L'America (36 page)

***

Beth stubbed her toe walking back to the pool. A frog leaped in the pond with a splash, and a butterfly settled in her hair. The cicadas sang, the heat pooled in her eyes, making her whole head swim. Her daughter ran back and forth from the pool's stairs to the shower with some little friend she had made. Beth didn't pay attention. Hunter kissed her. A few other people lay on chaises beneath umbrellas, sleeping, reading, smoking. "I'm so hot," she said. "You are?" he asked teasingly, flirting. He kissed her again and she hated him. She turned away. His breath smelled. She tried to read a novel but couldn't concentrate. She tried to read a book about a woman's life told through stories about food but found it irritating and unbelievable. She jumped in the pool and felt refreshed but no more calm. She wanted to see him. She would leave to find him. A beautiful woman dangled her long legs in the pool. Her lotioned body seemed to absorb the heat. She deftly smoked a cigarette and read
Elle.
Beth wondered if that were Cesare's wife. She knew his wife's name, Isabella. Beth wanted to say out loud, "Isabella," wanted Isabella to respond, wanted to swim over to Isabella and pull herself up next to Isabella and have a conversation with Isabella. Valeria and her new companion were screeching with delight, splashing each other with the cold shower water. Beth would say to Isabella, "I am Beth." And Isabella would know exactly who she was, and the knowledge would make her nervous, would threaten her serene beauty and calm. And Beth would learn from Isabella how not a day passed that Cesare did not think of her; she would learn that he had a shrine devoted to pictures of her on his office wall. Isabella would say to her that he should have married her, that it would remain the one big regret of his life. "Really?" Beth would ask, surprised by this truth, but not really. Hunter tried to talk to her, but she could not hear what he said so anxious was she with love. She wanted to tell him that she had seen Cesare, ask him what to do, deflate it, make it normal, not that big a deal. Perhaps they could all have dinner with Bear. Cesare could see how far she had come, that she had made something of herself. She felt ridiculous for thinking this, but imagined Bear, shedding his cash, would be proof that she were someone. "If only you didn't want to be a cook," Cesare had once said to her, as if that one desire were the cause of their divide. She stood up and wrapped her red sarong around her waist and told Hunter she was going to lie down before going out with Bear, who was coming to collect them in an hour or so for another night of rich food and wine. She would find him. She was all determination and belief. She would see him again. She would make him speak.

 

If you were there, standing in the middle of the lawn, looking toward the house you would have seen that all the windows on the second floor but one were shuttered. You would have seen the glass room jutting from the facade like a miniature crystal palace. You would have seen a woman inside in a silk slip, sitting in an upholstered armchair with big flowers in gold brocade, a vase of cut roses standing tall on the coffee table upon which rested her feet. If you had zoomed your lens in to get a closer look, you would have seen that she was crying, faint tears that could easily have been confused for sweat. But at her chest, you'd have seen there, love fairly palpitating, swelling the rise of her breast. You'd have seen a woman caught, frozen in a summer heat, caught in the divide, the grand chasm. If you were observing even somewhat keenly you would have seen the man in the one unshuttered window to the right of the glass palace. You would have seen that his eyes were trained on the woman's back. If you were godlike and could feel what this couple felt, you would know that she felt those eyes on her back and that it was the sensation of them that froze her to the brocade armchair. He was speaking to her. She was speaking to him. They were saying what they had always wanted to say. I love you still. I have never stopped loving you.
What has haunted you, what have you longed for and missed and dreamed of?
She was asking a million questions.
Do you know who you are now?

Bet, he said with his beautiful accent. Bet, you are always the same.

You are mine, she said. Silence.

You married Hunter, he finally said, that old tinge of jealousy.

You knew I would. Just as I always knew you'd marry a woman from Città. Only, I thought she'd be big and fat and hideous.

He laughed. I didn't like to think about who you would marry, he said.

You had a choice. You chose laziness, she said.

You chose, too, he said. But chose not to believe that you were choosing.

And they fell silent again for a while the way you do when having difficult conversations. The pause became like a breath. She contemplated the statement. Had she made a choice? Had she chosen something else over him? That's not the way she remembered it. He chose a Florentine who made silk hats, one of which he cruelly gave to her. The afternoon light was turning golden. A light breeze stirred the heat. On the coffee table by her feet were two empty jars of strawberry jam, licked clean by Valeria, who did not like the French cuisine and was eating only jam.

I could not compete with your ambition, he said. And I could not stop it.

I wasn't ambitious, she said. Only for you.

Be honest, Bet, he said. Give that to yourself.

You're being so pragmatic, she said. Didn't she already know all of this? What they wanted was to live something unlivable, step inside the lost chance.

Out the windows Beth could see her daughter twirling across the grass with her companion from the pool. She knew it just then—that was Cesare's son. They stopped at the frog pond, started poking it with sticks. And the pretty woman with her long legs dangling into the pool was his wife.

That's Leonardo, she said.

And Valeria? he asked.

The perfect ending, she said.

Always a romantic, he said.

Are you happy? she asked.

Are you happy? he asked.

Valeria and the boy dashed across the grass holding hands. The boy had long dark ringlets that shimmered around his round face. The sunlight came through the glass and pricked her on the shoulders.

She feels his eyes on her back, continuing their slow burn. The children dart through sprinklers, fanning cold water across the unnaturally emerald grass.

Do I have a choice now? She remembers their first kiss. The children pause to inspect something, side by side, heads close, they look carefully into the grass at some treasure they find magical. What language are they speaking? Valeria bursts up like a fountain suddenly turned on and runs away from the boy with the treasure in her hand. He chases her and she throws it at him and then leaps into the sprinkler again. Her daughter's body is strong and agile. Beth loves that body, loves scooping it up in her arms, pulling Valeria to her chest to hear the constant of her heartbeat.

How could I have asked you to do what I could not? he says.

Tears in her nose and at the base of her throat. Her chest is swollen with them. You should have asked me. That should have been my decision to make.

Hunter now appears on the lawn. He seems somehow small, stooped, old. Valeria runs into his arms. The little boy stands at Hunter's side, looking up to him. He kneels down and begins to help the children with something. The sun is slipping off the day, casting light, spraying the room with gold. She stands up. Hunter disappears.

Cesare wills her not to turn. If she turns just now she will see him. He knows she knows he is there. He can see her in her pink slip. He can see the sharp angles of her shoulder bones. He wants her to turn and not to turn. If only she would turn. He wants to see her face once more, see some signal on it. Now the children catch crickets in the palms of their hands.

A maid knocks on the door, then enters. In her soft French she says she is here to prepare the room for the evening. She turns down the bed. She clears off the empty jars of jam from the coffee table. She begins to pull the heavy curtains across the tall windows. Beth asks her to leave the curtains open. "
Pardon,
" the maid says, "
pardon.
" Beth hears the children squealing outside. She wants to see him. Just for an instant. She wants to know if he is there, if she is right. Has he been speaking to her? She feels those eyes; they are there, his eyes. She wants to ask the maid to tell her if a man is sitting in the window, the one with the open shutters? Is he there? What is he doing? Is he looking this way? He is telling her not to turn. She starts to turn. She pleads with him to wait. I want to touch you again, she says. I want to see you, smell you, breathe you, feel you, be you. She is invincible, golden in the golden light in her glass palace. The sensation is exquisite, the sensation is life in all its depth and beauty, all blurry with chaos and confusion and longing and will. It becomes a game almost, with her will. Just one quick glance back. She hears the boisterous voice of Bear downstairs, gently commanding. She hears the children. She sees Valeria, sees her thick dark hair, wet from the sprinklers, whipping against the grass as she turns cartwheels. The boy is no good at them, but he tries. She thinks of the fireman and his dead parents and she remembers him sitting at the table at Claire telling her the story. "Before I got there, before I saw the man in the door of my house, standing there telling me to go away, it had been real. I had seen my mother. I had seen my father. They'd been alive." She sits down.

In the morning they all flew home.

Morning comes as it always does. Pale blue at first, but you can tell it will be a beautiful day, one of those cloudless September days that make it seem the whole world is clear. The sun, creeping into the sky, burns off the night's thick fog and though it is early, the sun is high enough already to light the snowcapped mountains, to make them shimmer, miragelike. If he were to stand up and part the curtains, the mountains in the distance would greet him, floating islands in the sea of sky. But he sits still, in his velvet chair, waiting. Waiting for his son to rise, for his wife to stir, for the momentum of the day to begin, to push him along. But the light leaking through the velvet curtains spells with certainty the nature of the day. This light catches in Valeria's longing, pleading eyes.
The brilliance of the artist,
Beth had said.
He leaves it up to us to interpret, and how we choose reveals just a bit more about ourselves.

He contemplates the painting now. Not the outsized girl or her love or the party carrying on around them, but rather the small details: the bell tower at the edge of the town, the hill of flowers, the road (no more than a thin line) running down from the town toward the lake. He will drive that road today. He thinks of how little the landscape has changed in five hundred years. He will drive that road today with his wife to speak with construction workers and a designer and a stonemason, all people involved with the construction of the pool. Once it was a day's drive by horse and carriage from Città to Fiori. Now it takes half an hour by car. The pool, once finished, will be where his father's vegetable garden is, jutting, it would seem, from a wall of rock, giving the illusion of being suspended in the air high above the lake. The pool, once finished, will be the first change to the landscape in five hundred years. The idea sweeps across his mind, as it has many times before, but now, instead of triggering a pang of guilt, it makes him bold. What else will he do? Where will his son be in twenty years?

On the table beside him is a phone, beside the phone is an ashtray, in the ashtray are a dozen partially smoked and stubbed out cigarettes. Behind the table are the drawn curtains with light leaking through, behind the curtains are the snowcapped Alps, beyond the Alps lies the rest of the world dappled with the multitudes of unhistoric lives, with the yous and the mes living our hidden myths, offering our small kindnesses. The piece of paper holding the e-mail message falls from Cesare's hand to the floor. He hears the soft sound of his child's feet shuffling to the toilet; he hears the child pee and then flush the toilet. He hears his wife call after the child telling him softly and with love to do what he has already done. Cesare smells the ashes in the ashtray, feels the smoke in his lungs. He is not a smoker, but it feels good to feel it there now.

Valeria married the year after Benvenuto left. She married a man figured in the painting. He is the only guest whose eyes address the viewer, but is so small you might not notice him. They had three children and he prospered as a lawyer working for many of the industries thriving in the already rich town of Città. They lived together into old age and then he died and then she died and then her children died and then her children's children died and so on and so forth. And now Cesare sits beneath her, able to realize for the first time in the forty-three years he's been lucky enough to contemplate this painting, that this moment, falling so precisely in the center of After and Before, captures not only her entire life but that of twenty generations of her family—spells it, the pleading desire to be free and not free.

"
Babbo?
" Leonardo calls. He stands in front of Cesare rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He climbs into his father's lap to nestle. Leonardo smells like sleep. His little body is warm. Cesare holds his boy tightly, feels the rhythm of his breath. He runs his fingers through the child's thick black hair, inhaling the sweet scent of him. Valeria, looming tall in her fresco, presides over them with her question of freedom. The child grows bigger and bigger and bigger in his arms. He is a teenager who wants to study in America. He is twenty-three years old and wants to teach in America. He is thirty years old and wants to marry an American and build a house with her somewhere in Connecticut. He is forty years old with three English-speaking children living in rural America. (
Married to my Valeria?
he imagines Beth asking.
Always a romantic,
he imagines answering.
Is that what you want for your son?
he could imagine her asking.
For him to live the life you didn't get to live? Are you sure?)
Cesare holds the boy now with everything he has and only then, only after the night and the fog and the story of it all, after five hundred years culminating in an American dream, only then does he begin to cry.