by John Domini
So the kids were one burden. The Jaybird was another, in on the nasty secret and yet, these days, such a nice guy. When he complimented Barbara’s looks, the man offered sweet nothings the likes of which she hadn’t heard in years. Naturally she could see through his ploy, his own silver-tongued go at Paul’s healing touch. But she couldn’t begin to explain the slick and muscular way in which she’d repaid his kind words, two nights out of three. Two nights out of three, after they’d found themselves alone, she and Jay had tumbled into fucking. Fucking seemed to be the word for it, an angry business well-nigh impossible to make sense of. The grind and sigh were familiar, granted, as were the sensations of climax. These seemed to buck off her caked-on experience until Barbara was returned to layered glass, knitted and flexible, and between the glass gaps some other flesh-bound portion of her skied downward, hooting. Yet the need to come like that wasn’t the same desire she used to know. Her greediness erupted in the middle of bedtime, it cut into her sleep, even as it set up a wholly unrecognizable counterpoint to the prayers that Barbara kept attempting during her days. Her downtown rosaries were supposed to offer Extreme Unction. At the end of everything, absolution.
The husband, beneath his bandages, must’ve suffered the same confusion. Like Barbara he couldn’t think of anything sensible to say about their lovemaking. Rather, in the mornings as they shared a cappuccino, or in the evenings as he helped with the dishes, the Jaybird found other things to talk about. In particular, he was interested in Owl and the kids making a tour of his job site. He thought it would be good for the family to visit the Refugee Center.
“What we’re doing up there,” he said, “think about it. It’s good work.”
Was this was the second morning after the morning of the attack? Was it the third? In any case the man checked over his broad shoulder, in his white chef’s top, making sure none of the children were in earshot. Then, just above a whisper:
“I mean, if it’s over between us, okay. If that’s what has to happen, okay. But you should at least get a good look at the kind of guy you’re leaving.”
Barbara knew this gambit too: calling the bluff.
‘You should have a look, Owl. The kids too, the kids especially. Hey, you know Silky’ll drive. You know he loves to take out that Humvee.”
Barb shook her head, though she couldn’t say just what she meant by it. She might’ve been declining a trip out to the Refugee Center, tomorrow or the next day, or she might’ve been shaking off the wild ride she’d taken in the bedroom down the hall, just the night before. Trying to understand, there at the table and later in the church, she recalled some of the seedier confessions she’d heard at the Samaritan Center. She remembered in particular an all-but-divorced couple who’d enjoyed a standup quickie on the way to their final mediation session. They’d done it in the elevator, those two, and now Barbara herself seemed none the wiser. Under her polished surface she seemed nothing but contradictory animal impulses: lick or destroy.
Which might be what she sensed, ultimately, in the pitch and rhythm of the original city. Downtown, everything revved with savage pretending. On all sides, even in streets jammed from wall to scaffold, hustling couples and threesomes kept up a baroque and airy masquerade. The performing style, the hands perpetually in the air, manifested itself in the hustlers and executive track alike, whether you were wearing a hand-me-down soccer shirt or a glittering silk tie. Even the people walking unattached made small gestures, the same sort of scene-stealing business Barbara had noticed in Mr. Paul. In particular these people had a shrug that was more than a shrug, an effort of the entire body, requiring a pause between strides. In the moment of that pause, fixed in place with shoulders hiked, a Neapolitan would look like one of the plated ojetti.
Barbara, taking it in, itched with a fresh doubt. Could she indeed trust the obliterating vision she’d had her first time through these spaces? Or had she become Italy-addled in spite of herself, bitten by some virus that incubated amid the clutter and breakage? For starters, it seemed unlikely she’d ever gone unnoticed. These mornings alone, as she’d dawdled on the Street of the Oil Cistern, or on the Street of Dried Grapes, the locals had known her, la Mama Americana, the one from the video. But they’d made believe otherwise.
Also the ruling color, other than the gray spectrum from sulfur dust to tufa stone, remained the same blue as had confounded Barbara when she’d first seen it on that map. Napoli azzura, half the street vendors wore it, whatever their skin color. Nor did it matter whether their cart was chockablock with DVDs or piled with the kind of sea salad they’d been offering around here since Christ was a carpenter. The sea itself provided different colors, from scallop-white to squid-purple. Then the fish smell gave way to a citrus tang, the oranges and lemons like clowns hustling into the center ring before the elephant’s out of the tent; then all the rest would be shot through by the acid stench of metalwork, another shop turning out the ojetti.
Even the commerce going on, the bills unfolding and changing hands, struck her as part of the show. Another flutter of gladrags. This even though Barbara knew how hard it could be to get by, around the ransacked Bay, and though she didn’t fail to notice the ill-nourished Senegalese or Eritreans who manned the more decrepit of the open-air markets. Nevertheless, to her the Euros could look like Monopoly money. A tourist’s delusion, this was, and stupid of her, and whenever Barbara scolded herself for it, she had the impression that she’d been deluded—infected—by history. She couldn’t separate the buying and selling, and the false fronts that went with it, from the history. The displays shrieked for impulse buys, here as much as when she drove the Bridgeport bypass, but in so ancient a setting the pitch to feather your nest, your flimsy and rotting nest, looked inherently nutty. The very name of the city seemed at the same cross-purposes, an expression three thousand years old that meant, roughly, New & Improved!. Barbara thought of a hustler working in a museum. In fact the Museo Nazionale was close by, with a thousand imitation antiquities on sale. She didn’t need Chris to tell her that, under all the daily deal-making, the foundations went back long before Christ was a carpenter.
“This whole trip was an act,” she told her chosen priest. “That’s what I realized, that first day. It was the old shuck and jive, when we came to Naples.”
“Really? And the refugees of the earthquake, the terremotat? They’re children of God, don’t you know, neglected children.”
She shook her head. “I’m not saying it’s not good work, what Jay came here to do.” Back in Bridgeport, her husband had brought home a DVD put together by the relief agencies, a documentary on the quake damage. Some of the scenes had disturbed her as deeply as the materials from the Samaritan Center.
“Good work, well. God’s work, rather.”
“Yes, Father, but for Jay and me that was just the cover story.”
“Cesare, please.”
“Cesare, that was our story, doing God’s work. But then came our first morning in Naples, our first time out in the sunlight. As soon as Jay went down, I saw this trip for the farce that it was.”
The old priest eyed her, his mouth a red fold in a wall of limestone or chalk. Barbara had to remind herself that he had no trouble with her English; he’d done his seminary work in Dublin.
“Though the Jaybird,” she went on, “he’s sticking to the story. He keeps talking about the Refugee Center, saying the kids and I, we should visit.”
“As indeed you ought,” Cesare said, “if you do intend to stay.”
Barbara’s dress was binding under the arms again. She wished that she and this man were using the confession booth.
“If you do intend to stay…”
“Cesare, what am I telling you? I’m telling you, it’s not so easy for me.”
“No need to shout.” He waved a heavy-nailed hand at the empty pews.
“I know what I need to do. I can feel it, Father, like I can feel a prayer. Like when the rosary’s working, you understand? That’s the way it came o
ver me, my marriage is shot. But now what? The logistics, New York and a lawyer, it isn’t easy.”
There: her confession. The old man shifted closer, his crossed legs flopping like drumsticks inside a musician’s black tote.
“I mean, Father, Cesare, what’s it like for other people? When they’ve been married twenty years, is it just, boom, one day it’s off?”
“Other people, oh my. You ask a priest about other people.”
This visit was Barbara’s third in as many days, but her first without the children.
“The will of God, don’t you know, it’s got nothing to do with the polls.”
“Come on, what’s so bad about looking for some kind of model, out there? I’m asking, just for example, what do other people do about the kids?”
A touch of self-consciousness softened his long face: you ask a priest about kids.
“I’m saying, the will of God, in my case that could cut either way. On the one hand, do I live a lie so that the Jaybird won’t be disturbed, while he gives food and shelter to the terramotati? Or on the other hand, do I remain true to my conscience? The conscience that God gave me?”
Cesare turned thoughtful, putting the choice under the calipers of his Jesuit training. He must’ve spent a lot of time up in his head, or over in the library—like all Barb’s favorite church people, over the years. The Signore must’ve turned so many pages, the paper had softened the edges of his testosterone. Not that Barbara was handling him gently, showing respect, the way she’d been raised. Her work at the Sam Center, she realized, had gotten her into the practice of being blunt. Especially the time one-on-one with Nettie, her mentor. A Bride of Christ, a Franciscan, Nettie had nonetheless taught Barbara not to pussyfoot around just because there was crucifix on the wall. Then too, when it came to Cesare here, one of the connections she’d felt from the first was his distaste for pat answers.
“Perhaps,” he said finally, “it would help if you didn’t always think in such personal terms. Try putting some distance between yourself and these vicissitudes. Imagine that it were some other family, in which a successful executive gives up all that he has, or he gives up a—”
“Come on, do you really believe it’s that simple? Give up all your worldly goods, for the sake of the least among you? That’s not my Jaybird, building the New Jerusalem.”
“I should hope not. I’m rather a skeptic when it comes to New Jerusalems.”
“Well, I’m saying it’s not about a better world, or not only. Jay’s got something else going, a private agenda.” Her husband had brought the family here, Barb insisted, in an attempt to regain lost power. “He needed to run my life again.”
The old man looked dubious.
“Listen, I realize I talk a good game. How do you think I know an act when I see one? But I’m telling you, Jay, he had the real power. He’s always had it.”
The old Dominican sat so still, his robes plainly laundered that morning, that he prompted the contrary image of Barbara’s kids tearing around in a nearby soccer field, their shorts and sneakers smeared with grass. The place was open to the public most afternoons. Her chosen church wasn’t down in the vicoli, but up in the family’s part of town, where you found regularly groomed green-spaces and a responsible staff The last she’d seen the children, the teenagers were playing goalie and the younger ones were sharing a pickup squad with a few locals. Paul had looked fine, just another kid with a ball, and Barb had no problem leaving to meet with Cesare, a couple of staircases farther uphill (in this city even the best neighborhoods presented an aerobic workout).
What did it matter that Barb had discovered this man uptown? Cesare wasn’t defined by the parish assigned him any more than by Jesuit or Dominican. He’d committed his ministry to “the wretched of the earth,” a phrase his new member from New York admired, though so far she’d avoided admitting that she didn’t know the source. She knew enough, anyway. Barbara understood that though she liked the old man, there was chemistry, what she depended on in their give and take was his commitment to the opposing point of view: Jay’s version of the Lulucitas’ business in Naples. This made the Padre Superior a bracing corrective. Again, with him it was like with Nettie: if the wife could make her argument to this priest, then she might be frightened, she might be disappointed, but she wasn’t merely whining. For Cesare hadn’t needed an earthquake in order to do something for the non-Europeans, the people off the Italian books—the clandestini. Over the past couple of years, though it violated church policy, he’d allowed homeless blacks and Arabs a night or two of sanctuary. If they could make it up to Cesare’s, these strays, they had an alternative to the lice-infested shelters in the old city, or the Camorra-run “squats” out by the mozzarella ranches.
Even now, the priest had two such lost souls camped in the church basement. The first time Barbara had spoken of the attack on her husband, Cesare had noted the date with interest; on her next visit, after he’d decided the American could be trusted, he’d revealed that he’d taken in “two poor creatures” that very same evening.
These two had been guests of the church for a week, Cesare reminded her now. “And it’s obvious, don’t you know,” he went on, “that these young men have had some scrape with the law. See them flinch when they hear a siren, it’s entirely obvious.”
The mother wasn’t sure what had brought this on.
“Well, one wonders, Mrs. Lulucita. These two in my care, one wonders if they weren’t the same fellows as attacked your husband.”
Barbara got a hand on her purse, a reflex.
“This husband who you claim had the power to drag you all the way across the Atlantic—well, two penniless beggars laid him low just like that.”
“Mary, mother of God. What are—”
“Take care, Signora. That’s a holy name you’re using.”
“But what are you saying?” She and the priest were alone. Between morning Mass and evening Mass, people in this neighborhood preferred to stay home with the appliances. Now Barb had the purse in her lap, her hands in fists around the handle. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Why are you complaining to me about some so-called power in a marriage? In this world, power is a piece of iron pipe. It’s a wallet full of Euros.”
“Oh, Father. The two that hit my Jaybird, that night they would’ve had the Euros. Now don’t you think they would’ve taken the money and run? That’s what the police think, they hightailed it for Norway or someplace that very night.”
Cesare had kept his own arms down. In another moment, unflappable, he undid what he’d just done. He pointed out that Jay’s attackers had had a motorcycle, which meant they must’ve worked with some under-the-table dealer out on the city’s periphery. Out in a mob neighborhood like Secondigliano, for instance. The two men the priest was keeping in the cellar, on the contrary, had shown up on foot.
“One could see that they didn’t even have 90 cents for the funicular.”
Barbara hadn’t quite shaken her panic, her blood-rush. “If you’re saying there’s no power dynamic in a marriage…” She tsked, irritated at her vocabulary, power dynamic. “If you’re saying it wouldn’t be about power out at the Refugee Center, the Glorious Jaybird Show, then you’re the one who doesn’t know how the world works.”
“But think of the reason you couldn’t stand to see him in power. If that man had power, signora, it was because you loved him.”
Sighing, Barbara lifted her purse and set it back down.
“It was love between you two,” the priest said.
At least she resisted the counseling-session response, I acknowledge that. She looked to the altar. A thing of glazed concrete, flecked with shards of glass in purple and green, it hardly seemed an Italian piece. It was New Age California.
“Well, and wouldn’t that love be the reason you still find yourself making love, actually, Mrs. Lulucita?”
“Oh, so far as that goes, listen.” Another reason she’d chosen this priest was how willing he w
as to talk about sex. “We can’t be sure what’s going on, so far as that goes. What does any of us know, honestly, when it come to the libido?”
“I suppose. But you are some years past forty.”
“Some years. Some years, there’s a nice way to put it.”
Much as she preferred straight talk, Cesare’s collar didn’t give him the right to check her hormonal balances. Whatever menopause or its approach might have to do with Barbara’s ongoing Neapolitan upheaval, she could handle that part of it herself. With Jay, she’d gone so far as to use the expression “change of life,” just the night before. This was after another spasm of clutching and gasping, turning to glass and tumbling through glass; her energy had been up.
“But,” the priest replied, “I’m not just talking about your body and its changes.”
“Cesare, I had five children, you know what I’m saying?”
“Indeed I do, signora. Your body and its changes, that’s your own affair, finally. What I’m trying to talk about is a long and happy marriage.”
And faithful too, Father. Barb, nodding, sighing again, recalled in silence her lone suspicion of adultery. She’d suffered a wondering night or two early during her final pregnancy—and in the next minute, never mind that she and Cesare weren’t in the confessional, she told him about it. “There were just two nights in twenty years,” the mother said, “two nights of something jay called a late inventory check, down at Viciecco & Sons.” And whatever kind of inventory the man had been taking, it was over and done with by the time the twins had entered their third trimester.
