s door on the way to the bathroom, your hair in a shower cap, your face creamed; I heard you say, ‘Darling, I didn’t see anything.’ Lucia must have crossed the open threshold at that moment in some state of undress; perhaps this discreet modesty, this absence of inquiry, held you fast to one another.
Lucia was calling out, ‘Every day I have my sisters with me is a holiday for me.’
Presently, Lucia came in to me to see if Nicholas and I were all right. She tested the nightlight by the bed, and clucked with approval that it was working. I protested that Nicholas no longer needed one.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘You must have it on. Both of you.’ She had a sitter in, you told me, if Marty had to be away for a night. Yet she moved around the room with despatch, straightening, gathering, smoothing; she appeared as self-possessed in her intent business as Nicholas’s gerbil Ricky sorting out its cage, shredding paper for a nest, scraping sawdust for a burrow.
‘Is that an English outfit?’ she asked me, looking at my Laura Ashley stand-by, a blue and green floral.
‘Is it all right?’ I asked. I felt so helpless with two aunts and a mother as constant witnesses, even only for a week. ‘It’s not very new, I’m afraid.’
‘You want to go shopping for some new outfits, darling? I love to shop – I come with you.’
We were going to meet up that night with Talia, in a restaurant, and with some cousins – Caterina’s son, and various members of my own generation: Eddie, the insurance man and Bella the broker, who were Talia’s children, and Beatrice and Scotty, Lucia’s children. Scotty had a business in cosmetics – he’d patented a toe-separator, for keeping the toenails apart while varnishing them, so that the polish wouldn’t smudge. It had caught on in a state where every young woman went in for nail sculpture on her hands and glossy finish on her feet. He’d made money, like his mother and father had in real estate when they first arrived in California after the war. ‘We have the Midas touch,’ proclaimed Lucia, with a laugh, hand on hip, chin up.
We took Marty’s car this time, his Mercedes; there were so many of us that we had to put our handbags and wraps in the boot; when my uncle opened it, I saw a carton filled with discount coupons snipped from boxes of detergent, instant-coffee jars, tissue and toilet rolls, years’ and years’ worth, it looked like, the immigrant rag-picker’s habit of thrift going to waste. As we rolled down the canyon into the valley and onto the freeway, Lucia pointed out the new construction in the area, counting off rises in real-estate values as we passed; yet the houses were perched on crumbling mud slips. ‘We’re going to get out of here,’ she said, with satisfaction, ‘We’re going to the coast, to join Talia and the kids. We’re too far away from them here, and we’re a family that likes to be close.’
You have often said to me, ‘How is it that I am the youngest, the most coddled, the one who was always spared, and yet I’m
the only one who hasn’t ended up in Parnassus, living on the same block, in the bosom of the family, just like fifty years ago?’
‘How much will your house cost to buy?’ asked Nicholas.
‘Little boys shouldn’t want to know such things,’ said Lucia, but she was delighted.
‘How much? One thousand pounds? Two thousand? No? Three thousand?’
‘Yes, darling, three thousand – dollars, not pounds.’ Lucia chuckled. ‘He’s got a lot to learn.’
‘Wow!’ said Nicholas. ‘That’s a lot of money.’
‘It is,’ I said.
We were all dressed up; in summery cottons and silks, sweet-pea colours. Lilac for Imma with the perfect embroidery and hand-sewn buttonholes and finishing; carmine for Lucia, in a tailored frock with a fichu of white muslin neatly starched and ironed, and matching carmine pumps with white bows; you in smoky chiffon with pale trimmings on the collar and cuffs and belt, low-key Ascot, compared to your sisters’ Dynasty.
The car was cramped, but the air conditioning kept us cool. I was sitting in the back between you and Imma; Nicholas was in the front, between Lucia and Marty, within easy reach of the routine supply of sweets in the glove compartment. Imma was tiring quickly of the endless freeway uncoiling ahead; the eldest, she gave an impresssion of frailty and languor compared to Lucia’s vim. She spread out the lovingly worked panels of her lilac dress and sighed close to my ear, in her low-pitched voice like a pigeon in the rafters, and patted my hand, ‘You will write something nice about our mother, darling, won’t you? I want you to be sure to do that. She wasn’t a brilliant woman, she didn’t go to school like you or Lucia and Marty’s kids and get a masters, she couldn’t read or write hardly, but she always kept us nice, and did everything she could, and we always had enough to eat and we were always pretty. People wanted to know us because we were lively and pretty and we could be like mat on account of Mamma. And Mamma only. There was no one else. After Papà died. She did it all by herself.’
The Lost Father Page 32