The Apprentice Lover (15 page)

I watched her, waiting until she drew herself from the water, loose-
limbed and slippery-skinned. She smoothed the wet, black hair behind her head. To myself, I quoted a favorite line from Catullus:
“Vivamus, mea Lesbea, atque amemus.”
(“Come, my Lesbea, let us live and love.”)

Now she walked toward me, her feet printing the travertine tiles. Yes, I said, I would be Lorenzo. I would be whomever, whatever, it took to make this happen, even if I jeopardized everything with Rupert Grant. It was time to live and love.

T
hat evening I had been invited to the villa of Dominick Bonano in Anacapri. It was my second visit to the Villa Vecchia, meaning “old house,” though it was fairly new, built in the fifties by a wealthy German manufacturer of bathroom fixtures. “The guy made the best goddamn toilet seats in Germany,” Bonano told me, showing me around the house in May. Standing in the doorway of one bathroom, he said, with his usual eloquence, “This is the best place in Capri to take a crap.”

I liked the way the Villa Vecchia had been built on many levels to accommodate the ragged, sloping hillside, with several terraces overlooking Punta Tresete and the Tyrrhenian Sea. In the distance, Vesuvius was faintly visible, an exhausted legend wreathed in scarlet haze, a reminder that no life is without the threat of unforeseen and violent erasure. The cone of Ischia rose between Capri and the mainland: an island that, in my mind, belonged to Auden, who had owned a house there.

Bonano was a self-centered but amiable raconteur, highly intelligent despite his raw manner. He delighted in stories of village life in Anacapri. My first night with him over dinner he explained that the liveliest procession of the year took place on the Feast of Saint Anthony. The local bands, in uniforms with gold lace on their shoulders harking back to the Bourbon kings of Naples, would huff and puff, threading the town's narrow streets
a tempo di màrcia.
“In the old days,” he said, “everybody in Anacapri would get up at four in the morning. After a series of masses in
the cathedral came the big parade at noon.
La processione!
Kids dressed up like angels flew by, then came the
Figlie di Maria—
skinny-legged, angelic girls in white robes and blue veils.” But his favorites were the old ladies, “
bizzocche,
black dresses and veils, these old prunes who never lost their cherries. They stayed true to their first love, Alex—Jesus Christ.”

It relaxed me to hear Bonano talk. So like my Uncle Vinnie, I kept thinking. Crude but funny, with a bemused slant on the world. Nothing got too serious around Vinnie or Dom. They surfed the world, finding just the right waves, holding their balance. If they toppled into the sea, they got up and shrugged it off.
C'est la vie.
Got back up on their boards and caught the next wave. Even Bonano's wife, Rose, was familiar—a version of Vinnie's Gloria. A plumpish woman with mounds of platinum hair teased (in sixties style) to a dome, Rose liked to call attention to her origins in the American southwest, near Albuquerque, by draping herself in turquoise and silver. Heavy earrings tugged at each lobe, and she clanged as she walked, with several bracelets rattling on each arm. Her father, Vera told me, had made a fortune in movie theaters, owning (as Bonano claimed) “half the movie theaters in Nevada, Wyoming, and New Mexico.” Now her brother Rocco ran the chain, though Rose scooped a sizable yearly profit from the company.

Not that she needed it. Bonano was himself a millionaire several times over. He frequently hit the national best-seller lists with his mob family sagas. They were big books, often running to six or seven hundred pages. “You don't wanna read them in bed,” he quipped, “since they might drop on your chest and smother you.” Three of them had been made into movies, and one—
The Last Limo on Staten Island
—had pulled in several Oscars, including Best Actor for Anthony Quinn as Carlo Mobilio,
capo di capi
of the Mazzino crime family. “It's not Lit,” Bonano told me, during my initial dinner at the Villa Vecchia, “but neither is it shit. Look at the best-seller list sometime—there's a lot of good writers on the lists, for a few weeks anyway. Mailer and Vidal, for example. Or that Roth guy, who wrote the Portnoy book—the one about jerking off into a piece of liver. Not my idea of literature, but the critics went nuts for it.” He called the critics “a bunch of assholes who identify with the kind of guy who enjoys jerking off into somebody else's liver.”

Bonano despised the “U” crowd, as he called them: writers who lived and taught in universities and colleges. “They're bums, mostly, and they've screwed up everything. Their books are about nothing. Writing about writing, for God's sake! Who gives a shit about that? A novel has to tell a goddamn story.” He argued that plot was central to good fiction. “Why do you think Dickens and Balzac pulled in the big numbers? They were the kings, Alex. They invented the whole goddamn form. We're still feeding at their trough. And those college writers who want to play around with the form—hey, it's a free country—but they will screw it up. Pretty soon we're gonna lose the readers. One reader lost is gone for good. It's TV all the way from there, and the programs ain't gonna interest Jean-Paul Sartre.”

I couldn't really argue with him, not having a vast acquaintance with the “U” writers he mentioned. Like him, I admired Graham Greene, as did everyone on Capri. “He's the best, the cream of the cream,” Bonano maintained, slapping the table. “You don't compete with Graham when it comes to storytelling. You just tip your hat to the gentleman. It's called professional respect.” He added, “The guy sure knows about spies. He was one himself in Africa, during the war.”

I asked if he saw much of Greene, hoping I might catch a glimpse of the novelist myself. Bonano shook his head sadly. “
Il Maestro,
he seems to spend more time in France these days, somewhere on the Riviera. Got himself a girlfriend there, I'm told. A French lady. But once or twice in the summer, you'll see him in the piazzetta. You want to meet him, I'll arrange it. He's a pretty friendly guy, for an Englishman, though you'd never guess it from his books.”

“They're depressing,” said Rose. “What's that one about Mexico, with the priest who drinks?”

“
The Power and the Glory,”
I said.

“I like that one,” Bonano said. “The way I see it, I'm a good Catholic and so forth, but I don't go around in a cold sweat about heaven or hell. You can tell Graham is a convert. They're always the guys who take up the collection.”

Somehow I wasn't surprised to hear that the Bonanos owned an apartment in Manhattan, on East 77th, overlooking Central Park. “You can't
live on Capri all year or you go stir-crazy,” Bonano explained. “Everybody gets into your pocket. It's a small place. But we're here half of the year—March to October. Those are the good months.” He told me, again, that I would like his daughter. “She's your type,” he said.

So there I was, revisiting the Villa Vecchia, ready to meet my destiny in the shape of Toni Bonano. I fought off a queasy feeling, guessing that she would not especially please the eye—the fruit can't fall too far from the tree—and that I would regret having agreed to this encounter. No girl likes to meet a guy anointed by her parents, and Toni would already have been made wary by their enthusiasm. On the other hand, given her parents, it seemed likely that she had grown accustomed to their match-making. They had not been shy about pushing us together, so I imagined this was not the first time she had been tossed into the company of a chosen suitor.

The actual Toni Bonano confounded my expectations.

“So why did you drop out of Columbia?” was her first question, popped within seconds of my meeting her. “I mean, you were so close to graduation. It doesn't add up.”

“It's a long story,” I said, “and it doesn't make sense anyway. Just something I did.”

“You're impulsive?”

“I guess.”

We had been left to our own devices on the terrace while her parents “finished the dinner,” as if two local cooks weren't up to their elbows in pots in the kitchen.

Toni was a solidly built but striking young woman, taller than both her parents, from whom nature had cleverly and benevolently picked and chosen features, taking the slight arch in her father's nose and her mother's appealing high cheekbones. Her enthusiasm for track-and-field had served her well; in fact, the long hours of racing around gravel tracks in empty stadiums had slimmed and sculpted what might, under less benign conditions, have become a hefty body. That she was big-boned was not in question, but she carried herself gracefully. The Dalton School in New York and Bryn Mawr had worked their class magic, and Toni shared none of her parents' crudeness. Yet she had held on to their unaf
fected warmth and energy, and her eyes—large chestnut eyes beneath blond-streaked hair—fixed me in their gaze.

“You ask a lot of questions,” I said.

“I'm a nosy person,” she responded. “I hope you don't mind if I ask a lot of questions.”

I shook my head. “Feel free. But I might lie.”

She tipped her head slightly to one side. “You want to be a writer, so you're probably nosy, too.”

“I'm curious about things.”

“That's a euphemism. You're nosy—just like me.”

I grinned, finding her superbly pleasant.

“And shy, too?” she asked.

“Only in the company of others,” I said.

She passed over my little joke. “I don't meet so many shy people. The places I live—you know, you don't find them so much in the academic world. There are lots of neurotics around, and people who can't communicate. Navel-gazers. But that's different. The people I meet are usually passive-aggressive, and that's pretty boring.”

I felt my ears burning. Without knowing it, Toni had exposed raw emotional flesh. Yet I liked it that she had no fear of stepping on sensitive ground, and found something fresh and direct about her lack of pretense. After the confusing social scene at the Villa Clio, this atmosphere felt liberating. Its distinctly American qualities appealed to me as well. Americans often presented themselves as frank and friendly, available for immediate contact, although these contacts were rarely—were not intended to be—lasting or deep. I had noticed at Columbia that guys in my dorm acted like your oldest friend within minutes of first meeting them; yet only a few relationships developed beyond the initial warm flush. America was, in the end, a lonely country, full of bluff and cheerful creatures who didn't really know what to say to each other after the first flurry of superficial bonhomie.

“Daddy likes you,” Toni said. “Mom does, too.” She lit a Marlboro, offering me one first, which I refused. Tobacco had never interested me.

“I'm glad,” I said, aware that they hardly knew me. “I like them, so it's mutual.”

“They're fish out of water here. Fortunately for them, they haven't noticed.”

“But you like Capri, don't you? I mean, it's so beautiful.”

“I could never live here, not permanently. But it's fun to visit. What a bizarre bunch.” A conspiratorial look crossed her face. “The Grants, for example. Is that going okay?”

“It's all right.”

“So you don't like them. I guessed as much.”

“They're pretty interesting,” I said. “There's a lot going on.”

“Rupert's too domineering.”

“What writer isn't?”

“Daddy.”

“I don't know him well enough to say.”

She stepped neatly around this subject. “I've known Rupert since I was a little girl.”

There was a long pause. “He's eccentric,” I said.

“That's way too generous. Only on Capri would his lifestyle make any sense.”

“You think it makes sense here?”

“He's always had girls around him. They're his Muses, or so he claims. Daddy thinks he would prefer boys anyway—the Brits all do.” She ran a hand through her lovely hair. “I wonder how Vera copes.”

“Pretty well,” I said.

“It's called repression.”

“Ah, I forgot. You're a psychology major.”

“Daddy told you?”

“The first time I met him.”

“And what else has he told you about me?”

“Only good things.”

She took a long drag on her cigarette, then exhaled. “Have you read Norman O. Brown?”

“He's just a name to me.”

“Have a look into
Life Against Death.
It's a totally new look at Freud. He argues that we should take Freud seriously. That would mean getting rid of repression altogether. Bizarre, I know—but it follows.”

“Maybe we need repression. Maybe things would fall apart without it.”

Toni grew animated, having guided the talk onto familiar ground. “That's what Freud suggests in
Civilization and Its Discontents
. Or seems to. But if you look closer, he's arguing for more than that. Repression has fucked us up. We need it, for sure. But enough is enough. We're repressing each other all the time, in personal and larger ways—like in Vietnam. Who needs that? That's Thanatos, death.”

“More Eros, huh?”

“Lots more,” she said.

I said, “Freud would have adored Rupert Grant.”

“That's just old-fashioned British licentiousness. Not the same thing as genuine polymorphous perversity. A counterfeit version, maybe.”

In walked Rose Bonano, ablaze in a loose red shift with golden spangles. Her lipstick was reddish brown, unnatural, but the same color as her fingernails and toenails, which poked through her leather sandals. She carried a plastic tray that teemed with antipasto goodies: slices of local sausage, chunks of parmesan, and gray-green olives in tiny white bowls. “You guys are having a brainy talk, I see. You better eat.”

“We were discussing Freud,” I said.

“Hey, she's a psychology major,” said Bonano, appearing on the terrace with a bottle of wine in one hand—a rosé from Ravello. He leaned on his daughter's shoulder. “She's gorgeous, right? And smart!”

Rose lowered her eyebrows, and I suspected it would be no fun to get on her wrong side.

Bonano feigned a guilty look. “Okay, honey. I'll behave. No bragging about my only child. So what if she's a genius and happens to look like a movie star?”