How to Breathe Underwater

by Julie Orringer

  It doesn’t matter what the Baroque masters thought. The big breasts, the lush bodies, those are museum pieces now, and who cares if they stand for fertility and plenty, wealth and gluttony, or the fullest bloom of youth? Rubens’s nudes made of cumulus clouds, Titian’s milky half-dressed beauties overflowing their garments, Lorenzo Lotto’s big intelligent-eyed Madonnas—they have their place, and it is on a wall. No one remembers that a tiny breast used to mean desolation and deserts and famine.

  Take Aïda on the billboard in Florence, wearing a gray Escada gown held up by two thin strands of rhinestones. Where the dress dips low at the side, there is a shadow, like a closed and painted eyelid, just the edge of Aïda’s tiny breast, selling this $6,000 dress. That is what you can do today with almost nothing.

  The fact is, Aïda guessed right when she said I was a virgin. There were other girls at my high school, fat girls, who would go out by the train tracks at night and take off all their clothes. There were some who would give hand jobs. There were others who had sex for the first time when they were eleven. Few of these girls had dates for Homecoming, and none of them held hands at school with the boys they met by the tracks at night. At the time I would rather have died than be one of these girls, the fat ones who had sex thinking they’d be liked.

  But sometimes I think about how it might have been for those girls, who touched and were touched and lived afterward with complicated varieties of shame. When I look at my drawings of men and women, there’s a stiffness there, a glassiness I’m afraid comes from too little risk. At times it makes me dislike myself. Perhaps it even makes me a bad artist. Should I regret the way I conducted my life all those years? Can these things be changed now that I am, in most ways, grown up? Where would I begin?

  Drew lies back on his elbows and whistles “Moon River.” I wish I could relax. Somewhere below, my cousin stalks an artifact of her non-mother. I picture the tall, cool rooms with their crumbling ceilings and threadbare tapestries woven in dark colors. Maybe she will burn the place down. In another few months, I imagine, she will need to do something to get herself on the evening news. Being on a billboard can’t be enough for her.

  I put on Aïda’s sun hat and tie its white ribbons beneath my chin. Just as I’m wondering if either of us will speak to each other all afternoon, Drew asks if I’ve decided to submit any works for display in the Del Reggio gallery in Rome.

  “What works?” I say. “You’ve seen my sliding people. Maybe I could do a little installation with a basket underneath each painting, to catch the poor figure when she falls off the page.”

  “You have a talent, Mira. People criticize my work for being too realistic.”

  “But I don’t plan to draw them expressionistically. They just come out that way. It’s artistic stupidity, Drew, not talent.”

  “Well, then, I guess you’d better quit now,” he says, shrugging. He picks up some fallen grapes, waxy and black, and throws them into the hammock of my skirt. “How about another profession? Sheep herding? Radio announcing? Hat design?”

  “There’s a fine idea.” The words come out clipped and without humor. A dry silence settles between us. I’m angry at myself for being nervous and at him for bringing up the exhibition. He knows his work will go into the show.

  At times I think it would be terrible to have him touch me. I can imagine the disappointment he would show when I removed my dress. One hopes to find a painter who admires the old masters, like in the personal columns I’ve read in the Chicago Tribune: Lusty DWM w/taste for old wine and Rubens seeks SWF with full-bodied flavor. Would I ever dare to call?

  “So what do you think of my little cousin?” I ask.

  “Why?” he says. “What do you think of her?”

  “She’s had a hard past,” I say, in an attempt at magnanimity. Because if I answered the question with honesty, I would blast Aïda to Turkmenistan. All our lives, she has understood her advantage over me and has exercised it at every turn. When I pass her billboard in town I can feel her gleeful disdain. No matter how well you paint, she seems to say, you will remain invisible next to me.

  Perhaps because Drew is older I thought of him as enlightened in certain ways, but I saw how he looked at my cousin today with plain sexual appetite. I hand him a plum from our lunch bag and turn my face away from the sun, because I am hot and tired and want to be far away from here.

  As we eat, we hear the foreign-sounding ee-oo of an Italian police siren in the distance. Dread kindles in my chest. I imagine Aïda being wrested into handcuffs by an Italian policeman, and the shamefaced look she’ll give Joseph as her lie is revealed. Will I be too sorry later to say I told her so? I can almost hear my mother’s phone diatribe: You let her break into a house with some boy? And just watched the police haul her off to Italian jail? Drew and I get to our feet. The house below is quiet and still. A boxy police car sweeps into the lane, dragging a billow of dust behind it. It roars down the hill and screeches to a stop somewhere in front of the house, where we can no longer see it. After a moment someone pounds on the front door.

  Drew says, “We’d better go down.”

  “They’ll see us.”

  “Suit yourself.” He flicks the pit of his plum into the grapevines and starts down the hill.

  I follow him toward the front of the house, until we see the paved area where the car is parked. He is about to step onto the paving stones. Panicked, I take his arm and pull him behind a stand of junipers at the side of the driveway. There are just enough bushes to hide both of us. The shadows are deep but there are places to look through the branches, and we can see the police officer who had been pounding on the front door. The other officer sits quietly in the car, engrossed in a map.

  “This is ridiculous,” Drew says. “We have to go in.”

  “No way,” I whisper. “There’s enough trouble already. What’s the minimum penalty for breaking and entering in this country?”

  Drew shakes his head and says, “Tell me I came to Florence to stand in a bush.”

  The front door opens slightly, and the policeman goes inside. After a few minutes the officer with the map gets out and goes to the door, then into the house. Everything is still. A bird I can’t name alights near Drew’s hand and bobs on a thin branch. We stand together in the dust. The heat coming off his body has an earthy smell, like the beeswax soap nuns sell in the marketplace. If I extended my hand just a centimeter I could touch his arm.

  “Uh-oh,” he says softly.

  And there are Aïda and Joseph being led from the house by the policemen. Aïda’s hair is mussed, as if there has been a struggle, and her dress hangs crooked at the shoulder. Joseph walks without looking at her. A woman in a black dress—a housekeeper, from the looks of her—curses at them from the doorway. They’re not in handcuffs, but the police aren’t about to let them go, either. Just as the first policeman opens the car door, a chocolate-colored Mercedes appears at the top of the drive. The steel-haired housekeeper stiffens and points. “La padrona di casa,” she says.

  They hold Aïda and Joseph beside the police car, waiting for the Mercedes to descend into the driveway. Its tires are quiet on the paving stones, and its darkened windows yield no glimpse of the driver. After it rolls to a stop there’s a tense moment while the dust clears. Then the lady of the house climbs out. She squares herself toward the scene in front of her villa. She is tall and lean. Her hair is caught in the kind of knot the Italian women wear, heavy and sweeping and low on the neck. Beneath her ivory jacket her shoulders are businesslike. She looks as if she would be more at home in New York or Rome than out here on this grape farm. She lowers her black sunglasses. With a flick of her hand toward Aïda and Joseph, she asks who the two criminals might be.

  Aïda raises her chin and looks squarely at the woman. “La vostra dottore,” she says.

  Your doctor. The policemen roar with laughter.

  The maid tells her padrona that Aïda was apprehended in the boudoir, trying on shoes. She had tried on nearly t
en pairs before she was caught.

  “You like my shoes?” the woman asks in English. She tilts her head, scrutinizing Aïda. “You look familiar to me.”

  “She’s a model,” Joseph says.

  “Ah!” the woman says. “And you? You are a model too?” Her mouth is thin and agile.

  “A photographer.”

  “And you were trying on shoes also in my house?”

  There is a silence. Joseph looks at Aïda for some clue as to what she wants him to say or do. Aïda glances around, and I almost feel as if she is looking for me, as if she thinks I might come down and save her now. Her eyes begin to dart between the padrona and the policemen, and her mouth opens. She lets her eyes flutter closed, then collapses against a policeman in an extremely realistic faint.

  “Poor girl,” the woman says. “Bring her into the house.”

  The police look disapproving, but they comply. One of them grabs her under the shoulders and the other takes her feet. Like an imperial procession they all enter the house, and the housekeeper closes the door behind them.

  “She must be sick,” Drew whispers. “Does she eat?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  He climbs out of our hiding place and starts down toward the house. I have to follow him. I picture being home in bed, lying on my side and looking at the blank wall, a desert of comfort, no demands or disappointment. As I navigate the large stones at the edge of the driveway, my foot catches in a crevice and I lose my balance. There’s a snap, and pain shoots through my left ankle. I come down hard onto my hip.

  Drew turns around. “You okay?”

  I nod, sideways, from the ground. He comes back to offer me his hand. It’s torture getting up. My body feels as if it weighs a thousand pounds. When I test the hurt ankle, the pain makes my eyes water. I let go of Drew’s hand and limp toward the door.

  “Are you going to make it?” Drew asks.

  “Sure,” I say, but the truth is there’s something awfully wrong. The pain tightens in a band around my lower leg. Drew rings the doorbell, and in a few moments the housekeeper opens the door. Her eyes are small and stern. She draws her gray brows together and looks at Drew. In his perfect Italian, he tells her that our friends are inside, and that we would like to ask the forgiveness of the lady of the house. She throws her hands heavenward and wonders aloud what will happen next. But she holds the door open and beckons us inside.

  The entry hall is cool and dark, like a wine cavern, and there’s a smell of fennel and coffee and dogs. Supporting myself against the stone wall, I creep along behind Drew, past tall canvases portraying the vintner’s family, long-faced men and women arrayed in brocade and velvet. The style is more Dutch than Italian, with angular light and deep reds and blues. In one portrait a seventeenth-century version of our padrona holds a lute dripping with flower garlands. She looks serene and pastoral, certainly capable of mercy. I take this for a good sign. We move past these paintings toward a large sunny room facing the back garden, whose French doors I recognize as the ones Aïda slipped through not long ago. My cousin is stretched out on a yellow chaise longue with Joseph at her side. The policemen are nowhere to be seen. I imagine them drinking espresso in the kitchen with the inevitable cook. The padrona sits next to Aïda with a glossy magazine open on her lap, exclaiming at what she sees. “Ah, yes, here you are again,” she says. “God, what a gown.”

  It’s as though royalty has come for a visit. She seems reluctant to look away from the photographs when the maid enters and announces us as friends of the signorina.

  “More friends?”

  “Actually, Mira’s my cousin,” Aïda explains. “And that’s Drew. He’s another student at the university.”

  Drew nods politely at the padrona. Then he goes to Aïda and crouches beside her chaise longue. “We saw you faint,” he says. “Do you need some water?”

  “She’ll be fine,” Joseph says, and gives Drew a narrow-eyed look.

  Drew stands, raising his hands in front of him. “I asked her a simple question.”

  The padrona clears her throat. “Please make yourself comfortable,” she says. “Maria will bring you a refreshment.” She introduces herself as Pietà Cellini, the wife of the vintner. She says this proudly, although from the state of their house it seems the family wines haven’t been doing so well in recent years. As she speaks she holds Aïda’s hand in her own. “Isn’t she remarkable, your cousin?” she asks. “So young.”

  “I’m awfully sorry about all this,” I say. “We should be getting home.”

  “She’s darling,” says Signora Cellini. “My own daughter went to study in Rome two years ago. She’s just a little older than Aïda. Mischievous, too.”

  “Is that so?” I say. The pain in my ankle has become almost funny. My head feels weightless and poorly attached.

  “Aïda was just showing me her lovely pictures in Elle,” our host says. “The poor girl had a shock just now, all those police. I’m afraid our housemaid was quite rude.”

  “She was just protecting your house,” I say.

  Aïda sips water from a porcelain cup. Joseph takes it from her when she’s finished and sets it down on a tiny gilt table. “Feel better now?” he asks.

  “You’re so nice.” Aïda pats his arm. “I’m sure it was just the heat.”

  Black flashes crowd the edges of my vision. The ankle has begun to throb. I look past them all, through the panes of the French doors and out into the garden, where an old man digs at a bed of spent roses. Dry-looking cuttings lie on the ground, and bees dive and hover around the man. He is singing a song whose words I cannot hear through the glass. I rest my forehead against my hand, wondering how I can stand to be here a moment longer. Aïda laughs, and Joseph’s voice joins hers. It seems she has done this intentionally, in reparation for the thrown candlestick or the words I said to her, or even because all my life I have had a mother and she has had none. What a brilliant success I would be if I could paint the scene in this sunny room, glorious Aïda in careful disarray, the two men drawn to her, the elegant woman leaning over her with a porcelain cup. Sell it. Retire to Aruba. I can already feel the paint between my fingers, under my nails, sliding beneath my fingertips on the canvas. And then I hear the padrona’s voice coming from what seems a great distance, calling not Aïda’s name but my own. “Mira,” she says. “Good God. What happened to your ankle?”

  In defiance of all my better instincts, I look down. At first it seems I am looking at a foreign object, some huge red-and-purple swelling where my ankle used to be. It strains against the straps of my sandal as if threatening to burst. “I got hurt,” I say, blinking against a contracting darkness, and then there is silent nothing.

  It is nighttime. I do not recall getting back to the apartment, nor do I remember undressing or getting into bed. The room is quiet. There is a bag of crushed ice on my ankle, and an angel bending over it as if it had already died. Translucent wings rise from the angel’s back, and its face is inclined over my foot. Its hair shines blue in the moonlight. It murmurs an incomprehensible prayer.

  The mosquito netting fills with wind and then hangs limp again, brushing Aïda’s shoulders. Her face is full of concentration. She touches the swollen arch of my foot. I can hardly feel it. You could help me if you wanted to, she might say now. You have lived longer than I have and could let me know how it is, but you don’t. You let me dance and giggle and look like an idiot. You like it. You wish it. Is she saying this?

  “How did we get home?” I ask her. My voice sounds full of sleep.

  “You’re awake,” she says. “You sure messed up your ankle.”

  “It feels like there are bricks on my chest.”

  “Signora Cellini gave you Tylenol with codeine. It knocked you out.”

  Sweet drug. My wisdom-tooth friend. One should have it around. “Where are the guys?”

  “Home. We made quite a spectacle.”

  “You did.”

  “That’s what I do, Cousin Mira.”<
br />
  “I don’t.”

  “Was I the only one to faint today?” She raises her eyebrows at me.

  “Well, I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “You’ll have to go to a doctor tomorrow.”

  “So be it. This is your fault, you know,” I tell her. I mean for it to be severe, but the last part comes out “falyuno.” I am almost asleep again, and grateful for that. With my eyelids half closed I can see the wings rising from her shoulders again, and her feet might be fused into one, and who knows, she might after all be sexless and uninvolved with the commerce of this world, and I might be the Virgin Mary, receiving the impossible news.

  The next morning Aïda calls a cab and we go down to the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova, where a dark-haired nurse named Bella examines my ankle. “È grave,” she tells me, shaking her head. My ankle, if I were to reproduce it on a canvas, would require plenty of aquamarine and ocher and Russian red. Bella calls for an English-speaking doctor, who handles me gently. He orders X rays and tells the technician to take plenty of pictures. In another room the doctor puts my films up on a lighted board. He shows me a hairline fracture, which looks to me like a tiny mountain range etched into my bone. He does not understand why I smile when he gives me the bad news. How can I explain to him how apt it is? Drew would recommend a self-portrait.

  When I return to the waiting room wearing a fiberglass cast from toes to mid-calf, I find Aïda eating a croissant. I feel as if I will faint from hunger.