Fin & Lady: A Novel

by Cathleen Schine

  Then his thoughts would turn to Charles Street and the house left behind. Mabel would be going there once, twice a week to check on things, to clean the city grime that crept inexplicably into a shut-up house. He imagined her opening the door to the smell of pipe tobacco and cigarette smoke. He imagined them there, the suitors, even Biffi, still waiting. He imagined them there when Lady and Fin got back, just where she had left them. If Lady and Fin ever got back.

  It was hard for Fin to talk to Lady these days, about anything, almost as hard as talking to Donatella, but especially about New York, about going back to New York, where they belonged. Lady never took a hint, for one thing. On principle, she said. Just come right out and say it, she would say. Don’t expect me to do the work for you. Which he hated. There were times when he hated Lady, period, hated little things about her, the way she smoked, say, with her head thrown back as she exhaled. It was a little phony, anyone could see that. Why couldn’t she be more natural? He even mentioned it once. Lady said, of course, typical Lady, “I’m naturally phony.” She made him laugh when she said things like that, and he would be left wondering why on earth he’d been so mad at her in the first place.

  After dinner, the “young people,” Fin and Donatella and her older sister, went to one of the discotheques. Naturally the little sister did not come. She went back to the hotel with her parents. But Lady did not join them, either.

  She did not consider herself one of the young people.

  When had that happened?

  At some level Fin did not care. The air smelled of lavender. The stars were enormous, vibrant, scattered and clustered across the darkness of the sky. All he cared about was dancing to strange corny Italian rock. All he cared about was watching Donatella move. All he cared about was standing so close to her he could feel the sweat of her arm on the sweat of his arm. Outside, in the dark street, he would hold her against him and kiss her, and she would run her hands up his back, inside his shirt, and he would run his hands up her back inside her shirt, and even the Emperor Tiberius, who was supposed to have lived such a licentious and depraved life on the island, could not have experienced anything close to the glorious agony of Fin Hadley.

  Donatella learned more and more English.

  Lady took more and more photographs.

  Michelangelo had a friend on Capri, a fellow photographer with a darkroom, and there he’d taught Lady how to develop pictures. He’d offered to teach Fin, too, but Fin could not imagine spending even one minute in the small stuffy room when he could be swimming or climbing. Lady’s photographs did not impress him, either. They were grainy and sad, shadows of the meticulous pictures Michelangelo took. At first, anyway. But that changed. While Michelangelo was away and Fin was entwined in the arms of his English student as much as possible, that changed.

  If you walked to the right of the church, down a steep, narrow street, then turned right at the shrine to the Virgin Mary, you would come to the house Lady and Fin lived in. You would open a green door and walk down a long path. Above, an arcade of trellised lemons hung down, colossal lemons, and the sudden change from the glare of the street to the dappled shade was almost shocking. There was a garden and a terrace and steps to the small, cool white house. And from the windows upstairs, you could see beyond the other cool, shaded white villas to the sea. Fin’s room was not much wider than the window at the end of it that faced the blue sky and the bluer water. Lady’s room, downstairs, was a little bigger. She hung her prints all over the blank white walls. And slowly, as the weeks passed, the photographs seemed to find their feet. That’s what Lady called it: finding their feet.

  “They look better,” Fin said. “They really look better. But why?” They were still black-and-white photographs of rocks, of the trunk of a tree, of the shadowy whites of a plaster wall.

  “They’ve found their feet,” Lady said.

  * * *

  Fin lay on his back on the little deck that formed the bow of the boat. His hands were behind his head. Donatella was beside him. Behind them, Donatella’s sister listened to a portable radio. “Girl” in Italian. Ahh, gii-irl. He tried to translate the song back to English for Donatella, but instead of “She’s the kind of girl you want so much / It makes you sorry,” the Italian seemed to mean something about the sea telling a story. Maybe. He wasn’t at all sure.

  “She’s the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry,” he sang, hoping Donatella would not understand. Or hoping that she would. The suitors would understand, and Fin thought that perhaps now at last he understood the suitors. Hopelessness is not the end of desire, it’s not the end of need. And so? Hopelessness is not the end of hope.

  “Ahh, gii-irl,” Donatella’s sister sang from the back of the boat.

  Donatella rolled over on top of him.

  “Tomorrow,” she sang to the tune of “Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday,” he corrected.

  “No,” she said. She shook her head and her hair flicked across his chest. “Tomorrow we go.”

  “Where?”

  “Firenze,” she said. She pointed vaguely in the direction of the mainland. “Home.”

  * * *

  Goodbye, Donatella. Fin remembered the last sight of her, a small figure in a yellow dress pulling farther and farther away, away from the enchanted island on a ferry. He could not remember her older sister’s name. He could not remember her younger sister’s name. He could not remember Donatella’s last name. But that vision of a girl shrinking on the wide horizon he always remembered.

  He mourned in his room. He tried to read Extraordinary Women, the book about lesbians on Capri, though he knew Lady had given it to him just for effect. But it required too much concentration. Some of it was in Latin, some in Greek, and there was, as far as he could tell, absolutely no sex. Just squabbles.

  “It does have one of the most satisfying endings in literature,” Lady said. “But, yeah, maybe when you’re older.”

  “Not everything is about age.”

  “I know, Fin. And I know you’re sad. Even if you’re just fifteen.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  Lady sighed. “That didn’t come out right. Nothing I say to you these days comes out right.”

  No argument from Fin.

  “But you have to get out of the house, Finny. You want to go out on the boat?”

  “Not really.”

  “Anacapri? Ruins?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Okay. We could go shopping.”

  Fin made a face. How many pairs of sandals could Lady buy? How many scarves and floppy pajama pants?

  “Beach?” she said.

  He shook his head. No. Of course he couldn’t go to the beach. The beach without Donatella? “I’m fine.”

  “Right.” She took hold of his shirtsleeve and gave him a pull. “Then we’ll walk.”

  “You’re always pulling me,” he said.

  She pushed him instead.

  “Great.” But he went with her. She packed two oranges and a bottle of water in his backpack and threw it at him.

  “Andiamo, Mary Sunshine,” she said.

  He led her on a particularly steep path down to the water, an almost invisible path, straight down to a little cave on the stony shore. Fin had discovered it on one of his rambles. If Fin had been little, this would have been his pirate cave. But he was not little. If he hadn’t been so down, it would have been his own nymphaeum, the caves the Romans decorated with statues and tiles, places where they worshipped or swam or cavorted. But he was down. So down.

  Lady sat on a damp, flat rock and peeled her orange. The scent of orange mingled with the briny sea smells.

  “You didn’t take any pictures,” he said. “Not one.”

  And it was unlike Lady to go at someone else’s pace, not to stop to pet every stray dog, every mangy cat, to talk to old men in baggy suits who bent precariously over their canes.

  “Not in the mood.” She turned to look at her camera perched on the rock beside her,
as if she had never seen a camera before. “Just not in the photography mood.”

  What kind of mood was she in? A quiet one, anyway. Fin ate his orange in the shade of the little cave and listened to the gulls, and all the irritation and annoyance and indignity that came along with Lady seemed far away. Even his broken heart, as he secretly described it to himself, lifted. He felt oddly sheltered here, protected. Beyond was the Bay of Naples, an expanse of deep, rich blue, and beyond that Mount Vesuvius. The volcano looked down on them, so far off, so benign when viewed from this spot, cushioned by the water between them; so benign when viewed from this moment, cushioned by the centuries of quiet, a dormant volcano, sleeping.

  He looked at Lady. She, too, gazed out at the water and the distant mainland.

  They’ve found their feet, Lady said about her photographs. But it was Lady who had found her feet, Fin thought. It was Lady who looked better than she ever had. It was Lady who smiled her smile with a new warmth, who could sit still, for hours, calm and still in the fading evening light.

  It was Lady who was pregnant.

  “I’m pregnant,” Lady said.

  He hadn’t heard her right. “Huh?” he said. “What?”

  “Pregnant,” Lady said. “I’m going to have a child.”

  But I’m your child, he thought.

  I’m your child. Everyone knows that.

  I’m your child, he almost said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

  “I wanted to tell you. To tell you first.”

  “Oh,” he said again.

  “I haven’t even told Michelangelo.”

  “Oh. No? Oh.”

  Lady put her hand out, and he took it. There was orange pith in her fingernails. She was perfumed with orange.

  He didn’t know what to say. Or think.

  “No more Uncle Tylers or Uncle Jacks,” she said.

  “No more Biffi?”

  She shook her head.

  “Oh. Of course not.” But he could see Biffi and Tyler and Jack, could see them camped in the house, the ice in their glasses making a cheery jingle, the low murmur of male voices. He realized he would miss them. He would miss his enemies Tyler and Jack. He would miss his friend Biffi. But she was done with the uncles, done with the suitors, done with them all. And in some way done with Fin.

  “I’m out of a job,” he said.

  “No more lemon sorting?”

  “Well, anyway, I approve. Except for his bathing suits. Aren’t you supposed to be vomiting or something?”

  He smiled and tried to joke around. But he remembered Mrs. Holbright at the dinner table a few years ago. She really does like to bat them around a bit. Like a cat with mice, bat them around while they’re alive. “It’s so easy for you,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “To cut people off.”

  Lady didn’t say anything.

  “Just like that. To leave them. Leave them behind. When you can’t walk, run, right? Run away and leave the mess you made behind.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly. Then: “I’m sorry, Fin. I told you I was a lousy guardian.”

  “Thanks for the breaking-news bulletin.”

  “But things will be different now.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “We’ll have a real home. You and me and Michelangelo and the baby. We’ll be a family.”

  “We are a family,” Fin said. “At least we were.”

  “You’re not happy for me?”

  Fin picked at a stone embedded in the hard, wet sand.

  “Yeah, I am.”

  He was. He was angry, he was worried, he was horribly, stabbingly jealous. And he was happy for her. She would have a baby, a bald, big-headed, screeching, lumpy, gluey baby. And she would have a husband. A taciturn Italian husband. Everything she wanted. Everything she had secretly wanted all this time.

  He realized that Lady had never asked him to call Michelangelo “Uncle Michelangelo.”

  “So no Uncle Michelangelo, I guess,” he said as they walked back up toward Capri town.

  “Just Uncle Fin. You’re the only uncle now.”

  “Yeah. I guess I am,” he said. “Uncle Fin. Weird.”

  “And Papa Michelangelo.”

  It turned out, however, that Michelangelo did not really want to be Papa Michelangelo. It also turned out that Michelangelo already was Papa Michelangelo to several boys and girls who lived with their mother, his wife, in Milan.

  “You’re married?”

  “Separated. For many years.”

  “But then…”

  “We can’t get a divorce, Lady. This is Italy. Not New York.”

  “I don’t care,” Lady told him. “As long as I have you.”

  Uncomfortable silence.

  “I forgive you,” she said.

  “I did not ask forgiveness, Lady.”

  “I just want to live here for the rest of my life with you and our child.”

  “But I don’t live here, Lady. I live in Milan. I can’t just move to this island, this fantasy place.”

  Then Lady would move to Milan with him.

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I don’t mind. I do mind, actually, but we can come here for part of the year, can’t we? The rest of the time we’ll squeeze in with you in your bachelor pad.”

  “Lady, I live with my mother. I have children almost grown. It is all wrong.”

  “Well,” she said, mimicking Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot, “nobody’s perfect.”

  Fin did not hear this discussion. It was relayed to him by Lady. She sat on the tile floor of her bedroom, crying. At first, Fin thought she was retching, vomiting, the sound was so coarse and so pained. But it was sobbing, a kind of sobbing he had never heard from Lady. Or from anyone else, for that matter.

  Lady had never eaten much. Now she stopped eating altogether. She was queasy from the pregnancy, and she seemed to be in a kind of shock.

  “Let’s go home, Lady,” Fin said.

  “This is home.”

  “We’ll go home, and Mabel will cook us fried chicken.”

  Lady ran out of the room. He heard her throwing up.

  “Okay,” he yelled. “We’ll go home, and we’ll fast.”

  She came back into the little living room looking pale and haggard. She lay down on the old couch, a hard, high-backed thing upholstered in faded blue brocade, her feet in Fin’s lap. He massaged them, first the left, then the right. Her feet were swollen. Her hands were swollen. Her eyes were swollen from crying. Fin leaned toward her belly, put his ear to it.

  “The baby says it wants to go home to be born in New York.”

  Lady gave a feeble laugh.

  “The baby says the doctors here are all Italian and don’t know how to say anything it understands. The baby says you should try to stop crying. It gives the baby a big headache. And the baby says it’s hungry and wants a piece of bread, at least. And the baby says…”

  “Okay, okay.”

  They sat in the garden at a wrought-iron table. Lady took a small bite of bread.

  “The baby says, It’s about time, it’s famished.”

  “Tell the baby to lay off for a bit.”

  “The baby says to tell you, What, are you crazy? Babies never lay off.”

  * * *

  Michelangelo came and sat with Lady for hours, holding her hand.

  “Come with me to New York,” she said.

  “I am already a father. I have already children. I live my life in Milan.”

  “And me?”

  “I will never desert you, Lady. But I cannot give up everything of my life for you, either.”

  Their conversations were repeated every day, throughout the day; their words looped around, tangled up, knotted themselves, came out the same every time.

  “I’m sorry,” Michelangelo said to Fin each time he arrived at the house.

  “I know,” Fin said.

  “It does no good.”

  “No.”

  * *
*

  Fin never mentioned the baby Lady had never had. Neither did Lady. But that information was there, unspoken, unacknowledged, between them.

  “Will you write to Tyler?” Lady said.

  “Me?”

  “And Jack. And Biffi, of course.”

  “Don’t you think it would be better coming from you, Lady?”

  Lady shook her head. No.

  Fin nodded his head. Yes.

  They stared at each other through the bright humidity of late morning.

  “The baby says, Pull yourself together. The baby says, How the hell are you going to take care of it? You’re a basket case.”

  “The baby said I was a basket case?”

  “Direct quotation.”

  Lady began to cry again, this time quietly. “Smart baby,” she said.

  * * *

  That was the day Fin sent a telegram to Biffi. Lady pregnant. Complete mess, he wrote. Doesn’t eat. Even drink. Don’t know what to do.

  Michelangelo had gone to Morocco on a shoot.

  “He’ll be back in a week,” said Lady. “But it doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s duty, his duty. I don’t believe in duty. I believe in love.”

  It all made sense, if you were Lady. You believed in love, so you toyed with those who loved you, trying it out, trying out their love to see if it turned into your own. Then you fell in love at last, except the one you loved was not the one who loved you; you left the ones who loved you behind, moaning and beating their breasts, and now the one you loved was going to leave behind the one who loved him. You believed in love the way others believed in a god, an all-powerful god, a god who was destructive, indiscriminate. The god of war.

  Lady had waited all her life to fall in love. And now the god of love made her suffer for his sins.

  “No more than I deserve, I suppose,” she said.

  Fin was sympathetic and exasperated. And, when Biffi showed up, relieved.

  “I’ll give you a tour”

  Fin saw Biffi in the piazzetta. He just appeared there one morning. No letter, no telegram, no warning, just Biffi sitting at a table by himself, sitting there smoking his pipe. His hair was short, but he was not in uniform. Was that legal? When he caught sight of Fin, he gave a desultory wave. “You look surprised,” he said.