Giovanni's Gift (16 page)

“I'm spooked by all sorts of things,” she said, drinking water from the jar. “I'm completely superstitious, something I inherited from my father.”

“Superstitious about what, for instance?”

“Wait a minute. I'm the one who has two questions coming.”

Again, I said nothing.

“All right,” she said. She uncrossed her legs, pulled off her boots and socks, dropped the latter into the former, and set them away from her before crossing her legs again, now barefoot. “Second question. Tell me, why are you here?”

“I thought you didn't care about why things happened. Isn't that what you said?”

“That was then, this is now.”

“All right. But what makes you think I have any other reason to be here than to visit my aunt Edmé and uncle Henry?”

“When someone answers a question with questions, it generally means the answers would be questionable, if you were able to hear them. So in a way you've answered your own question. If you were only here to visit, you would just've answered my question by saying, I'm only here visiting and that's all.”

“Too complicated for me. What's in that water, anyway? Listen, I'm here in part because I didn't have anywhere else to go—”

“Yes—and?”

I told her that there had been things happening down at Ash Creek, in the night mostly, that Henry was loath to discuss with anyone. He and Edmé didn't really know who was behind it, or why it had been going on, and so I asked her to keep this to herself. She held my gaze steadily as she crossed her heart with her forefinger, and waited for me to elaborate, which, though I knew I should not, I did. The night music, the other aberrant facets of the twilight siege—much of which still had not been fully revealed to me by Edmé—I narrated to Helen Trentas, who sat there rapt, while she listened: not so much shocked, or agog, as such, than engaged fully, as if she were memorizing each mite of data I could provide. “You know all about this already,” I said.

“Nothing of the kind,” she contradicted, with such force that I found myself offering an apology.

“I might stick around for a little longer, if they'll let me. Not that they need my help, God knows—I'm not
that
patronizing—but just because … I don't know,” and I wondered whether I should add that my interest in remaining here had also to do with her.

“You're curious,” she said.

“Who wouldn't be?”

“No, I don't mean you are
curious.
I mean
you
are curious.”

“Me? curious?”

“I don't say it as an insult; it's a compliment really. Most people are neither curious about things nor curious per se, and I think you're both.”

Who was this woman? I thought, with faint regret at having told her what I had about the episodes at Ash Creek, a sudden paranoid worry that I had made a mistake.

“I have one more question, but I'll save it.”

“Why do you get to ask all these questions?”

“Only three, just like in the fairy tale,” she said. “I'll save the third one for just the right rainy day,” leaning forward toward me, having taken a bite from the pear that she'd been tossing gently from palm to palm. Her face was very close to mine and I studied the flecks, slivers, specks of variant colors in her irises, and the distension of her pupils as she moved into the small shadow my head cast upon hers under the lowering sun, a warm afternoon sun that must have been about halfway along in its descent through the blue elliptic. She tasted of musky pear when her mouth opened on mine, and she kept her eyes unshut, looking into my own with an urgency that suggested to close them would be a kind of travesty, or betrayal, or even a hypocrisy. And so, although she was blurred, I focused on the buttery light on her skin and on her dark drift of hair, glistening with reds and prismatic greens, even golds and oranges. I could hear us each breathing through our noses with a steady rhythm that had become congruent, so that we inhaled at the same time and then slowly let out the air, paused, and breathed in again, as if metamorphosing into a single person.

We kissed for what must have been a very long time, before my hands—which had touched her back and her hip, had come to rest on her thigh after tracing her side, caressing her breast beneath the thick, smooth surface of denim—before my hands found themselves on the grassy earth, supporting our weight as we shifted and lay down. Our fingers began to loosen buttons and belts and pull away clothing, and when we were both naked from the waist down and I moved on top to enter her, she finally closed her eyes, turned her head to the side. On her face was a perfect fusion of ecstasy and anguish. My hands on her shoulders, my elbows dug into the unpliant ground cushioned only by long waves of heavy grass and tiny flowers, I lowered my head to kiss her at the side of her coral-brown lips, in which a twining of her hair was caught. “Is this all right?” I whispered, surprised at how breathless my voice was, and when she moaned
Yes,
I did enter her, and the softness of her was beyond anything I'd ever known.

We were simply meant to coalesce, it would seem, just there. My left cheek pressed into her right cheek, as if we were slowly dancing. Her arms splayed, wrists up above her head, freely vulnerable but somehow powerfully
sure
—because such a gesture of relinquishment indicated trust, and such trust came solely from choice, and such choice was hers because she was ardent and strong—she loved me back with the same vitality I gave to her. As we moved with each other, her suppleness and élan merged beneath me, in a way that seemed to have little to do with our rhythmic plunging bodies, so that my skin on hers was as if charged by an order of spiritual electricity that raced down my bristling spine. When I finally strayed onto my side, facing her, close, our nostrils taking in the same small air, though there was a vast universe of air surrounding us and moving in breezes over us that we might have seized if we wanted, the world went temporarily obscure.

A little black ant, delicate and harmless, awakened me, as it made its way across my forearm, sometime later. Helen was already conscious, again with her dark eyes on me, although she had not pulled away an inch from where we had been when I blacked out before. You are beautiful, was all that came into my mind when I saw her there, studying me, a look of magnificent knowing innocence on that face. Then, I said it aloud, “You're beautiful,” and she said to me before a moment had passed, “You are, too.” When we got up to stand on the tangle of our clothing, began to gather ourselves together to return to Ash Creek, I was sorry to relinquish the joy of that tiny mutual paradise we'd briefly created.

Lunch detritus in the knapsack, scythe over shoulder like the figure of death, rake slung beside it, we juggled the sundries and tools in such a way that we could hold hands, leaving the meadow behind. My instinct, a suspicion which spread through me like dye spilled in water, that we had been observed in secret, maybe from the verge of the clearing, just within the curtain of trees, didn't come over me until we were well down into the dappling shade that struggled with sunlight in the lower woods. I stopped suddenly, and Helen stopped also. “What is it?” she asked.

Wary, I looked back up the path to scan the complex of trees, rocks, leaves, flowers, behind us.

“Grant?”

Of course there was nothing to see. I say “of course” because even now, knowing what I know, this premonition remains ambiguous to me. “I'm not sure,” I answered Helen then, and half smiled at her. “Is someone back there?”

“Maybe,” I answered, and yet if the questions were put before me now—What proof do you have you were being watched? what proof is there that such a feeling was not the result of your own sense of, like, guilt or paranoia or even something else?—I'm not sure I could answer any better than before.

“Shall we go look?”

“No. Let's get back,” I said.

We continued down through the forest, and though the sensation remained with me, I turned my attention to asking Helen when I could see her next. “I'll be away for a few days—there's a thoroughbred show I have to ride in,” she said. “That's what I do, you know, work at a stable, training horses. You'll have to come by sometime.”

“I will.”

We reached her car, down by the main gate, knowing we were within view of the house, and somehow sensed, though without saying as much, that we had best shake hands. So we did, and afterward I traipsed halfhearted, faintly out of sorts, toward the shed to rehang the antique apparatus and stare for a moment at that rusted but potent bear trap, trying and failing to imagine Helen raise a shotgun at the growling head of the poor beast caught in that iron jaw, while she studied it with the same sweet holy eye that had so recently stared into mine, before pulling the trigger that would send its brute and terrified soul hurtling into the next life.

Ma bien aimee soeur et beau frére, il-y-a quelque jour que j'ai reçu votre letre … , I read, behind the closed door of my bedroom, hearing the steady noise of the creek through the window, thinking I should go downstairs soon to help Edmé set the table for dinner, but not before despairing of my ever making much headway with the clutch of letters written in patois …
tante belle cose …
some kind of northern dialect, written to Giovanni many years ago by a friend of his family's. The handwriting was spidery, the ink blotched and paper browned. What emerged from the correspondence was this above all: that Giovanni Trentas and his sister were consigned to the care of friends, left to continue on alone in their new providence in part because of the sudden death of their mother and in part because of the disappearance of a father who seemingly was caught up in the nasty politics and dark war of his day—a fragment of biography derived from these other missives from Aosta and Rome. Trentas senior appeared to be a gunrunner for the
partigiani,
the antifascist partisans, a fact that Edmé would later corroborate, though she herself would say Giovanni was never quite clear about the hard facts of his father's deeds and ultimate fate. What was clear, from the letters, was the boy's abandonment, whatever the reasons, to the currents of life in bucolic Coeur d'Alene, where he learned the ways of a new culture.

The letters from overseas were interesting, but did not really offer me, or at least so I thought, anything about the Giovanni who was my uncle's friend and my (now) lover's father, and so I turned to the next, much smaller bundle of notes, which were folded, and secured with a paper clip.

These were more like bits of old confetti swept up from the gutter in the wake of a forgotten parade, so exhausted was the paper and faded the writing. They were also immediately more provocative. The first was merely a scribbled note, penciled on a tiny scrap,
When he goes I can come to see you but not before. I don't want him to see me. Until tomorrow, then.
Unsigned, I saw: anonymous to me but so close to Giovanni that no name was needed. Or was the sender afraid it might fall into other hands?

I turned to the next, written on notebook paper with bristly edge where it had been torn from a spiral pad,

Dearest, Not tonight I am afraid, and not tomorrow either. I am sure they do not know but it is not good to take the chance now. I am hoping you enjoyed that little present though it was nothing very much. I am sorry for all this trouble. I love you.

What was this? I thought, and began to open the next note but was interrupted by a knock at my door. Hastily, I slid Giovanni's box under my bed, where it would be hidden by the dust ruffle, and said, “Yes?”

“Dinner,” answered my uncle Henry. I opened the door and we walked downstairs together. When he asked what I had been up to today, that he hadn't seen me around, I didn't deceive him in so far as I said I spent the afternoon gardening the cemetery with Helen. Needless to say, I didn't elaborate beyond that, and his apparent reaction was far less negative than I might have presumed. Indeed, he said, “Thank you for doing that.”

“It's a paradise up there.”

“I haven't been to pay respects to Giovanni and my folks for a while. Everything is all right?”

“Everything's fine.”

Centered on the kitchen table was a simple bouquet of late-summer flowers arranged in the small Venetian glass vase I had brought as a present the week before. The vase reminded me of Rome, the unassuming gift shop where I bought it, and prompted a consciousness of how much had happened since then, since the Sunday of the Angelus bells. The disaster wrought with Mary, the presentiment that all was winding down toward a vortical black hole for me, my several decades in the world having amounted to a great big zilch, a grand naught, a goose egg, what have you—this polluted vision of myself had shifted some in these past few hours. Here at Ash Creek, where one might have imagined less rather than more would be going on than in Rome, here I had managed to immerse myself into not just my own new life but the lives of others. The leaf I'd planned to toss in the air to see which way the wind blew, so that I could follow it if all else failed after the Labor Day feast, seemed to have floated downward and come to rest just at my feet: I was where I should be, not just because of my interest in Giovanni Trentas's death, and in his daughter, too—but because I felt at home here with my family. I was in what might well have been an inappropriately agreeable mood—inappropriate because it was fringed by some ugliness and antipathy I couldn't yet fathom—and enjoyed the conversation, about nothing in particular, that evening more than any we had before, gathered around their hospitable table.

After dinner, after our customary smoke and drink on the porch, Edmé excused herself, saying she was tired, and Henry, too, proposed to turn in early. The thought of going upstairs to read more of
The Wonder Book
did not, tonight, attract me—my God, not at all—and I asked Henry if I could borrow the car, go down into town, have a drink somewhere. I wasn't tired, I told him.