L'America (12 page)

Paul and Beth had kissed once at a party. He had put the gum he had been chewing on the back of his wrist and they had kissed, a sloppy wet kiss that left her lips and her chin sore and chaffed. He had driven too fast a month after graduation with the Grateful Dead blasting away on the cassette player. Somehow it was still playing "Sugar Magnolia," so the rumor went, when the fireman found him. The girls slept in an Athenian park, thinking themselves just as invincible. Beth would picture their luggage at the edge of the café while the three of them marched up the hot hill to the remains of ancient Greece.

"Do you think you'll sleep with Miki?" Bea asked as they rose to the Parthenon, history and its ruins all around them. Paul had asked Beth to go steady that night when he put the gum on his wrist. She had said yes, and they had walked around the party hand in hand, trying on love, trying on the grown-up world with all its formulations and rules—a dear boy with long black hair that he let cover one eye in a way he believed made him look dangerous. He did not want to be a nice boy, a good boy, but he was. For years Beth would see those kids from her Pennsylvania high school, her New York high school (more sophisticated though they were with their cocaine in the bathrooms of clubs), and she would see Bea and Sylvia and herself, all of them invincible, all of them waiting impatiently for the
real
(definitely emphatic here) to begin. What was it? Where was it? Won't someone show us the way? Take us there now? Guide us. Lead us. No wonder Beth and Sylvia surrendered so easily to Bea.

Going steady had felt awkward and uncomfortable, a shirt that didn't fit right. At the end of the party, Beth broke off the affair, explaining the news to her friends who were only just beginning to celebrate. The drama of their reaction was as far as she wanted to push adulthood. The relationship had lasted four hours. Paul hit the sycamore tree at ninety miles per hour. Despite his mangled body, it took him a good twelve hours to die. "How are they going to fix him?" his mother kept crying, repeating the words into the enormous chest of her sad-eyed husband, wondering how the doctors would make her son whole again. When Beth learned about the accident, she would think of the Maserati speeding along on the Italian highway. She would think of her own mother, so deeply dead she was as much a part of history as George Washington. Beth would think of Paul's gum stuck to his wrist, his sloppy wet lips kissing hers, his black hair falling in the way of their mouths. By the time she learned of his death she would be well initiated into adult pain and deeply ensconced in the early days of her life's most central myth.

 

It slipped out, on the tiny island of Antiparos, that Bea's Cesare was a friend of Miki's and that he was a big windsurfer and that he, too, might be coming to Páros. The detail was just one of many details that occupied the girls as they passed the hot days beneath the fierce Greek sun on their own small nude beach. They camped on this beach for three days, which felt more like an eternity, dreaming of when they would get to Páros and wondering if they would still be keen on their men, inventing instead some new men they would meet—Frans, Hans, and Reinhold, rich Germans (heaven knows why they were German) who drove a Mercedes. And, as they starved on their beach, waiting for the days to pass, they told each other ridiculous stories about the things they would do with these men. The girls had only brought some melons (which turned out to be round cucumbers) for food and Antiparos's main town was a good ten miles by mule away from their beach. They had wanted to eat melon for three days in order to lose weight. On the third day of starvation, as if an apparition, an ice-cream truck appeared on a rocky dirt road above the beach, a road they had thought was intended only for mules. But it was no apparition.

It was the real thing and all the weight the girls had lost eating cucumbers they gained back eating ice cream. The ice-cream truck gave them (and their green leather suitcases) a lift to the ferry and from there they sailed across a small gulf to Páros, adorable in Bea's clothes, carefully manicured, and deeply tanned (even their boobs and butts).

Miki and Dario and Miki's car, a Land Rover this time, waited for them at the Páros dock in Parikia. Awkwardly, but possessively, the boys kissed their girls and then whisked them and Bea and their luggage off to the small fishing village of Naoussa, the road winding through eerie magnificent rock formations and gentle terraced hills, some laced with vineyards. In the front Miki and Dario spoke nervously and fast to Bea, and in the back Beth and Sylvia were suddenly exhausted. Beth couldn't keep up with the Italian and didn't bother trying. Though it was late afternoon, the sun was still high, shining red and magnificent against the aquamarine sky. It felt as though the ten days since Forte dei Marmi had passed as fast as a breeze, blowing them all to this moment.

And then there was Cesare, standing halfway up the steps of one of those traditional Cycladic homes—whitewashed with a deep sea-blue trim. Above the stairs wisteria draped a latticed balcony and here and there stood pots of brilliant red geraniums. Cesare was struggling to communicate with the landlady, attempting to negotiate the price of a room for the girls—his friends' friends—using his best ancient Greek learned several years before at the Liceo Classico. The landlady, her bulk draped in a black housedress, that revealed only her thick ankles and bare feet, did not understand a word but seemed to understand the topic was money and was thus keen for the conversation. The light of the afternoon sun caught in Cesare's hair, illuminating him, while his figure cast a shadow over the landlady. He gestured with his hands and smiled, clearly flirting. On the small road upon which the car was parked, a mule led by a hunched-over old man clomped by. Beth stood at the car door, green leather suitcase near her feet. She wore a mandarin-colored sundress and her Jesus sandals and she looked up at Cesare, thinking that he wasn't as attractive as Bea had suggested. His features were too sharp—angular jaw, Roman nose, even chiseled temples, making the lines of his face seem harsh. And there was something funny to his look, something strange, perhaps only the result of being animated by his conversation. Just then, as if he had heard her thoughts and wished to prove them wrong, he looked at her. She looked away, but felt the shock, the stab, a sensation she had not felt before and that struck her just as swiftly as something randomly falling from the sky. It was utterly intoxicating and seemed to have nothing to do with anything that made any sense, and she wanted to look at him again. Indeed, she could feel her face flush, a very hot and brilliant red. He's not that attractive, she thought again, as if to excise something uncomfortable—a thorn from a toe.

 

I will never go back to Páros. White houses trimmed with blue, small towns at the edge of the water with outside cafés serving fried squid and other fresh seafood—the smell of it, grilled fish and salt air and corn—the corn on the cob dressed still in its silk was grilled, too. On that island Beth and Cesare are perpetually falling in love—over and over and over again. It's a level in Dante's
Paradiso
out there in the blue sea where this blessed young couple are forever able to reenact their first moment of love, when everything is absolutely possible and you're blissfully unaware of the destruction that lies in your wake, of the cruelty and pain you'll inflict on each other in the name of love at some unforeseen and distant time. You trust. You trust your body, your future, the
mysterious laws that say everyone will receive love. You trust, you have no experience yet to teach you otherwise. I will never go back to Páros.

 

A fragment of Valeria's mother's life. Dated 1992, written by her mother in her mother's diary, in her mother's neat, careful, swirling script, her mother trying to tell a story, her mother, perhaps, trying to be indelible, poetic even, her mother speaking. It was all she ever said about Páros in her journals because she didn't start writing them until well after the Páros trips were over. (She and Cesare went to the island several times because they loved to windsurf and because the nature of their vacations were decidedly Italian rather than American.) And that was also the last passage Beth wrote about Cesare. She had just been to Italy to see him for the last time, Valeria knew from the letters. They started breaking up in 1987, but the drama endured until 1992, for five years—telephone calls, letters, fast and secret trips to somewhere. Years later, after Beth's death—fifteen, sixteen years later—Valeria, a twenty-year-old woman living in New York, wished her mother had written more. Beth had written plenty in Valeria's baby book, written not just about her first smile and bite of food but also about the politics of the time—some sex scandal, an impeachment, a stolen election. Valeria wouldn't care so much about her mother's views of her baby years (sweet, yes) as she would about her mother's life. You see, Valeria, unlike Beth, would have memories of her mother. Simple things, her mother cooking with her, her mother helping her to brush her teeth, her mother dressing up like magic for an evening out with Valeria's father, the wonderful scratching. Thus for Valeria her mother would not always be dead (like George Washington). But because of the way in which Beth died, the memory of her would not be about her life but rather about her death. She would become for Valeria someone who was always dying. Perpetually she died. For eternity Valeria would be able to watch her mother's death. For years and years and more years still she would be able to see it on television. Thus she would love digging into Beth's life, retracing it, finding in this passage, written in her mother's hand, a moment where her mother is doing something fabulous and dangerous just as perpetually, just as permanently, just as indelibly. In this passage she breathed, alive, a person feeling, immortal.
On that island Beth and Cesare are perpetually falling in love—over and over and over and over again.

 

Cesare came down the stairs, smiling, "All I know is the ancient Greek," he said in English, apologetically, to his friends and the American girls. He had a big smile, not one bit harsh. His accent was clearly Italian but with a hint of British English (from having studied in London, Beth would later learn). He didn't seem surprised by the arrival of the three of them and Beth wondered what he had been told by Miki, hoped it wasn't much. "She doesn't understand it though," he said, shrugging. He kissed Bea on either cheek and, in Italian, asked her about her adventures getting to Greece. Beth noted that they did not seem like lovers. Miki appeared behind Beth and introduced her to Cesare with a certain amount of pride that made Beth feel both possessed and annoyed. Beth smiled and so did Cesare and she wondered if he had felt the shock that she had and then hoped that no one could hear the way her heart thumped. Miki, as if he could sense something, swept Beth upstairs to see the apartment and his room. She could still hear Bea, her big flirtatious voice carrying on with Cesare. The room had a vine-covered balcony that offered a view of the sea. Miki's clothes were neatly unpacked and arranged in his closet, and Beth wondered if he packed like Bea did, if all Italians were taught to pack so precisely. Somehow she didn't find this habit as attractive in a man. More than that, she didn't want to be in the room alone with him. She wanted to be outside with the others. She wanted to know if she would feel that shock again. She wanted to feel it again. Just then Miki tried to kiss her. She told him she had to pee. Alone, in the bathroom, she studied herself in the mirror. The shock was palpable. She could see it. She felt it again, aftershocks trembling through her, making her somehow feel beautiful though she knew she was not a beautiful girl. She went back to Miki's room. She heard nothing that Miki said as she sat down on his tidy bed. She saw nothing. She tasted nothing. She was blissfully and completely and absolutely and marvelously empty. Miki kissed her. Cesare entered the room. She pushed away from Miki, almost meanly. Medium tall and dark and slender, Cesare had a body like the
David,
but he was dressed in American-style swimming trunks, a T-shirt with the words
NEIL PRYDE
beneath a picture of a sailing windsurfer, and flip-flops. Italians never go barefoot. "
Scusatemi,
" he apologized, and backed out of the room. His eyes were big and dark brown with a spark. "No no," Beth said fast, as if her words could yank him back. And they did.

"
Cosa vuoi?
" asked Miki. What do you want?

"Will you come to dinner with us?" Cesare asked, reentering but only just slightly. Such lovely English. He was all grace and humility and elegance. And Beth said yes before Miki could answer, and the big group of them went off to a café at the edge of the water in Naoussa for red snapper and grilled octopus and tsatsiki and something else and something else ... but Beth barely noticed. Despite the daze and the shock and the desire to watch this boy talk and smile, she had no idea what she was experiencing, and that night, after a little too much wine for all of them, they would be paired off by Bea's design, and not by the direction of this wonderful new sensation of Beth's, which made her eager and anxious and pretty and giddy and the whole evening smelled of jasmine and rosemary and citrus and was filled with the rhythms of the little fishing boats knocking about in the port and the Greek wine was terribly good and she loved Greece and never wanted to leave.

 

Valeria would find this fragment of a letter, dated 1987, written in English:

 

My dear little Americanina. My America. My future. My dream. My impossible dream. Your body so soft, so like velvet your legs. I detest the thought of you with another man and love the thought that others should experience you. I want to know every detail by name. It is good and right for you to be with others. Perhaps I am repenting for my sins. But let me know. Spend one hour each day, at least, to let me know. If you are to be my wife, if we are to realize this love—you must. But don't be cruel. Don't torture me. Not with someone young, not with someone you could love. I love you more than ever, more than life. I'll love you when I'm dead.