“New York.”
“Really! Me too. Though mostly in East Hampton. Did you ever go to East Hampton?”
“Not until I was grown up.”
“And where did you go to school?”
“Bronx Science.”
“I was at Spence. I dated a boy from Bronx Science once. Gerald Ashenauer. Did you know him?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, of course not, you’re probably just decades younger than me, aren’t you?”
“Not decades.”
“And what kind of work do you do?”
“For God’s sake, Sylvie, don’t interrogate the poor girl,” Alex says, pouring more wine. “After all, she’s only come to lunch.”
“I don’t mind answering,” Celia says. “Only it’s not very glamorous. I was a proofreader and copy editor.”
“Any kind of work sounds glamorous to me,” Alex says, “never having done any myself.”
“Why do you say ‘was’?” Sylvie asks.
“Celia’s quit her job,” Seth says. “We’re not going back. We’re going to stay here in Italy.”
“Oh, jolly good for you!” Alex says, lifting his wineglass. “Wonderful. A new wave of expatriation, that’s what we need over here. A shot in the arm, since all the British around here are so bloody boring.”
Francesca and Adriana come out from the kitchen again.
“We’ve washed the bowls, Mummy,” Adriana says.
“Thank you, sweetie.”
“Mummy,” Francesca says, “can’t I please go to the Bon Jovi concert next week?”
Sylvie’s hand once again cradles her breast. “We’ll talk about it another time, Francesca.”
“But Seth says it’s all right, he says nothing will happen and he likes Bon Jovi, don’t you, Seth?”
“Uh—yes,” Seth says. “Absolutely.”
No one laughs.
“Please, Mummy.”
“Just say yes,” Alex says.
“I said we’d talk about it later,” Sylvie says.
“Oh, I’m so sick of you!” Then Francesca picks up an empty bowl from the table and smashes it against the bricks, where it shatters loudly; her father’s beautiful, hand-painted bowl.
Signora Dorati gives the only audible gasp.
Sylvie is standing in an instant. “Get in the house,” she says, but though Adriana runs indoors, Francesca doesn’t move. “You’re fakes, you and Daddy,” she says, “you haven’t worked a day in your lives, you just sit out here on your asses. I’d rather be dead than grow up like you.” Then her eyes bulge, and she brings her hand tentatively to her teeth, as if to stuff the words back in.
“Mummy, I—”
“Get in the house,” Sylvie says again, with dental precision, her voice dangerous. Francesca turns, and is gone.
“Excuse us just a moment,” Sylvie says. “Just your run-of-the-mill family catastrophe.”
She follows her daughter into the house. Signora Dorati, fluttering her fan, whispers something furiously to Ginevra, who whispers something back. Signora Dorati wipes her brow with a handkerchief.
“I think,” Alex says, “that a toast is in order, don’t you, Seth?”
“Ah, sure,” says Seth. “What shall we toast? Mothers and daughters?”
“I was thinking, not working a day in one’s life. Sitting on one’s bum.” He is pouring himself yet another glass of wine.
“Here’s to bum-sitting, then,” Seth says.
“Cin-cin,” Ginevra says. The glasses clang.
The chick on Sylvie’s tit, in spite of her best efforts, has died. With a sort of sentimentalist’s imitation of peasant hardness—her face stoic, her lower lip not quivering one bit—she buries the small, feathered corpse in the garden. Francesca and Adriana, their eyes red but dry, watch her, don’t say a word. Then the three of them disappear into the kitchen together, the girls clinging to their mother’s arms, tied to her by some blood bond not even broken pottery can threaten, and from which Celia is naturally, painfully excluded.
On the patio, Seth practices his Italian on a bored-looking Signora Dorati. “Che meraviglia,” she responds tiredly to everything he says. “Che bravo. Che stupendo.” Ginevra and Fabio play a foolish game of Ping-Pong at a green table. Once the ball goes rolling under Signora Dorati’s chair, but she has apparently been so defeated by the events of the afternoon that she hardly notices when her daughter reaches under her legs to get it.
Then Alex—drunk, but pleasantly so—invites Celia for a tour of his studio, and together the two of them head off down the hill toward the old barn. “Now you’ll get to see my ‘work,’ ” he says, making little quotation marks around the word with his fingers.
“I can’t wait,” Celia says, as he pulls open the wide, scarred doors. Inside the barn the air is dark and moist, and all around them are animals—willowy, spindly, brass tigers and antelopes, gazelles, stone cats, their eyes painted black.
“So you see,” he says, “I have my own grotto of the animals.”
Looking at all these animals, the first thing Celia thinks of is her mother’s shelves and shelves of elephants.
“They’re fantastic,” she says.
“My daughter’s right,” Alex says. “There’s no reason for Francesca to take me and Sylvie seriously, to listen to us. We’re anachronisms. Useless, really. Look at what I do all day! A toy man!” He laughs. “When they were young, that was fabulous, there was nothing better a father could be than a toy man. But now—well, you only have to look at what happened. I don’t understand these young people. They’re so—practical. They have no romance in them. Francesca, especially. She says her ambition is either to be a rock star or go to work on the stock exchange and make her first million pounds by the time she’s thirty. Sixteen years old, and talking like that. Whereas when I was sixteen—well, a lot has changed.”
Celia cautiously strokes the neck of a ceramic giraffe painted with blue spots.
“Do you sell them?” she asks.
“Now and then, through friends. I don’t have much of a mind for business. Once Sylvie and I went to New York to talk to some gallery people, people who’d known my father—very intimidating, those people were, not encouraging and not very kind. We fled back here as fast as we could. We really aren’t made for the world, you see. Francesca is. She’ll go to England, get a job, be a Sloane Ranger in London, just like she says. And maybe on the way she’ll join a punk band, she’ll live in a tenement in Brixton. The world. Adriana’s more like us. I’m not so sure about Adriana.”
He has led Celia over to the working space of his studio. Here the animals are smaller—the size of hands and fingers. She notices a brass elephant, like many of the other animals, so spindly she’s afraid it will break in half when she picks it up. But it doesn’t.
“My mother collects elephants,” she says.
“Then why don’t you give her this one?”
“What?” Celia puts the elephant down. “No, no, I didn’t mean that, really. Oh, you probably think I mentioned my mother just because I hoped you’d offer, when really—”
“Just give it to her,” Alex says, pressing the elephant into her palm. “After all, there’s nothing else for me to do with them. If you don’t take it, it’ll just sit here getting dusty.”
Celia is flustered from too much speech. “Well, then, all right. Thank you.” She looks again at the tiny elephant.
“We were beastly this afternoon,” Alex is saying. “I hope you’ll forgive us. My family has a tendency to behave rather animalistically, to just express ourselves all over the place, and sometimes that can be a bit of a strain for visitors. Signora Dorati, for instance. Somehow I don’t suspect we’re going to be receiving an invitation to lunch at her villa anytime soon.” He laughs halfheartedly. “Supposed to be quite a splendid villa, too. I would’ve liked to have seen it.”
“Well, I didn’t mind,” Celia says. “It made me feel like one of the family.”
�
�You’re kind,” Alex says.
The tiny elephant in Celia’s palm looks up at her, its face inscrutable but knowing, as if it has a secret to tell but no mouth.
“You can’t imagine how much my mother will appreciate this,” Celia says. “Why, she’ll probably clear a whole shelf for it, a special shelf, and when her friends come in, Mrs. Segal or Mrs. Greenhut or the ladies from the block association, she’ll gather them round and say, ‘Now look at this, Elaine, this elephant was made by a real artist in Italy. My daughter Celia got it for me. Isn’t it gorgeous?’ ‘Oh, gorgeous!’ ‘Now don’t touch, it’s fragile!’ ”
Alex laughs mildly. “I wish everyone I gave a sculpture to was so enthusiastic,” he says. “Most often they just sort of shrug. If I’m visiting the person, and I’m lucky, it’ll turn up in the bathroom, and I’ll look under the sink and see the bowl of flowers it’s been brought out to replace for the afternoon.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Celia says.
But Alex once again doesn’t seem to have heard her. And once again, this strange afternoon, it seems to Celia as if a piece of fragile thread, spun like spider’s web, has been cast out across the ocean, from this ancient Tuscan barn to her mother’s apartment in Queens, pulling these two disparate places into a nearness so intimate she feels as if she could reach across the darkness and brush Rose’s arm. She has known for some time now that Seth cannot save her, at least the way he says he wants to, that he can never “take her away from all that”; no one can ever take anyone else away from all that. There are always those threads, billions of them, crisscrossing and crossing again, wrapping the world in their soft, suffocating gauze.
The futility, the falseness of her romance with Seth—each of them playacting for the other the role of something long sought, long needed—she sees clearly now, but at a remove: the sort of truth you can gaze at for years; ponder; affirm; ignore.
Yes, she sees it all now; sees that she will stay in Italy, no matter how ardently her better judgment tells her not to; sees that, to the extent that it’s possible, she’ll become a different person from the person she used to be. And then one day she’ll be walking down the cobbled street of her own Tuscan village, thinking about something properly Italian—olive trees, maybe, or art—when suddenly that mysterious thread will start to tighten, and Queens and Tuscany will be pulled to somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and briefly, magically merged. She’ll turn and see, sitting on a bench in her own piazza near where the old men smoke cigars and play dominos, two Hasidic boys trading rabbi cards. And two little girls playing jump rope. And hearing the thwack of the jump rope against the pavement, she’ll feel her feet start to dance, and want to jump herself, jump until the rope slipping under her is no longer anything real, is just a blur of speed. “I see London, I see France …” (But of course they didn’t see any of those places, didn’t even imagine they’d ever see any of those places.) Who, after all, is speaking? And in what language? And how can those boys be here, and her mother’s voice calling to her down this ancient cobbled street? “Celia, come home, dinner’s ready! It’s spaghetti and meatballs! Your favorite!”
Chips Is Here
Here is why I decided to kill my neighbor:
On a rainy morning in midsummer, after several failed efforts, my cat finally managed to scale the fence that separated my yard from Willoughby Wayne’s. The cat landed on all four feet in the narrow space behind a privet hedge. At first he sat there for a moment, licking his paws and acquainting himself with his new situation. Then, quite cautiously, he began making his way through the brushy underside of the hedge toward Willoughby’s lawn. Unfortunately for him, the five Kerry blue terriers with whom Willoughby lives were aware of the cat’s presence well before he actually stepped out onto the grass, and like a posse, they were there to greet him. The cat reared, hissed, and batted a paw in the face of the largest of the Kerry blues, who in turn swiftly and noisily descended with the efficient engine of his teeth. “Johnny! Johnny!” I heard Willoughby call. “Bad dog, Johnny! Bad dog!” There was some barking, then things got quiet again.
A few hours later, after I’d searched the house and checked most of the cat’s outdoor hiding places, I called Willoughby. “Oh, a young cat?” he said. “Orange and white? Yes, he was here. Needless to say I did my best to introduce him to my pack, but inexperience has resulted in their maintaining a very puppylike attitude toward cats; the introductions—shall we say—did not go well. I interceded delicately, breaking up the mêlée, then, for his own good, lifted the feline fellow over the fence and deposited him in the field adjacent to my property. I believe he was quite frightened by Johnny, and suspect he’s probably hiding in the field even as we speak.”
I thanked Willoughby, hung up, and headed out into the field that adjoins both our yards. It was a fairly wild field, unkempt, thick with waist-high weeds and snarls of roots in which my dog, accompanying me, kept getting trapped. I’d be thrashing along, breaking the weeds down with a stick and calling, “Kitty! Here, kitty!” when suddenly the dog would start barking, and turning around I’d see her tangled in an outrageous position, immobilized by the vines in much the same way she often became immobilized by her own leash. Each time I’d free her, and we’d continue combing the field, but the cat apparently chose not to answer my repeated calls. I went back three times that afternoon, and twice that night. In the morning I canvassed the neighbors, without success, before returning to comb the field a sixth time. “Still looking for your young feline?” Willoughby called to me over the fence. He was clipping his privet hedge. “I’m really terribly sorry. If I’d had any idea he was your cat I most certainly would have hand-delivered him to you on the spot.”
“Yes, well,” I said.
“For whatever it’s worth, it was right here, right here where I’m standing, that I lifted him over.”
“Well, I’ve been meaning to ask you. He was all right when you handed him over, wasn’t he? He wasn’t hurt.”
“Oh, he was perfectly fine,” Willoughby said. “Why, I would never put an injured cat over a fence, never.”
“No, I’m sure he’s just hiding somewhere. I’ll let you know when I find him.”
“Do,” Willoughby said, and returned to his clipping. The thwack of the clippers as they came down on the hedge followed me through the field and out of the field.
I’m not sure what it was, but the next day something compelled me to search Willoughby’s yard. I waited until he wasn’t home, then, like my cat before me, crept stealthily through a side gate. From their outdoor pen the Kerry blues growled at me. I circled the lawn, until I was standing at the place where Willoughby was standing when he claimed to have put the cat over the fence. On the other side of the fence a thorny bush blocked my view of the field, and just to the left of it lay my cat, quite dead. I didn’t make a sound. I went around the other way, into the field, and dug behind the bush, in the process cutting myself quite severely on the brambles. There was a gash running from the cat’s chest to near his tail.
I picked up the carcass of my cat. His orange-and-white markings were still the same, but he was now just that—a carcass. I went to the house and got a garbage bag and shovel, and then I buried my cat in the overgrown field.
On the way home, climbing over my own fence, I decided to kill my neighbor.
At home I took a shower. The soap eased me. I considered methods. I felt no urge to confront Willoughby, to argue with him, to back him up against a wall and force him to confess his lie. I did not want to watch him writhe, or try to wriggle away from the forceful truth inhabiting my gaze. I simply wanted to kill him—cleanly, painlessly, with a minimum of fuss and absolutely no discussion. It was not a question of vengeance; it was a question of extermination.
Of course a shotgun would have been best. Then I could simply ring his doorbell, aim, and, when he answered, pull the trigger.
Unfortunately, I did not own a shotgun, and had no idea where to get one. Knives seemed messy. Wit
h strangulation and plastic bags, there was almost invariably a struggle.
Then, drying myself after the shower, I noticed the andirons. They were Willoughby’s andirons; nineteenth-century, in the shape of pug dogs. He had loaned them to me one night in the winter. I’d lived next door to him for three years by then, but for the first two years I was living with someone else, and he hadn’t seemed very interested in us. We’d exchanged the merest pleasantries over the fence. All I knew of Willoughby at that point was that he was exceedingly red-cheeked, apparently wealthy, and a breeder of Kerry blue terriers. It was only when the person I was living with decided to live somewhere else, in fact, that suddenly—at the sight of moving vans, it seemed—Willoughby showed up at the fence. “Neigh-bor,” he called in a singsong. “Oh, neigh-bor.” I walked up to the fence and he told me that one of his dogs had escaped and asked if I’d seen it, and when I said no he asked me over for a drink. I didn’t take him up on the offer. One day my dog managed to dig under the fence to play with his Kerry blues, and when she returned there was a small red Christmas-tree ornament in the shape of a heart fastened to her collar. It hadn’t been there before.
A few nights later a smoldering log rolled out of my fireplace, setting off the smoke alarm but bringing no one but Willoughby to the rescue. He was wearing a red sweatsuit and a Vietnam jacket with his name printed over his heart. I thought, Rambo the Elf.
“I must loan you a pair of andirons,” he said happily as he looked down at the charred spot on my rug. “Firedogs, you know. I’ll be right back.”
“Ah—no need. I’ll buy a pair.”
“No, no, you must accept my gesture. It’s only neighborly.”
“Thanks very much, then. I’ll come by and pick them up in the morning.”
Willoughby beamed. “Oh, too eager, I am always too eager when smitten. Well, yes, then. Fine.” But in the morning, when I woke up, the andirons were waiting on my doorstep, along with a piece of notepaper illustrated with a picture of a Kerry blue terrier. On it, in red pen, was drawn a question mark.
A Place I've Never Been Page 16
