Good on Paper

by Rachel Cantor

  He knew Romei. No wonder Romei had asked him for my number. He wasn’t just an editor who’d published my stories, he was Romei’s dear friend, without whom who knows!

  I have a problem with duplicity. If I’d been Dante’s wife, I’d have kicked him out the minute I got wind of Beatrice. What’s a second chance but license to repeat the offense?

  I splashed water on my face, grabbed my purse, and slammed out the door. Real people have it out, they say what they mean! I’d give Benny what-for. I’d been happy to have him in my life again, but I couldn’t imagine what he might say to convince me to stick around.

  He didn’t have to: through his window I could see the back of his cherry-red bodysuit, his arms wrapped around Lila-cum-Marie, who sat facing me on the counter like a child, her short legs entwined around Benny’s waist, her flat eyes looking at me over his shoulder. Her expression didn’t change, or maybe she smiled.

  What was I to do? Interrupt them? Pretend I didn’t see? Would Marie tell him I’d been there? I didn’t think so. I’d never mention it—what would I say? I chose not to enter your store because I realized you were boffing your salesgirl? So I moved on, in the direction of Cohn’s Cones, as if that had been my destination all along.

  So what if Benny wanted the narcoleptic Marie, with her tragically torn fishnet stockings and her Pop Tart art, what concern was that of mine? So what if he wanted to be with someone whose firm, young body helped him forget he was hurtling like a locomotive toward death, what did I care?

  Idiot.

  22

  THE ALL-IMPORTANT COUPLET

  I woke up Friday to find more pages from Romei and an email from Benny:

  I have the feeling I’ve angered you. I’d like to apologize, but I don’t know what I’ve done. This happens rather a lot: please give me another chance. I’ve enjoyed having you around. Call before sundown if you can.

  Yeah right, I thought, and shut off my computer.

  That afternoon, we witnessed Andi’s camp graduation. Ahmad gave her a Nancy Drew, wrapped in silver paper, which made me angry—we’d joked about the silliness of camp graduations. He also said he’d cook a special Friday Night Dinner.

  To recapture ground, I offered to take Andi to the park. She asked if she could get ice cream, and pointed east across Broadway, between the Love Drugstore and the Dollar Store.

  Huh? I said, since Cohn’s Cones was north. This place was new: Nice Cream. Damned if I could remember what had been there before.

  Can we, Mom? Can we? Andi tugged my arm.

  It was a stinky, sticky end-of-summer day, the kind that insults you with its heat, so Andi may have had a point, had she not had cake and cookies and stevia-sweetened brownies at camp. Knowing that the you-don’t-want-to-spoil-your-dinner argument didn’t cut it with Andi, who always wanted to spoil her dinner, I said, You can’t swing and hold ice cream at the same time, right?

  She considered this, then nodded in sage agreement. Then, as I tried to remember whether that particular play on words, Nice Cream, had a name—or Cohn’s Cones, for that matter—she told me about someone named Ovidio. A boy nobody wanted, not his father, not his mother. He lived with an auntie who wouldn’t let him watch TV.

  You know, I said, walking her across Riverside Drive, Ovidio is the name of a famous poet, though he’s usually known by his Latin name, Ovid. His full name was Ovidio Nasone, I guess because he was nosy.

  Ovidio isn’t nosy, she said. He may have a broken nose, though.

  That’s sad! I said. She nodded. You’ll need to be a good friend to him, then, won’t you?

  Andi looked at me funny, as if to say, Why do you say such weird things?

  When we arrived at the park, I covered her with sunscreen. Then we Eskimo-kissed and she scampered off in her pink Marimekko to join two girls from science camp.

  Have fun! I shouted, as if she needed my blessing to enjoy herself, and marveled that she could run in this heat, when I felt brave just for breathing. I sat on my usual bench in the shade in front of the fountain, took off my Birkenstocks, and buried my toes in the sand that drifted from the sandbox. Then rummaged for my MOM! hankie and used it to mop my brow. Andi was already leading the girls in an intricate game that involved running in concentric circles: they could dizzy themselves while tagging each other out—a twofer where everyone got to be “it.”

  I picked up the section that had arrived that morning: “Lo Schermo.” Usually translated as screen, schermo in Vita Nuova also means protection or defense. It refers to the practice of using a “pretend,” or “screen,” love to distract attention from a “real” love.

  So, “The Call,” followed by a threshold of sorts, and now “Deception.” Romei could only be following the structure I’d proposed in my paper. I ought to have been flattered, but instead I found it odd—troubling, even.

  At this point in the book, Dante, smitten, stares at the now-married Beatrice in church. Another lady, standing between them, believes that Dante stares at her. What an opportunity! He decides to use this second lady as a “screen love,” to deflect attention from Beatrice. For years—years!—he pretends to love this blameless girl; people talk, he writes her poems, a brilliant stratagem! Then she leaves town. What’s a poet to do? Love, disguised as a grubby pilgrim, suggests another who might serve as a substitute “defense.” But when gossip about this new lady reaches Beatrice, Beatrice snubs him.

  Dante is devastated—poor Dante! He retires to lament and is again visited by Love, who this time suggests that Dante address Beatrice directly—through the mediation of poetry. Art will thenceforth be his only “screen.”

  Critics remind us that screen loves were a convention of the time. Some question the innocence of these affairs, but no one—no one!—asks if Dante’s screen loves (or his wife) are ill-used as a result. No one asks if he was right to make one lady the object of gossip to save the reputation of another.

  In what follows, Romei, to his credit, makes explicit the cruelty and deceit glossed over by Dante. The narrator’s courtship depends on an ever-escalating series of deceptions, practiced with increasingly less concern for consequences. The narrator invites himself to parties where Esther is likely to appear, polyglot affairs evoked through cascades of jumbled language: The Wasteland meets La Dolce Vita. Esther drifts toward Romei, a bit high, highball in hand. He grabs the attention of the crowd, tells raucous stories of an invented past—aristocratic loves, artistic coups, meetings with remarkable men—discovers a garrulousness, a facility for fakery, he hadn’t known he’d had. Esther affects indifference but neglects to introduce him to her husband.

  His first poem in this section concerns one of these “performances.” An English sonnet, inverted so the all-important couplet, the rima bacciata (the “kissing rhyme”), appears on top, where all couplets secretly feel they belong. Three quatrains follow, subordinate now, a Babel-ing Greek chorus.

  I scanned my memory of Romei’s books and concluded that the sonnet was neither an old poem nor a patchwork of old poems. It was a pastiche, a Romei poem playing at being a Romei poem, a parody of the work Stockholm called the “strangulate cry of a remaindered generation.”

  Romei, enchanted by his new life, realizes he’s been in hiding, a prisoner still of his grain silo. He liberates clothes from the closets of drunken friends, takes any opportunity to practice his new persona. He watches Esther read and write in the park. Sometimes—a limber man, apparently—he watches her from a tree. Sometimes he comes upon her “by chance,” takes her to the Catacombs, the church of skulls, places where she trembles and must touch his sleeve. Over cappuccino, using half sentences, broken words, she confides a certain unhappiness: her husband is kind but … One doesn’t … He can’t, which is to say he won’t … not really. Her gabbling is captured in an Italian sonnet replete, of course, with weak feminine rhymes.

  One day, in front of Masaccio’s Expulsion, in a scene brimming with elevated language, elegant artifice, Romei kisses the back of Esther’s
neck. She doesn’t stop him—in fact, she kisses him back. The scene’s artificiality, its nonliterality, is made plain by the fact that the painting in question, a fresco depicting the ejection of Adam and Eve from Eden, is not (in “real life”) in Rome, but attached—firmly, we hope—to the walls of a Florentine chapel.

  Esther seeks him out. She waits in Piazza Santa Maria, umbrella in hand, as if they had a date, she calls asking about Italian authors. They meet on weekdays when her husband is away, which is often. When the narrator thinks a man has touched Esther in a tram, he punches him, pulls her out at the next stop, presses her against a building—he can’t stop kissing her face, her neck, her shoulders till poked by a grandma in black: Vergogna! she cries. Shame on you!

  Indeed.

  Some nights, crazed by the thought of her, the narrator calls, her husband answers, the poet babbles in Romanian, as if that were a disguise. Poem number three, written, appropriately, in twisted terza rima, concerns the language of these calls: three voices, uncomprehending, frantic, hurt, propelled then stalled by rhymes that never quite arrive at their destination.

  Then one day in the Vatican, Esther whispers in Romei’s ear: Come to me tonight, I’ll be alone. They stand before Raphael’s Parnassus, the triumph of Poetry, the great ones bearing witness to his victory: Homer, Dante, the muses. Romei is no longer an exile, no longer an isolated poet rejecting tradition. He has slithered his way into the very home of the Pope, he has claimed his place in the confraternity of art. That night, Romei takes Esther by candlelight. Her face is lit by fire, her post-coital languor enflames him to unprecedented acts of virility.

  Despite his hyperbole, Romei is reticent about their lovemaking, preferring to dwell on their stratagems and lack of remorse. Art becomes a screen for them both. He’s brought to Esther’s home, is introduced as an expert in the Bible, Hebrew literature—everything he knows exactly nothing about. He’s agreed to help Esther with her translation, she says, not bothering to temper her excitement. Romei acts the fool, tells self-effacing stories, unfunny jokes; he tries to downplay the threat, which must have been as palpable to the husband as the chicken on his plate.

  Sonnet number four recounts this dinner conversation.

  Later, while washing his back, Esther reminds her husband what she’s given up for him—her studies, her youth, her ambition. She plays on his soft spots: his need to indulge her, to see her as someone who needs indulging. Despite her attention, his “spots” remain soft, described in language that can only be called flaccid. It’s unclear what the husband suspects: they don’t care. Romei tosses stones at her window, misses, shouts apologies to shopkeepers who open their shutters in response, he takes her to restaurants where they might be seen.

  The section is honest and peculiar: their passion is plain but there is little evidence of love, certainly not the kind which (I’m told) sustains a couple for forty years. What Esther seems to desire is not Romei so much as escape from marriage: she is stifled, he is free! Romei’s motivation is more complex: he enjoys his new self, it pleases him to see her take risks for him—he has nothing to lose, or so he thinks; also, he likes to see her flush under the pressure of his hand, and when she says, Yes, yes! he begins to feel he’s found a place in this world.

  The fifth poem concerns the pleasure the narrator takes in artifice and orifice (artifizio e orifizio), and his concern, the perennial concern of the male lover, over his lady’s pleasure: Is it real or is it Memorex?

  Charming. This was what Romei wanted to share about his wife? I couldn’t imagine why.

  But I was troubled by something else. I went through the pages again—slowly—and counted seven images and ideas familiar from my stories: stone hitting bedroom window, woman helped off a bench, a first kiss to the back of the neck, roast chicken on a plate … They weren’t extraordinary, I held no patent. But still: coincidence?

  Disgusted, I stuffed the pages into my folder and reached for last week’s puzzle. There was still the betrayal of the husband to look forward to.

  I couldn’t wait.

  •

  My crossword was a patchy mess when I realized it was time to go home. I looked over at the playground to call Andi.

  She wasn’t there.

  She wasn’t running in circles, I couldn’t see her on the swings or on a seesaw. I couldn’t see her anywhere.

  Andi! I shouted, grabbing my mom-bag, but leaving Romei’s pages, Andi’s shovel and pail on the bench. Andi! I screamed, and ran barefoot from the fountain. Andi! I screamed as I ran around the jungle gym.

  And saw there, behind a tree, the edge of a Marimekko dress. And there, by the whirligig, a science girl, face hidden in her hands, counting to one hundred.

  23

  OH HAPPY DAY!

  I was surprised on returning home to detect the unmistakable scent of an Oh Happy Day Cake. An upside-down macaroon concoction Joe made us on special occasions, as when Ahmad published another book or Andi found a dollar on the street. I guessed that this was yet more camp-graduation nonsense, but resolved to be chipper.

  Tradition mandated that the cake be eaten before dinner, because that’s the way God intended it, and served with as many candles as the frosting could support, so that Andi, acting as proxy for the celebrant, could blow them out as a way of sharing the joy. Which she did tonight, in just four tries.

  Hooray! we cried, and passed around slices, admiring the cake’s macaroon lightness, its admirable upside-downness. Then Ahmad stood and clinked his glass with a fork.

  Friends, Romans, and country girls. I have an announcement.

  Announcement? He must have heard from Mirabella. He must be about to tell Andi she has a brother—or rather, a half-brother half of the time.

  A pause as he allowed suspense to build. Andi didn’t care: she was eating her cake.

  I have decided, he said,… to buy a house!

  A house?

  You’re kidding! Where? I asked, thinking, let it not be Brooklyn! The Village would be a drag, but Brooklyn—impossible!

  Connecticut! he said, and named a town, a hamlet known for its green lawns and polite Republicans. It was on the commuter line, but only barely.

  Oh, an investment! I said. I was confused for a minute! Good thinking!

  We’ll need a bigger place, he said, and looked at me meaningfully.

  Have you …?

  He shook his head one degree: he hadn’t heard from Mirabella.

  But wait, I said, you want to move there? To Connecticut?

  I’m hoping, assuming, that you’ll join us … me there. There will be lots of room.

  You’re assuming what? I asked. We’ll move to Connecticut?

  What’s Connecticut? Andi asked, having finished her cake.

  A stupid place very far from here, I said. Nowhere you’d ever want to live.

  A wonderful place very close to here, Ahmad said, looking at me in disbelief. With lots of kids, plenty of room in which to ride your bike …

  I don’t have a bike.

  We’ll get you a bike.

  You’re not getting her a bike! Ahmad, that’s enough!

  I want a bike! Andi cried.

  Jesus, Ahmad! I understand that you might need … space, but Connecticut? We are not moving to Connecticut. You can find a bigger place here. What about the university?

  They’ve already given me three bedrooms. If the number of my, uh, dependents goes up, technically we’d still only need three bedrooms. Given that you and I are …

  I get it! We’ll figure something out.

  I can’t buy an apartment big enough for us all, not even on my enormous professor’s salary. And last I knew, you weren’t able …

  I get it! I said. We’ll rent. I’ll contribute.

  In Forest Hills, maybe. If we have to go that far, I’d rather buy. Something nice. With space out back for a studio. And a pool, he added, looking at Andi.

  A pool! Andi said.

  Ahmad, we can’t just pick up and go!
r />   I don’t think you’re trying to understand my situation.

  I understand your situation but aren’t you acting a bit rashly, considering …

  Ahmad’s face went hard.

  Say it.

  Nothing, Ahmad. Sorry. I didn’t mean it.

  Considering I don’t know the outcome of current events?

  I hope it works out, really I do! Why doesn’t he take my study?

  Why doesn’t who take your study? Andi asked.

  Ahmad shot me a warning look.

  We’re just talking options, sweetie. Ahmad, we have a life here.

  You have a life here. If you can call it that.

  If you can call it that? What’s that supposed to mean?

  SuperTemps has a branch in Fairfield County, Ahmad said. I checked.

  I stood, glaring. To Ahmad, I would always be underachieving Shira, Shira-going-nowhere, never-realizing-her-potential Shira. When I published stories, Ahmad didn’t like how I portrayed his precious Jonah. When I temped, he said I’d earn more translating for the UN. Nothing was good enough for his high-achieving highness, not even translator to the stars.

  When do I get my bike? Andi asked.

  We’ll talk about this later, I said, and began bringing dishes to the kitchen. No seconds for anyone—I was too angry.

  Ahmad followed me to the kitchen.

  That was snide of me, he said. I’m sorry. But you can’t actually expect Hassan to live in a pantry.

  You’re not sorry, I said, slopping Tibetan takeout into bowls and bringing it to the table.

  Andi, Ahmad said after we’d passed the food in silence, tell us a story from school.

  So Andi talked about Pammy, who’d insisted that if Andi didn’t start wearing a bra very soon, her bosoms wouldn’t grow. Andi concluded that Pammy wasn’t quite “right in the head,” but she’d put up with her “for the moment.”

  Ahmad laughed in all the right places.