Arkansas (12 page)

No, he decided, better just to face the music, ring the bell, bow before his friend in her justifiable wrath, and hope, as he had hoped so many times before, that she might show some mercy on him. And yet, might he not stand a better chance with her in the morning? No doubt a Celia refreshed from a night of sleep would be more compassionate than a Celia roused rudely from her slumber.

Anyway, the borscht belt comedian in him observed, it could be worse. It could be raining.

This was the cue for rain to begin, but it didn't. Again, he closed his eyes. He didn't want to worry about the morning, or think about the tree, or contemplate the not thrilling prospect of his own return, two weeks hence, to New York. Still, in his memory the taste of bark lingered.

Eventually he dropped off. Yet the sleep into which he fell was too tenuous to keep out the sounds and changing light, nor was it sufficiently deep to muffle his consciousness of the passage of time, a consciousness in the shadow of which time progressed with agonizing slowness. Nor was this sleep uninterrupted; indeed, the slightest disturbance jolted him out of it, and into a grim awareness not only of his dilemma, but of the dilemma that was his entire life.

Finally dawn broke. It seemed to wander up from the bottom of the world, and the light, which every day is reborn without memory, called in its nascent innocence to some nascent innocence in Nathan, making him believe that wounds could be forgiven, slates cleaned, time turned back. Possibilities danced before his eyes, possibilities that he knew, in a few hours, the grim brilliance of high noon would desiccate. Yet for the moment they were alive.

And then, in an instant, two brindle-and-white-spotted dogs were licking his arms, compelling him to open his eyes, to sit up, to pat first one, then another soft, spotted head.

“Nice doggie,” he murmured. “You're a good doggie, aren't you?” A hummingbird flew within inches of his face.

He looked up and saw standing before him a tall young man, shirtless like himself, his mostly hairless chest gleaming in the early light, the pale skin flushed with vitality, as if it had been recently handled. This young man wore on his face an expression somewhere between guardedness and delight. There emanated from his body the smell of lemons. He smiled crookedly. Altogether he presented an impression of extraordinary but unlikely beauty which the fact that he was slightly cross-eyed only heightened. Indeed, he might have been one of Bronzino's cavaliers, divested, for the moment, of his brocades and codpiece; a knight who had taken a bath in the woods, or spent an hour sporting with a maiden.

“Luna, Venta,
venite!”
the young man called then, and the spaniels went to him. Awkwardly Nathan sat up. The towel fell from his chest, so that he wondered whether to pick it up again.

The young man asked something complicated in Italian.

“Scusa?”

“Ah, you're American”—this time in good English. “You must be one of Celia's visitors.”

“Yes, I'm Nathan.”

“I'm Mauro.” The hand which he reached down yanked Nathan to his feet.

“The chef!”

"
Chef!
I hate these French words.
Cook
is quite fine. And you? Did Celia compel you for some reason to sleep outside?”

“I got locked out,” Nathan said, and looked at his watch. “Six-thirty! Do you always get here so early?”

“Not usually,” Mauro said. “Only I was sleeping last night at my girlfriend's house in Montesepolcro ... Well, I suppose you would like to go back inside.”

“You have a key?”

“Of course!”

With that Mauro strode over to the kitchen door, and taking a chainful of keys from his pocket, unlocked it.

“I'll make coffee,” he said, as they stepped through, then reaching into a high cabinet, chose some beans for grinding. He hadn't bothered to put on his shirt again, and Nathan, admiring the corded muscles of Mauro's back, lamented his own nakedness. After all, he had always been the sort who looks better in clothes.

“I think I'll take a shower,” he said next, and surreptitiously slipped the car key back onto Celia's key ring.

“Bene”
Mauro said, pouring milk into a saucepan. “And when you get back, maybe you ought to tell me what happened—in case I have to lie for you.”

He flashed Nathan a brilliant smile. There was no calculation in it, only good humor and a little shyness.

“Yes, of course,” Nathan said, “of course I will,” and went off, amid the coffee smells, to take his shower.

 

Later, of course, I would grow more articulate; I would have ideas of my own. That morning, however, as Nathan finished telling me his story, I found myself literally at a loss for words. What could I say to him, after all, when my own experience of the “supernatural” was limited to a single encounter with an apparent poltergeist that had once broken some of my mother's best china? In that case, the poltergeist had turned out to be my brother Eddie, who had drug problems; nonetheless I hesitated to offer the example to Nathan, for fear that it would seem I was trying to rationalize away what had happened to him. Which I didn't want to do. On the contrary, I felt that I owed it to him to accept his account at face value: in all its singularity and antique terror.

Nathan, on the other hand, appeared not to believe himself, or at least to be disappointed by my credulity.

“Well, who's to say I
wasn't
hallucinating?” he asked.

“Do you think you were hallucinating?”

He considered for a moment. “No. Then again if I really am psychotic, I'm hardly in a position to
assess
the parameters of my own psychosis, right?”

“Maybe. Or maybe something really did happen.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me?”

“Doesn't it?”

“No! Decidedly not!”

“Why?”

“Because if it wasn't real, I'm just another human being going mad. Whereas if it was real, then the world's going mad. And something else may happen.”

“Yes, I see your point.” We were quiet for a moment. “Anyway,” he concluded, “at least now you know. So if I disappear tomorrow, don't assume I've gone somewhere. Talk to trees.”

Since there didn't seem much I could say to that, we went into the kitchen and drank some blood orange juice from a carton in the refrigerator. Celia came home. “Hi, guys,” she said, her arms full of onions. “Gosh, have you two been sitting here reminiscing this whole time?”

“Sort of.” Rather awkwardly, we smiled. Meanwhile, just outside the door, Mauro waited. I thought his eyes met Nathan's uneasily before he crossed the threshold and, reaching out his hand, introduced himself.

Now: a word about Mauro. There was no denying that he was good-looking. Not that I would have likened Nathan's rescuer, as he had, to a Bronzino knight; his self-presentation was entirely too modern for that. Still, the fact cannot be ignored that in certain Italian faces that aristocratic sullenness that animates Renaissance portraiture does linger. And in Mauro—how else to put it?—blood told. Yes, blood told, and it was in his ankles, brown and elegant in Top-Siders, that curiously enough, it told the most.

After we'd finished lunch, the four of us walked into Montesepolcro to have a coffee at the Bar Garibaldi. Tourism is correct in noting that in every little town in Tuscany there is a Bar Garibaldi, or a Bar Centrale, or a Bar Italia—to which observation I shall add only that in this particular Bar Garibaldi, a red-haired boy was arranging coconut wedges on a three-tiered revolving tray, listlessly, the tray revolved; listlessly, listlessly trickles of water poured from a spout at its tip, ostensibly to moisten the coconut, but really, I think, in feeble imitation of those glorious fountains that in Renaissance water gardens jet upward before spilling over artful arrangements of carved stone. Or so mused my imagination that afternoon, an imagination still radiant with that amazement that so often marks the visitor's first days in Italy. And you cannot feel it twice. It is like the pleasure that accompanies the first reading of a great novel, something that can afterward be approximated, but never replicated, so that no matter how many fond returns you make, no matter how many coconut trays you see, you must always envy the virgin eyes of the neophyte.

But to get back to the story: as is the habit among Italians, we took our coffees standing up. Mauro and Nathan, I noticed, were pretending they'd only just met each other, a somewhat theatrical bit of dissimulation in the enactment of which Nathan's spirits seemed to rally considerably. I'd never deny that he's the sort of person in whom deviousness always provokes a little thrill. As for Celia, I didn't know if she had a clue as to what had taken place during the night; if so, she certainly didn't let it on. Instead she drank her coffee placidly. Perhaps she too was dissimulating; especially now, I wonder. Or perhaps she simply hadn't noticed the numbers on her odometer.

So there we were at the Bar Garibaldi, and Mauro was telling Nathan the history of the dish he and Celia intended to prepare for supper that evening. “It is called
La Genovese
,” he said, “even though it is Neapolitan, because the Genovese used to own a lot of trattorias in Naples—”

“Basically it's a pot roast made with about five kilos of onions,” Celia said. “And cooked for hours. First you eat the
sugo
—all melty onions and white wine and beef drippings—with the pasta—”

“Pasta
lisce,
not pasta
rigate.”

“And then you have the meat as the
secondo.”

“It sounds delicious,” I said.

“Your English is very good, Mauro,” Nathan said. “Where did you learn it?”

“Mauro studied two years at the University of Minnesota.”

“Also, my mother was half-American. I've spent several summers with my relatives in Milwaukee.”

“Ah, that explains it. And does Roman cooking go down well in Milwaukee?”

“As long as I don't use too much
peperoncino”

“As far as I'm concerned,” Celia said, “there's no such thing as too
much peperoncino”

“Yes, I remember that about you,” Nathan said. “At this Greek pizza place we used to go to,” he said to Mauro, “Celia liked to shake so much hot pepper onto her pizza that if she got some on her fingers and rubbed her eyes—and she was always rubbing her eyes—they'd swell up and tear.”

“A
Greek
pizza place? How strange. To me Celia does not talk so much about her college days.”

“Oh, but there are such stories to tell! Celia, don't you have any old pictures lying around?”

“All burned.” Celia drained her coffee. “Well, shall we head back home and start chopping onions?” And we headed back home and started chopping onions: all four of us in the kitchen, chopping, chopping. And what a difference, I observed, between Mauro's face, with its flustered vivacity, and my ex-husband Bill's face, getting jowly as he neared forty, and Nathan's face, to the middle-aged contours of which his never-changing repertoire of boyish expressions now lent a comical, even clownish aspect! Poor Nathan. He did not fare well in the comparison. For Mauro, though no older than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, clearly felt comfortable being a man; indeed, had probably felt comfortable being a man even before he was one. Whereas Nathan seemed log-jammed in a sort of perpetual adolescence, and where his features were becoming every day more masculine and rugged, the spirit that animated them remained that of an aggravated, even aggrieved childhood: a childhood that had lasted too long.

Onions, onions. My eyes started to tear. Meanwhile across the room Mauro was describing to Nathan the red wine he had just brought up from the
cantina.
“It comes from near Ancona, and tastes like violets,” he said, then went on to explain certain technical aspects of its character'—tannins and such—of the sort upon which heterosexual men (my husband was the same way) seem always to dote so fondly, and this knowledge, curiously, Nathan, whom details usually bored, lapped up as thirstily as if it were the wine itself.

“Mauro, why don't you take Nathan to that
enoteca
in Siena?” Celia suggested. “He might get a kick out of it.”

“Would you like to go?” Mauro asked.

“I'd love to.”

And so, soon enough, the
Genovese
was bubbling on the stove, and Mauro and Nathan were on their way to the
enoteca
in Siena, leaving Celia and me to girl talk and a little messing around in the vegetable garden.

“Tell me more about Mauro,” I said to her when we were alone, and she was picking leaves of bitter chicory for the evening salad.

“Not much to tell, really. He's a sweet boy.”

“Gorgeous, if you want my opinion.”

She looked up from her lettuces. “What, are you interested in him, Lizzie?” she asked, her voice a little sharp.

“He has a girlfriend, doesn't he?”

“How did you know? Did he tell you?”

“Well, I just assumed. A good-looking boy like that.”

Celia returned to her chicory. “No, of course he has a girlfriend. In fact, that's how I managed to get him to work for me. You see, before I hired him, he cooked at this trattoria in Rome where Seth and I used to eat all the time—a wonderful place—and one evening the three of us got to talking, and he mentioned the girlfriend. She was from Montesepolcro, and he was looking for a job in the area.”

“What a coincidence!”

“A match made in heaven, you might say.”

“I hope they don't break up. Wouldn't he go back to his Roman trattoria?”

“Maybe. I don't know. I think he likes it up here. He sleeps every night at her house,” she added. “Very Italian. Sneaks in after the parents have gone to bed. They pretend they don't know.”