Follies

by Ann Beattie

  After a day, Yuri returned to my house and barked loudly on the front lawn. I hobbled out to greet him, relieved that he had reappeared after whatever journey he had been on, and gathered him up in my arms to take into the house, in order to call Cissie.

  Cissie had the flu, unfortunately, though her older sister came to get the dog, and in so doing, she met the man from the drugstore. They hit it off and decided to take a walk together, so I went into the living room to keep the UPS man company.

  I should have come. I understand that people think I have an exciting life, and those who do not think that seem to believe that I am a recluse. I have entertained the possibility that both things are true simultaneously, though it seems equally possible that neither is true.

  Had I come, I had decided to leave the Vuitton at home, but had still not decided between the other suitcase and the duffel bag.

  I intended to phone and explain, but the power went out and I could not use the telephone. Though telephone service resumed, by the next morning the man from the drugstore and Cissie’s sister asked to borrow my car to go to Las Vegas and get married. Though the UPS man offered to drive me to the airport, it was understood by both of us that this was not an approved use for his vehicle.

  The caulk in the bathtub was inadequate, and the kitchen ceiling flooded as I was bathing.

  I wanted to come, but I was forced to remain home for the plumber, the plasterer, and then for the painter.

  Winter is, of course, a very good time for travel, in spite of possible inclement weather.

  I intend to come, but summer may be best.

  Though my life is temporarily unsettled, in that two people are living with me, and my car will not be available to me for a significant amount of time, it may all be for the best; while the funeral of the bird was accomplished rather easily, the funeral of my friend was a much more complicated affair, and emotionally exhausting.

  It is best to set out when one has had a good night’s rest.

  One likes to tie up loose ends, such as the twenty dollars still owed me by the dental hygienist. Someone else’s dental emergency required me to delay my appointment for three days, and as my visit to the dentist is still pending, I must, at this time, delay my departure.

  Mostre

  SHE hadn’t done very well in Rome, not knowing the language. The buses were hard to figure out, and even when she did get the right bus, she stood all the way to her destination. She avoided the 64 entirely, because of pickpockets. More often she walked, and held her breath as the motorcycles and motor scooters whizzing by missed touching her legs by only a fraction of an inch. On a late-night walk, she stood looking at the Trevi Fountain, thinking like Evel Knievel, imagining what it would be like if a motorcycle jumped the whole thing. Forget Anita Ekberg: Romans—if any natives at all stood looking at the fountain—would appreciate much more the unexpected sight of a beautiful, silvery machine flying overhead. It would make a wonderful children’s book: some gutsy little bastard on his motorino flying over the fountain’s grand massive statues, shaking the men’s fig leaves, setting the nymphs’ nipples aquiver.

  The Gypsies wouldn’t like it, though, because then everyone’s camera would be clicking, not snug in a pants pocket, where nimble fingers could delicately extract it. The guidebooks were full of warnings: so many that she thought it must be the paranoiac’s ideal to write for them. Sort of like offering inmates the opportunity to build ships in bottles, encouraging fantasies of escape as they worked on the tiny masts and sails until the vessel was complete, and then the state could sell their dreams for profit.

  Her brother, Larry, was in jail. Though he had told her in detail what he had done, it was so complicated that she could barely grasp the concept. As best she could understand, Larry’s company had applied to the FDA for a patent for something that he had bribed a researcher from another company to supply him with information about. But Larry had gone too far—as when had he not?—and threatened the researcher when he realized the information was incomplete. The researcher went to the FDA, the FDA investigated Larry’s company, and the company made Larry the scapegoat and saw to it that he alone was indicted. Larry maintained that he had been set up: the lawyer he had been working with quit their firm and resurfaced six months later in Silicon Valley, working for the researcher’s brother’s company. Larry’s lawyer intended to use that new information in his appeal.

  About one thing, though, she was perfectly clear: she had custody of her thirteen-year-old nephew, Chandler. This is what her brother had wanted: that she become the legal guardian of his son and, as soon as that was accomplished, that she leave Chandler and go to Europe to see the place her brother had always most wanted to see. Of course she agreed to the first request, which she had assumed would happen. After all, who else did the boy have? Private detectives had never turned up his mother. His grandmother on his mother’s side lived in West Virginia and had four young boys of her own from her third marriage and made it clear she wanted nothing to do with Chandler. Their own parents—Larry’s and hers—had died prematurely a year apart, their mother from pneumonia, their father from a heart attack.

  Well, she thought, everyone travels with baggage. The bags you pack and check and lug to the hotel and unpack are the obvious ones, and then there are all the others: the little silk pouch in which you’ve tied your delicate dreams; the steamer trunk of worries (never big enough to contain them); the lovely little Hermès suitcase that contains elegant ideas; the last-minute duffel bag for the leftover things not yet dealt with, that will probably never be dealt with; confusions that bury themselves amid your socks and underwear and the paperbacks you know aren’t great literature, but who doesn’t enjoy a good mystery?

  What was mysterious to her was why she’d come. It would have been too awkward to write a letter to Chandler at his boarding school in Connecticut—for which she was somehow going to have to come up with the next year’s tuition…. The fact that she’d been too cowardly to tell him on the phone, afraid he’d see it as another abandonment…. But here she was now, buying a postcard of the Trevi Fountain, composing in her mind a message to Chandler about how much she was enjoying herself, which even she did not believe. She felt sorry for herself—an emotion she did not like to indulge, if only because admitting it usually cast things in stone, so that the complainer would be left frozen in a tableau of unhappiness that would grow enormous, like the lying Pinocchio’s nose.

  A bird landed on the head of one of the figures of the fountain (Abundance, she would later learn). She put the postcard in her money belt—she dared not carry a purse—and knew she would write nothing on it. Later, back at her hotel, she looked up the fountain in her guidebook. She read:

  The custom in Imperial times of building a monument where the new water arrived in Rome was copied by the later Popes, and some of Rome’s fanciest fountains were the result. These were called Mostre (Shows), and were also a monument for whichever Pope built them.

  The next day, she looked at her checklist of places to see and left it deliberately on the night table. She had seen a banner flying from one of the galleries, announcing a show of photographs by Lartigue. She thought France might be the perfect antidote to Rome. Better yet, France in the 1920s. She bought a ticket by holding up one finger for the cashier and handing her the correct number of lira. She was given a little red disk that she had trouble separating from its sticky backing. But apparently she was not supposed to do that: she gave the disk to a second woman who worked there. The second woman returned the peeled-off disk unsmilingly, and she took it and placed it on her collar. She gathered, from what the woman said, that the show she had come to see was on the second floor, which was called, perversely, the first floor: the piano nobile.

  She saw a beautiful enlarged photograph of three women at the racetrack, viewed from behind in their confectionery hats, the vertical lines of their stylish skirts echoing the railing before which they stood. But the skirts reminded her of prison unifo
rms—no, they didn’t look like that any longer: Larry wore a pastel-blue jumpsuit that made him look like a rumpled Easter bunny; still she was reminded that Larry was there and she was here, and that seeing Lartigue was cheating because it wouldn’t have been Larry’s notion of seeing Rome. But she couldn’t stop: it was like a seduction, that long-gone world, those beautiful women, the countryside, the stylish cars, the ridiculous airplanes, and a woman in a long skirt, her face a happy blur, caught in midair as she was jumping down the stairs.

  “I hope she timed that right,” a man said. She turned to see another American, alone, who seemed to have come from nowhere. He was wearing a long raincoat, unbuttoned, the belt almost trailing the floor.

  “Because if she didn’t, I’m sure he wasn’t able to photograph anymore that day,” the man said. He smiled—more a smile to himself than to her—and moved past her to look at the photographs on the other wall. To avoid him, she decided to stay where she was, which required looking longer at the photograph.

  It was a photograph that couldn’t help but make you smile. You could feel the woman’s happiness. Her skirt was like a blurry whorl of cotton candy, and her jump was so high, it did not look as if she could possibly have known where she’d land.

  Out of the corner of her eye she watched the man, who moved slowly, examining each photograph. He did not stop concentrating when one of three teenagers in the room became giggly. He tuned them out; she tuned them out as best she could. Better laughing voices than the insistent buzz of motorcycles, she thought. The relentlessness of the sound had given her afternoon headaches every day she’d been in Rome.

  Hardly anyone was at the show: a couple (German?); the teenagers talking to each other, trying to hush their silly friend, only occasionally noticing a photograph; the man; and an elderly woman who walked with a cane and did not closely consider any of the photographs.

  The man left the gallery and she began to look at photographs he had already examined. How Lartigue must have loved those women, with their lips painted in shapes no unadorned human face has ever possessed, attired in their fabulously ludicrous, feathery, gauzy hats, their expressions of absolute self-possession. She stood in front of one bizarre beauty—a face transformed from inherently beautiful into artificial beauty, but still—and lost herself, contemplating the woman’s alabaster skin. The face was not quite in profile, but not looking into the lens, either. As she squinted to see any imperfection, another face came into focus behind the first face—her own, of course, mirrored back from the deeply saturated black tones of the background.

  Ah, my little moment of comeuppance, she thought: I realize that if what I’m seeing is a little too glamorous, it still deserves more contemplation than the plain, rather sullen, unangular face that lurks behind. She lowered her eyes and moved away. There was much more of the show to see, and she saw it all, and then she went around one more time, avoiding the photograph in front of which she had already lingered.

  The man was nowhere, and she was glad. She would report a chaste trip to her brother, who would have to settle for hearing about the sights she described, without the vicarious thrill of hearing about a traveler who connects with an unexpected person, caught up in an unexpected romantic encounter that must of course be an end in itself.

  Larry was handsome. He had married twice. He had been in the army. She knew about several of his affairs. He’d had all that, so she had no regrets about not providing him with more. Besides, if the appeal worked—if Larry’s excellent, expensive lawyer prevailed—he might even get out of jail. And if she was really lucky, that would happen before she had to figure out a way to pay her underachieving nephew Chandler’s tuition.

  It started to rain, so she cut short the rest of her plans—meaning: whatever occurred to her that had not been on Larry’s damned list of things she must do—and went back to the hotel. The Asian man behind the desk finally recognized her, after four days, and took down her key without her having to say her room number. She hated her Italian pronunciation. She sounded like what she was: someone who had taken a couple of semesters of French in college twenty-five years ago. She went up to her little room and dropped her coat on the bed. The motorcycles in the street were loud. The hotel was not in a quiet location. Her room was only on the second floor (the real second floor), and she was jolted awake an hour later, next to her coat, by a crash outside the hotel. She got up and went to the window: almost at the corner, someone had been knocked off his motorcycle. A small blue car had come to a stop. A crowd had already gathered, including the Asian man from the desk and several children as well as men and women with briefcases and cell phones and grocery bags, all of them attracted and repelled by the scene, so that first a woman would rush forward, then recoil; a man would peer over people’s shoulders, then turn away and speak into his cell phone. A woman with red hair, who might have been with the motor-cyclist, seemed particularly distraught. There were sirens. Police raced onto the street, but by then the motorcyclist was standing, and the Asian man was helping him. Two children seemed to be playing tag but then ran away, and it was only then that she realized that they were Gypsy children. The woman with red hair pointed and screamed, and one of the policemen gave chase, the Asian man following behind. She could do nothing, had no idea how the accident had happened, and the motorcyclist seemed to be all right, so she turned away from the window and picked up her coat and put it over her shoulders. She was about to go into the bathroom when she glanced one last time out the window and saw the man from the museum, recognizable because of the gray raincoat that fell to his ankles. He was one of the men who had been holding a briefcase. Now that he had stopped peering at the no-longer-fallen cyclist, she was sure it was him. She left the room immediately, the keys in her coat pocket, the door left unlocked. She took the stairs instead of the elevator. By the time she got to the man’s side, she had come to: This wasn’t some dream, or some movie, so what was she to say? Though just by seeing her, the coincidence—the near impossibility of their meeting again in a city of two and a half million people—would say it all, she supposed.

  She was out of breath. And since she hadn’t thought of what to say, she stood there feeling foolish—which was only an intensification of the way she’d felt ever since arriving in Rome.

  The man turned in her direction and did a double-take. “The woman in the air,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “And the boy is okay,” he said, looking at the motorcyclist, who had hobbled away and was leaning against the policeman’s van. “He’s okay,” he repeated, as if it were required of him to narrate events for her. But then he paused, as if unable to finish the story. “Everyone has landed on his feet,” he said, giving it one last try.

  “I wasn’t in any danger,” she said. It was the first time she had spoken to him. “It was only the woman in the photograph. And she was so obviously”—she faltered—“joyful, that there was never any real danger for her, I imagine.” She thought, but did not say, that she had never been a woman who’d leapt for joy, but a woman in the shadows, a woman who saw herself when she least expected it—saw herself against a deeply saturated black background, a background as empty as Rome was chaotic, that revealed her to be unexceptional, startled, plain.

  Her brother had wanted to know why she had never married. That was why.

  “This is incredible, I still can’t believe it,” the man said. “We must have coffee.” He looked back at the policeman’s van, a little confused but also riveted, as if the blue vehicle itself symbolized his past. “I mean,” he said falteringly, “now that everything has worked out.”

  Fontana di Trevi

  I have not been to Italy and neither has my dad, but when I go it is my idea to see the Trevi Fountain. The fountain is located in downtown Rome. About Rome, Robert J. Hutchinson has written in his book When in Rome, subtitled A Journal of Life in Vatican City (Doubleday, 1998), that “I forgive Rome all its petty sins, because it has one redeeming quality that it shares
with a few other large European cities and which strikes Americans with particular force: it’s tremendously safe.” Sometimes in the downtowns of some cities safety can be a problem and interrupt the pleasure of the traveler. I feel that in Rome it is a necessary thing to see the Trevi Fountain, known to the Italians as Fontana di Trevi.

  It can easily be explained what the fountain is. First of all, the fountain is very big and is very much like looking at beautiful scenery in a Broadway play. The building behind it was left with a blank wall so that the fountain could be there. People come from all over the world to see it, and some say it is one of the most romantic spots in the world. It is lit at night. One of the best things about the fountain besides its size is that there are many statues of people and also bigger-than-life sea horses. In my books I have many pictures of sea horses alive in the ocean.

  The mixture of sea horses and people is very interesting. The people are called Abundance and Good Health. In the middle is the Ocean. Very much work had to go into carving the things that you see at the Trevi Fountain. It was done for the Pope, but we still enjoy it today.

  In summary, when I go to Rome, Italy, I will go first to see the Trevi Fountain. It is said to be beautiful at night when the lights are on and the lights can even make it look like things are really moving. It is safe to see the Trevi Fountain, and almost every tourist goes there.

  The man used the cash machine around the corner from the Trevi Fountain. Rome was turning out to be more expensive than he had expected, even with the dollar strong against the lira. Also, there had been the store with the broken machine that had prevented him from using his credit card to buy Marissa’s cashmere sweater. What was he going to do? Walk away, when she’d finally found the perfect style, the perfect color? His wife liked the colors that were popular in Italy that fall: the burnt oranges, the dark purples. Aubergine, his wife always called the color. She painted her nails aubergine. He and Marissa liked pale colors: pale peach, that shade of pink that is almost not pink at all. Unlike his wife, Marissa chewed her fingernails. That and her quick step—she could be in a hurry even when she didn’t know what she was doing—made her very different from his wife. The strange thing was, she looked like Paula. They had the same long, auburn hair. Even their expressions were sometimes the same: both women often looked at him quizzically, when he thought he had just been saying something inane. He would find it necessary to explain that what he’d said was just a cliché or that he had meant a remark ironically.