The Apprentice Lover (26 page)

The convoy assembled and moved forward, flanked by destroyers. Overhead, silvery balloons floated in the sky, these artificial moons designed to keep the dive-bombers from attacking. The radios went silent as the sea grew louder and louder, as if roiled by the events that loomed. In each soldier's life, an invisible line would soon be crossed, a personal Rubicon. Life before action, and life after. That many of these men would die or go blind or lame was clear to everyone, but nobody
talked about this. There were silly jokes about who looked scared and who didn't. There were obscene jokes, too. The more outrageously obscene the better. And the laughter felt good to many, and they could put from their minds for a few seconds the reality that lay before them. And then a shadow fell over the men, as the hugeness of the occasion became apparent. In this covering shade, each soldier encountered a solitude that, quite suddenly, he understood was his most precious and permanent possession, and he began to master the difficult language of silence.

Just before dawn, the rhythm of life abruptly shifted, and the troops disgorged into amphibious landing crafts. Before the men quite knew what was happening, the first great wave had begun to roll. The invasion of Italy was really underway. Into the pearl-haze of dawn, with nobody talking, and with the moon behind them, they poured themselves into action, becoming an army—a real army—at last.

I stood on the beach now, looking at a sea that ran in smooth, expansive waves without whitecaps. The sun was only beginning to rise, and it surprised me how easily I could see them approaching: my father and his comrades in the Fifth Army. The ducks massed on the horizon, arriving in droves, running up from the sea onto the broad, moon-whitened beach. Bulldozers worked frantically, pushing wet sand into mounds that became ramps for trucks to land on. An advance phalanx of specially-trained men were digging for mines on their bellies, clearing the way for troops and trucks and tanks.

I remember asking my father about the noise of battle. Was it loud? Was it bearable? He considered my question, then explained that if a shell burst within twenty feet of you, it was too loud to hear. But you could hear the popping sound of the .88s, fired from the nearby hills, and the machine guns rattling from the dunes. He remembered star shells lighting up the skies, and tracers that zipped across the beach. He heard a loud
whoosh
once, the explosion of a surf mine, and he saw a dozen or so bodies floating shoreward, but he never saw any blood. He was sure of that. He also remembered seeing a case of .50-caliber shells floating by him, the case gone green from contact with sea water. “It's funny,” he said, “but it's only bits and pieces you remember, and it's never the
important things. Not the worst things, either. Thank God you forget those.”

It must have felt better to get onto firm land, where the men gained control of their movements. But quickly a new reality would have overwhelmed them, as they made their way on their bellies toward the city itself, over sand, with intermittent, deadly splashes of dirt and dust, as shells burst and the air thickened with smoke and the sharp smell of cordite. My father probably heard wounded men crying out, in pain so fresh and fierce that it quickly seemed remote, like somebody else's pain. I had experienced that only once, in infinitely less exaggerated circumstances, when an ax cut into my leg at summer camp, and I had to get thirty stitches. The real pain didn't come for hours, seeping in gradually. By the time the pain would have arrived for these soldiers, many would have died already or been dosed on morphine.

I once read an account of this invasion in a book of letters by soldiers to their friends and families. One of them described the stretcher-bearers, and how brave they were, carrying the dead or badly wounded to first-aid stations, the canvas of each stretcher soaked in gore. They remembered men walking through the fog of battle without arms, with an eyehole blasted away, an ear or chin removed. They saw men without legs, crawling. They saw things that nobody should ever have to see or remember—like children with their guts blown away or young men twitching in the sand, moments from death, begging for their mothers. Or dead mules in the road, their hash of furry intestines blackened by flies.

My knees weakened, and I knelt in the sand as the day brightened, with a red sun tinting the water. I believed I had seen something there, in Salerno. Heard and smelled it, even tasted it. And it would never leave me. It would become part of who I was, making it far more possible for me to connect to my father when I went home. He had been only nineteen when he went to war, and when he landed on Salerno, he was barely twenty. I'd never before quite understood what that meant. (As Napoleon once said, to understand a man deeply, you have to know where he was at the age of twenty.) The experience at Salerno would surely have framed his life in ways beyond calculation. It would have determined everything that came after.

I also realized, as I knelt there, that my feelings about Rupert Grant had shifted, however slightly. He acted like a general, but he had never known war, not as Nicky had, or my father. There was nothing wrong with this, of course. I myself had never experienced battle. But Grant's world was so purely aesthetic, a maze constructed to hide some mythical beast that frightened him. He had created a dazzling thing, employing his talents to the fullest, and yet those around him scarcely understood what he'd done, or what their part in his fantasy might be. On one hand, it was difficult not to admire a man with the power to summon a vision and declare it his. But there was a limit to this vision. I felt that I was only beginning to see through and around the construction.

H
olly and I became better friends, but every attempt I made to shift the relationship in a more amorous direction was subtly rebuffed. When I reached for her hand in a restaurant, she let me hold it briefly, then withdrew. When I put my arm around her shoulder as we walked toward the bus station in Salerno, she managed to twist away from me. All conversational gambits designed to increase intimacy were resisted, and I would find myself in the lap of friendship once again. (I did my best to conceal my frustration, but it would break out insidiously, and I would quarrel with her about idiotic things, like where to eat or which bus to take.)

We left Salerno after lunch, sitting in the back of the blue SITA bus, which carried handfuls of passengers to villages along the coast. The sea was golden-pink in the August light, the beaches blowsy. Through the open window came the tinny smell of eucalyptus, ferried on a warm breeze. Having gotten up so early in Salerno, I felt ready for a siesta. But the presence of Holly kept me alert. I let my hand, at one point, stretch around her shoulders, resting above her neck; to my surprise, she put her head back on my forearm, closing her eyes. I felt no obligation to shift my position, and thrilled to the weight of her head against my bare arm.

Arriving in Paestum in late afternoon, we immediately found a
pensione
that overlooked its Doric temples, one of Italy's grandest remnants from the ancient world. The hotel was, fittingly, called the Magna Graecia,
alluding to the ancient Greek empire that once included this part of Italy in its sweep. A spidery old woman in black led us to our room—a smaller version of the Salerno room, with twin beds pushed together. There was a faded portrait of the Virgin Mary above the headboard in a gilt frame, with a scrap of dry palm pushed through a loop in the hook that held it to the wall. The room had no toilet, but there was a makeshift shower in one corner, with a yellow plastic curtain that one drew around it. Through glass doors, the temples and the sea were perfectly framed.

“Va bene?”
the old woman asked.

“Sì, mille grazie,”
I said.

We left at once to see the temples. Paestum was, among all sites of interest in southern Italy, the most fascinating: Greek temples in astonishingly fine fettle, considering their ages. The site had been an ancient city of considerable opulence and grace, and it dated to the turn of the sixth century, B.C., when it was called Poseidonia. Eventually, in the third century, A.D., it became a Roman colony. What remained, after so many centuries, was a sequence of Doric columns, tall and symmetrical, with a slightly ruddy tint that tended, in the dust of late afternoon light, to turn orange.

The relative absence of tourists, even in summer, pleased us. A few Swedes were pouring over guidebooks, and some Germans took pictures of each other in the colonnade of the basilica, which had originally been a temple dedicated to Hera; but we had the prize all to ourselves, the Temple of Athena. Its bronze-tinted columns thrust at the sky, solid and straight, while a delicate cornice at the top of each formed a crown of sorts. The light fell slantwise from the west, and the columns replicated themselves in long shadows that crossed the courtyard, where lizards and scorpions scuttled among tufts of crabgrass.

Holly was lost in thought, leaning against one column, in a T-shirt like a white sail. I studied the outline of her body, wafer-thin. I was trembling inside, without access to words that could explain my feelings. Was this love? Or was I simply lusting after her? How did one separate these things—love and sex—or did it matter? I realized how little I knew of anything that mattered, and I was grateful to have Rilke back in my room, for comfort and wisdom. “Sex is difficult,” he wrote bluntly to his
young disciple. “If you only recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve a relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom), then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession.”

I was beginning to understand a little of what Rilke meant as I thought about Holly. “In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive,” said the poet. I had not had those thousand nights of love, having experienced the strangeness of naked contact only a handful of times, most recently with Marisa. These nights had each been memorized, analyzed, and relived many times. Yet they were nothing in themselves, adding up to little but a flurry of sensations. Whatever the word “love” meant, it was not these nights. I had never really known the women I'd met in those wild stabs at sexual experience, and this saddened me.

Holly and I had dinner on a terrace overlooking the Greek ruins, and—for the first time—I began to make emotional contact with her. A full bottle of wine loosened the gates of inhibition, and I told her about my experience on the beach in Salerno. She responded by telling me about her father's experience as a prisoner of war in Burma. What a violent century it had been, we agreed, beginning with the Boer War, running through the tragedy of two massively destructive world wars, followed by an unbroken sequence of bloody regional wars from Korea to Vietnam. So many millions had been killed or maimed. So many people had been dislodged from homes, from beloved traditions. And for what?

“Capri is so unreal,” I said.

“It's your life, Alex,” she said. “Your life can't be unreal. That's illogical.”

“I suppose I wanted something unreal.”

“You're avoiding something, aren't you?” she asked.

My mind wandered, and I thought about Nicky, my parents, and the hectic and fragmentary years I'd spent at Columbia, trying to catch up—socially and intellectually—with my peers. My freshman roommate had graduated from Andover, and could never begin to comprehend the life I'd lived in Pittston, where only a few had ever been to Europe or read
Proust or heard about the Geneva Convention. I had managed, somehow, to ratchet up my levels of sophistication, and to pretend that I felt at ease with those around me. But I didn't. There had been a huge emotional fee attached to my recently acquired sophistication, and I was still paying it off, with interest.

Holly herself, I discovered, had come to Capri to sidestep things that troubled her. Much to my amazement, she described in some detail a “breakdown” of sorts during her final year at Lady Margaret Hall. In response, I told her about my last months at Columbia. Though different in context, these episodes had much in common: a sense of dislocation, an urgent wish for a change of environment. The more we talked, the less Holly seemed just a physical presence, and the more her soul became tangible. I thought of Tolstoy, who (in emulation of Buddhist monks) acquired the habit of bowing whenever he met people, acknowledging their separate, soulful presence, and I wanted to bow to Holly. Instead I reached across the table for her hand, and this time she didn't withdraw it.

After a glass of grappa, we paid the bill and returned to the Magna Graecia. It was late, but in the usual Italian fashion, the streets teemed with young children in fine clothes; they were taking in the evening with their parents, many of whom were no older than Holly or I. Teenage boys gunned their motorbikes, and girls in colorful blouses flirted with them behind dark eye shadow. Europop poured from the open bars. It was important for everyone to take a turn in the night air,
fare un giro.
This was Italy, after all, land of
la bella figura
.

From the balcony of our bedroom we could see the illumined columns of Athena's temple below us, ghostly in the chalk of moonlight. One could easily believe that centuries had not passed, and that holy rites of love might well be performed again on that sacred ground at any moment.

While I remained on the balcony, looking at the temples and the sea beyond, Holly slipped into bed. I soon followed, in boxers and T-shirt. Unobtrusively, I lay beside her, keeping my distance, expecting another night of sexual frustration, since the hand-holding in the restaurant had led nowhere, though I had stealthily draped an arm around her shoulder
on the way back to the
pensione
. There was, it seemed, a line I could not cross. Vistas of friendship had widened, but physical love seemed far away, an impossible shore.

“A domani,”
she said, her back against me.

“
A domani,
Holly.”

“I'm awfully tired,” she said, as if to explain her distance from me, and her position in the bed.

“It's the wine,” I said. “I'm a little dizzy.”

Leaning toward the weak lamp on my bed table, I read a few paragraphs from Rilke. “You are so young,” he wrote to Kappus, “but I want to beg you, with all my soul, to be patient toward all that remains unsolved in your heart. Try, dear sir, to love the
questions themselves
that lie inside you like locked rooms or like books that are written in a foreign tongue.” He urged, above everything, patience. “There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years mean nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree that does not force its sap but stands confident in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who behave as though eternity lay before them, still and wide. I learn this daily, learn it with pain for which I am always grateful:
patience is everything!
”

Though I wanted everything to happen at once—poems, novels, love—I was beginning to understand Rilke's point. Truth glimmered off his pages. But soon I let the book fall onto the floor with a soft thud, switched off the light, and lay back on the pillow, closing my eyes in the room's half light, with street sounds churning behind the zebra slats of the shutters, which replicated themselves on the bedroom wall.

How much time elapsed, I can't recall. Ten minutes perhaps? In any case, Holly's voice—slightly husky, but soft—startled me.

“Are you awake, Alex?”

“Me?”

“Are you sleeping?”

I smiled. “Not any longer.”

“I'm sorry.”

“No, I was kidding. I'm awake.”

“Oh, good,” she said. She drew a long breath. “I don't know if you want this, but would you like to make love?”

“Sure,” I said, as matter-of-factly as if she'd asked me if I might pass the pepper.

My heart was pounding in my throat and temples. We said nothing else, but I watched as—in the dim light—she lifted the nightgown over her head, so that I could see the outline of her small breasts, their upward tilt. She quickly turned toward me, moving as close as could be. I welcomed her, putting my arms around her shoulders, letting my face brush against the side of her head.

“I want you,” I said.

The experience was like that which Rilke had described: “And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do earnest work. They gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.”

I knew those ecstasies that night as we came together, again and again.

How unexpectedly the room filled with sunlight the next morning as I lay on the bed, on my stomach, and breezes drew across my buttocks and back. The air seemed light and pure. Holly stood at the open shutters, peering onto the terrace, still naked as well. I glanced at her, furtively, culling the perfection of her form. There was nothing to say that could possibly add to the experience, and we both seemed to understand that. Silence was, indeed, our best friend that morning, which I count among the sweetest mornings of my life.