The Liar's Wife (35 page)

She spent most of her days in silence, and she was happy in that silence, happy even in her growing ease speaking her simple Italian. But this made the prospect of phoning Gregory Allard all the more daunting. Words were so rare in her life now that they seemed newly precious and significant. The ordinary polite lies—I'm planning to do my dissertation on Civitali, I don't know why Professor Ferguson cancelled his trip—well, they weren't lies, but the truth they yielded was
so partial she felt she was misusing the words in saying them. Misusing or wasting.

But eventually she began to feel ashamed that she was squandering the university's money. She knew that wasn't really right; she was looking at Civitalis every day and she had made an appointment with the curator of the archives. The curator seemed to be away for two weeks, a gift. Theresa told herself it was another sign, but of what? And her being here was really a gift of Tom's. “A wonderful opportunity, you must always be very grateful.” That was the kind of thing her mother would have said. She hadn't talked to her mother. She knew she could buy a phone card and speak to her mother in Arizona very cheaply, but it was another thing she couldn't bring herself to do. She spent a whole morning trying to find the right postcard to send her mother. Her mother, who wouldn't have the slightest interest in anything depicted on any postcard she could find. For her mother, Europe was pretension and discomfort. Italians were Mafiosi or pizza makers. At least she had said that she was sure Theresa would be eating some delicious food. And so Theresa was relieved when she found a postcard showing many different kinds of pasta. “You were right, Mom, the food is great. It's beautiful here.” She knew the words were empty, but they had no falseness to them.

She was paralyzed whenever she thought of contacting Gregory Allard. And then she thought of a way out of her paralysis. She needed to be in touch with Maura.

They had been friends since they were thirteen. A friendship that was encouraged, nurtured, possibly engineered by the nuns who taught them. Maura and Theresa were invited by the nuns to help them after school in the office; they felt it as a signal honor, being trusted to file receipts and run various errands. It was only much later that they realized the sisters could have done it themselves. But they asked this favor of Theresa and Maura because they knew how depressing and painful their home lives were, and they understood that the girls could be a solace to each other. Theresa's misfortune was public knowledge, but only the sisters knew about Maura's troubles: two alcoholic parents, and a brother three years younger for whom she had the primary responsibility. Maura told Theresa that she guessed the nuns figured
it out because they noticed that Maura was coming to school without lunches, and with unmatched socks and unmended clothes. And that the Shaughnessy parents came to teachers' conferences—when they came—smelling of alcohol, with bloodshot eyes and broken veins.

And so the nuns made a place for the two children of affliction, afflicted themselves but refusing to admit it. It took five years for Maura to confess her problems to Theresa, and after that she spoke about her parents only with contempt and rage. Her tenderness was saved for her brother, Rory, who wasn't half the student Maura was, although Maura insisted, to Theresa's sadness, that he was “really, really bright. He just has a different learning style.”

And so both girls knew they couldn't go away to school; they were needed at home, Theresa because she wouldn't leave her father to her mother's care, for both their sakes, but particularly for her father—she understood her mother's position, but didn't trust what outcomes her harshness might engender. And Maura because she wouldn't leave Rory to those two “assholes who can't even take care of themselves.”

Their freedom came at just the same time, their sophomore year of college, when Theresa's father died and Rory joined the navy. The next year, Theresa's mother married George Hoffman, a man she'd worked with for years, whom Theresa thought of as a Coors drinker who combed his one existing strand of hair over his bald spot. His crudity hurt Theresa, and she felt it an affront to her father, who, whatever he had been, had never been crude. And she had to wonder if her mother had been sleeping with George for years, coming home from assignations with him to check her husband's oxygen. She and Maura moved into a room in the dorm, provided, of course, by the sisters. By that time, Maura, who had thought of herself as a poet, had decided she would major in nursing because it would give her the freedom to travel, which was her romance, as the study of art history was Theresa's.

But it was Maura's only romance, because she was determined to be hardheaded, practical. Having lived with alcoholics whose ordinary register was exaggeration, she refused extremes of language, even of thought. Having endured the hourly swerves—“I love you/I hate you/you are the devil's child, you can't be mine/why did I ever have you?/
you are my angel girl and I don't deserve you/you're goddamn lucky to have us as parents, you ungrateful little shit/how can you ever forgive us for what we've done to you?…”—she was determined to inhabit a solid unmoving ground, a temperate, coldish climate. Unlike Theresa, she was determined not to take things too seriously. And to trust to luck.

Maura had an instinct for pleasure, as Theresa did not. Sitting on her bed in the warm air of Lucca in July, Theresa thought of her only happy Christmas, one she'd shared with Maura. It had happened her first year at Yale, when Maura won a raffle—she had bought an environmentally friendly fire extinguisher from a friend who was selling them on a pyramid scheme. The prize was a round trip to Disney World, and Maura figured out how to make a good thing of it. She and Theresa would take the airline tickets and the three days at the motel in Orlando. They would not go near Disney World. They would sit by the pool and drink, and eat pizza in their bedroom, watch movies on the TV, play cards, maybe go outside a bit if it was warm. It was the first Christmas either of them had enjoyed; Christmas with alcoholics was always a nightmare, and there was never room for a Christmas tree in a room that was completely taken over by a hospital bed. And now that her mother had married George and moved to Arizona, Christmas would be another kind of nightmare, which Theresa was grateful to be spared.

The second night they were there, two men came to them at the side of the pool carrying extra beers, clearly on the prowl. When one of them asked if the girls would like to come to their room for more drinks, Maura said, “We'd love to, but we really can't. We know what you have in mind, and it would be great, but we both have these terrible vaginal discharges. It might be a yeast infection … it might be chlamydia,” and the men were waving goodbye before she could finish her sentence.

And the two of them ran to their room so they could lie on their beds giggling in the way that had always been the sign to themselves and to each other of their liberation, their victory over what might have been considered impossible odds. And because of this, because they had
been children together, trying to discover a way out to a larger life, but with no one to help them, stitching together the hints they had picked up accidentally from the accident of being alive, having got out … Theresa to Yale, Maura to the island of Tortola (where she was working as an emergency room nurse), Theresa knew she could make any atavistic, embarrassing request with complete freedom. There was no shame in traveling with Maura to the place they had once been, repeating patterns that were fine for a fourteen-year-old (“make an appointment with the doctor for me, I'm embarrassed to call him and tell him I have to pay cash because we have no health insurance … Open this envelope for me, it's from Yale, I can't stand it if I haven't got in”). The only gap in the utter safety of their friendship had occurred because Theresa never told her about Tom Ferguson. Maura wouldn't approve, not only because he was married but because she knew that Maura would include Tom in her overlarge category of “asshole” or, more lately, “pretentious asshole.” But her fear of calling Gregory Allard was something Maura would be more than ready to help with; Theresa didn't doubt that for a second.

The cell phone reception in Tortola was erratic, and Maura's hours in the emergency room were unpredictable. The five-hour time difference was one more problem. Theresa only got Maura on the fifth try. “Where the hell have you been?” she asked.

“Working, you know. I'm a wage earner, unlike some.”

“I can't call this guy. I just can't. If you were here, we could do what we always did when we were afraid to call someone. You could call him and say you were me. But it wouldn't work from your island.”

“Just email him then.”

Theresa felt like a fool. Why hadn't she thought of that? She wouldn't have to talk to him at all. Not just yet.

“And when you email him, think of him—he's kind of an old guy, right? Think of him sitting at this big old, totally out-of-date computer in a white T-shirt, maybe like a V-neck, and white boxers and black socks.”

Theresa lay on her bed and laughed. She realized she hadn't laughed out loud since she'd left America. Anyone but Maura would have said,
Think of him naked, think of him on the toilet. Only Maura would have thought of the black socks.

“Do it right now. I'm not hanging up till you tell me you've pressed Send.”

She'd chosen a good time to email Gregory Allard because she'd been invited to Chiara's family for lunch, so she couldn't sit in front of her computer all day waiting for a response. They'd agreed to meet in the square by the cathedral, because Chiara didn't want the owners to see her “fraternizing with a guest.” She was straddling her Vespa, and she held out a peacock-colored helmet for Theresa to wear. Theresa hadn't imagined she'd be riding on the back of a Vespa. When Chiara said her family lived on the road to Bagni di Lucca, Theresa had imagined they'd be driving there in a car.

For the first five minutes, she was terrified. The seat seemed narrow; the distance from the pavement was extremely slight, and slight, too, was Chiara's torso, to which she had to cling. She thought Chiara drove very fast, but she had no idea what was considered fast on a Vespa, and, after a while, Chiara's confidence, the complete relaxation of her body, induced a kind of relaxation in Theresa as well. No sooner had she got used to the feeling of relaxation than it was replaced by something else, something she'd never felt, a kind of elation at moving very fast through space, through air, covering ground at a great rate, eating up the road, climbing up hills, barreling down hills, and then, with a judder and a quick stop, an arrival at a low, white house with lemon trees in pots on either side of a dark wooden door.

Chiara took Theresa's hand, pulled the helmet off her head, and pushed her into the hallway, which was white-walled, the floor tiled with plain brown tiles, full of rubber boots in various sizes. How did it happen: suddenly everyone was in the hallway, everyone was embracing Chiara and then Theresa, and she was being introduced to Chiara's mother, who was younger than Theresa could imagine anyone her age's mother could be, wearing lime green capri pants and golden sandals. Chiara's father's bald head gleamed with pleasure at seeing his daughter, who towered over him by three inches. And suddenly she was in the midst of it, people laughing, people pressing drinks on her,
introducing her to Chiara's grandmother, Chiara's younger brother, who Theresa guessed was around fifteen. There was food and more food: first thin crackers with pâté and capers the size of grapes, thin delicious slices of ham and small pieces of cheese: some sharp, some mild. The grandmother demanded: Tell the truth, did she ever in her life encounter olive oil to equal what could be found in Lucca? Theresa was guided to the table, where everyone knew exactly where to sit, and Chiara's mother brought out a huge white bowl of pasta with tomato sauce, and then cold pork and a salad of cold green beans, and four different cakes. People wanted to know everything about America: Does she love President Obama as they love him in Italy? He is so much better than any of our politicians, and had she been to the Grand Canyon or Hollywood? She said she was from the Midwest and someone said the word “prairie” and someone else said Chicago and they all laughed at the impossibility of pronouncing the word “Milwaukee,” and then there was more food and she found herself laughing at jokes she didn't quite understand, and some man's name was mentioned and Chiara pretended to slap her brother's face, and then, suddenly, they were on the Vespa again. “My family is very loud and probably talks too much. They didn't ask you anything about your work, because they wouldn't have anything to say about it. Or they would, but would feel too embarrassed because they'd think of you as an intellectual, a
professoressa
, and then that would be the end of fun.”

In the dark quiet of her room, Theresa felt quite lonely. This was what a family could be, this was what it was to have ease and pleasure with the people you were related to. She felt a slashing bitter envy of Chiara and knew that, as much as she liked her, they could never understand each other enough to be real friends.

She checked her computer. Gregory Allard had asked if it would be convenient for her to meet the following afternoon at a café on the Fillungo called Di Simo. She answered that it would be perfect, and that she was grateful for his time.

He wrote back one word: “Fine.”