The Afterlife (20 page)

“How’re you doin’?” she asked.

Had he betrayed, by some groan or tensing, discomfort? Had the transfixed state of his soul translated somatically into resistance or involuntary spasm? “Fine.” It felt like a lie—less than the whole story—or like a vow, which is also too simple. Now another mangy pet of the easy-listening stations slid into the room, an arrangement of “The Girl from Ipanema” shorn of the troubling, too-rapid lyrics, which he had once been told were much more suggestive in Brazilian Portuguese.

“Just a little more,” she promised lullingly. “Then we’ll polish and floss.”

“Unnh,” he consented, like a ditto mark under his previous, mendacious yet sincere monosyllabic avowal.

And in her flurry of searching out the last potentially disastrous plaque in the remotest crannies of his upper left molars her spirit intertwined with his. She leaned deeper in; he felt the parallel beams of her gaze like lasers vaporizing his carious imperfections; their bodies became mere metaphor. Timeless moments passed in rhythmic scraping. Then she pulled back and straightened up, her face a mask, her eyes noncommittal. He was clean. He was done. She had done him. “You may rinse,” she said.

The polishing, with its playful caress of microscopic grit, and the flossing—quick, brusque, nimble around and under the bridges—felt anticlimactic. Without the threat of pain, their encounter became small, much as the childish perpetrators of giant agitated shadows, in an attic or a summer-camp shack, shrink when the candle is put out. She did not use that agonizing machine some of the women used, the Cavijet, a high-pressure nozzle with a high-pitched whine, an icy needle on your inflamed nerves. It would have been a cheap effect. The pain, to have meaning, should come purely from her. “Nice,” he said, working his bruised lips over his teeth, as ideal as they could ever be. “How did I look, overall?”

“Uh—do you smoke or drink a lot of tea?”

“No. Why?”

Her mask and goggles were off; she blushed. It was thrilling, to see emotion tinge that prim, professional face. She cared. She had to care, after all. How could she go through these motions and not care? “I just wondered,” she said, turning away in, at last, embarrassment. “You have a fair amount of staining.”

“Maybe that’s my age. Normal deterioration.”

She shook off the idea—it was heretical, perhaps; there existed no normal deterioration in her belief system—and wrote on a chart in his folder, and inscribed a small slip for him to take down to the front desk. Then … then she turned and faced him. Her eyes in the TV-screen-shaped rectangles of her glasses were distinctly, earthily hazel—green flecked with gold and rust above her rosy cheeks, cheeks whose thin skin could no longer conceal the circulating heat of her blood. She hesitated to speak, then took the plunge. “There’s a bleaching process that’s pretty safe and effective,” she said, with a lilt reined in just short of ardor.

There was, but she wouldn’t be the one to witness the shining results. The woman was always a stranger. You never had the same one twice. The principle lay between the two of them like a sword. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be sublime. It wouldn’t be hygiene.

“There’s one—it says
aperto!
”

“Where?” Allenson asked, knowing perfectly well. There was a tense gullible nerve in his young wife that it amused him to touch.

“Right there! We went right by! Mobil, just like at home! I can’t believe you did that, darling!”

“I didn’t like the look of it. Too many ugly trucks.”

Vivian explained to him, with the complacency of a knowing child, “You’re just nervous because you don’t know how to say ‘Fill ’er up.’ But if we don’t get gas soon we’ll be stuck by the side of the road, and then what’ll you say?”

“I’ll say, ‘
Scusi
,’ ” he said.

In the several years of their secret affair, Vivian, George Allenson’s third wife, had had ample opportunity to observe how little, in relation to his second wife, he was to be trusted; but he had not expected her, once
they
were married, to perceive him as untrustworthy. He was twenty years older, also, and he had not imagined that this superiority in time spent upon the earth might be regarded as a deficit—in eyesight, in
reaction time, in quality of attention. Throughout their vacation trip to Italy, Vivian was vocally nervous in the car, sitting beside him clutching the map while he, with growing confidence and verve, steered their rented subcompact Fiat through the Italian traffic, from one lovely old congested city to another. He was even mastering the Italian trick of turning a two-lane highway into a three-lane by simply passing anyway, right into the teeth of the oncoming traffic. Whenever he did this, she shrieked, and now she was worried about their running out of gas, and kept urging him into gasoline stations. Far as they had driven, from Venice to Ravenna to Verona, they had not yet replenished the tankful that came with the car.

“I’ll turn gracefully to you,” he elaborated, in the mellow baritone that even a smidgeon of Italian brings out in the male voice, “and say, ‘
Mi scusi, mia cara
.’ Actually, honey, we’ve got plenty of gas. These little Fiats go forever on just a liter.”

He was nearly sixty, and she nearly forty, and as these irrevocable turning-points approached, both of them, perhaps, were showing their nerves. They were headed toward Lake Garda on a day’s trip out of Verona. Their Veronese hotel room was not merely expensive but exquisite, provided with real antiques and a balcony view of roof tiles and
campanili
whose various bells rang the hours in a ragged procession of tollings. The Allensons had developed a daily routine—two continental breakfasts in the room, delivered with much waiterly fussing and musical clatter, followed by a walking excursion to a church or two, a Roman amphitheatre, or a castle converted into an art museum, and then their return to the room and a lunch of fresh fruit bought en route and some thriftily saved breakfast rolls, the elemental economy of this
lunch suggesting an even less expensive entertainment, in the languor of the sunny hour, on one or the other of their little Empire-style beds. This routine was intimate and strict, so it was with trepidation and potential irritability that they had set out, this morning, in the neglected car to brave the narrow unmarked streets and the helter-skelter of buzzing, thrusting Italian vehicles.

On their last excursion, which had brought them from Vicenza to Verona by way of the S
-11
—an inescapable green line on Vivian’s map—Allenson had managed almost immediately to take a wrong turn that headed them up into the hills, through pastel flocks of villagers attending mass, between flowering hedgerows and fields dotted with sheep, on a winding upward road that offered, it seemed to him, no place to turn around. Her resentment of his failure to follow the route so clear and plain right there on her lap became shrill, and he risked their lives by angrily ducking into a dirt lane and backing out into the road. On their descent back through the village, which she retrospectively identified, on the map, as Montecchio Maggiore, Vivian confessed, by way of making up, how pretty it all was. And it was true, his blunder had in a minute uncovered a crystalline cisalpine charm bared by none of their mapbound excursions, including one in the very next hour, to Soave, at the end of a little spur that crossed the A
-4
.

Soave, hitherto to them merely a name on a bottle of cheap white wine, was an old walled town; they parked outside the gates and walked along the main street. Outside the town’s main bar, a crowd of men had gathered after mass, and one of them abruptly presented Vivian, as she passed, with a red carnation. Allenson, a step behind her, was startled to see his wife accept the gift with an instantaneous broad smile and the appropriate gracious gesture of bringing the flower to within
a few inches of her chest. “
Grazie
,” she said, managing nicely that little flirted tail of an “e” which Allenson always had trouble pronouncing.

Perhaps women are biologically conditioned to accept flowers, even from total strangers on the street. Vivian was dark-haired and somewhat stately of figure; but for her chunky, practical running shoes, she might have been Italian. Allenson reflexively reached toward his pocket to pay for the flower, but no charge was exacted. The man, in a suit but unshaven, matched Vivian’s smile with an equally broad one of his own and responded, “
Prego, signora
,” ignoring her husband.

Allenson quickened his step to place himself by her side. When they had put behind them the crowd of loitering, chattering men, Vivian asked him, “What did it mean?” For all her criticism of his driving and deportment she expected him to know everything, to be wise.

“Damned if I know. Look—those little girls have carnations, too.”

“Does it mean I’m a Communist or something?”

There were election posters all over Italy, and some of them did show a carnation. “Left of center, at the worst, I would think. Communism’s had it, even here. Maybe it’s just something they do for tourists.”

“I think we’re the only ones in town.”

It was true, entering the walled town at Sunday noon felt as if they were trespassing in a large living room full of happy families. Allenson’s eyes, moving on from the little preadolescent, carnation-carrying girls, had received the equivalent of a flower: seen from behind, a father and daughter strolled with their arms about each other’s waists, the gray-haired father, in his possessive fond grip, apparently unaware that his long-haired daughter had grown to be as tall as he and voluptuous, her mandolin-shaped bottom just barely contained in a
leather mini-skirt. These skirts, taut swatches exposing the full length of thigh, had been all over Venice, moving up and down the stepped bridges that crossed the canals. As a child wants to reach out and pat balloons, to verify their substance, Allenson had mentally reached out. Perhaps Vivian was right, he was not trustworthy; he wanted to be forever a young lover. He had left his anti-hypertensive pills at home, and she—rather chemically, he thought—credited to that his rejuvenated sexual energy. But, broken loose from the routines of work and old friendships, one is, as a tourist, immersed in youth, unable to ignore how the world’s population is renewing itself. Even Vivian was old, relatively.

Allenson really couldn’t understand why, after these many kilometers in which he had not crashed into anything, she seemed still not to like his driving. The car’s five gears (six, with reverse) did sometimes still jumble under his hand, so that he tried to start in third or to move straight from first to fourth, but within a day he had satisfied himself that, in Italy as elsewhere, a subtle camaraderie of the road mitigates the chances of collision. Amid an incessant buzzing of motorcycles, and between onrolling walls of double-van trucks, understandings were being reached, tolerances arrived at. Even at the most frantic mergers, he felt a Latin grace and logic; the drivers of Italy, though possessed of a gallant desire to maximize the capacity of their engines, were more civilized than the Calvinistic commuters of Westchester and Long Island. “Relax,” he told Vivian, on the road to Lake Garda. “Enjoy the scenery.”

“I can’t. You’ll take some crazy wrong turn like you did outside Vicenza.”

“What if I do? It’s all new to us. It’s all Italy.”

“That’s the problem.”

“I thought you loved it here.”

“I do, when we stop moving.”

“You know, Vivian, I could start to resent all this criticism. Elderly men have feelings, too.”

“It’s not you, you’re doing great, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering,” she said, “you’re driving on an empty gas tank.”

Sirmione, even in early May, was full of other tourists. “The kids are here,” the couple said, continuing a joke that had developed in Venice and continued into Ravenna, where every basilica and baptistry seemed crammed, beneath the palely shimmering Byzantine mosaics, with packs of sight-sated, noisily interacting schoolchildren. Even the vast Piazza San Marco wasn’t big enough to hold the boisterous offspring of an ever more mobile and prosperous Europe.

The small fortress at Sirmione offered views of the lake and, most fascinatingly, of the process of laying roof tiles. Three men labored gingerly on a roofed pitch beneath the fort’s parapets. The oldest stood on a dizzying scaffold and guided onto his platform each wheelbarrow-load of tiles and cement hoisted by a crane in the courtyard; the youngest slapped mortar along the edge where roof met parapet; the middle-aged man crouched lovingly to the main task, of seating each row of tiles on gobs of mortar and tapping them, by eye, into regularity. “Doesn’t that seem,” Allenson asked his wife, “a tedious way to make a roof? What’s wrong with good old American asphalt shingles?”

“They’re ugly,” Vivian said, “and these roofs are beautiful.”

“Yeah, but acres of them, everywhere you look. How much beauty do you need? The cement must dry up and then everything slips and slides and cracks. I wonder when this roof last had to be done like this. Probably last summer.”