L'America (6 page)

When Beth returned, it was the beginning she liked to dwell on most, the clear dance with Fate, Fate's hand coming down, pushing her this way and that. The word
fate
is related to the words
fame, fairy, nefarious,
and
preface.
In common is the root
fan.
It means "to speak." Pause
on fairy:
enchantment, magic, illusion:
fata,
one of the Fates.
See
Fata Morgana, a fairy celebrated in medieval tales of chivalry. In Arthurian legend Morgan Le Fay is the half sister of Arthur, the wife of Uriens, King of Gore, and is a great necromancer. She tries to procure the death of her brother and attempts to slay her sleeping husband. She is evil; she personifies fortune living in the bottom of a lake in the
Orlando Innamorato
of Boiardo. She is a mirage, one seen especially (and frequently) at the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily. She is enchantment, magic, illusion. She is Clotho spinning her thread; she is Lachesis determining the direction and the length of our respective lots; she is Atropos inflexibly cutting off that lot; she is the Weird Sisters of Norse myth. Think divine foreordination. Think that which is destined or decreed. Think final outcome, end, ruin, disaster, doom, death, as in "to bemoan a friend's fate," as in "the fated day" or "the fated sky" or "the fateful cawings of the crow." Think, fairy: enchantment, magic, illusion. Think fortune lying at the bottom of a lake, shimmering dreams on a body of water, illusions in rose and lavender skipping upon the slight waves. For how long have we been searching for a pattern, a meaning, an interpretation, a reason—reason?

Beth was no different: she was a girl, a woman, who wanted to know why. She was as susceptible as the rest of us to the whatifs, to the romantic notions of something personal having implications larger than the personal, some divine pattern or at least purpose. It was there within her, this story, her myth; its power receded with time, but the questions persisted like wonderful rare butterflies we are eager to capture and preserve. Did he love her? Does he love her still? Will he love her always? What is the relationship between Fate and Chance, does the one differ from the other? Is love simply, as Dante said, an accident? If, instead, Fate does exist, for what purpose did it lead her there?

Who among us doesn't have a story that she loves to repeat simply because it brings back something—life?

***

There.
Summer of 1982. Hot. Beth is in Europe with her friend Sylvia Summerhaze, who has never been to Europe before. Sylvia is a country girl from Snyder County, Pennsylvania, and has been Beth's friend since the second grade. Even after Beth moved to New York they stayed friends, seeing each other whenever Beth visited her father, spending extravagant weekends in New York together with Beth's grandmother. Beth is the leader. (Secretly she loves the role of the sophisticated guide. She has been to Italy two times so far. Some small part of her thinks of herself as Italian. She speaks the language fluently and thinks she has more style than she actually does.) They are traveling around on EurailPasses for two months, at the end of which Sylvia will return home to college and Beth will go to Italy to live with Beatrice Nuova and her family in the northern Italian town of Città. Beth is taking a year off before college funded by her grandmother and from money Beth earned as a waitress in Manhattan's West Village. Now the two girls are in Spain. Spain is sponsoring the World Cup. Italy will win for the first time in forty-four years, beating West Germany and making of Paolo Rossi a big star on the world stage—star striker. Beth and Sylvia have just graduated from high school. Reagan is president. John Hinckley Jr. is on trial for attempting to murder him. In March, John Belushi died of an overdose. Israel has just invaded Lebanon, stirring up the Middle East. But Europe, for the summer anyway, belongs to Beth and Sylvia. They are eighteen years old, giddy with possibility, traveling with their backpacks, their Indian print skirts and Jesus sandals, a little bit of money in their money belts, and a guidebook entitled
Europe on $5 a Day.
The dollar is strong—a very important detail for two American girls in Europe.

The story begins really (the beginning of
there,
that is) in San Sebastiàn, where the Golfe de Gascogne meets the Bay of Biscay in that gentle curve of land as Europe turns west from France to Spain, reaching toward America. The mouth of the Urumea River opens into the particularly protected Shell Bay, and rising through gardens and promenades, tamarinds and railings, are Mount Urgull and Mount Igueldo with views of the sea and the islet of Santa Clara that floats just offshore. Beth had remembered reading in a novel about San Sebastiàn, a popular seaside resort for the royal and the rich, known for its balconies and its food. She didn't remember which novel—she believed it was something by Hemingway—but she wanted to visit the town simply because she had read about it.

She wanted to hitchhike from Deva to Bilbao, visit Bolivar and Guernica and also the birthplace of Saint Ignacio, founder of the Jesuits. She wanted to be in the heart of Basque country, land of Euskera, a language with unknown origins. Of the two of them, Beth was the dreamer. She was driven by romantic notions and whims, a desire to make the impossible happen. Sylvia was the pensive one and the planner, infinitely practical. She read the guidebooks. She had notepads and pencils, knew how to spot gypsies (cute little kids with dirty faces and dirty clothes who'd take you for everything you had with a piece of cardboard as their tool), knew how to read the train schedules and find hotels cheaper than youth hostels. Beth loved exploding Sylvia's plans and Sylvia loved Beth for doing so. In Innsbruck at the train station, way past midnight and everything closed, it was Beth who met Hans, a nice man with gentle eyes and a gentle face and a slight stutter who offered them his grandmother's bed for the night because she was out of town for the season. "He might be a murderer," Sylvia said. "Oh, come on," Beth said impatiently, looking her in the eye and then looking around the sad, quiet train station. "Would you rather sleep here or in a bed?" It was a big warm bed with a huge soft goose down comforter. He fed them soft-boiled eggs at 4
A.M.,
using his grandmother's silver spoons. Then he let them sleep well into the afternoon.

"How did you know he wouldn't murder us?" Sylvia asked, curling up to Beth in the grandmother's bed. The bed and the room smelled like rose petals and old age. "He still could," Beth said, and fell asleep.

The next day she said, "Season! Murderers don't have grandmothers who go away for the season."

From Austria to Paris to Nice to San Sebastiàn they zigzagged their way, the itinerary designed by their whims. In Nice they met Chas, an American who serenaded them from the street beneath the tiny balcony of their tiny pension, singing Cat Stevens songs.

"It's him, it's him," Sylvia said, lighting up. She had a large smile that opened her entire face.

"Who?" Beth asked. They were having a midnight snack of
pain au chocolat
and white wine that tasted a little like whiskey. They could buy all the wine they liked and no one ever said a thing. They could sleep late and no one ever said a thing. They could eat chocolate for dinner, lunch, and breakfast, and no one said a thing.

"The cute man from the single down the hall." Sylvia leaned over the balcony and smiled down to him on the street, his songs rising up to them as if the three of them were the only people in the world. From the balcony the girls could glimpse the silver Mediterranean seeming to hold the moon. Beth thought he was singing to both of them, but learned, when he changed his easy plans to come with them to San Sebastian and climb 425 feet up the famous Mount Urgull (presided over solemnly by the imposing statue of the Sacred Heart) that Chas was serenading Sylvia alone—beautiful Sylvia Summerhaze, with her long auburn hair and her sea green eyes (set just a fraction too close together).

Sylvia was Beth's best friend and Beth was jealous, the way a lover might be. Freshman year in high school they had once contemplated sharing a boyfriend simply so they could experience everything together. The boy was Jacob, a blond drummer in a band called Random Joe. Random Joe played a lot of the Police, and Jacob sort of looked like that band's drummer, Stewart Copeland—tall and lanky with dusty blond hair that framed a long angular face with lips as red as lipstick. "He has a strong jaw," Sylvia liked to say. And she kissed him and shortly thereafter Beth kissed him and, lying in bed at Beth's farm, the girls compared notes. Sometimes what Beth wanted most was simply to kiss Sylvia, one of those unspoken ideas that even she herself did not fully comprehend. Jacob sang "Walking on the Moon." He sang it often for Beth and Sylvia. He said he loved Sylvia for her mind and Beth for her body. For a while Beth liked the idea of being liked for her body. She had confidence in her mind.

On Mount Urgull, Beth was admiring the view, her face turned away from Chas and Sylvia, feeling quite light with independence and with the excitement of Chas's company. Chas was four years older than the girls. He had just graduated from Harvard and was working his way around the world before getting serious with a job. He spoke of trekking in Nepal, riding elephants in India, teaching English in Taiwan. He was a good boy, a gentleman in the making, but a type all the same, with his guitar and easy manner. The kind you see traveling the world, privileged and rich, trying on poverty for a year or two before settling down to earn millions in some banking job or other, this excursion a reminder for the rest of his life of what he had seen of the world and of what he didn't want, though he would never admit it. This type, he spoke of eating dog in China just as enthusiastically as he spoke of camel treks, eager to let people know he really had been adventurous—once upon a time, long ago. Back then he had slept on thin mattresses with bedbugs and cockroaches, slept in huts on dirt floors, lived without water for a week, contracted giardia and hepatitis. Oh, but the Taj Mahal was stunning, shining in the heat of Uttar Pradesh with all those cute poor children begging for bonbons and school pencils. Through the young eyes of Beth and Sylvia, Chas was simply an adventurer, all bravado and fearlessness, traveling in the footsteps of the great explorers who came before him, from Marco Polo to Vespucci to Kerouac. And the girls loved that about Chas, that stories and ideas spilled from him—exotic expectations, a desire to experience everything and all. The world was his and the girls found that seductive; at night, curled up together in their bed, they would dream of their own adventures, of taking a world tour, of being brave enough to head to Africa.

But up there on Mount Urgull, determined Chas took Beth's turned back as a chance to sneak up behind Sylvia and kiss her. (Later, Sylvia would tell Beth that she had not been surprised by the kiss, that indeed she had been hoping for it and would have kissed him herself if he hadn't first. "The desire," she said, "had been visible." "Desire?" Beth asked, wanting to laugh. What did they really know about desire?) And just as their lips met, Beth turned toward them. Then, before they could see her seeing them, she turned away.

The kiss hit her like a slap. A rush of envy and fury pushed against her chest, caught at her throat. She saw Chas stealing Sylvia from her. That was the only picture she could see. Suddenly she hated Chas, understood him (just as suddenly) not as an exotic adventurer but as a fraud, a thief taking Sylvia for his own, seducing her with his guitar because she was an easy sweet girl. He would carry her along until grabbed by some other whim. The picture was there, developed in that quick glimpse of Sylvia's head leaning back, her lips reaching up to his. Beth saw them skipping across the world, from elephants to tall mountains to little Chinese men eager to learn English. His lips so gently on Sylvia's, his hands so lightly on her back, as soft as the light summer breeze, which caused her long auburn hair to dance. Their embrace was gentle, it was loving, it was romantic. Beth could feel it as if Chas had been kissing her. She wished Chas had been kissing her.

For a long time Beth would think about this moment. She would think about it once she met Cesare in Greece and everything and everyone became easily dispensable, sacrificial even, and nothing mattered but more of Cesare. She was struck by the uncontrollable will of love, the awesome force of it, which created indifference and undeniable selfishness in regard to others, yet exquisite selflessness in regard to the other, the lover. She and Cesare would be together in Greece for just four days, on the Aeolian island of Páros. They would meet on that first morning as Cesare spoke ancient Greek to the landlady of his pension and as the sun lit his black hair, turning it almost blue. Have you ever been watching a movie when the film burned? It starts as a small hole and then grows. As it grows, it devours the image, takes over the entire screen, blotting out the picture with white light until the film snaps. Do you remember how quick it is, how all encompassing, nothing matters but that hole, the increasing size of it, the triumph of it?

 

Beth gave Sylvia the silent treatment as they drifted back to the hotel, Sylvia all but oblivious as she floated along at Chas's side, believing they held a secret from Beth, a secret that made the intensity of their desire all the more powerful. Walking ahead, Beth hated both of them. She was fury itself—irrational fury, she realized—threatened, afraid, as if somewhere she did believe that Sylvia would abandon her, leave her there in Spain by herself.

"But what's wrong, Beth?" Sylvia asked once they were back in their room and a good ten minutes had passed without a word from Beth. Sylvia danced around trying on dresses. She wanted to tell Beth about the kiss, but was afraid. She had only a vague understanding of that fear; she simply understood that it would be better if she didn't mention kissing Chas. All that was on her mind was seeing Chas again, kissing Chas again. She had even liked the smell of his breath. It was as if she were still inside that kiss, a bubble surrounding just the two of them. She imagined she could sneak out for a midnight walk once Beth was asleep. Seeing him again was an urgent need. She wanted to be free of Beth. She wanted to know everything about Chas, to reexperience that wonderful jetting sensation.