Darling? (3 page)

“Here, let’s take a walk, you and I,” I said, wanting to get her life figured out for her, so it wouldn’t weigh on me so, and to have her admit that I
had
been a good mother to her, I’d been right all along.

“I’ve got two kids, I can’t just
go out for a walk,
” she said.

“Take a walk, no problem,” said Gino, but she dismissed it and he shrugged again and turned on RaiUno, national television, where a serious-looking woman in thick glasses was reporting on Bosnia’s day.

“The news is really news over here,” Garrett said. “In the U.S. it’s just more entertainment.” In a moment came
Colpo Grosso,
a kind of strip-
Jeopardy
where the players ran up from the audience and, failing to answer a few questions, found themselves dancing in the ludicrous nude. The contestants looked mostly British—thin, blond, and awkward, striking exaggeratedly casual poses in their wish to seem at ease. “It takes the pleasure out of it somehow,” Garrett said in perplexity. The ads showed men striding through woodland, though I’d seen nothing wilder yet than the double row of poplars at the edge of town where Etta had been frightened by some Gypsies.

“Prosecco? Grappa?” Gino was asking. He peeled and quartered an apple with a few strokes, handing the wedges around. Etta was clearing the table—“She get tired, that’s all,” Gino said when she returned to the kitchen. “You got two kids … you got everything! But she gets tired.”

I followed her into the kitchen, but finding her at the sink went stubborn and couldn’t bring myself to help her. She was determined to despise me, let her have a reason.

“He doesn’t listen, he doesn’t care at all,” she said. “Yesterday I told him I didn’t think he’d even mind if I died, and you know what he said? He’d rather lose me than the boys.”

“Well, he’s no diplomat,” I laughed, and she turned away. “But, I mean, don’t you think he loves you all, his family?”

She shrugged. “I hardly feel like a woman,” she said under her breath, and to me: “They hate me; they all do, and the boys, they’re
mezzo-Americano,
they’ll never amount to anything. In the States we talk about respecting differences and all that; here they’re like … clans, or something, It’s like … the people of Vicenza eat cats.”

“What?”

“They say, ‘Don’t go to Vicenza. They eat cats there,’ and Vicenza’s only twenty miles away! No one from up here would ever go south of Florence, they think all southerners are thieves, and Americans are—well, you can guess. Nothing I do is right, not the way I sneeze, not the way I hang the clothes on the line. They insist Thanksgiving is in honor of Columbus, and when the Gypsies stole my wallet down on Via il Gruppo, Gino’s mother just sniffed that it wouldn’t have happened if I’d stayed in the house where I belong!”

“Who are your friends?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Christiana and Marbella, I guess, they try to be nice. But they’re busy with the church.”

“Ah, yes, the church,” I said. I’d been wondering.

“They’re Scientologists.”

“Etta, those people are crazy!”

“I don’t know,” she balked—not knowing is a point of pride with her. She’d told me how she explained to Franco that some people believed the Bible and some believed Darwin—the great lesson being not about science or faith, but a righteousness inherent in ignorance. And when I said, “But one of them is right,” her eyes narrowed and she said she wouldn’t presume to judge such a question. “It’s a different way, that’s all,” she said now. “They gave me that
Dianetics
book, but I don’t have time to read.”

I felt so sleepy I worried about carbon monoxide and went to open the window, but she asked me not to—these fogs came in from Venice, she said, they get into your lungs. Her laundry was strung on lines over our head, to get the heat from the stove—things took days to dry in the winter, but they didn’t believe in electric dryers. I thought how my mother had laughed when I asked what Etta and Gino would have to talk about, saying, “Live a little, Francine. Marriages aren’t about conversation, you know!”

“
Bianco, come,
how you say,
latte?
Like milk!” Gino was saying, telling Garrett about the mushrooms. He loved his boys, accepted his life and its lack of expectation with a grace you’d never have seen in the States. National health, maybe, or some mineral in the Italian water. The copy of
Where Angels Fear to Tread
I’d sent to Etta years ago was sitting on her bedside table.

“I mean to get to it, really,” she said. “I just don’t have the time.”

*   *   *

She’d hung my portrait of her over the guest-room bed—where she was least likely to see it, I supposed—and as I unpacked I decided she’d been right to be offended. I’d given up on it too soon, left it while her face still fit convention and missed some idiosyncracy I thought she wouldn’t like to see. Without this, her beauty was missing, too. Then, catching sight of myself in the mirror, I had to sympathize with Garrett. Everyone knows men are judged by their wives’ attractiveness. Who could blame his embarrassment? I, too, wished I were sleek and lithe; I regretted this tuberous feminine mass—had dressed to disguise it, to look more like a man, but it persisted, seal-like under the very chic suit—formless but for the two large, disappointed eyes.

Undressing though, I wondered what lunatic would quibble—seeing it (me, that is: pink and white, breasts swelling, nipples the lightest touch would awaken), I felt a pull of desire myself. What’s more erotic than one’s own darling self? When I first knew Garrett he’d once asked me to stand at the window so he could see me in the streetlight, and looking into his face I knew the riches womanhood had conferred on me: it was like coming into a great tract of land, with a swift river running through it and rich soil turned up for the heat—who knew what might grow there? I’d always felt a glad conspiracy with any statue of Venus, knowing she’d certainly wink at me if she only had a head.

Now I looked quickly away from myself, afraid that in the next glance I’d see something hideous, too. Garrett’s read more than me, lived longer—he’s been there in loco parentis since I was twenty-five. No one is better fitted to see all that’s wrong with me. And if he was hallucinating, seeing a swan for a sow, what of it? He’s my husband; if I’m ugly in his eyes, ugly I might as well be. As for the portrait—I’d tried to do Etta a favor by giving her face an ordinary, recognizable prettiness, the gold standard women trade on every day.

*   *   *

It was thrilling to wake up the next morning and find everything strange—the thick bedsheets smelling of incense in the perfect dark of the shuttered room. A thoughtful cooing came from the dovecote, but I didn’t hear the boys, so it must still have been early. Garrett was heavily asleep beside me, so I tortured myself for him, thinking that my face in the mirror had looked like a worn-out shoe, wondering whether he’d rather have Etta than me.

He’s going crazy,
I told myself.
Don’t accompany him.
He stirred and reached for me—for all of it he still wanted to make love all the time, though instead of pleasure I imagined he looked at me with curiosity and revulsion. I jumped up to avoid him, pushed the heavy shutters open to see the early sunlight deep red in the fig trees, on the tiled roofs and the cornfields behind them and the brick factory buildings across the canal.

“Venice today?” he said, stretching, smiling; we were in Italy, what could be wrong?

“Etta’ll be hurt,” I said.

“It’s deadly here,” he said angrily. “What are we going to do all day, watch her cook?”

So an hour later I heard myself explaining that we were taking the bus into Venice for the day, we wanted to see the Miracoli. Etta winced. Was I on a first-name basis with the buildings of Venice, then? The people I know now drop names of buildings and paintings as if they were celebrities. Men approach me with lines like “Have you ever been sculpted?” and I’ve been called “a slave to an antiquated aesthetic where beauty is the only standard,” in
Art News.
It all sounds pompous to me, too.

“Come with us,” I said. “You can bring Giorgio, and Christiana or Marbella can pick Franco up at school.”

“What would they think?” she asked, and I remembered they feared the Venetian air.

“What would they think about you taking your houseguests on a daytrip?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m making osso buco. Gino comes home for lunch.”

“It’s just one day,” I said. “Or, we could go to Padua—we’d be back by lunchtime.”

“Pad
o
va,” Etta corrected, giving the English pronunciation of the Italian spelling. “Osso buco takes hours.… I can’t. You go, have a good time,” she said, meaning:
Abandon me, so that I in my generosity can forgive you.

*   *   *

Garrett was happy; we were in a vaporetto. The man smoking in its doorway looked urbane as Nabokov, and when he disembarked at the Accademia, we decided with a glance to follow him. We always pick someone like this, in a foreign city—we’re sure there must be ancient quarters; lush, exotic places no Baedeker admits to, places we can slip into by following a stranger through a secret door. A few weeks ago I’d have named this and the sexual undertow as our strongest bonds, the things that held us together in ways past our understanding. Now … but Nabokov had a quick, long stride we could hardly keep up with, and my heart began to beat as if my life depended on staying close behind him; everything else fell away. He was wearing crepe soles, so for a long time we heard only the canal sloshing against the
fondamenta
and our own footsteps. I imagined Garrett had picked him to father my child; they’d make some transaction by which I’d find myself alone with him, and this idea so pleased me that I was stunned when he turned off, into a small, fountained courtyard, and I realized he was home and our adventure had come to an end. He stopped to suck the last out of his cigarette in front of the arched door, and we had to go on or he’d know we’d been following. Within ten steps, though, the canal dipped underground and the pavement ended at a wall. We walked back to see Nabokov flick his cigarette into the water, put his key to the lock, and, turning, look over his shoulder at us as if he was used to having strangers dog his steps. “Quite marvelous, isn’t it?” he said. His English was exact, almost British. So he was Venice’s best representative: he came from somewhere else.

We’d thought we were pushing outward, but really we were heading into the center: I looked down an alley and saw the sign for Harry’s Bar. And San Marco opened before us, flooded, the herds of off-season tourists keeping to the wooden walkways while above them the gilded stallions pranced, the great figures emerged from the medieval clock to beat the hours, the fairy-tale bridges crossed into the torture cells.
“La Serenissima,”
Garrett said rhapsodically, as if he knew something.

“Shall we go through the palazzo?” he asked, and I thought, he wishes I was some odd lot he’d met on a bus, an Experience, like Venice, or the woman who peed in her shoes. There was no escaping our question: suddenly we were in a ballroom which was painted with hundreds of women, round breasted, rose-nippled—I wanted to touch them myself—but when Garrett looked up at them the sight turned bitter and I remembered I had been cast out of this pantheon. In the next room was a painting of Saint Agatha, proffering her severed breasts like custards on a tray. Garrett took umbrage at a crucifixion—Christ’s belly looked soft. “He looks like a woman!” he said in anger. “He was a carpenter, he would have been solid!”

“No one looks his best during crucifixion,” I tried to explain, but he wouldn’t have it, so I pulled him on to the Miracoli, the only place in that city of unholy fascinations where one could imagine praying. Across the square was a little restaurant, low and dark, with some kind of party roaring—we took the last seats, in a corner so the waitress had to squeeze behind the celebrants to reach us and for a long time we were left alone. We looked past each other, down at the table, up into the rafters.… Then the waitress passed a carafe of wine through the party to us. As I poured it our eyes met, by chance; we both looked quickly away.

“Garrett,” I said. “I’m sure you don’t mean to hurt me.…”

“I hate having to hurt you,” he agreed angrily, as if it were essential that he hurt me, and unseemly of me to upset him by mentioning it. After a while he added, with contempt, “What happens between us isn’t important.
Look beyond yourself. Accept.
Did you read the paper this morning?” No, and I’d thought him a fool to do so, while the train passed over the long causeway into the city, which hovered over its own shimmering reflection in the lagoon. “Well, if you want to know about suffering…”

And he began to talk about American foreign policy, in Nicaragua, Haiti, Macedonia, Iraq—all the complexities, mistakes, and hypocrisies—he’s at work all the time, worrying the rage among nations as if the world were a Chinese puzzle he might solve. He talked and talked until the waitress brought him a plate of tiny calamari fried whole: tasting one he lost his train of thought.

“I thought I ordered the pesto,” he said after he’d eaten half of them.

“It’s so loud, I don’t think she could really hear us,” I said. The spirit of the party broke over us like a wave, a joyful shock that stood everything on its head so my little tragedy looked entirely amusing all of a sudden. “I mean, that’s why one travels, isn’t it?” I said, “So as to order the pesto and get the calamari, and have it all to remember.”

“That’s not why
I
travel,” he said grimly, and I thought
No, he travels in the hope of becoming someone like our Nabokov, so sophisticated life can’t get a firm grip on him.
And here he found himself with a mouth full of tentacles—of course it was disappointing.

“If people like us didn’t love each other, need each other, then we could die like ants under a shoe—so what?”

His face softened, and I remembered that for all he reads, and knows, still he sees me as wise—an endearing thing in a man.