Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  “Even though we know the end is coming, many of us at university do something very strange. We do not flee or take up weapons to protect ourselves, as you might expect. We stay where we are and form groups to do such things as read the novels of Marcel Proust or cook the food of Mexico or make Cubist painting or do the dances of Bali. I had already been doing plays with my brother since we were children and so I form with seven of my English-speaking friends an acting company that will perform classical drama in English.

  “Some people cannot believe it, how obsessed all of us become with these private pursuits, and they criticize us. You hide your head inside the sand like the ostrich, they say. But the reason we did this should have been clear to them—allowing these subjects to consume us also allows us to forget for a time that we cannot prevent the worst that is soon to happen.”

  She talked awhile more, then began to collect her things.

  “You aren’t leaving, are you?” Jack moped.

  “I must.”

  “Please stay,” he begged. “I won’t be able to go to sleep without you.”

  “I think you will sleep because I know you are very tired.” She gave him a significant look. “I must go. I am expected.”

  I had never really seen Jack jealous before. Normally he was pleased to have someone else pay the emotional upkeep on his conquests and in fact relieved not to have responsibility for filling up the long nonsexual hours. But while he had only known this girl for a little more than a day, he seemed shaken by the idea that she might have someone else. While she waited for the cab, he was agitated, giving petulant responses to her attempts at conversation.

  When the driver sounded his horn and she headed toward the door, he suddenly said, “You’ll have to choose, you know.”

  “Choose?” She looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Between him and me.” Jack spoke the words as if they had been physically extracted from him.

  “It is a little soon for the ultimatum, no?” she said. “And who is this him that you’re talking about?”

  “Fortunato.”

  She teased him with a sneaky little laugh: “I could never choose against him.”

  Jack’s face fell as she let him dangle for a moment.

  “I could never choose against him because he’s my father.”

  Then she was gone.

  EIGHT

  Later on, when he had become blasé and venereal, and when sex, while even more an addiction, had also become something of a chore for Jack, a note of dolor and finally of ennui entered his amours. I remember in particular a somewhat forlorn call from the White House in the spring of 1962 when Jackie was off on her Pakistan tour.

  “The Leader of the Free World here,” he said when the operator put him through. “In the presidential bed with a white girl and a Negro girl. If I only had an Indian girl too they could make me a Neapolitan sandwich. Tasty! And what am I doing, you may wonder, as these two girls give evidence of being interested in knowing each other carnally? I am reading the Wall Street Journal and wondering what my administration can do to improve its standing with the Rockefellers and others of their ilk. Should I be worried?”

  By then he had become JFK, that familiar stranger whose cheeks were slightly puffed from steroids and whose sham hardiness came from the methamphetamines handed out by Max Jacobson, the ghoul of his administration known as Dr. Feelgood. Jack’s former droll facetiousness had fermented into negligent sarcasm, and his once fierce desires had dwindled into rote satisfaction.

  But during our brief interlude in Southern California when he was still Jack, a romantic at heart, although an irregular and deeply wary one, he stepped out of the armor of irony that had been so crucial to his survival and would be so instrumental to his future success, and allowed himself to fall in love.

  It was immediate and intense, literally overnight, a direct hit by that sudden strike of emotion the French call coup de foudre. It electrified him over the next few weeks as the three of us moved into a heightened zone of fast-forward.

  It was all the more dramatic because love was not something Jack ever wanted to happen to him. He had always regarded love as self-delusion and weakness, which was why he had tried so hard to scour a need for it out of his psyche. He had been scarred by his parents’ parched marriage, which he once described to me as a “wasteland with children,” and would sometimes grumble, when we were younger and I was speaking effusively of my feelings for Kick, “You just don’t get it, do you? Love is for suckers.”

  But Val instantly erased all the doubts about deep emotional connections that Jack had accumulated and caused him to dive head first into waters whose depth he didn’t bother calculating.

  It was partly about sex, of course. “It’s like going all the way for the first time every time with her,” he later said to me, acknowledging the jejune clumsiness of the words by a self-critical blush.

  She was the first woman he’d had after all those girls. But she was also the first and only one for whom the act involved feeling as well as friction; the first to make him feel the need for something more than a spasm of release and the sense of self-possession it brought; the first whose own fervor quickened him. And the first and perhaps only one he really touched—so much so that once early in their days together I saw her knees buckle slightly and her eyes go blank after he had been rubbing her back during a long hug and realized that she had just had a fleeting orgasm.

  Jack’s problem was not whether to be in love—that was no longer a matter of choice—but how exactly to go about it. Because he had convinced himself that love was not in the cards for him, he seemed clueless how to comport himself now that the lightning had struck. He was like someone on a crash program to learn a foreign language for an emergency trip abroad.

  Generally he succeeded with women by giving them a brief look at the rich complexity of his temperament and leaving it up to them whether there was to be a next step. But with Val he was frontal and direct; an arrow of desire always nocked into a tautly drawn bowstring. He did things I had never seen him do before and would never see him do again, things that would have convulsed him in condescending laughter if someone else had done them. Pacing nervously around the living room if she was even a little late and then rushing up to her the minute she came through the door to center her face with both hands and tenderly pull it to his for a lingering kiss; always surreptitiously searching for her fingers and entwining them with his when they were sitting next to each other; allowing, even inviting her to massage his neck and shoulders and run her hand through his hair, a deep act of faith for someone who was by nature so deeply ambivalent about touch; and always following her hungrily with his eyes as she moved around the room unaware that he was watching.

  When a romantic song he liked came on the radio, he would raise Val up and begin to dance. It was not the energetic foxtrotting of our youth that he would make into a sort of demolition derby when we were at a school mixer, bumping shoulders with male friends also on the floor, mugging at them as he twirled by and in effect dancing with them rather than his female partner. Here he snuggled into Val, his eyes closed tight as his body merged with hers into a oneness that shuffled so slowly in a square of such diminishing size that after a minute or two they seemed to be dancing on the pinpoint of eternity.

  And sometimes when he did these things he would shoot me a look of dismay as if to say, “Who is this fool and why is he doing this crazy shit?”

  Val’s love was more somber, more considered and aware of contingencies, and because of this it appeared to me even deeper than Jack’s. Like everyone else, she was swept up in his venturous élan. But she also understood that at this point he was still making himself up as he went and had as yet not taken on the burden of moral seriousness. Her feelings for him were based in part on what I always thought of as a Christian hope.

  Once after returning from a walk on the beach the two of them sat on the sofa leafing through magazines, their feet and fingers touch
ing. When Jack nodded off after a while, Val rested her copy of Time on her chest and studied his features as they dropped their guard in sleep, then looked over at me and whispered, “I think Gianni will be a good man someday, don’t you?”

  Within days he was pressing her to move into the beach house. She kept telling him it was too soon, but her resistance quickly crumbled under his reckless onslaught.

  On the morning we arranged to pick up her belongings, we assumed we’d be driving to her father’s house, which caused me, at least, some anxiety. But she told us that while she sometimes stayed at Fortunato’s place in the Hollywood Hills, her belongings were at a Toluca Lake apartment a couple of blocks from the studio that Warners had rented for her at the beginning of shooting to make early morning calls easier.

  It was a smart little place with a single bedroom and a galley kitchen, a sofa covered in a print of crocuses and a large fiddle-leaf fig in a sunny corner of the living room. The only problem was the deafening all-day construction noise six days a week at the large apartment complex going up a few doors down.

  When we arrived to pick her up, she was waiting at her front door with a battered European-style leather valise secured by wide belts. Leaning against it was a small oil painting of a lovely dark-haired woman.

  “It captures you perfectly,” Jack said.

  “It is not me,” Val smiled sadly. “It is my mother when she was about the age I am now.”

  “Well, she is almost as beautiful as you are,” he tried to bail himself out.

  “More so,” she corrected him. “Much more. And beautiful from the inside out.”

  When we got back to the beach house a few hours later, she promptly mounted the painting in the living room. Surprisingly, it not only seemed compatible with all the nautical objects, but organized them into an odd unity.

  Jack stood beside her to admire it. “So you’re here for good, then.”

  “You mean forever?”

  “Yes,” he became earnest. “Why not?”

  Looking thoughtful, she said, “Forever is a place very far away from here. You know that. We might get to there one day, but many things can happen along the way. What is important is that I’m here now.”

  NINE

  The next month and a half was an eyeblink in time, but as it was transpiring, it sometimes actually did seem like they stood at the gateway to forever. They moved through a forcefield in which they communicated by the flick of an eyelid, mind-read each other from twenty feet away, and constantly rehabilitated their neural connection by brushing against each other as if accidentally while passing in a room.

  There were times when Val was still powerless to keep herself from retreating into a grim solitary confinement, physically present but emotionally inaccessible—assailed by dark moods whose time of arrival and intensity couldn’t be predicted. But she seemed to spend a larger part of each passing day in the light, and her high spirits had less trouble escaping her overcast. The abrasion on her arm was healing, and that elemental tristesse which neither sympathy nor argument could dispel when we first met her at last began to yield.

  The vehemence of their feeling brought both of them forward. After all these years, I can still see them sitting in facing sofas in their bathrobes, tousled from a quick shower, lazily postcoital after just gorging on each other. Jack is looking at her expectantly, wondering if she will take the lead; Val rests an elbow on the arm of the sofa and props her chin on her palm, effortlessly beautiful as she eyes him from within the still-damp hair, thickened by toweling, that has caused a partial eclipse of her face. They chat desultorily like runners warming up until some subject arises that has potential and then they are off.

  Often it was just extemporized sexual afterplay, but sometimes they headed toward serious subjects. Before and after Val, Jack was deeply allergic to women he saw as “intellectual,” always coming to me or another of his friends when he had accidentally become involved with one of them and saying in a panic: “Jesus, this one has ideas. You’ve got to get me out of this!”

  Val was all heart and intuition, but oddly, she did not have what in those days was considered a feminine sensibility. On issues of importance, she did not defer and was not tactical or demure in her talk, instead challenging Jack as a matter of course with her shrewd intelligence and solid grasp of the world situation. They fired arguments at each other like tracer rounds about subjects ranging from whether the Czechs could resist Soviet domination to the possibility of justice being served in the Nuremberg trials that were about to begin, and I think Jack always learned something from these encounters.

  In the pattern they established, he sometimes ribbed her for her moral absolutism while she mocked his provincialism.

  Sometimes it was a small matter, as in his refusal to eat any food not smothered with white sauce. But occasionally it was something more meaningful. When he casually referred to one of the set decorators on her film as a “fag,” for instance, she raised her hand like a traffic cop to signal a pause in the conversation, put on an expression of deep thought, and then said, “I have a proposal I think you might like. You should use our Italian insult finocchio instead of that word you just used, which is not so nice a word. Finocchio is much more pretty. It came about because once upon a time they burn homosexuals at a stake in my country, but being Italian they also throw fennel seeds on the fire so it will smell good. If you were to begin using this word finocchio instead of the one you use, people will admire you for being so cosmopolita.”

  The only subject she tried to rule out of bounds was her father, which of course made Jack even more obsessive in his pursuit. He wanted to meet Fortunato and kept nagging her to introduce him. She kept refusing. He asked why, and she tried to deflect him: “Why would you want him to enter this Glocca Morra of ours? He does not belong here. You can understand why he is a painful subject for me, because of what he does for a living.”

  This just made Jack more inquisitorial, and Val finally tried to take the subject off the table once and for all: “If you must know, I already did ask him to meet with you and he said no.”

  “Why?”

  “His exact words to me were that he didn’t want to know you until he was absolutely certain he wouldn’t have to hurt you.”

  Jack’s thoughtless laugh alarmed her.

  “You think this may be a joke?” she scowled. “If so, I assure you that you have no idea of the kind of man my father is.”

  One afternoon when Jack brought the subject up yet again, she gave a fatalistic look, lit a cigarette and, trying to hide in its smoke, began to talk in the factual monotone of someone who’d just been injected with sodium pentothal.

  “My mother said she knew only two stories of my father’s life in the business of crime. Just two. One he told himself. It was about the Sicilian criminals of New York who despised him for his birthplace and always called him ‘the dirty Calabrian.’ They once capture him when he travels from Chicago one time for business. They put him in a storage room with no windows for two days. He tells my mother he thought he might never get out. He had nothing to defend himself with, no weapon or heavy object. But he still wore a large silver crucifix that he brought from the old country—‘big as a bishop’s,’ he told my mother. He took it off and began sharpening the top of the cross against the stone floor during the long hours, and one day when his jailer came to bring him food and water he stabbed him in the chest several times and then escaped. At the end of this story, my mother said, he smiled in that romantic way of his that wrinkles the corners of his eyes and says, ‘Since then, I have always been a religious man.’

  “The other story comes from a sister of my father who came from Reggio for a visit. She told how he was once in deep conflict with another Chicago criminal who was his sworn enemy. This man had many bodyguards and lived in a house with the fortifications of a castle. My father got three of his own men to wear uniforms of service workers and go to his opponent’s house saying they had come to repair a
dangerous gas leak. When they were inside, they pulled guns out of their tool bags and killed everyone there.”

  But then she tried to close off this narrow opening: “I’m sure you must know more than I do about the life of this man you Americans call Nicky Fortune, so there’s no point in going further.”

  “I only know a few facts,” Jack complained.

  “Even for a daughter there are only a few facts,” she said with exasperation.

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, okay,” she sighed. “He met my mother in Naples when he is there to do business. His people in Calabria are ’Ndranghetisti and cousins to the Camorra he comes to deal with. He met my mother walking on the Lungomare one day and was with her for a few weeks and I was the result. He was good to her until the time came to return to America, and then he became very cold.

  “He comes back to Italy two years later to do more business with the same people in Naples and was back together with my mother for a few more weeks before leaving her just as before. This time Franco was the result.

  “He returns only once after that. It was Christmas when I am four and Franco just learns to talk. He arrives from America like a god falling from the sky, giving presents and U.S. dollars and handing out to children chewing gum that makes bubbles. He was from a poor family but now he dresses like the owner of a bank. His shoes are so polished that they looked like they are made from black glass. When he takes us out to dinner in Naples all the other families in the neighborhood where we live follow a few feet behind us on the way to the restaurant as if he is a cardinal and he throws coins to the children. Every Christmas for many years I hope he will suddenly appear like that again. But he never did.