A Carnivore's Inquiry

by Sabina Murray

  No doubt the whole thing sounded suspicious and Travis was not a stupid guy, but I sensed that he felt his adventure on the east coast was just starting and he wanted to make the trip count for something. A guy like Travis would rather become destitute than return home without a good story. I could satisfy that need. I wrote the address down for him. I told him to wait a couple of days and he nodded and thanked me “kindly.”

  Silvano’s apartment was only four blocks from Boris’s. I wondered if he’d been able to find any daffodils. He was the only person who knew that they were my favorite flowers—cheap in the spring, then gone. I liked the way they bowed their heads, their lack of posture, their drunken wagging in the breeze. I liked the way the two green leaves were always raised in a shrug, questioning and futile. I remembered that my apartment with Silvano had always been full of daffodils.

  That apartment was in the Oltrano, just west of the Ponte Vecchio, which made everything smell moldy, but I loved it. Perhaps we were together for only six weeks, but my memory had logged it as an eon. In the afternoons I walked around the neighborhoods with the sole purpose of losing myself, always disappointed to find that I recognized that certain angle of alleyway or the conglomeration of pots and flowers on a particular set of steps. Sometimes I’d buy shoes or go into one of the old churches just to feel the silence, which I had once thought was God and now recognized as history and large amounts of stone and stained glass. One time when I came home, Silvano had filled the house with roses. I thanked him politely, but Silvano saw that the flowers made me uneasy.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said, “but I feel like I’m in a hospital. I feel I am sick.”

  The next day the roses were gone and in their place were vase of vase after vase of lilies. These too were beautiful, but after some uneasy silence I confessed.

  “I feel I am dead.”

  “What do you want?” he asked, hands on temples.

  “I like daffodils.”

  “Why daffodils?”

  It was some Wordsworth-inspired melancholy “bliss of solitude” thing that had lodged in my head in high school and was yet to be displaced with some more sophisticated poetry/flower association. I looked at Silvano, while trying to find the necessary Italian for the explanation. After a significant silence I said,

  “They’re yellow.”

  Silvano accepted this, as he accepted all my simple, present tense, declarative Italian. The truth of the matter is that Silvano had not fallen in love with me, but rather with a much simpler person. And this because I was only capable of expressing myself to him in the most basic, unadorned ways. To his credit, I did always sound like a lovable moron, a contented idiot who possessed some variety of pure soul. I was aware of this at the time, but not capable of explaining it to him. I respected Silvano and wanted him to know why we—despite our marriage—were not going to last. I managed,

  “You love me because I like daffodils because daffodils are yellow. But I do not like daffodils because they are yellow.”

  And this was the last thing I said to him before I disappeared. Until I saw him in Boris’s living room. I hit the buzzer.

  “Silvano, ecco Katerina,” I said. He buzzed me in.

  I walked down the hallway looking for apartment 5L. It wasn’t hard to find. Rigoletto was blasting out the door, something Silvano always played when he felt tragic or deformed by his years. I knocked on the door, but he couldn’t hear me. The door swung open under my rapping. Cosimo, Silvano’s Italian greyhound—a five-pound dog with tiny paws and the delicate snout of a rodent—sniffed my hand and wagged his tail aggressively, unbelieving. Had it been so long? Silvano was seated at the end of the table smoking a cigar. On the table was a vase with a half-dozen daffodils in it. Silvano picked up the remote and turned down the music.

  “Just when Gilda was about to do her aria,” I said in English.

  “Yes, but unlike you, the story is more to me,” he said in Italian. He never used even isolated English words, offended by the sound of it, the lack of forced meter. He smoothed his mustache and I wondered why I’d come. “For you coffee or wine?”

  “Wine,” I said. I sat down at the furthest chair, hidden by the daffodils, and moved in such a way that the vase obscured Silvano’s head. His head was the vase. Silvano gracefully pushed the vase aside with a walking stick that I’d noticed him carrying the night before.

  “Where to begin?” said Silvano.

  I searched around for words. Funny how quickly languages deserted me. Even my English seemed worse after being on the road trip and in Mexico. My Italian was almost gone.

  “Wine immediately. After, talking,” I said.

  “Do you remember Rigoletto?” he asked. He poured me a glass of wine and brought it over.

  “We take the train to Milan. We eat at Wendy’s.”

  “Like a child, you wanted to eat there.” Silvano’s mood was fluctuating between sentimentality and complete bitterness. “And later we went back to the hotel. You were crying because you felt bad for Rigoletto, that he was destroyed and had lost everything. I comforted you and asked you to marry me. And what did you say?”

  I winced. “I say yes.”

  “Was it because of Rigoletto?”

  “I don’t know.” Why did I do anything? I remember feeling bad for deserting my father and wanting to make Silvano happy because of this. I looked at him, his long silver bob, his perfect mustache, his cashmere turtleneck. “Maybe. Rigoletto is a good opera.”

  Silvano sighed and whistled through his teeth. “You want to marry this Boris?”

  “No.”

  Silvano laughed. “He says that you do. He says that it is essential to your happiness.”

  “Is his Italian good?”

  Silvano shrugged. “Better than yours.”

  I knew that.

  “But he speaks like a communist.”

  I had no idea what that meant. “That’s very true,” I said, but only because I’d remembered how to say it.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “No? I have prosciutto chingiale. I carried it in my bag. And melon, which I bought here. Like all American fruit it is very large and probably has no flavor.”

  “I like that,” I said. “I drink more wine now. It is good.”

  I drank a lot of wine. Italy had seemed so far away but now, in Silvano’s apartment, I felt like I was back there, as if apartment 5L was in Florence. As if 5L were the Florentine embassy, a sacred square of concrete somehow beyond the reach of corporate, industrious, disposable, amiable America. How to tell this man that I had left on impulse, gone down the street to buy a can of orange soda and one of those little custard tarts from the Café Mingo, then found myself at Piazza Maria Novella and the trains? Trains going everywhere: Lugano, Rome, Trieste, Belgrade, Amsterdam, Paris, Istanbul. How could I stand there and not take one? How could I go back? I didn’t have enough cash on me to go very far. I’d wanted to go to Venice for the day maybe, but I’d just missed a train. There was another in an hour, which gave me enough time to go outside and have a number of cigarettes before deciding. But I’d left my cigarettes at home. I’d only planned to be gone for ten minutes after all. Then I saw two young men with their map spread over the hood of their car. They were arguing in French. They were both smoking. As I walked over I saw them both lift their eyes from the map, that look of startled interest. Soon I was heading eastward, threading through the mountains at gear-grinding speeds through the brushy pines and ear-popping drops, hairpin curves and cerulean skies. I was heading to heaven and who knew—or cared—what lay on the other side.

  Silvano’s eyes narrowed. “You went to buy an Aranciata and somehow, you’re not sure how, ended up in Rimini?”

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I go to Rimini and not call. Now I am in New York. I do not tell you. I am bad.”

  “What has happened to you?” he asked. Silvano was now sitting on a couch, more comfortable for him. I got up fro
m the table and sat on his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck. He smelled of oily tobacco and lavender soap. His hair was slick with pomade.

  “No talking now,” I said. “I have tired. I sleep now.”

  Silvano’s breathing was raspy, heavy. He inhaled and exhaled in great drafts and I rose and fell on his chest as if I were floating on a raft at sea. I had a headache, just a small one, that I attributed to last night’s heavy drinking. Soft blue clouds were exploding against the inside of my eyelids and as my breathing slowed, I thought I heard the voices of children calling me, “Katherine, Katherine,” and soon I was in a deep sleep, dreaming that I was on the beach and children were swimming in the waves. Vieni, Vieni. Join us, Katherine. But in the dream I could not swim. I stayed on the shore because I didn’t want to drown.

  I’d hitchhiked across Italy with the two French boys—Ludo and Olivier. Ludo had a new Fiat Seiscento, a graduation gift from his parents, and he and Olivier were off to see the world. I remember them sitting in the car drinking a bottle of red wine, arguing in French. They were probably arguing about me. I’d already had enough to drink at that point and had actually hallucinated my mother, who I thought was standing knee-deep in the water in her favorite houndstooth suit.

  Then she disappeared.

  I went down the beach and into the water. I wasn’t wearing shoes, but my skirt was long and quickly tangled around my legs. I parted the reflecting surfaces, half expecting to see my mother’s pale face peering up, her hair pulled by currents. Instead all I saw were my own wide eyes again and again, mirrored back from every section of the sea. My heart pumped loudly, but as I calmed down I realized that the thumping wasn’t me, but rather some immense pounding machinery involved in the nearby construction.

  I came up the beach, exhausted.

  “Are you okay,” the French boys asked. “Were you drowning?”

  “Je suis ça va,” I said. “And no, I wasn’t drowning.”

  “Then why this?” said Ludo and he gestured up and down my body, indicating my suspicious disarray.

  I wrung my skirt out and sat down on the sand. The sea was gray, cold, and blank—not beautiful at all. I pushed my hair off my face and said, “I’m not really sure.”

  That night I went out with Ludo and Olivier and drank myself into a coma. The bar was not much of a bar, rather the downstairs of the rooming house. The booze was cheap and the beer cold and that’s all I really cared about at the time. There were white Formica tables and fluorescent lights that fizzled, at times lit you up like an X ray. Up the street, they were tearing down an old house and all the construction workers were lodged in the rooms upstairs. This is where Pietro, my handsome construction worker, normally stayed, but he had left that afternoon to visit his wife. And all that was left for me were the Frenchmen: Ludo with his blond hair and annoying laugh, Olivier with his freckles.

  I had fallen into a profound misery and was having a hard time explaining this to the Frenchmen. I was having a hard time explaining this to myself.

  “Sweet baby,” I remember Olivier saying. “I help you. I help you.” And I remember Ludo’s milky eyes staring at me as he lay with his head rested on the table.

  Ludo and Olivier were not very amused when I was still morose the next day. We were ostensibly driving to Paris, because their money had run out and I had nothing better to do. I could see them giving me disapproving looks in the rearview mirror. A hangover was one thing, but American girls were supposed to be fun. Something was making me throw up. Alcohol was a possible cause, but I thought it was food poisoning coupled with fear and a threatening depression, which was hovering around like an opportunistic thundercloud. At any rate, while I was vomiting out behind the Fina, they left me.

  20

  Throughout the whole plane trip to Portland, I thought of Arthur. A part of me had wanted Arthur to save me, for this to be the one special relationship. He was my angel. But a number of things had happened over the course of the last couple of weeks, a number of things I was going to have to keep from him. The relationship, despite all my optimism, had already failed and Arthur had become a mirror, reflecting all my deviancy back at me. I considered being frank with him, but quickly changed my mind. Arthur would be happier that way. Wasn’t the truth usually the most ugly thing in life? If truth wasn’t inherently ugly, than why was truthfulness so laudable?

  I called Arthur from the airport.

  “Are you at Newark?” he asked.

  “No. Surprise, surprise. I’m in Portland.”

  “Great. I can’t wait to see you,” he said. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  “Let me take a cab,” I said. “It’s no big deal. Make sure there’s something to drink in the house.”

  Hearing his voice on the phone had a calming effect on me. I missed him, his easy manner, the damaged quality that made him warm and sensitive.

  I’d been away for only two weeks, but it felt much longer and also somehow much shorter. The leaves were all gone and the sky an even steel color. I could smell snow in the air. Boris and I had a big fight just as I was leaving. I’d hoped that I would be able to sneak away without a blow-up and all the signs were promising. We’d made it out of the apartment in peace. Boris had whistled “Lily Marlene” all the way down in the elevator. We’d waved to the doorman, who was negotiating some packages for Mrs. Mingus while her Pomeranian was trying to eat his leg. The cab had been waiting right where it was supposed to be and there was no traffic in any direction. The avenue of sky blocked out by the buildings was a lovely blue. Boris kissed the top of my head and put me in the cab.

  “And don’t worry about the divorce. I’ll take care of it. I’m sure there’s no reason for you to be involved.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll talk to Silvano. I think we understand each other.”

  Boris shut the car door and waved for the driver to leave.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” I said. I rolled down the window. “I don’t want you talking to Silvano.”

  “Is that your choice?”

  “And what’s this about me not being involved in my own divorce?”

  “Katherine, I am only protecting you.”

  “From what?”

  “From yourself.”

  “Oh. From myself.” I lit a cigarette, despite the no smoking sign. The driver took a quick look at me in the rear view mirror and lit one too. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should stop being involved in everything about me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only thing wrong with me is me. Maybe you should take care of that too.”

  “You are not making sense.” Boris looked down at his gray felt slippers and shook his head. “Can’t we part civilly?”

  “Go. Go, go, go,” I said to the driver. I looked at Boris briefly through the rear view window. He had already turned to go back into the building. “Can you believe that guy?” I asked the cab driver.

  “He is really an asshole, that man.”

  “Yes he is.”

  “You are with him for money?”

  “God, I wish it was that simple.”

  “Isn’t it that simple?”

  The cab driver was African and reminded me of one of the wise kings from the Little Drummer Boy. He looked like that and had the same reassuring, supremely civilized voice. I gave him a twenty-dollar tip when we got to Newark.

  “Merry Christmas for you and your family,” he said.

  “The same to you,” I replied and meant it.

  It was getting near Christmas. I’d somehow missed Thanksgiving while in Mexico, which was no big deal, even though I liked Thanksgiving. How could one not like a holiday devoted to food? But Christmas was fun too. Johnny would be back in New Mexico by then. Arthur and I could get a tree, decorate it. We could wrap socks and scarves and hats in gold paper, fill stockings with Baci and biscuits and fancy coffee in little tins. There would be lights blink-blinking away. For the holidays we’d drink bourbon in eggnog and Zinfandel, smoke Export A’s and N
at Shermans, eat and eat and eat, then sleep in sweet sweaty lumps beneath the covers. Many houses already had their wreaths on the door and more than one illuminable, unmeltable Frosty waved, broom in hand, from the front lawn. A few pillars on the larger houses had spruce garlands snaking up in a spiral. It was good to be back in Maine, good to be—dare I say it?—home.

  Christmas was the highlight of my year when I was growing up. I attended a Catholic grade school and Advent pretty much brought a stop to any scholarly pursuits. We were herded every morning into the school hall and drilled through a number of Christmas carols. And there was the yearly Christmas play. In the first grade, I played a narrating angel, not because I was particularly angelic, far from it, but I could memorize lines and that was rare in a six-year-old. In the second grade, I again held a starring role—that of Noah’s wife. I’m not exactly sure what Noah had to do with Christmas, but there was some musical based on Noah’s life and as Noah’s wife I had a song all to myself and much time standing at the center of the stage flanked by pairs of animals. When the dove sent to scout for dry land returned, I had the line, “Look, an olive branch! We are saved!” The dove was played by Penelope Cornwall, whose costume was outrageous, rows of feathers sewn painstakingly onto wings that really flapped and a pair of yellow bird feet. But her only line was a steady croo, croo, croo that didn’t project very well and was hardly heard by the audience. In the third grade, I somehow fell from grace and found myself standing two rows back from the manger, as a sheep. I was bitterly disappointed by this and blamed my teacher, Ms. Balfour, who was in thrall to the Cornwall family. I remember my Christmas gift—a scented candle—sitting on the classroom piano next to Penelope’s gift—fancy looking skin-products in a large basket bound up in red cellophane and gold ribbon. Penelope was the angel Gabriel—who should have been a boy anyway—but Penelope got the role and as I watched her lisp her way through her lines, her sweet manner and ineptitude eliciting all sorts of ooh’s and ahh’s from parents in the audience, I felt a rare and precious anger rising within me. Penelope was wearing her first communion dress, a gorgeous satin thing, pure white (my first communion dress had been pale blue because my mother thought that dressing little girls like brides was an act of unmistakable perversion) and her wings—wings again—were huge cardboard appendages stuck all over with crumpled opalescent cellophane, dusted with gold glitter. I, however, was wearing an old fleece car seat cover, belted at the waist, and pair of ears made from my father’s gym socks. On leaving the house, my mother had said, “Don’t you look cute.”