Everybody Loves Somebody (23 page)

There’s a cot in the hotel dining room, the cot this man who introduces himself as Frederic usually sleeps on during his shift.
Nora can have the cot. Frederic will sleep in a chair.

He’s leering again, obviously plotting how he’ll use his strength and twenty years’ superiority to do whatever he wants to
do to her tonight. His fingernails are long for a man’s, filed into smooth arcs, the whites tinged with yellow. He walks around
the lobby in his brown socks. But he is eager to help Nora, and she’s too tired to go through the dance of polite refusal.
He has offered her a place to sleep. She has accepted. She doesn’t have the stamina to be afraid. After he leaves the room
she collapses on the cot, drawing the starched sheets and heavy wool blanket over her.

She wakes often during the night—every time the hotel’s front bell is rung by a guest wanting entry. As she drifts back to
sleep she wonders when Frederic will come for her, when he’ll ask for payment. At one point she is vaguely aware of him standing
in the doorway watching her.

The Baggley boy passes through her dreams, along with Larry Groton, Gus, Trevor, her mother, her great-aunt, her father, all
of them ringing the bell to bring Frederic to the door.

And then, miraculously, it is morning, and Frederic is urging her to wake, bending over her with a smile that in daylight
has lost its quality of greedy insinuation and is simply expressive of his curiosity and kindness. He must set the tables
for breakfast; Nora offers to help. They fold napkins, arrange bread and pastry in baskets, and when they have finished they
sit down together to big milky cups of coffee and a plate of
cornetti.
When his shift is over at nine, he will take Nora to the American Embassy a few blocks away. She doesn’t bother to point
out that they’ll take one look at her and decide to ship her home.

What is she doing in Italy? he wants to know. How long will she stay? Where has she been? She tells him that she has come
to work on a photography project for school, but her camera and film were stolen along with her backpack. She spins the lie
easily, for no other reason than to try to prove to him that she hasn’t been lazy.

When two waiters arrive, Nora retreats into the bathroom and leaves Frederic to his work. She washes her hair in the sink
with the foam of hand soap, shakes a cracked tooth from her comb after pulling it through a tangle. She pauses to study herself
in the mirror, her reflection familiar and foreign and inadequate, like an old photograph of herself—the narrow nose, chapped
lips, brown eyes, and heavy brows all sharing the label of her name.

Back in the lobby she sits in a chair and waits for Frederic to return so she can tell him that she doesn’t want to go to
the Embassy. She tries to concoct a new lie in order to get away, though what she’d really like is to stay here for a week
at least and sleep on Frederic’s cot, eat a hotel breakfast, wash up at the sink in the ladies’ room.

The desk phone rings. Frederic doesn’t arrive to answer it, and there is no doorman at this hour. The ringing stops for a
few seconds and then begins again. Nora feels herself drawn to her feet by the responsibility. She wants to answer the phone
herself and almost does, but it stops again. She waits for Frederic. He has left a newspaper open on the counter and his jacket
hanging on a hook. He has left a pack of cigarettes in one pocket, his eyeglass case in another pocket, his wallet in the
inside pocket.

She lifts a few cigarettes for herself and then reaches for his wallet, struggling against the impulse to hesitate. She pries
open the billfold, takes out a lira note, another note, another. She has no idea how much she is stealing. She just takes
the paper money from the wallet, tucks the jacket closed again, and bolts. The glass door eases back on its hinges behind
her, closing with an accusing groan as she hurries up the sidewalk.

T
HE THIEF KNOWS
that the thief’s remorse is worthless, as long as the thief takes no reparative action. The thief knows that it is better
to be free than in prison. The thief is three hundred thousand lire richer, and that’s plenty to keep her going for weeks.

The strike is over, and the thief takes a train north toward Milan. She stops off in Florence because she has never been to
Florence. She visits the Duomo, dodges taxis, explores the San Lorenzo market. She discovers that stolen money isn’t easy
to spend. She can’t find anything to buy that is worth the value of her guilt.

After a few hours the rain begins again. The thief is wet. The thief is weary. The thief walks past a Gypsy huddled on the
steps of a church and takes refuge inside. She rests there, revives, and because it is still raining she wanders around inside
the church trying to see the paintings through the thick darkness. She fiddles with the light switch of a nearby lamp and
fails to make it work. The best she can do is drop a five-hundred lira coin into a slot, lighting one electric candle in a
row of twelve.

It’s a cheap, pathetic light, but still it’s something—enough to cast a glow on the back of her hand. It’s true, isn’t it,
that this is the same hand that stole a good man’s money? If someone had told her a year ago that this hand belonged to her,
she wouldn’t have believed it. But the truth is the truth, and based on what she has learned about herself, she can only imagine
a future that is a continuation of the present. It will always be raining. She will always be a thief. One electric candle
in a row of twelve will always be lit. The present will always be the present, and it will always be raining in the center
of Florence.

She is tired. She is hungry and alone and foolish. But where do you go if you are condemned to be a good-for-nothing thief
for the rest of your life? You proceed in an arbitrary direction, not just away from where you’ve been but toward whatever
destination you happen to choose.

As she leaves the church her right hand brushes against cold marble. Her left hand is thrust in her jacket pocket. On her
way down the steps she bends beside the Gypsy and with a clumsy motion she drops all the money she has left in her shallow
plastic bowl. She hurries on through the rain. Though she doesn’t turn around, she imagines the old woman behind her nodding
in a routine fashion, as if she’d received exactly what she expected to receive—no more and no less.

Rain on Concrete

O
r else Nora Owen never encounters little Larry Groton in White Oak Cemetery—then she doesn’t have to decide whether or not
to help him after he falls from the stone wall, she won’t just turn and head home, she won’t move to Providence and then leave
Providence for Europe. Instead of going to Europe, she’ll do what’s expected of her and go to college.

Her hair, a dense brown with a surface film of frizz, hangs to the middle of her back. Her unplucked eyebrows rise in fluffy
peaks. She wears jeans and T shirts year-round, desert boots in cool weather, flip-flops in summer. By her sophomore year
she has a strong, if not spectacular, academic record and plans to declare her major in psychology. But first she wants to
stop pretending to be what she’s not.

Her boyfriend, Max, and her roommate, Sophie, think they know what she wants. They’ve been conferring privately, and Nora
is supposed to be too naive to guess the plan they’ve concocted. As she approaches their table in the cafeteria, she sees
them stop talking. She sets down her tray with a bump that sloshes Mountain Dew from her glass. Max’s expression is tranquil
as he watches her mop up the mess with a napkin. Max has a reputation for tranquillity. Born and raised in the Maryland suburbs
of Washington, D.C., the son of two State Department bureaucrats, he openly aspires to a career as a high school swim coach.

“Hey, Nora.”

“Hiya.”

Sophie has a reputation for spunk. The eldest in a family of eight children, she is putting herself through school, supplementing
financial aid with tips she earns as a waitress. With her cap of glossy dark hair and her mocha skin she is by far the most
attractive of the three and is inevitably the one who draws unwanted attention to their group. But Nora and Sophie and Max
have learned to negotiate their relationships with what they consider sophisticated ease. Max has been Nora’s boyfriend since
they met at a party three months ago. Sophie, who has her own boyfriend in New London, is Max’s confidante. And at some point
Max confirmed to Sophie that Nora really does have some hang-up about chastity.

Nineteen years old and still innocent—though only by reputation, and not for long, if Max and Sophie are successful. Combining
encouragement with convenience, they will help Nora Owen lose her virginity. Or, more exactly, though they can’t know it,
they will help her lose her virginity again.

Night after night these past few weeks, Sophie has been peppering Nora with information. For instance, the average length
of an erect penis. The chemical composition of semen. The mechanics of orgasm, male and female. Working from the assumption
that Nora’s prudishness began as childish disgust and evolved into stubborn ignorance, Sophie has sat propped against pillows
on her bed across the room from Nora and tried to explain everything, talking at Nora, talking and talking, until eventually
Sophie talked them both to sleep.

And off Nora has marched each morning across the quad, an unremarkable female student who still refuses the full experience
of love. The emotion of love supposedly connected to the action of love. But the logic is flawed. She wishes she could explain
this to someone. How would she begin?

As she watched her chemistry professor diagram conversions on the blackboard during the day’s first class, she imagined her
cool, precise testimony in a court of law. Given her decision to keep her secret to herself, she can’t turn around at this
late point and confess. The idea of confession, though, intrigues her. Isn’t Saint Augustine more forthright than Rousseau?
she wanted to argue later in her political science class. But she kept her mouth shut. It’s always best to keep your mouth
shut unless you can predict at least in some general way where a conversation will go.

The conversation with Max and Sophie at lunchtime in the cafeteria, for instance: this, she’s sure, will lead to a good end.
Here’s Sophie demanding that Nora go back to the counter and add a pile of bologna to her sandwich. Two pieces of white bread,
mayonnaise, and relish do not make a sandwich, Nora! Her loud reprimand draws glares from other students. The disapproval
of their peers rebinds the three of them into an impermeable triangle. And now it’s time, as good a time as any, Sophie coaxes
Max with a nudge, to ask Nora to dinner at Chanterelle’s on Saturday night.

Chanterelle’s! Nora knows that Sophie will be in New London celebrating her boyfriend’s birthday this coming weekend—which
means Nora and Max can have the dorm room to themselves. But though she’s been expecting this invitation, she feigns surprise
at the extravagance. Not just pizza this time, eh, Max? Not just sausage and beer?

“Okay?” Sophie prompts. “Okay, Nora?”

Nora examines her fingernails. She sighs. She peels the top crust off a slice of the sandwich bread. She thinks of the previous
evening, sitting with Max on the secluded stairs leading to the basement laundry room, their lips wet from kisses, her T shirt
pulled up in a crumpled necklace. She considers how serene Max is in manner and speech, how he accepts whatever limits she
imposes. He loves her too much to take advantage of her. She’ll never have to defend herself against him. But neither can
she go on perpetuating this notion that she is what she isn’t.

Okay, Nora?

As if she could persuade herself that the past has no verifiable reality. As if, without cause, there were no lasting consequences.
Is she willing? A nice dinner, and then she and Max can spend the night together?

“Okay,” she finally says, raising her eyes, locking startled stares with Max. For a few seconds they are silent while Max
and Nora regard each other and Sophie looks on. Then Sophie swallows a burp with a hiccup, and they dissolve into hilarity.

B
UT BY THE NEXT MORNING
Nora has changed her mind. Through lunch, which she eats alone because Max is swimming and Sophie is in class, and on through
the afternoon, she searches for an excuse to renege on the commitment. She thought she could convince herself to be willing.
But she doesn’t feel willing. Why not? She, who is usually admirably in command—why can’t she just get it over with and move
on with her adult life? Why won’t they just leave her alone? Why can’t she be lighthearted on such a fine spring afternoon,
apple blossoms browning on the sidewalk, cottonwood seeds floating in the light breeze? Even the rattling of a bus engine
at the intersection is soothing. Even the smell of old, percolated coffee in the 7-Eleven when she goes in to buy some groceries.
The fluorescent lights. The rapid exchange in Arabic between a customer and clerk. The quiet voice of a man turning to ask,
“You’re Nora Owen, right?”

Nora Owen. You’re Nora Owen. And that’s your political science instructor in line ahead of you, the one who assigned the whole
of
City of God
for next Thursday—this after a week spent on the
Confessions
. Dr. Eric Harrison, associate professor, office number 316, Packard Hall.

“Yes.” She is impressed that he remembers her name.

“Taking a break from Augustine?”

She forces a polite chuckle in response. He waits for her to put her change in her wallet. They leave the store together,
and as they cross the parking lot Nora becomes abruptly conscious of the intense resin scent of his aftershave. Four thirty
in the afternoon, and Professor Eric Harrison appears to have alighted on this dingy city street fresh from a bath, with his
salt-and-pepper hair brushed neatly in two stripes on either side of the bald ridge of his scalp. His even teeth, Nora notices,
stealing a glance as they walk along the sidewalk, are an unnatural white. His eyes have a copper tint. He’s a short man whose
bulk makes him look taller, with imperfections enhanced by age. Thick black nose hairs, expansive pores, oversize ears, and
beneath his chin a little fold of skin that trembles as he guffaws. But the smell of pine is delicious, and he walks with
a boyish bounce, springing forward off the soles of his shining loafers.