Follies

by Ann Beattie

  His wife was a lawyer and could only manage to get away from her job for the first week he was in Rome. He would be in Rome for two more months—three months total. Marissa, the youngest daughter of a French businessman, had Daddy’s blessing about traveling while she was young and unattached. Perhaps because she was the youngest, her father didn’t want her to grow up. The week before, she had turned twenty-eight, though she looked five years younger. In Rome, as opposed to France, people sometimes looked at him a few seconds too long as he and she walked down the street. He had met her in Paris, when she acted as a translator at a business meeting. He had been surprised, astonished, when she’d flirted with him. Her father supplemented her income and didn’t ask questions. She had flown to Rome to see him at her own expense. She had suggested the restaurant in Trastevere where they had met on the first night. It wasn’t far from the apartment his company was renting for him, on the hill above Trastevere, near Ireland’s Embassy to the Holy See.

  October in Rome was sometimes rainy but often lovely: warm; blue skies. As was Marissa: warm; blue eyes.

  They had had the stupidest fight that morning. He had put two small plastic bags in each of his raincoat pockets because he would be stopping to buy milk and other small things on the way back to the apartment. She had looked up from the sofa—insouciant: he had asked himself why she wasn’t getting up, as usual, to kiss him good-bye. Why didn’t he have a nicer sack, she wanted to know? The plastic bags would do fine, he told her: it was what they gave you when you made a purchase, after all. She accused him of being cheap. He turned, frowned at her. Was that a serious comment? Was she really saying that it wasn’t stylish to carry things—things for both of them—in simple plastic bags? Did she, perhaps, think the problem might really be that she cared a little bit too much about appearances?

  She got up, walked up the curving iron staircase to the bedroom loft, and went into the bathroom—about the size of his sink at home—and slammed the door.

  “Bravo!” he said, and applauded. Imagine calling him cheap, when the night before he had bought her a 400,000-lire cashmere sweater.

  There was no response. Did that mean that she still intended to meet him at the Palazzo di Esposizione to see the Lartigue exhibit? Would she be embarrassed to meet a man wearing a mere 725,000-lire raincoat? More than 350 dollars for a raincoat; he couldn’t believe he’d spent that. And it wasn’t exactly the sort of raincoat one could wear easily in Cincinnati. Then again, his plan—his and his wife’s plan—was to relocate to New York by the spring of the following year. His wife’s cousin was selling his brownstone in Brooklyn. His wife would be going there to look at it while he was on this trip.

  Amazing that Marissa had gotten mad at him about two plastic bags. Just amazing.

  He stopped for an espresso. Real Italian coffee was something he was going to miss back in the States. He would miss the late-night walks on the cobblestone; the way the moon looked through the sycamore trees; the people who lingered on the Spanish Steps, all in their own worlds, eating their gelato, looking at their maps, eating their chocolates, looking at their maps.

  He would like to feel that he would miss Marissa most of all, but he hated her pointless outbursts. He hated her pouting. Though she did have very pretty lips with which to pout…

  He paid for the espresso and left. He saw, in a store window, a sweater remarkably similar to the turtleneck he had bought Marissa, for 260,000 lire. He went inside and peered at it, draped over a satin pillow like some luxurious cat. A saleswoman asked if she could help him. “No, grazie,” he said, but she could tell that he was looking at the sweater. She gestured to the shelf behind her and extracted the exact same sweater from a neat pile. He felt it with his thumb. If it had purred, he wouldn’t have been surprised. He asked if they accepted credit cards—he could manage that in Italian—and nodded when the saleswoman said they did. He gave her his American Express card. “Grazie,” she said. She walked to the back of the store and processed the card and wrapped the sweater in tissue paper. He took a plastic bag out of his pocket. She was scandalized: no, no, she would put it in a bag. She put it in a lustrous green bag with the name of the store lettered in gold and closed it with the store’s seal. The sweater was an indescribable color somewhere between orange and peach. He would give it to his wife.

  Outside, he opened the bag, took the sweater out of its little bundle of tissue paper, and threw the bag in the trash. He placed the sweater in one of his plastic bags and slid it into the deep satin-lined pocket of his raincoat. He smiled, somehow feeling much better.

  He called Marissa to make sure that she would meet him at the museum. She had been delighted to hear about the Lartigue show. Her grandfather had once had an affair with one of Lartigue’s models in Corsica, and she knew detail after detail about his photographs.

  Marissa was due back at her job, teaching an intensive course in German for businessmen, in two days. There was not time for them to fight. He decided to show her the sweater and, if she liked it, give it to her. About Lartigue, he knew almost nothing. A famous photograph of a man standing on some jetty by the sea, the water splashing high.

  Three hours later, he climbed the steep steps to the museum and paid the cashier. A woman in a dowdy blue uniform stepped forward and took the little red badge he’d been handed, peeled off the backing, and handed the badge back to him. He took it with his thumb, was reminded of his thumb’s having recently touched cashmere, was reminded of the very nice sweater in his pocket, hoped that Marissa would meet him at the entrance to the exhibition as they’d arranged.

  The horizontal stripes of yellow on the walls were a shock: exactly the color of his kitchen in Cincinnati. It was a bright, insistent primary color—very odd, he thought, as a background against which to display photographs.

  There were only a few people at the exhibition: a tall blonde in platform boots who seemed to have come to strut up and down the long corridors. He did not look closely at her as she passed by, because he knew she wanted him to notice her. Why should he stare—just because she’d dressed so that men would? He admired his wife’s understated style. He admired Marissa’s mixing and matching and layering and tossing some grand scarf over everything. He had the distinct feeling that he was not going to rendezvous with Marissa at the exhibition. Preoccupied, he had passed halfway down a line of photographs. He turned and retraced his steps to examine the smiling face of Picasso. There were four photographs of Picasso looking intense and, sometimes, happy. A couple passed by, pointing to the photographs and saying something he didn’t understand, in German. If Marissa had been there, she could have translated. “How do you know I am telling you the truth?” she liked to tease him, after she’d reported on some overheard conversation. “How do you know I am not just having fun with you?”

  He decided that she was not coming. Could she really have been so upset that he’d made a faux pas by carrying two balled-up plastic bags? How could she stand him up when they had only two more days together?

  Maybe it was her way of detaching. Maybe the parting was going to be painful, and if she pretended that she had abandoned him, rather than vice versa, she could make things easier on herself.

  But surely she’d be at the apartment at the end of the day, wouldn’t she?

  He found the photograph he knew: the man looking sideways, the white burst of water in the background. Another, of three women at the racetrack, was also familiar, but it had been greatly enlarged and was a little disconcerting because the figures looked so real in the room. Real figures, intent upon watching something that had nothing to do with him, or with anyone else.

  It was so quiet in the gallery that a woman examining a photograph heard the rustle of plastic in his pocket and gave him a look as he passed by. He had been fingering the bag nervously, as if it were pocket change. “Don’t jiggle your damned change!” his wife always said to him. It set her nerves on edge.

  Three teenagers were moving through the room, welded to on
e another’s sides. One wore glasses and too much makeup but was, he decided, the prettiest of the three. Another was giggly and chatty. The third girl stepped away to actually look at a photograph or two.

  Again he saw the woman—American? English?—examining a photograph of a woman with a painted mouth, the same dark lipstick one of the teenage girls was wearing.

  He looked at photograph after photograph: people in cars, portraits, ladies in their fabulous dresses. And then he came upon the American (he’d decided) once more, standing and staring at an image he had seen before but had not realized was by Lartigue: a woman in a billowing skirt, jumping at an impossible angle above the stairs she was descending. He felt stricken. He felt as if he, too, had jumped but that his landing was not going to be easy. That he was going to make a fool of himself, crumple to the ground, end an ecstatic leap with dreary clumsiness.

  He realized from the way the woman stood that she sensed his presence. He said something inane—he didn’t know what: it just came out of his mouth—and then moved on, lest she think he had been studying her instead of the photograph.

  He thought of the photograph as he was descending the stairs outside the museum. Halfway down, a beggar with one leg sat on a dirty blanket. She turned toward him and raised her cup as he passed. He felt light-headed: no lunch, no Marissa, no response from the woman to whom he had made the remark, as if all the world disdained him. He did not know whether he’d been right and she’d been an American. She could at least have smiled, if she didn’t deign to speak. And Marissa could at least have been honest about her feelings instead of orchestrating that ludicrous moment in which she tried to make him look foolish.

  Well, he wasn’t buying it. He wasn’t foolish. He plunged his hand into the pocket that held the sweater. If not for a last second of sanity, he would have handed the sweater to the beggar. As he hesitated, the beggar bent forward and he saw that she was holding a McDonald’s cup. It was so grotesque he almost laughed. Instead he gave her all the change from his pocket and continued down the stairs.

  There were motorcycles, buses, scooters, trucks, and vans, all honking, spewing exhaust, riding bumper to bumper, everyone trusting that everyone else would stay in motion, because if one vehicle stopped, it would mean disaster for them all. He waited for the light, crossed the street, and walked away from the noise, down a cobblestone street that finally, blessedly, became quiet. In a doorway, he took the sweater from his pocket and pulled a bit of cashmere from one end of the neatly wrapped parcel, touching it to his lips and his nose, then using the soft wool to absorb the tears in his eyes.

  Fontana di Trevi (Revised Version)

  The beautiful Fontana di Trevi in Rome, Italy, may have gotten its name from two Italian words “tre” and “via” (“three” and “road”), which means that three roads met where the fountain was built. It was built for Pope Clement XII, but it is more famous because in a movie by director Federico Fellini, the actress Anita Ekberg cavorted in the Trevi Fountain. Because of its beauty, too many tourists to count visit the Trevi Fountain each year.

  I intend to be one of those tourists when I am older. Right now, all I can do is imagine what the Trevi Fountain is like from reading about it. (All guidebooks about Rome give information about the majestic Trevi Fountain.)

  The Trevi Fountain is an enormous fountain that is brightly lit at night so that tourists can better enjoy it. I imagine that the lights shimmer in the water and that when you look at it, it seems like the sea horses are really jumping. In my personal experience, when I have been to Sea World with my dad you sometimes can’t tell when something is really moving due to the rushing water. Adding shimmering lights to this situation would further present things as really being in motion. The carved statues which must have taken a long time to create are very big, and although they do not seem to be in motion they are beautifully carved and they stand above the action in the fountain.

  It is said (in guidebooks, etc.) that if you want to return to Rome, all you have to do is throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain and your dream will come true. I will be sure to take some coins there, because once I see the Trevi Fountain, I am sure I will want to return many times.

  What I imagine happening is that I will probably go to the Trevi Fountain in the middle of the night, when it is lit brightly but there are not so many tourists, so I can be alone with my thoughts. I look forward to the excitement of seeing something so famous and I will be sure to take pictures for my friends. I feel that pictures you take yourself have more personal meaning than postcards you buy of famous places. If I am alone in Rome, I will ask someone in the crowd to take my picture. I imagine that people who go there are happy and excited and in a good mood on their vacations, so someone will be glad to take the picture to provide me with a keepsake of my trip to Rome. Even though it might be a while before I get there, the Trevi Fountain will be waiting for me since it has been there as a welcoming place for young and old, friends and lovers, since 1762.

  The Garden Game

  MY aunt Leticia could be counted on to explain the family mysteries. She’d forget I didn’t know something and drop it into conversation, or use the occasion of having a fever—or being ill in any way—to let down her defenses and tell me things I hadn’t been told. Sometimes the words flew out of her mouth like frogs jumping onto the road after a rainstorm.

  She was never the heroine of the stories. Neither was Beaumont, her husband. Infrequently, a dog was the hero. She had two dogs: one a collie; the last one a mutt from the pound who could not be cured of sniffing under women’s skirts, who died after being struck by a go-cart. A little monster who was visiting his aunt and uncle hit it. The young man buried it twice, once in the field across from Leticia and Beaumont’s house, and again the next day, after Leticia rethought the final resting place.

  I liked the first dog, Tyke, better, though of course I felt sorrier for the dog who’d been run over. Tyke had lived to be thirteen, which I think is ninety-one in human years: exactly the age Leticia was when she died.

  I used to visit my aunt and uncle for two weeks during the summer. I was driven there by my parents, who were divorced though they got together to do things with me on significant days, such as my birthday, and once or twice I remember trick-or-treating with them on Halloween. They attended all graduations and more musical performances than necessary. They no doubt gave thanks that I never played sports.

  I always loved to work in a garden, though. Now I grow herbs, along with some Better Boy tomatoes I’ve staked in a washtub I leave on the front stoop so the deer won’t eat them. Around the lantern at the end of the walkway are sweet peas, in with the morning glories, and so far no animals have sniffed them out.

  Going to visit my aunt and uncle was one of my favorite things. My mother did not approve of my father’s family, but she knew how much the Maine vacation meant to me. I started thinking about it at Christmas, which helped get me through winter in Cleveland. Leticia and Beaumont were nothing like their names: she wasn’t prim and proper at all—in fact, she guffawed instead of laughing—and although you might assume Beaumont was a Southerner, he was from a tiny mining village in Michigan. He was six feet tall, and his scowl was deeply etched below and above his eyes. He was self-conscious when he laughed along with his wife. Did I think Beaumont was always a lot of fun? Well, he most surely wasn’t, but that was due to the terrible death grip alcohol got on him after he was fired from his factory job, Leticia told me when she was in the hospital recovering from pneumonia.

  This was the routine: my pajamas were kept from year to year and placed on the bed as if I’d just slipped out of them that morning, replaced only if I outgrew them (Leticia queried my mother before my arrival). I was sent a catalog of flower seeds in March, from which I could pick a dozen different kinds to be planted in the garden that spring. Uncle B. would write a letter in which he enclosed “gas money” to pass on to my parents, who always protested but ended up saying, “Well, we don’t want to put her
in the middle, so just this once, we’ll take it.” My father did all the driving from Cleveland to Maine. We stayed at a Howard Johnson’s, where we ordered fried clam dinners and had mint ice cream for dessert. My mother and I slept in one bed, my father in the other. The second day, we were there. I wonder, now, what the ride back must have been like. In those days I did not think much about anyone except myself. I remember times when it felt like my life was unraveling like the ball of string it was, and me the little surprise inside, freed, after some necessary untangling, to the place where I belonged.

  I never knew Leticia fought breast cancer.

  I didn’t know that B. sold his Mustang convertible because his best friend died when a convertible rolled over, which made B. decide it was time for a sensible car.

  I knew, the year I was thirteen, that my father had left my mother for another woman, who subsequently decided she didn’t want him, but that was top secret, and I never asked for details, even from Leticia, who told me the bare facts amid sneezes from a fit of hay fever, saying it was time I understood things. My first morning in the garden was always golden, whether or not the sun shone. Leticia rarely followed us to the rectangular patch of plowed soil, just down the slope from the peonies that multiplied every year. Herbs had been planted along one edge before I arrived, but somehow herbs never seemed to be magic to begin with. I would step carefully over the lush oregano, kept from spreading everywhere by a channel of mint planted between bricks. Then, amid the smell of lemony mint, I would begin to move the dried grass off the little yellow tendrils of chives, being careful to avoid any bugs that might be crawling near my fingers as I uncovered the garden in preparation for the planting of bug-repellent marigolds and nasturtiums.