Advice for Italian Boys (17 page)

“Eventually I became a Trapasso too, around the time that they enrolled Marco and me in kindergarten. A name change isn’t difficult to get, and it made it easier for people to understand and for my parents to fill out forms and enrolments for all of us. They mixed us kids in together and treated us all the same. Like Marco and the others—there’s also Tina and Joseph and Emma and Stephanie—I learned dialect at home before I learned how to speak English.”

“And did you see your own mother again?”

“She came to see me twice when I was growing up, once when I was six and a second time when I was eleven. Just short visits. A few hours, even though she’d come all that way. She’d moved out west to Vancouver almost right away, and later she moved out even farther, to one of the smallest islands off the coast that you can actually live on, Lasqueti Island, population about three hundred. I took the train and
then two ferries out to see her there for a few days during the summer after I finished high school. She sends me parcels once in a while, something that she finds and thinks I might like, books or shells or stones, one time a purple silk scarf that she wove herself on a loom. I mail her cards at Christmas and on her birthday, and I’m pretty certain my mum and dad have sent her some money over the years. She’s had a hard time—a few hard times.”

“You don’t sound mad at her.”

“I have been. I was furious with her most of the time I was growing up. I felt like one of those birds, you know, cuckoos, whose parents are too lazy to raise them and so they roll their egg into another bird’s nest. There is no point, though. I’ve long since realized that I can’t go through life angry with her. It’s just self-pity—and what reason do I have to feel sorry for myself? My mother made a really good choice when she left me, one of the better decisions she’s ever made. My job is in child protection. I see the kinds of homes that kids have to grow up in. My mother picked the kind of place for me that she didn’t have as a child but that she probably wanted, somewhere she would have been supported even if they didn’t understand her. My family is great; I have two brothers and three sisters and my mum and dad are wonderful. I don’t think they even remember most of the time that I wasn’t theirs from the start, except that, of course, I don’t look at all like any of them. It was harder on Marco, sometimes, having me always around, having to explain me, and having me steal some of his thunder. He would have been the oldest if I hadn’t come along and he would have had his parents to himself for at least a while longer. That bothers me a
bit, that I caused that, although I know there really isn’t anything I could have done to fix it; it’s something he’s had to work through for himself. The only issue I think I still have apart from that is that I can’t help feeling that where I ended up seems arbitrary. You know? I could have been brought up Greek Orthodox or Lithuanian or WASP or Jewish. I could have been anything. Why this family, this culture, this place, and not some other one?”

Because, thought Nicolo, surprised himself at the quickness, the intensity of the idea. Because this is what brought you to me.

M
assimo didn’t allow any concerns about Vito to take root in his mind for the first few months after the boy arrived. He knew it would take Vito a while to settle in. He was still young, after all, and in an unfamiliar country and a new workplace with a new language to grapple with. But frigid February became melancholy, stormy March, and then a long, blizzard-filled, sharp-winded April, followed by the first, still-bitter week of May without any thaw in Vito’s approach to his work or the customers, most of whom still continued to come in to the shop, as they had always done, for their trims and their shaves; they were, like Massimo, slow to make changes and willing to suspend unfavourable judgment in the case of a recently arrived
paesano.
Paola had
persuaded Massimo to install a television, a black sixteeninch Panasonic. This had been attached to an angled stand above the waiting area, and it provided noise and colour that moderately compensated for the absence of garrulous Guido. But Vito’s silence and aloofness were unalloyed and it was impossible not to read into his manner at least some level of disregard, if not active disrespect.

Then, late in the morning of the first Thursday of an unseasonably slow-to-start May, before breaking to eat the hot lunch that Paola had carried over for him in a foil-covered dish, Massimo, who had just finished cutting Tony Dario’s thick helmet of iron-grey hair, left Tony in the chair to make change at the cash register for Dom Cremona, who had dropped into the store while passing by because he had only a twenty-dollar bill and needed change for the bus. Dom, while not suspicious, was cautious about money—he wanted no more and also no less than his due—and it took Massimo several careful counts into Dom’s broad palm before Dom was assured that he was leaving with his twenty dollars transformed into coins, with neither increment nor shrinkage. After this small, concentrated transaction, the two men lobbed
ciao
’s at each other and then Massimo turned around to walk the four or five paces to his chair so that he could sweep the back of Tony’s neck with a neck duster and unfasten the Velcro closure of Tony’s black plastic cape. As he turned he saw, in a disbelieving instant, that Vito had stepped into his place behind Tony’s bent head while he, Massimo, had been distracted. Vito’s two feet, in their beautiful calfskin loafers, were on the very patch of linoleum from which Massimo’s feet had worn away almost every trace of
the scattershot pattern, and Vito was just lifting his long, slick scissors and tortoiseshell comb away from the back of Tony’s head. Massimo turned and saw Vito standing in his place, and everyone in the shop in that moment held perfectly still—Massimo, Vito, Tony, and even Dom, who paused at the door with his bus fare securely inside his closed fist. For another instant the only movement in the entire store was the silent and minute flurry of just-severed hair that spun toward the floor from the back of Tony’s head, shimmering in a sudden beam of light that pierced at that moment, like a godlike pointing finger, through the broad window at the front of the store. Massimo had no vocabulary for what he saw, and nor did Tony or Dom or Vito himself, it seemed, because none of them uttered a word.

Vito took two slow paces backward, retreating in a sliding motion toward his own workstation. Once there, he set down his scissors and comb and leaned toward the mirror, as if scrutinizing his appearance for flaws. He drew the palm of his flat hand along the side of his own hair. Dom went out the front door without saying anything, the bell above the glass and brass door jangling briefly to give emphasis to his departure, and once outside, he gave a backward glance through the window, shook his head, and shifted his shoulders up and down before walking stiffly and rapidly away along the sidewalk. Massimo felt a hot clench in his heart, or lower, in his stomach, or even farther down, in his bowels. Something, somewhere, swelled and boiled inside him. There was a spot at the back of Tony Dario’s head that had always given him considerable trouble. Tony had an off-centre swirl of hair there, a seemingly unconquerable cowlick, the hair spinning counterclockwise
around an area where his coverage had thinned. Massimo had never managed to trim this problematic area without exposing the bald spot and so he usually avoided the hair just above it, which meant that Tony was left with an elongated and protruding hirsute knob, the shape and size of half an egg, a hand span above his shirt collar. Before Massimo could begin to comprehend what Vito had done, his feet had carried him to his usual spot and his hand had reached out automatically for the horsehair brush on the counter. He began to sweep Tony’s neck, taking infinite care. Tony craned forward in order to help with the task. With Tony’s head thus extended in front of him, Massimo observed that Vito’s quick cuts had been highly effective. The rough area that Massimo had, as usual, left largely untouched, and that Tony had never complained about and perhaps hadn’t even noticed, had now been cut by Vito’s clever scissors at an oblique angle that neatly solved the problem. The hair underneath was snipped short; the hair on the top lay flat. The thinning spot was completely concealed by the slightly longer layer of overhanging hair. Massimo could see that it was a neat job with, perhaps—given the short time it had taken and the pressure to accomplish it while Massimo’s back was turned—even a touch of genius.

Massimo stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and then back again, brushing Tony’s extended neck with short, careful swipes, and tried to identify the emotions that had seized possession of his body and determine which would prevail. In his bowels and stomach, shame was most evident. It was unheard of, unthinkable, unimaginable, for one barber to knowingly interfere with the work of another. Even
more improbable was the possibility of a junior, a
giovane,
a
subalterno,
tweaking his master’s nose in such a manner. It had already become apparent that this Vito was furtive in his ways, but no one could have predicted this.
Fidarsi è bonu. Ma non fidarsi è megliu,
he reminded himself. To trust is good. But, he thought, not to trust is better still. There was, at the same time, a small and opposing emotion in Massimo’s chest, something that could develop in time into something like pride, that this Vito, whom Massimo had sponsored and then imported from Italy, like a fine wine or silk ties or a sports car, could demonstrate such virtuosity; this attested however indirectly to Massimo’s discernment, good sense and sound judgment. His head buzzed with these and other contending thoughts. Tony said nothing, only waited, patiently, while his neck was swept over and over. His skin began to redden, but he did not like to ask Massimo to stop, to point out that the job must be finished. At last, Massimo reached out and he swept the cape from Tony’s neck, added one or two more superfluous flourishes with the brush, spun Tony to face the mirror, and then held up a round hand mirror so that Tony could inspect his cut from all sides.

“Is okay?” said Massimo.

“S’okay,” Tony replied, and he ducked his head almost imperceptibly in Vito’s direction. Tony was not a subtle man, but he was a careful one.

Vito sniffed deeply and turned to the back of the store to rearrange his growing collection of lotions and waxes and creams. At that instant, miraculously, as if summoned or sent in by a stage manager, three customers came in through the door like the cast of a comedy team—one tall
and almost bald, the second short and spiky-haired, and the last medium-sized with a halo of corkscrew curls—all needing to be served. At the same time, a noisy talk show came on the television, a popular local program, and it turned out not to be necessary or possible for Massimo or Vito to say anything to each other until the day ended, and even then no words were necessary since they had been busy and had run late and Vito left quickly, apparently having an appointment to keep, while Massimo stayed to close up the store.

That night at home Massimo ate his dinner silently. If he was not more quiet than usual, his silence had at least a deepened and shaded quality, and Paola tried to discover what the problem, if there was one, might be. Something at work, possibly, but the gnocchi she had made that afternoon hadn’t risen to the top of the pot as they should have and the cheese that she had grated over them was not as sharp as Massimo liked it, so that could be it too. In any case, Massimo gave her no opening, no clue, and she wondered about it until they were in bed, as close together as a single sheet of origami paper folded cleverly into two nested figures: sleeping husband, sleeping wife. She felt her eyes fill, so concerned was she for this man, for his hidden sorrows whatever they were, and she thought of a rhyme from her youth:
Se vai’ a lettu non mi pidghija sonnu. Pensu a’ l’amuri e mi ment’ a ciangiri.
If I go to bed, I won’t be able to sleep. I’ll think of love and start to weep. She reached up and pulled her fingers through Massimo’s hair, finding and rearranging the few snarls and knots into neat rows of curls, forgiving him for suppressing whatever it was that was bothering him, and comforting herself over not having detected the cause.

Her preening sent chills down Massimo’s back, a pleasurable sensation that transformed into heat as it crept lower, a warmth that began to erase the day’s tensions. He reached back and pulled Paola’s hands so that they were flat on his shoulders. She kneaded his muscles there, and when her hands tired she reached around his chest to embrace him. He turned toward her and tested her in the dark, ran his hands over her arms, shoulders, neck, breasts and waist, overcoming her modesty, until she was warm, giving, willing, and wholly ready to embrace all of him. He folded back his clothes and hers, and came into her, and they rocked together like the tightly joined boards in the keel of a boat afloat in calm waters. The concern that Paola had intuited was worn away, and the moment when Massimo might have told her about what Vito had done slipped by. (He could never have told his mother. “
A ru zingaru ‘nsiegni a minare ‘u mantice?
” she would cry, blaming Vito. No man should be so foolish as to try to teach a Gypsy how to operate his bellows?) Before he fell asleep entangled with the limbs and unbound hair of his trusting wife, Massimo was reminded of a gesture his sons had sometimes made as children, pressing their lips firmly together and turning the fingers of their right hand before their closed mouth like a key securing a lockbox where a secret would be kept safe forever.

Inside Paola’s belly, Massimo’s sperm, continuous and countless and relentless as a swarm of bees, coursed toward her womb, where a coy egg, warm and round and luminous and as sweetly evasive as a lone pear overlooked by a hot day’s gatherers, awaited suitors in darkness and in silence.

N
icolo had been trying to persuade Bella and Phil to add stretches to their morning workouts. They were both remarkably inelastic, particularly Phil, whose fingers could only just brush through the air in front of, but not near, his own knees when he inclined forward from the waist. Although they were not yet thirty, both Fells were like antique wind-up toys, mechanical soldiers that had not been used in a long time and so had slowed and seized up. They both liked the elliptical machines, however, and would have spent all of their allotted hour on them, if Nicolo had let them, moving their arms and legs forward and back in a martial gait. One early morning before they got started, Nicolo made a rough drawing on a plain sheet of paper on
top of his clipboard. He sketched in the muscles in the upper legs, hips and trunk, as well as the hamstring and Achilles tendon, and then added arrows to show Phil and Bella how their muscles were meant to extend and contract when their bodies moved. He demonstrated three or four simple trunk and leg stretches, and then persuaded both of them to lie down on mats, on their backs, face up, legs bent, and he grasped each of their sneakered feet in turn to guide them as they moved their legs first up and then in toward the chest. He showed them how to use a looped skipping rope to gently pull a straightened, extended leg up into the air. Over the following morning sessions he added new leg, neck, shoulder and trunk stretches. Both of the Fells followed his instructions perfunctorily. They made no effort to push themselves to add to their limited, resistant range of motion. After a couple of weeks, Bella said, abruptly, as they were about to get started, that she didn’t see the point of these stretches.

“We ssit at our desks all day,” she told Nicolo, and as she spoke, she tucked her sharp chin in toward her chest, and then jutted it out several times in a repeated emphatic tic or twitch. “We don’t need to be flexible. Sstretching isn’t relaxing for us.” Beside her, Phil made several sharp, repeated inward and outward movements with his neck and chin that echoed and emphasized Bella’s words.

Nicolo felt a bubble of dislike rising up like heartburn from his chest into his throat. “Have you tried yoga?” he asked. He felt an unanticipated rush of heat. His face flushed and he could sense his heart labouring under the skin of his chest,
pump-pump, pump-pump, pump-pump,
like a diesel motor. “Many people find that yoga—”

“Too sslow,” said Phil.

“Too mindless,” said Bella. “We tried it once.” She shuddered.

“No, not yoga,” they said almost in unison.

“Pilates?” Nicolo tried again. He drew in a breath that seemed to leak back out steamily through his forehead and ears. “There’s a course that you could both take on Saturday mornings with a new German-trained instructor. I hear he’s very good. You might want to think about switching to that instead.”

Phil and Bella quickly turned to look at each other, and then Phil shifted his gaze to a spot on the ceiling and Bella tipped her head downward, toward the polished wooden floor, so that her words were slightly muffled.

“We can’t do that,” she said. “We want you to undersstand this. We’re used to you now. It would be very difficult for us to change. Neither of us likes change. We aren’t adaptable. If you say this stretching is important, we will jusst need to try to do better.”

The three of them stood there for a full minute, not speaking. All around them the activity of the gym continued busily and noisily. On the other side of a long glass wall, an aerobics class bounced and lunged to rhythmic, disco-like beat. In the weight room, barbells and free weights were lifted and then dropped with resonating thuds corresponding to their weight. Piped-in pop music swirled above the heads of people on stationary bicycles, stair climbers, treadmills and rowing machines.

Neither Phil nor Bella looked at Nicolo, but he could feel them waiting for him to provide a response. When he opened
his mouth to speak, he intended to provide assurances, reassurances, plans, a shared commitment to a sustainable strategy for their physical development. But what he really wanted was not to have to deal with them for a while.

“I should let you know…” he said, not certain until he said it what excuse he would give, “I should let you know that I’ll be away for several days, quite soon, in Las Vegas, and so I’m afraid I will have to reschedule a few of our sessions.” He felt an unexpected bolt of joy, a warm ray that struck somewhere near his solar plexus and then spread out, a small thrill of possibility.

Bella raised her head. “That is very dissappointing for us to hear,” she said. “We had been given to understand that all of the insstructors here were very reliable. We checked this carefully before we signed up.” She blinked once, twice, and Phil blinked too, an unsyncopated beat behind her. “We will have to conssider this carefully together,” Bella said. Phil nodded, and then the two of them picked up their towels and evaporated in that odd way they had, soundlessly, like smoke or vapour, in the direction of the change rooms.

Nicolo met Zoe at seven-thirty that evening on the pavement outside the theatre where the play
Wit
was showing. Nicolo had come downtown from work and he was wearing jeans and a gym shirt and a jacket with the crest of his high school hockey team on it. Zoe was there ahead of him, wearing a calf-length blue dress, a yellow quilted jacket with a
stand-up collar and red low-heeled shoes. A small red bag hung from her arm.

“Shoot,” she said. “I’m overdressed. You don’t happen to have a tux on underneath that bomber jacket, do you? Because if you don’t, I am not sure we go together well enough for us to sit next to each other.”

“No,” Nicolo said. “You’re just right. It’s me. Work ran late and I didn’t get home to change.”

There had in fact been time to change, but Nicolo had lingered at the gym instead. Going home and then going out again would have attracted his mother’s interest, and his nonna’s, and he didn’t want to establish expectations, even for himself. He had dated before—not regularly, but enough to wonder about whether he was the kind of person who would ever do what Mario was doing—pick someone, or allow himself to be chosen, and live in an entirely different way, not as a solitary person but as half of a pair, like those birds that mate for life. And even if this was possible for him, Zoe did not seem to be the kind of person who might want this from him. She was more educated than he was, and more serious, not the sort who would fall for a guy who worked in a gym. She had finished a degree in social work and was working for a newly formed charity called The Moses Project, which proposed to set up a system of doors and bassinets on pulleys and levers at the regional hospitals. A baby could be deposited anonymously into this system from outdoors and conveyed inside. The scheme was controversial because it freed the parents from responsibility and robbed babies of the chance to know anything about their identity, and the start of construction had been delayed twice. Zoe was impatient, she told him.

“I don’t understand it when people just don’t get on with whatever it is that needs to be done. I can’t see how hard it would be to just start, and work out any issues that come up later.”

They found their seats and Nicolo helped Zoe shrug off her jacket, which she accepted back from his hands without shifting her gaze from the stage, which had been set up as a hospital room. She shook the jacket, folded it neatly, laid it flat in her lap and then began to study the program. Zoe’s arm was so close to Nicolo’s on the armrest of her seat that he could feel, or at least sense, the mild heat that she radiated. He watched the movement of her flexors and supinators as she raised her arm and passed her program from one hand to the other. When she laid down her arm again, he saw how her extensor muscles rippled smoothly like fabric or water under her skin and then subsided. He observed from the corner of his eye the surface of her cheek, fine, pale, faintly freckled, and he saw how her temple crimped outward and then smoothed flat again when she closed and then opened her eyes. Her bare shoulders shone in the red light of a distant exit sign, sharp bone under pale skin, and her neck inclined slightly forward at an angle that was already familiar to him, although he didn’t make the connection, from years of watching his father cut customers’ hair. Her lower lip hung slightly open except when she placed it between her teeth and slowly drew it out. She looked as self-contained and still as a pool of water. He wanted with an intensity that startled him to place his hand on hers, to feel the play of bones under her flesh, and the length and strength of her fingers, but he was reluctant to distract her. The play was just beginning.

The main character was a woman, a professor who taught poetry. Her specialty was the work of a long-dead poet named John Donne. She was brave and archly clever, but she was told early in the first act that she was dying of cancer and she spent the rest of the play getting the dying done. The professor told a story about a poem that Nicolo remembered from his last year of high school, in which death was compared to sleep. He remembered as he heard it again the trick at the end, how it mocked death, defining it as only a brief interlude before an eternal afterlife. What he had forgotten, or hadn’t realized before, was the defiance of it, like whistling into a hurricane:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me…

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,

And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The woman told how, as a young student, she had been reproved for using a semicolon in the last line instead of a comma. “Nothing but a breath—a comma—separates life from life everlasting. It’s very simple really,” she said, standing with one hand holding on to her IV pole and lifting the
other, palm upward, in a half shrug. “Life, death. Soul. God. Past, present. Not insuperable barriers, not semicolons, just a comma.”

Toward the end of the play, the sick woman died and this scene was one of pain and confusion. A team of doctors tried to restart her heart, and the shouting and barking of orders and what looked like brutalities inflicted on the small body pulled Nicolo’s attention fully away from Zoe at last and to the action onstage. In the play’s last scene, the actress, in the gentlest of motions, rose and walked away from the medical ministrations. This was the moment of her death, and she had risen out of and shed her own racked body. She stood for a minute, reached up and set aside her hospital gown and the cap that had covered her head, and then walked, naked, bald, toward a strong light that shone directly down on her.

For a few moments the crowded theatre was silent and still. Then someone clapped in the upper balcony, and immediately after, several others joined from below. Like a flock of birds taking off in an expanding flurry, the theatre had poured into it a rising surge of applause. Nicolo glanced toward Zoe and saw a tear, a tracing of a sliding bead, creeping downward on her cheek.

“You cry at plays?” he said. He stretched an arm around Zoe’s shoulders, and she lowered her head so that it leaned against his upper arm. He could feel her smooth hair against his chin, and under his arm he felt her heat, the speed of her heart and pulse, the way her breath pushed against and then pulled together the bones of her chest. He had an impression of how active the motor of her entire body was, even seated, and when she turned toward him, he felt that her face
was transparent as a crystal and that he could see how her thoughts and feelings agitated inside her head.

“Of course,” she answered. “Who doesn’t?” She placed a hand on his arm and examined his expression closely. “How could you not? It’s tragic. It’s not the death so much; we all die in the end. It’s the futility. What is life for, after all—getting things, learning things—when it always ends like that? It’s heartbreaking if you stop to think about it.”

Nicolo didn’t know how to answer. He couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. He closed his eyes, experimentally, testing, waiting. Nothing came. The play had affected him; his chest had tightened and he had felt in the base of his throat an unnameable ache, but no more than that. Was he defective in some way? Was this evidence of an irredeemable lack of feeling? A sign that he had an unusually stony or obstinate heart?

“It was sad,” he said, slowly. “It’s a terrible story. But part of me can’t let go of the fact that it is a story, with actors.”

“I do forget,” Zoe said. “I suspend disbelief as easily as that.” She held up one hand and brushed her fingers against her thumb. “I’ve always been able to do it. It only takes a moment, when I read a good book or go to a movie or a play, and then, once it happens, I’m lost, as if I’ve fallen into a hole. It’s funny, but I actually don’t mind that, being dropped or pulled completely into another universe. Even when whatever happens makes me upset, it’s worth it. It’s like getting to live another life for a while. Otherwise you’re always stuck in your own. It’s a chance to be taken somewhere else completely.”

The lights had not yet come up and the theatre was still
dark. They were close to the stage, in very good seats in the centre, a dozen rows back from where the actors had played out their drama. Zoe’s head brushed against Nicolo’s shoulder and it may be that at one end or the other of their row of seats a door or vent was opened. A thin stream of cold air settled down around them. Nicolo’s skin contracted in this abrupt change of temperature, and, for the smallest space of time, he experienced a strange physical dislocation. He felt as if some essence of himself had rushed as easily as a breath out into the room, and then he had an even stranger sensation, of flowing in some unimpeded way into Zoe, as though she had become permeable and he was somehow moving through the receptive pores of her skin. For a moment he could feel her body from the inside, see through her eyes, hear what she heard, breathe as she breathed. He felt how wide and orderly and well-stocked was the calm place in the centre of her, like the shelves of a library surrounded by thick walls that held the world and its clamour and disorder at bay, and how complete and whole she was, not lacking in some important way as many lone people are—one hand soundlessly clapping, a scant pound of flour at the bottom of an enormous sack, a lone cypress tree without its companion Lombardy poplar, the barrel of a bell without its clapper. The experience lasted as long as a blink. He had time for only the briefest impression of a very different geography from his own. The space he inhabited, his own interior self, resembled the rooms and streets where he lived—busy, domesticated, commonplace, conventional. Hers was a more original and mazelike arrangement, and he felt it might take a very long time to work through it. Zoe shifted next to his arm and
immediately the experience ended. He was himself, back inside his own head and skin. He felt a sense of marvel but also of confidence and warmth. What a strange sensation, but one for which there must be a rational explanation—the result of having just seen the play, and the darkness of the theatre, and his desire to understand Zoe. Or it was possible that he had fallen asleep; people must doze off in theatres all the time, and a play, after all, so closely resembles dreaming.