Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  “Oh, but there are such stories to tell! Celia, don’t you have any old pictures lying around?”

  “All burned.” Celia drained her coffee. “Well, shall we head back home and start chopping onions?” And we headed back home and started chopping onions: all four of us in the kitchen, chopping, chopping. And what a difference, I observed, between Mauro’s face, with its flustered vivacity, and my ex-husband Bill’s face, getting jowly as he neared forty, and Nathan’s face, to the middle-aged contours of which his never-changing repertoire of boyish expressions now lent a comical, even clownish aspect! Poor Nathan. He did not fare well in the comparison. For Mauro, though no older than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, clearly felt comfortable being a man; indeed, had probably felt comfortable being a man even before he was one. Whereas Nathan seemed log-jammed in a sort of perpetual adolescence, and where his features were becoming every day more masculine and rugged, the spirit that animated them remained that of an aggravated, even aggrieved childhood: a childhood that had lasted too long.

  Onions, onions. My eyes started to tear. Meanwhile across the room Mauro was describing to Nathan the red wine he had just brought up from the cantina. “It comes from near Ancona, and tastes like violets,” he said, then went on to explain certain technical aspects of its character'—tannins and such—of the sort upon which heterosexual men (my husband was the same way) seem always to dote so fondly, and this knowledge, curiously, Nathan, whom details usually bored, lapped up as thirstily as if it were the wine itself.

  “Mauro, why don’t you take Nathan to that enoteca in Siena?” Celia suggested. “He might get a kick out of it.”

  “Would you like to go?” Mauro asked.

  “I’d love to.”

  And so, soon enough, the Genovese was bubbling on the stove, and Mauro and Nathan were on their way to the enoteca in Siena, leaving Celia and me to girl talk and a little messing around in the vegetable garden.

  “Tell me more about Mauro,” I said to her when we were alone, and she was picking leaves of bitter chicory for the evening salad.

  “Not much to tell, really. He’s a sweet boy.”

  “Gorgeous, if you want my opinion.”

  She looked up from her lettuces. “What, are you interested in him, Lizzie?” she asked, her voice a little sharp.

  “He has a girlfriend, doesn’t he?”

  “How did you know? Did he tell you?”

  “Well, I just assumed. A good-looking boy like that.”

  Celia returned to her chicory. “No, of course he has a girlfriend. In fact, that’s how I managed to get him to work for me. You see, before I hired him, he cooked at this trattoria in Rome where Seth and I used to eat all the time—a wonderful place—and one evening the three of us got to talking, and he mentioned the girlfriend. She was from Montesepolcro, and he was looking for a job in the area.”

  “What a coincidence!”

  “A match made in heaven, you might say.”

  “I hope they don’t break up. Wouldn’t he go back to his Roman trattoria?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I think he likes it up here. He sleeps every night at her house,” she added. “Very Italian. Sneaks in after the parents have gone to bed. They pretend they don’t know.”

  Her basket was now so foil that leaves were dropping over the edge. “Ah, Celia,” I said, for I was feeling moony, “maybe a boy like that would be the answer to all my troubles. Do you think so? Well-mannered, easy on the eyes. After Bill, I’ve had enough complicated Americans.”

  “But Italian men aren’t so simple as everybody thinks.”

  “Oh, I realize—”

  “They’re vain and smug and think they’re little gods because of their mothers. Which doesn’t mean they don’t have a certain appeal. I’d never deny that. Still, let’s be realistic. How could you make a life with a boy like Mauro? You wouldn’t have anything to talk about except food.”

  “Well, who says we’d have to talk?”

  “Oscar Wilde said that conversation has to be the basis of any marriage.”

  “Oscar Wilde is like Freud. Everyone thinks that just because he said something, it’s automatically true.”

  “But isn’t it in this case? And anyway, conversation’s important. For instance, Seth and I, the one thing we really do have going for us is conversation. We talk all the time on the phone, about books and music, America and Italy. I couldn’t give that up.”

  I wondered why she said this. Had someone asked her to give it up?

  “Well, I gave it up, and I must say, I feel a whole lot better. Not that I don’t see your point,” I continued. “But a vacation romance with a handsome Italian—I could get into that, Celia.” I poked her in the ribs. “Mauro doesn’t happen to have a brother, does he?”

  “Three. Two married and one ten.”

  “Just my luck.”

  We returned to the kitchen, where Celia washed the salad, leaving it to dry on a dishcloth. Then she joined me at the table. “Lizzie, now that we’re alone,” she said, “I would like to talk to you a little more about Nathan.”

  Of course, I thought. In his presence, Celia always seemed irritated with Nathan, whereas when we were by ourselves, her tone became conciliatory, even maternal.

  “Goon.”

  “Well, first of all, you know that he and I have always had a very complicated relationship. I was in love with him, and so whenever he treated me like a sister, I resented it. I still do.”

  “As much?”

  “Less. I’ve grown up, I suppose. Still, there’s an anxiety. And also, naturally, I worry about him. What does his future hold?”

  “I find it hard to worry too much about someone who’s as rich as Nathan is,” I observed practically.

  “Oh, I know that. And yet, don’t you wonder sometimes what’s going to become of him, money aside? No career to speak of. Also, the whole time we’ve known each other, except for Martin, he’s never had a long-term boyfriend. And God knows he isn’t getting any younger, Lizzie.”

  “Well, maybe he’s the sort of person who’s happiest single.”

  She played with her wedding ring. “I guess the thing that surprises me is that after sue years, his wants haven’t changed. Nothing’s changed. He shows up, and he’s demanding, insensitive. Like the other day when I picked him up at the station. Automatically I carried his bags to the car. And he didn’t even try to stop me!”

  “But that’s just the kick-me sign, Celia!”

  “The what?”

  “You know, kid comes up to smaller kid, pretends to pat him on the back but actually tapes a sign to his back that says ‘kick me.’ Then all the other kids kick him, until some adult notices.”

  “And you’re saying there’s a kick-me sign on my back?”

  “Nathan may find it hard to resist.”

  Celia seemed to think about this for a moment. Then she said, “Well, if that’s the case, if I’m wearing, as you say, a kick-me sign, it was Nathan who put it there. He put it there seventeen years ago, the first time he ever came to my dorm room.”

  “Does that mean only he can take it off?”

  “Oh no. I’ve already taken it off myself.”

  “Have you?”

  Getting up, she nibbled a piece of lettuce.

  “Well, anyway,” I went on, “my main point is, I wouldn’t worry too much. For instance, if Nathan were really losing it, somehow I doubt he’d have taken such an interest in wine—or Mauro.”

  Celia crossed her arms. “Oh, he’ll never get anywhere with Mauro. Mauro’s invincibly heterosexual.”

  “A challenge, then?”

  “One he’ll never meet.”

  She pulled a dead leaf off her basil plant.

  “You know what my problem is?” she said then. “My life is composed too much of food. You can’t imagine. This week is an exception. Usually it’s just American women, and cooking, and cooking. So much cooking it loses all relationship to eating. And you have to stay hungry all the time,
Lizzie: you can’t cook when you’re full. That’s how I lost the weight. And soon everything you see starts to be food. The grass looks like spaghetti. Shells on the beach are pasta shells. And the smell! That little odor of onion, all the time, on your fingertips.” She shook her head. “I never meant to be a cook. Mauro, he’s a natural. He has an instinct for these things. But me, I’m just a slave to instruction.”

  “Oh, I doubt that—”

  “All I wanted was to live here, in this house, this countryside. That was the only reason I got into the business, so that we could have quiet, and a place for Seth to work on his translations.”

  “But he’s never here.” ,

  “Oh, sometimes he’ll come up for a few days. But then there’s too much noise, or one of the clients asks him to mix her a drink, or fix the window in her room, like he’s the bellhop or something. And he hates that. At most he’ll last forty-eight hours before heading back to Rome.”

  “Do you mind?”

  She shrugged. “I’m pretty indifferent, to tell the truth. When we’re together, we bicker. Whereas on the phone, we have the most fantastic conversations. Very nineties, that. If we keep going in this direction, pretty soon our whole relationship will be E-mail.”

  Moving toward the stove, she opened the lid of the Genovese. From underneath a heady fog pulsed out, steaming my glasses, which I had to wipe with a napkin. “Basil,” Celia said, tasting, and, pinching a few leaves off the plant that bloomed on her windowsill, tore them into the sugo. And how luxurious that plant seemed to me then—effulgent, even excessive—as if Celia, like Boccaccio’s Isabella, had buried a lover’s head in the soil, then watered it with her tears.

  She stirred, tasted again, pinched in some salt.

  “What do you mean you don’t have instincts?”

  “Oh, Mauro never has to taste anything. He just knows.”

  “Handsome, and a cook. All the more reason for me to grab him up.”

  “Oh, Lizzie!” She wagged a finger at me. “My God, all he reads is II Corriere dello Sport”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  Ignoring me, she replaced the lid.

  After that, for a week or so, life got so busy that I lost touch with the dramas and melodramas attendant on Celia and Nathan’s reunion. Instead, under Mauro’s guidance (or so it seemed to me), activity consumed us. He took us to the cathedral in Siena, the church of Santa Fina in San Gimignano (which Forster reinvented as the church of Santa Deodata in Where Angels Fear to Tread), the water gardens at the Villa Lante. And Celia, in her dark glasses, seemed easy on these expeditions. So did Nathan, who shopped for alabaster eggs and other prodotti tipici "with all the hell-bent alacrity of a Jewish aunt on a Perillo tour. Likewise he took pictures with hellbent alacrity: it seemed we were forever being posed and grouped in front of monuments, or against the backdrop of stirring views. Especially Mauro. The rapid evolution of their friendship, on which Celia never remarked, certainly raised my eyebrows. Might it have taken on an erotic cast? I couldn’t help but wonder, all the while reproaching myself for such suspiciousness. After all, there was the matter of that unseen girlfriend, to whose Montesepolcro balcony, like Romeo, he repaired every midnight, no doubt by means of a rope or a secreted ladder. And anyway, if Mauro and Nathan were, as it appeared, just friends, such a friendship would probably be better than a love affair for Nathan, who had started doing things under Mauro’s aegis which he’d never done in all the years we’d known him. One afternoon, for instance, Celia and I looked out the kitchen window and saw that on the lawn, Mauro was teaching Nathan—Nathan!—the rudiments of soccer. Hidden by gardenias, we giggled as they kicked the ball around—Mauro graceful and lithe in shorts and jersey, Nathan lumbering and scoliotic in jeans and sweatshirt. Like a lynx playing soccer with an octopus, Celia said, and I laughed; we were that glad. And judging from his smile, Nathan was glad too, which made us remember the story he used to tell about the elementary school teacher who wrote on his report card, “Though Nathan isn’t as well coordinated as the other children, he certainly does enjoy himself at games.” It was good, I supposed, to see him enjoying himself again.

  One morning—it was now a little more than a week into our visit—Celia announced yet another expedition: she and Mauro were going to take us to see the Olivone, the oldest olive tree in the world. And since this natural wonder was located relatively far from Montesepolcro, more than an hour’s drive, it had been decided that we should go in two cars, Mauro’s Alfa-Romeo and Celia’s Fiat, in order to spare Nathan and me the discomfort of sharing a cramped backseat.

  It is a moment not unworthy of contemplation, that awkward preamble to a journey when a group of travelers, heading off in several cars, must decide who will ride with whom. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, the emotional temperature rises. Will Nathan ride with Celia, his host, or with Mauro, his new friend? And what about Lizzie? Which driver would she prefer to accompany? And who would prefer to accompany her?

  When the confusion finally resolved itself, it was in a surprising way: that is to say, Celia went off with Mauro in his Alfa, leaving Nathan and me to the Fiat.

  He drove. As it happened, I didn’t mind. I’d been hoping for an opportunity to spend a little time alone with him—this despite the fact that he was making no effort to hide his disappointment at the way the arrangements had worked out. Again, typical Nathan, not to bother to pretend.

  “So,” I said eventually, to break the silence. “The oldest olive tree in the world.”

  He murmured an assent.

  “Are you scared?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “Well, after your encounter in Florence—”

  “Oh, that.” He brushed the beard buds on the underside of his chin. “My encounter, as you call it, I’m now fully convinced was a hallucination induced by jet lag. Or at least Mauro thinks so, and I’m inclined to trust him.”

  “Oh, you told him?”

  “I had to! After all, he rescued me.”

  “And why does he think it was a hallucination?”

  “Because something similar happened to him once. He saw a dog fall into a canal in Venice, and when it climbed out of the water, it had webbed paws, like a duck.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. That’s the point. When he saw it, he’d just finished one of those huge exams Italian students always seem to be taking. And before the exam, he hadn’t slept in three days.”

  We had reached the autostrada. Here a tiny, rusted sign, pointing back the way we’d come, read “Montesepolcro, 4 km.” Ahead of us, in the Alfa, Mauro shifted gears and, as if intent on proving the car’s powers of acceleration, shot off into the distance and the future.

  “How am I supposed to follow him?” Nathan asked, his voice oddly frantic. “This car won’t go more than eighty.”

  “Don’t worry. I have directions.”

  We merged onto the highway. Nathan drove cautiously, like an American. Periodically a little dot of light appeared in his rearview mirror, then magnified, in a matter of seconds, into the sharklike visage of a Mercedes or BMW which, having consumed the entire dimension of the mirror, flashed dangerous, impatient lights at us, as if to say, Move to the other lane or I shall with great pleasure squash your little insect of a car into pulp. These vehicular predators were usually driven by fat men talking on cellular phones. Sometimes there were beautiful women in dark glasses in the passenger seats.

  As for Mauro, to my surprise, he didn’t lose us. Instead he sped up and slowed down, sped up and slowed down, so that after a while it seemed he was always awaiting us over the next hill, his Alfa athrob with virile impatience.

  “I’m glad to see you and Mauro have gotten to be such good friends,” I said after a few kilometers.

  Nathan nodded. “I only hope Celia isn’t jealous.”

  “Why should she be?”

  “Because I came to see her, and instead the person I’m bonding with, if you’ll pardon that awful word, is M
auro.”

  “Well, if she’s jealous, she certainly hasn’t mentioned it to me. To be honest, I think she’s pretty preoccupied right now with her own problems.”

  “You mean Seth?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh, I know,” Nathan said, shaking his head. “It really is too bad about the girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend? What girlfriend?”

  Not very convincingly, he clapped a hand over his mouth. “You mean Celia didn’t—”

  “No. She only said that she and Seth don’t really live together anymore.”

  “Oh, fuck. Then I really have let the cat out of the bag, haven’t I?”

  “I can’t say I’m surprised to hear it.”

  “No, neither was I. Well, I might as well tell you the rest, since I’ve told you this much—only please, not a word to Celia. She doesn’t know we know.”

  “Okay,” I said, wondering why it was that in Nathan’s company, one was always being pledged to keep secrets one hadn’t asked to be let in on in the first place.

  The secret, as it turned out, wasn’t much different from what I’d guessed. According to Mauro, the real reason Seth lived in Rome was that he was having an affair with a woman there, the editor in chief of a Communist newspaper. “And Celia knows all about it,” Nathan said. “Knows, and claims to accept it. Apparently—Mauro couldn’t believe this—she even let him bring the girlfriend up one weekend, and gave them the best bedroom, and made them breakfast.”

  “Oh, Celia.”

  “Mauro doesn’t approve,” Nathan added reverently. “Mauro is a gentiluomo. A cortigiano.”

  “You mean like Castiglione?”

  “Exactly. He holds to the old values. Loyalty, fidelity. Above all courtesy. Fuck you back!” he shouted at a Mercedes in the process of passing us. “That’s why he loathes Seth. He thinks he’s discourteous.”

  “Because of the woman.”

  “Also because he has no table manners, and talks too loudly, and once ate a hundred grams of this very expensive ham— culatello, it’s called—that Mauro was saving to use in a big Easter timballo. Mauro just opened the refrigerator, and it was gone.”