“No,” she said. “We have a spot for you. I want you to come. Please come along. I am happy to pay your way.”
“Well,” he said, “a person only gets this chance once. I do have some cash squirreled away in a pastoral retreat budget. This sounds like just the ticket.” But she had offered to pay—she didn’t hoard her good luck. She had not offered to pay for the others, but then Mr. Keillor took care of that, so it wasn’t a problem. But she hadn’t been greedy. She had shared.
And now she felt no moral qualms at all about collecting a windfall. She had done the neighborly thing and reached out to Mr. Norlander in his last days and she had brought closure to an old story in his life and lent him some peace as he rode off into the sunset. And she had reaped a bucket of gold. Good for her.
BEAUTIFUL MAN
Vacation days! Free to go where you please. She was in high spirits all day and the next. Carl and Daryl wanted to go on a double-decker bus—Fine! Go!—and off they went. Eloise collapsed into bed and so did Clint and Irene. Okay for them. Let the sleepers go sleep, she could sleep when she got home. Weariness is only a feeling, you don’t have to obey it. Sleep can be postponed. There’s coffee. That helps.
She visited the Keats-Shelley house, a tiny shrine with a lock of Keats’s hair, a pair of his socks, a box of his shoes, two letters from Byron, a teacup, a golf club, a 5-iron.
She and Maria had planned to meet for coffee at a café near the banks of the Tiber. She walked and walked toward where she thought the river was, but didn’t check her map, for fear of looking like a tourist. Finally, she saw the coffee bar and stepped through the open door into a beehive of people coming and going. A narrow room. A pleasant aroma of coffee and oranges. She took a deep breath and felt a buzz in her head. No lounging around. Customers stood at the long bar of granite and stainless steel and ordered their coffee from the barmen bopping back and forth between the espresso machine and the cooler, a hundred bottles of booze on shelves against a mirror, and when your coffee came, you downed it and out the door you went. There was room for a few loungers at three small tables along the wall. Next to a cold chest full of ice cream. Photographs on the wall of Rome in horse-and-buggy days. From the radio came a throbbing baritone singing about his broken heart. A box of breath mints by the register. She took a pack and put down a ten-euro note and ordered her coffee and, bing bing bing, a tiny cup was set down in front of her and her change, and she dropped two breath mints into the coffee and stirred it. The man next to her was studying her but he said nothing. She drank the coffee in one gulp and it wasn’t bad. It could’ve been worse. She ordered another, and then her phone rang. It was Maria saying she couldn’t make it because her mother had taken a turn for the worse.
She looked around and thought the man next to her was on the verge of talking to her. He was looking at her in the mirror, through the rows of liquor bottles, and when their eyes met there, he looked down at his drink. It smelled of licorice. He was a beautiful man in his thirties with black hair slicked back, tortoise-shell glasses, a black jacket, jeans.
Her coffee came and this time she didn’t put breath mints in it. She sipped it. Bitter, but in a good way. The man next to her ordered another drink. Maybe he was getting up his courage to ask her to go somewhere with him, come to his home and see his etchings. Maybe this happened all the time in Rome. And what if he did? What if he said, “You’re an American, aren’t you? I thought so. I love America. I’ve been there a dozen times. I live not far from here. Would you like to come and see my artwork? I am a painter. I’d love to paint you. Have you ever been painted? I think you’d be magnificent. The light is still good. What do you say?” Would she go? Yes, she might. And an hour later, she’d be sitting naked on a couch and he’d be gazing at her body, a big canvas in front of him, a palette in his left hand. And then he’d offer her a drink to relax her. And then…
The man said, “You’re American?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Bellissima. We were delighted when you elected Obama.”
“So were we.”
“And then the inauguration. My gosh. Aretha Franklin singing in front of the Capitol. And what a speech he gave!”
The man was Italian. Paolo. They shook hands. He was slight, with beautiful hands with long fingers. He taught American literature at a university in Milan. He loved Fitzgerald, Updike, Flannery O’Connor. Did she read those writers?
“I do,” she said. “I teach high school English. We read The Great Gatsby. And an Updike story, ‘Pigeon Feathers,’ they like. Not O’Connor. Too dark for my kids.”
He wanted to talk about Fitzgerald, she being from Minnesota and all. The movie Benjamin Button—had she seen it? (No.) And she wanted him to be somebody who would take her to a building with a tiny cage elevator and up they’d go to the fifth floor and into an old high-ceilinged studio with skylights and canvases stacked against the walls and she’d undress for him and sit on a couch, her knees primly together, her arms folded over her chest, and he’d look at her fondly and say, “Ah, bellissima.” And she would lie down on her back on the sofa, one foot on the floor, her arms up over her head.
“Do Americans spend all their time on the Internet?” he said. “I’ve heard that.”
“I don’t, but my younger daughter told me she goes online after supper and she might be on the computer until three in the morning.”
Hmmmmm. His handsome face darkened, he shook his head.
“She can be in four or five chat rooms at once. She keeps up her Facebook page and MySpace and HisSpace, which is a Christian web site, and then there’s FriendLink and One-plus-One. And she’s updating them every day and answering e-mails and trying to be amusing and smart and, my gosh, the work. The sheer amount of typing. Keeping in touch with all these people she’s never met and never will meet …”
“So strange, so impersonal,” he whispered. “I prefer this. The human touch.” He put his hand on her arm.
She said she probably should be going, but she didn’t go. And he leaned toward her and said, softly and simply, “My hotel is near here if you’d like to come up and have tea.” He almost put his hand on her hand, on the counter. He was going to put his hand there and then it stopped short, in midair.
And she heard herself say, “I’d love to.”
His hotel was called Il Paradiso and it was smaller than the Giorgina, a tiny lobby, no couches, no bellman, just a hallway with a little office for the clerk, and he led her into an elevator so small she felt suddenly joined to him. Her bare arm touched the sleeve of his jacket where they stood facing front.
“Do you write poetry?” he said.
“A long time ago. But I ran out of things to write about.”
“You could write about this.”
“About meeting you?” She smiled. “Well, I hope I will.”
“You’ve lived all your life in Minnesota?” The elevator stopped and the doors opened. Yes, she said. He walked down the hall to the second door on the left and unlocked it. She stepped in. There was a double bed and a chair and a desk, a door leading to the bathroom. “I want to get out of Milan and start something new. First, I must earn some money though. I don’t think my parents are going to die anytime soon and I don’t think they will leave me much.” He gestured toward the bed and she sat down. He picked up an electric teakettle from the floor and took it in the bathroom and ran water into it.
“I’ve stayed around out of habit, I guess,” she said. “Can’t think of another reason.” The single window at the head of the bed looked into a small empty courtyard.
“I don’t think people live by habit,” he said. “Everyone has a sense of adventure, don’t you think? You must. You’re a poet. Poets have to be brave.” He plugged the teakettle into the wall socket and set it on the chair. He sat down on the bed beside her. He put his hands in his lap and looked at her legs.
“I’d like to read your poetry,” he said. She said she didn’t have any with her. He nodded. “I hadn’
t written poems in years and then the other night I woke up with a poem in my head and oddly it was in English. I spent a year at Indiana University. I sometimes dream in English. Still. All these years later. So I dreamed the poem and then I woke up and wrote it down.”
He put his hand on her knee and said, “Your face and your green eyes. My knee pressed against your thigh where you sat crosswise. And the next three hours flew by and my life was made new by you, my lover, that fragrant night. Nothing to do but love you, and when it was over, we lay together, me and you. Like horses in the summer sun, we happy two.”
“That’s very lovely,” she said. Surely he could feel her pulse pounding with his hand on her knee like that. He was gently squeezing it. She was going to tell him to stop, but if she did, then what had she come to Italy for?
“What did you write poems about?” he said.
“Things I thought about when I was a girl.”
“How could you run out of things to write about?” He was feeling around her kneecap. He was thinking about moving up her right thigh, she guessed. She was thinking about stopping him.
“I had children, I had other things on my mind.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes,” she said. Yes was the correct answer, wasn’t it? She and Carl were married. But she almost had said, “I don’t know.”
“Did you ever write poems for your husband?” She shook her head. She couldn’t remember if she had or not.
He turned to her and put his right hand against her left cheek and kissed her very lightly on the lips. And then a second time.
“That was nice,” he said. “Thank you.”
She nodded. Did she nod? Yes, she did. She hadn’t meant to, though.
And then he put his right hand on her breast. She quailed. She whimpered.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m scared like a little rabbit.”
“What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of your own feelings? I won’t hurt you. I’ll only admire you and when you tell me to stop, I will stop.”
He opened her shirt and pulled down the cup of her bra and kissed her breast and licked her nipple.
She stood up. It took all her effort but she made it and didn’t fall down or have to brace herself against the wall. “Thank you,” she said. “I really should go. They’re expecting me. I’m in charge of a large group. I don’t want anybody to get lost.”
He unplugged the teapot. “Can I see you again?”
She whispered, “Where?”
“At the coffee bar. Tomorrow.”
“I will if I can get away.”
“Otherwise, this is my phone number.” He handed her his business card. “You are a very attractive woman. I hope you know that. I would say—magnificent. I was so lucky to meet you. I want to see you again.” He smiled. “Do you and your husband ever make love?”
She blushed and opened the door. “See you tomorrow,” she said. He closed the door and she rang for the elevator. She could hear the engine humming far below. Yes, she and her husband made love. Months ago. It was the day after Christmas, the kids had all left, and she and Carl toppled into bed around 4:00 P.M. and he rolled over next to her and caressed her, and slipped his hand up her blouse. She reached over and unzipped his pants and put her hand down and there it was, all ready to go. And when he pulled her skirt up, he was in a hurry to get inside her. He got on top and thrust hard and it was over in a few minutes but it was okay. Very much okay.
The elevator door opened and she got in. Had she just committed adultery? She wasn’t sure. Should she ask Father Wilmer what constitutes adultery?
GUSSIE MOVES IN
Dear Lille Bror,
The German front is falling apart and our Second Corps is heading north on Highway 7, and we’re also busting out of the Anzio beachhead, and this made the Brigadier sad because he had to give up his ritzy quarters and take to the roads. He was playing Duke Ellington records last night and feeling very moody. He is afraid of getting whacked by an American mortar. His best friend, a Captain Merrill, was hit by a mortar shell while squatting over a latrine and there wasn’t enough of him left to bury so they just covered over the latrine and stuck a cross in it. The Germans are retreating but very craftily, and our line advances, it waits, it moves, it waits, it waits, and so we are edging toward Rome. Nobody expects the Germans will put up a fight there. They’ll make their stand farther north. General Clark let the Germans escape across the Tiber so he can put on his parade past the Colosseum and get his headlines. When we get to Rome, the Brigadier is hoping for a Palazzo. He has got his heart set on it. One with paintings and a gilded ceiling. Tonight we are bivouacked near a soccer field outside the city, a stone’s throw from Highway 7. It is quiet. Thousands of aircraft and tanks and trucks in the vicinity and a half million men on our side and a hundred thousand on the other side and it’s quiet as Sunday in Minnesota. We found a stone hut and the Brigadier is inside sleeping on a pile of electrical cables and I am sitting in the Jeep writing by lanternlight. Maria was assigned to go into Rome to mark the good locations for the newsreel cameras and I am sick from worrying that she will get shot or raped and be left bleeding in the street. I stand at the window praying to the God who doesn’t exist to watch over her. The Brigadier got very drunk today. He dreads the sight of dead bodies and today we drove through a little valley where there’d been some hard fighting an hour before and the carnage was still there to be seen. A tank driver who got roasted hanging out of his forward hatch and the flies crawling on him. The Brigadier closed his eyes and I drove around the tank and on we went. The historians will take an aerial view of the war but here on the ground it just looks like cruelty and stupidity rolled into a ball, a rolling opportunity to do despicable things and be admired for it. And in the midst of it, this woman whom I love who wends her way on the outskirts of horror. She sees the worst, fratricide, Italians preying on each other, partisans hunting fascists, patriots chasing the collaborators, and it’s pure cruelty under a thin veneer of principle. I don’t believe in any of it anymore, but I do believe in her. She is my true heroine.
Your brother,
Gussie
WHAT IS HIS PROBLEM?
The pilgrims were resting in the lobby of the Giorgina when she came back, all except Carl who was upstairs napping and Evelyn who had eaten a doughnut from a street corner vendor that turned out to be a meat pie and it hadn’t agreed with her. And Mr. Keillor—“He went to visit friends,” said Irene, raising her hand with uplifted pinky. La-di-da. “Too good for the likes of us,” said Wally. “The more I see of him, the more I wonder, Where did this guy come from?” said Clint. “You know what I mean?” They did, indeed.
For years the man had spoken in a plummy semi-Brit voice that bore no resemblance to how anybody in Lake Wobegon talked—had he learned it from old Charles Laughton movies? Of late, he seemed to be aiming for boyishness (a little late, at 66) and greeting people with a big warm howdy and a wink. The producers of his show had teamed him up with a chimp named Bombo who was supposed to humanize him somehow (according to a story in the paper). Margie wondered if he might’ve been fired from A Prairie Home Companion and if his traveling with them to Rome might be out of desperation, to cushion the shock. What if he were devastated and on the verge of taking a fistful of pills and what if he called her at 3:00 A.M. one of these nights, sobbing, and asking why he shouldn’t just kill himself right now and save everyone the misery of his presence? What would she tell him?
“How are you doing, Margie?” said Lyle.
“I am having the time of my life.” And she was. Three days in Rome and she didn’t see how she could possibly go back to being the little country mouse she used to be. A Lake Wobegon woman was expected to go along with things. If people snub you, smile and move on. Smile at insults. Water off a duck’s back. If men say stupid sexist things in front of you, be a good sport, laugh, and move on. Boys threw snowballs at you. They called you names, said you were ugly, stupid. Sm
ile and turn away. Don’t make an issue of it. Drop it. Grandma Schoppenhorst gave her a plaster plaque for her birthday, the Blessed Virgin in her blue smock and underneath BLESSED ARE THE MEEK FOR THEY SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH and like Grandma, Margie was wellschooled in meekness. Last fall she went in to see Dr. DeHaven about the lump in her breast and his secretary Gloria called Margie up to the counter and as she approached, Gloria sang out, “So this is about the bladder leakage?” And all around the room, people with their heads buried in People made a mental note, Margie Krebsbach pees her pants. Guess that’s why she gave up wearing white ones. Too bad. Must be embarrassing for her. My uncle had that problem, but he was eighty-three. And she wanted to turn and announce to the room, “No, I don’t. She’s got my mother-in-law’s folder, not mine. Myrtle suffers from occasional incontinence. She is pushing eighty. Or pulling it, we really don’t know. I am fine. If you must know, I do have a little problem with hemorrhoids, and if you’d like a close look, let me drop trou and bend over, okay?” But she smiled and said, “No, that’s my mother-in-law, Myrtle.”
“Oh!” Gloria shrieked. “You’re here for a boob check then?”
What could you do with these people?
But now she was a new woman. She had had an illicit meeting with a man she met in a coffee bar. It happened in slow motion, giving God time to alter events unless—what?—did God intend for it to happen? And now she was considering divorce and pondering what to do with half a million dollars. Maybe she wouldn’t go home at all. She could take twenty grand out of the bank and find a room to rent, enroll in Italian class, advertise for work on Craigslist, and get to know Paolo better and better. Maybe move to Milan. Her kids didn’t need her. Mr. Halvorson could find a sub to finish out the year. There would be talk—She stayed in Rome. She and Carl are separated. Irene thinks she met someone there. Isn’t that unbelievable? She’d need to find friends. But she had found a close friend. In just a couple of days, Maria had become her closest confidante.
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