Wonderland (27 page)

“Do you think he’s happy?”

“The Pope? I don’t even think he’s a person.”

“What did the Queen of Denmark say to him?”

“‘I’m sorry, Mr. Pope’?”

“No, before that. What was the insult?”

“Oh. Something about money. About the Church having a lot of it.”

“But they do have a lot of it.”

Zach shrugs. “I guess it’s more polite to say he has a lot of holiness. Good
yontif,
Pontiff.” He holds up the cell phone image, and it’s very funny, the juxtaposition of us with the Pope, a rainbow of ironies. Zach’s fingers are long, his fingertips callused. “I’m going to post this onto our site.”

Rome is hot and still today. A striped cat lies on top of a parked car not much bigger than a shoe, cleaning itself. Zach hits buttons, squinting, grinning. His duck feet, in sneakers, splay outward. We amble on and the narrow street opens up into a bright piazza.

“Is this the one from before?” I ask.

Zach eyes it. “Maybe?”

“Did we . . . Wait, I’m—” I take out the map we got at the hotel, but it’s only half a map, studded with stores and restaurants that are apparently the size of the Roman Forum. “I’m confused.”

“Rome is confusing,” says Zach.

“It is.” Which postcard rack is that? Which church? Which man? “But pretty.”

Zach looks around. “It’s okay. I think I like Jerusalem better.”

“Those are the two cities? Rome and Jerusalem?”

“You’re so sassy, Anna. Just, you know, in terms of shit being old. I like the old shit in Jerusalem better. I guess because it’s old Jewish shit.”

“There are plenty of Christians in Jerusalem,” I point out, still trying, and failing, to read the cartoon map. “What’s the name of that street over there?”

Zach shrugs. “I’m hungry.” He palms his head. “And horny.”

Even as I light up, it occurs to me, not for the first time, that this is a bad idea, and a cliché to boot. Who doesn’t know the next part of this movie? It ends with bizarre yet inevitable abruptness, I am rueful, he says he’s sorry, but he isn’t, really. He feels clean and free, and I know this, but I don’t say so, because it’s more becoming to be rueful and wise and bite my lip in the last scene, waving a small wave at the station as his train pulls out, flicking my cigarette butt onto the tracks. No regrets, coyote.

I sigh. It’s not my song. Plus, I don’t smoke.

“What?” says Zach. “Come on. We have a whole
day.
”

“Do you think we’re a cliché?”

Zach laughs his squinty-eyed laugh. “What, like ‘Maggie May’ or something? I don’t know.” He pauses, frowns. “I might be. I have a little thing for—” He shakes his head.

“Older women?”

“Sad women. Like Alicia. They always dump me.”

“I’m not anything like Alicia. That is hilarious.”

Zach looks me in the eye. “Not in your story, maybe. And you’re my boss—you know, boss?”

“Well—”

He opens his palms. “I know I keep you amused.” He winks. He takes the map and turns it around. “The museum is that way.”

And, in fact, it is. It’s a small museum, the long-ago folly of some count who fancied himself a connoisseur of art. It still has the air of a crazy rich person’s house, with multiple staircases and heavy drapes on the windows. The marble floors are scuffed. Zach steers us up the correct staircase and along several hallways into the main exhibition room, which must have once been the house’s ballroom. Hanging in surprisingly unforced groupings, the unfinished sketches of the master are seamed, stained, interrupted by second thoughts and afterthoughts, ghostly, half-realized possibilities. Next to the precisely drawn curve of a man’s back, a pair of legs, upside down, plunge toward the bottom edge of the yellowed sheet. The side of a woman’s face interrupts the front view of the same woman’s face, snub-nosed, round-cheeked. A boy has three left arms, in various positions.

“They look like the hands of a clock, don’t they?” says Zach. “Like time-lapse photography of waiting. I feel like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that boy. I’m always
waiting,
you know? On edge.”

“For what?”

“Something. Everything. It gets annoying. It’s like spiritual ADD.”

I regard him, peering at the boy with three left arms. Zach stands so close to the sketch that he’s almost touching it, as if he is trying to learn something by smelling it. There is no guard in this room, no one else but us, so he could touch it, but he doesn’t, although he holds his palm quite close.

“That doesn’t change,” I say.

He glances up at me but doesn’t reply. We walk on, making our way slowly around the walls hung with indecision. It’s ironic, or something, because we both know that I haven’t texted Terry yet. It’s up to me. The hundred little girls with hammers furrow their brows. They will not wait for me. And though they might not seem important, all the determined little rich girls, I see now that they are. Will I say no to her again, all hundred of her, all her arms?

Zach takes my hand. “That doesn’t really make sense,” he says. “People slow down.”

“Today is my birthday,” I tell him. “I’m forty-five.”

“Congratulations.”

We go back to the fairly ratty hotel to make love, laughing as we walk down the dank corridor. The lights, on a timer, click on for a moment, then as quickly go off again. Against the closed door of someone else’s room, in the penumbra of midmorning, I press against Zach and open his mouth with mine. He tastes of coffee, pastry flakes; his lips are soft. His hands are strong, his arms are strong, but alone in my room a few minutes later, I notice again that he is a smaller and more compact man than he seems when he’s clothed. His nakedness always happens in an instant, quick as a thought, while I am still unbuttoning. He is so easy to fuck. It is like being in water. We twine and push; he is muscled everywhere, firm and rounded and curled so tightly that he seems like a creature that might be on the verge of turning into another creature altogether, sprouting wings or fins. He comes fast, silently, eyes closed. I don’t entirely know him in that moment, I don’t know where he goes. He is more than his animal then, and this is why, I see, that I am falling in love with him. I want to know his remainder that I can’t ever know, a remainder that is only broadened by the difference in our ages. Curled against him when we’re still, my leg over his hips, I know that he is thirty-two, maybe thirty-three. The years between us feel like another person, a being with its own personality, tastes, interests. I don’t feel younger with him; on the contrary, I feel exactly and fully forty-five, every minute of it, every frame; it feels something like wealth. I am not sure I have ever felt as completely my age as I feel with Zach. He is a true clock to me, like one of those mirrors that doesn’t reverse your image. Left is on the left, right is on the right. These are the actual years of my life.

“Have you done this before?” I ask him.

“Um, yeah.”

“No, I mean, been with someone older.”

“Well. Yes. Just once. It was kind of a messed-up thing. But you must have had a boy toy or two—”

“No. Never.”

“Really? So how is it?” He smirks a little.

“I’m not sure yet.” I run my hand over his beautiful leg. “Rome is a weird place for me. People in my family don’t have good luck with it. A lot happened here.”

“Good or bad?”

“Oh”—I shake my head—“you know.” I pull the thin sheet up to cover us. We sleep awhile.

“Anna? Do you have your ears in?”

I nod. Zach’s chord pings clearly in my ear.

The lanky sound guy at the back of the house says, “There’s a buzz on the left channel.”

We are at the venue, which is midsized but well known. It is in the center of Rome, in the center of a labyrinth of gardens that open unexpectedly into small seating areas, squares of lawn, leafy bowers. The last time I played here, I fell over one of the knee-high hedges; Simon had ended it, again, for the last last time. I wasn’t sure I believed him, although it turned out to be true. In retrospect, it seemed the beginning of a longer fall, all the way back to my sky-blue bedroom on 19
th Street, my dying cat. The labyrinth looks the same to me, although possibly the hedges are higher. I’m not sure. The venue smells exactly the same, stale beer and cigarette smoke.

Boone is pacing back and forth, biting his thumb, ears in. He is clean-shaven now. When did that happen? And why? His skin is exceptionally clear and soft-looking. Zach, a few feet away to my right, runs his hand across the electric acoustic, pressing the foot pedal on the floor. “Wow,” says Boone, “that was worse.” He signals to me. I sing a few bars of “Waiting for a Sign,” like running up a short stair. Boone shakes his head. The open double door of the dim, cool venue is a square of light. My throat is stiff. I cup my hand around it. I do not want to sing today. Tom and Alicia materialize in the square of light, both in wraparound sunglasses. Alicia, in Rollerblades and a white jumpsuit, glides in, taller. Tom walks beside her, talking. They take seats at the empty bar, their heads together in conversation, Alicia’s skates surreally big on her feet.

“Hey,” I say from the stage, and they briefly turn their insect faces toward me, Tom lifts a hand, and they turn back to each other. Australia. Japan. Who would we all be by the end of that? Everyone knows about Terry’s offer, of course, but no one is asking me what I’m going to do. Boone, over drinks in the hotel lobby last night, ran the numbers for me on a cocktail napkin. They were Janus-faced numbers. He tap-tap-tapped them with a forefinger. He has other people he has to go out with in the fall, he’d be sure to drop in to check up on us but . . . Zach noodles a few chords, stretching them, like licorice, with the foot pedal. They tickle my ears.

The lanky sound guy at the back of the house says, “There’s a buzz on the right channel.”

Boone looks at the ceiling in exasperation. His naked chin is delicate, like a small white arrow pointing up. He wants to be gone, I think. He’s done with this now. That’s why he shaved. He runs a hand over his eyes. “I’m so fucking tired.”

“Let’s take a break,” I say, pulling the small plastic buds out of my ears.

The Via Condotti, at any time of the day or night, is packed with shoppers shopping. This is the narrow, twisting street of high-end stores, window after window of mannequins draped in silk, in fur, in ropes of gold. The shoppers display their bags, the celebrated names written across the shiny white or black surfaces, loving to be laden down, to have to dodge and weave as they walk in the street. Efficient forward progress is not only rude but sad; no one on the Via Condotti has, or should have, any place to be but here, tacking from window to window on gusts of desire. I pass the windows of Lanvin, of Prada. If you have to ask what it costs, as they say, you can’t afford it. It cost a bit of rubble, pitted from salt and weather. My transparent reflection shadows me, flash of red, disappears as I pass. It occurs to me that just now I looked, in the glass, like one of my mother’s pieces, one of her evanescent women. She had to wear special glasses to paint on glass, because the paint could move so fast.

I drift. I’ve always loved the Via Condotti, its mad, nouveau riche shamelessness, its ridiculous excess. Who needs ermine socks? A bikini made of strands of diamonds? It’s a continuous impromptu show composed of shoppers’ fantasies, a show that never ends. When my father was in the hospital, my mother and Lila and I used to sit on the Spanish Steps for hours, watching the crowd, doing crossword puzzles, and eating warm chestnuts, cracking the skins quickly to get at the pale knot of meat inside. Lila and I took turns braiding each other’s hair. That was the time of the punks, who busked ineptly at the foot of the steps, singing parts of songs off-key and holding out their dirty hands. Lila was fascinated. “Where do they sleep?” she asked.

They’re gone now. In their place, a few folky street musicians, tourists on cell phones. I take a picture of the scene on my phone, send it to Lila, captionless. She’ll know what I mean. I zigzag through the Piazza di Spagna, buy a bag of chestnuts. I enter a smaller street where the linen shop I like might still be, and there, standing before me, is Billy Q. He is wearing lacy cream-colored leggings, short black leather boots, and suspenders, with no shirt. His chest is smooth.

“Anna,” he says, as if we had agreed beforehand to meet on this very corner, on this very day, at this very time, 14:17. We kiss on both cheeks.

“Sir,” I say. “What are you disguised as?”

“A younger, better-looking man than I am.”

“Chestnut?”

“Love these.” He cracks it in one hand, pops the meat into his mouth. “Do you believe in God?”

“I never thought about it, I guess. Do you?”

“I might. I really might.” He looks pensive, chewing the chestnut.

“Are you making another film here?”

“No, no. Vacation. Let’s walk around. There’s a designer a few streets over you should see.” From I’m not sure where, the air maybe, he produces an exceptionally thin white cotton scarf, which he ties around his head, pirate fashion. Instantly, although he looks like he might be someone in that outfit, he doesn’t look especially like Billy Q anymore.

“How do you do that?” I ask.

“My head was cold.”

We talk about Ezra a little as we walk, the same conversation we had in Göteborg, in Berlin the morning after the show, before Alicia staggered over, still in the catsuit; the same conversation we will have in other cities, at other times, for many years to come. We agree, and, after all, Ezra is still alive. That seems to signify something, though whether it’s for or against isn’t clear. Billy Q has a few facts to offer that I didn’t know about, facts about money that make me wonder what, at the end of the day, Ezra’s true habit is. Susie’s role, of course, is more complicated than it seems. She’s already back in Berlin. His heart, his eyes, his hands: no one knows what holds him together, whatever has done; perhaps it’s the memory of fire. His given name probably wasn’t Ezra, but does it matter? We’ll never know that, either. Billy asks about my father, he heard what happened, and I try to explain at least part of it. I show him the little twisted slug, which he examines carefully, almost scientifically.