by A. J. Molloy
CHAPTER TWELVE
HE SMILES AT me, and at my mother, as if nothing untoward has happened between him and me, ever. It’s the same, confident, handsome-sad masculine smile. His manicured hand is extended. His suit is an immaculately dark charcoal-gray, verging on black. The shirt is blinding white; the silk tie aquamarine and primrose. I had forgotten how tall he is.
“Buona sera, X.”
“Um . . .” I am flustered, stammering like a fool; glancing at both my mom and Marcus. “Um . . . Ah . . . Uh . . .”
My mom. Oh God. She is staring up at Marc as if Jesus had just descended from the heavens to give her a new Bulgari purse. Her expression is somewhere close to adoration, mixed—incontrovertibly—with desire. My mom is experiencing urges.
Even worse, I am feeling a slight tinge of embarrassment for my mom; now I see her from Marc’s perspective. This overweight American woman in her department-store clothes, her Gap jeans, her mussed gray hair. What will Marc think?
But why should I damn well care what Marc thinks? This is my mom and I love her and he can go to hell with his stupid beautiful suits. What right does he have to exude superiority?
And why am I so angry at myself if I don’t care about Marc?
“X?”
Marc’s voice interrupts my thoughts. Calm but firm.
I come to my senses with a jolt. I’ve been standing here vexing for twenty seconds. Both Marc and my mom are looking at me.
“Sorry. Uh . . . Sorry.”
Come on, Alexandra, get a grip.
“Mom, this is . . . Marc. Marc Roscarrick. He’s a . . . He’s a . . .” Spit it out. “He’s a friend, um . . . a friend I made here. In Naples, I mean.”
Excellent . . . not.
I hurry on.
“And this is my mom, Marc. Angela. From San Jose. She’s here on vacation. We’re going to the Gambrinus, just for a coffee.”
Marc’s suntanned hand reaches out and takes my mother’s and he lifts it to his mouth and imperceptibly kisses it, graciously and courteously, with that Old World insouciance that is simultaneously amused and amusing.
“I am grateful for the pleasure,” he says, staring deep into her bespectacled Californian eyes.
I think my mom is actually going to swoon.
“Well, isn’t this nice!” she says, in a kind of falsetto, whooping, I-may-have-recently-inhaled-helium voice; a voice I have literally never heard before. “It’s so nice to meet you! So nice!”
Oh lord.
“So, Mom, ah, Marc and I . . .”
I begin to explain our friendship, but then I trail off, embarrassed. What can I say? Oh, Mom, meet Marc, he’s a billionaire aristocrat into prehistoric S&M who fucked me into blissful oblivion the other night; shall we have some coffee? A bit of me wants to say this, of course. To show off. To tell her that I—yes, me, Alex Beckmann, the studious daughter, Spinster of the Year, two years running—I snared a gorgeous billionaire. Then I chucked him.
However, it doesn’t really matter what I think because Mom is off, doing her own thing: she is trying to speak Italian.
The only problem with this is that my mom cannot speak Italian. As far as I know she has never spoken a foreign language, ever. Trying not to blush, resisting the urge to cover my eyes with my hands in mortification, I stare fixedly at the umbrella pines at the corner of the square beside the dingy royal palace, as Mom says: “Aha! So . . . um . . . buon gonna, señor.”
Señor? Does she think he’s Spanish?
“Stop now, Mom. Please?
“Due . . .” she stumbles on. “ . . . señor Rascorr . . . Mie amigo.”
Please. Stop. Mom.
At last she stops, realizing she is making an idiot of herself, and I can see she is beginning to flush, the color is rising in her cheeks and she is evidently embarrassed. Why should Marc humiliate her like this?
Before I can hit him, or cause a diverting scene, perhaps by assaulting a pigeon, Marc smiles and touches her gently on the shoulder and he laughs that warm, calm laugh and says, “Mrs. Beckmann, per favore, the painful truth is, most Neapolitans cannot speak Italian, so you really need not trouble yourself on my behalf.”
It’s a tiny little joke but it’s just exactly the right little joke to relieve my mother of her embarrassment and now she giggles girlishly, her humiliation gone. But my confusion is returning in fine style. Marc has said exactly the right thing; my mom is swooning; I think I want to fly to Rome.
“You were going to the Gambrinus?”
Marc is talking to me.
“Yes . . .”
“Will you allow me to buy you and your charming mother an aperitif? It would be my absolute pleasure.”
I am in no position to say no. He knows we’re going to the Caffè G. My mom now looks like a dog that has just been promised one of those filet steaks from Japan that cost three hundred dollars.
Reluctantly, I surrender. “Sure.”
And so we cross the Piazza del Plebiscito and, of course, when we reach the Gambrinus, the waiters make a big fuss of Marc, escorting him, with much feudal bowing and scraping, to his usual table, the best table in the best cafe in Naples. Then the three of us sit down, and we drink Venezianos, and we look out at thronging, lively, triangular Piazza Trieste e Trento. And as the drinks come and go, Marc tells my mom stories about Naples life and she laughs and sips the glowing orange aperitifs, and nibbles the tiny prosciutto rolls, and laughs some more.
Then Marc stands and pays our bill, tipping the waiters lavishly. Finally, he kisses my mom’s hand one last time—I suspect she won’t wash it for a week—and then he disappears into the Neapolitan dusk.
Mom looks at me. She shakes her head as if amazed.
“Well, my word! What a lovely man! Why didn’t you tell me you had such lovely friends? Tell me all about him!”
I tell her something about him, and then add some lies. I tell her I met him at a couple of parties in Marechiaro and the Chiaia. I tell her we are friends and leave it at that. She gazes at me as I speak, sipping her Veneziano. She nods and eats the last delicious miniature pizza. And then she says, “He’s not entirely unattractive, is he?”
“Mom.”
“What? I’m just saying.”
“So . . . ?”
“I may be three hundred years old, Alex, but I am not blind. And I am still a woman.”
“He’s okay.”
“I’m guessing he’s rich, too. The way he is . . . The way he acts and dresses. A kind of confidence?”
I mumble something about “import export” and “maybe a few million.” Mom eyes me. I fidget and squirm, like a petulant child. This is predictable. I don’t know why people worry about aging. All you have to do to knock all the years away is hang out with your parents. They can reduce you to a whining teenage brat in a matter of minutes. It’s a species of magic.
But I want to move on.
“Shall we get some dinner? We can have pizza—there’s a nice place near my apartment, on the Via Partenope.”
Mom nods and wipes her mouth with a napkin. And says: “Is he married?”
“Who?”
“Darling.”
“No.”
“Engaged?”
“Don’t know. How would I know? He goes out with models. Actresses. You know. People who appear in People magazine. People people.”
“A rich, handsome man in want of a wife.” Her expression is shrewd. Calculating.
“Don’t try to marry me off, Mom. Not again. Remember you wanted me to marry Jeff Myerson in San Jose.”
“He has Apple shares.”
“He’s five foot six.”
“He could wear heels at the wedding?”
Our laughter is shared. Some kind of sanity is restored between us; the mother-
daughter equilibrium has returned. We stand and she takes my arm and together we walk back to the seafront and the restaurants and pizzerias of Via Partenope. And over a margherita and a marinara, Mom tells me all about the family, how my younger brother Paul (major-league jock, should have studied medicine) is faring at the University of Texas, at Austin, and how my older brother, Jonathan (bit of a stoner, never gonna settle down), has finally sorted himself out and got a nice girlfriend and a well-paying job at Google, and might now settle down.
I listen to all this quite happily, sipping my Montepulciano, literally the cheapest wine on the menu. None of my mom’s tattle is news to me—I Skyped both my brothers over the weekend, as I do every week—but there is something comforting in simply hearing her say it, in her warm, loving, heedless chattering way. I am back in San Jose in the big family kitchen that smells of lemon and baking, and the sun is streaming in, and Mom is struggling to make sorbet and laughing as the gunk goes everywhere. And I am eleven years old and happy.
I had a happy childhood; my parents were kind and loving. I loved my brothers. Even the family dog was cute. It feels like a guilty secret, but it is true. Until I was twelve or thirteen I was entirely happy. It was in my teens that the boredom kicked in, or maybe it was something more than boredom: an existential tedium, something deep. Something that has never been satisfied. Going to the East Coast to study was an attempt to quench this thirst, but it wasn’t enough. I want to experience. I crave something more. Life can’t just be baking and sorbets and kids and a nice dog, wonderful as they are.
Mom has finished gossiping. I take her back to her hotel and kiss her in the lobby, and tell her how much it means to me, her coming to see me—and it does, it does. And I promise to meet her in the morning at ten to take her sightseeing.
And so I do. And, as I expected, it all goes very seriously downhill.
Mom doesn’t like Naples.
I suspected she wouldn’t. It’s not her kind of place. Too wild, too outrageous, too pungent. Everywhere we go I see her wincing at the piles of garbage, or inwardly tutting at the graffiti, or staring in frank displeasure at the Vietnamese prostitutes inexplicably sitting on sofas in the middle of seedy, smelly, narrow cobblestoned streets by the Stazione Centrale.
Part of me wants to remonstrate with Mom. To tell her to take off her bourgeois suburban spectacles and see the beauty of Naples beneath the dirt and squalor: to see the authenticity, the realness, the incredible history. To see the old women polishing the sacred skulls in the caves of the cemetery of Fontanelle as they have done for centuries; to look in the single windows of the bassi and see the aging men in string vests with hairy shoulders eating friarelli greens, in houses built over buried Roman temples; to simply stand on my balcony and gaze down on streets laid out by Ancient Greeks, then look to the west and feel your heart rush at the twilit colors of sunset over Sorrento, a cassata of faded pink, pale violet, Barolo red, and pistachio green—finally melting into the black of night and the diamantine stars.
But my mom sees the grime and the drug addicts, and she doesn’t like it. She even dislikes the lack of tourists, one of Naples’s main attractions.
We are sitting on a terrace outside a cafe in the Old City, by the archaeological museum, and she frowns and looks tired and says, “Where is everyone?”
We are surrounded by Italians—yammering, gesturing, laughing, arguing Italians. We have barely managed to find a decent place to sit, but my mom is wondering where “everyone” is, by which she means “Where are all the sensible people?”—the tourists, her fellow Americans, English speakers, normal types.
I could tell her that they have all been chased away by the squalor and crime of Naples, and the reputation of the various mafias, but I’m not sure that will assist her mood. Or my mood, for that matter.
Because, if these few days have been a bit of a disappointment for my mom, they have been a total trial for me, too. The encounter with Marc has left me unsettled, agitated, as confused as before, missing him again. Worse still, everywhere we have been in Naples—me and Mom—has somehow served to remind me of him.
In the Duomo, the cathedral, we saw the great relic housing the sacred blood of St. Jenuarius—and this reminded me of that blissful roseate wine he served me for lunch, the Moscato Rosa. Every palazzo we explored along Via Toledo has reminded of the one palazzo above all others: The Palazzo Roscarrick.
And then we went to the museum of Capodimonte, a rigid Bourbon palace, standing stiff and forlorn and unvisited on its sunny little hill, in its dusty little park. This is one of the world’s great museums, and this time my mom was actually happy, enjoying her time alone with the Raphaels and Titians, the El Grecos and Bellinis—yet I was transfixed by one particular painting, by Caravaggio.
And the painting was The Flagellation.
What can you do? I can be nice to my lovely mom. On the last afternoon we take a taxi to the station; she’s getting a train down the coast to meet her friend Margo in Amalfi.
It’s four P.M. Mom looks at the waiter and says, proudly, in her improving Italian, “Un Cappuccino, per favore.” I remind myself not to cringe. Was this what I was like when I first arrived? Ordering cappuccino after twelve noon? Now I know it is a total faux pas. Did I eat spaghetti with knife and fork, like Mom? Probably. Oh dear. And now I hate myself for judging my mom. What a mess. Marc, what have you done?
Mom sits and sips at her cappuccino, trying not to look at the beggars across the great station hall. I have to be honest.
“Mom, I’m sorry you didn’t like Naples.”
“Oh, darling,” she says. “It’s not that I didn’t like it, it’s just that it’s so . . . different.”
“I’m sure you will like Amalfi more. It’s beautiful. And clean.”
Her hand reaches out and touches mine.
“I don’t care about Naples. Or Amalfi,” she says. “I care about you. My darling daughter, my only daughter. I am very proud of you.”
“Why?”
“Because,” she says, setting down her coffee cup. She stares deep into my eyes. “Because you are bright and beautiful—and because you are doing what I should have done.”
I gaze across the table, wondering where this is going.
“You are living, Alexandra. You are alive. Seeing the world. I wish I had done that.”
“Mom? What do you mean?”
“X, I love your father and I adore my kids, all three of you, even Jonny most of the time. But . . .”
I have never seen my mom like this—wrestling with some inner truth, something evidently painful. She stares into the deflated foam of her mistimed cappuccino, then looks at me again.
“You know, Alex, I was never young. Not really. And that’s very sad.”
“How—”
“I never realized I was young until it was too late. Please . . . don’t do what I did.”
And that’s that. She stands; her train is waiting. I help her carry her bags to her carriage and she leans out the train window to wave good-bye, and there are something like tears in her eyes as the train takes off, and she mouths the words I love you, and I wave at her helplessly. Then I stand, watching the train until it rattles into nothing and, when it is completely gone, I have an enormous urge to cry.
This deep, abiding sadness stays with me for a day. I feel like the wilted dusty palms on Partenope. I never realized I was young . . . Don’t do what I did.
I want experience. I am young. This is it. I will never be twenty-one in Naples again.
Late the next afternoon, I pick up the phone. Then I put it down. Then I hide it under a cushion. Then I retrieve it, and dial, and count the seconds, and wait.
“Sì?”
“Buona sera. Uh . . .”
“Yes?”
“Can I speak to Marc? Signor Roscarrick?”
“Who is it, please?”
“Alexandra. I mean X. Tell him it’s X.”
There is a pause. Marc comes on the line.
“Hello? X?”
Oh God, that voice. That accent. I want to kiss him through the phone. I want to cry on his shoulder. Then kiss him some more.
“Alex?”
“Marc, I . . . God . . . I . . . I want . . . I just, I’m sorry . . . I . . . I wonder . . . what are you doing?”
“You want to see me?”
This is it. I answer: “Yes.”
“Come to the Gambrinus.”
“Sorry?”
“Meet me there tonight, at seven. We need to talk first.”
Click.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE GAMBRINUS. OF course. This is where it started, this is where it will end—or continue. I sit nervously at the table, trying not to look at my watch. I am ten minutes early. Maybe I should have been mysteriously late? Maybe I should have dressed up? I am in simple jeans and a simple top. I dithered over a minidress, but then I decided that looked too needy.
And maybe I am needy. I need him. And his kisses. Sipping my gin and tonic—hard liquor for resolve—I stare across the square. Nervous. And waiting. And looking at my watch again.
And here is Marc. At exactly seven P.M.
I glance pointedly at my watch as he joins me at my table. I need to ease the tension with small talk.
“Are you always this punctual?”
“Blame my mother,” he says suavely, sitting down. “She drummed it into me. Punctuality is the politeness of princes.”
“Or the virtue of the bored?”
He gazes my way, and he laughs; and our laughter is mutual. And then I remember that we get along. In a very basic and simple way: we get along. And I need to hold on to this, if I am going to do what I have resolved to do.
“So,” he says, and he is no longer laughing. “There can only be one reason you have summoned me.”
“Yes.”
“You have agreed to be initiated.”
