by Lorrie Moore
“A circle jerk?” she said uncertainly. The cigarette was making her dizzy.
“Yeah,” said Martin, reknotting his tie.
“But six books on Chaucer? Why not, say, a Cat Stevens book?”
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m in the circle.”
She sighed. “Then I shall sing to you. Mood music.” She made up a romantic Asian-sounding tune, and danced around the room with her cigarette, in a floating, wing-limbed way. “This is my Hopi dance,” she said. “So full of hope.”
Then it was time to go to dinner.
The cockatiel now seemed used to Adrienne and would whistle twice, then fly into the back room, perch quickly on the picture frame, and wait with her for Ilke. Adrienne closed her eyes and breathed deeply, the flannel sheet pulled up under her arms, tightly, like a sarong.
Ilke’s face appeared overhead in the dark, as if she were a mother just checking, peering into a crib. “How are you today?”
Adrienne opened her eyes, to see that Ilke was wearing a T-shirt that said SAY A PRAYER. PET A ROCK.
Say a prayer. “Good,” said Adrienne. “I’m good.” Pet a rock.
Ilke ran her fingers through Adrienne’s hair, humming faintly.
“What is this music today?” Adrienne asked. Like Martin, she, too, had grown weary of the Mandy Patinkin tapes, all that unshackled exuberance.
“Crickets and elk,” Ilke whispered.
“Crickets and elk.”
“Crickets and elk and a little harp.”
Ilke began to move around the table, pulling on Adrienne’s limbs and pressing deep into her tendons. “I’m doing choreographed massage today,” Ilke said. “That’s why I’m wearing this dress.”
Adrienne hadn’t noticed the dress. Instead, with the lights now low, except for the illuminated clouds on the side wall, she felt herself sinking into the pools of death deep in her bones, the dark wells of loneliness, failure, blame. “You may turn over now,” she heard Ilke say. And she struggled a little in the flannel sheets to do so, twisting in them, until Ilke helped her, as if she were a nurse and Adrienne someone old and sick—a stroke victim, that’s what she was. She had become a stroke victim. Then lowering her face into the toweled cheek plates the table brace offered up to her (“the cradle,” Ilke called it), Adrienne began quietly to cry, the deep touching of her body melting her down to some equation of animal sadness, shoe leather, and brine. She began to understand why people would want to live in these dusky nether zones, the meltdown brought on by sleep or drink or this. It seemed truer, more familiar to the soul than was the busy, complicated flash that was normal life. Ilke’s arms leaned into her, her breasts brushing softly against Adrienne’s head, which now felt connected to the rest of her only by filaments and strands. The body suddenly seemed a tumor on the brain, a mere means of conveyance, a wagon; the mind’s go-cart now taken apart, laid in pieces on this table. “You have a knot here in your trapezius,” Ilke said, kneading Adrienne’s shoulder. “I can feel the belly of the knot right here,” she added, pressing hard, bruising her shoulder a little, and then easing up. “Let go,” she said. “Let go all the way, of everything.”
“I might die,” said Adrienne. Something surged in the music and she missed what Ilke said in reply, though it sounded a little like “Changes are good.” Though perhaps it was “Chances aren’t good.” Ilke pulled Adrienne’s toes, milking even the injured one, with its loose nail and leaky under-skin, and then she left Adrienne there in the dark, in the music, though Adrienne felt it was she who was leaving, like a person dying, like a train pulling away. She felt the rage loosened from her back, floating aimlessly around in her, the rage that did not know at what or whom to rage, though it continued to rage.
She awoke to Ilke’s rocking her gently. “Adrienne, get up. I have another client soon.”
“I must have fallen asleep,” said Adrienne. “I’m sorry.”
She got up slowly, got dressed, and went out into the outer room; the cockatiel whooshed out with her, grazing her head.
“I feel like I’ve just been strafed,” she said, clutching her hair.
Ilke frowned.
“Your bird. I mean by your bird. In there”—she pointed back toward the massage room—“that was great.” She reached into her purse to pay. Ilke had moved the wicker chair to the other side of the room, so that there was no longer any place to sit down or linger. “You want lire or dollars?” she asked, and was a little taken aback when Ilke said rather firmly, “I’d prefer lire.”
Ilke was bored with her. That was it. Adrienne was having a religious experience, but Ilke—Ilke was just being social. Adrienne held out the money and Ilke plucked it from her hand, then opened the outside door and leaned to give Adrienne the rushed bum’s kiss—left, right—and then closed the door behind her.
Adrienne was in a fog, her legs noodly, her eyes unaccustomed to the light. Outside, in front of the farmacìa, if she wasn’t careful, she was going to get hit by a car. How could Ilke just send people out into the busy street like that, all loose and dazed? Adrienne’s body felt doughy, muddy. This was good, she supposed. Decomposition. She stepped slowly, carefully, her Martha Graham step, along the narrow walk between the street and the stores. And when she turned the corner to head back up toward the path to the Villa Hirschborn, there stood Martin, her husband, rounding a corner and heading her way.
“Hi!” she said, so pleased suddenly to meet him like this, away from what she now referred to as “the compound.” “Are you going to the farmacìa?” she asked.
“Uh, yes,” said Martin. He leaned to kiss her cheek.
“Want some company?”
He looked a little blank, as if he needed to be alone. Perhaps he was going to buy condoms.
“Oh, never mind,” she said gaily. “I’ll see you later, up at the compound, before dinner.”
“Great,” he said, and took her hand, took two steps away, and then let her hand go, gently, midair.
She walked away, toward a small park—il Giardino Leonardo—out past the station for the vaporetti. Near a particularly exuberant rhododendron sat a short, dark woman with a bright turquoise bandanna knotted around her neck. She had set up a table with a sign: CHIROMANTE: TAROT E FACCIA. Adrienne sat down opposite her in the empty chair. “Americano,” she said.
“I do faces, palms, or cards,” the woman with the blue scarf said.
Adrienne looked at her own hands. She didn’t want to have her face read. She lived like that already. It happened all the time at the villa, people trying to read your face—freezing your brain with stony looks and remarks made malicious with obscurity, so that you couldn’t read their face, while they were busy reading yours. It all made her feel creepy, like a lonely head on a poster somewhere.
“The cards are the best,” said the woman. “Ten thousand lire.”
“Okay,” said Adrienne. She was still looking at the netting of her open hands, the dried riverbed of life just sitting there. “The cards.”
The woman swept up the cards, and dealt half of them out, every which way in a kind of swastika. Then, without glancing at them, she leaned forward boldly and said to Adrienne, “You are sexually unsatisfied. Am I right?”
“Is that what the cards say?”
“In a general way. You have to take the whole deck and interpret.”
“What does this card say?” asked Adrienne, pointing to one with some naked corpses leaping from coffins.
“Any one card doesn’t say anything. It’s the whole feeling of them.” She quickly dealt out the remainder of the deck on top of the other cards. “You are looking for a guide, some kind of guide, because the man you are with does not make you happy. Am I right?”
“Maybe,” said Adrienne, who was already reaching for her purse to pay the ten thousand lire so that she could leave.
“I am right,” said the woman, taking the money and handing Adrienne a small smudged business card. “Stop by tomorrow. Come to my shop. I have a
powder.”
Adrienne wandered back out of the park, past a group of tourists climbing out of a bus, back toward the Villa Hirschborn—through the gate, which she opened with her key, and up the long stone staircase to the top of the promontory. Instead of going back to the villa, she headed out through the woods toward her studio, toward the dead tufts of spiders she had memorialized in her grief. She decided to take a different path, not the one toward the studio, but one that led farther up the hill, a steeper grade, toward an open meadow at the top, with a small Roman ruin at its edge—a corner of the hill’s original fortress still stood there. But in the middle of the meadow, something came over her—a balmy wind, or the heat from the uphill hike, and she took off all her clothes, lay down in the grass, and stared around at the dusky sky. To either side of her, the spokes of tree branches crisscrossed upward in a kind of cat’s cradle. More directly overhead she studied the silver speck of a jet, the metallic head of its white stream like the tip of a thermometer. There were a hundred people inside this head of a pin, thought Adrienne. Or was it, perhaps, just the head of a pin? When was something truly small, and when was it a matter of distance? The branches of the trees seemed to encroach inward and rotate a little to the left, a little to the right, like something mechanical, and as she began to drift off, she saw the beautiful Spearson baby, cooing in a clown hat; she saw Martin furiously swimming in a pool; she saw the strewn beads of her own fertility, all the eggs within her, leap away like a box of tapioca off a cliff. It seemed to her that everything she had ever needed to know in her life she had known at one time or another, but she just hadn’t known all those things at once, at the same time, at a single moment. They were scattered through and she had had to leave and forget one in order to get to another. A shadow fell across her, inside her, and she could feel herself retreat to that place in her bones where death was and you greeted it like an acquaintance in a room; you said hello and were then ready for whatever was next—which might be a guide, the guide that might be sent to you, the guide to lead you back out into your life again.
Someone was shaking her gently. She flickered slightly awake, to see the pale, ethereal face of a strange older woman peering down at her as if Adrienne were something odd in the bottom of a teacup. The woman was dressed all in white—white shorts, white cardigan, white scarf around her head. The guide.
“Are you … the guide?” whispered Adrienne.
“Yes, my dear,” the woman said in a faintly English voice that sounded like the Good Witch of the North.
“You are?” Adrienne asked.
“Yes,” said the woman. “And I’ve brought the group up here to view the old fort, but I was a little worried that you might not like all of us traipsing past here while you were, well—are you all right?”
Adrienne was more awake now and sat up, to see at the end of the meadow the group of tourists she’d previously seen below in the town, getting off the bus.
“Yes, thank you,” mumbled Adrienne. She lay back down to think about this, hiding herself in the walls of grass, like a child hoping to trick the facts. “Oh my God,” she finally said, and groped about to her left to find her clothes and clutch them, panicked, to her belly. She breathed deeply, then put them on, lying as flat to the ground as she could, hard to glimpse, a snake getting back inside its skin, a change, perhaps, of reptilian heart. Then she stood, zipped her pants, secured her belt buckle, and waved, squaring her shoulders and walking bravely past the bus and the tourists, who, though they tried not to stare at her, did stare.
By this time, everyone at the villa was privately doing imitations of everyone else. “Martin, you should announce who you’re doing before you do it,” said Adrienne, dressing for dinner. “I can’t really tell.”
“Cube-steak Yuppies!” Martin ranted at the ceiling. “Legends in their own mind! Rumors in their own room!”
“Yourself. You’re doing yourself.” She straightened his collar and tried to be wifely.
For dinner, there was cioppino and insalata mista and pesce con pignoli, a thin piece of fish like a leaf. From everywhere around the dining room, scraps of dialogue—rhetorical barbed wire, indignant and arcane—floated over toward her. “As an aesthetician, you can’t not be interested in the sublime!” Or “Why, that’s the most facile thing I’ve ever heard!” Or “Good grief, tell him about the Peasants’ Revolt, would you?” But no one spoke to her directly. She had no subject, not really, not one she liked, except perhaps movies and movie stars. Martin was at a far table, his back toward her, listening to the monk man. At times like these, she thought, it was probably a good idea to carry a small hand puppet.
She made her fingers flap in her lap.
Finally, one of the people next to her turned and introduced himself. His face was poppy-seeded with whiskers, and he seemed to be looking down, watching his own mouth move. When she asked him how he liked it here so far, she received a fairly brief history of the Ottoman Empire. She nodded and smiled, and at the end, he rubbed his dark beard, looked at her compassionately, and said, “We are not good advertisements for this life. Are we?”
“There are a lot of dingdongs here,” she admitted. He looked a little hurt, so she added, “But I like that about a place. I do.”
When after dinner she went for an evening walk with Martin, she tried to strike up a conversation about celebrities and movie stars. “I keep thinking about Princess Caroline’s husband being killed,” she said.
Martin was silent.
“That poor family,” said Adrienne. “There’s been so much tragedy.”
Martin glared at her. “Yes,” he said facetiously. “That poor, cursed family. I keep thinking, What can I do to help? What can I do? And I think and I think, and I think so much, I’m helpless. I throw up my hands and end up doing nothing. I’m helpless!” He began to walk faster, ahead of her, down into the village. Adrienne began to run to keep up. She felt insane. Marriage, she thought, it’s an institution all right.
Near the main piazza, under a streetlamp, the woman had set up her table again under the CHIROMANTE: TAROT E FACCIA sign. When she saw Adrienne, she called out, “Give me your birthday, signora, and your husband’s birthday, and I will do your charts to tell you whether the two of you are compatible! Or—” She paused to study Martin skeptically as he rushed past. “Or I can just tell you right now.”
“Have you been to this woman before?” Martin asked, slowing down. Adrienne grabbed his arm and started to lead him away.
“I needed a change of scenery.”
Now he stopped. “Well,” he said sympathetically, calmer after some exercise, “who could blame you.” Adrienne took his hand, feeling a grateful, marital love—alone, in Italy, at night, in May. Was there any love that wasn’t at bottom a grateful one? The moonlight glittered off the lake like electric fish, like a school of ice.
“What are you doing?” Adrienne asked Ilke the next afternoon. The lamps were particularly low, though there was a spotlight directed onto a picture of Ilke’s mother, which she had placed on an end table, for the month, in honor of Mother’s Day. The mother looked ghostly, like a sacrifice. What if Ilke were truly a witch? What if fluids and hairs and nails were being collected as offerings in memory of her mother?
“I’m fluffing your aura,” she said. “It is very dark today, burned down to a shadowy rim.” She was manipulating Adrienne’s toes, and Adrienne suddenly had a horror-movie vision of Ilke with jars of collected toe juice in a closet for Satan, who, it would be revealed, was Ilke’s mother. Perhaps Ilke would lean over suddenly and bite Adrienne’s shoulder, drink her blood. How could Adrienne control these thoughts? She felt her aura fluff like the fur of a screeching cat. She imagined herself, for the first time, never coming here again. Good-bye. Farewell. It would be a brief affair, a little nothing; a chat on the porch at a party.
· · ·
Fortunately, there were other things to keep Adrienne busy.
She had begun spray-painting the spiders, and
the results were interesting. She could see herself explaining to a dealer back home that the work represented the spider web of solitude—a vibration at the periphery reverberates inward (experiential, deafening) and the spider rushes out from the center to devour the gonger and the gong. Gone. She could see the dealer taking her phone number and writing it down on an extremely loose scrap of paper.
And there was the occasional after-dinner singsong, scholars and spouses gathered around the piano in various states of inebriation and forgetfulness. “Okay, that may be how you learned it, Harold, but that’s not how it goes.”
There was also the Asparagus Festival, which, at Carlo’s suggestion, she and Kate Spalding, in one of her T-shirts—all right, already with the T-shirts, Kate—decided to attend. They took a hydrofoil across the lake and climbed a steep road up toward a church square. The road was long and tiring and Adrienne began to refer to it as the “Asparagus Death Walk.”
“Maybe there isn’t really a festival,” she suggested, gasping for breath, but Kate kept walking, ahead of her.
“Go for the burn!” said Kate, who liked exercise too much.
Adrienne sighed. Up until last year, she had always thought people were saying “Go for the bird.” Now off in the trees was the ratchety cheep of some, along with the competing hourly chimes of two churches, followed later by the single off-tone of the half hour. When she and Kate finally reached the Asparagus Festival, it turned out to be only a little ceremony where a few people bid very high prices for clutches of asparagus described as “bello, bello,” the proceeds from which went to the local church.
“I used to grow asparagus,” said Kate on their walk back down. They were taking a different route this time, and the lake and its ocher villages spread out before them, peaceful and far away. Along the road, wildflowers grew in a pallet of pastels, like soaps.
