The Apprentice Lover (16 page)

“Do your best to ignore Daddy,” said Toni.

Bonano beamed. “Why not? Join the crowd.”

We settled in for a jolly evening. The Bonano clan treated me like family, asking about Massolini Construction, my parents and grandparents, my Italian roots. I summoned a few family stories—most of them about my grandfather and namesake—but never mentioned Nicky. Although I never quite lied, I gave the impression I was an
only child—like Toni. When the conversation shifted to Vietnam and the national lottery, I pretended my number was so high I could never be drafted. To my relief, everyone at the Villa Vecchia opposed the war. Indeed, Bonano had signed a major petition against the bombing of Cambodia that appeared in the
New York Times
. “I'm not a protester,” he said, “but this thing in Asia, it's out of control. Nixon is crazy. Why bomb Cambodia anyway? What have they done? It's going to make everything worse, believe me. Stir up the hornets. Watch what happens there—a nice little country, and kaboom—up in smoke.” He talked about Cambodian and Laotian politics with no apparent strain, reaching back easily in time to the fifties and before. I was surprised, and duly chastened, by this knowledge of Southeast Asian history. It was too easy to dismiss a man like Dom Bonano because of his manner and appearance.

Throughout dinner, which took its usual Italian time, I was conscious of the ticking clock. Marisa might be taking a bath now, thinking about me, planning to visit the cottage. The prospect of lying beside her was strange but thrilling. I felt buoyed by the wine, by the friendly conversation and genuine interest turned toward me. In gratitude, I complimented Rose on the food, assuming that she was responsible for the menu, though aware she hadn't personally prepared each item.

“I see you've been in the kitchen with Vera,” she said. “Be careful. She'll want you to start a trattoria with her. She even asked
me,
and I hate cooking.”

I explained that I loved the time spent in the kitchen with Vera, who had entered dozens of her best recipes into my journal. Only that afternoon she had lectured me on cotechino, a pork sausage roll that you covered with prosciutto and served with a rich, onion-flavored gravy. She described it as “the culinary equivalent of good sex.”

“You'll remember the recipes long after you've forgotten Rupert's poems,” Rose said, only a touch facetiously.

At ten-thirty, my anxiety peaked. Marisa would appear at my cottage in half an hour, and I needed at least that much time to get back to the Villa Clio. If I weren't home when she called, Marisa would be disappointed and angry. She was perfectly capable of rage, as I recalled from
an afternoon when she and Grant, for reasons unknown to me, staged a shouting match of operatic proportions. The darker side of Marisa—her temper, plus a brooding quality that bordered on depression—was often apparent, and I didn't relish contact with it.

“You like cognac?” Bonano wondered, hovering behind me with an ornate bottle. “This stuff will knock your socks off.”

“Don't get him drunk, Daddy,” Toni said.

“Hey, he can handle it. I've heard about those fraternity parties. Am I right, Alex, or what?” Bonano poured the brown-gold liquid into a snifter the size of a giant soap bubble, then drew it slowly under my nose. “Ambrosia of the gods,” he said.

I had waited long enough to make any decision about my departure entirely moot. I would never get home on time. Taxi service was sketchy at this hour, and no buses ran after ten. I consoled myself by thinking Marisa would probably not have come anyway. Why jeopardize her own position at the Villa Clio and her relationship with Grant? Indeed, why would I jeopardize mine? While nothing explicit had been said, I understood perfectly well that both Marisa and Holly belonged to him.

I had glimpsed the extremes to which Grant could go when pushed. Once, after reading a profile of himself in an Italian newspaper, he lunged with a letter opener, gouging a huge hole in his antique desk. (I was standing beside him, breathless, hoping my chest would not seem like another appropriate target—since I had pointed out the article.) Another time he flung a book across the room at Marisa, who had been sulking. She sulked at the slightest provocation, so it puzzled me that this particular sulk had drawn his wrath. Thus far, I'd been spared the full brunt of his fury, though I didn't doubt my turn would come. “It's only a matter of time,” Vera said one morning, in the garden, as we trimmed a rosebush. “He'll bite your head off. Then you'll squawk around the room for a while.” After a pause, she added, “Then you'll expire.”

Had it been Holly waiting for me at the cottage, I would have abandoned the Villa Vecchia long before; but Marisa did not have quite that pull for me. I felt attraction, but no compulsion. It would be pleasant to sleep with her, but that was all. As I drank Bonano's peppery cognac, its vapors stinging my nostrils, I realized it made no sense to pursue
the Marisa business. An affair with her would shrink my chances with Holly even further, and it could hardly improve my relations with Grant. In general, life at the Villa Clio would instantly become more complicated and nuanced. I didn't think I could stand more nuance and complication.

“Here you go,” said Bonano, putting on the table before me a signed copy of
The Last Limo on Staten Island
. “First edition,” he said. “My hair wasn't so gray,” he added, pointing to the author photograph.

I fingered the neon-colored dust jacket, which featured a stretch Caddy (1959, jet black, with gigantic fins) parked beneath the portico of a Greek Revival mansion. “Thanks,” I said, “but you didn't have—”

“He's got two hundred copies in the basement,” Rose cut in. “We're never gonna get rid of them before they go moldy. Take all you want.”

Bonano sighed. “Thanks, Rose.”

I read the inscription.
To my fellow writer and paisano
,
Alex. Forget the fancy stuff! Tell good stories!

“I'm glad to have this,” I said. “If I can think of any good stories, I'll tell them.”

“Why don't we let the children alone?” Rose muttered, sotto voce, to her husband.

“Yeah,” he said, “sure. Good idea. Help yourself to more cognac, guys.”

After another drink, I followed Toni to the pool for a midnight swim. “There are bathing suits in the poolhouse,” she said, pointing to a tiny building at one end of the garden. “Help yourself.”

I did so, and when I emerged, she was already in the water, having slipped into a bikini herself while I was changing.

“It's not bad,” she said. “Come in.”

I leaped, clumsily, splashing her. We treaded water for a few minutes, head tilted back. A billion stars sprinkled over us, and I quoted some lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! / O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!”

“You wrote that?”

“I wish,” I said. “A Victorian priest wrote that, a Jesuit.”

“Sounds like a Jesi,” she said, lifting herself to the side of the pool. “Are you religious?”

“Gnostic,” I said.

“What's that?”

“My own thing.”

“Cool,” she said, lifting herself from the pool.

I watched her closely, taking in everything.

Her body fit naturally with the setting—a garden sculpted from the wild, tamed by travertine and tile, illumined by recessed lighting that seemed to caress this little world's cunningly wrought surfaces: bushes shaved into perfect globes against the background of umbrella pines and camellias, a maze of paths with stone benches set artfully beneath woven canopies of vine. Toni might have been a marble statue—so smooth and molded, the lines classically drawn, idealized beyond the point of eroticism, which seems oddly and perversely to depend on error, visual mischance, a touch of formlessness.

“Do you like my body?” she asked.

“I do.”

She responded by diving into the water again, flipping onto her belly before she jackknifed and plunged to the bottom. I was still treading water, watching her form as it shattered into angles and shapes like a Cubist painting. Her head broke the water only a foot in front of me.

I reached to touch her hair.

“We can meet another night,” she said, ducking away from me. “Daddy is waiting up for me. He always does for a week or so when I come home. Then I become Old News.”

I told her I could meet again whenever it was convenient. My schedule at the Villa Clio was flexible. I had no plans, no obvious commitments. Indeed, I could see no direction whatsoever in my life. I merely stumbled from moment to moment, day to day, person to person. Though not unpleasant, it was the next best thing to chaos.

We dressed quickly, then she walked me to the gate, where we kissed politely, a peck on the lips.

“Call me,” she said. “I get bored here.”

“I will.”

Stumbling to the piazza of Anacapri over crooked paving stones, I wondered if Toni Bonano would become a friend or a lover. It was impossible to tell, but either possibility was fine. In truth, I needed a friend more than a lover, a reference point outside the crazy circle of the Villa Clio. I needed someone to say,
Alex, they're all nuts. Remember, they're all nuts.

T
he clock in the tower of San Michele la Croce gonged twelve times as I made my way home, having crossed from one side of the island to the other by taxi. By now, I recognized many faces in the piazzetta, a mix of resident foreigners and locals who could be found, in some combination, on any night of the summer under one of the colorful awnings, a glass of grappa or espresso on the table before them, a cigarette in hand. Capri came alive at night, and even small children (always dressed to the nines) were allowed to parade with their parents,
fare un giro,
making “a circle” in society at late hours that, to an American, reeked of child abuse. I caught sight of Patrice, transfixed in conversation with Giovanni at the opposite end of the square. To avoid them, I ducked into a side alley, hurrying along the Tragara, back to the Villa Clio.

Moonlight bathed the grounds, turning the lawns ghostly; every blade of grass seemed distinct, otherwordly in the phosphorescent glow. I stood for a moment in the moon's full light, transfixed. Beside me, Vera's flowers shone colorless, white as stone. All the bedroom lights were out—the Grants retired each night quite early—but I found my way easily to the cottage by following the pale gravel path.

In those days I slept naked, especially on hot nights. Without bothering to turn on a lamp—the moonlight was more than sufficient, pouring through windowpanes onto the tiled floor—I began undressing on my way to bed, dropping bits and pieces behind me: a sweaty shirt, shoes
and socks, a pair of jeans, my boxers. The cool sheets of the bed would feel welcoming. Built of stone, the cottage always retained a certain musty coolness, and a fragrant cross-breeze swept between the open windows, never failing to create obliging conditions for sleep.

I realized, before I hit the bed, that I was not alone.

“You have been late, no? And drinking!”

“Marisa?”

“I have waited too long for you. You make me so angry, Lorenzo. We have made arrangements, no?”

“I'm sorry, I—”

“Don't argue it. You have been to the bar, I can smell. The men in Naples are like this when they go to the bar.” She draped her arms around my neck, pulling me toward her breasts. Like me, she wore nothing.

I resisted, slightly.

“You don't like my body?”

“No, I do. I like it very much.”

“So be here,” she said. “It is a very short life.”

I could hear Nicky in my head, urging me on. “Just do it,” he was saying. Yes, Nicky, I said. Yes.

Our bodies lengthened beneath the sheets and the world was soon all skin, teeth clattering as we kissed, clicking like ice cubes in a glass. I tasted the tobacco on her breath, but it was not unpleasant. Her arms circled me, and she pressed close, rocking against me with her hips, now undulating with quick, sharp pelvic thrusts. I was startled by the length of her, the sense that her body seemed to extend in every direction for a thousand miles. Her long black hair was wonderfully thick and rich, and she had recently washed it—the shampoo was fresh and clean. I took long, slow breaths.

“Make love with me,” she said, her voice hoarse.

I said nothing, but followed her instructions, sinking into my first full sexual experience in many months, savoring the liquor of her body. I drank her in, loving the soft fuzz of her pubic hair, the moist brush of skin and tongue. When I finally came into her, she was wide beneath me, her legs as open as I could possibly have wished for. She was wet and warm.
I floated out to sea on this raft of pleasure, forgetting everything that had ever happened in my life, ignoring everything to come.

Afterward, Marisa sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while I lay half asleep beside her, too exhausted to contemplate anything so rational as a consequence. I had been completely in thrall to instinct, and didn't mind at all. The experience had felt absolute, unmediated, and commonplace in the best way. Before long I fell asleep, my arm across her stomach. A deep and apparently dreamless sleep overwhelmed me, as if the unconscious were going to let me off the hook for once. When I woke, soon after dawn, I noticed that she had gone, and that the moon, too, had fallen across the sky, dragging with it the whole night sky.

I sat in bed with Rilke's letters, fumbling for a passage in the seventh letter that I recalled dimly and wanted to reread. “For one being to love another,” he wrote to young Kappus, “that is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the ultimate and last test and proof, the work for which all other work is mere preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.” I underlined that passage, knowing I had a great deal to learn about this subject. “But young people err so often and so grievously in this,” Rilke continued, “they (in whose nature it lies to have no patience) fling themselves at each other, when love takes possession of them, scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their untidiness, disorder, confusion.”

That morning, more than ever, my life was just those things: untidiness, disorder, and confusion.