L'America (14 page)

***

The first time that Bea and Beth said good-bye to each other they cried. But actually Beth was glad to go, and Bea was happy to see her go. They liked each other a lot and wanted to see each other again, but they weren't in love. Sometime during the winter Bea proposed they do another exchange the following summer. They decided to do six weeks in each other's country instead of three. When they said good-bye the second time, at JFK International Airport, Bea's aunt by Bea's side (she had come for the last two weeks of Bea's trip because she had just lost her husband to brain cancer and had discovered a lump in her left breast and hoped a vacation would do her well), it was as if one of the girls were going off to war to be tortured and then murdered and the other would have to endure the pain for the rest of her life. They cried the whole day before, during the entire drive to the airport, and for three hours while they waited for the plane. At customs, where the final separation occurred, Bea's aunt, a slender slip of a woman who had little patience for all this crying given her current woes, had to physically pry the girls apart and ask them to stop causing such a scene. But it was heartbreaking watching the two clinging to each other like answers. Even Bea's aunt could recognize this.

Upon arriving home, their love letters began in earnest. (Beth saved these, too; they took their place among the papers spoken of when we speak of going through a dead person's papers. Of course Valeria read them, but Bea was no mystery to her. Bea was Valeria's godmother and had settled in New York many years before Valeria was born, wanting to be far away from all that she found confining about Città. In the months after Beth died, Bea saw Valeria every day.) In the first letter Bea invited Beth to come live with her in Italy for a year; she couldn't bear the separation, and looking forward to a year together would make this one pass the more swiftly. Beth agreed, and she came. And she fell in love immediately, madly, irreversibly, with the very man Bea was keen on.

The day following Beth's disappearing act and the kiss, Bea, no fool, understood the betrayal and hated her friend. But being proud, she remained aloof and cool for a day. She watched Beth pretending that Cesare was of no interest, listened to Beth asking leading questions about Bea's feelings about Cesare, heard Beth lying about where she had been the night before, and observed Beth trying to be sweet to Miki when it was clear Miki repulsed her in the way a spurned lover always repulses the deserter. For the first time since she had known Beth, Bea's world started to become a bit smaller.

On the next day, when it became clear that Beth and Cesare couldn't even be bothered to hide how they felt, when pretending they wanted to was impossible, Bea turned to Sylvia. Strong, radiant, proud Bea broke down and cried. She and Sylvia sat together in their rented room with their suitcases spilling several seasons of Bea's beautiful clothes, their skin prickly with the sand and the sun. Bea was heartbroken, not for the loss of Cesare but for the loss of Beth implicit in the betrayal.

"I should be worth more," Bea cried.

"I know, I know," Sylvia kept saying, rocking Bea in her arms, glad that Bea felt close enough to her to be able to cry. Sylvia felt very grown-up and mature, comforting Bea. At the same time, she felt betrayed, too, thinking of Chas. Perhaps Sylvia was realizing that people change, becoming something other than what we know of them. As Beth was blossoming into the great love of Cesare's life (and he of hers) she was wilting before her friends. What Sylvia didn't yet understand, because she didn't yet have the experience, was that people just as easily turn back into who they were, that all this change is nothing special, indeed quite ordinary, and the little fissures don't amount to much in the larger scheme of things.

"Did you love Chas?" Bea asked. She, too, had no idea yet of the elasticity of friendship. Sylvia continued to stroke Bea's thick dark hair. How had Sylvia felt about Chas? She thought of the fight in the small San Sebastián hotel room. They had been scared, lying there on that bed, of something they couldn't articulate. If she had loved Chas, would she have run off, abandoning Beth? Was there a reason she had fled so fast to Irún, a reason, which did not involve Beth, that would explain why she had chosen not to see Chas again? Would that reason explain their fear?

"I don't know. I don't think so. I didn't let myself find out."

"I hate her," Bea said. The afternoon sun illuminated her face, which glistened with tears.

"No, you don't," Sylvia said, and they rocked there, trying to negotiate everything they felt. Yet even though the girls took great comfort from each other, it was really Beth each wanted to be holding and to be held by. And they wondered, more simply than this, because once again they would not have been able to articulate it quite so clearly, if their friend had crossed the divide into that new region looming ominously in front of them. Each was bewildered, perhaps even jealous, that Beth was crossing the divide first, without her. A long time passed and then they began to scheme.

 

When Beth returned to the room, Bea was silent no longer. She was not mean; she did not yell. Rather she was direct and clear. Sylvia let Bea speak first, but it was clear to Beth they were united against her, and she had a terrible sinking feeling because it seemed that all the beauty of the last three days was now to be paid for, and she could only think of that injustice, not of her friends.

"You have a choice," Bea said. "We are leaving tomorrow. You can come or you can stay."

It was two in the morning. Beth noticed their packed suitcases, standing side by side like soldiers or simply like her two friends, standing united now in their disappointment in her. Still she did not care.

"The ferry is at six in the morning," Sylvia said.

They never discussed Cesare or betrayal or Chas. All of that was perfectly clear, implicit. There was no way for Beth to tell Cesare anything. The girls would be long gone before he awoke. She couldn't go to his room now, not with Miki there and all of the others asleep. Beth looked at her friends. Oh girls, they can be so punishing, so mean and cruel. Bea and Sylvia enjoyed this test, though perhaps they didn't fully know it or admit it. Either Beth chose them or she chose Cesare. She had known Cesare a few days; what would he do with her if she stayed? What would she do with him? What if all that had passed between them—that shock, that stab, the giddy desire, that kiss—was nothing? Bea and Sylvia stood like two shades in that moony night. Beth got their game. Checkmate. She hated them now but knew she was in no position to fight and scream and carry on. Instead, there was just a vast silence in the room. Sylvia and Bea prepared themselves for bed as if nothing were wrong, saying little things to each other about toothpaste and nail scissors, talking comfortably as if they had always been great friends.

"Of course, there's no decision," Beth said. She sat down and started packing and did not let them see her cry.

 

The night of the kiss, Beth and Cesare walked all over Naoussa. A tremendous wind had settled on the island, the one they had been waiting for all day; it whipped every tree and every shutter, sending litter aswirl. They are called Meltemis, these winds. The couple was blown miles, it seemed, up into the hills, down to the water, electric, in that state where selfishness reigns. Part of the beauty is that you are sacrificing everything—your friends, your family, your country—for this love, and you're young enough not to really understand that you're hurting others, a concept you can't quite get because you've never been hurt. After the realization that Cesare and Beth were likely together, Sylvia comforted Bea, Dario comforted Miki, then they all comforted each other. They all hated Beth and Cesare. When the sun started coming up, Cesare and Beth, realizing this might be the case, decided to just keep walking, and so they did—walking and laughing in that Meltemi wind. The wind was causing its own private destruction. Branches snapped, flying this way and that. The town started to wake up, little Greek women in black, hunched over, carrying enormous shopping bags. Church bells ringing. "
Tu sei perfetta,
" he whispered. "
lo sono perfetta,
" she whispered back, and nothing really seemed to matter much even if it did. At the harbor the fishermen were just coming in with their catch.

 

"Are we even?" Beth asked Sylvia with a smile, lying beneath the shower of soot on the ferry back to Italy. They were headed now to Favignana, an island off of western Sicily where Bea's parents were vacationing. The girls had inevitably warmed to each other again. But it took Beth a good four days after the Páros departure, four days of roaming all over Corfu on mopeds in search of Chas, to ask that question.

"Yes," Sylvia said, with her equally winning smile.

 

Beth saw the train. She would always see the long train dividing in the middle of a Spanish night with two girls on it cradled in the broad expanse of some nuns' laps. These girls have never been in love, have never known anyone their own age who has died; their futures are filled with promise and the train is dividing to take them toward it, dividing in the middle of the night with the rumbling of so much metal over so much metal. And though there may seem to be a choice, there is only one inevitable direction.

A fast car on a wide American highway. A free soul from an exotic land of deserts with blood-red canyons and buttes and mesas that scrape the sky; a land of strip towns with drive-thru-just-about-everything, seedy hotels, and lonely phone booths on long lonely roads. A drive-in movie theater, jazz, and alligators in the bayous, the heaving and sighing of semitrailers lined up and glinting in the night. New York City, Los Angeles, Las Vegas. A wide-aisled supermarket flooded with choice. McDonald's, fried chicken, apple pie—simple things Cesare had never tried. Cornfields and wheat fields and soy, shifting loess hills, rolling into more fields, then pastures dotted by cows and sheep, and farmyards with barns and silos and grain elevators, and wide-open views the size of Texas. Beth was all of this for him. Twenty-one years old with a gap between her teeth and blond hair, blue eyes, and the longest darkest lashes he had ever seen, she was abundance and risk, experimentation and discovery, and she had fallen sweetly, deeply, permanently for him. Her name, ordinary American name, he pronounced it
Bet
with his Italian accent that didn't know that foreign
h—Bet
as in "to gamble everything," his tongue transforming the name (and her) into something different entirely, extraordinary even. She was the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building shooting into the sky like hope. She was America.

"If I'm America," she said to Cesare, "then you're the Roman Empire." She lay beside him in the soft summer grass of Fiori, his parents' country house in the hills above Lago Maggiore. She was leaving Italy soon and had been trying to convince him to come to America and he was trying to convince her to stay, to put off returning to college for another year. They had been together three years already and he had not yet been to America. There were excuses, of course, but even so she was becoming impatient. For the first year she had lived in Città. The second year, while she started college at NYU, he began a two-year tenure of military service, which he spent in the Servizio Civile because he did not believe in firearms, and during this time he was forbidden to leave the country. Thus for their third year she took her sophomore year away from NYU to study economics at the Bocconi in Milan so that she could live again in Città, always with Bea's family, who welcomed her as if she were a daughter. The Bocconi would open up for her the economics of business, fueling what would become her calling. The Bocconi became part of her life plan.

Now, however, her year was coming to an end and she was going home. His service finished, he was free and she wanted him to come. He knew that. She wanted him to come not for a few weeks or a month or two, but for an entire year. She wanted him to give America a try. She wanted him to prove that his desire to construct his own life, separate from the life being handed to him by his family, was authentic. It was a test of sorts, and he knew that as well.

"Why am I not simply just Italy?" he asked, curious about the way of her mind. He liked to explore every inch of her as if he could find in her the answer. There was a lot to excavate even after three years; she had the weirdest family he had ever heard of. He had met the grandmother, Grammy as she liked to be called. He had shown her all over Città and Milan, taken her to Como to buy silk. She was a handsome woman who wore sturdy shoes. "Hand stitched," she informed him because she knew he had an interest in shoes. "My husband's relatives were of Buster Brown fame," she added, "beautiful hand-stitched shoes. Ruined, they were, by Bata which came in from Czechoslovakia—or some such country—and were cheaper because the soles were glued!" Grammy was one who liked to know a bit about everything and enjoyed letting her company know the breadth of her knowledge. (It is debatable whether or not her husband's relatives were attached to Buster Brown, but that's another point and one that didn't concern Cesare because he had never heard of Buster Brown anyway.)

She made a fuss about being an "opera buff," wishing it were the season to go to La Scala because there was nothing in the world she would have preferred more. "I'm a patron of the Met," she said to him, fixing him with her sharp and penetrating eyes, which seemed to delight in absolutely everything he took her to see. At four in the afternoon she liked to have her tea, "Piping hot," she would say. He learned the term and its definition well. He enjoyed the eccentricities of this woman. She referred to Cesare as a prince and Fiori became his castle. She was impressed with the azaleas and rhododendrons and returned to Europe in Beth's third year especially for the annual party to celebrate their flowering. Of Benvenuto's fresco depicting Valeria she said, "I have an eye. I have a discerning eye. I know art history and this picture is worth a lot." Never did it occur to her that its value to the family was beyond recognition and money, that the last thing they would want was a bunch of art historians claiming it for history, no matter the price. ("So American," Cesare had said to Beth, not as a reproach, but rather with a certain wistfulness at how easy it is for Americans to let go.)