Advice for Italian Boys (8 page)
Massimo and Paola begin with the most sedate of waltzes, moving in small circles in the centre of the oval hooked rug, arms around each other’s back and waist and neck, her hair or cheek occasionally brushing, accidentally in passing, the skin of his shaved jaw. Massimo holds his left elbow high and uses it much as a yachtsman uses a rudder, steering them both through the dining room in more or less the same area that is occupied during the rest of the week by the large circle of lace that sits on the table weighted down by a white china soup tureen with its matching china ladle. They get bolder as they go, ventur
ing outside the circumference of the lace tablecloth, their orbit expanding. The music gives a charge to the blood in their veins. Their tendons loosen. Their bones rock and their muscles swim. One of them reaches over to the stereo and turns up the volume. Massimo pulls Paola closer, enfolding her progressively nearer to his chest. Paola adds a flourish with one leg. She kicks up the heel of a shoe. Her eyes and hands and ankles move and slide around him. She sends him glancing sideways looks of comic-book love, or turns away false-haughty, teasing, enticing. Massimo pulls and then spins her from him to the end of his grasp, to his fingertips, and then reverses to pull her back again into his embrace. He changes direction, light as a moment on his feet, and her feet reflect his steps so closely that it is impossible to tell that they are not following a single, shared inclination. All the atoms in the room and in their liquid bodies are spinning end on end. When their hour is done, on the last note, Massimo dips a trusting Paola backward through a sphere of space. They trace together a final large, sweeping parabola. Then, briskly, they release each other, pull away, smooth their clothes.
They lift and carry the table back to the middle of the room, where it belongs. They unroll and smooth the rug. One of them switches off the stereo and closes the cabinet doors, and they both go to change into work pants and housedress to take up the afternoon’s tasks. Nothing is left over from the dancing; no expression or gesture gives them away, except perhaps, if you are watching for it, the faintest trace, like atomized mist, of contentment, of serenity, of something essential having been accomplished.
The boys sometimes used to peek at their mother and father through the doorway, and there was a time, even further back, when they would sit cross-legged on the floor under the dining room table and watch. But as soon as they were old enough to sense that Sunday dancing was something between their parents only, and perhaps more hallowed than the Mass that preceded it, they began to find something to do other than watch their parents behaving so strangely. Sometimes when they were younger, Nonna would give them cookies to eat to distract them, or even allow them to sit in front of the television and eat bowls of sweet
canadese
cereal drowned in milk.
In grade eight, Father Santino taught Nicolo’s class that the first proof of God’s existence as laid out by Thomas Aquinas was that nothing can move itself, that the first object in motion needed a mover, and that the first mover, the unmoved mover, is called God. Listening, Nicolo felt that this was something he already knew and understood because he had been a witness to this fact since his earliest years. His mother and father, his first childhood gods, his
genii loci:
it had always seemed to him that they set the world in motion, wound it up like a watch, from the very centre of the household, not the hearth or the stove, but from the area created when the dining room table was lifted and displaced, a central, crucial, fundamental space in which constancy, goodness, decency and ardour dwelt, and in which shelter, safety, beauty and love were created and recreated over and over every Sunday morning from the beginning of time without cease forever.
Massimo and Paola were strangers on the night of their afternoon wedding, and Massimo, who had been taught as
a boy to waltz by his uncle Rudolfo, a small-town dandy with polished two-tone shoes and a thin moustache waxed to twin tips pointing northeast and northwest, taught downcast Paola the three-step between the hours of ten and twelve, after which they fell asleep with several modest centimetres between them in a double bed in a small room. It wasn’t until weeks later that Paola conveyed an invisible signal to Massimo that he had earned her trust and Massimo parted the folds of her embroidered nightdress and discovered with his hands and then the rest of him her secret places—her warm, giving softness formed into ridges like sand carved by wind or water, flesh laid down unstintingly over bone that fit into his palm like a shell, his fingers reaching inside his wife as if he were a sailor and she were the warm, glossy, eternal ocean—and they began the process of creating Enzos and Nicolo.
Dancing took the place of birth control in their marriage, which they both felt was undertaken under Roman sanction and scrutiny and therefore was to be practised according to its exacting rules. Their three sons were judicially spaced over a span of fifty-seven months by means of many Sunday afternoons spent dancing in the dining room, supplemented by the occasional midnight session when Massimo, in ardour, would pull Paola out of bed, sleeping, laughing, protesting, and take her in his arms and spin her on the bedside rag rug, humming into the thick waves of her hair as her head grew heavier and heavier, trusting, dozing, contented and warm on his shoulder. The daughter that might have arrived three years after their third son simply had never appeared, although Paola is still, after all these years,
attentive to any possible signs that God might not yet have completed his promises to her. She believes that her daughter is waiting, floating in some small and fluid place inside her belly, a miniature of her future self, wise and pink and, while perfectly formed, not yet animated, delicate, curled up in the shape of a seahorse, eyes and ears and mouth closed as tightly as small new buds on the earliest day of spring. Paola counts the days between one month’s ever-advancing flow of blood and the next—this month it arrives on the fifth, the next month on the third, on the cusp of the next—ready for and alert to the subtle changes that may yet come. She dreams sometimes of her daughter, a girl she has provisionally named Sofia Rosa (the first name for wisdom and the second name for her grandmother, Rosa Catterina Spina, remembered still back in Arduino for her unparalleled goodness, modesty, charity and kindness), as she will be one day when she is finished, unfurled, sparked with life and born at last, the weight of her on Paola’s lap, her sleeping eyes swelling under their lids like almonds and fringed with blackest lashes. The scent and colour and texture of this daughter come to her in her dreams as well. Sofia Rosa is poppy seeds and flowers and grapes, she is pinker and creamier than gardenias. She smells of honey and yeast and lavender. She is as warm and heavy in Paola’s waiting arms as new dense bread pulled fresh and salty and sweet and soft from the oven.
Although Paola loves her grandchildren Zachary and Isabella, they have not replaced Sofia Rosa, nor has Enzo’s wife Mima. Mima and her small children live almost exclusively in the constant, feverish, hectic dramas of the Bon-figlio family, which now has, in addition to its six handsome
daughters, five sheepish sons-in-law and thirteen grandchildren (with a fourteenth grandchild and sixth surprised son-in-law pending), and so Zachary and Isabella, although they live only a few blocks away, seldom visit, and, although Paola and Nonna are often invited to the enormous and complicated events at Mima’s house—engagement parties, wedding showers, baby showers, baptisms, first communions—Paola realized long ago that she is surplus to the Bonfiglios’ requirements, whether for dramatic actors, chorus or audience, which are more than met by the Bon-figlios themselves. Also, she has tired of the boasts of Mima’s mother, Augusta, which chiefly concern how well settled all of her daughters are, but also include frequent mentions of how close her bond is to Enzo and Mima’s children. Augusta never fails to mention that she is the only person Mima trusts with them, the broad category of persons not to be trusted including, by implication, Paola herself. Paola has come to understand some of the reasons Mima and her sisters might have been so eager to get out of Augusta’s house and into homes of their own, and she feels as if she understands why her eldest son comes by so often to help Massimo with the heavier chores—taking down storm windows, mending the back fence, splitting wood—and why he usually stays for an hour or two longer than strictly necessary, drinking coffee or a beer at the kitchen table and talking to Massimo about the plans he still has to go into business for himself. He has looked at a chicken sandwich franchise, a brew-your-own-beer outlet, and an organic grocery store, but so far he has not settled firmly on one thing or another.
What Paola can’t know, but what Massimo intuits, is that Enzo is happier with Mima than he predicted. Mima had surprised him. Stole his breath. Cemented his love. After their wedding, after his early morning denials of her, after she had, before the priest and a few moments following Enzo’s hesitant, unsteady “I do,” responded in the clearest, most assured of tones “I do” (to the amusement of the congregation, none of whom older than twelve were in any doubt as to how things stood), at the reception, hiked up the skirts of her drop-waisted wedding dress, released her hair from the constraints of its pins and the too-tight, pearly tiara that pinched and threatened to give her a headache, downed a glass of her Zio Giovanni’s wine, led Enzo out onto the floor and danced with the passion of a flamenco dancer. Her smouldering assurance carried over into the hotel suite where she made love to him against the wall of the bedroom, in a cloud of steam against the cold tiles of the shower, in a surging sea of bubbles in the bathtub to the sound of eight roaring jets of hot water. There was no part of her body that she withheld from him—her mouth, her belly, her hair, her feet, the warm, scented bounty of her breasts—all the while making it seem as if she were an emanation, a creation of Enzo’s most fervent wishes and fantasies, like a genie released from a bottle that he had accidentally brushed, until Enzo ached with confusion and pleasure and astonishment.
Younger Enzo, although he is only five years junior to older Enzo, because he has gone to university and has travelled a bit—east to a debating competition at Dalhousie at which his team came in second nationwide, west on a
high school ski trip to Lake Louise (where, although he had never skied before, he deftly mastered the relatively simple art of falling to one side while controlling the pull of gravity with bent knees, a trick that might, he thought at the time, be something like arguing in court, using the weight of precedent to pull the decision to one’s side of the argument)—because of these experiences, and because of his hopes and plans, younger Enzo existed in a different world, one in which one-night or only slightly longer relationships were possible, even desirable, and unexpected babies are not, in which virtually all hazards were banished through atheism, chemistry, prophylaxes, diligence and a cost-benefit analysis that included the danger of jeopardizing a chance at a clerkship at the Supreme Court of Canada or, failing that, at least the Court of Appeal. Nicolo’s younger brother had never yet had a sexual adventure that wasn’t planned and strategically negotiated by both parties. He was satisfied with this; this is not the part of his life in which he has ever wanted to take any risks. He had a woman friend, Nandita Dasgupta, in her final year of the accountancy program at the university, who slept with him once or twice a month, in order, as each said to the other, not to fall completely out of practice, much like now and again running the motor of a car that is not otherwise taken out of the garage. So efficient are they at this task that Nandita seldom takes the time to undo her long braid, although when she does so, Enzo is weakened, like the inverse of Samson in the Bible story, destabilized, disarmed inside its glossily swishing tent, which blurs the light and smells of soap and tea and licorice.
Nicolo has had a somewhat more complicated sexual life than either of his brothers so far, although not, perhaps, as fraught as his client Patrick’s, which is chaotic at best.
Patrick made his living in a random and occasionally frantic catch-as-catch-can manner as a reviewer, editor, script development consultant, assistant assistant producer and the like, being generally useful in a vaguely creative/organizational way, the kind of person likely to be brought into a flagging project after a very late-night meeting near the end of which someone would toss the stub of a cigarette into the scummy, pearly pool at the bottom of a cardboard coffee cup and suggest in an anxious but not unhopeful tone that perhaps Patrick might be asked to lend a hand—did anyone know what he was doing these days, didn’t everyone agree that Patrick, if asked, might have a solution for that portion of the project that had gone off the rails?
Patrick has been smitten, bitten hard by love, and Patrick impassioned is a hundred times worse than Patrick between his frequent, intensely felt, ephemeral affairs. He arrives these days to his sessions with Nicolo with alarming punctuality, but, once attired and presented to the equipment, he moons and droops and swoons.
“Ah, Nicolo,” Patrick sighs. “I can’t tell you how I feel. It’s impossible. No. Yes. I do have the word.
Exalted. Exalted.
That’s what it is.
Exaltation.
” He turns away from the rack of free weights and he grasps Nicolo’s shoulders fervently. “Do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt like this?” His eyes burn raw and elemental as embers. “I ache!” he declaims. “It hurts all over.” He pedals on the elliptical bicycle like a maniac for five or ten minutes, and then drapes himself over the bars, his hands and head dangling, moaning.
“What am I going to do?” he asks, shaking his head, addressing the floor. “I love him far more than he loves me. It is hopeless. He’ll see that I am old and boring and ugly, and give me up. I like to stay in. Timothy likes to go out. He likes dance parties. I like dinner parties. He’s been dragging me out to clubs and restaurants at all hours and I have been trying and trying to keep up with him. I’m not a kid any more. I’m exhausted. My head hurts. My joints ache. I have a hangover every morning. I can’t keep it up. What can I do? I am addicted. I am addled. I am lost and bewildered and doomed. Advice! I need advice!”