L'America (11 page)

After the declaration of love, the Maserati drove back to Città with two happy boys eager for the ten days to swiftly pass. The girls were happy, too, to be on their own again, in charge of their own adventure, though Bea took command and led them, lugging their green leather suitcases first to Florence, sweltering in the July heat, to see Michelangelo's
David
and the
Slaves
and Botticelli's
The Birth of Venus
rising from the foam. The girls felt nourished by culture and less guilty for at least having seen something. It didn't matter that Beth and Bea had seen all this "stuff" before. That knowledge simply allowed them to hold forth, which they did, as if they knew so much more than Sylvia about Michelangelo and Botticelli.

After Florence they traveled to Rome where the biggest attraction, aside from the Vatican and the Forum, was the Porta Portese market. They each bought a string bikini and here Sylvia saw plenty of her gypsies and even had the chance to thwart a robbery. "I caught him! I caught him!" she screeched, holding on to the arm of a dirty little boy who had tried to snatch her wallet. He struggled with a fiery energy to free himself from her grasp. No one, not a single person, seemed to care.

It was in Florence though, in front of the
David,
in the heat with hundreds of other bodies sweating and pushing against the girls, that Bea first mentioned Cesare. "Cesare has a body like that," she said. "Who?" Sylvia asked. "Who?" Beth echoed. Beth knew intimately the details of Bea's love life, knew that for two years she had been having an affair with a married man. Bea would write Beth long letters about him that Beth would read and reply to during English class or say, history, while pretending to be taking notes, riveted by her friend's escapades because they were so much more daring and grown-up than anything she or her American friends even dreamed of. Bea liked being with a married man because she always knew what to expect, knew that someday he would leave her and knew in advance that the reason would be the wife and not some flaw of her own. (Italians rarely leave for the other woman.) She never wanted anyone, especially a man, to identify her flaws. She was overly proud that way, wanted to keep her flaws to herself. Above all, Bea loved spilling her insides out to Beth in a letter, something she could never have done in person or with any other friend.

"Cesare," Bea said.
Chey-zar-ay.
Just from the way Bea said his name with an uncharacteristic warmth and a tenderness, Beth knew. "He has a body like that?" Sylvia said. "He's so big," Beth said, feeling a little jealousy creeping up her throat that she tried to quell like one does an overexcited dog. Most of all she wanted to know the details.

And as they floated toward Greece on their bubbly cloud of youth, the details of Cesare would emerge, a bit like treats to reward the girls. Cesare was generous, warm, handsome, playful, studying economics at the Bocconi in Milan, and he came from an old family with a name in her town. "Old family" was an idea that meant nothing to Beth and Sylvia, but to Bea it meant a lot; it was better to be aligned with a good old family with a name just as it is better to go to Harvard, say, than to a state university. Her family, though good, was not old and did not have a name. The Nuovas had been transplanted to Città from Verona and Genova—towns not a great distance from Città, but far enough all the same to make the Nuovas a new family (even though they had been in Città for over a hundred years). And their wealth was new, too. Bea's grandfather, a manufacturer of dyes for stocking threads and sock fibers, had been a factory worker who happened to be educated and lucky. He rose within the company until one day he owned it (an extraordinary feat), and was thus able to give to his son, Bea's father, a fortune and a job. In Città the new families were distinguished from the old families and the new families carried a certain unspoken stigma. For example, Cesare would be a good match for Bea. He would lift her from her unspoken lower status (within the upper echelons, of course) to one equivalent to his own. Bea's parents were delighted by this flirtation not only because they did not approve, needless to say, of the married man (whom they knew about even if Bea told them nothing), but because Cesare had a good name and was known as a nice boy—if not an all-too-serious boy. For Cesare's family the match with Bea would be a bad one. The family's status was solid and a match with Bea would not lower it, but these things mattered, and all things being equal a marriage between Bea and Cesare would not be desirable. She would be a freckle on the complexion of the family name. (Heaven forbid an American!) Of course, Bea as a match had not crossed Cesare's family's mind, nor even Cesare's, to be truthful.

His family did not even know who she was. But Bea knew all the subtleties of class, of new and of old and of how they existed, thrived even, in late-twentieth-century Italy like some sort of burden from the past. Thus Bea's last name always felt to her like a mark, a scarlet letter. And though she had mostly observed in America, she loved the freedom of being there, of being anonymous, of being free of the burdens and expectations conferred by her family name. But most of all, Bea loved Beth madly simply because this vast web of name and stigma and class that ran beneath the surface of Città like a complicated power grid supporting the infrastructure meant absolutely nothing to her and wouldn't even if Bea bothered to explain it.

"But how long has this been going on?" Beth demanded. "I never received word."

"Never received word?" Sylvia said, laughing at Beth's stilted sentence construction, which seemed the result of too much time abroad.

"New new new," Bea said. "Brand-new."

"Have you kissed?"

"Almost," she said, and told them how she had been introduced to him in town one night. They did not share the same group of friends and she only knew him vaguely by face but that night he rode her home on his motorcycle and would have kissed her had the married man (his name was Giorgio) not been waiting for her in his car outside the gate. "I have never more not wanted to see Giorgio."

Beth had never met the married man, but she had this image of him as tall and dark and cloaked in a black cape so that he never emerged from the shadows, a sort of hooded Darth Vader (Bea had described his black hair, deep-set eyes, strong jaw pocked with shallow dimples, and his hands—hands that could hold a lot, all of her).

At this particular moment the girls were in their hotel room in Florence, Bea on the bed in her underwear with tweezers, leaning over her left leg, from which she plucked newly emerging hairs. She could do this for hours and she would try to get Beth and Sylvia to do it, too, but neither one had the patience. In fact, they had given up on waxing and gone back to shaving. Their beauty treatments involved gentle tasks like facials and deep conditioning of the hair.

"Are you in love with Miki?" Bea asked Beth, still with her eyes hard on the project of her left leg. She did not like to talk much about Cesare and didn't mention him very often as it made her feel too vulnerable. Indeed, by the time they arrived in Páros, when Beth would see him for the first time on those steps, Bea's romance, lived vividly in her own mind, was only a faint memory to Beth and Sylvia.

"He's too tall," Sylvia said. "And those feet."

"He is tall," Beth admitted, and remembered him leaning down, way down, to kiss her. "Plus I don't think he knows what he's doing. He cupped my breast and just sort of held on to it as if it were a knob. I was afraid he might turn it to see if he could open something." Then she told them about his penis and how big it was and how he had put it in her hand, but that she realized once she was touching it that she didn't want to be. She didn't mention that she hadn't known what to do with it.

"Yick," Sylvia said, but they loved talking about sex. They wanted to talk about the really juicy stuff, and of the three of them Bea had had the most experience because of the married man. Beth would get Bea to describe her escapades for Sylvia, how she and the married man (they liked to call Giorgio that because it sounded so sordid and adult) snuck around late at night, making out in dark parks and in the back of his Mercedes. "His wife is always there," Bea would say. "And I like that." His wife looming over them like some sort of aphrodisiac made the encounters one hundred percent satisfactory.

"What about Cesare?" Beth asked now.

"I love my married man," Bea said, turning the attention away from Cesare. She did not want them to know how much she thought about him. Beth and Sylvia had no idea yet that he, too, was one of the friends coming to Greece.

 

Their suitcases were heavy but Bea always found some kind stranger to carry them, and when she didn't, they dragged them, destroying the rich green leather. From Brindisi to Patras they took the ferry, sleeping on the deck beneath a shower of soot from the ship's smokestack, feeling like real travelers. They danced Greek reels in the discotheque and played slot machines, getting rich on worthless drachmas. They were well dressed in Bea's adorable clothes, miniskirts, cropped pants, cropped tops, delicate strappy shoes in gold. The clothes featured last year's color, mandarin. "Orange," Sylvia would say in that direct way of hers. Poor and in Athens, however, they slept in Zappeio Park in order to save a few more of those easily won drachmas and because Sylvia read in the guidebook that it was safe as long as you secured your luggage to your body so that thieves couldn't snitch it in the night. Beth and Bea were skeptical and this excursion was truly slumming it for Bea. After all, her money problems were not the same as Sylvia's and Beth's. Bea's parents paid for her entire trip. The idea of an Italian child waiting tables to earn spending money of any sort was anathema in their world. In Italy waiters were waiters and had always been waiters and would always be waiters. But Bea enjoyed the adventure of traveling on a budget and knew that with Italian friends she would never have slept in a park. With Beth the world was always just a bit bigger for Bea, and for that she loved Beth all the more. "Can you imagine sleeping in Central Park?" Beth asked. "Or the Cascine?" Bea said of Florence's big park, thick with transvestites and transsexuals who had had operations in Casa Blanca—a detail the girls had found unbelievably curious, so they had taken a midnight tour of the Cascine (in a taxi) to observe these "ladies" strutting about in their high heels and sleazy skirts, thinking of them all the while on an operating table in the depths of Africa with doctors magically transforming them from men to women, chopping here, adding there. "Gross," one of the girls had said.

Zappeio Park was in the center of Athens and part of the National Garden, which was once part of the royal family's palace grounds. Signs at the entrance said (in English, quite clearly) that the park was open from dawn to dusk. "But this isn't Central Park, or the Cascine, and the guidebook says it's fine," Sylvia insisted, pointing to the passage. They indulged her, allowing her to thread a long cord (they had no idea where it came from, but Sylvia somehow produced it) through all the handles to all the suitcases and then through all their clothes so that they were neatly bound together like some bulky, but precious, package. "If anyone tries to snitch a suitcase they'll get all of us and that will be too heavy to carry away. We're anchored here," Sylvia said. Beth and Bea rolled their eyes, but Beth was happy to save the price of a night's room. They also noticed other travelers, with backpacks, beginning to emerge from the shadows to find a spot for the night beneath the orange and the lemon trees. The new company made Sylvia more confident, and she gave Beth and Bea a "see" look—squinting, pursing her lips. It was dusk and the city was hot and dry and smoggy (smog was the detail the girls noted first and foremost upon their arrival), but the park was green and fragrant. A breeze rippled the air.

Beth felt guilty about her suitcase as she watched the backpackers, as if somehow the suitcase made her a less serious traveler, and she wished she had brought her backpack. It was also much easier to carry. One of the long-distance travelers camped nearby approached (long beard, bare feet, tie-dyed undershirt, cute in a Jesus hippie sort of way, definitely an American) to ask them if they had any spare rope, and this request made Sylvia's afternoon. "I just don't understand the attraction of American men," Bea said, as the young man walked away. Secretly, though, she did: they seemed to belong to a world of no cares. And when the birdsongs died down and the late sun finally disappeared and when there was no more conjecture about the other friends Miki and Dario might be bringing along to Páros (a subject that occupied a good portion of their conversation), the girls drifted easily into sleep.

In the middle of the night, to Sylvia's great delight, a thief tried to steal their bags. Instead of the suitcase, the thief got the whole bundle and was scared away by the three screaming girls. (For the rest of her life, Sylvia would love to tell that story.) Then at 5
A.M.
when the orange light of dawn began creeping into the lemon trees, the girls were awakened again, this time by a shower of water as all the park's sprinklers turned on.

Ambitious, feeling confident, if a little tired, that morning they planned a tour of the Acropolis, the Agora, and the Plaka. They left the heavy suitcases on the sidewalk near a busy outdoor café, agreeing that no one would steal them, because any thief would believe the owners were sitting nearby sipping coffee. "Who would be so stupid as to leave their bags on a street in Athens?" Bea asked. "No one." "Precisely," Sylvia said. And after a hot morning of drifting through the Temple of Athena Nike and the Parthenon and of imagining them as they must have been two thousand years ago, painted brightly and active with life (everyone in white togas as in the movies), the girls went shopping at the Plaka and returned to find their bags almost exactly where they had left them (though moved a few feet farther toward the street by a waitress because they were in her way).

 

Funny about that age, you're invincible. Death is a long way off, something that happens to others. Risk is less risky. That summer a boy Beth and Sylvia knew from high school in Pennsylvania died. Likely, he was dying at the moment they left their bags on that crowded Athenian street; the night before while they slept in the park, he was doing the damage that would later kill him. He had driven too fast in his car with too many drugs and too much alcohol in his system, believing, like everyone his age, that he was invincible. (Do you remember all those high school nights when you rode fast in your Camaros, your Mustangs, your cute VW Bugs, when you got home without even knowing how, how you would laugh about it later, boasting to friends?) Beth and Sylvia's friend was Paul. He had been the guitarist in the Random Joe band, the band whose drummer both Beth and Sylvia had kissed. When Beth later heard that Paul had wrapped his beat-up old LeSabre around a sycamore tree, she imagined the accident literally—his car curling around the tree like a snake, Paul inside, the metal slicing into him. Paul had actually been thrown into a blackberry thicket, where he was found by a fireman, who took snapshots of the scene to warn his kids about the dangers of speeding and drunk driving. This was one of the worst accidents the fireman had ever seen. Rescue workers had to pick parts of Paul from the blackberry thicket. Even so, he somehow lived for half a day more.