Meeting Luciano

by Anna Esaki-Smith

  “Some chefs spend a few weeks at a restaurant camp in Florida, but they mostly make it up as they go along,” I replied. “Did you go to school for painting?”

  He ignored my question and rose to his toes to reach a high spot on the wall. From the kitchen, my mother was attempting to sing the mad aria from Lucia di Lammermoor. “I think you and your mother both need a man in the house,” he said, straining. “Things feel out of control here. It doesn’t seem right with only you two around.”

  Ironically, there had rarely been a man around, even when my parents were married. Pappa frequently traveled alone out of the country and slept late when he was home. My mother tried to fill in by doing more than a mother needed to, making crepes on weekday mornings and ironing my underwear. Yet, unfettered by another’s input, her parenting became increasingly free-form. I felt empowered when I went out with my high school friends, knowing I could drink whatever I chose, or stay out all night if I wanted. The only men consistently present in our lives were disembodied: Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, Carlo Bergonzi, Leo Nucci. Their voices followed me around the house, singing of love and betrayal.

  “Smells like dog,” Alex said, freezing at attention and sniffing the air. “Right here.” He was standing in front of the air conditioner.

  “Our dog liked to sleep there when it got hot,” I said, taping the box shut and running my fingers over the top, embarrassed by the smell of old urine and dog hair. “He died a few years ago.”

  “It’s like he never left,” Alex said, laughing.

  “My mother likes to have him around. It comforts her.”

  “She likes this smell?”

  I shook my head and pointed to a wooden box, wrapped in a mauve silk cloth, on the mantelpiece. Alex looked at me blankly.

  “Giuseppe’s ashes,” I said. “My mother can’t decide where to bury him.”

  “He’s in there?”

  “Since 1988,” I replied.

  Alex whistled. “That’s a long time to have a dead dog in your living room,” he said, slowly putting his brush down. He stepped away from the air conditioner and began examining the room.

  “I’m thinking satin finish for the trim,” he said loudly, so my mother could hear from the kitchen. “Trade eggshell. It’s pretty expensive and needs careful brushwork, but it’s the best. And if I paint the ceiling a slightly whiter white than the walls, the room will look bigger.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s a good idea,” my mother called out. “I want the room to feel big and airy. I want it to become a different place.”

  For as long as I could remember, the room had been a shrine to Danish Modern, with a white floor lamp on a curved stem like a limp tulip, and a modular couch that worked its way around the room like a swollen upholstered worm. In the corner a huge, opaque white plastic orb, three feet in diameter, lit up like a giant glowing Ping-Pong ball. The carpet was a blinding ocean of electric blue.

  THE SMELL OF olive oil and garlic wafted in from the kitchen as my mother tossed pasta with fresh basil and a little anchovy. She hadn’t really cooked since the renovation, hoping to preserve the artificially clean state of the room. No grouper osso bucco, which involved deboning the fish and grinding fresh Italian herbs with mortar and pestle; no braised-rabbit risotto, which involved so much dredging and reducing that afterward the kitchen looked like a battlefield.

  After sprinkling chopped basil on top of each plate, she called me in to eat.

  “Alex, are you hungry, too? Would you like some pasta?” she asked.

  “No thanks. Smells wonderful, but I never eat when I’m in the middle of something,” he called back.

  My mother smiled. “Such a proper reply,” she murmured.

  “I feel like we should be in Architectural Digest,” I said. The kitchen table was a spotless white oval on which the noodles sat steaming on bright blue plates.

  My mother sat down and blew on her capellini. “This is quite nice, I must admit. Much nicer than when your father was around.”

  I nodded, chewing a mouthful of hot noodles silently. She had lived among the remnants of her life with Pappa for years, and I now wondered if their sudden absence made her feel more alone.

  “In many ways, your father has always been an undisciplined man,” my mother continued.

  “I know—he’s lazy,” I said, poking at my pasta with my fork. “You always tell me that.”

  “No, not lazy. Undisciplined.” My mother paused, watching through the window as a charcoal gray squirrel shot across the yard and zipped up a tree.

  “I don’t think there’s a difference,” I told her.

  “Just before I married your father, he was living with another woman,” she added.

  “You mean his mother,” I said, suddenly alert.

  “Yes. And then with a young woman. He’s had many women, you know.”

  I rested my fork across my half-eaten plate of food and looked out the window. Rain was beginning to fall.

  “That’s a stupid story,” I said.

  My mother laughed. “Well, I didn’t make it up. You have to understand what kind of man your father is.” She continued to eat, sucking the long noodles into her mouth without a sound.

  • • •

  THOUGH DIVORCED FOR two and a half years, my father still hadn’t settled into a new home. Instead, he lived in a succession of hotels—each night pulling open crisp bedsheets, bleach and starch disguising the fact that countless strangers had slept in them before. He drank from the minibar, left glasses scattered around the room, and dropped damp towels on the bathroom floor. All he needed to do was take a long walk and the room would be completely cleared of his presence, reset like bowling pins. Pappa apparently loved that life.

  When I was growing up, he had written me letters on stationery from hotels around the world. The Peninsula in Hong Kong, The Château Frontenac in Quebec, The Crillon in Paris. He never said what he was doing in those places, and once I laid out the letters in the order they had come, looking for the logic of his travels. Why did he go from Melbourne to Brasília? The letters asked uninspired questions and provided strange bits of information. “How are you? Are you well? There is a fruit here called the rambutan that looks like a hairy Ping-Pong ball. I find there are many old people walking the streets. Love, Father.”

  I often thought about living with Pappa. We could live in hotel suites, liberated, each in our own room. The meals would always be perfect and exactly what we wanted that day, rolled in to our rooms on tables adorned with tiny vases of flowers. Life would be distilled to simple acts carried out amidst furniture picked out by a stranger.

  WHEN I RETURNED home from work that night, there was a postcard on the kitchen table. My mother was at the sink, her back toward me, washing dishes. It wasn’t until I sat down at the table that I realized the card was from my father.

  “I can’t believe that you are still in contact with him,” my mother said, her words barely audible above the water streaming into the sink.

  I had already intercepted two letters from my father, but had started working lunch shifts and could no longer meet the eleven o’clock mail. I watched my mother dry her hands and walk out of the room. A moment later the door to her bedroom clicked shut behind her. I knew she would sink into a dark, trembling mood that would confine her for a day like a tunnel.

  The postcard was from the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. “Hello from Japan. The bread here is surprisingly delicious. The wind smells of the sea. I will soon settle down. Love, Father.”

  That sounded promising. A year earlier, he had sent photographs of a Louis XIII–style château for sale in Brittany. “Groomed gardens, vaulted ceilings, a ballroom,” he wrote on the back of one. “This is beyond beauty.”

  The owner, a countess, ran a bed-and-breakfast to make ends meet but now was tired and old and wanted to sell. “From chandeliers to oven mitts,” my father had written, “it’s all there.” I was sure this would be his home.

  AS ALEX PAINTED th
e ceiling in the living room, my mother perused her battered opera records. She pored over librettos and listened to her records over and over until she had memorized the Italian lyrics phonetically. She’d sing the arias and love duets from Daughter of the Regiment, Tosca, Rigoletto, and L’elisir d’amore while cooking and cleaning, and those songs were the first thing I’d hear in the morning. Even I could hum the melodies.

  She kept these records meticulously organized beneath the record player. The mahogany stereo console sat alone against one wall of the living room, like the black lacquered altar that dominated the sitting room in the house where she grew up. She treated the actual records terribly when listening to them, handling them like plates, stacking one atop another, and carelessly plunking down the needle. But when she wanted to find a particular performer or composer, she knew its exact location. Domingo, after Debussy, before Donizetti. She’d sit in the middle of the living room, listening to a record with eyes closed, as serene as a Buddha.

  Secretly, I longed to feel a similar passion. While she plunged headfirst into things, I kept life at arm’s length, never delving too deeply into anything—an observer of my own life.

  Lately, my mother played records not only for entertainment, but to educate Alex as he worked around her. She slammed a record down onto the turntable, and after missing the beginning with the needle, successfully hit the scratchy start on her second try.

  “Plácido, Plácido,” she said, gazing at the record cover as the music warbled from the speakers. She flipped the cover over to see the song list. “Such an overachiever,” she said, showing me Domingo’s face. “Can’t you tell by the boastful way that he looks?”

  I nodded, taking the cover from her and wiping its edges with a rag.

  “After singing his first Otello in the late 1970s, he completely recast himself as a heldentenor,” my mother continued.

  “Heldentenor?” Alex repeated, standing on a ladder, paintbrush in hand. “What does that mean?”

  My mother looked up at him and paused. For a moment I worried that she couldn’t answer and the reputation she had fostered would fall from her like a heavy drape.

  I handed back the album cover and pointed to a corner of the ceiling. “You missed a spot there, Alex,” I said.

  “Heldentenor,” my mother said, using a fingernail to scrape off a price tag from a corner of the cover. “A tenor with a strong, dramatic voice. Well suited for heavy Wagnerian roles such as Parsifal or Tristan. In other words, a heroic tenor.”

  Alex looked at her and nodded. “Very interesting,” he said, turning to dab at the ceiling corner with a brush. Pleased, my mother began perusing the E’s.

  WE WERE NEVER meant to be Americans. My parents’ move to the U.S. was only going to be for a few years, five at the most. Even when I was a child, my mother treated her American life as an educational experience, a sort of sociological experiment. “Fill up please, fill up please,” she’d chant while driving to town, swerving uneasily around squirrels on Quaker Road. She’d carefully enunciate the l’s right up until she rolled down her window at the gas station and the pimply face of a teenage boy peered in.

  “What’ll it be?” he would ask.

  When my father returned from work, she’d tell him how her l’s had become r’s, how the word “fill” turned to “fear.” “There is so much to learn before we leave,” she’d say. I wasn’t sure if Pappa really listened to her stories. He’d drink a glass of wine and eat a handful of macadamia nuts, his head tilted at an angle as if trying to listen with one good ear, but would say nothing in return.

  Each Saturday morning, Charlotte and I attended Japanese language school in Riverdale, as religiously as if it were church. We made fun of the other Japanese students at school, the boys in tight shorts and white ankle socks, the girls tittering like birds, but we did so a little jealously, alone. While we struggled with the ideograms for tree and rock, our American friends sailed around on bicycles, faces upturned to the sky.

  One Saturday morning, Charlotte and I dressed and went downstairs for breakfast, character workbooks and flashcards in hand. My mother was in the kitchen drinking coffee, wrapped in her bathrobe.

  “You can go back to sleep,” she told us.

  “School is canceled?” Charlotte asked hopefully.

  My mother shook her head, folding a paper towel and slipping it between her coffee cup and saucer. “No more school,” she said.

  “It burned down?” I asked.

  “No. Just no more school,” my mother replied.

  She looked at us with a solemn face, as if not yet convinced herself. I remember wondering why she looked so sad. In time, we forgot what Saturdays had been like when we couldn’t go out and play like the other children on our street. It wasn’t until much later that I realized what my mother had done that day, snipping the final tie that connected us with her home.

  “WELL, THAT’S IT, finito,” Alex said, stepping away from the ladder and surveying the living room with his hands on his hips. “Looks pretty good, pretty darn good.”

  The new white paint gave off a matte glow. The windows, stripped of curtains, let in a large rectangle of sky. My mother emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel, and nodded her approval. “Simply lovely,” she said. “The feeling of the house has changed. Completely.”

  I bent down and pulled away a portion of the tarp in front of me. The edge of the tarp was faintly outlined on the carpet in specks of white.

  My mother stood near Alex, who was closing the lid on a can of paint. Suddenly, he turned to her.

  “Have you ever considered weather stripping?” he asked.

  I flipped the tarp back further to reveal speckles of white in the shape of a trapezoid that had been left uncovered. Beyond that, a distinct white bootprint.

  “I’m not even certain what weather stripping is,” my mother replied, though her voice had turned wooden.

  “In the winter, your door shrinks, creating a gap which lets in cold air,” Alex explained, crossing his arms across his chest and rubbing his shoulders vigorously with his hands. “If you install metal spring strips around the doors, the air can’t get in. It’s a real money saver. The strips also stop doors from swelling in the summer, so they don’t get stuck.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” my mother said flatly.

  I picked up most of the tarp.

  Alex whipped out a rag, bent over, and began scrubbing at the dried paint. “Oh, this’ll come up, no problem,” he said.

  “Alex, don’t worry,” my mother told him. “The furniture will cover that.”

  I looked at her. “No it won’t. The couch doesn’t go anywhere near there.”

  A stony silence followed as Alex rubbed the carpet furiously.

  “Anyway,” my mother continued, “I’ve been thinking about removing the carpet.”

  “You have?”

  “Yes, I have been thinking about a hardwood floor in this room,” she said and looked at me defiantly. “The wall-to-wall carpeting was your father’s idea, anyway. He thought it was so American.”

  We all stood silent and still for a moment.

  “Coast sitka spruce?” asked Alex, stuffing the rag into his back pocket. “Ponderosa pine? Eastern hemlock-tamarack? It’s up to you, Mrs. Shimoda.”

  “Ponderosa pine. I love the way that sounds. Quite musical, isn’t it?”

  I dropped the tarp and left the room rather than expressing my disgust.

  When I came back ten minutes later, Alex was jumping up and down, his dusty workboots thumping on the carpeted floor like a heartbeat. “Are the windows shaking?” he asked, jumping more lightly.

  My mother stared at the living room’s large glass pane and nodded vaguely. “Seems to be so,” she replied.

  He suddenly stopped, as if waiting for an echo, and we were all quiet.

  “Is this a bad thing?” my mother asked.

  Alex scratched his head. “Well, it’s something I’ve been concerned about. T
he floor joists are undersized, or maybe even cracked. And the floor seems a bit bouncy. If we’re going to do the floor, maybe we should replace or reinforce the joists first. Anyway, I’ve got some wood samples in the back of the truck. Care to take a look?”

  My mother flushed pink and nodded. “Love to,” she said.

  They went out the front door and crossed our lawn, Alex walking backward while speaking, gesturing as if in pantomime, my mother listening with her hands in her pockets as they headed for the truck, parked in the driveway. I watched Alex reach into the back and pull out what looked like a large key chain with wood samples. He flicked to one and said something, flicked ahead to another, pointed, and laughed. A gust of wind blew through the pink and white trees across the street, sending a few petals floating through the air.

  WHAT I HAD liked best about Ben was his fearlessness. His exuberance was swashbuckling in scope. He wasn’t terribly athletic, but he loved tennis, thrashing about the court like he was cutting down sugarcane. He wrote strange, avant-garde plays for an experimental theater company, never flinching when only a few friends would show up for an uncomfortable performance. His Mandarin was elementary and awkward, but he insisted on trying it out whenever we ate at a Chinese restaurant, much to the amusement of the waiters. “They only speak Cantonese,” he’d explain to me apologetically.

  Meeting him was like being hit in the face with a snowball; my senses had been jarred awake, tingling with irritation as if a deadened outer layer had been suddenly peeled away. College was no longer simply classes, laundry, and regular calls home. Ben took me to a gay disco and a taxidermy museum a few towns away; he insisted on trying the food at every eating hall on campus and dragged me regularly to the top of the school bell tower for a bird’s-eye view of campus. Within a week, he was sleeping in my bed and had reduced my laundry regime to cold-water washes of mixed loads.

  I watched rain pelt the window of the bus as it hummed quietly on its way downtown. Ben’s head tapped my shoulder at irregular intervals, until he finally gave in to the pull of sleep and dropped his head against me. In the short time I had known Ben, I had discovered a few key things about him: He was violently allergic to nuts, he loved the singer Tom Jones, and he could sleep in anything that moved. The one time we went skiing together he nodded off riding the gondola, the back of his head softly banging against the glass.