L'America

by Martha McPhee

  Cesare came down the stairs, smiling, "All I know is the ancient Greek," he said in English, apologetically, to his friends and the American girls. He had a big smile, not one bit harsh. His accent was clearly Italian but with a hint of British English (from having studied in London, Beth would later learn). He didn't seem surprised by the arrival of the three of them and Beth wondered what he had been told by Miki, hoped it wasn't much. "She doesn't understand it though," he said, shrugging. He kissed Bea on either cheek and, in Italian, asked her about her adventures getting to Greece. Beth noted that they did not seem like lovers. Miki appeared behind Beth and introduced her to Cesare with a certain amount of pride that made Beth feel both possessed and annoyed. Beth smiled and so did Cesare and she wondered if he had felt the shock that she had and then hoped that no one could hear the way her heart thumped. Miki, as if he could sense something, swept Beth upstairs to see the apartment and his room. She could still hear Bea, her big flirtatious voice carrying on with Cesare. The room had a vine-covered balcony that offered a view of the sea. Miki's clothes were neatly unpacked and arranged in his closet, and Beth wondered if he packed like Bea did, if all Italians were taught to pack so precisely. Somehow she didn't find this habit as attractive in a man. More than that, she didn't want to be in the room alone with him. She wanted to be outside with the others. She wanted to know if she would feel that shock again. She wanted to feel it again. Just then Miki tried to kiss her. She told him she had to pee. Alone, in the bathroom, she studied herself in the mirror. The shock was palpable. She could see it. She felt it again, aftershocks trembling through her, making her somehow feel beautiful though she knew she was not a beautiful girl. She went back to Miki's room. She heard nothing that Miki said as she sat down on his tidy bed. She saw nothing. She tasted nothing. She was blissfully and completely and absolutely and marvelously empty. Miki kissed her. Cesare entered the room. She pushed away from Miki, almost meanly. Medium tall and dark and slender, Cesare had a body like the David, but he was dressed in American-style swimming trunks, a T-shirt with the words NEIL PRYDE beneath a picture of a sailing windsurfer, and flip-flops. Italians never go barefoot. "Scusatemi," he apologized, and backed out of the room. His eyes were big and dark brown with a spark. "No no," Beth said fast, as if her words could yank him back. And they did.

  "Cosa vuoi?" asked Miki. What do you want?

  "Will you come to dinner with us?" Cesare asked, reentering but only just slightly. Such lovely English. He was all grace and humility and elegance. And Beth said yes before Miki could answer, and the big group of them went off to a café at the edge of the water in Naoussa for red snapper and grilled octopus and tsatsiki and something else and something else ... but Beth barely noticed. Despite the daze and the shock and the desire to watch this boy talk and smile, she had no idea what she was experiencing, and that night, after a little too much wine for all of them, they would be paired off by Bea's design, and not by the direction of this wonderful new sensation of Beth's, which made her eager and anxious and pretty and giddy and the whole evening smelled of jasmine and rosemary and citrus and was filled with the rhythms of the little fishing boats knocking about in the port and the Greek wine was terribly good and she loved Greece and never wanted to leave.

  Valeria would find this fragment of a letter, dated 1987, written in English:

  My dear little Americanina. My America. My future. My dream. My impossible dream. Your body so soft, so like velvet your legs. I detest the thought of you with another man and love the thought that others should experience you. I want to know every detail by name. It is good and right for you to be with others. Perhaps I am repenting for my sins. But let me know. Spend one hour each day, at least, to let me know. If you are to be my wife, if we are to realize this love—you must. But don't be cruel. Don't torture me. Not with someone young, not with someone you could love. I love you more than ever, more than life. I'll love you when I'm dead.

  Mom, Valeria would have said, had she been able to speak directly to her mother, Ma-omm, in that drawn-out disbelieving tone in which her friends called for their mothers, taking them so guilelessly for granted. (Mom, she would love the word.) You what? Do you see, Mom, what this letter implies? Did you really? But why? If you loved each other? That's sick, perverse. But look at how this person loved you. How can you stop loving someone if you loved her this much? What is this twisted love, twisted into knots? I'll love you when I'm dead. Did he love her still?

  Beth's life. Valeria would feed upon Beth's life. It would nourish her own. What Valeria would give to read her mother's letters to Cesare. Beth would be with Valeria always, standing by her side. Picture this: just now they are in the kitchen together making pasta with tomatoes and basil and mozzarella because it is a hot July day in New York City with those fire engines racing up Broadway and car alarms and police cars and the stench of garbage on the streets just the same as always. The Hudson flows carelessly by; Valeria can watch it from her window. It flows both ways, the river an estuary here, flowing backward, defying Heracleitus's notion of time moving in one direction only. Here, a young woman can, in fact, step in the same river twice.

  Picture this: the year is 2017. Catastrophes happen, former presidents die, pop stars die, even a famous singer from Beth's youth, known for turning her life into fodder for songs that rocked the charts. Future kings and queens and dictators are born. Men are still in power doing powerful things, not for the right reasons but simply because they can. All of us skipping along in tandem with the parallel world of history. Valeria is twenty years old. She has an adoring father in New York City, a lovely stepmother, a younger half brother of whom she is ridiculously fond. She has a crazy old grandfather on his commune in Pennsylvania, which struggles, a bit, to stay afloat. He reminds her of Miss Havisham, preserving the wreckage—and why not? The man who killed Valeria's mother is long dead. But Evil still lurks as it always will, people seizing power because they can. God bless her grandfather for his utopia, for trying to make something right of all that has gone wrong. Her mother had been wildly in love. Valeria wants to know the size and shape of love, wants to quantify love's power, understand its capacity for endurance. What has Cesare made of the wreckage? Would he love Beth when he was dead? Does she, dead, love him still?

  Bea and Cesare kissed that first night on a beach in Naoussa near a bonfire they built of driftwood, oblivious to the other pairs and their whereabouts. They stayed out all night and at dawn Bea floated back to her room and her friends and flopped on the bed in a dreamy sort of way and they exchanged stories about their midnight escapades (barefoot walks in the sea, salty kisses, and the like), giggling, posturing for one another, stretching their legs into the air, giddy with romance and the notion of feeling sexy. It was summer and they were in Greece and the moon, if inconstant, was always bright. Of the three of them, Beatrice's glee radiated the most and the other two tried to drill her, tried to extract nuggets of her adventure as if each detail were a jewel. Finally, the conversation dropped off and the girls fell asleep, until they were wakened at noon by the loud arrival of Miki who wanted to take them windsurfing at Santa Maria beach.

  The next night on one of those small labyrinthine streets, not far from one of the many churches of the town, not far from Cesare's apartment that he shared with his friends, not far from Bea's room that she shared with her friends; that next night when the sun was well down and Bea and Sylvia and Dario and especially Miki were searching the streets for the missing pair, afraid that Cesare and Beth were lost, calling their names with perhaps too much wine in their tones; that next night, hearing their names and sneaking farther into a nook in a wall, a secret hiding spot illuminated ever so gracefully by the moon and all those stars; that next night feeling the exhilaration of the new and the secret and the illicit and the mystery of choice; that next night with the distant sounds of a discotheque and people eating, the clatter of silverware and glass; that next night, cool from the wind and too much sun, caring not a whit for
Bea's feelings, for Sylvia's whereabouts, for Miki's probable pain, Beth and Cesare kissed.

  A first kiss, do you remember? Gentle at first, his lips exploring every delicate curve of her neck and face, the hollow of her throat, her eyes, the ridge of her nose, the curl of her ears, as if reading her face, deciphering there some complete, some absolute, truth. His lips in her hair, his hands so gently on her back, his fingers on her arms, then the kiss. That way that desired lips feel. Voices calling their names, a brilliant night sky, moonlight dancing on the Aegean Sea. Thieves stealing kisses. How fun it can be to steal. The smell of fried something or other. Then hungry, then greedy, then desperate for those lips. Their names so clear; the voices so close. Their bodies pushing together, hiding. "Tu sei perfetta," Cesare whispered into her ear, and his words became all of her body. This was dizzying, this hurt, this she did not want to tell anyone, this she did not want to leave. No wine, no ouzo, she was drunk just the same. "Io sono perfetta,"she repeated in his ear, drawing out the words in order to believe them, loving the confidence, and he pulled her into him again and up to him and they were both so light, ethereal as if shades, barely there. Their names rang out again, a little more urgently this time: Bea calling for her friend—not even for Cesare but for her friend—all concern in that tipsy tone. But Beth did not care. Indeed, she was annoyed by their persistence. She cared about nothing beyond his kiss. The voices, thank god and finally, disappeared as if the friends had given up. Beth and Cesare were alone within the kiss. Beth thought of all previous kisses, gum-on-wrist kisses, Carlos beneath the lights of the brothel. Beth had never kissed or been kissed before.

  They had spent that day paired in their pairs on Santa Maria beach, a gentle curving beach with a predictable wind, onshore, good for windsurfing. Other friends were there, too: rich boys of sock-and-shoe fame and money, all with their windsurfing paraphernalia of boards and sails and wetsuits. This crowd simply added to the mass, if not the story. These were boys whose families made incredible things like the thread that is woven into fine silk stockings or more mundane things like shoelaces and the little metal rings that fit into the eyelets of shoes. So many jobs Beth had never thought of. The boys attempted to windsurf, tried to teach the girls, but they all gave up for lack of wind and spent the day talking and eating Greek salads and playing endless games of backgammon at a small taverna at the edge of the beach. Bea and Sylvia had entertained the group first with stories of their adventures en route to Greece and then with stories of Beth's commune and of Beth's father, making everyone laugh and ask even more questions about the logistics of the place and about the reality of the place. Beth's was truly the strangest family life any of these Italians had ever heard of; they were astonished by the idea of a dead mother memorialized in a farm, Mother Earth, Beth raised on the back of her mother. "I'll admit," Bea said, speaking in Italian, "my first summer in America I was terrified of the place. All these children, all these people all over the place, and this one big man leading them and not leading them at the same time—all living together in chaotic orderliness. By the second summer I realized you could go unnoticed if you chose, that no one was watching. As long as you helped, that's all anyone cared about. And Jackson, the interest he took in you was inspiring, made you want to try things you'd never have thought of. I milked a goat even, can you imagine?" To outsiders, life at Claire was a curiosity, as if Beth and her strange home were like some sort of object that could be picked up and examined and admired. Sometimes she became tired of this song and dance, but mostly she was proud. She looked across the flat waters to the island of Naxos. It rose, awesome, to the sky. Beyond it, she knew, lay Turkey.

  "You grew up there?" Cesare asked, sitting down beside Beth. He seemed to be searching for something to say. His voice faltered: the question need not have been asked. She smiled. All over again she felt that sensation. She liked that he wore American swimming trunks instead of the Italian kind that Miki wore. Miki nudged himself a little closer so that they formed a triangle and he leaned in as Cesare asked for an example of what someone like himself could do at this commune.

  "What would someone like yourself want to do?" Beth asked. It was a pretty simple question, a pretty simple notion, for an American girl. There was very little to it but the obvious. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was the big question for children in America. The possibilities for girls had evolved since Beth was very young, when schoolteacher, nurse, or mother ran the gamut of female choice. But it was a question asked regardless and equally and all the same, and it made each child dream of potential, revel in fantasy. Beth was asking this simple question, asking it innocently and sweetly, without any understanding of Italian tradition, a chasm that would always divide her from Cesare.

  He repeated the question aloud, turning it over, it seemed, in his mind as he said the words, "What would someone like yourself want to do?" He was not making fun of her. She understood that. Rather, he enjoyed the question, the possibilities of it. She studied his face, his eyes looking into the bright blue sky. She wanted to ask him a thousand questions. "I suppose I'd like to be a writer," he said. "Would they ever have a writer at Claire?"

  "We've never had one, but I'm sure my father would know how to use a writer. A writer could help him write his long doctrines and letters to Washington." She raised her eyebrows with an affectionate smile, thinking of her father hard at work at his desk. She imagined Cesare at his side, helping him with the letters. No one had ever come to Claire to stay on her recommendation. The idea that she would meet someone who would wind up living at Claire had never occurred to her. She liked the notion. For a moment it made her feel proud of Claire, closer to her father.

  "Are you a writer?" she asked.

  "I study economics and I don't like it," he said honestly.

  "Then why do you study it?" This made no sense to her.

  "I'm in training to take over my family's banking business," he answered. And he pointed to his friends milling about on the beach. "So that I can finance their dreams of better shoelaces and eyelets and dyes and designs. So that I can help them become richer."

  They were both only partly aware of Miki. His English was all right but not good enough to keep up with the speed of their conversation. He smoothed the sand with his hands, as if ironing it into something neat and orderly. Beth and Cesare threw him smiles as if to suggest he was part of the conversation, but if he had asked a question they wouldn't have realized it.

  "But you'd rather write."

  "I love to read." He noticed just then that she was reading Middlemarch. He picked it up and told her he had read the book in English during one of his summers studying in England. Miki grabbed it and asked Cesare in Italian if he'd really read the whole book in English, declaring it long. Beth wished Miki would go away. She was impressed that Cesare had read the book. It was difficult enough for her in English. She had been sharing this one with Sylvia, too, having finished Anna Karenina. Beth wasn't very far along, but Dorothea had married Casaubon and was honeymooning (sort of) in Rome, a city she found claustrophobic from the pressure of so much history and time. Beth loved that Dorothea hated the weight of all that history since tradition taught you to love it no matter what.

  "The weight of history," she said, suddenly understanding why he'd found her question amusing, why he'd repeated the words.

  "For that reason especially I enjoyed those summers in England reading. Now I read only American books." He was reading On the Road, a book Beth had not yet read. She liked Cesare just a little more already simply because he was a reader. Their enthusiasm for literature is too banal to describe beyond the rush that such a connection triggers, a sense of sharing something big, important yet undefined—a vocabulary, if not a language, of their own.

  Miki said something about what he was reading and then about what he would become at Claire, but neither Beth nor Cesare heard him.

  They talked and they talked and the wind never came and she stopped feeling that shock of ne
rves, just the exquisite desire to hear him ask her questions and to make him laugh and to be made to laugh by him. His sister, Laura, was just now in America, he said, in Alabama of all places—a state Beth had never been to—on an exchange with a family down there. Unlike Beth's arrangement, it was a one-way exchange, since no one from Alabama would come home with Laura to Italy. She wrote long lively letters home (in the American fashion), describing the trailer she lived in, the room she shared with the four daughters, the bunk beds they all slept in. Late at night the girls would ask Laura to help them spell American words, help them read English books, and carefully and patiently she would teach these American girls English. Beth imagined a female version of Cesare as Beth tried to comprehend the implications of an Italian teaching English to English-speaking girls. "She has warned us that she has gotten fat on hamburgers," Cesare said. "That is all they eat and she loves them." Beth loved the way he didn't make conjunctions of his words; she loved the rhythm it gave his speech. When Laura's boyfriend came to visit, they rented a big American car and traveled all across the country following Bruce Springsteen on tour. They covered three thousand miles and received over two thousand dollars' worth of speeding tickets.