American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  “Ew,” she says.

  “Ow,” I say. It really hurts.

  “What about one of those things?”

  A butterfly stitch, I think she means. “That might work,” I say.

  On the way to the drugstore we talk about replacement trees, in case our cherry trees pass away. How about a ginkgo tree? How about a red bud? We could plant another honey locust. Maybe deer prey on fruit trees.

  “All the little trees are dying,” she says. That old crab apple won’t last much longer. Two bad winters in a row.

  I hold tissue to my nose, which continues to seep blood. I’ve got more tissues in my pockets, just in case. She says she hopes we’re not too late for dinner.

  The pharmacist, when we ask first aid advice, wants to see the cut. I show him and he says he doesn’t think a butterfly stitch will work, we’re welcome to try, but he recommends an antihemorrhagic.

  “Your nose is wet where the stitch should adhere,” he says. “A butterfly stitch will come loose.”

  “His nose is always wet,” my wife says. “He’s like a beagle.”

  The pharmacist points at my nose. “Jack Nicholson.”

  “What?”

  “Chinatown? The movie? He’s J. J. Gittes. And Faye Dunaway is . . . someone. Wonderful film. Water rights, skullduggery. Very up to date all of a sudden, wouldn’t you say?” He squints a little, peers at my nose, considers it. He has a reddish nose. He’s balding on top and has longish gray hair, long enough to cover his ears. He’s obviously worn the white coat for quite a while. “Roman Polanski,” he says, “wielding a switchblade. I believe the Nicholson nose required stitches.”

  “Gittes,” I say.

  He nods.

  “He cut himself shaving,” my wife explains, implying, I guess, that there is no skullduggery. “Will he need stitches?”

  He points us to aisle five. Tells us styptic pencil is our best bet.

  I read the package out loud in the car: “Anhydrous aluminum sulfate.” So that’s what it is.

  “Do it.”

  “A vasoconstrictor,” I say. “This stuff hurts.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt already? You’re bleeding. Do it. Shouldn’t you try it?”

  I lean forward, strain to see my nose in the rearview mirror. I’ll do it when we get to Rachel and Ron’s, I tell her. It might be messy.

  Rachel and Ron have wine and cheese, fresh figs, and fennel ready in their recently redone kitchen. It’s all white: cupboards, cabinets, countertops, blindingly white and beautiful.

  “Let’s nosh. Let’s have some Frascati,” Rachel says. “I can drink this stuff like Fresca. I only want Frascati now.”

  “We say ‘antipasto,’” Ron says. “We’re so Italian.”

  “Rome was beautiful. The artichokes, the fountains.”

  “It was hot. They drink wine at 10:00 a.m.”

  “What’s wrong with your nose? Good God!”

  “He cut himself shaving.”

  “You forget it’s a razor in your hand. You get so casual. It’s like scratching your eyebrow with the barrel of a gun.”

  “Wait, you still use a razor? Aren’t you electric?”

  “He’s got no visible beard.”

  “I just love figs. Figs and Frascati.”

  “I have facial hair. It’s transparent.”

  “And gray.”

  “Transparent and gray. Could I use your bathroom? I need to fix myself up.”

  The styptic pencil reminds me of a tube of lipstick: white lipstick, cold fire. I run it under the cold water faucet and daub my nostril. It burns, holy cow it burns so much my right eye tears up. “You okay?” Ron yells from the kitchen. I hear wine glasses, a cork popped from another bottle. They’re touching on subjects: Florence and the Baptistery doors, Rome and the Romans, Caravaggio, riding in taxis. I touch the cut again, press tissue against it, and wait. No go. Vasoconstrictor, my ass. Pressure on, pressure off, a few more styptic burns, until finally there’s a milky film of anhydrous aluminum sulfate up and down the right side of my nose.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Looks like you were snorting in there.”

  “Good for now.”

  “You need to be more careful. How on earth do you cut your nose? If you can cut your nose, you can cut your throat.”

  “Yum, figs.”

  “This woman in our group, everywhere we go in Rome she’s like, ‘This is nice, but it’s hard to beat Piazza della Senorita.’ Did she not say that, Ron?”

  “She did say that. But I think it was just for the fun.”

  “And every night, she orders that tomato mozzarella salad and calls it a ‘Caprice,’ like the Chevy car? ‘Um, I’ll have the Caprice.’ The waiter, waitress, they roll their eyes and say “cah-PRAY-zay.” Next night it’s Caprice all over again.”

  “You say that very well.”

  “Caprese.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Thanks. You were right, though. We hung with the tour guide only for a little while. Then, see ya.”

  “A lot of old people.”

  “So many old people.”

  “But the cutest couple. Tell them about the cutest couple, Ray.”

  “How about another glass of wine? One for the nose?”

  “Nope. Rule of one.”

  “They’ve been married forty years. Tony and Diane. Every trip they take, they find one of those photo booths, like in shopping centers, remember those things when you were a kid? You sit on these stools and mug for the camera and get a strip of black and white pictures. They have forty or fifty of those things. Every trip they take.”

  “Romantic.”

  “Cute.”

  “They were like kids.”

  “They were like newlyweds. All over each other. They made the Italians blush.”

  “So, about the rule of one.”

  “It’s his new thing.”

  “One glass of wine. One dish of pasta. One potato, one piece of meat, one piece of cake. Take what you want. Just take one.”

  “Why would you do such a thing?”

  “So, like, one glass of Frascati, one glass of Sauvignon Blanc? One Merlot? I’ll just keep opening bottles.”

  “Nope. One is one.”

  “It’s the loneliest number.”

  My wife taps the side of her nose. “You’re bleeding again.”

  “You might need a stitch.”

  “I think we should move to the dinner table.”

  A couple swipes of the styptic pencil is all it takes. I stand in front of the mirror looking at my old face while Rachel and Ron put dinner on the table. Rachel’s talking about Florence, a pasta they ate with pear sauce and asparagus tips. She tries to say the pasta name. “Fiocchetti,” my wife says. “Was that it?” She says it two or three times, calling attention to the double consonants. Rachel repeats. I turn my head to the left, the better to see my nostril. So this is my old face. So many wrinkles. One day years ago I was driving west. It was early evening. Stopped at a light, I looked in the mirror and saw, for the first time, all this gray over my temples. What the hell? Tonight I take in my drooping eyelids, the long, deepening furrows in my cheeks. The skin in my neck is beginning to look slack.

  “You’re back.”

  “Chianti. Let’s open that Chianti now.”

  “I cauterized myself.”

  “It better work this time. You bleed again we’re going to emergency.”

  “I was up late a few nights ago. Rambo was on TV.”

  “Ron, please, don’t talk about Rambo at the dinner table.”

  “It’s the third movie. Rambo goes to Afghanistan, where he fights with the Mujahedin. Those were the days when the people who want to kill us today were sort of our friends. So Rambo and the Mujahedin are fighting the Soviets, and Rambo gets wounded.”

  “He just likes to say ‘Mujahedin.’”

  “Three Rambos. Where is the rule of one when you need it?”

  “He’s got this shrapnel in his
side that he pulls out, and blood comes oozing from the wound, kind of like your nose. What does Rambo do? He takes the gunpowder out of a bullet and pours it in the wound and lights it. He lights it, with a little torch. There’s this explosion, and flames and smoke shoot out both sides of the wound. Rambo, he just takes it.”

  “That’s what I just did. You must have smelled the smoke.”

  “Poor Rambo, he’s so dim.”

  “All he knows is rage.”

  “And vengeance.”

  “Everything else is inchoate.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m not quite sure.”

  “Then why say it?”

  “No. Inchoate, you’re not quite sure, kind of muddled.”

  “Rambo, man of muddle.”

  “That’s how Rambo stops the bleeding.”

  “All right, I’ll have one more glass, just because it’s Chianti.”

  “Tony and Diane, that couple on our trip, told us a sad story, about their dog that died. It got to be old and infirm, deaf and disoriented. It would wander into a closet and couldn’t find its way out.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “The car, Ray.”

  “Yes, the car. The dog loved to go for rides. Just loved it. One day it sort of fell out an open car window. Tony turned, Diane swerved, I don’t remember. The dog tumbled out the window at thirty-five miles per hour.”

  “Onto a grassy shoulder.”

  “It was a grassy shoulder. They stressed that. And the dog was okay, but not. It walked and ran fine, but mentally it started slipping.”

  “Dogs get dementia.”

  “Canine Alzheimer’s.”

  “Finally they had it put down.”

  “A terrible expression. Don’t say that, Ray.”

  “And they decided to have the dog preserved.”

  “Stuffed?”

  “Yes!”

  “‘Our one and only dog,’ Diane said. ‘We couldn’t bear to part with it.’”

  “One is the loneliest number.”

  “What do you do with a stuffed dog? Keep it on the hearth, with its little dog dish next to it?”

  “I wonder if you could do that with humans? Stuff Nana and keep her in the family room.”

  “What about Lenin? What about Mao? They’re stuffed. And that guy in Venezuela?”

  “They’re lying down. They’re dead. Stand Nana up. Make her lifelike.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to remember the dog in its youth? Its most lively and frisky state? Rather than, ‘There’s old Fido, right after he got lost in the closet.’”

  “Something tells me he may end up in the closet.”

  “Probably Nana, if she had any say-so, would not want to be preserved the way she looked on her final day.”

  “Where would we put your mother, Ray?”

  “There’s more. They get the dog home, and it’s doing something that bothers them. Really bothers them. The dog is standing there with one paw raised. You know how dogs strike that funny pose?”

  “Interrogative.”

  “Quit it.”

  “‘It never did that in real life,’ Tony said. ‘The dog was brimming with confidence. It threw caution to the wind.’”

  “Canine carpe diem.”

  “‘Brimming with confidence?’ He said that?”

  “More or less.”

  “Probably for the taxidermist, it was an opportunity. You can imagine him, a craftsman, thinking, ‘I’ll make this dog stand on its own three feet, with one foot raised, expressing personality.’”

  “An interrogative pose.”

  “More like, WTF?”

  “Wouldn’t they have a pre-preservation conference with the taxidermist to iron out those details?”

  “Okay, one more glass. Then that’s it.”

  “See how strong he is?”

  “See how silly it is to live by principles?”

  “It’s very good Chianti. Or what is it now?”

  “You’re having one glass of Barbaresco.”

  “You say that very well. Barbaresco and Mujahedin.”

  “I’m picturing that old dog.”

  “Holding its WTF pose, for all of eternity.”

  “God, that’s a long time.”

  “In the Rapture, you know, the virtuous are sucked up into heaven, for all of eternity. Not just your spirit, but your body too.”

  “There’s a good reason you should stop at one glass.”

  “It’s in the Bible. Body and soul.”

  “Our tribe has a different mythology, don’t we, Ray? Don’t we just die?”

  “The living and the dead, bodied and re-embodied, off to heaven they go.”

  “I think we just die.”

  “What I want to know is, which body goes to heaven? Take Nana. Is she raptured away in her old, decrepit body—liver spots, mustache, loss of bone density, half-blind? Or can she say, you know, ‘Make me twenty-one’? ‘I’d like to be thirty-five?’”

  “You should have seen Rach at eighteen.”

  “Thank you, Ray.”

  “If I went tonight, would I have this Jack Nicholson nose for all of eternity?”

  “What?”

  “And Diane and Tony’s dog, lost in heaven’s closets, looking for its dog dish?”

  “Jack Nicholson nose?”

  “Don’t ask. He’s exceeded his one-glass limit. We better say good night.”

  It’s a long good-bye. Global warming, the rising of the lakes, why can’t they build a decent road where we live. Now the Roman road system was something else, my wife reminds us, and we give three cheers for the Appian Way. Next time, how about some Italian lessons? How do you say “next time” in Italian?

  Back home, lying in bed, we talk about trees.

  “Right now the deer could be out there,” my wife says, “finishing off our cherry trees.”

  Tomorrow we’ll definitely go to Newton. We’ll buy deer Off. We’ll look at some replacement trees. She suggests rose of Sharon, I suggest baobab. “There’s a baobab tree in Africa, I tell her, that’s six thousand years old.” How about one of those? That’s a tree with thick skin. She gets up and finds a towel to cover my pillow, says I might bleed in the middle of the night. I would like to guarantee her that I won’t.

  29

  Water Me

  Some years ago my wife and I had lunch at Scoma’s in Sausalito. While we ate, the waiter told us his immigration story—transplanted from Italy to Philadelphia, then Las Vegas, now San Francisco. There was good money in restaurant work, he said. He wanted to put away as much as he could, then move back to Puglia. Our two kids were supposed to be outside on the restaurant deck overlooking the bay. Except my daughter, ten at the time, was now pulling on my sleeve.

  “He’s trapped,” she said.

  “Trapped where?” I said. “Is he okay?”

  She covered her mouth, barely containing her delight. “His head is stuck in the fence.”

  “The fence!” the waiter said.

  She led us outside to her brother. Our five-year-old had pushed his head through the rails on the wrought iron deck fence to see better and was now staring down into a bank of swaying seaweed, holding the bars like a prisoner, calm, a little sheepish.

  The waiter said he’d run and get some olive oil.

  “What, to oil his head?”

  “Well, the poor kid.”

  “Wait,” I said. “If he got his head in there, we ought to be able to get it out.” After lunch we were going to Muir Woods. I pictured loading an oily child into the rental car and then dragging him around the redwoods.

  The trick was all in the ears. With a little pressing and folding, he popped out, born again, blinking, but okay.

  “Would you like a glass of water?” the waiter asked.

  “Huh?” the boy said. “Water?”

  “Huh?” I said.

  What is it with Italians and water? Recently, walking around a no-traffic zone in Rimini, I heard what could only be descri
bed as a heavy splat. I turned and saw that a late middle-aged woman, somewhat on the heavy side, had tripped and fallen face-first to the pavement. A man nearby rushed to her side, helped her sit up, and asked if she would like a glass of water. She said she was okay. Seconds later a store clerk who had seen the fall ran outside and told her she should go file a complaint with the city. Then she asked the woman if she would like a glass of water. The woman said she was okay, but they insisted on getting her to take a drink. The clerk ran back into the store and a few seconds later came out with a plastic water bottle and a small plastic cup.

  To Italians, sometimes water is more than just water. It soothes a stuck head and a smashed face. At a local Italian market where I shop here in Detroit, I used to see an old gentleman buying cases of San Benedetto bottled water. “It’s good for the kidneys,” he explained one day in the parking lot, “and keeps the prostate from heating up.” Water can do that?

  There is a long tradition in Europe of people “taking the waters” for their health benefits. The Italians refer to it as “the cure.” The 1828 edition of London Universal Dictionary of Science, Art, Literature, and Practical Mechanics lists close to six hundred sites in Europe offering mineral waters with health benefits. There is a distinct British bias. Here is one entry, for Harrowgate, in Yorkshire: “Discovered in 1571 by captain [sic] Slingsby; found to contain sulfur, muriate of soda, and purging salt; destroys worms; is praised in scurvy, scrofula, palsy, and chiefly in cutaneous hemorrhages.” And here is the reference, from the Universal Dictionary, to Italy: “Contains many sulfurous and warm springs, of little note.”

  Tell the Italians that. San Pellegrino Terme was already a thing in the thirteenth century. Castrocaro was a destination for the Romans. They called it “Salsubium” (a place rich in waters). A few years ago my wife took me to Castrocaro. We soaked in water, waded in it, inhaled it in its steam state, dunked in cold baths of it, and, of course, drank some. Neither of us has since been troubled by scurvy or scrofula. Nor have I broken any bones. And I think I sing better. Amazing water. Just the names of some bottled waters in Italy smack of the miraculous: Fonte Santafiore, Acqua della Madonna, Acqua Santa Chianciano, Acqua dell Cardinale, San Fautino, San Giorgio, San Pelligrino, Santa Vittoria, Sergente Angelica.

  The first time I went to Italy, a few months after I was married, I was told not to drink the tap water. While we were settling into the family apartment, my wife’s uncle carried in a few cases of bottled water. I pointed at the tap in the kitchen sink. What about that? “No one drinks that,” he said. This was before bottled water had become a common consumer product in the United States. The way I was raised, if you were thirsty, you went to the tap. That was my aquatic orientation. It was an August visit to Italy, and it was hot. There was no AC. For ten days, everywhere we went, we were on the bottle.