L'America (31 page)

Out on the cold street, wrapping the cashmere coat from her boutique tightly around her waist and neck, knotting her scarf high beneath her chin, pulling her hat down over her ears, feeling the bite of that January air, looking south to the buildings high above the park, seeing her breath, watching a taxi scream down Fifth, admiring a couple strolling home late and a little drunk hand in hand, walking to Madison to catch the bus north, admiring the lit-up windows of the fancy stores, all the pretty prospects they promised, an enormous check for her dinner in her pocket, Beth would get a rush. She could do this, she believed. Whatever
this
was, she could do it.

***

A childhood friend of Cesare's came to New York. He took her to a famous steak house and ordered a four-pound lobster for them to share and she showed him just how to eat it, just how to get every last little piece from the head, how those pieces are the sweetest and most tender. (She did not tell him that a four-pound lobster was a ridiculous notion and bound to be much tougher than a one-and-a-quarter-pound lobster.) Told him how you kill a lobster, told him that originally lobster had been the food of indentured servants and slaves and in colonial days that they had had an uprising to protest the incessant meals of lobster; they wanted something different; they wanted meat.

"How in the world do you know so much about lobsters?"

"I'm a chef," she said with a blue-eyed twinkle. Just saying the words felt like she was cheating a little, like she was stealing something. But she loved saying it anyway, the first time she ever had:
I am a chef.
Always people were asking you to list your accomplishments, detail your resume to prove yourself.
I am a chef.
She blushed a little with the confidence. It was easier declaring this to an Italian; she knew an Italian wouldn't care.

This man, Gianni, was Cesare's oldest friend. They had met as boys ice-skating on a frozen pond on the outskirts of Città. They had been five at the time, and had been good friends ever since. Gianni was a doctor, engaged to be married. Beth had met his fiancee in Città, her name was Grazia and she was tall and slender with lots of hair and a bright toothy smile. She was incredibly sweet, if not too smart. Grazia towered over Gianni and teased him often about his height, but in a nonthreatening way that somehow made her size seem maternal, as if she would mother him well for life because of her height. Her ambition was to be Gianni's wife, mother of him and of his kids—an ambition, Beth surmised, that made Grazia's life simple: all she had to do was remain slender and sexy and soft with Gianni, curl up to him like a cat and make him feel comfortable and safe. Gianni was a small man with a round warm face and sharp eyes. His professional specialty was blood and he had come to New York for a conference at Sloan-Kettering that concerned the relationship between a rare T-cell lymphoma and mononucleosis and something to do with Japan. In Città, Beth had always had more questions for Gianni than for Grazia, endless queries about his research and the makeup of blood and the cures for the various kinds of leukemia. Blood was a subject that Grazia did not want to hear about. Thus she did not come with him to New York.

Eating the lobster, pulling the tender bits of meat from the tiny crevices, Gianni asked Beth to feed him the meat. She did. Then he fed her a piece of the tail. He let his index finger linger on her lip, just long enough for her to become curious about his intentions. The candle on the table lit his face. The waiter approached to ask a question, but faded quickly back into the swirl of the restaurant. Beth showed Gianni secret crevices in the tail and fed him those bits, just flecks of meat on her finger, which he sucked off. He poured her another glass of wine. They spoke Italian, which she loved because it had been a long time since she had had a chance to. He reminded her a little of the violinist in his size and confidence. She thought, it flashed across her mind delightfully and painfully, that there was not a person in the world she could sleep with who would wound Cesare more. She wanted to wound Cesare. Gianni ordered a chocolate dessert, a mixture of cake and soufflé, oozy warm interior, a fashionable cake, popular in New York. He fed her spoonfuls of the chocolate, which she ate slowly, pretending to be innocent of her own seduction. Never once was Cesare mentioned. Gianni paid the bill and took her to his hotel and made love to her very gently and very carefully (as if he were handling delicate china that did not belong to him) beneath the cool pressed hotel sheets. Slowly enough, patiently enough, thoroughly enough that she couldn't do anything but explode with pleasure, until it began to dawn on her, horrified and too late to stop the inevitable, the notion itself working like an aphrodisiac, that this was just what Cesare had wanted.

Afterward, as Gianni's fingers drifted the lengths of her back, her bare arms, she pressed her cheek into the soft cool pillow and allowed herself to feel the burning sensation in her eyes and nose. She lay there, silent, for a long time. Gianni fell asleep. The hotel's thick windows kept all the noise of New York out. But she could see through a gap in the curtains that it was raining outside. She lit one of his cigarettes and smoked it and then another, watching the rain come down. She was not a smoker, never had been.

"Did this unfold as planned?" she asked Gianni before leaving. She half expected him to take out his wallet and pay her.

"He loves you," Gianni said.

 

"I hate you," she said to Cesare on the phone, glad somewhere for the excuse to call him.

"No you don't," he said.

"Why?" she asked. Then she started to cry. No one said a word for a while. She could hear the static in the line hissing and shimmying all the way across the Atlantic, all the way across Spain and the Mediterranean, beneath the Alps to Città.

Because I'm some part of you. I'm what you didn't have growing up. I'm your dead mother, I'm your father as he would have been, I'm the life you would have had had your mother not died. I'm impossible. I'm the Atlantic Ocean, another world. Because you are some inextricable part of me, my ambition, my possibility, my potential. You embody it, promise it, answer it. Because you refuse and I refuse to believe in the power of history and time.

Campanilismo,
Beth thought. Valeria came to mind, looming above the crowd at the Fiori party, her stricken face reaching desperately for the leg of the artist as he rises inevitably into the cloud as if she were trying to pull back time.

Benvenuto only lived in Florence. Think of how far we've come, she thought. Cesare can be with a Florentine. In three hundred years perhaps he'll be allowed to be with an American. Then she thought of Benvenuto fleeing love for what he wanted most, for what he wanted more than Valeria. Then Beth thought about herself, her own inability to leave America, her own allegiance, what she wanted most.
Campanilismo,
she thought again, picturing all the many skyscrapers of Manhattan, their spires shooting into the heavens. Her bell towers.

"Why do you need to torture me?" she asked. "Why do you need to humiliate me?"

"Because I want you to stop loving me," he said.

"I hate you," she said, contempt becoming seduction in their mad dance.

"Come visit me," he said.

"Pay for the ticket," she said.

"Certainly," he said.

"This feels like an addiction," she said.

"It's worse," he said. "It's a belief."

 

He sent her a plane ticket. They met in France at the Lac d'Annecy. Beth had never seen water that shade, emerald like the jewel. They met in Paris. They met in Milan on her way to visit Hunter (and Dina) in India. Her visits were secret. He never told his family. She did not tell Bea. The trips were fast, a few days, and awkward. At first, hope filled Beth. But she soon realized that distance had transformed them both into strangers and within only a few hours, a day, her hope would vanish. Cesare could not stand what New York had made of Beth, someone inelegantly scrounging for money through a complicated network of shady real estate deals that didn't even involve equity, someone who bought and spent on credit, someone desperate for more, chopping vegetables and believing she was becoming something. For Beth, Cesare had settled, settled into a life as a banker, loaning money to support other people's dreams. He no longer carried a book. Indeed, he never read, never wrote. She felt sad; she did not know him anymore. Even so, for a while they stubbornly believed that somehow they could return to before, make time stop, that they could still save each other from their lives.

Then his father died. He died late at night in his bed at home. His wife and daughter and son were there. Cesare stood by the bed, holding his father's hand, rubbing it to give comfort, silent tears about his eyes, silent promises about his lips. "Put out the cigarette," the father said to his boy. His boy felt very much like a boy—a reprimanded child—not a man saying good-bye to a man, but a boy who wanted to grow up and be admired by the one person who would not be there to appreciate the transformation. It was his turn to take the mantle, leave folly behind by annihilating Beth once and forever and, in doing so, annihilating himself. For what? "Put out the cigarette," his father had said, and soon thereafter he died.

Years later, Cesare sits beneath the fresco in the bright dark of that late-September night. For what? For what? He can see nothing but the tenderness of night, the daring of morning trying to push through the part in the thick velvet curtains.

 

The next meeting was in Città. Beth stayed four days and then flew home to New York knowing the love affair was finally over. Cesare was now a new and completely unrecognizable man. He detested Beth from the moment he saw her and it seemed he brought her to Italy simply to show her all the ways in which he now could not bear her. He would not kiss her; he feared she could have AIDS. He said he never would have married her, even at the height of their romance, because he knew she would never be able to bear him a son because her mother had only had a daughter and her father had only had daughters. "Leave my mother out of this," she said. He said that she was so disorganized she would lose her children on a street somewhere. He would not take her to Fiori. He would not take a day off from work to spend with her. Rather, he left her in his apartment (he had moved away from the family villa). It was an ugly modern apartment with views of the town and its mocking bell tower. Finally at the airport, as he dropped her off, he took her hands in his and held them warmly and said as if conceding something that he would be here for her as a brother, nothing more, but always as a brother.

"I don't hate you," she said to him, looking him sharply in the eye. Travelers streamed around them, all the sounds of an airport. A plane took off.

"You, your eyes, reminded me of your grandmother just then." For an instant he seemed tender. Then, as if trying to cauterize any weakness he said, "
Addio.
"

Such a cold word,
addio,
it jabbed her as he intended it to. Looking at Cesare, she could see only his father. But she did not say that. She said again, "I do not hate you," because she would not let him win. Everything inside of her ached, throbbed actually. She turned her back and disappeared into the terminal. She would not let him win because she was not talking to Cesare but to some impostor who had possessed the Cesare she had known because of circumstances that were far larger than and deeper than her ability to comprehend.

She flew home to New York, crying the entire way, banished, exiled, bereft. Suddenly somewhere over the Atlantic, waves way beneath like clouds, the water like sky, she sat upright. She would call her father. She saw him in front of her, holding her hand—her little hand warm in his big hand. She was four years old and he was playing with her; she was riding on his shoulders. "Run, Daddy, run," she used to say as she made him dash across the fields at Claire. She would interrupt him at work, in his office, in the fields, in the orchards, and make him get down and play with her, and he would. He always would. She had never really asked him, asked him with urgency, to come to her. Her requests had always been halfhearted; she'd never expected him to come. Now she would be urgent in her demand. She designed a plan. A fat old man sitting next to her on the plane asked if he could eat her meal. She had not even realized the meal had been sitting in front of her for a long time. Sunlight poured through the window. Her father. She would call her father. Simple as that. She would talk to him about love, about her mother. He would come to New York City and visit her. It became crucial that her father leave Claire for her. She was all hope, a muscle of hope and optimism.

 

"But you know I can't, darling," he said into the receiver.

"But I need you."

"It's all right to suffer, sweet girl." She had never asked him so completely and so eagerly, with so much resting on his answer. She had never asked him because she had not wanted to be rejected. It was easier for her to never ask than it was to ask and be told no. She imagined her mother tethered to her father's leg, anchoring him as if with ball and chain and lead and cement to Claire. Once again she hated her mother.

"Please," she whispered into the phone. "Please," she said again. She would not let him know how hard she was crying. In a nearby apartment, work was being done; a jackhammer was demolishing something large and tough. Jackson was silent. She could imagine all the beauty of Claire spreading out around him, the far and distant hills with the little farms glowing like miniatures, like prizes; the quiet songs of the birds, a tractor in the field. Silence. A golden silence. Silence that held potential, a remedy for all. Her father would drive in to New York City in the pickup, visit her in her apartment, bring her fresh lamb and eggs and apples from Claire, make a delicious meal with her, talk to her late into the night about love and love gone bad and love stopping time and the awful leap that occurs once time starts again, how time speeds up as if to make up for stopping, the horrendous shock of the real and the inevitable. He would give to her all the beauty of his pain and knowledge, everything she had been deprived of. He would stroke her hair, kiss her gently on the scalp, rub her back—his sweet girl, his little daughter three years old again when everything was as it should have been and she was in the blissful self-centered state of the age. He would look south out her windows and say, "What a wonderful world you have made for yourself." Perhaps he would say, "You're so like your mother." The potential of that silence, the thick cloud of it that held everything and nothing.