by Andrea Lee
* * *
Next day, I keep to myself, as one is entitled to do in a hotel that has a library. When Simon calls from Hunan, before breakfast, I don’t say a word about my daylong excursion but instead wax lyrical on the joys of solitude until, through the crackling Chinese static, he asks me suspiciously what I’ve been up to. “Just the usual sex with hotel waiters,” I tell him.
From my lounge chair in the shade beside the pool, I observe Silver’s movements on the last day before her retreat. After bidding me a cheerful good morning, she breakfasts garrulously with the assistant manager, who dreams of opening a luxury hotel in Rangoon; she meditates on the rocks by the bay; and by late afternoon she is one of three torsos emerging from the water at the far end of the pool, drinking cocktails with the black male model and one of the stylists from the shoot. When she sees me watching, she holds up her glass. “The last gin-and-tonic!” she calls. “Vive la folie!”
I don’t see Silver again. She goes off to Cornelia and a cleaner life without saying good-bye. Once or twice, she drifts through my thoughts in her white sarong with her cocky grin. But almost immediately I banish her, and for the last part of my vacation I set about being indolent and uninteresting.
Still, it happens that on the day before I leave I find myself in the library, deep in conversation with a woman I have just met. She is younger than I am, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and English: blond, with a pudgy, tanned body packed into a girlish bikini; entertainingly foulmouthed, with a Geordie accent. She came to the hotel a couple of days ago, with a tall Jordanian husband covered in gold chains; two blond, black-eyed toddlers; and a pair of male attendants in white robes and Arab headdresses, who carried suitcases and looked after the children, even changing diapers. Leaning on a table covered with weeks-old foreign papers in the dim, low-ceilinged library, she looks at me and says, “I envy you, being practically alone on holiday. Sometimes I get so fucking sick of the lot of them—”
Mice scurry in the palm thatch on the roof. The Oxford English Dictionary looms behind us, in its glass case, locked away against the ravages of suntan oil and salt air. Across the room, Basia, reading MAD magazine in a varnished planter’s chair, has stopped turning the pages. In the woman’s surly blue eyes I can see skeins of experience poised to unwind, and the password trembles on my lips.
The Visit
As we agreed, you are waiting for me in Piazza Crimea on the corner between the taxi stand and the bus stop, at the hour of the afternoon that always scares me to death. Two-thirty, the time when the butcher’s shop and the pharmacy in the piazza are shuttered in steel, and the good burghers of Turin are digesting their agnellotti in brodo, and a paralyzed stillness hangs over the whole peninsula of Italy. It’s a dangerous hour of daylight ghosts, an hour when I can’t write or sleep. Instead I try always to be doing something definite, like making love or drinking strong coffee, nursing the baby, having my hair washed, or reading a scandal magazine. Otherwise, if the sun is shining, one could be vaporized in that deadly silent brightness, or if it is overcast or foggy, one might feel one’s soul leached away, particle by particle, into damp gray nothing. You could have taken the train from Milan at any time, but it was I who suggested this hateful time of day.
There you are under the sycamores, a slender woman of my own height and weight, looking dismayingly elegant in a black ski jacket and narrow black pants. Oddly flattened, a theatrical silhouette. A female stage Mephistopheles, or a sexy transvestite Hamlet. And your entourage of sycamores—a mottled platoon of them leading up to the Crimean war memorial—makes me think of college writing seminars, when I stuck lyrical sycamores into all of my prose. “Parti-colored branches searching the heavens…” One of my best stories from those days describes a professor whose trousers fall down as he strolls beneath the sycamores of the Cambridge Common. It dates from the time when I was about to marry R, the young man who years later would marry you. R is no longer husband to either of us, but his quondam presence in our lives has formed the frail bond that connects us. Not sisters or lovers or yet friends, we are certainly not strangers.
I stop the car and get out and kiss you on both cheeks. We are used to the greeting; we both know Italy well enough to have picked up the customs of the country. But already I feel my disadvantage planted and growing, established in the exaggerated strength with which I grabbed your shoulders and pressed my lips against your face. I wanted to show you that I was relaxed enough to be very happy to see you. All I did, however, was leave myself open to one of those ironical glances of yours, the mute comment of a West Coast earth child, disdainful of all pretentiousness. In the shadow play that lies behind all of our encounters, I am the false, frothy artist type; you, somehow, the genuine human article.
I grab your bag, which is slightly larger than an overnight bag, and wonder how long you are going to stay. On the phone, I urged, no, insisted, in my frivolous way, that you stay for two nights, but we both know that that’s probably too much. You have the excuse, anyway, that you have little time. You don’t live in Italy anymore; you’re on vacation here from the Oregon town where you moved after you divorced R. Where you are a consultant to fiber optics companies run by callow billionaires. Where you live with a dog that used to be my daughter’s puppy. Why do I feel secretly possessive about your life?
What are you writing nowadays, you ask me as you get into the car. I’ve been following the magazine and wondering…
It occurs to me that you might feel possessive about my life.
We drive away from the city center up into the hills, or the Hill, as they call it, winding past walled villas, green stretches of park with rust-colored beeches, the turn-of-the-century Ospedale San Vito, with its peeling stucco towers streaked with water stains. As we go higher, we drive through patches of November fog. Your presence is making me rattle along like a tour guide about the history of this area where I’ve come to live with my second husband, who’s an Italian businessman. About the court of the Savoy kings, and the Juvarran villas the courtiers built for summer rustication, out of the heat and malaria of the Po Valley. About Fiat, and the postwar invasion of automobile workers who constructed their socialist dream in the smoggy industrial flatlands below.
And every so often, you’ll prick the bubble of my rhetoric by saying something droll. Yes, you’re droll. You have a sexy, slightly adenoidal voice. So, you say, do you hang out with Gianni Agnelli? What’s the Italian word for Motown—Mottocittà?
* * *
From the corner of my eye, I see you sitting as always like a wary child, with your cropped head thrust forward and your hands in your lap. You are wearing the most beautiful scarf I ever saw, black with a design of peacock blue. Its changing colors and heavy fringe match your eyes. When I compliment you on it, you say that it’s from a movie wardrobe, that a well-known actress wore it in a recent role. Someone in your family, I recall, is in the film business. Once, when R was still married to you, he stopped by my house on a casual errand, wearing a pair of oversized jeans that he told me proudly had been worn by Gérard Depardieu. They hung alarmingly low on him, like a rapper’s jeans, and caused me to muse for a second on exactly why it was that a wife—a recently married second wife—would present her husband with Depardieu’s trousers. Why he wore them to visit his first wife was, I thought, fairly obvious.
* * *
We get to my house at three-thirty, a few minutes before my daughter gets off the bus from the American School. Piles of raked leaves dot the garden, and someone as usual has left the side door wide open.
It’s very big, I say of the house, in my tour guide’s voice. But we don’t have the time or money to keep it as it ought to be kept up. It’s old, over six hundred years, and there used to be a pair of round towers, though it was never a real castle, just a fortified farmhouse. You are silent, so I babble on. Down the hill are the outbuildings, but they belong to our neighbor, a lawyer with a shady side business of selling used luxury cars. That bulldozer is him trying t
o dig out the old fishpond, which there is officially some city ordinance against doing. Imagine, all the land that we can see, with those modern suburban houses, used to be vineyards that were attached to this place. You are still silent, walking beside me as I carry your bag, your profile inexpressive as a face on a cameo; and I am running out of things to say. I tell you that there are supposed to be secret tunnels joining the cellars of our house with all the other old villas on the hill, that this hill is a warren of underground passages.
We pause alongside the back garden wall, where the stone urns are full of yellowing geraniums. From here, on those rare clear blue days that sometimes descend on Turin without warning, one can see green slopes sweeping down to the city; streets and buildings and factories as if in a diorama; and beyond the Po, rising into the sunlight, the snowcapped wall of the Alps. The mountains are extraordinary presences, angelic witnesses to our lives. But today they are hidden, and the line of the hillside fades off into the usual smoggy haze.
Even so, you look out over the wall and say: I think it’s beautiful. And you have such a winning way of saying it, as I have heard you say other things in the past: an earnest tone with a curious submissiveness to it, that gives one the feeling of having won a small but valuable prize. Suddenly I love you. I invite you into my house.
* * *
Your bag is full of presents for my daughter, formerly your stepdaughter, presents of a perfection that I am not sure I would ever be able to manage. We are upstairs in the attic playroom having a gift opening, one of those tiny misplaced Christmases that expatriates, always celebrating things minimally or out of season, get used to. You’ve brought a CD of UK garage music that the twelve-to-fifteen-year-old crowd desires ardently this year; another CD of Christmas carols miaowed by a computerized chorus of felines; a floppy stuffed cat and dog; a T-shirt from your local microbrewery; and, most marvelous of all, a fantastic array of kids’ magazines, the kind that Theodora can never find on the international newsstands here, with subjects ranging from Internet pet exchanges to feminist water polo.
Theodora sits with her long legs crossed Indian-style, so we can see the mud caking the soles of her size nine Doc Martens, bending her flat-chested eleven-year-old body over the gifts, pushing back a single skinny braid she has made at the front of her hair, a braid tipped with an orange bead and a tiny piece of tinfoil. She knew you were coming, and was excited about it, but when she gallumphed in from school, ready for her snack, and saw you and me together, she turned mute. I was embarrassed, but you wisely sat still and waited, and now she is giggling and chattering as she tears wrapping paper. She is the nominal reason for this visit, after all. I have a snapshot from six years ago, of Theo sitting on your lap, her head lolling back in an abandoned attitude of perfect confidence. It scared me at the time: I thought you might steal her. Some years later, I was scared at the idea that you might vanish forever from her life: that, instead of the stepmother she learned to love, you might become a woman who left her father’s house one spring night, and stepped into nonbeing. Theo already has too many memories that hover on the verge of being apocrypha.
The baby is awake from his nap, and crawling around shredding wrapping paper and making noises like an engine that needs a muffler. As usual, his fat toothless face wears an expression of expectant hilarity, as if he were awaiting the punch line to the joke of the century. His Sri Lankan nanny is crawling after him. We’ve put on the British CD, and the clamor of young black female voices makes it seem that there are a lot more of us in this attic with its posters and toys and cushions, that we’ve been transported to an intimate noisy paradise of women and children. I leaf through National Geographic World and find an article on the Hubble telescope. New galaxies, it appears, have been discovered, not just a few dozen, but billions, and those billions crammed into a visual space the size of my fingernail, like angels on the head of a pin. Theo is looking at some snapshots you brought of the Fourth of July celebrations in your hometown. Shaggy-haired, Gore-Tex-clad Oregonians are reveling in patriotic weirdness.
Mom, look at these two guys, says Theo. They’re dueling with foam swords on this board over a mud pit.
Just wanted to give you a little taste of home, you say, with a half smile.
Strangely enough, these pictures fill me with real contentment, as though I’d been missing something without knowing it.
* * *
The phone starts ringing, and it’s my editor from New York. I have to correct last-minute details of an article on Fellini that is closing the next day. Specifically, we’re thrashing out whether Fellini for decades nourished an illicit passion for a woman the Italian scandal sheets call Fatty. And whether in his famous sketches he drew “thousands of penises” (my words) or “hundreds of penises” (fact checker’s specification). I have to keep jumping up from dinner to discuss these matters, and I fear I’m neglecting you. Theodora devoured a plate of tortellini and dashed upstairs to do her homework. My husband, home from the office at eight-thirty and, knackered as usual, is eager to stretch out in front of the television and watch one of those big Italian variety shows in which platoons of scantily clad girls wag their butts and lip-synch Spice Girls tunes. My husband knows and likes you, the more since he enjoys acting grandiose and liberal about our mutual ex-husband. But it is clear that in the labyrinth of his Mediterranean male brain, this visit is a foreign female caprice. It’s woman’s work, my work, and aside from opening a wonderful 1982 Barolo, and making a few obligatory flirtatious comments on your unchanged beauty, he’s leaving me to it.
I’m sorry I have to bore you like this, I say, as the phone rings for the fifth time. I didn’t expect it. I promise that if you stay tomorrow night, we’ll go out, we’ll take you to one of the grand old Piedmontese restaurants, with their magnificent heavy pastas and polenta and boiled and fried meats. It’s white truffle season, I add, almost pleadingly.
You’re sitting with a full glass of wine that looks like a globe of ruby. I don’t mind, you say, I’ve never seen a writer at work before.
I have to turn around and get a look at you. Droll again?
Much later, I finish, and go upstairs to find you in Theo’s room, sitting in the dark beside her bed. I kiss Theo, and she grins at me blankly from the borderland between sleep and waking, and tells me that you checked her Latin for her. I feel a pang of jealousy, and a sudden illumination—it occurs to me for the first time that the two of you, a few years ago, did indeed have a real life together, of homework and bedtimes. I used to feel that my daughter melted into mist when she left for her father’s house. Now, for a second, I feel strange, insubstantial, standing at my daughter’s bedside with you, as if we are twin fairy godmothers. And suddenly I wonder what it is, apart from the bare physical fact, that makes a mother. What it is, for that matter, that makes a wife.
* * *
The baby gets me up twice during the night, but I’m awake anyway, thinking of you up in the guest room under the eaves, with British Vogue on the night table, and an anemic ivy plant snaking down the wall. Are you awake too? My husband huddles at the other side of the bed, as if he knows that I’m not present for him.
* * *
I’m thinking of the many times you have passed through my life. First in anecdote, as R, courting me, naïvely—how men live to regret this—confided far too many details of his earlier loves. And you were the earliest of all. An image: a small California town, citrus groves on the edge of the desert, and you and R at fifteen, eerily similar in unisex bell-bottomed jeans and Pre-Raphaelite hair, feeding the ducks under monumental palms in the park. Hand in hand, venturing inside the gigantic troubling maze of romance that we all enter so lightheartedly and find so hard to leave. A snapshot from that time used to prick my heart cruelly. I’d sneak it out of the box where R kept old pictures, and study your face, as you sat in Polaroid murk, cross-legged, arms clutched in the wary position you’ve never lost, gazing apprehensively at somebody out of the picture.
; I knew about your childhood troubles, your fragmented family, and envied you even that. I could not summon up an aura of melancholy even faintly equal to that which you wore so seductively, like one of those girls who looks well in vintage clothes. You were the kind of girl Smokey Robinson and Linda Ronstadt had in mind as they sobbed out their lyrics. And then there was the fact that the adolescent romance between you and R had foundered in college, giving you the consummately enchanting quality of absence, the perfume of the vanished woman.
So many things I knew about you, as if we were best girlfriends. The fights, the reconciliations, the devastating letters, the elegiac lovemaking in a hayfield in France.
When I finally met you, at a beery Oakland reunion of college friends, I was happily married. You, the ex-girlfriend, were annoyingly beautiful, but you wore a pair of designer high heels that dispelled any uneasiness on my part. A romantic legend, I thought, would not need a pair of flashy shoes. I felt your power was neutralized. And I liked the way you kept dipping your head, checking me out through your thick Welsh eyelashes.
Years later, when R and I had moved to Rome and I, in a moment of epic distraction, left R, I wasn’t entirely surprised to find you suddenly, mysteriously, back in his life. You came to Europe on a visit, and decided to stay on; but this, and that swift, subsequent marriage are merely the facts. You had perpetually been present, as a kind of mist that coalesced into a presence after I departed. Theodora, who was five, came back from her father’s house one day, speaking in a portentous voice of “the other,” and that was you. You had always been the other.