The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  It was too cool to eat outside that night, so Paul and I took our dinner of cold chicken on trays in his study.

  “With some friends you don’t want to stand on ceremony,” he said. “This is how I usually eat when I’m alone.”

  “How often is that?” I asked.

  “More often now that my children are away.”

  I don’t know why it surprised me that he had children. Most people do, after all. “I didn’t realize. Did you mention them before?”

  “Haven’t I? Usually I can’t stop talking about them. Lilly is in her third year at Berkeley, and Stephen just started boarding school. My wife has strange New England notions about that sort of thing. I insisted that he at least stay in California. Thatcher. Not far.” But the expression on his face suggested that the school felt very far indeed.

  “He’s what then, fourteen?”

  “Yes. An age when you might want—you might not want, but you might need—your father. Isn’t it?”

  “I’m sure it is, but I’m probably the last person to ask.”

  “Did you and your wife ever consider it, children?”

  I shook my head. Part of the reason Faye and I never had children was that I feared the responsibility—not of caring for a child, exactly, but of curating a childhood. I felt I had no idea how to do it, and, as it turned out, that was one of the few questions on which we agreed.

  “I might as well tell you, Paul, that I’m separated from my wife,” I said.

  He nodded sadly and pushed away his plate. “I was beginning to guess that might be the case,” he said. “Would you care to tell me about it?”

  I told him. About our public arguments, our private infidelities. I explained how odd it had been to like someone so well, even at the end, to be charmed still by the traces of Texas in her accent, the outraged face she made at the price of bananas, the religious discipline with which she approached her writing. I explained that, unfortunately, fondness wasn’t enough, that what ultimately did us in was our inability to comfort each other. I explained that we were both surprised to learn just how much comforting the other needed.

  “But enough of that,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve been wiser in love than I have. When does your wife return? You met her in Italy, I heard?”

  “I did,” he said. Was there something to detect in how his jaw tightened as he said this? “Did Steiner tell you? I did, indeed.”

  I tried to make my voice sound light. “Anyone I know?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  In La Morra the air was thick with insects and the particular green light of valleys. Mr. and Mrs. Tom Morrow stayed in a family-run hotel without hot water, but in the evenings the family—the Donatis—cooked bright yellow pasta they called tajarin, or simmered risotto in the local wine.

  In the afternoons Mr. and Mrs. Morrow sat with the truffle dogs on the terrace above the vineyards. Across the valley they could see the other hill towns—Barolo, Cherasco, Verduno—in the greenish haze. They could see Nebbiolo grapes planted in long lines on the hillsides, little roads penciled between the square fields. The dogs followed at a respectful distance everywhere they went.

  The Donatis had their own vineyard at the foot of the property, the vines as old as Italy. They had their own patch of forest where once they had found a white truffle the size of a man’s head. The family home had stood for more than four hundred years. Turning the old house to an inn must have been quite a humiliation, but they never let it show.

  Mrs. Morrow spoke to them in Italian, and Mr. Morrow chipped in when he could. Questo è interessante, questo è terribile, he said when the family matriarch, Marisa, explained that the grapes were of such value it had once been a crime to cut them down, punishable by amputation or death. She explained that, as children, they were forbidden even to go into the vineyards.

  “Did you have a forbidden place when you were a child?” Mrs. Morrow asked Mr. Morrow later that evening.

  She meant some place rife with both terror and possibility, but the truth was that most places had been forbidden to him: stores, restaurants, the lobbies of the buildings downtown. And of course the place he most wanted to go: the flower shop where his mother worked. He didn’t tell Mrs. Morrow any of this because he was embarrassed. He wondered which questions she answered with half-truths.

  He had feared it would feel different to take her hand, to steal a kiss, to make love when it was no longer forbidden. But it didn’t feel different, at least for him. Then again, they were only pretending it wasn’t forbidden, weren’t they? He said this to her one night, her hair sticking to his cheek.

  “Perhaps we were only pretending it was forbidden,” she said.

  They learned that they found some of the same things funny. She told him about a trip she’d taken to Sicily with her aunt, a pilgrimage to a Greek amphitheater where plays by Aeschylus had premiered more than two thousand years before. In Siracusa, there was a cathedral built on the remains of the old temple to Athena, Doric columns still visible in the Christian marble. Maud sat in the café on the other side of the square and wept.

  “When I asked her what was wrong she said that she was ‘just so moved by civilization.’ ”

  Mr. and Mrs. Morrow laughed on the terrace.

  One of the truffle dogs was named Victor Emmanuel. Without quite meaning to—the wine came in big clay carafes, so there was no way to know how much they’d drunk—Mr. Morrow began to speak for the dog. “Would you mind, Mrs. Morrow, sneaking me a truffle?”

  “It seems only fair,” Mrs. Morrow said. “Where did you learn such good English?”

  They joked about stealing the dog, taking him with them when they left. In that way they began to talk about the future.

  She wondered if he wanted to return to Chicago. He said that someday he’d like to see the headstone inscribed with his mother’s name in the cemetery on Milwaukee Avenue. But, otherwise, as far as he was concerned, there was no more Chicago.

  Did she want to go back to Boston? No. Though Boston—Wellesley—was very much still there. She could feel it, feel the old version of herself shut up in her room. What would they do?

  He said he’d learned that he could be happy doing almost anything.

  “I’m not sure I believe that,” she said. “Maybe you could once, but is that still true?”

  “No,” he said, thinking about it. “In fact, it isn’t true at all anymore.”

  He had another week left in Bologna. Should they look further ahead than that? Let’s try, she said. One evening, when the sun was yellow and low, she turned to him on the terrace and closed her eyes. In this light, she said, I can almost see you through my eyelids.

  * * *

  Bologna Centrale again. Sarah and I walked arm in arm through the overflowing arcades. I carried my typewriter, having just written a profile of Bianchi that I would need to send on to Marcel that afternoon. She hadn’t slept well on the train, and we’d planned to go to her hotel near the piazza—a far nicer room than mine, she assured me—and lie down.

  “I’m not a person who naps in hotel rooms in the middle of the day,” I said.

  “Yes, well, no one is who they used to be,” she said.

  But the hotel and the hospital were in opposite directions, and I hoped to check some of the terms with Bianchi before I filed the story. I could picture Marcel in the La Voix office, laughing at my misspelling of dementia praecox, shaking his head, calling me back to Paris.

  “I won’t be long. I’ll meet you.”

  “How many hours straight have we spent together, do you think?” she asked. “Let’s not ruin it yet.”

  Perhaps I believed she was too tired to mean anything other than exactly what she said. Certainly I believed she was too happy.

  “I won’t be long.”

  “You already said that.” She looked at me, her smile only just slipping. “And I already said that the hospital doesn’t matter to me. I’d just like to stay with you now.”

/>   We passed a cart heavy with green tomatoes, purple lettuce, and white radishes. I lagged a few steps behind.

  “Keep up. I don’t know where I’m going,” she said. “I might lead us into the river.”

  “But there is no river,” I said.

  * * *

  It was early enough that many of the patients at San Lorenzo were still in bed, in various states of undress. One man was stripping his sheets with rubber gloves. Others lay with pillows over their heads to block the squeaking of nurses’ trolleys, or the light from the big windows. A strange sight, but certainly there had been times when I couldn’t tell day from night myself. We arrived at Bianchi’s office to find the door locked.

  I pecked her cheek. There was a black padded bench—a piano bench—in the hall.

  “Can I leave you here while I look for him?” I asked. Trusting her? Testing her?

  I found Bianchi in another office, deep in conversation with a much older doctor with enormous eyes.

  “Sit down, sit down, Tom,” Bianchi said. “Dr. Boccioni would like you to tell him how the Italians are getting on in America. In New York City, for example, what is life like? He has a nephew who wants to immigrate, but he doesn’t trust what he hears. I will translate.”

  Boccioni looked surprised, but with eyes like his he probably always did.

  “I don’t know much about New York City,” I said.

  “Then tell us about Chicago. He won’t know the difference,” Bianchi said.

  * * *

  The truth was, I never fully believed in Lee Hagen. I knew abstractly that he existed, but I was never jealous of him. I continue to wonder how this was possible, exactly.

  Once, when Father Perrin and I had stayed up late in his office, when we had drunk too much wine and talked for too many hours for the question to feel offensive, I asked him how he still managed to believe in God. The day had been particularly upsetting. A couple from Nîmes had come to pay their respects to a dead son and to inquire about a missing one. During the course of the conversation they told us that two more sons had survived the war, but one had come home blind and the other deaf.

  I often wondered what exactly Father Perrin did believe in. He quoted Charles Darwin as often as Paul of Tarsus. He once told me that if I wanted to see the proof of the devil on earth it was in the fact that the two ideologies that dared to help the poor—Catholicism and Marxism—should find themselves opposed in so many other ways.

  Father Perrin drained his glass and plucked his mustache sardonically, like a movie villain.

  “I don’t believe in God anymore,” he said. “Not in the way you mean, if I understand it. That is: I don’t think He exists. How could I?” And yet, he continued, when he prayed, when he said mass, when he dreamed, he still did believe, and, above all, he still did love. “And I must tell you, Tom, for the first time in my life, truly, I don’t find myself in despair.”

  If Father Perrin had given up on God in his rational mind, but still felt him in his stomach, my belief in Lee Hagen followed the opposite pattern. As did my relationship with despair.

  It feels almost needless to say that when Bianchi and I returned to the hall outside his office, my typewriter had been orphaned on the bench. He raised his eyebrows and unlocked the door. I hadn’t told him any of the lies I had considered—that Sarah was my fiancée, or my sister. I’d only said: friend.

  “Your friend should not be walking around alone.” Bianchi looked at me with more disapproval than I’d thought his face could muster. “These men live here. And to tell the truth, it may not be completely safe for her.”

  I was about to apologize when I heard a woman’s voice. She was crying. I shot from the chair, afraid that one of the patients had confused her for someone else—touched her, frightened her. And I saw that panic flash across Bianchi’s face too. I followed him down the hall.

  We found ourselves in a familiar room, Fairbanks sitting in his familiar position on the bed, cheek agitated by its familiar tremor. There was a woman sitting in the chair beside him. She had black hair just to her shoulders. Pale skin and blue eyes, crying—I could see now—tears of joy.

  Countless pages have been written on the varieties of melancholy, but precious few on the varieties of happiness; most people, I think, simply want to leave the happy alone. And when we don’t leave them alone we talk down to them. There’s something stupid-seeming in happiness. It’s false most of the time, and, even when it is sincere, we think of it as bereft of the complexities of sorrow. But in her face I saw an expression as concentrated as sun off a mirror. It took even Bianchi a moment to find his voice.

  * * *

  Should the parting of lovers be shot from below to maximize, or from above to diminish? Through the window to offer distance, or close-up to offer intimacy? No one ever thinks to ask a writer’s opinion, but, obviously, the camera should go in the veins.

  The story takes place in the body. Happiness flashes across the brain. Sorrow ripples through the arteries. Joy and fulfillment are real, but they’re quiet and they’re slow. They drip like relief from an IV. And the devastation, when it comes, is usually quiet and slow too. Because the real story is not one of dramatic instants, but of the gradual reversal of expectations over many days in the dark when hope is slowly abridged. As often as life is difficult, it is just as rarely sudden.

  Later, I told myself I was a fool to be surprised. But, in the moment, I felt the sense of sublime shock that one turns to great forces of nature to explain—avalanches, storms, and the like.

  I kept thinking: it’s not real yet, not until someone else speaks. If we walked from the room we would erase the scene inside it. Why not just admit that at one of the critical moments of my life I reasoned like a baby playing peek-a-boo? Why not admit that for a moment I actually believed—and I believed this more strongly than I ever believed in Lee Hagen—that if Bianchi smiled kindly, if he laughed and sat down beside her and took her hand and said, Signora, that can’t possibly be, it would make a difference.

  Bianchi caught my eye, curled the corner of his mouth in a question mark. But what choice did he have?

  “If he is your husband, tell me who you are, please,” he said. I could hear only the blood in my ears. I don’t know how she answered the question. There was paint peeling on the ceiling. An empty portico, wanting its composer’s plaster head.

  “Tom,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tom. Didn’t you recognize him?”

  * * *

  In the late afternoon, Santo Stefano was empty and damp, the chapels lined with dark paintings of grime-soaked angels, a dented brass altar plate left as a decoy to thieves.

  I wandered into the deserted cloister, ringed with pencil-thin arches of red marble. I envied the monks this space, so perfectly proportioned. I envied that, for them, there was nothing to see; this was simply the place to walk on nice evenings, to think on awful evenings.

  * * *

  In a square off Via Maggiore I watched five boys play Terremoto. The game worked like this: The boys pantomimed baking bread, sweeping out storefronts, threshing wheat. Then one boy yelled, Terremoto! They pretended the earth was shaking—bending their legs to keep their balance, twisting their faces in terror. Eventually, the four larger boys collapsed onto the smallest and lay there, stone-still, as he tried to dig himself out.

  * * *

  On Via Ugo Bassi I found two women in tears in front of a shop window. The bridal shop. All the white dresses had been dyed Marxist red.

  * * *

  I crept into a vinteria near my hotel. Paul was at a table reading a newspaper, the only other patron. As I waited for my glass of wine from a boy no older than fifteen, I watched Paul snap the pages, section by section. No one ever taught me to read a newspaper like that, I thought. But when he lowered the paper his eyes were bloodshot. The ashtray was full of mangled butts.

  “You don’t look well,” I said.

  “Oh, I never look well,” he said.
“I am a bit surprised at how you look. How was your trip?”

  “The trip was wonderful. I suppose I can at least say that.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Sarah believes she found her missing husband in the hospital this afternoon. You see, Paul, the language of suffering is seldom literal.

  “I drank too much wine, I think. By the way, I brought you some.”

  The shelves were crowded with hundreds of bottles; some looked a hundred years old. The tables were a clean, white marble, and behind the bar the boy shaved ham with a sharp knife.

  * * *

  Sometime later—it was true dark and I’d finished my dispatch to Marcel—there was a knock on my door. The bed was unmade, I hadn’t put on a clean shirt or so much as looked at a mirror. I hadn’t at all decided what to say to her—still, it was no relief to open the door to Dr. Bianchi. I pushed open the window, all too aware that despair has its own smell.

  “I now understand what happened today,” he said. “You should not be embarrassed.”

  “What should I be?”

  “You should have a drink,” he said, pulling a bottle from his doctor’s bag.

  “I’ve already had a drink.”

  He smiled. “I don’t permit myself any day but Sunday. I’m making an exception for you out of friendship. And perhaps you are not the only one who has problems.”

  He poured the Fernet into the dirty wineglasses, and sat in the chair by the window. In the single lamp’s yellow light he looked quite unwell. God knows what I looked like.

  “Did you recognize Fairbanks?” he asked.

  It would have been easy enough to tell him that I couldn’t possibly have recognized Lee Hagen, that I’d never seen him in my life—not even a picture. That I’d lied to Sarah from the beginning. Bianchi would have understood, in his way. But the truth—that version of the truth—no longer seemed to apply. It may be best to say this: I knew the story I’d told Sarah was a lie, but I no longer felt it as such. I only felt my hold on her slipping—palms, to fingertips, to nails.