Interesting Women

by Andrea Lee

  After immersion in that smooth body, he feels not tired but oddly tough, preserved. An old salt cod, he says to himself, but for some reason what he envisions instead is a burl on a tree. At Santa Radegonda, a vast country house in Gorizia that nowadays exists only in the heads of a few old people, there was in the children’s garden an arbor composed of burled nut trees trained together for centuries. The grotesque, knobby wood, garish with green leaves, inspired hundreds of nursemaids’ tales of hobgoblins. Inside were a rustic table and chairs made of the same arthritic wood. The quick and the dead. A miracle of craft in the garden of a house where such miracles were common—and all of them grist for Allied and German bombs. He seems to see that arbor with something inside flashing white, like Elizabeth’s legs, but then the Tavor takes hold and he sleeps.

  2. REMEMBERING EASTER

  The storm has blown itself out into a brilliant blue morning, and Elizabeth lies in bed below an engraving of a cow-eyed Circassian bride and reads the diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume II, 1920–1924. She imagines Bloomsbury denizens with long faces and droopy, artistic clothes making love with the lighthearted anarchy of Trobriand islanders. Through the window she can hear Edo talking in his surprisingly awful English to the gardener about damage to Cruciferae in the kitchen plot. Rows of broccoli, brussels sprouts, and a rare black Tuscan cabbage have been flattened. The gardener replies in unintelligible Scots, and Elizabeth laughs aloud. She finds it shocking that she can feel so happy when she is not in love.

  They met when she was depressed over the terrible, commonplace way things had ended with her married lover from Milan, with all her friends’ warnings coming true one by one like points lighting up on a pinball machine. She had sworn off men—Italians in particular—when a gay friend of hers, Nestor, who spoke Roman dialect but was really some kind of aristocratic mongrel, invited her to Scotland to spend Easter with him and some other friends at the house of a mad old uncle of his. Nestor and the others didn’t show up for their meeting at Gatwick, so Elizabeth bought a pair of Argyle socks at the airport shop and took the flight up to Aberdeen on her own. It didn’t feel like an adventure, more like stepping into a void. After the tawny opulence of Rome, the obstinate cloud cover through which she caught glimpses of tweed-colored parcels of land far below suggested a mournful Protestant thrift even in scenery. She listened to the Northern British accents around her and recalled her mother’s tales of a legendary sadistic Nanny MacGregor. In her head ran a rhyme from childhood:

  There was a naughty boy,

  And a naughty boy was he

  He ran away to Scotland,

  Scotland for to see.

  Nestor was not in Aberdeen, had left no word, and the mad uncle was disconcerting: white-haired, thin-legged, with the pitiless eyes of an old falcon. He was exquisitely unsurprised about her coming alone, as if it were entirely usual for him to have unknown young women appear for Easter weekend. Jouncing along with her in a green Land Rover, he smoked one violent, unfiltered cigarette after another as she talked to him about Rome, trying to conceal her embarrassment and her anger at Nestor. Air of a near-polar purity and chilliness blew in through the window and calmed her, and she saw in the dusk that the landscape wasn’t bundles of tweed but long, rolling waves of woodland, field, and pasture under a sky bigger than a Colorado sky, a glassy star-pricked dome that didn’t dwarf the two of them but rather conferred on them an almost ceremonial sense of isolation. No other cars appeared on the road. They passed small granite villages and plowed fields full of clods the size of a child’s head, and Elizabeth felt the man beside her studying her without haste, without real curiosity, his cold gaze occasionally leaving the road and passing over her like a beam from a lighthouse.

  Edo was wondering whether his young jackass of a nephew had for once done him a favor. But he himself had offered no kindness that merited return, and Nestor was ungenerous, like the rest of Edo’s mother’s family. Perhaps the girl’s arriving like this was a practical joke: he remembered the time in Rome when a half-clothed Cinecittà starlet had appeared on his terrace at dawn, sent by his friends but claiming to have been transported there by group telekinesis during a séance. But Elizabeth’s irritation, barely lacquered with politeness, was genuine, and lent a most profound resonance to her odd entrance. In the half-light he admired the gallant disposition of her features below her short, fair hair, the way she talked in very good Italian, looking severely out of the window, from time to time throwing her neck to one side in her camel-hair collar, like a young officer impatient with uniforms.

  “We’re on my land now,” he said after forty minutes, and she observed ridges of pleated dark forest and a jumble of blond hills. Down a slope behind a wall of elms was the house—a former grange, two hundred years old, long and low, with wings built on around a courtyard. With windows set deeply below an over-hanging slate roof, it looked defensive and determined to endure; on each wing, black support beams of crudely lapped pine gave it the air of an archaic fortification. When Edo opened the Land Rover’s door for her and she stepped out onto the gravel, the air struck her lungs with a raw freshness that was almost painful.

  * * *

  “Why do you live here?” Elizabeth had changed from jeans into a soft, rust-colored wool dress that she wore to the bank on days when she felt accommodating and merciful. She stood in front of the fire with one of the red Venetian goblets in her hand, feeling the airiness of the crystal, balancing it like a dandelion globe she was about to blow, watching the firelight reflecting on all the small polished objects in the long, low-ceilinged room so that they sparkled like the lights of a distant city. She knew the answer: gossipy Nestor had gone on at length about Byzantine inheritance disputes, vengeful ex-wives, and drawn-out tantrums by climacteric princes. However, with Edo standing before her so literally small and slight but at the same time vibrant with authority, so that one noticed his slightness almost apologetically—with him playing host with immaculate discretion, yet offering, subtly, an insistent homage—she felt strangely defenseless. She felt, in fact, that she had to buy time. Already she was deliberately displaying herself, as the fire heated the backs of her legs. Before she let everything go she wanted to understand why suddenly she felt so excited and so lost and so unconcerned about both.

  “Why do I live here? To get clear of petty thieves,” he said with a smile. “The daily sort, the most sordid kind—family and lovers. When I got fed up with all of them a few years ago, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to go off to live in Geneva like some dismal old fool of an exile. Africa was out, because after a certain age one ends up strapped to a gin bottle there. So I came up here among the fog and the gorse. I like the birds in Scotland, and the people are tightfisted and have healthy bowels, like me.” He paused, regarding her with the truculent air of a man accustomed to being indulged as an eccentric, and Elizabeth looked back at him calmly. “Are you hungry?” he asked suddenly.

  “I’m very hungry. Since breakfast I’ve only had a horrible scone.”

  “Horrible scones are only served in this house for tea. I have something ready which I’ll heat up for you. No, I don’t want any help; I’ll bring it to you as you sit here. It will be the most exquisite pleasure for me to wait on you. There is some snipe that a nephew of mine, not Nestor, shot in Sicily last fall.”

  “What do you think happened to Nestor?” asked Elizabeth. “Could you call him?”

  “I’d never call that bad-mannered young pederast. He was offensive enough as an adolescent flirting with soldiers. Now he’s turned whimsical.”

  When Edo went off to the kitchen Elizabeth walked back and forth, glancing at photographs and bonbonnières, touching a key on the computer, looking over the books on cookery and game birds, the race-car magazines, the worn, pinkish volumes of the Almanach de Gotha; and she smiled wryly at how her heart was beating. In the kitchen Edo coated the small bodies of the snipe in a syrupy, dark sauce while from her corner the Labrador bitch looked at him beseechingly
. His thought was: How sudden desire makes solitude—not oppressive but unwieldy, and slightly ludicrous. It was a thought that had not come to him in the last few years—not since his last mistress had begun the inevitable transformation into a sardonic and too knowledgeable friend. Randy old billy goat, he said genially to himself, employing the words of that outspoken lady; and with the alertness he used to follow trails or sense changes in weather he noted that his hand was unsteady as he spooned the sauce.

  * * *

  The next day, Good Friday, they drove a hundred miles to Loch Ness and stood in the rain on a scallop of rocky shore. Edo broke off a rain-battered narcissus and handed it to Elizabeth in silence. He was wearing a khaki jacket with the collar turned up, and suddenly she saw him as he must have been forty years earlier: a thin, big-nosed young man with a grandee’s posture—an image now closed within the man in front of her, like something in a reliquary.

  On the drive back, he asked her abruptly whether she knew who he was, told her that his curious first name (Edo was the third in a procession) had set a prewar fashion for hundreds of babies whose mothers wanted to copy the choice of a princess. It was a rather pathetic thing to say, thought Elizabeth, who from Nestor knew all about him and the family, even down to alliances with various unsavory political regimes. Long beams of sunlight broke through over pastures where lambs jumped and ewes showed patches of red or blue dye on their backs, depending on which ram had covered them; shadows of clouds slid over the highlands in the distance. Edo drove her across a grouse moor and talked about drainage and pesticides and burning off old growth, about geese and partridge and snipe.

  Then he said: “I want the two of us to have some kind of love story. Am I too old and deaf?”

  “I don’t know,” said Elizabeth.

  “I’ve quarreled with nearly everyone, I’m solitary and selfish, and I understand dogs better than women. I have been extremely promiscuous, but I have no known disease. That’s just to prevent any misunderstanding.”

  “It doesn’t sound very appealing.”

  “No, but I have a foolish, optimistic feeling that it might appeal to you. The thing I like most is a girl from a good family who dresses vulgarly once in a while. Nothing flashy—just the cook’s night out. And schoolgirl underclothes, the kind the nuns made my sisters wear. Do you think you’d be willing to do that for me?”

  “I might.” Elizabeth felt as if she were about to burst with laughter. Everything seemed overly simple—as it did, she knew, at the beginning of the most harrowing romances. Yet, laughing inside, she felt curiously tender and indulgent toward him and toward herself. Why not? she thought. During the rest of the trip home they traded stories about former lovers with a bumptious ease startling under the circumstances, as if they were already old friends who themselves had gotten over the stage of going to bed. His were all bawdy and funny: making love to a fat Egyptian princess on a bathroom sink, which broke; an actress who cultivated three long, golden hairs on a mole in an intimate place.

  The telephone rang before dinner that night, and it was Nestor. He was in France, in some place where there were a lot of people and the line kept dropping; he wanted to know whether Elizabeth had arrived. His uncle swore at him and said that no one—male, female, fish, or fowl—had arrived and that he was spending Easter alone. Then Edo slammed the phone down and looked at Elizabeth. “Now you’re out of the world,” he told her. “You’re invisible and free.”

  They stood looking out of the sitting-room windows toward the northwest, where a veil of daylight still hung over the Atlantic, and he told her that when seals came ashore on the town beaches people went after them with rifles. He came closer to her, felt desire strike his body like a blow, called himself an old fool, and began to kiss her face. Her hair had a bland fragrance like grain, which called up a buried recollection of a story told him by his first, adored nurse (a Croat with a cast in one eye), about a magic sheaf of wheat that used to turn into a girl, he couldn’t remember why or how. Elizabeth remained motionless and experienced for the first time the extraordinary sensation she was to have ever after with Edo: of snatching pleasure and concealing it. “We won’t make love tonight,” he said to her. “I’ve already had you in a hundred ways in my mind; I want to know if I can desire you even more. Prolonging anticipation—it’s a very selfish taste I have. But without these little devices, I’ll be honest with you, things get monotonous too quickly.”

  Later he told her not to worry, and she said happily, “But I’m not at all worried. In a few months we’ll be sick to death of each other.”

  This arrival at Easter has become currency in Elizabeth’s sentimental imagination, but unlike other episodes with other men it doesn’t pop up to distract her during work or even very often when she’s not working. She had never been anxious about Edo, but she wants to see him often. Though he is never calm, he calms her. When he sends for her and she takes the now familiar flight up to Aberdeen, she feels her life simplified with every moment in the air. It’s a feeling like clothes slipping off her body.

  She thinks of it this morning as she sits in the sunlight with her knees up under the covers, and she takes possession, a habit of hers, of a phrase from the book she is reading. “So the days pass,” she reads, half aloud, “and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living.”

  3. SPORTSMEN

  For the last ten minutes Elizabeth, the old prince, and three young men have been sitting around the table talking about farts. The young men are Nestor and two cousins of his, whom Elizabeth knows slightly from parties in Rome. All three are tall and thin, with German faces and resonant Italian double last names; they wear threadbare American jeans and faded long-sleeved knit shirts. They are here for a few days’ shooting, and in the front hall stand their boots—magnificent boots the color of chestnuts, handmade, lace-up, polished and repolished into the wavering luster of old furniture. The front hall itself is worth a description: wide, bare, pine boards, a worn, brocade armchair, antique decoys, a pair of antlers twenty thousand years old dug from a Hungarian bog, ten green jackets on wall pegs, exhaling scents of waxed canvas and dog.

  The three young men worship Edo—since their nursery days he has been a storybook rakehell uncle, wreathed in a cloud of anecdote unusually thick even for their family. They are also very interested in Elizabeth—two of them because she’s so good-looking, and Nestor from a piqued curiosity mixed with sincere affection. She has stopped confiding in him since he mischievously threw her together with his uncle at Easter. He owns the condominium next to the one she rents in Via dei Coronari and knows that she has been using a lot of vacation time going up to Scotland; he assumes that the old skinflint is laying out money for the tickets and that they’re sleeping together, but he can’t understand what they do for each other, what they do with each other. She is not an adventuress (in his world they still talk about adventuresses), and she is clearly not even infatuated. Elizabeth’s non-whim, as he is starting to call it, only serves to confirm in Nestor’s frivolous mind the impenetrable mystery that is America.

  Elizabeth sits among them like a sphinx—something she learned from watching fashionable Italian women. But she feels conflicted, torn between generations. Edo feels a growing annoyance at seeing how her fresh face fits in among the fresh faces of the young men. Her presence makes the gathering effervescent and unstable, and all the men have perversely formed an alliance and are trying with almost touching transparency to shock her.

  “It’s a sixteenth-century gadget in copper called la péteuse,” continues Edo in a gleeful, didactic tone. “It consists of a long, flexible metal tube that was used to convey nocturnal flatus out from between the buttocks, under the covers of the seigneurial bed, into a pot of perfumed water where rose petals floated. I own three of them—one in Paris and the other two in Turin. I keep them with the chastity belts.”

  Everyone is crunching and sucking the tiny bones of larks
grilled on skewers, larks that the guests brought in a neat, foil-wrapped parcel straight from Italy, it being illegal to shoot songbirds in Great Britain. They eat them with toasted strips of polenta, also imported. Elizabeth hates small birds but is determined this evening to hold up the female side; she draws the line at the tiny, contorted heads, which make her think of holocausts and Dantean hells. Game, she thinks, is high in the kind of amino acids that foster gout and aggressive behavior.

  “The worst case of flatulence I know of,” Edo says, “was the Countess Pentz, a lady-in-waiting to my mother. She was a charming woman with nice big breasts, but she was short and ugly, and farted continuously. It was funny at receptions to see everyone pretending not to notice. I believe she used to wear a huge pair of padded bloomers that muffled the noise to a rumble like distant thunder.”

  They go on to discuss Hitler and meteorism. One of Nestor’s cousins, Giangaleazzo, sends Elizabeth a swift glance of inquiry, perhaps of apology. There is something sweet about that look. Edo sees it and glowers. Elizabeth seizes the opportunity to contribute, mentioning—she realizes it’s a mistake the minute she does—Chaucer. Blank looks from the men, although only Edo is truly uneducated. Edo says: “The middle classes always quote literature. It makes them feel secure.”

  Elizabeth has lived in Rome long enough to be able to throw back a cold-blooded barb of a retort, the kind they don’t expect from an American woman. She knows that the young men aren’t even surprised by Edo’s remark, since it seems to be a family tradition to savage one another like a pack of wolf cubs. But she is looking at the row of restaurant knives and cleavers stuck in back of the long, oiled kitchen counter, and she is imagining the birds heaped in the freezer—small, gnarled bodies the color of cypress bark. She decides that she would like not simply to kill Edo but to gut him swiftly and surgically, the way she has watched him so many times draw a grouse.