Now that she was alone with him, Iris knew she could not wait until the next morning to confront Max, though she had no idea what she should say or do. The only thing she knew for certain was that she could not share her bed with him until she discovered the truth. “Play it by ear,” Auntie Rosa would say. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” her mother would say. “Things always work out for you,” Lily would say. “What’s the worst that could happen?” Iris would say. Plenty, that’s what.
Her stomach in knots, Iris retrieved the cell phone from its hiding place in the cupboard; there were new messages and unanswered calls showing on the display, but she had already seen enough. She activated the ringer, and hid the phone in the palm of her hand, then joined Max on the terrace. She approached him slowly, her movements weighed down by the disturbing impressions and uncouth behavior she had glimpsed on many occasions, but chosen not to see until tonight, and by the sobering realization that she may have placed her heart upon an altar of shifting sands.
Max smiled an inebriated grin as she neared, his eyes twinkling with that mischievous glint that had both attracted and agitated Iris from the moment they first met. A pile of smoldering napkins flared, the lights and shadows distorting Max’s features. Iris lowered her gaze, waiting for the blaze to burn itself out, and darkness to shield her face. Cigarette butts littered the floor of the terrace, and stuck out from the soil of her potted herbs. Pigs! This time they were from Milan instead of Rome, but that’s all they were - just another herd of disgusting pigs. A sense of revulsion made Iris jerk up her head and face Max, just as he unzipped his fly.
“Can’t be too careful,” he snorted, as he pulled out his penis and began urinating on the grill. The glowing embers sizzled, and a final puff of smoke rose in the warm night air.
“Max!” Iris gasped.
“It’s just water, Capo. It’s good for the plants, too,” he said, slurring his words, drawing circles on the ground with his pee before directing it into the pot where her little lilac had recently lost its first and only bloom.
“Stop it! That’s my lilac!” she cried.
Max laughed. “If it were in a park, dogs would be pissing on it, wouldn’t they?”
Anger and disgust roiled deep inside her like molten lava, but lacked the force to break through her crust of fear. She stared at Max with clenched fists and burning cheeks as he finished pissing on her lilac, his face turned toward the night sky, his mouth open in a gaping yawn. As he shook off the final drops of urine, Iris set his phone beside the grill then rushed to the kitchen, where she picked up her own cell phone. She pressed the redial key to call the number she had stored by calling herself from Max’s phone, then returned to the terrace just as Max was zipping up his fly, looking startled to see a phone flashing and ringing at him in the night.
“I think that’s for you,” Iris said.
“What the fuck?” Max said, staring at the phone as if he had never seen one before.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?”
“That’s not mine. My phone’s in my pocket.” Max reached into his back pocket, took out another phone and waved it in front of Iris’s face. Iris pressed the “end call” key on her phone, and the other one fell silent. Max looked disinterested as he picked up the phone. “One of those assholes probably forgot it. I’ll have Silli find out who it belongs to.”
“Right. Maybe Silli can also tell me how it got into the pocket of your shorts?”
“You found this in the pocket of my shorts?” Max asked, his eyes now dark and dull under half-closed lids.
“Yes, Max.” Why couldn’t she just accuse him outright? Maybe because she didn’t really want to force a confession out of him. Maybe because she wanted to give him time to come up with one of his highly creative but plausible excuses.
“Oh – now I know what happened. This phone,” he said, waving in the air the phone he had taken from his pocket and held in his right hand, “is mine. Only I lost it somewhere on the way to Ponza. So I had to get a new one. This one.” He waved in the air the phone in his left hand. “Only then my assistant found the one I lost in one of the equipment cases, so now I have an extra. A spare always comes in handy, you know?”
If Iris hadn’t seen those messages she would have left it at that. In the time she had known him, Max had dropped, smashed and lost more cell phones than most people would own in a lifetime. But she had seen the messages, and read them. She needed to know what they meant.
“Especially for all those other women who need to call you and text you?” she said, annoyed to hear her voice sounding so thin and uncertain.
“What women?”
“Women who go by the name of ‘PonzaLor’, for example?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Look, Max. I found the phone when I was doing the laundry. It kept ringing, so I looked at it. I didn’t mean to, but I happened to see there were all these messages and calls coming from this person. Who is she? What’s going on?”
“This is so wrong! You had no right to go snooping around like that! What are you, the fucking CIA?” Iris had heard Max raise his voice before, but never with her. It scared her.
“Max, I’m your …” Iris began, her voice cracking. What was she to him, anyway? His girlfriend? His woman? His partner? “I’m your companion. And I need to know what this is all about.”
“It’s not about anything,” Max said, his voice reverting to a drunken slur. “It was probably just that Lorella woman, pestering me for advice again. We all stayed at her bed and breakfast, and I was giving her some tips on how to promote the place. It turns out she’s from Rome, too. We found out we have some friends in common. That sort of thing.”
“That’s not the only thing you have in common, is it, Max?” Despite the Xanax and the wine, she could not forget the words she had read. “Don’t you have in common this thing that you started and have to finish? And something that happened by the light of the moon?”
“Oh, come on! I can’t believe you’re making such a big fucking deal out of a couple of text messages!” His words rang with the indignant shrillness of the unjustly accused.
“It is a big deal, Max. If a woman is writing those things to you, I can only imagine what you’ve been writing to her!” Iris felt ready now. She wasn’t interested in reasonable explanations anymore. She knew there were none; she had known it from the start.
“Like what?” Max shouted. “Give me an example. Go on.”
“There weren’t any messages from you. You deleted them all.”
“Get your story straight, Iris!” Max yelled. “First it was an accident, and now it turns out you spent the whole day snooping through my stuff!”
“Once I saw what she wrote, I had to know the rest!”
“How about asking me, Iris? Huh?”
“That’s what I’m doing. And please lower your voice before someone calls the carabinieri.”
“Go ahead, ask me what you want to know,” Max hissed. “Go on.”
Why was he making her do this? Why couldn’t he just deny it all, or admit it all, and be done with it? It wasn’t fair for him to force her into the role of interrogator.
“Did you go to bed with her?” she blurted out.
“You left me, Iris. You don’t know what that did to me, when you flew away like that,” Max said.
“I didn’t ‘fly away’ from you, Max!” Iris cried. “How can you say that? I went to bury an aunt who was like a mother to me!”
“You abandoned me,” Max said. His accusation was laced with that pathetic tone of vulnerability Iris knew so well. Instead of clearing things up, everything he said just confused her more.
“Please, Max!” she pleaded. “Just tell me. Did you go to bed with her?”
“So what if I did?” Max shrugged his shoulders.“It was no big deal.”
“Nothing’s a big deal to you, is it, Max?” she cried, her jaw quivering. “How could you do that to me? How c
ould you?”
Max threw back his head and laughed. “How could I? So it’s all right for you to screw around on your old man with a rich guy twice your age, huh? And it’s all right for you to screw around on him again with me. But if I make one little slipup, you’re suddenly some kind of saint, and I’m a fuckin’ sinner!”
“That’s not how it was and you know that!”
“Yeah – it was worse. You were married, and I’m not. Why don’t we just call Gregorio and tell him the whole story, huh? Why don’t we see what he thinks?”
Iris couldn’t believe this was happening, she couldn’t believe the things she was hearing. The anger and hurt were already crushing her, without adding the guilt. It was too much to bear; too much. She hunched over in a stance of defense, her hands on her head, her forearms shielding her face, her chin tucked to her chest. She couldn’t stand the sight of him standing there. She couldn’t bear the sound of his voice. She couldn’t listen to another word.
“Stop! Please!” she said, tears streaming down her face.
“The fact is, you’re no better than me,” Max shouted, pulling her head back by the hair, shoving a finger in her face. “And you know it!”
“Shut up!” Iris screamed, her fists beating the air. “Get out of here! Leave me alone!”
“I’ll give you a little time to think it over,” Max said, releasing her.
Iris crumbled to the floor, her ears so filled with the sound of her own sobbing she didn’t hear him slam the door.
“Feel free to leave anytime,” Iris said, her red-rimmed eyes burning and her head throbbing from a sleepless night spent crying in her bed. “But now would be good.” She kicked an empty wine bottle across the living room floor just to hear the noise it would make when it slammed into the wall by the sofa. “Bitch,” she muttered, walking out onto the balcony. The sea far below was a deep shade of blue, and the air clear enough in the early morning light for her to make out the shape of Genoa’s lanterna in the distance. She would count to twelve, and if Silvana wasn’t gone when she went back inside, she would grab her by the hair and drag her out to the street.
“Learn to live with it!” a voice croaked from the living room. “That’s just the way he is.”
Iris was picking cigarette butts out of her plants when she heard a slam. She ran to the door and locked it, securing the safely latch for good measure. She grabbed a broom, dustpan and garbage bag from the kitchen, and went back out to the balcony, where she finished cleaning up the litter, then filled the watering can from the outdoor tap. She sprinkled the lilac, filled the can again, then poured more water on the plant to flush it clean. The whole story of the phone, the whole scene with Max seemed like a bad dream. Staring out at the sea, she wondered whether she had been wrong to confront him right after the party, when neither one of them was clearheaded. She wondered whether things would have gone differently if she had waited until morning as she had planned. Maybe they would have been able to talk things over, work things out.
Sniffling and wiping her tears from her face with the hem of her T-shirt, she went back inside the empty apartment, where less than forty-eight hours earlier her now broken heart had danced with joy at Max’s unexpected reappearance. Though she had removed the bulk of the dirty dishes and glasses while the last of the lingerers were still shooting shots of liquor down their gullets, the living room was a shambles. But as much as it disgusted her to see the whiskey and rum and vodka bottles scattered around the room reeking of smoke and booze, Iris was dying to set to work purging her house of the filth.
She raised a liter of vodka to see how much was left, but remembering she had seen a couple of slutty looking girls and a bald guy with a beard swigging it straight from the bottle, she took it to the kitchen, and poured the rest of the liquor down the drain. A wave of nausea made her grip the edge of the sink, as images of finding Lily passed out drunk on her couch flashed through her mind.
Splashing cold water on her face, Iris wondered whether she would be living alone in this house from now on, with no job, no family, no friends. Would she end up like Lily, and Dolores before her, guzzling vodka on her sofa, too?
What if it was over with Max? Would she stay in Italy, or move back to America? Despite two decades of living and working in the country, she knew she would never be Italian; she would never understand certain nuances of its multifaceted culture. How could she, when a Sardinian couldn’t really understand the workings of a Venetian’s mind, or a Sicilian that of a Milanese? And because of the ways she had changed over the past two decades – as had her family, friends and native country - she never felt truly at home when she went back to America.
Iris had not spoken at length about Max to her sisters, but she had no doubt what they would say if they knew about his little lark. They would dismiss him as an asshole and tell her to kick him out. But she was pretty sure the people she knew here would react differently. The men were likely to chortle and brush it off, maybe even congratulate him when she wasn’t around, while the women would adopt their usual boys-will-be-boys attitude, and with a roll of their eyes and a shrug of their shoulders, tell her to get on with it.
For now, that was the only thing Iris could do. Armed with dust rags, furniture polish, and glass cleaner, she went to tackle the living room. The mess inside her and all around her reminded her of how she had tried to put up a good front for Lily when they had cleaned her house together. Stupid Iris, with her stupid illusions that she could turn the project into something fun, when even a fool could see Lily didn’t even want her there. Lily didn’t need Iris or her optimistic platitudes; she didn’t need her stupid housecleaning music, or her warm champagne and foolish fixation with celebrating.
Iris wished she could give it another try. She wished Lily would materialize instantly, and they could try cleaning house together again, on her turf this time. Maybe as they worked, Lily could repeat those questions she had asked Iris about her life with Max. Maybe Lily had been filled with good intentions, and not resentful, as Iris had assumed after seeing her eyes dart from Iris’s ears to her neck, where Auntie Rosa’s diamonds had come to rest.
Even if Lily wasn’t around to help clean house, Iris remembered that something else was. She dropped her dust cloth, went to her bedroom, and rummaged through the canvas shoulder bag Violet had given her to use around town, then let her keep for the trip back. She hadn’t yet found the courage to empty out the bag, because it contained a few of Auntie Rosa’s belongings – her Italian prayer book, her rosary beads, Iris’s wedding photograph which no one wanted, but which Iris did not have the heart to simply throw away – in addition to the copy of Jesus Christ Superstar she and Lily had listened to while cleaning. Hearing that Iris had lost her copy during a move, Violet had insisted that she take hers. Reaching into a zippered compartment, her fingers found the CD, and behind it, a padded envelope. She opened the envelope, and pulled out another CD, with a note wrapped around it. The sight of Lily’s handwriting brought tears to her eyes.
Dear Iris,
You wouldn’t let me throw this away, but I don’t even want it in the same house with me right now.
Hope it doesn’t bring you the same bad luck it brought me.
Love,
Lily
P.S. Thanks for coming over. Really.
Iris knew that listening to Lily’s voice, that beautiful voice Iris had always known was meant to be heard by the multitudes, would wrench still more tears from her. But that didn’t matter; it was a small price to pay for having Lily there with her. She went into the living room and popped the CD into the cheap portable stereo she kept hoping to replace. She punched the sofa cushions until the indentation left by Silvana’s body was beaten out of them, and lay down.
When you look at me, tell me what do you see?
Would you be surprised to learn that in my heart desire burns?
If you look inside my soul, let go of all you think you know
You'll find that I'm a lot like yo
u,
Just someone who hopes their dreams come true
I know I may not have all that it takes
To reach those dreams alone
But with open hearts and open arms
I feel your strength become my own
The sound of Lily’s soulful voice carrying a message of hope and dreams quickly melted Iris into a puddle of tears. She thought of her little sister’s ravaged dreams, and she thought of her own lost dreams, of the faded fantasies of motherhood and happily ever after that had eluded her during her marriage with Gregorio. She thought of the dreams of a fun-filled future of travel and romance and adventure she shared with Max. Sensuous, spontaneous, Max. But Max was weak, at times fragile. It was her strength that kept him balanced when he was depressed, and her hope and freshness that kept his cynicism in check. He had told her that himself many times, even recently, on the ferry to Carloforte. Like in the lyrics, he felt her strength become his own. Together, maybe their dreams still had a chance.
Lift me up, take me higher
Feel the power; feed the fire
Lift me high above the clouds
Up to a place where dreams come true
Lift me high enough to touch the sun, the stars, the moon
Lily’s words kindled enough inspiration in Iris to make her stop sniveling. She might not be in a position to reach for the moon right now, but maybe once she pulled herself together, she could start by lifting herself off of the sofa, then figure out how to lift herself out of this situation she had created. She should have known by now that Max was too complicated to be handled like most men.
Still, there was something Max had said that hurt her more than anything - probably because it was true. She had regretted telling him about her previous affair the moment she had blurted it out one night over their second bottle of wine, when they had been playing a game of dare, each of them taking turns sharing their darkest secrets. Max and his stories were starting to make the Iris feel like Snow White, and even the chocolate-stealing episode at Sacred Family and the pot-snatching scheme with Lily and Frances had done little to impress him. That was when she had surprised him with the story of Claudio Olona.
The Complete Series Page 139
