by Andrea Lee
We all socialized nobly for a time in Rome, in our cramped expatriate circle: I’m thinking particularly of a time when the three of us shocked a Pakistani friend by sitting in a giggling row at Theodora’s school Christmas concert. And of a rather elegant Thanksgiving dinner I gave where you came in a loose Jean Muir dress, and my friends came sidling up to me and hissed delighted speculations as to whether you were pregnant.
You knew so much about me—as much as I knew about you. I could see the knowledge flickering uneasily in your eyes. You couldn’t quite dislike me.
Then one afternoon I came to pick up Theodora, and realized that for you things in your new Italian life, in that brief marriage, had reached one of those obscure points of no return we all have experienced. Your face was a study in controlled desperation. Caught in my own role, I could say nothing. But I wasn’t surprised when the phone call came that told of shock, a sudden wild flight to America. You were almost instantly back on your feet, but then came the usual stunningly sordid debris of wrecked vows. Bits of them floated downstream through my life.
Hurt and furious, R wanted to cancel you from the record. You weren’t supposed to exist anymore. But Theodora missed you and, to my surprise, at the outset of a new marriage, I missed you, too. So with Theo as an excuse, the first feelers went out, the telephone calls, the letters. Little nearly imperceptible stirrings, the movements of a breaking cocoon. This visit is the outcome, the emergence of a new form of life. And I haven’t got a clue as to what kind of animal it will turn out to be.
Over on the far edge of the bed, my sleeping husband mumbles gibberish that sounds like tag ends of Latin. Veni, vidi, vici. He, too, has indissoluble links with extinct partnerships. I picture an endless mazurka of former wives, husbands, lovers, children, and assorted hangers-on, not excepting au pairs, cleaning women, and pets, and suddenly the whole thing makes me sick. I lie awake another half hour, furious at myself for inviting you, and at you for using up the air in my guest room.
* * *
You said you wanted to go along when I drive Theo to school in the morning, and when I knock on your door at seven, you emerge dressed, with the groomed, cold-shower flush that professional people have in the early morning. And you are carrying your black overnight bag.
I just remembered that I promised to have drinks with friends at the Principe di Savoia tonight, you say, as you and I and Theo clump down the freezing cold stone steps to the kitchen. It’s all done correctly, discreetly, with impeccable regard for dignity, yours and mine. And with a slight implied rebuke for something overbearing and yet insincere in my insistence on your staying a second night. I am put in my place, and though it irks me I have to admire you for it. You don’t take even the subtlest shit from anybody.
* * *
The American School is ten minutes away in a nearby suburb, a beautiful medieval town with a sixteenth-century Savoy castle looming over it. I had hoped for clear weather, but the November fog is so thick this morning that we can see only the silhouette of a tower and a soaring brick parapet. The car winds slowly through the labyrinth of slick cobblestone streets, as trees and pedestrians loom and vanish, and the fog lights of other cars shine in cone-shaped beams around us. Signs of provincial commerce—frutteria, trattoria, bar, supermercato—slide in and out of sight. We drop Theo off at the school gate, and you get out and hug her and tell her you’ll write to her. I know you will, says Theo, in a serene voice that makes me want to cover her with kisses. She stands clutching her book bag, smiling and waving sleepily at us through the fog.
* * *
And at last we are on our own. We drive into the center of Turin, and I take you first for breakfast to one of my favorite bars, an Art Nouveau place frequented by opera fans, set under the arcades near the Teatro Regio. Then we cross the bridge over the Po on foot, and poke around the fashionable shops near the Gran Madre church; and end up lunching on roast kid and potatoes at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Via Mazzini. The whole time, in fits and starts, we have the conversation that is the occult reason this whole visit occurred.
It is not nearly as much fun as similar conversations have been in the past. Once at college, when I had been battling a roommate of mine for the affections of a scoundrelly med student, we both came to our senses over a bottle of tequila and in one epic night probably talked the wretch into a premature grave. Ah, those are the ribald confidences between unbuttoned ex-consorts that rightfully strike terror into the heart of every male. Incantatory insults to every gasp of his sexual performance, shrieks of witchy laughter over each stitch of his wardrobe and every pimple on his poor vulnerable ass.
But what you and I have to say about the man in the matter has a surprisingly wan quality. There is no blood, no tears, no sweat, no sperm in any of it. With a great many words, we compare a few notes, settle a few minor questions, chuckle with a curious sound of mortification. Out of some bizarre sense of etiquette, that has to do with your being the guest, we talk more about you than about me. We keep coming close then veering away from a central mystery that seems in my imagination to shine like a big incandescent globe between us. The question in its bare simplicity is whether or not we were really married to the same man.
Not whether or not we fucked him, because that, as we have seen, creates a farcical camaraderie between two women. Not whether we were both in love with him, because that shifts things into the banal rose-colored light of the eternal triangle. Not even whether we both lived with him, since that is simply within the classic tradition of ex-girlfriends swapping complaints about his farts, his blissful indifference both to laundry and to the historical grief and pain of female existence, his annoying party trick of dancing the boogaloo with a bottle of Dos Equis balanced on his head.
No; whether or not we were both married to him, feeling the weight that is marriage. The extra dimension, whatever it is, that gives simple lovemaking an affiliation with eternity; that makes one able to view a mole on the back of a strong young male neck—a reddish mole we both are familiar with—with a feeling of investment, an instinct that a great deal of knowledge still waits to be accumulated about this and other details. The sense, in a word, of possession, the mysterious ingredient in marriage that nobody at all understands.
Is it possible that we were both involved in this way with the same man? As I listen to the pathetic little confessions we are making, creating two portraits of astonishing dissimilarity, my good sense tells me that the answer is no. Your R was not my R. What the hell, then, is the connection between us?
* * *
I watch you drinking a latte macchiato in the bar, surrounded by dark curving wood and stained-glass nymphs. We have paused in our reminiscences, and you are telling me about the house you bought on the Skagit River, how you drive to work each day through the fern-covered trees down one of the most beautiful stretches of highway in the state. I can tell by the calm, downbeat way you talk about this that you are happy nowadays, perhaps happier than you have ever been. Though you don’t brag, it is clear that, as usual, men are courting you. One suitor is a Chinese stockbroker from Vancouver, and another swain is the local vet, a guy who saves racing greyhounds. You don’t want to live with anyone at present. Your dream is to buy a ranch with your brother.
Through the windows of the bar, we can see the cavernous seventeenth-century stone arcade where African street vendors have spread out their wares on blankets. No other foreigners in Italy look quite as misplaced as these blue-black Senegalese, wrapped up like Siberian grandmothers against the freezing fog. Cross-legged on the pavement, they sit as motionless as the cheap wooden statues they are selling, along with counterfeit Vuitton luggage. And I wonder what remarkable antipodean memories of love and devastation are unrolling behind their still eyes, while the two of us review what is, after all, only a minor domestic drama. A common one, at that. Near the vendors, a newsstand displays a headline: SCANDAL IN PARIS: DEAD MITTERRAND HAD TWO WOMEN.
* * *
At lunc
h I ask you: Why did you run away like that? The question just pops out, and it’s the only spontaneous one I’ve asked you all day. Over the dish of roast meat and rosemary potatoes, in the middle of the chattering lunchtime crowd with two old waitresses rushing to and fro.
Your blue-green eyes, suddenly glacial, hook into mine and hold them. Didn’t you run away too? you ask, in a voice that chills presumption, and silences me. You pick up your empty water glass and drink an imaginary drop.
Yet in the wake of this rebuke, I experience a sensation of perfect happiness. A sensation so brief and slight that if it were pain it would be called a twinge. And it’s not even really happiness: it’s a kind of satisfaction, as if together we have solved a complicated problem. There is no reason for this, and no way to explain it, so I say nothing. But I take a minute to admire you as you sit across the table from me—to gloat over the shape of your face and lips and hands, almost as if I were a susceptible man. As if I were our ex-husband, R, falling in love with you all over again.
* * *
The inauspicious hour of the afternoon has rolled around again, and it is time to get you to your train. As we walk across the river, the sun is burning off the fog, but for some reason the temperature has dropped. I am wearing a down vest, and I’m freezing; my impulse is to take your arm, the way Italian women do when they walk together on the street, but I don’t. Below the bridge, the Po is mud-colored and swollen from the November rains. On the other side of the river we pass a travel agency outside of which, to promote tourism in China, someone has set up a peculiar pagoda-shaped booth in garish red, with gold dragons at the corners and lanterns hanging from the eaves. It looks so sinister that we have to giggle.
I wouldn’t go near there, you say. It’s either an opium den or one of those UFOs where they snatch humans for research.
Maybe it’s just a Chinese time machine, I say. You and I could end up rival concubines in the Forbidden City.
More laughter. We walk on toward the car, close together but not touching.
* * *
As we drive to the station, I feel a growing relief that this visit has gone off so well. Twenty-four hours. We got along marvelously, and it was so good for Theodora, I can imagine myself saying to my friends. She’s a lovely person, a strong, wonderful woman. I’ll inflate my own image with every admiring adjective I apply to you. At the same time, I can hardly wait for you to get out of the car. And I know from the winged restlessness of your glance that you are impatient as well.
And now the kiss, once more a shade too forceful; and then you walk swiftly into the station entrance between the taxicabs, and the sleepy porters leaning on their metal carts. You seem to dart, a slender black figure with a black bag, the peacock scarf fluttering airily behind you, and as you go you remind me of a figure from a children’s book. Peter Pan, maybe; or that capricious and slightly sinister little shadow of the Robert Louis Stevenson poem. A bit of past magic flickering out of sight.
Driving home up the hill, I turn on the radio, and tumble into the voluptuous sense of solitude one has after any guest leaves. Rounding a curve, I see in the distance that, as the mist thins, a phantom outline of the Alps has begun to sketch itself on the sky beyond the city. I think of you, probably already leaning your cheek in relief against the upholstery of a first-class compartment, pounding through the rice paddies and cornfields toward Milan, and eventually America. And I feel sorry that I wasn’t able to show you the mountains from my house.
I drive on, still glad to be alone but feeling strangely diminished now that you are not beside me anymore. All the rest of the afternoon I go around feeling that I’ve lost something. Something as essential and indefinable as a shadow. I wonder if you feel the same way. Maybe you’ll tell me, when I visit you.
About Fog and Cappuccino
During my second autumn in Milan, I would always stop in at the Delinquents’ Bar on my way back from dropping my daughter off for school. The bus from the American School stopped in front of the Hotel Milan, and so from our apartment in Via Monte di Pieta we had a long walk through the fog. At that opaque morning hour the streetlights still made big blurred cat’s-eyes in the muffling gray; the legendary shops of Via Montenapoleone and Via della Spiga, which just a few hours later would be filled with hordes of reckless women battling for luxuries, were shuttered. The antique palaces that had been turned into banks and boardrooms for the making and reshuffling of new money and new ideas were still unlit, revealing themselves through the thick numbing atmosphere in Piranesian glimpses of barrel vaults and muscular caryatids. It was a purgatorial landscape through which to guide a six-year-old girl every morning, a landscape that illustrated my dreary bemusement at finding myself, at my own initiative, suddenly unmarried and making a new home in a foreign city.
My daughter, the subject of much guilty pondering, was, in fact, obstinately cheerful in the midst of the fog. Full of oatmeal and orange juice, she skipped along in her dark blue jacket and mittens, chattering and laughing at the top of her lungs. While walking she liked to play a game called Torture and Forgive, in which she would pretend to crush my fingers, squeezing them as tight as she could in her own small, fierce grasp, and then raising my hand to her lips, where she would undo the damage with kisses. On our route, there were certain things we couldn’t look at because they brought bad luck: a monstrous rubber plant in the window of a pharmacy; the flyblown diamond earrings in the grimy showcase windows of the Hotel Milan, which apparently had not been refurbished since Verdi died there, and was famous for its cockroaches. We stood with our backs to the diamonds until the school bus came. When my daughter stood on the steps of the bus and I kissed her cold red cheeks, her face would blaze out at me from her dark hood like a fiery rose.
Then I was alone and it was time for my cappuccino. In Italy cappuccino has not taken on the overblown dimensions it has acquired in America, and remains a spare and seemly breakfast drink. Whether it is good, really good, depends not just on the lightness of its foam, the perfection of its mixture of strong coffee and bland milk, the correctness of its temperature. To my mind, it has to incorporate a slight taste of misery as well, a tinge of bitterness or sadness that has nothing to do with the provenance of the beans but is drawn from the surroundings in which it is drunk. From this point of view, the cappuccino served in the Delinquents’ Bar was nearly perfect.
The D.B. was a neighborhood bar of mine—in fact, it was on the ground floor of my apartment house—and was really called Bar Opera, in honor of the fact that La Scala was a block away. I’d renamed it because it was a gathering place for a peculiar subspecies of the generally fashionable denizens of central Milan: ten or fifteen sidewalk loan sharks and ruffianly small-time dealers in gold and jewelry. These men spent their mornings hanging about the sidewalk in front of the great stone facade of the Monte di Pieta Bank, which was a few doors up the street and had since the Middle Ages been the public pawnshop of Milan. There they lay in wait for the desperate souls whose offerings were too scanty for the official exchange. Often the carabinieri would pull up, and they would scatter like a flock of vultures, to regroup a few minutes later around an old man brandishing a pair of silver forks, or a woman in a worn fur coat who furtively displayed a set of cameos. It was an odd sight in a neighborhood where the normal uniform for men and women was English sports clothes, or suits by Armani, Valentino, and Versace; where chauffeurs and bodyguards hung about idly outside gateways through which manicured gardens could be seen like glimpses of Arcadia. Yet the Milanese are pragmatic enough to comprehend the sudden ascents and collapses of fortune—to see that the easy wealth they seek and enjoy must have its spectral reverse side in the gray mornings at the Monte di Pieta.
So one by one the delinquents used to materialize out of the fog as I sat on a high slippery stool, sipping my cappuccino and glancing through La Repubblica. They would order coffee and grappa, greeting each other with a weary matutinal precision, like employees checking in at an office. In looks t
hey were a brilliant cast. Their leader was a short muscular fellow, wide as a refrigerator, with a fixed carnivorous grin and glistening gelled hair that seemed to begin at his eyebrows and swept back all the way to the base of his fat neck, where it turned up in a dandified flip. His principal colleague was a tall pimply blank-eyed lad with a straw-colored pompadour and an anarchic snaggle to his teeth; he dressed in striped suits, and never have stripes looked sadder or scarier.
Giovanni and Giacomo, the father and son who owned and ran Bar Opera, detested their clientele. They once confided to me that they had removed most of the tables inside to discourage the delinquenti from sitting down and doing business there, but they dared not do more. There was some low-level odor of Mafia there that I never felt like investigating. They had reason to feel annoyed, because just a hundred yards away other bars were packed with well-heeled businessmen, fashion models, elegant housewives and their little yapping dogs; while the Bar Opera attracted only this louche company that seemed to be an interior manifestation of the fog in the streets. It was partly the proprietors’ own fault, since they hadn’t bothered to gentrify the place with smoked glass mirrors and little islands of green plants; and because they served horrible stony pastries, too obviously bought day-old on the cheap. Father and son floated wanly behind a dented aluminum counter in a brown cavern of nineteen-fifties paneling lit by a grimy chandelier that seemed to have been looted from a provincial dance hall. Giovanni, who came from a mountain village near Bolzano, still retained a hearty physiognomy that went with his crisp Austrian accent, but Giacomo, who had clearly grown up on an urban caffeine diet, was a forty-year-old with the face of a schoolboy preserved in formaldehyde. And there was an heir, a pale sprout of a ten-year-old who appeared after school and pumped coffee with the deadpan ease of a pro.