The Liar's Wife

by Mary Gordon

  The cell phone reception in Tortola was erratic, and Maura’s hours in the emergency room were unpredictable. The five-hour time difference was one more problem. Theresa only got Maura on the fifth try. “Where the hell have you been?” she asked.

  “Working, you know. I’m a wage earner, unlike some.”

  “I can’t call this guy. I just can’t. If you were here, we could do what we always did when we were afraid to call someone. You could call him and say you were me. But it wouldn’t work from your island.”

  “Just email him then.”

  Theresa felt like a fool. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She wouldn’t have to talk to him at all. Not just yet.

  “And when you email him, think of him—he’s kind of an old guy, right? Think of him sitting at this big old, totally out-of-date computer in a white T-shirt, maybe like a V-neck, and white boxers and black socks.”

  Theresa lay on her bed and laughed. She realized she hadn’t laughed out loud since she’d left America. Anyone but Maura would have said, Think of him naked, think of him on the toilet. Only Maura would have thought of the black socks.

  “Do it right now. I’m not hanging up till you tell me you’ve pressed Send.”

  She’d chosen a good time to email Gregory Allard because she’d been invited to Chiara’s family for lunch, so she couldn’t sit in front of her computer all day waiting for a response. They’d agreed to meet in the square by the cathedral, because Chiara didn’t want the owners to see her “fraternizing with a guest.” She was straddling her Vespa, and she held out a peacock-colored helmet for Theresa to wear. Theresa hadn’t imagined she’d be riding on the back of a Vespa. When Chiara said her family lived on the road to Bagni di Lucca, Theresa had imagined they’d be driving there in a car.

  For the first five minutes, she was terrified. The seat seemed narrow; the distance from the pavement was extremely slight, and slight, too, was Chiara’s torso, to which she had to cling. She thought Chiara drove very fast, but she had no idea what was considered fast on a Vespa, and, after a while, Chiara’s confidence, the complete relaxation of her body, induced a kind of relaxation in Theresa as well. No sooner had she got used to the feeling of relaxation than it was replaced by something else, something she’d never felt, a kind of elation at moving very fast through space, through air, covering ground at a great rate, eating up the road, climbing up hills, barreling down hills, and then, with a judder and a quick stop, an arrival at a low, white house with lemon trees in pots on either side of a dark wooden door.

  Chiara took Theresa’s hand, pulled the helmet off her head, and pushed her into the hallway, which was white-walled, the floor tiled with plain brown tiles, full of rubber boots in various sizes. How did it happen: suddenly everyone was in the hallway, everyone was embracing Chiara and then Theresa, and she was being introduced to Chiara’s mother, who was younger than Theresa could imagine anyone her age’s mother could be, wearing lime green capri pants and golden sandals. Chiara’s father’s bald head gleamed with pleasure at seeing his daughter, who towered over him by three inches. And suddenly she was in the midst of it, people laughing, people pressing drinks on her, introducing her to Chiara’s grandmother, Chiara’s younger brother, who Theresa guessed was around fifteen. There was food and more food: first thin crackers with pâté and capers the size of grapes, thin delicious slices of ham and small pieces of cheese: some sharp, some mild. The grandmother demanded: Tell the truth, did she ever in her life encounter olive oil to equal what could be found in Lucca? Theresa was guided to the table, where everyone knew exactly where to sit, and Chiara’s mother brought out a huge white bowl of pasta with tomato sauce, and then cold pork and a salad of cold green beans, and four different cakes. People wanted to know everything about America: Does she love President Obama as they love him in Italy? He is so much better than any of our politicians, and had she been to the Grand Canyon or Hollywood? She said she was from the Midwest and someone said the word “prairie” and someone else said Chicago and they all laughed at the impossibility of pronouncing the word “Milwaukee,” and then there was more food and she found herself laughing at jokes she didn’t quite understand, and some man’s name was mentioned and Chiara pretended to slap her brother’s face, and then, suddenly, they were on the Vespa again. “My family is very loud and probably talks too much. They didn’t ask you anything about your work, because they wouldn’t have anything to say about it. Or they would, but would feel too embarrassed because they’d think of you as an intellectual, a professoressa, and then that would be the end of fun.”

  In the dark quiet of her room, Theresa felt quite lonely. This was what a family could be, this was what it was to have ease and pleasure with the people you were related to. She felt a slashing bitter envy of Chiara and knew that, as much as she liked her, they could never understand each other enough to be real friends.

  She checked her computer. Gregory Allard had asked if it would be convenient for her to meet the following afternoon at a café on the Fillungo called Di Simo. She answered that it would be perfect, and that she was grateful for his time.

  He wrote back one word: “Fine.”

  She stood against the wall of a pharmacy on the street that intersected the Fillungo so she could watch him from a distance, knowing, somehow, that he’d be early. He was wearing a seersucker jacket. Theresa had heard of seersucker jackets, or read about them, but she’d never seen a living man wearing one. She knew Gregory Allard was in his eighties, but he looked younger. His hair was the color of silvery hay; it hung over his forehead like a boy’s, like that of someone whose mother had cut his hair at the kitchen table. He was pacing up and down. She saw that, somehow, he had never quite got the knack of his long thin legs, and the stiffness that characterized his walk wasn’t the stiffness of old age, it was the stiffness of someone who had at a young age adopted certain habits bred either of unease or of a lofty unconcern for how he looked. He would walk a few paces and then swing one leg over the other and turn around. She thought of one of those compasses she had used in grade school, then in high school geometry, when one was required to draw mathematically precise circles. She thought of a grasshopper: the colorless tuft of hair, the stiff overly long legs, the sense that at any minute, he might leap, alarmingly, and then land somewhere out of sight.

  He offered his hand to be shaken. Theresa had very rarely shaken hands with anyone, although she had heard often enough that it was important to have a firm handshake. But she had no idea what that really meant.

  She had looked in the window of Di Simo but had been afraid to enter it. It was so elegant that she felt she had no right. The gold art nouveau lettering of the sign, the bow windows, the beautifully wrapped confections … and she had heard that it had been the meeting place for great poets. She preferred her pizzeria with the corny poems pretending that Dante and Beatrice had met there and fallen in love over ceci pizza. She was worried about what to order. What was the right thing at four? She thought probably an espresso couldn’t be too far off the mark, but she was never sure whether to order espresso or just caffè, as she was never sure, when she wanted a glass of tap water, to ask for natural or normale, because she didn’t want to pay for bottled water, and was too embarrassed to refuse it when it was offered.

  Gregory Allard ordered something called Punt e Mes. She was surprised when it turned out to be a dark-colored drink, accompanied by a separate glass of ice cubes.

  She noticed the dark spots on his hands, and that his watch was like something from a movie about heroic pilots.

  “So, Miss Riordan. You are at work on our friend Matteo. May I ask how you came to him?”

  “Professor Ferguson suggested it. He’s my advisor. I’m very grateful.”

  Saying that made her realize that she was grateful to him, grateful and disgusted at the same time.

  “I have the privilege of owning two Civitalis. A marble head of a woman and a polychrome Madonna and child. I’m hoping you will come to my home
and see them. Of course I wanted to meet you first. If you’d turned out to be some version of ghastly, I wouldn’t have invited you.”

  How could you possibly know whether or not I’m ghastly? she wanted to say. We’ve only just met. She understood that it had to be something about the way she looked.

  “I of course came to Civitali because he’s a Lucchese and I have lived here for over forty years. His reputation has been hindered because he didn’t work from Rome or Florence or Venice or Naples. A local boy. Of course, the fact that he’s not better known is something of a joy to me. I almost resent it when anyone else knows about him. I’m not sure I don’t resent you a bit. Obviously, I want him to be better known. But not too much better. I like very much the idea of a fit audience but few.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. If I’m looking at him, and someone else comes by, I want to tell them they have no right to be there, and they simply have to leave. But you really don’t have to worry, Mr. Allard. I don’t think my dissertation’s going to be sold at airports.”

  Gregory Allard raised his glass to her. “A good thing, that,” he said. “I think you should have something more than a coffee.” He gestured to the waiter and ordered her a Punt e Mes.

  Reaching into his pocket, he took a folded piece of paper from his wallet and passed it to her. “A local antiques dealer, someone I rather trust, suggested that this piece is a Civitali. He’s offering it to me for twenty thousand euros. What do you think?”

  What could he be thinking? He was asking for her opinion, as if she were an expert. Which she knew herself not to be.

  “I couldn’t possibly say. Not from a photograph. Probably not at all.”

  “Tom was supposed to give me his opinion when he came. I don’t know why he bailed out.”

  I am the reason, she wanted to say. Do you know that he is a very weak man? Debole. That he has debolezza.

  “Would you like to look at it? The Civitali, or the putative Civitali. Possibly only scuola di?”

  Was it the alcohol that had given her courage? Dutch courage, she remembered it was called. Well, she had liked the Netherlandish painters. Their attention to detail. The Italians and the Spanish had learned from them. “I would be happy to look at it, as long as you don’t ask me whether I think it’s authentic or not.”

  “Not-at-all, not at all, just think of it as a kind of window shopping. Isn’t that the kind of thing young women like to do? Or do you just live a life of the mind?”

  “Mr. Allard, I’ve never shopped for anything with a twenty-thousand-euro price tag.”

  “Tom Ferguson said you had spunk. I’m glad to see it. So many serious young women are bundles of nerves. Afraid to eat. I hope you’re not afraid to eat. My friend Paola owns the best restaurant in town. If I say I am bringing a young friend, she’ll outdo herself.”

  I am in Europe, Theresa said in her mind. He is a rich man. A rich American. He thinks of me as his young friend. “That would be very nice,” she said.

  “Shall we walk around the walls until Paola will receive us?”

  “That would be very nice,” she said, wishing she hadn’t repeated herself.

  It was still full light, and the heat of the day had not lifted; the cicadas were making their noise in the large plane trees. The sun shone strong through the rich leaves of the plane trees, new to her, and the oaks, familiar. He was telling her things about Napoleon’s sister, who’d lived here, and Chet Baker, the jazz musician who’d been jailed here for heroin. But she couldn’t really listen; she was hypnotized by the honey-colored light. The buildings seemed to shift angles, the corners to open into views down narrow streets and then close, the campaniles of churches to slide in different directions. Runners in immaculate tracksuits with immaculate matching headbands; mothers in jeans and high wedge sandals pushing strollers; old couples, the men in jackets and ties, the women in low heels and neutral-colored skirts and long-sleeved blouses—everyone was doing some version of their passeggiata, everyone very aware that what they were doing was not simply taking exercise, it had something importantly to do with being looked at. She probably shouldn’t have had a drink, she told herself. She still wasn’t sleeping well and she often forgot to eat lunch. It was a relief when they walked down from the walls onto the main street and he opened the door of the restaurant which was called, not surprisingly, Paola’s.

  She assumed it was Paola herself who greeted them, embracing Gregory Allard and thanking him for something, something to do with medication for her daughter. She was impressed at the woman’s sophistication. She wasn’t young, perhaps in her late fifties. How did she convey sophistication although she was wearing only jeans and a light blue T-shirt? Was it her hair? So well cut, so subtly colored, as opposed to the aggressive metallic impression that her mother’s hair, and the hair of all Theresa’s mother’s friends, conveyed.

  Gregory explained that Theresa was a student and was studying Civitali. Theresa couldn’t tell from Paola’s response whether that meant anything to her at all. What was clear, though, was her affection for Gregory Allard.

  “You’re very lucky to have a friend in Lucca like Gregory. The most generous man in the whole of the city.”

  Was it possible that Gregory Allard blushed? He bared his strong yellowish teeth, the teeth of a strong, healthy, but no longer young horse. Theresa couldn’t read whether the baring was a grimace or a shy smile.

  “Shall I leave it to you to order for us?”

  “What else?” Paola said.

  The prosecco arrived, then a golden local wine, a small plate of squid and mussels, then another of eggplant, and then another of polenta and mushrooms. Pasta tossed with only tender green peas in their shoots, and then a grilled fish: Bronzino. Theresa giggled, thinking of the painter, and shared the joke with Gregory Allard, who didn’t laugh.

  She realized that she had never been in a restaurant alone with a man before. She’d had a bowl of soup and a sandwich with Tom in small casual places from time to time, but mostly they couldn’t appear in public together. This was a real restaurant, serious, impressive, its offerings complex. She felt with a sense of pride and pleasure that a man was spending money on her, and this had never happened before. Oh, she supposed that Tom had paid for the motels, but the transaction was by necessity secretive and rather sordid. Possibly before the accident, her father had bought her an ice cream or the three of them had eaten in a Chinese restaurant. But she couldn’t remember a specific instance, and her sense of her father as someone who needed to be cared for, provided for rather than providing, overcame all other ways of thinking about him.

  This was like something that happened to people in movies. She wished she had seen more movies, not what her fellow graduate students would calls films, serious, ironic, but movies that would have given her information, the kind of information she never thought she needed until now, about how to be a woman with a man, even an old man who reminded her of a grasshopper and a compass and a horse.

  But somehow, coming from somewhere—her blood, the air—knowledge arrived. She knew how to sit, how to arrange her arms and legs, how to hold her head, so that she indicated a relaxed readiness, tilting her head like an expectant, eager bird, her hands palm upwards on her lap so that he, Gregory Allard, a man, would understand that she, Theresa Riordan, a woman, wanted more than anything in the world to hear what he had to say.

  “How did you come to settle in Lucca?” she asked, not feeling impertinent or intrusive, understanding that this was what people did. They wanted to know things, they asked questions.

  “My late wife was Lucchese. It was rather a late marriage. After Harvard—sorry, I know you’re at Yale, but I’m afraid I’m a Harvard man—I went into the army, because I was drafted, and then for years I just traveled and collected and lived a very aestheticized life. I went where I liked, bought what I liked, made very few deep human attachments; my attachments were much more to places and things than to people. And then, when I was in my forties, I met
Elisabetta. She was working in an antiques store. I suppose I couldn’t have loved her if she weren’t so lovely. She was very lovely. Not only physically, but with a tremendous vitality, a rather scalding wit from time to time, but a great open heart. And she died a terrible, tragic death. A death that took far too many years of her short life to arrive. Lupus, it was called, her disease. The wolf. And she was so beautiful, she had something of the Civitali Madonna in her, a rather cool beauty, perhaps a bit austere, with a great, innate elegance. So that when she was afflicted and not only her health, but her beauty, was taken from her, it was a terrible thing. A terrible thing for her, but for the world, too. This beautiful woman, with clear, beautifully pale skin, a victim of this lupus rash, the wolf rash, so that her face was covered by horrible, red eruptions, and then she had strokes so that one side of her face was distorted, lopsided. And then the terrible pain, the difficulty breathing. Years and years of it. One learned that death was not the worst thing that could happen, that death could be something of a relief.”