Advice for Italian Boys (4 page)

Alden and Clarissa O’Brien came in together after work on Wednesday. Alden was a tall man in his mid-fifties. His upper back was beginning to curve forward into a studious stoop. He had a round stomach, thick arms and legs, a ropy neck, a substantial head of greying hair and a face deeply etched after years of close reasoning into a permanently shrewd and competent expression. He plunged his large, smooth hand forward to enfold Nicolo’s in a solid grip when he introduced himself, adding quickly “Call me Alden,” to put an end to any question that Nicolo may have had about the correct form of address for a judge. Judge O’Brien? Your Honour? Your Worship? M’lord? There was no way of knowing. Even Enzo hadn’t been certain when Nicolo had consulted him on this point of protocol. Alden’s handshake was a double up and down, strong and authoritative.

The clasp of Clarissa’s long, freckled hand was considerably gentler. She was twelve years younger than her husband, and very slender. Her face—pale skin, wide-set eyes, strong nose and chin, elaborately furled lips, and a high brow winged by thick dark waves of hair—seemed familiar to Nicolo, likely from some TV show or other, Clarissa suggested, and she named six or seven programs she had hosted that he might have seen. Nicolo had heard of none of them. “A billboard maybe,” she concluded, and she raised her shoulders, making it clear that both she and Nicolo knew that TV programs and billboards were ridiculous. Her smile hung in the air for a long moment, a curved and complicated bracket.

Partway through their orientation tour of the gym, Clarissa hung back while her husband walked ahead. She rested one of her hands on Nicolo’s forearm.

“I bought these sessions with you as a birthday present for Alden,” she said to him. She spoke in a low voice and inclined toward him, her manner direct and complicit. “The trouble is he works too hard and spends far too many hours at his desk. His oldest friend died a year ago and since then he doesn’t even get out to play tennis any more. He needs to get some exercise, move around a bit, or he’ll end up like Bruce with his heart attack. I have to confess to you that I only signed on to keep him company. I hope you don’t mind that I’m telling you this. It’s easier for him to have me do this with him.”

Alden caught up with Nicolo at the end of the tour, after Clarissa had returned to the women’s locker room to change out of her workout clothes. “It is important for you to know
that my wife is not strong,” he said. “She will want to push herself, but she can’t do as much as she would like. I made up my mind to go along with this scheme of hers only so that I could make sure that she paces herself. There’s nothing serious, don’t get me wrong, but she had a close bout with an eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, a few years ago, a year before we were married, and I want to make sure she doesn’t head down that path again. It still holds temptations for her. So we can’t let her overdo it or get too fixated on any of this. Do you understand me? We’ll watch her together, both of us?”

The judge thrust his hand into Nicolo’s and pumped it up and down, once, twice, making the bargain physical, manifest, and Nicolo felt that an enforceable pact had been made between them.

Early on Thursday afternoon, Patrick Alexander gusted into the small room where Nicolo met his clients. He was almost half an hour late, and he emitted explanations and apologies like nonna’s watering can, which leaked and streamed and sprayed where it would. A long and utterly boring meeting had run hopelessly, fruitlessly late. Dreadful people—he was sure Nicolo knew the kind: demanding, grudging with money, quick to judge, but slow to make any kind of decision. Certain Nicolo understood but terribly sorry nonetheless. Simply not possible to break away. Dying to be here. And then the direst traffic possible. Every intersection clogged with pedestrians. Who walks these days? With this weather? Sheer idiots all of them, in those stupid puffy jackets and tuques. Drove like a maniac. Miracle hadn’t crashed or killed someone or gotten yet another ticket. Hoped he hadn’t thrown an absolute wrench into the schedule. Ready as soon as he changed.

Patrick was a whirl of chatter and confessions. He emerged from the men’s change room after another five minutes wearing very short white shorts with a dark green stripe down the sides, a lime-green tank top of a synthetic woven material that clung to his skinny chest, black socks with a subtle pattern of chevrons running along the outside of his ankles, and black lace-up leather shoes.

Nicolo looked down at Patrick’s feet and cleared his throat. Patrick was bouncing at the knees and swinging his arms forward and backward to loosen his shoulders. He gazed expectantly at Nicolo. Nicolo hesitated. He could let the shoes go, but they were likely to mark up the floor and, more seriously, they didn’t provide the kind of cushioning and support he advised his clients to have when they exercised. Patrick’s feet looked to be about the same size as his own, nine and a half, although not quite as broad.

“Would you like me to lend you a pair of training shoes?” Nicolo offered.

Patrick looked down at his socks and shoes and smacked his forehead with his right palm. Nicolo must think him an absolute idiot. Always in too much of a rush. Hadn’t been thinking. Mind somewhere else completely. Too many things going on to try to keep track of them all. Sure he understood. New project keeping him up all day and half the night. Sheer madness of people to try to get an entire product launch done in under two months. So sleepy during the day, completely drained. Too tired to think straight. What an utter nuisance he must be. Would not be a minute. Three shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Patrick reappeared minutes later wearing fine-spun lime-green socks that slouched around his ankle bones, and thin
soled lemon-yellow tennis shoes. Nicolo decided to make allowances in light of the unavoidable crisis in Patrick’s professional life, and, although they were a good twenty minutes late getting started, gave Patrick the full allotted hour, which was devoted almost entirely to Patrick’s single stated goal: abs. Abs as solid and ridged as wet sand on the beach, abs to die for, was how Patrick described what he wanted. Deadly, killer, suicide-inducing, mouth-watering, knuckle-gnawing abs.

The brother and sister pair, Phil and Bella Fell, arrived more than promptly at ten minutes before seven on Friday morning, the start of a dark day in which snow hung heavy in the cold, pregnant clouds. They were not identical but close to it, slope-shouldered, narrow-chested, twenty-nine and a half years old, both of them sales associates at Vit@lity, a rapidly growing computer parts and software manufacturer in an industrial park east of the city. Both were tall, thin, grey-eyed and slightly stooped. Their inturned shoulders bracketed their chests. Phil wore his hair long, and Bella wore hers short, and their hair, which was fine and formless, fell in a similar way around both narrow skulls, in limp ferny fronds over their pointed ears and sloping brows. Their skin had a yellow cast over a darker underlayer, like a cheaply made metal alloy. They had similar quick, tightly sprung mannerisms: a flat-line, flickering manner of smiling, a rapid series of irregular, darting eye movements when they were thinking and after they had spoken, and a tic that involved raising their shoulders in half-circles around their necks, lifting first the left, front to back, and then the right. The air around them smelled damp and electrically charged.

And their goals were…? Nicolo enquired.

“They ssay we need some exercise to help us deal with stress,” Bella hissed.

“Ssomething physical to relieve the pressure.” Phil’s words followed quickly behind hers as if he were finishing a sentence that she had started. He had the same curious lisp.

Each of them blinked and raised first one shoulder and then the other, while their thin lips stretched into identical brief, humourless grimaces.

“What do we have to do to sstart?”

Nicolo looked from one to the other, uncertain which of them had spoken, unsure how to respond. He was beginning to understand that working with people alone or in pairs would be considerably more difficult than he had anticipated.

A
fter dinner one December evening, Nicolo sat down in a chair at the kitchen table to work his way through the course outlines that had arrived in a large brown envelope from the university. He hooked his feet behind the chair’s metal legs and leaned forward into the task. He had been thinking along the lines of accounting or investment management, something to do with finance that would help him make good decisions about the money that was building up in his bank account. His mother had more than once suggested that he buy a house and start planning for the day when he would have a wife and family. His father, he knew, would like him to quit the gym and go back to school for a degree. Nicolo didn’t know whose advice he should follow. He felt that his
work, his savings, all the many different things he was learning, the advice and views of his parents and brothers, even Nonna’s
proverbi,
all of these were or could be important, and that he was reaching the point in his life, close to a quarter-century, when he should be putting them together somehow toward an end. But so far, no picture had emerged, no image or map or solution or key to his life or to its purpose. Occasionally he imagined that he had been granted the shortest possible flash of insight, but these revelations were clear for only an instant. They flickered into his mind and then out before he could take in more than a fleeting impression, like the striking of a distant match. There was so much to consider and the context was vast. The world was chaotic; that was clear. And it was unfair: some people were lazy and grew fat, while others worked hard and still starved. He could see that. Everywhere there were people who made mistakes, or acted wrongly, deliberately or in error. He wanted to become a purposeful adult. And although so far his purpose, the reason for his existence—the son of Massimo and Paola, the brother of Lorenzo and Vincenzo—remained without form, it had begun to occur to him that the answer might have something to do with providing clarity and order and with helping people get what they wanted most. He had also a concept of service. At least, that was the impression he had from time to time. Beyond that, he had no certainty. But he liked to believe that the rest, the details and timing, the who, where, when, why and what, would be revealed to him in time. If he was patient. If he was ready.

Enzo came into the kitchen and poured two short glasses of their father’s homemade wine, which was almost as
purple and rich and rough as the
musto
from which it was made every fall, and which had the sweet odour of decaying roses. He slid a glass of wine across the table to Nicolo, sat down, pushed a long strand of hair behind his ear, and pulled one of the course descriptions toward him. He began to read through them with his characteristic focus, his hands curled around his brow to concentrate his gaze. Nicolo drew a sip from his glass, circulated the wine around his tongue and into the roof of his mouth, and then swallowed. The wine had a familial taste, warm and sweet and strong. He had already divided the courses into two piles, in and out, and was working on reducing the most likely pile to one or two. Enzo reached across and ran through the subjects that Nicolo had eliminated. After a few minutes, he pulled out a piece of paper and pushed it at Nicolo.

“This one,” he said, and stabbed with his forefinger at the title of the subject he had selected. “Psychology 101.” He pushed a strand of hair back from his face.

“Why psychology?” asked Nicolo. “I was thinking of a first-year accounting course or something about investing.”

“You work with people. You’ll be better at it if you understand how your clients think. What motivates them. How to recognize and get them beyond avoidance tactics. Let’s face it. People don’t like to exercise. We’re lazy really, most of us; we want to take shortcuts. That’s why they can sell so much crap on TV, those diet pills and miracle exercise machines and drinks that are supposed to speed up your metabolism. People are going to be paying you to make them do something they actually don’t want to have to do. The reason they hire you is to help them to succeed despite themselves.
You’re going to need to know what kinds of strategies you can use, not to manipulate them exactly, that won’t work for long, but to manoeuvre them into working harder so they can get what they want. People often unconsciously sabotage their own good intentions. I’m sure you see it all the time. Learning how people think and what will make them work will help you understand why people do the things they do. Anyway, once you get rich you can always hire an accountant or an investment adviser.”

Nonna came from the living room into the kitchen, silent as a shadow on her slippered feet. She must have fallen asleep in her armchair in front of the television; her short, dove-coloured hair fell in disarray, like ruffled feathers, and one side of her face had the white and crumpled appearance of unironed linen. She turned her head and blinked slowly at her two grandsons as they sat with their heads together at the table, conferring in low tones over their glasses, and then she shook her head severely. She turned in her thumb and the two middle fingers of her right hand and waggled the first and smallest fingers like two horns at Nicolo and Enzo.

“Alla cira si vidi lu core,”
she said in an admonitory tone. On the face the heart may be seen. It must have seemed to her, perhaps from their complicit expressions, that they were plotting misdeeds, as they had sometimes done as boys, and she thus warned away any possible harm their discussions might engender. Nonna switched on the stovetop, which burst alight with a brief hiss, and a red-orange flame with a halo of blue, into the still air of the kitchen. She filled the kettle with water, placed the kettle on the burner, and turned and shook her head emphatically at the brothers,
tsk
ing under her breath.
Then she made her way back to her chair in the living room. The heat from the gas flame made the drops of water on the outside of the kettle spit and burst. The kettle groaned and then slowly began to exhale a moistly rising sigh.

“Okay,” said Nicolo, who was in that instant suffused with a strong sense of the absolute and fundamental unknowability of each one of us to anyone else, even our closest family members. He shrugged and let his weight fall against the back of his chair. “Psychology. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea. It’s somewhere to start anyway.”

“Come on up to my room,” said Enzo. He stood and gathered one or two of the brochures in his hand. “We can register you online right now, before the class fills up.”

They left their empty glasses sitting on the table. Over the years they had learned to take care to leave or create enough work for both their mother and their nonna to feel sufficiently needed within the small household. Deliberate divisions of labour had been created in the household, watertight compartments of work. Their mother cooked their meals and planted and kept up the garden. Their nonna washed and ironed the clothes. Paola made bread, sauce, pizza and pasta. Nonna made their beds and dusted and tidied their rooms. When Nonna took sheets from the line after washing and prepared them to be put away in the cupboard in the hall, she always folded them first widthwise, and once when she saw him watching her, she explained to Nicolo that she did this to divert any lurking bad spirits away from the household, for the dead lie in their final linens lengthwise and it would be unwise to invite misfortune into the house through the carelessness of seeming to prepare for a death.

Everyone in the family was used to the odd, totemic piles of stray objects that Nonna created as she worked. Because she had a limited frame of reference, Nonna was sometimes unable to separate the important from what could be jettisoned. A shirt button, a business card, a flyer, the plastic cap from a ballpoint pen, a single cufflink, three linked paperclips and an insole might be gathered together and left neatly folded inside a handkerchief in the top drawer of the dresser. She would leave on the windowsill the cap from a can of shaving cream in which she had placed a golf tee, several bank withdrawal receipts, the stub of a pencil, a tie clip and the empty transparent holder for a roll of tape. The boys understood that these symbols of their lives outside the houses were mysterious to their grandmother. They cleared away these collections periodically, and this gave Nonna the opportunity to create new inexplicable groupings from different materials—bottle caps, twist ties, mateless socks, cheque books, nail clippers, ticket stubs, coins, the minute metal clips that had held a new pair of socks together at heel and toe, toothpicks, wrapped mints from restaurant counters, tokens, stamps, maps, pens, envelopes and tags—all manner of unrelated items bound together only by their peculiar, quotidian gravity, which Nonna had no means to measure or to weigh.

Within three days of signing up for Introduction to Psychology on Enzo’s desktop computer, Nicolo received, via Enzo’s Hotmail account, an e-mail with an attachment that confirmed his registration and listed details about the location, dates and times for the course. He was pleased to see that the classes included three lectures on motivation and emotion,
and another on stress, coping and avoiding. He was beginning to see Enzo’s point, that an understanding of all of these might be useful to him in his work at the gym. He asked Enzo to pick up the textbook at the university bookstore downtown, and Nicolo began to work his way through the first chapters at the kitchen table in the evenings after work.

Nicolo had learned that his new clients came in an assortment, ranging from least to most difficult, although each presented an individual challenge. The O’Briens were the least demanding and seemed to be the easiest to please. Clarissa always deferred to Alden, allowing him to set the pace. Alden’s progress was slow because he didn’t like to be moved on to something new until he was certain that he had completely mastered whatever Nicolo had been teaching them. On the first day they came, Nicolo started them in one of the smaller weight rooms, one that held the simplest machines, the kind that were adjusted by pressing buttons that increased or decreased the level of resistance by adjusting the air pressure in shiny cylinders. Nicolo had intended to rotate the couple in their one-hour session through several of these machines, then move on to spend a few minutes on free weights, then the bicycles or treadmills or stair climbers for some aerobic exercise, and then finally over to the mats to stretch, but the entire first hour was spent showing the O’Briens (really only Alden; Clarissa caught on quickly and then Nicolo could see that, although she remained close beside them, her attention drifted) all of the possible positions and levels of difficulty of two of the leg-press machines. During the second session, they focused on an extended biceps curl, except for the last ten minutes,
which Nicolo insisted they spend stretching on the mats. Alden was taken with a back stretch that Nicolo had adapted from a yoga position called the cobra, and they spent, it felt to Nicolo, five minutes on every one of Alden’s seven cervical and twelve thoracic bones. The hour ran late, but Alden took evident pleasure in the machines and in the stretching, and Clarissa seemed to be happy enough that Alden was content, and so the time passed easily and without conflict.

Monica Faye was next in difficulty. Monica’s conversation during the hours she worked with Nicolo was almost exclusively about her ex-husband and his imminent remarriage.

“I dumped him like a sack of hammers,” she told Nicolo during their first workout session together. She was lying on her back on a blue mat, her hands locked behind her head, straining her way through the second of eight sets of crunches. “I dumped him like a sack of hammers three times in a row and each time I turned around and took him back again like an idiot, once for each of the other girlfriends, at least the ones I know about. First, little Carley with the curly hair. Then weird Wendi. She was tall and bony and disjointed, sort of like Olive Oyl in the old Popeye cartoons, you know? Then that ridiculous Suzanne, not a brain in her head. I’m sure there must have been—urrrgh—others, because that’s just the kind of guy Gordo is. None of them worked out very well for him—well, they wouldn’t, would they?—and he always seemed so sweet and contrite and untended and rumpled and unhealthy and tragic afterward. So then, what happened was, the fourth time, I dumped him for good. I’ve always been a fan of Brigitte Bardot—you know the French actress? against furs and seals?—and what she said was, Always leave first; be
the one to decide. But that was the one and only time that he finally didn’t come begging like a puppy for me to take him back. That one was Hayley. I said, yes, please God, when he asked me for a divorce. I wish her—unngh—well. He hasn’t a clue, though. Not the remotest, foggiest notion of a clue. He’s used to having me around to come running back to, to reassure him and pat him and fix everything and sweep up the wreckage. She’s a cute little thing, only twenty-four and sweet and not too bright. She really can’t have any kind of idea what she’s getting into husband-wise, although I tried one time to tell her. They felt they had to—ahhhhh—invite me because they want the kids to come and because I’ve been such a good sport about it all. Well, why wouldn’t I be, it’s not as though I want him back. Lexie’s going to be the—urgh—flower girl. Well, she’s maybe a little old at twelve and with her growth spurt she’s not exactly what you might call dainty—how am I going to find low-heeled pink shoes that aren’t like boats in a woman’s size eight?—but she’s never—huhh—been one before, so here’s the big chance, eh? That’s got to be eighty at least. I don’t know how you can listen and keep count at the same time.”

Monica wanted results faster than they seemed to be coming. She weighed herself at the end of each session on the scale against the wall outside of the women’s change room.

“I need to be no more than a hundred and thirty pounds, one thirty-four or -five at the absolute, outside, top, top max,” she said, joggling the weights on the scales to see if she could get the right-hand end of the lever to move a fraction lower. Nicolo was impressed, as he always was, by her clarity of purpose and the specificity of her goals, but he
was beginning to believe that their relationship might provide him with an opportunity if not an obligation to suggest more personal, longer term goals. He began to try to derail Monica when she set off on a description of her ex-husband and his impending marriage, and to encourage her to talk about her children or her plans.