L'America

by Martha McPhee

  "Are you still dressing like a preppy?" she asked. She remembered his inspiration a few years earlier to translate The Official Preppy Handbook into Italian, remembered the smile igniting his face at the idea big enough to build a bridge for them. He was a dreamer, too, she knew, and she would never give up hoping that he would allow his dreams to flourish. In the car, James turned on some radio music, a beautiful country tune that floated from the window, seeming to dress the blue day.

  "Made in America," Cesare said.

  "I'm waiting for you here," she said, looking down the long road, cornfields as far as she could see, feeling a slight ache at the emptiness, at everything that was not. But she believed, defiantly and somewhere, that he would arrive in the nick of time, blowing in hard on the breeze, hurting her in his arms.

  She called him first from the outskirts of Hazelville, a little town outside of Pittsburgh that James had wanted to visit because he had been born there. James had been in Beth's graduating class at New York University, a good boy who detasseled corn as a kid, a geologist in the making whose subject was America, a poet at heart. Beth had been impatient with the sentimental notion of the detour to his birthplace. But she did not let him know that. What she did let him know was that she was falling in love with him—deeply, madly. In a field of sunflowers, she told him so for the first time.

  Hazelville was a depressing town whose coal industry was long dead and whose character had remained frozen for decades—broad avenues with broad storefronts with long-forgotten names: Franklin's Five and Dime. A town hidden in the recesses and folds of this big land like a mole hidden in flabby flesh. Beth, too, had grown up in Pennsylvania, on an apple farm commune in Snyder County, four hours to the east, where hills rolled into more hills and all of it disappeared into wide blue sky. It was Amish and Mennonite country, the men and women in their plain black clothes with their buggies and their horses trotting over dale and hill. More than once, Beth had gotten stoned with a few Mennonite boys. She was the daughter of a hippie and a dreamer, her mother long dead, memorialized in the name her father gave the farm: Claire.

  Beth and James had camped in some woods not far from the road, on the edge of James's birth town. In the middle of the night Beth had taken off in the Lincoln to call Cesare from a truck stop. The engines heaved and sighed; the massive trucks, lit up, sparkling and dazzling in the night, swarmed around her. She was silent, just listening to his voice. The night was cold with no moon and no stars. Knowing he was on the other end of the line was enough; she didn't need to speak. "I love you," he said. "Ti amo." Ti amo is different from Ti voglio bene, which means "I wish you well" but stronger, something a parent says to a child. Ti amo is reserved for lovers. Beth knew the subtleties, the moment in their relationship when one replaced the other. She adored the precision of his language.

  Over the course of five years he had written her hundreds of letters. She had carried them back and forth from Italy to America, from her father's farm to her grandmother's apartment, to her place on Sixth Avenue. She would carry them into adulthood, she would carry them for the rest of her life, stacked neatly in a box just the size to hold them closely, folded as he had folded them, tucked in their envelopes, the flap licked by his tongue, a proof, a testimony, a declaration of the absolute. Ti amo sempre di più, he wrote.

  I will tell you the truth: I am andato for you, which in Italian means "I am out of my head for you," which means "I am crazy for you," which means "I am mad for you," which means "I would do anything for you," which means "you can rely on me," which means "my life only makes sense when I think of you," which means "you can do with me as you please," which means "you and only you can decide my fate: if I'll be happy or if I'll have to live the rest of my life remembering the time when you loved me."

  Why do you love me? Her response consisted of that one question, written on a long blank page. She was not beautiful, she had no style, her sophistication had nothing to do with that of Italian girls, she did not understand his way of life. She could not see herself as he saw her. Generally, she did not lack confidence, but early on she loved him to the point where it was almost unbearable. Why? She would ask. It was her perpetual question over the years. She was aiming for logic. Simply: the love was hard to believe. Love is hard to believe. Why do you love me? What is love? Why do people find one love out of all possible loves? What are the forces, the attractions, the causes, the consequences? What are the requirements, the shapes, the sizes, the measurements? Explain it. Why you? Why me?

  She had met him on a small Greek island floating in the Aegean like a song. She had been eighteen years old. He was standing on some steps leading to a whitewashed pensione, struggling to speak with the landlady, to negotiate a price. The sun was on him, caught in his hair as if he could shake it free. Beth had watched him, the gesturing of his hands, listened to the odd and unfamiliar words. She had just arrived on the island with two friends of hers. Friends of his were there, too, laughing at his attempts to communicate. The old landlady was dressed in black, hunched over, and thick around the waist. The sun lit him, Beth would remember that detail forever, the way the sun illuminated him as if for her benefit. And then the way he turned, as if he could feel her eyes on him. His eyes locked on her, for an instant only, but long enough for her to feel a shock—a jab, a stab—and then nothing was the same.

  The rich smell of oil and fuel floated through the night. Truckers with their bellies spilling over their pants waddled toward the buffet in the restaurant. In pulled a traveling chapel in the form of a semitrailer with JESUS SAVES in blinking neon on the roof. As a lover, a deceptive lover, caught between continents and cultures, separated by an ocean, she felt important, alive, standing there with the phone pressed to her ear in the cold night. James lay asleep in the tent, believing in her, in her declaration of love in the field of sunflowers.

  "Dai, parla," Cesare said, begging her to speak. He waited for her to respond, but still she said nothing. "Non essere scema," Cesare said with impatience now: Don't be yourself, don't be stupid, don't be irrational.

  "Come get me," she wanted to say, but she said nothing, too proud. She remembered him once telling her that he wished he were her father because he would know for certain she would love him for his entire life.

  "Cocolina," he said, suddenly tender.

  "Be brave," she wanted to demand of him, blaming the whole mess on his inability to be brave. She wanted to blame—blame Elena, blame anyone. She wanted a culprit, wanted to point her finger, to indict the criminal. America spread out around her, engulfing her in the night. Without a word, she hung up. His voice receded like a measuring tape back into its metal casing and she wished she could be sucked back with his voice across all of those lines to him.

  She drove back to the tent, slipped into the sleeping bags James had zipped together. He pulled her close against his chest and though her back touched his stomach she felt utterly alone and afraid and guilty because everything was wrong and this was not where she was supposed to be.

  "I love you," she whispered, and she thought of Città: In the evenings the streets and the central piazza, Garibaldi, were alive with people out for an aperitif, greeting friends, carrying their packaged pastries neatly tied in paper with bows. They had been doing so for hundreds of years, perhaps thousands. After all, what was a forum? Stepping out among those people, it was as if she had been there all along as well.

  She thought of Città: the Cellini bank advertised all over town, the Cellini name shouting from the streets, from the papers, from buildings and buses and bus stops. CELLINI. Betta Cellini. Bet Cellini. Betti Cellini. Never Beth. Signora of Città, Signora of Fiori. She could take Elena's place, become a Cellini wife, caretaker of the Cellini line, mother of more Cellini sons and daughters. Never Beth. Beth would become a thing of her past, a memory of her youth. That simple.

  She was twenty-three years old. Beth had her own dreams, too.

  She called Cesare from Gary, Indiana, and Peoria, Illino
is. "America's so ugly," she said, staring at a sky filled with smoke-stacks and fuel tanks, the air thick with their smells. She knew he liked it when she found America ugly, as if this journey were an indulgence, a quest to get the country out of her system. She pictured the lakes of northern Italy with the Alps seeming to rise out of them, the small winding roads, clusters of stucco houses gripping the tops of small hills like colonies of barnacles and just as white. And the triumphant bell towers looming above it all. Hundreds of years in the same town, of course they loved their bell tower.

  She called Cesare from Lake of the Ozarks and the rolling green of the Flint Hills; she was amazed as the country became beautiful and amazed because she had always believed that Kansas would be flat. The country didn't become flat, it seemed, until they got to Colorado. Flat like water just before a wave, shrinking, receding to nothing so that the wave could grow. And just like the wave, the Rockies rose into sight, cresting majestically, snowcapped (like foam) up there with the clouds. "It's so big," she said to James, loving him in the instant and the wonder. The wind raced through the open window, and James, enthusiasm lighting his blond smile, his voice ascending to beat the wind, explained to her how the Rockies came to be. His explanations of plate tectonics and erosion, of ancient oceans and sheets of ice made sense while he was talking, but Beth soon lost track as she imagined a tropical world of figs then covered over by ice, smothering the mountains, some many millions of years ago. "A nanosecond in the past, a blink of the eye," James said. He blinked then, his eyes hard on the road and then on her. As he began to describe the slow exhumation of the Rockies, the continent being flapped out like a sheet in a breeze to dry, the seas pouring off the surface to the Gulf of Mexico, Beth began to sing. "God bless America," she sang. Fields of lavender rolled by and she liked being on the road, the steady rhythm, the anticipation of what would be next.

  "This land is your land, this land is my land," James responded, singing Woody Guthrie's answer to Irving Berlin.

  Beth laughed but kept singing her song, though she only knew a few more of the words. "He wrote it in 1918 for a burlesque show but discarded it because it didn't have enough humor. In 1938 he rewrote it so that Kate Smith could sing it on Armistice Day to mark the twentieth anniversary of the war's end. He immigrated here from Siberia when he was five years old," she said.

  "You like trivia," James said. "But not geology."

  "A fat American man in Spain taught me that piece of trivia. For some reason I haven't forgotten it." She imagined their future. With James it could be anywhere, something designed together. James was generous, easy to be with and he loved her. He liked that she liked to cook. He liked for her to teach him food tricks, ways to cook garlic, which pasta to use for which sauce (he hadn't known it mattered). He liked to watch her concoct gourmet meals on a campfire—odd dishes from Iran and India learned during her strange childhood at Claire. The wind caught in his blond hair, mixing it all up.

  At a state park James pulled over. "Where are we going?" Beth asked. He walked ahead of her, tall and slender, enthusiasm in his stride. He walked up a trail and then off the trail into the woods and tentatively she followed him, wondering where he was taking her. Beneath a big pine, needles on the ground, James told her to take off her clothes and she did. He told her to lie down and she did. She could hear other hikers, a child laughing, the sounds of the woods, some birds, some bugs. Rays of sun streaked through the canopy. She could hear a father shout. James let her lie there, naked, for a while, all anticipation. Her heart raced. She wanted him. He touched her gently, a seduction, her skin feeling the air, her body becoming thirsty. Cesare shot across her mind. She imagined him watching her here. Then she banished him. James continued to touch her until she was asking for him to touch her more. Then he stopped touching her. She needed him to touch her. It was essential that he touch her. "Please," her hips were rising, "please." He wanted her to plead. She would do anything. Please. He touched her. He kissed her. Please. He sank into her, right there for anyone to see. She could hear the child and the father as they unwittingly hiked by, hear them stopping for a rest. She wanted to shout. "This is going to take a long time," James whispered, cooing into her ear. She bit his shoulder, bit his cheek, he was pushing her head back. His hands were all over her, working her, and her skin was cold and hot and she wanted the father to walk off the trail and see her here and then she wanted Cesare to appear and watch, too. Leaves pressed into her back, twigs, a pebble. She arched to meet him and kept reaching until it seemed her body met the sky. Then she was thinking of nothing.

  In Italian it was called andare in camporella or "fucking in the fields of the woods." Later, she told James this. One of the things she knew that James loved most about her was her air of being Italian. He would list the attributes that contributed to her aura: she spoke the language fluently (the day he met her she was reading Elsa Morante in Italian and he had let her know that he was impressed); she wore her clothes with some extra flair, even down to the dark liner around her wide blue eyes; she ate her salad after her meal; she cooked that meal with the ease and simplicity of a native. With James she felt exotic, rare, imbued with all the mystery of the other.

  Then the conversations with Cesare started to change. "Tell me about him," Cesare said.

  "Him?" Beth repeated.

  "Him," he said. "I know who you're with." She had told Cesare she was traveling with a group of friends from college. On occasion she made up elaborate stories about their adventures, entertaining him with lies, of getting lost in the world's largest corn palace. It was true, somewhere in the Dakotas there was an entire palace made from cornhusks. ("L'America," Cesare had said, just like that, capturing simply in the way he said the word the wonderful ridiculousness of a palace of cornhusks, the brash spirit of the country. He had loved, in particular, the supermarkets with their wide aisles, their endless choice. Walking through the A & P, aisles upon aisles presented choice upon choice. In aisle five, to be exact, with, let's see, canned goods, SpaghettiOs, and baking needs, he declared, "I want to live here for the rest of my life.") But it was James she had lost in the corn palace and for an instant she had worried she would never see him again, that he had left her there because he knew where her mind was.

  Lies encouraged more lies until she spun a fine filigree of untruths around her. "Tell me about this one," Cesare demanded. "Jason, Jeremiah, whatever his name is. Jack. Jerk-off." She could imagine Cesare in the living room of his parent's home, in the big velvet chair with all the lights off, sitting in the dark with a beer beneath the fresco of Valeria, waiting to be hurt like a patient waiting for surgery, begging for a wound to be cauterized so that everything could be that much easier.

  "What about the hat lady?" she said. Then, "Your mother says you've always had girls."

  "Come to Italy," he said.

  "I can't," she said. But just then some truth that had been there all along acknowledged itself to her. She could go to Italy. She could, of course, why not? What held her back? She felt a little desperate inside, anxious, as if she would run there, fly there herself. Betta Cellini, heir to the Cellini line.

  "Try," he challenged.

  "You try," she said, getting mean. Once he had tried America, but was only able to imagine himself as a gas station attendant, pumping gas like so many other immigrants that he saw. "I wasn't trained to be ambitious," he had said. "Try," she had demanded. Try. It seemed so sensible, so easy—little word that it is. If he loved her, he'd do it for her.

  "What's his name?" Cesare asked.

  "Not this one," she wanted to say. Sometimes she would tell him about flirtations. Small details, enough to make him curious. It was a game they played designed to conjure jealousy or hurt, and ultimately hope—the hope that the other would come and put an end to all flirtations. She wasn't sure why she wanted to protect James, wished somewhere that she did love him so that everything could be that much easier. "You know who I'm with," she said. "We've just been to Mount Rushm
ore."

  "Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt—Theodore, that is—and Lincoln."

  "Bravo," she said. "The wind was strong. We were almost blown away, clear to Kansas."

  She met James in Washington Square on a brilliant spring day. He was juggling four oranges. He admired her as she walked by, tossed her an orange and told her to eat it, which she did. She liked the command. The juice dribbled down her chin, the sweetest she had ever tasted. He watched her carefully. The attention of his eyes released an entire box of butterflies in her chest. And for an instant and for the first time, she thought she could see beyond Cesare. Not a cloud in the sky. "Severe clear," James had remarked. "That's how pilots describe skies like this." The clarity made her laugh. He told her he liked her smile. He began leaving poems for her, tucked between the bell and the handlebar of her bicycle. ("I ride my bicycle," Cesare wrote to her, "all over Città, just like an American boy.") In the beginning, Beth intended James as nothing serious, just another flirtation.

  "Him," Cesare said. "The ragazzo, tell me about him." Something mean and bitter infected Cesare's tone, as if there were a switch in him, too.

  She remembered the first time they said good-bye, after a year of being together. They had been at the departures gate at the Zurich airport—sobbing, faces ugly with it, red and grotesque as if this were some sort of death. She had been nineteen years old. Shortly after she had returned home from the Zurich good-bye, four years before her trip west, just as she began her freshman year at NYU, he called her to say that he had learned that couples could marry through the mail. He made elaborate plans for their wedding, drew funny pictures of her crazy family—her father, her grandmother, and all the many people from the commune in all the funny clothes he imagined they might wear—alongside his small and formal family: tall mother, short father, sister with fuzzy blond hair.