Birds of America (32 page)

“I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“You don’t?”

“I
feel for
you. I’ve grown to love you. We’re grown-ups here. One grows to do things.” He was a practical man. He often referred to the annual departmental cocktail party as “Standing Around Getting Paid.”

“I don’t think, Martin, that we can get married.”

“Of course we can get married.” He unbuttoned his cuffs as if to roll up his sleeves.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Normal life is no longer possible for me. I’ve stepped off all the normal paths and am living in the bushes. I’m a bushwoman now. I don’t feel like I can have the normal things. Marriage is a normal thing. You need the normal courtship, the normal proposal.” She couldn’t think what else. Water burned her eyes. She waved a hand dismissively, and it passed through her field of vision like something murderous and huge.

“Normal courtship, normal proposal,” Martin said. He took off his shirt and pants and shoes. He lay on the bed in just his socks and underwear and pressed the length of his body against her. “I’m going to marry you, whether you like it or not.” He took her face into his hands and looked longingly at her mouth. “I’m going to marry you till you puke.”

They were met at Malpensa by a driver who spoke little English but who held up a sign that said
VILLA HIRSCHBORN
, and when Adrienne and Martin approached him, he nodded and
said, “Hello,
buongiorno
. Signor Porter?” The drive to the villa took two hours, uphill and down, through the countryside and several small villages, but it wasn’t until the driver pulled up to the precipitous hill he called “La Madre Vertiginoso,” and the villa’s iron gates somehow opened automatically, then closed behind them, it wasn’t until then, winding up the drive past the spectacular gardens and the sunny vineyard and the terraces of the stucco outbuildings, that it occurred to Adrienne that Martin’s being invited here was a great honor. He had won this
thing
, and he got to live here for a month.

“Does this feel like a honeymoon?” she asked him.

“A what? Oh, a honeymoon. Yes.” He turned and patted her thigh indifferently.

He was jet-lagged. That was it. She smoothed her skirt, which was wrinkled and damp. “Yes, I can see us growing old together,” she said, squeezing his hand. “In the next few weeks, in fact.” If she ever got married again, she would do it right: the awkward ceremony, the embarrassing relatives, the cumbersome, ecologically unsound gifts. She and Martin had simply gone to city hall, and then asked their family and friends not to send presents but to donate money to Greenpeace. Now, however, as they slowed before the squashed-nosed stone lions at the entrance of the villa, its perfect border of forget-me-nots and yews, its sparkling glass door, Adrienne gasped. Whales, she thought quickly.
Whales
got my crystal.

The upstairs “Principessa” room, which they were ushered into by a graceful bilingual butler named Carlo, was elegant and huge—a piano, a large bed, dressers stenciled with festooning fruits. There was maid service twice a day, said Carlo. There were sugar wafers, towels, mineral water, and mints. There was dinner at eight, breakfast until nine. When Carlo bowed and departed, Martin kicked off his shoes and sank into the ancient tapestried chaise. “I’ve heard these ‘fake’ Quattrocento paintings on the wall are fake for tax purposes only,” he whispered. “If you know what I mean.”

“Really,” said Adrienne. She felt like one of the workers taking over the Winter Palace. Her own voice sounded booming. “You know, Mussolini was captured around here. Think about it.”

Martin looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“That he was around here. That they captured him. I don’t know. I was reading the little book on it. Leave me alone.” She flopped down on the bed. Martin was changing already. He’d been better when they were just dating, with the pepper cheese. She let her face fall deep into the pillow, her mouth hanging open like a dog’s, and then she slept until six, dreaming that a baby was in her arms but that it turned into a stack of plates, which she had to juggle, tossing them into the air.

A loud sound awoke her—a falling suitcase. Everyone had to dress for dinner, and Martin was yanking things out, groaning his way into a jacket and tie. Adrienne got up, bathed, and put on panty hose, which, because it had been months since she had done so, twisted around her leg like the stripe on a barber pole.

“You’re walking as if you’d torn a ligament,” said Martin, locking the door to their room as they were leaving.

Adrienne pulled at the knees of the hose but couldn’t make them work. “Tell me you like my skirt, Martin, or I’m going to have to go back in and never come out again.”

“I like your skirt. It’s great. You’re great. I’m great,” he said, like a conjugation. He took her arm and they limped their way down the curved staircase—Was it sweeping? Yes! It was sweeping!—to the dining room, where Carlo ushered them in to find their places at the table. The seating arrangement at the tables would change nightly, Carlo said in a clipped Italian accent, “to assist the cross-pollination of ideas.”

“Excuse me?” said Adrienne.

There were about thirty-five people, all of them middle-aged, with the academic’s strange mixed expression of merriment
and weariness. “A cross between flirtation and a fender bender,” Martin had described it once. Adrienne’s place was at the opposite side of the room from him, between a historian writing a book on a monk named Jaocim de Flore and a musicologist who had devoted his life to a quest for “the earnest andante.” Everyone sat in elaborate wooden chairs, the backs of which were carved with gargoylish heads that poked up from behind either shoulder of the sitter, like a warning.

“De Flore,” said Adrienne, at a loss, turning from her carpaccio to the monk man. “Doesn’t that mean ‘of the flower’?” She had recently learned that
disaster
meant “bad star,” and she was looking for an opportunity to brandish and bronze this tidbit in conversation.

The monk man looked at her. “Are you one of the spouses?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked down, then back up. “But then, so is my husband.”

“You’re not a screenwriter, are you?”

“No,” she said. “I’m a painter. Actually, more of a print-maker. Actually, more of a—right now I’m in transition.”

He nodded and dug back into his food. “I’m always afraid they’re going to start letting
screenwriters
in here.”

There was an arugula salad, and osso buco for the main course. She turned now to the musicologist. “So you usually find them insincere? The andantes?” She looked quickly out over the other heads to give Martin a fake and girlish wave.

“It’s the use of the minor seventh,” muttered the musicologist. “So fraudulent and replete.”

“If the food wasn’t so good, I’d leave now,” she said to Martin. They were lying in bed, in their carpeted skating rink of a room. It could be weeks, she knew, before they’d have sex here.
“ ‘So fraudulent and replete,’ ”
she said in a high nasal voice, the likes of which Martin had heard only once before, in a departmental meeting chaired by an embittered interim chair who
did imitations of colleagues not in the room. “Can you even use the word
replete
like that?”

“As soon as you get settled in your studio, you’ll feel better,” said Martin, beginning to fade. He groped under the covers to find her hand and clasp it.

“I want a divorce,” whispered Adrienne.

“I’m not giving you one,” he said, bringing her hand up to his chest and placing it there, like a medallion, like a necklace of sleep, and then he began softly to snore, the quietest of radiators.

They were given bagged lunches and told to work well. Martin’s studio was a modern glass cube in the middle of one of the gardens. Adrienne’s was a musty stone hut twenty minutes farther up the hill and out onto the wooded headland, along a dirt path sunned on by small darting lizards. She unlocked the door with the key she had been given, went in, and immediately sat down and ate the entire bagged lunch—quickly, compulsively, though it was only 9:30 in the morning. Two apples, some cheese, and a jam sandwich. “A jelly bread,” she said aloud, holding up the sandwich, scrutinizing it under the light.

She set her sketch pad on the worktable and began a morning full of killing spiders and drawing their squashed and tragic bodies. The spiders were star-shaped, hairy, and scuttling like crabs. They were fallen stars. Bad stars. They were earth’s animal try at heaven. Often she had to step on them twice—they were large and ran fast. Stepping on them once usually just made them run faster.

It was the careless universe’s work she was performing, death itchy and about like a cop. Her personal fund of mercy for the living was going to get used up in dinner conversation at the villa. She had no compassion to spare, only a pencil and a shoe.

“Art
trouvé
?” said Martin, toweling himself dry from his shower as they dressed for the evening cocktail hour.

“Spider
trouvé
,” she said. “A delicate, aboriginal dish.” Martin let out a howling laugh that alarmed her. She looked at him, then looked down at her shoes. He needed her. Tomorrow, she would have to go down into town and find a pair of sexy Italian sandals that showed the cleavage of her toes. She would have to take him dancing. They would have to hold each other and lead each other back to love or they’d go nuts here. They’d grow mocking and arch and violent. One of them would stick a foot out, and the other would trip. That sort of thing.

At dinner, she sat next to a medievalist who had just finished his sixth book on the
Canterbury Tales
.

“Sixth,” repeated Adrienne.

“There’s a lot there,” he said defensively.

“I’m sure,” she said.

“I read deep,” he added. “I read hard.”

“How nice for you.”

He looked at her narrowly. “Of course,
you
probably think I should write a book about Cat Stevens.” She nodded neutrally. “I see,” he said.

For dessert, Carlo was bringing in a white chocolate torte, and she decided to spend most of the coffee and dessert time talking about it. Desserts like these are born, not made, she would say. She was already practicing, rehearsing for courses. “I mean,” she said to the Swedish physicist on her left, “until today, my feeling about white chocolate was why? What was the point? You might as well have been eating goddamn
wax
.” She had her elbow on the table, her hand up near her face, and she looked anxiously past the physicist to smile at Martin at the other end of the long table. She waved her fingers in the air like bug legs.

“Yes, of course,” said the physicist, frowning. “You must be … well, are you one of the
spouses
?”

·  ·  ·

She began in the mornings to gather with some of the other spouses—they were going to have little tank tops printed up—in the music room for exercise. This way, she could avoid hearing words like
Heideggerian
and
ideological
at breakfast; it always felt too early in the morning for those words. The women pushed back the damask sofas and cleared a space on the rug where all of them could do little hip and thigh exercises, led by the wife of the Swedish physicist. Up, down, up down.

“I guess this relaxes you,” said the white-haired woman next to her.

“Bourbon relaxes you,” said Adrienne. “This carves you.”

“Bourbon carves you,” said a redhead from Brazil.

“You have to go visit this person down in the village,” whispered the white-haired woman. She wore a Spalding sporting-goods T-shirt.

“What person?”

“Yes, what person?” asked the blonde.

The white-haired woman stopped and handed both of them a card from the pocket of her shorts. “She’s an American masseuse. A couple of us have started going. She takes lire or dollars, doesn’t matter. You have to phone a couple days ahead.”

Adrienne stuck the card in her waistband. “Thanks,” she said, and resumed moving her leg up and down like a tollgate.

For dinner, there was
tacchino alla scala
. “I wonder how you make this?” Adrienne said aloud.

“My dear,” said the French historian on her left. “You must never ask. Only wonder.” He then went on to disparage sub-altered intellectualism, dormant tropes, genealogical contingencies.

“Yes,” said Adrienne, “dishes like these do have about them
a kind of omnihistorical reality. At least it seems like that to me.” She turned quickly.

To her right sat a cultural anthropologist who had just come back from China, where she had studied the infanticide.

“Yes,” said Adrienne. “The infanticide.”

“They are on the edge of something horrific there. It is the whole future, our future as well, and something terrible is going to happen to them. One feels it.”

“How awful,” said Adrienne. She could not do the mechanical work of eating, of knife and fork, up and down. She let her knife and fork rest against each other on the plate.

“A woman has to apply for a license to have a baby. Everything is bribes and rations. We went for hikes up into the mountains, and we didn’t see a single bird, a single animal. Everything, over the years, has been eaten.”

Adrienne felt a light weight on the inside of her arm vanish and return, vanish and return, like the history of something, like the story of all things. “Where are you from ordinarily?” asked Adrienne. She couldn’t place the accent.

“Munich,” said the woman. “Land of Oktoberfest.” She dug into her food in an exasperated way, then turned back toward Adrienne to smile a little formally. “I grew up watching all these grown people in green felt throw up in the street.”

Adrienne smiled back. This now was how she would learn about the world, in sentences at meals; other people’s distillations amid her own vague pain, dumb with itself. This, for her, would be knowledge—a shifting to hear, an emptying of her arms, other people’s experiences walking through the bare rooms of her brain, looking for a place to sit.

“Me?” she too often said, “I’m just a dropout from Sue Bennet College.” And people would nod politely and ask, “Where’s that?”